Brains create consciousness?

apeiron

I see it differently because generalisation should produce two things - two halves of a dichotomy, two poles of a spectrum, two levels of a hierarchy. And so we can remain "within" what we produce. If we only imagine monistic options, then we are putting ourselves "outside" looking on.

Subjectively, for instance, the world seems patchily both broken and smooth. We then generalise from this experience to create the metaphysical dichotomy of discrete~continuous to represent the two limiting extremes of what could be the case. Just imagining all reality to be fundamentally discrete would be monistic and leaving us standing outside. But imagining reality instead to be bounded in these two opposed directions means that we can remain inside, living in a reality that is still just a patchy mix and suspended between two limiting cases.

It should be no surprise this is our actual situation when it comes to physical theory. We have to one side (the local scale) a theory of reality as a discrete grain of events (QM), and to the other side (the global scale), a theory of reality as a continuous dynamical fabric (GR). And attempts to collapse one extreme into the other (QG) is a project that keeps floundering in paradox.

So the internalist approach says the apparent dualism of QM~GR is what we should expect to find - reality crisply differentiated in the most general way possible, and then ourselves inside it. To collapse the crisply differentiated into a single monistic generalisation (QG) would put us outside reality, and it doesn't really work.

Now I believe that you can collapse QM~GR back into some prior "monistic" state, but it would be a vague state, a perfect symmetry. Not a crisp monistic generalisation. You would have to collapse, in effect, both the local and the global, both the notions of the discrete and the continuous. So the primal QG state is neither discrete nor continuous, merely the potential to become divided towards these opposing crisp limits.

Sorry, getting a little off track here. But the point is that internalism in systems science/hierarchy theory/Peircean semiotics is motivated by this idea that limits always come in complementary pairs and so we always have something definite to either side when we generalise and objectify our ideas.

Now your goal is to have a relational view of reality. So you say instead of focusing on the point like actors, you will build a model around their point-to-point interactions.

But this is monistic as you are still outside looking down at these individual events or histories. You stand in the (undefined) larger space or void in which there is a play of atomistic relating. Because you want to deal with events isolated at an instant, you don't account for the generally passing time within which all these events are located.

A more complete Peircean approach would be properly hierarchical. First you have the something that can happen (the local fluctation). Then you have the interactions that fluctuations make possible (the dyadic interaction you want to focus on). But then you have over time the generalised organisation that results from a free play of localised relating. You have a global system that has developed definite habits that constrain the relating.

So internalism is not imagining the view of actors interacting with each other - that is still an atomistic or local scale of analysis. It is about local actors interacting with global constraints - the systems view in which you are generalising the opposing extremes of scale and so placing yourself, as the observer, in the middle of things.

I think it definitely clarifies physics - it makes more sense of QM~GR and QG for a start. It is a more suitable ontology than monistic atomism.

Hierarchy theory is also the best model for making sense of brains and minds that I have come across. It really works in my experience.

Systems thinking grew out of Naturphilosophie, Schelling and Hegel.

pftest

The only types of thresholds you will find are those where process undergoes a 'dramatic' increase. For example, a single drop of water might cause a filled bucket to tip over. It may seem dramatic, but its still just water in motion, just like the single drop that caused it.

There isnt really a boundary between life and inanimate matter either, its just that when we compare an organism with a rock, we place them on opposite extremes of the spectrum and label them as such. But a spectrum it is, just like with the pile of sand. "Pileness" isnt a physical property that pops into existence at some point, its just label we attach to some configuration of physical ingredients. Labelling things is very useful socially (to communicate), but it isnt an indicator of the emergence of new physical properties. If it were, then a rock would get all kinds of new properties when a japanese person observes it.

This is why many people say that life is just chemistry, that it doesnt contain any extra properties, while others say that the whole universe is alive. In the OP paper Strawson also mentions that life is reducible.

A signal is only a signal when it means something to an observer. Someone might flash a light at you with certain intervals and you may receive a message this way, but otherwise it is just a bunch of photons. Talking about rocks and signals, have a look at this article:

nismaratwork

Panpsychic Solipsism? Ow, my head.

Again, who is saying that the universe is alive? If you want the boundary that straddles what is living and what is inert, see Virus. In my view, you're overcomplicating this for the sake of your pre-existing beliefs. Then again, maybe I'm just tired of the pure philosophy interpretations of QM Interpretations... to say that much is lost in the translation is a grotesque understatement.

pftest

I dont see any counterarguments in your post, so i think my point has been made.

nismaratwork

You didn't observe it so it doesn't exist?


There is this as well... http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...1&postcount=32

Not that it really needs to be repeated.

