Mind-body problem-Chomsky/Nagel

apeiron

I have absolutely no clue why Chomsky does things the way he does, other than the fact that he has clearly been well rewarded for doing so. A Skinnerian would explain superstitious behaviour in terms of ordinary operant conditioning.

Perhaps he has made an art-form of social boundary maintenance - he is great at creating a zone of incomprehension to mark the limits of a field of academic inquiry.

Like Freud and other charismatic leaders, at some point you are forced to decide whether you are fundamentally for him, or against him, as the irrationality marking the boundary of Chomsky's kingdom leaves no other choice.

And either reaction serves his purposes. Having a horde of angry enemies is as important to your reputation as having the band of devoted followers, always ready to quaff the Kool-Aid. You need both the action and the reaction to keep you perennially in the limelight of discussion.

Chomsky's even more famous political views shows he has a social talent for controversy. And it is the same tactic at work as far as I can see.

There is stuff - like this hopeful monster nonsense - you just have to swallow to join his club. And it is probably made deliberately uncomfortable. Think of it as a hazing ritual, or a cult. The nonsense does not allow you to straddle the divide in a way a reasonable person might want to. And once you have chosen to cross a divide marked by this unreason, it becomes very difficult to return. You have been cut off from your family and your only choice becomes an over-identification with the teachings of the master.

The master of course then always talks in confusing and opaque ways, so that you also get the feeling it is your failing that his teachings are not more clear. You must try harder to believe young grasshopper!

bohm2

I have no clue what you're saying. Maybe it's because this isn't really my field? Personally, I find Chomsky's philosophy pretty easy to understand, although Pinker's stuff is easier. Fodor is far more difficult. I still don't understand why he favours that 'hopeful monster" stuff but given that he's a nativist with respect to language he does offer an argument as I pointed above:

Which part of this argument do you not agree with? I mean how does a cognitive system go from a few (other animals/ancestors) to infinite? Both with respect to linguistic and mathematical stuff?

apeiron

We've already discussed the singing ape and vocal tract constraint hypothesis that would have produced a recursive phonology. That would be a gradual evolutionary change happening over perhaps 100,000 years or more.

Then the next step is the taking over of that phonal technology by semiotic mechanism and cultural evolution. More simply put, vocalisation became symbolic and H.sap took off, probably in saltatory fashion in just a few thousand years.

So first the steady exaptation, Gould's spandrel, in the evolution of fancy expressive calls. Then the sudden cultural/mental explosion once a grammatical language got invented for coding socially-useful ideas.

bohm2

That option might be viable for one who favours an environmental (importance of culture, etc.) approach but not one who espouses a nativist or "language instinct" position, like Chomsky. As I wrote above:
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm starting to favour Chomsky's versus Pinker's nativist position.

apeiron

Yeah, I can see that there are so many facts in its support.

bohm2

I provided 2 reviews on this issue above in the Susan J. Lanyon and Thesissen piece. Inside those there are many references. Lanyon's major argument is that gradual change is not consistent with the paleontological evidence. This is not to say that in the nativist camp, this is more popular than Pinker's gradualist approach. It's not, but it seems to be becoming more popular not less popular, if one accepts Lanyon's arguments. But irrespective of some increase in popularity, the issue is the paleontological evidence. Those "facts" do not strengthen the gradualist approach, or so argues Lanyon and provides many references.

bohm2

Just to add some terminology here so there's no confusion about what nativists like Chomsky are saying, here's 2 interesting quotes hi-liting the difference between E-language versus I-language (and why only the latter is a valid/scientific study of human language). That issue of Platonism is also discussed in the second quote:
A Saltational Approach for the Evolution of Human Cognition and Language
http://www.lkse.net.au/PhDThesis.pdf

Collins explains this part and the issue of Platonism by using analogy from physics:
A Question of Irresponsibility: Postal, Chomsky, and Gödel
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.p...cle/view/71/97

apeiron

But I have always said this - all the available evidence is that the human mind came on suddenly and language was the key.

The difference is that Lanyon offers no actual theory of what happened (hers is just a review of the evidence that something did) and Chomsky flaps his hands about, talking about some hominid getting struck by cosmic rays and sprouting a recursion module.

