It seems like a good starting point. — Malcolm Lett

It seems a big fail right after the first step of “approachable by science”. What is “representational qualia” being opposed to?

The very idea of qualia is reductionist and Cartesian. So that means the fork ought to be the “other” of that. Which for my money is neurobiological holism - the triadicism of a global systems viewpoint.

As a scientific problem, the broad options are monism, dualism and triadicism.

The first wants to claim the mental just supervenes on the physical - somehow. That collapses into incoherence pretty fast as an “explanation”.

The second wants to treat qualia as real rather than epiphenomenal or essentially unreal. That leads to the irresolvable riddles of dualism.

The third moves pass both camps in ways that finally become amenable to scientific theory.

So we can just have a switch after “approachable by science” which sends monism and dualism, along with their reductionist debate over representation and qualia, to the pseudo-science bin. Just leave the way clear for the varieties of triadic systems thinking that can do the job. :smile:

the broad options are monism, dualism and triadicism

Oh. I've got some reading to do. Thanks.

One theory that isn’t represented In the list is Buddhist Abhidharma. I note there is an entry about Advaita, which is related in some ways, but Buddhist Abhidharma and Advaita are actually traditionally opposed (for reasons that would take an encyclopedic article to begin to explain.) However it is a major influence in the Maturana-Thomson book ‘Embodied Cognition’, published early 90’s and since become quite influential.

The point about the Buddhist approach is that it never refines ‘consciousness’ as some kind of mystical whatever. It is dealt with straightforwardly in terms of the ‘five aggregates’ of form (or material image, impression) (rupa), sensations (or feelings, received from form) (vedana), perceptions (samjna), mental activity or formations (sankhara), and consciousness (vijnana). This is all grounded in the experiential awareness of the flow of sensations-ideas-perceptions as they arise and cease in the continuum of consciousness. Buddhism does have it’s mystical side but is basically grounded in a kind of ‘first-person empiricism’ (somewhat similar to William James’ generally neglected idea of ‘radical empiricism’).

The point about the Buddhist approach is that it never refines ‘consciousness’ as some kind of mystical whatever

Its interesting that it still treats consciousness as a separate thing from those other qualities.

My own opinion is that it will ultimately be proven to be merely an artifact of those other qualities (though I have no idea how we'll get there), but interesting just how much every society and ancient philosophy always seems to puzzle over it.

My own opinion is that it will ultimately be proven to be merely an artifact of those other qualities — Malcolm Lett

Artefact - an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest.
"gold and silver artefacts"
2.
something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure.

the triadicism of a global systems viewpoint.

What would be a key text, or some key texts, for this approach please?

Now you’re asking a difficult question. But the clearest thinker on the biosemiotic guts of it for my money has been Howard Pattee.

So for example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225988428_The_Necessity_Of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

Then for the neurobiological version, there is Karl Friston and his Bayesian Brain approach.

A social history of that, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51739007_The_history_of_the_future_of_the_Bayesian_brain

And a New Scientist account as an intro, https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Is%20this%20a%20unified%20theory%20of%20the%20brain.pdf

:ok: Thanks.

Artefact - an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest.
"gold and silver artefacts"
2.
something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure. — Wayfarer

Hmm, yes. I see I'm going to have a hard time picking the right words.

My own opinion is that it[ consciousness] will ultimately be proven to be merely an artifact of those other qualities — Malcolm Lett

Well, I was pointing out that 'artefacts' are by definition consciously designed, which suggests that consciousness ought not to be considered an artefact, as it's a circular or question-begging definition.

Skim read the references, but I don't think it is quite what I'm after as to some extent the articles seem to be "preaching to the converted" insofar as it looks as if one already has to buy into a fully representational approach to the mind in order to appreciate the strength of their position. For instance, this from the short Friston piece:

if the
brain is making inferences about the causes of its sensations then it
must have a model of the causal relationships (connections) among
(hidden) states of the world that cause sensory input. It follows that
neuronal connections encode (model) causal connections that conspire
to produce sensory information.

It seems that the reader is supposed already to accept the antecedent of the initial conditional, and "inferences about" seems to be a representational notion, and the notion of "models" in the consequent certainly is. (Leaving aside the question about whether talk about brains making inferences is supposed to be taken literally or metaphorically.)
I might be wrong about this, of course: maybe the position does not stand or fall on the basis of a representational theory of mind. I appreciate also that the references you gave are overviews written with a somewhat sympathetic audience in mind. I think what would help clarify things for me is something on the philosophical foundations of this approach. You used the word "triadicism", is it to Pierce that one has to look, and if so, where?

