It's all about politics. If you try to assume that it isn't, that there is some Leibnizian way we talk about about it and hide this into mathematical formulas and pseudo-scientific narrative, it's simply wrong. — ssu

Where would I have said that? You are off at a tangent.

Really? I think that history is full of examples of societies collapsing because of the unsustainability of the system and the incapability of the elite to solve the societies problems. — ssu

But what caused the collapse and led to the unsustainability? Clearly I would look to the balancing act that any sociologist or anthropologist understands - the necessary tension between the individual and the group.

And that tension is hierarchy theory in a nutshell. The need to balance local degrees of freedom and global habits of constraint.

So human organisation - in any form - has the same balancing act. And any natural organisation - of any form - also performs the same balancing act.

That is the thesis here ... if you want to focus on something worth discussing.

And since they have different premises, different World views, it's really a bit difficult to argue about universal solutions. — ssu

You haven't understood a word.

Sure, in a laboratory we can make things, but nature doesn't think things out beforehand. — magritte

Completely irrelevant, but I just happened to re-read this old quip about the reality of the pragmatic approach to science. Attributed to engine designer, John Kris....

Start her up and see why she don't go!

Sure, in a laboratory we can make things, but nature doesn't think things out beforehand. But I doubt that either proposed upwards or downwards direction of natural complex development is logically possible or practicable. — magritte

The problem is that if you now deny the naturalness of molecular machines, then you play straight into the hands of Creationists who want to use ATPase or the bacterial flagella as mechanical marvels that could only have been dreamt up in God's mind.

Pick your poison carefully.

Because to maximize something, you have to have the ability measure it. — ssu

Sure. Economics is known as the dismal science because it could justify slavery by choosing to measure horsepower.

But don't pretend that better metrics aren't possible. There is a ton of literature on that.

What burn rate? — ssu

Energy expenditure per capita is a good gross metric. Just check out the literature on ecological footprints.

As I said, one person could define a "functional, stable and persisting social organisation" one way and another totally differently. So we have a problem. — ssu

You have a problem as you don't seem to accept that societies are part of the natural world and so are constrained by the same general ecological limits, even while being also radically free to invent new worlds if such worlds are possible.

So my view can happily place the idiocies of neoliberal climate destruction alongside the techno-fantasies of limitless clean fusion power.

I don't have to pick a side in some religious fashion. It just becomes a hopefully pragmatic and measurable economic question. Do we bank on the dream of fusion power arriving in time, or do we fully price in the cost of burning fossil fuel?

I have absolutely no clue of what kind of actual policies you would implement with that kind of description. — ssu

You are not even listening, just raving.

Every human social system that has ever existed has found ways to balance social cohesion with individual autonomy.

And it's never been a utopia. :razz:

the enclosure of exist in scare quotes is significant - because these constraints must pre-exist, in other words, existence itself depends on them, were they not so, then nothing would exist. — Wayfarer

The constraints aren't fixed and eternal. They represent a history of development that acts to remove all lesser possibilities.

So at best, in the "beginning", they are vague. And by the end, they might retrospectively be considered the only correct and possible habits of nature. But it wouldn't help to argue that they thus post-date reality anymore than they pre-exist it.

The circle might sit as the ultimate limit of irregularity. You can't get more symmetric. But dontcha need the irregularity to discover the circle which is its ultimate limit?

If you place Platonic ideals outside of the space/time/energy system we are talking about - the Cosmos - then you are reducing its metaphysics in an unhelpful way.

A process philosophy would see that everything must arise co-dependently. So the symmetries are yoked to their own breaking. The perfection of one is actively reciprocal to the imperfection of its other. Immanence must rule over transcendence if you want to move out of the camp of the reductionist.

Peirce said ' I call your attention to the fact that reality and existence are two different things.' — Wayfarer

Peirce developed the fully triadic view where actuality was sandwiched between top-down necessity (or constraint) and bottom-up possibility (or unconstrained potential).

So yes, he made a fuss about universals being real. But equally, he made a fuss about spontaneous chance, or logical vagueness and Tychism, as being real.

The perfections and the imperfections are logically yoked in a reciprocal deal. And inbetween you get what actually expresses both poles as a historical trajectory of development.

But those rules can't be the result of an evolutionary process - they must pre-exist it. — Wayfarer

Again, time itself is emergent at this level of metaphysics. You can call the rules immanent. But that is a retrospective call. It would have been hard to discern any rules at the actual beginning while they were still in a competition to form.

When you talk about downward constraints, are you just talking about the normal rules of the more complex level of the hierarchy, e.g. are chemical interactions constrained by the rules of biology, or is it something else? Where did those constraints come from if not constructed from below? — T Clark

The rules of nature ultimately seem to be mathematically Platonic - based on symmetry principles.

Our cosmos has a dimensional structure, an evolutionary logic, a thermodynamic flow. We can go back to first principles and say that for anything to exist, it must be able to develop and persist. So there is already a selection for the global structure that works, that is rational, that can last long enough for us to be around to talk about it.

So the constraints don't arise out of already concrete material foundations. Constraints (or universals) only "exist" if they have proved to be of the right type to conjure a Cosmos into being out of raw possibility. That is, if they could produce the concrete material foundations needed to instantiate themselves as systems composed of those kinds of atoms/events/processes/etc.

The constraints that fail to stablise their own constituent parts can't even exist. And that selection principle means nature is the product of whatever global rules did the best job at stabilising the means of its own bootstrapping existence.

The ends always justifies the means.

I went to his web page and I'm reading some of his articles. — T Clark

Good luck! :smile:

But he wrote two books on hierarchy theory that are very readable.

This is a good analogy. It clarified things for me. I still don't get the mechanism that generates the constraints. — T Clark

An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.

