here 'seems' to be a residue that can't be scraped. — plaque flag

Or is it that there is some uncertainty that can’t be constrained?

Dictionaries try to constrain the meaning of words so that we must come to share the exact same interpretation. But in the end, we can only converge on a pragmatically “good enough” agreement in our collective behaviour. There is always a “residue” that is left vague and unspecified.

But that is a feature, not a bug. It makes minds - as interpreters of signs - creative, flexible, efficient, fault-tolerant. All the things the vagueness intolerant computer can’t cope with.

Of course, computer architectures can shift from pure Turing machines and try to implement neural-like systems. Even a small step in this direction creates a powerful new technology.

The gap becomes that between the living organism - where the genetic information is in such intimate relation with its biochemical milieu that it is controlling it at the quantum decoherence level - and the neural network simulation which still fakes any actual involvement with a physical world.

Thus AI can swim as if it were a real creature in the realm of pixels on a LED display. Humans will read it as really thinking and acting, judging by pictures and print on a display. But it is Searle’s carburettor. Nothing depends on the computation moving any atom or particle with quantum level precision in the real world. Life uses genetics to move electrons and protons with military precision.

So life constantly faces the chance of a surprise every time an electron quantum tunnels across the seven of so iron-sulphur receptors of a respiratory chain protein. Error would release so much energy too fast that it would blow the protein up. Life has skin in the game at the quantum level.

All AI systems are simulations of neural like processes operating in the sterile and risk-free environment of a metal box with a surge protected power supply and cooling fans. They interact with the world by switching pixels off on on. Maybe there will be a human there to interpret them. But who - on the AI side - knows or cares?

Chalk and cheese. Where do we see technology being able to reach down into entrails of the nanoscale quantum chemistry? The entropic forces of the battering storm of water molecules would blast any fabricated hardware apart in a millionth of a second. Only a self-repairing biology can ratchet this wild and utterly alien physical environment.

To make artificial life, we would in fact have to make real life. And real life already makes itself, thank you very much.

Just to be clear, I'm 'worried' instead that we humans are not conscious, that we are 'only' computers. — plaque flag

We are organisms. We are in a pragmatic modelling relation with reality. We beat all other known organisms by modelling reality at four levels of organismic organisation - genes, neurons, words and numbers. We are capable of conscious surprise at truths on all levels from chemistry to abstract mathematical patterns.

Do you think any computer was ever surprised by anything? When we have good reason to think that about some dumb box, plugged into a socket and mindlessly radiating its heat, then perhaps something new might be up.

There 'is' feeling. There 'is' color. Under or beyond the concept. — plaque flag

Yep. Theory can only reach as far as the counterfactual. We have to accept that as the pragmatic limit of explanation - or the modelling relation.

We want to answer why red is red, why there is a something and not nothing. But this is then bumping up against the limit of the counterfactual.

We can point to the brain’s opponent channel processing algorithms and say why red isn’t green. It is written right into the receptive fields of the cone cells. Red light turns it on and green light turns it off.

But then why red as red? There is now no evidence in terms of a cone cell that could be doing all the same algorithmic things and yet produce some other experience for a good reason.

So counterfactual reason comes with its counterfactual limits. Science halts when there is no difference that can be observed in terms of a measure that a theory might suggest.

Or as Bateson put it - the semiotician’s motto - we have to have a difference that makes a difference. That is what separates meaning from noise. At the limit of inquiry lies the vagueness of differences not making a difference. Anything might be possible and thus nothing can be certainty. Or as Wittgenstein put, nothing can be said.

And that’s alright. You still have all of neuroscience and all of cosmology to cross before you can claim to be anywhere close to reaching this confounding boundary to the possibilities of human knowledge.

but here's a key example ? — plaque flag

A vortex is universal. It is the marriage of the Cosmos fundamental degrees of dynamical freedom - rotation and translation. If you flatten the chaos of 3D into the holding pattern of a 2D plane, then the third dimension can be used to create the focal direction of the motion. Force can be projected in a meaningful fashion.

Vortexes organise the universe all the way up to black holes with their accretion disks, spiralling galaxies and even wheeling galactic clusters.

But the other standard entropic pattern is fractal fracturing. A crumbling over all scales. An inverse story of force being projected in a single direction and splintering in a way that allows it to completely fill a 3D space with its dissipated energy.

The physicalist’s dichotomy that gives us the structure of the materially dissipating world.

The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. — plaque flag

Searle nailed it even better when he talks about simulated carburettors. You need actual meaningful dissipation to count as being real.

If you read my post on biophysics, you should be able to see how real symbol processing is not about flipping switches for flipping’s sake. The switches are ratchets that keep pointing the dissipative system in the direction it is designed to go.

A metabolic reaction could go either way. An organic molecule could form and as easily fall apart. Genetic information flips the switch so that the structure keeps reforming - at the cost of another small jolt of energy expenditure. The discharge of a few ATPs.

So switching creates the information patterns. But it also ratchets the metabolic discharges in a way that produces the still self surfing it’s own entropic flow.

