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

[disregardthat]

Pain could certainly exist in the body and not be accessible to the dominant consciousness - during local anesthesia for example.

But is that what we mean by pain? I would say certainly not. You are taking an expression, pain, and using it where it does not belong. No one knowledgeable of the correct use of the word pain would claim to be in pain if they could not feel it. "I am in pain, but I can't feel it" has no place in our vocabulary of sentences. Likewise; "I am in pain, but I'm not sure of it", or "I doubt I am in pain" are both meaningless. We don't refer to any physical condition of the body (which can be doubted, or known).

 

[bohm2]

I think it's really interesting how this mind-body problem seems to kind of play itself out in the debate regarding the meaning of the "quantum wave"/empty waves of Bohm's model between Many-worlds vs Bohmians. These 3 articles below, in particular, are very interesting. It's as if the Bohmians are trying to defend dualism at the micro-level:

Lewis writes:

An obvious strategy for defeating the above argument in the Bohmian case is to claim that wavefunction-stuff is just not the kind of stuff from which objects like cats could be made, even in principle. One might even claim that the wavefunction is not any kind of “stuff” at all, but is merely a mathematical device for calculating the motions of the Bohmian particles. If either of these claims could be substantiated, then one would have a principled reason to deny that empty branches could contain cats, either dead or alive, or any other measurement outcomes for that matter. Against this strategy, however, Deutsch writes of the empty branches (or “unoccupied grooves”) that “it is no good saying that they are merely a theoretical construct and do not exist physically, for they continually jostle both each other and the ‘occupied’ groove, affecting its trajectory” . Since empty branches interact with each other and with the occupied branch, and empty branches are nothing but aspects of the wavefunction, the wavefunction must be real a physical entity and not just a mathematical construct.

The wavefunction states of the two branches are the same, but according to Bohm’s theory, the physical state of a system consists of its wavefunction state and its particle state. An occupied branch and an empty branch plainly do not have the same particle state, and hence Deutsch fails to establish that empty branches contain measurement outcomes.

Empty Waves in Bohmian Quantum Mechanics
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2899/

Valentini discussing Bohmian "empty waves":

Furthermore, in realistic models of the classical limit, one does not obtain localised pieces of an ontological pilot wave following alternative macroscopic trajectories: from a de Broglie-Bohm viewpoint, alternative trajectories are merely mathematical and not ontological.

De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Theory: Many Worlds in Denial?
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/valentini_2008_denial.pdf

Brown responds:

The analogy in pilot-wave theory to dualism, and in particular to mental substance, in this story is obviously the matter assumption. Why impose it? Why is it necessary within quantum mechanics to understand the nature of physical systems, apparatuses, people, etc., in terms of configurations of hypothetical point corpuscles? If it can be shown that the wave-function or pilot-wave is structured enough to do the job, why go further?

Comment on Valentini, “De Broglie-Bohm Pilot-Wave Theory: Many Worlds in Denial?”
http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/brown_on_valentini.pdf

I think there's something very important here in these debates. While Bohm's non-local pilot wave is not just a mathematical device as in Copenhagen it isn't as "real" in the same sense, as Many-worlds. In a sense, Bohmians are almost forced to try to preserve this mental-physical distinction at the micro-level while the Many-world perspective are going all out to the ultimate and treat each branch as being another "world".

 

[apeiron]

But is that what we mean by pain? I would say certainly not. You are taking an expression, pain, and using it where it does not belong. No one knowledgeable of the correct use of the word pain would claim to be in pain if they could not feel it. "I am in pain, but I can't feel it" has no place in our vocabulary of sentences. Likewise; "I am in pain, but I'm not sure of it", or "I doubt I am in pain" are both meaningless. We don't refer to any physical condition of the body (which can be doubted, or known).

Neuroscience shows that pain experience is hierarchical, as I noted in a previous post. And the complexity of pain experience - its reportability, its anticipation, its suppression - are understood in reasonably fine detail now.

So for instance, the anterior cingulate itself can be divided into a mid part that maps the current intensity of a pain, a rear part that is crucial to actively anticipating a pain (ohh, sticking my finger in the fire is going to hurt), and a forward part that deals with the modulation of pain (this is how much it should be hurting me).

It is this kind of neuroscientific evidence that makes a nonsense of panpychism.

http://www.wesleyan.edu/psyc/mindmatters/volume02/article02.pdf

The brain is calculating what to feel. If you are anticipating that a planned action will make a pain go away (ie: take you away from a cause of damage), then already you are becoming less concerned about it.

Now this can be explained in terms of the brain's functional architecture (particularly the anticipation-based brain models I've cited). But by panpsychism - not so much.

How does panpsychism account for the suppression of experience?

The top-down inhibition or modulation of neural activity is not a problem for neuroscience. You can count the fibres and synapses if you want.

But if panpsychism says everything lights up with awareness, then how does it explain the active switching off? Especially if the theory is that "panpsychic complexity" is what produces human-scale reportable awareness and neuroscience is telling us that actual hierarchical complexity is what is modulating the reportable levels of pain with phenomenon like placebo. Complexity is needed to dial pain down.

 

[apeiron]

I think it's really interesting how this mind-body problem seems to kind of play itself out in the debate regarding the meaning of the "quantum wave"/empty waves of Bohm's model between Many-worlds vs Bohmians. These 3 articles below, in particular, are very interesting. It's as if the Bohmians are trying to defend dualism at the micro-level:

I don't see that in Bohmian mechanics. Instead, it is trying to preserve the atomism and locality that is essential to a materialist paradigm. It wants to make concretely physical the machinery of local~global interactions. And it attempts to do this by imagining a new kind of space - a multidimensional configuration space - in which a guidewave can propagate in.

So this is "all physics". It is not about employing experience, choice, feelings or any other kinds of "mental properties" to account for what is happening.

