Time and relationships (or, "consciousness" per Martin Heidegger)

[ConradDJ]

In this forum we focus again and again on questions about “consciousness” – and I think there’s a deep reason why the meaning of this term tends to remain so unclear. Basically what we’re trying to understand is how our subjectivity fits into the world of objective reality described by science.

We have two basic standpoints available to us. If we take the (Cartesian) standpoint of science, we treat “consciousness” as an objective property that certain kinds of entities “have”. After all, we experience consciousness, so it must be objectively real, right? But this leads only to confusion.

Or, we can take the (Kantian) perspective of subjectivity itself, which is after all the only thing anyone ever experiences. Therefore “consciousness” must be something basic and irreducible, right? This justifies various kinds of mysticism, but otherwise leads nowhere. It treats “consciousness” so abstractly that it loses any relevance to science or to our actual experience.

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926) was an explicit attempt to get past this dichotomy. He said, the reason we can’t fit subjectivity into our scientific picture is that we haven’t gone deep enough on either side. Yes, we need to develop an ontology based on our own existence, because that’s ultimately all we have. But our own existence is not mainly a subjective viewpoint on a world of objects – it’s an active / receptive engagement in relationships of many kinds.

In other words, consciousness is not basically “self-enclosed”... though it can seem that way when we become self-reflective about it. This capacity for focusing on our own experience as something going on “in our heads” is basic to how we philosophers think, since the 17th century. But it’s not basic to human consciousness, which is essentially involved with the people and things it cares about.

Now presumably, existing in a world of connections is something we humans share with all other kinds of beings. It’s not a matter of some things being “inert objects” and other things being “conscious subjects”. It’s a matter of different kinds and levels of beings coming to exist in the context of different kinds of relationships. So Heidegger’s project was to develop the kind of categories needed to describe a world of relationships “as seen from inside.”

The idea that consciousness is built on engagement is not unique to Heidegger. But his analysis of human existence was specifically intended to sketch out a new concept of time that he thought was fundamental to all forms of existence as “being in the world,” not just human.

I’ll summarize his idea of time in another post. But does it make sense to anyone that we could “bridge the gap” between subjective awareness and objective reality in this way? Thinking of the world as made not just of different kinds of things – some “conscious” and some not – but as a nexus of different modes of involvement between things.

From this perspective, what’s unique about human beings is not what goes on in our brains, but the kinds of communicative relationships that our brain-software has evolved to support. That is, we grow into “having a conscious perspective” through the kinds of relationships we develop with others who have such a perspective. (And when dogs or cats or chimpanzees have relationships with us, it’s not surprising that they too can at least begin to develop in this direction.)

[Maui]

Science is pretty much sterile on questions concerning existence and its not possible to model existence even in principle.

I would say that such questions might be addressed through other means - e.g. self-reflection and meditation. Consciousness is not like anything else we've observed in the universe so it makes sense(to me) that perhaps questions about it should be relegated to exploring its true inner nature. Especially if we can get some form of reputable findings and research to compare and draw conclusions.


This justifies various kinds of mysticism, but otherwise leads nowhere. It treats “consciousness” so abstractly that it loses any relevance to science or to our actual experience.


I would say that both approaches become equally abtract once you push them hard enough. But the first is definitely more intuitive.

Sorry i am not of much help, your questions seem quite abstract by themselves.

[dm4b]

From what I can tell, Heidegger’s idea is not unique. It's just another viewpoint, or formulation, of old, old ideas, from many mythologies, and within seemingly disparate belief systems, such as Buddhism to the American Indian myths. (Of course, the disparities aren't as deep as they seem, as has been shown)

It's often called the idea of Interdependence.

In the modern day western mind, we like to view ourselves as seperate beings from the environment around us. But, the claim could be made that this view we hold is just a "modern-day" myth (i.e. an image we create in our minds to help us get on in the world, help us make sense of it), but it's not at all how things really are. If that is the case, then, yes, we are truly limiting ourselves in understanding what consciousness really is, by adhering to this viewpoint.

[apeiron]

It is hard to find anything to disagree with in this preliminary statement. I would much prefer Peirce to Heidegger of course. Heidegger remained too attached to the human condition and a narrowly psychological model IMHO. But the essential approach is the same.

We have two basic standpoints available to us. If we take the (Cartesian) standpoint of science, we treat “consciousness” as an objective property that certain kinds of entities “have”. After all, we experience consciousness, so it must be objectively real, right? But this leads only to confusion.

Right. The traditional "scientific" approach is to work with a stripped down "objective" view. The apparently subjective stuff, like mind, meaning, reason, intelligent organisation, rational form, gets left out ontologically. And then can never be found again.

So the alternative view (suggested by quite a few) is to generalise the whole(ness) of our experience. Take the mind and reduce the entirety of what it is about.

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926) was an explicit attempt to get past this dichotomy. He said, the reason we can’t fit subjectivity into our scientific picture is that we haven’t gone deep enough on either side. Yes, we need to develop an ontology based on our own existence, because that’s ultimately all we have. But our own existence is not mainly a subjective viewpoint on a world of objects – it’s an active / receptive engagement in relationships of many kinds.

This is key. The traditional view sets up mind and world as two realms with no real connection. You have a passive subjective realm simply contemplating a world of causal action. The mind is outside, looking in the window. And its presence makes no difference (just as the mind does not need a world to be full of thoughts about things such as its "self").

The alternative view says mind only exists in interaction with the world. It is part of the action. And generalising the very notion of mind as an action is a way of describing precisely those parts of reality that have gone missing in the atomising reductionist paradigm. Like a direct causal linkage for a start.

The idea that consciousness is built on engagement is not unique to Heidegger. But his analysis of human existence was specifically intended to sketch out a new concept of time that he thought was fundamental to all forms of existence as “being in the world,” not just human.

I don't see Heidegger's approach to time as that unique or that successful. The anticipatory aspect is excellent, but also routine in this kind of approach. The final cause aspect - with death as a finite horizon that draws out the actions of the moment - probably does also work. Especially I guess because we can generalise these days to talk about dissipative structure and the heat death of the universe as the same story.

But I wasn't grabbed by it that much, so it would be interesting to hear more of why you like it.

[ConradDJ]

From what I can tell, Heidegger’s idea is not unique. It's just another viewpoint, or formulation, of old, old ideas, from many mythologies, and within seemingly disparate belief systems... often called the idea of Interdependence.
The traditional view sets up mind and world as two realms with no real connection. You have a passive subjective realm simply contemplating a world of causal action. The mind is outside, looking in the window... The alternative view says mind only exists in interaction with the world.

I don't see Heidegger's approach to time as that unique or that successful...


Yes, we’re looking for a way to understand our existence as interdependent. And the notion that the mind grows out of active engagement in the world is by now commonly accepted. This is very good... but it’s not hard to make objective statements like this. In the same vein physicists learned to acknowledge the viewpoint of “the observer” in Relativity, and even “observer participation” in Quantum Mechanics – and continue to develop theories about the world from the same objective viewpoint, as if we could put the world on our desks and inspect it “from outside.”

What I think was important about Being and Time is that it tried to develop a radically new conceptual framework for understanding the world “from inside,” as a web of interactive dependency. And it certainly did not succeed. Heidegger couldn’t even complete the work as he’d originally envisioned it... “Part Two” of the book never appeared. Most readers saw the book as a profound analysis of “the human condition,” but didn’t take seriously its claim to open up a new “fundamental ontology” relevant to all the sciences.

So that task is still before us, as I see it. We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

I have to apologize, because I’m thinking slowly this morning and I have to get to work, so I won’t get to the question of time until tomorrow. But I think this is where Heidegger made his most important contribution. He understood that the essential thing about “the world from inside” is that it operates with a different time-structure, more fundamental than the time-continuum of objective reality. But the point is not to replace the old concept of time with a better, more accurate one.

It’s not that our view of the world “from outside” is inaccurate. The problem isn’t that our objective scientific theories are wrong, but that they’re not fundamental – they’re operating with the wrong notion of what a foundation should look like. So we can know all about the physical world, down to an incredible level of detail, and still have no clue what the picture is showing us.

We can recognize that we live in a “participatory” world, but we’re still looking for a way to understand what that means.

[Energystrom]

So that task is still before us, as I see it. We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

I'm not sure how fruitful this reference will be, but Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences seems to treat, briefly, this idea of "interdependence"

He posits two different standpoints, that of the transcendental ("inner experience") and that of the scientific (starts from the world of "physical nature").

Here are his conditions for the reconciliation of the two: "a demonstration of the objective reality of inner experience and a proof of the existence of an external world from which we can then conclude that this external world contains human facts and spiritual meaning by means of a process of transferring our inner life into this world."

While I'm not sure he tells us HOW to fulfill either of the necessary conditions, he seems to encapsulate some of the issues quite clearly.

Let me know if any of these quotes need clarification, or if they are germane to the conversation. Dilthey seemed a natural element to inject into this conversation, as he is manifestly concerned with the ultimacy of the human individual, and the nature of the relationships his existence in the "objective" world entails.

[apeiron]

Again, I will come back to Peirce. And his reduction thesis. The claim that a worldview must be not monistic, nor even dualistic, but fundamentally triadic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce)

Monism seeks the one - the one true principle, the one essential stuff, the one fundamental thing. So this is standard issue reductionism. What is reality made of? Atoms. Or energy. Or geometry. Or something. Even "everything is mind" - our mind, god's mind, a panpsychic property, or a Matrix-style simulation.

It then seems obvious that the one must become two. Relationships seem primal. Dichotomies seem fundamental. You have to have a worldview based on dynamic interaction somehow. Monistic approaches always end up with dichotomies anyway. If everything is atoms, you still need a void. If everything is geometry, you still need an energy or an entropic direction to animate it.

But Peirce's approach was triadic. Hierarchical. He pointed out that a little bit of inter-relating eventually must end up with a stable global pattern of relationships. Local dynamics eventually produces global equilibrium states. And the local dynamics has to arise out of some potential in the first place. So you have an essential threeness.

And how else could we place ourselves in the universe except in the middle of it? To be the interior or subjective POV, we must have reality extending to either side. To both the larger and the smaller. We must be bounded both above and below.

Dyadic relations still leaves one side standing looking at the other. There may be an interdependence, but the two entities anchoring it are not "inside" the relationship. They are its object(ive) boundaries.

But a triadic framework puts all the localised interacting within a more general realm, a broader, more stable and enduring, context. So a local subjective POV can make sense as it is now both made of - or generated from - something (firstness), and it constrained by something (thirdness), and it is then freely doing something (secondness) within this world. The world, in the end, is all spun of relating. But there is that further level of global relations which stabilises the local relating, forming a meaning-making context.

Now this is obvious to many people. But Peirce really went to town to construct a whole metaphysics based on triadic systems principles. It was fundamental and explicit in his worldview, rather than something that popped out as a result, or was left vaguely implied.

Heidegger's approach to time in fact also seems to have just this Peircean structure of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. But more by luck than design perhaps.

Time is naturally triadic - we divide it psychologically into past, present and future. And as you say, the objectifying reductionist wants to reduce our subjective experience to a monistic description. Time is a linear succession of moments - atomic intervals, points on an endless line. Past and future are meaningless. We have mechanical equations that can describe everything as a frozen block.

But Heidegger wanted to re-psychologise time (from the admittedly little I have read him). So the past became firstness - the ground of possibility. A history of events creates a memory that sets the scene for what can happen. Then the future weighs down as a strong set of global constraints that create a context for what ought to happen. Then the present is about what is happening, the freedoms being expressed from this POV suspended between grounding possibility and super-arching constraints.

So, to the extent that Heidegger sounds to have got it right, it is because he is talking about a hierarchically organised, dynamically evolving, systems view. The Peircean metaphysic. Does this sound plausible from your readings?

[ConradDJ]

I'm not sure how fruitful this reference will be, but Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences seems to treat, briefly, this idea of "interdependence"...

Dilthey seemed a natural element to inject into this conversation, as he is manifestly concerned with the ultimacy of the human individual, and the nature of the relationships his existence in the "objective" world entails.


I don’t know Dilthey well, though Heidegger did. He mentions Max Scheler along with Dilthey in a passage in Being and Time. They were all looking for ways to talk about the depth of human “lived experience” (as opposed to the merely observational sense of “experience” as used in physics). In effect, instead of making the opposition between objective, physical reality and conscious subjective awareness, they took “subjectivity” in a deeper “existential” sense. This was when Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelianism was becoming widely read.

So Dilthey took “life” as a fundamental category – not in a restricted biological sense, but in the sense of an entire human life, from beginning to end. I don’t know where he went with that, but it’s appealing to me. But of these philosophers, I think Heidegger is the one who made a real breakthrough, seeing “subjectivity” as growing out of relationships, taking “being in the world” as his basic category, describing subjectivity as “being there”.

This points toward human connection as what’s fundamental in our “lived experience” – though Heidegger’s was too abstract a thinker to develop that theme very far. I think it’s the basic weakness of his work that it doesn’t focus specifically on human communication, or give it a central role in the nexus of relationships that underlie our existence. But by making being-in-relation a basic ontological category, he did open up the possibility of seeing both physical “objects” and conscious “subjects” as having the same ultimate ground in a world of connections.

[ConradDJ]

It then seems obvious that the one must become two. Relationships seem primal. Dichotomies seem fundamental. You have to have a worldview based on dynamic interaction somehow...

But Peirce's approach was triadic. Hierarchical. He pointed out that a little bit of inter-relating eventually must end up with a stable global pattern of relationships. Local dynamics eventually produces global equilibrium states. And the local dynamics has to arise out of some potential in the first place. So you have an essential threeness.

And how else could we place ourselves in the universe except in the middle of it? To be the interior or subjective POV, we must have reality extending to either side. To both the larger and the smaller. We must be bounded both above and below.

Dyadic relations still leaves one side standing looking at the other. There may be an interdependence, but the two entities anchoring it are not "inside" the relationship. They are its object(I’ve) boundaries.

But a triadic framework puts all the localised interacting within a more general realm, a broader, more stable and enduring, context...


Apeiron – thanks for putting so much into your response. I’ll have to discuss the time question separately – with apologies again if it gets pushed off to another day!

In the abstract, I can agree with what you say here. “Triadic” thinking has a long history in our tradition, always as a kind of resistance movement against the monistic ontology and dualistic logic of the dominant Greek philosophy. In the development of Christian doctrine, which was (from an intellectual standpoint) a defense of a “mythic” way of thinking against Greek rationalism, the Trinity was a key idea. Where the NeoPlatonists, for example, saw the dynamic of the universe as an emanation of Oneness out into Difference, Trinitarian thinking always kept alive a sense of connection-in-difference as belonging to unity itself.

So I’m in sympathy with your metaphysical inclinations. I appreciate the grand scale of your vision and how much thought has gone into constructing it. To me, though, you seem to be standing a long way outside the universe, not merely viewing it objectively the way a physicist does, but seeing it as a unfolding drama of essences, ideas. I get what you mean when you say “one must become two”... or “how else could we place ourselves except in the middle”? But although I recognize this is trying to express the dynamic / relational nature of existence, this kind of quasi-logical language doesn’t appeal to me – “local dynamics has to arise out of some potential...”

When I read “self-evident” statements like this, I think of Heidegger’s constant (and even tiresome) refrain, that the basic categories we use rest on assumptions we haven’t thought through. To me, what we take as “basic” reflects the aspects of our own “lived experience” that we’ve implicitly chosen as most meaningful. So with Peirce – he takes very seriously that as thinking beings we emerge out of a formless vagueness, as we grow up, and learn to structure our experience through interacting sets of dichotomies. As I’ve mentioned before, this has a kinship with Hegel, who found deep meaning in the intellectual experience of resolving philosophical antinomies by brilliant strokes of insight, and developed his basic ontological categories on this model – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Peirce also seems like someone for whom the experience of achieving intellectual clarity went very deep.

As for me, I identify with Kierkegaard, in that struggling with personal relationships is by far the deepest experience in my own life. What I found in Heidegger was an attempt to build categories not to describe the world as “a nexus of relationships” seen from afar, but to describe existence as an issue of being in relationships. So even as I’m trying to understand the physical world, I remind myself over and over – the basic structure of a world of relationships can’t be envisioned “from the outside”. Relationships don’t even exist, except for the ones who are in them.

This is just my own perspective, the basis from which I’m trying to work. But it explains why I don’t find Peirce’s categories and logic convincing, even though I appreciate the creativity of his intellectual imagination. But the dynamic of intellectual dichotomies just does not seem profound to me, as compared with the dynamic of actual one-on-one relationships.

[apeiron]

What I found in Heidegger was an attempt to build categories not to describe the world as “a nexus of relationships” seen from afar, but to describe existence as an issue of being in relationships. So even as I’m trying to understand the physical world, I remind myself over and over – the basic structure of a world of relationships can’t be envisioned “from the outside”. Relationships don’t even exist, except for the ones who are in them.

How would your relationships with yourself fit into this scheme?

I of course see selfhood as hierarchically and semiotically structured. So it is full of internal or subjective dichotomies such as impressions~ideas, surprise~anticipation, habit~attention, what~where, figure~ground, action~sensation, psychology~sociology. And all these dichotomies are based on local~global interactions, and all can be mapped onto the brain's actual design.

So I see selfhood/consciousness as having an immense amount of structure. It is not at all a pure "being there", but complexly organised. And organised according to the common logic of a hierarchy in which local and global are in interaction - that is the fundamental nature of interaction.

But I don't see how this obvious rich complexity can be handled just by a stripped-down view of pure relating, with no account of the differing scales of relating.

My view is essentially asymmetric. There is the small at one end interacting with the large at the other. Whereas you seem to be talking about a symmetric interaction (neither side is dominant). Or at least scale seem irrelevant.

So is "being there" really about a "me" in interaction with a world (which is actually pretty asymmetric I guess). Or is it more accurately describe as my ideas in interaction with my impressions? So my global weight of memories and expectations bearing down as a context to organised the current upwelling flood of stimuli both predicted (so able to be handled thoughtlessly) and surprising (so the proper focus of attention and learning).

Being there could be very simple (a pure dyad), or it could be irreducibly complex (a hierarchical triad).

[ConradDJ]

... I see selfhood/consciousness as having an immense amount of structure. It is not at all a pure "being there", but complexly organised. And organised according to the common logic of a hierarchy in which local and global are in interaction - that is the fundamental nature of interaction.

But I don't see how this obvious rich complexity can be handled just by a stripped-down view of pure relating, with no account of the differing scales of relating.

My view is essentially asymmetric. There is the small at one end interacting with the large at the other. Whereas you seem to be talking about a symmetric interaction (neither side is dominant).


Yes, “self” is complicated, and operates on many levels. Likewise “relating”. One of the things I most like in Being and Time is that in trying to grasp what’s fundamental in human existence, Heidegger isn’t looking for a single basic structure. For example, he talks about the “being in” aspect of existence – that is, relating to one’s overall environment – and the “being with” aspect – relating to other people – and he calls them “equiprimordial”.

We could say – existence involves an “I - it” kind of relationship, which is asymmetrical. It could be a relationship of “observing”, or a more practical kind of involvement with things we need and things we make. In any case there are particular objects we’re relating to, as well as a general background-context of other relationships.

And, existence also involves an “I - You” kind of relationship, which we experience as mutual, or at least as having a potential for mutuality. Here also we’re having a relationship with someone in a context of other relationships.

And our relationships with ourselves involve both an “I - it” aspect – reflecting on our own behavior, for example – and an “I - You” aspect, i.e. talking with ourselves. So there are quite a few “basic” relationships going on, each contributing to the context of meaning in which the others evolve.

I think your asymmetric dichotomies capture some aspects of this kind of structure. The key question for me is whether they’re adequate to describe this intersection between the essentially impersonal world of “I - it” relationships and the essentially personal world of “I - You” relationships. Since I think the difference between these two is fundamental, along with their interdependency.

There’s no question about the importance of hierarchies and differences of scale. And I think we agree that the very notion of “relationship” has nothing “pure and simple” about it, since relationships can happen only in the context of other kinds of relationships (even in physics). The question is how best to clarify what’s involved in this irreducibly complicated business of being in relationships.

[ConradDJ]

Heidegger's approach to time in fact also seems to have just this Peircean structure of firstness, secondness, and thirdness...

Time is naturally triadic - we divide it psychologically into past, present and future. And as you say, the objectifying reductionist wants to reduce our subjective experience to a monistic description. Time is a linear succession of moments - atomic intervals, points on an endless line. Past and future are meaningless. We have mechanical equations that can describe everything as a frozen block.

But Heidegger wanted to re-psychologise time (from the admittedly little I have read him). So the past became firstness - the ground of possibility. A history of events creates a memory that sets the scene for what can happen. Then the future weighs down as a strong set of global constraints that create a context for what ought to happen. Then the present is about what is happening, the freedoms being expressed from this POV suspended between grounding possibility and super-arching constraints.


We’re talking about two kinds of time. The one is the objective time we measure with clocks and mark out on calendars. This sense of time is basic to the very notion of an “object”, as something that keeps on being what it is over time, and also moves and changes, in time.

Heidegger calls this “inauthentic” time (“uneigentlich”, i.e. not one’s own). Essentially this just means time conceived “from no point of view,” as if we could stand outside of time and view the whole course of history from a distance, mapped on a time-line. In contrast, “authentic” time is this ongoing present time that is all we ever actually experience, in which we live our lives from our own points of view.

The conceptual shift from the usual “subjective” / “objective” dichotomy to “authentic” / “inauthentic” is at the heart of Heidegger’s project in Being and Time. It’s a shift from a relatively neutral language about experience and reality into language that’s highly charged with psychological and even moral overtones. For Heidegger, being a “self” and having a point of view of one’s own is not at all something to be taken for granted. Our normal view of the world is an inauthentic one, a view we learn from other people as we learn to talk and think. The shared world of “objective reality” is an aspect of this inauthentic view.

Because of the highly charged language, it’s very easy to misunderstand this, and interpret Heidegger as saying that the “inauthentic” view of the world is wrong. On the contrary, we can only be “objectively right” about things within this inauthentic framework, which is the framework of science, among other things. Our own “authentic” view is of course partial and limited and biased, always merely subjective, with respect to the facts about reality.

“Subjectivity” in this sense is just a given. “Authenticity” in contrast is something we have to fight for and struggle to achieve – learning to see and understand things from our own unique viewpoint. We get to “have a self” only to the extent that we learn a certain degree of independence from the way “everybody” thinks.

Now the reason this is so important, for Heidegger, is not just that independent thinkers may sometimes break through the limits of our collective worldview and discover new truths. The point is that what’s truly fundamental about the world can only be seen from a point of view “inside” it. The objective, inauthentic view may get the facts right, but because it only sees the world in general, from a distance, it misses the inner life of the world, so to speak – that is, the one-on-one engagement each of us has in our relationships. Our lives are not just the subjective observation of objective facts!

So there’s a paradoxical aspect to the language of Being and Time. This highly charged language of “authenticity” seems to pertain exclusively to human psychology and human morality. But it’s only by getting to the depths of our own emotional existence that we can see what’s fundamental to “existence” as such. A more neutral language – for example, about logical dichotomies and hierarchical systems – remains at a distance. So it may not be able to get to the heart of what it means to “have a point of view” – to be lucky enough to get to participate in this world.

Inauthentically, we live in a world of objects, things that last through time and change over time. No doubt, this objective reality is important for us to get to know and understand. But authentically, we live in a world of "real-time" connections which is no less important, and maybe even more fundamental.


So what is “authentic” time? The idea is not to replace the “inauthentic” view of the time-continuum, as if it were incorrect. The objective view is right, but may not be fundamental – since it doesn’t get how time actually happens, how this business of “the present moment” actually works. It just takes it for granted that “time passes”.

From one’s own point of view, there is always only “now”. The objective past is gone, and the objective future doesn’t yet exist. But this ongoing moment in which each of us lives is nothing like the frozen “point in time” captured in a photograph. It’s a continual happening, that has an “authentic past” and an “authentic future” built into it.

So you’re correct about the “triadic” structure of time, except that the “ground of possibility” is what Heidegger understands as the “authentic future”. The “now” we experience is first of all an anticipatory openness to what can happen. Like the wave-function in Quantum theory, the “present situation” is essentially a structure of what’s possible. Secondly, it’s constrained by “the authentic past”, i.e the structure of facts inherited from the past. Thirdly, what happens in each moment, in our connection with the world, revises the shape of what’s possible by adding new facts to the situation.

So this does have affinities with your way of describing how the world happens. Though Heidegger was building on Husserl’s phenomenology of time-perception rather than Peirce’s metaphysics. Heidegger also sees this as a phenomenological description of our human experience of time – but again, what he’s really is something deeper. He’s trying to develop a basic understanding of how this side of the world works, that’s based on participating in relationships.

And Being and Time was only a preliminary sketch, despite the length and density of its arguments. Even as a sketch, I think it has serious limitations. Heidegger was never able to focus on the structure of one-on-one (“I - You”) relationships, or on human communication. And in his analysis of the triadic structure of the moment, he has surprisingly little to say about “the authentic present” itself.

But these are limitations of our entire intellectual tradition. My sense is that we’re still at a very primitive stage when it comes to envisioning the world we actually experience, each from our own existential viewpoint “in real time”. And I think that’s why we’re still so far from an integrated evolutionary picture of the world that encompasses physics, biology and our own humanity. There are big pieces of the puzzle that are invisible when we only see the world from a distance.

[Maui]

But authentically, we live in a world of "real-time" connections which is no less important, and maybe even more fundamental.



I can find zero reason to assume that time is fundamental. Or space or causality. In fact we know they are not. The fields ontology being our by far the best and most consistent theory of the world, i would say that awareness is the odd one out. Think about it, the longer you think, the less likely you'd be to return to naive common-sense views. You do have a no-go theorem that explicitly forbids the fields from being both local and realistic and the foundations of all human knowledge is a philosophy that we believed was true(though it never really made sense either).





So what is “authentic” time? The idea is not to replace the “inauthentic” view of the time-continuum, as if it were incorrect. The objective view is right, but may not be fundamental – since it doesn’t get how time actually happens, how this business of “the present moment” actually works. It just takes it for granted that “time passes”.


Well if space and time really turn out to be not fundamental, then the fundamental dynamics of reality would lie completely out of sight(i am stumped by this possibility).

[apeiron]

“Subjectivity” in this sense is just a given. “Authenticity” in contrast is something we have to fight for and struggle to achieve – learning to see and understand things from our own unique viewpoint. We get to “have a self” only to the extent that we learn a certain degree of independence from the way “everybody” thinks.

I think this is a basic disagreement I would have. My view would be that the authentic, in systems terms, would be an equilbrium outcome - the parts in synch with the whole. So the concern is not about "being a self", in some way distinctive, but being a creative part of the collective.

This is why I like Peirce's epistemology.

Peirce's sense of truth is what an ideal community of inquirers would believe. That allows him to compare like to like. (i.e. our beliefs versus some potentially hypothetical beliefs in the future) This avoids the problem of correspondence between thought and reality typical in metaphysical realism since what corresponds are our thoughts and that ideal inquirer's thoughts. It's a realism since reality acts on inquirers eventually leading to stable beliefs.
The way Peirce rescued realism from this sort of idealism (since all metaphysics and physical laws are a sort of mind-relation) is by saying they are independent of what any finite set of inquirers would believe. So the notion of infinity is very key to avoiding a lot of traditional problems for Peirce.
http://enowning.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-der-blog-sein-mormon-metaphysics-on.html

[PhizzicsPhan]

Responding to the OP: read Whitehead's 1925 book Science and the Modern World and his 1929 book Process and Reality. Whitehead is difficult, but SMW is the best introduction to his thought. He presents a comprehensive and compelling worldview that encompasses science, philosophy and faith. He was a mathematician, logician, physicist and philosopher at Cambridge and Harvard so he is well-qualified to write on these issues. The last phase of his career was his philosophical phase and he sums up a lifetime of thinking about nitty gritty mathematical, logical and scientific problems in the books I mentioned. His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes. I agree with Apeiron that Heidegger seems to mistake psychology for ontology at times, but he certainly got it right in focusing on relationships.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Some essays on these issues, from a Whiteheadian perspective:

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

[Maui]

His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.


That would have been the minimalist, no-assumptions, critical view of everyone, had they spent enough time pondering the following:

1. Reality is surprizingly knowable and comprehensible(no requirement that it had to be so)
2. The geometrical nature of spacetime and the relationships that are its sole occupant
3. Laws - the constituents of reality follow strict physical laws that can be modelled effectively by math(no requirement that it had to be so)
4. Mind and awareness cannot be explained by the prevailing philosophy of science(mind is unlike anything else found in the universe)
5. Inexplicable but seemingly fundamental features of the reality we experience - Meaning, Logic, Intelligence
6. The inexplicable by the current mainstream philosophy rich inner life of each one of us(or at least me in particular)


These points don't prove anything yet but should serve as red flags for hasty conclusions.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Maui, are you saying you agree with Whitehead's panpsychist approach to the mind/body problem?

[Maui]

Maui, are you saying you agree with Whitehead's panpsychist approach to the mind/body problem?


I am not in a position to say what the deep nature of 'everything' is and claim that it has a mental aspect to it, so i withhold judgement(though i would generally doubt such claims). But i would be willing to agree that mind, existence and reality are terms referring to one and the same thing.

[apeiron]

His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.

How is the monist position of pan-experentialism "all about relationships", the dyadic view"?

If it is all about drops of experience, then it is precisely not all about the interactions those drops may subsequently experience. The experience is being said to exist regardless of whether or not interactions are also taking place.

[ConradDJ]

Responding to the OP: read Whitehead's 1925 book Science and the Modern World and his 1929 book Process and Reality... His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.


Compared to other versions of “panspychism”, I think you’re right that Whitehead is tuned into the question – how to describe a universe made of relationships rather than things.

In comparison with Heidegger, his “apperceptions” could be seen as tiny bits of a “subject / object” relationship, or “observer / observed”. British philosophers liked to keep things light and intellectual, where the Continental ones tended to go deeper. But I’m not sure any of them really got into the question – what are the fundamental relationships out of which human consciousness emerges?

I don’t know Whitehead very well, but I think of him as a modern version of Leibniz – still envisioning the world as a whole, “from the outside”, though as a web of relationships rather than as a collection of things. To me, what’s important about Heidegger is his insistence on “being in” relationships as the starting-point for ontology, rather than “relationships” per se, almost as if they were a kind of “object”.

The key difference has to do with time. So long as we’re thinking of the universe as this vast space that exists over a vast length of time – the view “from outside” – we can’t help but objectify what we imagine to exist in it. Even “drops of experience” or “moments of connection”. I think it’s only to the extent we can think about the world “from inside”, from the “authentic” point of view each of us actually has in this ongoing present moment, the now that connects us into the web of existence, that we can begin to appreciate the kind of “relationships” that the world is made of.

The “inauthentic” viewpoint that can so easily imagine the whole universe at once, from no point of view in particular, is basic to all our conceptual language. This viewpoint is essentially what the first Greek philosophers discovered, and virtually all our science and philosophy over the centuries has taken it for granted. So even when we’re talking about “subjective consciousness”, we tend automatically to assume it’s sensible to talk about it from this global viewpoint, as an objective property of certain kinds of entities.

And this leads to the specious arguments made in favor of “panpsychism” by people like Tam Hunt in the articles you linked to above. He says –

“Consciousness is entirely different because we are not talking about relational properties of the outsides of various substances. We are talking about insides, experience, consciousness, phenomena, qualia, and all the other terms we can use for mind or subjectivity. And when we define our physical constituents as wholly lacking in mind then it is literally impossible for mind to “emerge” from this wholly mindless substrate.... The emergence of insides from what previously consisted only of outsides would be the spontaneous creation of an entirely new category of reality. And it is philosophically profligate to suggest that this kind of thing can happen when there are other, more plausible, alternatives.”

This treats the “inside” point of view as if it were some mysterious kind of objective reality in addition to the “outsides” of things. This just points to the basic inadequacy of the ontology our intellectual tradition tends to take for granted, that Heidegger was trying to remedy.

I tried to make this point in a couple of posts in the recent “Brains create consciousness?” thread –

http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3200689&postcount=16
http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3202562&postcount=24

[ConradDJ]

4. Mind and awareness cannot be explained by the prevailing philosophy of science(mind is unlike anything else found in the universe)
5. Inexplicable but seemingly fundamental features of the reality we experience - Meaning, Logic, Intelligence
6. The inexplicable by the current mainstream philosophy rich inner life of each one of us(or at least me in particular)


It’s true that mental experience is profoundly different from the world of objective fact, but there’s no reason its emergence should be “inexplicable”. Again, the radical difference that appears here is a difference in point of view, not in the objective nature of things.

We can describe a human being as a certain kind of entity that talks and behaves more or less intelligently. Such a description is perfectly correct and reasonable, yet nothing like “consciousness” appears in the picture... simply because what we mean by “consciousness” only exists from its own “authentic” viewpoint. “Mind” is not a different thing from the “brain” – it’s the brain’s own moment-to-moment functioning as “seen” from inside.

I don’t think there’s anything inexplicable or even mysterious about what makes humans different from other animals. Because we relate to other people by talking with them about the world, we can also talk to ourselves about the world. We not only pay attention to things in our environment the way other animals do, in the moment, but we evolve a “rich inner life” and a highly articulated “model of reality” in our heads. So we can pay attention to things that happened centuries ago on some other continent, and we can pay attention to how it feels to pay attention to certain things, what colors look and feel like, etc. This is all possible not because of anything magic in our brains, but just because of the software we run on our brains, that constitutes our “experience” and “sense of self”. It’s basically software for developing and maintaining talking-relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.

No other beings that we know of have this kind of relationship with each other. But there’s no reason to think trees, rocks or atoms don’t have some kinds of relationships with each other, that are important to their existence as language is to ours. As a matter of fact, we know that atoms exist in several kinds of complicated relationships, which among other things support the existence of stable molecules and chemical interaction.

So far physics has been operating on the assumption that it’s enough to describe atoms as objects with objective properties, “seen from outside”. And yet, both in Relativity and in Quantum theory, the standpoint of “the observer” plays a fundamental role. This has led to a certain amount of nonsense connecting Quantum physics with consciousness... and more importantly, to a situation in which physics has essentially given up on ontology. It has no way any more of envisioning the world its theories describe, because QM in particular seems so radically “counter-intuitive”.

But I think the problem here is just the same one that leads to treating “mind” as something inexplicable. We need an ontology that includes both the objective “view from outside” and the “view from inside” – from the point of view of being in the world of relationships, i.e. an “authentic” point of view.

From any point of view “inside” the world, including that of an atom, the structure of space and time is very different from that of the global “block universe” we’re used to imagining. From inside, the world is not a collection of objects spread out in space, that move and change over time... it’s an environment made of moment-to-moment interactions, in the context of evolving relationships. In the language of QM, it’s a world of “measurement contexts” defining information that sets up other “measurements”.

Atoms don’t have “consciousness” in the human sense because they don’t talk to each other the way humans do. But they do a lot of other things with each other, and we know that a tremendous amount of interaction goes on within each atom as well. I don’t think it’s in any way “anthropomorphic” to suggest that physics needs to develop a description of what the world looks like from the atom’s “authentic” viewpoint – a description of this complicated interaction-web from inside.

[PhizzicsPhan]

How is the monist position of pan-experentialism "all about relationships", the dyadic view"?

If it is all about drops of experience, then it is precisely not all about the interactions those drops may subsequently experience. The experience is being said to exist regardless of whether or not interactions are also taking place.

Apeiron, for Whitehead, the fundamental "atoms" of the universe are drops of experience, yet these drops are each interconnected in some manner to all other "actual entities." The process of becoming concrete occurs in each moment, starting from the "prehension" of other actual entities and ending with a decision about how to become concrete. It's highly abstract but Science and the Modern World does a great job of explaining why he went down this path and why the prevailing materialist/substantialist position fails on principle.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, you make a lot of very valid points. I have a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that attempts exactly what you say we need: a physics that accounts for both external and internal relationships.

Here's the abstract:

A new approach to the “hard problem” of consciousness, the eons-old mind/body problem, is proposed, inspired by Whitehead, Schopenhauer, Griffin and others. I define a “simple subject” as the fundamental unit of matter and of consciousness. Simple subjects are inherently experiential, albeit in a highly rudimentary manner compared to human consciousness. With this re-framing, the “physical” realm includes the “mental” realm; they are two aspects of the same thing, the outside and inside of each real thing. This view is known as panpsychism or panexperientialism and is in itself a partial solution to the hard problem. The secondary but more interesting question may be framed as: what is a “complex subject”? How do simple subjects combine to form complex subjects like bats and human beings? This is more generally known as the “combination problem” ” or the “boundary problem,” and is the key problem facing both materialist and panpsychist approaches to consciousness. I suggest a new approach for resolving this component of the hard problem, a “general theory of complex subjects” that includes “psychophysical laws” in the form of a simple mathematical framework. I present three steps for characterizing complex subjects, with the physical nature of time key to this new understanding. Time is viewed as fundamentally quantized. I also suggest, as a second-order conceptualization, that “information” and “experience” may be considered identical concepts and that there is no double-aspect to information. Rather, there is a single aspect to information and it is inherently experiential. Tononi’s, Chalmers’ and Freeman’s similar theories are compared and contrasted. Part 2 of this paper will propose an experimental research program for obtaining data to support or negate the asserted framework.

[Maui]

It’s true that mental experience is profoundly different from the world of objective fact, but there’s no reason its emergence should be “inexplicable”. Again, the radical difference that appears here is a difference in point of view, not in the objective nature of things.

We can describe a human being as a certain kind of entity that talks and behaves more or less intelligently. Such a description is perfectly correct and reasonable, yet nothing like “consciousness” appears in the picture... simply because what we mean by “consciousness” only exists from its own “authentic” viewpoint.


So the brain has its own viewpoint but you want to assert that this fact is somehow not mysterious and deseriving attention? What is the reason for you what you assert?




“Mind” is not a different thing from the “brain” – it’s the brain’s own moment-to-moment functioning as “seen” from inside.


Could be, but i see little more than assertions so far.




I don’t think there’s anything inexplicable or even mysterious about what makes humans different from other animals. Because we relate to other people by talking with them about the world, we can also talk to ourselves about the world.



Why would be interested in animals? Aren't we supposed to look through a much wider perspective to encompass existence, reality, the fundamental concepts in physics? What clue could a couple animals and their behavior give us for the nature of existence, time and even consciousness(the title of the thread)?


We not only pay attention to things in our environment the way other animals do, in the moment, but we evolve a “rich inner life” and a highly articulated “model of reality” in our heads.


Who needs another description? We are supposed to look for the explanations, right?




So we can pay attention to things that happened centuries ago on some other continent, and we can pay attention to how it feels to pay attention to certain things, what colors look and feel like, etc. This is all possible not because of anything magic in our brains, but just because of the software we run on our brains, that constitutes our “experience” and “sense of self”.


What software are you talking about? Do you have a reference that the brain FIRST operates like a machine(essentially a computer) and SECOND that it's digital? Where do you get the idea that the software is the "personal experience" and "the sense of self"? You should support anything you assert with references or reasoned argumentation as per the PF rules.


It’s basically software for developing and maintaining talking-relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.


I know of no software in ANY human brain at all. I don't think anybody knows of such, please support your assertions. First prove that the brain is a computer, you can't use it as a starting premise unless you can prove it.




No other beings that we know of have this kind of relationship with each other. But there’s no reason to think trees, rocks or atoms don’t have some kinds of relationships with each other, that are important to their existence as language is to ours.



Rocks have some kinds of relationships with each other? I guess my participation in this thread is over.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Maui, of course rocks have relationships with other things - every electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., connection is a relationship.

The deeper question in this thread, however, is do things like rocks have anything we can call consciousness or mind-like? I would say "no" because even if we ascribe some rudimentary mentality to the fundamental constituents of the universe (as I do), it doesn't follow that all things are themselves mind-like. Rather, we can have "mere aggregates" of mind-like entities that are not themselves mind-like. Rocks and chairs are great examples of mere aggregates. So even if the atoms or molecules comprising these objects are mind-like in a highly rudimentary manner (a simple humming of connectivity perhaps), these collections are not themselves mind-like in any manner.

This the "combination problem" or "boundary problem" and is the key question I tackle in the paper I just mentioned above.

[apeiron]

Apeiron, for Whitehead, the fundamental "atoms" of the universe are drops of experience, yet these drops are each interconnected in some manner to all other "actual entities." The process of becoming concrete occurs in each moment, starting from the "prehension" of other actual entities and ending with a decision about how to become concrete. It's highly abstract but Science and the Modern World does a great job of explaining why he went down this path and why the prevailing materialist/substantialist position fails on principle.

Of course I agree with process philosophy in general, and I go along with Whitehead quite a long way, but it all breaks down for me in the end as he has the aim of working god and conscious experience into the very fabric of reality.

Now where I agree with Whitehead is on his "decoherence model" for actual occasions. There is a transition from potential to actual that comes about as a localised potential becomes crisply developed into an atomistic something through interaction with a globally prevailing context. But note that this is not a symmetrically dyadic interaction (a one to one), but instead an asymmetric or hierarchical interaction (a one to many, or rather a local to global).

Or if we stick to the actual occasions view, we could see the whole of the universe as the largest scale actual occasion (a crisp global context defined by a lightcone event horizon) and then every new event that happens within the universe is a localised act of prehension~concrescence, formed by a local~global interaction, that contributes novelty to the total swelling story.

So for me, all that works as it derives from QM, it fits with known physics, it is the same basic systems ontology you can find in Peirce, and it is what is modelled in modern hierarchy theory by the likes of Stan Salthe and Howard Pattee.

Yet then there is the regressive move of panexperientialism and theism.

If you are taking a systems approach, then you are arguing for some notion of holism or emergentism. You are not looking to atomise or localise everything because you are accepting that some aspects of what you are describing are fundamentally global in nature. Or rather trans-global, as there is an irreducible triadicity to the situation. It is no longer even about local vs global properties, but about local, global, and the interaction, with the whole system having certain "properties".

So Whitehead appears to be building towards a system view, and then suddenly he wants to locate "the wholeness of consciousness" within atomistic drops of experience. Very complex states (and even generalised feelings of sympathy are complex states, as the neuroscience can tell us) are suddenly posited at the simplest possible level of reality's structure. And this trick is passed off with the usual hand-wavey philosophical device of saying "well, you know what a property is when it exists at full strength, now imagine diluting it to the point it is barely even there, and that's how it would work".

I should call this the homeopathy gambit perhaps. :smile: Take a solution and dilute it until there is barely anything there. Just a single molecule/atom in a tube of water. Then dilute further and there is still the impression of what has just departed. In the same way, take consciousness as a complex systems property and reduce, reduce. Imagine it then never vanishes even as you consider the view from inside an actual occasion.

Yet if the triadic interaction is irreducible - the one between a locality being shaped up to have concrete being, and the global context that is doing the shaping - then there just cannot be a systems property inside the local event. The systems property is only inside the system. The local event is in fact an event horizon on that systems property.

It is just like asking about the structure of the information that has fallen inside a black hole. Structure is precisely what cannot exist beyond the horizon. You can "dilute" the system only so far. Eventually there is a radical breakdown and the holistic properties are no longer there.

So I find Whitehead frustrating. He clearly has a much more sophisticated approach than someone like Heidegger (sorry Conrad!), but it all gets twisted into a faulty argument for panexperentialism and theism as far as I can see. There is a sleight of hand where what is clearly a property of a system (like consciousness) gets suddenly transferred across the local event horizon of the system. We get down to talking about the grainy microscale - the simplest and smallest actual occasions - and suddenly experience pops up again inside the grains.

Homeopathy. Remove every molecule and still the essence of the molecule remains present. Although at least homeopathy claims that the surrounding water molecules can take a ghostly imprint. Which smuggles a systems perspective back into things to make the endless dilution story seem credible.

Anyway, this view of process philosophy I accept. There is a local unformed potential, some localised degrees of freedom. There is a local~global interaction - the degrees of freedom come into contact with a global realm of crisply-formed constraints. There is then an act of development that results in a concrete local identity. What was just a potential becomes a well-formed, enduring and contributing part of the greater whole.

But I do not see any argument here that gets the experiencing across the event horizon that is the "actual occasion" before it actually became part of a larger wholeness. Before the local occasion became something actual for the system, and so part of a state of experience, it was only a potential and so not actually contributing to such a state.

Panexperientialism just seems like the same kind of illegitimate manoeuvre as hidden variables in QM, put this way.

The process/systems approach is irreducibly tradic. It believes in 1) a raw unformed potential that 2) through interaction becomes 3) hierarchically developed. You can't then seek to collapse all this back to a monistic existence view which talks now about concrete, atomised, drops of experience. The whole point is that if you take away the reality structured by its interactions, all you will have left is again the initial raw unformed potential.

There is no concrete "inside" to an actual occasion. This would be to take an illegitimate spatialised view. Even for Whitehead, the correct view must be to ask about panexperience "before" an occasion was actual. We must do justice to the the axis of development that is the foundation of a process philosophy. And before something has developed, logic says it just isn't there - except in the potential sense (potentially yes, potentially no, lets interact with a concrete context and we will find out a concrete answer).

[Maui]

Maui, of course rocks have relationships with other things - every electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., connection is a relationship.


I thought we were past that already.



The deeper question in this thread, however, is do things like rocks have anything we can call consciousness or mind-like?


Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

[apeiron]

Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

But here, what about your presumptions?

A systems/process view of reality would argue that classical objects in spacetime are what become the primary substances. While the potentials, superpositions and relationships are just that - the unformed potentials from whence the concrete objects developed.

And it sounds odd to call the unformed potentials more real than the formed objects (and the world that is forming them).

So the real is what has become. And science just has to come up with a developmental ontology that matches the facts we already know about the quantum rules of becoming.

This is where the philosophy of Peirce (and, alright, Whitehead) can make sense of QM and GR, in a way that atomistic, monistic, reductionism is doomed never to do.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

Maui, Whitehead's key point (and mine) is that modern materialism has unworkable assumptions built into it, which I think is what you're arguing. And that modern materialist view includes the Copenhagen interpretation of QM that you are apparently advocating as though this is somehow an unassailable conclusion about the nature of reality. There are numerous (dozens) of interpretations of QM that are all adequate to the facts. Similarly, there are many interpretations of relativistic data that don't require that we view space and time as malleable in an ontological manner. In fact, there are literally an infinity of interpretations for any given set of data. Obviously, one or a few interpretations gain prominence and there is generally one prevailing interpretation. But surely you know enough history of physics and science to know that one generation's prevailing interpretation can quickly become the next generation's joke.

I actually agree with you that the primary stuff of reality is pure potential - call it the vacuum, ether, apeiron, Brahman or what have you. I currently believe that this primary stuff of the universe is non-experiential and that experience only arises when potentiality becomes actuality. But the totality of actual entities comprise collectively the universe itself - there is no other stuff that is actual (as opposed to the pure potentiality of apeiron). Whitehead shifted on this issue, apparently endorsing something like what I just wrote in Science and the Modern World but then adopting a more Leibnizian view of actual entities independent from any substrate in Process and Reality. But in both cases he is an avowed panpsychist even though he doesn't ever use this term.

But don't fall into the trap of presuming that your assumptions are unassailably true. There is no ultimate truth - only conjectures that are more or less supported by data.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron,

I'm going to plagiarize myself and quote at length from a recent essay of mine on these topics:

Whitehead’s system is compelling for a number of reasons, not least of which are its adequacy to the facts of human experience, its logical consistency, and the pedigree of its creator. It’s hard to find someone more qualified than Whitehead to create a comprehensive philosophical system, due to his background in mathematics, logic, and physics at the highest levels of academia.

Perhaps the primary purpose of philosophy is to explain the objective world and how we fit into it. When we look around us, feel around us, sense around us in the most general sense, we detect solidity. The chair I’m in right now stops me from falling to the ground because of its solidity. The ground, because of its solidity, more generally stops me, and you, from falling through the Earth. The stars in the heavens are detectable to our telescopes because of their presumed solidity. And the microbes and electrons we see in our microscopes are detectable because of their solidity. So what is this solidity?