In semiosis, switches have a foot in both camps - what we call the mental and the physical. There is thus no explanatory gap. The switch is acting simultaneously on both sides of the equation, getting mental and physical work done.

Computers are by design software patterns physically isolated from their thermal worlds. The computer is always plugged in, always cooled, always operating in a fashion that ensures it has no physical limitations on its Turing Engine mechanisms.

So computers are not functioning semiotically as organisms. They are engineered not to be doing that. And no amount of extra computing capacity or data is going to change that designed-in fact.

Time to stop worrying about the fantasies of machines becoming conscious. The legitimate concern is how humans are drifting away from a pragmatic relation to their entropic realities as a cultural trend.

What about the virus metaphor then ? AI tempts us to make more of it. — plaque flag

Or is it the Second Law’s way of luring us into building more heat-dissipating data farms? Entropy sits out there chortling. Look, I’ve got these little critters obsessed with flipping silicon switches millions of times a second in ways that use up a shit-load of energy.

Hey, what if I could get them to invent some kind of new money system that required ridiculous amounts of CPU to operate? The value of this crypto could be completely in the minds of those trading - not connected to their physical reality at all. Yet they would all got out and become their own data mining enterprises. Flipping meaningless switches and not thinking about the climate change idiocy of that.

So you can impute mind to the grids of switches. But you may as well grant it to the Second Law that is the ultimate telos of the Big a bang Cosmos.

This is some of what I'm getting at. What do we think this core of being is ? The thereness of the there ? The pure witness ? the givenness of the given ? a glowing plenitude ineffably present ? — plaque flag

Optic flow shows how selfhood is the still centre of its own entropic flow. Dissipative structure is all about the regulation of uncertainty. A vortex is an effective structure imposed on thermal chaos. It is the thing that exists in dynamically stable fashion because it connects an entropic potential to its entropic destiny. A vortex holds still, perennially reforming the same gurgling twist, for as long as it can maintain a greater rate of entropy production - drain your bath faster than would be the case if the bath just had to rely on an inefficient and unstructured glugging at the plug hole.

So life and mind are just dissipative structures like vortexes, with the exception that a code is added to create intelligence. A modelling relation where the vortex can figure out where the entropy gradients are in its environment and go chase them.Tornadoes and dust devils seem almost alive as they are indeed vortexes eating their way along gradients, as if in pursuit of each next self-sustain bite of warm surface air to funnel up into the colder sky above.

You can do the human thing of imagining there is some greater world of “mind” that dissipative structure is heir to. But the human condition is quite transparently prosaic.

Fossil fuel - the concentrated hydrocarbon of ancient Carboniferous swamps and half a billion years of anoxic plankton sediment - couldn’t be entropified as it was locked up in its geological tomb.

But once a critter got semiotically smart enough to find a reason to drill and burn - and indeed, could scale that entropic project exponentially by the invention of a culture of consumption limited only by its own population - then this is exactly what had to happen. That kind of still self at the centre of its own whirling vortex had to erupt in the form of collectives of humanoids.

Happiness for us humans is flow states - like Neal Cassidy steering the Magic Bus of hippies across the wide American expanse with his feet on the wheel.

Running a trail or any other skilled activity is the joy of being the still centre of an energetic flow, regulating chaos and uncertainty in a way that keeps building the core self that outpaces its world in terms of delivering what the Second Law demands even faster than it knew was possible.

Bro, are you going to ignore all my questions? — Eugen

From now on.

Ok... so you're basically saying that the fundamental-emergent framework can be replaced by another system of reference, by eliminating the ''fundamental". By doing so, emergentism disappears.
AM I right? — Eugen

To return you to your own thread, I was only pointing out that Zizek’s “theory of consciousness” looks to be not an externalist/objective discourse but an internalist/subjective discourse. You want to do physics. He wants to do phenomenology.

I then make the point that a Peircean metaphysics let’s you flip from one to the other. That is why it is metaphysically deeper, more fundamental.

PoMo is stuck in its own distorting hall of mirrors as it is not speaking in ways that connect the subjective to the objective. Reductionist science likewise is a discourse that stands forever outside the subjectivity it might want to describe. It has an observer problem at a fundamental level, as quantum physics so well demonstrates.

So you can’t get a tale of physical mechanism from Zizek’s psychoanalytic babble. Or at least you would be hard pushed to see how he is talking about the kind of psychological mechanisms like the optic flow phenomenon I mentioned.

If you want to understand consciousness or emergence as physicalist phenomena then that is perfectly possible. As I say, Friston’s Bayesian Brain is state of the art as it makes a mathematical strength connection between information and entropy when describing an organism as being in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world.

This is what a systems scientist understands to be proper “strong emergence”. The irreducibly triadic thing of a semiotic modelling relation.

And if you want to employ the full resources of Peircean metaphysics, you can even rewrite cosmology so that it is triadic and not dualistic - split by quantum theory into the disconnected realms of the “real” wavefunction and its “mystic” collapse. You can heal that wound too.

The starting point is to realise that most debates about emergence are rooted in the confusions of reductionist thought. Strong reductionism sets itself up to win out over the warm and fuzzy holist sentiment. Actual emergence can’t even be imagined from within this metaphysical mindset.