 

[Ferris_bg]

Q_Goest, disregardthat,

The idea behind the epiphenomenalist defense is that knowing is certain neural firing. For your BRAIN the mental states and their definitions are just different firing patterns, for YOU they are what we feel. P and M are distinct, but correlated.

Imagine how would you explain the word "consciousness" to a 4 year child for example. What will you tell him? After the word "consciousness" gets matched with everything else in his brain, with every other information it has available, the child will know what it means to have consciousness. It will know what it is to not have, to be in deep sleep for example. The same process goes with "pain" or every other word. A specific word can make you laugh today and cry tomorrow, depending on its current representation in the brain.

For the agent "I am in pain" is certain neural firing in the brain. And because the mental supervenes on this firing, the agent has pain while in this physical state. And because knowing represents the introspective process of this firing, the agent can know what it is to be in a certain state. M stays hidden to P, but the correlation between the two (P -> M) makes it possible for the agent to know and be able to make a difference between its own states.

Just to say the above are my thoughts, many of the philosophers reject epiphenomenalism and every theory leading to it.

 

[apeiron]

The idea behind the epiphenomenalist defense is that knowing is certain neural firing. For your BRAIN the mental states and their definitions are just different firing patterns, for YOU they are what we feel. P and M are distinct, but correlated.

What these conversations keep coming back to is the intuitive view that there is an "inside" aspect to whatever is physically going on.

That is what needs to be philosophically examined with more rigour.

If you are a reductionist, the only place that can still be "inside" is a place that is still smaller than your current scale of reduction. So that is why we have people believing in panpsychism. Experience must still be in there, somewhere, inside the electron or QM event.

Epiphenomenalism takes the different tack of putting the inside right outside - of the physical. So the interior aspect of being becomes something with a dualistic existence. It isn't to be found anywhere "in there" - inside the physical neural machinery - so it must float off as some unplaced separate thing. Naked "insideness" much like the Cheshire Cat's grin.

So fine, reductionism leaves you its unsatisfactory choices. Or you can take the systems route where the "inside" is the interior of the system. Once you recognise global causes as well as local causes, there is a place that is now always "within".

The M is inside the P as an interior complexification of its organisation, not something that has to be either even more microscopic (existing on the inside of particles) or mysteriously supervenient (having a concrete existence that floats off somewhere that is not part of the closed causation that is the M).

Reductionism is just a modelling tool, a simplifying paradigm. When it proves too simple to handle the job, then it is time to find a better tool.

 

[disregardthat]

Ferris, you have simply taken the word pain and given it an entirely new meaning. When I say I am in pain, I don't mean that my neurals are firing in such a way that I am experiencing pain. I am simply in pain, and that is what I report. I can know and doubt any statement about neural firing in my brain, but I cannot know or doubt whether I am actually in pain, it doesn't make any sense.

Only other people can know or doubt it, but then it will be a question of what I report, and whether or not I am lying, not a question of neural firing.

Sure, you can find that when we observe a certain effect in a brain, the subject will report it is experiencing pain. But we haven't found pain, or discovered what it really is by this sort of experiment.

 

[apeiron]

but I cannot know or doubt whether I am actually in pain, it doesn't make any sense.

So there is no borderline case where you are not sure whether it is pain or discomfort you are experiencing? Or emotional or physical pain? Or that sudden realisation you were in pain, but hadn't being paying it attention until just now?

So you can't treat pain as a single unambiguous thing - a qualia. It is as varied (as its neural and cognitive basis).

 

[bohm2]

So fine, reductionism leaves you its unsatisfactory choices. Or you can take the systems route where the "inside" is the interior of the system. Once you recognise global causes as well as local causes, there is a place that is now always "within".
...Reductionism is just a modelling tool, a simplifying paradigm. When it proves too simple to handle the job, then it is time to find a better tool.

apeiron,

Let me summarize 2 points that need to be stressed. Nobody is denying that some macro-micro, synergisti/systems stuff is not relevant. For, this is already implied even at the micro-level in all interpretations of QM including Bohm's. What is being questioned is whether this on its own is enough to infer the mental/experiential. Many don't believe so. Chalmers writes:

A low-level microphysical description can entail all sorts of surprising and interesting macroscopic properties, as with the emergence of chemistry from physics, of biology from chemistry, or more generally of complex emergent behaviors in complex systems theory. But in all these cases, the complex properties that are entailed are nevertheless structural and dynamic: they describe complex spatiotemporal structures and complex dynamic patterns of behavior over those structures. So these cases support the general principle that from structure and dynamics, one can infer only structure and dynamics.

http://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf

So the systems view isn't being neglected. It's just not going to lead us to the promised land of bridging the gap. That's the argument. You disagree. Fine.

I don't see that in Bohmian mechanics. Instead, it is trying to preserve the atomism and locality that is essential to a materialist paradigm. It wants to make concretely physical the machinery of local~global interactions. And it attempts to do this by imagining a new kind of space - a multidimensional configuration space - in which a guidewave can propagate in.

I have no idea what you mean by locality but Bohmian mechanics is manifestly nonlocal. Furthermore, "observables" other than position are contextual; that is, measurements depend crucially on experimental set-up. In Bohm’s model, all the properties of a “physical” system (i.e. spin, energy, etc.) are encoded into the non-local features of the quantum potential as the only property really and intrinsically possessed by a particle is its position.

See:

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/passon_2006.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#hv

Moreover, the properties of the guiding wave in Bohm's model are a bit unusual. I'll just list some of the major ones:

1. As stated above, in Bohm’s model, all the properties of a “physical” system (i.e. spin, energy, etc.) are encoded into the non-local features of the quantum potential as the only property really and intrinsically possessed by a particle is its position.

2. In Bohmian mechanics the wave function acts upon the positions of the particles but, evolving as it does autonomously via Schrödinger's equation, it is not acted upon by the particles...And as you say, the guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space (the wavefunction lives in 3n-dimensional space, where n is the number of particles). What is the meaning of this?

