Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[apeiron]

See Prigogine, for instance, who used Markov (i.e, stochastic, as opposed to deterministic) models and always spoke against determinism:

Yes, Prigogine certainly gets it when it comes to indeterminism/vagueness. And his work is really about dissipative structure rather than chaos. So it is as much about the order half of the equation as the disorder. He is explicitly tackling the issues of constraints.

You're still focusing too much on the word chaos.

Well you raised it and then cited a journal that quote definitions that take a standard reductionist stance. You obviously believed this was central in some way here.

Prigogine, of course, could hardly be accused of simple-minded reductionism. A completely different kettle of fish (and very controversial in his day because of it).

A nonholonomic system is just one that is path-independent (there is a specific definition that can be applied to a system to test this) and changing constraints can be investigated through bifurcation theory. There's also "symbolic dynamics" which can be modeled through Markov partititions.

OK, you don't see a difference when words or genes are in control of the dynamics. But then you admit you are not even familiar with the Santa Fe brand of complexity. So perhaps you are describing the view from a somewhat restricted sampling of the phase space?

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, as far as I remember the only direct question I've left hanging is the issue of brute facts (please remind me if I've forgotten other questions you've posed).

I would certainly remind you if I thought it would make a difference to the likelihood of getting an answer.

But why not start with the question Bohm2 asked in https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3509579&postcount=131

But where you seem to be happy with positing it at some vague mid level of reality,

What is vague about saying life starts with DNA and human-level mentality starts with words?

Both of these are definite levels of semiosis, definite examples of the epistemic cut.

Phase transitions from ice to water to vapor are sharp at one level of description: the molecular bonds.

Oh yes I see now. All three are clearly different at the molecular level of observation, but step back and it becomes quite impossible to see any difference between a solid, liquid or a gas. Silly me.

I trust this little gem of analysis will make it into your JCS paper. For anyone wavering on the merits of the panspychic argument, this should definitely decide them one way or the other.

 

[Gold Barz]

The reason being is that the development is said to happen via a specific process - call it semiosis, or the epistemic cut. A specific model of causality, the systems model, is being invoked.

In this theory, what "drives" this semiosis?

 

[bohm2]

For me, mysterianism is a copout, a giving up. It's a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. For me and many others like me, thinking about consciousness and other grand questions is as fun in its process as it is in its conclusions. And, frankly, each of us could simply pronounce the hard problem solved well enough for own needs and thus pronounce mysterianism wrong. This raises the question of what constitutes an explanation, more generally. When will the majority of philosophers and scientists consider the hard problem solved? Ever?

I don't think anybody is going to give up. For the reasons you mention. But these authors just raise the possibility that it may be one of those questions that may, in principle, be beyond our cognitive powers. That seems reasonable to me, given our lack of progress, I think. I mean, look at other animals. Are we not part of the animal kingdom? If we are, it seems rational that we also must have cognitive limitiations. To make the assertion that we don't have such cognitive limitiations is to assert that we are god-like, I think? But one can fully agree with cognitive closure/epistemic boundedness but still believe in infinite growth of that knowledge. To use an analogy used by those who espouse this view, the set of prime numbers is infinite but it does not exhaust the set of all natural numbers. Consider Richard Popkin:

(while) absolutely certain grounds (cannot) be given for our knowledge, we (still) possesses standards for evaluating the reliability and applicability of what we have found out about the world (thus) accepting and increasing the knowledge itself (while) recognising that the secrets of nature, of things-in-themselves, are forever hidden from us...This kind of knowledge is not that which previous dogmatic philosophers had sought, knowledge of the real nature of things. Rather it consists of information about appearances and hypothesis and predictions about the connections of events and the future course of experience.

 

[apeiron]

In this theory, what "drives" this semiosis?

It would be evolution and development. The development part is conventional dynamics - self-organisation as a system rolls down an entropy gradient. The evolutionary part is conventional Darwinian competition.

In biology, this is part of the evo-devo perspective. Semiosis would be the process that connects the two aspects.

 

[bohm2]

It would be evolution and development. The development part is conventional dynamics - self-organisation as a system rolls down an entropy gradient. The evolutionary part is conventional Darwinian competition.

In biology, this is part of the evo-devo perspective. Semiosis would be the process that connects the two aspects.

On this topic I found these stats (if accurate) interesting:

The Naïve Nativist Model

The human brain is estimated to contain roughly 100 billion = 10¹¹cells, each of which has between 100 and 10,000 synapses, leading to at least 10¹⁴ synapses in the brain. To specify 1 of 10¹¹ cells exactly, you need 37 bits. Therefore, to specify simply the connecting cell corresponding to each synapse you would need 37 x 10¹⁴ bits (and to specify the synaptic weight you would need at least eight bits per synapse). There are about 3 billion (3 x 10⁹) base pairs in mammalian genome, so even if the genome was fully dedicated to specifying brain structure (which it is not) and had perfect coding in an information-theoretic sense, we would have a shortfall of at least 5 orders of magnitude to specify the connections in a human brain: We have1/10,000th of the DNA we would need to code the detailed wiring of our brains. This ‘gene shortage’ has led scholars like Paul Ehrlich to conclude that little of our behavior could possibly be innate. Let us therefore similarly consider an exclusive role for the environment.

The Naïve Empiricist Model

Let us optimistically suppose that we learn something from our environments every second, waking or asleep, of our lives. There are 31 million seconds in a year (3.15 x 10⁷). If we live to 100, that’s just 3 x 10⁹ seconds (roughly the number of base pairs in the genome). The first five years of life, when most language learning is occurring, contain only 15 x 10⁷ seconds. Even the most fortunate and well-stimulated baby has this paltry number of environmental inputs available to specify 10¹⁴ synapses. Although we can hope that many synapses are influenced by each environmental input, this doesn’t help unless each input event, is very highly structured, carrying a large amount of optimally coded information. This seems optimistic, to say the least. Thus the naïve empiricist faces the same vast information shortfall as the naïve nativist.

The Naïve Evolutionist Model

Finally, for completeness, consider the plight of a different type of nativist: An idealized ‘evolutionary empiricist’ who suggests that natural selection alone has programmed behavior. Vertebrate evolution has occupied about a billion (10⁹)years. If we optimistically hypothesize a few bits of information per generation to accumulate, that’s only a few billion bits again (and of course any particularities of the human brain have had far less time —roughly, 6 x 10⁶ years — to accumulate). Again a vast information shortfall exists, of roughly the same order: This one a shortage of evolutionary time. Are we to conclude from this little exercise that development is impossible? Or that the evolution of the brain could not have occurred? No, such basic considerations force us to reject overly simplistic models, and to conclude that both the naïve nativist (genome as blueprint) and naïve empiricist/evolutionist (environment as instructor) viewpoints are woefully inadequate models. Such considerations quickly lead all serious thinkers on these problems to realize that understanding any aspect of development and evolution requires understanding the interactions between DNA and the world beyond the cell nucleus. Despite its tiresome persistence, ‘nature versus nurture’ is a sterile conceptual dead-end, and any valid answer must consider ‘nature via nurture’ in some form or other.

http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes/courses/UCY10S/IBL/material/Fitch_Prolegomena.pdf

 

[Pythagorean]

Well you raised it and then cited a journal that quote definitions that take a standard reductionist stance. You obviously believed this was central in some way here.