You have to read Peirce and other systems thinkers - even Hegel - to understand how reality could arise as a self-organising causal structure.

Emergence is now a word thoroughly corrupted by metaphysical reductionism. And that is unfortunate as it does describe how a crisp structure of reality might develop out of the vague mists of uncertainty - an Apeiron or Ungrund as Anaximander and Schelling put it, before Peirce came along with his own Vagueness and Firstness.

Maybe DNA and source code will use us as moist robot labor. — plaque flag

But if my thesis is that life and mind is already entrained by the telos of the Second Law, then source code only amplifies our entropification reach unless it also becomes its own “moist” machine that grows its own data farms through some kind of metabolic connection to the resources of the world.

We feel the call of the Second Law viscerally. AI doesn’t need to represent the real world by design. It is only a machine and not an intelligent dissipative structure as we supply both the bottom up metabolic resources and the top down telos. We build the data farms and power grids. The current crop of “AI” then just pattern matches the artefact of our written symbols - groups of letters found in vast datasets representing all the online chitter chatter of the human world.

The words have visceral meaning for us. They have no meaning for the pattern matching algorithms that simply rearrange them into convincing simulations of something someone might have said. There is no felt reason that connects the data dots, no mind that can pragmatically use the symbol strings to organise a collection of psyches to do actual collective work in the world.

It is all a hollow charade if you are talking about actual consciousness. But as I say, it is also a potent technology that could undermine our own necessary human connection to a practical reality.

Any thoughts on how AI might affect our existential or technological or thermodynamic situation ? I think a storm is coming, beautiful and terrible. — plaque flag

Biosemiosis defines life and mind in relation to the regulation of dissipation. So computers lack that kind of intimate connection to reality. They can’t be “conscious” or even intelligent in any autonomous sense until they are in a modelling relation upon which their moment to moment existence relies.

AI is a misnomer. What we have are pattern recognition algorithms.

Like any technology, these systems exist as extensions of our dissipative interests. They amplify us rather than replace us.

The danger of current AI lies in that amplification. AI can be used to extend our rational reach. But also our irrational tendencies. They could plug us more closely into the world as it actually is, or fabricate the world of our crazy conspiracy theories.

We are seeing how easily anyone can concoct deepfake evidence like the Pope in a puffy jacket or Trump running from the cops. How long before our currently already confused landscape of fake news becomes completely impossible to read as truth or fiction? AI is powerful enough to erode people’s sense of reality in ways that make Trump and anti-vaxxers the good old days.

Information autocracy already exists as a state tool in Russia and other such regimes. We already have infowar. We already have large chunks of democracies under the sway of social media bubbles.

It’s about to go on steroids once any 14 year old can produce documentary proof of any scenario imaginable.

But if something is not 100% reducible to the fundamental reality, that's strong emergence. — Eugen

Yep. That is how the reductionist ends up with substance dualism. The mind just pops out as a whole new class of property with its own causal story.

A holistic understanding of emergence is different in that both the global form and the local materials emerge in mutual causal fashion. There is no fundamental stuff - some ur-substance - that begets the other emergent stuff. The very thing of “stuff” is emergent from the deeper “thing” of a logical vagueness, a Peircean Firstness, an Anaximanderian Apeiron.

It is like quantum mechanics. There are no particles without observers, or observers without particles. So neither particles, nor observers are fundamental. It is the mutual relation between the two that is “fundamental”. Or at the deeper level, what is fundamental is the impossibility of this relation failing to emerge from unbounded potential.

Zizek is famously critical of postmodernism, — Jamal

Did you check @absoluteaspiration’s post on his consciousness account? That’s what I commented on. Is it an accurate précis?

Zizek agrees with the argumentative technique of Immanuel Kant's transcendendental idealism. For example, he believes that the subject only emerges once a Rational Being imposes ideal forms onto the objects of bare perception. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he understands the imposition of these forms as the subject unconsciously repeating the scene of a traumatic encounter. However, at the outset, this is a "primordial repression" of an encounter that is imputed to be traumatic only in hindsight. The subject that emerges in this way has to be further "hystericized" before it can become the subject engaged in emancipatory struggle. — absoluteaspiration

It doesn’t come across as AP, nor Pragmatic, but seems throughly Continental in style.

Have you looked into Moloch as a game theory metaphor ? — plaque flag

Not as game theory. Ginsberg writes nice lines...

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

But it makes the usual mistake of thinking that it is the mechanical part of the story that is "monstrous" when that is in fact the aspect that both separates and connects the organism to its world in the biosemiotic view.

We are machine elves dropped like a match on fossil fuels, maximizing throughput ? I'd like to know more about dissipative structures. — plaque flag

If you search for my mentions of the thermodynamic imperative, I've done tons of posts on this.

But a more serious post on biosemiosis as rate independent code in control of rate independent dissipation can be seen here – https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

How might you account for technological progress ? Or the enlightenment goal of increasing autonomy ? In other words, how does timebinding fit in here ? — plaque flag

My argument would be that organisms arise in nature as code-based dissipative structure. Life from the start was simply about the genetic ability to pass on algorithms that controlled the dissipation of chemical gradients. That long post explains what we have now discovered about this.