3. In the case of the quantum wave, the amplitude also appears in the denominator. Therefore, increasing the magnitude of the amplitude does not necessarily increase the quantum potential energy. A small amplitude can produce a large quantum effect. The key to the quantum potential energy lies in the second spatial derivative, indicating that the shape or form of the wave is more important than its magnitude. For this reason, a small change in the form of the wave function can produce large effects in the development of the system. The quantum potential produces a law of force that does not necessarily fall off with distance. Therefore, the quantum potential can produce large effects between systems that are separated by large distances. This feature removes one of the difficulties in understanding the non-locality that arises between particles in entangled states, such as those in the EPR-paradox.

4. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which affects all particles within its range, the pilot wave must act only one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own that “senses” the location of every other particle of the universe. Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle but its own.

What I find interesting, is if accurate, are the meaning and consequences of:

(i) The non-locality
(ii) The multidimensional-configuration space where a single 3n-dimensional Bohmian 'world particle', evolves, a particle that encodes all the information about the apparent n particles.

 

[apeiron]

So the systems view isn't being neglected. It's just not going to lead us to the promised land of bridging the gap. That's the argument. You disagree. Fine.

But that does neglect what the system view actually claims. Which is that the micro-scale does not "exist" in the way that is being implied in such arguments.

Reductionism assumes that reality is constructed from a micro-scale that is atomistic - a fixed elemental stuff. But the systems approach argues the micro-scale is shaped up by top-down causality. The micro-scale does not exist, it gets actively made. It is a process view of reality.

This being so, you can't appeal to the micro-scale as the locus of all causality. The micro-scale cannot entail the macro-scale (except to the extent that the macro-scale is in turn, mutually, synergistically, entailing the micro-scale).

I have no idea what you mean by locality but Bohmian mechanics is manifestly nonlocal.

It still wants to retain the propagation of something. It still wants something that is localised to guide every step of the way. It still wants a particle that marks an actual location at all times.

So it is nonlocal in a good old fashioned local way. It agrees some stuff has to be contextual - but then does that by "spreading it about a bunch of locations" in a concrete fashion.

I don't have a problem with that at the modelling level if it offered something new and observable. But as an ontological interpretation, it seems a backward step.

4. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which affects all particles within its range, the pilot wave must act only one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own that “senses” the location of every other particle of the universe. Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle but its own.

Again, you are highlighting the attempt to preserve assumptions about atomism and locality. Which only pushes the mysteries another step deeper.

Now we have particles with private waves, and no explanation of how all the implied information processing occurs.

It seems much more commonsense to take a coarse-grain decoherence type approach where locales have freedoms and contexts exert constraints, then a synergistic balance emerges that is quasi-classical.

So like a dipole of a bar magnet (at the critical temperature). Each dipole has some local indeterminate potential in its thermal jiggling. The bar magnet also has a developing global emergent orientation, a field that constrains all its dipoles to an alignment. Each dipole "senses" this global field - but not in some mystical way in that it has a personal interaction with a second kind of object, a field, or in an information-heavy fashion where it is having to be in touch with every other dipole in dimension-collapsing nonlocal style. But instead, there is a coarse-graining correlation, with nearest neighbours being given the greatest weight, and a dynamical balance emerging.

This is a classical analogy, but the point is about the nature of local~global interaction. If you allow causation to be properly divided (into local freedoms and global constraints) then you can get actual emergence of order with little mysticism. If you insist on reducing all causality to one end of the spectrum (such as the micro-physical) then you end up having to make strange claims about how the other aspect of causality gets handled.

So if you fixate on the existence of fundamental point particles, then private pilot waves reaching out to know the entire state of the universe are the kind of clunky objects you need to account for nonlocal (ie: global) factors.

 

[disregardthat]

So there is no borderline case where you are not sure whether it is pain or discomfort you are experiencing? Or emotional or physical pain? Or that sudden realisation you were in pain, but hadn't being paying it attention until just now?

It is simple and unambiguous because it is a grammatical form of expression. Have you ever been unsure whether you are in pain or simply in discomfort, or whether your emotional distress really is pain? What form of uncertainty is this? If you learn that you are in pain, you have in fact learned a grammatical rule, a new application of the word. The doubt here is not of the pain, but of the grammar of the expression.

A sudden realization of pain is nothing like doubting (and then suddenly knowing) that you are in pain, it is something completely else.

I want to show the error of equating expressions such as pain, distress, happiness etc.. with mental states of the mind (physical states). Knowledge is no part of these things, when you report them as "mental states of mind".

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

It is this kind of neuroscientific evidence that makes a nonsense of panpychism.

http://www.wesleyan.edu/psyc/mindmatters/volume02/article02.pdf

The brain is calculating what to feel. If you are anticipating that a planned action will make a pain go away (ie: take you away from a cause of damage), then already you are becoming less concerned about it.

Now this can be explained in terms of the brain's functional architecture (particularly the anticipation-based brain models I've cited). But by panpsychism - not so much.

How does panpsychism account for the suppression of experience?

apeiron, human brains modulate consciousness in a way unique to humans, with specialized architecture for many aspects of consciousness, including pain. But what about pain in insects or other creatures without anterior cingulate cortex? Are you suggesting that only creatures with ACC experience pain? I hope not because that is a very difficult position to defend given everything else we know about biology and neuroscience.

Just because we know certain functions of ACC with respect to pain does not in any way preclude subconsciousnesses within the hierarchy of human consciousness from experiencing pain and other features of consciousness - or other creatures from experiencing pain or other aspects of consciousness.

More to come this weekend with respect to your comments on Peirce.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, I wanted to ask you also, which may warrant its own thread, how you view causality more generally?

I'm planning an essay on this issue and I don't see much basis for the duality you seem to have suggested many times between local and global causality. Rather, I see causality as, like most things, a continuum from near to far, both spatially and temporally.