If that the signal you are receiving, it's the incorrect one. I actually specifically talked about what the central idea was (the whole discussion about "new science" being in quotes) and how it relates to the epistemic cut, in response to the question of where the philosophy ends and the science starts (i.e. the answer was there is no such fine line).

The complexity I speak of is an integrationist approach, not a reductionist approach, but it's not in denial of the valid applications of reductionism; if that's what your'e saying, I agree. But denying that reductionism is valid at all is crackpot.

This is the same with determinism, but you have to be careful with separating the philosophical from mathematical definition of deterministic. The study of complexity (even when published in Chaos) enjoys several noise injections, markov partitions, and other stochastic hybrids. None of them are truly "deterministic" in the hard mathematical definition, but this does not imply they are "indeterministic" or completely stochastic either.

But that is all completely irrelevant to the philosophical question of whether the universe is deterministic or even the models we're studying are actually representing a deterministic system. All that can be said is where the models work. So you can't go projecting what people have what philosophy based on the language in their scientific journals because philosophies can be held completely independent of what's published in a journal through the social peer-review process (which produces expectations in the first place, leading to anticipatory writing of the journal, but also gets directly edited as a result of the peer-review process itself).

Anyway, it's only human nature to separate stochastic from deterministic; nature does not partition them so neatly.

OK, you don't see a difference when words or genes are in control of the dynamics. But then you admit you are not even familiar with the Santa Fe brand of complexity. So perhaps you are describing the view from a somewhat restricted sampling of the phase space?

There's really a lot of pretense in this paragraph... but for the sake of your clarity, no, I never said I don't see the difference between a biological system and the more general dynamical system. My sampling size of the topic 'complexity' is restricted to my interests: biological applications.

But it is well known within the complexity community that the language and beliefs across the field internationally are rampantly diverging and different, so we can't be pretentious when we talk to each other or the fields we interact with, whether it be physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or sociology; we have to carefully lay out our language and go over topics several times so that everybody is on the same page.

 

[apeiron]

On this topic I found these stats (if accurate) interesting:

That is a good ballpark argument as far as the figures go. And quite correct that it long ago killed the either/or approach. This is why theoretical biology focuses on evo-devo, semiosis and systems thinking.

Pattee's analysis after all starts with just a humble protein. We can see how DNA might completely specify a sequence of amino acids, but how an ambient environment then causes the chain to ball up into an actual shape. The epistemic cut in a nutshell.

The brain develops the same general way. But how do we now model this story? Is information still the right metric? Are we still dealing with the determinstic and computable? Etc, etc.

 

[apeiron]

If that the signal you are receiving, it's the incorrect one. I actually specifically talked about what the central idea was (the whole discussion about "new science" being in quotes) and how it relates to the epistemic cut, in response to the question of where the philosophy ends and the science starts (i.e. the answer was there is no such fine line).

What do you mean by "epistemic cut" here. It sounds different to the definition I was referencing.

I'm talking about Pattee's distinction between rate independent coded information and rate dependent dynamical processes. This is the critical part missing from models of complexity which try to rely just on dynamism, even non-linear or chaotic.

You seem to be talking about a dividing line between philosophy and science, or something else. That would certainly explain your earlier rather baffling posts in this thread.

There is clearly plenty being lost in translation here.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Even if one was to accept panpsychism with respect to treating the quantum field/pilot wave as a proto-mental/informational pole, the pilot wave affects no other particles but its own. This is inconsistent with telepathy.

bohm2, how so?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

I would certainly remind you if I thought it would make a difference to the likelihood of getting an answer.

But why not start with the question Bohm2 asked in https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3509579&postcount=131



What is vague about saying life starts with DNA and human-level mentality starts with words?

Both of these are definite levels of semiosis, definite examples of the epistemic cut.



Oh yes I see now. All three are clearly different at the molecular level of observation, but step back and it becomes quite impossible to see any difference between a solid, liquid or a gas. Silly me.

I trust this little gem of analysis will make it into your JCS paper. For anyone wavering on the merits of the panspychic argument, this should definitely decide them one way or the other.

Mockery, the last refuge of scoundrels. I thought you were interested in serious and dispassionate debate about ultimate issues.

apeiron, you have used the word "vague" yourself many times. Check what you've written. You seem to be changing your position now in asserting that life emerges with DNA. I agree this is less vague but now it suffers from arbitrariness. Why DNA? Why not RNA? What about Dyson's suggestion that life began before DNA and then merged with DNA? What about computer life? What about non-DNA biological life?

As for words being the origin of consciousness and the epistemic cut this is even worse. So are babies not conscious; do babies have no epistemic cut? I'm not interested in where "human level mentality" starts and this has not been the topic of discussion until you raised it. We're talking about consciousness as a general feature of the universe. Where does it arise and why? I've offered a logically coherent framework that is fully naturalistic and matches the existing data.

You offer mockery, vagueness and now arbitrariness.

 

[apeiron]

Mockery, the last refuge of scoundrels. I thought you were interested in serious and dispassionate debate about ultimate issues.

Well you aren't doing much of the latter. Am I suppose to take seriously your remark that solids, liquids and gases are not obvious transitions at the macro-scale?

If you want to go back and correct yourself, explain further, please do. But mockery is the only option you are now chosing to leave me here.

apeiron, you have used the word "vague" yourself many times. Check what you've written. You seem to be changing your position now in asserting that life emerges with DNA. I agree this is less vague but now it suffers from arbitrariness. Why DNA? Why not RNA? What about Dyson's suggestion that life began before DNA and then merged with DNA? What about computer life? What about non-DNA biological life?

Return to post 130 where I specifially argued the case for RNA as the vaguer precursor to the development of the robustly divided epistemic cut we know as DNA/dynamical processes.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3509551&postcount=130

And I've cited Pattee's papers on artificial life quite a number of times.

As for words being the origin of consciousness and the epistemic cut this is even worse. So are babies not conscious; do babies have no epistemic cut? I'm not interested in where "human level mentality" starts and this has not been the topic of discussion until you raised it. We're talking about consciousness as a general feature of the universe. Where does it arise and why? I've offered a logically coherent framework that is fully naturalistic and matches the existing data.

You offer mockery, vagueness and now arbitrariness.

As you can check by re-reading, I have said language is the semiotic mechanism that enabled a transition from an animal level mentality to the human socialised mind with all its familiar add-ons.

What you call consciousness confuses a whole bunch of levels of development (as you must to give panpsychism even a prima facie plausability).

 

[apeiron]

bohm2, how so?

If telepathy is a direct connection between minds, then how does an "experiential" pilot wave help that offers precisely no such connection, one to another?

 

[Pythagorean]

What do you mean by "epistemic cut" here. It sounds different to the definition I was referencing.