The army exists as an idea in the minds of all its participants. So that makes it seem like an idealist fiction.

And yet every private quickly runs into the reality of the army way in a brute and direct fashion if they so much as twitch a nervous smile or leave a speck of dirt on their boots.

The mechanism that generates the constraints is the system as a whole in action over its long-run existence. Or what Salthe would call its cogent moment scale.

Constraint is the great weight of historical accident that builds in Darwinian fashion and acts on every local degree of freedom within a system. It represents the past in terms of what it intends to be its own future.

And then to evolve - being a natural system - it must also be slowly changed by its experiences. So even in armies, the system of constraint gets modified to make it better adapted to its current environmental challenges.

One day you might find women, as well as men, being trained to be unthinking killing machines.

So general evolutionary principles generate the constraints. And at the simplest level, the Darwinian competition is to just exist as a stably persisting process or functional structure.

Because you look at it with the idea: "OK, let's organize the society to survive and thrive" and go with central planning or then say: "OK, let's have the society organize itself to survive and thrive" and go with free market capitalism. Or anything between. — ssu

If you can't properly describe nature then of course you can't then judge economic theories in terms of what might be natural.

But here, you have already made the right start in setting out your dialectical extremes in the usual sociological manner. We have the polar extremes of global cooperation and local competition.

The mistake then is to believe that one or other extreme could be the "correct" setting. Hierarchy theory - as our best theory of self-organising nature - tells us that both poles are correct and ought to be maximised as the upper and lower bounds that make the living system.

So the "best" society is always the one that manages to balance its global cooperation with its local competition. It will be organised to maximise its social cohesion and its individual independence.

The larger problem is then the ecological setting of the sociocultural system in question - the thermodynamic equation that defines what is a functional "burn rate". Are you a society living by hunter/gathering, feudal agriculture or fossil fuel age technology? The rate at which you can afford to eat your world sets the general constraint on what will prove to be a functional, stable and persisting social organisation.

So for example, is neo-liberalism a bad thing? You would think not to the degree that it existed to use up the energy bonanza of fossil fuels. And you would think so to the degree it failed to factor in the long-term cost of the environmental degradation and atmospheric heat sink it treated as an unowned commons.

I'm fine with the idea of putting a price on everything. If you do indeed put a price on everything.

So maximising individual freedom is great - up until the point it erodes the degree of social cohesion needed to survive and thrive. And vice versa. Maximising social cohesion is great - up until it is too restrictive on the individual freedom that is needed.

It's not rocket science.

Hence what is the role of "economics", can it be a "purely objective model of reality?" — ssu

Societies are organisms. So why would a holist expect "pure objectivity" when the production of "subjectivity" is what defines an organism.

Or in other words, objectivity is the code name for accounts of causality that only take material and efficient cause seriously. Subjectivity then becomes the code name for the formal and final aspects of causality ... which the reductionist wants to remove from nature and reserve solely for the creative human mind.

So the way to understand economics in the most general sense is that it is the way the organism that is a society believes it can organise itself to survive and thrive in a material and efficient cause fashion. It is the machinery for regulating those kinds of entropic flows.

Now when you make the leap from biology to sociology, the questions are so much different, that the answers basic biology can give hardly matter anymore. — ssu

The funny thing there is that biology used to look just like complicated chemistry. In class in the 1970s, the Krebs cycle at the heart of cellular metabolism was presented as some kind of warm soup of precursors mixed with catalytic enzymes. You had to memorise a chain of chemical reactions.

But nowadays, the foundations of a cell are looking extremely mechanical. Every biomolecule needs to be understood in the language of information switches and engine cycles.

So life itself harnesses the power of reductionist thought! It too learns to regulate the material world by entraining it using an apparatus of molecular machinery.

An enzyme is a mechanical structure that can manipulate chemistry at a quantum level.

So biology is not emergent from chemistry as the "hierarchy of scale" used to have it. Instead, mechanisation - the informational regulation of thermodynamically-driven processes - is a way that formal and final cause can be used to regulate material and efficient cause in an organismic fashion.

Life exists because it could apply mechanical constraint in a top-down fashion to messy chemical dynamics.

And so the irony is that complexity is mechanical - but the causal action reaches down from above rather than works its way up from below.

I think it's really about the questions we make. Or the answers we want to have. — ssu

If you just want technology, you only need to answer the questions concerning efficient and material causality. The questions about formal and final causality appear redundant - because you, as the human, are happy to contribute the design of the system and the purpose which it is intended to serve.

Science is thus shaped by human pragmatic considerations. A search for stable material substance that the creative human mind can fashion into a world of "medium sized dry goods".

But we shouldn't then think reality is mechanical. We should also work on an understanding of reality that is properly holistic.

That’s where the hierarchy of scale comes in. It represents an artificial division of the universe into manageable pieces. — T Clark

Reductionists and holists mean different things when they talk about hierarchical order.

Reductionists think only in terms of upwards construction. You start with an ultimately simple and stable foundation, then build upwards towards increasing scales of complexity. As high as you like.

But a holist thinks dualistically in terms of upwards construction working in organic interaction with downwards constraint. So you have causality working both ways at once, synergistically, to produce the functioning whole.

The hierarchy thus becomes not a tower of ascending complexity (and arbitrariness or specificity) but it itself reduces to a "basic triadic relation" (as hierarchy theorist, Stan Salthe, dubs it). The holist account reduces all organisation to the interaction between an upward constructionist flow and a downward constraining history or context, plus then the third thing which is the relation that those two causal actions develop in a stable and persistent fashion.

So many key differences to reductionist metaphysics follow from this connected causality.

For example, it makes everything historically or developmentally emergent - the upward construction and the downward constraint. There is no fundamental atomistic grain - a collection of particles - that gets everything started. Instead, that grain is what gets produced by the top-down constraints. The higher order organisation stabilises its own ground of being in bootstrap fashion. It gives shape to the very stuff that composes it.

