I know that is bullshit as I've had close involvement with parapsychology research for instance. — apokrisis

Parapsychology research is not at all what I had in mind, but it's significant that you assume it must be the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I see, but when you said mind only appeared in h sapiens, you seemed to have something specific in mind. I would like to know how it was, and why it is confined to humans. — MikeL

The aim of the question I asked Apokrisis, was to ascertain if he really does have a physicalist view of mind, which he claims to have. The view that mind is a product of evolution is, after all, the mainstream view in our day and age. So I asked the question, when does mind enter the picture, and the answer was, 'right at the beginning'. So I'm trying to pinpoint what 'mind' means, if it has been there 'right from the outset'; and it seems obvious to me that this has metaphysical implications which don't really fit within the naturalist paradigm.

Read this column - it touches on all these issues.

I'll state the same differently: do you justify the ontic presence of reasoning/maths/logos via awareness OR do you justify the ontic presence of awareness via reasoning/maths/logos? Of course reality is a perpetual conflux of both, but that's not the question. — javra

The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around. Epistemology also turns out to be ontology.

So semiotics starts off simply how humans (and lifeforms generally) make sense of the world. Then - ontically - the claim becomes that the Cosmos itself arises by the same "reasoning process". This is the pansemiotic hypothesis that Peirce dubbed objective idealism.

So for you, the world must be strictly divided into our epistemic view, and the ontic reality beyond.

Maths then sits in some curious Platonic realm. The philosophy of maths is torn over the question of whether maths pre-exists human thought and so is a realm to be discovered, or instead humans just construct convenient fictions. Maths is all a product of our contingent invention.

So for you, you speak for the conventional either/or framing. Either maths is an epistemic construction or a Platonic ontic reality. Them's your only two rational choices.

And I am taking the much more radical Peircean step of saying epistemology is onotology. The Cosmos is a form of mindfulness as much as a composition of materials. Maths then is the invariant structure that cannot help but emerge as the limit on chaotic or vague dynamics.

That is, the particular maths which centres on symmetries, or the groping after the maths of "pure invariance".

What I have been able to glean is that they is no experience, no mind, just a relation which is the experience. An experience without an experiencer. Which means everyone who is conscious and experiencing is wrong and shouldn't be. What should be and is, are chemicals aimlessly and without any awareness (awareness requires an experiencer) having lunch together.

I see, but when you said mind only appeared in h sapiens, you seemed to have something specific in mind. I would like to know how it was, and why it is confined to humans. — MikeL

If you may remember, when you asked me the question, I was able to give you a one sentence, coherent, easily understandable definition. The c rain is because I understand the question and have an answer that makes sense to anyone who has experienced like.

Mind is the force that is creating novelty, experimenting (willful intention), learning (awareness and memory), and is thus evolving. It is not chemicals that are evolving, it is the mind.

Psi research is the one I've had close contact with. I can speak to the sociology of that as science as it is in the field.

If you want to talk about yogis, I've only read the biofeedback research. So I know that science is happy to research these things. And it is possible to learn to control the autonomic nervous system - the involuntary smooth muscles of the body.

But then no one is that amazed by toddlers eventually learning not to shit their pants. I guess it's all context.

Mind still continues to enter the scene. Even just 2600 years ago, we were simply linguistic minds, not mathematically and logically formed minds. — apokrisis

A definitions based mindset is itself anti-pragmatic. — apokrisis

pragmatic
adjective
dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

Definitions become a waste of breath if your goal is truly to arrive at some new state of understanding. — apokrisis

It is true that word games are a waste of time, but definitions are the cornerstone of understanding. Otherwise you get the type of protracted arguments that have defined most of this thread with people talking at cross purposes because nobody truly understands what the other has said.

To say we minds only 2600 years ago were simply linguistic minds, not mathematically formed or logical is something that requires me to ask how you could make such an outrageous claim, or more pragmatically, to ask how you would define mind.

That's right, you did. I don't think it's too much to ask for a definition when claims are being made. Hey, did you get my questions on your OP?

So I asked the question, when does mind enter the picture, and the answer was, 'right at the beginning'. So I'm trying to pinpoint what 'mind' means, if it has been there 'right from the outset'; and it seems obvious to me that this has metaphysical implications which don't really fit within the naturalist paradigm. — Wayfarer

Maybe I'm being too complex for your tastes but I've explained a thousand times that I am working on two levels here.