I'm talking about Pattee's distinction between rate independent coded information and rate dependent dynamical processes. This is the critical part missing from models of complexity which try to rely just on dynamism, even non-linear or chaotic.

You seem to be talking about a dividing line between philosophy and science, or something else. That would certainly explain your earlier rather baffling posts in this thread.

There is clearly plenty being lost in translation here.

Well, this is the whole point though. To simplify it, the rate-dependent dynamical process is the 'science' part, the 'rate independent coded information' is the 'philosophical' part. Symbolism is developed naturally and is seemingly arbitrary, but matter is measurable and dependable.

or to paraphrase Pattee by quoting Hoffmeyer

Howard Pattee has claimed that an epistemic cut separates the world from observers and therefore from organisms.

Of course, I'm not saying that we all agree what the bridge for the epistemic cut is, but most of us recognize that there's a line that's difficult to cross with the standard approach.

So to return to this:

I'm talking about Pattee's distinction between rate independent coded information and rate dependent dynamical processes. This is the critical part missing from models of complexity which try to rely just on dynamism, even non-linear or chaotic.

This is exactly what bifuraction theory allows for. Maps from one qualitative regime to another. The symbolic representation of a dynamical state. For instance, a simple-minded approach will say (in the matter of gene expression) that genes are either off and on, but we can use bifurcation theory to model the system in whole, and watch bifurcations develop naturally that partition the system into an "off region" and and "on region". So the humans have this crisp separation, of off and on, but through bifurcation, so does the system (though not as crisply defined as humans like to imagine it is).

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, the questions presented thus far that interest me (and bohm2, the OP originator) are the origins of consciousness and origin of life.

So, again, what is your current position on these questions? That is, how do you explain, in a non-arbitrary and non-vague way, how life and consciousness emerge from the realm of pure potentiality?

You will eventually come to see that what we're actually suggesting as answers have much in common, as I've mentioned previously, but your thoughts thus far suffer, as I have mentioned, from major lacunae of vagueness and arbitrariness.

If you're curious about a systems approach to panpsychism, see Skrbina's doctoral thesis (the systems approach is one of five extant research efforts in panpsychism that Skrbina lists at the end of his comprehensive overview, Panpsychism in the West):

http://people.bath.ac.uk/mnspwr/doc_theses_links/d_skrbina.html

 

[apeiron]

Well, this is the whole point though. To simplify it, the rate-dependent dynamical process is the 'science' part, the 'rate independent coded information' is the 'philosophical' part. Symbolism is developed naturally and is seemingly arbitrary, but matter is measurable and dependable.

What? You still seem to be trying to map this to an epistemology/ontology distinction. And that is so missing the point that I doubt I can straighten things out.

Semiosis (and systems thinking) would take the symbol side to be as real, measurable and dependable as the material side. Software and hardware, if you like. Both distinct from each other (separated by an epistemic cut), but also both real.

This is exactly what bifuraction theory allows for. Maps from one qualitative regime to another. The symbolic representation of a dynamical state. For instance, a simple-minded approach will say (in the matter of gene expression) that genes are either off and on, but we can use bifurcation theory to model the system in whole, and watch bifurcations develop naturally that partition the system into an "off region" and and "on region". So the humans have this crisp separation, of off and on, but through bifurcation, so does the system (though not as crisply defined as humans like to imagine it is).

Have you read JA Scott Kelso's Dynamic Patterns? He is really good at modelling this kind of dynamics. But I am still arguing that you can only get so far with DST (otherwise that is all I would have needed to be interested in). You need the story from the other side of the epistemic cut as well.

So you can explain hysteresis in terms of bistability, but then something must be prodding the system from one state to the next. You could say it is a random internal fluctuation (which might be the best answer in a system which has such fluctuations). Or you could say it was a driving input - and now you have something further that is external and must be accounted for. And then this driving input might be a memory, a bit of coded information, a symbol. And now you are really talking about something diifferent in kind.

If you can offer a reference where you think bifurcation theory does the complete job here, please do.

I think DST is an important piece of the puzzle - it means that the computational side of reality has so much less work to do because dynamical systems do so much of their own self-organising. But then there still is that job of switching states in a way organised by memory and habit.

As you note, there are the genes as a straight dormant code, then the genes in action as a dynamical device. It is the gap between these two kinds of existence that the epistemic cut/semiosis seeks to span.

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, the questions presented thus far that interest me (and bohm2, the OP originator) are the origins of consciousness and origin of life.

So, again, what is your current position on these questions? That is, how do you explain, in a non-arbitrary and non-vague way, how life and consciousness emerge from the realm of pure potentiality?

You will eventually come to see that what we're actually suggesting as answers have much in common, as I've mentioned previously, but your thoughts thus far suffer, as I have mentioned, from major lacunae of vagueness and arbitrariness.

If you're curious about a systems approach to panpsychism, see Skrbina's doctoral thesis (the systems approach is one of five extant research efforts in panpsychism that Skrbina lists at the end of his comprehensive overview, Panpsychism in the West):

http://people.bath.ac.uk/mnspwr/doc_theses_links/d_skrbina.html

Another post that tries to evade previous questions about your claims and asks me to repeat arguments I have already made.

Perhaps Bohm2 will have better luck getting a reply from you?

 

[bohm2]

You seem to be changing your position now in asserting that life emerges with DNA. I agree this is less vague but now it suffers from arbitrariness. Why DNA? Why not RNA? What about Dyson's suggestion that life began before DNA and then merged with DNA? What about computer life? What about non-DNA biological life?

Here’s Chomsky’s argument on this topic. He is basically arguing that trying to delineate such boundaries of living/non-living or mental/non-mental is on par with delineating the boundary of the “chemical”/non-chemical, "electrical”/non-electrical, etc. From a naturalistic perspective, it’s pointless:

I will be using the terms "mind" and "mental" here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand "mental" to be on a par with "chemical", "optical", or "electrical". Certain phenomena, events, processes and states are informally called "chemical" etc., but no metaphysical divide is suggested thereby. The terms are used to select certain aspects of the world as a focus of inquiry. We do not seek to determine the true criterion of the chemical, or the mark of the electrical, or the boundaries of the optical. I will use "mental" the same way, with something like ordinary coverage, but no deeper implications. By "mind" I just mean the mental aspects of the world, with no more interest in sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in other cases.

