The question I want to ask is if you believe the DMN, or rather the ingrained habit of self-conscious, can be unlearned to a significant degree, say with the methods I've mentioned and perhaps a sustained mindful attention? — praxis

Again, I would highlight the two different ways of framing what is going on.

The overly biological view would be that good concentration is an evolved brain function. Some folk are naturals. Other people have some kind of weakness. We could diagnose them with a disorder like attention deficit even. Give them drugs.

Then the view I'm taking is that concentration is the human learnt habit of being able to attend to essentially boring things that the brain isn't naturally designed to be interested in. If you are a radar operator watching a screen where nothing much happens all day, then why wouldn't your mind wander? It is wired to do just that.

This is a fact of neurology down to the micro-scale. If you have an image stabilised on your retina, it fades within a second, no matter how hard you try to keep seeing it. The nervous system is designed to discount that which doesn't vary right from the first step in sensory processing. To stay aware of some constant visual stimulus, our eyes have to be kept dancing over it in micro-saccades. We must introduce motion to create some sense of interest down at the front-line of vision.

So to the degree there is ever a problem, it is down to a social demand about the ability to self-regulate. It is just part of our culture - a useful part of course - that we can pay attention to stuff that brains are not evolved to find exciting.

Concentration is thus itself a skill to be learnt, a habit to be developed. We have to learn little tricks to keep us on task. Having a strong awareness of the penalties for failure can become quite a motivating part of the deal. Finding ways to insert brief refreshing breaks is another way to keep the brain on task.

And some people do have a stronger or weaker biological ability to stay focused, just as we all vary in the precise balance of our neurology. Another feature of humans is that we are more highly lateralised and that the brain's attentional networks are lateralised so that left brain leads for endogenous focus - tunnel vision in pursuit of plans - and right brain is the mode we switch to for vigilant focus, or an open-minded alertness where we don't know what is about to happen, but are ready to catch whatever it is very fast. So some people may be just better at one than the other, or just better at switching clearly between one and the other.

The balancing act is reflected in neurotransmitter differences. Dopamine is part of maintaining endogenous or internally-directed focus. Nor-adrenaline is for jumpy alertness as it boosts signal-noise ratios. It makes neurons more likely to fire, and so both more sensitive to stimuli and more likely to produce false guesses.

So there is no simple story. But the simple story is that humans in general, especially in this modern age, live with this high expectation about being able to concentrate when the brain would naturally be bored. And then within this, individual humans would struggle with their own individual biological differences in how the balances of their nervous systems happen to have been set up during neuro-development.

Where does meditation fit in? Well it would train both the social and the biological aspects of concentration as much as they are trainable.

It is a skill you can learn to switch between a left brain and right brain style of attention. We learn to do it in simple fashion just by looking up and to the left when wanting to search our memory or imagination in vigilant brain manner. It wakes up the right brain enough to emphasise that style of processing.

So biofeedback training is also a thing. If we train hard enough, we can establish top-down voluntary control over what would be normally some very low level and automatic stuff - like our heart rate or attentional settings.

And as you say, if being self-conscious is a social self-regulatory habit we have learnt, a cultural overlay, then we can somewhat unlearn that as a further cultural habit - the kind meditation is meant to represent as a higher state of self-mastery and enlightenment.

As you likely know, the inner voice can't actually be shut off. But we can learn to just keep on ignoring it every time it catches our attention. We can get into the habit of letting every itching beginning of a speech act go the instant it begins to clearly form. We can even let the babbling go on somewhere at the back of our mind by keeping our senses focused on the blue patch on the wall or whatever - keep returning our attentional focus to some neutral and un-comment worthy point of focus so that the inner voice has as little to work off as possible.

I had some zen training as a kid and I must confess I found it very hokey for these reasons. It just seemed another obvious trick you had to learn to play with your own neurology. My approach to life was always to chase my curiosities rather than worry about controlling them in some culturally arbitrary fashion. So I was never a good fit with meditation as an approach to anything. But in terms of neuroscience and cultural anthropology, how it works does not seem a vast mystery, just a very complex story of balances and interplays.

Anything within the limits, being not the limits themselves, which is the entirety of "the real" would be excluded from the dichotomy under the designation of "jointly exhaustive" — Metaphysician Undercover

Together they exhaust other possible limitations to that aspect of reality.

And don't forget that what follows after a dichotomous separation or symmetry breaking is the arrival at the stable equilibrium of a triadic hierarchical state of order. You get an ending to the breaking when the two limits are in equilibrium with the contents they thus now contain.

Again, because you can't be bothered to study how all this works, you keep falling woefully short of any understanding. I have to keep explaining basic stuff again and again.

That's because I normally use "dichotomy" in the more general and common way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. You think it is a simple division. And the process view says it is irreducibly complex. Things only reach stability once the separating into polar opposites has arrived at a hierarchical balance where there is also now a connecting spectrum of concrete possibility.

This leads to the idea that things which are opposed to each other, like hot and cold, form a dichotomy. But notice how all things which are warm are excluded from that dichotomy. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. All things warm are now specified in concrete fashion because they are related to the extremes of a dichotomy. There is the hot in one direction, the cold in the other. So now the warm has its own definite and measurable location somewhere on the spectrum of possibility just established.

Dichotomies are incompatible with your process philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you understand about process philosophy? A big fat zero so far.

Why? — darthbarracuda

What @Bitter Crank said.

Also, if you say an obsessive pursuit of truth is some kind of grand delusion, who would disagree with that diagnosis - to the degree you aren't being well paid and enjoying high status for doing that?

But who would damn you for a life devoted to accumulating practical wisdom?

So why not focus on that?