Physics is of course the science that directly addresses solidity, and “matter” is what we generally call most of the stuff that collectively comprises solidity. Most non-physicists — and perhaps many physicists also — presume that modern physics has in fact pinned down solidity. But it hasn’t. Physics still has no idea what matter really is. Theories abound. Most physicists, when pressed to really drill down deep, would suggest that matter is comprised of fields which are themselves comprised of energy, or vice versa. Quantum field theory, one of the crown jewels in modern physics, successfully combined quantum mechanics with special relativity. (See Max Jammer’s Concepts of Matter).

The far more difficult task of reconciling general relativity (the prevailing theory of gravity, space, and time) with quantum mechanics (the prevailing theory of matter) has yet to be achieved. String theory is the most well-known reconciliation attempt and this theory (or actually “set of theories” because there are a huge number of related theories) suggests that all matter/energy/fields are really tiny strings vibrating in many dimensions. There are many problems, however, with string theory, as described by Lee Smolin in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics.

My point here is not, however, to survey all the candidates for a “general unified theory.” Rather, my point is to highlight that we really don’t know — still — what the heck this is.

But there is a solution. The solution is more philosophical than physical, even though there’s really not a separation between these two endeavors because philosophy’s role is to truly generalize science. And we don’t need to get hung up on the terms — matter, energy, fields, strings, etc. — to get to that solution.

For example, if we consider energy to be the most fundamental reality behind the apparent solidity of matter, it suddenly becomes very difficult to define what energy “really” is. The discussion becomes a word game. We can define energy by using yet more words. If we’re trying to explain the apparent solidity around us, the apparent solidity that our senses present to us, we can label it “matter,” as is the usual convention. Or we can label it “condensed energy” or we can use both terms. Or we can describe it as “really” tiny vibrating strings, when we look all the way down. We could even label the “true” reality behind our senses “Ideas,” as Plato did and many Idealist philosophers since Plato have done.

What really matters, however, is not the terminology but the conceptual placeholder. What are we trying to explain? In this case we’re trying to explain the apparent solidity of the objective world. Philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian novelist and polymath, have recognized this difficulty and opted to use more general terms that will remain accurate and useful no matter what terms our current physical theories prefer.

For Whitehead, the ultimate constituents of reality are “actual entities.” An actual entity is just another name, but it’s very different than traditional views of “matter” or “energy.” An actual entity is a general description for an event. An event is a happening, a becoming. So the actual entity is very different than the traditional notions of matter or energy. An actual entity never exists outside of time. It’s a process, not a thing. Time — duration — is built into the definition.

Whitehead’s “actual entity” is thus a more complete description of fundamental reality because it necessarily implies that no physical thing exists outside of time. All actual things, to be actual, which means they are perceivable or “physical,” must exist in time. We can conceptually freeze objects. We can image an arrow frozen in mid-flight, hanging in space. But this is just a reflection of our imaginations, not a reflection of reality. Similarly, modern physics often imagines that the ultimate constituents of matter could in actuality be frozen in place and given a name, independent of time. Physics takes the approach of asking the universe to “just please hold still for a second so that we can study you.”

But it never does. The universe is always in motion, always becoming. Time is always proceeding forward. It is, then, a mistake to conceptually separate matter from time and to believe that this conceptual separation is indicative of reality.

Arthur Koestler coined another term that is perhaps even more general than Whitehead’s actual entities. Koestler described a “holon” as a universal unit of organization that is both a part and a whole. Koestler writes:

“A part, as we generally use the word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, there is a tendency among holists to use the word ‘whole’ or ‘Gestalt’ as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But wholes and parts in this absolute sense do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organizations. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in ascending order of complexity, each of which has two faces looking in opposite directions: the face turned toward the lower levels is that of an autonomous whole, the one turned upward that of a dependent part.”

Koestler’s holon is a very useful explanatory concept that can be used to describe any level of reality. It can also be used outside of physics to describe social organization or biological structures.

Holons and actual entities are, then, the most general of terms to explain the apparent solidity around us. For Whitehead and Koestler, all actual entities and all (physical) holons have an accompanying experience. This is more than a re-labeling. Holons and actual entities do a far better job of explaining the solidity around us because they also explain our relationship, as conscious beings, to that solidity. Each actual entity is, according to Whitehead, a “drop of experience.”

If all things are actual entities, then all things have experience. Ergo: Experience goes all the way down. And up. This is where we return to the theme of this series of articles: absent-minded science. Today’s prevailing physical theories have such a hard time explaining consciousness because they subscribe to a view of matter that from the outset excludes mind.

Whitehead, Koestler, Griffin, and other panpsychists have realized that our explanations of solidity had to be revised in order to adequately explain our place in that solidity, the universe around us.

Now, back to my opening theme. I’m still infatuated with Whitehead because his ideas are, as mentioned, logically coherent, empirically adequate, and come from such a respected intellect. But I’ve realized since my initial infatuation that Whitehead is one in a long line of comprehensive thinkers that includes Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Locke, Russell, James, Royce, etc., all the way to the modern era with such key figures as Ken Wilber, David Chalmers, etc. I’ve also realized that thinkers who I at first dismissed as silly, such as the idealists Berkeley, Hegel, Schelling, etc., were actually getting to many of the same truths. They just use different language.

The terms don’t matter as much as what these terms point to. Whether we call our philosophy “idealism” or “materialism” or “panpsychism,” we are trying to explain the same thing: reality, this. Some approaches are better than others—but our criteria are themselves subjective. I have highlighted empirical adequacy, logical consistency, and intellectual pedigree here. But other criteria could be used and different conclusions reached.

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. I need to read some Peirce - I must admit I've not a read a thing by him.

[apeiron]

PS. I need to read some Peirce - I must admit I've not a read a thing by him.

I'm about to read your JCS sample. Meanwhile a good fun article on Peirce (with a set of direct quotes relevant to this discussion) is...

http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/

Although Parker is stretching in trying to make a direct connection between Peirce and Plotinus (as he admits at the end).

[apeiron]

For Whitehead, the ultimate constituents of reality are “actual entities.” An actual entity is just another name, but it’s very different than traditional views of “matter” or “energy.” An actual entity is a general description for an event. An event is a happening, a becoming. So the actual entity is very different than the traditional notions of matter or energy. An actual entity never exists outside of time. It’s a process, not a thing. Time — duration — is built into the definition.

No controversy here. The usual natural presumption is that the world is made of stuff that is solid and unchanging. But watch anything over enough time, and everything appears to develop, change, evolve. In Whitehead's day, QM and GR were demonstrating that this was true at a physical level for both local events and global contexts.

Holons and actual entities are, then, the most general of terms to explain the apparent solidity around us. For Whitehead and Koestler, all actual entities and all (physical) holons have an accompanying experience. This is more than a re-labeling. Holons and actual entities do a far better job of explaining the solidity around us because they also explain our relationship, as conscious beings, to that solidity. Each actual entity is, according to Whitehead, a “drop of experience.”

But here is where I don't see a proper argument. Why should we conclude that conscious experience is a property that goes all the way down to the smallest scale of being?

The standard argument seems to be that because reductionism fails to deliver us a causal account of consciousness as an emergent property of complexly organised brains, then we have to presume that consciousness never actually emerges. Instead it exists all the way down to the simplest levels of organisation. And even past that to the atomistic state of things where what exists is not even part of an organisation.

This does not strike me as a powerful story. Reductionism fails to explain consciousness as a systems property, so therefore we have no choice but to still reduce consciousness to the littlest atoms of experience (rather than getting on with modelling systems as actually systems).

So apart from justifying a belief in panpsychism on the all too evident and widely agreed failure of simple-minded reductionsism, are there any positive, evidence-backed, reasons for believing the idea?

(And when you say Koestler also believed that all holons have experience, I don't think this is correct. He talked about autonomy and other such qualities. But I don't believe he was a card-carrying panpsychic at all. Or can you point to a source on this?)

[Maui]

And that modern materialist view includes the Copenhagen interpretation of QM that you are apparently advocating as though this is somehow an unassailable conclusion about the nature of reality. There are numerous (dozens) of interpretations of QM that are all adequate to the facts.


None of the interpretations(save for maybe one) retain the old notions of a mechanical universe. The BI isn't much farther than the belief in unicorns, you could always label the pink unicorn a hidden variable that's able to manipulate outcomes of experiments. So when you talk about a mind arising from matter in spacetime, keep in mind that your thesis isn't entirely inkeeping with the facts.




Similarly, there are many interpretations of relativistic data that don't require that we view space and time as malleable in an ontological manner. In fact, there are literally an infinity of interpretations for any given set of data. Obviously, one or a few interpretations gain prominence and there is generally one prevailing interpretation. But surely you know enough history of physics and science to know that one generation's prevailing interpretation can quickly become the next generation's joke.



Obviously, but yet, we are now better informed than we previously were. There is nothing strange about looking at the double slit and getting classical, common-sense results. We do this every day - i open the door and expect that the room is there in a classical, well-defined state. When i don't look at the double slit - i don't care that i get non-sensical results. After all i live and exist when and where i take a look, not when and where i cannot possibly look. This is well illustrated in the DCE.

The only problem is people's expectations that existence has to be certain way - i.e. preexisting, definite and absolute. This cannot be supported.


I actually agree with you that the primary stuff of reality is pure potential - call it the vacuum, ether, apeiron, Brahman or what have you. I currently believe that this primary stuff of the universe is non-experiential and that experience only arises when potentiality becomes actuality.



Add the determinsim of SR and the blockworld view, and you might reach interesting conclusions about being.



But the totality of actual entities comprise collectively the universe itself - there is no other stuff that is actual (as opposed to the pure potentiality of apeiron). Whitehead shifted on this issue, apparently endorsing something like what I just wrote in Science and the Modern World but then adopting a more Leibnizian view of actual entities independent from any substrate in Process and Reality. But in both cases he is an avowed panpsychist even though he doesn't ever use this term.

But don't fall into the trap of presuming that your assumptions are unassailably true. There is no ultimate truth - only conjectures that are more or less supported by data.



It makes no sense to me to suppose that matter down to the last atom has consciousness. The definition of an "atom" seems quite ambiguous when the atom is not in an observed state. So i see no reason to attach more mystery(mind) to something that sits as near infinite as a potential.

[Maui]

But here, what about your presumptions?


What presumptions? That I exist(have a personal experience)? That's not a presumption, that's a cold fact as far as i am concerned. I am not willing to assume anything more until the situation becomes clear as to the nature of the classical world.



A systems/process view of reality would argue that classical objects in spacetime are what become the primary substances. While the potentials, superpositions and relationships are just that - the unformed potentials from whence the concrete objects developed.

And it sounds odd to call the unformed potentials more real than the formed objects (and the world that is forming them).

So the real is what has become. And science just has to come up with a developmental ontology that matches the facts we already know about the quantum rules of becoming.

This is where the philosophy of Peirce (and, alright, Whitehead) can make sense of QM and GR, in a way that atomistic, monistic, reductionism is doomed never to do.



Agreed so far. But what about mind(personal experience) and the potentials that actualize? I don't see how mind(awareness) fits the picture.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, in terms of why panpsychists assert that experience/consciousness is fundamental, there are many lines of argument. The bottomline, though, is that what we normally conceive of as matter (defined as being non-mental) is better conceived as being both objective and subjective, in oscillation.

Here's another essay of mine on the issue of emergence in materialism. There are really are only two very broad choices on this issue: either mind emerges at some point in our universe from what is not mind OR it is there from the very beginning in some manner (this second option encompasses both panpsychism and idealism).

______________________

At a recent talk I attended at UC Santa Barbara, Professor Marcus Raichle, one of the pioneers of brain imaging, jokingly referred to consciousness as the “C word.”

His little joke highlighted the fact that for many working neuroscientists and others who think about the brain, trying to explain what consciousness actually is – as opposed to explaining the various functions of brains – is still a bit frowned upon. It also seems that many neuroscientists who do think about the “hard problem” of consciousness – the mind/body problem by a different name – believe that once we explain the functions of brains there’s really not much, if anything, left to explain about consciousness itself.

I find in my discussions on consciousness that arguments about “emergence,” well, emerge as a response from critics time and time again. Consciousness is, in this view, simply an emergent property of complex biological structures like brains.

I’ve written a number of essays (and an unpublished book) defending the alternative panpsychist view of consciousness. The type of panpsychism I find compelling is that developed into a comprehensive system by Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and many others during the 20th Century. It is growing in popularity, but still a minority view.

The basic idea is that all components of the universe have at least some rudimentary type of consciousness or experience, which are just different words for subjectivity or awareness. The key question for panpsychist theories of consciousness is why some aggregations of matter contain unitary subjects and others don’t (saying “unitary subject” is actually redundant but I want to be entirely clear).

For example, no modern panpsychist that I know of argues that a chair or a rock is conscious - despite the bad jokes often lobbed at panpsychists. Rather, the molecules that comprise the chair or rock presumably have a very rudimentary type of consciousness but the larger objects themselves (again, presumably) lack the kind of interconnections required to become unitary subjects.

The subjects we know best are humans. Each of us, in fact, knows exactly one subject intimately: ourselves. Clearly, then, some aggregates of matter do in fact produce a complex unitary subject and we call this our “mind.”

The “hard problem” of consciousness is figuring out the relationship between mind and matter and why some matter gives rise to unitary subjects and why others don’t. Why am I conscious, and you, and my cat, but not the chair or the rock?

We have literally no certainty as to what objects in the universe, other than ourselves, are also subjects because we can only know our own self as a subject. We must, then, use reasonable inference to determine what other objects in the universe are also subjects.

And it is through reasonable inference that we can conclude that panpsychism is a better solution to the hard problem than its competitors. This is a strong statement, to be sure, but I have presented numerous lines of reasoning to support this assertion in previous essays and present some additional lines below.

The prevailing position with respect to the above-referenced hard problem, however, seems to be some type of “emergence” theory. The basic idea is that mind simply emerges from matter in certain complex forms, just like wetness or solidity or color emerge from matter in certain situations.

Jeffrey Goldstein provides a concise and clear definition in a 1999 paper: Emergence is “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” There are many other definitions, of course, but this one is good for present purposes.

So, is mind like wetness or other emergent physical properties? To my mind (pardon the pun), the answer is a resounding “No.”

There is a crucial difference. Let’s take liquidity. Liquidity is indeed a new feature of molecules that isn’t present until the right conditions are present. Hydrogen and oxygen molecules aren’t themselves liquid at room temperature. And yet the liquidity of water is entirely explicable by looking at how these molecules interact with each other. There is really no mystery now (well, surely some, but not much) in how these molecules combine to form dipolar molecules that attract each other more loosely than in a solid but less loosely than in the constituent gases. In other words, liquidity is pretty predictable, or at least explicable, when we consider the constituents of any given liquid. We’re dealing with “outsides” at every step in this process - first the outsides of the individual molecules and then the outsides of the combination of molecules in the liquid.

We can strengthen the point even further by considering the fact that both hydrogen and oxygen become liquids of their own if we cool them enough. Liquid hydrogen “emerges” from gaseous hydrogen at -423 degrees Fahrenheit. Liquid oxygen emerges from gaseous oxygen at the comparatively balmy temperature of -297 degrees. Liquidity thus emerges at different temperatures as a relatively straightforward shift in the types of bonds between the constituent molecules.

Consciousness is entirely different because we are not talking about relational properties of the outsides of various substances. We are talking about insides, experience, consciousness, phenomena, qualia, and all the other terms we can use for mind or subjectivity. And when we define our physical constituents as wholly lacking in mind then it is literally impossible for mind to “emerge” from this wholly mindless substrate. Emergence of mind from no-mind is what Strawson calls “radical emergence” and he makes basically the same argument that I’ve made here as to its impossibility, in “Realistic Monism” and Consciousness and Its Place in Nature.

It is “radical” because the emergence of insides from what previously consisted only of outsides would be the spontaneous creation of an entirely new category of reality. And it is philosophically profligate to suggest that this kind of thing can happen when there are other, more plausible, alternatives.

Now, maybe impossibility is too strong a word. Granted, at this level of abstraction we can’t prove anything (can anything be proved, period?). I can’t prove that it is impossible for mind to emerge from matter where it was wholly absent before. So perhaps a better word would be implausible. It is highly implausible, then, that the inside of matter (mind, consciousness) would suddenly emerge at some arbitrary midpoint in the history of the universe. Sewall Wright, a well-known American evolutionary biologist, stated it well in a 1977 article: “[E]mergence of mind from no mind is sheer magic.”

Colin McGinn, a British philosopher, states perhaps even more forcefully why emergentism fails:

“[W]e do not know how consciousness might have arisen by natural processes from antecedently existing material things. Somehow or other sentience sprang from pulpy matter, giving matter an inner aspect, but we have no idea how this leap was propelled… . One is tempted, however reluctantly, to turn to divine assistance: for only a kind of miracle could produce this from that. It would take a supernatural magician to extract consciousness from matter. Consciousness appears to introduce a sharp break in the natural order-a point at which scientific naturalism runs out of steam.”

In light of these arguments, isn’t it far more plausible that mind is simply present where matter is present instead of emerging for the first time at a seemingly arbitrary midpoint in the history of our universe?

This is the panpsychist position: Where there is matter there is also mind; they are two aspects of the same thing. As matter complexifies, so mind complexifies. (The details become far more complex than this, but this is the basic position).

Alan Watts said it best: “For every inside there is an outside, and for every outside there is an inside; though they are different, they go together.”

It seems, then, that today’s prevailing theory that advocates mind as a purely emergent phenomenon has major problems.

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. You're right that Koestler would not say all holons are mind-like - only physical holons, that is, actual holons. Holons can of course be purely conceptual, like "France," for example, which is obviously not a mental entity.

[apeiron]

Apeiron, in terms of why panpsychists assert that experience/consciousness is fundamental, there are many lines of argument. The bottomline, though, is that what we normally conceive of as matter (defined as being non-mental) is better conceived as being both objective and subjective, in oscillation.

Oscillating? Whose theory is that?

The key question for panpsychist theories of consciousness is why some aggregations of matter contain unitary subjects and others don’t

Yes, so what is the answer? The only apparently unitary subjects are complex brains with a well understood organisation, evolutionary history and reason for having the functions they do. Their unique position with the material world is well accounted for. So what further rules of material organisation have been overlooked?

Jeffrey Goldstein provides a concise and clear definition in a 1999 paper: Emergence is “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.” There are many other definitions, of course, but this one is good for present purposes.

So, is mind like wetness or other emergent physical properties? To my mind (pardon the pun), the answer is a resounding “No.”

This is talking about the simplest possible notion of emergence as seen in phase transitions. It is not the kind of self-organisation that a systems scientist would be thinking about. So the liquidity angle becomes a straw man very fast. The real argument to tackle is the complex systems one.

A key difference, for example, is that brains self-organise over multiple spatiotemporal scales. There is learning and adaptation of state that takes place over genetic scales (whole genomes, multiple generations), lifetimes (memories, habits, neural circuitry), minutes and seconds (working memories, goals, expectations), and split seconds (preconscious habitual responses, attentional shifts, recognitions). Water just condenses.

Associated with this is the ability to store information in unmysterious ways (genes, words, membranes, axons) and so create a level of control over material events that is actually unphysical. ie: Semiotic. Rate independent information in control of rate dependent dynamics. Water and other simple examples of emergence just do not have this further aspect to their material reality, making them illegitimate as analogies.

Consciousness is entirely different because we are not talking about relational properties of the outsides of various substances. We are talking about insides, experience, consciousness, phenomena, qualia, and all the other terms we can use for mind or subjectivity.

This is a big jump in the argument that needs more careful justification. There are a whole array of objections.

For a start, when I talk about having a view from the inside, I am actually taking a view from the outside "looking in". This is the distanced self-aware description of what is happening. "Oh look at me, I'm having 'experience', I'm busy 'being aware of qualia'."

So a lot of the apparent 'unitary subject' story is a result of this objectification. I am taking up an imaginary stance (one formed as a sociocultural idea) that packages me as a 'me'. Consciousness itself is a process, a state of brain response, an emboddied interaction with the world that is complexly structured across multiple timescales. ie: Described like that, the unification is between an organism needed to predict and control its world, and the world that is being controlled and predicted.

But introducing the self-aware view involves now cutting away all that living tissue of strong connectedness and treating my experiences as the experiences of a separate self. It objectifies and so in fact constructs the notion of a subjective state as a further objective fact about material reality.

So while it sounds naively appealing to just take the outside/inside difference as read, it is in fact a pretty tangled story. The very terminology betrays you as "inside" is another objective description of the world. And when you actually consider what consciousness is about, it does not feel anything like being separate from the world. I may know objectively it is all just happening inside my head, but that is not the nature of my experiencing.

It is “radical” because the emergence of insides from what previously consisted only of outsides would be the spontaneous creation of an entirely new category of reality. And it is philosophically profligate to suggest that this kind of thing can happen when there are other, more plausible, alternatives.

Again, it just sounds like a rhetorical device this outside/inside dichotomy. More work needs to be done to pin down what is being argued.

Think of a computer with its hardware and software. This is actually the nearest I can imagine to an outside/inside situation. The hardware is all outside. The program is all inside. But this creation of a new category of reality (ie: Turing's world) does not seem philosophically troubling to most people.

I can’t prove that it is impossible for mind to emerge from matter where it was wholly absent before.

But that is not the claim of neuroscientists and others arguing on the basis of complexity. Their claim is that mind emerges from the wholly simple (as it becomes wholly complex in a particular fashion).

Clearly, material and immaterial are set up to be disconnected realms. Like outside/inside, the conclusions is wired into the premise.

But when you start talking instead about simple and complex, then the mystery evaporates. Matter in simple arrangements has simple emergent properties (like liquidity). Matter in exceptionally intricate arrangements, ones organised to achieve ends, has "internal states" to match. If brains are organised to represent their worlds in anticipatory fashion, there is going to be "something it is like" to be that brain at a particular moment in a particular place.

Complexity is not something that has to be either wholly present or wholly absent in a material world, so the anti-emergence argument just collapses at this point.

In light of these arguments, isn’t it far more plausible that mind is simply present where matter is present instead of emerging for the first time at a seemingly arbitrary midpoint in the history of our universe?

But if your panpsychic theory still ends up arguing that the "unitary subject" is a result of complex organisation - as why else is a brain conscious, but not a chair? - then why not just apply occam's razor and accept complexity as the answer?

A lack of complexity easily explains a lack of subjective "what it is like to be" mental activity, like anticipatory representations of a world, in a chair. Positing a further mysterious category of reality for simple arrangements of matter is the superflous step here.

Once you accept complexity as necessary to your panpsychic stance, you have to be able to demonstrate why complexity cannot now carry all the load to preserve that stance.

Alan Watts said it best: “For every inside there is an outside, and for every outside there is an inside; though they are different, they go together.”

Yes, thesis always justifies antithesis. Every concept has to be a complementary pair. This is a truth that applies to absolutely any stance we could end up taking here.

So to have the simple, we need also to have the complex (to define what simplicity is not). And likewise the complex is defined in terms of how un-simple it is.

The difference is that inside~outside is not actually a scientifically useful distinction here. What is an "inside" in science? It can mean many things. It can mean smaller in scale. It can mean the more highly specified interior (such as the inside millieu of a cell). It could mean the gauge symmetries that are the "inside" aspects of a particle. It could mean the way the software is "inside" the hardware of a computer.

There are just multiple meanings, and so which one is the panpsychic argument claiming to be the one on which science is falling down? Some psychic distinction which is not even posited?

But on the other hand, science does have theories about complexity. There are concrete models that distinguish between the simple and complex on measurable grounds.

To say science is on the wrong path, it cannot hope to reach its destination, panpsychism has to deal with the actual models employed by scientists, not a straw man definition of emergence, or hand-wavey talk about insides and outsides.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, before I respond in detail, let me ask you: when does mind emerge in the universe? In other words, at what point is sufficient complexity reached such that we can validly ascribe something a mental nature in addition to its physical nature? (I am assuming, based on your above response, that you are in fact an emergentist).

[apeiron]

Apeiron, before I respond in detail, let me ask you: when does mind emerge in the universe? In other words, at what point is sufficient complexity reached such that we can validly ascribe something a mental nature in addition to its physical nature? (I am assuming, based on your above response, that you are in fact an emergentist).

There is no short answer. But the short answer would be that I take a dissipative structure approach to complexity - most systems scientists would today found their views in a thermodynamic approach to "materiality". So if you wanted to be really general about "mind", you can stretch definitions to say that all dissipative structure has "mind" in some sense.

This would be the pansemiotic stance. But it is really nothing like a "drops of experience" concept. It would be just looking at a dust devil, or a river, and saying that these are dissipative structures that seem to "know" their worlds in the sense that they are localised forms of order pursuing entropy gradients.

And then, by establishing a foundation for what semiosis even is - so we do have a continuum from the simple to the complex - then there is the further step of introducing the proper distinction between the living and the non-living, the mindful and the mindless.

So start with some view of material reality that is systems-based and says everything is really "the same". Then come in with a sharp definition of the nature of the difference to mark the transistion to where something pretty new-looking emerges - which is bios, or life and mind.

This is not easy because it is not that clear-cut. But I would reference the epistemic cut of Howard Pattee as the best single definition I have come across. And then there are a whole bunch of other theoretical biologists who are playing variations on that theme.

So formally, mind is being identified with life - they are two terms for the same basic process. Where you have one, you have the other. But still not in a naive "drops of experience" way obviously. Rather, it is all about a general difference between biotic and abiotic dissipative structures - what distinguishes a dust devil from a bacterium, even when both are doing the Second Law's work.

So it is not about "sufficient" complexity (a growing quantity of dissipative structure, or a particular achieved rate of entropification) but indeed about a change in the qualitative nature of complexity. There is something sharply new going on in living systems - the thing Pattee describes as the epistemic cut.

And so it is also broadly an emergence approach, but not at all like a simple emergence approach such as liquidity or chaotic attractors or whatever. It is a strong emergence approach in which "something hidden lay in wait". With DNA for example, it may be all just reducible to the chemistry of molecules. Yet there is also something qualitatively new in the symbol processing capabilities of DNA.

Liquidity is a change in collective behaviour - a simple phase transition from one global equilibrium state to a new global equilibrium state. Gassy, liquidity, solidity, plasma-ity. These are labels for "dead" macrostates - holonomic boundary conditions. Nothing is happening when H2O is in a gaseous phase, or a liquid phase. There is just static existence. The happening is only during the transition.

We can get closer to a living state when we are "far from equilbrium" to use Prigogine's old term. For example, H20 perhaps seems a bit more interesting when it is in its opalescence phase - the "edge of chaos" balance when it is poised scalefree between vapour and water. At the critical point, we see actual dissipative structure. And that is already more impressive than tired old "liquidity" as an illustration of (still very simple) emergence.

But life/mind crosses a border. We still just have dissipative structure. The material universe will not permit anything else. The second law rules all possible actual phenomena. However we now have autonomous systems - ones that objectify themselves using time-defeating memory devices like genes, axons, membranes, words. Something alive and mindful carries around its own packaged idea of what it wants to be, what it should do. And there is no essential mystery about how that trick is achieved.

However what is lacking - in the wider scientific and philosophic community - is a clear understanding of the trick and its implications for models of causality.

Simple-minded reductionism cannot work. Reality is irreducibly complex. We have the evidence, we have the general theories (even if they are not widely broadcast). But people still continue to debate as if simple causality applies and complexity is epiphenomenal to existence.

So the clear answer would be that mind appears as soon as life appears. The best definition of where that happens is probably Howard Pattee's epistemic cut. And then the best theory of the material reality that grounds both life and non-life in the language of complex systems would be dissipative structure theory.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, you're making some progress compared to the prevailing materialist/emergentist view, but you're not there yet.

You've punted the mind/body problem to the life/not-life problem by equating the two and then stating your lack of insight (and science more generally) into when life begins. This isn't really that helpful if we stop there.

I agree with you entirely that life and consciousness are in fact two words for the same phenomenon - which can be quantified as the complexity of any particular thing. We are in agreement on these broad points.

But life is, like consciousness/mind, a quality that inheres in all things just a little bit and in more complex things a lot. Pansemiotism = panpsychism = panzoism.

Here's a recent essay of mine on panzoism:

http://www.independent.com/news/2011/mar/27/what-life/

And here's another on why emergentism (and eliminativism) equates to crypto-panpsychism:

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/feb/23/conscious-or-not-conscious/

You've assumed in your discussion that I'm arguing (and Whitehead) that the most basic experience requires complex structures. That's not my position. My position is that as the fundamental entities of the universe complexify so mind complexifies. Not all aggregates are themselves mind-like but all constituents are indeed mind-like. And some collections of constituents combine in such a way to create new higher-level minds/holons/actual entities.

As for your earlier question about the oscillatory theory of minds, this is part of Whitehead's theory of actual entities, prehensions and concrescence. Each actual entity oscillates in each moment of the "creative advance" (the laying down of the universe and the creation of temporality) between subjective and objective. The subjective component receives/prehends the universe and chooses which information to heed or ignore, becoming concrete/objective. This process is the universe. That is, every locus of the universe goes through this process with each tick of the clock (time is fundamentally quantized, as is matter) and collectively produces the universe in each tick.

[apeiron]

You've punted the mind/body problem to the life/not-life problem by equating the two and then stating your lack of insight (and science more generally) into when life begins. This isn't really that helpful if we stop there.

I thought I was stating the abundance of insight that actually exists within the systems science perspective, especially in the semiotic and dissipative structure area. :smile:

And it was you who asked me to state the cut off between systems without mind and systems with. The life boundary is where I would draw it for the reasons stated. So I was answering a question, not "punting" a problem that I felt uncomfortable with.

But life is, like consciousness/mind, a quality that inheres in all things just a little bit and in more complex things a lot. Pansemiotism = panpsychism = panzoism.

Here's a recent essay of mine on panzoism:

http://www.independent.com/news/2011/mar/27/what-life/

Yes, so what unites complex systems is the dissipative structure perspective. Good. In some useful sense, there is a unified perspective of global organisation to be found in standard thermodynamics. Biology can make proper connection with a non-reductive kind of physics as we would want.

But then you also need the further theory that allows you to chalk in the line between live and non-live, mind and non-mind.

You are wanting to argue that every dissipative structure is a "little bit alive". And you can sort of say that as a way to first get people out of the mental rut of thinking all material systems must start out "dead and unorganised". But then you have to proceed to the next step of having a theory of how life and mind are distinctive.

Or I guess you can presume they are not. But given most people presume an actual difference just on naive realism, and that people who are theoretical biologists widely believe they have good theories about this matter, then you at least have to be seen to have some strong argument that allows you to dismiss these things quite so quickly.

As an aside, you cite Schrodinger. But he explicitly touches on the Pattee-style point that there is indeed something causally novel about life. See p85 where he talks about clockwork vs organism. He is talking directly about the fact that simple complexity (abiotic dissipative structure) it ruled by the hurly burly of thermodynamics. It is rate dependent dynamics. A dissipative process has no control over the speed at which it unwinds. The boundary constraints are fixed and whatever is within just goes to equilbrium in a straight line.

But Schrodinger, with considerable genius, already could see the reasons why a genetic code was a game changer. "The aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance [stands] largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion." He said physics had to realise this was indeed a new principle, a new source of causality. Schrodinger himself drew the line just where I am saying it should be drawn.

A good historical review of the issue is Pattee's The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut".
http://informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/pattee/pattee.html

And here's another on why emergentism (and eliminativism) equates to crypto-panpsychism:

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/feb/23/conscious-or-not-conscious/

I don't buy the argument you're making there for the same reasons already stated.

You've assumed in your discussion that I'm arguing (and Whitehead) that the most basic experience requires complex structures. That's not my position. My position is that as the fundamental entities of the universe complexify so mind complexifies. Not all aggregates are themselves mind-like but all constituents are indeed mind-like. And some collections of constituents combine in such a way to create new higher-level minds/holons/actual entities.

You talked explicitly about drops of experience, so I get that you see experience as basic.

My complaint is still I see no theory of complexity in what you say (I may have to wait for the JCS paper, perhaps, but you could surely be more specific here if you had a mind to).

What do you mean by complexity?

I've already said I mean the irreducible triadic complexity of Peirce and modern hierarchy theorists. Which in turn looks like dissipative structure theory these days. And then there is the further level of complexity that comes with life/mind. So there is nothing simple about my model of complexity. :rolleyes: But I can point you at as many papers and books on the subject as you like.

As for your earlier question about the oscillatory theory of minds, this is part of Whitehead's theory of actual entities, prehensions and concrescence.

Sorry, I misunderstood as I don't see that as an oscillation as such, just a process of development. An oscillation in my mind is a returning to a prior state, but this is instead a taking of destinies which then generates a fresh set of possibilities.

So I would use different words. Did Whitehead actually call it "oscillatory"?

[apeiron]

PS. You're right that Koestler would not say all holons are mind-like - only physical holons, that is, actual holons. Holons can of course be purely conceptual, like "France," for example, which is obviously not a mental entity.

No, I still don't believe that is a correct characterisation of Koestler. I've never seen him make panpsychic claims himself. So I would be interested if I had missed that.

I've found commentaries that try to interpret him as a believer, but even they are clearly straining the point, and probably don't really understand what he was saying (even though he was a straight down the middle hierarchy theorist in my view).

For instance...p244
http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/publications/doc_theses_links/pdf/dt_ds_chapter6.pdf

Whereas by contrast in his own words it always seems clear he is talking about consciousness as a biological phenomenon....

8.7 Consciousness appears as an emergent quality in phylogeny and ontogeny, which, from primitive beginnings, evolves towards more complex and precise states. It is the highest manifestation of the Integrative Tendency (4.3) to extract order out of disorder, and information out of noise.

http://www.panarchy.org/koestler/holon.1969.html

[Ferris_bg]

Hi PhizzicsPhan,

Great post (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3231023&postcount=37) by you on the panpsychism and emergence topic. We had a similar discussion (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=482365) while ago. You said you've written some articles, can you present a little more yourself.
For example, no modern panpsychist that I know of argues that a chair or a rock is conscious - despite the bad jokes often lobbed at panpsychists. Rather, the molecules that comprise the chair or rock presumably have a very rudimentary type of consciousness but the larger objects themselves (again, presumably) lack the kind of interconnections required to become unitary subjects.

The subjects we know best are humans. Each of us, in fact, knows exactly one subject intimately: ourselves. Clearly, then, some aggregates of matter do in fact produce a complex unitary subject and we call this our “mind.”

The “hard problem” of consciousness is figuring out the relationship between mind and matter and why some matter gives rise to unitary subjects and why others don’t. Why am I conscious, and you, and my cat, but not the chair or the rock?

We have literally no certainty as to what objects in the universe, other than ourselves, are also subjects because we can only know our own self as a subject.


Don't you think that once one finds the required dependence/interconnection/relationship for unitary subjects, subjectivity goes away? In other words do you think that you can have subjectivity without emergence? I personally don't, but I want to hear your thoughts on this.

[ConradDJ]

What software are you talking about? Do you have a reference that the brain FIRST operates like a machine (essentially a computer) and SECOND that it's digital? Where do you get the idea that the software is the "personal experience" and "the sense of self"?


Maui – I apologize for slipping into private metaphor without explanation. I mistakenly assumed it would be evident that the “software” I referred to is human language, which gets “installed” in our brains as we learn to talk. Of course it’s clear that the brain works very differently from our current digital computers.

But the point is that a human brain does not automatically “grow” a human mind, through its biological programming. Our biological “hardware” only gives us the capacity to develop the kind of consciousness that distinguishes human beings, by hooking into the web of language that surrounds us as we grow up.

It seems to me that the kind of reflective self-awareness specific to human consciousness, our awareness of being ourselves and of "having awareness", our ability to think beyond the moment, all arise out of the ability to talk with others and also with ourselves.

I realize the difference between human awareness and animal awareness doesn't seem important to you. But what you and PhizzicsPhan seem to be doing is taking this specifically human, language-based awareness of "being inside" our own heads and treating it as a mysterious objective property called “consciousness” that may or may not pertain to all kinds of entities.

For example:
Colin McGinn, a British philosopher, states perhaps even more forcefully why emergentism fails:

“[W]e do not know how consciousness might have arisen by natural processes from antecedently existing material things. Somehow or other sentience sprang from pulpy matter, giving matter an inner aspect, but we have no idea how this leap was propelled… . One is tempted, however reluctantly, to turn to divine assistance: for only a kind of miracle could produce this from that. It would take a supernatural magician to extract consciousness from matter....”

This is the panpsychist position: Where there is matter there is also mind; they are two aspects of the same thing. As matter complexifies, so mind complexifies...

Alan Watts said it best: “For every inside there is an outside, and for every outside there is an inside; though they are different, they go together.”

It seems, then, that today’s prevailing theory that advocates mind as a purely emergent phenomenon has major problems.


If all that was meant here is that everything has its own point of view on the world, I would have no problem with it. I think in physics it will eventually turn out to be very useful to describe an atom’s physical “relationships” with other atoms, from its own “point of view” in space and time. But it makes no sense to me to insist that there must therefore be some sort of mysterious “rudimentary consciousness” in an atom.

So I don’t agree at all with the conclusions drawn here – i.e. that it takes a “miracle” to create “sentience” from mere matter, or that there is any problem with thinking about mind as “emergent”. There is just a confusion here between the “point of view” that could be ascribed to anything located in space and time, a “sentience” that in varying degrees all living organisms have, and an “inner awareness” that is very specifically human.

[ConradDJ]

To try to sum up what I learned from Heidegger –

There is a very deep tendency in us to imagine the world “from no point of view” – that is, “inauthentically”. The sketches drawn by Apeiron and PhizzicsPhan above are examples of this... but so is most of science and philosophy.

This “inauthentic” viewpoint is not at all wrong. In the first place, it’s a key human ability, and perhaps the thing that most distinguishes us from other animals, that we can “see” the world in our minds in a way that goes far beyond the “here and now” of our actual real-time experience. And secondly, of course, this ability to envision reality “objectively” is basic to the success of philosophy and science.

But, according to Heidegger, any objective description of the world necessarily leaves out something fundamental. Our “subjective” viewpoint on the world does give us not merely a partial, limited, biased version of objective reality. Subjectivity is not just something that we need to “get beyond” in order to get to the truth.

Because what’s most fundamental in the world has to do with participating in relationships, from one’s own “authentic” viewpoint. The world is not only a collection of more or less complex systems sitting out there in a vast objective space and time. At a more basic level it’s made of the “here and now” communicative interaction between different points of view, which is the world each of us actually experiences.

So what I get from this is that we need both the objective viewpoint and the very different viewpoint each of us actually has on the world. A purely objective picture of more and less complex systems interacting in various ways according to various principles can give us a vast amount of useful information. But if what’s ultimately going on in the world has to do with the evolution of the kinds of relationships each of us actually has, from our own point of view, then no objective picture can get to what’s fundamental.

And I think that’s exactly the dilemma physics is facing now. It wants to abstract from the “viewpoint of the observer” in order to get to an objective picture of reality. It has done that very well, and harvested a vast amount of precisely detailed information about the world... but with essentially no understanding at all of what the fundamental theories are telling us about the kind of world we live in.

The "observer" in physics is not necessarily "conscious". What's at issue here is the "here and now" viewpoint that physical systems have of each other as they interact. I think this "being there" in real-time relationships is what we're being challenged to conceptualize... not some sort of "inner awareness" conceived as an objective property of things.

Maui complained that these are “just assertions”... I would say, they’re just attempts to imagine the world in a way that hasn’t been done before. I’m not trying to “prove” I’m right and that the objective picture is demonstrably inadequate. We don’t yet have any well-developed picture of the world from an “authentic” viewpoint, to argue in favor of.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, I'll respond in more detail later (I have a day job unfortunately), but for now here is my response to your question about my theory of complexity.

I have fleshed out in my forthcoming JCS paper a three-part theory of complexity that provides an answer to the question: "is A conscious?" and "how conscious is A?"

1) Perceptual unity - this quantifies the information bandwidth of A at a snapshot in time with the "Perception Index" (PI or the letter pi). "Perception" refers to information in a general sense, not biological perception only.

2) Internal connectivity - this quantifies the processing power of A with the Connectivity Index (CI or the letter psi).

3) Field coherence - time is quantized at a fundamental level and the boundaries of A are defined by the ability for information to flow through A within each chronon (time quantum) or chronon multiple. That is, the speed of information flow creates the boundaries of A. What we normally describe as living organisms have evolved to bootstrap various physical properties to enhance the speed of information flows, as Mae-Wan Ho describes beautifully in her book, The Rainbow and the Worm. This is achieved through resonance/coherence/synchrony of various kinds in organisms and also objects that we wouldn't normally consider organisms, like electrons. It's all a matter of degree. Biological life seems discontinuous from other forms because of the degree to which cell-based life and multi-cellular life in particular has been able to bootstrap information flows. But it's not really a difference in kind, just of degree.

I am currently adapting this same framework to "life" and equating life with consciousness, as discussed above. Both go all the way down.

[PhizzicsPhan]

I forgot to add that the consciousness of A is the product of PI and CI = Omega. This is normalized score of 0 to 100. This answers the question: "How conscious is A?"

I also forgot to add that the third step (field coherence) answers the question: "Is A conscious?"

[apeiron]

So what I get from this is that we need both the objective viewpoint and the very different viewpoint each of us actually has on the world. A purely objective picture of more and less complex systems interacting in various ways according to various principles can give us a vast amount of useful information. But if what’s ultimately going on in the world has to do with the evolution of the kinds of relationships each of us actually has, from our own point of view, then no objective picture can get to what’s fundamental.

I still don't see how this works without also being the construction of an inauthentic objective description of reality. Because as soon as you speak about a relationship between a me and a you, you are already standing outside that dyadic interaction in a third place.

The fundamental authentic description would seem to limit you to just a monistic me, as even imagining a something at the other end which is a you, with its own viewpoint, is taking yourself outside of your viewpoint to a generalised realm where viewpoints may or may not be the case.

[apeiron]

I also forgot to add that the third step (field coherence) answers the question: "Is A conscious?"

Of course this is just a sketch of your paper, but I see some questionmarks.

If the key idea is some form of global field coherence, then this no longer seems strictly panpsychic, and also seems not to answer the hard problem.

It is not panpsychic because coherence must be a relationship (a state of correlation) between things, not a local property of some thing.

It would still be a pan-something argument (pansemiotic I would say perhaps). But panpsychism is usually taken as a "property of a substance" ontology. Whereas a coherent field is an "emergent feature of relationships" ontology.

Second, the hard problem would appear to remain untouched. You are asserting that a coherent field IS conscious. But we could equally imagine that a coherent field does everything it does as a zombie.

An electron could be the result of some Whiteheadian process in which an actual occasion swims into concrete being through an act of engagement with a wider world. We could grant all the "becoming coherent" part of the argument. But the electron could be conscious or it could be a zombie. Nothing in the argument necessitates one or the other (so far from what you have said).

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, it seems clear to me that because we are not zombies that zombies can't exist in actuality. That is, they are logically possible but not metaphysically or physically possible in our actual universe. I never bought Chalmers' arguments about zombies for the same reason.

As for my solution to the hard problem, there is a level at which you are right: there is a substrate of pure potentiality in my ontology that is not conscious. So my ontology is, strictly speaking, a panpsychist neutral monism. The substrate is ether/apeiron/Brahman, whatever you want to call it. But the actual entities that comprise our universe are all drops of experience that comprise the only actual things. All matter/energy/stuff is ultimately an actual entity. And experiential.

The universe arises in each moment because of the bubbling of actuality from potentiality in each moment/chronon. Complex actual entities, as opposed to maximally simple constituents such as quarks or electrons, arise through resonance/synchrony. The "field" of synchrony is the collection of actual entities themselves. This field can consist of constituents that resonate entirely at different frequencies, as in the primordial chaos that preceded our ordered universe. Or they can resonate in some areas in synchrony, as in humans and other complex life.

[apeiron]

Apeiron, it seems clear to me that because we are not zombies that zombies can't exist in actuality. That is, they are logically possible but not metaphysically or physically possible in our actual universe. I never bought Chalmers' arguments about zombies for the same reason.

That's a little surprising as the zombie argument is what is necessary to drive a wedge of doubt into standard emergentist account of consciousness, so justifying the search for something as radically unsupported as panpsychism.

I agree zombies can't exist, but that would be for logical reasons.

As for my solution to the hard problem, there is a level at which you are right: there is a substrate of pure potentiality in my ontology that is not conscious. So my ontology is, strictly speaking, a panpsychist neutral monism. The substrate is ether/apeiron/Brahman, whatever you want to call it. But the actual entities that comprise our universe are all drops of experience that comprise the only actual things. All matter/energy/stuff is ultimately an actual entity. And experiential.

The universe arises in each moment because of the bubbling of actuality from potentiality in each moment/chronon. Complex actual entities, as opposed to maximally simple constituents such as quarks or electrons, arise through resonance/synchrony.

Put that way, our positions are then much closer. As I say, it sounds more like what I know as pansemiosis - which is a fairly new position based on Peircean metaphysics (and no one says Peirce was saying something completely new, just that he had a fairly complete story).

Yet still I don't see consciousness as a process that exists all the way down to the fundamental scale of being. To be a mind requires that selfhood and autonomy that comes only with life. There has to be an extra ingredient as spelt out by Pattee.

So I do see a qualitative difference arising in semiosis with the transition from abios to bios, then again another big qualitative change in the transition from animals to humans. It is not merely a quantity thing.

The "field" of synchrony is the collection of actual entities themselves. This field can consist of constituents that resonate entirely at different frequencies, as in the primordial chaos that preceded our ordered universe. Or they can resonate in some areas in synchrony, as in humans and other complex life.

I suppose this is where Water Freeman comes in?

[ConradDJ]

I still don't see how this works without also being the construction of an inauthentic objective description of reality. Because as soon as you speak about a relationship between a me and a you, you are already standing outside that dyadic interaction in a third place.

The fundamental authentic description would seem to limit you to just a monistic me, as even imagining a something at the other end which is a you, with its own viewpoint, is taking yourself outside of your viewpoint to a generalised realm where viewpoints may or may not be the case.


Yes, in both cases we are imagining something beyond our immediate experience.

The way we’re all used to doing this, when we think about “the world”, is to “stand outside” our relationships and describe the world to ourselves from no point of view. For example, we picture a vast space in which things are located, we describe the characteristics of each system, and how this picture changes over time.

Something else we’re not nearly so good at is to try to describe our conscious experience itself – for example, in phenomenology. Maybe this is what you mean by a “monistic me”. There are all kinds of difficulties here – starting with the fact that it’s hard to generalize about “consciousness” when you will never have more than one version of it available to you... a version with its own unique developmental history.

The value of the “objective” view can hardly be doubted, and to you and me, at least, the “internal view” is also of great interest. But they are both “inauthentic” in the sense that in both cases we are “stepping out” of our own existence in order to be good observers.

So the question is, what would it mean to imagine the world “authentically”, without standing outside of our own experience? And what would be the value of describing the world from that viewpoint, i.e. the viewpoint we always actually have? Where we are not observing, primarily, but participating in our relationships?

I think essentially it means seeing the world as made of communications rather than things. If we think of the world we live in as made of our relationships – including the relationship with ourselves that we call “consciousness” – then the key point is that all our information about the world and about ourselves comes to us through this web of real-time interaction. Everything we can know, everything we can do, everything we care about, is made possible only because this interaction-environment supports meaningful communication.

Now we can hardly doubt that whatever else is it or does, the physical world communicates information. But from the usual “inauthentic” viewpoint, this gets taken for granted. When we “stand outside” the relationships in which it’s actually happening, communication gets conceived as an objective “transfer of information” – as if the information were inherently meaningful.

But from any point of view in the world, an interaction can communicate information only to the extent there is a context of other kinds of interaction to which it makes a difference, in terms of which it “means something”. In physics, there is determinate information only to the extent there is an appropriate “measurement context”.

