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

[Pythagorean]

I like to refer to the scientific journal, Chaos and their "about us" page:

In the past two decades the "new science," known popularly as "chaos," has given us deep insights into previously intractable, inherently nonlinear, natural phenomena. Building on important but isolated historical precedents (such as the work of Poincaré), "chaos" has in some cases caused a fundamental reassessment of the way in which we view the physical world. For instance, certain seemingly simple natural nonlinear processes, for which the laws of motion are known and completely deterministic, can exhibit enormously complex behavior, often appearing as if they were evolving under random forces rather than deterministic laws.

http://chaos.aip.org/about/about_the_journal

Notice that "new science" is in quotes. This is because fundamentally, there is no new science, but a different perspective on "causation". More accurately, it calls us out on our definition of causation.

What it does is expand our coverage of science by adopting another method of troubleshooting for systems that are so complex that we can't piece-wise them apart. This is the reason there are "soft" and "hard" sciences (or, in reality, a spectrum of soft to hard sciences).

Soft sciences classically have much less deterministic models, mostly only correlations (which we all know doesn't immediately mean causation) so there's little in the way of predictions; you can try to predict that the correlation will hold, but sometimes correlations only appear linear... or even curvlinear... on a short range and in the right "parameter regime" (the technical case of "too many variables").

As per the quoted paragraph above, the new perspective is that there are still deterministic models underlying these correlations in complex systems, we just need to understand and find generalities about "systems" in general; that is, "laws" of emergence.

 

[apeiron]

I like to refer to the scientific journal, Chaos and their "about us" page:

As per the quoted paragraph above, the new perspective is that there are still deterministic models underlying these correlations in complex systems, we just need to understand and find generalities about "systems" in general; that is, "laws" of emergence.

Chaos, and most of the Santa Fe brand of complexity, are in fact just extensions of reductionism and not at all true models of complex causality in the systems sense.

So they are useful models, but most definitely not what I am talking about.

Non-linearity arises when constraints are removed from a system. Linearity arises as constraints are added. But who is now talking about how constraints themselves arise? That is the next step taken by a semiotic view of complexity.

 

[Pythagorean]

Chaos, and most of the Santa Fe brand of complexity, are in fact just extensions of reductionism and not at all true models of complex causality in the systems sense.

So they are useful models, but most definitely not what I am talking about.

I don't know what you mean by Santa Fe complexity... never heard the designation before, sounds like "in-crowd/out-crowd" language.

This is not about chaos (sensitivity to initial conditions) just because one of the journals is called "chaos". Chaos is a very small piece of it (but it's the element of it that caught attention and the imagery is attractive so the title stuck).

Anyway, the field itself (sometimes called chaos theory, sometimes called nonlinear dynamics, sometimes called complex system theory) is neutral on the matter of reductionism (and in fact, embraced by systems theory). There is also no requirement for purely deterministic model, but it is an important aspect that seemingly random behavior can sometimes be determinstic.

Non-linearity arises when constraints are removed from a system. Linearity arises as constraints are added.

In my field's language, it seems it would always depend on the nature of the constraints. What context do you mean this in; do you have a quote and citation?

But who is now talking about how constraints themselves arise? That is the next step taken by a semiotic view of complexity.

Implicit in this sentence is supposed to be that scientists submitting papers to PRE and Chaos don't talk about how constraints arise?

 

[apeiron]

I don't know what you mean by Santa Fe complexity... never heard the designation before, sounds like "in-crowd/out-crowd" language.

The Sante Fe Institute? Kauffman, Gell-Mann, Anderson, Crutchfield, Farmer, etc?

When people wrote books titled "Complexity" in the early 1990s, that is what they were talking about.

Anyway, the field itself (sometimes called chaos theory, sometimes called nonlinear dynamics, sometimes called complex system theory) is neutral on the matter of reductionism (and in fact, embraced by systems theory). There is also no requirement for purely deterministic model, but it is an important aspect that seemingly random behavior can sometimes be determinstic.