In science and philosophy, we tend to focus on local causality, by which I mean near in time and space, but we never know what the actual causal influences on any given event are, in a comprehensive sense. We can never rule out causal influences other than the ones we've chosen to focus on - just as has happened in recent decades with non-locality.

 

[apeiron]

It is simple and unambiguous because it is a grammatical form of expression. Have you ever been unsure whether you are in pain or simply in discomfort,

Well, right now for instance. First thing in the morning and I'm full of aches which on a spectrum between discomfort and pain.

Surely you would agree that pain is not a single undifferentiated experience but reasonably rich in its variety and so we might have as many words to describe the shades of feeling as eskimo have for snow (or Brits for rain).

If you learn that you are in pain, you have in fact learned a grammatical rule, a new application of the word. The doubt here is not of the pain, but of the grammar of the expression.

A sudden realization of pain is nothing like doubting (and then suddenly knowing) that you are in pain, it is something completely else.

I want to show the error of equating expressions such as pain, distress, happiness etc.. with mental states of the mind (physical states). Knowledge is no part of these things, when you report them as "mental states of mind".

If you are saying that self-awareness - introspection and reportability - is language-scaffolded, then I would agree. Humans do have a way of being objective about their subjectivity through the distancing power of speech.

So what is your point here then?

If the question becomes what is the material basis of human scaffolded self-awareness, then I would say brains still have to run the habits and ideas, but those habits and ideas are socioculturally evolved and encoded in language. So to put it crudely, human mentality is made more hierarchically complex in having memes on top of the genes.

That is the simple psychological view. Then philosophically-speaking, you seem to be raising the symbol-grounding problem. And that of course is central to semiotics and is what I have argued is best answered by Pattee's epistemic cut approach.

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, human brains modulate consciousness in a way unique to humans, with specialized architecture for many aspects of consciousness, including pain. But what about pain in insects or other creatures without anterior cingulate cortex? Are you suggesting that only creatures with ACC experience pain? I hope not because that is a very difficult position to defend given everything else we know about biology and neuroscience.

The ACC is standard mammalian issue so not unique to humans.

The point I actually made is that the phenomenological complexity (forebodings, anguish, broken heart) can be tightly correlated to a known brain architecture. So if neural design explains the variety, why does it not in the end explain the experience?

I have already agreed earlier in this thread that we cannot get beyond a certain point with this strategy. We need counterfactuals to have explanations (of why this, and not that). But that is a general epistemological issue for any theory. In physics, we can explain everything as a variety of energy, for instance, but then are still left with just having to accept energy as a brute fact.

Just because we know certain functions of ACC with respect to pain does not in any way preclude subconsciousnesses within the hierarchy of human consciousness from experiencing pain and other features of consciousness - or other creatures from experiencing pain or other aspects of consciousness.

Do you not think there is a problem in talking about non-conscious experience here? It is taken by most as definitional of conciousness that it is reportable, surely?

Now I don't defend that definition as it is obvious that "consciousness" is a too-simple label slapped on a vast amount of complexity. So I would prefer to talk in terms of processes with known architectures, such as attention and habit.

So I would say that for pain to be reportable, an animal would have to be able to attend to this fact. It would have to have a brain that supports attentional processing. Clearly mammalian brains do. Reptiles, not so much. Arthropods, well not really at all (though jumping spiders are interesting to discuss).

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, I wanted to ask you also, which may warrant its own thread, how you view causality more generally?

I'm planning an essay on this issue and I don't see much basis for the duality you seem to have suggested many times between local and global causality. Rather, I see causality as, like most things, a continuum from near to far, both spatially and temporally.

In science and philosophy, we tend to focus on local causality, by which I mean near in time and space, but we never know what the actual causal influences on any given event are, in a comprehensive sense. We can never rule out causal influences other than the ones we've chosen to focus on - just as has happened in recent decades with non-locality.

The systems view divides causality into the local and global - construction and constraint. But it is also a hierarchical view, so while causality comes from two directions (bottom-up and top-down) it is mixed over all scales. The two directions have to be at equilbrium at any particular scale of observation for a system to reach stability, to have a persistent order. So yes, there is then also the third thing which is that spectrum of balanced interaction that lies inbetween.

In hierarchy theory, this is indeed made explicitly spatiotemporal. It takes a light-cone type view where causality does have a global upper bound. There can be an absolute physical cut-off.

It is true when you say that we can never rule out the possibility that we have failed to attend to all the causes of events.

But that is what the systems view is always saying. You are not paying proper attention to downwards causation, because your explanations are all focused on material and efficient cause. Formal and final cause are being neglected in the models.

 

[bohm2]

I found this article by Davies discussing "The physics of downward causation" interesting. He doesn't seem too convinced about the possibility except in a very limited sense. Some quotes:

Let me offer a few speculations about how. In spite of the existence of level entanglement in quantum physics and elsewhere, none of the examples cited amounts to the deployment of specific local forces under the command of a global system, or subject to emergent rules at higher levels of description. However, we must be aware of the fact that physics is not a completed discipline, and top-down causation may be something that would not show up using current methods of enquiry.

Many emergentists would not welcome it either. The conventional emergentist position, if one may be said to exist, is to eschew the deployment of new forces in favour of a description in which existing forces merely act in surprising and cooperative new ways when a system becomes sufficiently complex. In such a framework, downward causation remains a shadowy notion, on the fringe of physics, descriptive rather than predictive. My suggestion is to take downward causation seriously as a causal category, but it comes at the expense of introducing either explicit top-down physical forces or changing the fundamental categories of causation from that of local forces to a higher-level concept such as information.

http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/The%20physics%20of%20downward%20causation.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I found this article by Davies discussing "The physics of downward causation" interesting. He doesn't seem too convinced about the possibility except in a very limited sense.

Davies is certainly sympathetic to a systems view, but I've never seen him discuss the detailed proposals as made by actual systems thinkers (who are mostly to be found in theoretical biology).