A simple analogy. If you want an army, you must produce soldiers. You must take average humans with many degrees of freedom (all the random and unstable variety of 18 year olds) and mould them in a boot camp environment which strictly limits those freedoms to the behaviours found to be useful for "an army". You must simplify and standardise a draft of individuals so that they can fit together in a collective and interchangeable fashion that then acts in concert to express the mind and identity of a "military force".

So in the holist view, there is no foundational stability to a functioning system. The stability of the parts comes from the top-down constraints that shape up the kind of parts that are historically best suited to the task of constituting the system as a whole. The parts are emergent and produced by a web of limitation.

When it comes to the metaphysics of science, this is why we see thermodynamics becoming the most general perspective. The broad constraint on all nature is that it must be able to self-organise its way into stable and persistent complexity. And thermodynamics or statistical mechanics offers the basic maths for dealing with systems that develop negentropic organisation by exporting entropy.

From particle physics to neuroscience, thermodynamics explains both simplicity and complexity.

Well, it does if you let it.

Human reason has been drawing the limits on being since philosophy began using self-referential or dichotomous argument.

If you say “everything is stasis”, I say “everything is flux”. And having identified the complementary extremes of what could even be the case, we thus secure the spectrum of possibility that arises within such limits.

Our metaphysics is organised by any number of such dichotomies or symmetry breakings.

Matter-form, atom-void, chance-necessity, discrete-continuous, infinite-infinitesimal, one-many, local-global, structure-process, so on and so forth,

We only ask that question thanks to centuries of established Western philosophical and scientific dogma which presume a split between mind and matter, subject and object, feeling and thinking. — Joshs

On the other hand, how does an organism exist without this epistemic cut, Markov blanket or schnitt?

It is not about scientific dogma. Science explains the semiotic process or modelling relation that makes life and mind what they are.

Minimising free energy is a very high-level idea, an abstraction at the level of thermodynamics and definitions of what constitutes information. I think we can agree that consciousness is more complicated than heat. — the affirmation of strife

It just tells us what kind of physics to root our life and mind science in.

Science believes it is constructing a hierarchy of theories. Neuroscience is explained by biology, biology by chemistry, chemistry by particle physics, particle physics by quantum mechanics.

The paradigm shift is to instead see that biology is rooted in the physics of thermodynamics. In particular, the thermodynamics of “far from equilbrium” dissipative structures, So not the science of material atoms, but the science of evolved or self organising physical complexity.

And even particle physics and cosmology themselves have made this paradigm shift. So even fundamental physics has abandoned simple atomism for the more complex view that reality as a whole is a dissipative structure,

Hence Friston is just doing the work to catch neuroscience up.

You are an emergentist. You think the vast majority of functions happen in the dark. — bert1

Err no. I’ve specifically ruled out supervenience and the like.

So show me why my choice of Genesis drops out of Friston's equations. — Banno

Stan Salthe's lifecycle model of ecology will do that. It is the kind of more detailed theory that you demand.

You say it yourself. You've got old. Brittle and senescent, to use the technical terms. That you would have Genesis on the turntable, rather than Black Midi or Connan Mockasin, speaks to your reduced capacity to deal with environmental novelty (even if you have the other side of the trade-off in the conviction of your certainties, the wisdom of a lifetime of evermore entrenched habit.)

Because it's interesting, of course — Banno

Yeah. Nobel prizes go to the most interesting theory of the year. I'd forgotten that's how it works.

but perhaps someone who thought in terms of the Peircean collective wisdom — Banno

But that is the pragmatic theory of truth you support yourself. The limit of exhaustive rational inquiry.

It is why you keep making plaintive appeals to an invisible audience who could only agree with your own good commonsense.

"No one agrees with you, Apo. Everyone agrees with me! Banno!!!"

(Tip: To be read in a Trump accent.)

Apo, I did, several times. — Banno

:lol:

I just made a cheese toasty, using a flatbread that was past it's "best by..." date, but which had been in the fridge, and had no obvious signs of mould. I put on the new Genesis album, quite loud, unaware that it was a rehash of their old stuff. But I enjoyed it, despite it lacking surprises. — Banno

Now you just want to make me sad. Toasties and Genesis FFS's?

There's the rub' it's just not obvious how what we do is result of our avoiding surprises. But it might be. — Banno

Not obvious to whom exactly? The Peircean collective wisdom?

Well why does Friston command an h-index of 253? (h-index of 20 = good, 40 i= outstanding, 60 = truly exceptional; h-index of typical PF poster, some comical negative value.)

You keep making these third person claims about your first person views. Again, that's political rhetoric not supported argument.

If you are satisfied that this stuff also explains evolution and consciousness, then I'm happy for you. — Banno

Did I say explain or ground explanations?

Note that it's not "long life vs reproductive fitness" with which I take issue, but "why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?" — Banno

So all you had to do was tell me you agreed. Instead you took the disagreeable path of pretending not to have heard.

I don't think I'm the only one here who thinks that thinking this already settled is overreach. — Banno

Again, if a field finds its grounding, then things are not settled but properly (re)started. Don't misrepresent what I say so as to be able to claim to be right about what I never said.

And stop appealing to your invisible audience. You sound like a politician. Its Trump's go-to gambit for a reason.

Are we playing "posts-last-wins" now? I'm good at that. — Banno

So you say. I'll be the judge of that.

Well, you keep falling into it. It works - utilitarianism in action; you should be pleased. — Banno

Ah, you say, it tis but a scratch. More video I'm afraid. But you've seen this one.

Which hasn't happened this page. — Banno

Long life vs reproductive fitness? Hello. Anyone there? I can hear your heavy breathing on the line. Come on out and defend. Don't just play for stalemate. The invisible audience that you think is hanging on your every post is waiting to see something more interesting.