...It is not that ordinary discourse fails to talk about the world, or that the particulars it describes do not exist, or that the accounts are too imprecise. Rather, the categories used and principles invoked need not have even loose counterparts in naturalistic inquiry. That is true even of the parts of ordinary discourse that have a quasi-naturalistic cast. How people decide whether something is water or tea is of no concern to chemistry. It is no necessary task of biochemistry to decide at what point in the transition from simple gases to bacteria we find the "essence of life", and if some such categorization were imposed, the correspondence to common sense notions would matter no more than for the heavens, or energy, or solid. Whether ordinary usage would consider viruses "alive" is of no interest to biologists, who will categorize as they choose in terms of genes and conditions under which they function. We cannot invoke ordinary usage to judge whether Francois Jacob is correct in telling us that "for the biologist, the living begins only with what was able to constitute a genetic program", though "for the chemist, in contrast, it is somewhat arbitrary to make a demarcation where there can only be continuity"

http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/old/class_text_095.pdf
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mikhail/documents/Noam_Chomsky_Biolinguistic_Explorations.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Whether ordinary usage would consider viruses "alive" is of no interest to biologists, who will categorize as they choose in terms of genes and conditions under which they function. We cannot invoke ordinary usage to judge whether Francois Jacob is correct in telling us that "for the biologist, the living begins only with what was able to constitute a genetic program", though "for the chemist, in contrast, it is somewhat arbitrary to make a demarcation where there can only be continuity"

What is he actually saying is pointless? In what you've quoted, the argument is that common-use terms may not map that well to scientific models of real life distinctions.

So if science does discover a truer way of talking about reality, then surely the hope is that this would eventually enter common usage?

Such a word is "consciousness", which as I've argued, is a term misused to confound language-scaffolded human mentality with the language-lacking animal mind. It also does not deal with the dynamic relationship between attention and habit. Or the fact that the principle job of a mind, a mental state, is not "to know" but "to predict".

 

[Gold Barz]

This might be going a little off-topic, but does systems thinking, in contrast to reductionism, solve the hard problem or does it just change the hard problem?

 

[apeiron]

This might be going a little off-topic, but does systems thinking, in contrast to reductionism, solve the hard problem or does it just change the hard problem?

It so much depends on what you believe the hard problem is about. But both reductionism and the systems view are both modelling. Both also run out of steam where they cannot posit meaningful counterfactuals - something we can go measure as a different result of a different set of causes. So I don't think one will work where the other fails.

On the other hand, systems thinking being a more complete account of causality could well be expected to do a better ultimate job, in so far as the job can be done.

If we are judging success of a theory in the usual way - the control it gives over reality - then a concrete test would be which gets us closer to artificial mind or artificial life? Reductionism or systems?

But the hard problem gets its bite because it wants theory to answer the question of "what it feels to be like"? Not something we so much expect from a theory about quarks or rocks or ecosystems, but somehow it is a legitimate demand of a theory of mind.

If you want to be able to map a set of physical facts on to set of mental facts, we can do a tremendous amount of this already. As I type on the key pad, I can say all sorts of things about what is going on in my brain and how that relates to feelings of how automatically my fingers find the keys, why it takes a particular lag to catch typing mistakes, why there is a jolt of physiological reaction that accompanies that, etc.

So there seems nothing hard about this level of mapping physical facts to mental facts. I'm doing it all the time.

If I did what a lot of people do and go, whoo, matter, whoo, experience; I know I'm my brain but also that I am a view of the world; nothing figures, then yeah, it would seem a completely hard problem.

But then if you ask the question can everything be handled by mapping physical facts to mental facts, as I say, there does seem to be an irreducible residue for any kind of theory in that eventually you run into a lack of available counterfactuals.

Take the zombie argument. I can't actually imagine it being true that a brain could do everything a brain does and conceivably lack awareness. I have no grounds to doubt that it would be conscious so far as I can see. There are just too many physical facts that map to the mental facts for such a doubt to be reasonable.

A zombie is of course easier for a reductionist to believe in. But a systems view is that the top-down is essential to things happening, so a zombie without top-downness couldn't mirror the function of a normal brain. So a systems zombie would have to have attentional processes for instance, and anticipatory states. Once you start giving a zombie absolutely everything, what is this extra thing that is still missing which is the feeling of doing these things?

But on the other hand, I couldn't be so sure about a zombie's experience of red, or yours either. Would it be the same as mine, or could it be utterly different? Could the same neural processes be occurring, yet with a different phenomenal result? It seems unlikely but how can I check? How would I measure?

You can't even check your own story of whether your experience of red today is the same as yesterday.

Logic demands that if we have A, then not-A is conceivable. The one justifies the other and so sets up a counterfactual and the possibility of a definite measurement.

At the level of a zombie, we have so much going on that A (consciousness is a result of many physical facts) can be contrasted with not-A (a lack of even some of these facts results in a lack of conscious-like behaviour - a zombie that won't fool anyone).

But at the level of a qualia like red, what is not-red (yet same physical facts)? A zombie's lack of convincingness is open to measurement. But comparing actual experiences of red in terms of some "otherness" is not possible.

 

[Gold Barz]

Another question I have apeiron is, I know you are a fan of him but I'll ask anyway, do you espouse Rosen's view of complexity and where does it fit in systems thinking?

 

[apeiron]

Another question I have apeiron is, I know you are a fan of him but I'll ask anyway, do you espouse Rosen's view of complexity and where does it fit in systems thinking?

Rosen is good on epistemology - the principles of the modelling relation. And he also takes an anticipatory approach to modelling living systems. And he takes a category theoretic approach to living systems (the dichotomous division into metabolism and repair).

But I admit that I don't find his category theory-based models that useful in practice. Pattee's epistemic cut and Salthe's hierarchy theory, for example, are more descriptive.

So it is more his view of epistemology than complexity that I cite.

 

[Gold Barz]

Who, in your opinion, has the best theory of mind or the best model of the mind? It will still for sure be incomplete but who do you think is going down the right track?

Also, does either Pattee or Salthe have anything to say about the mind or reality?

 

[apeiron]

Who, in your opinion, has the best theory of mind or the best model of the mind? It will still for sure be incomplete but who do you think is going down the right track?

Also, does either Pattee or Salthe have anything to say about the mind or reality?

I think Karl Friston's Bayesian brain approach sums up the general neuroscience the best now. And then Lev Vygotsky long ago cracked the sociocultural aspects of the human mind.

Pattee and Salthe don't address mind explicitly - their field was life. But they developed general system models of what is going on.

 

[Gold Barz]

So it is more his view of epistemology than complexity that I cite.

Correct me if I am wrong here but I find Rosen's complexity similar to your pansemiosis.

 

[apeiron]

Correct me if I am wrong here but I find Rosen's complexity similar to your pansemiosis.

It's not really "my" pansemiosis. But of course they are similar.

For instance...
http://www.lhl.lib.mo.us/services/reference/papers/fernandez/PRfinal.pdf

A comparison of Peirce’s sign systems with Rosen’s (M,R) systems yields
the following communalities: 1) they are both systems of triadic relations, 2)
they irreducibly involve self-referential loops, 3) some of the relata are
themselves relations, and 4) some of the relata are not things but temporal
processes unrepresentable in purely spatial terms.

But then...

There is also an important dissimilarity. The effect of self-reference in one
case is recursivity, through the production of an open-ended chain in which
each interpretant becomes a sign for another future interpretant. In the
other case the effect is circularity, in which each process is simultaneously
at the beginning and the end of a cycle.

Which I don't exactly agree with, but that is because both Rosen and Peirce don't properly bring in the further fact of hierarchical scale, I would say.

The recursive/circular bit only makes sense as an interaction across different spatiotemporal scales.

