Once you allow that similarity is not the same as difference, it becomes evident that it is impossible that the two are created by the same process. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you not see vagueness as inherent within meaning, and it is what we might try to exclude through the application of constraint? — Metaphysician Undercover

Your logic is all over the shop in your eagerness to foster a dispute. I make the obvious point that similarity and difference are terms relative to each other. So things in the world can be vaguely different or similar, or they could be extremely different or similar. Difference and similarity then become the dichotomous concepts we employ to try to define some absolute notion of sameness and difference.

So while we may talk of them as two categories of being, we shouldn’t make the mistake of demanding that only one or other is the case. We don’t have to reduce this dualism to a monism.

Indeed, following Hegel and Peirce, we can recognise the triadic metaphysics in play. Similarity and difference are opposing limits that define a connecting spectrum of possibility.

And that is where a logic of vagueness becomes valuable. It defines the third thing that is the state where neither similarity, nor difference, is the case. The principle of non contradiction has yet to apply. Things have yet to go either way on that score.

Mechanical thought routinely demands counterfactual definiteness. It can’t tolerate ambiguity in its claims about reality. That is why it ends up insisting - as you are doing - that things just either are similar or different, with no scope for relativity.

But an organic understanding of reality sees that all universals are pairs of relatives. A unity of opposites. And so a triadic logic, a systems logic, needs to be used.

So I approach every argument with that triadic logic. And you have your own habit of always trying to reduce every dichotomy to an either/or monism. You can never see the big picture like that.

If you are interested, it would be worth checking out Howard Pattee’s papers on biosemiosis, the epistemic cut and the physics of symbols. His is the most incisive presentation of the crucial ideas. — apokrisis

I’ve now read Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee, and I must say it’s top notch. Thanks for this reference.

Semantics is a social game of pretend. — bongo fury

But there just is no fact of the matter whether a word or picture is pointed at one thing or another. No physical bolt of energy flows from pointer to pointee(s). So the whole social game is one of pretence. Albeit of course a hugely powerful one.

Can it both be a pretence (in physical terms) and yet also a hugely powerful one? I would say that undercuts your own argument.

My claim is that the human language game is all about organising the material environment that gives physical reality to human society as an organismic state of being. So language is all about regulating entropy for self-interested reasons. It could evolve as a communal habit because it physically plugs in a cultural mind into a material world.

But of course, as I said, the power of any code is that it is not tied to the physics of its world. It is powerful because it could refer to anything. That means when it is not used that way, but instead pointed rather precisely, that is what makes it meaningful - signal rather than noise.

So a community of speakers can spin any fictions or fantasies they want. They can talk nonsense if they choose. The faculty of language has that absolute freedom built in as the necessary other to what language is actually evolved for - organising social behaviour in ways that physically sustains that community of speakers.

One can’t be definitely pretending anything unless that is a clear contrast to the “other” of now making clear and meaningful reference to something understood to have a genuine social reality. Something that is of material consequence.

I would add that we should consider what happened once human societies added numbers on top of words as ways of regulating their material conditions.

Maths considers itself a truly transcendent exercise in abstraction. A Platonic realm of form. It has no necessary connection to physics or material reality.

And yet then this very separation turns out to make maths a next level tool of entropification. It went hand in hand with the scientific and industrial revolutions. Human entropification went exponential as we became technological and economic creatures speaking the language of numbers.

Evolutionary history shows that symbols systems are always about a separation - an epistemic cut - that then enables an organism to take over control of the "laws of nature" for personal gain.

That is what unifies the biological, neurological and social sciences. The humanities even.

And biosemiosis is a general model of this story. It shows how symbols and physics are bound in this mindful causal loop.

As such, it stands apart from the regular mechanical description of nature given by the physical sciences. It says organismic causality is also its own part of nature.

So when it comes to panpsychism, we can rule it out just by its failure to speak to this organismic causality. If panpsychism wants to argue that awareness is a property of particles just like gravity, then already it is sunk by its attempt to ape the metaphysics of monistic material reductionism.