I don’t quite follow your meaning when you say that neurology celebrates the efficient brain. Do you essentially mean that this is optimal for health and function? — praxis

No. I was meaning informationally efficient. Predictively efficient.

Ideally the brain should be so good at predicting its world that it doesn't even need to waste time finding out what actually happened. The more the brain can afford to ignore in terms of the available information contained in its environment, the better it is doing its job.

This of course is counter-intuitive to ordinary views about consciousness. It seems that to be highly evolved is to have an ever greater span of conscious awareness. The larger your attentive bandwidth, the better.

Yet the opposite is the basic driver of the neurocognitive equation. Less is more. We have a very limited working memory, and an even more constricted spotlight of attention, by design. Humans have large brains and use them to discount even more of the world than other animals.

One finding - might be a bit old now - is that monkey primary visual cortex (V1) has a proportionately smaller central foveal representation. The visual cortex gives more weight to what's happening in the periphery of the field of vision.

But humans devote a lot of V1 to just the pin-point size fovea. Everything outside that tiny central spot gets much less attention by comparison. And the logic is that humans use all their extra smarts to be already knowing where they should be looking. Less is more. What we can predict, we can discount. And the result is that what doesn't get discounted has far more informational significance. It is already more meaningful as what we didn't expect.

When working to improve our skills in some activity, such as stair climbing, we necessarily focus our attention on the activity and often to good effect, so it seems there must be more to the story. — praxis

Of course. We have to attend and learn when any skill is new. And then as fast as practical, the skill is made a smoothly integrated automatic habit - a thing we can now do without deliberative thinking.

It is literally a story of short-circuiting our reactions. When we attend, everything is looping right up the brain hierarchy so that the prefrontal cortex and other highly plastic and unspecialised higher brain areas are involved in figuring out how to do things - like drive a car or climb the stairs.

Then as there starts to be some success at that, the mid-brain begins to short-circuit those long and slow loops. It begins to emit the same response in a speedy template fashion. It knits together the complex set of instructions that the higher brain has been helping forge into just a memory that can tell the motor centres exactly what to do.

That is why you can do really smart and skilled things in a fifth of a second when attention would still be fumbling about in its experimental fashion, trying to see which bit has to happen exactly when.

I understand this learned habit of self is neurologically located in the DMN (default mode network). — praxis

You would need to distinguish now between a biological sense of self and a social sense of self.

So yes, all animals need an embodied sense of self just so they can move and act. They need to know where their bodies end and the world starts. They need to know if they turn their heads sharply, it was not the world that suddenly lurched. So for sure there is a neurology which maps the embodied self in proprioceptive fashion.

But now I am talking about self-conscious as a social construct. And this is about seeing the self as "a self". It is the habit of stepping back from all that is going on in "your" head and seeing it at an objectifying remove as the thoughts, perceptions, memories and feelings running through the experience of a person.

So when you think of yourself in this fashion, that is going to be a habit of thought that also lights up the part of the brain that help make that effort of self-visualisation a vivid experience for you. But it is still a social habit and not a genetic faculty.

The brain did not evolve a biological self-consciousness. Although - being highly social creatures, like all the great apes - we did definitely evolve the kind of imaginative skills that help make it an easy narrative skill to master.

We were pre-adapted by having highly developed social modelling abilities - the ability to model our fellow hominids as social actors with thoughts and desires. So we did have a biological ability to read the minds and intentions of others - the famous theory of mind "module". But what I am saying is that the final touch - the ability to step outside our own heads to model ourselves in that fashion - couldn't happen until symbolic language came along and allowed society to create that as a new self-regulating habit of thought.

If so, it would seem that neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to live as attentively as possible, without the burden of an overactive DMN. — praxis

The DMN story was way overplayed in my view.

Animals don't get bothered by extraneous thinking. They just react as automatically as possible. Attention would keep its sticky mitts out of things without having to be told.

But humans are supposed to be always narratising. That's the irony. It becomes an ingrained habit of thought. We can't shut up. The inner voice has been trained to start making some comment about something during every conscious moment. Whatever catches our attention in any instance has to be treated as a possible departure point for some "intelligent" remark.

So attention can't be literally shut off. Even if what we are doing can be handled entirely automatically - like driving your car on a familiar journey - your narratising mind is going to want to wander. It will latch on to anything random and ruminate about that.

Even in deepest slow wave sleep your inner voice will be trying to say something meaningful out of blind habit.

So the DMN is rather a neurocognitive artifact.

A well drilled brain wants attention put in idle. It would otherwise just get in the way of smooth and rapid performance. Attention would always be trying to invent some nifty new experimental way of doing stuff, and causing the brain to balls up what it actually needs to be getting on with doing.

But humans have learnt this further habit of chattering away in the head in watchful self-regulatory fashion. It itself is now a habit that just runs automatically of its own accord. So sometimes the inner voice is getting called in because something needs to be figured out attentively. And a lot of the time it can be allowed to wander off in distracted reflective thought with no great purpose.

It is not in competition for resources as such. It isn't going to be overactive and a burden in a normal and well-adjusted person. But that is all part of the social training. It is why we get told off in class for daydreaming. And why some might demonise this DMN as something that endangers our modern standards of cultural self-regulation and responsibility bearing.

First they train us to narratise to the point it is an unstoppable habit. Then they tell us off when we let our minds narratise in automatic fashion. The demand is that we ought to be in attentive control of what the inner voice is pondering about an any instant, no matter how little actual demand there is for attentional control at that precise moment.

Society cuts self-regulation no slack in the modern world.

The tie, Bob says, is green, even though it looks blue. After a few days, John gets the hang of this way of talking. John has learnt a new way of talking. — StreetlightX

And interestingly, almost a Platonic way of talking. Conception sees beyond mere appearance.