So there’s a basic aspect of the world’s structure that gets lost in the “inauthentic” view – which is how many different kinds of relationships make an “informational environment” that supports communication between points of view, moment to moment.

Now Heidegger did not focus on the communicative nature of relationships, or on what kind of support relationships need from other relationships to make meaningful connection possible. This is still uncharted territory, I think.

And again, it’s not a matter of replacing the objective view of the world with a better one. But the objective view only gives us the “content” of the information carried on the web of real-time interaction – the facts about things. It completely misses the contextual structure of the world as a system that lets the facts “appear” – that makes information meaningful or measurable from a particular point of view in a particular moment. And it can therefore easily mislead us into thinking of “objective reality” as all there is to the world, and all that needs to be understood about it.

[JDStupi]

For me, the problem seems to lie in going from

The value of the “objective” view can hardly be doubted, and to you and me, at least, the “internal view” is also of great interest. But they are both “inauthentic” in the sense that in both cases we are “stepping out” of our own existence in order to be good observers

to

So the question is, what would it mean to imagine the world “authentically”, without standing outside of our own experience? And what would be the value of describing the world from that viewpoint, i.e. the viewpoint we always actually have? Where we are not observing, primarily, but participating in our relationships?



Now, first I do not claim to be very conversant with Heideggerian philosophy, as such I am largely going off of your comments.

The problem I see with going from the first statement (primarily the bold part) to the second (same) is that I feel that possibly once we ask the question "What would it mean to imagine the world authentically without standing outside of experience?" We are already "stepping outside" back into the "inauthentic view", an "inauthentic" view more "authentically" informed albeit, but still we are in the same basic mode-of-thought (maybe Heidegger would call it mode-of-being or something). It would certainly be a productive and valuable way of looking at things, similar in some sense to Varela's calls for phenomenology entering the neruoscience picture, except in this case much broader. It may lead to more tightly fitting "models" or a better "inauthentic" picture of reality, but for me it seems that the "imagining the authentic picture" is still the shadow of our Western frame of mind.

Cue The East. I do believe that when thinking along the lines of "authentically" viewing reality, one should certainly explore Zen and/or other predominantly Eastern philosophies. The West's intellectual comphrehensiveness should not be understated, however as we seem to come closer to this "viewing the world authentically" viewpoint we come closer to those approaches to philosophy that the East has been purveying for a lot longer than the West. I may be imputing too much Zen for your liking into this, but the answer to the question "What would it mean to examine the world authentically without standing outside of our own experience" would be "It wouldn't". To truly view the world "from-the-inside" (Cartesian language notwithstanding) we would not imagine it, we would simply view it. There may very well be no "meaning", for the truly "authentic" viewpoint would not need a meaning, for in that case we would be not standing in a relation of "subject interpreting object" but in a sort of actual unity between the subject and object.
I apologize for the vagueness of this speech, because I also do not claim to be some kind of expert on Eastern philosophy (far from it). But it is also interesting to note the language differences between the West v East philosophies. Eastern philosophy is largely disliked by Western "rationalist" types because of its "contradictory" language and its imprecision. This is just its positive though, for its purpose is served by imprecision. It is using language to "point at the moon" not to "confuse the moon for pointing at it" ultimatley attempting to awaken some type of insight in the practictioner so they change their mode of being.

But in any case, it seems as though for the "authentic" existence, the Zen doctrine of "No-Mind" may be worth looking into, and the emphasis of Zen on concrete practicality (in the sense of practice not just the workaday world's practicality) may be truly appraoching an "authentic" existence. Simply being-in-the-world rather than drawing our distinctions.

[fuzzyfelt]

PhizzicsPhan, those are very interesting ideas, thanks for sharing them.

[fuzzyfelt]

We have two basic standpoints available to us. If we take the (Cartesian) standpoint of science, we treat “consciousness” as an objective property that certain kinds of entities “have”. After all, we experience consciousness, so it must be objectively real, right? But this leads only to confusion.

Or, we can take the (Kantian) perspective of subjectivity itself, which is after all the only thing anyone ever experiences. Therefore “consciousness” must be something basic and irreducible, right? This justifies various kinds of mysticism, but otherwise leads nowhere. It treats “consciousness” so abstractly that it loses any relevance to science or to our actual experience.



Regarding the OP and this “Software” of “Human language", I agree that there are problems about how this is understood or shared, etc. I would think “seeing” it as communication or relationships would still not be partaking in it and communicating the experience with human language would give problems, too. Also, Heidegger later argued that all language is inauthentic:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iHM9ABHZyB0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
-Page 221.

And if this is about relativity, this sort of thing might be of interest:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html

I agree with comments that it sounds more like other philosophies and think it sounds less like something specifically to do with human language.

The OP said one philosophical direction is confusing, yet this doesn't seem free from confusion. The OP said the direction of panpsychism justifies mysticism. Although, I don’t think that is necessarily the case, in any case, it has been suggested that although “Being” is taken to mean human “Being”, that the conclusions could logically be extended to pertain to other “Beings”. As well, Heidegger’s “Being” became more obscure and mystical over time (same reference), and so neither reason seems good support for the OP's case.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, we're back to my earlier line of questioning: I asked you when consciousness emerges in your ontology and you linked it to the emergence of life. I then suggested that you were punting because the origin of life issue is perhaps as tricky as the origin of consciousness. So let me ask you directly: when does life begin? What are the objective criteria for the phylogentic and ontogenetic emergence of life?

[apeiron]

Apeiron, we're back to my earlier line of questioning: I asked you when consciousness emerges in your ontology and you linked it to the emergence of life. I then suggested that you were punting because the origin of life issue is perhaps as tricky as the origin of consciousness. So let me ask you directly: when does life begin? What are the objective criteria for the phylogentic and ontogenetic emergence of life?

First, there are a bunch of my questions you have not answered. A whole lot now.

Second, I've already referenced the origin of life issue - Pattee's epistemic cut.

The non-living world is completely ruled by dynamical laws (the laws of physics) and has no control over initial conditions (the measurable states which those laws determine the dynamics of).

But life does have control over initial conditions. A rock just has to accept the sunlight that falls on it. A leaf can turn towards the sunlight. A cat getting too hot can walk away.

The capacity to control initial conditions depends on non-holonomic or flexible constraints - constraints such as switches, escarpments, enzymes, as Pattee says. The path of the dynamics can be switched to a new course "at will".

This capability that life exhibits, and which is definitional, in turn depends on the matter~symbol distinction. Life regulates its law-bound dynamics, its metabolic/entropic processes, using the "something extra, something completely new" of symbols. Memory devices such as genes, words, membranes, axons.

Thus the epistemic cut - the sharp division between material processes and symbolic control over initial conditions that is defining of life.

The non-living is completely ruled by dynamical laws. The living has the new thing of symbolic control over initial conditions.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, I will respond to your additional questions, believe me. But please humor me with this line of questioning a bit longer. Where does the "epistemic cut" occur? With unicellular life? Viruses? Prions? Self-replicating RNA? Is there an exact moment that life emerged phylogenetically? And is there an exact moment in each life form's development that it transitions from abios to bios ontogenetically? If so, what is that moment and why?

[apeiron]

Apeiron, I will respond to your additional questions, believe me. But please humor me with this line of questioning a bit longer. Where does the "epistemic cut" occur? With unicellular life? Viruses? Prions? Self-replicating RNA? Is there an exact moment that life emerged phylogenetically? And is there an exact moment in each life form's development that it transitions from abios to bios ontogenetically? If so, what is that moment and why?

Do you think viruses and prions existed before life began? If you agree this is unlikely, as they are parasitically dependent on life, then we can rule them out as a foundational issue. (You could have "less than life" developing from life proper, if there is life around to hijack).

And the actual beginning is unknown. It left no record. So we can only make educated guesses. We can't bring it forward as evidence in this argument, and if that is what you are asking for, it is not a legitimate tactic. Talking about what might have been the case might help the argument along, but it is not a make or break part of it.

So you will have to tell me what it is about the epistemic cut, matter~symbol, dividing line that you object to.

Asking me to take you back to the point at which it first happened is an interesting question, but a sidelight. If we know it is what happened.

But because it is interesting, my answer would be that the origin of life was all about the "constraint of dimensionality".

So ordinary law-bound dynamics takes place in generic environments. A chemical reaction takes place in a solution, a 3D space at constant pressure, temperature, etc. And so its rate is dependent on these globally rigid or holonomic constraints.

But changing those constraints changes the rate. So in a rock-pool heated by the sun, flushed by the sea, you get imposed patterns.

When a collection of hydrophobic fatty molecules form up into a globular sphere, that again shrinks the dimensionality for chemical processes. Likewise when the processes are confined to a thin water film as on the spur formations of clay.

So first we have to recognise the importance of dimensional constraint as a way of locally changing the rate of generic chemical processes. And a theory about the origins of life would be seeking these kinds of stories. Which indeed they do.

And then we can show also that symbolic systems lie at the very end of the spectrum of possible dimensional constraint. Shrink down the space of a reaction and it goes from 4D down to 1D and then 0D. It becomes a serial code - like genes and words. And it becomes something novel because once removed from the hurlyburly of generic dynamics, serial codes have the newfound freedom to objectively measure that hurlyburly and start to control its initial conditions employing flexible or non-holonomic constraints.

So you can see the nature of the argument? The reason the origin of life seems such a puzzle is that it is usually framed as the surprising emergence of two critical things at the same time - metabolic processes and rate-controlling codes.

But I am unifying those two kinds of emergence as one. They are both the result of the same process of dimensional reduction. Metabolism can arise spontaneously as generic dynamics wanders into some more dimensionally constrained regime (like a crystalline clay formation with its films of water). And codes can arise spontaneously for the same reason.

This is also my view of the emergence of speech in homo sapiens. The development of vocal cords for other reasons (song like emotional/social calls perhaps) placed a serial constraint on utterance. This led to a rapid development of symbolic speech. Once vocalisation had wandered into a sufficient degree of constraint by "chance" - evolution of a restriction for other reasons - symbolic speech became inevitable.

([EDIT] I should add that the semantics~syntax issue is just as confounding for evolution of speech theorists as the metabolism~code one is for origins of life theorists. And this is the way out of that issue.)

So as you can see, having a strong definition of life vs non-life leads on to a richly structured view of biology and mind science generally.

On the other hand, panpsychism as a model of reality just appears to shuffle the fundamental questions around.

Can't find consciousness popping out the top where things are maximally complex, well lets guess that it instead exists down at the bottom where things are maximally simple.

[Pythagorean]

So you will have to tell me what it is about the epistemic cut, matter~symbol, dividing line that you object to.


Wasn't the epistemic cut already made when atoms where first created in the stars, when the sea of neutrons took the form of distinct forms of matter? Each atom a symbol, each interaction a phrase, each molecule a sentence, each macroscopic structure a story?

[ConradDJ]

...I feel that possibly once we ask the question What would it mean to imagine the world authentically without standing outside of experience? We are already stepping outside back into the inauthentic view , an inauthentic view more authentically informed albeit, but still we are in the same basic mode-of-thought (maybe Heidegger would call it mode-of-being or something)... for me it seems that the imagining the authentic picture is still the shadow of our Western frame of mind.

...I may be imputing too much Zen for your liking into this, but the answer to the question What would it mean to examine the world authentically without standing outside of our own experience would be It wouldn't . To truly view the world from-the-inside (Cartesian language notwithstanding) we would not imagine it, we would simply view it. There may very well be no meaning , for the truly authentic viewpoint would not need a meaning, for in that case we would be not standing in a relation of subject interpreting object but in a sort of actual unity between the subject and object.

I apologize for the vagueness of this speech... But in any case, it seems as though for the authentic existence, the Zen doctrine of No-Mind may be worth looking into, and the emphasis of Zen on concrete practicality (in the sense of practice not just the workaday world's practicality) may be truly approaching an authentic existence. Simply being-in-the-world rather than drawing our distinctions.


You have nothing to apologize for -- I think you make a very clear point. And Heidegger in his later years had a group of Japanese students he felt very close to. By then he had long given up on the project of Being and Time himself -- though I think he always believed in it as an important starting-point for philosohy. But argument failed him, and he gradually turned to more evocative language in his exploration of the terra incognita beyond the scope of the Western tradition. I think their background in the tradition you describe made it easier for his Japanese friends to follow a line of thought that became (from my Western standpoint) increasingly obscure.

“Simply being-in-the-world rather than drawing our distinctions” – I agree that this is a very valuable skill, especially for us intellectuals, to learn just to “be in the moment” instead of “standing outside”. It’s something no other animal needs to learn, of course, since they’re hardly ever anywhere else than in the moment.

But to me this “no-mind” is not a goal to be reached, as it seems to be in the Buddhist traditions. I feel it’s very important for us to learn to see and think about the world around us from this standpoint in the moment. I would agree with you that “drawing distinctions” and “imagining” involve stepping out of the immediacy of existence. But I believe they can also bring us back into our “authentic” viewpoint in life.

What’s most essentially human, I think, is not only our ability to “stand outside” the world of connection in order to view it from an intellectual distance, as a world of things in space and time. It’s also our ability to come back into the moment and connect with people and things on purpose, thoughtfully, using our mental picture of the world in order to better pay attention and not just to pre-judge. Zen seems to treat this as an either/or, with “authentic being-there” as a goal. And Heidegger also often sounds as though that’s what he means.

But to me, the point of making a fundamental distinction between the objective standpoint and the point of view each one of us always has, in this ongoing present moment, is to see that both are giving us vital information about the world we live in. Our difficulty is that we have such sophisticated ways of thinking about reality “from outside”, while we've barely begun to develop a conceptual framework for "the world from inside”.

I would agree though that this kind of intellectual exploration requires a very different mind-set. And the traditional culture of academia is not a good place for such a thing to grow – at least, that was the moral of Heidegger’s story.

[ConradDJ]

Also, Heidegger later argued that all language is inauthentic:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iHM9ABHZyB0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
-Page 221.

And if this is about relativity, this sort of thing might be of interest:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html



I couldn’t get to page 221 in the Existentialism book, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The Harvard article is very interesting.

In Heidegger’s thinking, “language” always refers not just to the words and grammar and syntax, but to the whole world of communicative connection that humans grow up inside.

The Harvard article ends with the question “Do people think before they speak or do words shape their thoughts?” I would say, the experiments described here are exploring the world of human meaning in which young children already participate, before they begin learning actual words. This is important, because if we want to maintain that language is what’s most essential to being human, we need to think of “language” in this broader way.

When human “consciousness” first began to evolve, branching off from the primate mainstream, I doubt very much that it involved anything like a “language” in the narrow sense of the word. I imagine it involved giving certain kinds of experiences a special emotional weight that people could share with each other and pass on... out of which something like “symbols” could eventually emerge.

The key point is that something got passed on, from individual to individual, from generation to generation, something that kept on getting itself passed on. It’s hard to imagine what this earliest form of communicative connection might have been like, as it’s hard to imagine how self-replicating entities first got going, as the basis for the evolution of life.

We could maybe say – the essence of “language” is the feeling that at bottom it’s important to connect with others, to understand them and make ourselves understood. I would guess that whatever it was that first began to get itself passed down among our proto-human ancestors must have been able to communicate some such feeling, to hook children into to the process of reproducing what eventually became human culture.

As to my point of view being “free from confusion” – as if! It certainly is not. My hope is only that it may eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of “consciousness”. I don't feel that mysticism or panpsychism are heading in that direction.

[ConradDJ]

The reason the origin of life seems such a puzzle is that it is usually framed as the surprising emergence of two critical things at the same time - metabolic processes and rate-controlling codes.


I find this statement odd... I would think that the origin of life is usually framed as the accidental emergence of some sort of system that could split into duplicate copies of itself. Metabolism and codes would have developed later, no? At least that seems like the “usual” view.
This is also my view of the emergence of speech in homo sapiens. The development of vocal cords for other reasons (song like emotional/social calls perhaps) placed a serial constraint on utterance. This led to a rapid development of symbolic speech. Once vocalisation had wandered into a sufficient degree of constraint by "chance" - evolution of a restriction for other reasons - symbolic speech became inevitable.


There really is no “usual” view of the origins of speech, and yours seems sensible to me. But again, I think you’re skipping over what’s really “original” in language and focusing on later developments.

I like the thought of pre-human beings singing to each other... there’s a theory that this began as a way of keeping the baby quiet since the mom had to put it down while she gathered food. But the key point is that “something” began getting itself reproduced from person to person – a non-genetic reproductive process.

Of course other primates teach each other things – there's information that gets passed on in all primate communities about what to eat and how, etc. And that's not unique to primates. But in the case of humans, this business of teaching and communicating somehow caught fire and began to take over virtually all of our existence, to the point where our survival entirely depends on it. The need to be in touch with other people in this special way became an “instinct” that could successfully compete against other kinds of strong adaptive pressures... – probably through the process of “sexual selection”, which is to some extent independent of environmental selection.

I know that you feel “development” has been shown to be more basic than “evolution”, and that leads you to focus on the development of symbolic, linearly coded speech. Which was surely important. But the development of the genetic code in biology must clearly have happened in the context of evolutionary selection established by self-replicating entities of some kind. And my guess is that the emergence of coded speech happened in the context of an evolutionary process that was already strongly selecting for a kind of emotional bond that reproduced itself through the need to communicate.

[JDStupi]

But to me this “no-mind” is not a goal to be reached, as it seems to be in the Buddhist traditions

Out of curiosity, do you feel as though it is not a goal to be reached at all, or rather it is not a goal to have your whole life be in a state of "no-mind"? If the former I can understand, if the latter I would be slightly curious as to how come.

I think the "authenticity" and the Zen approach is largely to be approached with an ethical mindset moreso than a metaphysical. The idea of "being-in-the-now" and "not drawing distinctions" doesn't seem to be epistemologically motivated so much as attempting to withold judgement and better the way in which people live their life.

What’s most essentially human, I think, is not only our ability to “stand outside” the world of connection in order to view it from an intellectual distance, as a world of things in space and time. It’s also our ability to come back into the moment and connect with people and things on purpose, thoughtfully, using our mental picture of the world in order to better pay attention and not just to pre-judge.

Now, I personally would agree with his statement, but I wouldn't be too quick to apply the judgement. Simply because an extreme attainment of "No-mind" and a very pure meditative state is something extremely difficult and I have not experienced it, as such I am not quite sure if it is simply my Western socialization and way of seeing things speaking when I think that way.
Ultimatley, I agree that we should excercise all aspects of our "being-in-the-world", the good old "Everything in moderation", in order to experience the most we can.


Zen seems to treat this as an either/or, with “authentic being-there” as a goal. And Heidegger also often sounds as though that’s what he means

Now, I do not mean to paint myself as somebody who knows a lot about Zen, in fact "The way that can be named, is not the true way" and one of the first principles is that it is about practice, something I find difficult because of my A)laziness and the difficulty of never meditating and having an active mind and then coming to meditation. In any case, a large tenet of at least some forms of Zen buddhism is entirely based around its practicality everywhere.

That is, Buddhism is not necessarily this lone meditate-in-solitude endeavor. A large portion of the changes that came about with Zen is that Zen buddhism moved through China, and China was a culture heavily oriented towards practicality as opposed to the Indian culture. In Chinese culture the buddhist's "temples" were not able to just house monks who did nothing. They had to perform work and chores within the Chinese society, working during their day like anyone else. As such,they developed a way of "meditating" or practicing everywhere and "being-in-the-world" in even their work and social interactions. It is this everywhere-you-go-there-you-are type of mentality that some schools of Zen carved out for themself.
That is another thing to realize, my knowledge of buddhism is tiny, amounting to a small amount I have read or picked up "along the way" and there are an incredible amount of schools of buddhism. Some may say "x or y" about buddhism and really only be thinking of one particular strand, and even Zen has a number of offshoots.

As a side note I think that Zen and other "spiritual" practices are something that Western ethical philosophy largely lacks. Ethics is primarily concerned with how we live life and it is quite peculiar that we attempt to abstract away from the concreteness of living life and then try to proclaim moral "principles" for living from our deliberate abstractions from living. More so than abstracting in any other branch, abstracting away from the practice of life seems peculiar. That is not to say that is has no use, but the Zen/other eastern spiritual practices seem to be much more "ethical" to the extent that they make you work to transform the very way in which you "experience" reality, as opposed to changing your guiding principles. But then we come to a larger question of what is the relationship between meaning, the concrete and the abstract in religion and religous experience?

But in any case, that may be a quesiton for another time, I do not wish to hijack your thread.

I would agree though that this kind of intellectual exploration requires a very different mind-set. And the traditional culture of academia is not a good place for such a thing to grow – at least, that was the moral of Heidegger’s story.

Absolutley, our culture's schools and universities aren't geared towards teaching you things about "right living" or finding meaning or what have you. I do not necessarily think this the job of the university (though the option should be available) so much as the high school. We don't really teach much about critically examining our ways of living and our culture, but this may simply be because many teachers themselves are young and do not examine such things. This is a question of myth and meaning and western society and what some call the "existential crisis" of western society. We don't have much that is concrete and generative of a sense of meaning or placement, other than a hollow consumerism.



Regarding "Time and consciousness" viewed from the inside, something you may notice in certain states of lucidity or otherwise is the relationship between your sensing of the passage of time and the way in which you categorize your experience and divide it up into "objective" or "inauthentic" clock time. You may find that your sense of the passage of time in your consciousness is largely a matter of attaching something to "do" at this time and something to "do" at the next. Even if the something is really a nothing, the question "What now?" is always there, though you rarely get past the "inauthentic" division of time and the odd abstractive barrier you place, you never say I am just going to "be" here and now. Being here and now is of course different from just slothing around and saying "I'm being" when the mentality remains the same.
Of course these things are known "objectively" that is to say we know that there are relationships between attention and time-consciousness, but it is certainly not usually thought about from an internal point of view. That of how attention and time-consciousness relate to how you live your life, in the sense of how you experience it. As we all know the "same" time as measured by some external periodic phenomena can seem vastly different from the "authentic" point of view of time.

Related to the above discussions of temporal consciousness, perhaps somebody more neuroscientifically inclined and informed than myself could check out this article and see if it is of interest: "Effects of psilocybin on time perception and temporal control of behaviour in humans"

http://www.grp.hwz.uni-muenchen.de/pdf/wittmann_pdf/Wittmann07JPsychopharm.pdf

Sorry for long and winding post.....

[fuzzyfelt]

I couldn’t get to page 221 in the Existentialism book, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The Harvard article is very interesting.


I will come back to this when I can, but for now, I hope this link is better:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iHM9ABHZyB0C&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=solomon+existentialism+heidegger+language&source=bl&ots=xKQ94HU3EP&sig=vNjUjbBTR82GqHqyJWj2R-8ygJU&hl=en&ei=8CqfTcKnC9GahQfCo-n1BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, I guess I'll just state my point at this juncture: under your own rationale there is no discontinuous origin of life, phylogenetically or ontogenetically.

I am not trying to ask you to reconstruct the actual phylogenetic beginning of life - of course that is impossible. I'm asking you to provide clear criteria for when A is considered alive, or not.

But we can short circuit that whole discussion by considering that we end up with either an arbitrary distinction between life and not-life under all such approaches, based on one's own pet criteria for what SHOULD be considered alive, or vitalism. I already linked to my essay discussing the first problem, focusing on the various criteria for life extant today.

The vitalism complaint arises when we consider what exactly is happening when something suddenly transitions from abios to bios. If this does in fact happen, what on earth suddenly comes into being at this transition? A God-given soul or some mysterious quality by a different name? Biology has long given up vitalism, justifiably, because everything we know about life suggests strongly that there is no qualitative difference between the substance of living organisms and non-living entities. It's all the same stuff, but in different arrangements.

This last conclusion gives us the key insight, which you've hinted at without taking the final logical leap: all things are alive and as matter complexifies so "life" complexifies.

Mae-Wan Ho defines life as the capacity for high-energy storage - similar to your discussion above about the ability of living organisms to respond to their environment. But all things respond to their environment. An electron responds rather well to its environment. So where is the epistemic cut between an electron and "life"? It doesn't exist.

So rather than discussing what "life" is or what "consciousness" is, we can focus instead on complexity - IF and only IF we include in our basic substance of the universe mentality itself, as Whitehead has.

Whitehead's "actual entities" oscillate between subjective and objective aspects as they take in information from the universe, become concrete, perish objectively, revive subjectively, become concrete again, usw. Whitehead didn't use the term "oscillate," but this is the process he describes. You are right to point in an earlier post that it's not a mechanical or purely repetitive oscillation. Emphatically to the contrary: this is the creative advance that brings new things into the universe and creates the universe itself in every way. That is, every locus of the universe undergoes its own perpetual oscillation, combining in various ways with other actual entities to form more complex new actual entities.

My three-step theory of complexity above is an extension of Whitehead's panpsychism that allows a quantitative approach in cog sci and biology (when it is extended to cell-based life) as well as a determination in each particular case as to whether A is conscious or not as a single subject or a mere aggregate of many constituent subjects. Again, this is the combination problem or the boundary problem, which my framework is designed to address.

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. Here are the general lines of reasoning for panpsychism more generally:

- dualism is untenable primarily because it raises the seemingly intractable question of how two fundamentally different substances interact. Descartes and Leibniz suggested this was God's role, but it's hard to take this kind of argument seriously today.

- materialism, emergentist or eliminativist, can't explain consciousness very well at all because it appeals to magic in terms of how something purely subjective can emerge at some defined point from what is defined as wholly objective (matter/energy)

- idealism is tricky in its traditional forms because it seems to deny solidity entirely, or again appeal to God to explain solidity as distinct from mind

- panpsychism remains.

- the only matter we know intimately is our own matter and this is obviously subjective. We assume wrongly that other matter isn't subjective for itself because we, by necessity, perceive its outside not its inside. Matter is objective for others but subjective for itself. So the default assumption is simply wrong.

- more circumstantially, panpsychism leads to all sorts of solutions for scientific and philosophical problems

[Ferris_bg]

PhizzicsPhan, I asked you in my previous post (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3232359&postcount=45), why you think you can have subjectivity without strong emergence? Yes, panpsychism counters a lot of mind/body problems, but once you find the required complexity dependence formula for consciousness, the theory fails to account for subjectivity (mind can be reduced to its required conditions).

[apeiron]

I find this statement odd... I would think that the origin of life is usually framed as the accidental emergence of some sort of system that could split into duplicate copies of itself. Metabolism and codes would have developed later, no? At least that seems like the “usual” view.

By code, I mean the RNA or whatever other self-replicating molecule first kicked it off.

And which came first, is a fundamental division among theorists. Eg..

The conceptual gulf that separates the `metabolism first' and `replication first' mechanisms forthe emergence of life continues to cloud the origin of life debate. In thepresent paper we analyze this aspect of the origin of life problem and offerarguments in favor of the `replication first' school.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q7640p84j30836k5/

There is the same chicken and egg question in language evolution - if you need both semantics and syntax to have a language, one must have arisen first, but then both also plainly need the other to make sense. You were either a semantics-first, or syntax-first, theorist, and neither stance was ever satisfactory.

But in the case of humans, this business of teaching and communicating somehow caught fire and began to take over virtually all of our existence, to the point where our survival entirely depends on it.

This doesn't really seem an issue to me as memesis is so common in social animals. As you say, the transmission of culture is commonly seen in animals. And there are things like "mirror neurons" to show that brains are evolved to anticipate/follow the actions of others.

The paleo record also shows homo were skilled tool users and fire makers and co-operative hunters long before the modern sociocultural speech transformation. We existed in a pre-symbolic communicative stage for at least 600,000 years and have been fully symbolic only for about 120,000 years.

The transformation looks tied to the evolution of vocal articulation - arched palate, dropped larynx. And so as I say, a constraint on vocalisation that made it suddenly syballic - probably as a "singing" refinement. Then almost immediately there was a swift transition to a semantics~syntax division that underlies symbolic speech. The hardware was suddenly found to be there that could support an entirely new level of software that had never existed before.

I know that you feel “development” has been shown to be more basic than “evolution”, and that leads you to focus on the development of symbolic, linearly coded speech. Which was surely important. But the development of the genetic code in biology must clearly have happened in the context of evolutionary selection established by self-replicating entities of some kind. And my guess is that the emergence of coded speech happened in the context of an evolutionary process that was already strongly selecting for a kind of emotional bond that reproduced itself through the need to communicate.

If devolopment is dichotomous with evolution, then I would have to in fact see both as equally basic. And indeed that is the modern theoretical biology position - why everyone talks about evo/devo these days. So if I emphasise development, that is mainly because that is the forgotten half of the complementary pair. Darwinian evolution seems so easy to understand that people like to treat it as the "everything". Developmental biology always strikes people as more mysterous.

I agree that speech evolved out of a host of pre-adaptations and existing behaviours - hominids were already tool-using, large brain, lateralised, highly social animals. So everything was there for a long time. Which is why the story of dimensional reduction is a powerful explanation. The puzzle is symbolic speech did not arise earlier given all the psychological and sociological conditions appeared to be in place. The one last lucky accident had to have been the evolution of a throat and tongue designed for biting a stream of vocalisation into discrete chunks - syllables.

[apeiron]

Apeiron, I guess I'll just state my point at this juncture: under your own rationale there is no discontinuous origin of life, phylogenetically or ontogenetically.

OK, I put forward clear grounds for distinguishing life from non-life - one widely accepted by actual biologists - and you just want to jump right back to what you believe without dealing with my points. That is rhetoric rather than dialogue and suggests your position is very weak indeed.

If my argument is that life is defined by the epistemic cut - a matter~symbol or metabolism~replication dichotomy - then you would have to show that either this division does not exist at all, or that it exists all the way down and is present also in the non-living.

This you have not even tried to do. Instead you just want to assert I (and all those other biologists, including our pals Schrodinger and Koestler) have failed to make a cogent case. It is not even worth your effort to deal with the evidence.

This is an excellent way to preserve your personal belief structure, but it is not philosophic/scientific.

But we can short circuit that whole discussion by considering that we end up with either an arbitrary distinction between life and not-life under all such approaches, based on one's own pet criteria for what SHOULD be considered alive, or vitalism. I already linked to my essay discussing the first problem, focusing on the various criteria for life extant today.

The epistemic cut cannot be either arbitrary or a pet criteria if it arose in a community of thinkers with the best knowledge of the evidence and the issues. If you are not prepared to listen to biologists on this, who's views are you going to respect?

In your own writings, you seek out old timers like Haldane and Mayr, cherry picking quotes. And I have already highlighted how you have misrepresented or misunderstood the positions of some others. So I don't feel your scholarship is secure in this area.

Sorry to be harsh. I am actually interested in your arguments as they are well presented. But now we are getting down to the nitty-gritty of how they hold up.

Here you are taking the line that all other explanations fail, so therefore we are only left with mine. But I have to remind you that you have not yet actually shown my explanation to have a problem.

The vitalism complaint arises when we consider what exactly is happening when something suddenly transitions from abios to bios. If this does in fact happen, what on earth suddenly comes into being at this transition? A God-given soul or some mysterious quality by a different name?

Symbols suddenly came into being. A semiosis for the self. Autonomy, autopoiesis, bios, complex adaptive systems. There are many ways of describing the something obviously new that arose with life/mind.

Calling this an appeal to soul-stuff or vitalism is just a further rhetorical trick, hoping that mud sticks. And all that tells me is that you have no argument against what I have said.

Biology has long given up vitalism, justifiably, because everything we know about life suggests strongly that there is no qualitative difference between the substance of living organisms and non-living entities. It's all the same stuff, but in different arrangements.

More rhetoric. If you say "everything we know suggests strongly", can you please now provide that evidence. Cite me a dozen biologists who are saying this. Shouldn't be hard if this is so well known and accepted.

But all things respond to their environment. An electron responds rather well to its environment. So where is the epistemic cut between an electron and "life"? It doesn't exist.

But life responds also to its own internal information - its memories, goals, anticipations. Electrons don't. So there is the epistemic cut.

My three-step theory of complexity above is an extension of Whitehead's panpsychism that allows a quantitative approach in cog sci and biology (when it is extended to cell-based life) as well as a determination in each particular case as to whether A is conscious or not as a single subject or a mere aggregate of many constituent subjects. Again, this is the combination problem or the boundary problem, which my framework is designed to address.

And if you are right, then biologists will be tearing up their existing ideas based on their own view of complexity.

[apeiron]

PS. Here are the general lines of reasoning for panpsychism more generally...

Again, you are talking about every option except the actual systems view that is standard in theoretical biology (and reasonably represented in theoretical neurobiology).

[PhizzicsPhan]

Again, you are talking about every option except the actual systems view that is standard in theoretical biology (and reasonably represented in theoretical neurobiology).

Apeiron, the "actual systems view" that you cite is a type of materialism. And it relies on the magic of emergence. More to come...

[apeiron]

Apeiron, the "actual systems view" that you cite is a type of materialism. And it relies on the magic of emergence. More to come...

If this is what you think, then you do not yet understand the systems view.

It is a type of materialism - but one that sees form as well as substance as fundamental. So it is not monistic but irreducibly triadic.

It relies not on the "magic" of emergence but on the logic of systems. And this is the view everything "emerges", or more correctly, develops. So both your local substance and your global forms start out as merely potential and have to develop synergistically to become actual.

So it is in fact far more radically "emergent" than the kind of liquidity arguments you want to make (and the criticisms of which you have not yet addressed).

Your position is double aspect substance monism. And whereas most such theorists restrict themselves to consciousness, you want to argue that even life is a property of all substance it seems.

I'm really scratching my head how that is not a reductionist version of vitalism? It's certainly pretty way out there. And utterly lacking in experimental justification.

[ConradDJ]

I’m going to try again to summarize my perspective.

PhizzicsPhan is reinventing Descartes, insisting on an irreducible difference between mind and matter.

And there is an irreducible difference here, but it’s being misstated, treated as if it were a difference “out there” in objective reality. The basic difference is between the world seen from one’s own point of view, and the world imagined “from outside” as objective reality.

So there is confusion between “one’s own point of view” – which could apply to an atom or anything else – and “mind” or “consciousness”, which are meaningful terms only for beings who can talk to themselves about themselves.

PhizzicsPhan and Apeiron share the global viewpoint on the world “from outside”, and take it for granted that this objective viewpoint is the one that promises the most fundamental insight. From that standpoint Apeiron is quite correct – there are no irreducible differences here between life and non-life, consciousness and non-consciousness, etc. Everything is emergent from a dynamic of relationships, “systems” described from outside.

And Apeiron recognizes that an “internal” perspective has a role to play in analyzing systems, along with the “external” one. But I think he is doing something similar to PhizzicsPhan, at perhaps a more sophisticated level. That is, treating “one’s own point of view” as if it were something that fits nicely into the traditional philosophical view of the world “from outside”. The difference in viewpoint becomes for him another instance of the “local / global” dichotomy. The “internal” viewpoint reveals the objective boundaries of local systems.

And there I think PhizzicsPhan is right, in insisting that there’s something important about the “inside” perspective we all have, that’s missing from Apeiron’s schema.

Heidegger was trying to invent a different perspective. He believed that a fundamental insight was only possible by starting from our existence “in real time”, in this ongoing present moment. This existence right now, from this unique point of view, is the only experience we (or anything) has. So he was projecting the fundamental “meaning of being” as being here in relation to others, and the fundamental meaning of “world” as the kind of environment of connections we’re always in the midst of, here and now.

So the idea is – instead of stepping out of our own “authentic” perspective to see the world as a whole – we want to understand the world “from inside” as a web of real-time connection. This certainly involves abstracting from one’s specific experience here and now... but without globalizing or objectifying.

The view “from outside” that objectifies the world as “systems within systems” is by no means wrong. We can and obviously have learned a great deal through this viewpoint. But it leads only to confusion when it comes to the foundations of physics, or to the question about the nature of “consciousness”. That’s because we miss what’s fundamental here unless we comes to terms with the real-time structure of “being-there” from a point of view in one’s own relationships.

This makes sense to me, but it proposes a perspective that is still undeveloped. It’s still much easier for all of us (including me) to imagine the world objectively, in the Cartesian manner, or to think about our subjective experience “inside our heads” in the Kantian mode. It’s still very foreign to us to try to conceptualize the world of relationships between us in present time, even if we’re able to recognize that this is ultimately what’s most basic in our lives and our experience.

[ConradDJ]

Schematically:

Descartes – the world is an objective reality to be investigated by objective means, and mind is a special part of that reality about which we have direct knowledge.

Kant – the world we experience is a construction of the mind, according to the mind’s own constitutive rules... the reality of “things in themselves” is not part of experience and is not ultimately knowable.

Heidegger – our experience is a struggle to find our own point of view in a world constituted by our relationships with others. To the extent we learn to interpret our own experience “authentically”, we can gain insight into the way everything in the world has its being in and out of its relationships.


So far the (3rd-person) Cartesian perspective has been immensely fruitful. The (1st-person) exploration of our subjective experience is much harder, but may become very valuable as the emergence of brain-science lets us combine 1st-person and 3rd-person information.

The Heidgerian viewpoint, which I think will turn out to be a kind of “2nd-person science”, hardly yet exists. But I believe we will need to operate with all three viewpoints to understand our world in depth.

[Ferris_bg]

PhizzicsPhan's view seems to me like a form of type-F monism as explained here (part 11) (http://consc.net/papers/nature.html) by Chalmers and here (http://faculty.lagcc.cuny.edu/rbrown/Russellian%20Physicalism.htm) by Barbara Montero.

Apeiron's view is a form of non-reductive physicalism - here (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:NmtyRTudSGoJ:complexity.vub.ac.be/phil/presentations/Siqueiros.pdf) is a good presentation of it.

[apeiron]

Apeiron's view is a form of non-reductive physicalism - here (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:NmtyRTudSGoJ:complexity.vub.ac.be/phil/presentations/Siqueiros.pdf) is a good presentation of it.

Thanks, that is a very good reference that sums up most of the essentials.

What would have to be added to this basic hierarchy theory description these days would be 1) a logic of vagueness, or I guess what could be called "strong development" and 2) semiosis, or an explicit model of the matter~symbol issue in bios.

[apeiron]

The view “from outside” that objectifies the world as “systems within systems” is by no means wrong. We can and obviously have learned a great deal through this viewpoint. But it leads only to confusion when it comes to the foundations of physics, or to the question about the nature of “consciousness”. That’s because we miss what’s fundamental here unless we comes to terms with the real-time structure of “being-there” from a point of view in one’s own relationships.

But then where is the evidence that subjectivity is fundamentally dyadic rather than triadic? An "authentic" POV does seem intrinsically and inescapably globalised - as Peirce argued.

For example, I see a ship on the horizon as a large object moving with a fair speed at a great distance, rather than perhaps a small bug crawling very slowly near at hand. So there are three things bound up to make this POV. There is me, there is the ship, and there is the global space that is the context of our relationship or interaction.

All conscious experience has this necessary structure. Everything we experience is placed within space and time, within some prevailing context or relations and meanings.

It would in fact be "objectifying" to pick out just the atomistic interactions which "make up" the holistic experiencing - as for instance, just focusing on the ship and my eyeball, saying that it is indeed true that "all I know" is that I'm registering a moving dot and it could in fact be a bug or ship. A psychophysicist might analyse the situation in those terms - the size of the image case upon my retina, etc - but I experience directly only a triadic POV in which there is me, it, and the context that includes us both within it.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, responding to post #72.

I am a biologist so I'm not ignoring what biologists say on these matters. Granted, my view is a minority view, but you can see from my essay, What is Life?, that I am not alone in my panzoist views.

I have indeed responded to your arguments - in a categorical way. I'll humor you, however, and respond in a more detailed manner.

Your systems view of life is, as I just mentioned above, another type of materialism. And materialism relies on magic for the emergence of consciousness, so if you are suggesting a necessary linkage between the emergence of life and consciousness, you will find no help in a theory about the emergence of life unless you have a non-materialist theory of consciousness also.

(Conrad almost gets there in his commentary but misses the key insight that physicalist systems fail to explain consciousness, in principle, if they don't allow for consciousness as a fundamentally different feature of the universe as the alleged purely objective descriptions of physicalism; this is NOT Cartesian dualism and I am NOT a Cartesian dualist. Rather, panpsychism is the remedy to Cartesian dualism's even uglier descendant: materialist physicalism, which lopped off Descartes' "spirit," res cogitans, in order to give to religion the realm of spirit and leave science the matter, res extensa, and in the process allowing a description of exactly half the world).

You yourself have suggested in this thread that your key criterion for life exists on a continuum: "And then we can show also that symbolic systems lie at the very end of the SPECTRUM of possible dimensional constraint."

But let me ask you again (the key point): under your own criteria for life, when would A transition from abios to bios? When a particular molecule snaps into place in exactly the right way? At what exact picosecond would this occur and how would we decide?

You cite Pattee for support in your approach to "life," but the paper you linked to reveals that Pattee proceeds down a very similar path as Mayr, who you criticize. Pattee states: "we know that a heritable genetic memory is an essential condition for life." But why on earth does life require a heritable genetic memory? What rulebook states this? Dyson has speculated that life in fact began quite differently, with a single cell maintaining its form over eons and eventually teaming up with a separate form of life that was a replicator - the ur-genetic system - to form the first cell-based life.

Pattee is, like Mayr, using his inductive intuitions about what SHOULD constitute "life" and imposing criteria for life. This is fine if the approach is acknowledged as based on pet criteria - but it's not explicitly acknowledged in the case of Pattee or Mayr, or any criteria-based approach to "life."

Pattee does, however, quote Von Neumann, with respect to the arbitrariness of the "epistemic cut" more generally:

"That is, we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all physical processes (in principle at least) arbitrarily precisely. In the latter, this is meaningless. The boundary between the two is arbitrary to a very large extent. . . but this does not change the fact that in each method of description the boundary must be placed somewhere, if the method is not to proceed vacuously, i.e., if a comparison with experiment is to be possible." (von Neumann, 1955, p.419)

Pattee fails to make the final step to panzoism because he doesn't recognize that the solution to a slippery slope is to slide to the bottom - where one can stand on firm ground.

So your and Pattee's approach to "life" mirrors the problems with the Copenhagen Interpretation and the "measurement problem." It makes zero sense - ontologically - to suggest a classical system of measurement for what are quantum phenomena because if QM is right QM should apply to all things, including the observer. Yet Heisenberg's and Von Neumman's "cut" was a simplifying assumption used to try and make sense of a nascent theory. Like most simplifying assumptions it should be jettisoned when the time is right.

Pattee seems to recognizes the arbitrariness of the epistemic cut later in his paper but again fails to make the necessary leap downward:

"The epistemic cut or the distinction between subject and object is normally associated with highly evolved subjects with brains and their models of the outside world as in the case of measurement. As von Neumann states, where we place the cut appears to be arbitrary to a large extent. The cut itself is an epistemic necessity, not an ontological condition. That is, we must make a sharp cut, a disjunction, just in order to speak of knowledge as being "about" something or "standing for" whatever it refers to. What is going on ontologically at the cut (or what we see if we choose to look at the most detailed physics) is a very complex process. The apparent arbitrariness of the placement of the epistemic cut arises in part because the process cannot be completely or unambiguously described by the objective dynamical laws, since in order to perform a measurement the subject must have control of the construction of the measuring device. Only the subject side of the cut can measure or control."

Again, the solution I have suggested is to recognize that "life" is just a label we use for more complex forms but that the distinction between "more complex" and "less complex" is completely arbitrary. If we recognize "life" as a rule of thumb, a heuristic, it retains some usefulness, but we shouldn't reify it as a real property, which is a return to an unjustifiable vitalism.

We should also recognize, as I have urged, that we can quantify complexity and arrive at a more comprehensive and logically rigorous biology and evolutionary theory.

Pattee states: "The origin problem is still a mystery. What is the simplest epistemic event?" So Pattee doesn't know where we should place the primordial epistemic cut and he doesn't offer a final answer on this. But I do: at the bottom. The "simplest epistemic event" is the fundamental event that Whitehead labels the "actual entity." In fact, "event" is generally synonymous in Whitehead's system for "actual entity" or "occasion of experience."

Pattee and you are right to point to the epistemic cut as important in discussing life and consciousness, but it only makes sense if you push it all the way to the bottom. Otherwise it becomes completely arbitrary.

[apeiron]

Again, the solution I have suggested is to recognize that "life" is just a label we use for more complex forms but that the distinction between "more complex" and "less complex" is completely arbitrary. If we recognize "life" as a rule of thumb, a heuristic, it retains some usefulness, but we shouldn't reify it as a real property, which is a return to an unjustifiable vitalism.

You seem to be misunderstanding what is "arbitrary" here. It is where the cut is made perhaps, but not the fact that it is made. To suggest otherwise is simply misrepresentation of the passages you just quoted.

And "property" is a predicate of substance. Life is a description of a particular kind of system or species of complexity. So there is no reification involved.

Instead it is you who want to reify consciousness as a universal property of substance. Which is why you sound vitalistic.

Pattee and you are right to point to the epistemic cut as important in discussing life and consciousness, but it only makes sense if you push it all the way to the bottom. Otherwise it becomes completely arbitrary.

Not really. We know that the epistemic cut in fact exists. The secret of life is the division between genotype and phenotype, replication and metabolism, evolution and development. As a biologist, that is what you would have learnt in biology class. The origin of the epistemic cut is an event that we can only speculate about. But the fact of it is standard science.

Note, in case clarification is still needed, it is quite standard in biology to agree with Schrodinger, etc, that it is dissipative structure all the way down to the physical level. But that then something extra must define the boundary between abiotic and biotic dissipative structure.

On the other hand, where is the hard evidence for panzooism? Where are the biologists who believe in it?

Are you still saying Schrodinger was a panzooist despite my earlier citation?

I am finding your treatment of sources - such as Pattee and Schrodinger - worrying as you repeatedly seem to disregard what people actually say, and instead hear what you want to hear.

Another concerning example of this. In your "what is life" paper, you cite John Dupre and Maureen A. O’Malley as panzooists.

Yet in their work they say quite explicitly...

Our continuum view of life is open to chemical systems being sometimes describable as living systems, though perhaps it is likely that they will meet the relevant criteria only transiently.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ptb;idno=6959004.0001.003;cc=ptb;rgn=main;vi ew=text

I don't think much of their actual attempts to distinguish life from non-life on the basis of "collaboration", but the point is they do still want to make that distinction. It is not life all the way down as you suggest they say.

Their concern instead is to be able to include viruses and organelles within the realm of the living. Hence the notions of cooperation and symbiosis as a way to get round the usual idea that evolution and life are "selfish". Autonomy can be a collective property.

Yet they explicitly state that they are not talking about particles being alive, or meeting even a loose definition of the living.

Thus atoms combine to produce molecules, and the latter have properties that are not found in any of the atoms of which they are composed. But certainly more than this is required to count as collaboration in the sense we are elaborating.

So you are proving unreliable in your interpretation of sources. Or did Dupre and O'Malley nail their colours to the hylozoic mast somewhere else I haven't seen?

Where are the references that show they believe life to be a fundamental property of matter?

[EDIT] Checking your reference to Bruce Jakosky, I can't see how you claim him as a hylozoist either. Again, he says he is unsure how to define the dividing line, but that is not the same as your claim that it is life (and mind) all the way down.

You cite this bit...

“Was there a distinct moment when Earth went from having no life to having life, as if a switch were flipped? The answer is ‘probably not.’”

But then in the magazine article, that quote is qualified thus....

There were probably entities that had some but not all characteristics we would view as evincing life. These would have fallen in that gray area, in which they could arguably be placed into either category.

Jakosky wouldn't be concerned about placing things into "either" category unless he believed abios and bios are in fact two categories (of dissipative structure or complexity).

Were you planning to use these citations in your JCS paper?

[ConradDJ]

But then where is the evidence that subjectivity is fundamentally dyadic rather than triadic? An authentic POV does seem intrinsically and inescapably globalised - as Peirce argued.

... Everything we experience is placed within space and time, within some prevailing context or relations and meanings.