And then looking at the extraordinary human journey in particular, it has just been one new entropic bonanza after another. We have kept getting smarter because we kept stumbling into new lifestyles that would pay for the greater entropy involved.

So 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus had invented fire and cooking. The great apes were driving down a dead end where they relied on forest fruit and herbs. They literally need to chew and rest up all day to consume enough calories to support their much smaller brains. Erectus changed the game so we could both soften meat and tubers, while also sleeping out in the open with the big predators. Our bodies and guts shrunk, allowing our brains to double in size. And we moved towards an hour a day of chewing to get the calories, leaving lots of time to do more interesting stuff, like chip axes and carve spears.

So a clever trick - control of fire - opened the door for big evolutionary change. We just had to be able to pass on the cultural habit in timebound fashion. Some sort of protolanguage seems needed. But the rewards in terms of entropic return was huge. We became animals that uniquely consumed wood – all this unwanted savannah trees just poking out of the ground – and gained in terms of fat and protein.

Homo stumbled onto further such entropy bonanzas that no one else could unlock. The ice ages created the Mammoth Steppe where great herds of horse, cattle, elephants, etc, were an easy lunch for any critter with spears and teamwork. Sapiens had clearly developed proper grammatical language and a new level of social organisation. When they gate-crashed the Mammoth Steppe around 43 kya, it was curtains for Neanderthals in a few thousand years. The better semiotic tech ruled.

Again, along came the Holocene – the sudden stable thaw – at 10 kya. The new bonanza available to our intelligence was the life of the settled crop and domesticated animal farmer. We became socially reorganised around that. The new level of semiosis was literacy and numeracy – the record keeping and counting systems that could organise a river valley empire. A timebinding way of kings taxing a kingdom, a way of lords owning land and slaves.

You see the argument? Intelligence in the form of semiotic innovation as well as simple neurosemiotic capacity both needs feeding, and is justified by being able to consume more. The Second Law says if it is possible for organisms to degrade locked up negentropy – do better than the unorganised world was doing – then such organisms must evolve.

The trees of the savannah demanded an intelligence that could burn them. The herds of the Mammoth Steppe demanded a super-predator – the new organismic human collectives that hunted so effectively. The Holocene's climatic stability demanded settled farmer collectives that would invest in irrigation channels, manuring flocks, crop rotation, and all the other technological changes that greatly increased calorie yields.

And so it rolls on until maths-based science could really make an explosive leap. Political change saw 18th C farming reorganised so that landowners could enclose property and compete to produce marketable food surpluses. Peasants were "freed" to go live in cites. The population that had been flat-lined for nearly a thousand years could start its exponential climb.

Agriculture went next level within a capitalistic and democratic economic structure. Then the Industrial Revolution could hit, stumbling first into the "free energy" of buried coal, and then buried oil.

Whaling was another brief and unsustainable oil and calories boom. Humans investigated every niche and built lives - economic ecosystems and cultural mythologies – around each of them. But the most rewarding combinations of politics and entropy were always going to win out and come to dominate human identity.

Ginsberg wails about Moloch. But the Beats celebrated the image of cool Neal Cassidy – driving the endless American highway in a big-ass car. Entropification personified. The flow experience of mindlessly riding a surging wave of gasoline and asphalt.

Once you learn to love a V8, what hope is there that you will lobby for hair-shirt Green energy policies? Burning gas has become a defining identity issue.

Perhaps you can also comment on the self in relation to the community, as something like the way a body is held responsible. — plaque flag

Self awareness is socially constructed as I say. That is familiar psychology.

Where I would take things forward today - given the emergence of biosemiosis and Bayesian mechanics as new advances - is that the human individual is shaped by four key levels of semiosis. The psyche is constructed by codes in the ascending forms of genes, neurons, words and numbers. Biology is about the first two, sociology about the second two.

So the Bayesian mechanics approach of Karl Friston says all organisms are prediction machines - embodiments of Robert Rosen’s modelling relation - that work to reduce their levels of surprisal. In less jargon, we learn to predict reality in such routine fashion that we can control its flow without ever being surprised.

Of course, there are always going to be surprises. But the goal is to reduce them to the bare minimum needed so that we can navigate life and do stuff like land a plane just by staring at a fixed mental spot even as we are buffeted by winds.

Genes thus exist as the informational machinery needed to encode surprisal in metabolic terms. Genes react to the chemical signals of our interior metabolic worlds to keep everything flowing smoothly in a way that continually rebuilds our physical selfhood.

Neurons are next level in that they are the informational machinery that encode environmental surprise. They are the outward view of our body as it exists in a world of entropy gradients and material uncertainty.

Then words deal with social uncertainty, and numbers encode … Platonic uncertainty.

So the development of language in Homo sapiens allowed us to get organised as social organisms - group minds. A crucial part of being able to function as such is to be aware of the self as an individual player with a collective game.