 

[apeiron]

This is also a good paper from Pattee on how he uses semiosis. (Pattee and Rosen were close colleagues, but their views are not identical).

The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect the two categories. This is a classical philosophical problem on which there is no consensus even today. Biosemiotics recognizes that the philosophical matter-mind problem extends downward to the pattern recognition and control processes of the simplest living organisms where it can more easily be addressed as a scientific problem. In fact, how material structures serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA. Cartesian dualism was one classical attempt to address this problem, but while this ontological dualism makes a clear distinction between mind and matter, it consigns the relation between them to metaphysical obscurity. Largely because of our knowledge of the physical details of genetic control, symbol manipulation, and brain function these two categories today appear only as an epistemological necessity, but a necessity that still needs a coherent explanation. Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.

www.panmere.com/rosen/mhout/doc00007.doc[/URL]

 

[Gold Barz]

In Rosens theory (I do not know what the official name for it is lol) life is a consequence of complexity and while life is not a first principle in the universe, complexity is...is that true of pansemiosis too?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Another post that tries to evade previous questions about your claims and asks me to repeat arguments I have already made.

Perhaps Bohm2 will have better luck getting a reply from you?

Then I guess we're done with this dialogue, with your positions collapsing into self-contradiction, mockery, vagueness and arbitrariness.

I think if you step back a bit and reconsider your own statements you'll see the merits of what I'm suggesting. As I've mentioned more than once, the systems approach has many similarities to my approach and can perhaps be subsumed, as Skrbina suggests, in the panpsychist approach to the hard problem.

 

[Pythagorean]

What? You still seem to be trying to map this to an epistemology/ontology distinction. And that is so missing the point that I doubt I can straighten things out.

well, no, I'm was answering bohm's question, which was exactly about epistemology vs. ontology, but it's still related very much to the epistemic cut:

Does semiosis bring any new facts to bear or is it just a different way of looking at the known "facts" of neuroscience, biology, cognition, etc.? I mean, does it make any new predictions/testable models? Is it a just a philosophical perspective or a different approach that offers new directions/predictions? If the latter what are some of those predictions/testable models?

Semiosis (and systems thinking) would take the symbol side to be as real, measurable and dependable as the material side. Software and hardware, if you like. Both distinct from each other (separated by an epistemic cut), but also both real.

I'm not saying the symbol side is "fake" by any means. But symbols are arbitrary. An 'a' does exist, but it has no meaning alone, and it's place is no better or worse served by a 'b'. But, you can't have an alphabet of just 'a' so there is something meaningful about how the symbols exist, but it's not their labels (i.e. it's not the symbol itself).

Have you read JA Scott Kelso's Dynamic Patterns? He is really good at modelling this kind of dynamics. But I am still arguing that you can only get so far with DST (otherwise that is all I would have needed to be interested in). You need the story from the other side of the epistemic cut as well.

So you can explain hysteresis in terms of bistability, but then something must be prodding the system from one state to the next. You could say it is a random internal fluctuation (which might be the best answer in a system which has such fluctuations). Or you could say it was a driving input - and now you have something further that is external and must be accounted for. And then this driving input might be a memory, a bit of coded information, a symbol. And now you are really talking about something diifferent in kind.

If you can offer a reference where you think bifurcation theory does the complete job here, please do.

I think DST is an important piece of the puzzle - it means that the computational side of reality has so much less work to do because dynamical systems do so much of their own self-organising. But then there still is that job of switching states in a way organised by memory and habit.

I have not heard of Kelso but looking over his CV he has many publications in Chaos, PRE, and IEEE. One of his publications looks relevant. I've bolded the part dealing with bifurcation. Here, the external 'force' is the control parameter.

Pattern formation and switching between self-organized states are often associated with instabilities in open, nonequilibrium systems. We describe an experiment which shows that systematically changing a control parameter induces qualitative changes in sensorimotor coordination and brain activity, as registered by a 37-SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) array. Near the instability point, predicted features of nonequilibrium phase transitions (critical slowing down, fluctuation enhancement) are observed in both the psychophysical data and the brain signals obtained from single SQUID sensors. Further analysis reveals that activity from the entire array displays spatial patterns evolving in time. Such spatiotemporal patterns are characterized by the dynamics of only a few coherent spatial modes.

As you note, there are the genes as a straight dormant code, then the genes in action as a dynamical device. It is the gap between these two kinds of existence that the epistemic cut/semiosis seeks to span.

Yes, people do this with dynamical systems! All that's different is the philosophical approach, really (but this doesn't have a null-effect on the science)

here's some groundwork that I found quickly. I can spend more time on this later if you're really interetsed:

http://chaos.aip.org/resource/1/chaoeh/v11/i1/p160_s1?isAuthorized=no
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v88/i4/e048101
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519305800785

 

[apeiron]

In Rosens theory (I do not know what the official name for it is lol) life is a consequence of complexity and while life is not a first principle in the universe, complexity is...is that true of pansemiosis too?

Well the pan- is the claim that it is a universal process. And Peirce did see even the development of the universe as being driven by semiosis.

His argument was of course philosophic rather than scientific. So pansemiosis today would be taking the next step of seeing if the idea can really be applied in a useful scientific fashion - a model that can be tested.

Rosen was making the point that reality is irreducibly complex (at least compared to the over-simplification of reductionism). And semiosis would be a particular view of what that complexity looks like at core.

 

[apeiron]

Then I guess we're done with this dialogue, with your positions collapsing into self-contradiction, mockery, vagueness and arbitrariness.

I think if you step back a bit and reconsider your own statements you'll see the merits of what I'm suggesting. As I've mentioned more than once, the systems approach has many similarities to my approach and can perhaps be subsumed, as Skrbina suggests, in the panpsychist approach to the hard problem.

So the answer is no, you cannot even answer Bohm2's query about pilot waves and telepathy?

 

[apeiron]

here's some groundwork that I found quickly. I can spend more time on this later if you're really interetsed:

http://chaos.aip.org/resource/1/chaoeh/v11/i1/p160_s1?isAuthorized=no

And as the abstract states..."This work places the study of dynamics in genetic networks in a context comprising both nonlinear dynamics and the theory of computation."

So are you intending to support my contention that the systems approach must somehow recognise the reality of both dynamics and computation?

 

[Pythagorean]

So are you intending to support my contention that the systems approach must somehow recognise the reality of both dynamics and computation?

I don't understand why you think that was ever a question...?

 

[Gold Barz]

Apeiron, would you agree to this statement made by Rosen, "mind is to brain as life is to organism"?

 

[apeiron]

I don't understand why you think that was ever a question...?

Well then what the heck are you trying to say? You appeared to be arguing that the whole of the story could be told in the language of dynamical systems.

Pattee puts the epistemic cut issue this way: "Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics."

How does DST deal with questions of function and dynamics?

That old Goodwin/Kauffman reference is in fact very good. It draws attention to the key fact of hierarchy theory that dynamics + scale does give you an epistemic cut. The dynamics of a much larger scale stretch out to look like an unchanging context, while those of a much smaller scale merge to become a grainy blur.