My suggestion is to take downward causation seriously as a causal category, but it comes at the expense of introducing either explicit top-down physical forces or changing the fundamental categories of causation from that of local forces to a higher-level concept such as information.

You see here that he talks about global causation in terms of another higher level of materiality. So he is unable to break out of the reductionist paradigm where anything real and fundamental is a form of material/effective cause.

The systems view is that top-down causality is about constraints. What acts downwards are limits that don't force something to happen, but instead limit the freedom for something to happen.

So it is a complementary view of causality. At the local level you have causality that looks like freedoms, at the global level you have causality that looks like restrictions.

This is standard scientific modelling - the separation into initial conditions and the laws of physics. But it places the local potentials and the prevailing constraints in a formal systematic relationship. It makes explicit the nature of laws in the organisation of material reality.

 

[disregardthat]

Surely you would agree that pain is not a single undifferentiated experience but reasonably rich in its variety and so we might have as many words to describe the shades of feeling as eskimo have for snow (or Brits for rain).

Of course it isn't, but the uncertainty is grammatical; that's the point, and furthermore, the meaning of the word pain has little to do with the "state of mind" of "being in pain". The richness of the experience of pain, equates to the richness of the utility of the word pain (in what circumstances it it used, how it applies, and how to react to its application etc..) And this is where we get confused when talking about qualia. For it is treated as something which must (logical must) have a physical correspondence, but this is ad-hoc, and we may very well never find such a thing.

Pain is used in so many different situations, yet still we insist on it being a sort of mental state of mind, distinguished from other types of states (such as happiness, anger etc..).

 

[bohm2]

bohm2, as with all inferences about other consciousnesses we make such inferences based on observed behavior, including movement, speech, etc. In the case of non-human consciousnesses, obviously the repertoire of behaviors doesn't include speech. Dyson's point, which I agree with, is that it makes more sense to ascribe a very rudimentary consciousness to electrons and other simple structures, on up the chain to us, because even these subatomic particles display behavior that suggests consciousness. As Dyson states, instead of ascribing such behavior to chance (the traditional QM interpretation, which is based on probabilistic predictions because predictions in any given instance are not possible due to the chance/choice nature of each instance), it makes more sense to ascribe such behavior to choice. So choice not chance.

I'm having trouble understanding this part. Consider the two-slit experiment. Are you saying that from a panpsychist perspective the wave function of electron(e.g. Bohm's quantum field-the "mental pole" to use Bohm's metaphor) represents a primitive mental element that determines/decides which hole the electron goes through?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

bohm2, yes, I'm suggesting exactly that. Where does Bohm use the phrase "mental pole"? This is actually a phrase from Whitehead, who Bohm cites a number a times in The Undivided Universe and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, but I don't remember seeing that phrase.

The Copenhagen Interpretation holds that actual quantum events are entirely random. The panpsychist Bohmian Interpretation holds that actual events are choices.

Each actual entity oscillates between a mental pole and physical pole. Or, to be entirely accurate, each actual entity has one oscillation because an actual entity only exists for one cycle and then forms a datum for the entire universe's next cycle, in what Whitehead called the "creative advance."

The choice I referred to earlier arises when actual entities transition from "prehension" (Whitehead's generic term for reception of information) to actuality. Once they become actual their experience perishes (Whitehead calls this "perpetual perishing"), but their objectivity continues as a datum for future entities.

Getting a bit more detailed, Whitehead's thought has a slightly confusing feature. Whereas the mental pole and physical pole are conceptually distinct, they are not considered to be temporally serial. Rather, the mental pole refers to "conceptual prehensions" and the physical pole to "physical prehensions." The former consists of information received from "eternal objects," very akin to Plato's Forms, and the latter consists of information received from the physical universe (the sum total of all actual entities). I'm still torn on whether I buy the idea of eternal objects or whether they are conceptually required. I think Whitehead's key motivations for including this term in his system is to explain the source of creativity and morality. For Whitehead, God, in his primordial aspect, was the set of all eternal objects, and he/it provides the "subjective aim" for each actual entity as a goad to progress. Actual entities can ignore this subjective aim, and this is where choice and free will come into the world for Whitehead.

In Bohm's terms, conceptual prehensions are referred to as "quantum potential," which is information received from the implicate order (I believe, it's been a little while since I read Bohm's stuff).

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

On causation, top-down causation is easily confirmed when I choose to lift my finger or type these words. Davies is a bit of a Whitehead fan but hasn't really grokked his system. Davies cites Whitehead numerous times in The Mind of God (a great book), but either hasn't taken the time to really understand Whitehead's system or has rejected key parts of it - such as the inherent free will/choice built into every level of actuality. For Whitehead, every actual entity is defined by its ability to make choices, so each level of physical and biological hierarchy has its own ability to choose, but constrained to varying degrees by history.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

I quite agree that in "Man's Glassy Essence", Peirce gets very carried away and ends up arguing for telepathy and group-mind (do you follow him there too?). But you can't just pick and choose your quotes to suit your beliefs here.

In that essay, Peirce was developing a train of thought in which he was trying to account for the evidence of "feeling" right at the protoplasmic level of life. Now if you have read it, you can see Peirce lacked a critical piece of information about how life is actually "mechanistic" in having genes and other forms of systems memory. There is a place where habit is encoded.

So his reasoning goes wrong from there. Because Peirce could not find a place for accumulated habit to reside in a global fashion, he had to speculate about an atomistic level memory.

Likewise, because there was not enough neuroscience to explain how attention is a global brain mechanism, he again had to try and place the "feeling of attending" at the atomistic moment when some habit is being eroded by the vagaries of spontaneity.

So you are jumping in where Peirce is clearly wrong (due to a lack of better knowledge in his day) rather than focusing on where he was right (which is in his hierarchical approach to logic itself - treating causality in self-organising systems terms).