I stand with the non material nature of the mind, which for sure as to exist requires material (brain) but on its own it's not something material also. — dimosthenis9

That leads to the symbol grounding problem - how does a code do its job?

A code is "physic-less" not because it has no material base, but because that material base is constrained to be a single standard cost. So a symbol is physical dimensionality constrained to where it becomes a dimensionless point. Just a bare mark. Like a letter on a page, a spike on a wire, the switching of a logic gate.

It takes as much, and as little, effort to utter any grammatically-structure sentence. Each word is just a puff of air, whether I speak the ravings of a lunatic or recite a play by Shakespeare.

So codes have to have some physical base so they materially exist. But that entropic cost falls out of the equation if it is some tiny and inconsequential sum that is constant, no matter how random or magnificent might be the meanings embodied by symbol sequence itself.

In that way, the brain-mind does create a "safe place" which can stand outside the physical world so as to regulate the goings-on of that physical world.

For all practical purposes, a code puts the organism outside of the second law ruled world. For all practical purposes, the brain implements an idealist ontology - a realm that is like a virtual machine with absolute freedom of action.

But - as Friston models, and the second law demands - there is an electricity bill to pay to keep the lights on. Even small costs can add up. The brain-mind's idealism only makes metaphysical sense if the benefits of the free imagination are coupled to the costs of that free imagination over the long run.

Any model of mind has to include the two sides to the equation. Which is where we get back to the triadic systems view of consciousness.

but I'd much rather a paper — Banno

Sure. And that takes about 10 seconds on Google. So....

Acting on the environment by minimising free-energy through action enforces a sampling of sensory data that is consistent with the current representation. This can be seen with a second
rearrangement of the free-energy as a mixture of accuracy and complexity. Crucially, action can only affect accuracy. This means the brain will reconfigure its sensory epithelia to sample inputs that are predicted by its representations; in other words, to minimise prediction error.

fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20-%20a%20rough%20guide%20to%20the%20brain.pdf

The equation you seek to avoid is next to that caption in Box 1.

Look, Apo, I'm flattered and all that you feel the need to make me the topic of this thread, but I don't owe you explanations or replies, and I'm sure others are finding this tedious. — Banno

The familiar gambit. But look Banno, my complaint that you demonstrate disingenuity by claiming to be interested in something and yet failing to respond on that something as soon as it makes you look flat-footed. That is what I'm sure me and others find tedious.

Even on the simplest question, you play the wombat defence. You say a matter of interest is "why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?".

And indeed that is not the argument a biologist would make, although an information theorist might.

So for the benefit of your interest, I explained. Darwinian selection would not be thought to maximise life span but maximise reproductive fitness. (Which is another one of those pesky risk-reward, complexity-accuracy, trade offs that the equation you don't want to look at models.)

Seen in that light - the need for an organism to get busy with the jiggy - the silliness of the dark-room problem because blindingly apparent. What the free-energy principle minimises is the prediction error in following the life course that achieves that goal. The Bayesian Brain becomes the Lagrangian of optimised reproduction.

Now you might not like the fact that you didn't immediately see this obvious answer. But getting in a huff, going off to fume while you inspect your rotting garlic and spider infested terracotta, is entirely you making the discussion all about you and your ego.

Blame me and claim it to be a form of flattery. But I know that you know that you know better.

All you have to do is respond to informed replies with a little more scholarly integrity. It's not as if I am setting a high bar even there.

No surprises there. The Dark Room Problem was mentioned by Friston in the questions of a video you posted. — Banno

You read the comments on YouTube videos? And yet you say you are too old to watch the videos themselves?

Meh. A curious approach to scholarship indeed.

And in this case the details remain to be settled. — Banno

How so exactly? Be specific and not general.

So in general, if I get it right. For example in the "mind/ body problem" (physical /no psychical) you would use that theory as an argument in favor of the idealistic no physical nature of the mind. Right? — dimosthenis9

I'm not sure I understood your question. But I think the answer is that the computational approach to mind is inherently Cartesian, hence dualist and representationalist. Friston's approach is inherently semiotic, hence triadic and enactive.

And you can claim that semiotics sounds sort of idealist. But then it is an idealism that is a pragmatic realism. So not really idealism, but a way of fixing the fundamental issues around knowing the world that Kant raised.

Idealism is a broad church. But if you mean idealism in terms of some synonym of soul, spirit or consciousness as a monistic substance - one that stands opposed to matter as the other candidate monistic substance underlying reality - then no way am I making any argument in that direction.

What I am saying is that a triadic systems perspective - like Peircean semiotics, like Friston's Bayesian mechanics – does the best job of dissolving the tensions of the Cartesian notion that is "the Hard Problem".

Dualism says there are two distinct realms of being and no good causal explanation of how they might then interact.

Triadic logic says there is an interaction. And then two distinct realms are what develop out of this fundamental connection.

So an ontology of opposed substances - matter and mind - is replaced by an ontology of a self-organising dichotomy. The unity of opposites which is the brain modelling its world in terms of its self-interest.

The self establishes itself in the world by becoming causally opposed to this world. An organism gains autonomy by finding a way to impose its desires on an environment.

This trick is achieved by the interaction that is the modelling relation. Friston puts that into the familiar language of differential equations.

Peirce described it in logic. Rosen described it in category theory. Friston uses now the kind of maths that even engineers can understand.

Think about it. UTMs are finite state automata. Almost immediately engineers could see how to turn an algebra of information - a digital encoding - into real world programmable machines.

But then computer science was also tinkering away with these other things called neural networks. They had some rules of thumb, but no fundamental theory. It was a promising project but stumbled along in the background.