This is precisely the kind of approach I am talking about. But it does not seem to be the concept that you are appealing to here.

And even then, this dynamical story does not touch the story of the codes themselves. You still have to have all this hierarchical dynamics and also the something else.

 

[Pythagorean]

Well then what the heck are you trying to say? You appeared to be arguing that the whole of the story could be told in the language of dynamical systems.

Woah now, you started the argument. I never said anything about ONLY dynamical systems and I've never held that position. The position I do hold is that dynamical systems are necessary to quantify the subject, I said nothing about sufficient.

In our long history here, you're always very ready to argue, when I'm trying to discuss. It's unfortunate because, as I've said many time before, I think we could have productive discussions if you weren't always accusing me of being a cold-hearted, evil, malignant, cancerous, reductionist Nazi.

How does DST deal with questions of function and dynamics?

Another way to make my point in response to this: DST doesn't deal with questions, researchers do. But anyway, I'm not just talking about DST, I'm talking about complexity; a HUGE field. A huge field that has a journal called Chaos, that is most certainly not restricted to deterministic chaotic systems, and most certainly doesn't avoid discussions of scale or symbol.

That old Goodwin/Kauffman reference is in fact very good. It draws attention to the key fact of hierarchy theory that dynamics + scale does give you an epistemic cut. The dynamics of a much larger scale stretch out to look like an unchanging context, while those of a much smaller scale merge to become a grainy blur.

This is precisely the kind of approach I am talking about. But it does not seem to be the concept that you are appealing to here.

And even then, this dynamical story does not touch the story of the codes themselves. You still have to have all this hierarchical dynamics and also the something else.

Well my advice to you then is never try to judge people's intentions... it's really quite counter-productive (look at all the time and energy we've wasted... though I'm glad we could rediscover the Kauffman reference together).

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

So the answer is no, you cannot even answer Bohm2's query about pilot waves and telepathy?

apeiron, you may have noticed I asked bohm2 to elaborate on his question. Regardless, you've completely glossed over the meat of my ideas, which I provided at your request, choosing instead to nitpick at peripheral issues. Why don't you address the core concepts instead and dispense with the snarkiness?

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, you may have noticed I asked bohm2 to elaborate on his question. Regardless, you've completely glossed over the meat of my ideas, which I provided at your request, choosing instead to nitpick at peripheral issues. Why don't you address the core concepts instead and dispense with the snarkiness?

The point of his question seemed completely obvious, but I expanded it for you anyway. So this is now just further evasion. If you want to consider it now my question, then I'm fine with that.

As to nitpicking, I don't see how the question of how events have both a material and experiential aspect is so trivial.

You have only asserted that this is a fact, not given any reason to believe it is a fact.

If you had a model of the causes that said why it should be so, then that would be an argument whose logic could be examined.

If you had data which suggested that fundamental events have minds, then at least this would create an interest in looking for such a causal link.

Your assertion that electrons are making choices rather than behaving probablistically is just that - an assertion again unsupported either by theory or data.

You complain about my tone but you keep talking like a crank. I'm happy to discuss panpsychism because nothing should be ruled out without being fully examined. But as soon as we get into the detail of data and theory, you just make ungrounded assertions and get all huffy and abusive.

You also have not replied on the solid/liquid/gas remark. Was this an honest mistake on your part, or are you still really saying there are no readily apparent macro-distinctions when it comes to phase transitions?

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, would you agree to this statement made by Rosen, "mind is to brain as life is to organism"?

But isn't the complete quote: "because both are examples of organisational complexity"?

So the point is that reductionism thinks the global interactions (global constraints) can be simply reduced to a host of local material causes. But the systems view is that local~global complexity is fundamental. And so brain~minds and bodies~life are just more complex versions of this basic complexity.

You then still need a fork in the path to distinguish life and mind from ordinary complexity - to start talking about complex complexity.

So simple complexity just has self-organising global constraints (it is more like what people think of as simple emergence - the way water turns to ice because something outside its control, a cooling temperature, forces the change).

But complex complexity has learned how to organise its own constraints. It is in control of the control parameters, to use dynamics-speak.

Which is where genes and words come in. And semiosis and the epistemic cut.

A system with life and mind can avoid freezing by moving somewhere that is warm. It has active choice and is not ruled by "chance", or rather circumstance - global constraints - outside its knowledge, modelling, and thus control.

So now we need another level of complexity theory that accounts for this.

Rosen's work emphasises the essential continuity - all reality is irreducibly complex. Pattee emphasised the essential transition - only part of reality appears to have achieved a complex complexity. So their work is nicely complementary.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

The point of his question seemed completely obvious, but I expanded it for you anyway. So this is now just further evasion. If you want to consider it now my question, then I'm fine with that.

As to nitpicking, I don't see how the question of how events have both a material and experiential aspect is so trivial.

You have only asserted that this is a fact, not given any reason to believe it is a fact.

If you had a model of the causes that said why it should be so, then that would be an argument whose logic could be examined.

If you had data which suggested that fundamental events have minds, then at least this would create an interest in looking for such a causal link.

Your assertion that electrons are making choices rather than behaving probablistically is just that - an assertion again unsupported either by theory or data.

You complain about my tone but you keep talking like a crank. I'm happy to discuss panpsychism because nothing should be ruled out without being fully examined. But as soon as we get into the detail of data and theory, you just make ungrounded assertions and get all huffy and abusive.

You also have not replied on the solid/liquid/gas remark. Was this an honest mistake on your part, or are you still really saying there are no readily apparent macro-distinctions when it comes to phase transitions?

"If you had a model..." Did you even read what I wrote?

As for snarkiness, I only escalated in response to your escalation. Cranks respond to reason with mockery. And which of us has done that? Put aside the silliness and let's discuss ideas.

As for data, as I've mentioned before, I follow Dyson's lead in reading the available data as supportive of some type of mind in electrons and other structures far below the human level. The whole point of science and philosophy is to interpret data in the most useful, logically consistent and parsimonious manner. I have asserted that panpsychism is a more logically consistent, more useful, and more parsimonious approach than the alternatives.

As for you, you have previously stated you can accept Griffin's panexperiential physicalism and then you dismiss with snarkiness panpsychism, which is the same thing. Which is it? Are there two apeirons or is there just residual confusion?

As for the water/ice/vapor issue, I guess I'll have to elaborate what I thought was a pretty basic point.

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.”

These last few paragraphs are from my previous essay: http://www.independent.com/news/2011/jan/08/c-wordconsciousnessand-emergence/

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

I'm also going to start a new thread and ask folks to cooperate. It's going to be called "Solving the Hard Problem" and I'd like the very intelligent people populating this thread and others to work with on specific aspects of the problems of consciousness and life in an attempt to gain some consensus on key issues. My hope is that with some better organization of thoughts and responses everyone here, obviously keenly interested in these issues, will be able to better arrive at their own conclusions.

 

[Gold Barz]

But isn't the complete quote: "because both are examples of organisational complexity"?