We model our social environment in a way that allows us to glide to smooth landings and achieve our interpersonal goals with minimal surprises. But it is an always complex game. Not up to soap opera levels of challenge perhaps, but demanding enough to need a large brain.

Then comes the new thing of numbers. The birth of maths, logic and rationality in Ancient Greece, sidelined for a while, and then returning in force with the arrival of science and technology to implement its possibilities in a world rich with the entropic possibilities of unburnt fossil fuel.

A new level of the organism had developed that stands even above the conventional social world of the hunter-gatherer, wandering pastoralist and settled village farmer. We now need to be civilised selves on top of being tribal selves.

The Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction were the efforts to define what it would mean to be selves that were rational, technological, pragmatic, studious, rule following, mechanically disciplined. The Romantic reaction - as Fukuyama notes - was about cranking up the antithesis to the thesis. It polished up the “other” that is the irrational deeper truth of authentic being.

From a semiotic point of view, the pure Platonic abstraction of the logical symbol - the dichotomous zeros and ones of physics-strength information theory - I has taken over the human animal. We now hold hands with the pent-up desires of fossil fuel that just wants to burn, baby, burn. And so we drill, baby, drill, and consume, baby, consume. :grin:

Thus you can see the Peircean metaphysical story predicts it all, and minimises the surprise, of where we now stand in our Hegelian historical arc. We have reached the summit of abstraction with a brand of semiosis that is so pure as information that it engages entirely nakedly with its “other” of entropification for entropy’s sake.

PoMo and AP are pathetically weak when it comes to accounting for reality as it actually is. The evolution of symbols tells us why we continue to act as if we have no choice but to do things like climate change a whole planet.

Our socialised linguistic selves have us still playing the old games of the agrarian era - the lifestyle and sense of self appropriate to living with the entropic flux of the daily solar cycle. And before we could implement civilised controls on our industrial revolution/fossil fuel reincarnation as rational-logical beings, we had already locked ourselves in on the exponential rise to destruction.

Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics.

Fossil fuel forced us to move up to a world valued in dollars. Most folk want to move it back to a world valued in dignity, respect. Or even just likes. Even just attention.

So anyway, any useful analysis of the socially-constructed self now has to understand the big gulf between a semiosis of words and a semiosis of numbers. Something really did change between 1750 and 1850. Smart structuralists like Fukuyama are starting to figure it out.

Just passing if I have any sense. :cool:

This starts with the very first organism, doesn't it? — Wayfarer

Yep. Hence pansemiosis and not panpsychism. The Peircean view is grounded in the irreducible triadicity of the modelling relation and not the broken dualism of Cartesian representationalism, let along the dullard monoticity of the lumpen physicalist.

There are many views. Only one survives the tests of metaphysical reason and best scientific practice.

A thread about Zizek and Chalmers. — Banno

Deconstructionism vs quantum Cartesianism. Sounds like an even match. :lol:

(Thumb nose, sniffle, pull shirt) — Banno

Shits pants.

Existence is irreducibly complex. So seeking something simpler than that is a fool’s mission.

But 1), I’m just going off @absoluteaspiration’s OP which gives what looks to be an interested commentator’s clear account of Zizek’s thesis. Read that. It would seem clear that he treats it as fundamental in the phenomenological sense. Our minds and experience is the place where all inquiry must start.

As a Peircean, I agree with that too. The “objective” material world is as much a useful idea as our notion of a separate subjective realm. Inquiry starts beyond this critical demarcation of our experience.

And 2) a semiotic or Peircean approach to the issues - which is now the respectable position in the material science of biology and neurology - says that the whole idea of “100% reduction to material cause” is the reductionist delusion. The foolish attempt to make the existence too simple.

You can’t get the true causal logic of reality until you understand why reductionism is flawed … even if usefully simple for performing everyday mechanical tasks.

Then 3) if Zizek is talking phenomenology, and you are wanting to talk about conventional physicalism, such a question about reductionism vs holism become apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese.

If you really want to talk about theories of emergence, then again, no reductionist account of that can be adequate - weak or strong. The first is eliminative, the second is dualistic.

To reach the giddy metaphysical heights of true emergentism, you have to go full-strength pansemiosis. That is where Peirce’s psychological model of pragmatic reason is turned around to be the triadic relation by which a reality could construct itself.

But that’s another story.

The theory seems adequately outlined in the OP of this post.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7080/an-outline-of-slavoj-zizeks-theory-on-the-structure-of-subjectivity-as-the-foundation-of-leftism

I would call it amusing PoMo tosh. It is more a phenomenological account that takes consciousness as its ground than what you may be thinking - consciousness as a target for material explanation rather than as a target for PoMo style deconstruction, employing the usual suspects of Marx and Freud.

In short, it tries to turn things into a psychodrama - the frustration of making sense of the conscious self from the inside. Confronting the paradox involved in being the Cartesian eye that sees the world and yet also seeks to see itself.

The agony of being bounced about in the realm of your own thoughts, chasing the core of being that thus becomes precisely the mysterious absence, etc.

As a pragmatist/semiotician, the psychology of this is no big deal. Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing.