His semiosis does not actually support his own argument towards the end of the essay. But it is modern biologists who are developing the field of biosemiosis on the back of his triadic process. And the critical modification they make is the clear recognition that both words and genes function as symbols - ie: Pattee's epistemic cut.

Then pansemiosis (again, a modern development) would be based on Peirce's logic, but be able to fill in the blanks properly.

So semiosis as a triadic process was a proto-theory in Peirce's hands. He polished up the essential logic. But a modern systems thinker can also see that Peirce failed to deal explicitly with the issue of the epistemic cut, and also the centrality of scale to hierarchy.

Coming back to your panpsychism = pansemiosis, if you read Man's Glassy Essence carefully, what happens is that he stretches semiosis as far as he can, then starts talking in a handwavy panpsychic way that is unsupported by the notion of semiosis.

He takes a correct subjective observation (attention loosens habits) and tries to associate it with some micro-physical event. But that is because he lacked a better understanding of brain architecture. If you asked a neuroscientist to explain the relation between habit and attention today, you would get a pretty straightforward account in terms of cortico-striatal interactions.

eg: http://web.mit.edu/bcs/graybiel-lab/pub.html

It would be unfairly anachronistic to use Peirce as a champion of panpsychism when the thrust of his work was instead a focus on systematic causality. That is what scientists are actually using today (biosemiotics does not exist because it supports a panpsychic view of life).

So by all means, try to square Peirce's statements. But you will have to deal with the fact that the panpsychism is not properly derived from the semiotics even in Peirce's own writings. It was a jump he made in handwavy fashion when he ran out of facts that would allow him to imagine the world differently.

Fortunately we now know about genes, neural circuits, and suchlike.

apeiron, I follow Peirce not only on his panpsychism but also on telepathy and the potential for group mind. There is ample evidence for telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. See Radin's Entangled Minds for an exhaustive overview. As for group-mind, I'm less certain on this, but the panpsychist view of mind and physical reality suggests that higher-level minds may form in certain situations. My own work suggests that the key to the formation of a unitary subject is the right kind of field coherence. This may require some type of quantum coherence, but I am far from convinced of that yet. Rather, where lower-level minds vibrate/oscillate/resonate at similar enough frequencies they may form a higher-level mind in addition to the lower-level minds. "The many become one and are increased by one" is a key Whitehead phrase of the deepest profundity for the workings of the universe. It is the process by which reality is laid down and how complexity arises.

As for the "epistemic cut," as I've suggested in previous discussions with you, this is a major problem for your approach and Pattee's if we are concerned with ontology as well as epistemology. Peirce did in fact solve this problem with his panpsychism, that is, the epistemic cut exists between every actual thing and all other actual things because actuality is synonymous with experience. Pattee recognizes that the epistemic cut's placement is entirely arbitrary (from the paper you've cited):

"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)

As for explaining consciousness through knowledge of genes, neural circuits, etc., such an approach (the "materialist project," to use a broad label) cannot provide an explanation of consciousness, in principle. This is because your approach has from the outset defined away interiority. This is the motivation for Chalmers' hard problem/easy problem distinction, of course, and it is a valid point. We can explain complex systems in as much detail from the outside as we like, but we will know exactly nothing about the interiority of such systems (your mind, for example) from purely objective physical descriptions. I could describe your brain in excruciating detail from the outside, with adequate time and tools, but I would never be able to say anything from such knowledge about your mind UNLESS we acknowledge that what I describe from the outside, objectively, is for you, from the inside, experience. The panpsychist approach merely extends this realization to all stuff because it recognizes that to be actual is to be experiential.

I provided a more substantive critique of Pattee's paper at this post: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3242532&highlight=Pattee#post3242532

 

[bohm2]

bohm2, yes, I'm suggesting exactly that. Where does Bohm use the phrase "mental pole"? This is actually a phrase from Whitehead, who Bohm cites a number a times in The Undivided Universe and Wholeness and the Implicate Order, but I don't remember seeing that phrase.

In Chapter 15 of “The undivided universe” Bohm and Hiley write:

It is thus implied that in some sense a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics, and that as we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality becomes stronger and more developed. (p.386)

At each such level, there will be a ‘mental pole’ and a ‘physical pole’. Thus as we have already implied, even an electron has at least a rudimentary mental pole, represented mathematically by the quantum potential. Vice versa, as we have seen, even subtle mental processes have a physical pole. But the deeper reality is something beyond either mind or matter, both of which are only aspects that serve as terms for analysis. (p.387)

He actually uses apeiron’s “magnet pole” (Fig. 15.8 in book or Fig 5 of first link) as an analogy to argue his point.

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/bohm_mind_matter_1990.pdf (this link is very similar to Chapter 15)

http://books.google.ca/books?id=vt9...m=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Further in Ontological basis for the Quantum theory (see-‘Extension to the many-body system’ (p.330-332 of link) he argues that this can be extended upwards for some complex systems with the “right” configurations (e.g. superconductivity, living organisms, etc.). So if I understand him correctly he is interpreting the quantum potential as a mental pole that can’t be measured (like the mental) but can be inferred via the behaviour of the physical pole which is picked up by our measurements. So the configuration space for Bohm is really an information/mental space that guides the electron? So it’s “real” but not in the typical "physical" sense?

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/local_papers/bohm_hiley_kaloyerou_1986.pdf

 

[apeiron]

As for explaining consciousness through knowledge of genes, neural circuits, etc., such an approach (the "materialist project," to use a broad label) cannot provide an explanation of consciousness, in principle. This is because your approach has from the outset defined away interiority.

On the contrary, it defines interiority in terms of systems complexity.

A reductionist here has the obvious logical problem that there can be nothing inside the smallest grain of reality (as otherwise there must be something smaller than that grain to be contained inside it).

So yes, materialism has that problem (and it can't be fixed by handwaving talk of interiority as a property of the smallest grain).