Yes that the complete quote, I do not know why I left that out since it's the key to the whole quote. I have not read much by Pattee, it seems at first glance, his work is going to be even harder to grasp.

Also apeiron, what would the free energy bayesian brain, ultimately say about the mind/consciousness? would this be an example of complexity Rosen was talking about?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Here’s Chomsky’s argument on this topic. He is basically arguing that trying to delineate such boundaries of living/non-living or mental/non-mental is on par with delineating the boundary of the “chemical”/non-chemical, "electrical”/non-electrical, etc. From a naturalistic perspective, it’s pointless:

I will be using the terms "mind" and "mental" here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand "mental" to be on a par with "chemical", "optical", or "electrical". Certain phenomena, events, processes and states are informally called "chemical" etc., but no metaphysical divide is suggested thereby. The terms are used to select certain aspects of the world as a focus of inquiry. We do not seek to determine the true criterion of the chemical, or the mark of the electrical, or the boundaries of the optical. I will use "mental" the same way, with something like ordinary coverage, but no deeper implications. By "mind" I just mean the mental aspects of the world, with no more interest in sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in other cases.

...It is not that ordinary discourse fails to talk about the world, or that the particulars it describes do not exist, or that the accounts are too imprecise. Rather, the categories used and principles invoked need not have even loose counterparts in naturalistic inquiry. That is true even of the parts of ordinary discourse that have a quasi-naturalistic cast. How people decide whether something is water or tea is of no concern to chemistry. It is no necessary task of biochemistry to decide at what point in the transition from simple gases to bacteria we find the "essence of life", and if some such categorization were imposed, the correspondence to common sense notions would matter no more than for the heavens, or energy, or solid. Whether ordinary usage would consider viruses "alive" is of no interest to biologists, who will categorize as they choose in terms of genes and conditions under which they function. We cannot invoke ordinary usage to judge whether Francois Jacob is correct in telling us that "for the biologist, the living begins only with what was able to constitute a genetic program", though "for the chemist, in contrast, it is somewhat arbitrary to make a demarcation where there can only be continuity"

http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/old/class_text_095.pdf
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mikhail/documents/Noam_Chomsky_Biolinguistic_Explorations.pdf

bohm2, thanks for the great quotes from Chomsky in support of my position. It would great also if you could bring these quotes into the new thread I just started.

 

[Pythagorean]

Here's an interesting PRE paper comparing word-use dynamics to allele expression using "[URL sampling formula[/URL]:

http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v70/i4/e042901

 

[apeiron]

"If you had a model..." Did you even read what I wrote?

So what is the model's answer on telepathy and pilot waves?

As for the water/ice/vapor issue, I guess I'll have to elaborate what I thought was a pretty basic point.

Please remember the context of the original point.

You said: "Last, a "fundamental seamlessness" and "very distinct transition" are entirely contradictory."

I said: "Would you make the same argument about the phase transitions of water from ice to liquid to vapour?"

So it is plain your assertion that there cannot be both continuity and distinct transitions is wrong. As you say, it is all just H2O molecules (continuity), but then very different macro-states (which we describe qualitatively as solid, liquid, gas).

Which in turn means you are wrong to say life and mind cannot be treated analogously. We have good reason to believe that "more can be different". There is no problem with radical state change as a result of gradual control parameter change.

This is the argument you need to pay attention to if you mean to address my comment.

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.

Yes, your case for panpsychism rests on the argument that there is ordinary emergence and then radical emergence. One is not a problem for reductionism. The other is so inexplicable that we must look for its source in the most unlikely of places.

But if emergence is just reductionism, then it would be computable. If I gave you the genetic code for a protein, you should be able to model its emergent shape, its dynamical self-organisation resulting from a global minimisation of free energy.

Yet this kind of ab initio or free modelling of protein structure is known to be at least NP-hard (intractable for any reasonable size molecule on any physically-realisable computer), if not NP-complete.

Protein structure prediction can only be done by hand inserting various reasonable constraints - adding external information to guide the bottom-up number-crunching meant to represent the raw physics.

So even the emergence of a protein's folded shape is "radical" here. It's "computability" looks a matter of exponential, rather than polynomial, time. In other words, not actually computable in a meaningful sense. The calculation branches faster than any branch gets solved. It is only at infinity that there is "time enough" for everything to get done.

Now again, you say either a system is merely the sum of its parts or there has to be something mysterious going on. But we can see that real-world proteins manage routinely to satisfy a global constraint (the minimisation of free energy) without this being computable from the "outward properties" of its parts. They snap themselves into shape in a split second nevertheless.

Should we then impute some interior aspect to these parts that know how to assemble in a fashion that meets the global constraint? Or rather, should we just accept that this is the real world and constraints also exist as the proper causes of things?

And when we start talking instead about whole cells, or even whole brains, well if you are going to make claims based on your reductionist concept of emergence...

Deal first with something half-imaginable as "mere computational emergence" like a moderate sized molecule.

 

[bohm2]

You said: "Last, a "fundamental seamlessness" and "very distinct transition" are entirely contradictory." I said: "Would you make the same argument about the phase transitions of water from ice to liquid to vapour?"

So it is plain your assertion that there cannot be both continuity and distinct transitions is wrong. As you say, it is all just H2O molecules (continuity), but then very different macro-states (which we describe qualitatively as solid, liquid, gas)...Should we then impute some interior aspect to these parts that know how to assemble in a fashion that meets the global constraint? Or rather, should we just accept that this is the real world and constraints also exist as the proper causes of things?

And when we start talking instead about whole cells, or even whole brains, well if you are going to make claims based on your reductionist concept of emergence...

Deal first with something half-imaginable as "mere computational emergence" like a moderate sized molecule.

I think your points are important in this issue. Chomsky makes similar points here where he seems to side with Strawson on some issues but is unwilling to go the full distance with Strawson's panpsychism for some of the reasons, you mention, I think (although you offer a solution replacing the missing "intrinsic" part with semiosis, I think:

Priestly, it seems, would reject Nagel's qualms while accepting Strawson's formulation, but without drawing the panpsychic conclusions. It should be noted that the molecule-water example, commonly used, is not a very telling one. We also cannot conceive of a liquid turnng into two gas by electrolysis, and there is no intuitive sense in which the properties of water, bases, and acids inhere in Hydrogen or Oxygen or other atoms. Furthermore, the whole matter of conceivability seems to be irrelevant, whether it is brought up in connection with the effects of motion that Newton or Locke found inconceivable, or the irreducible principles of chemistry, or the mind-brain relations. There is something about the nature of Hydrogen and Oxygen "in virtue of which they are intrinsically suited to constituting water", so the sciences discovered after long labors, providing reasons "in the nature of things why the emerging thing is as it is." What seemed "brute emergence" was assimilated into science of ordinary emergence-not, to be sure, of the liquidity variety, relying on conceivability. I see no strong reason why matters should necessarily be different in the case of experiential and nonexperiential reality, particularly our ignorance of the latter, stressed from Newton and Locke to Priestly, developed by Russell, and arising again in recent discussion.