Or more pragmatically, the mind seeks out a way to impose stability on the flux of experience. It is trying to describe the essence that endures.

And even more pragmatically - accepting now that experience is a phenomenal umwelt organised by a mediating system of signs - we do end up knowing only our concrete symbols of things. Green is something we can reliably recognise, no matter what its current guise.

Importantly, this 'how' involves what Sellars refers to as a normative dimension of knowledge claims, an 'ought-to-say' over and above a mere 'is'. — StreetlightX

Again, the pragmatic story. Knowledge - in the linguistically-structured sense particular to humans - is what a community sharing a language, a system of linguistic sign, would come to agree the meaning of in the long run. To say "green" would have a socially-constrained interpretation. And to be a functioning part of a linguistic community is to be able to participate as a native in its linguistic habits.

So yes. There is a normative ought that emerges at the sociocultural level. But it is a soft "ought" in being just a constraint. There is still an irreducible freedom or creativity about what any particular speech act might actually mean.

That too is a key aspect of semiosis. Essences or generalisations are limiting but not completely restrictive.

Do you think this admits of a purely physical solution? — Wayfarer

Or it could be that Pattee is adopting a useful rhetorical position in which the glass is half-empty rather than half-full.

It is definitely part of his character that he pushes the expected scientific attitude of: "Well, we don't really know yet. And we may never actually know the answer on abiogenesis because we haven't got a time machine to go back and see what may have been some of the accidental steps along some actual sequence of events."

Pattee set himself apart from his mostly far more easy-going theoretical biology colleagues on this score. There are always plenty happy to believe they have the answer - RNA world, or whatever. And Pattee's chosen role was to be the one bringing clarity to the actual question to be answered. So he was always saying, hold up, not yet. You will have to go deeper than that to count as a final theory.

So what you are hearing is the kind of rigour that makes science a metaphysically-responsible exercise worth doing.

It is certainly not any kind of semi-religious wavering - the thought that the causes of life and mind might not have a naturalistic explanation. I never heard Pattee make the faintest nod in that direction. And the subject did come up as others in his circle, like Robert Ulanowicz, were openly theistic.

Pattee would be the most hard-nosed of materialists and so resisted Peircean metaphysics and semiotics pretty strongly - until he was converted and came out with his late flood of papers arguing the case elegantly.

That the epistemic cut, or the distinction between the semantic and the physical, will be erased in due course? — Wayfarer

But the cut exists. The abiogenetic issue is how could it have evolved as it seems there is a significant gap to leap.

And now - in just the past decade - that gap has shrunk dramatically, as Nick Lane and Peter Hoffman can tell you from their frontline position in experimental biology.

With Hoffman, the gap is pretty much literally not there. At the quasi-quantum nanoscale, where the entropic costs of converting thermal gradients to negentropic work falls effectively to zero, life is left with no choice but to get started.

The epistemic cut simply is lying there on the floor ready to be picked up. It doesn't need to be created anymore. You couldn't avoid stumbling into its grip if you are some passing biochemical process. The likelihood of life not breaking out falls to some improbably tiny number that we might as well call zero.

At the moment, I am reading Nick Lane’s new book “The Vital Question, Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life.” — Read Parfit

Another really important popular science account - maybe even more important as a glimpse into the future of biology - is Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet. See http://lifesratchet.com/

Notice the quote "speculation far outpaces evidence in many of the book's passages". — Metaphysician Undercover

Who would'a thunk? Science has to generate speculation to give its experiments something to knock down.

I guess some folk still believes science works the other way. First up pops some significant experimental fact, some inconvenient laboratory truth, and everyone gathers around to invent a new theory.

But the efficient way to search for answers is to have formed a clear idea of what you might be looking for.

If you read Lane, you might be impressed by the way science works to narrow the options. It used to be thought that life would have to start with little fatty vesicles - spontaneously developing proto-cells.

But in considering the problems of life beginning on boiling hot ocean floor vents, that narrowed attention to luke-warm alkaline ones. And that in turn threw up the speculative possibility that the porous mineral structure of those vents already gave you the kind of reaction chambers you need. Even before fatty vesicles, the right kind of material constraints would be in place to get the barest form of metabolic reaction going.

Of course the only way to judge the reasonableness of such speculation - which ran ahead of the experiments now being done by Lane and others - would be to actually read his book.

A revolutionary concept, I guess.

Look at me! Listen to me! I have truth, I am the truth! In actuality there cannot be a lover of truth but only lovers of opinion, and more specifically their own. All of this is a charade - ironically, the lover of truth is in a state of profound self-delusion. — darthbarracuda

I am not criticizing truth in this circular manner, I am simply saying that truth as it is truth in and of itself is worthless. — darthbarracuda

You seem caught up in your own version of the liar's paradox.

"It is true that truth isn't true but a delusion. Listen to me. I'm telling you the truth. Therefore I'm deluded. Therefore what I said isn't true."

We get the same self-defeating rants from the anti-totalisers who make anti-totalising their totalising philosophical viewpoint.

Pragmatism offers the quiet exit door from these kinds of standard pathologies of thought. Walk out now and never look back!

He seems to make a stark dichotomy between "physical laws" and "local constraints". So were local constraints always in the picture in his view or were they created by the physical laws? — schopenhauer1

You seem not to understand that laws are simply constraints that are universal - baked into the fabric of the Universe as a result of its history of development.

So all biology is ruled by the laws that express the cosmological imperative to thermalise. They can't break that law and have to live within it. They are .... constrained by it. The constraint is a holonomic one, to use the technical term.

But then - as Pattee says - life and mind arise by being able to construct their own localised non-holonomic constraints. These would be the various barriers, gates and switches that make it possible to regulate material flows of entropy - to put any available entropic gradients to good use and do negentropic work.