I hadn’t read that one myself. But it’s a handy paper in connection with this Panpsychism thread.

Just skimmed it, thanks Oliver5 for pointing to it. Very interesting and easier to comprehend than Apo. That's not necessarily an insult to Apo - maybe Apo would be just as clear at paper-length. Need to read more carefully, but at first glance there's no explicit dissolution or even mention of the hard problem, which is odd as it was written in the last few years. Perhaps he does not see philosophers of mind as his audience.

Interesting thread. I had sort of a "symbol" kick over the summer, starting with Jung and other Jungians, which led me to Guenon on the one hand and papers/lectures on information science on the other. I was looking into semiotics and then got derailed by Psychology and Alchemy, which got me reading on the Gnostics and Kabbalah, topics I was already familiar with but was revisiting.

Now that is a rabbit hole, but certainly the Sepirot and the Ogdoad are early examples of an systems that see reality as a series of interactions.

Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? My cousin's wife recommended it to me. I absolutely love the guy's fiction.

Is drawing a rational inference - 'because this is the case, that must be the case' - also 'a brain state?'
— Wayfarer

Yes, I think so. — Kenosha Kid

Well, here's the problem: this associates, or reduces, logical causation to a physical state. Whereas physical and logical causation operate on completely separate levels.

Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, greetings, your Hghness! The contributors here are much more inclined to what is called bio-semiotics, which originated with the application of C S Peirce’s conception of signs to biological disciplines.

(I’m probably one of the few contributors whose heard of Rene Guenon on this board, generally speaking there’s very little discussion of esoterica on this forum.)

Need to read more carefully, but at first glance there's no explicit dissolution or even mention of the hard problem, which is odd as it was written in the last few years. — bert1

Maybe the Hard Problem is only a problem for those still stuck in the maw of Cartesian dualism?

Pattee is a biologist. And biology had its own version of the "hard problem". It was called vitalism. It was just obvious that some spirit must animate a flesh and blood body. But who now believes the body is anything other than a complex machine? Life - as a phenomenon - holds no metaphysical mystery anymore.

Well in fact, the machine metaphor was also inadequate as far as any curious biologist was concerned. And so people like Pattee in particular have gone beyond that in defining life as a semiotic phenomenon. The organismic view of physics parasitised by codes.

A holistic or triadic paradigm now explains life. And it is easy to see that it also explains mind, as semiosis already grants life an intentionality and "awareness" at the cellular level ... the subject of the cited paper here.

I came up through both sides of the debate as the Hard Problem was raging in Philosophy of Mind at the same time that neuroscience was finally getting to grips with the enactive and semiotic basis of the brain's relation to the world.

So on one side, there was this constant chanting of the "Hard Problem". On the other, there were the neuroscientists not interested in the time-wasting diversions. It was a very 1990s moment.

I was sitting next to a philosopher when Chalmers gave his first big public presentation of the Hard Problem. I asked him why all the fuss? He said Chalmers was making dualism respectable again as a philosophical position. And ain't it great just to have something new to stir things up, give philosophers something of their own to argue about rather than just tag along behind the science bandwagon?

In a nutshell, that should tell you the social dynamics at work.

Thanks Apo, that's made things much clearer.

Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is worth knowing that semiotics is divided into the dyadic tradition of Saussure and the triadic tradition of Peirce. And until the rediscovery of Peirce's corpus in the 1990s, it was Saussure who dominated the landscape.

On Eco's own position here....

Peirce and Eco approach this abstract/concrete duality of signs, and the theory of signs more generally, in quite different ways. The most obvious difference is that while Peirce's theory is triadic (revolving around sign, object and interpretant, with this latter bringing the sign-user into the formula), Eco’s is a modification of the dyadic theory of Saussure (which is built up entirely from the relation of sign and signified – no sign-user is considered14), but Eco’s dyad is operational, in my sense, and it is a difference that reaches to the core.