Deterministic chaos is not "neutral" if it calls itself deterministic. I agree there is a lot of overlap between chaos people and systems people. But there is still a big difference in orientation depending on whether you believe all systems to be an extension of reductionist analysis, or whether you believe that reductionism cannot in principle capture the full picture even with "add-ons" such as chaos.

The giveaway is your quote to the effect that "chaos theory shows that randomness is merely an appearance, the reality is a complicated determinism".

As I have said, the semiotic/systems view, as expressed for example by Peirce, is that the indeterminacy of reality is something that is real, not mere appearance.

Note also how your quote slides "the laws of nature" off to one side. The Peircean view puts them centre stage as part of what must develop to make the system.

So as a journal, I have to class Chaos as extended reductionism rather than systems science. Doesn't make the field less valuable. Just makes it not the same thing.

Implicit in this sentence is supposed to be that scientists submitting papers to PRE and Chaos don't talk about how constraints arise?

Are you claiming that these journals regularly feature articles addressing the semiotics of constraints?

The systems view (as I've referenced in Pattee's work on the epistemic cut) is that complex complexity (of the kind relevant to this thread) depends on control over non-holonomic constraints.

So if you want the more exact claim, it is about talking about how non-holonomic constraints arise (and then, from there, having established the biosemiotic view, perhaps making the pansemiotic leap to being able to talk about holonomic constraints as well).

 

[Gold Barz]

I always thought Kauffman was a systems guy?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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 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).
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?

apeiron, as far as I remember the only direct question I've left hanging is the issue of brute facts (please remind me if I've forgotten other questions you've posed). Here's how my ontology works, inspired primarily by Whitehead, Griffin, Bohm, Watts, Vedanta and Buddhism, in brief:

- the ground of being/pure potentiality/implicate order/apeiron/Brahman is the metaphysical soil from which all actuality springs.
- we can't know anything directly about this realm because it is not actual. We can, however, infer much about it, as with all human knowledge (we don't really know anything directly other than our own awareness).
- it is only when potentiality becomes actuality that experience/consciousness arises. To be actual is to be experiential and it is not possible to be actual without being experiential. This and the very existence of the ground of being are the brute facts of my system.
- my working model for the ground of being is an infinite grid of what can be envisioned as 3-d pixels. These pixels manifest as either space or matter/energy.
- matter/energy behaves according to the dual influences of the implicate order (described by Bohm and Hiley as the quantum potential or guiding wave) and explicate order (classical forces)
- it is the suggestibility rather than coercion of the quantum potential that results in free will from the lowest level of actuality to the highest
- the universe is more akin to a computer program than a physics equation in that it is irredeemably irreversible. Time is serial and quantized. Each click of the universe is a chronon and it may be as brief as the Planck moment. The universe is laid down in each chronon anew, with the prior actualities forming the data (prehensions) for all actualities in the present moment
- there is a finite speed with which causality propagates in the universe and this speed is the ultimate limit for actuality. In other words, each single actuality is limited by the speed of causal propagation. There are, however, ways in which causal speed may be bootstrapped to far faster levels than would otherwise be possible. Life may be defined by this ability, but it's a sliding scale, not an all-or-nothing attribute (all things are alive to some degree, a position known as panzoism or hylozoism).
- the simplest actualities combine into higher-order actualities, at many different hierarchical levels, through coherence in terms of the frequency with which they resonate at different chronon multiples. Through resonation, causal influence may be propagated in each chronon far further than would otherwise be the case.
- mere aggregates (clumpings of matter) may be distinguished from actualities (individuals) through this informational coherence. There is a certain type of coherence in any clumping of matter (or it wouldn't be a clump), but it's a particular kind of coherence that leads to true individuals. I'm still pondering what is the exact nature of the required coherence, but it may be that quantum bootstrapping is itself the required coherence. However, it is probably not beany qualitative difference in terms of the required coherence; rather, it may simply be that what we normally describe as life has mastered causal channels to the point that coherence is achieved at much greater spans within each chronon or chronon multiple than would otherwise be the case. So a mere aggregate is a larger clump of matter than the individuals that reside within it. An actual entity/individual is defined not by the physical clumping but by the informational/causal coherence made possible by its particular organization.