... I experience directly only a triadic POV in which there is me, it, and the context that includes us both within it.


You’re raising some important issues. But I think in order to clarify the situation we have to distinguish between the “I - You” kind of relationship and the “I - It” kind.

In both cases, the “dyadic” relationship needs a context, as you say. The main thing about the relationships we’re talking about, that make up our experience of the world, is that they support communication. And what gets communicated in the relationship needs a context in which it makes a difference.

The “You” kind of relationship involves a back-and-forth, mutual exchange of information, while the “It” kind is essentially a matter of an observer and an object that’s observed. In the one case these are “talking” relationships between two different points of view, that involve a context of meaning on both sides, and in the other case we have relationships of “seeing”, where there is only one point of view.

Now in both cases, I don’t think I agree that the context must be essentially global. I’m not sure my actual experience has anything “global” or “holistic” about it... the context for what I see and hear in the moment seems to be made of other things I see and hear, etc. The context for what we’re talking about is made mainly of other things we’ve talked about or might talk about. So I think when you say “global” you’re referring to a relative difference between focal point and background rather than a logical difference between the particular and the universal.

But I agree there is something “globalizing” about the “I - It” relationship, where we’re merely “observing”. This is especially clear in scientific observation, where we deliberately construct a universal framework so we’re comparing different things within the same controlled context. Heidegger points out a basic difference between being engaged with things (such as tools), within a context of other engagements, and “stepping back” from things and ”just observing” them as objects. Focusing on the thing just as it is “in itself” does involve projecting a somewhat more “global” context.

On the other hand, I would say the “I - You” relationship tends in the opposite direction. In our mutual communication, who I am, and what I do and say, is as much at issue as who you are. Of course if all we’re doing is trying to come to agreement about what’s out there in reality, then the “I - It” mode predominates, and we try to work out a common framework for observing things together. But to the extent our relationship itself is important, the context for what we communicate to each other becomes less global and more specific, as we get more engaged.

Now at least for us humans, it seems clear to me that one-on-one talking relationships are what’s basic. We’re already born into the profoundest kind of emotional engagement with our mothers, long before there’s any conscious “I” or any “You” identified as a separate person. It’s true that as we learn to talk, the more explicit part of what we learn has to do with describing the object-world around us the way other people describe it. But beneath that we’re implicitly learning how to communicate and build personal connections with the people we care about. And if we think of human existence essentially as a structure of “care” (as Heidegger does), then it seems to me that the interpersonal domain is always ultimately what’s deepest for us, as compared with the domain of objective reality, which is so much easier to talk about.

But this is in the context of a discussion about ontology, not just human psychology. So what I’m suggesting is that the basic structure of relationships in the world is inherently complicated. In physics there are many distinct ways of relating, and they all seem to be built out of one-on-one “dyadic” interactions. There is a one-way “cause and effect” aspect to all these interactions, and also always a mutual aspect, in that a change in one system is balanced by an opposite change in the other, within their respective contexts.

Every kind of physical interaction can communicate information – to the extent the right kind of “measurement context” is available. And those contexts always involve other kinds of interactions that communicate other kinds of information, in other kinds of contexts.

We generally describe physical interaction in a “global” spacetime context – which clearly works for classical physics. But my guess is that the quantum theory will only begin to make sense when we see it as describing “the world from inside” – from the point of view of the participants, so to speak. Classically we expect a system to “have” certain properties and “be” in certain states – defined in terms of a global background. But at the atomic level, information about “properties” and “states” can be determinate only insofar as there’s a local context within the web of one-on-one relationships that can actually define and communicate that information.

Carlo Rovelli once defined physics as “a description of the information systems have about other systems.” He was taking the “observing” kind of relationship as what’s fundamental here. But I suspect we’ll need to include the back-and-forth mutual “talking” mode of connection, if we want to understand how the universe emerged as a system that communicates with itself about itself.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, please read what I wrote again. You're misinterpreting what I've written about my own claims and what I state of others' claims, including Pattee.

And please answer my question: under your theory about the origin of life, when exactly does A transition from abios to bios? What exact turn of a molecule transitions A in what exact picosecond? And why?

You are perhaps right that I should have been more careful in dealing with Dupre and O'Malley because even though their own statements in many places lead necessarily to panzoism, I agree that they have not fully come out of the closet as panzoists. But if life is a continuum, as they clearly claim, this is indeed panzoism. It is only when they attempt to "sell" their ideas as more palatable than that crazy claim of panzoism that they back-pedal.

[apeiron]

Apeiron, please read what I wrote again. You're misinterpreting what I've written about my own claims and what I state of others' claims, including Pattee.

If I have misinterpreted you, you will have to explain how. I think in fact I have understood the nature of your arguments pretty well.

And please answer my question: under your theory about the origin of life, when exactly does A transition from abios to bios? What exact turn of a molecule transitions A in what exact picosecond? And why?

The logic here works the other way round. It is the fact that it is so hard for origin of life theorists to come up with a story of the first moment that demonstrates just how big a jump there must have been. If it was a simple transition story, then it would be happening all the time. Life would be evolving every day in some new form.

So we know there is an epistemic cut in the form of genotype~phenotype. We understand completely the difference it makes. Rate independent information (genes) give non-holonomic control over rate dependent dissipative processes (metabolic cycles, membrane formation, etc). This is standard biology you would have learnt about in biology classes.

The difference between abiotic dissipative structure and biotic dissipative structure is unambiguous - only one has a level of genetic control and so carries a history with it, shows autonomy, and can learn by evolutionary selection.

But the difference is also so great that it becomes hard to imagine how it could have happened in a gradualistic way - even though biologists presume it must have.

Asking about the first picosecond, the first molecular transition, is just your way of trying to deflect attention from the real issue. That there is an easy distinction between life and non-life. This is why no-one apart from the Ken Wilbers and Madam Blatavskys of this world come out as panzooists. It is a crackpot position.

Now I would say the same about panpsychism. Except whereas life has long since ceased to trouble people as a natural phenomenon, a vitalistic approach to consciousness (seeing it as a property inherent in substance) is still remarkably widespread.

And even more widespread is the other polar belief, that consciousness is nothing but computation - a pattern of information. This must be because computers are now so much a part of people's lives that they become the natural metaphor for all thinking about difficult things (just as clockwork and hydraulics were the metaphors for earlier eras of popular philosophising about natural phenomenon).

So what I have been pointing out all along is that the same deflationary concepts that work in theoretical biology, also apply in mind science. Pattee's epistemic cut is a generalised description of the essence of life and mind. So if you accept life is not a mystery but instead a particular kind of complexity, then it is only logical to regard mind in the same light.

You are perhaps right that I should have been more careful in dealing with Dupre and O'Malley because even though their own statements in many places lead necessarily to panzoism, I agree that they have not fully come out of the closet as panzoists. But if life is a continuum, as they clearly claim, this is indeed panzoism. It is only when they attempt to "sell" their ideas as more palatable than that crazy claim of panzoism that they back-pedal.

You would be quite wrong to call them panzoists of even the closet variety without some confirmation. Why don't you just email and ask them if you are representing their positions correctly if they have never stated it anywhere?

Clearly, they are arguing "continuum" in the way one might argue there is no clear moment - no picosecond or molecule - where the land becomes the sea. At the transition zone, you see spatially mixed or temporally transient states of dry and wet. But it is not then "actually land all the way down", because quite quickly it actually does become unambiguously just sea.

A vague transistion zone is a very different claim to panzooism (where the essence is always there). So you shouldn't be twisting the words of others to claim they are panzooists backpedalling for the sake of academic credibility.

Has this JCS paper of yours passed peer review and been accepted for publication?

[apeiron]

We generally describe physical interaction in a “global” spacetime context – which clearly works for classical physics. But my guess is that the quantum theory will only begin to make sense when we see it as describing “the world from inside” – from the point of view of the participants, so to speak. Classically we expect a system to “have” certain properties and “be” in certain states – defined in terms of a global background. But at the atomic level, information about “properties” and “states” can be determinate only insofar as there’s a local context within the web of one-on-one relationships that can actually define and communicate that information.

How does this square with QM as a sum over histories story? One history emerges as a result of a collapse of the wave function. But all the other shadowy histories exist in a way that contributes to the final outcome as QM corrections.

So yes, there is a one-to-one story here in that one particle may emit a photon, another absorbs it. Each changes state in a well defined way. But then QM is also non-local. There is a global aspect to collapse. An event has to feel out the context of all the possible histories to settle on then the most probable actual history.

It is the classical view that seems to demand the least contextuality. Spacetime is an a-causal backdrop in Newtonianism. A static and uninvolved void that permits one-to-one interactions that take no account of context.

But both QM and relativity showed that the bigger picture is about the intimate connection between local events and global contexts. Scale does not matter according to classical physics, yet scale changes everything say the models of QM and relativity. The you-you dyad breaks down rather radically as two particles exchanging a photon are actually embedded in a relationship with a larger system.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Really, Apeiron, name calling and taunts? Seriously. Try again.

[apeiron]

Try again.

Clearly there is no point. You are not dealing with my criticisms, just attempting to deflect attention from them. But that is no skin off my nose. So good luck with your paper for the JCS.

[PhizzicsPhan]

To those on this thread interested in panpsychism and panzoism, I highly recommend the following reading list:

- Unsnarling the World-Knot, David Ray Griffin (an excellent introduction to and exploration of Whitehead and the mind/body problem)

- The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin (a prescient and wide-ranging overview of matter, energy, life, mind, and spirit)

- Panpsychism in the West, David Skrbina (a scholarly overview of the eponymous topic)

- Consciousness and its Place in Nature, Galen Strawson, et al., (an anchor essay in favor of panpsychism with responses and a reply from Strawson)

- Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead

- Process and Reality, same

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, you've missed the point time and again. My forthcoming JCS paper is not about panzoism, it's about panpsychism.

Think about what I've wrote and attempt to answer my question. You might find it helpful in developing your own ideas.

[ConradDJ]

How does this square with QM as a sum over histories story? One history emerges as a result of a collapse of the wave function. But all the other shadowy histories exist in a way that contributes to the final outcome as QM corrections.

So yes, there is a one-to-one story here in that one particle may emit a photon, another absorbs it. Each changes state in a well defined way. But then QM is also non-local. There is a global aspect to collapse. An event has to feel out the context of all the possible histories to settle on then the most probable actual history...

The you-you dyad breaks down rather radically as two particles exchanging a photon are actually embedded in a relationship with a larger system.


Yes, there’s no question that dyadic relationships can only communicate information within a larger context. But I don’t think the local/global dichotomy is very helpful for understanding how this works. In the world I experience, I don’t find anything “global” – though my local environment has many different aspects on different scales in space and time. And the same seems to be true of the atom’s world.

I think that to understand physics, we need to understand what each kind of relationship (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc.) contributes to this communicative environment. So I’m not trying to uncover a universal “logic” of communication, but rather to understand how this system of very diverse kinds of contexts evolved – such that for every parameter of every “field” or “particle” there’s an interaction-context that measures it, and makes it available as part of the background-context for the measurement of different parameters.

Even in your system, I believe you need quite a few different dichotomies to make a world. You’re looking to unify the system by pointing to an underlying dynamic that’s essentially the same for all of them. But my guess is that in physics as in biology, each component structure has a unique role to play, and therefore its own “logic”.

It seems that at the fundamental level, in physics, all interaction is dyadic and momentary. So the basic issue for me is, how does a web made of moments of one-on-one connection evolve into an environment that supports long-term spatial relationships between points of view that persist over time? Evidently this involves many kinds of “universal principles” that we can think of as providing “global” constraints. But even the universal “laws” have to be meaningful (measurable) in terms of local interaction-contexts.

As to the peculiar character of QM – it describes a basic “quantum vacuum” made of “virtual events” that obey no laws, in which no conditions or parameters are definable. So let’s say any kind of “event” can happen at this base level. But apparently the only events that can become part of the “real” world that we (or anything else) can actually “observe” are dyadic interactions... and specifically, one-on-one connections between events that connect to other such events. Events that don’t connect, don’t participate, remain part of the indeterminate background.

Then of all the possible events in this web of momentary connections, only those can be part of an observable world that also happen to participate in certain “lawful” patterns in the web, which make a context for defining each other.

So basically I’m imagining that all the “laws” and “global constraints” in physics arise by chance, as the conditions that define this informational environment. In a given interaction, everything happens – but only insofar as the interaction happens to “obey” the laws (in a context of other interactions that happen to obey the laws) can it be “determinate” (and participate in the evolving context that lets other events be “observed”).

As to “non-locality” – first, my “local” context doesn’t include only what’s “near by” in space. When I see a star, I’m participating in an interaction over several light-years. But I’m not connecting with anything “global”.

Second, QM does not describe any interaction over space-like intervals, only correlations between otherwise random measurements. So QM describes “patterns” in the interaction-web that are essentially different from the light-cone structure given in Relativity. Again, I don’t see anything “global” here, only very radical differences in the kinds of patterns that are apparently needed to define what happens in the world.

So yes, clearly the “laws of physics” are “global” in the sense of “universal”. But I think they arise not out of the logic of dichotomy, but out of the complicated conditions that have evolved to let information be defined “locally” and communicated between local viewpoints.

[alt]

Well, no matter what else, this has been a fascinating and informative thread which I have followed closely and have learnt a lot from. So Apeiron and PhizzcsPhan, thank you for it. I hope you can continue it a little further. I have a couple of questions, if I may.

Apeiron, in post #61 you said;
But I am unifying those two kinds of emergence as one. They are both the result of the same process of dimensional reduction.

I've read through and pondered all you've said and I still can't understand what you mean by dimensional reduction. Could you please clarify ?

PhizzcsPhan, in post #81 you said;
Pattee and you are right to point to the epistemic cut as important in discussing life and consciousness, but it only makes sense if you push it all the way to the bottom. Otherwise it becomes completely arbitrary.

Push it all the way to the bottom - OK. Do you then also push it all the way to the top ? Meaning, do you believe that the universe, the largest macro you can imagine (whatever that might be) also has life and consciousness .. and 'psyche' ?

Thanks - and once again - a wonderful thread !

[Ferris_bg]

Do you then also push it all the way to the top ? Meaning, do you believe that the universe, the largest macro you can imagine (whatever that might be) also has life and consciousness .. and 'psyche' ?

It depends on if your definition of dependence/interconnection for unitary subjects is complete or not. If there is something left, you can have some "global hidden relationship" meaning that the universe is itself an organism.

[apeiron]

I've read through and pondered all you've said and I still can't understand what you mean by dimensional reduction. Could you please clarify?

I mean going from 3D volume to 2D plane to 1D line to 0D point. Constraints that cut down the dimensions available for interaction and change.

So the regular world is generically 3D. Chemistry mixes freely in every direction in unconstrained fashion.

When a chemical reaction is confined to a 2D film, this constraint can be informational. It concentrates the reagents and so can speed the reaction. Indeed, it can do much more by way of organising.

See for example Wächtershäuser's surface metabolism theory of the origin of life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%E2%80%93sulfur_world_theory) or even just regular use of membranes like the endoplasmic reticulum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endoplasmic_reticulum).

So surface films are the kind of gray area, first step towards life, that Tam was demanding evidence of - but then ignored.

If you constrain the dimensionality of physical interaction still further, then you can get an even more radical step towards computational control over biophysical processes. As we have with RNA and proteins. A linear molecule like RNA becomes a code that the world can read sequentially. A direction of interaction is enforced and becomes thus a sequence of point contacts.

In a 3D soup, you can wander about in any direction. In a 2D plane, you must flow across a surface and so it is easier to create gradients, easier to ensure the chemical contacts you seek to bring about. Get down to 1D, and there is just a line to follow.

This is the little trick that allows a molecular code to become separate from the world it encodes. And also a verbal code. Enforcing a serial form on attempts to express thoughts means you have to chunk and organise.

This is what top-down causality is about. By the global constraint on local freedoms (such as restricting 3D interactions to 2D surfaces, or 1D chains) you "discover" new local properties or potentials.

Reducing the dimensions available for interaction makes big differences in the world. You get "strong emergence".

[apeiron]

Yes, there’s no question that dyadic relationships can only communicate information within a larger context. But I don’t think the local/global dichotomy is very helpful for understanding how this works. In the world I experience, I don’t find anything “global” – though my local environment has many different aspects on different scales in space and time. And the same seems to be true of the atom’s world.

I would still argue that for anything to be seen to change, then there must also globally be the larger world that didn't change. So events (whether treated as occasions, particles, interactions or any other form of localised action) necessarily imply contexts. You can't have the one unless you have the other.

And consciousness is about the manufacture of such states of high contrast mental organisation. There is in every moment a state of clear mental prediction (we are already expecting the walls to hold firm, the floor to still be there, the sun continue to shine, the fridge to continue to hum). So there is a global backdrop of "nothing changing". And even action motion and change is part of this state of prediction. We already expect a falling ball to keep falling.

This is what then makes any unexpected sources of change so directly noticeable. If the fridge stops droning, suddenly you wake up to the fact of what is not there. You attend to a localised event - even though the event is the absence of something.

Your mind has to keep the world as "still" as possible - discount all sources of change so as to have a global mental backdrop that can detect the changes that are significant, surprising, or otherwise events worthy of the bright focus of awareness.

Even in your system, I believe you need quite a few different dichotomies to make a world.

It does boil down to just the two cannonical dichotomies of local~global and vague~crisp. And these are themselves of course the single dichotomy of becoming~being - the development from vague and perfectly symmetric potential to crisply dichotomised, or asymmetric, scale.

It seems that at the fundamental level, in physics, all interaction is dyadic and momentary. So the basic issue for me is, how does a web made of moments of one-on-one connection evolve into an environment that supports long-term spatial relationships between points of view that persist over time?

Here you are sticking to the view of time as something that moves along tick by tick. I see time as a scaled realm. So you do have what Stan Salthe calls a hierarchy of cogent moments. The largest scale in physics would be set by the speed of light, and so for our universe, in practice it is the particle horizon, or some other suitable measure of the visible universe.

Then some particular interaction would be bounded by its own more local light cone. If atom A is having an interaction with atom B, then that positive event is in fact happening within a global lightcone that includes all the other points or locales where atom A is simultaneously not having an interaction (but could have been!).

As to the peculiar character of QM – it describes a basic “quantum vacuum” made of “virtual events” that obey no laws, in which no conditions or parameters are definable. So let’s say any kind of “event” can happen at this base level. But apparently the only events that can become part of the “real” world that we (or anything else) can actually “observe” are dyadic interactions... and specifically, one-on-one connections between events that connect to other such events. Events that don’t connect, don’t participate, remain part of the indeterminate background.

Exactly. Again the point is that there must be this vacuum for there be this event that is not then part of the vacuum. You must have an "unchanged" background to have a "change" that stands out as a mark upon that background. You can't just have marks that exist in naked splendour. That's like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. Easy to say, impossible to do.

Then of all the possible events in this web of momentary connections, only those can be part of an observable world that also happen to participate in certain “lawful” patterns in the web, which make a context for defining each other.

This is different. Now you are talking about a history of marks. And this is where you need the kind of global state that can accumulate such a history. The vacuum (imagined as only a cold void, a zero point virtual sea) is indeed a bad surface to write upon. But a hot vacuum - the actual universe we find ourselves in - is a sea of real particles, real events, all busily thermalising away their energies. There is a global entropic gradient that gives a direction to all events, all localised changes, and so creates an arrow for time.

So basically I’m imagining that all the “laws” and “global constraints” in physics arise by chance, as the conditions that define this informational environment. In a given interaction, everything happens – but only insofar as the interaction happens to “obey” the laws (in a context of other interactions that happen to obey the laws) can it be “determinate” (and participate in the evolving context that lets other events be “observed”).

Certainly the Peircean view is that you have to start with spontaneous activity. So you have to have dyadic interactions before triadic habits of interaction can become established. So dyads are more primitive in that sense. They are pre-geometry or pre-systems if you like. But they are the tentative and fragile first actions, that must eventually develop into something more robust - events within a context, where the dominant interaction is now that between bottom-up construction and top-down constraint.

As to “non-locality” – first, my “local” context doesn’t include only what’s “near by” in space. When I see a star, I’m participating in an interaction over several light-years. But I’m not connecting with anything “global”.

Perhaps this is not something I have explained well enough. The global is the largest scale in terms of that interaction. Generally speaking, the universe is presumed to be homogenous and isotropic. We believe that it is the same over all possible scales. But some particular event can only know that to be true for a fact over its particular scale.

So maybe here is a key objective vs subjective, externalist vs internalist, distinction that can be drawn.

It would be objective to stand back and say the universe has these global properties even beyond the realms of what I have measured. But subjectively, every measurement has to exist within the lightcone of what it can actually measure. And that is a fact that needs to be worked into the epistemology. Which is indeed what hierarchy theory - particularly Salthe's internalist version - attempts to do.

So yes, clearly the “laws of physics” are “global” in the sense of “universal”. But I think they arise not out of the logic of dichotomy, but out of the complicated conditions that have evolved to let information be defined “locally” and communicated between local viewpoints.

If you are saying that everything starts just as spontaneous dyadic interactions, and only later becomes organised with a history, then that is the Peircean approach. It is also the kind of story modelled in phase transition physics. You must have fluctuations, localised correlations, to start anything happening.

But a view that then only recognises local dyads can never speak of the global order that arises as a consequence. Or at least, it cannot model that order in simple terms. It cannot speak of that global organisation in a direct manner.

[alt]

It depends on if your definition of dependence/interconnection for unitary subjects is complete or not. If there is something left, you can have some "global hidden relationship" meaning that the universe is itself an organism.

Interesting - thanks. I'm also very keen to see PhizzicsPhan's response to the question I posed - to repeat; (for PhizzicsPhan) ..

Push it all the way to the bottom - OK. Do you then also push it all the way to the top ? Meaning, do you believe that the universe, the largest macro you can imagine (whatever that might be) also has life and consciousness .. and 'psyche' ?


Apeiron, thanks for the explanation in post #94. I'm taking time to digest it all ..

[PhizzicsPhan]

alt, yes, this is where it gets quite interesting. If mind is ontologically fundamental - it is part and parcel of everything we see and detect - then "God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension," as the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in his 1988 book, Infinite in All Directions. This is the natural extension of Whiteheadian panpsychism, which satisfactorily explains consciousness life, matter, energy, mind and spiritual experience. Consciousness is a continuum from the simplest to the most complex structures in our universe. For Whitehead, the process of "concrescence," that is, becoming concrete, is universal and the entire universe becomes concrete in some manner in each moment, with an accompanying mentality. Whether the temporal scale of the universal consciousness is anything close enough to our own to meaningfully interact at our level is a big question mark. For Whitehead, there are two aspects to God: the "consequential" aspect, which I just described, and the "primordial" aspect, which is the set of all "eternal objects," that is, Platonic forms. I don't accept this second aspect in the way Whitehead did and I think his ontology could be improved by jettisoning the primordial aspect - unless we simply translate it into Brahman/ether/apeiron without any Platonic notion of pre-existent forms. It is, instead, simply the ground of being from which reality grows.

Anyway, this is going far beyond the original questions in this thread - but you did ask.

If you're curious, check out my in-progress book, Mind, World God, at:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/mind-world-god-science-and-spirit-in-the-21st-century/12289274

[PhizzicsPhan]

This is interesting: I just went back to Panpsychism in the West and looked up Peirce. Skrbina categorizes him as a panpsychist, along with Chardin and Whitehead, even though Peirce himself seemed torn on this issue, depending on which work is at issue.

[Edit: Peirce wasn't torn on panpsychism; rather, he is more well-known for his work that doesn't relate to panpsychism. Skrbina makes a convincing case that Peirce was a panpsychist through and through even though Peirce used the terms "hylopathy" or "objective idealism" rather than panpsychism.]

[PhizzicsPhan]

"Viewing a thing from the outside, ... it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside ... it appears as consciousness." C.S. Peirce, Man's Glassy Essence, 1892, p. 349. (Quoted in Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West, p. 154).

[Gold Barz]

Just a question about panpsychism, how serious is this view being taken anyways?

[PhizzicsPhan]

Gold, panpsychism is certainly a minority position but growing fast. At the annual Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences panpsychism boosters are increasingly common and panpsychist papers are appearing fairly regularly. Here's a list of prominent past and present supporters (from my recent paper):

Many respected thinkers have subscribed to some form of panpsychism, including the ancient Greeks Heraclitus and Empedocles, Plotinus in the 3rd Century CE, to Giordano Bruno in the 16th Century, Spinoza and Leibniz in the 17th Century, Immanuel Kant (in his earlier work) in the 18th Century, Arthur Schopenhauer and Ernst Haeckel in the 19th, and in the 20th Century William James, Gregory Bateson, the biologists J.B.S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, and C.H. Waddington, the paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the physicists Sir Arthur Eddington, Whitehead, David Bohm, Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell (to some degree). More recently, Galen Strawson, Stuart Hameroff, David Chalmers, William Seager, Gregg Rosenberg, Jonathan Schooler and many others have advocated panpsychist or quasi-panpsychist views.

[apeiron]

This is interesting: I just went back to Panpsychism in the West and looked up Peirce. Skrbina categorizes him as a panpsychist, along with Chardin and Whitehead, even though Peirce himself seemed torn on this issue, depending on which work is at issue.

[Edit: Peirce wasn't torn on panpsychism; rather, he is more well-known for his work that doesn't relate to panpsychism. Skrbina makes a convincing case that Peirce was a panpsychist through and through even though Peirce used the terms "hylopathy" or "objective idealism" rather than panpsychism.]

Tam, before you claim Peirce as one of your own, perhaps you ought to read what he said. It is pretty clear.

See The Architecture of Theories where he explains why objective idealism is NOT panpsychism. From http://danmahony.com/peirce1891a.htm

The old dualistic notion of mind and matter, so prominent in Cartesianism, as two radically different kinds of substance, will hardly find defenders to-day. Rejecting this, we are driven to some form of hylopathy, otherwise called monism. Then the question arises whether physical laws on the one hand, and the psychical law on the other are to be taken―

(A) as independent, a doctrine often called monism, but which I would name neutralism; or,

(B) the psychical law as derived and special, the physical law alone as primordial, which is materialism; or,

(C) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as primordial, which is idealism.

The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to scientific logic as to common sense; since it requires us to suppose that a certain kind of mechanism will feel, which would be a hypothesis absolutely irreducible to reason,―an ultimate, inexplicable regularity; while the only possible justification of any theory is that it should make things clear and reasonable.

Neutralism is sufficiently condemned by the logical maxim known as Ockham's razor, i.e., that not more independent elements are to be supposed than necessary. By placing the inward and outward aspects of substance on a par, it seems to render both primordial.

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every Philosophy.


So there are three options. Dual aspect theories that see mind and matter as the irreducible properties of substance are a form of monism. Which Peirce rejects. Instead he says the material world emerges from mind.

Or "mind", as you then have to pay careful attention to how Peirce views firstness, or vagueness. It is indeed pretty psychological at times, but you have to work out whether he means literally, analogically or generically.

But anyway, this is not panpsychism, except in some unacceptably loose sense.

The big difference is that dual aspect theories take both aspects of substance to just exist. Material and experiential properties are just what they are. Essences in the old sense. So no matter how finely you chop matter, you will find the properties still there, still inherent.

But Peirce argues something completely different. He says in the beginning there is just "mind". An unformed disorder of "feeling" - a psychical version of the apeiron in fact. Then the material world develops out of this in emergent fashion.

So it is not matter/mind all the way down. The material aspects dissolve and all that is left is the raw potential of unformed mind. This is why it is a species of idealism, not materialism, not monism.

[alt]

Hi PhizzicsPhan

Anyway, this is going far beyond the original questions in this thread - but you did ask.

You know, I went back to check on that, and it isn't that far off. In any case, I appreciate your response - we gotta push the envelope sometime, I suppose!

Consciousness is a continuum from the simplest to the most complex structures in our universe

One would of course, encounter opposition, or at least argument to this, depending on ones definition of consciousness - a much debated subject. But we all agree (I think) that an atom is animate, and that we are a group of animate atoms. And we attribute consciousness and intelligence to ourselves. Hooray ! In the same vein then, it is not a stretch IMO, to attribute consciousness to more complex structures (all the way up ?) that we are constituents of. So I guess I'm saying I see it the way you do.

Whether the temporal scale of the universal consciousness is anything close enough to our own to meaningfully interact at our level is a big question mark.

A blink in the eye of Brahma (10,000 years, say) would reveal a hollow earth with an internal sun :-) (note, mods - humor intended)

"God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension"

Yes, Dyson's point is an interesting one. Wordsworth goes one further, bringing it back to nature and man (note the underlined);

.. There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege.
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
'Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,
And cannot choose but feel. The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own.

(from, The Prelude, Book 14th, Conclusion)

Wordsworth seems a panpsychist too, I think.

If you're curious, check out my in-progress book, Mind, World God

I checked your link, but couldn't find any text of your in-progress book. If something of it is available on line, I'd like to have a look at it.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, I think we're actually saying the same thing but for some reason you don't like the panpsychism appellation.

Look, there are different levels of explanation and terms such as idealism, monism and panpsychism (not to mention physicalism, materialism, etc.) are themselves a bit squishy. Here's how I see it: there is a non-psychical substrate to reality (which I've mentioned previously) that we can call Brahman/apeiron/ether or simply the "vacuum" as modern physics sometimes does. This is the neutral monist substrate from which reality grows. Matter, as Peirce points out, springs from this substrate.

Peirce himself states, as I quoted previously that matter is what is viewed "from the outside" and mind what a thing is for itself "from the inside."

How is this not panpsychism?

Peirce also uses the term "hylopathy" - all things feel. How is this not panpsychism?

Now, we could split hairs and I suspect you will by saying that dual aspect panpsychism isn't the same as "objective idealism." But when we square Peirce's various statements it seems quite clear that his intent was to stress that mind is omni-present. And this is panpsychism.

When I am obliged to get technical in expressing my views, I describe my position as either "panexperiential physicalism," the same phrase Griffin uses, or "panexperiential neutral monism," to stress that there is a neutral substrate that is neither mind nor matter - pure Spirit, to use Hegel's term.

Last, idealism is a form of monism, labeled more technically "idealist monism," as opposed to "materialist monism," otherwise known as materialism. Distinguishing idealism and panpsychism becomes a matter of semantics and the two shade into each other quite easily.

Neutral monism, as I just described, suggests that there is a neutral substrate that can be described as neither mind nor matter. It is somehow beyond the subject/object distinction and to grok this it appears we need to move more into the spiritual and experiential realm and away from the word games of philosophy.

[apeiron]

Just a question about panpsychism, how serious is this view being taken anyways?

Let a panpsychist answer that question for you....

First, although the panexperientialist starting-point overcomes what has thus far been considered the heart of the mind-body problem, it has obviously not been easy for philosophers and scientists to see why we should adopt that starting-point. Second, even when the basic idea is accepted, it is far from obvious how to work out this idea in a plausible way (as illustrated by the failure of Leibniz, hardly a dimwit). That these are indeed severe difficulties is shown by the reception panexperientialism (usually called 'panpsychism') has received thus far. Although some version of it has been proposed by a number of first-rate philosophical and scientific minds (such as Leibniz, Fechner, Lotze, Peirce, Bergson, James, Whitehead, Hartshorne, Sewall Wright, and David Bohm), it is scarcely considered in mainline discussions of the mind-body problem. Virtually everyone assumes that we must choose between some version of dualism (including epiphenomenalism) and some version of materialism. Thanks partly to Nagel-who believes that some version of panpsychist physicalism must be true but also suspects it to be 'unintelligible' (1979, pp. 181-2, 188-9; 1986, pp. 49-50)-some contemporary philosophers do mention it. But they usually dismiss it quickly as 'implausible' (Seager, 1991, p. 241n),2 'extravagant' (McGinn, 1991, p. 2n), or even 'outrageous' and 'absurd' (McGinn, 1982, pp. 31-2). Panexperientialism clearly has an uphill battle.

http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/Biblio/Papers/David%20Ray%20Griffin%20-%20Panexperientialist%20Physicalism.html

On the science side, it is favoured by quantum consciousness theorists and psi researchers. So it risks being judged by the company it keeps. :smile:

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, glad you found Griffin's paper. I know David fairly well (he lives very near me in Goleta) and he would very likely agree with me that things have changed quite a bit since he wrote that paper 15 years ago. Panpsychism, due in no small measure to Chalmers and Hameroff (the organizers of the annual TSC conferences), as well as Griffin himself and others like Seager who is now firmly in the panpsychist camp, is definitely on the upswing.

Anyway, the fact that a view is a minority view has little to no bearing for me. I evaluate ideas on their inherent strengths, not their supporters or lack thereof.

And a key problem that has plagued panpsychism, the "combination problem," is exactly what I address in my forthcoming JCS paper.

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. Your last comment in #105 is rather strange considering that you have regularly cited Peirce as the base for your ideas and he is clearly a panpsychist.

[PhizzicsPhan]

alt, I love the Wordsworth poem - thanks for sharing.

As for my book, there is a preview available and a free pdf download, at least there is when I click on the link. If you can't find it give me your email and I'll send you a pdf.

[apeiron]

Look, there are different levels of explanation and terms such as idealism, monism and panpsychism (not to mention physicalism, materialism, etc.) are themselves a bit squishy.

No, it is the way that you are using the terms that is squishy.

Now, we could split hairs and I suspect you will by saying that dual aspect panpsychism isn't the same as "objective idealism." But when we square Peirce's various statements it seems quite clear that his intent was to stress that mind is omni-present. And this is panpsychism.

It was Peirce who was "splitting hairs" here. And if you read enough Peirce, you will find it hard to pin him down to a final view. As I said, you have to decide on balance whether he is being literal, analogical or generic.

To me the generic interpretation makes the most sense. And so I would characterise his position as pansemiotic. What is universal is not the literal experiencing but the essential causal structure. Which would not be panpsychic.

Again, panpsychism is a reductionist substance ontology. Experience is an essence, a property of substance. Pansemiosis is a systems story. Experience is irreducibly triadic. It develops through organisation. It is about global form as well as local substance.

The problem with squaring Peirce's statements is that he did have his mystical moments. He did sort of believe in god at times. But he also talked about god and mind in such a deflationary way that they just don't mean what the everyday usages mean. And he was also careful to keep separate what he might like to believe from his more rigorous metaphysical arguments. So you could take his semiotic framework and drop the woo-woo bits quite easily.

This is why Peirce is popular with both theologians and systems thinkers. Each can emphasise the aspects that fits their more sharply distinguished worldviews. But again, this does not mean either can lump him with what he argued against.

When I am obliged to get technical in expressing my views, I describe my position as either "panexperiential physicalism," the same phrase Griffin uses, or "panexperiential neutral monism," to stress that there is a neutral substrate that is neither mind nor matter - pure Spirit, to use Hegel's term.

Well, I can go along quite a way with Griffin's panexperiential physicalism because it is a contorted form of systems thinking. It is more pansemiotic than panpsychic because it is about global constraints on local freedoms. He identifies experience with the development of organised states. So I read Griffin and think he has the basic elements, he just doesn't want to assemble them in the explicitly hierarchical fashion of a systems thinker because he is so concerned not to become a dualist - and systems thinking can sound dualistic (it is actually dichotomistic) because it takes both local and global causality as fundamental.

So panexperiential physicalism and objective idealism have an awful lot in common. They are both sophisticated and complex metaphysical positions - that when straightened out become a systems approach.

But "panexperiential neutral monism"? That just sounds a self-contradicting term. Neutral monism says things begin neutral (I would prefer Peirce's vague). And the neutral can't be both neutral and experiential. Experience is one of the things that develop out of a pleni-potential.

As I keep saying, you have to decide which camp you are in and stick to it.

Either you are a reductionist and believe that everything reduces to stuff - the local properties of substance - or you are a systems thinker and believe that everything develops, everything emerges from pure potential by way of an interaction between the local and the global, between local construction (the substantial causes) and global constraints (the formal causes).

Panpsychism takes the reductionist approach. Reality is made of a stuff that has material and psychic properties inherently.

Pansemiosis is a systems approach. Reality starts beyond stuff. It starts out as a raw potential. Then stuff emerges as a bootstrap process of self-organisation.

Arran Gare has done a bunch of good papers on these issues. You might particularly like to check Whitehead and Pythagoras (http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.concrescence.org%2Findex.php% 2Fajpt%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F85%2F47&ei=sNaoTdOrNImiuQPVmPH8CQ&usg=AFQjCNEDIgm3xQD6ZOrVKl-_Itm3P5QA8A) where he compares Whitehead to Peirce and Bergson as well as systems approaches generally.

For instance...

Such ideas have been recently put forward again by
hierarchy theorists, notably by Howard Pattee, Timothy
Allen and Stanley Salthe, among others, who have
argued that emergence is associatedwith newconstraints
emerging which are not in the initial conditions.ä¢ While
developed without reference to pre-twentieth century
thought (or to Bergson), this conception of nature
revives Anaximander’s conception of cosmos as having
formed through the limiting of the unlimited (an idea
also taken up further developed by Schelling at the end
of the eighteenth century).ää Along with the notion
of dišerent minimum durations, or dišerent process
rates, this has enabled Pattee, Allen and Salthe to clarify
the nature of both emergence and hierarchical ordering
in nature. Treating time as pulsational rather than
atomic and treating causation as essentially a matter of
constraining,äß overcomes a number of di›culties in
Whitehead’s philosophy, but then requires a rethinking
of the nature of concrescence.

Last, idealism is a form of monism, labeled more technically "idealist monism," as opposed to "materialist monism," otherwise known as materialism. Distinguishing idealism and panpsychism becomes a matter of semantics and the two shade into each other quite easily.

Err, I think distinguishing positions is pretty important here. And the critical distinctions are between monism (some variety of reductionism, either material or idealistic), dualism (whether ontic mind-body Cartesian dualism or double aspect panpsychic substance dualism), and then thirdly, the systems alternative (which includes pansemiosis and even neutral monism, given the larger intent of neutral monism).

Neutral monism, as I just described, suggests that there is a neutral substrate that can be described as neither mind nor matter. It is somehow beyond the subject/object distinction and to grok this it appears we need to move more into the spiritual and experiential realm and away from the word games of philosophy.

The word games of some people's philosophy in fact do a good job of pinning it down. And science can make the ideas increasingly precise. So no need for grokking. Just patient scholarship.

[Pythagorean]

I now realize that I've misunderstood and misused the word "panspsychism".

The word first came to me here in physicsforums. The idea was that if consciousness is the result of a physical process, then that physical process, if it occurs outside of a living thing, would lead to consciousness still. But this is a systems view (consciousness still emerges from the interplay of the matter; it wasn't inherent).

That idea doesn't bother me, personally; it's a consequence of physicalism.

But panpsychism doesn't say that (as I've just learned for the first time); it actually says that all matter has a subjective experience or mind. I would disagree with panpsychism, then.

What does pansemiotic mean?

[apeiron]

But panpsychism doesn't say that (as I've just learned for the first time); it actually says that all matter has a subjective experience or mind. I would disagree with panpsychism, then.

What does pansemiotic mean?

It means that all existence is systematic. It arises from unformed potential as an interpretive process. Limits placed on the limitless.

So in a loose way, it is "mental" in that it talks about interpretation. There has to be something like a self-observation. There has to be a global point of view or some kind of strong top-downness that constrains things to be.

But this is a generic description. Interpretation is a general or universal process rather than a literal claim that interpretation = experiencing in the usual sense.

[alt]

alt, I love the Wordsworth poem - thanks for sharing.

As for my book, there is a preview available and a free pdf download, at least there is when I click on the link. If you can't find it give me your email and I'll send you a pdf.

Ah ! Got the book now, thanks. I'll start reading.

As to the Wordsworth, I'm glad you liked it. Those guys (and those before them, and those before them, etc) pondered the same things - and it is good that we should continue to ponder them today.

This is a great thread.

[Deveno]

reading this thread makes me feel rather, um, stupid. i am not quite sure exactly what is at stake with the various positions involved.

there is something qualitatively different between myself and my guitar. i rather doubt it has a name for itself. this same difference is less marked between my cat and i, he has some of this "self-awareness" (for example, he recognizes his name), but it appears to be to a lesser degree. plants? gosh, i'm not sure....

so, i think a dynamic system needs a certain threshold of complexity and self-organization before consciousness emerges. that said, i see nothing to preclude some superset of myself possessing the same characteristic, perhaps to an even higher degree.

this thread has made for some fascinating reading, and only a little sniping.

if i were pressed to sum up my way of looking at things, i would say it is something like:

Ø = 1

the null set is a weird thing, it has every property, but none of them are realized. it is usually seen as a very small thing, smaller than anything else, but i see it as very large, just empty. a vast wall-less container. but, as soon as you put something IN it, all of a sudden you have distinction, in and out, me and not-me. and i think consciousness hinges on that distinction, a division between subject and object.

i'm probably not saying this very well.

it's like the universe is this huge potential function. there's not really anything there, just a potential for being there. but as soon as you introduce a constraint, it induces being. the potential becomes kinetic, no longer an it-is-what-it-is, but something with a history to it, a directedness. i suppose duality is built-in to this view, but in light of the fact that there is duality, describing half of it suffices. the idea that losing degrees of freedom can create self-organization...i can go along with that, it seems to me to be another way of describing what i am saying so poorly.

the thought that consciousness might be distributed down to even the sub-sub-atomic scales of existence...seems to dilute the concept of consciousness down to worthless. it totally fails to capture the distinction between alive and non-living. consciousness seems to be a sort of fire, burning the fuel of genetically-directed organisms as it goes. it's rather peculiar, that DNA should be able to create such a profusion of delicate homeostatic dynamic systems based on such a simple code, and odder still that some of these systems evolved to become creatures that devised languages to talk about the DNA, but here we are.

anyway, i think that there are different kinds of consciousness, and at the risk of sounding anthropomorphic, we have the best kind going. dolphins may be able to sing, but can they make digital copies of 18th century dolphin hits? and i think this special kind of consciousness we have is inextricably bound up in the fact that we can construct a (largely faithful) internal model of what seems to be what other people we observe seem to model internally. this multiple layering of: i see what you see, and imagine you imagining what i imagine i'm seeing. in other words, we can rectify, both linguistically, and conceptually, a consistent world in which our concepts and the words we use to describe the the concepts and the world are consistent with our perceived observation of other people's use of the same concpets and words. perhaps some other species share a similar ability, but they haven't told us, and until they do, it doesn't count.

i think meaning arises when the maps are good. and i think that reflection, is the distinguishing hallmark of consciousness (using the word in both senses). so it at least requires a brain, or some other physical structure suitable for such mappings. salt crystals don't have it.

[Ferris_bg]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

This is the original response from David Griffin (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2982) to Jaegwon Kim, and here is Kim's response (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2984). Basically Griffin shows adequate way for escaping the epiphenomenalism, which as according to Kim the non-reductive physicalism theories entail.

If you want we can discuss the both papers in a separate thread.

[apeiron]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

Perhaps you can briefly outline the difference for us then? Griffin does not even use the word panpsychism, let alone spell out a difference. And neither does Kim do anything but say Griffin's panexperientialism is Griffin's term for his approach to panpsychism. So there is not much to go on in those papers.

Anyway, as I said, I do not see Griffin as a million miles away from Peirce or a systems view. Whereas Tam, and others like Hameroff, just have a non-theory in my view. They treat matter and mind as two essences somehow localised in the same substance. No explanation given. So I agree they are not interchangeable terms here.

As to Kim's arguments, I would reiterate that he does not deal with the systems view at all in his work. The systems claim is that top-down constraints restrict local freedoms. So they actively shape their own micro-causes (even as the micro-causes also make for the global states of constraint). Thus the systems view goes far beyond ideas about mereological supervenience. It sees even the micro-causes as something that must develop, not something that pre-exist.

[alt]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

This is the original response from David Griffin (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2982) to Jaegwon Kim, and here is Kim's response (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2984). Basically Griffin shows adequate way for escaping the epiphenomenalism, which as according to Kim the non-reductive physicalism theories entail.

If you want we can discuss the both papers in a separate thread.

I never even heard of the term panexperientialism until I came across it in this thread. A search for that term in Wiki defaults to panpsychism and says ..

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.

Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.

So a panpsychist would always place a rock for example, under panexperientialism, unless he thought that that rock had a fully fledged mind ? Am I on the right track ?

[JDStupi]

"...Even if we had any senses, we should be situated toward such a world precisely as inanimate objects are toward the present one, provided we suppose that these objects have an absolutely transitory and instantaneous consciousness without memory―a supposition which is a mere mode of speech, for that would be no consciousness at all"

C.S. Pierce .....Just browsing through, might be relevant for those of you claiming C.S. Pierce as a panpsychist

[Ferris_bg]

Panexperientialism, as described by Griffin, holds that "everything experiences, or is capable of experiencing". Here by "experiencing" Griffin means the non-cognitive aspect of consciousness - the qualia (Q). So the single particles can have Q, but are lacking M (a fully developed cognitive mind). Panpsychism grants both M and Q.

As Griffin points out "panexperientialism clearly says that the mind emerges from the brain". Mental causation is logically consistent in his panexperiential physicalism, because Q is present in P thus there is no problem the higher level order M to be reported by P or to causally interact with P. That is the core idea of his response to Kim, who has showed that mental causation in non-reductive physicalism is only possible when causal over-determination exists. So Griffin finds a solution to this. But there is always a catch you know. And the catch in his view is the so called "combination problem" or how does Q develops to M in the brain, and not in the rock, when Q is present in all particles.

[ConradDJ]

Without hoping to talk anyone out of their pan-____________-ism, I’d like to try explaining Heidegger’s thought once again, maybe in simpler terms.

“Pan” (meaning “all”) is the oldest word in our intellectual vocabulary. Before it had any other concept to work with, Greek philosophy began with “the All” as its subject... the world as a whole, as one thing. That was a profoundly new idea.

By trying to imagine what it could mean, “the All”, these men were learning to see the world as if they were outside it and independent of it. They were inventing the conceptual standpoint that gradually evolved into scientific objectivity, through which we’re gained so much in the way of understanding. Less fortunately, it also evolved a kind of intellectual life in which people attach to “-isms” and argue about them, which has been much less fruitful.

The essence of the Greek intellectual achievement is to create for itself a universal “quasi-viewpoint”, abstracting from any actual point of view on things. Abstracting from what physics calls the viewpoint of “the observer”.

We all know how valuable it is to be able to see the world “from outside” in this way. What was at first only barely imaginable to a few crazy philosophers has gradually become the everyday objective reality we all imagine around us all the time, the world of facts.

Now Heidegger’s essential point is that this way of imagining the world is limited by its very universality. It can uncover the facts, but it can’t perceive what’s fundamental. It can’t get at what’s ultimately going on here, at where the facts are coming from, so to speak. It can't see what the facts are telling us about the world.

For Heidegger, what’s fundamental about existence – about the world we actually live in together, that each of us sees “from inside” – is that it’s always and exclusively one’s own. It’s always from my specific point of view in space, in this particular context of relationships, in this unique ongoing moment “now”, summing up my whole past and creating a future. Most importantly, this “own point of view” arises in its relationships with other points of view.

So what Heidegger suggests is simply that at bottom, the world is a web of connections between “own” points of view, in real time. The world is the world each of us lives in and experiences, in our respective, interconnected present moments, now. And the fundamental character of this web of being-in-relationships can only be seen “from inside” it.

The time and space of “existence”, lived from inside, are very different from the global time and space of objective “reality”. Existence is structured as an “environment” – it’s made of the many unique contexts that each perspective has in its own present connections with others. This business of “being in one’s local context” is the whole show. “Being here, from this point of view, now” has its own complex, multi-leveled structure – whether we’re talking about a human’s point of view or an atom’s. This context involves close relationships and distant ones, things are happening in many time-scales at once. But all this articulates the uniquely located "here and now" -- there's nothing global or universal about this side of the world that's one's own.