Now Friston offers a geometric approach to information. It is all about trajectories on attractors. Instability, self-reference and complexity are all built in. And yet still, the chaos can be tamed enough to model it with a set of differential equations – providing you can apply the right constraints, the right learning environments.

So people can complain that they don't see a theory of consciousness in Friston's Bayesian mechanics. They can complain that the surprise a human feels is nothing like the surprisal - the free energy metric – that Friston's formalism minimises.

Fine. They just show that they don't even realise how deeply they are stuck in a Cartesian framing of the whole issue. They don't even begin to get the paradigm change being talked about.

I was using Zwingli’s own persuasion technique in an effort to counter what he was promoting. — praxis

And I was joking - with the intent of demonstrating that cancel culture is indeed a slippery slope where no formula of words can escape criticism.

Well, not quite. We want a theory that rules out things that are contradicted by the evidence. — Banno

I am sympathetic to your attitude towards totalizing theories. But there is a difference between a general unifying idea and a detailed treatment of a subject. — SophistiCat

Yep. A totalising theory must still have some counterfactual impact on our thought. A new paradigm must be able to knock down the one it means to replace.

So Darwinian evolution killed a creationist account of life on Earth, for all practical purposes. And it would be nice if Friston's Bayesian Mechanics kills off Universal Turing Machines as the general paradigm framing mind science.

So if I get it straight, your main objection is the way Banno presented Friston’s idea here on this thread? Using the "dark room problem"? You find it misleading? — dimosthenis9

Banno compounded the confusion for sure. But my comment was directed at the dark-room problem itself. It is motivated by a misunderstanding of the theory it intends to question. And the misunderstanding is so obvious that I wonder how it got started.

Maybe someone else can spot it, but I see no reference in the paper to the supposed source of the dark-room problem. The authors just say...

A recurrent puzzle raised by critics of these models is that biological systems do not seem to avoid surprises. We do not simply seek a dark, unchanging chamber, and stay there. This is the “Dark-Room Problem.”

... so the suspicion I voiced was that Andy Clark was pulling a smart career move to get some kind of controversy going. The dark room problem was an invention to draw attention, create a dialog, even if the lobbing of this "recurrent puzzle" into the conversation was going to be a patsy toss easily batted to the boundary by the home team.

Then as far as Banno goes, it seemed curious that he should pluck this paper out of the past just when I happened to be promoting Friston as having arrived at neuroscience's theory of everything in another thread. He will say that is an innocent coincidence of course.

And it is also curious that instead of pointing to the obvious misunderstanding of the free-energy principle used to motivate the dark room problem – which I feel he gets – he said his real interest was...

But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest? — Banno

...which is the promotion of an even lamer quibble. How could one pretend to be baffled by that? And why did Banno ignore my point that the biologically correct reply would be that living long ain't so much the point as reproducing the most successfully. (Try maximising that by retreating into a darkened room with only yourself and your sexual fantasies.)

So the paper itself is a bit of a time waster. And Banno played his usual game of stirring the pot, claiming interest without being interested enough to spend 10 seconds clicking on a link and scrolling to a time stamp.

I'm not complaining of course. It is really funny that Banno's essential complaint against theories of everything are in fact exactly what one finds once one delves into the actual maths of the free-energy principle. Poetic justice when you blow yourself up with the very mine you tried to lay.

So in your opinion, and in a few lines what exactly this theory tell us about consciousness? Or what it implies at least as to rephrase it. Why you find it so huge? — dimosthenis9

As I said, it puts neuroscience on its own secure mathematical basis. It gets neuroscience off computation - the Universal Turing Machine formalism - as the general theory of everything it has been employing. It underwrites the whole shift back to an embodied, enactive and semiotic approach to mind science.

I was asked to write an opinion piece for the 20th anniversary of a major neuroscience journal on what I thought was the biggest thing of the past 20 years. My answer is exactly this. The construction of a mathematical formalism with the generality of any other "physical mechanics" that mind science can now call its own.

Real men are secure. Baby men are misogynist. — praxis

Thought crime! Stereotyping, ageist and offensive to cis-males who identify as anxious.

(There is no escaping, is there?)

It has been explained that he was banned for the one post. — tim wood

I see this as more the weak link. The post did "adopt and support" the bannable view. But I think of espousing more as trying to force your views on others in a way that is unreasonable.

I'm not familiar with the guy and his post history. But it struck me more as a posturing than an espousing. Even a note of self-mocking.

The judgement call is whether delving into his views for more context is worth the bother. On something as low stakes as an internet forum, rough justice is justice enough. :wink:

While I hold deep and intensely felt prejudice against certain cultural activities, like FGM, I distinguish that from ethnicity and other immutable characters, like sex, etc. — James Riley

Wow. Did you just espouse transphobia?

Thought crime! Banned! Cancelled! :grin:

Which is the tendency of everything to become less organised. And evolution goes against that. — Wayfarer

No. Evolution works by accelerating the ambient rate of entropification. It gets the second law to its destination faster.

As I've said before, the major problem with the Cartesian depiction of 'res cogitans' was its tendency to 'objectify' it as a 'spiritual substance', which is oxymoronic right from the outset. — Wayfarer

Yep.

Tests don't make claims. — RogueAI

They embody claims. So they proclaim, if you like.

I'm strongly in favor of idealism. — RogueAI

Of course. And how does that square with what you also seem to believe about the mess of neurons in people’s heads and the inability of robots to have minds as they are somehow the wrong kind of stuff, or the wrong kind of material structure?

There's an idealist explanation for why poking a brain causes changes to mental states. If you poke a dream brain, the dreamer alters the dream. That's clunky, I admit, — RogueAI

No. It is a simple enough materialist account.