Much of this is still a work in progress and as I've mentioned many times my first hefty paper on these topics is coming out in JCS soon (hopefully Nov/Dec this year), so stay tuned.

As for your points above, circular definitions are by definition not helpful for anything. You can't learn anything about the actual universe through circular definitions.

As for seamlessness and sharp distinctions, I agree with you at the most general level that some type of radical emergence with respect to consciousness has to occur somewhere. But where you seem to be happy with positing it at some vague mid level of reality, I suggest that it is far more likely to occur at the very beginning of the chain of being. If we are to posit a miracle, far better for that miracle to occur at the beginning of the chain of being than at some arbitrary mid-point. In my system, the miracle occurs in each chronon as each actuality emerges from potentiality and with it experience. This rudimentary experience at the most basic physical level compounds upwards. In some cases, like humans, it compounds to a very high degree, made possible through the causal bootstrapping of the various information channels in our brains and bodies.

Phase transitions from ice to water to vapor are sharp at one level of description: the molecular bonds. There is a very easy explanation for such transitions in terms of the difference in bonding. But this is not radical emergence and nor is it seamless at this level of description.

The emergence of consciousness and life is best conceived as occurring at the very beginning because we recognize that to be actual is to be experiential is to be alive. It's a continuum from the first brute emergence to the last.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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?

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

 

[Pythagorean]

The Sante Fe Institute? Kauffman, Gell-Mann, Anderson, Crutchfield, Farmer, etc?

When people wrote books titled "Complexity" in the early 1990s, that is what they were talking about.

not familiar with their work, at least not directly.

Deterministic chaos is not "neutral" if it calls itself deterministic.

As I said, real chaos (sensitivity to initial conditions) is only a small piece of complex dynamical systems. The namesake has stuck. See Prigogine, for instance, who used Markov (i.e, stochastic, as opposed to deterministic) models and always spoke against determinism:

In his 1997 book, The End of Certainty, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

I agree there is a lot of overlap between chaos people and systems people. But there is still a big difference in orientation depending on whether you believe all systems to be an extension of reductionist analysis, or whether you believe that reductionism cannot in principle capture the full picture even with "add-ons" such as chaos.

You're still focusing too much on the word chaos. Chaos is one very small statement about a maximal positive lyapunov exponent. "Chaos theory" has grown to be so much more than that. I don't really like the name, and it's actually not used within the field in my experience (we use 'complex dynamical systems'), but it's how the public knows us.

The giveaway is your quote to the effect that "chaos theory shows that randomness is merely an appearance, the reality is a complicated determinism".

Which of course, was a "for instance" if you read the quote carefully. This is true: systems that appear irregular and random can be completely deterministic. This does not speak for all systems nor does it represent the whole complex systems approach.

As I have said, the semiotic/systems view, as expressed for example by Peirce, is that the indeterminacy of reality is something that is real, not mere appearance.

But this has nothing to do with dividing types of complexity up. All across the sciences, and especially in QM and quantum chaos, this is a well-supported perspective. For instance, we cannot define space and time as we'd like to below the Planck-scale and there's of course Heisenberg principle.

Once you come into thermodynamical systems, it's a hodge-podge of classical and modern physics. The so called, "quasi-classical" physics.

That we can't put concepts and entities cleanly into little buckets is stressed heavily in the first couple lectures of Sapolsky's "Human Behavioral Biology". Sapolsky is also a fan of chaos and neuroethology.

Note also how your quote slides "the laws of nature" off to one side. The Peircean view puts them centre stage as part of what must develop to make the system.

So as a journal, I have to class Chaos as extended reductionism rather than systems science. Doesn't make the field less valuable. Just makes it not the same thing.

There are no laws at this point; we use quotes in "laws" but terminology is officially dead; even as far back as QM, we started saying postulate and principle.