The difference is that neural representationalism assumes an input-output data processing story. The display of a polished picture of reality is meant to be the supreme aim of the whole exercise. And the further thing of an “observer” seems required.

But Friston is talking of a generative or forward-modelling neural architecture. The game for the brain is to predict its inputs. And thus be able to ignore them! Rather than consciousness being about representing the world in some bright and vividly experienced fashion, instead it is an effort to be successful at not having to notice anything about the world.

Of course, by doing this, the brain sets itself up to be capable of being surprised. It’s predictions get contradicted. And then attention can take over from habit to figure out and learn how to be better at prediction the next time around.

So it is a truly radical flipping of how we conceive of cognition as a process.

On triadicism, Peirce certainly had trichotomania. But what I am talking about is hierarchical organisation. All complex systems have a triadic structure of relations. A cybernetic feedback story between a local set of degrees of freedom and a global state of constraint.

It’s the same thing behind all complexity, whether we are talking of condensed matter physics or neural network architectures.

The best place to start on the pure theory of this would be Stan Salthe’s two books, Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution. Or von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory as the classic.

If you tell me your actual project, I might be able to give you more relevant references.

No real project, just an interest in feasible alternatives to monisms and dualisms in the philosophy of mind.

I would consider two basic categories, which may be named as immaterialist and materialist, or something like that. The immaterialist perspective assumes an active, internal, and immaterial first principle, such as the soul, which is the cause of the conscious experience. The materialist perspective assumes that the consciousness is fundamentally passive, being acted upon by external forces and therefore caused to be what it is. The difference is best seen in the freewill/determinist debate, and the various attempts at compatibility.

There's so many different lines of thought taken to understand consciousness. In my own line of thought I've intentionally taken a spell to form my own theories, free of priming/framing from the theories of others. It's a hard job to then try to get one's head around the different views available.

I just came across an effort to categories the different theories.
https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness

It seems like a good starting point. — Malcolm Lett

What is consciousness?

No real project, just an interest in feasible alternatives to monisms and dualisms in the philosophy of mind. — jkg20

I'm trying to think of a simpler way to sum it up. So from a philosophy of mind point of view, monism would say either all is physics or all is mind.

Physical monism has to then invoke epiphenomenalism, eliminativism, or other arguments that explain away the rather primary fact what we do experience the world. Consciousness remains a thing.

Idealist monism then says all is mind, but has to find ways to account for the fact the physical world also appears to remain a thing.

Dualism is thus always lurking in the monistic approaches. Unless we are willing to just be eliminativist, or just be idealist, we are stuck with a fundamental dichotomy of some kind. And so we might say there are two kinds of stuff (as in Cartesianism), or matter has two inherent aspects (as in panpsychism).

Triadicism - as in Hegelian dialectics, or the tradition of the Unity of Opposites generally - says fine. We can't get away from the fact that Nature always seems to divide into its poles of being. This has been the story for metaphysics on every question ever asked.

Is reality deterministic or probabilistic, stasis or flux, form or matter, discrete or continuous, one or many, part or whole, organic or mechanical, etc, etc? We always end up being pulled strongly in two opposite directions when we try to drill down to the fundamental.

A triadic way of thinking then takes that familiar fact and turns it back on itself to say that this then tells us Nature is the product of emergent process, of systematic structure. A synthesis or unity of the opposites.

The oppositions are instead complementary states of being. Each is related to its other by a reciprocal or inverse relation. Continuity is measured by the degree to which it is not discrete. And the discrete to the degree it is a lack of the continuous.

So a metaphysical-strength dichotomy is not reality split into dualistic halves. It is reality becoming divided towards the opposing limits of the possible. And then the actuality of reality is that which now stands as the third thing - the relation that is defined by that complementary state of affairs.

A metaphysical contrast has been produced. And now a spectrum of states inbetween two bounding extremes has been revealed.

Triadicism is thus this general way of thinking. It arrives at the desired goal of a unity - a "monism" - by accepting the inevitability of duality and showing how dichotomies are what actually allow a world of complex relations.

Simplicity is arrived at not by identifying the right fundamental substance (ie: matter or mind), but by accepting that all existence is based on the irreducibly triadic logic of a systematic relation.