There is good old ordinary semiosis which would just be the biology of the epistemic cut. Life and mind begin as soon a molecule can function as a message. And that is a physicalism based on information and dynamics.

Then the more speculative metaphysical project is the Peircean one of pan-semiosis where the Cosmos itself is understood as an interaction between information and dynamics.

You could have one without the other. So life and mind only needs to begin on Earth some 4 billion years ago in a hydrothermal vent. Or we could talk about how the Big Bang was semiotic in marking the first moment that differences could make a difference.

Material events - as in particle interactions - could start definitely happening and result in a developing temporal history. And that could be described as "mindful" in a theoretically useful fashion. Semiosis gives us a particular tool - an irreducibly triadic metaphysics - that allows us to formulate a new physicalism to replace the old reductionist one.

But then no one is that amazed by toddlers eventually learning not to shit their pants. — apokrisis

Q: What's the name of a Greek skydiver?
A: Con Descending

The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around. Epistemology also turns out to be ontology. — apokrisis

You’re trying to corner me by assuming me to hold perspectives that are easy for you to argue against.

Remember the old forum? That whole evolog business? Discussions about the episteme of the time coinciding with fossil finds, and the like. Point is, this too is a world view wherein epistemology is not metaphysically fully divided from ontology. But it gets complex, right? Especially when strangers to this perspective tend to perpetually succumb to the aberrant irrationality of solipsism. To end this story, I do happen to hold this view, as always - that of epistemology being a kind of opposite side of the same coin to ontology - but I’ve become rather shy about expressing it as openly as you’ve just done.

You’re still sidetracking the metaphysical issue, though. To use your words, “epistemology also turns out to be ontology”. OK, we’re both well informed enough to not ask the ridiculous question of “whose epistemology”. My question to you nevertheless remains: can there be epistemology sans awareness (quite importantly, entailing the awareness we all know to be via the experience of being first-person points of view)?

If not, the ontic presence / reality of awareness is the primary justification to all that can be rationalized.

And that could be described as "mindful" in a theoretically useful fashion. — apokrisis

Right! So, for the purposes of arguing against the lumpen materialist, you can pull the 'representation' card. But when challenged as to what it is that is representing what, and to whom - why, nothing! Just a 'theoretical construct', a Cheshire cat grin, which all us dumb simpletons aren't intelligent enough to fathom.

My question to you nevertheless remains: can there be epistemology sans awareness (quite importantly, entailing the awareness we all know to be via the experience of being first-person points of view)? — javra

That kind of awareness would have to be sociocultural - Peirce's community of reasoning thinkers.

So epistemology only exists in the form you mean - rational inquiry - if you grant the ontic reality of social level mind.

We each individually then become shaped by that culturally evolved habit - and rather assume we just are born as reasoning linguistic creatures. Even without words and the conceptual structures they encode, we would have the necessary ideas in want of expression.

So the ability to divide the world conceptually into first person and third person point of view - the fundamental epistemic cut of modern metaphysics - is not something that would ever arise within biological level individual consciousness.

It is an epistemology that emerged at a higher level than that particular level of awareness, even if it is the habit that now shapes all us who have been brought up educated to think that way.

Autistics are great at math. They use the part of their brain normally used for facial recognition, to amp up their skills. Math is also neurologically opposed to linguistics, as the former is digital, and the latter analogue. Math is pure, in that definitions are exact, and precise. Which is why digital computers can't recognize objects, as they can only see precise definitions, and not "kind of", and "close enough".

To truly learn something new, the structure of the brain must change, which requires some certain conditions to maximize the ability for new connections to form, and in any case, we lose plasticity as we age.

Math is simplification, the highest end abstraction, into bits, or quanta to maximize the amount of information one can deal with, as normally conclusions and systems are better representative, or more predictive, the more information they're based in.

That kind of awareness would have to be sociocultural — apokrisis

How do you justify its presence?

Do you need a reasoning based on personal awareness? Or can you justify it without any personal awareness?

[Edit: this isn't to disagree with the notions of habit which you endorse]

A habit of interpretance is hardly nothing if it becomes the cause of everything.

Maybe you should slow down and actually think all this through some time, not just pile in in desperate and defensive fashion.