And no, I hardly no any scientists that are actually reductionists, depending on what you mean. I assume you mean philosophical reductionism:

a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.

This is definitely not the case for a dissipative nonlinear system (in which superposition and reversibility fail).

Are you claiming that these journals regularly feature articles addressing the semiotics of constraints?

I don't know if you're intentionally moving the goal post, but regularly is no requirement. You had previously had the tone "worlds apart" "nothing to do with" and I had the tone "no, it's neutral".

You would actually find more regular crossings between chaos and stochastic systems in ieee with regards to control systems; but they're still not unheard of in Chaos and PRE.

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

All the quantitative tools and techniques developed for by Poincaire are important to complexity if you want to be able correlate evidence with theory on a systems level.

 

[bohm2]

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

You mean what I think constitutes (scientific) knowledge?

 

[apeiron]

I always thought Kauffman was a systems guy?

Not really in the sense that I mean here. He was certainly trying to model the computational/semiotic aspects of systems. But doing so fairly strictly in the language of dynamics.

I'd say the same thing about some other important thinkers like Scott Kelso and Walter Freeman. They were trying to build up to computational looking behaviour (rate independent control in Pattee's terminology) from dynamical models (the rate-dependent side of the epistemic cut).

It's difficult to describe, and it becomes my personal opinion, but while something of the truth of systems can be modeled from either side of the epistemic cut - from the dynamical or the computational perspective - to do the job properly requires a new hybrid discourse. Or better than just a hybrid. A deeper level that unites both.

Which is where semiosis, the epistemic cut, dissipative structure theory, etc, all come in. Semiosis is as good a name as any for current efforts to knit the essential dichotomy together.

Some of Kauffman's work does get close to this area. But then it comes down to orientation. I've not seen any consciousness in anything he has written that this is what he wants or needs to do. Instead he kind of backs into it without realising.

By contrast, Gell-Mann is much more the proper systems thinker at Santa Fe. But he was not actually producing mathematical models like Kauffman and the others. So his influence has not been that great.

I personally have had no contact with the Santa Fe crew, or even many chaologists. So this is just what I have heard and observed in their writings.

But I have talked enough with others like Freeman, Kelso and Friston who are trying to make it work from a neuroscience perspective. And also of course plenty with Pattee, Salthe, Ulanowicz and the others who have been doing it for longer in biology.

If you are talking about "who is systems?", then you would have to include all sorts of people including some fairly crackpot people like Ken Wilber and Ervin Laszlo.

And if you just relied on the "official view" of who is who - like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory - then again, the people I talk about hardly feature. None of this lot are part of the latest semiotic paradigm, if I can call it that, though many would be precursors.

There is a good attempt at a genealogical map of systems thinking here...
http://www.nickbaily.com/Complexity-map-overview.png

Then a further much more complete (and confusing) family history here...
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=273

But anyway, Kauffman is a landmark figure in science, he does work that is very relevant to those taking the semiotic view of systems, but he himself is not a semiotician in his general orientation.

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Gold Barz]

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

In this theory, what "drives" this semiosis?

 

[bohm2]

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

In this theory, what "drives" this semiosis?

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

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

 

[bohm2]

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

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

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

The Naïve Nativist Model

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

The Naïve Empiricist Model

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

The Naïve Evolutionist Model

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

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

 

[Pythagorean]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

There is clearly plenty being lost in translation here.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

bohm2, how so?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

You offer mockery, vagueness and now arbitrariness.

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You offer mockery, vagueness and now arbitrariness.

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

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

 

[apeiron]

bohm2, how so?

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

 

[Pythagorean]

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

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

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

There is clearly plenty being lost in translation here.

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

or to paraphrase Pattee by quoting Hoffmeyer

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

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

So to return to this:

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

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

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[bohm2]

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

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

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

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

 

[Gold Barz]

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[Gold Barz]

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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

 

[Gold Barz]

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

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

 

[apeiron]

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

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

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

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