But the systems approach says the interior is that which exists between local and global limits. So it is a model of "insides".

I provided a more substantive critique of Pattee's paper at this post: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=3242532&highlight=Pattee#post3242532

You are still utterly missing the point if you are asking for exact moments when something happens when the argument is that beginnings are vague. The epistemic cut is something that has to develop.

So for instance, if we are talking about the origins of life, one plausible theory is the RNA world idea where you start with RNA doing both jobs (acting as both genetic memory and metabolic catalyst), then these roles becoming more crisply divided with the evolution of DNA and proteins.

So RNA has the mix of stability and plasticity to do both jobs (act on both sides of the epistemic cut), but neither of them that well. It is to unstable to be the best coding material. And insufficiently dynamic to be the best enzyme material. Yet there is still enough of a division of roles to have a living system arise - dissipative structure controlled by rate independent information, or non-holonomic constraints.

And then life becomes much more firmly established as a process as the division becomes concrete with a chemistry specialised for the memory task and a second chemistry specialised for the metabolic dynamics.

This is what science looks like - models of causal processes tied to real world observations.

Whereas panzooism is a lot of handwaving nonsense. It does not actually have any model when you dig into it. It is just a claim that life is a fundamental property of material reality. No reason is offered as to why or how this might be so. No data exists that suggests it might be true.

 

[bohm2]

apeiron, I follow Peirce not only on his panpsychism but also on telepathy and the potential for group mind. There is ample evidence for telepathy and other paranormal phenomena.

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

 

[apeiron]

He actually uses apeiron’s “magnet pole” (Fig. 15.8 in book or Fig 5 of first link) as an analogy to argue his point.

Not really the same analogy, because they are contrasting the north/south poles of a bar magnet with the magnetic field that is the "true whole" of the story.

And it is a bad analogy because it smuggles in the epistemic cut to make its point. The shape of the bar is what creates distinct north and south poles. Someone had to make a choice to forge the bar that way. So this is a further source of information, a further imposed constraint, that needs to be accounted for.

Bohm/Hiley compound this mistake just a couple paragraphs later, talking now about seeds growing into trees.

Yes, life is about all the matter flowing through it and so accelerating the entropification of the universe as required by the second law. But this does not underline the seamlessness of bios/abios, but instead the epistemic cut that is definitional of the divide between the animate and the inanimate.

The seed is the rate-independent information that stands separately from the rate-dependent dynamics which it controls to produce over time some tree.

The universe is in fact divided by this epistemic cut, this separation of constraints and construction.

Now pansemiosis - building on the philosophy of Peirce - would argue that all beginnings are vague and so the epistemic cut would be vaguely present even at the most primitive or simple levels of material organisation.

This is actually a contentious claim. Pattee himself is no great fan of the idea. While some of his colleagues, like Stan Salthe, say that all dissipative structure has at least a proto-epistemic cut. There is both a fundamental seamlessness and a very distinct transition.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, "proto-epistemic cut"?? What does this even mean. You are shading into panpsychism even as you deny it.

You've stated previously you can accept Griffin's panexperiential physicalism. This is just another name for panpsychism.

The epistemic cut concept, it seems to me, can also be looked at as defined in a circular manner because you have suggested in previous discussions that the cut arose with the origin of life and yet you in this thread suggest that the cut is the origin of consciousness (so the origin of life is the origin of consciousness is the origin of life).

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

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, "proto-epistemic cut"?? What does this even mean. You are shading into panpsychism even as you deny it.

About time you replied to the many detailed questions that have been posed of your position in this thread.

But in the meantime...as I have said endlessly, I am arguing a developmental perspective in which the crisply structured emerges from the vaguely possible. So "proto" is a recognition that the definite has to develop.

If this is like anything, it is like neutral monism. But it is different from that.

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

You, on the other hand, are not able to describe any process that distinguishes mind and matter at a root level. You keep being asked pointed questions about this, but failing to answer.

The epistemic cut concept, it seems to me, can also be looked at as defined in a circular manner because you have suggested in previous discussions that the cut arose with the origin of life and yet you in this thread suggest that the cut is the origin of consciousness (so the origin of life is the origin of consciousness is the origin of life).

The epistemic cut is a general description of a process, just like evolution is a generalised concept. And both would be justified in their use by observation - is a system organised by such a mechanism?

So that would be the "circular manner" here - the match between model and measurement.

And I have said that life and mind are fundamentally the same process once you get down to basics. They share a common mechanism (ie: epistemic cut, semiosis, anticipatory processing, modelling relation, etc).

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

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

So time now for you to address the many questions about your own theories?

 

[bohm2]

Is mysterianism/cognitive closure with respect to consciousness as advanced by McGinn (and perhaps Chomsky) as strange/incoherent as these authors suggest?

Mysterianists maintain that it is prejudicial hubris to suppose that humans are somehow spared this predicament and are cognitively closed to nothing. As a natural, evolved system, the human cognitive system must have its own constitutional limitations. Thus the initially reasonable position is that some phenomena and features of the world are bound to elude human comprehension. Just as misunderstanding of algebra is part of the canine condition, so misunderstanding of some other phenomena is part of the human condition. Mysterianism represents an unusual approach to the intellectual problem raised by consciousness. Rather than offering an explanation of consciousness, it attempts to quell our intellectual discomfort by offering an explanation of why we cannot obtain an explanation of consciousness. It thus combines first-order pessimism with second-order optimism: although we have no clue about consciousness, we have a clue about why we have no clue about consciousness!

