Time and relationships (or, consciousness per Martin Heidegger)

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose this is where Water Freeman comes in?

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[JDStupi]

For me, the problem seems to lie in going from

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

to

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

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

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

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

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

 

[fuzzyfelt]

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

 

[fuzzyfelt]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Pythagorean]

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

Also, Heidegger later argued that all language is inauthentic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[JDStupi]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Sorry for long and winding post...

 

[fuzzyfelt]

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

I will come back to this when I can, but for now, I hope this link is better:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...&resnum=1&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

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

- panpsychism remains.

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

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

 

[Ferris_bg]

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

Schematically:

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

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

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


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

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

 

[Ferris_bg]

PhizzicsPhan's view seems to me like a form of type-F monism as explained http://consc.net/papers/nature.html" by Barbara Montero.

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, responding to post #72.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet in their work they say quite explicitly...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You cite this bit...

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

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

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

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

 

[apeiron]

Try again.

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

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

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

- Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead

- Process and Reality, same

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

 

[ConradDJ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[alt]

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks - and once again - a wonderful thread !

 

[Ferris_bg]

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[alt]

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

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

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


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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

 

[Gold Barz]

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