I instead argue the case that is consistent with the evidence - the one that sees first the gradual biological development of the underpinning phonal hardware followed by the very swift social evolution of the semiotic software to exploit the existing neurology in an entirely new way.

So saltatory change is not in dispute. And Lanyon does a good job on knocking down the various biologically-rooted stories on how the human mental change could have occured - the theory of mind module and other such fantasies popular in evo-psych circles.

But Lanyon (who after all is no particular expert) does not even consider the alternative story based on a Vygotskian view of language and mind. So there is no argument there to either accept or reject.

Granted that the emergence of the human mind looks to be a saltatory phenomenon, there are then three hypotheses going around.

1) There was some biological trait being actively selected which led to a radical neurological breakthrough (the general evo-psch view that fails for the reasons Lanyon mentions).

2) There was instead a radical breakthrough in evolutionary mechanism itself - the emergence of a new level of the epistemic cut/semiotic mechanism that is basic to life/mind as a phenomenon. Words, like genes, can encode the general group-level constraints that act on the development of particular individuals, so setting the scene for the explosive sociocultural evolution of the human mind.

This new phase of evolution looks "saltatory" - but only because the pace of sociocultural evolution is perhaps thousands of times faster.

3) The Chomskyian view of saltation which argues that because a "biological selection" argument does not cut it, then the biological change must have been a naked, unsupported, mutation event - the hopeful monster hypothesis.

This view does not fit with normal biology. Despite the attempts of Chomskyites to jump aboard the evo-devo movement, it does not accord with evo-devo principles. Even you appear to discount Chomsky's hopeful monster story.

Nor do the Chomskyites offer any good argument against the Vygotskian/semiotic alternative. Instead, they try to prevent it even being discussed by claiming a-priori that E-language is "ephemeral".

There is then the issue of "other factors". The standard evolutionary view emphasises Darwinian selection and so material/historical causality. But causality includes formal and final cause too.

Chomsky is hardly unique in pointing this out.

Evo-devo of course now recognises this with its talk of structural attractors, dissipative structure theory, and other top-down, rather Platonic-sounding, notions. Biosemiotics is even more explicit in modelling the role of top-down causality.

But where Chomsky differs is apparently trying to shift the full burden of explanation over to that side of things. He wants the history of material and efficient causes (the "gradual" selectionist story") to be reduced to some a-causal accident (the hopeful monster mutant who arose for no good reason by complete chance) so that formal/final cause (in the guise of "optimal computation" or such-like) becomes the whole story.

This is why Chomsky is viewed correctly as a Platonist.

I'm not sure in what way he could now be called a nativist as he has no story at all on how the semiotic machinery of language is biologically innate - not if he is arguing for this causally unbalanced hypothesis of hopeful monster~optimal computation. Where is the evidence that supports it?

Whereas the evo-devo/biosemiotic approach can point to the generally recursive/hierarchical nature of brain architecture, the novel constraint created by a serial/digital vocal tract, the social communicative value of phonal expressive calls, etc.

The true nativists in this discussion are the ones like Lieberman that can talk about the actual evolutionary biology, not the ones who are having to resort to "rabbit out of a hat" tales about hopeful monsters.

bohm2

From what I recall the papers I linked do offer many arguments against both these positions (e.g. underpinning phonal hardware and social/cultural evolution). To me the most reasonable approach is the following position advocated by Bickerton:
Bickerton also hi-lites some problems with treating language as evolving out of prior means of communication or social interaction, etc.

Language evolution: A brief guide for linguists
http://www.ucd.ie/artspgs/langevo/langevobriefly.pdf

It's Chomsky's emphasis on just recursion alone that seems hard to swallow, I think. But I'm pretty sympathetic to Chomsky's argument against adaptionalism and his emphasis on physical constraints as argued here:
Cartesian Biolinguistics
http://www.punksinscience.org/kleant..._Cartesian.pdf
You equate cultural change with evolution or do you mean something different? Consider Bickerton's argument:
P.S. I read that A. Jaerrero piece you linked and I'm about to read a piece by Butterfield that seems interesting (it wasn't):

Laws, Causation and Dynamics at Different Levels
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8745...velsRoySoc.pdf

apeiron

The Boeckx article is a good read. Nice on the philosophical history. Amusing in the conceit that the minimalist program may discover general cognitive primitives - making Chomskian linguistics again the heart of the cogsci revolution!