I will ask again, who is saying that the universe is alive?

apeiron

But this can't be the case if information has been defined in a way that removes all internal structure and leaves only an externalist perspective. There is no room inside a physicalist definition of information for meaning, and hence any kind of experience.

Hence a natty slogan, but also a vacuous statement.

Information theory was all about removing particular observers so as to be able describe signals in a general way. It was in fact about making a sharp distinction between meaning and marks, symbols and the ideas they might refer to.

So the "objective view" became the generalised idea that any mark could potentially be meaningful (to someone or something). But a mark needs to be made on a surface to be actually distinctive. A bit must have a context.

So this now also gives us a new objective definition of meaningfulness as the amount of information discarded or actively suppressed. It is the work done to make that flat surface which can be marked, that global context in which a distinctive event can be detected. Noise is not noise but actually a measure of the entropy dissipated in order to manufacture a bit of information.

You can see this pretty easily with consciousness. A meaningful state of awareness is about all the potential experience that has been actively suppressed. If you are thinking of a rabbit, it is a distinctive mental state because of all the other things you know and could have been thinking about, but aren't. The more constrained your mental state - now think about a pet rabbit you had as a kid - the more alternative experiences you have discarded and so the more intensely-felt is your current state of consciousness.

So information has no inside. It is atomistic. It is a limit, a boundary state. It is the smallest detectable mark - which in turn requires that there be the globally flattest surface possible. A mark can only exist to the extent that there is a global state that is removing, discarding, all other potential marks surrounding it.

The slogan should thus be that physics (ie: information theory) is imagining a world of marks without contexts, while experience involves the manufacturing of meaningfully marked states of organisation.

Or more succinctly, physics is information without context, experience is information with context.

So panpsychism fails as experience demands rich contexts and active entropification.

A rock has few internal degrees of freedom and is a poor entropifier. It can absorb radiation at a high wavelength and re-radiate it at a lower one. So it does some dissipation. But very limited.

Something living however is continually manufacturing meaning by disposing of negentropy. The throughput is high. And the internal states (of the system) are accordingly rich. There is a high degree of informational order because of the large amount of waste heat, or disordering, being exported.

This dissipative organisation in fact gives a subjective POV. A rock re-radiating sunlight creates only a shallow entropy gradient. But it does still have a distinctive orientation to the world. There is information in the fact it exists at that location and is dissipating the sun's photons. So stretching definitions, the rock is conscious or experiencing in this sense - it has a POV.

But the rock is a holonomic device. Its global organisation is fixed - the electrostatic bonds that holds in atoms in a crystaline lattice were long locked into place by the cooling of magma. So the dissipation achieved by a heated jiggling of the atoms is not a complex story. There is no internal organisation that is thinking rabbits instead of cats, dogs and geese. Or even its hot, time to get into the shade before I crack.

But living things have non-holonomic constraints. They can organise their internal states to have internal meaning. There are alternative paths that can be taken. A lizard can choose to go sit in the sun to warm up, then retreat to the shade to cool down.

The POV is clearly far more meaningful - there is now "something that it is like to be" a hot lizard, because there is also something it is like to be as a cold lizard. Whereas a rock just be whatever it is with no choice. It's dissipative actions are entirely outside itself - a matter of whether the sun shines - and not something that it can meaningfully regulate by changing its relationship with the world.

So the sun's heat means something to a lizard, it means nothing to a rock. Physics can say the hot photons are just information. Their entropification is just rearranged information. And the dissipation - the shift from ordered to disordered states - is meaningful only in the god's eye view enjoyed by the second law. It sees what's going on. Indeed what must happen as a global constraint on reality.

But a systems view, one that can account for non-holonomic constraints and complexity in general, can distinguish meaning from information. The systems view also counts the information discarded, not just the information present. It sees the whole, rather than the parts, the creation of the surface as well as the making of the marks.

nismaratwork

A natty slogan, possibly why it's in the Times and not in a peer reviewed journal where laughter would resound.

ConradDJ

I'm sorry, it's the end of my workday and I'm too worn down to respond intelligently to your post -- I'll try in the morning. But I just want to say, this is a very cool idea. For a moment, I felt like I could see your metaphysics from inside, and the dualities became palpable... "being here" as being pulled in opposite directions. Except that the "pull" in each direction is quite different, not at all symmetrical...

Really, whatever this existence-environment is that we're each seeing from inside, from our own viewpoints, I think that it's made of more different kinds of structure than these dualities. But I love the image of "producing a dichotomy that we remain inside..."