A classic example from ecological perception is landing a plane on a runway. The pilot fixes on a landing spot and just maintains a steady optic flow.



So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the world’s still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner.

Neuroscience has caught up with psychological science as this kind of modelling relation has been captured in the maths of “Bayesian mechanics”. Anyone who wants a material explanation of consciousness only has to dip into the literature.

Ironically, PoMo exists because self-consciousness - our language-enabled narrative about being a “self” in the world - is a socially-constructed addition to the biological structure of awareness.

Francis Fukuyama’s Identity is a good account of how we have come to “other” the society that indeed constructs our selfhood at this linguistic level of thought. Since Rousseau and the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s pragmatic model of humanity, the relation between the “authentic” self and our outer “social mask” has been turned into a popular culture psychodrama. Via Marx and Freud.

The pilot landing the plane must see beyond the conventionality of just flying down a tunnel of even motion and thus feeling at one with the world … while they also stand apart from that world by being able to impose their will on that world.

It is essential that they are both at one with the world of the collective mind - move smoothly through everyday society - yet also permanently tense, angsty, unfulfilled, etc, because they are also necessarily standing apart from that everyday society as its critic and frustrated “other”.

The Peircean semiotic approach to mind explains why things have to be divided so that they can be united - as the modeller that is then in a modelling relation with a world. But PoMo based its deconstruction on (its version) of Saussurean semiotics.

Dichotomies are made paradoxes. And the paradoxical is what can pretend to be philosophy - a problem of logical argument - while actually just being a cultural psychodrama industry. A brand of modern entertainment.

Whatever the dialectic is, it is not logic in the modern sense. — Banno

Modernism is so 1920s. We are post modern now. :grin:

Perhaps intent goes all the way down to chemicals but culpability starts near viruses? — Banno

Do you really not understand or are you just mucking about?

Read this post where I explained it carefully...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/68661

But more than that, there seems to me to be something peculiar in talking about the intent of chemicals. — Banno

Strawman. It should be clear enough that I said the intent lay in the enzyme's regulation of a chemical process.

The reaction can and does go both ways. The enzyme is the bit of molecular machinery that adds a switch which gives the reaction a functional direction.

If you see a switch on a wall, that speaks to intentionality right? Whether the switch is on or off must mean something to someone.

What is quite spectacular so far as biology is concerned is to be discovering just how much life is based on molecular engineering. We used to think cells were more or less bags containing a soup of chemicals. Toss in a few enzymes to speed up or slow down parts of the cycle.

But over the past 20 years, there has been a complete revolution of thought. It is regulation or semiosis all the way down to even the quantum level of chemistry.

DishBrain says neural networks shows that biology has some neat little semiotic tricks up its sleeve. But drill down to the foundational scale and you find life is so skilled at building systems of physics-regulating switches that is doing quantum-tunnelling to manage its chemical environment.

By the way, its now G-theory (in homage to M-theory). :lol:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.11543.pdf

Are we on your view mistaken to talk in intentional terms? — Banno

Stop trolling. How can you construe my talking in terms of intentionality as not intending to talk in those terms?

I might ask, Banno, have you stopped beating your wife?

If what you are addressing is "how to resist entropification" then it is far from clear that you are addressing intent at all. You appear to think eliminative materialism or something similar has been demonstrated, confirmed. But that's not so. The discussion remains ongoing.

Are we on your view mistaken to talk in intentional terms? That would be quite an overreach. I'll leave you to it. — Banno

As usual, not one thing you say engages with the position I argue. The good old wombat technique. :grin:

To repeat myself - as you really don’t get it - the central point of the Free Energy approach is that homeostasis rather than “intent” is the true goal here. This is what is so clever about Friston finally arriving at this particular formulation.

The problem for life and mind is how to resist entropification. The body is a regulated metabolic state - a flow of chemistry that is having to constantly build itself back up as it is constantly being broken down.

That sounds scary. But this instability is the dynamical feature and not the mechanical bug. The semiotic modelling relation thrives on finding the tippable conditions that then cost next to no energy to tip in some intended direction. The direction that keeps rebuilding the organismic self.

So the foundation is intentional from the level of the enzyme or any other bit of molecular machinery. The chemistry is poised and going both ways in any reaction. An enzyme is a switch to tip the rate in the “right direction”.

Thus life and mind are intentional right where organic chemistry starts. This just doesn’t seem impressive as it speaks to a foundational desire to create a stable and predictable metabolic flow. You might protest that intention “means something else”.

But even at the level of human linguistic and technological semiosis, homeostasis comes first. Speech and engineering are ways of constructing a well-regulated world for the kind of selves that would feel at home in such an environment.

A dualist might indeed think of intent in terms of individual choice or preference. That is the standard Cartesian representational notion of the experiencing soul. It seems a given that humans with their freewill stand in vivid contrast to Newtonian physics with its blind determinism.

But the semiotic understanding of intent is all about homeostasis or practised habit. The mind exists to do stuff as mindlessly as it can get away with.

This is the deep metaphysical truth that Friston’s approach now foregrounds.