(Chomsky in "Mysteries of Natureow Deeply Hidden", 2009, p. 192-3)

Repeating this theme, Chomsky writes:

The new version of the mind-body problem resurrects some observations of Bertrand Russell’s 80 years ago, and recently reinvented. Russell asked us to consider a blind physicist who knows all of physics but doesn’t know something we know: what it’s like to see the color blue. Russell’s conclusion was that the natural sciences seek to discover “the causal skeleton of the world.” Other aspects of the world of experience lie beyond their reach. Recasting Russell’s insight in naturalistic terms, we might say that like all animals, our internal cognitive capacities reflexively provide us with a world of experience, largely shared in fundamental properties – the human Umwelt, to borrow the term of ethologists. But being reflective creatures, thanks to emergence of the human capacity, we go on to seek to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena of experience. These exercises are called myth, or magic, or philosophy, or “science” in the sense of that term proposed in the 19th century, distinguishing the pursuit from the rest of philosophy. If humans are part of the organic world, we expect that our capacities of understanding and explanation have fixed scope and limits, like any other natural object a truism that is sometimes thoughtlessly derided as “mysterianism.” It could be that these innate capacities do not lead us beyond some understanding of Russell’s causal skeleton of the world – including the principles that enter into determining conscious experience; there is of course no reason to expect that these are even in principle accessible to consciousness. It is always an open question how much of Russell’s “causal skeleton of the world” can be attained. These could become topics of empirical inquiry into the nature of what we might call “the science-forming faculty,” another “mental organ.” These are interesting topics, in principle part of normal science, and now the topic of some investigation. They should not be confused with the traditional mind-body problem, which evaporated after Newton.

http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mikhail/documents/Noam_Chomsky_Biolinguistic_Explorations.pdf

With respect to the whole concept of a "science-forming faculty", this paper is a really interesting one discussing this topic:

On the Very Idea of a Science Forming Faculty

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j108/faculty.htm

 

[apeiron]

It should be noted that the molecule-water example, commonly used, is not a very telling one. We also cannot conceive of a liquid turnng into two gas by electrolysis, and there is no intuitive sense in which the properties of water, bases, and acids inhere in Hydrogen or Oxygen or other atoms.

The liquidity example is a good one to examine.

The reductionist assumption is that everything can be accounted for as the sum of the action of the parts. So phizzicsphan's focus on "exterior properties".

The systems view, by constrast, says the causes of things are alway dichotomous and hierarchical. Yes, there is bottom up construction based on local properties or freedoms, but also always some matching global shaping context, some set of downward acting constraints.

(The "clever" part of this is that constraints are responsible for the local freedoms as constraints limit vague potential to crisp definite "directions" of action. While equally, those local freedoms have by definition to be of a kind that will keep reconstructing that global context of constraints. So each side is making the other synergistically, or ultimately, semiotically - semiosis being about a more specific model concerning the nature of global constraints.)

Anyway, when it comes to a liquid state, you need two things to account for its persistence as an equilibrium balance of causes. You need local thermal/kinetic jostle and you need global pressure/containment.

You need molecular bonds of some kind of course to create an actual potential for interaction. But this potential is the part of the story that is the continuum (it connects all the phases of H2O). To inquire into molecular bonds is a larger question. You are asking about what makes atoms and electromagnetism. But talking here about liquidity as an emergent state, we want to focus sharply on the actual variables. Which are local average kinetics and global average pressure.

Now we can take any H2O molecule and assign it a thermal energy as a property. But we can't locate pressure in the molecule. That isn't even a property correctly of a mass of molecules. What causes pressure here is some form of confinement. So external constraints like a vessel, gravity, a weight of atmosphere - something that is the source of the limits exerting a downward causality from "outside", or a larger spatiotemporal scale.

The causes of liquidity are thus dual. Two things in dynamical balance - local kinetics and global constraints - result in what is actually the interior property, the emergent quality, that we are labelling liquidity.

Worrying about other kinds of things, like the predictability of electrolysis or solvent actions, is an unnecessary complication of the discussion. The simplest description of liquidity boils down to a local freedom (thermal motion of particles) and their global constraints (there is no liquidity without suitable constraints being imposed). And it is clear liquidity emerges not from just one or other variable, but the balancing of both the bottom-up and the top-down.

A reductionist will try to argue that it is all about the molecular bonds. Well, at least they might remember that as the clinching idea presented to them in school chemistry class. But the significance of the bonds is that they are a constant that does not change. Every H2O molecule is identical in its inter-molecular attraction (given a normal range of temperature ad pressure).

So to squeeze liquidity or any other form of difference out of the something which does not change is of course going to seem paradoxical. There is just no liquidity (or gassiness, or solidity) intrinsic in the bonds as a further property. The bonds alone offer no account of the dynamics. And can't do.

Think about this. What if the inter-molecular bonds were in fact all much weaker, or much stronger? This alone would make no difference to whether a collection of molecules were liquid or solid or gas. It would determine nothing new. The story would still come down an emergent balance of local temperature and global pressure.

 

[bohm2]

A reductionist will try to argue that it is all about the molecular bonds. Well, at least they might remember that as the clinching idea presented to them in school chemistry class. But the significance of the bonds is that they are a constant that does not change. Every H2O molecule is identical in its inter-molecular attraction (given a normal range of temperature ad pressure).

So to squeeze liquidity or any other form of difference out of the something which does not change is of course going to seem paradoxical. There is just no liquidity (or gassiness, or solidity) intrinsic in the bonds as a further property. The bonds alone offer no account of the dynamics. And can't do.

Think about this. What if the inter-molecular bonds were in fact all much weaker, or much stronger? This alone would make no difference to whether a collection of molecules were liquid or solid or gas. It would determine nothing new. The story would still come down an emergent balance of local temperature and global pressure.

What about this reductionist argument:

Where there is discontinuity in microscopic behavior associated with precisely specifiable macroscopic parameters, emergent properties of the system are clearly implicated, unless we can get an equally elegant resulting theory by complicating the dispositional structure of the already accepted inventory of basic properties. Sydney Shoemaker has contended that such hidden-micro-dispositions theories are indeed always available. Assuming sharply discontinuous patterns of effects within complex systems, we could conclude that the microphysical entities have otherwise latent dispositions towards effects within macroscopically complex contexts alongside the dispositions which are continuously manifested in (nearly) all contexts. The observed difference would be a result of the manifestation of these latent dispositions.

So I'm guessing a reductionist can claim that we lack these "latent dispositions" because we don't have a complete physical theory, yet?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

I'm not saying the symbol side is "fake" by any means. But symbols are arbitrary. An 'a' does exist, but it has no meaning alone, and it's place is no better or worse served by a 'b'. But, you can't have an alphabet of just 'a' so there is something meaningful about how the symbols exist, but it's not their labels (i.e. it's not the symbol itself).

This is an interesting point. That sounds like an "intrinsicality" argument since anything can be a symbol. What determines what is a symbol comes from the subject. That seems like an argument against symbolic or semiotic function?