The point is that either/or approaches here are always going to distort the science. It is quite clear that adaptationalism can't be "everything". But then neither can rationalism. Instead, these are the two extremes that then allow a complexity to arise between them (the usual systems point of view).

So that is my problem with Chomsky - the extent to which he tries to make it all about rationalism (which leads to his programmatic rejection of E-language, mutterings about hopeful monsters, vague utterances about "other factors", etc). And equally it is why I would have a problem with SR behaviourism, or Dawkins/Dennett style neo-Darwinism. People are always splitting into opposing camps (representing the thesis and antithesis) and so failing to model the synthesis - the actual way extremes get mixed to form the resulting system.

So language evolution (and the saltatory mental change it created in H.sap, as Boeckx agrees) is going to be a mix of rationalist and empiricist factors - formal and material causes. This is just what systems are.

The question then is what are the forms that constrained language evolution? And have the Chomskyites identified the right targets for research?

Generally Chomsky's big thing has been hierarchical organisation (as the deep "cognitive" structure behind the "superficial" surface structure of the linear sentence).

But I keep pointing out that the hierarchy is not special to language. It is in fact the most general kind of organisational form. Hierarchical causality underpins the whole of reality in the systems view. And it certainly is the general form when it comes to brain architecture. So of course hierarchy is a big and foundational aspect of language, but it is not specific to language. It was not what was new when language first evolved!

Evo-devo suggests other targets for the significant change perhaps. At least, evo-devo as Boeckx understands it - the kind that focuses on self-organised criticality and edge of chaos type dynamical phenomenon. So maybe the essential rational form is something like Kauffman's autocatalytic sets?

Well yes, this kind of "Turing constraint" is important to the evo-devo approach. Creative self-organisation and dissipative structure are exactly the kind of potentials that life harnesses. This level of chemico-physical form is the raw material of biotic systems. But Boeckx is completely missing the more important realisation of theoretical biology - the still higher laws of form described by semiotics, modelling relations theory and the epistemic cut. All that Santa Fe brand complexity stuff, and Prigogine dissipative structure stuff, is a theory of nativist form for the physico-chemical realm of nature. Life/mind depends on a still more highly specified level of form.

The key, as I've said plenty of times, is the ability to construct constraints. Life/mind has semiotic mechanisms like genes and words (and in a lesser way, membranes, pores, axons, spikes) that can harness the Santa Fe/Prigogine/Turing style dynamical emergence. So if we are talking about embracing rational laws of form as a rightful part of science here, then that is what semiotics is about. It identifies the thing that is actually new and so marks a sharp evo-devo transition between the non-living and the living, the mindless and the mindful.

Semiotics is not the only candidate for the forms that define bios of course. The Bayesian paradigm has also emerged as something that seems very central to understanding life, and more especially mind. It captures the anticipatory aspect of any semiosis, and also roots the semiosis in something concretely measurable - information/entropy.

So there is a natural convergence going on there at the moment. Anticipation and constraint go together because a reduction in surprisal is dichotomously also a maximisation of behavioural variety. That is, the better you get at predicting the world, the more tightly defined become its surprises, and so in turn the more precisely you can learn the something new it takes to refine your future predictions.

Anyway, this illustrates - Boeckx's point - that none of us are naked adaptationalists here. It is basic to the systems' point of view that we must also identify the laws of form. But the system's POV also stresses that the laws of form are themselves a hierarchy. There are some very general laws (like hierarchical organisation), and then the more specified ones that identify the essential transitions, such as the kind that produce phase transitions in condensed matter physics, or separate life from non-life.

So what of language evolution? What, if anything, are the essential novelties that led to that saltatory change? What are its specific rational forms?

Recursion is not special to speech. But a strong separation between what Chomsky calls E- and I-language is. So it is in fact the relationship between the two that should be the focus of attention. It is the semiotic interaction that arises between the hierarchical (holistic) organisation and the serial (digitally-constained) expression that is the key. This is the justification for vocal tract/phonology arguments about language evolution. The first thing that had to happen was exactly this kind of serial constraint on hierarchical output.