So it is all about nested hierarchies of constraints. It begins with the most general. And then localised complexity is free to develop within those global bounds. Life and mind go the step further in being able to construct self-interested structures that do work. And they pay for that by always having to accelerate the local production of entropy. They have to exist by doing the second law's job more efficiently than happened to be the case at some particular spot in the Cosmos.

There is nothing forbidding the acceleration of entropy rates by negentropic structure. And what isn't forbidden by natural law is almost sure to happen. Indeed, it must happen if it is actually possible.

That inevitability is why we tend to call it "a law".

Presumably, emergent theories claim that new properties are created from the processes of a lower order and cannot be reduced. I don't really see that problem with proteins per se. — schopenhauer1

How does a protein function as a biological message? How is that emergent from some "lower order" rather than that being an emergent result of there being a larger interpretive context. And enzyme tells a metabolic reaction to hurry up. A membrane tells a metabolic reactant to wait there.

Barriers, gates and switches are all physical devices. But they have no meaning that emerges from within themselves. Their meaning is emergent due to a holism of the whole system operating to meet a goal.

So Pattee was focused on the classic issue of abiogenesis. How could life get started unless life - in that holistic sense - already existed? What is the point of a protein if its folded structure doesn't already mean something in terms of some functional system?

If the fundamental property of a biological protein is to "act like a switch", that can't in fact be a property until it is useful from a holistic and functional point of view to have a part that behaves just like that.

So your notion of emergence is the wrong one - the bottom-up/supervenience story that bedevils material reductionists. Pattee is talking about a top-down systems causality where the whole shapes the parts it needs due to a functional holism.

It is the constraints-based view of metaphysics. That is the critical intellectual leap you are being asked to make.

OK, let's start from the beginning again — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Let's see if you can just remember the definition of a dichotomy as that which is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". So there is a process of separation towards reciprocally-matched limits. Two contrasting limits on "the real" emerge into view according to the distance each can each put between itself and its "other".

They are defined in such a way that the one excludes the other in opposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Don't forget that they are also jointly exhaustive. So you have to have these two (the assertion about the mutuality of a pairing). And also only these two (the assertion about the exhaustion of any further possibilities).

You make the right noises about dichotomies only then to collapse everything back to your happy simplicities of pairs of terms that are then neither mutual nor exhaustive anymore so far as you are concerned.

I know it is a little bit complicated. But it ain't that complicated.

So here is the problem I have, which I've been trying to relate to you. If we model reality in this way that you are proposing, how would we distinguish between, and identify, the two defining elements, the container and the contents, within the thing which is being modelled? — Metaphysician Undercover

This is some other confection of misunderstanding you are attempting to concoct as a distraction.

Keep starting from the beginning until you accept how a dichotomy actually works - mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Dwell on that truth deeply. Really soak up the meaning in a way you can't forget or deny. Then maybe you will have the logical wherewithal to take a next step.

1. What is the main point between the physical laws and control constraints? When do the local constraints get in the ontological ecosystem? He mentions them as if they are already existent along with the physical laws (or at least how I interpreted it). How do the local constraints come into the picture if all were originally physical laws? — schopenhauer1

So some constraints are global. And other constraints can then be local. Where's the problem?

The Cosmos has its universal constraints on action or uncertainty. Physical systems, like stars or rocks or waterfalls, then express more local or particular constraints. And then organisms can even construct their own local and particular constraints via the symbol~matter deal of biosemiosis.

2. What is the emergent property of protein (what he calls enzyme) folding? I know he talks about strong and weak bonds, but that didn't seem to answer the question. — schopenhauer1

Your question doesn't make sense.

3. I guess what is the main point regarding biosemiotics in regards to experience? — schopenhauer1

Experience should be understood as an organismic sign relation.

But there seems to be a third category; emotional motivations that are not understood by the conscious mind. — EnPassant

True. So habits are the mid-brain doing its thing of automating responses so "you " don't have to think about them, or attend to them. That is one aspect of what people label the unconscious, or subconscious, or preconscious.

And as well as this "how" of unconscious, or rather non-attentive, behaviour, there is the "why" - the motivation or valuing that gets labelled as emotion, in opposition to "conscious reasoning".

So now the neurological basis of that is about the brainstem and limbic system - amygdala, hypothalmus, etc. And that is its own complex story.

But primarily, the emotions can be understood as perception of the internal state of your own body and physiology. Are you hungry, thirsty, excited, tired, in pain, etc. So it is hardly unconscious. Like all perception, the question is whether you are attending and so focused on how to respond to the signals.

I could just as well be staring out the window and not seeing what my eyes are seeing because my mind is far away concentrating on something else. But seeing isn't then part of the subconscious mind. It just means attention blocks out awareness for what doesn't currently matter.

All the sensations - internal or external - are "there". But attention acts as a filter that focuses on a foreground by blanking out a background. Whether some aspect of what is going on is conscious or unconscious is down to a dynamical balance of selection/repression.

But a second aspect of this emotion story is the habit/automatism one. Emotions do seem to break through unbidden because the brain does have to know when to jerk attention towards significant events. And as importantly, our physiological state has to start reacting as soon as possible to deal with whatever is about to happen.

So if we hear heavy footsteps coming up behind us on a dark night, we instinctively get all the right reactions starting up as soon as the possible significance of this is realised at an automatic level - heart beats faster, digestion slows to divert blood to the muscles, cold sweat begins, nor-adrenaline pumps in the brain to create an aroused alertness.

Conscious or attentive awareness of the world takes about half a second to develop. It takes that long to focus and work out what is going on in an intellectual fashion. But habits - as learnt response - can simply be emitted in reflexive fashion. We can react in a simple startled fashion in about a tenth of a second, and in quite a well-honed smart fashion - the kind of skilled moves involved in sport - in a fifth of a second.