This is the Peircean point. He showed how it was a logically irreducible relation. He showed how to put an end to substance-based ontology and move on with the holism of a triadic relational model.

Now we come to applying that triadicism to the problem of mind specifically.

The problem becomes to identity the right dualism - the one that is complementary in a fashion that can result in a formal unity. And following the lead of biology, neurology can also view the two halves of this whole as a semiotic interaction between information and dynamics. Physics controlled by symbols. A modelling relation.

So life and mind are made part of a continuum. But also, the steps in terms of the semiotic machinery - from genes, to neurons, to words - are pretty major divisions.

What persists all the way through a full-on triadic metaphysics is the agreement that all reality is founded on the logical irreducibility of a triadic, or systematic, or hierarchical, relation. The only monism that makes sense is one based on a unity of opposites. And dualism simply speaks to the fact that opposites must arise so as to construct that unity as an actualised state of being.

To wrap it up, we have to wind up having something concrete to say about qualia, the explanatory gap, the feeling of what it is like to be conscious, the ineffability of experience, the reality of freewill, etc. All the usual problematic that obsesses folk.

My position there is that neurobiology explains "consciousness" fairly straightforwardly at a neural level. The brain models the world from a selfish organismic perspective. It is no surprise that such an elaborate exercise in modelling would feel like something. It would feel exactly like being a self in pragmatic and regulating interaction with a world.

Life embodies that interaction between information and dynamics. Genes are a model of the body. And a regulation of metabolism is that body getting made.

The nervous system allows the organism to then extend that regulation of physics out into the environment. Neurons encode our surrounds in terms of its physical potentials and effects. That way we can weave them into our ongoing state of being.

But humans then have the further social level of semiosis that comes with language. And this is where the social construction of the human mind kicks in. We don't just nakedly experience the world through our own eyes. We learn to see ourselves as others see us. We learn to see ourselves as "selves", with "consciousness", and "freewill", and "qualia", and "spirit", and "thoughts".

A further categorisation is forced upon us in a sharp distinction between the objective reality "out there" and the subjective reality "in here".

An animal mind just lives in its world. And that world is a semiotic umwelt. It is essentially a subjective world - the world as the animal learns to construct it for itself.

But humans - for functional social reasons - learn to distance themselves from their subjective umwelts. We are taught to regard our perceptions as veridical representations of the actual world (especially once backed up by the mathematically encoded ideas of science :grin: ). And then by the same token, see even our selves as split off into their own metaphysically objective sphere of being. The ghost in the machine. The spirit or res cogitans.

A crazy dualistic metaphysics gets invented as a cultural meme. But this dichotomy exists because it is pragmatically useful. It becomes the basis for a new level of social complexity. Human societies could get organised so that information now regulates physics as agriculture and then technology.

So the argument here is that we find ourself with all this philosophy of mind dualistic bullshit. The neurobiologist has to wonder why wider society is so stuck on humans being lodged halfway between the animal and the divine. Yet the reason why the basic problems of philosophy of mind persist is that it is functionally necessary for humans to think that way about themselves. It has become the basis for the modern technological way of life and the romantic reaction that that mindset must engender as the "complementary balance".

The scientific revolution was the birth of a still further level of semiosis - one based on number. We learnt to view the world as objectively a machine. And that was an excellent way to think about reality. It led to the industrial revolution pretty smartly. Engineering was the way to unlock the vast resources of buried fossil fuels. Life's story - information regulating physics - could vault to a whole new scale of being.

But if all physical reality is a machine (and no longer the Aristotlean notion of a holistic, triadic, system) then now "the mind" becomes a real ontological problem. There is no longer any place in this imagined objective world for the other half of things. So that has to now have its own spiritual realm ... or something.

Anyway. My point is that a triadic perspective is logically basic. Peirce in particular showed how complexity is irreducible. We can't actually arrive at something simpler, such as a dualism or monism.

And this same demonstration that reality has a triadic irreducibility was there in Aristotle or even Anaximander. It remains the key thing linking modern systems theorists - the hierarchy guys, the cyberneticians, the neural networkers, the condensed matter physicists, the biologists and ecologists, the enactive psychologists, the social constructionists and semioticians, etc, etc.

But culturally we remain mired in the wrangles between realists and idealists, monists and dualists, because that is a functional viewpoint for modern society. Not because they are real scientific problems.