I'll keep pointing out that we keep running into the hard problem and science keeps not solving it. It's not even close to solving it. There's not even a coherent framework for what an explanation for consciousness will look like. — RogueAI

This is going nowhere. :mask:

Tests and observations are evidence. Evidence is used to confirm/disconfirm theories. — RogueAI

Thank you for these tutorials in the philosophy of science. But you might want to check your facts.

Do theories of minds somehow run into an epistemic wall? — RogueAI

Of course. In the same way that all theories have to be motivated by a counterfactual framing - one which could even in principle have a yes/no answer.

So are all minds the result of a mush of complicated neurology found inside skulls? As a first step towards a natural philosophy account of consciousness, does this feel 99% certain to you.

If not, why not? Where is your evidence to the contrary?

Does poking this delicate mush with a sharp stick cause predictable damage to consciousness? Well ask any lobotomy patient.

And so we can continue - led by the hand - to where neuroscience has actually got to in terms of its detailed theories, and the evidence said to support them.

I think minds are special, and I think science will continue to have nothing to say about the mind-body problem, and the failure of science so far to explain how matter can produce consciousness is expected. — RogueAI

Bully for you. And I'm sure you are in the majority. It is the view built into our standard-issue culture, after all.

After a couple of thousand years of organised religion and several centuries of the romantic recoil from the squalid horror of technology, this is the operating system that got installed during your manufacture. The factory settings.

If something passes the Turing Test, we should assume it's conscious? OK, does it then have rights? Can you deactivate a machine that passes the turing test? Beat it a sledgehammer when it malfunctions? Degrade its performance so it can't pass the test anymore? What obligations do we have to things that pass the Turing Test? — RogueAI

All good moral questions. How do you answer them?

We assume each other are conscious because we're all built roughly the same way. — RogueAI

I thought it was because we all act the same way. Roughly. Within engineering tolerances.

You might need a neuroscience degree, along with an MRI machine, to tell if a person is indeed built the same way.

You know. Verified scientific knowledge and not merely social heuristics.

What about chess programs that are superior to humans? Do they have minds? — RogueAI

Certainly not.

But if it could get drunk and kick over the board in a fit of pique, then I might start to wonder.

If we don't have a theory of mind that makes testable predictions, we're going to be in trouble before too long. — RogueAI

Oddly, it is commonly claimed that humans do have an evolved theory of mind. We are genetically equipped to understand others as other selves taking part in the same collective social game.

That is why a Turing machine test feels like any kind of good test at all. We believe we can instinctively tell when we are engaging with some aspect of the material world that also is animate and mindful.

Of course that is also how folk arrive at the conclusion the weather gods, or the poker gods, are against them. A generalised animism was quite a tough cultural habit to unlearn.

So do you think it's plausible to argue that all organism are intelligent, at least in some basic or fundamental respect? — Wayfarer

My argument would be that all life and mind is semiotic. And so that means they have pragmatic intelligence. As levels of encoding, they can learn - in Darwinian fashion - to live and persist in their material worlds.

And that, therefore, the emergence of living organisms is also the manifestation of intelligence - not the work of an 'intelligent designer', but an incipient tendency towards conscious existence that might plausibly begin to flourish wherever the conditions were suitable. — Wayfarer

Well now you edge into language that smuggles in "consciousness" as its ultimate destination. And consciousness is a technical term employed by Cartesian representationlism. It presumes that the ultimate evolutionary goal might be the kind of rationalising philosopher who sits in an armchair in a darkened room just passively contemplating the facts of reality. Or perhaps more in your case, a guru passively engaged with nothingness in a tropical glade. :razz:

But if you stop short of that - if you retain the stress on pragmatic action, and avoid crossing over into a passive, sensory and static conception of consciousness - then you can see a natural arc of progression.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, no less.

'What is latent', my Hindu philosophy lecturer used to say, 'becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

For sure. I do take a Hegelian dialectical view that evolution involves historical progress. We are ascending towards some antithetical bounding limit that is a triumph over unruly disorder and the arrival at Platonic/Hegelian/Peircean perfection of some kind.

But then I also stress that this "perfection" is of the pragmatic kind. Which is the unromantic conclusion that would make the happy holist upset.

So as I have said often enough, modern humans climbed the semiotic ladder. Our world encoding machinery has become increasingly abstracted from the world it would regulate. We have genes and neurons. But we have added further semiotic machinery in the form of words and numbers.

Language organises our social worlds and gives us the habit of self-addressed speech as well. We gain self-awareness, freewill, higher emotions, recollective memories, prospective imaginations. All those good things that led us to take over the planet and start bending it to our collective desires.

Then along comes maths and the power to apply its completely abstracted view of reality in terms of technology - machines and computers.

But look at what we actually do with all this semiotic prowess. In the end, we just obey the thermodynamic imperative to entropify. We don't do anything smarter that a bacterium filling up a petrie dish and choking itself in its own material waste, starving itself to death with its own depletion of the environment's limited resources.

There is no "enlightenment" that will be made patent at the end of this evolutionary journey.

Or if there is some further step that comes after the current epoch, it will have to be one that continues the same old entropic game to its next pragmatic level. And sure, I can sketch what that means in practice. It is the obvious stuff - like realising we need to invest in recycling and renewables as a properly organised living structure is all about being "closed for material causality".

The paradox is the one I describe - the need to both entropify (that is, waste energy to heat), and yet to keep the materials that do the job locked into the system that does the entropifying.

You can't drive a car far, no matter how much fuel is available, if everything is dropping off, or dripping out, as you fly along the highway. It has to hold together to be the combustion-propelled structure that is.

This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly.

Yep. This is fine as antique metaphysics. Logos and flux, order and disorder, laws and initial conditions, constraints and degrees of freedom. All ways of talking about cosmic existence as evolutionary persistence.

But what if the logos is the second law of thermodynamics?