You can’t read this as “intent” because you are still stuck in an outdated paradigm of how biology and neurobiology might function.

For you, does intent enter at the level of molecular messages or symbolic representation in an organism? You seem to be implying both. — Banno

Is it implying or have I not explicitly said how it applies all the way up from that first threshold point?

I said at the beginning that it fails to be an organism in that it ain’t modelling its world in a proper semiotic fashion. It ain’t reducing the uncertainty of the Umwelt by which it sustains itself as a creature in an environment.

So as a borderline case, it sits to the other side of a virus in my view. The only semiotic intent on show would seem to be that of the experimenters who claim DishBrain to be playing Pong.

Slap some stems cells on a slab and poke them with electrodes. That’s not an organism in the biosemiotic sense.

It just demonstrates that biology has the kind of molecular machinery to grow its predictive processing structure in even the most “brain in a vat” circumstances.

I kind of yawned right from the start as I remember folk pushing “neural chip” tech like this in the 1980s.

The question is whether the separation is one of degree or of kind. — Banno

Of kind. But of the kind that begins at the level of biophysics, where the question is: how does a molecule function as a message?

So it is about the origins of intent or finality. The question of abiogenesis.

Classical physics – Newtonian mechanics – excludes choice or intent. That is its set-up. Blind determinism rules.

But what is under discussion here is Friston's Bayesian mechanics. And now intent in its most generic sense is the thing being modelled.

So you might not accept grades of intent. The currently most cited neuroscientist does.

See for example....

On Bayesian Mechanics: A Physics of and by Beliefs

The aim of this paper is to introduce a field of study that has emerged over the last decade, called Bayesian mechanics. Bayesian mechanics is a probabilistic mechanics, comprising tools that enable us to model systems endowed with a particular partition (i.e., into particles), where the internal states (or the trajectories of internal states) of a particular system encode the parameters of beliefs about quantities that characterise the system. These tools allow us to write down mechanical theories for systems that look as if they are estimating posterior probability distributions over the causes of their sensory states, providing a formal language to model the constraints, forces, fields, and potentials that determine how the internal states of such systems move in a space of beliefs (i.e., on a statistical manifold).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.11543.pdf

Again the intentional behaviour and language sits on and yet remains distinct from the physically causal description of events. — Banno

If you insist on a mechanical understanding of physical causation, then of course you are going to wind up with this kind of half-arsed AP dualism.

Get your physics right, and things start to work. You will realise that you can't escape finality or "intent" once you've had your nose rubbed in the principle of least action.

Gestalt psychology, post-Pavlovian orientation response psychology, Hebbian network neuroscience, early cogsci guys like Neisser, any number of cybernetic approaches.

I started looking for embodied approaches in the 1980s and I found a ton of such work. I was shocked by how much had already been figured out. So I was fairly bemused when suddenly enactivism was being touted as this exciting new thing.

But there is this grey zone, and I take it this is where apo's grand synthesis lives, in which we consider what a possible natural world could be, and that means, to begin with, showing that the actual natural world can be described without remainder as such a world. — Srap Tasmaner

The deep paradigm shift is from reductionism to holism.

A mechanistic and atomistic view of the world is that it is composed of stable bits of stuff. It is constructed bottom up and complexity “emerges” as a property at a higher level.

The rival view is that the world is fundamentally a state of instability that then gets organised by the emergence of top-down constraints. It is order out of chaos.

This systems science metaphysics has been around since philosophy began anywhere, and Aristotle’s hylomorphism is the usual cite. But Peirce gives us a view rooted in logic itself. He achieved the trick of unifying epistemology with ontology and so vaults us way past Kant.

So my “grand synthesis” indeed connects everything in this Peircean pattern.

You have what we believe about causation itself. An organismic causation replaces the more usual mechanistic one. The world does not begin in a state of atomistic fixity. It begins in a state of pure fluctuating uncertainty - a vagueness or quantum foam.

That is pansemiosis. It sounds remarkably like quantum field theory or ontic structural realism. Somethingness emerges via a self-limiting constraint on everythingness.

Then the new thing is biosemiosis. Now we find that life and mind are not mechanical constructions but systems of semiotic constraint. Codes can stabilise the instabilities of metabolisms and unlock entropy gradients.

Life and mind don’t require a stable world to thrive. They instead exist by seeking out criticality - the edge of chaos - because where the world is at its most “tippable”, that is where being a system which has a memory has the greatest advantage. Instability is the power source that the encoded information of biology harnesses.

Robots struggle to walk as they are designed mechanically. Animals can walk without thinking as "surfing instability" is what is designed in to their bodies and nervous systems from the ground up.

Being right on the point of always toppling is the efficient way to get around. You just have to master the trick of using instability to your advantage.

So you have the absolutely general metaphysics of pansemiosis, You have the paradigm shift in life and mind science that is biosemiosis.

Then you have the enactive turn in cognitive science that also flips the mechanical paradigm on its head, but has yet to catch up in terms of producing a fully fledged neurosemiosis. But a shift to a prediction-based ontology - one that is all about regulation of uncertainty - is clearly near enough the same thing. All that is missing is the Peircean branding.