Now when we universalize our perspective, we gain a great deal. We gain a theoretical standpoint on the whole universe, and ways of investigating facts to an amazing depth, way beyond the scope of everyday experience. But we also entirely lose sight of the different kinds of structure our world has “from inside”.

Heidegger believed that this “environmental” kind of world-structure, that only exists for me and for you, from this particular point of view that each of us has for our own, is what’s basic. And that makes sense to me, but I’m not trying to prove it’s true. It’s hard for me even to find language for it.

The thing is, we’re all so used to living “in the real world” of objective facts that it’s hard to start imagining the world as we actually see it around us, in real time. A world where there are no facts, a world of momentary connections, impressions, expressions and anticipations. We hardly have even primitive concepts for describing this contextual connectivity we live in... though we’re incredibly adept at objectifying our world, automatically translating all our experience into the universal perspective we take for granted.

To me, the mystery of quantum theory and the mystery about “consciousness” define the boundaries of our traditional intellectual world. I think that so long as we keep inventing models of the world as a whole, from outside, as a vast body of objective fact, these two issues will remain opaque. Not only will we find no real answers, it will not even become clear what the real questions are. And that’s been the situation already for a long time.

But it’s not that QM and consciousness really have anything to do with each other. It’s just that both involve the structure of a web of communicative relationships, that can only seen from a point of view inside it.

So I suggest that unless you’re thinking from the standpoint of your own conscious existence in your relationships with others, then any talk about “consciousness” or about the “mental” vs the “physical”, etc. is going nowhere. If you talk about “mind” or “conscious awarenss” as objective attributes of certain kinds of things, you’re taking a point of view that excludes from the start what you’re trying to understand... you’re abstracting from the “own point of view” within the web that each of us “things” always has, in this moment.

But this “authentic” standpoint – even though it’s where we always are, in our lives, and the only standpoint anything actually has – is very abnormal for us, and still very foreign to our intellectual tradition. It’s a terra incognita that’s open for us to explore, but we’re all just beginners here.

I know there’s a lot of pleasure in inventing theories about “the All”, and I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of something I’ve enjoyed so much myself. It’s great. But I think the real work to be done now needs a different point of view.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, if you can accept Griffin's panexperiential physicalism, my job is done here :)

Pansemiotism = panexperientialism, as I have mentioned before. The essence of both is interiority, subjectivity, no matter how simple. A world of objects only cannot give rise to subjects without magic or miracles.

Granted, there is a kind of magic in transitioning from the pure potentiality of Brahman/ether/apeiron, but far better for this magic to occur at the beginning of the chain of being rather than at an arbitrary mid-point in the chain of being, as is argued in the mainstream emergentist materialism.

I use the term panpsychism more generally than panexperientialism because the former term is simpler and has far more currency than the latter. And to me they actually mean the same thing because, again, the essence of both (and pansemiosis/ism) is that interiority is built into all things. The outside and inside are dual aspects of each real thing. As matter complexifies, so mind/interiority complexifies.

Galen Strawson's version of panpsychism is probably the closest to mine. Griffin invented the term panexperientialism in the 1970s to avoid the silly objection to panpsychism that "you're saying rocks have minds?" No, no modern panpsychist or panexperientialist says rocks have mind. Rather, the constituents of a rock have extremely rudimentary minds and the rock itself is most likely a "mere aggregate." As is a chair, table, etc.

My forthcoming JCS paper addresses this issue in detail, suggesting that the key for solving this "combination problem" (what is a unitary subject rather than a "mere aggregate") is field coherence. This idea relies on time being quantized at a fundamental level. We can suggest that the Planck moment (10 to the negative 44 seconds) is the time quantum or chronon. And the universe is re-created with each ticking chronon. Information can travel only so far within each chronon and this is the fundamental limit for what can be a unitary subject. As matter learns how to bootstrap various pathways for faster information transfer, such as high energy storage in cell-based life, it can then lead to far larger unitary subjects than are possible without these bootstrapping techniques.

Last, apeiron, you inaccurately categorize panpsychism as a type of dualism. Obviously, these categories are debatable but I think it's an unhelpful move to categorize dual aspect panpsychism/panexperientialism as a type of dualism because this categorization ignores the fact that a certain type of dualism is necessary to explain the mind/body problem.

It is undeniable that there is a subject here, now, and it is writing to you. The subject I call my "self" is always changing, but it is undeniably here, now, as Descartes famously pointed out (and then went quickly astray in his consequential musings). The subject that is me clearly has a number of objects that present themselves to me. This is the fundamental subject/object distinction that is the mind/body problem.

Cartesian dualism "solves" the problem by suggesting that mind and matter are fundamentally different substances that somehow interact. This "somehow" is the key problem behind this type of dualism - it makes little sense to posit two fundamentally different substances without any clear means of interaction. And it's redundant in many ways.

Dual aspect panpsychism (inside and outside are two aspects of each real thing) obviously has some shades of dualism because it admits two basic features of the universe. But it is not dual aspect substantialism like Descartes' system. Rather, it posits just one substance that has two basic features - an outside and an inside. To be more accurate, the Whiteheadian version of panpsychism posits one basic process that has these two aspects. Whitehead was careful in stressing that his ontology did not deny substance entirely - what can process work with if there is no substance? Rather, he emphasized process and substance.

Actually, one more thing: I call my system "panexperiential neutral monism" for the same reason that Peirce called his system "objective idealism": there is a neutral substrate in my system that is neither mind nor matter; mind and matter only appear as the actuality from the pure potentiality of Brahman/ether/apeiron. The actuality is panpsychist, but the neutral substrate is not. So whereas Peirce's idealist substrate is not objective for him, the "objective" description refers to his notion of matter as condensed mind.

I'm not saying my system is the same as Peirce's (I haven't read enough to map out the parallels), I'm just saying the appellations have a similar logic. And Peirce was also a panpsychist of some stripe because he recognized that mind must be ontologically fundamental.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, thanks for the explanation of Heidegger's viewpoint. I agree entirely. And this is the basis of the panpsychist position: the universe is indeed the sum total of all interconnected subjects. From the top to the bottom. There is no objectivity without subjectivity. Schopenhauer also had a lot to say on this and I highly recommend The World as Will and Representation.

Would you say Heidegger is a panpsychist? Apparently most scholars don't view Heidegger as panpsychist.

[apeiron]

Panexperientialism, as described by Griffin, holds that "everything experiences, or is capable of experiencing". Here by "experiencing" Griffin means the non-cognitive aspect of consciousness - the qualia (Q). So the single particles can have Q, but are lacking M (a fully developed cognitive mind). Panpsychism grants both M and Q.

I don't see the relevance of the difference. The only thing either variety of theory claims as beyond physicalism is qualia, the subjective experiencing, not the cognition. So they are not different in the respect that matters here.

BTW I don't buy that you can separate cognition from qualia. It is contrary to the neuroscientific evidence. Even when your eyes are doing something so simple as following a moving light, there is "neural computation" involved.

In a paper in the journal Nature, he and his colleagues showed how nerve cells in the retina respond most actively to the leading edge of a moving object. They also fire slightly ahead of it.

http://bmes.seas.wustl.edu/WhitakerArchives/00_annual_report/meister.html

So it is a false dichotomy in the first place.

[apeiron]

My forthcoming JCS paper addresses this issue in detail, suggesting that the key for solving this "combination problem" (what is a unitary subject rather than a "mere aggregate") is field coherence.

So what does your "theory" predict as the difference in consciousness that results from cerebellectomies vs decerebration?

The cortex and cerebellum are reasonably equivalent on measures of complexity such as neural number and synaptic density. Yet cutting one out has quite different results to cutting the other out?

Why is this so according to your field coherence theory?

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

I am sorry we spammed your thread with our "pan-____________-ism", but I can't ignore others questions posed at my comments.

apeiron,

A lot of philosophers use panexperientialism and panpsychism as identical terms, but I think the "little" difference is actually not little at all, because I can't imagine a form of reductive panexperientialism (it always implies emergence), but I can very well imagine a form of reductive panpsychism (where if you know the M of the single particles you can know the M of the subject they form).

About the separation of cognition from qualia, I posted a thread (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=447726) while ago, in which I criticize Kim's believe that we can have reducible cognition and epiphenomenal qualia at the same time (post #22 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2988780&postcount=22)). I showed that such type of physicalism implies multiple mental states or some kind of interruption. Now in Griffin's panexperiential physicalism this is not a problem at all, because the two mental states can be linked together (P ~ Q | P ~ M), so that the mental state is unified (the "what it is to smell a rose" and your thought about some equation at the same time appear to you as a single unified mental state, but they could be in fact two or more, which you experience as one). I probably sound like some guy from "Inception", but thats only because we still have to use language and not telepathy haha.

EDIT: If you want to read more on the pan-topic, check this reference (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:QprwqdGJfYQJ:assc.d5x.insights.net.au/files/assc/2657.pdf+%22Panexperientialism,+Cognition,+and+the +Nature+of+Experience%22&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg3D6NMlBkE3V-PtWSyUxWI7V2p09alRqlZJCM-VpqO5u10JESxVEueCqBwBmhSNuJ_egiAVpDUTbi35IGKxBPzUd 0GvPkWYR4QCJSqmifsjRBuz4rxrNq207k-mVA9jnMZ9BaU&sig=AHIEtbTBPYFYRXlhx3Abtwbt57K7OCPOmw).
The key panexperientialist move is thus to divorce the existence of experience from the existence of mentality, or more specifically, from the existence of cognition.

[ConradDJ]

Conrad, thanks for the explanation of Heidegger's viewpoint. I agree entirely. And this is the basis of the panpsychist position: the universe is indeed the sum total of all interconnected subjects. From the top to the bottom. There is no objectivity without subjectivity....

Would you say Heidegger is a panpsychist? Apparently most scholars don't view Heidegger as panpsychist.

No... I think Heidegger would say, you need to think more deeply about the meaning of “subjective consciousness”, and “objective reality” too. (He said that sort of thing a lot.)

I’m glad you’re in sympathy with my explanations. I get that you’re working on the basic issue, how to understand the world as made of all the relationships between us.

But I don’t think your argument for “panpsychism” is helpful. You say – “...when we define our physical constituents as wholly lacking in mind then it is literally impossible for mind to ‘emerge’ from this wholly mindless substrate.” This seems to take it for granted that we know what “mind” is, at a fundamental level – in spite of the fact that the term is being generalized so broadly that it includes both your mind and the mind of an atom.

So I think most of us feel that “panpsychism” or “panexperientialism” is just a theory with no content. Ok, atoms have “mind” – so what does that mean? I agree with Apeiron – we need to see what conclusions you draw from this that have empirical significance.

When we talk about “mind” or “consciousness”, we’re always starting from our own personal consciousness... the one each of us has been evolving since we were born, by learning how to relate to the world as other humans do, and above all by learning how to have talking-relationships with other people, and with ourselves. These are things that not even other animals do. So it makes no sense to me to generalize about “mind” or “conscious experience” while ignoring their roots.

Unfortunately, Philosophy has a long history of ignoring these roots, treating “Mind” – and specifically, the kind of logical mind a philosopher has – as if it were something primal and universal. So even though I see that you’re trying to work out a deeper understanding, I think the label “panpsychism” only continues this tradition of covering over what really needs to be thought about.

Exactly the same could be said about “materialism”. The Cartesian dichotomy of subject-mind and object-matter covers over a deeper difference that we need to learn about. You and I can agree (with Leibniz) that “the universe is the sum total of all interconnected subjects” – but we’re not close yet to understanding what that phrase actually says, or what kind of “system” makes these “interconnections” work the way they do.

The first question should be – where does your own subjectivity come from, in this world of interconnection? And your answer seems to be, in essence, it was there from the beginning. That may be satisfying to you – and you have a lot of company, in the philosophical tradition – but I don’t think it really helps. The kinds of relationships atoms have are obviously different from the kind you and I are having. Until we understand those differences and how they evolve, it won't mean much to talk about the "mind" or "experience" of something that can't talk.

[PhizzicsPhan]

A quick note on the difference between panexperientialism and panpsychism: there isn't any.

Both suggest that subjectivity, qualia, experience, mind, interiority, whatever term you prefer, is inherent to actuality. That is, there is no actual stuff without subjectivity.

Griffin coined the panexperientialism appellation to be able to discuss (sell) his ideas, based explicitly on Whitehead, without facing the silly objections to panpsychism that have plagued the theory for centuries - in particular the one I've already mentioned as to rocks and chairs having minds (they don't, but their constituents do).

Humans have a hard time grokking non-human minds. No, the mind of an atom is not much like the mind of a human. But the essential feature, subjectivity, unitarity, interiority, is there - or so we infer based on the best available evidence.

The most simple anatomy of mind I can suggest is 1) perception and 2) internal processing of perceptions that results in a choice as to how to manifest in the next time quantum. So an atom's mind is its perceptions (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc. forces that act on it) and its very rudimentary choice as to how to react to those perceptions. Atoms, being highly rudimentary minds, almost always behave as the mathematics of physics would tell us. But they occasionally diverge, as quantum physics also tells us can happen, and this is a result of that rudimentary mind choosing a different path than the habitual path.

And this process complexifies at each level of actuality, from atoms to molecules, cells, etc.

[apeiron]

A lot of philosophers use panexperientialism and panpsychism as identical terms, but I think the "little" difference is actually not little at all, because I can't imagine a form of reductive panexperientialism (it always implies emergence), but I can very well imagine a form of reductive panpsychism (where if you know the M of the single particles you can know the M of the subject they form).

That Kind paper makes the same point I made. Panexperientialism is no milder than panpsychism as both make claims about qualia as fundamental.

But I see that you agree with her that panexperientialism creates a difficulty as many would feel cognition is an inextricable aspect of experiencing.

In the spirit of splitting hairs, I could add that pansemiosis would seem to be committed to the belief that cognition is in fact what is fundamental, not qualia. So physical reality is irreducibly dependent on habits of interpretance. A semiotic structure of interaction.

This might help Tam who seems not to understand the difference as yet.

Panexperientialism believes Q --> C
Panpsychism believes Q = C
Pansemiosis believes C --> Q

[PhizzicsPhan]

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

[apeiron]

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

And your "theory" handles the difference between cortical complexity and cerebellar complexity how exactly? Let's get back to the real world at some stage please.

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, when you can bring yourself to write theory and not "theory" I will humor you. Otherwise you'll have to wait for the paper to come out.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, post #126 generally addresses your points. But let me add a few thoughts.

You seem to be assuming that panpsychism or panexperientialism require a far more complex mind to be "pan-ed" than I am suggesting. As I wrote in #126, mind, at its root, is just the process of information transfer between subject and object(s) and a rudimentary choice as to how to manifest in the next moment. This choice results from the processing power ("connectivity index"in my theory) of each actual entity. For extremely simple actual entities like atoms, the connectivity index, the ability to make choices, is extremely simple. And this is why we see such regularity in simple actual entities like atoms, electrons, molecules, etc.

At the most basic level of actual entities, what I call "simple subjects," there is the brute fact of perception and internal connectivity. There is no explanation below this level, it just is. We can certainly hypothesize that even an atom or an electron has some complexity (as Bohm did with respect to electrons), but at some point we have to just accept that there is some ability to process rudimentary perceptions in the most simple subjects. That is what it means to be actual. We don't know if electrons or quarks qualify as "simple subjects" and I suspect not, but my theory is meant to be a general theory of consciousness and psychophysical laws that will remain valid no matter what current physical theories hold to be the constituents of nature (as Whitehead did with his "actual entities" and Koestler with his "holons").

I've mentioned before that my theory relies on the Perception Index (PI) x the Connectivity Index (CI) = Omega (capacity for phenomenal content/experience/choice).

"Field coherence" is also a necessary component of my theory but the type of field coherence required for a unitary subject to arise as opposed to mere aggregates is a matter of additional research, a framework for which I'm fleshing out currently in Part 2 of my JCS paper (to be published separately).

In sum, it seems that Heidegger was saying essentially what Whitehead and other panpsychists were saying (though I haven't read Heidegger yet, so can't say for sure on this point - I'm relying on your digest).

[apeiron]

apeiron, when you can bring yourself to write theory and not "theory" I will humor you. Otherwise you'll have to wait for the paper to come out.

Such a tease. As if you had an answer.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Of course I have an answer apeiron - mine is a general theory.

[ConradDJ]

A quick note on the difference between panexperientialism and panpsychism: there isn't any.

Both suggest that subjectivity, qualia, experience, mind, interiority, whatever term you prefer, is inherent to actuality. That is, there is no actual stuff without subjectivity...

No, the mind of an atom is not much like the mind of a human. But the essential feature, subjectivity, unitarity, interiority, is there...

The most simple anatomy of mind I can suggest is 1) perception and 2) internal processing of perceptions that results in a choice as to how to manifest in the next time quantum. So an atom's mind is its perceptions (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc. forces that act on it) and its very rudimentary choice as to how to react to those perceptions...

And this process complexifies at each level of actuality, from atoms to molecules, cells, etc.

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

At the most basic level of actual entities, what I call "simple subjects," there is the brute fact of perception and internal connectivity. There is no explanation below this level, it just is... We don't know if electrons or quarks qualify as "simple subjects" and I suspect not, but my theory is meant to be a general theory of consciousness and psychophysical laws that will remain valid no matter what current physical theories hold to be the constituents of nature.


Essentially what I object to here are two things. One is that “subject” and “object” are taken for granted as basic... so the nature of “mind” is taken as something “internal” to “actual entities”. Now as a “thinker” I do spend a lot of time “in my head”. But Heidegger’s first main point was that our “conscious existence” is fundamentally all about being out there in the world. We are “out there” in our relationships long before we develop any sort of “interiority”. This experience we “thinkers” have of existing inside our own minds is not basic at all but derivative.

His second main point was that having an (“authentic”) point of view on the world is not just “given” a priori, as “subjectivity”. Our “subjective” perception of a world of “objects” is an inauthentic viewpoint, a generalizing interpretation of our experience that we learn from others. It amounts to “stepping back” from our engagement with things to the detached perspective we call “objectivity” – very valuable, but ultimately limited... because the heart of what’s going on in the world is “out there” in the engagement. We need the “stepping back” way of thinking, but we also need a way of consciously reconnecting.

So my first objection is that what you are projecting as “simple and basic” is wrong. There are no simple “mind-atoms” in the world, any more than there are simple “matter-atoms”. You think you are talking about relationships, but all your categories (perception, choice, internal connectivity, unitarity, interiority) are all the traditional ways of talking about subjects “in relation to” objects. From my point of view, none of this gets anywhere near what it means to be in relationships, to have one’s ground of being in one’s relationships, which is what Heidegger was trying to describe.


My second objection is to this “reductive” style of thinking... this “pan-whatever“ business. It seems to me that the great contribution of Darwinian evolution was to show that the most complex and finely-tuned functional systems can arise through a series of unlikely accidents. Living systems involve many very different kinds of structures and processes, each of which arose in a specific set of circumstances, and then evolved to suit other contingencies that happened to arise in the species’ history.

If we want to, we can say that all of life amounts merely to self-replication. There is a very deep truth in that. But this is not really at all “reductive” – it states a problem that every species at every stage in its evolution has to solve in a different way, or go extinct. “Self-reproduction” doesn’t really describe any sort of “process” but (as Heidegger would say) a way of “being at issue” – something that can either succeed or fail, in each case, in each unique situation.

Now going back to ancient times, philosophers have again and again fallen in love with an Idea, and convinced themselves that “the All” was all about their Idea – whether “monistic” or “dualistic” or “triadic”, etc. There is a basic “mind-stuff” or “process” or whatever, that explains everything. In most of the sciences, this metaphysical style of thinking has gone by the boards, since Darwin... though it still lives on in physics, and of course, in philosophy. Physicists and philosophers still tend to believe, despite a vast amount of empirical evidence to the contrary, that the ultimate truth about the world must be “unified” by a single Idea.

Being myself a philosopher and the son of two philosophers, I’m deeply in sympathy with this traditional goal. And I have no sympathy at all for the “positivism” that sees no point in the quest for foundations.

But what Heidegger was doing was trying to develop a deeper, “existential” sense for what it means to be a foundation... what it takes to be a basis for something. Our traditional way of thinking wants to find something Simple at the bottom of things. As Aristotle says, whatever is Basic is what doesn’t itself need any basis. Or as you say - "There is no explanation below this level, it just is... "

But from Heidegger’s point of view (and mine), being a basis isn’t ever simple, there’s a difficult and complicated issue at every level, that can either succeed or fail. And it’s different at every level.

So yes, we do want to develop a “unified” view of existence as a whole, “the All.” But I think this involves understanding what’s “at issue” at each stage, in the evolution of relationships between things. Not the reduction of all the unique solutions to one “basic Idea”. The deep lesson is the one we all struggle to learn in our daily lives, about the problematic nature of being a basis for each other... to which there is no single or simple solution.

Atoms are, in fact, very complicated and very finely-tuned little “entities”. The electron-shell structure through which atoms relate to other atoms is remarkable, and the complexity of interaction going on within an atomic nucleus is quite literally incalculable. If you want “interiority” there’s plenty of it there! But things don’t get simpler as you go deeper, in the quantum realm, on the contrary. Nor, despite the efforts of hundreds of brilliant physicists over the past few decades, is there any actual evidence that they get more “unified”.

This is only the age-old prejudice that philosophy needs to outgrow. Until we do, we’ll just keep recycling the same old set of “theories” in new disguises. We shouldn’t be satisfied with that, and keep on “doing philosophy” as a collection of endless debates between “-isms”.


I apologize for going on at such length in these posts of mine. But this thread has been very helpful to me, and I really appreciate the opportunity to try to be more articulate... I hope it turns out to be helpful to a few others as well.

[John86]

That's a very fascinating view you have on evolution Conrad. Evolution of physical proceses doesn't have to be lineair in a sense that it has to become always more complex. Microscopic proceses at moleculair or in the quantum realm tent to mostly be more complex, than the theoratically worked steps before the testing

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, I appreciate your thoughts.

I think, however, that there is a fundamental disagreement about the fundament of thought. (Almost a palindrome...)

I agree with Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc., that subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible. What do you know with 100% certainty? Only the fact of your own thought. Not even your "self" is certain - and this is where Descartes actually went astray, immediately after his initial correct insight.

There is, here, now, simply the stuff of thought, always changing. This is all we know. Everything else we think we know about the world "out there" is actually "in here," presented to our little Cartesian theater through various means.

This is of course the mind/body problem: how does each of our "in here" relate to the "out there"? How does the "out there" get "in here"? And is there any "out there" that doesn't have its own "in here"?

Panexperiential neutral monism suggests that every "in here," which I'll call a subject from now on, is also an "out there," which I'll call an object from now on. This is the case because the only thing we know - our own thought - is a subject, and we surmise that we/our bodies are objects for other subjects through our normal interaction with people and other thinking creatures like dogs, cats, etc. So the only objects we know with any intimacy at all are in fact subjects - our own subjects.

It is interesting that you bring evolution in as support for your ideas. I think you've got it backwards. Evolution shows that complexity arises from simplicity. Even though certain species can indeed become simpler over time this is anomalous and the general trend of evolution is clearly toward more complexity. And the other clear lesson from evolution is that the universe proceeds incrementally not discontinuously.

This is called "the principle of continuity" and is itself a very powerful argument for panpsychism and against emergentist materialism. This is the case because when we study the natural world we don't see sharp jumps - nature abhors sharp jumps. Yes, species themselves display some discontinuity with their cousins, but evolutionary biologists (my first training) are clear that evolution doesn't proceed through "hopeful monsters," but rather through incremental change. Punctuated equilibrium doesn't change this statement - even this "saltational" theory of evolution still requires lengthy spans of time and small changes to achieve speciation.

Sewall Wright, the American biologist, said it well: "Emergence of mind from no mind is sheer magic." Mind doesn't emerge - it is always there in some form and it complexifies as form complexifies. This is the key insight from biology.

Now, I also infer a ground of being, the neutral substrate for reality (Brahman/ether/apeiron), because it seems clear to me that there has to be a foundation for reality to rest upon. If there is no base, no ultimate level of being, it all just falls away and there is nothing. We clearly have something, however - an entire universe. Thus, for this universe to stand it must have a foundation.

This last point is a contentious one between Buddhism and Vedanta. Buddha famously taught that there is no foundation, it is all "dependently arising." But some schools of
Buddhist thought agree with Vedanta and many descriptions of the Buddhist "Emptiness" sound to me just like Vedanta's Brahman. Indeed all things are in process, all dependently arising, but there must be a substrate to have process. Otherwise, what is there to process?

So we may simply have to disagree on the fundament, and I should read some more Heidegger at some point. But what I have read thus far seemed to mistake psychology for ontology. Heidegger didn't seem to be looking for fundamental ontology separate from any human viewpoint, which is what ontology desires.

Again, my panexperiential neutral monism is a general theory that can apply to quarks to quagga mussels to quasars. And this is what philosophy should be seeking, as well as science.

[apeiron]

This is called "the principle of continuity" and is itself a very powerful argument for panpsychism and against emergentist materialism. This is the case because when we study the natural world we don't see sharp jumps - nature abhors sharp jumps.

Discontinuity is as basic to nature as continuity. We see it all the way from quantum jumps and big bang phase transitions to the freezing of water, the onset of chaos, to mitotic replication and the sudden emergence of symbolic thought in Homo sapiens.

Nature loves sharp jumps as much as it abhors them it seems.

[apeiron]

So yes, we do want to develop a “unified” view of existence as a whole, “the All.” But I think this involves understanding what’s “at issue” at each stage, in the evolution of relationships between things. Not the reduction of all the unique solutions to one “basic Idea”. The deep lesson is the one we all struggle to learn in our daily lives, about the problematic nature of being a basis for each other... to which there is no single or simple solution.

How can this "unification that isn't a unification" succeed?

It sounds as though you are arguing that only local particulars are authentic (the actual dyadic interactions which are everywhere going to be different and individual).

The general is identified with the inauthentic. So the global rules, the universal truths, Peircean thirdness, the laws of physics, the unified field theories, are all wrong as a basis of reality. There is only the local atomic particulars.

But you can't actually have the local without the global. You can't have "just the interactions" without the space and time that is necessary to separate them - to allow them to be particular. Atoms have to have voids to be atoms. It is incoherent to talk about events without having the contexts that allow them to be distinguishable as events.

Even in Heidegger's philosophy it seems, this dichotomy is inescapable. It is basic and fundamental. You need the inauthentic to ground the concept of the authentic. The authentic is particular and definite only in relation to what it is not.

And once you accept that the duality of a metaphysical dichotomy is basic, rather than the monad of either the particular, or the general, either the authentic or the inauthentic, then it is a short step to the triad of a developmental ontology where both the particular and the general then have to be unified within something else - a ground of naked potential such as the Apeiron or Vagueness.

Again, your argument wants to take local particular and individual interactions as the basis of reality. But to be able to distinguish even one end of an interaction from the other, a larger context is already implied (and so ontically required) in this very distinction.

[PhizzicsPhan]

I agree entirely with apeiron's #138 comment.

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, responding to #137: I agree that at the most basic level natural loves jumps and I have argued that quantum theory needs to embrace quantized time as well as quantized matter. These quanta are apparently the brute facts of the universe upon which everything is built.

But beyond that level nature generally abhors jumps, particularly when we reach cell-based life. The growth of symbolic thought was indeed rapid from an evolutionary point of view, but it was hardly discontinuous. It was, rather, continuous each step of the way as far as we can tell.

So I'll amend my statement: "Nature abhors jumps except at the most fundamental quantum level; and she particularly abhors jumps once the level of cell-based life has been reached."

[apeiron]

So I'll amend my statement: "Nature abhors jumps except at the most fundamental quantum level; and she particularly abhors jumps once the level of cell-based life has been reached."

I would put it differently. Nature love discontinuity over all scales as much as it loves continuity over all scales.

Reductionism always wants to reduce the intrinsic complexity of polar opposites to an either/or. Either nature must love one thing, or it must love the other. But a systems approach is based on dependent co-arising. Polar alternatives are in fact the creatively complementary. They are the synergistic.

So it would be "against nature" for one pole to be suppressed at the expense of the other. Because nothing can actually exist as a persisting whole, a lasting state of structure and process, unless there is that synergistic interaction to power it.

If you think of the actual "science of complexity" that arose in the 1980s, it was all about the "edge of chaos", about self-organising criticality. And this was completely based on the dichotomy of the discrete and the continuous in a "scalefree" (ie: a powerlaw distribution of scale) fashion.

In a critical system, the product of a persisting dissipative balance, you have to have a constant balance of integration and differentiation over all scales of observation. Continuity and discontinuity is a fractal story.

So where nature is "lively", it is marked by this critical balance that loves continuity and discontinuity with equal vigor.

And then for the complex to itself become complex - to get systems arising within a system - you need the radical discontinuity of the epistemic cut. But of course, by the same argument, you have to look around for the matching radical level of continuity that must also be produced in the process.

And this is why we have life and mind as systems which display far greater levels of autonomy, integrity, autopoiesis, ascendancy, or whatever you want to label it, than the surrounding non-living realm of entropification and dissipative structure.

By introducing the sharp boundary-making device of the epistemic cut, life and mind moves itself into a separate realm of "subjective" existence. It has a continuity of existence (represented by its goals, memories, anticipations) that is removed from the hurly burly of the "objective" realm.

So again, your metaphysical orientation is reductionist. If nature displays a fruitful dichotomy, your urge is to reduce that inherent complexity to a singular pole of existence.

Nature produces "mind" as its highest level of complexity. A complex complexity in that it involves systems within systems, worlds within worlds. But you want to break that down so that there is only the monadically simple. Mind gets reduced to a property of substance.

Of course, you then say that there is a level of ur-stuff below that. You talk of the ether/brahman/apeiron. There is a base level that is a pure potential, and not yet either mind or matter.

So in the end, you agree reductionism does not work. The simple is not simple enough if it is something that definitely and crisply exists. But now you have still scrunched up the notion of mind, and all the complex complexity it represents in its full splendour, down to trivialised "drops of experience". You have made what you seek to explain so reduced, it has become a hard and discrete property of matter - the "inner qualia".

While this shrinking of the critical issues to microscopic scale then makes the essential transition - the development of a simple ur-potential into a complex world - harder to see, it does not actually remove the problem. You still have to explain how there is this evolution from the ether/brahman/apeiron level to a level where something actually exists, whether this first level of existence is double aspect panpsychic or not.

[JDStupi]

My problem is in the justification for the jump from

[...] subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible

and

[...]This is the case because the only thing we know - our own thought - is a subject, and we surmise that we/our bodies are objects for other subjects through our normal interaction with people and other thinking creatures like dogs, cats, etc. So the only objects we know with any intimacy at all are in fact subjects - our own subjects

to the supposition that all objects possess "consciousness".

The general trend of reasoning seems to be using an epistemological observation to ground an ontological conclusion. I don't see how " [that] the only objects we know for certain are our own [have subjective experiences]" suggests that all objects behave similarly.

The key word there is "suggests", what do you mean by suggests? Having 100% certainty in the fact that our own bodies as "objects" possess a "subjectivity" is by no means a sufficient condition for concluding that "therefore all objects must have some degree of subjectivity".

You are certainly not resting your argument for panexperientalism on that premise.

Your next contention is most likely that "mind" cannot arise from "no-mind" and so this is a premise for your pan______ism. My first question is what is mind? How do you define mind? Do I have a mind when I am sleeping? If you define "mind" in a broad sense a la Gregory Bateson you would say that when I am sleeping I have mind, namely my body is performing certain "mental" activities such as regulating my blood and breathing and other normal bodily functions. To be certain, an individual in a coma would have mind in that sense as well. My point here is that even if you define mind in this broad sense, you still cannot justify that all objects must have internal experience. This example demonstrates that "mental processes" are by no means a sufficient condition for concluding that objects have "qualia" or an internal experience.

Now, that "mind" in the sense of a "conscious" (even that term is subject to analyses) qualia experiencing subject cannot emerge from no-mind may be a relatively uncontroversial assertion. However, I have yet to see any justification for how come it is claimed that "mind" in the broad Bateson sense cannot emerge from no-mind.

Your assertion that "nature's continuity" serves as evidence for your positition is wrong. It serves as evidence that qualia experiencing subjects did not just emerge, it does not serve as evidence that "ergo qualia must be fundamental". Moreover, I would agree with apeiron's assertion that it is certainly not "continuous or discrete" but both. There certainly are jumps in nature.

You seem to stretch vocabulary beyond its limits. Atoms have "rudimentary perceptions"? I don't even know what it means to say that I have rudimentary perception when I am sleeping (excluding dreaming) never mind that an atom has "perceptions". Does a quark-gluon plasma have "perception"? Unless you are using percpetion in a sense which is nowhere near what people mean by perception generally, then I fail to see how you can say that.

[PhizzicsPhan]

JD, you've asked and answered your first question: the principle of continuity supplies perhaps the key argument for panexperientialism, along with many other lines of reasoning I've fleshed out in this thread. For more detailed discussion, see my series of essays (1-4 in particular):

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

I've also explained what I mean by mind a number of times in this thread so I suggest you review what's been said so far. Again: mind is, at its essence, a subject, an object, and a link between the two. The subject-object relation is a brute fact that cannot be further explained. Why? Because we know subjectivity is fundamental and we infer that it goes all the way down due to the principle of continuity and many other lines of reasoning.

I respect Bateson highly, but I don't adopt his overly broad approach to "mind." To solve the combination problem we need further limitations on what is to be considered a unitary subject.

The "link between the two" I described above is what I mean by "perception." I've also explained previously what I mean by perception: any reception of information. So an atom perceives electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., forces in every moment of its existence. Whitehead uses the term "prehension" to distinguish this generalized reception of information from biological perception but I prefer to just use perception and explain that it is broader than our biologically chauvinist notions of perception.

Do you have a mind when you are sleeping? No. "Your" mind is only the flickerings of field coherence in the network of relationships that is your brain/body/universe. "You" don't actually "have" a mind. "You" are a particular brain/body/universe relation in each given moment.

"You" are the actual occasions of experience (to use Whitehead's term) in each moment. Your general waking consciousness is the result of gamma synchrony (30-90 Hz) achieved by various parts of your brain in concert with parts of your body and, of course, with the rest of the universe through your various connections to the rest of the universe - dominated by the five traditional senses.

When "you" dream, it is not the normal, habitual you. Rather, it is different configurations of brain/body that leave traces available to your normal waking consciousness. Each person consists of countless constituent "yous" that aren't accessible in terms of direct communication. There is a society of mind in a vast hierarchy beneath each complex subject/actual entity that is a human being.

And as I've already mentioned, very likely an infinitely complex hierarchy above the human level of existence.

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, I've explained a number of times that I am NOT advocating consciousness as a "property" of matter. Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Mind/matter (what I call "menter" in my JCS paper) is the limitation of pure potentiality.

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately. Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically? You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

The solution to a slippery slope is to slide to the bottom, the fundament, apeiron. Apeiron, accept the apeiron :)

Anaximander was a panpsychist. Peirce was a panpsychist. Why aren't you a panpsychist?

You make a decent point, however, about the need to explain the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality. Whitehead delves into this in detail in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality, though I don't accept his theories in whole. I do accept, however, that the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality is the "creative advance" that is the temporal flow, the laying down of the universe, in each moment. This is a process whereby each locus of the universe prehends prior actual entities and decides how to manifest in each moment. This universal process is the universe.

I've also suggested that this process may map onto the time quanta suggested by the Planck moment (10 to the minus 44 seconds), though this number is not necessarily the ultimate time quantum. So each tick of the universe is a time quantum and each time quantum is itself a consequence of each actual entity at its simplest level manifesting from the previous round of actuality.

I could go on, but this is probably sufficient for now.

[apeiron]

apeiron, I've explained a number of times that I am NOT advocating consciousness as a "property" of matter. Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Mind/matter (what I call "menter" in my JCS paper) is the limitation of pure potentiality.

What is an "aspect" then?

At least the idea of local properties of substantive objects is a well understood ontic concept. It is very easy to introduce vague terms that lessen your committment to any actual position and so allow you to elude specific criticism. It is a familiar tactic called hand-waving.

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately. Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically? You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

Pattee's theory is well enough understood and accepted among theoretical biologists. Their views count rather more for me here.

I answered you in some detail and won't waste further comment.

Anaximander was a panpsychist. Peirce was a panpsychist. Why aren't you a panpsychist?

I am sure that I am in grave danger of being added to your list of believers. You have a loose way with citations as I noted early on.

I do accept, however, that the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality is the "creative advance" that is the temporal flow, the laying down of the universe, in each moment. This is a process whereby each locus of the universe prehends prior actual entities and decides how to manifest in each moment. This universal process is the universe.

So there is still no story on how that first drop of experience arises out of a prior state of non-experiencing. Where does this power to prehend come from? It is sounding very chicken and egg, is it not? You need a locus to prehend, and prehension to have a locus.

That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory).

I could go on, but this is probably sufficient for now.

You could always have a go at answering my cortex/cerebellum question. Please.

[Ferris_bg]

You still have to explain how there is this evolution from the ether/brahman/apeiron level to a level where something actually exists, whether this first level of existence is double aspect panpsychic or not.

Yes, basically panpsychism doesn't solve anything by itself. Even Chalmers acknowledges that, although he favors and supports the type-F monism (http://consc.net/papers/nature.html), in which the "ether/brahman/apeiron" is called "(proto)phenomenal".

Accepting mind as a part of nature avoids some problems, but again you are still in the middle of the desert, when it comes to explaining the evolution of mind, the formation of the consciousness we refer to, etc. As William James said panpsychism faces its own problem of emergence.

And one more thing for those still following the discussion to think about - why we need mind or matter, when we have "ether/brahman/apeiron"? I'll tell you - we don't. Our need is justified only by our evidence of what we call mind and matter. Thats a problem I see in general with neutral monism theories, but its again another thread by itself.

[ConradDJ]

I agree with Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc., that subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible. What do you know with 100% certainty? Only the fact of your own thought.

...Now, I also infer a ground of being, the neutral substrate for reality... because it seems clear to me that there has to be a foundation for reality to rest upon. If there is no base, no ultimate level of being, it all just falls away and there is nothing...

Again, my panexperiential neutral monism is a general theory that can apply to quarks to quagga mussels to quasars. And this is what philosophy should be seeking, as well as science.

How can this "unification that isn't a unification" succeed?

It sounds as though you are arguing that only local particulars are authentic (the actual dyadic interactions which are everywhere going to be different and individual).

The general is identified with the inauthentic. So the global rules, the universal truths, Peircean thirdness, the laws of physics, the unified field theories, are all wrong as a basis of reality. There is only the local atomic particulars.

But you can't actually have the local without the global. You can't have "just the interactions" without the space and time that is necessary to separate them - to allow them to be particular... It is incoherent to talk about events without having the contexts that allow them to be distinguishable as events.


With apologies for another very lengthy post... which I hope those following the pan-X-ism discussion will feel free to skip.

I feel like I’m arguing here on the one hand with Descartes, and on the other with Hegel. That’s not a bad thing, since they were both profoundly original thinkers dealing with the fundamental issue of ontology. But there’s no winning this kind of argument... what we can do is to try to clarify the premises each of us is building on.

To me, Descartes represents the beginning and Hegel the end of the heroic period in modern philosophy... the period in which Reason breaking through to the fundamental Answer seemed imminent. This is where the spirit of modern Science was born, in a deep belief that we can soon understand Everything through careful thought.

What the beginning and end of this period had in common was a dedication to Certainty. PhizzicsPhan follows the Cartesian formula faithfully – start with what we Know absolutely, and then a little rational argument gets us to an Answer that seems 100% certain... or at least, is clearly the only reasonable one.

Hegel’s sense of absolute Certainty is almost opposite to this. He sees how many ways Reason can go wrong, and has to go wrong, in the process of its self-education. The things that seem most clearly true, at one stage, turn out to be delusions at another. His sense of Certainty, like Apeiron’s, comes from a hard-won ability to see the Answer in the complex interplay of opposite kinds of truth... all of which are needed in the grand scheme. It feels Certain not because it’s the only reasonable answer but because it’s the one that can make sense of all the reasonable answers and fit them together. From this magisterial point of view, the Cartesian kind of commitment to a particular Right Theory or “-ism” seems kind of quaint.

Now Heidegger’s deep belief was not in Certainty of any kind. He lived through the two World Wars when the most cilivized countries in the world were using science to destroy each other’s populations. He saw even physics and mathematics radically questioning their own 19th-century foundations. Today we’re used to this sort of questioning... scientists in general no longer believe in an ultimate, philosophically-grounded Answer at all. So it’s hard for us to realize how deeply the sense of being on the verge of The Answer had permeated Western culture, during the 19th century – or what a violent disillusionment was forced on the intellectual world in the first half of the 20th. Particularly in Germany, where the insanity and the ensuing destruction were most intense.

What Heidegger believed was that the terribly uncertain struggle to find your own authentic viewpoint is what gives us a window into the depths of existence. Neither the Cartesian nor Hegelian sense of Reason could get beneath the surface of the inauthentic view, the general and reasonable view of reality we can all agree on, the plane on which ordinary science makes its daily progress toward more and better information.

So this is my premise too. I don’t believe we’re on the verge of The Theory that answers everything. But I hope we’re close to breaking through to a radically different way of seeing the world around us, that will reconfigure all the questions. I don’t have confidence that rational arguments from evidence will get us where we need to be. It seems all too clear to me – the state of physics being only one example – that we’re no longer making real progress toward a fundamental truth. But I believe such a truth is possible. It’s not The Answer, not a Right Theory... it’s a different intellectual viewpoint on the world.

I don’t believe in a magisterial Reason that can see the whole universe from outside and grasp its Logic in a formula. What feels deeply right to me is that there’s a truth in seeing the world from one’s own unique viewpoint, enmeshed in one’s relationships. This kind of truth has no access to Certainty or to any “global” reference-frame... everything is “local” and in play, in the here and now. In my authentic view, I don’t even get to “see” both sides of a single relationship I’m in.

Now clearly such a limited personal viewpoint can’t be The Basis for Science. We need the kinds of thinking to which PhizzicsPhan and Apeiron have dedicated themselves. Hegel was right – the Truth is a process with many stages, and we need them all.

But Heidegger’s argument was that the detached, globalizing, generalizing view of the world was inherently limited – specifically in its ability to grasp what’s ontologically fundamental. Traditional philosophy sees the world in its own image. It wants a logical process, it wants a “clear and distinct” Answer that follows from rational argument based on objective evidence.

This is all good – and certainly far better than the prevailing style of academic philosophers, who chug along “proving” things without believing in anything that matters to anyone but themselves.

But the point I’m trying to make – not to prove, only to make plausible – is that we can’t understand the world we live in scientifically, unless we can also understand it “from inside”. Because ultimately, the world exists only “from inside” – only for the unique individuals who are actually participating in the web of one-on-one relationships. Not “observing” it in their own heads, but participating, being out there with each other, making the web happen. I think this is what’s fundamental. More than any picture of a Reality no one actually lives in.

And like Heidegger, I’m trying to imagine what kind of “categories” are needed for this kind of thinking, which none of us yet knows how to do... even though ultimately, our own limited and authentic viewpoint is the only one any of us have.

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

Lets say one invents a device with which one has the power to go "inside" in others and participate in their relationships exactly in the way they are. In other words my brain gets linked to yours, and I can feel your qualia, depending not on my "brain configuration", but on yours. So my experiences, during the time I participated in the world like you do, get stored somewhere and I can later access them somehow. So I can later say, ConradDJ's qualia from bier drinking felt "better" than mine. This kind of method get repeated by all people so that some "qualia map" is established. Now, if you agree with the logic of this example (if you disagree you can change it the way it applies best), what are the benefits of this "qualia map"?

[JDStupi]

The subject-object relation is a brute fact that cannot be further explained. Why? Because we know subjectivity is fundamental and we infer that it goes all the way down due to the principle of continuity and many other lines of reasoning.

We know that subjectivity is our epistemological brute fact, this does not warrant an extension to it being an ontological brute fact. Saying that the abstract relation between subject and object is a brute fact is not the same as saying qualia is fundamental is a brute fact. The idea of the abstract subject-object relation being fundamental in fact seems related to apeiron's speech about "the epistemic cut".

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately.

I may have missed something, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I have yet to see this alleged "detailed explanation" of the flaws in his reasoning.
First, apeiron's notion of "the epistemic cut" isn't apeiron's notion of the epistemic cut. It has a history, and if your intereted in that line of reasoning there are books available.

Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically?You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

Pointing out that apeiron is unable to point out when the epistemic cut arose exactly and then arguing the point that that is a reason against his viewpoint says nothing except that you may be insisting on false standards of exactitude. The non existence of a sharp line when the "epistemic cut" occured does not say anything about its validity, in fact the question "When exactly did the epistemic cut occur?" may be a falsely phrased question. Is the lack of knowledge of exactly when life arose (which this question is closely related to) entail that evolution is a vague theory?

The epistemic cut is a much more modest theory than proclaiming that subjectivity must be fundamental. The epistemic cut simply arises from considerations about life and the measurement problem, and they do not posit the extra entity of "fundamental qualia".

In fact, the assertion that everything has "fundamental qualia" doesn't even seem to be justified by your definition, unless you are playing word-games and equating qualia with receptivity of information.

Do you have a mind when you are sleeping? No. "Your" mind is only the flickerings of field coherence in the network of relationships that is your brain/body/universe. "You" don't actually "have" a mind. "You" are a particular brain/body/universe relation in each given moment

Yes, I apologize for my cartesian-laden english, I understand that there is no "I" who is some object who posseses a "body" and floats around in the world. "I am my body" in the Merleau-Ponty sense.

But in any case, that still has yet to say anything, my only point was I am not experiencing qualia in that state. That I am not experiencing qualia in one state is not a sufficient condition for concluding that therefore no other body experinces qualia, however it does serve as one counterexample to the assertion that all things experience qualia (well actually it only serves as sufficient to conclude that not everything has qualia at all times). Given that your epistemic grounds for asserting that everything has qualia is based off your experience, it would be largely assymetrical to ignore a portion of your (lack of) experience in favor of your conclusion.

Also, out of curiosity, do you explicitley presuppose free will's truth? Because you speak of electrons being conscious and therefore making "choices".

I respect Bateson highly, but I don't adopt his overly broad approach to "mind."

Wait wait wait wait, Bateson has an overly broad approach to mind? But defining perception as "receptivity of information" and some type of mathematical "field coherence" isn't an overly broad defintion of perception? I'm stumped.

Not to mention that founding your notion of "the subject" on a mathematical abstraction doesn't seem to solve much. You realize you have basically equated mind with anything that can exist, but in doing so have lost what people mean by mind and consequently have solved nothing. That which you call mind is not identical to what everybody else calls mind and the problem of emergence. It might share one property with that notion, namely "receptivity of information" which your notion also happens to share with everything else that exists.


To be sure, I don't have a problem with your process metaphysics or even your assertion that "mind is a subject and object and a relation between the two", but then your mind definition is virtually identical to epistemic cut. If you can't find whaen aperion's epistemic cut happens, how then can you find when your epistemic cut happens? If you say "slide to the bottom" sure, now we're at the measurement problem. I'll accept that. I won't accept the assertion that everything must have qualia. I won't accept the assertion that what you mean by "mind" and "subject" and "perception" is anything like what most people mean mind and emergence and perception. Because it is not the same notion, it doesn't solve the problems peculiar to that notion.

If all your asserting is "subject, object and a relation between the two is fundamental and all things are 'behaving' (in a loose sense) based off of available information" then I can agree, all you're asserting is the primacy of the measurement problem, saying that it isn't a problem but a feature of reality and elaborating a Bohrian relationalist metaphysics.
Fine. Then say that. "Mind is fundamental and all things are perceiving" now that you have redefined the word though, you can't jump back and say you've solved the problems of perception and mind.

It just seems to me like I am claiming to be solving for x and then solve for y, but then say "let y=x" and then saying "therefore x", clearly violating the law of existential instantiation.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, again, thanks for the thoughts.I can see that you're a deep thinker committed to achieving your own synthesis.