Well it is. But maybe humans just aren't intellectually equipped to complete the technological revolution they started. Maybe burning the free lunch of a billion years of accumulated fossil carbon in a 300 year belch was a little short-sighted. And things like ecology are "just too complicated" for humanity in general to understand - in the necessary gut-felt and immediate way that would involve reversing back down Maslow's hierachy of needs. :meh:

You've got to laugh.

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject

I see that kind of perspective as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Sorry to be hard, but hippie idealism failed for good and obvious reasons. Humanity has maths and so it builds machines. The failure of society to take a unified view of that - one that couples the subjective and objective view of reality in a pragmatic, long range, fashion - is where it all starts to go wrong.

We now run society as a machine - both a physical and intellectual one. There are transport systems and economic systems. The world that good engineering understands. Then there is the big divide that is all our culture, entertainment, consumption, social game playing.

We don't just encourage a dualistic "two worlds" approach to life, we fiercely demand it as the way humans can live with all the comforts of technology, and none of its responsibilities.

That leads to the completely predictable reckoning.

We should be busy coupling the two sides of the equation. Again, the simple and obvious stuff. Just bring in the carbon tax already. Connect consumerism and population growth to its environmental consequences. Etc.

But things are rolling too far and too fast. Smart folk will already be factoring in generalised collapse into their future models.

So if you want the complete Hegelian arc of biosemiosis, this is my summary.

History has always worked this way. The invention of photosynthesis nearly killed all life on earth because free oxygen is a deadly toxin, while using up all the CO2 turned the planet into a global snowball.

Photosynthesis might at first seem a miracle source of free energy - just point your leaves at the sun and flourish. But only 1% of life - bacteria eking out an existence in the small pools of meltwater that lingered in the ice-over tropics - survived this catastrophic innovation.

Life had to complete the job and evolve the inverse of photosynthesis, which is oxygen consuming and CO2 excreting respiration. After a few hundred million years things began to recover with that.

The Gaian material cycle was closed once more. One organism's waste was another organism's food. By complementing each other this way, a new global metabolic economy could be established - one with much more evolutionary complexity because the whole biotic game had been shifted up a gear to be driven by the "boundless" renewable energy of the Sun.

So biosemiosis is indeed a theory of everything when it comes to life and mind on Earth. The latent will be made patent.

Imagine if we did crack fusion. And the world hasn't collapsed into generalise chaos before we do. What kind of social beings would we have to be to flourish in that kind of world - where AI will also be as real as it is going to get?

How do we invent the culture, the politics, the mores, the institutions, that might intersect a future that is a step beyond the fast-failing now?

My argument is that the only framework is the one nature has always known. One way or the other, nature will fix things its way.

It will be quite hard for us to actually kill the planet. What's another half billion years for the re-emergence of something more complex than a world of cockroaches and weeds? The Sun won't burn out until another 7 billion years after that.

Yep. You got to laugh. :cry:

You surely show that you know your stuff! — Cartuna

Thanks. And I picked up that you have formal training in maths and physics. Shame you didn't seem to want to go further with the ontic structural realism angle on that.

See James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for the philosophical rallying cry on that front a few years back.

Before RNA came on the scene, how looked life, according to you? RNA? I think proteins came first. — Cartuna

Proteins can’t have existed first. That fact is written into the architectual history of the molecular machine that synthesises all proteins - the ribosome.

See this New Scientist article explaining that - http://revjimc.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-very-first-living-thing-is-still.html

But in brief, the ancient heart of the ribosome is the tunnel that bonds the peptides. And this is still constructed of RNA. Then as the ribosome became better at making structured protein, it used those new generations of protein to improve its own protein-manufacturing structure.

At first it just tacked on simple polypeptide noodles. Then peptide sheets. Then peptide helices.

So the ribosome is its own fossil record for how life started with RNA as the first catalyst. And then each improvement is also the manufacturing material for the next step in its home renovation project. Each new wing of the ribosome reflects the new protein possibilities it had achieved.

But are you keeping up? I hear your usual plea for “small steps”. So probably not.

I wanted to write that. Luckily I didn't. You have found it yourself! — Cartuna

For some reason, you didn't want to save me the trouble.

Well there are plenty of panpsychics and other variations of the same on this forum. You don't have to hide.

Once the first protein structures had formed from amino acids, their tendency to grow and pass on their life, created the need to economically pass on their proteins. RNA-like stuff did the job. — Cartuna

The current best guess theory of abiogenesis involves RNA making RNA, as RNA does an adequate job of both being an informational mechanism and a structural mechanism. A circlet of RNA makes a tunnel that can bond organic crap like polyesters and polypeptides. It can do enough on both sides of the coin to get the party started.

Later, life evolved a sharper epistemic cut. The roles of storing the genetic information and controlling the metabolic dissipation got divided into DNA and protein. The roles became too specialised for a single form of matter to do both.

You have to have a clean separation to have an effective coming together. A metaphysical unity of opposites as the Pythagoreans used to say.

Other than the video, is there maybe a more up-to-date article on this topic that you can recommend? — the affirmation of strife

You can easily search for Friston's recent papers - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=karl+friston&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

But you will see how he is engaged in doing exactly what @Banno complains there is so far a lack of - and that is putting theory into practice.

If you want to start with the general theory, this video is the summary which he has been hawking around the past couple of years as the one for a less technical audience.

His next step beyond that is then sketched out in this other workshop presentation from June - https://youtu.be/T711im7ZgmU

Maintaining free energy means maintaining the status quo. — Cartuna

I think you have some misunderstanding here.

Life and mind exist by constructing paths for entropy dissipation. The sun shining on bare rock winds up returning the radiation to space at the much cooler average temperature of about 60 degrees C. The same planet surface covered by a mature biofilm radiates at about 20 degrees C.

