Yep, it's a simple point. So why all the fuss? — Banno
And that's the point I want to make; that when someone provides us with a definition we go through a process of verifying it; but what is it that we are verifying it against? We presume to be able to say if the definition is right or wrong; against what are be comparing it? Not against some other earlier definition, but against our common usage.
And if we already accept that this common usage is the test of our definition, why bother witht eh definition at all? — Banno
So you say. Naive realist I'm fine with; but what is a transcendent solipsist? — Banno
This is not in contrast to what I have suggested; but I think it is in contrast to the notion of an essence, immutable and eternal, which seems to be what Meta has in mind.Our earlier "common usage" definitions come into question particularly when we come up against borderline classifications - like: "is a virus alive?". The vagueness or uncertainty we feel when answering is a sign that we now need to sharpen our definition by suggesting some new symmetry-breaking or dichotomous fork in the road by which we can measure what is what. An infected cell goes down this path to join the living, the virion fragment goes down the other path to join the class of the not alive, or whatever. — apokrisis
And yet you previously claimed: — Banno
So from where do you derive whatever you call the "essence"? — Banno
Tell me, Apo, how do you get on with Meta? I can't say I've paid much attention to discussions between you two. Are you in agreement as to the nature of essences? — Banno
I've been discussing essences with him for years; it seems to me he has some sort of reified view of essences; although sometimes he talks about them as if they are no more than language conventions. He might join us here again. — Banno
This is not in contrast to what I have suggested; but I think it is in contrast to the notion of an essence, immutable and eternal, which seems to be what Meta has in mind. — Banno
Perhaps we have three views: Meta advocating essence as a real thing that we can set out in terms of the necessary and exclusive attributes; you, with some notion of an asymptotic essence that we can approach but never quite reach; and I, with the view that essences best ignored in favour of the examination of language use. — Banno
...I, with the view that essences best ignored in favour of the examination of language use. — Banno
"But I am talking about life and mind as a semiotic process where the hardware isn't deterministic. In fact, it mustn't be deterministic if that determinism is what the information processing side of the equation is hoping to supply." — Apokrisis
I suppose my main difficulty is assenting to indeterminism — VagabondSpectre
I simply cannot get away from the idea that the material instability you describe (providing a mechanism for information to express through) is actually deterministic causation expressing itself in a complex way which only gives the appearance of indeterminacy. — VagabondSpectre
Although the pseudo-randomness of these unreliable switches can be incorporated into the functions of the data directly, (innovating new data through trial and error for instance (a happy failure of a set of switches)) at some level these switches must have some degree of reliability, else their suitability as a causal mechanism would be nonexistent. — VagabondSpectre
Computers already do account for some degree of unreliability or wobbliness in their switches. They mainly use redundancy in data as a means to check and reconstruct bits that get corrupted. In machine learning individual "simulated neuronal units" may exhibit apparent wobbliness owing to the complexity of it's interconnected triggers or owing to a psudeo-random property of the neuron itself which can be used to produce variation. — VagabondSpectre
...which then gives way to intracellular mechanisms, then to the mechanisms of DNA and RNA, and then to the molecular and atomic world. — VagabondSpectre
Consider the hierarchy of mechanisms found in biological life: DNA is it's base unit and all it's other structures and processes are built upon it using DNA as a primary dynamic element (above it in scale). — VagabondSpectre
I suppose my main difficulty is assenting to indeterminism as a property of living systems for semantic/etymological/dogmatic reasons, but I also cannot escape the conclusion that a powerful enough AI built from code (code analogous to DNA, and to the structure of connections in the human brain) would be capable of doing everything that "life" can do, including growing, reproducing, and evolving. — VagabondSpectre
Specifically the self-organizing property of data is what most interests me. Natural selection from chaos is the easy answer, the hard answer has to do with the complex shape and nature of connections, relationships, and interactions between data expressing mechanisms which give rise to anticipatory systems of hierarchical networks. — VagabondSpectre
you refuse to examine how language is used in deductive logic. — Metaphysician Undercover
English seems to have been now completely deducted from the statement as it first appeared. Curious. Perhaps English wasn't the language of logic after all?Hu? — Banno
Hu (ḥw), in ancient Egypt, was the deification of the first word, the word of creation, that Atum was said to have exclaimed upon ejaculating or, alternatively, his self-castration, in his masturbatory act of creating the Ennead.