I should clarify at this point that I agree entirely in the need for humility and acknowledge that we'll never know the Answer. There is no Ultimate Truth. It's all a matter of more or less plausible stories that use the best available evidence and the best lines of reasoning. I love Whitehead's statement from Process and Reality:

"How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.”

So if I have come across overly certain in my views, I want to stress now that there is no certainty - only inquiry. And, at the same time, a conviction that the views I'm putting forward, while by no means certain or final, are better (from my point of view) than the prevailing metaphysics and better than any other set of solutions I've come across to date.

See the last three essays in my series, On Logic, On the Heart and On Explanations:

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

However, it also seems that you're not understanding what I've been writing.

You state:

"But the point I’m trying to make – not to prove, only to make plausible – is that we can’t understand the world we live in scientifically, unless we can also understand it “from inside”. Because ultimately, the world exists only “from inside” – only for the unique individuals who are actually participating in the web of one-on-one relationships. Not “observing” it in their own heads, but participating, being out there with each other, making the web happen. I think this is what’s fundamental. More than any picture of a Reality no one actually lives in."

I couldn't have said it better. I agree 100%. And this is the point of panpsychism - it explains the world "in here" and "out there" by accepting that all objects are subjects are objects are subjects - in perpetual oscillation as the creative advance proceeds.

It seems that you are currently taken with Heidegger's efforts to magisterially sweep away all previous efforts at philosophy - this is after all how Heidegger fans describe his role. But keep in mind that Heidegger was writing at exactly the same time as Whitehead, who was the last truly systematic philosopher, present at the creation of modern physics' twin jewels (quantum mechanics and relativity), who also had a deep familiarity with the western philosophical tradition. Heidegger may have found himself a Whiteheadian if he had had a chance to take in his views.

[apeiron]

I don’t believe in a magisterial Reason that can see the whole universe from outside and grasp its Logic in a formula. What feels deeply right to me is that there’s a truth in seeing the world from one’s own unique viewpoint, enmeshed in one’s relationships. This kind of truth has no access to Certainty or to any “global” reference-frame... everything is “local” and in play, in the here and now. In my authentic view, I don’t even get to “see” both sides of a single relationship I’m in.

I agree that it is in fact fair to form a third person objective or globalised description of what you are actually trying to do - which is get completely away from that POV to have a view based on "just interactions". Which sounds exactly like Peirce's secondness BTW.

There is no choice but to look back and try to describe the indefinite, indeterminate in terms that are themselves then well defined in a way that what they refer to is not.

It is exactly the same with modelling vagueness or apeiron. So basing a philosophy on proto-interactions would be no different.

The only question is then whether such an approach can be made to work. But the quest itself has a legitimate goal and is not self-contradictory simply because it wants to talk about the ontically indefinite or proto-whatever in definite language.

And no, this is not a vote for pan-psychism which IMHO does not have a goal to explain anything in a causal fashion - answering the how or why questions - but simply posits that something is the case as brute fact. And reality's only acceptable brute fact is the fact that we subjectively exist [JDStupi's point]. All else must follow as explanation or I can't see how it is either philosophy or science, just an argument from faith.

[Pengo]

apeiron,

That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory).

Is this really a good criticism? I ask because it seems that in any scientific or even philosophical theory, the search always stops somewhere with that which "just is, period". Fundamental forces, for example.

I can understand the idea that we should be very reluctant to add new fundamental substances or forces. But still, it seems someone can still argue in good faith that some things "just are" (even if they qualify that with "in this theory, which may one day turn out to be wrong").

[ConradDJ]

Lets say one invents a device with which one has the power to go "inside" in others and participate in their relationships exactly in the way they are. In other words my brain gets linked to yours, and I can feel your qualia, depending not on my "brain configuration", but on yours. So my experiences, during the time I participated in the world like you do, get stored somewhere and I can later access them somehow.

I don't believe in the possibility of such a device... but regardless -- if you had access to my brain-states, how would you know the "qualia" you experience -- given your very different life-history -- was anything like how I experience them? The beer I'm drinking might taste amazing to you, because you've never experienced my beer-qualia before, but to me it's just the same old taste that I take for granted, right?

The basic problem here is imagining experience as if it were something "real" -- confusing categories of objective reality with categories of existence, that can only be "one's own".

I'm going to indulge myself in a little mini-essay on this difference in the next post.

[ConradDJ]

Here’s a way of imagining our situation. Let’s say, there’s Reality and there’s Existence. These are two ways of talking about the same world we all live in together.

Reality is the world we imagine “objectively” – the world of things that are in fact what they are, without regard to the context they happen to be in at the moment, or the perspective from which they might be seen.

Existence is the world we experience “from inside”... only from our own point of view, in this particular moment now, in the context prepared by our own entire life-histories.

We’ve been very successful at learning to describe and understand Reality, especially in the sciences. We’ve evolved an elaborate array of sophisticated conceptual tools for sifting and interpreting evidence, to verify facts and uncover basic principles.

There are however two big holes in the scientific view of Reality. When it comes to the foundations of the physical world, or the basis of human consciousness, it seems pretty clear that we don’t have the conceptual tools we need. Let’s suppose, that’s because these two questions are not really about Reality. We’re no longer dealing with “things as they are in themselves” but with being in relationships.

When we try to apply our conceptual tools to these questions, we get nonsense. Quantum mechanics is very beautifully structured nonsense – we know the theory is right, because it explains far more about the world far more precisely than any other theory ever has. But no one understands at all what it means. The only thing that’s clear about it is that it doesn’t give us definite facts about physical systems “in themselves”.

But when it comes to “consciousness”, the nonsense really gives us nothing at all. When we apply the kinds of logic we’ve developed for Reality, we get notions like “qualia”. Because I’m a philosopher, I do sometimes try to “experience qualia”, with some success. To do that I have to “step beck” into my own mind and see the world around me merely as my own internal “perception”, and then try to isolate some tiny aspect of it, like a patch of color or a moment of sound. I can do that, but I guarantee you that my wife has never “experienced qualia” in her life. And the notion that our experience is essentially made of these bits and can be understood in terms of them is a typical misapplication of our reality-tools.

Likewise the idea that other animals “have qualia” or “have subjective awareness”. It’s not that this is wrong, since of course the sensory functions of other animals aren’t very different from ours. But it applies an objective mode of thinking in contexts where it can have no possible meaning.

And this is the fundamental issue in Existence – how do things come to have meaning? This is where our categories for Reality fail us, fail to provide even a starting-point. We hardly know what “meaning” means or where it comes from, even with regard to us humans, who can talk about. But it’s just as fundamental in physics, where things “have” definite states and properties only insofar as they make a difference to other things.

The goal of Being and Time was to make such a starting-point, for understanding Existence – the world “from inside” – as distinct from Reality.

Existence is always in a specific context of relationships, in this moment. The context is always “anticipatory” – a context of possibilities, so that what actually happens now can make a difference, can “mean” something... namely, to what can happen further on.

The context also has a built-in history, made of everything that’s gone on in all these different relationships I’m in, over many different time-scales, all of which go to make this present situation possible.

So Existence is an evolving “present moment”, from one’s own point of view, in many different relationship-contexts at once... where what happens in each relationship makes a difference to what can happen in others, and so “has meaning”. When the relationships are talking-relationships, e.g. between human beings, they generate an “internal” relationship of talking to yourself. And in a highly-evolved, literate culture, this self-relationship can evolve into something like a “consciousness” that thinks of itself as such.

Now as to basic categories. Reality gives us a vast body of fact, laid out in space and time. The purpose of our categories is to let us describe, accurately and insightfully, what it is.

Existence is always only “here and now”. But it has its own kind of depth and complexity. There are many, many layers of history built into it – personal history, cultural history, the history of life, and many layers of physical history as well. All of these are built into the context that makes possible whatever’s possible for us in this present situation.

So the kinds of categories we need for this, to untangle this kind of profound complexity, are the kinds that can distinguish all these different layers of “meaning” that constitute this present moment. Some have to do with the physical interactions with our environment we experience as sensation, some have to do with the many stages of biological evolution that support the functioning of our bodies and minds, some have to do with the many stages of evolution of language and thought.

This amounts to a kind of archaeology of the moment – uncovering all the distinct layers of relationships in which different dimensions of “meaning” arise, through which people and things make a difference to each other. Instead of describing “what is” in Reality, by talking about all the different kinds of things there are spread out in space and time, we’re trying to describe all the different kinds of meaning in all these distinct relationship-contexts, that support our Existence in this ongoing “now”.

This thread was titled “Time and Relationships”, because this was the key point I learned from Heidegger. Each of the many relationship-contexts that underlie Existence has its own “temporality” – not only its own time-scale, but its own way of “doing” time, its own way of making happening “meaningful”. The time of physics is different from the time of biology, which is different from the time in which you and I exist as “conscious” beings. And each of these “times” is made up of many distinct relationship-contexts, each distinguished by a different “timing”.

In sum – we have in Science an wonderful picture of Reality. When it comes to Existence, we’re still at about the stage of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who were struggling to find language for imagining the world as a whole, as “seen from outside”. In Heidegger we see just the first steps of an equally difficult struggle.

[JDStupi]

But when it comes to “consciousness”, the nonsense really gives us nothing at all. When we apply the kinds of logic we’ve developed for Reality, we get notions like “qualia”. Because I’m a philosopher, I do sometimes try to “experience qualia”, with some success. To do that I have to “step beck” into my own mind and see the world around me merely as my own internal “perception”, and then try to isolate some tiny aspect of it, like a patch of color or a moment of sound. I can do that, but I guarantee you that my wife has never “experienced qualia” in her life. And the notion that our experience is essentially made of these bits and can be understood in terms of them is a typical misapplication of our reality-tools.

As a comment, I would say that I absolutley agree with this statement. It seems to me a perfect example of what I call the "Fallacy of Misplaced Linearity" which happens so frequently in certain philosophical discussions. Essentially, possibly due to the prominent role played by Analytic Philosophy in modern discussions, philosophers tacitly assume a belief in the primacy of formal logic in their reasoning. This is not inherently a bad thing, but frequently it seems to be that logical considerations and ways of conceptualizing the world are mistaken for ontological ways of thinking and conceptualizing the world. Formal logic can be viewed simply as yet another conceptual scaffolding, a scaffolding which enjoys no aprioricity with regards to justification. Formal logic is an abstract algebraic system with operators and primitive undefined terms, and it is we who apply this abstract algebraic system with its primitives, "The Proposition" serving the same role as "The Number" in other algebras. As such, it is subject to the same criticisms and epistemological uncertainties associated with the traditional scientific endeavor, for both involve the application of a formalized conceptual framework to reality.

Where the linearity comes into play, is in trying to formulate our conceptions in terms of this scaffolding. We take the whole of experience and break it up into "Qualia" some type of atomistic building block that linearly adds up to the sum of experience, we then isolate qualia and sicuss them as if experience were composed of qualia, but as you stated anybody who has really looked into experience, knows that qualia are absolutley not what experience is made of. In a Duhem analogy, there are always a conjunction of background "assumptions" and processes going on at any given time, and we cannot simply isolate one "qualia" out among others as being primitive. The most forceful illustration of this is in philosophers traditional lack of respect and appreciation for aesthetics. When you are sitting outside and the whole of a scenery takes on a perceptual sense, and it is not "this qualia" or "that qualia" but the whole field of consciousness that takes on an indescribable sense of calmness or beauty, this cannot be broken up into a "qualia".

This misplaced qualia abstraction then leads to misplaced science, because certain scientists influenced by a dominant philosophy will try to find one-to-one correspondances between "neural states" and "primitive qualia" and from there claim that the sum of the neural states associated with primitive qualia will successfuly explain consciousness. I am not saying the mind is seperate from body, simply that the specific methodology associated with atomistic qualia will fail.

And this is the fundamental issue in Existence – how do things come to have meaning? This is where our categories for Reality fail us, fail to provide even a starting-point. We hardly know what “meaning” means or where it comes from, even with regard to us humans, who can talk about. But it’s just as fundamental in physics, where things “have” definite states and properties only insofar as they make a difference to other things

You see, I am certainly interested in this Heideggerian viewpoint, but what I keep seeing as problematic is the attempt to develop a "view from existence" because I see it is a continual banging our head against the wall, against the limits of what can be said. Namely, I think that Heidegger attemped to get down not to "beings" but to "The meaning of Being". His idea was, as you are saying, that our Western Metaphysical tradition has went away from what it means to "Be" and simply explicated upon "beings" while leaving behind the fundamental ontological question of "Being". As such he believed the only way to view the meaning of "Being" it self was to investigate it from the perspecctive of Being, of existence as you call it, and so analyze our human condition and authentic existence. I see this as a great idea. However, where it seems to run into problems is that, we are limited to and can only know our own way of existence and of Being and the meaning that Being takes on for us is a personal "Existential" question, the minute we attempt to create a framework for how other beings "Be" we are necessarily abstracting and extrapolating from our own mode-of-Being and nothing necessitates that this is the case for others. We cannot understand their mode of Being, almost by definition. So this is where we get into, what Apeiron (or rather Pierce) calls thridness, namely we have to speak of habits and regularities between the world of beings. We may even come to Secondness or the world of individual fact and relation between beings, but the question of Being is relegated to the world of Firstness or quality and cannot be explicated upon or built upon without turning into Secondness or Thirdness.

This is why I feel as though we can learn from Wittgenstein in that "What can not be said can only be shown" or "Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent" in that we are coming up against the limits of abstraction, and we can only attemp to point and describe in terms of secondness or thirdness, we can only attempt to wake people up to the "Radical root of their existence" as Ortegga y Gassat called it, but we cannot built a system of Being, for that would be against the spirit of Being itself. Then we would just have yet another "paragraph in a system".

I completely agree that we need to show people that there is a world of Being that lies beneath the world of beings, but I think that this is best achieved through "pointing" and the world of art. Art can form a bridge between beings and Being. This is also why I spoke of certain aspects of Zen earlier, namely that its entire project is of bringing us into closer realation with Being, and realizing that Being is not to be spoken of, but to Be.

This is another reason why, I think the meaning of Being is difficult to approach in our culture, a culture entirely built around beings. A culture whose religions are even sometimes formed around beings and shallow moral rules and outdated abstract belief systems, but if there is anything to religion it is not its abstractions or its moral rules (well not from an Existential point of view, maybe from a sociological point of view) but it is towards its means of orienting people towards Being, a pursuit largely neglected.

Essentially, I think we may remain at the level of the "Pre-Socratics" and the only way to improve would be to show people the "limits of language" and then we can use language to discuss this mode of Being simply by virtue of having a shared experience of it.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And it shall always remain this way, neccessarily, for Being is not to be completely elucidated through speech.


I apologize for my long and winding post

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, again, you're taken with Heidegger's supposed sweeping away of traditional philosophy. You think "qualia" is some scientistic term to distract from authentic experience.

Qualia ARE authentic experience. Qualia are subjectivity. Qualia are mind.

Everything you do is the flux and flex of qualia. You are qualia. Your wife IS qualia.

These are all terms for exactly the same thing.

Reality, as you have defined it, is a construct of complex collections of qualia - human minds, in this case. Reality is, thus, dependent on the deeper reality of what you have called Existence. So Existence is what needs to be explained in any decent ontology.

And, again, this is what Whitehead and other sophisticated panpsychists have attempted to do.

You really need to read Panpsychism in the West and Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot. You might find that the vocabulary you claim doesn't exist has in fact been around for a long time.

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

My example was influenced by that of Rama, in which he addresses the problem, which the third person account create.
Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, "Fine, but you'll never know what it feels like to sense electricity."
These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It's just that the your account is incomplete epistemologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a "third-person" account.
For centuries philosophers have assumed that this gap between brain and mind poses a deep epistemological problem - a barrier that simply cannot be crossed. But is this really true? I agree that the barrier hasn't yet been crossed, but does it follow that it can never be crossed? I'd like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another. (...)
But what if I were to skip spoken language as a medium of communication and instead hook a cable of neural pathways (taken from tissue culture or from another person) from
the color-processing areas in my brain directly into the color-processing regions of your brain (remember that your brain has the machinery to see color even though your eyes cannot discriminate wavelengths because they have no color receptors)? The cable allows the color information to go straight from my brain to neurons in your brain without intermediate translation. This is a farfetched scenario, but there is nothing logically impossible about it.
Earlier when I said "red," it didn't make any sense to you because the mere use of the word "red" already involves a translation. But if you skip the translation and use a cable, so that the nerve impulses themselves go directly to the color area, then perhaps you'll say, "Oh, my God, I see exactly what you mean. I'm having this wonderful new experience."
This scenario demolishes the philosophers' argument that there is an insurmountable logical barrier to understanding qualia. In principle, you can experience another creature's qualia, even the electric fish's. If you could find out what the electroceptive part of the fish brain is doing and if you could somehow graft it onto the relevant parts of your brain with all the proper associated connections, then you would start experiencing the fish's electrical qualia. Now, we could get into a philosophical debate over whether you need to be a fish to experience it or whether as a human being you could experience it, but the debate is not relevant to my argument. The logical point I am making here pertains only to the electrical qualia - not to the whole experience of being a fish.
The key idea here is that the qualia problem is not unique to the mind−body problem. It is no different in kind from problems that arise from any translation, and thus there is no need to invoke a great division in nature between the world of qualia and the material world. There is only one world with lots of translation barriers. If you can overcome them, the problems vanish.


Now let's go back to my "qualia map" example - we have three possible results from such an experiment (consider the experiment successful):
1) There is no chance for the establishing of such qualia map. My comparison differs from yours, that is to say I find your feeling of the beer better than mine and you don't, you find them the same. So, applied on a massive scale, where a lot of people participate (a lot of reports differ), such map is impossible to make and materialism is not the whole truth, so you can stop worrying about solving consciousness.
2) Such map can be established, but the gap can't be reduced - we are left with a property dualistic view, in which matter is everything, but mind as its supervenient property is unsolvable.
3) There is no gap, mind can be reduced to matter.

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, responding to #145:

Dual aspect panpsychism and panexperiential physicalism may be equated but I think, to be entirely clear here, it's important to stress that I am not saying: "There is substance/matter and it has a mental aspect." Rather, I am saying: "There is mind/matter (menter) and it is equally mind and matter as it oscillates from subjectivity to objectivity in each time quantum."

You have already said you accept Griffin's panexperiential panpsychism - and he is a strong panpsychist - so, yes, if you accept Griffin's views then you are a panpsychist. Why do you resist the Borg?

As for Pattee's views, I'll assume that your appeal to authority substitutes for a lack of a good response. This forum is about debate, not appeals to authority.

As I explained previously, I'm not asking you to reconstruct historically the actual events that took place with the emergence of life - I'm asking you to describe your criteria for deciding exactly when "life" exists and thus how it emerged phylogenetically on our planet and ontogenetically with each new life form springing forth from its parents, seeds, spores or what have you.

You state: "So there is still no story on how that first drop of experience arises out of a prior state of non-experiencing. Where does this power to prehend come from? It is sounding very chicken and egg, is it not? You need a locus to prehend, and prehension to have a locus."

No, it is not chicken and egg. I'm not sure why you're battling me on this one because it seems our views are pretty much identical on the apeiron and the limitation of pure potentiality (apeiron) by actuality (the physical universe). We'll never know exactly how this process takes place because pure potentiality is necessarily inferred not detected. But we can theorize. And Anaximander, Plotinus, Whitehead and many others have written extensively on how pure potentiality becomes actuality.

Whitehead appeals to a complex process of "ingression" of "eternal objects" (akin to Plato's forms) and "prehension" of "actual entities." Ingression and prehension for each actual entity leads it to transition from unformed subjectivity to objectivity (or "superjectivity"). The set of eternal objects may be equated to apeiron/ether/Brahman. The set of actual entities may be equated with the physical universe.

Thus, each locus is, for me, akin to a three-dimensional pixel that manifests as space or matter as the sum of ingressions and prehensions suggests. Whitehead doesn't state this, but I imagine the substrate as an infinite 3-D grid through which the physical universe moves. Each actual entity/physical object is translated through this grid in each moment as it moves. And each translation is a result of the ticking of the time quanta that constitutes the creative advance, in each corner of the universe.

You state: "That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory)."

I agree that the panpsychist assertion that all things have a mental aspect doesn't get us very far in explanations. But it's a very key starting point. The necessary follow up is the framework I've outlined here and in more detail in my forthcoming JCS paper. The key follow up question is: what determines the boundary of each unitary subject? This is the "boundary problem" or the "combination problem." And this is what my three-part theory of complexity addresses:

The Perception Index (PI) x the Connectivity Index (CI) = Omega (the capacity for phenomenal content).

But we must establish the extent of field coherence in each candidate subject in order to apply this formula. And establishing the extent of the applicable field coherence is a matter of empirical inquiry, as I will flesh out in Part 2 of my paper.

Here's an example from Part 1 of my paper:

The fruit fly’s brain is mostly devoted to visual processing and contains about 100,000 neurons.[1] If we assume about 100 dendrites for each neuron, we have about 10,000,000 synapses, which are the internal connections quantified by CI in this case. (We would also, to be comprehensive, have to determine what neural subunits exist in the fly brain and quantify interconnections between neural subunits in addition to the simple internal connectivity of all synaptic connections.) For the purposes of this example, we can translate this calculation to a normalized CI value of 4 (again, the normalization rules will be described in Part 2 of this paper). Recalling the PI value of 3 for fruit fly vision, we obtain an Omega of 12 for the fruit fly’s visual system. In actuality, of course, there is no separation of senses in the complex subject that is a fruit fly. But, again, this is just a dramatically simplified example to illustrate the formalisms.

[1] Rein, K., et al., (2002). Chiang, et al., (2010).

And with respect to field coherence, I state:

“Field coherence” refers to the coherence in time of the various constituents of the complex subject. Reality is conceived as a series of snapshots – chronons – that represent an entire slice of the universe in each moment. Chronons are incredibly brief in duration – possibly as short (or shorter) as the Planck moment, which is about 5 x 10-44 seconds. Each constituent of the universe resonates at some chronon multiple. When different constituents near each other resonate at the same chronon multiple, they bind together into a single subject in addition to the constituent subjects. That is, as each constituent oscillates back and forth at the same frequency, they are bound together in such a way that a new larger-scale subject is formed. This process is, when conditions are supportive, hierarchical (holarchical[1]) and iterative. Simple subjects bind together to form a complex subject, then bind together again to form a higher level complex subject, and so on, up to the rarefied heights of human subjects and perhaps higher in the ontological chain. Each constituent of the complex subject at issue achieves synchrony through a jostling process that must occur within the time limits of the iterative process that constitutes the laying down of reality (the creative advance), like a sieve producing layers of dust, dirt, small pebbles, larger pebbles, etc. As more and more constituents become linked, and oscillate at the same frequency, the subject at issue becomes more complex. The limit on this process is the finite speed of information between the complex subject’s constituents. As constituents become linked through connections that provide faster and faster information flows, the possible size of complex subjects increases. Quantum entanglement is the fastest physical connection we know of currently and it appears to operate at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. This is still, however, a finite speed. Quantum entanglement may be a necessary condition for complex subjects.

[1] Wilber (1995, 2000) is adamant that the true nature of reality is hierarchical/holarchical all the way up and all the way down. I agree that nature is hierarchical/holarchical, but I differ with Wilber in that I do posit a lowest level holon, what I call “simple subjects.” My rationale is simple: for there to be anything at all there has to be some initial ontological emergence from pure potentiality, particularly if we agree with Whitehead’s views on time as the creative advance. Accordingly, this initial ontological emergence, which happens as each chronon ticks, produces my simple subjects.

Now, with respect to your cerebellum/cortex example, can you state your question clearly and I'll take a crack at giving you a good answer?

[PhizzicsPhan]

Ferris, my previous post also addresses your points.

[ConradDJ]

You see, I am certainly interested in this Heideggerian viewpoint, but what I keep seeing as problematic is the attempt to develop a "view from existence" because I see it is a continual banging our head against the wall, against the limits of what can be said...

...we can only attempt to wake people up to the "Radical root of their existence" as Ortega y Gasset called it, but we cannot built a system of Being, for that would be against the spirit of Being itself...

Essentially, I think we may remain at the level of the "Pre-Socratics" and the only way to improve would be to show people the "limits of language" and then we can use language to discuss this mode of Being simply by virtue of having a shared experience of it.


Thanks very much for your comments, JD... I can see you appreciate where the problem lies. If there can be an adequate way of understanding existence, it will have to operate with a conceptual language quite different from what we’re used to. And you’re right – it will need to bring us closer to our shared experience instead of distancing us from it.

The thing is – this is the reason I fell in love with the history of Western thought, when I was much younger – that over and over again these remarkable people were inventing new kinds of language, starting with the earliest Greek poets and philosophers. When the pre-Socratics began, there was simply no way of talking about “reality”... the concept had to be built up through a series of metaphors, piece by piece, until it finally emerged in Plato and Aristotle. Even in Plato “really” is still essentially an adverb, a way of emphasizing that one thing is more true than another. The concept of one exclusive truth about the world, that somehow encompasses all the differences and shades of truth we know in our lives... that notion of “reality” as a noun required not just a new word, but a whole new way of talking with each other. Eric Havelock is worth reading on this – e.g. The Muse Learns to Write. He points out for example that the construction “X is Y”, which came to dominate Western thought through philosophy, is almost absent from the language of pre-literate culture and from the earliest writing, e.g. Homer and Hesiod. It took many generations to establish the possibility of “theorizing” about the world.

At every stage, in the development of Christian dogma and then Medieval theology, in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, people were learning how to imagine the world in ways that just hadn’t been possible before. But you’re right – when it comes to “existence”, we face a new kind of challenge. And so it’s not so surprising that philosophy more or less gave up the ghost in the 20th century. The conceptual creativity of our tradition from 11th to the 19th centuries was unparalleled... but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of our Philosophy Departments today.
Namely, I think that Heidegger attempted to get down not to "beings" but to "The meaning of Being"... As such he believed the only way to view the meaning of "Being" itself was to investigate it from the perspective of Being, of existence as you call it, and so analyze our human condition and authentic existence. I see this as a great idea. However, where it seems to run into problems is that, we are limited to and can only know our own way of existence and of Being and the meaning that Being takes on for us is a personal "Existential" question, the minute we attempt to create a framework for how other beings "Be" we are necessarily abstracting and extrapolating from our own mode-of-Being and nothing necessitates that this is the case for others.


Yes, this is very good. If there’s an “authentic” way of thinking about existence, it can’t be a matter of generalizing from what I experience to what people in general experience... let alone to what animals or plants or atoms “experience”.

As soon as we start down that path, we lose what’s essential about existence, that it’s only “one’s own”. Each of us has only our own life, in this web of connections with others. It’s remarkable how much we can share with each other, but the “own existence” that each of us has is not something anyone can share.

So I strongly disagree, for example, with the perspective of Ramachandran quoted by Ferris_bg in #157 above. The point is not that there are objective “experiences” going on in my brain that could be transmitted to someone else’s brain through “a cable of neural pathways.” Apart from the fact that I think this completely misconstrues how the brain works, what gives me my own unique, “private” perspective on the world is not the fact that my “brain-state” at a given instant is walled off and hidden in my head. It’s that I’m the only one who will ever have lived my life, from beginning to end.

But then – If we can’t generalize about “what it means to Be”... does that mean there’s nothing to understand about it? Or is it that we need to find language for an appropriate kind of understanding?

My thought is that understanding has two directions. The one that we’re very accomplished at has to do with gaining knowledge – investigating the facts, and finding explanations that lead to further investigation. The premise is that there’s a lot out there we don’t know... including, of course, a lot we don’t yet know about us humans, how our brains and our cultures work, etc.

The other direction of understanding has to do with what we all already know, but take for granted. What’s hardest for us to understand are the things closest to us, that we’re all intimately familiar with, that we’ve all experienced ever since we were born. Time, for example. There are no mysteries about time, nothing “unknown” about it. We all know how this business of “past, present and future” works. But it’s very hard to describe it, or even to think about the time we actually live in. Our language about “flow” and “passing” and “lengths” of time all describe something we don’t experience.

Now I don’t see why it’s impossible to develop adequate language for this. But the point is not to develop a “correct theory” about time – i.e. to generalize about our “internal sense of time”, for example. Gaining knowledge about that is a valid task for psychology, part of the traditional task of understanding Reality.

The point of understanding our Existence is to stop taking it for granted... to appreciate what each one of us has been given as our own. As you say, “to wake people up.” But I don’t see this as a one-shot deal, like a spiritual awakening you achieve once and for all. It’s not at all possible or desirable simply to stop taking everything for granted at once. This was Kierkegaard’s objection to Descartes, that he presumed to “doubt everything” intellectually, while still going on with his daily life, taking so much for granted. That there’s a beautiful planet for us to live on, that the laws of physics are so reliable, that life evolved, that we can talk with each other and have such a rich culture, on and on.

The realm of Existence, of what we all know but take for granted, is maybe just as vast as the realm of objective Reality. These are not two different worlds, but two sides of the same world we all live in. So the intellectual project of “not taking for granted” will maybe turn out to be just as extensive as the project of gaining scientific knowledge. And the two are not unrelated.

Look, in physics today, virtually everything is known. We have good theoretical explanations for virtually all observable phenomena. But, because the theories themselves don’t make any sense to us, we go on and on looking for further knowledge – about “branes” and “hidden dimensions” of reality, etc. – in the hope that it will somehow clarify things.

But the problem isn’t that something is still unknown, the problem is in what we take for granted about the physical world. That it happens “in real time”, for example, or that everything about it is “measurable”. We know all about how to measure things... but we don’t know how to think about that, we don’t have the conceptual tools that would let us not take it for granted.

So the issue of thinking “existentially” is not just about us humans. It’s about finding a different point of view and learning to think in a different direction, for a different purpose. There’s more to life, and there’s more to understand about life, than this business of gaining factual knowledge and arguing about theories.

[JDStupi]

At every stage, in the development of Christian dogma and then Medieval theology, in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, people were learning how to imagine the world in ways that just hadn’t been possible before. But you’re right – when it comes to “existence”, we face a new kind of challenge. And so it’s not so surprising that philosophy more or less gave up the ghost in the 20th century. The conceptual creativity of our tradition from 11th to the 19th centuries was unparalleled... but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of our Philosophy Departments today

Ahhhh so your saying that you're much more optimistic about the creation of a new conceptual language because, historically, this has had to be the case for even the abstractive language we now take for granted.

So I strongly disagree, for example, with the perspective of Ramachandran quoted by Ferris_bg in #157 above. The point is not that there are objective “experiences” going on in my brain that could be transmitted to someone else’s brain through “a cable of neural pathways.” Apart from the fact that I think this completely misconstrues how the brain works, what gives me my own unique, “private” perspective on the world is not the fact that my “brain-state” at a given instant is walled off and hidden in my head. It’s that I’m the only one who will ever have lived my life, from beginning to end

I too would say I disagree with this mainly because I am skeptical of any overly "linear" ideas about how cognition and perceptual experience work. The way in which the very field of your consciousness is carved out is highly underappreciated, and I think that the way in which perceptual experience manifests itself in quality is intimatley related to your personal history, your body, your culture and the interaction between all of them. And again when I say "your x, your y" my language doesn't convey what I mean, I don't think there is a "you" to posess some body and some culture, you are these things.
Moreover, Rama explicitley stated that his idea was merely to show the logical possibility of connecting cables to the brain and "sharing" subjective experience, but this is not much, all it amounts to saying is it isn't a necessary truth under any definition. But then again, who ever thought that empirical knowledge was a matter of logical necessity?

The point of understanding our Existence is to stop taking it for granted... to appreciate what each one of us has been given as our own. As you say, “to wake people up.” But I don’t see this as a one-shot deal, like a spiritual awakening you achieve once and for all. It’s not at all possible or desirable simply to stop taking everything for granted at once. This was Kierkegaard’s objection to Descartes, that he presumed to “doubt everything” intellectually, while still going on with his daily life, taking so much for granted. That there’s a beautiful planet for us to live on, that the laws of physics are so reliable, that life evolved, that we can talk with each other and have such a rich culture, on and on.


Again I am finding I need to be more careful with the implications of my language, and I apologize for my blunders in this area. I do not mean to imply that it "waking people up" is sufficient, only necessary. "Waking people up" is only the first step, but continurally learning to see your existence from a new perspective is a life-long endeavor, an act of continual becoming. Yes, C.S. Pierce too spoke of how you can only start philosophy from where you are and that Descartes "doubt everything" dictum is not an actuality.

But then – If we can’t generalize about “what it means to Be”... does that mean there’s nothing to understand about it? Or is it that we need to find language for an appropriate kind of understanding?

I certainly do not want to seem like I am saying "there is nothing to understand" if anything I was doubting that it could be understood soley on the basis of discursive thought.

Now regarding "finding a language" would you agree with my notion ("my" as if it is all mine) that the "language" of art seems to be stronger at communicating this type of "thought" at this time? Mainly that language is simply communication and certain types of poetry or music may be able to better convey the depth of "Being"?

I hate to sound like some type of Eastern pundit, which I am surely not, but simply in the interest of discussing these notions I do still say that turning East would be a fruitful idea. I have yet to dig in to the East's philosophy, but as you have stated it is the West who largely developed this abstractive mode of communication. Quite possibly, many of the germinal seeds for the creation of this new authentic mode of speech is already to be had in Eastern thought. Something like the Dao-de-jing with its "The way that can be named is not the true way" may help us seek thought in that direction.

Of course, the problem with that is that it will be very difficult to open our culture up to for a number of reasons. First, if you wish to discuss Being authentically, it cannot be discussed as divorced from "Ethics" and by ethics I simply mean "how you exist" in a broad sense. Talking about ethics and how we exist is not something people like to do or are used to, our "Ethics" many times consists of abstract moral principles rather than transforming your Being itself. Another thing is talking about "Being" and "personal existence" and "The way in which we live our life from the inside" will seem repulsive to some of our culture's "knowledgeable fellows" they will conflate non-logical language with illogical language and think that talking about existence isn't a serious affair or that it should be left to religion, another lingering shadow of our dualism. As though "serious" "professional" people don't think about such things as "Existence itself" from the "inside". Professional people are supposed to be impersonal, "objective", but "friendly" to everyone. "Belief" is a matter of everybody's own personal opinion and what right have we to discuss the validity of personal beliefs because "Everybody is equal".

That is something that also needs to be discussed, not only developing a language for "the web of relationships from the inside" and authenticity, but communicating it. As you may agree, any communication about authenticity must be of a different type, must be "authentic". How are we to communicate about "authenticity" in a culture that is anathema to authenticity? We have dug so deep into dualism and have divided our life so much we have become "nihilistic". I do not know how the world is, I am in the US, I do not know where you are, but if you are in the US I am sure you can agree that our culture is diametrically opposed to authenticity in every form. We have a culture where everyone's beliefs are equal and ever person believes they are equal and all opinions are equally valid. We have a rampant relativism motivated by a lack of wanting to have to think. We have cultural idols who have lots of money and buy lots of products. We have popular music based around partying and purchasing. We have the notion that a "Successfull" existence is one in which you "get a good job" and run the rat race and have lots of things. Even the people who think they have "values", they make a big stint about curse words or sex or people mkaing fun of people, as though there weren't things by far more important to your existence. By the way, the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a book you may like called "To have or to be?"


And I apologize for what partly is a rant about our culture, but it certainly is a problem. Authenticity requires a mode of communication where we share some amount of common ground. In order to do this we must change our culture, the mindset of our people, and this is largely a difficult thing.

[PhizzicsPhan]

JD, there is indeed a limitation to language - many. But it's important to keep in mind the broader issues:

1) We try in philosophy to explain the world through words and the abstractions represented by words. Ontology seeks to at least in theory explain everything through the (hopefully) simplest set of words and concepts - while matching the evidence we glean from our senses.

2) A deeper understanding of the universe is experienced rather than conceptualized - it is beyond words. Some can go through life with words alone but for those seekers who want to plumb the depths more authentically, there is a need to abandon words - at least at times.

Eastern traditions emphasize 2) over 1) and vice versa in the West. But there is no exclusivity of modes.

Here's my best effort to explain the limitations of words and logic in a recent essay entitled On the Heart.
______________________________

The kindness of strangers seems irrational to some people and wouldn’t generally be considered economically rational behavior to an economist focused on pure cost/benefit analysis. Thankfully, humans aren’t entirely rational creatures, despite the assumptions of economists. We follow our hearts as much or probably more than we do our heads.

This latest essay in my series on absent-minded science continues the exploration of reason and logic, begun in my last installment. Part X will conclude the series with a light-hearted examination of why certain explanations are more compelling than others.

A broader insight into such kindnesses may be arrived at when we consider what it really means to be “rational.” Like a lot of concepts, we think at first blush we know what this word means. But there’s really no clear and defensible definition of rational behavior or “rationality” more generally. What time frame are we referring to? How broad are our considerations in making “rational” decisions? These details are key to any conclusion regarding “rational behavior” in any situation; and these details depend on the choices of the person acting in each situation. (As discussed in my last essay, truth is perspectival in all situations, other than definitions that are independent of any particular space-time.)

Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece, The Alchemist, has much to say about the heart. This amazing little book is a parable about how to live a good life by finding and achieving one’s “personal legend.” Alchemy is unsurprisingly a consistent theme in the book, meant as a metaphor for personal transformation. The book is still on bestseller lists despite its release in the early 1990s.

The book’s main character, a young sheepherder from Andalusia, Spain, travels with the Alchemist through the desert of North Africa looking for his personal legend. He asks the Alchemist: “Why do we have to listen to our hearts?”

‘“Because wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”

‘“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I’m thinking about her.”

‘“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”’

The boy had a long conversation with his heart there in the desert. He came to understand his heart. “He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message.”

The secret that alchemists have pursued over the centuries, according to Coelho, is known as the “Master Work.” The Master Work is written on an emerald and describes how to create the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone. But the Master Work, according to the Alchemist, “can’t be understood by reason alone. It is a direct passage to the Soul of the World.”

This metaphor stands for life in general. Can we grasp life, can we understand our own lives and find meaning, with reason alone? It seems not. Reason is a very powerful tool and it is certainly a good guide to most aspects of life. But reason has limitations. Reason depends on representations, on models of reality. To try and grasp life with reason alone is like trying to describe the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen with words alone. It can’t do it justice.

The problems go far deeper, however.

A prominent Second Century CE Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, concluded that there is no ultimate truth: All doctrines are ultimately empty. Jan Westerhoff writes in his introduction to Nagarjuna’s work (Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction): “According to [Nagarjuna’s] view of truth, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it.”

But if there is no ultimate truth, even this doctrine cannot be true, so there is ultimate truth. We end up in paradox, a problem inherent in all logical or conceptual systems, as discussed in more depth in my last essay.

This is a key insight of the Zen Buddhist tradition (which came much later than Nagarjuna’s version of Buddhism, but still relies in part on Nagarjuna’s thinking): Language and concepts ultimately fail in leading us to true understanding. They are, at best, pointers to reality. Hence the use of paradoxical koans as teaching aids, the most famous of which is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” These mind-twisters have no correct answer – they are intended to show that logic itself is illogical.

Reality is apparently deeper than logic.

Nancy Cartwright, a respected philosopher of science, makes a great case in her 1999 book, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science, that science does indeed exist within fairly limiting boundaries. Even our best theories of physics, biology, economics, etc. consist of a “dappled” patchwork of ideas and mathematics. Despite the fact that we have accomplished truly great things over the last few hundred years—modern medicine, powerful computers that fit in our palm, marvels in entertainment, etc.—we are just scratching the surface of what the universe has to offer.

Science, while limited, has obviously been tremendously important in helping us to understand the world and create useful technologies. This trend shall certainly continue, probably in perpetuity.

We know with certainty, however, that we will never know the fullness of nature because we never know the full extent of what we don’t know. We are like a hiker seeking the top of a mountain who thinks she sees the top not far away only to find as she crests the hill she is on that she sees yet another hill above her, and so on. We will never know where the top is because we don’t know the full extent of what we don’t know.

To extend the physical metaphor further: This mountain springs from an ocean of unreason, with other islands of reason rising from the ocean’s surface in the dappled manner suggested by Cartwright and other thinkers. The best we can hope for is to navigate this vast ocean of unreason and scale the islands of reason we come across with equanimity and grace.

The kindness of strangers often demands this, as does a more complete experience of the universe.

[ConradDJ]

Now regarding "finding a language" would you agree with my notion ("my" as if it is all mine) that the "language" of art seems to be stronger at communicating this type of "thought" at this time? Mainly that language is simply communication and certain types of poetry or music may be able to better convey the depth of "Being"?


I do agree with you. And you probably know that Heidegger wrote several essays on poetry as a kind of fundamental thinking... drawing mainly on Rilke and Holderlin.

I would say that art and music and poetry are the primary language we have for articulating existence – as contrasted with describing reality. Literature (fiction-writing) usually operates on both sides at once – describing the object-world we live in from a personal point of view. As ordinary conversation also does.

The thing about art and music and poetry is that they have the power to pull you into the present moment, if you can teach yourself how to pay attention to them. When I was in college I wanted to be a composer, and spent a lot of time learning how to listen to music. You have to stay focused and think about what you’re hearing, because music articulates “the moment” over different time-scales – notes and phrases and extended melodies, and the “architecture” of the piece as a whole, that supports a kind of drama, of one theme or one section contrasting with what came before. But the purpose of this “thinking” is to stay with the music in the moment and feel what’s going on. So this was an education for me in the “back-and-forth” aspect of paying thoughtful attention. It’s not just letting yourself be immersed in the moment, getting lost in it, but about using your mind to participate in it.

Art doesn’t have this aspect of articulating time, as music does. But it’s also all about being there in the moment with a painting or photograph, or whatever. Seeing becomes a kind of listening, you stay with it and see what happens, as you look at it. So there’s a similar kind of back-and-forth of attention, thinking “in your head”, but also coming back into the moment and focusing on a real-time relationship with something. And the same with poetry. Unlike fiction, poetry tends to trip you up with unexpected language, making you stop and think. But again, it’s not the kind of thinking that comes up with “ideas”, primarily. The goal is “appreciation” – which may sound trite, but I think it might be the best word we have for thinking in relation to existence.

[ConradDJ]

I hate to sound like some type of Eastern pundit, which I am surely not, but simply in the interest of discussing these notions I do still say that turning East would be a fruitful idea. I have yet to dig in to the East's philosophy, but as you have stated it is the West who largely developed this abstractive mode of communication. Quite possibly, many of the germinal seeds for the creation of this new authentic mode of speech is already to be had in Eastern thought. Something like the Dao-de-jing with its "The way that can be named is not the true way" may help us seek thought in that direction.


I wouldn’t want to discount the Eastern traditions... if we want to think about evolving human consciousness, it’s important to get to know something about them, because they developed very sophisticated ways of “thinking” in completely different directions from the West. I put “thinking” in quotes because the word doesn’t really even have the same meaning in all these different traditions.

And personally, I very much appreciate the expression of Taoist philosophy in Tai Chi. But the Western tradition is unique, in a certain way. It started out with the Greeks, who invented a kind of “abstractive” thinking that was actually fairly primitive, in comparison with the Indian or Chinese traditions. And if you only look at Greek thought – say, through the development of neo-Platonism in the 3rd century AD – you have a tradition that’s more or less comparable to the much more sophisticated traditions that developed in the East. All of them reached a certain point of development and then essentially leveled off.

But in the West, the Greek intellectual language got taken over by Christianity, in the development of its complex body of “doctrine”. This time I put the word in quotes because no other religious tradition has anything really comparable. There was a very strange fusion here between two utterly different way of thinking – you can see it maybe most clearly in Augustine. On the one hand there was the intellectually detached, “scientific” frame of mind of the Greeks, and on the other a passionate religious commitment to finding an ultimate meaning in day-to-day human existence.

Considered as an intellectual invention, Christian doctrine is just bizarre. It makes claims about reality that are deliberately paradoxical. It was a weird compromise created through a series of intellectual battles between those who believed in rational, intellectually satisfying explanation, and those who insisted on personal faith as the “meaning of Being”. And these conflicting commitments continued through the entire Western tradition. Look at Newton, for example, who was just as deeply engaged in theological debates (from a fairly fanatical point of view, incidentally) as he was with the creation of mathematical physics.

Now of course every tradition has its own history of conflicts and resolutions. But there’s something unique about the Western tradition that has kept it evolving, questioning its own foundations again and again in a long series of intellectual revolutions. So yes, this is why I believe in the possibility of another revolution in thought.

As to your “rant”, I’m much in sympathy with you. But our culture has many sides – even here in the US. In the 1950's and 60's there was a lot of talk about “authenticity” – Erich Fromm being a good example – and the intellectual world felt very alive, very engaged. Since then we’ve seen a long period in which “intellectuals” have been essentially irrelevant to what’s going on in the world. But I don’t think that will last.

[PhizzicsPhan]

An interesting comparison of Whitehead and Heidegger - the author concludes:

"Focusing particularly on Whitehead’s concept of prehension, I propose that the reconciliation between [the scientific and religious] tendencies of the West have been achieved. I argue that Heidegger has achieved a similar reconciliation within the context of Continental thought, but ultimately betrayed this delicate synthesis with the anti-humanistic and anti-scientific thrust of his later philosophy. Thus, I argue that it is the metaphysical vision of Whitehead which has set the dialogue between religion, science, and philosophy upon a new course."

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CB4QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metanexus.net%2Fconference200 5%2Fpdf%2Fweidenbaum.pdf&rct=j&q=heidegger%20whitehead&ei=VA-vTdWJB8GBtgePoZ3aAw&usg=AFQjCNF9cH1W-hsIS8vZ6Lvo1gA-Ur-KzQ&sig2=rCnQtvSpXCfHALyqyKKVXw&cad=rja

[ConradDJ]

An interesting comparison of Whitehead and Heidegger -

Thank you, this is indeed an interesting paper, and it describes just the issue I was getting at very briefly in my last post. The direct link seems to be
http://www.metanexus.net/conference2005/pdf/weidenbaum.pdf

Early on in his career my Dad also thought highly of Whitehead’s “process” philosophy, and I get why it’s attractive. This paper shows that if what you’re looking for is a nice, comfortable “reconciliation of these dual tendencies of the West,” Whitehead is a good place to settle.

The author says, “From Scholasticism to liberal theology, innumerable philosophical systems have been proposed to achieve the final synthesis of these two worldviews” – i.e. “the synoptic vision of the Greeks and the spiritual legacy of Abraham.” I agree that this goes to the heart of our intellectual tradition. And he seems to feel Whitehead has done a good job with this reconciliation. So I guess we should be glad that the driving conflict behind so many centuries of creative work finally got resolved, early in the 20th century. Now we can get on to other business of tidying things up, like reconciling Whitehead with Buddhism, and then we’ll be all set.

I apologize for the sarcasm, I know that’s not polite or appropriate, but I can’t help it. I don’t even want to disparage this paper – I recommend it, because I would guess most philosophy students these days don’t get this kind of viewpoint on their tradition. But when the author more or less equates the issues of Kierkegaard and Heidegger with those of William James and Whitehead, I don’t think he’s grasped what’s essential.

This paper is written from a viewpoint in which the obvious purpose of philosophy is to come up with a satisfying theory of the world. It doesn’t necessarily have to explain much – we can leave that to Science – it just needs to give us a friendly feeling that we’ve got the world more or less wrapped up and accounted for, that we have the kinds of basic concepts that can more less "explain" everything, and resolve all the conflicts that arise from our various one-sided viewpoints.

The thing is, the people on the “religious” side of this age-long conflict were not after this sort of reconciliation. They were radicals who believed in conceptual revolution, as I do too. So if you want, you can interpret Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel as a philosophical “refutation of totalization”, which is handled even more intelligently by Whitehead, and in a more balanced way. But Kierkegaard wasn’t trying to achieve a “correct” philosophical system. He was trying to break through the comfortable self-assurance of 19th century intellectuals, trying to show that with all their comprehensive theories they hadn’t even begun to think about what’s most important in human life.