Conrad

nismaratwork

Apeiron: he's not a little eloquent.

apeiron

Ahh, the next key idea now is equilibrium. You are being pulled from two directions (or pushed and prodded). But a system is developed when these contrasting forces or causalities are in balance over all scales (so isotopic and homogeneous for all possible scales of observation by observers within the system).

So the dualities are asymmetric (pulling from opposite ends of scale), but then locally symmetric because they are in a constant dynamic balance.

It is the old edge of chaos story. The criticality story. A fractal situation. If reality is being pulled on by two limits like the discrete and the continuous, then at any scale of observation, there is a fruitful mix of both things going on.

Thus you get classical mechanics arising as the balance between QM and GR. From inside the system, you cannot see that spacetime is locally grainy, or that it is globally curved. Everything within a decohered inertial frame looks differentiable and flat. There is no sense of being pulled in a direction if the "forces" acting on you are balanced.

[Edit]: Note a concrete example of how this works in the very maths of fractals.

The fractal dimension of a Koch curve (the equilibrium balance of the interative symmetry breaking) is log4/log3, or 1.26.....

So you have a basic ratio of a line 3 units long becoming broken out into a curve 4 units long. Then taking the log breaks the symmetry over all possible scales.

The "local" here is the 1D line as an element. The "global" is the 2D plane that is an extra dimension where the symmetry can break towards. And the "pull" of both limits is then seen over all physical scale.

Pythagorean

They're not contradictory at all! That's my point. Not that you can't do what you want, but that what you want is already determined by your genetic and sitmuli history. The act of you "subjectively" making a decision is the deterministic process playing itself out.

The alternative, that things are non-deterministic (random) wouldn't look very good for free will. either. There's really no room for free will anywhere without inventing something new! But there's room for willpower of course, as you said. We still subjectively feel the decision-making process as an integral part of our lives (whether it's inhibiting our own behavior or fighting the odds of our environment).

ConradDJ

I'm just not grasping what you mean by "free will", I guess. What exactly is it that "there's no room for", whether the universe is deterministic or not?

The evidence strongly suggests that at the quantum level, when systems interact, new information gets created. Decisions get made that are dependent on a context of prior conditions, but not uniquely "determined" by them.

That pretty much corresponds to my experience of the world, too. What I do and what happens around me is not random, and not independent of past history. If complex past situations didn't carry over into the present, if physical interaction weren't very precisely reliable, lawful, predictable, there would only be chaos here -- no atoms, no molecules, no chemistry, no life, and certainly no sort of "free will" worth talking about.

It seems to me that in order for there to be anything at all resembling "free will", we need a world that's both very highly "deterministic" and also open to new possibilities. And that seems to be exactly the sort of world we live in. The evidence is that chance rather than lawfulness is at the bottom of things. But there are so many levels of structure in the world, each characterized by a different way of combining randomness with order. So I'm wondering... what kind of world could better provide for something like "free will"?

Pythagorean

Ok, let's start this way. Define what you mean by free will.

ConradDJ

Now here's a real problem... can we usefully define something that neither you nor I seem to care about?

I have the impression, from discussions in this forum, that some people strongly feel that they have the power to make decisions, but they also believe that this is somehow in contradiction to what physics tells us about the world. I think we've agreed there is no such contradiction?

Because when I say "I" decide something, I'm not pretending to be independent of any prior history or conditions, whether inside my brain or out there in the world. "I" means, whatever decides what I'm deciding right now. If you want to claim that it's a "causal chain of determinism" that's bringing about the decision, I think you're exaggerating... though not entirely wrong. But I don't see why it makes any difference in this context.

Ken G

It almost sounds like you still believe that determinism is a self-consistent ontology for the process of perception and reason. Are you aware that it is not consistent with physics? Determinism in physics is not an ontology, it is a tool, like a hammer. Nothing more, that is quite demonstrably true about physics. Those who elevate determinism to an ontology are choosing a belief system, which is their prerogative, but it ain't physics.
That is hardly the alternative! That false dichotomy exposes the fundamentally incorrect assumptions that lie at the very foundation of your argument.

nismaratwork

Well said, and I'd add... preference has little to do with forming reality... unless solipsists are correct and then it's all a moot point anyway.

Ken G

I think another way to express this key issue is the question of whether we should subordinate the "self" to the "environment" (or the mental to the physical is another way to slice it), or subordinate the environment to the self, or simply say that both the concept of self and the concept of the environment stem from the interaction between the two. To me, the first choice is clearly wrong and the second choice is better but has problems (largely that the self appears to be made of the same basic "stuff" as the environment, there's no clear delimiter), but the third makes a lot of sense.