This works fine when we have essentially one instance of life and everything that evolved from it. But as Bitter Crank pointed out, we cannot wield our common usage intuition when we go to Mars and decide if something is life. A formal set of guidelines would really help, but it also must be flexible. Such guidelines are probably not forthcoming until we have several examples to compare (as opposed to the one we know now) and we have a reasonable data set from which common traits might begin to stand out. Who knows, it might turn out that we don't qualify ourselves.Where do you look, in order to determine that metabolism and replication are necessary and sufficient for life?
Presumably, at things that are alive.
It follows that you already know which things are alive before you set out this posited essence. — Banno
So there is nothing here to stop out common use of "life" being extended - indeed, I have several times explicitly said that definitions can be extended. — Banno
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
This goes back to what seems your fundamental misunderstanding about language use. A word does not have a definitional essence in as ostensive sense. It instead functions as an apophatic constraint on uncertainty. — apokrisis
Thus there is some essence in play - the purpose that is my communicative content (as much as that is ever completely clear and not vague to oneself, even in some propositional statement). — apokrisis
What you call a constraint on a definition I would describe as an additional term, changing the application. — Banno
So quolls are referred to as tiger cats. They are marsupials. We had one a year ago that would come once a month and have takeaway chicken, curtesy of my coop. When the Girl said things like "That cat took another chook last night", the meaning was clear.
But one might add to the definition of cat "...and is not a marsupial", thus ruling out the use of "cat" to refer to quolls.
Sure that "apophatic constraint" works for certain purposes, but it rules out a useful way to use the word "cat"; it would be improper to say that one use was "the correct use of cat".
There is no essence of cat here; only different uses. — Banno
I gather from the parenthetic comment that you are yourself not too happy with this terminology. — Banno
English seems to have been now completely deducted from the statement as it first appeared. Curious. Perhaps English wasn't the language of logic after all? — apokrisis
Can you explain what Meta meant? Is he just claiming that deductive logic relies on explicit definitions? — Banno
But there is an advantage in a constraints-based view of ontology - it still leaves room for actual spontaneity or accident or creative indeterminism. You don't have to pretend the world is so buttoned-down that the unexpected is impossible. You can have atoms that quantumly decay "for no particular reason" other than that this is a constant and unsuppressed possibility. You can have an ontology that better matches the world as we actually observe it - and makes better logical sense once you think about it...
...See how hard you have to strain? Any randomness at the ground level has to be "psuedo". And then even that psuedo instability must be ironed out by levels and levels of determining mechanism...
...My ontology is much simpler. Life's trick is that it can construct the informational constraints to exploit actual material instability. There is a reason why life happens. It can semiotically add mechanical constraints to organise entropic flows. It can regulate because there is a fundamental chaos or indeterminism in want of regulation. — apokrisis
...But my point is that this is not the same as being a semiotic organism riding the entropic gradients of the world to its own advantage....
...My semiotic argument is life = information plus flux. And so life can't be just information isolated from flux (as is the case with a computer that doesn't have to worry about its power supply because its humans take care of sorting out that)....
...Now you can still construct this kind of life in an artificial, purely informational, world. But it fails in what does seem a critical part of the proper biological definition. There is some kind of analogy going on, but also a critical gap in terms of ontology. Which is why all the artificial-life/artificial-mind sci-fi hype sounds so over-blown. It is unconvincing when AI folk can't themselves spot the gaping chasm between the circuitry they hope non-entropically to scale up and the need in fact to entropically scale down to literally harness the nanoscale organicism of the world....
...As I say, biological design can serve as an engineering inspiration for better computer architectures. But that does not mean technology is moving towards biological life. And if that was not certain before, it is now that we understand the basis of life in terms of biophysics and dissipative structure theory.... — apokrisis
I think this kind of thinking has had a disproportiantely large influence on post-Enlightenment thought. A lot of people still think like that - but Heisenberg (et al) showed that at the most fundamental level, it simply isn't so. Uncertainty and the probablistic nature of physics really does torpedo that. (That was subject of a lot of philosophical debate in the early 20th century by the likes of Arthur Eddington, Enst Cassirer, not to forget Heisenberg himself, and also Niels Bohr (who incorporated the ying-yang symbol into the family Coat of Arms.))
That is what allows for the element of creativity, of serendipity, of things that just happen for no apparent reason. Whereas Western culture seems to retain a belief that at bottom, what is real are 'bodies in motion' that are determined by physical forces. But physics itself has shown that really, in the memorable phrase by James Jeans, 'the universe is more like a great mind than a great machine'. — Wayfarer
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