So the brain is set up to respond fast in learnt habitual fashion - to generate an appropriate flood of emotional feelings - and then let lagging attention swing into place to check whatever it was that just gave us a surprise. We might either then start to calm down, or decide we really need some kind of conscious action plan.

Thus the key dynamic in neurobiology is the divide between attention and habit. Do we need to focus on something in a whole brain reasoning fashion, or do we basically understand exactly how to react from a lifetime of experience? The brain is set up so that everything first goes through the fifth of a second loop that pretty much equates to an unconscious level of processing. Then only if it matters does it break through to become the subject of slower reacting, but far more explorative and remembered, attentive processing.

Emotions, as perceptions of internal state, are just like perceptions of the external world in being new information filtered in this two-stage fashion.

And then emotions as orienting responses - or appropriate shifts in physiological state to match the level of challenge in the world - is about what happens down at a reflexive or habitual level of response without waiting for attention to catch up and say it is the proper thing to do.

So emotion becomes attached to the events of the world as judgements about how aroused or relaxed we need to be in the next moment or so. And emotions are also news about our physiological needs - hunger, thirst, lust, etc - that are drives that need satisfaction. If habit isn't already delivering and the need is growing, then time for attention to be interrupted and focus on the fact.

Sometimes people act without understanding their motivations. That seems to be a kind of unconscious mind. — EnPassant

Now we are into yet another different level of explanation - one that ain't strictly neurobiological but linguistic and socio-cultural.

Humans have narrative consciousness, or language-structured self-consciousness. A good way to direct attention is to speak to ourselves in our heads as if we are addressing a person - our self.

So this is another habit(!) we learn. We construct an integrated tale about who we are, what we are about. There is this whole life story about the reasons we would do this or that which is all part of the learnt apparatus of being a self-regulating member of a human society.

So we are meant to be able to explain the reasons for our behaviour to others at all times. It is just part of the routine. And yet the neurological truth is that much of the reason we do things are down to habits and instincts we have learnt as our reliable ways to deal with the world with minimal attentive effort.

The neurological level need is to be efficient and think as little as possible about life. If you know the right kinds of things to do, just do them without stopping to think and debate. Focusing attention on any skilled action - even climbing the stairs - and you can set up the kind of wrestle between two processes with different basic rates (a fifth of a second vs half a second) that causes you to stumble and misfire. When it comes to action or output, one or other level of processing has to be in charge for the moment.

So on the whole, as a general rule, neurobiology will be wanting to respond to everything at the most habitual and automatic level first. We get a big tick from our biological self if we are successfully "unconscious" when getting stuff done. That is what an efficient and well-adapted brain looks like.

But then we get a conflicting socio-cultural message as, at that level, we are meant to be self-conscious selves, completely in charge and attentively regulating every action that issues from us. We are held responsible. And we better be ready with articulated reasons for everything.

If we do stumble even on something so trivial as climbing a flight of steps, blame has to be assigned for the failure. Maybe a dog barked and distracted us. Maybe the step wobbled. Maybe - if we are really forced to confess our guilt - we were being "inattentive".

Society is built on this kind of expectation. We are all selves, and that entails a conscious level responsibility for every action that results. That in turn sets up this great social concern and mystery when it comes to "unconscious" behaviour or thought. We have this dangerous inner world with its own mind. Mostly it seems to go with the flow, obey our narrative about our motivations. But there is lurks, always ready to betray us.

Again, it all comes back to a natural division of labour - the dichotomy of attentive-level and habit-level processing. And neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to get by as inattentively as possible, while sociology demands the impossible thing of a brain that is attentively responsible for every single detail of its behaviour. The unconscious thus looms large and mysterious in the popular imagination.

You talk about the discrete and the continuous as if there is some real difference between them. — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct.

But when you describe the way that existence really is, you claim that there is no way of distinguishing between them within real existing things. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about. This is modelling. So to the extent that we know the thing-in-itself, the dichotomy of the discrete and the continuous is the conceptual division that would describe a separation of the real - whatever that is noumenally speaking - towards its "real" phenomenological limits.

Thus if we are talking about our ontic commitments, then containers and contents are both equally "real" in that modelling sense. Likewise our notions of the continuous and discrete as the limits on possible existence.

This stands in contrast to more reductionist or monistic schemes that would want to make one or the other the "real". Or indeed, dualistic schemes that take a substantial rather than a process view of dichotomies.

So your problem is that you conflate the phenomenal and the noumenal in this discussion. It is one of the ways you keep tangling your feet.

because the two are fundamentally inseparable, and therefore cannot be identified individually. — Metaphysician Undercover

Back to front. The two are fundamentally separable because they can be individuated in terms of a reciprocal relation to each other. And by that same token, the two are fundamentally connected by being the two poles of that reciprocal relation.

Blood pressure is complex plumbing. — frank

Why do I bother.

Hey, you brought it up, not I. It is your subject, look: — Metaphysician Undercover

Err, reality as a process.

It's not my fault that when I try to engage you on this subject, you simply tried to change the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

I just tried to prevent you going down your same old rabbit hole of non-process assumptions.

But when things are related, and one is designated as the largest, and another is designated as the smallest, it is not the case that the largest contains the smallest. They are considered, and compared as separate entities, or else this relation could not be established. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh. The relationship is precisely what is established by the discrete being part to the whole that is continuity. The relationship is that of the downward acting constraints to the upward constructing elements or individuated degrees of freedom.

The nearest thing would be to draw a number line, but that would be a representation... — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean like a representation of a .... continuous, just waiting to be broken, space?