I would agree with you that Whitehead was quite successful in developing a coherent intellectual system. Heidegger certainly was not. And now at the start of the 21st century, despite the radical breakthroughs in science a century ago, we’re still thinking pretty much in the same old 19th-century categories. Whitehead didn’t accomplish it single-handed, but it seems that teachers of philosophy have pretty much convinced their students that there’s no revolution on the horizon.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, I get the impression that you haven't read much Whitehead yet - I think you should before you judge him as inadequate.

And I'm still not sure what you're looking for exactly. You seem to be suggesting that philosophy is perhaps a failed enterprise from the outset - in which case the vehicles of words and concepts aren't going to be much help for you no matter their nature. If you're seeking a more spiritual route, there are many options.

There is in fact already a huge literature on Whitehead and Buddhism and these two traditions are fairly compatible in their philosophies. Here's a recent talk I gave on this topic at UC Santa Barbara (where I am a visiting scholar):

http://tamhunt.blogspot.com/2010/10/process-philosophy-buddhism-and-western.html

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, going back to an earlier criticism of yours: I agree with Skrbina that Koestler should be labeled a panpsychist, by implication if not by self-labeling. See page 220 of Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West, in which he discusses Koestler's various arguments on this issue. Koestler's final statement, from Janus: A Summing Up, is that psyche proceeds in a step-wise fashion at all levels of existence. This is panpsychism, even if Koestler himself didn't like the label:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Zdv6ngh2mMIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=panpsychism+in+the+west&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=Fvm1Tb7YDYrJgQegksG5Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[fuzzyfelt]

I couldn’t get to page 221 in the Existentialism book, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The Harvard article is very interesting.

In Heidegger’s thinking, “language” always refers not just to the words and grammar and syntax, but to the whole world of communicative connection that humans grow up inside.

The Harvard article ends with the question “Do people think before they speak or do words shape their thoughts?” I would say, the experiments described here are exploring the world of human meaning in which young children already participate, before they begin learning actual words. This is important, because if we want to maintain that language is what’s most essential to being human, we need to think of “language” in this broader way.

When human “consciousness” first began to evolve, branching off from the primate mainstream, I doubt very much that it involved anything like a “language” in the narrow sense of the word. I imagine it involved giving certain kinds of experiences a special emotional weight that people could share with each other and pass on... out of which something like “symbols” could eventually emerge.

The key point is that something got passed on, from individual to individual, from generation to generation, something that kept on getting itself passed on. It’s hard to imagine what this earliest form of communicative connection might have been like, as it’s hard to imagine how self-replicating entities first got going, as the basis for the evolution of life.

We could maybe say – the essence of “language” is the feeling that at bottom it’s important to connect with others, to understand them and make ourselves understood. I would guess that whatever it was that first began to get itself passed down among our proto-human ancestors must have been able to communicate some such feeling, to hook children into to the process of reproducing what eventually became human culture.

As to my point of view being “free from confusion” – as if! It certainly is not. My hope is only that it may eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of “consciousness”. I don't feel that mysticism or panpsychism are heading in that direction.

From this I take it you are saying that although initially confusing it may offer a better alternative to firstly, something which you say only results in confusion and secondly, to pansychism ( that may have the same result). I don’t know that these are exculsive or that this offers an exhaustive choice.

But, Heidegger is presented as an alternative, with a nebulous outcome that may be better, it may ‘eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of “consciousness”’.

Regarding how this may be appreciated, Whitehead was about hermeneutical concerns, his metaphysics being about an interrelated matrix of experience giving an interpretive context where experience has meaning. Much like Derrida, there is interest in language, and the limitations it involves. That is why I mentioned Derrida when Conrad first wrote of Heidegger here, a long time ago. Whitehead is probably more suited.

Some suggestions as to things that may be authentic here have been art including poetry and meditation. Elsewhere, Descartes mentioned dreams and madness, hence Foucoult’s “Madness and Civilization”. Silence is another.

There was mention here and elsewhere about the origins of language and ideas about a relationship with music. This may interest:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=413657&page=15
Post #236 and the next.

“but if you are in the US I am sure you can agree that our culture is diametrically opposed to authenticity in every form. We have a culture where everyone's beliefs are equal and ever person believes they are equal and all opinions are equally valid. We have a rampant relativism…

Will you explain the conclusions drawn about inauthenticity and relativism?

[ConradDJ]

Conrad, I get the impression that you haven't read much Whitehead yet - I think you should before you judge him as inadequate.


Tam – You’re right. I looked in my library and found only his one little book on The Function of Reason, written for a general audience, around the same time as his major work Process and Reality. It begins with a nice summary:

“History discloses two main tendencies in the course of events. One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness there is degradation of energy... The other tendency is exemplified by the yearly renewal of nature in the spring, and by the upward course of biological evolution... Reason is the self-discipline of [this second] originative element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic.”

Of course this doesn’t get at what’s most original in his work, but it gives a feeling for his view of the world. And whether this kind of thinking is inadequate depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. You seem to be looking for a bridge between Science and Buddhism, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I believe you that Whitehead is more than adequate for this.

His work is not “adequate” if you believe, like Heidegger, that Western thought came to an impasse at the end of the 19th century, with Nietzsche, and has to find a new starting-point. Not because it was wrong, but because it couldn't get to what's fundamental.

I looked into Whitehead’s “process” ontology many years ago, and didn’t spend much time with it, although it has some similarity to the ideas I was trying to develop. But it seemed clear to me that he’s operating within a pretty standard intellectual frame of reference. As represented in the quotation above, he has a quite traditional view of the role of reason and is content with some rather vague notions about science. This was the opposite of what I was looking for.

The bottom line for me is that Whitehead is still envisioning the world “from outside”, from the usual objective point of view. Instead of a world of objects, it’s a world made of “actual occasions” or “experiences”... Here’s a little summary from Wikipedia:

“Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.”

I have no real objection to this, but it has the same sort of vague relationship to science as the previous quotation. Many have found it adequate and interesting, as an alternative to the “materialist” view. But to me the discoveries of science are much more interesting than this kind of philosophical debate. What’s actually going on in Quantum Mechanics is not going to be illuminated by these tired old categories of “mind” and “matter”.

Leibniz made a real breakthrough in imagining the world – in essence, he saw the universe not as a single vast entity but as the coordination of all our unique individual worlds. But he still framed this within the unimaginable “mind of God”, i.e. from the traditional philosophical standpoint “outside the world”. I see Whitehead’s ontology as a version of this same kind of thinking, that was revolutionary back in the 18th century, but quite calmly “rational” in the 20th.

This is inadequate only if you’re looking for a more radical viewpoint. What I found in Heidegger was a way of thinking that’s trying not to “back away” from one’s own unique perspective in a world of relationships, that’s not trying to achieve an all-embracing view of the world as a whole, but to understand the nature of existence “from inside”. Instead of seeing the world from a distance, laid out along a time-line of "before" and "after", like Whitehead, he's trying to see it "in real time", as in fact we all do.

Whether that will turn out to be a new beginning remains to be seen. But it’s an attempt to find a radically different perspective.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, you write: "I looked into Whitehead’s “process” ontology many years ago, and didn’t spend much time with it, although it has some similarity to the ideas I was trying to develop. But it seemed clear to me that he’s operating within a pretty standard intellectual frame of reference. As represented in the quotation above, he has a quite traditional view of the role of reason and is content with some rather vague notions about science. This was the opposite of what I was looking for."

This is not accurate. Whitehead was a truly original thinker and I think you'll find a lot of what you're looking for in his work. Remember previous posts of yours in this thread where I've said I agree 100%? I agreed because the point of view you were expressing is the point of view that Whitehead came from (which I share, not because of any blind devotion, which is not the case, but because after decades of searching for an adequate ontology I found that Whitehead's system fits the bill in many many ways).

What you're looking for is, I believe, in Whitehead and his successors. His whole point is to recognize the fundamentality of the inside - which I've mentioned a number of times to you in this thread - and then to explain the relationship of the inside to the many outsides each inside is confronted with.

No, my primary purpose is not to reconcile Buddhism with any Western philosophy. I've crafted my own philosophy/spirituality over the decades and expressed it in the in-progress book I've linked to in this thread (Mind, World, God). My ideas draw on Western process philosophy, Vedanta, Buddhism, and many other traditions.

Again: you really should read Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. And if you find that you need some easing into his ideas, check out Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot or a Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality (this is the route I took).

[PhizzicsPhan]

I forgot to mention that Whitehead's philosophy does in fact provide key insights into quantum mechanics, as well as just about every other major area of science or philosophy. You write: "What’s actually going on in Quantum Mechanics is not going to be illuminated by these tired old categories of “mind” and “matter”."

To the contrary, David Bohm's "ontological interpretation" of QM is explicitly based in Whitehead's ideas. It resolves the wave/particle duality conundrum by suggesting that there is an actual particle in each case but there is also a "guiding wave" or "quantum potential" that influences the particle's course, like a small boat tossed on the ocean during a storm. So the wave is not a particle at the same time - they are, rather, two aspects of a single phenomenon.

I would go a bit further, however, and suggest that these two aspects can be united more closely when we consider the oscillatory nature of actual entities. So rather than there being a particle that remains a particle, and a guiding wave that represents the quantum potential, we can suggest that each particle oscillates with its wave aspect over time. When it is objective and measurable it is a particle, but between each particle aspect it is a wave, which is its subjective/prehensive aspect. This is why the double slit experiment can reveal wave or particle behavior depending on the conditions - particles aren't just windowless monads, they are, instead, feeling and choice-making entities, albeit at an extremely rudimentary level.

Other conundrums that the process view of the world helps to resolve:

- the hard problem of consciousness (discussed at length in this thread)
- spiritual experience
- "origin" of life - all things are alive to some degree because life and mind are different terms for the same thing
- free will - also fundamental, as I illustrated with the wave/particle issue (it compounds as matter compounds in its complexity, with true individuals exercising free will at every level, as opposed to mere aggregates, which are not true individuals)
- the nature of time: it is the result of all actual entities oscillating from subject to object to subject to object, which Whitehead calls the "creative advance"
- many problems in evolution, including the source of variation for evolution and a naturalization of mind

[PhizzicsPhan]

If apeiron is still tuned in, I wanted to respond to an earlier point I left hanging. Apeiron acknowledged the difficulty in establishing the exact point of emergence of life (and thus of mind in his theory), but said just because it's hard to pin down it doesn't mean it's not there. Just as we can't clearly distinguish the shore from the ocean, he wrote, we can't clearly distinguish life from non-life but we still know there is a transition.

His analogy is in fact strong support for my thesis of panzoism (life is omnipresent and it's all a matter of degree, literally). We can in fact exactly identify the border between the shore and the ocean because we can define clearly what "shore" and "ocean" mean. Ocean is water, which is uncontroversially defined as H2O mixed with various other trace elements and the creatures that inhabit the ocean. Shore is uncontroversially defined as solid rather than liquid - not H20. Thus we can exactly delineate the boundary between shore and ocean as the exact point where solids become H20. This point surely changes in each moment due to erosion, etc, but it is easily identifiable at any particular point.

Not so with life. Apeiron hasn't even given any particular criteria for what life is, other than to appeal to a fuzzy "epistemic cut," which seems by its very name to be an epistemological not an ontological notion.

As I've explained previously, any criteria-based notion of life falls prey to arbitrariness in selection of criteria (must life be DNA-based?) or non-discreteness, that is, the criterion at issue exists on a continuum. For example, metabolism: does self-replicating RNA metabolize as it replaces its molecules? Does an atom that exchanges electrons metabolize? Only if we circularly define metabolism as limited to cell-based life can we answer these questions in the negative.

The far simpler and cleaner approach to life is to acknowledge that "life" is simply a term we give to the more obviously complex features of our universe. Cell-based life has complexified to the point that it appears to be discontinuous, but it's really not - it's just an example of exponential complexification. We can arbitrarily choose to designate this a difference in kind, but when we think deeply we realize that's it's "just" a difference in degree.

[ConradDJ]

Looking again at my earlier posts in this thread, I don’t think I did justice to the concept of “authenticity”. So I’d like to try one more time. My earlier attempts at this were in #12 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3225035&postcount=12), #47 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3232513&postcount=47) and #54 (http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3234197&postcount=54).

The very odd thing about this notion in Being and Time is that it has a very personal tone – what JDStupi called “ethical”. Authenticity is about “being yourself”, as opposed to living within a point of view determined by others. Yet at the same time Heidegger presents it as the key to “fundamental ontology”, as leading to a new way of conceptualizing our world.

People often object to this notion of an “existential” basis for philosophy. E.g. Apeiron’s comment in his post #4, that “Heidegger remained too attached to the human condition and a narrowly psychological model.”

Now apart from his very personal standpoint, Heidegger’s thinking essentially follows the same path taken by Descartes and Kant. Each of them wants to make a new beginning for philosophy by going back to one’s own immediate experience of the world... since after all, this is the only point of view any of us ever have. If we can’t build philosophy on our own actual experience, then all we’re doing is accepting the stories people tell us about things.

Descartes believed that the application of reason to the data of our senses would get us to an ultimate, objective truth about the world – which is the basic perspective of modern science. Kant understood that even the world of our “immediate perception” is something we ourselves actively construct, in our minds – so there can really be no such thing as a pure, unbiased viewpoint. We have no access to reality “as it is in itself,” but we can learn the principles on which our mental constructions work. I would say, the dialogue between these two perspectives underlies most of modern thought.

Why then does Heidegger want to “personalize” this issue? Why does he want to make it about how we live our lives, about “being yourself” instead of just seeing the world from your own viewpoint?

Because so long as the issue is how we see the world and what we can know about it, we’re in effect “standing outside” the world as observers. From this “inauthentic” standpoint, we automatically conceptualize the world as a thing, an object we can look at from various points of view, about which there are facts to be found out. Even the “post-modern” perspective – which Heidegger would characterize as neo-Kantian – still tends to maintain this kind of intellectual distance from the world it constructs.

This is not a bad thing, for many purposes. But there is a basic aspect of the world it can’t grasp. I tried to summarize our situation in my second post –
We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

It’s not that our view of the world “from outside” is inaccurate. The problem isn’t that our objective scientific theories are wrong, but that they’re not fundamental – they’re operating with the wrong notion of what a foundation should look like. So we can know all about the physical world, down to an incredible level of detail, and still have no clue what the picture is showing us.


So what does “authenticity” have to do with foundations? The thing is, when we see the world as an object, a set of given facts, then we’re looking for some ultimate set of given facts as its “foundation”. Or from the Kantian perspective, we’re looking for the ultimate ground of subjectivity. In either case, what’s fundamental seems as though it ought to be something “basic” – simple and singular. We model what’s fundamental in the world on what we take as fundamental in our own being.

But for Heidegger, our “actual experience” of being is not a matter of “observing” but of participating and communicating. “Having one’s own point of view” in the world is not just an intellectual problem. “Being yourself” is hard for human beings, because we don’t exist independently of how other people see us and feel about us. For us to “be who we are” depends on being able to express ourselves to other people, and to understand and care about them, and to let them “be who they are.” This all has to work, or we have no way even to find out “who we are” authentically. Whether or not we think about it much, we all grow up inside a complicated nexus of personal relationships, and it’s never easy for us to be clear about the point of view that’s uniquely our own... even though this is the only point of view any of us ever really has.

So in a participatory world, the foundations are not simple. It’s not easy to be a basis for anything, and nothing ever depends on only one other thing as its foundation. Everything depends on a context of relationships with other things, each of which depends on some other, quite different context of relationships. And not much of what goes on in this kind of world can be nailed down as definite fact – since all the information exchanged between things is seen from some particular point of view in some particular situation.

In short, the “authentic” perspective gives us a different sense for what to look for as fundamental. The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

For Descartes, to be “authentic” meant to doubt systematically what we learn from others, to test what we believe against our own experience, in the light or reason. This is all to the good. This is the perspective of an independent mind, focused on a factual reality that just is what it is, in and of itself. But this doesn’t describe the world of interdependent existence that you and I live in.

So unless we start from the very personal difficulty of “being ourselves” in the world, we remain stuck in the “inauthentic” intellectual perspective of a detached observer, modeling the world on his own detached logic. That has worked very well, for analyzing facts and uncovering principles. But it doesn’t let us grasp what’s fundamental – i.e. where the facts are coming from, and what the principles are for. I don’t think we’ll be able to see what our world is actually doing unless we learn to see it from inside, from the unique viewpoint of something that’s helping to do it.

[apeiron]

In short, the “authentic” perspective gives us a different sense for what to look for as fundamental. The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

For Descartes, to be “authentic” meant to doubt systematically what we learn from others, to test what we believe against our own experience, in the light or reason. This is all to the good. This is the perspective of an independent mind, focused on a factual reality that just is what it is, in and of itself. But this doesn’t describe the world of interdependent existence that you and I live in.

So unless we start from the very personal difficulty of “being ourselves” in the world, we remain stuck in the “inauthentic” intellectual perspective of a detached observer, modeling the world on his own detached logic. That has worked very well, for analyzing facts and uncovering principles. But it doesn’t let us grasp what’s fundamental – i.e. where the facts are coming from, and what the principles are for. I don’t think we’ll be able to see what our world is actually doing unless we learn to see it from inside, from the unique viewpoint of something that’s helping to do it.

Again Conrad, you are presenting a very clear and useful argument. But I still see Peirce as offering the step forward from Descartes, Kant and the rest.

I think where these conversations keep floundering is with the urge to assert that the situation is fundamentally this (ie: monistically boiling down to authenticity, to the primacy of subjective interaction) and so not fundamentally that (ie: the antithetical notion of the inauthentic, the objective view of a collection of interacting subjects).

But what is real only exists because it is separable into figure and ground, event and context, the particular and the general, or whatever hierarchical dichotomy you choose to describe the situation.

It becomes tenditious to call one "authentic", and the other not, when nothing could actually exist with out them both being present and having a precisely complementary and synergistic relationship. So stepping back, the real interaction we should be focused on is the global one between the authentic and inauthentic, using your terms, not simply the localised play of interactions which you call the authentic.

Philosophy, like all forms of knowing, is about generalisation - the forming of universal ideas or universal truths. Descartes' faculty of reason is simply the result of a history of such generalisation about the world, the accumulated knowledge of how things work, how causality operates, the invariant seeming principles by which reality self-organises.

So when you say...

The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

...then it is general systems principles which explain how particular points of view can even be. There has to be a context (of universalised constraints). This is what supports the existence then of localised interactions.

Imagine some kind of interaction between two points. Draw a line. It seems easy to do. At a stroke, there can be a crisp and unambiguous relationship. It seems fundamental. You can now imagine building upwards to construct a world of point-to-point authentic interactions in this fashion.

Yet to draw that line, you also needed a generalised context, an empty backdrop. The line could only be definite to the extent that the absence of line everywhere else was equally definite. It was the dichotomy between event and context that was the fundamental relationship. And this fact needs to be central to the philosophy.

Say instead you tried to draw a line in some chaotic space where there was just a foam of possibility and no simple unmarked backdrop. How could the line have been clearly a line (when it is lost in a general confusion). It would be like painting a trace on a choppy sea.

So Heidegger's approach does not tackle the necessary existence of a global context for any localised notion of an authentic interaction.

Yes, you can argue that all philosophising must start with personal experience. The subjective stance. But it also seems clear enough that our subjective mind already has a history of development and carries its own heavy freight of context.

The marks of our own thoughts in any instant are crisp and clear because they are made against a living backdrop of all the other possible thoughts that we are not having, but could have had. The information we suppress (to create the blank page of our thinking) is just as fundamental to our current mental stance as the information we represent (as the chosen marks which construct our specific state of interaction at that moment).

This is the psychological reality. Thinking involves a dichotomisation into figure and ground, particulars and generals. The two parts of the process go hand in hand (even if they seem actions in opposite directions - in your terms, one a striving after the authentic, the other a stepping back to the inauthentic). And so a complete philosophy would have to embrace that essential dynamic. It would value both the particular and the general. And seek to account for the whole of nature in terms of that most fundamental interaction.

[Darken-Sol]

during meditation i catch little glimpses of a "place" where there is no thought. no me. it is slightly deeper than awareness. by that i mean when i realise i'm there, i cant stay there. it is difficult to explain how all the concepts i've read in this post remind me of that "place" and the layers i have to shed to get there. could it be consciousness?

[apeiron]

during meditation i catch little glimpses of a "place" where there is no thought. no me. it is slightly deeper than awareness. by that i mean when i realise i'm there, i cant stay there. it is difficult to explain how all the concepts i've read in this post remind me of that "place" and the layers i have to shed to get there. could it be consciousness?

The different ontic stances expressed here would give you completely different answers I would say.

A panpsychist might want to agree that you are describing a dissolution of the particular self into some more primal or global state of self.

But the pansemiotic view would be that consciousness exists at the top end of things, rather than being materially fundamental. It is the result of developmental complexity rather than primal simplicity. So meditation and letting go cannot be taking you towards some "higher state of being". Instead it would be doing the opposite - taking you towards merely a vaguer, less developed, state of being. The reverse of enlightenment in fact.

Not sure how the Heideggerian view would fit though. It would seem to demand a sharp sense of self, or at least a precise sense of orientation and location, to also have a sharply defined state of authentic interaction.

[Darken-Sol]

Not sure how the Heideggerian view would fit though. It would seem to demand a sharp sense of self, or at least a precise sense of orientation and location, to also have a sharply defined state of authentic interaction.

i sense the things that i use to define myself most of the time. after i tune out external sensations and later emotions and memories i can experience thoughts with out words in them, bet there is still a strong sense of self. its only when i get past the thinking that i lose orientation,self, and the ability to interact. any attempt to do anything forces me back a few steps then i usually give up.

[Darken-Sol]

aperion, have you heard about Dr. Amit Goswami, Ph.D? i recently watched a documentary of his. i haven't looked further into it but it seems to be along the same lines as this post. i dont know enough about the scientific side of consciousness to form any opinion about his ideas. from reading your posts you seem like you could argue for or against him. that would help me a great deal as i can ask you questions. if you dont mind.

[apeiron]

from reading your posts you seem like you could argue for or against him.

I would argue against him for sure. But that would be too far off-topic here.

[Darken-Sol]

I would argue against him for sure. But that would be too far off-topic here.

not trying to jack your thread. consciousness interests me more than any other topic. where should i start, scientifically?

[ConradDJ]

I think where these conversations keep floundering is with the urge to assert that the situation is fundamentally this (ie: monistically boiling down to authenticity, to the primacy of subjective interaction) and so not fundamentally that (ie: the antithetical notion of the inauthentic, the objective view of a collection of interacting subjects).

But what is real only exists because it is separable into figure and ground, event and context, the particular and the general, or whatever hierarchical dichotomy you choose to describe the situation.

It becomes tenditious to call one authentic , and the other not, when nothing could actually exist with out them both being present and having a precisely complementary and synergistic relationship.


Apeiron – I really appreciate your patience with me, considering how stubbornly I resist your point of view. Your response is very much on point.

You’re right that there’s something “tendentious” about these terms “authentic” and “inauthentic”... even though I’ve tried to emphasize that the inauthentic viewpoint – that is, objectivity – is in no sense “wrong”. In fact, it defines a fundamental kind of truth, the truth of facts – the kind of truth that remains true no matter what perspective anyone has on it.

And you’re right that there’s a kind of “synergistic” relationship between these standpoints. Even though my own point of view is the only one I will ever have, I have to grow up into a world as discussed and determined by other people, before I can even begin to develop a perspective that’s uniquely my own. I not only need to learn the customs and conventions of the society I was born into, but I have to learn how to transcend this particular socially-determined viewpoint and envision some kind of higher, universal truth – which is the mission of the many philosophical and spiritual traditions, and also of science.

It’s only from this kind of detached, transcendent perspective – which does not have to be an intellectual one – that the issue of how to be authentically yourself arises. It’s only when you’ve really internalized the notion of a universal truth, that you can see the possibility of something further, another kind of foundation, in which the unique particularity of the individual plays the basic role.

Now to me, what’s genuine and powerful in the point of view you’ve developed from Peirce, is the determination always to include both sides. If you look at Greek thought, or the various Eastern traditions, there’s a powerful belief in transcendence, so the particular is always caught up and pulled into the universal truth. But the Western tradition, with its long immersion in Christianity, again and again comes back to the individual as having a basic kind of truth of its own. After all, each of us only has our own existence. The universal truth is after all only an Idea, not something anyone can live and breathe.

The Western tradition has been so creative, intellectually, just because it keeps on insisting on both sides. It wants universal principles, but it also wants them to arise out of individual existence. In your terms, what’s completely universal is to begin with merely Vague, non-differentiated. It has to become individual, local and particular in order to develop any shape or structure.
So stepping back, the real interaction we should be focused on is the global one between the authentic and inauthentic, using your terms, not simply the localised play of interactions which you call the authentic.


Now here is the heart of our disagreement. In trying to understand this creative, evolving interplay, you and Peirce want to focus on the universal Idea of the interplay. The “real” interaction is the global one that happens between the principles of global and local, etc. Of course, you’re not talking about a battle of principles that takes place on some abstract level – the principles are always instantiated in particular, local events.

But this is why I keep referring back to Hegel. He was a true “existentialist” in his time. He believed that even the highest, universal truth works itself out in and through the daily grind of individual, material existence. But he found a universal Logic in it – as did Peirce. I can see reasons for preferring Peirce’s logic to Hegel’s, which is all too “binary”, too close to the traditional logic of “A” or “not A”. But the spirit is the same – the quest for Universal Idea that’s adequate to encompass all the particularity of existence.

Kierkegaard and Heidegger made the opposite choice. They wouldn’t agree with you that the “real” relationship we need to grasp is a relationship between Ideas. From their point of view, to the extent that global principles have meaning, it’s because they arise out of the “local” relationships between unique individuals in their particular contexts.

To you, this is a non-issue, because in any case we need both “global” and “local”. It’s foolish to argue about which is bigger or better or more basic – the point is to clarify the universal logic of their global interaction.

But for me, this “stepping back” to a global perspective where principles are what’s “real” is exactly the issue. What I want to emphasize about existence is precisely what becomes invisible when my individual, moment-to-moment existence gets pulled out the “here and now” of real life and turned into a principle.
Philosophy, like all forms of knowing, is about generalisation - the forming of universal ideas or universal truths. Descartes' faculty of reason is simply the result of a history of such generalisation about the world...

...then it is general systems principles which explain how particular points of view can even be. There has to be a context (of universalised constraints). This is what supports the existence then of localised interactions.


What you say makes sense, and this is the time-honored perspective. And I feel I should apologize for my persisting – but I believe that philosophy can take a new direction.

We agree that “evolution” and “development” are both important, in the emergence of life. And I keep insisting on evolution, because to me it’s by far the best image available of an “existential” science – one based not on universal principles but on the contingencies and exigencies of particular, accidental situations. It’s just because the quest for a general theory of development is seeking a universal systems logic, that I think it’s misguided.

You will say – yes, but even the effort to understand evolution must try to generalize about it. But if you look at the vast amount we do understand about evolution, not much of it has to do with general principles. The systems theorists have the goal of making biology look more like physics, based on a compact set of principles. My goal would be to make physics look more like biology. Ultimately we are where we are because of history, and not much of that is logical.

So on the one hand, “foundation” refers to an Idea, a Process that’s the basis for everything. And on the other it ultimately refers to something individuals provide for each other in their “local” relationships. My existence depends on my mother and father, my context of family and friends, on all the extremely improbable events that led to my “here and now”. There is something deep we need to understand about this, but I don’t think it will take the form of a set of global principles.

[ConradDJ]

Imagine some kind of interaction between two points. Draw a line. It seems easy to do. At a stroke, there can be a crisp and unambiguous relationship. It seems fundamental. You can now imagine building upwards to construct a world of point-to-point authentic interactions in this fashion.

Yet to draw that line, you also needed a generalised context, an empty backdrop. The line could only be definite to the extent that the absence of line everywhere else was equally definite. It was the dichotomy between event and context that was the fundamental relationship. And this fact needs to be central to the philosophy.


I get your point... but what kind of imaginative space are we in, here? We’re imagining an “empty backdrop” that you and I are not actually in. We’re not looking at this line between two points from any specific angle, or thinking of it as something that’s happening right now between us. So this image of a line between two points is nothing at all like the kind of relationship that people have with each other... or for that matter, the kind of relationship that two oxygen atoms have with each other to form a molecule.

I think it’s a deep reflection on our intellectual situation today that the world “relationship” does not distinguish at all between these two utterly dissimilar cases... on the one hand, the relationship between 2 and 4, or between local and global, or between two points on a line. And on the other, the relationships we actual beings “have” with each other, without which we couldn’t exist.

Our deepest difficulty, in trying to be philosophers and scientists today, is that this abstract mental space in which we envision a relationship between two points is such a natural and normal place for us to be. We’re completely comfortable in this space, which was not available at to the pre-Socratic philosophers, writing before Euclid.

In contrast, we can hardly begin to imagine the world we actually experience, from a point of view inside. All of these relationships we’re in, at the moment, happening in the context of all these other relationships... I use the word “context” because I haven’t found a better one. But there’s barely any similarity between the way words on a page made a literal context for each other, and the way what happens in a relationship makes it important what happens in another relationship.
Say instead you tried to draw a line in some chaotic space where there was just a foam of possibility and no simple unmarked backdrop. How could the line have been clearly a line (when it is lost in a general confusion). It would be like painting a trace on a choppy sea.

So Heidegger's approach does not tackle the necessary existence of a global context for any localised notion of an authentic interaction.


This is right – but I question again whether a global context is really necessary. “Global” or “universal” is basic to the logic of our traditional philosophy, but does it correspond to anyone’s actual experience of anything? “Global” refers of course to the wholeness of the Earth, but we don’t know that the universe has that kind of wholeness. The world we actually experience, from a point of view “inside”, is unbounded in every direction.

Where everything happens, in our existence, is in our local “here and now”, in relationships with other things present nearby, and also things distant from us, both in space and time. The structure of this world has hardly been described – mainly because we take for granted that our image of the world in that abstract mental space of “objectivity” is adequate.

And of course it is adequate, for describing objects. It was Heidegger’s point that we need a different conceptual structure for describing the “here and now” of relationships in which we exist, each from our own point of view.

So “global” / “universal” is a basic logical category in the object-world. But we shouldn’t assume it plays the same role in relation to existence. The category “authentic” doesn’t operate within the object-world at all. It’s not at all the same as“local” or “particular” as aspects of reality. What’s particular about me is how I differ, objectively, from other people. But “authentic” refers to my own viewpoint, my own existence – which is neither “like” or “unlike” anyone else’s existence, because in existence there is never more than one’s own point of view, in relation to others. There is no comparing one existence with another.

And in existence, “local” doesn’t mean “in some certain locality” that could be anywhere in the world... it means only here, only in this moment. So to articulate the world from inside requires a very different set of conceptual tools.

[ConradDJ]

Yes, you can argue that all philosophising must start with personal experience. The subjective stance. But it also seems clear enough that our subjective mind already has a history of development and carries its own heavy freight of context.


Yes... to try to understand the world “out there”, or even to understand yourself and where you come from — you need to able to get outside your own point of view and grasp the facts of your situation, your history and your psychology. The goal is not to do without the objective viewpoint, or the logical categories we've developed for the object-world.
And so a complete philosophy would have to embrace that essential dynamic. It would value both the particular and the general. And seek to account for the whole of nature in terms of that most fundamental interaction.


But for you the essential dynamic is something that can be envisioned and analyzed “from outside”, in that abstract mental space. And for me, the essential dynamic is between authentic and inauthentic ways of being, which can only be envisioned from the standpoint of one’s own life and one’s own personal difficulties.

On the one hand, we observe the dynamic of the local and the particular, the clear, crisp foreground against the vague, empty or chaotic background.

On the other, we struggle to find out how to be ourselves and also be in our relationships.

These are very different visions of an essential dynamic, involving different kinds of essential differences. In the one case the world evolves through logical dichotomies... in the other through our existential dilemmas. In the one case there’s a given basis of universal principles... in the other a history of successful relationships that were the basis for new kinds of problems, calling for new ways in which things can be a basis for each other.

It hardly makes sense to argue about which of these visions is “right”... since the contexts are so different. But I very much appreciate the opportunities you’ve given me to try to articulate a point of view.

[Energystrom]

Yes... to try to understand the world “out there”, or even to understand yourself and where you come from — you need to able to get outside your own point of view and grasp the facts of your situation, your history and your psychology. The goal is not to do without the objective viewpoint, or the logical categories we've developed for the object-world.

This is agreed; any attempt at understanding must begin from a transcendental standpoint, or that of the individual. That is to say, the most fundamental type of experience or understanding must account for the conditions of our consciousness to which all facts that we possess are subject; essentially, the conditions that color and make my experience possible. Of course, conditions of consciousness are not static apparati; they cannot be abrogated, but cannot ever be fully accounted for either. The necessity of the "objective" standpoint is obvious at this point--we can only strive to understand these conditions of consciousness, as you said, through a rigorous descriptive psychology and exegesis of socio-historical reality. Inasmuch as the content of human existence is the only means which we have for analyzing the human, we must harness this objective world with the ultimate goal of coming to a richer understanding of the transcendental standpoint of self.

But for you the essential dynamic is something that can be envisioned and analyzed “from outside”, in that abstract mental space. And for me, the essential dynamic is between authentic and inauthentic ways of being, which can only be envisioned from the standpoint of one’s own life and one’s own personal difficulties.

On the one hand, we observe the dynamic of the local and the particular, the clear, crisp foreground against the vague, empty or chaotic background.

On the other, we struggle to find out how to be ourselves and also be in our relationships.

These are very different visions of an essential dynamic, involving different kinds of essential differences. In the one case the world evolves through logical dichotomies... in the other through our existential dilemmas. In the one case there’s a given basis of universal principles... in the other a history of successful relationships that were the basis for new kinds of problems, calling for new ways in which things can be a basis for each other.

It hardly makes sense to argue about which of these visions is “right”... since the contexts are so different. But I very much appreciate the opportunities you’ve given me to try to articulate a point of view.

I also agree with respect to this. "Abstract mental space" must still submit to the conditions of consciousness; inasmuch as this is concerned, it follows that the organic conditions of consciousness must play a vital role in relationships between the individual and other individuals and the individual and the world. As the amorphous (yet existent) conditions of consciousness are changed and shaped by the individual's experience, his understanding, appreciation, and search for meaning are fundamentally altered as well. There exists a living, holistic, and dynamic relationship between the individual and what is there for him in both inner and outer experience.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, have you read Whitehead's Science and the Modern World or Process and Reality yet?

I actually agree with almost everything that Apeiron wrote in #175 and I also agree that Peirce has much insight on these issues. But Whitehead went further than anyone else it seems, in concordance with the development of modern physics, in his career - which was not an option for Peirce due to his point in history and was not taken up by Heidegger because he was paralyzed by the same word games and concepts that you have raised so many times in this thread.

Philosophy is indeed about generalization, about reducing complexity to simplicity and showing how simple assumptions can lead to complexity. Yes, humans exist necessarily in complexity, not simplicity. We are the result of at least 4 billion years of evolution - or 12 if we start from the beginning of this universe. But philosophy and science are about reasonable inference regarding origins and evolution. We'll never KNOW how the world became so complex - how I, or you, or apeiron, became so complex. But we can make reasonable inferences that are hopefully testable. And thus philosophy and science move forward in creating a (hopefully) increasingly accurate picture of the world independent of any particular human - and, yes, always interdependent.

Whitehead's ontology is all about melding the subjective with the objective, in a perpetual oscillation between subject and object, which is thus all about interdependency.

Heidegger, Peirce and Whitehead are almost completely commensurable - there's nothing "wrong" about any of their ideas (well, maybe some...). They're all looking at the same basic issues, but tackling different pieces of it and reaching different conclusions. But if we're seeking the broadest, most reasonable, most useful, and also the most hopeful, philosophy I think Whitehead and his successors have much to teach us.

[PhizzicsPhan]

Darken-Sol, my view is that there are "twin ultimates" and that various types of religious/spiritual experience can be explained by a metaphor of "holonic navigation." Holons are parts/wholes, which are all conscious in their own right, to varying degrees. With perhaps one very large exception: the most basic ground of being/Brahman/apeiron/ether is, I believe, probably not conscious. It transcends subject/object. It is pure Spirit. To be reunited with this ground of being - to lose one's ego, one's sense of self, is to experience pure bliss (satchitananda).

This is holonic navigation to the ground, the base.

But other types of navigation are possible, it seems: upward navigation. So rather than dissolving one's ego into pure Spirit, more personalized experiences of religious ecstasy seem to suggest a merging with a higher level holon. Just as the cells in our body are individuals in their own right (with most likely an extremely rudimentary consciousness) that form the higher level consciousness we call our "self," so this self may merge at least temporarily with an even higher level consciousness.

I'm not entirely convinced of this higher level holonic navigation because it seems that we should have more evidence of higher level intelligences than we do. But I am quite convinced of the downward holonic navigation - there is abundant evidence for this, and I have personally experienced this type of dissolution of ego on more than one occasion.

I think the model of holonic navigation is potentially quite powerful and it is one item on my increasingly long list to use this as the basis for a "general theory of spirituality." One day....

[ConradDJ]

This is agreed; any attempt at understanding must begin from a transcendental standpoint, or that of the individual.

Whitehead's ontology is all about melding the subjective with the objective, in a perpetual oscillation between subject and object, which is thus all about interdependency.


The deep question is – what is this “standpoint of the individual”? Maybe just because this standpoint is the only one we ever have, it’s the most difficult thing to be articulate about. Because it’s the thing that’s hardest not to take for granted.

The “standpoint of consciousness” is what we’re always looking through. It’s invisible to us in the same way that light is invisible: even though all we see is light, we look right through it and perceive the world of objects around us. And our basic mental orientation is to this world of objects in space and time, that we share with everyone else. It’s very difficult to shift back to the standpoint that’s truly our own, and consider the world of present-time interaction and communication in relationships.

First Descartes and then Kant made heroic efforts to take the standpoint of consciousness. Because of their efforts, modern thought became familiar with the subjective point of view, the idea that each of us has a world of our own “in our heads”. This left philosophy with a strange conundrum: the only universe each of us has is the universe within our own minds, yet our own minds clearly exist as part of the objective universe.

Tam’s statement about Whitehead above seems correct. His is one of a long series of attempts to “meld the subjective with the objective” in some way. To my mind, though, these attempts don’t really take the “standpoint of the individual” seriously enough. They end up talking about “mind” or “apperception” as something going on out there in the real world of objects. That is, these philosophies all live in that abstract mental space in which we envision the world “from outside”, as if we weren’t actually there.

Just to be clear, I repeat – there’s nothing wrong with this traditional theoretical viewpoint at all... so long as we’re talking about the object-world. The error is in taking this point of view for granted in trying to grasp what’s truly fundamental.

When we do that, we can easily convince ourselves that the radical conundrum of subject and object is not really such a big problem. Tam just says, look, they’re exactly the same – everything is both subject and object. True, I get that. Everything has its own point of view in the world, and everything can be seen from some other point of view – fine. We can relax and feel we’ve accomplished something. But to me this kind of “armchair philosophy” is not helpful, that sits on the sidelines of existence and comprehends it all from a distance. This doesn’t get us any closer to appreciating what’s involved in being here, Heidegger’s “Da-sein”, the “standpoint of the individual”.

It’s not merely that our point of view on the world is “subjective”. It’s that everything we ever experience is this universe of our own experience. As Leibniz put it, “the monad has no windows.” I believe the human mind is the most radically isolated, self-enclosed entity there has ever been. No one else will ever have any clue about what your world looks like or feels like, since hardly anything of what you see and feel, moment to moment, can be put into words. And (as Kant said), you have absolutely no access to a world that exists beyond the world you imagine.

Unless we grasp this isolation of our own minds emphatically, we can’t have any idea of what this word “relationship” really means. Communication between two human minds is like communication between two entirely separate universes. It works only because you and I both imagine that it works. We believe in a world outside our own minds, and we imagine how other people feel and think. This is what Heidegger means by “transcendence” – that we reach, in our own minds, for something beyond, out there in the world, and everything we do and think happens in the context of that unconscious reach.

It’s not easy to appreciate the point Heidegger’s trying to make. It’s much easier just to say, obviously humans get information about the world around them, through their senses... obviously humans communicate with each other, through language. What’s the problem? And then we continue to take for granted that abstract mental space, in which what’s truly fundamental can’t appear.

For most practical purposes, our minds are not isolated from each other, of course. For most practical purposes, the objective viewpoint works great for understanding what’s here in the world around us. Forget about “the standpoint of the individual” – it’s no big deal, it’s just something we all have, right?

But I think, if we want to understand how human consciousness evolved, or how the physical universe evolved, we have to find ways to stop taking so much for granted, specifically about our relationships, and our ability to communicate. Human minds could only evolve this level of “self-consciousness”, this awareness of our own existence in our own unique mental space, because our relationships with each other evolved to make that meaningful, through the language we’ve evolved for mutual imagining and believing. Something like “mind” could never have evolved by itself, in isolation. We can be the most radically isolated beings in the universe only because we’ve evolved a sense of connection between us that can bridge the gap even between two different universes.

This is hard not to take for granted. I think even Heidegger wasn’t able to appreciate the depth of what’s involved in this business of “having a relationship”. He didn’t focus on the one-on-one aspect of existence, that’s expressed in the word “you”. Instead he wrote about “being-in-the-world” in general – and it was all too easy for his readers to mistake this for the usual “subjective” viewpoint of the mind in relation to the object-world.

Apeiron objected to my focusing on personal, one-on-one relationships. His objections make sense, but only so long as we’re operating within the usual abstract mental space occupied by theorists and philosophers. But I don’t believe what’s fundamental in existence can be seen within that space. You have to be here, it won’t do to keep on imagining the world from outside. You have to work from the standpoint of what’s fundamental to your own existence... and for me that means one-on-one, personal connections.

[ConradDJ]

I think, if we want to understand how human consciousness evolved, or how the physical universe evolved, we have to find ways to stop taking so much for granted, specifically about our relationships, and our ability to communicate.


Here’s a link to another thread that didn’t go very far, but tried to open up the question –

What do human beings do when they communicate? (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=334249)

Also, in case anyone is interested in what this approach could possibly have to do with physics, here are a couple more links to old threads. Essentially I’m taking “measurement” in quantum theory as equivalent to “communication”. The idea is that we take it for granted that physical communication just means “data transfer” between systems – despite the fact that data is never just “copied” from one system to another, in physical interaction -- any more than data gets physically copied from one person’s brain to another’s. In both cases we’ve hardly begun to understand what sort of environment of real-time relationships can actually support defining and communicating information between different systems with different points of view.

Where can we go with Relational QM? (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=314441)

What are the fundamental information-processes in physics? (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=332292)

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, I think what you're really looking for is life experience, not philosophy. I don't know how old you or what your background is, but it seems that you don't need words and ideas - you need raw experience.

Whitehead did not assert, and nor have I asserted, that subject and object are the same thing. Rather, they are alternating dual aspects of each actual thing. Whitehead's "concrescence" is the process by which each actual entity becomes actual, starting from a subject, "prehending" the universe (a generalized term for perception), and then making a choice as to how to manifest objectively based on the sum total of prehensions. Whitehead's scheme is actually much more complicated than this, involving also "eternal objects" (Platonic forms essentially) as well, but what I've wrote captures the essence.

As such, the universe is nothing more than the sum total of each actual entity oscillating from subject to object in an eternal cycle of prehension, objectification, perishing of subjectivity and then revival again. It starts very simple but complexifies through the combination of actual entities at various levels.

Whitehead explicitly disavowed Leibniz's windowless monads and, instead, posited fully windowed monads. Actual entities are akin to Leibniz's monads but each actual entity is fully interconnected and interdependent with literally every other actual entity in the universe because it is part of the causal fabric that constitutes the universe. Leibniz's system was rather strange and required positing an omniscient God to coordinate monads in a "preestablished harmony." This is hardly an explanation of anything because it necessarily raises the question: where did God come from? Plausibility is much enhanced if we posit the brute facts of our system as being very simple, rather than a priori complex, leading to complexity through reasonably inferred processes.

We are indeed isolated minds in terms of not KNOWING anything other than our own experience, our own minds, but we can through reasonable inference know other minds - and other minds include literally everything in the universe. As we expand our conception and perception of self, we can come to know the entire universe.

[fuzzyfelt]

Just simply, can this particular interpretation of Daesin or authenticity be authentically explained? Is there an awareness of authenticity that isn't inauthentic?

Can it communicate authentically? For instance, can it communicate without an inauthentic awareness of itself, or further, the existence of others?

I’ll quote Apeiron, too, from another thread, but mentioned in relation to this one, in case that helps.


Language clearly objectifies the subject, the doer, along with the doings and the done-to (the verbs and the objects). It already lifts us out of any local particular notion of the subject, the active agent, the effective cause, and forces us into a generic or objective stance where we are just an example of such a locus of agency, the cause that produces the effects.

Although, I would qualify that position.

[ConradDJ]

Is there an awareness of authenticity that isn't inauthentic?

Can it communicate authentically? For instance, can it communicate without an inauthentic awareness of itself, or further, the existence of others?


No. I think the most important thing to understand about authenticity (in Heidegger's sense) is that it can't do without inauthenticity. The point is not to get rid of inauthenticity.

As Apeiron says, inauthenticity -- the ability to imagine the world from no perspective in particular, to "see" a world that goes far beyond the actual "here and now" -- is fundamental to language and to being human. I would say, it's what most radically distinguishes human "consciousness" from the kinds of awareness other animals have.

If you want a "pure" authenticity (or the state of "no-mind", that JDStupi discussed) – a kind of awareness that's fully in the present moment – just imagine how a cat or a dog sees the world.

The thing is, it can be very difficult for us to find our way back into a point of view that's truly our own. And to me, this doesn't involve undoing the inauthentic viewpoint or escaping from it, back to something like the zen ideal of "no mind". It is important to be able to disengage, to stop the self-talk in your head, to come back into the present moment -- because that's the only place we're really connected with the world and with other people. But for me the point is not to leave behind everything we've evolved in our heads, but to bring it and use it to re-engage, in our relationships.

So in physics, we certainly don’t want to leave behind everything we’ve learned about the world from an objective viewpoint. But I think in order to understand what’s going on in the physical world, we also have to see the world “from the standpoint of the observer” – i.e. from the standpoint each of us actually has, in the moment. This is something physics has only been able to do to a very limited extent – e.g. in Carlo Rovell’s “Relational Quantum Mechanics (http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002v2).”




[ConradDJ]

I have a couple of comments on Apeiron’s note in the Vygotsky thread, mentioned above –
... the inauthentic view seems in fact fundamental to humans in this regard. Language clearly objectifies the subject, the doer, along with the doings and the done-to (the verbs and the objects). It already lifts us out of any local particular notion of the subject, the active agent, the effective cause, and forces us into a generic or objective stance where we are just an example of such a locus of agency, the cause that produces the effects.

The open question is whether animals also have some kind of proto-objectification and cause and effect thinking wired in.


Yes, certainly the brains of other animals have built-in neural “hardware” that enables them to identify and track relevant “objects” out in the world. If you think about how difficult it is to get a computer to do this effectively, you know that this involves many very sophisticated, very complex processing systems.

Human language is a separate “software” system that makes use of this animal hardware. It’s “software” in the sense that it gets “installed” in our brains from outside as we learn to communicate with others. And it’s this that gives us that “inauthentic” ability to “see” the world from no point of view in particular, to keep track of people and things even when we don’t see them for days or years... even to make pictures in our heads of things of things no one will ever see.

But Apeiron says “language clearly objectifies the subject, the doer”... I would rather say, written language does this. In purely oral cultures there is much less of a sense of things as “objects” just existing in themselves with certain characteristics. There is much more of a sense of things as “agents”, “doers” that behave in certain ways.

