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.