They both coexist and there is no way of saying that one is the contents and the other the container because each, the continuous and the discrete, seem to have features of container as well as features of contents. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are getting it ... by trying so hard to get it wrong! Spectacular. My job is done.

You originally seemed to suggest that an analysis of an organism does not lend itself to talk of states. — frank

Nope. My point was that talk of "states" usually already presupposes a particular metaphysical point of view - a mechanical or computational one.

And indeed, talk of states does become problematic when talking about organisms as if they were merely finite state automata.

So it would be helpful if the OP had tried to define how state is intended to be understood - in some hand waving way that defies definition in fact, or as something that can be given a usefully precise set of ontic commitments.

That was my point. Not something else.

Homeostasis is in fact all about states. The state of blood pressure, the state of glucose and O2 supply, etc. — frank

Un huh. Well I did biology and it was all about managing the instability of those things.

And how do organisms regulate their blood pressure or glucose levels? In some sense they sense their own state of being. They can make measurements that encode something of significance about how they "are right now" compared to how they imagine they "ought generally to be".

And the fact that there is this interpreting of measurements business going on is where things start to get interestingly complex. What happens if your body is misreading its glucose signals - something about its instrumentation is out of whack - and so homeostatically it is chasing a misguided target?

So yeah, in a very loose way you can talk about "states" of the body's vital signs as if they were something clearly physical - the kind of readings a doctor's instruments would provide. But that kind of Newtonian physicalist ontology doesn't really get you very far in understanding how the biology actually works.

And the same applies in spades when it comes to neuroscience and "states of mind".

Yes. — frank

So is a flux itself a state of balance according to you? Help me understand your understanding of homeostasis here.

Well if applied to antinatalism.. — schopenhauer1

...which wasn't the subject under discussion here.

you’ve said it’s not tenable because the majority will simply stampede over it with their preferences and thus can’t be a true ethical theory. — schopenhauer1

I have indeed pointed out the unintended irony that in eliminating those unwilling to breed, that would strengthen the impulse to breed of those remaining by definition. To the extent that wanting kids is a genetically or memetically evolved trait, antinatalism would act like the culling hand of selective breeding, removing an undesirable trait from a population and so increasing the general propensity to have children.

For antinatalism to win the race, it has to be all or nothing. The whole population has to be convinced it should halt. For reproduction to win out, even a little bit of breeding is enough to keep the game going.

So at best, antinatalism is a Pyrrhic gesture, the stance of the dedicated absurdist. The real "ethical" choice is being made at the collective population level. And that may also lead to human extinction anytime soon. Death of the species by perfectly natural causes. :)

Do you understand what homeostasis means then?

Don't you think that talk of flux, and talk of fluxes held in deliberate equilibrium balance, constitute two different "states of affairs". ;)

Flux is a state. — frank

Flux is a state of what though? And why have you suddenly changed the subject from homeostasis, or the intentional regulation of fluctuations, in pursuit of some stable - and in fact, "far from equilibrium" - equilibrium condition?

Stability is the outcome of equal opposing forces. — frank

Yep. Equilibrium is a state of all forces, or sources of fluctuation, arriving at some steady persisting balance. It is an outcome of a system being closed or bounded in a fashion that allows it to be so. And also some mind, some point of view, which no longer sweats the uncertain details.

The particles of an ideal gas at equilibrium are still in furious motion. But the state of the system can be completely determined by its macro-properties, such as temperature and pressure. At equilibrium, the kinetic details get averaged away. The actual state - some account of every individual particle - doesn't matter. The effective state is enough so far as the physical model is concerned.

So we do have our very mechanical notions of statistical states. But they in turn still rely on holistic and rather mental notions - like points of view that apply suitable cut-offs in terms of when the fine-grain details cease to matter.

The number 12 is not in a state of flux. It can't be. A mind can be in the state of contemplating the number 12. Yet 12 is apparently something beyond any individual mind. We believe that because a person can be wrong about what 12 is. — frank

We suddenly seem to be discussing Platonism. Are you completely abandoning homeostasis, which I agree is a great starting point for highlighting an organic approach in contrast to a mechanical one?

That sounds like a position stripped of all nuance. Maybe you are thinking of Jamesian pragmatism?

I read the tail end of this discussion here and thought just your pragmatism is harder to apply to value theory. — schopenhauer1

Maybe read the discussion then. It's not about value theory. Or at least no version in which values would be something with an objective or transcendent existence.

I can see you are approaching the paper with a completely open and unbiased mind. :up:

What analysis of an organism doesn't start with concept of homeostasis? — frank

Exactly. And homeostasis is about having the goal of regulating dynamical instabilities. So that is a very organic conception of nature - to be able to impose stability on instability in pursuit of a purpose.

You can have the defining desire of maintaining a "constant state" only because that state is in fact absent without the appropriate constraints being applied.

So now we are clearly starting to talk the language of organisms rather than machines. Some form of long-run intentionality has already come into play. And at the same time, some presumption about simple atomistic states of affairs - a state as a snapshot of all that exists during some "instant" - is making its exit.

Talk about "states" is Newtonian physics-speak. It presumes localised linearity and determinism. But good, you agree that talk about the mind is already talk about holism. We are really talking about states of intentionality. We are talking about sticking determinedly, in a fairly straight line, to goals that have a long-run stability. Or better yet, that produce that long-run stability.

That is why we can see the OP has already made the wrong move in accepting the Newtonian physics-speak notion of a state when it asks such questions as: "Is it just experiencing Mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, intentions , and sensations?"

Now we have goal-directedness being spoken of as some kind of object floating in some kind of space. It is a mental thing, a lump with properties, that is to be found wandering about in some stray corner of this great place called "experience".