It is easy to see how the dualist framing arises as a meme with social payback. It constructs the individual as "a free agent" operating in a liberal "open market". New levels of "world construction" and "physics regulation" can flow from such a mindset.

And of course that then brings its discontents. There is the Romantic backlash that asks "is that all there is"?

So a mathematical level of semiosis feels rather dysfunctional in fact for us humans. We no longer feel so seamlessly embedded in our world in terms of our latest version of a socially constructed level of "consciousness".

From a philosophy of mind perspective, there is thus something actually worth talking about. What can we learn from the earlier grades of semiosis - genes, neurons, words - to make better sense of this latest transition to a numerical interaction with nature?

But fat chance while philosophy of mind generally fails to move past the simplicities of monism and dualism, realism and idealism. :meh:

So triadicism in general is the idea that the relations between two things gives rise to a third, and that those three things do not have a reality independent of those relations? Probably a little simplistic, but if that is the gist of it, I suppose the tension for me here comes from the idea of giving rise, which looks like it might require independence of what gives rise and what is given rise to. But perhaps "giving rise" is not the right metaphor. Anyway, food for thought, thanks.:up:

The triadicism is boot strapping. So all three aspects arise together.

That leads to the obvious question, arise out of what? The Peircean answer would be out of vagueness. Out of pure indeterminacy itself.

This isn’t a perfect answer. But it certainly begins things in the most minimal possible notion of a set of initial conditions. And the causes of the development of structure can be considered to be finality acting from the future.

Another way of looking at this is spontaneous symmetry breaking. The breaking always formally demands a fluctuation that triggers the change. But absolutely any and every fluctuation would suffice to trigger the avalanche or rock the ball off the apex of the dome.

So as an efficient cause, it is the least special imaginable. On the other hand, the fact that things were so poised that they would break so easily means that the finality was mighty strong. The change really wanted to happen. The future was beckoning.

Wow. Nice summary. You have thoroughly convinced me of the need to learn more about triadicism.

The Peircean answer would be out of vagueness. — apokrisis

However, ‘vagueness’ is not ‘nothing’. It’s still something - just something not very definite. Maybe something like a range of possibilities, out of which something definite condenses.

Thanks. I spent a decade of confused groping after the basic principles while with the neuroscience types. Then I met up with the theoretical biologists and found they had had it elegantly worked out all along.

They themselves were just then assimilating the new scholarship on Peirce and realising he had got it in an even more basic way a century earlier.

Funny how these things work out. :up:

OK, so at the risk of putting words into your mouth, one kind of triadicism is the view that all reality arises from pure, unstructured indeterminateness. I guess we see that in Hegel's analysis of Being/Nothing/Becoming, although he often leaves me at a loss. I am presuming that the initial indeterminateness of which you speak is to be thought of as the ball balanced at the apex of the dome, so if that is wrong, what follows can be ignored. If that is right, though, then I get that the slightest fluctuation, no matter the source, or even if there is a source, can set the ball rolling, and I presume the ball's rolling is a metaphor for our experienced determinateness of actuality. What, though, stops the ball from just going straight back to a balanced initial state, i.e. even if the symmetry of indeterminateness is broken, randomly or otherwise, what stops it from simply reestablishing itself? We know that what the metaphorical ball is representing does not do that, because we are living through actual, albeit fleeting, determinate moments. If we take the example non metaphorically, we of course have gravity and we have laws of motion discovered/developed from which it is entailed that the ball will not return to its initial position but will follow inexorably a path we can predict. (We can hedge that prediction if necessary, but in a perfectly determinate and lawlike manner, by including the vanishingly small, but determinate, possibility that all the molecules constituting the ball suddenly disassemble and reassemble themselves at the apex. I also do not think it matters in understanding the metaphor whether we take gravity in a Newtonian sense as a fixed force acting between bodies, or an Einsteinian sense as being the manifestation of the determinate large scale distribution of mass through spacetime, but I might be wrong about that, perhaps it does matter in understanding the metaphor which approach is taken.) Taking the example literally, those physical laws exist independently of those specific initial conditions and gravity, if you like, is a determinate and permanent fixture of the background. Thus the ball's path is explained. Now, if to understand the metaphor we have to think that it is the future that is performing the gravitional role, then the future also has to be understood as something fixed and with a determinate structure. I'm not saying here that the future has to be regarded necessarily as an end state, i.e. as final conditions as opposed to initial conditions, but that in order to account for the momentary determinateness of experience, (i.e. the way the ball is rolling as opposed to the many ways in which it could roll, including rolling back to the apex) the future seems required to have a fixed and determinate character. So, it looks like the future, whatever it is, at least must be something that is both real, yet does not arise from indeterminateness. That looks like it contradicts the kind of triadicism described, which requires that all reality arise from indeterminateness. I presume some version of triadicism might try to insist that the future itself is also something arising from the evolution of determinate experienced moments. But that seems equivalent to saying that in the ball metaphor, the ball's rolling and only the ball's rolling actually determines the gravitional field, and so the gravitional field perforce loses its role in explaining how the ball actually does roll, and we are back to square one, why does the ball roll the way it does rather than just return instantly back to the indeterminateness of balance at the apex? Perhaps the triadic response would be to ask "How do you know it won't"? But that seems like avoiding the question rather than answering it, and also leaves me a little panicked insofar as it leaves open the continual possibility that all of what I am experiencing, and even my experiencing of it itself, is as likely to disappear as it is to continue developing.
Anyway, I hope at least I have made some sense to you of what my issues are with triadicism, and perhaps you will have some kind of response.

