Had a read of the primary scientific source

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

Some healthy skepticism as they were funded by the John Templeton foundation, founded with a partly religious aim? But an open one, and I see they funded the collating of Darwin's letters (many of which were to religious officials). I liked the letter where he said something about life being special, how if it was just microbes shaking about in the middle of the moon, would we think as much of it?

I wonder how this article may fit with what I was just posting about first order functionalism, they talk about first order selection. But firstly how are they making use of the idea of selection? Darwin used it by analogy to domestic breeding by humans. Possibly it also fit ok with the design arguments that were widely held then? But he meant it as just the relevant nature around an organism/population. But what does it mean in this broader astrophysics sense.

They say regarding persistence despite energy entropy

"Unlike static persistence, which only requires dissipation during formation, dynamic persistence requires active dissipation. Other functions—such as autocatalysis, homeostasis, and information processing—can emerge that prolong the act of dissipation through space and time. For example, self-replicating systems—including life as we know it—are necessarily autocatalytic; all else being equal, variations of such systems that have greater autocatalytic prowess will propagate faster and can be characterized as having a higher “dynamic kinetic stability” 

Ok. By autocatalytic do they mean DNA develops into organisms and more DNA by itself?


"Perhaps the dominance of Darwinian thinking—the false equating of biological natural selection to “evolution” writ large—played some role. Yet that cannot be the whole story."

Darwin didn't say that the term evolution can't be applied to anything else, did he? He was just focusing on variation from parent to child, as a cause of speciation etc. He didn't yet know about DNA. Americans do seem to tend to have a real antipathy toward Darwin. Not just the religious fundamentalists. I suspect Darwin did overemphasise overpopulation and culling in the struggle between 'races', because he'd based ideas on Malthus. But he was quite anti-racism (his granddad Erasmus was a leading abolitionist, not to mention physician and botanical poet who changed the family crest to say "everything from shells" due to belief in evolution from sea). I read it was actually powerful racists from the USA who influenced institutions in the UK and this pressured Darwin in his later writings where he was less antiracist reportedly). Anyway

"A more deeply rooted factor in the absence of a law of evolution may be the reluctance of scientists to consider “function” and “context” in their formulations. A metric of information that is based on functionality suggests that considerations of the context of a system alters the outcome of a calculation, and that this context results in a preference for configurations with greater degrees of function. An asymmetric trajectory based upon functionality may seem antithetical to scientific analysis. Nevertheless, we conjecture that selection based on static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation is a universal process that results in systems with increased functional information.

Interesting. So where does this functionality come from (other than random asymmetries from the big bang).

I've been through a similar line of thought about extended consciousness between entities. Partly after reading an Italian academic who'd been an AI/robotics engineer; I forget his name which began with M. One thing he suggested that, as creative as we humans are, there's no evidence we can imagine ourselves into experiencing a new colour we haven't perceived first, but then we can experience it without the eyes though, as if time has not passed in some sense? I wasn't sure how serious he was in the end though, he seemed to be running life coaching courses based on the universe actually being colourful it's not just in our heads.

"Second, if function is going to play a key role in defining consciousness, then it seems that form probably should too"

What do you mean by form - the actual stuff we're made of? I tend to agree with the physicist Smolin that it must be relevant - so that as he puts it, the solution will be a mixture of functional (specific to the organism) and reductive (in his speculation, that info about causal history is built into particles, as energy and momentum are he says).

I still have no clue though what determines which of our functions (by whatever definition of function and as ascribable from outside knowledge) are experienced consciously. It does seem to be hierarchical? So if phenomality is baked in, somehow it gets funneled up into e.g. overall visual scene rather than the initial array along the optic nerve from each eye (upside down).

I happen to agree about the unpleasantness of the term qualia (and I try to keep in mind Dennett's caution about it not actually being more specific than just phenomenal experience). I don't see that your mereological point applies to what I said because I did use the plural.

Oh no I was just trying to say that our phenomenality is a given for this post (as opposed to illusionism or something). I try to be monist.

saying consciousness evolved by natural selection says almost nothing about it - everything else evolved by natural selection, ok, now what? We should attempt to give some account as to why it exists, what does it do and so on. — Manuel

One of the issues with functionalism in phil of mind, though, is that 'functions' can potentially be ascribed all over the place, not just to the products of genetic evolution. The biologist McShea writes about that in terms of naturalistic goal-directedness even.

The abstractions vs actual is another relevant issue. I was meaning the causal issue, like how qualia can cause physical speech about having qualia (a problem if they're passive as Carroll pointed out, but also for monism? And for p-zombie).

Per Wikipedia, Chalmers' naturalistic property dualism involves "psychophysical laws that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism."

Whether something's information-bearing would seem to depends on the context though, like needs to be assessed from the outside and over time maybe. Similar to something having a 'function'. How can that objectively in itself trigger qualia. But it does seem like we experience functions, like vision overall rather than like optical electrical pathways inside the brain.

I'm sure I read in the past that while Chalmers considers various options possible, he has leaned towards dualism. I'm not sure how reliable that source was though or why he does or did.

A specific subset of the p-zombie challenge is speech about having consciousness. I recall there's a name for that puzzle, perhaps even from Chalmers or he just used it. I don't know if the p-zombie helps unpack it and I find it very confusing to think about. I'm not sure how to make any progress on it, under monism or whatever.

I was in agreement with @Patterner's point. Reading Carroll's 2021 article, he seems to base it on there being only two options. A mental (phenomenal) ontology would change the laws of physics in some places (and no such is detected), or it's just "passive mentalism" (epiphenomenal).

But if phenomenality has always been baked into our universe 'stuff' (as he also calls it), why would it not just be part of the causal processes, why would it need to change the laws of physics in places in our universe? So therefore I couldn't get on board with his p-zombie points.

I appreciated how firm and clear he is on e.g. "From the point of view of particle physics, a brain is not a densely packed system; indeed, it’s practically empty space. There is no physical rationale for expecting the dynamics of the Core Theory to break down in such an environment, regardless of how complex the overall situation is. For any particular electron or nucleus, almost all of the rest of the brain is so far away as to be essentially irrelevant."

But I wasn't sure how his preferred 'weak emergence' would be real phenomenality as he indicates, as he seemed to switch to talking about levels of explanation. He refers to functions (brain functions not just wave function maths) but I wasn't sure what version of functionalism in Phil of Mind he would ascribe to.

So try to conceive of a universe with exactly the same physical laws as ours, and similar enough to have an Earth with humans like us on it, — GrahamJ

I think this must be drawing a distinction between the 'laws' and the 'stuff' a universe is made of? In order for there to be any relevant difference, given that conscious humans are just pieces of universe, earth.

I don't think I can answer the poll in good faith because under monism I see epiphenomenalism as a red herring but the clarification

"For options three and four, "not all causes are physical" can be also be taken as "epiphenomenalism is not true"."

is still dualistic.

I recall from looking into Spencer a few months ago in journal articles, that he'd long been promoting his own Lamarckian theory of evolution. Got the impression he was a senior figure whose writings suited various economic interests, and was popular with Americans. It seemed that he was thrown by On The Origin of Species into needing to save face. I mean Darwin himself retained a little Lamarckian thinking which Darwinists don't like to mention I think, but anyway. But it seemed Spencer, rather than admit he'd been wrong, came up with the compromise catchphrase. I'm not sure why Wallace supported him.