But there is more. The step from phonology to semantics is the tricky one. And it contains the further question of whether this step was achieved mainly by genetics or by cultural learning. Although in fact - from a "laws of form" perspective - this does not really matter so much. The answer is that it is going to be a bit of both most likely. And either way, it is the organising form that matters, not the material, the medium, in which the change became encoded - biological or cultural evolution. If you are indeed embracing rationalism, then the nature vs nurture dichotomy has even less force because the action lies now somewhere more "Platonic".

Now there are two aspects to the semantics of speech - the way words, mere noises, encode meanings. And in good systems fashion, one is local, one global. Or one lexical, one syntactical.

So you have the lexical. Words, through associative learning, come to stand for particular meanings - they are symbols that reliably constrain our state of thought (or more properly, given a Bayesian perspective, constrain our state of expectation). A word like "cat" or "blue" exerts a top-down boundedness on our current thinking. And then words can be freely combined to construct even more constrained states of thought - as of course the mimimalist program recognises with its focus on the operation of merge.

So part of UG is this "universal lexicon", this ability to construct bottom-up the states of mental constraint, Bayesian expectation, that normally, in animals, only exists as top-down hierarchical organisation.

That is a genuine evolutionary novelty. It is not completely novel because, as said, genes also do the semiotic trick of constructing constraints. But it does seem a purer, less restricted, form of semiosis, or symbolism. And it may have its own completely novel aspects. Well, that is the kind of research question that can be posed once it is accepted that we are indeed exploring the laws of form, and their hierarchical complexification.

But then there is the global aspect of semantics - which the minimalist progam would appear to hope to cover with the operation of move. And this is the way that there is organising meaning at the level of sentences. Or as Chomskyites would prefer to see it, I-language.

To cut a long story short, my view is that the saltatory step here was the evolution of subject-verb-object sentence structure. Because what this did was encode the notion of efficient cause. It created the crisp mental habit of reducing reality to statements of cause and effect logic - tales of who did what to whom.

The animal mind is holistic in modelling reality. It does of course pick out efficient cause - that is what SR Behaviourism was all about. But it only does this in a contextual or situational fashion. So efficient cause remains entangled with an accompanying set of material, formal and final causes so far as the animal is concerned. A symbol like the ringing of a bell only has a meaning in a particular context (which includes final causes like whether you happen to be hungry or not, as well as other aspects of context like a history of reward in a similar experimental set-up).

So - again as Boeckx recognises - the new trick was to be able to break out of the animal mode of thought by being able to construct generalisations. Generalised models of efficient causality.

The question then arises whether this Rubicon step was a matter of biological or cultural evolution? The key thing is that this is a rational principle (what could be more rational than going back to Aristotle's foundational analysis of causality?). So what matters here is to identify it as the general crucial novelty in the human story. But then the question of whether the step was genetic or memetic is a valid subsidiary research question of interest to the paleolinguist.

So does the brain seem innately wired for subject~object distinctions? Or is the formal idea of efficient cause - the Newtonian idea that there is always a pusher and a pushee - just extremely learnable because the brain was preadapted to making long-range phonal connections?

I think the current evidence suggests that the brain is genetically more general purpose, and the habit of forming subject-verb-object structure sentences was a pretty sudden cultural invention. It crystalised a way of viewing and remembering the world that was so powerful that the small group of H.saps who developed it, took off and never looked back. Though as a meme, no reason why it would not have spread through social contact and migration.

So to sum up, rationalism is as essential to the full evolutionary view taken by systems science and theoretical biology as empiricism. The holistic view of causes demands that we seek the laws of form - the universal constraints of reality - as much as its fundamental materials, the stuff out of which complexly ordered realities get constructed.

There is then going to be a hierarchy of the laws of form. There is an emergent story in which simplicity develops into complexity. And novelties in form, in the nature of constraints, will mark the major observed transitions.

As we agree, the animal/human transition is a major one. So we should expect novel constraints to be one half of the explanation (the other half being the material/effective causes beloved of neo-Darwinism).

Chomsky certainly puts forward candidates for these novel forms. First UG, then principles and parameters, now the minimalist program. But Chomsky has always been hamstrung by his rationalist prejudices. He wants it to be the whole story (which become Platonism). And it has caused him to miss the aspects of formal organisation which are in fact the critical ones when it comes to life/mind. ie: the semiosis, the serial constraint, the epistemic cut, the Bayesian prediction.