That is why I suggest that the OP ought first define what is meant here by state. If meaning is use, it is clear that the only definition the OP has in mind is some drab and lifeless notion derived from Newtonian mechanics and computer science.

The discussion shows that to talk about "states" introduces the false step right at the start. It is an information processing term. One derived from a mechanical approach to dynamics. And so it imports all the metaphysical deficiencies of that particular language game (even if it might also have some advantages, such as a familiarity and simplicity).

Is the brain a machine, a computer - a finite state automaton?

If you are happy to think so, then sure, the OP probably seems to make sense to you. You can spend forever trying to make the organismic facts fit that weird thing of "a state".

OK, but our subject is the question of the existence, or non existence of the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover

That might be your subject. And the only way you understand any subject.

Clearly you are saying here, that "discrete" and "continuous" refer to two "reciprocally define extremes", and that they are "limits to existence". But now, when you apply the container/contents analogy, continuity is represented by "the container" and is called "the constraints", which represents the limits, and "contents" represents the discrete. — Metaphysician Undercover

What's so difficult? Being reciprocal is why the discrete and the continuous would map naturally to a hierarchical story of the smallest vs the largest. That is the nature of the relation being describe. The bigger one gets, the smaller the other gets.

A point can't contain the line, but it can compose the line in being its contents. And likewise, a line can't be the contents of a point, but it can certainly contain points.

How can the infinite actually constrain anything" "Infinite" means the exact opposite, unconstrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

I thought it meant the space within which every possible number exists in bounded fashion.

The second question is what type of existence does the discrete have now? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is a limit on any continuity - the least amount of continuity imaginable. Just as continuity is whatever is the least unbroken state of affairs that you can imagine.

So to the degree you can define the one, you can define the other.

You are simply showing that the two can't in fact be disentangled with arbitrary completeness. Just as my developmental approach concludes.

As I say, your non-process view of metaphysics keeps crashing into paradoxes because it believes in ontological absolutes rather than a logic of relations. You keep demanding to be shown something fixed and concrete that answers to your mechanistic conviction that reality has to begin in counterfactual definiteness, rather than definiteness being a relative outcome.

'm sure that there are many nuances in the maths that I am glossing here, but does that capture the basic idea? — Esse Quam Videri

That’s it.

In case you are interested, there is this nice paper on the Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

And I highlighted the "mysteriousness" of the PLA in this discussion - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/178536

Also I follow Stan Salthe on how to keep telos unmystical within philosophical naturalism - http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Purpose_In_Nature.pdf

This naturalistic approach recognises nested grades of purpose. So you have {tendencies {functions {purposes}}} as the physical, biological and then psychological levels of telos. The prime mover at a generalised physical level is simply a global tendency, nothing grander. More organised states of purpose then evolve locally within organisms as higher levels of systemhood.

Do you understand the neurological difference between attentional processes and habitual or automatic ones? Is there something further to be explained after those?

Moving along, you assume "contents" as well as the container, something which is contained by the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover

I chose to talk about the same general distinction in another way so as to broaden the view you were taking. So try to understand it that way rather than setting things up for further confusion.

To talk of contents and container is to talk about the systems view of physicalism. Everything that exists is the product of the process that is the formation of a global structure of constraints, a state of systemhood, which results - matchingly - in some locally emergent degrees of freedom.

So the container is emergent - some set of global boundary conditions or "habits" which stand for the system's defining final/formal cause. And the contents are emergent too - as the now definite degrees of freedom that stand for the system's material/effective cause.

Unpredictability regarding the contents has been stripped away by the nature of the container, resulting in a set of contents that is now definite to the degree that its material possibilities have been sharply restricted.

The discrete and the continuous do map to this view. Continuity becomes the global container - the constraints. And discreteness describes the now locally countable, because crisply individuated, degrees of freedom that are being "held" within the container.

Now, the real existence of contents and container are spoken of in terms of "degree". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Degree of development. In the beginning, when everything is just vague, containers and contents would be hard to distinguish apart. A clear difference is what then emerges.

Could you say that this thing is 50% contents, and 50% container (discrete and continuous), making it 100% real or existent? Could a thing have 80% real existence, being 40% contents and 40% container? — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I probably made a mistake given you such a concrete image to latch onto. I aimed to give you a stepping stone out of your worldview. You are not using it to avoid actually have to step out of that worldview.

Think of a cloud. As an object, it only has a vague boundary and so only vague contents. It is kind of contained, and kind of substantial. Fly into one and it goes all misty, damp, cold. But neither its form nor its material is particularly definite - certainly relative to our usual notion of a substantial object.

Or to give another example where the active nature of containment might be clearer, think of a tornado. It is a vortex that entrains all its contents with a direction. Stuff gets sucked into its shape. It become composed of a spinning air mass, plus anything else light enough to be swept along.

But it is hard to put a finger on a sharp boundary to that vortex. It is a container, a constrainer, with a vague outline. And its contents are also in a vague state. There is a general sort of directionality to all the parts, but also a lot of individual chaos still.

I'm afraid your philosophy is nihilistic — Wayfarer

And I’m afraid that is bollocks. My entropic approach takes meaning so seriously that it can measure it. Yours is theistic wishful handwaving.

Yes, this makes sense, except that I think the final cause Wayfarer is looking for must, according to him, lie outside (be transcendent to) the system, which really makes no sense. So, I tend to think that Buddhist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics are not in any sense philosophies of transcendence in the way Wayfarer seem to conceive it, quite the opposite in fact. — Janus

Correct.