Putting a Peircean spin on it all still brings you blank looks in metaphysics, let alone physics, biology or neurology. Yet for me, in the late 1990s, hooking up with Pattee, Salthe and their little community of theoretical biologists who were just discovering Peirce, it was like finally arriving home. Everything finally clicked into place at a metaphysical level under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Dissipative structure theory was showing that open systems were more generic than closed or "gone to equilibrium" ones.

Hierarchy theory was a mathematical framing of what systems science had been trying to say.

The DNA revolution in biology was becoming properly understood in terms of a semiotic modelling relation.

A whole bunch of stuff fell into place, with Peirce proving to have a triadic model of logic that argued reality could not be organised any other way.

And now biophysics has come to the party in a big way with its molecular machines, while Friston has cashed in on enactivism and infodynamics with his free energy formalism.

It just keeps rolling.

Friston's basic free energy gradient equations are just re-arrangements for Bayesian optimisation of entropy gradient climbing expressions. It's more a description of what it means to avoid entropy (remain organised) than a modelling assumption, in that sense. — Isaac

Well put. His achievement is to take the general prediction-based view of “brain processing” and turn it into differential equations. So he gives a mathematical basis that offers some unity to the field.

Outside of neuroscience, the view had taken hold that the brain must be some kind of input-output, data-crunching, computer. The mathematical basis was Turing Universal Computation. The metaphysics was homuncular Cartesian representationalism. Philosophy of mind was in love with the modular cognitive science model.

But Friston offers a maths more suited to the actual neurobiology of the brain as a model of its environment that acts to predict its inputs. This is the metaphysics of Peircean semiotics or Rosen’s modelling relation. And it fits the general enactive or embodied turn of cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind.

Mind science was tracking down this road since Helmholtz until the computer revolution derailed it in the 1950s. A new mechanistic paradigm was forced on to it. And now it has returned to that more naturalistic paradigm.

A string of inaccurate ad homs. Why did you ping me for my response I wonder?

Is that what you're telling me? — Srap Tasmaner

Of course not. That would be like asking house painters what they thought about abstract expressionism.

The meta-theory of the biological and neurological sciences is still deeply reductionist. Especially where it is dominated by medical and pharmaceutical funding.

You would have to strike on folk who indeed research at the meta-theoretical and inter-disciplinary level – like the Salthes and Fristons of this world.

That is why this is as much about metaphysics as physics. What is Friston saying when he claims to have created Bayesian mechanics as a new branch of physics? What is Salthe saying when he rejects Darwinian evolution?

You are talking about the tiny few who are seeking to shift paradigms rather than the vast majority who simply hope to assimilate more facts to the prevailing theoretical structure.

Like me, you would have to seek the right people out. This isn't about a weight of evidence. It is about a willingness to stand apart from the herd.

Salthe paid the price career-wise for being too openly metaphysical. Friston stuck closely to the mathematical route and has been rewarded. He only started to make his bold claims a couple of years ago. And he couches them in terms of engineering. Society is going to get paid in terms of technological results – as DishBrain is trying to sell.

Even in science, there are strong constraints on what you are allowed to believe. And the money is in the reductionism that produces the machines.

So if your local life sciences department is in general anti-reductionist, then something very weird is going on there.

Is it "accounts for ..." or is it "may be able to account for ..."? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, you are being challenged to challenge precisely this. So tell me, how does biosemiosis fail the task? What does it lack or overlook exactly?

If Dishbrain is meant to be a test of the Bayesian Brain approach, then at least the "philosophical" reaction ought to take its modelling relation thesis seriously and not just wander off into the thickets of yesteryear's armchair AP musings.

but am I wrong to think there's rather little in the way of observation to support all this theory? — Srap Tasmaner

Spectacularly. You are talking about what has arisen in first theoretical biology, and now theoretical neuroscience, as a meta-theory.

As I have said often enough, biosemiosis as "the mechanism" of bios – life and mind – has really hit pay-dirt now that we have the tools to see what is happening down at the nanoscale of the body and brain's molecular machines.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/68661

You guys have preferences among theories, good for you; let us know when you have overwhelming evidence. — Srap Tasmaner

But how can you assess the evidence if you haven't understood the paradigm shift?

Challenge yourself. — Banno

...says the guy who never does...

Hence my preference for something along the lines of anomalous monism, in which our intentions are not reducible in any direct way to physical states. — Banno

Doesn’t fly. Old hat.

Biosemiosis fixes things by showing why life and mind are based on this epistemic cut. We now have a testable theory of the modelling relation that accounts for how it works, whether we are talking semiotic codes at the level of genes, neurons, words or numbers. Intentionality can be understood genetically, neurally, verbally and numerically.

No point trying to breath life into ancient history. :grin:

So you knew I didn’t say that but then asked if I said it?

Are you just wanting to play games? Or do you have an interest in the OP you posed?

So are you saying that if these hypothetical or literal millions wanted to die — Average

This bit. Something I hadn’t said, but which you now claim as a fact worth considering.