But from an evolutionary perspective, we would expect to see a phonology-first emergence of a formal organisation (the serial constraint on hierarchical output) because otherwise how else could the necessary biological pre-adaptations be explained? The evolution of the vocal tract demands a theory, it can't be treated as a hopeful monster, and even a spandrel is pretty limp (the whole spandrel concept is weak, like all Gould's proto-evo-devo work really - again Boeckx is on the mark there).

Then the jump from phonal machinery to semantic/semiotic mechanism is a short one, in terms of further material change at least. But quickly revolutionary in terms of formal change of course. Suddenly H.sap had the machinery to construct words and sentences. To locally constrain states of thought to exact meanings, and to globally organise states of thought so that they articulated statements of efficient cause.

Suddenly you had a rational being (oh the irony!). Humans with the mental habit of viewing absolutely everything through the universal prism of cause and effect logic. And likewise, finding it hard not to reduce everything to just this one notion of cause.

The reason that there are not many systems scientists about is that the very tool of human thought - our SOV-based language - works against thinking in any other more holistic fashion.

And even the rationalists - those claiming to be investigating the laws of form - are still thinking in terms of efficient cause. Chomskyian UG is typical in talking about how hierarchical structure gets constructed from the bottom-up (when the brain itself is decomposing vague intentions into crisp hierarchical states of organisation, working from the top-down - again, the Bayesian view where global expectations constrain the information processing).

The very terms that Chomsky chooses - like I-language - betrays this basic misorientation. He sees the deep structure, ie: the global constraints of hierarchical form - as "inside". But to be more global - to be contextual and situational - the I-language has to be in fact "outside", larger in scale. It is a small but significant terminological confusion. It already sets a field on the wrong path.

Boeckx also gets things back to front with his hopeful claim that the minimalist program will prove to be foundational to the evo-devo rationalist project generally. The paleolinguistic question is certainly right at the heart of things - it is where material complexity, in the form of the human mind, is indeed the most complex. And a specific theory of the formal novelties is going to be required.

But it is hardly then foundational. Quite the reverse. Systems science, condensed matter physics, dissipative structure theory and other modelling discourses are going to provide the more general laws of form here. Then paleolinguistics has to pick up the story of the further specific laws that emerged at the crucial saltatory transition of grammatically-structured speech.

apeiron

I find Bickerton to be both usefully clear and quite disingenuous in his paper.

There is of course no actual argument made against cultural evolution here. And semiosis spells out just why words are like genes (as rate independent constraints on rate dependent dynamics). So human cultural evolution is literally evolution in the broad view taken in theoretical biology. There is a memory mechanism, a serial/digital code.

Even if you don't believe this, you at least have to make the actual argument, which Bickerton is not doing.

Same with many other parts of Bickerton's paper. For instance, he insists it is impossible for gradual change to cause sudden change. And yet has he never heard of gases turning into liquids turning into solids due to steady incremental temperature or pressure changes?

Faced with saltatory change, phase transition stories are thus precisely what we should be looking for - the sudden emergence of new global constraints in a system.

What do they say about drunks looking for their lost keys under lamp posts? If your models of causality are as scientifically limited as Bickerton's, then you are indeed going to fail to find what you seek.

[Edit: I should add that Bickerton is wrong to claim that biological evolution has stopped - remember this earlier discussion? http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...postcount=312]

bohm2

Yes, he should have been more precise and say there's no gross evolutionary changes, particularly with language. So, take a human infant from any part of the planet today or over the past ~50,000-100,000 years and bring them up in today's society. Do you think they would have any problems in learning the local language, going to school, etc? Are there any differences between the different world cultures with respect to lingustic abilities?

I'm sympathetic to Steven Pinker's quote here:
The thing that is kind of interesting to me and also confuses me is this Peirce quote by Chomsky in the 1960s:
Now, at first one would think that Chomsky is agreeing with Peirce, especially because he did/does believe that evolution of our higher cognitive structures like language/math/science may not be explained by natural selection alone but require as yet not understood physical principles/constraints/laws, etc. but he doesn't. For he writes:

apeiron

Surprisingly little given the degree of genetic change - which again suggests that the logical heart of language is more cultural than biological. SOV is more of an idea than a trait.