However, ‘vagueness’ is not ‘nothing’. It’s still something - just something not very definite. Maybe something like a range of possibilities, out of which something definite condenses. — Wayfarer

Not just something but everything. And everything is nothing by another name.

The metaphor I use is the white noise static of a TV screen. A state of everything and nothing at the same time. But start to constrain the static, turn the noise into a signal, and it potentially contains every TV program ever made, or which ever could be made.

the initial indeterminateness of which you speak is to be thought of as the ball balanced at the apex of the dome, — jkg20

For reference, this is a standard poser - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome

What, though, stops the ball from just going straight back to a balanced initial state, i.e. even if the symmetry of indeterminateness is broken, randomly or otherwise, what stops it from simply reestablishing itself? — jkg20

You can see that in this example, once the ball starts to accelerate under gravity, it is not going to be able to fluctuate back. So the point is really that given a state of perfect symmetry, even the most infinitesimal asymmetry is going to get massively amplified.

So a deterministic view of the physics says the ball can’t move. It ought to be stuck where it stands forever. Thus strict determinism shows itself to be incomplete. Some element of chance must be introduced into the metaphysics. A clinamen or swerve as the Atomists put it.

But the point of mentioning this example is to illustrate the principle of making the material/efficient cause - the first triggering event - so trivial, so random, that it barely seems like any proper cause.

The system was ready to tip. So “anything” was going to tip it.

So, it looks like the future, whatever it is, at least must be something that is both real, yet does not arise from indeterminateness. That looks like it contradicts the kind of triadicism described, which requires that all reality arise from indeterminateness. — jkg20

Again, this particular example is only mentioned to show the way the future was already built into the initial state as a potential - a gravitational potential in this case.

It is the same as with an entropic gradient. An ordered state is inevitably going to arrive at a messy state. The future is ordained in that sense.

To understand spontaneous symmetry breaking, we are shifting the burden of causal explanation as much as we can from the initial conditions to the final outcome. That was the take home message I meant. That is the contrast with normal causal stories.

OK, well thanks to you I've been able to look into an aspect of philosophy I've not really considered in relation to this particular issue in metaphysics. I took a look at some of the history behind the development of semiotics, and, if we go back to the Greeks where everything begins, it appears that they had no single notion of a sign, but two: semeion, and symbolon, the former being something along the lines we might express by saying yellow skin is a sign of jaundice, i.e. a kind of natural correlation between two things which is arguably mind independent, with the latter being the kind of thing we might express by saying that a cross on a map is a sign for a church, where mind dependent conventions are presupposed. Then we get Augustine who comes along and uses, in Latin, a single word signum to talk about both, and that's where semiotics as a general science of signs appears to get going, although it gets forgotten about for a few centuries thanks to Descartes. A fundamental question that seems to divide semioticists from non semioticists appears to be whether Augustine was showing philosophical insight by doing what he did, or whether he was simply conflating two notions that ought to be kept apart. I'll have to continue my reading to see what side, if any, I end up on :wink:

Peirce divided signs into three categories - icons, indexes and symbols. That works pretty well.