The literature on mysterianism has so far been somewhat dogmatically dismissive. Critical discussions of the merits and demerits of the view are few and far between. In particular, McGinn’s argument is rarely if ever engaged. This is unfortunate, although perhaps understandable from a heuristic viewpoint. Nonetheless, some problems with, and suspicions about, the view have emerged in the literature. Perhaps the main suspicion (aired by Daniel Dennett among others) is that the view is based on a mistaken conception of the relationship between an intellectual problem and its corresponding solution. We may well understand a problem but not know its solution, or be unable to understand a solution to a problem we do not fully grasp. But it is incoherent to suppose that we cannot in principle understand the solution to a problem we can and do understand and fully grasp. Plausibly, understanding what a problem is involves understanding what would count as an appropriate solution to it (if not necessarily a correct one). It is true that dogs cannot in principle understand algebra; but that is precisely why algebraic problems do not pose themselves to dogs.

http://uriahkriegel.com/downloads/frankthetank.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_mysterianism

I'm guessing Gödel's incompleteness theorems would be evidence against these arguments?

 

[bohm2]

And I have said that life and mind are fundamentally the same process once you get down to basics. They share a common mechanism (ie: epistemic cut, semiosis, anticipatory processing, modelling relation, etc).

aperion

I'm a bit confused about semiosis. Does semiosis bring any new facts to bear or is it just a different way of looking at the known "facts" of neuroscience, biology, cognition, etc.? I mean, does it make any new predictions/testable models? Is it a just a philosophical perspective or a different approach that offers new directions/predictions? If the latter what are some of those predictions/testable models? As "incomplete" as reductionism has been, it has delivered the goods, so far, I think. I've been looking at some of the articles you linked and some articles on biosemiotics and found them interesting but again maybe I don't understand but I don't see anything beyond very useful descriptions. Having said that, it's possible that I'm just not "getting" it. It wouldn't be the first time.

 

[Pythagorean]

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

what does "epistemic cut" mean to you?

 

[bohm2]

what does "epistemic cut" mean to you?

In physics it would be the “measurement problem”. Higher up (language, etc.), it would be the information/meaning distinction. For consciousness, how the brain/neurons can generate mental representations/qualia, etc. At least, that's how I interpret it.

 

[Pythagorean]

In physics it would be the “measurement problem”. Higher up (language, etc.), it would be the information/meaning distinction. For consciousness, how the brain/neurons can generate mental representations/qualia, etc. At least, that's how I interpret it.

Woah, slow down! Let's go backwards a little bit. What does "epistemic" mean to you?

 

[apeiron]

I'm a bit confused about semiosis. Does semiosis bring any new facts to bear or is it just a different way of looking at the known "facts" of neuroscience, biology, cognition, etc.?

In my view, you have to look at it as a whole framework of logic.

So people are generally taught to think about the world in a way that is non-systematic. If asked the question of why things happen, they will start to analyse using an interlocking set of assumptions that we generally call reductionism. The elements of this include atomism, mechanicalism, monism, locality, determinism. Cause is equated with material construction - parts stuck together make wholes. So explanation begins with the smallest, simplest, action or component.

This is a powerful and familiar way to look at the world. It really works. But - systems thinkers claim - it is not the whole of things. It is a too-simple view that gains efficiency at the expense of leaving out the full story. And this is what create problems with explanations - scientific, philosophical or otherwise - when you get towards the limit of things. When what you are seeking to explain is the whole.

So the systems approach seeks the expanded view. Like Aristotle argued, you need to at least include formal and final cause as part of the package of causes. You need to deal with development and process.

Systems science thus has a more complex model of causality. Principally, it sees cause as hierarchical. There is both the local and global (as a fundamental fact). So scale matters. Cause is divided into bottom-up construction and top-down constraint.

The other fundamental assumption is that reality is dynamic. Everything must arise as a process of development. So change is also real (not merely rearrangement).

We could call this the organic view, in contrast to the mechanical. But the point is that it is another way of modelling reality. And it both includes reductionism and contradicts it.

So it has a place for bottom-up construction, but then also says that the parts or atoms or degrees of freedom doing the construction are not fundamental. Instead, they in turn are being shaped into crisp being by a system's downward acting constraints. The parts are emergent rather than existent.

In this way, you can have the same material facts (the existence of atoms) but a different explanation of those facts (one says the fundamentally small just is...somehow, the other says smallness is ultimately created as the counterpart to largeness).

I haven't even mentioned semiosis yet. But semiosis was really the particular view of systems taken by CS Peirce, who emphasised certain aspects of systems logic (and neglected some others). His writings have become only recently fashionable and so the tag 'semiosis' has become a bit of a bandwagon among the current generation of scientists who are dabbling in the systems view.

The key thing that I mean to draw attention to by talking about semiosis and the epistemic cut is a yet a further dimension to the whole systems view. I just said the two principle elements of systems thinking are hierarchical causality and a developmental ontology. Well this is enough for simple complexity, but not complex complexity (as we know it from life and mind).

You also have the possibility of global constraints being locally constructed. Systems with some kind of memory can store information and make active choices. So as well as dynamicism we also have computationalism, as well as semantics we also have syntax. There are coding mechanisms like genes and words, neurons and membranes, that can be used to control the world of rate-tied dynamics.

Now, science already knows this of course. We build computers and use them all the time. We invent mathematical syntax. We long ago discovered genes and realized the difference speech made to human consciousness.

But regular science, based on a reductionist model of causality, cannot ground these facts in a common framework of logic. Lacking a systems view of complex complexity, all sorts of philosophical problems arise about how to define life and mind. Not to mention all the other regulars in philosophy forums, like the problem of freewill, the nature of maths, etc.

So semiosis is systems science as it gets to its most intricate. It provides a different framework for the same facts. But does it predict different facts?

Potentially it should. But it would first need to be made more mathematical - hierarchy theory is semi-mathematical at the moment. And also, many of the facts we have discovered are as a result of scientists using systems thinking intuitively (and presenting the results in terms of reductionist models). So we can say it has already worked in that sense.

But an example of applied systems thinking is Friston's Bayesian brain, which I've mentioned. There explicitly is a systems model of brain function. And it claims to account better for a whole range of facts than previous models. It proposes an actual probability process that can be measured experimentally.