I see you instead want to insist that the genes involved in language/cognition must be then the part of the genome that in fact has remained stable in the face of continued change elsewhere.

But where is the evidence for that? And more tellingly, would a Chomskyite now have to argue that language/cognition is under strong selective pressure - sufficient to stabilise it at some pre-50kya setting? Or instead, that as a hopeful monster event, this part of the genome somehow got stuck, immune to further selective tuning?

Either way, the more you try to load onto the genetic basis, the more troubling the fact of continued evolution of the rest of the human genome must be. If our digestion, skin colour, muscle fibre composition, etc, are all easy to evolve, then why did cognitive abilities get frozen? What was stopping runaway improvements in working memory, critical learning periods, etc?

On the other hand, if the invention of SOV modelling of efficient causality was a one-time game changer, then it makes more sense that continued genetic change has not seen much change in base cognitive ability.

I believe he says Peirce seems right about this ability of abduction, but his explanation of it does not hold.

And I agree. As already discussed, Peirce returns to his Unitarian roots and gets too mystic, touched by the finger of god, at this point.

But Chomsky's purpose is to then use this "mystery of abduction" to suggest that evolution works occasionally in a similar fashion - making its inexplicable abductive jumps in genetic design, its hopeful monsters, that are not random leaps in the dark but instead intelligent and fruitful guesses.

It is baloney. But there you are. Chomsky is pretty much all alone when it comes to his hopeful monsters view of genetics.

bohm2

Just to return to the mind-body problem here's an interesting quote from Penrose that seems in tune with Eddington's/McGinn's arguments:
Shadows of the mind
http://books.google.ca/books?id=gDbO...usness&f=false

apeiron

Yes, some things have been clarified. Generally, our models of reality have to deal with both substance and form as fundamental issues. Reductionism does this by talking about local materials which have inherent properties, while the holistic or systems view of reality talks about local degrees of freedom in interaction with global bounding constraints.

So a panpsychist is reductionist in seeking an explanation to something "higher order" like complexity or mind in terms of the micro-scale properties of the material realm, while the equivalent systems project is pansemiosis - the search for the ultimately simple, yet essentially scalefree, description of the "localised degrees of freedom in interaction with global constraints" relationship.

Penrose starts out acknowledging the importance of formal cause - global organisation - but his thinking quickly collapses into the search for some panpsychic property of matter.

His "non-computability" is of course the same as Peirce's abduction in talking about the ability of minds to think holistically about causality. Computability is again just the world according to SOV logic - modelling in terms of efficient causality, simple deterministic cause-and-effect. And the "non-computable" part of thought is the abductive jump to general principles, such as axioms, which then can be tested against reality for their pragmatic value. Humans can cope with vagueness or indeterminacy as a starting point for forming a systems view of what is going on. Turing machines can't.

Penrose - a card-carrying Platonist - does try to make some kind of systems sense of the issue with his "three worlds/three mysteries" model of metaphysics. He creates a self-closing circle of the three realms of form, material and mind. He says each arises from some small part of the prior and then fully encompasses the latter. So mind arises from a small part of total material possibility, form arises from a small part of total mental possibility, and materiality arises from a small part of total formal possibility. You go round in a circle with each realm having a restricted starting point that then unfolds into a new species of causal action.



So this is beyond dualism, and is a triadic story (like Popper, and of course Peirce/hierarchy theory).

As a grand metaphysical view, it has the interesting ring of truth to it perhaps. It seems superficially attractive.

But consider what is actally going on. First it fails completely as a causal model. It is not telling us in what way each realm creates the next - in either a constructive or constraining fashion.

And then it only works at all by confounding the human creation of formal concepts (ie: epistemology, the modelling relation) with the actual existence of formal cause (ie: an ontological acceptance of the downward causality due to constraints). And also of course by accepting an ontological dualism of the mental and the material.

So (as befits a topologist ) he posits three ontic realms - formal, material, mental - then glues them into a circle by an illegal splicing of the formal realm. The mind's epistemic generation of mathematical models gets discretely twisted into the ontic concept of formal causality so that the connection can be made back to the material realm.

Confused? Penrose certainly is.

The Peircean or systems view does it differently. All arises out of the one-ness (firstness) of vagueness, then via dichotomistic separation (secondness) becomes the triadic causal relationship of a hierarchy (thirdness).