A small improvement so far as the second law is concerned. But even a small difference is one that counts and so is the path the physics will select for.

The problem for life (and mind) is then to separate its materiality from the entropy it transacts. To do better than bare rock, it has to invest in complex material structure. It must recycle its atoms, so to speak - keep them recirculating and so creating the path down which actual free energy becomes actual physical entropy.

This leads to a delicate balancing act in biology - a matter of considerable theoretical debate. Is life caused by the principle of maximum entropy production, or instead the contrary, the need to evolve towards a zone of minimum heat loss/maximum efficiency?

The solution is that existing as a degrader is indeed a delicate trade off. Plasticity and stability both count. An organism that grows too fast is like a cancer. It burns bright, but burns short.

Once you get this, the whole of ecology and evolutionary history follows. You need weeds, but then it is also natural that forest takes over. Complexity is good, but also the simplicity of bacteria is nature's other enduring pole or attractor.

So there is an optimisation function to be had. Yet - as a dynamical balance - it also affords a wide spectrum of solutions. And it is this scalefree variety that we must then expect to find actually expressed in nature.

And so it goes. Life has organised the earth from bacteria that can eat rock to the Gaian cycles that have stabilised the Earth's climate and retained its benign watery condition, its fine-tuned balance of CO2, its unusual reservoir of free oxygen, for several billion years longer than would be the case for the bare rock thermodynamic counterfactual.

Biology has figured it out. Life is self-maintaining, code-based, dissipative structure. But the status quo is a dynamical balancing act - always an optimisation, a trade off. Every organism has to have a goal that then defines it as a self in its world. There must be stored information - genetic information - that encodes the homeostatic set-point for the kind of species of thing it is. A weed or an oak, for example.

And neuroscience is recapitulating the same intellectual journey that biology got started on back in the 1960s. Mind is a higher level of organisation for constructing dissipative structure.

There are all kinds of mindful organisms. Bacteria included. They can sense environmental gradients. They can swim towards nourishment and away from toxins.

And mind continues the effort to solve the essential optimisation problem. To have stable existence as an organism, that organism must transact some quantity of entropy while extracting some sufficient degree of work from the dissipative flow it thus creates. It must repair, and even reproduce, the material body - the structure of metabolism - that achieves the feat of both serving the second law and also defying it by maintaining the integrity if its material structure.

Mind science thus doesn't talk about consciousness as such. In the lab, they talk about researching cognition as some self-optimising balance of attention and habit. Or voluntary and automatic processes. Or top-down and bottom-up information flows in a hierarchical architecture.

Always it is about detailed balance. The optimisation of two complementary factors.

So the idea of the minimisation of free energy speaks to that. There has to be some baseline of entropy production that supports its "other" of investing in negentropic structure. The structure that is doing the entropy production.

Nothing makes sense until the two sides of the equation are cybernetically coupled. Action and perception have to be coupled - as in Friston's Markov blanket formalism – so that together they will track the goal of being optimised in a way that produces both enough entropy, and also enough negentropy to "live the longest". Or better put, as I have said, "reproduce the most successfully".

Ecology amazed the world back in the 1960s with its maths modelling predator-prey relations and other systems-level facts about the dynamics of evolutionary processes. Biology could claim to have its own maths. And this maths was itself rooted in the right kind of physics - thermodynamics.

Friston continues the story.

Maybe if it was presented differently would be much more helpful as people to take notice on it . — dimosthenis9

I dunno. The more common complaint might be that Friston seemed to have changed names for his story so many times down the years. When I first met him 25 years ago, it was all about coupled neural transients and generative neural networks. Then it became Bayesian brains, Free-energy principles, Markov blankets, a Unified theory of unifying theories.

So there have been a ton of different presentations. Much ink spilt. And now he has come up with equations - a general model condensed to a single slide or two. He has proposed a Bayesian Mechanics.

If nothing else, this is huge because it allows neuroscience to finally kick computationalism and Cartesian representationalism out the door.

Cognitive neuroscience started off with the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. The formalisms were already there in the 1800s with Helmholtz and his mathematical definition of free energy, Bayes and his theory of probability.

But then the science of mind got infecting by computer-mania in the 1950s. The maths of the Universal Turing Machine tool over at the putative new foundations. This resonated nicely with the Cartesian representationalism of popular culture where consciousness is treated as the witnessing of some kind of data display.

So now we have Friston emerging as at the top rated cognitive scientist of his age because - as well as also sorting out the maths that underpins the credibility of functional neuroimaging - he returns neuroscience to the wisdom of the 1900s. He unifies the maths needed to ground formal cognitive theory in the 21st Century.

Anybody who studies neuroscience, or even biology in general, always knew life and mind aren't merely machines - neither Newtonian physical machines nor Turing computation machines. But it was difficult to resist the mathematics of those paradigms for as long as neuroscience hadn't established a maths of cognition it could call its own.

That in a nutshell is what is at stake.

Now of course Friston's claims to arrived at a final maths of everything cognitive needs challenging. I've already detailed the challenges I find warranted.

But this "darkened room problem" is a tedious misrepresentation of the maths. And as I say, if this is the best you have got, you ain't got nothing.

That's the long-expected post. Your habit of attacking the messenger has been noted by others. — Banno

You are a curious chap. If you are indeed the messenger, why do you keep disappearing at the very moment you are asked to deliver the message you claim to bear?

You said, aha!, the problem with all totalising generalisations is that they risk leaving out particulars essential to telling the larger story. I said, check this single slide. You can see that the totalising generalisation makes that same totallising generalisation - but now as a mathematically specified and biologically relevant fact.

Now you want to seek cover as the victimised. You want to answer reasoned argument with social game playing.

Well I guess when you are hoist by your own petard trying to play one game, you must scramble to make it a different game instead.