This is a really interesting point. At the heat death, thermally speaking, there would be the ultimate degree of order, which is changelessness. But in terms of the spatial distribution of (dead, cold) matter it would be the ultimate disorder or lack of order. I've long thought that is a kind of weird paradox about entropy. Wayfarer also refers to it with his "I'm not sure which". — Janus

This is a very subtle technical point in cosmology. The total entropy content of a “co-moving” region of space never changes. If the expansion and cooling of the universe is a smooth unfolding that maintains its original equilibrium, then the entropy count never changes despite all that cooling and expanding. The change is adibiatic.

So while the Heat Death is often characterised as a maximum entropy state, on a larger view, nothing entropically changes. All that happens is that those degrees of freedom - the initial burst of radiation considered as a bunch of rays - are more stretched out and so as cold as possible. But unless there is something to compare their temperature to, there is no real difference to speak of. The total number is the same.

That again is why we need yet a further dimension of reality - the vague~crisp - to measure the transition from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. The beginning would be seen as a state of maximum indeterminism of those degrees of freedom, those radiation particles, and the end would see them have a maximally determinate existence. They would be in their simplest energy state in the flattest possible world.

Note that at the Heat Death, I am presuming all the cold matter has been fizzled back to radiation again by being first swept up by blackholes which then decay to release all remaining matter back to this simplest possible state.

Although it also works that at the end of time, space gets so expanded that every individual particle disappear over an event horizon. So even if things get down to a dust of protons, there would eventually be just a single proton inside any light cone region of the universe.

Also note that this particular scenario - where there is an actual Heat Death at some point in an eternal future - depends on the dark energy or cosmological constant that provides a faint continuing accelerative push. And making sense of that negentropic force, when talking about the cosmological entropy balance, is yet another headache in getting the sums to come out right.

But anyway, the Heat Death is usually described in very simple terms as a maximum entropy state. That is only a very simple introductory idea. The discussion quickly gets metaphysical and dialectical after that.

not because it is not the case that some physicalists (such as apo) might understand entropy to be a kind of ultimate telos — Janus

On the contrary, i agree with Nietzsche that the demand for such an ultimate purpose is what leads to nihilism — Janus

I should mention that my physicalism is of the systems vairiety. So an imperative towards entropy is also matched by one towards negentropy. Thus nihilism is avoided by all things being dichotomies rather than monisms.

And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. Or Hegelian dialectics.

Even finality is dualised in the sense that entropification take organisation. The Heat Death is a state of extreme order as much as extreme disorder. Everything becomes as much alike as possible.

So a proper Peircean view here is that the Cosmos describes a phase transition from absolute vagueness to absolute generality.

Entropy is a convenient local measure of something that seems to increase with time. But we could just as well measure this transition into a state of maximum generality by 1/entropy, or negentropy. The Heat Death is where change effectively ceases and spacetime finally achieves its flattest, most eternal, universal condition.

The problem is that you talk about the contents and the container as if they are separate things, — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. That is how you are talking about them. The way I would talk about them is relative to each other. So there would be a contents to the degree there is a container, and vice versa.

What is a state? First things first.

so my etiquette may not be up to snuff. — Esse Quam Videri

I wouldn’t worry about that.

Setting aside the question of anthropomorphism, does your system posit a "necessary" component that causally grounds the entire system? — Esse Quam Videri

The part played by a prime mover would be the thermodynamic imperative or least action principle.

Modern physics tells us that the finality guiding the Cosmos is a general imperative towards a flat and even balance - a Heat Death. So we can discern in that end the goal that grounds the existence of the Universe.

So the hylomorphic story speaks to some generalised motion that turns the heavens. But now it is about the slithering down an entropy gradient in the most direct way feasible.

This won’t make sense unless you are familiar with the physics of course. But yes, I am saying that there has to be some form of telos in play for existence to be called into being in an immanent fashion.

What bothers me, is that through your process philosophy, you have assigned to the limits (discrete and continuous) the status of not real, non-existent. But then you go ahead and talk about these limits as if they are somehow part of reality. You describe reality as being somehow forced to exist within these limits, yet the limits are said to be non-existent, not real. — Metaphysician Undercover

But in the process view, how would the contents be more real than their container?

So you are trying to impose your own non-process view on an understanding of process philosophy. And yes I agree, it doesn’t work. But that is now your problem.

You readily avoid the paradoxes by simply ignoring them. — Metaphysician Undercover

The paradoxes are a product of your metaphyics. So I can simply ignore them.

I’ve given the godless view quite a few time just in this thread. See the post just a few back on this page, for instance. Or on p2.

Basically I draw on CS Peirce for the broad metaphysics and a modern physical understanding of self organising systems (ie: systems science).

But anyway, to the degree that physical systems can self organise, and that this in turn is accounted for by an unavoidable mathematical logic, we have no need for any kind of god or supernatural/transcendent extras.

So if god exists, he is left with bugger all to do so far as existence is concerned. You could claim he could have made maths and logic come out differently. But there doesn’t seem any particular reason to believe that. And of course there is no evidence to suggest it. So why invoke something that makes no real causal difference?

That is, that there is an immanent 'logic' that math exhibits that is exactly parallel with the logic of, well, anything else. — StreetlightX

Heh, heh. After the post-structuralist revolt comes ontic structuralism again.

So you are arguing that neither, the continuous nor the discrete are real? They are ideals and reality stands in between. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well remember that here I’m using the conventional categories of Being rather than Becoming. So the discrete vs the continuous is talk about that which exists in static eternal fashion. This then creates the tension that bothers you - how can limits be part of what they bound if they are in fact the precise place where that internal bit ends and the external begins.

In my own preferred process metaphysics, the discrete and the continuous become a dialectics of developmental actions. So now you have the rather Hegelian opposition of differentiation and integration. Or individuation and generalisation.

And that active view, one that sees reality as fundamentally a flux with emergent regulation, would avoid the kind of hard edge paradox that your own non-process metaphysics tends to encounter at every turn.