So it is a developmental view rather than the circular or Ouroboros logic Penrose uses. And it is a causal view because you end up with global constraints in interaction with local degrees of freedom (as the formal and material "realms"). And then you get reality itself as that which arises due to the action of this causality on a ground of raw potential, or vagueness. So reality is just whatever crisply exists within the constrasting limits of upwards and downwards causes. And this reality spans the gamut from the simple to the complex.

Something further is then required to explain this spectrum. Which is where some kind of thermodynamics must come in. Complexity is tied to the dissipation of gradients. Negentropy is the partner of entropification.

Which gets us back to pansemiosis - the story of how constraints get constructed. This is something that happens over all scales, from the simple to the complex. And the "realm" of mind is semiosis at its most negentropic, at its most complex. The reductionist question that Penrose wants to ask then comes down to an understanding of semiotic mechanism - what is the "least" form it takes. When the material world is being organised by downwards constraint, what is the simplest possible example of this kind of interaction?

As said, reality has gone through some phase transitions so far as semiosis is concerned. You have a step from genomic to memetic semiosis. And an even bigger one from a-biotic to biotic semiosis (as in the step from non-living dissipative structures such as gyres to living ones such as cells). The project for pansemiosis is then to define the essential causal mechanism in a way so general that it can encompass all these complicating transitions.

Panpsychism? Well that has only ever proved to be a cul-de-sac of metaphysical thought. An easy and tempting path for the reductionist to head down. But it is a blind alley, leading nowhere.

Penrose tries to suggest there is a magic door out of this cul-de-sac - his topology cut-and-splice trick with epistemology/ontology which rotates you through human modelling and back out into formal cause behind the concealing cloak of a "third Platonic realm".

Shazzam, a theatrical wave of the wand, and you are stumbling blinking again into the street marked Materialism, ready for your next go-around of his Ouroboros coil.

A systems theorists instead says there are no "local properties", only a top-down restriction on degrees of freedom that thus creates degrees of freedom of some definite kind. The material "realm" is just as much an emergent aspect of reality as the global constraints which constitute "Plato's Heaven".

Which is not a bad thing, because all definite things are emergent in the systems view.

bohm2

I never understood what is meant by the Platonic world. I always considered abstract objects like mathematical objects as mental stuff. So when Penrose writes this quote for me this seems more an argument for mathematical objects being innate and mental stuff:

I mean except for being quite specific, this isn't different than the way internalists like Chomsky treat linguistic concepts:
It's not surrprising that Chomsky thinks the two are related:
Some simple evo-devo theses: how true might they be for language?
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...gO76OQ4A&pli=1

To be honest, the more I read on this stuff, the more I'm persuaded by both the internalist and nativist view.

apeiron

But that quote from Penrose says the opposite.

Even if the ontic status of the natural numbers (and other mathematical forms) is "conceptual", he is still claiming an ontic and not an epistemic distinction.

And I don't actually disagree with the idea that forms objectively exist in some fashion (as well as also having a separate epistemic existence as the models humans may create of them).

Rather what I was drawing attention to was the way Penrose does make the mistake of mind/matter dualism, that he does confuse the epistemic and the ontic in his characterisation of the "Platonic mathematical world" so as to set-up his triangular circuit, and he fails to take a systems-style view of the relationship between form and substance, such as for example Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphic form.

The Aristotlean approach differs in crucial details, such as the fact that the only forms that "objectively exist" are the ones that are indeed materially possible. Penrose explicitly says that he sees all mathematical truths as "objectively existing", even if only a limited subset then are materially incarnated in the "physical world".

So these are not just minor quibbles.

You say you view abstract objects as just mental creations. That is fine as an epistemological view. We would say concrete objects - energy, particles, charge - are just as much free creations of the human mind.

But Platonism is about ontology. And it is just as big a metaphysical claim to say abstract objects don't exist as to assert they do. Neither view is uncontroversial. And a major part of the systems view is showing how forms can objectively exist as "constraints".

Calling them abstract objects creates the problem that it sounds as though you want to grant them material existence. But that is exactly - dichotomously - what they mustn't have. So instead we give them a name that makes it clear in what sense they exist. Ie: in the fashion of global constraints.

I'm delighted.