How do you justify its presence?

Do you need a reasoning based on personal awareness? Or can you justify it without any personal awareness? — javra

Huh? It forms awareness - biological, in the flow, extrospective awareness - into considered, rationally structured, introspective awareness.

You just did the usual thing of treating awareness as a substantial state - "personal awareness" - when I have explained that as the interaction between two levels of semiosis, the biological and the cultural.

Understanding involves mastering a skill, a habit of thought, that reliably sees you always popping out on the right side of any particular speech act. — apokrisis

Thanks for explaining what understanding is. I prefer to pop out on the wrong side of a speech act, so long as my logic has taken me as far as it can go. If I'm right, how boring. If I'm wrong, my logic can be improved and there is personal growth.

The only time I don't want to be on the wrong side is when it has to do with morals.

Do you have any comment on this or my other post to you?

If you want to celebrate guys who can stick their arm in the sky until it withers and locks, go for it.

If you believe in levitating monks, present the evidence.

No point just promising me that you can upturn my arguments by suddenly presenting the supernatural abilities of those steeped in the exotic mysteries of the east.

Get on and show us what you got. Leave the really poor puns out of it. Flames that lame aren't even entertainment.

You just did the usual thing of treating awareness as a substantial state — apokrisis

sub-stance: that which allows things that stand to so be (yea, there's some allegory to etymology sometimes)

What can I say, you can in the same breath deny the presence of substance while affirming the triadic relation as the substance.

And yes, that is the metaphysical issue. Is awareness or something physical (triadic relations included) the sub-stance that allows other things to stand. [BTW, awareness devoid of telos is not something coherent (as I see it); so, by awareness, I do find a) other information-bound awareness (i.e., selves), b) a real telos, and c) interactions in-between entailed.]

But, hey, we're turning round, and round, and round, and, for now, going nowhere. I'll agree to disagree for the moment.

Sorry, didn't notice any questions that you may have asked me.

I understand that certain people have an agenda to eliminate mind for specific reasons. But given that you don't have an agenda, can you explain what precisely intrigues you about this story of chemicals that react in such a way to desire to eat hot dogs without experiencing it? I can't even begin to take it seriously from any perspective where it be philosophical, scientific, it straight hard core sci-fi. Among all the verbiage I find nothing, literally nothing. Is this some sort of game of who conjure up the best tale of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table? Without a clear agenda (this I understand), why would anyone spend any time with this?

You talking to me or Apokrisis? The questions are on your OP about qualia.

The question is directed to you Mike.

I didn't see any questions for me, but I'll check.

I admire the persistence with which you hope to trap me into a formula of words which you can then claim to interprete dualistically rather than triadically.

So I will just remind that I am happy with the idea that the personal exists because what else is it that I might hope to explain as being the emergent limit of a bio-social semiotic process here?

There has to be an I that experiences the power of his beliefs in terms of their measurable outcomes.

Or at least, that is the emergent structure one might observe in the blood and flesh creature successfully navigating its world via developed habits of interpretance that minimise the entropic uncertainty connecting his intentions to their results.

If you want to celebrate guys who can stick their arm in the sky until it withers and locks, go for it.

If you believe in levitating monks, present the evidence. — apokrisis

No point just promising me that you can upturn my arguments by suddenly presenting the supernatural abilities of those steeped in the exotic mysteries of the east. — apokrisis

I'm not trying to upturn your arguments, so much as put a different perspective. Notice that as soon as the mere hint is made that the answers might lie outside your conception of 'Peircian semiotics' then immediately it is assumed that I'm arguing for 'shamanism and supernatural powers'. Then when I point that out, you say that I am 'dichotomising'.

As it happens, the sole reason I mentioned yogis, was as a response to your point about the 'socially-constructed nature of awareness'. My point is, disciplined introspection, such as that practiced by yogis, perfectly reveals the artificial or constructed nature of conscious awareness. This has been understood for millenia. Yet your representation of it is such that, this wasn't even understood until science comes along and points it out.

In the Buddhist understanding the constructive nature of consciousness is understood as 'vijnana'. That understanding was arrived at purely through disciplined introspection. Some of your sources, such as Maturana and Varela, were highly conversant with those modes of understanding. But in any case, not everything is a construction, a vikalpa. 'There is, monks, that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated, that which is unconstructed. Were there not that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated, that which is unconstructed, there would be no escape from the made, the fabricated, the constructed.' But that is out-of-scope for third-person science.