In pre-literate culture there is a kind of built-in balance between authentic and inauthentic – and thinking about this is a good way of seeing how these two aspects of human awareness work together. Language allows us to “step back” out of our own immediate experience, but in a purely oral culture, language only exists in “real time” relationships, in the moment. Talking is “doing” something with other people, expressing oneself from one’s own point of view, much more than it is just a description of reality. And telling stories is a much more basic function of language than arguing about objective truth.

In our culture, which has been more and more shaped by written language over some 2,500 years, the objectifying, “representational” function of language becomes more dominant, particularly in the intellectual sphere. Some even claim that making statements about reality is the function of language, or at least the most important one. And only in a literate culture is it conceivable that the inauthentic, “objective” viewpoint on the world is the only one worth considering.

Obviously I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with literacy, any more than with objectivity. But I would say that our culture, and above all our academic culture, has lost the balance between authenticity and inauthenticity that was a given throughout most of human evolution.

[apeiron]

But Apeiron says “language clearly objectifies the subject, the doer”... I would rather say, written language does this. In purely oral cultures there is much less of a sense of things as “objects” just existing in themselves with certain characteristics. There is much more of a sense of things as “agents”, “doers” that behave in certain ways.

I certainly agree about that. Luria classic study of Uzbeks in transition from an oral to literary culture illustrates your point. Also Walter Ong's more recent work - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality

[fuzzyfelt]

No. I think the most important thing to understand about authenticity (in Heidegger's sense) is that it can't do without inauthenticity. The point is not to get rid of inauthenticity.

I understand both are required here, so then the response to Whitehead’s matrix of interpenetration of the two perhaps was about the "from outside" view being considered too priviledged?



To my mind, though, these attempts don’t really take the “standpoint of the individual” seriously enough. They end up talking about “mind” or “apperception” as something going on out there in the real world of objects. That is, these philosophies all live in that abstract mental space in which we envision the world “from outside”, as if we weren’t actually there.
....The thing is, it can be very difficult for us to find our way back into a point of view that's truly our own.

Rather, the idea called for here may instead privilege subjectivity or authenticity?



I would rather say, written language does this.



Derrida disagrees with the "devaluation of writing".

"In the application of this ensemble of rules and historical perspective, one observation about the "devaluation of writing," proved crucial for all of Derrida works: the devaluation of writing is an ancestral bias that was born with Western civilization itself, and remains crucial in modern culture, including science.[5] "


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

Derrida’s arguments against the devaluation of writing includes the idea that writing makes processes more apparent. Amongst things he mentions, too, is the division of self during inner dialogue, into speaker and listener.

He “interiorly” considers the structure of such concepts and “exteriorly” writes of uncovering historic dissimulation.
‘In a 1972 he remarked the historical aspect of deconstruction:[4]
To "deconstruct" philosophy [...] would be to think – in the most faithful, interior way – the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine – from a certain exterior [...] – what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid [...] By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between the inside and the outside of philosophy [...a] putting into question the meaning of Being as presence.’


It is also this sort of approach to things like subjectivity and the time of “presence” that I think is quite balanced. I enjoy considerations of boundaries and "trace".

[ConradDJ]

I understand both are required here, so then the response to Whitehead’s matrix of interpenetration of the two perhaps was about the "from outside" view being considered too privileged?

...Rather, the idea called for here may instead privilege subjectivity or authenticity?


Well, yes... but both the authentic and inauthentic viewpoints can be “privileged”, in very different ways. On the inauthentic side there’s everything from bigoted dogmatism to the open, self-critical objectivity of science, which deserves to be privileged. Authenticity can’t make the same kind of claim to being right about things. It’s “privileged” only in that it’s the point of view we all start from and end with.

The key point is that both are required, as you say, but the value of both can only be appreciated from the authentic viewpoint. Objectivity wants to move beyond “subjective appearances” to uncover the reality of things. All well and good. But I think when we take that distanced mental perspective that envisions the world as Whitehead does, what’s most important about our connectedness becomes invisible. We get abstract notions about how things connect. Whitehead’s “apperception” is modeled on sense-perception. Tam refers to Ken Wilbur’s metaphysics based on the notion of things being parts of other things. We can probably all agree that “interdependence” is a basic aspect of the world. Apeiron looks to theoretical biology and general systems theory as a guide to describing what this means.

But I think it’s only when we take seriously our own personal point of view on the world, as we live it moment to moment, that we can begin to see what it means to be in relationships, always in the context of other relationships. This was the main point of Being and Time, that the environing structure of “being-here” is different from any objective description of “what’s there” in the world. The “here and now” in which existence happens is very different from the space and time of world-history seen “from outside”. And the basic failing of the inauthentic view is that it doesn’t see this difference at all.

So authentically, we can appreciate what we learn from an objective standpoint about our shared reality. But the kind of philosophy that imagines the world from no point of view in particular misses what’s fundamental. It describes the world of connections “from outside” and talks about the relationships between things from the standpoint of a third party. It can’t see the side of the world that consists in points of view communicating with other points of view, each in its own context... even though that’s all any of us have ever actually experienced.

[ConradDJ]

Derrida disagrees with the "devaluation of writing"...

Derrida’s arguments against the devaluation of writing includes the idea that writing makes processes more apparent. Amongst things he mentions, too, is the division of self during inner dialogue, into speaker and listener.


This links to the part of the Wikipedia page that’s most relevant –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Of_Grammatology

Thanks for pointing this out. I find Derrida’s language hard to tolerate, so I haven’t spent much time on his work. It seems that Heidegger’s main influence, in French philosophy at least, was to encourage a rhetorical style that feels to me deliberately obscure. But this is very relevant to the discussion...

I’m sorry, though, I have to be at work early this AM, so I’ll have to respond tomorrow.

[ConradDJ]

From the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Of_Grammatology) –

Derrida argues that people have historically understood speech as the primary mode of language and understood writing as an inferior derivative of speech.

Walter Ong’s perspective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality) is that on the contrary, in our literate culture it’s difficult to appreciate the nature of speech, since our ways of imagining the world have been formed over the centuries in writing. And it’s oral culture that’s often dismissed as primitive and inferior.

Derrida argues that speech is historically equated with logos, meaning thought, and associated with the presence of the speaker to the listener. It is as if the speaker thinks out loud and the listener hears what the speaker is thinking and if there is any confusion then the speaker's presence allows them to qualify the meaning of a previous statement. Derrida argues that by understanding speech as thought language "effaces itself." Language itself is forgotten. The signified meaning of speech is so immediately understood that it is easy to forget that there are linguistic signifiers involved - but these signifiers are the spoken sounds (phonemes) and written marks (graphemes) that actually comprise language.

Heidegger often emphasizes the opposite, in relation to “language”. That is, what’s essential in language has to do not with the “signifiers” but with the kind of relationship to the world and to other people that talking makes possible. Everything humans do and feel is bound up in this kind of communicative relationship, which goes far beyond the use of words and sentences.

This thought that something very basic to existence is being taken for granted and “forgotten” is very much in Heidegger’s vein. But for me, this basic thing that’s taken for granted has to do with the nature of human relationships. For Derrida, it seems to be the technology of “signifying”, or “language” in the narrow sense:

The consideration of language as writing leads inescapably to the insight that language is a system of signs. As a system of signs the signifiers are present but the signification can only be inferred. There is effectively an act of translation involved in extracting a signification from the signifiers of language. This act of translation is so habitual to language users that they must step back from their experience of using language in order to fully realise its operation...

The insight that language is a system of signs, most obvious in the consideration of language as writing, leads Derrida to state that "everything [...] gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to [...] the name of writing."

So Derrida takes “language” in such a narrow sense that it almost excludes talking, as a “naive” derivative of writing. Of course he can’t mean that talking evolved out of writing. But he thinks that only writing brings out what’s essential in language.

This feels to me like an extreme of the Cartesian viewpoint – the intellect enclosed in its own world, recognizing there’s no way of connecting with any world except the one it constructs itself. But at least it can be aware of the technology it uses.

Naturally such a distanced intellectual perspective prefers writing, i.e. objectified language. It takes the representing / signifying function of language as essential, and ignores the function of letting people be in touch with each other, as something merely illusory.

It’s true that the only world we actually experience is the world each of us builds “in our own heads”. It’s true that when we talk, we’re only imagining there’s someone out there who’s listening and understanding. And when we listen, we’re only imagining we understand what another person thinks or feels. But this kind of mutual imagining is what relationships are made of, and it’s what’s basic to the kind of “consciousness” we humans evolve.

I think human language began with the emergence of this kind of relationship, that we all learn to participate in when we’re very young, and from then on take for granted. As compared to this, the aspect of language that appears in writing is highly derivative, very distanced, “inauthentic” – but certainly not “inferior”.

For a great many purposes, including science and philosophy, writing is indispensable. Derrida is right, that written language in particular is what makes self-reflection possible. But self-reflection isn’t all there is to existence. Nearly all of what makes us human had evolved long before writing.

[fuzzyfelt]

I’m rushing and I’m unlikely to account for Derrida well in a post, and even less likely to at the moment, but I’ll make a quick attempt.
So Derrida takes “language” in such a narrow sense that it almost excludes talking, as a “naive” derivative of writing. Of course he can’t mean that talking evolved out of writing. But he thinks that only writing brings out what’s essential in language....



That is not my understanding. Spivak argued along these lines. Derrida's aim was to treat both writting and speech similarly.

An asymmetric reversal, with one side privileged at the expense of the other, would be at odds with Derrida’s anti-totalitarian stance. Derrida’s aim was to destroy the opposition in the relationship, not reverse it. An example of destroying opposition is that both terms “master” and “slave” require the other for their definition, enslaving the term “master” (from ‘The Restricted to General Economy’).

He treated speech and writing similarly, as “writing” in this case is about a signifier for as long as there has been one (including prehistory), which (imperfectly) points back to a signified, and so includes speech. Speech equally requires “reading” and interpretation.

More, this idea of “writing"/iterability/inscription/textuality, not only includes speech but all the philosophical system (Reilly, 2005), or all experience (Coward, 1990). And so, along these lines, Derrida is looking from inside experience's relationships, rewriting categories and concepts.

Metaphorically or not, Derrida reads between these historical dichotomies of reason/philosophy/experience in ever changing con-texts, within the relationships between these oppositions, and in uncovering what is present but unsaid/absent (“a chain of signification becomes the trace of presence-absence”) he, at the same time, reconstructs.

I don’t know how to link to areas on a wiki page, but there is a heading here called Heideggerian Dasein and Derridian Trace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction)

Thanks for the more specific link before, but perhaps other parts of the page introduce some of the related ideas more simply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

It may be some time before I can post again.

[cosmographer]

Conrad, again, you're taken with Heidegger's supposed sweeping away of traditional philosophy. You think "qualia" is some scientistic term to distract from authentic experience.

Qualia ARE authentic experience. Qualia are subjectivity. Qualia are mind.

Everything you do is the flux and flex of qualia. You are qualia. Your wife IS qualia.

These are all terms for exactly the same thing.

Reality, as you have defined it, is a construct of complex collections of qualia - human minds, in this case. Reality is, thus, dependent on the deeper reality of what you have called Existence. So Existence is what needs to be explained in any decent ontology.

Forgive me for barging in and quoting a post from some pages back. Great thread, but I believe you here exhibit most clearly what has been strangely unpalatable to me in much of your argumentation. I believe it is the style of your inquiry. I would characterize is as the style of ontology that wants to go all the way down, that is not ready to grant any thing an irreducible ontic consistency. It needs to be qualia all the way down, or turtles, or objects, or systems. What is strange is that you seem to admire Whitehead. With Whitehead we might think of any theorizing we do here as devising "lures for feelings" that will direct us toward the world once again, on new trajectories towards coming actuality. The engineering of our abstractions matters. When we think in the style of academic ontology we're often dragged down the slopes because for our "systems" to be universally arguable above others we seek out the safe haven of the mythical "smallest" (or biggest, or universal mode of transformation). If I have understood you correctly you wish to argue for the ontic primacy of qualia as congregating into events. Fair enough, but where does that lead us when we wish to interrogate the ontic consistency of human minding for instance? I would argue that there is really not much use to posit a theory of the smallest things when we, in everyday experience AND from what the sciences explicate as being in our world, encounter so many things that have irreducibly different ontic consistencies. The ontic consistency of human minds, the weird self-knowing reality, that all these human shaped bodies seem to carry around should perhaps be first and foremost treated as a unique "element" in the universe. We routinely observe other observers that have an I to talk about and a who (we acknowledge this when we name)t hat may compel our thought. Not only that, the thinking of kinds activated by the talk of "elements" breaks down when we approach observers, because they are never actually regular! Finding a mind in nature might be like finding a gem of which there exists no other instance in the universe. Isn't that enough to have us thinking already, to compel us to inquire into the specificities of these unique realities? Or take any "kind" that the sciences make available for us to think and talk with. Why would we go and reduce them to fit a systematic onto-story when their specificities are already there, excessively compelling thought that doesn't inevitably lead us down to final principles, the final stuff of the universe, mechanisms of becoming etc.

tl;dr. Could we not for every level of organization be ready to accept a certain mode of existence and rather ask what it does in the world, instead of trying to build these reductive onto-stories?

[ConradDJ]

Derrida's aim was to treat both writting and speech similarly.

An asymmetric reversal, with one side privileged at the expense of the other, would be at odds with Derrida’s anti-totalitarian stance. Derrida’s aim was to destroy the opposition in the relationship, not reverse it...

He treated speech and writing similarly, as “writing” in this case is about a signifier for as long as there has been one (including prehistory), which (imperfectly) points back to a signified, and so includes speech. Speech equally requires “reading” and interpretation.


Thanks for the clarification... your interpretation of Derrida is surely more accurate than mine... though he apparently denies not only the possibility of accurate interpretation, but even the relevance of considering what an author actually meant. But, it also seems that when he denies things, he likes to keep them on the table, “under erasure”... part of the dance of “absence - presence”.

Here’s the specific link. (I don’t do anything special to get the link... I just click on it at the top of the web page, and copy whatever shows up in the URL box on my browser.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_%28deconstruction%29#Heideggerian_Dasein_and _Derridian_Trace

This section has this summary at the end –

The sign never leads to the extra-linguistic thing, it leads to another sign, one substituting the other playfully inside the structure of language. We do not feel the presence of a thing through a sign, but through the absence of other presences, we guess what it is.

I think this is only partly true, but I get his point. Of course, words can be used to indicate things that aren’t words, and our language everywhere assumes a non-linguistic world of things. But that world does come pre-interpreted through language.

On the other page there’s this section – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Speech_and_Phenomena

Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the différance between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the intentional meaning of the speaking subject.

This makes sense to me too, though it sounds very one-sided. Certainly language isn’t a transparent medium on which the autonomous intentions of pure consciousness imprint themselves. But neither are the thoughts and feelings of people irrelevant to what they say to each other, or to the evolution of language. It’s just that our thoughts and feelings depend on the background of language.

By describing language as if it were essentially writing, Derrida emphasizes what I’ve been calling the “inauthentic” side – the aspect of language that’s already there before we’re born and already given in the culture into which we grow up, that we appropriate in order to learn to be conscious in the human way... the aspect of language that doesn’t “originate” in us. But that’s only half the story.

Derrida seems to want to “erase” the person who speaks to another person, and consider only the language itself as a system of signs. But I doubt there’s much that’s useful to be said about this kind of system, unless we’re thinking about how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.

The “authentic” aspect of language is what each of us has to invent in the moment, in order to say what we need to say, to someone we care about. The face-to-face aspect is key here – so that even when the communication is an email written to someone far away, what’s going on is more like speaking than writing and reading. For some reason Derrida seems to set this aspect aside as “naive”. But speech is only secondarily a matter of “signifying” and “interpreting” – at bottom I’d say it’s about creating and maintaining personal connections with people. Understanding a person is quite different from reading a text -- at least, in life outside the Forums.

[fuzzyfelt]

Sorry for the delay

Thanks for the clarification...

Pleasure, although I see some mistakes I missed during numerous edits, but hope it makes some sense.


…though he apparently denies not only the possibility of accurate interpretation, but even the relevance of considering what an author actually meant. But, it also seems that when he denies things, he likes to keep them on the table, “under erasure”... part of the dance of “absence - presence”.

I don’t know how we could be certain of totally accurate interpretation. “The experience of the other refuses totality”, is another view (Levinas, from Physicsphan’s link from earlier in the thread). Also this could include the idea of fragmented identity, and I’d guessed the relevance to Rovelli lay in these ideas. However, I understand that when discussing language like this, Derrida is talking of functional language. Yes, both are kept on the table, I understand it isn’t closure, it is like Heidegger’s Destruktion.



Here’s the specific link. (I don’t do anything special to get the link... I just click on it at the top of the web page, and copy whatever shows up in the URL box on my browser.)


Thanks for explaining about specific linking, I’ll try it sometime.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_%...erridian_Trace

This section has this summary at the end –

The sign never leads to the extra-linguistic thing, it leads to another sign, one substituting the other playfully inside the structure of language. We do not feel the presence of a thing through a sign, but through the absence of other presences, we guess what it is.

I think this is only partly true, but I get his point. Of course, words can be used to indicate things that aren’t words, and our language everywhere assumes a non-linguistic world of things. But that world does come pre-interpreted through language.

Words can indicate things by what they are not: by distinguishing them from other possible, related things. A “cat” is not another word that sounds like cat, nor another animal with the name cat, from experience and context it is a domestic cat, and not another domestic animal, etc.



Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the différance between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the intentional meaning of the speaking subject.

This makes sense to me too, though it sounds very one-sided. Certainly language isn’t a transparent medium on which the autonomous intentions of pure consciousness imprint themselves. But neither are the thoughts and feelings of people irrelevant to what they say to each other, or to the evolution of language. It’s just that our thoughts and feelings depend on the background of language.


The experiences of a person in time may be part of the context.



By describing language as if it were essentially writing, Derrida emphasizes what I’ve been calling the “inauthentic” side – the aspect of language that’s already there before we’re born and already given in the culture into which we grow up, that we appropriate in order to learn to be conscious in the human way... the aspect of language that doesn’t “originate” in us. But that’s only half the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy)

I think you have, as, following the structuralists, Derrida has, described various things aside from linguistics as language. Perhaps you would mention which you are talking of, how it is different to other language, and how the type of language you are referring to “originates” in us, differently to other types. I’m confused by what you said, you could be claiming oral/”phonocentric” authenticity on the grounds that it originates in us?

Much earlier in the thread I mentioned that Heidegger came to say that all language was “inauthentic”.

Derrida discusses functional language, “Because at its functional level all language is a system of differences, says Derrida, all language, even when spoken, is writing, and this truth is suppressed when meaning is taken as an origin, present and complete unto itself. Difference traces function, transforming texts. ”

However, the term “authenticity” itself is tricky, but I offered some suggestions of authenticity previously in the thread along historical lines of inauthenticity associated with reason, although I didn’t mention Heidegger’s discussion of death.

And, just btw, since I mentioned “function”, what is the significance of Heidegger’s view of objects as functional? That this occurs to people before they are even aware of it?

And another aside, since I have now mentioned Heidegger’s discussion of death, I’ll mention a problem Derrida discusses with this view.

“Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal cannot do so. But the animal cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.” (The Nature of Language, translated, Heidegger)

http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12931

The concluding paragraph of Derrida’s response-

Against, or without, Heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. Although the innumerable structural differences that separate one “species” from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality or bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the “name” of death as such, nor, by the same token, to the other as such, to the purity as such of the alterity of the other as such. But neither does man, that is precisely the point! . . . Who will guarantee that the name, that the ability to name death (like that of naming the other, and it is the same) does not participate as much in the dissimulation of the “as such” of death as in its revelation, and that language is not precisely the origin of the nontruth of death, and of the other? (A 75-6/PF 336)



Derrida seems to want to “erase” the person who speaks to another person, and consider only the language itself as a system of signs.

In this balanced way, “…the name of the author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no master signifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in a text “(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Or if this refers to the one who is being, Heidegger was criticised for an emphasis on “Being”, “His infatuation with ‘Being’ is equal only to his devaluing of ‘Beings’” (Levinas, again physicsphan’s link). In being influenced by both Heidegger and Levinas, Derrida may have destroyed (not reversed) the error by instead concentrating on the connection here.



But I doubt there’s much that’s useful to be said about this kind of system, unless we’re thinking about how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.



Would “useful” things said about this system describe it “from outside” and talk


about the relationships between things from the standpoint of a third party. ?

However, as these sorts of ideas have been about for around 40 years, I think it has had some influence. There could be merit in redefining categories, as Heidegger suggested, which has met with some success in changing perceptions of others like females, etc., opening up new categories of study, or balancing pervading logocentrism, and, yes, a use may include “how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.” Was that last sentence meant as a criticism?

Whether or not it furthers the hopes of thread that it

may eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of consciousness,
I think Derrida raises worthy objections and additions to Heidegger. Possibly being open to seeing things differently might help.


The “authentic” aspect of language is what each of us has to invent in the moment, in order to say what we need to say, to someone we care about. The face-to-face aspect is key here – so that even when the communication is an email written to someone far away, what’s going on is more like speaking than writing and reading. For some reason Derrida seems to set this aspect aside as “naive”. But speech is only secondarily a matter of “signifying” and “interpreting” – at bottom I’d say it’s about creating and maintaining personal connections with people. Understanding a person is quite different from reading a text -- at least, in life outside the Forums.

I think I’ve addressed this already in this post, asking for greater explanation of which speech or type of linguistic connectivity is primarily not a matter of signification.

[ConradDJ]

I think you have, as, following the structuralists, Derrida has, described various things aside from linguistics as language. Perhaps you would mention which you are talking of, how it is different to other language, and how the type of language you are referring to “originates” in us, differently to other types...

...asking for greater explanation of which speech or type of linguistic connectivity is primarily not a matter of signification.


I think about language mainly from an evolutionary viewpoint. So what’s basic to language in this sense is not the specific function that Derrida emphasizes in connection with writing – i.e. the way words and linguistic expressions get to have meaning in relation to different words and expressions. I don’t disagree that this is important – but I think this aspect of language evolved to support something deeper, which tends to fall into the background when things are written down instead of spoken face-to-face.

This deeper thing in language is the kind of relationship expressed in the word “you” – a word which is almost not needed in written language, but which is always implicit when we speak with each other.

To me the key thing that makes us different from other animals is that we’re born into a unique kind of emotional connection with other people. Just as one example, babies learn to recognize faces before anything else in their environments. And of course, human infants develop in a state of helpless dependency on others for much longer than almost any other animal, including our primate ancestors. So we’re biologically programmed to grow up into a web of “you-relationships” – which is what I take to be essential in language.

In this sense, language is the “software” that runs on the human brain – i.e. whatever gets installed in our heads through communication with others, as we grow up. That includes specific languages and other kinds of codes we pick up, along with all the rest of human culture.

The basic thing this communications software does, from an evolutionary standpoint, is just to communicate itself, from one brain to another, to another. Since only to the extent it succeeds in doing that, can it continue to evolve.

One of the main things about literate culture is that’s able to “freeze” ideas and expressions in writing, and conceive them as static objects to be analyzed. In pre-literate, oral cultures, there’s no way to “preserve” any aspect of language or culture. Only what actually gets spoken in the moment by one person to another, only what gets enacted in real time between people, can get passed down – everything else disappears. So during the greater part of its evolution, the language-software was developing the emotional dynamics of face-to-face interaction, rather than static sign-systems and the intellectual ability to “read” them.

Now if we’re interested in analyzing the results of this evolutionary process – i.e. the state of a language or a literature or a culture, at a certain point in time – it makes sense to imagine it as like writing, as a system of signs interpreting other signs. But if we’re trying to imagine the process itself, I think it’s important to think about all the things people do in trying to make (and break and repair) their relationships with each other. That certainly includes many ways of “signifying” and “interpreting”, but not only that.

To return to the question of authenticity and inauthenticity – these are built into the process I’m describing. We always begin by learning how other people communicate with each other, we pick up codes invented by others and try to behave the way other people expect us to behave. So yes, in that sense it makes sense to say that “all language is inauthentic.” The connection-software gets installed in us from outside.

But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique. This is the main thing we’re working on, as kids, from the time we begin learning to talk through adolescence. So the software evolves to promote authenticity as well as inauthenticity.

As adults also, and as philosophers, this remains a fundamental issue – how to take over a thought-system we inherit from others, and "appropriate" it by finding our unique point of view in it. And I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.

[fuzzyfelt]

The arguments made here against Whitehead seem weak in light of discussions about authenticity, and this from me early in the thread, ‘it has been suggested that although “Being” is taken to mean human “Being”, that the conclusions could logically be extended to pertain to other “Beings”’, was ignored, so it seems that these ideas with without good reason given, exclude ‘the non-human world’.


The views expressed involve the idea humans have evolved a heritable mechanism from ‘real time’ present connections “only what gets enacted in real time between people, can get passed down” which applies meaning to signification other than that gained from contextual experience and difference, but which eludes other animals which have also evolved ability to signify on the basis that "something " got passed on. It might seem designed to exclude non-human animals.


However, these ideas are flawed by placing importance on the one being at the expense of other beings. Insistence upon face to face, real time connection with others as a means is the exclusion of the others not present in space or time. These ideas exclude the non-present Other.


And there remains a lot of confusion about how the ideas might be expressed "authentically", being variously described as opposing reason, the view of connections from the inside, and being inside your own head. The last has been used to criticise Whitehead, etc, yet is used for appraisal of the "results" . An "authentic" view has been used here in a one-sided way, excluding non-self areas of the relationship.


Further flaws exist regarding the method Heidegger uses the term “caring”. ‘But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique..’ Heidegger’s caring has been called a one-sided caring about the self’s personality, different to Levinas’ ‘responsibility’ to the Other. Given this the aim of the thread, too, appears one-sided “But it’s not basic to human consciousness, which is essentially involved with the people and things it cares about.” Heidegger’s ideas seem designed for the sake of own-most personality at the expense of non-Beings.



I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.
Evolution and the vitality of western civilisation have been given as reasons to regard Heidegger’s ideas. I’ve mentioned some attempts by which Heidegger’s exclusive ideas have been learnt from, how more balanced ideas been considered and have evolved and adapted, and yet evolution is the reason given to devolve back to the same ideas from almost a century ago. And further, these ideas occurred back, prior to vital Western civilisation committing “one of the biggest crimes against humanity ever made” (wiki). Heidegger, whose ideas are espoused here, became a nazi in 1933, and whose decrees as university fuhrer-rector applying nazi ‘cleansing’ laws were designed for the exclusion of non-aryans.


But it would seem, from the ideas written here about real time, present language over writing, that written communication about Heidegger’s writings would be considered unproductive anyway.

[apeiron]

To return to the question of authenticity and inauthenticity – these are built into the process I’m describing. We always begin by learning how other people communicate with each other, we pick up codes invented by others and try to behave the way other people expect us to behave. So yes, in that sense it makes sense to say that “all language is inauthentic.” The connection-software gets installed in us from outside.

But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique. This is the main thing we’re working on, as kids, from the time we begin learning to talk through adolescence. So the software evolves to promote authenticity as well as inauthenticity.

As adults also, and as philosophers, this remains a fundamental issue – how to take over a thought-system we inherit from others, and "appropriate" it by finding our unique point of view in it. And I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.

This debate is hard to resolve as you seem to agree there is a irreducible dichotomy here (there is both the authentic and the inauthentic) but then keep returning to the hope that one pole of the dichotomy will be somehow the more important, the more fundamental, the more primary.

Yet the point about dichotomies is that both poles are needed to have anything (anything both persistent and dynamic). So the proper questions to be asking become 1) do I have a rightful dichotomy, 2) what is their mutual relationship, and 3) what is their equilbrium balance (the point at which they are dynamically mixing in a persistently stable fashion)?

To put all this back into a Peircean framework again :smile:, and deal with Derrida's concerns too, the fundamental relationship is always the dynamical/developmental one between local degrees of freedom and global constraints.

So in the Peircean triadic scheme, everything starts in vagueness or firstness - the apeiron or the pure unbroken symmetry of potential. Then it develops as an increasingly definite dichotomy. You have secondness - the local concrete events that equate to the authentic you-relations in the Heideggerian view. The degrees of freedom. Then arising out of secondness, but also coming eventually to regulate it, is the thirdness of Peircean habits, or the global constraints that act downwards to shape the local events. The realm of the inauthentic in the Heideggian view.

As an aside, the Peircean view is sharp contrast to the Derridian because Derrida argued that crisp structure (ie: habits) must arise out of some ground already crisply structured. So beginnings are already complex. But Peirce instead says both the impressions and the ideas, the phenomenology and the structure, arise mutually from out of vagueness via their own self-organising process of development. If we must ask what comes first, then secondness is slightly ahead of thirdness - as the fleeting spontaneous event that then immediately implied its own context and so made possible the beginnings of a habit. Or as they would say in condensed matter physics, the fluctuation that broke the symmetry. But really, it is not a very meaningful question (because what comes first is vagueness!).

Anyway, focus on the notion of global constraints acting on local degrees of freedom (thirdness interacting with secondness to stabilise or make use of its crisp possibilities). In the beginning, when things are still very vague, the degrees of freedom are almost infinite (because they are unconstrained). And so anything happening seems essentially spontaneous and meaningless. A long way from "subjective" - a crisp POV.

Take as an example a human newborn and its relations with its own hands. At first the baby is surprised by the actions of the hands. These are just spontaneous events in its world (like everything else, including all those faces looming in and out of view). The baby has no control over the events. They are unconstrained degrees of freedom and so essentially meaningless. But pretty quickly, the baby discovers it can constrain the freedom of its digits. It moves from a realm of the random to a realm of the willed. And it can constrain the freedom of other discrete events like the looming faces. It can wail and then later call out. Then point and even signify in words.

The more the degrees of freedom of the world become constrained, the more the child comes to feel like a subjective being, a locus with a POV. Differance is important also of course. What lies outside the child's conscious control - the unconstrainable facts like the redness of red, or the pull of gravity, or the unpredictability of fellow toddlers - is just as much a part of the subjectivity. The basis of self-other. If we could regulate everything, we would be the world (in the way racecar drivers feel the car as an extension of their own bodies).

So inauthenticity lives within us as well as without. The pure authentic would be just secondness alone - a fleeting, spontaneous, meaningless play of events. Any POV, any context, might be weakly implied (vaguely present). But by the same token, as absent as it is possible to be. Subjectivity arises as a locus (such as an infant) comes to accumulate constraints over the freedoms of what is, now, "its world". The inauthentic has to become locally resident for there to be a persistent and developing succession of authentic moments. You have to have ideas to contextualise the impressions, structure to organise the phenomenology.

Touching again on Derrida, his valuation of the written over the oral is drawing attention to something else really - the need to have a mechanism or technology to encode the constraints. A locale needs to be able to remember its history to accumulate a set of habits. The Peircean view is fundamentally developmental. But dichotomous to development is evolution. And as life and mind show, real complexity demands both.

So a biological level of mind has the coding machinery of DNA. And a sociocultural level of mind arose out of the coding machinery of syntactic language (yes, here comes Vygotsky once more).

Derrida was just pointing out that behind the highly situated and contextualised interactions of everyday orality (the you-relating) was this structuring machinery. A machinery that just becomes far more obvious in writing (as now the interaction between writer and reader has to contextualised in a more overtly "mechanical" fashion - the gaps have to be filled in explicitly).

But again - as always - becoming focused on one pole of a dichotomy leads to unbalanced scholarship. Deconstruction can quickly come to seem like an obsession with syntactical gaps. Whereas a theory of semiotics or meaning would be about the correct interaction between syntax and semantics.

And the story on that seems pretty obvious if you focus on the idea of local degrees of freedom~global constraints.

In the begining :smile: meanings were vague. A caveman went "urgh". An utterance with a huge number of degrees of freedom - especially if written down as a word, but perhaps vaguely interpretable in an intra-personal context where you were out hunting and he was also gesturing towards some prey.

Then syntactical speech got invented. A systematic way to constrain degrees of free floating meaning. The caveman could grunt "animal". Already your interpretation would have a great reduction in entropy (and so the grunt is officially information - a constraint on entropy production).

Your fellow caveman might indeed increasingly precisify his grunt, going {animal {deer}}. He would of course only say "deer", but the point here is to draw attention to the hierarchical nature of this downward acting contraint on the freedom of your mental response - your semantic state. Animal is more general. Deer rules out a great number of other animals to focus you on one particular variety of animal. You have that much less freedom about what you might have in mind at that moment.

Further syntax produces increasingly constrained or specific states of mind. So {animal {deer {Bambi}}} reduces your available degrees of freedom still more.

Now trace this precisification in terms of the authentic~inauthentic dichotomy. With weak constraint, you get weak specificity. The grunt of {animal} is the inauthentic bit that puts you in mind of some authentic you-relation with...the animal kingdom. But {animal {deer {Bambi}}} is strongly contextualised and so strongly authentic. You are looking into Bambi's doe eyes right now in your mind's eye (you have no choice).

So again, the false move is to try and make one pole of a dichotomy your fundamental. Instead, discover your rightful dichotomies and then map them back to the general logic of dichotomisation (or Peircean triads - which is the fuller view where local~global scale dichotomies arise out of vagueness as a process of eternally dynamic development.)

[Sorry for the essay, but it's a rainy Sunday morning and now the sky is clearing...]

[cosmographer]

For another resource on time and Heidegger: Brassier here tries to work through Heidegger's time by means of Deleuze. Dense and compelling as usual. There are six parts to this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbQ6p0ZwW_s

[apeiron]

Are we Terrance Mckenna fans here?

No, he's a crackpot. (But very good in Twin Peaks.)

[apeiron]

How about Sitchin?

So crackpot I had to google to find out who he was. :smile:

Why are you posting the names of cranks which don't have any relevance to the OP?

[fuzzyfelt]

This debate is hard to resolve as you seem to agree there is a irreducible dichotomy here (there is both the authentic and the inauthentic) but then keep returning to the hope that one pole of the dichotomy will be somehow the more important, the more fundamental, the more primary.

Yet the point about dichotomies is that both poles are needed to have anything (anything both persistent and dynamic). So the proper questions to be asking become 1) do I have a rightful dichotomy, 2) what is their mutual relationship, and 3) what is their equilbrium balance (the point at which they are dynamically mixing in a persistently stable fashion)?

To put all this back into a Peircean framework again :smile:, and deal with Derrida's concerns too, the fundamental relationship is always the dynamical/developmental one between local degrees of freedom and global constraints.
Yes, as I understand Derrida, there is regard for dynamic, developing relationships between apparent dichotomies.


So in the Peircean triadic scheme, everything starts in vagueness or firstness - the apeiron or the pure unbroken symmetry of potential. Then it develops as an increasingly definite dichotomy. You have secondness - the local concrete events that equate to the authentic you-relations in the Heideggerian view. The degrees of freedom. Then arising out of secondness, but also coming eventually to regulate it, is the thirdness of Peircean habits, or the global constraints that act downwards to shape the local events. The realm of the inauthentic in the Heideggian view.

As an aside, the Peircean view is sharp contrast to the Derridian because Derrida argued that crisp structure (ie: habits) must arise out of some ground already crisply structured. So beginnings are already complex. But Peirce instead says both the impressions and the ideas, the phenomenology and the structure, arise mutually from out of vagueness via their own self-organising process of development. If we must ask what comes first, then secondness is slightly ahead of thirdness - as the fleeting spontaneous event that then immediately implied its own context and so made possible the beginnings of a habit. Or as they would say in condensed matter physics, the fluctuation that broke the symmetry. But really, it is not a very meaningful question (because what comes first is vagueness!).

Anyway, focus on the notion of global constraints acting on local degrees of freedom (thirdness interacting with secondness to stabilise or make use of its crisp possibilities). In the beginning, when things are still very vague, the degrees of freedom are almost infinite (because they are unconstrained). And so anything happening seems essentially spontaneous and meaningless. A long way from "subjective" - a crisp POV.

Take as an example a human newborn and its relations with its own hands. At first the baby is surprised by the actions of the hands. These are just spontaneous events in its world (like everything else, including all those faces looming in and out of view). The baby has no control over the events. They are unconstrained degrees of freedom and so essentially meaningless. But pretty quickly, the baby discovers it can constrain the freedom of its digits. It moves from a realm of the random to a realm of the willed. And it can constrain the freedom of other discrete events like the looming faces. It can wail and then later call out. Then point and even signify in words.

OK, I see, if orality equates to authenticity, and if pressed, you feel Peirce sees it is as somewhat prior here to thirdness, whereas I understand Derrida might say generally of apparent oppositions that they may not exist in isolation. I wasn't aware of this difference between them.

I like the "baby" analogy, but even this from the start talks of a relationship. It is about a relationship "with". The baby is surprised “by”, and then may “constrain”. Subjectivity “wills” something (or the absence of something).

I’m not sure I have the same interpretation of Derrida, and you have clarified our different interpretations for me before, thanks. How has he argued origination from crispness? I’m of the impression that he argues for always/already.


The more the degrees of freedom of the world become constrained, the more the child comes to feel like a subjective being, a locus with a POV. Differance is important also of course. What lies outside the child's conscious control - the unconstrainable facts like the redness of red, or the pull of gravity, or the unpredictability of fellow toddlers - is just as much a part of the subjectivity. The basis of self-other. If we could regulate everything, we would be the world (in the way racecar drivers feel the car as an extension of their own bodies).


I like this thought very much.


So inauthenticity lives within us as well as without. The pure authentic would be just secondness alone - a fleeting, spontaneous, meaningless play of events. Any POV, any context, might be weakly implied (vaguely present). But by the same token, as absent as it is possible to be. Subjectivity arises as a locus (such as an infant) comes to accumulate constraints over the freedoms of what is, now, "its world". The inauthentic has to become locally resident for there to be a persistent and developing succession of authentic moments. You have to have ideas to contextualise the impressions, structure to organise the phenomenology.

Touching again on Derrida, his valuation of the written over the oral is drawing attention to something else really - the need to have a mechanism or technology to encode the constraints. A locale needs to be able to remember its history to accumulate a set of habits. The Peircean view is fundamentally developmental. But dichotomous to development is evolution. And as life and mind show, real complexity demands both.

So a biological level of mind has the coding machinery of DNA. And a sociocultural level of mind arose out of the coding machinery of syntactic language (yes, here comes Vygotsky once more).

Derrida was just pointing out that behind the highly situated and contextualised interactions of everyday orality (the you-relating) was this structuring machinery. A machinery that just becomes far more obvious in writing (as now the interaction between writer and reader has to contextualised in a more overtly "mechanical" fashion - the gaps have to be filled in explicitly).

But again - as always - becoming focused on one pole of a dichotomy leads to unbalanced scholarship. Deconstruction can quickly come to seem like an obsession with syntactical gaps. Whereas a theory of semiotics or meaning would be about the correct interaction between syntax and semantics.

And the story on that seems pretty obvious if you focus on the idea of local degrees of freedom~global constraints.

In the begining :smile: meanings were vague. A caveman went "urgh". An utterance with a huge number of degrees of freedom - especially if written down as a word, but perhaps vaguely interpretable in an intra-personal context where you were out hunting and he was also gesturing towards some prey.

Then syntactical speech got invented. A systematic way to constrain degrees of free floating meaning. The caveman could grunt "animal". Already your interpretation would have a great reduction in entropy (and so the grunt is officially information - a constraint on entropy production).

Your fellow caveman might indeed increasingly precisify his grunt, going {animal {deer}}. He would of course only say "deer", but the point here is to draw attention to the hierarchical nature of this downward acting contraint on the freedom of your mental response - your semantic state. Animal is more general. Deer rules out a great number of other animals to focus you on one particular variety of animal. You have that much less freedom about what you might have in mind at that moment.

Further syntax produces increasingly constrained or specific states of mind. So {animal {deer {Bambi}}} reduces your available degrees of freedom still more.

Now trace this precisification in terms of the authentic~inauthentic dichotomy. With weak constraint, you get weak specificity. The grunt of {animal} is the inauthentic bit that puts you in mind of some authentic you-relation with...the animal kingdom. But {animal {deer {Bambi}}} is strongly contextualised and so strongly authentic. You are looking into Bambi's doe eyes right now in your mind's eye (you have no choice).

So again, the false move is to try and make one pole of a dichotomy your fundamental. Instead, discover your rightful dichotomies and then map them back to the general logic of dichotomisation (or Peircean triads - which is the fuller view where local~global scale dichotomies arise out of vagueness as a process of eternally dynamic development.)

Nice explanation. But, just considering the last sentence for now, how does this eternal process arise?

[Sorry for the essay, but it's a rainy Sunday morning and now the sky is clearing...]

I enjoyed reading this!

[apeiron]

Nice explanation. But, just considering the last sentence for now, how does an eternal process arise?

What I have in mind here is the heat death universe for example - a process that is eternal in its striving towards the goal, but approaches that limit asymptotically, or with ever diminishing returns. The expanding and cooling of the universe need never stop, so it is eternal, but there is less and less actual progress being made all the time.

If you are asking more specifically how does it arise?, then the Peircean view would be that vagueness fluctuates and fleeting events can spark the start of a symmetry breaking.

[fuzzyfelt]

What I have in mind here is the heat death universe for example - a process that is eternal in its striving towards the goal, but approaches that limit asymptotically, or with ever diminishing returns. The expanding and cooling of the universe need never stop, so it is eternal, but there is less and less actual progress being made all the time.

If you are asking more specifically how does it arise?, then the Peircean view would be that vagueness fluctuates and fleeting events can spark the start of a symmetry breaking.

Thanks for the explanation.

Sorry, I’ve reread the post of yours that I quoted before and realise that I misunderstood. I was confused by the view expressed that Derrida argues that crispness arises from crispness, and was trying to guess at what that meant and how it differed to Peirce. Instead I’ll ask if you would explain the crispness which you say Derrida argues gives rise to more crispness?

And, I see now you had stressed the importance of the relationship in Peircean thought, too. I think in Derrida’s view the importance of relationships would remove prioritisation of any polarities.

And lastly, the seeming prioritisation of terms like “secondness” had me confused. I thought you were saying that the eternal process itself arose.

[apeiron]

Sorry, I’ve reread the post of yours that I quoted before and realise that I misunderstood. I was confused by the view expressed that Derrida argues that crispness arises from crispness, and was trying to guess at what that meant and how it differed to Peirce. Instead I’ll ask if you would explain the crispness which you say Derrida argues gives rise to more crispness?


In his critique of structualism, Derrida argues that beginnings must have "originary complexity". I am calling that crisp initial condition in the sense that something definite and already complexly structured exists. Whereas vague initial conditions would be a high symmetry fog of everything/nothing. A state of pure indeterminacy.

From Wiki....

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[44] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[45] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida


And, I see now you had stressed the importance of the relationship in Peircean thought, too. I think in Derrida’s view the importance of relationships would remove prioritisation of any polarities.

Yes, but in order of priority it would still be first, the existence of a vague potential, then some differentiation or secondness that breaks the symmetry, then the thirdness of habits or law as this symmetry-breaking takes a widespread stabilising form. In vagueness, there is not yet either a polarity or a relating - just the potential for these things to start happening.

The Peircean scheme is quite difficult to get right because it is not a familiar way of thinking at all. And also, the scheme is a little lacking in how it deals with dichotomies (even though Peirce saw himself improving on Hegel).

So Peirce would stress the relationship of event with event (secondness or dyadic relations). I would stress the greater relationship between event and context (thirdness or the interaction of local free action and global habits or constrants). Though both things are going on in Peirce's causal scheme.

Note that the polarities or dichotomies always fit into a local~global format. They are asymmetric in scale and so result in the triadic organisation that is a hierarchy.

So for example any standard Greek metaphysical dichotomy like discrete~continuous or chance~necessity. Discrete is the the local pole (point-like, marked, definite, located) whereas the continuous is the global scale (the context for discreteness, the extended, the unbroken, that which gets marked). Likewise, chance is the local spontaneous event, the local free acts, and necessity is the global constraints, the ambient laws about what must be.

And lastly, the seeming prioritisation of terms like “secondness” had me confused. I thought you were saying that the eternal process itself arose.

Yes, secondness arises out of the pure possibility of firstness or vagueness in the Peircean triadic scheme. So firstness comes first. Then there is a first weak fluctuation that produces "an event" and so the possibility of relating with any other weak fluctuations that might be occuring. If this relating constructs anything more definite, then arises the possibility of thirdness or habits/regularities. And, to make things more recursively complicated, thirdness would have to be present at least weakly even for relating fluctuations to begin to find some stable expression.

So priority is given to vagueness. And in the beginning, there is both secondness and thirdness, though secondness is only tentative or weakly developed in the first moments, and thirdness is present even more weakly, more tentatively. But later, when the world has become crisply developed, the structuring force of thirdness or habit will be the dominant player. Local freedoms or play of events will be highly constrained.

[fuzzyfelt]

In his critique of structualism, Derrida argues that beginnings must have "originary complexity". I am calling that crisp initial condition in the sense that something definite and already complexly structured exists. Whereas vague initial conditions would be a high symmetry fog of everything/nothing. A state of pure indeterminacy.

From Wiki....

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[44] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[45] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida




With caveats, as I understand Derrida, I agree that he writes of “originary complexity”, however as the quote says, “this must not be understood as an original positing”. I think, instead, it is a dynamic, open repetition, for example, interpretations changing over time and into the future, with no precise origin (" but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46]"). But in writing this I’m probably assigning it an amount of crispness which I think Derrida would avoid. So, I find it difficult to consider this a precise origin.

Although to quote out of context could make this sound a bit awkward-

“For example, the value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace."

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=Yet+we+know+that+that+concept+destroys+its+name +and+that,+if+all+begins+with+the+trace,+there+is+ above+all+no+originary+trace.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=jnzZR6xRW4&sig=-SltbKajfst5fyTOHCDRgT4vXGc&hl=en&ei=Sgv5TZ7bPIOAhQewnM3wCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
(Peirce is discussed in these pages, too.)



I edited this link out, but not finding the one I want to replace it, have edited it back in again, as fairly relevant-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2bPTs8fspk



Yes, but in order of priority it would still be first, the existence of a vague potential, then some differentiation or secondness that breaks the symmetry, then the thirdness of habits or law as this symmetry-breaking takes a widespread stabilising form. In vagueness, there is not yet either a polarity or a relating - just the potential for these things to start happening.

The Peircean scheme is quite difficult to get right because it is not a familiar way of thinking at all. And also, the scheme is a little lacking in how it deals with dichotomies (even though Peirce saw himself improving on Hegel).

So Peirce would stress the relationship of event with event (secondness or dyadic relations). I would stress the greater relationship between event and context (thirdness or the interaction of local free action and global habits or constrants). Though both things are going on in Peirce's causal scheme.

Note that the polarities or dichotomies always fit into a local~global format. They are asymmetric in scale and so result in the triadic organisation that is a hierarchy.

So for example any standard Greek metaphysical dichotomy like discrete~continuous or chance~necessity. Discrete is the the local pole (point-like, marked, definite, located) whereas the continuous is the global scale (the context for discreteness, the extended, the unbroken, that which gets marked). Likewise, chance is the local spontaneous event, the local free acts, and necessity is the global constraints, the ambient laws about what must be.



Yes, secondness arises out of the pure possibility of firstness or vagueness in the Peircean triadic scheme. So firstness comes first. Then there is a first weak fluctuation that produces "an event" and so the possibility of relating with any other weak fluctuations that might be occuring. If this relating constructs anything more definite, then arises the possibility of thirdness or habits/regularities. And, to make things more recursively complicated, thirdness would have to be present at least weakly even for relating fluctuations to begin to find some stable expression.

So priority is given to vagueness. And in the beginning, there is both secondness and thirdness, though secondness is only tentative or weakly developed in the first moments, and thirdness is present even more weakly, more tentatively. But later, when the world has become crisply developed, the structuring force of thirdness or habit will be the dominant player. Local freedoms or play of events will be highly constrained.


So, here is where my confusion lies, that something without beginning might begin, and for the existence of a relationship between things before both those things come into existence, and see some address of this.