The Cosmos is a form of mindfulness as much as a composition of materials. — apokrisis

Of course all the idealists would support such a statement as this, but when pressed, you seem to withdraw it again.

What can I say, you can in the same breath deny the presence of substance while affirming the triadic relation as the substance. — javra

This systems approach is as old as Aristotle's hylomorphism. So no need to sound so put upon in a discussion on metaphysics,

Substance in a process philosophy view is an emergent limit on individuation. So yes, it is irreducibly triadic. It is the meat in the sandwich. You have formal/final cause and material/efficient cause in interaction. Substance is the emergent result of these two sources of cause - constraint vs potential - arriving at some steady state of balance or equilibrium.

Each side goes at it until the changes don't start to make a difference anymore and things look solid, or at least static enough to become a ground of further developments.

My point is, disciplined introspection, such as that practiced by yogis, perfectly reveals the artificial or constructed nature of conscious awareness. — Wayfarer

But my view is that kind of thing is the most exquisitely artificial kind of practice of all. It is wildly unnatural. It takes introspection away from being just a pragmatic habit of social self-regulation and treats it as mystic experience.

I'm sure I already mentioned to you that I had zen training from a Buddhist monk as a kid living in the East. That was when I became personally clear that eastern mysticism was just as much bullshit as the western kind. I concluded it was simply mad posturing to mediate under the tropical sun when all you could hear was the cloud of malarial mosquitoes forming over your head and starting to make their buzzing descent.

Of course you won't agree with me there. But the idea of the stilled and wordless mind is against the neurocognitive facts.

(Or rather you will execute another bait and switch because you won't ever really make your own case, just carp about mine.)

Of course all the idealists would support such a statement as this, but when pressed, you seem to withdraw it again. — Wayfarer

That is because the idealists want support for a substance ontology. Semiotics is about a metaphysics of emergent process.

Sure Rich,

The short answer, for me at least, is yes. It is a game for me to see if we or I can come up with the best story of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table. It's as simple as that and it's great fun.

For me, it's the ultimate rubix cube. On the one hand we have those dumb little atoms bobbing around senselessly, and on the other we have the people who like to experience eating hotdogs.

There is a disconnect as we all know between those atoms and that person who smiles at the sunset and somehow feels fulfilled. The disconnect is huge.

Semiotics makes sense. A lot of sense. Although the fine details may disagree, on the whole it's just another way of saying explicate order or emergent properties. I think that by taking this shorthand approach we can quickly get out of the bog of biology and move into or close to the mind, and then we can have at it.

Of course there has been no substantial evidence presented at all in this thread that attempts to explain the first steps in life - the emergence and arrangement of the particles into a cell or why a system would continue to maintain a negentropic state after the removal of the initial gradients.

I don't want to eliminate the mind permanently, quite the opposite. I'm just not quite ready to turn my mind to the mind as an abstract philosophy though. My feeling on the matter is that to see the mind's true state and function, you must first remove it and see what happens.

The problem I have with saying life is all mind, is that there is no concept there that I can explore. Nothing to manipulate and turn around and examine in terms of biology. It doesn't acknowledge that we are made of atoms and molecules and cells that have organised themselves. Mind is not a path to understanding life in this instance, it's more like a get out of jail free card. I come away dissatisfied.

I also have problems understanding what is meant by mind. There are many features I can think of as mind that I think I would stand a really good shot at explaining biologically (neurologically) or through the idea coding (which is semiotic language).

In regard to your difficulty understanding why this is relevant for investigation or even real, I would ask you to hold in your mind what was mentioned in your OP about the spinning cube and how it can be perceived differently at different speeds. I would also point out Explicate Order, which you directed me to in one of your talks - the emergence of patterns etc.

It may be that the universe is just oscillating matter fields which we read as a holographic projection. But what the holograph is constructing for us is this world of atoms. It's natural to want to play with them and figure out how they all go together. There is pattern in the building of life.

I have the converse problem that you have Rich, I can't see how mind explains anything. How should we investigate it? What should we investigate? What are your definitions? What is the world that you are trying to show us, Rich?

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