For Eco, the fact of lying is more important than telling the truth, or attempting to tell the truth. As he says, “semiotics is in principle the discipline of studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for general semiotics.” (Eco 1975: 6-7; 0.1.3).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1112

Also, Saussure was focused on semiotics - the science of meaning-construction - as it relates to human linguistic culture. That was broadened somewhat to the degree it influenced psychological structuralism and continental philosophy.

Whereas Peirce was mounting a fundamental assault on meaning in the Cosmic context. He was concerned with grounding logical and mathematical thought in some general metaphysics. So his ambitions were vastly greater.

But who now believes the body is anything other than a complex machine? Life - as a phenomenon - holds no metaphysical mystery anymore. — apokrisis

Nevertheless, Pattee acknowledges that he has been unable to solve the question of the origin of life. He says that in the Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, in a couple of places.

I'm in agreement with a lot of what you say, but wary of scientific hubris. Maybe some very simple or even elementary fact about the nature of existence is beyond science, due to the specific ways that science has to go about analysis of an issue. I think that's Chalmer's point, and I think it's a valid point. But if you don't see the point, or don't think it's a valid point, then what scientific evidence could be assembled to convince you? None, I would suggest. Which is, kind of, the point.

Nevertheless, Pattee acknowledges that he has been unable to solve the question of the origin of life — Wayfarer

We've had this discussion before. In my view - and I spent many years talking with him – he took this angle to sell his wares.

He was making his name in the era of Crick-Watson where science had discovered the double helix of DNA, the cellular machinery of protein manufacture and respiration. The reductionists where dusting their hands on a job well done.

But Pattee was making the point that a system of code and metabolism raises an obvious chicken and egg problem for biology. We know they evolved to be the two aspects of the one whole, but it seems one ought to have evolved first. And that has become the new great problem.

In my view, this is another advantage of a Peircean metaphysics. The origins of things are not about some first thing and then the next other thing - a simple chain of cause and effect, a tale of material/efficient causality.

Instead, the origin of things is about symmetry-breaking, co-dependent arising, or however you want to put a fully organicist position - one large enough to embrace the holism of all four Aristotelean causes.

So the bug becomes a feature. It would be my argument that the degree to which symbol and matter are formally the "other" of each other - the product of a symmetry breaking or dichotomising development - then it is inevitable that you should have both arising in tandem.

Actually this applies to the origin of human speech and any other origin problem. The language origin problem is which came first - words or rules, semantics or syntax? My answer is that words (as atoms of meaning) and rules (as the structuring habits of a grammar) would be the matching halves of the one division. Each would arise within the context of the other.

The more you have something like a word atom, the more you are going to get something like rules for combining those atoms. And the same goes the other way. The more you have a habit of using rules, the more words you are going to require as components to manipulate.

It is a virtuous feedback spiral. The faintest starting difference becomes magnified until you get a very clear difference between vocabulary and grammar. It is only together that they work. But at the beginning, you only need a slight difference with a slight edge and then a positive feedback that amplifies things and gives the divide its fullest expression.

Anyway, I've also pointed you in the direction of Nick Lane's The Vital Question as a good contemporary view on abiogenesis. The picture of how life could have got started in the way I describe is explored there.

Maybe some very simple or even elementary fact about the nature of existence is beyond science, due to the specific ways that science has to go about analysis of an issue. — Wayfarer

Of course I agree that our epistemologies frame the facts we are able to discover. Everything is just a paradigm.

But that is also why I put so much effort into exploring all the different paradigms people use and defend the few key people – Peirce and Pattee for instance - who do it best.

I think that's Chalmer's point, and I think it's a valid point. — Wayfarer

I think you give Chalmers way too much credit as a critical intellect. He's a nice chap. But a showman.

I found the specific passage I had in mind:

The origin of life question is: How did this separation, this epistemic cut, originate? As Hoffmeyer (2000) has pointed out, the apparently sharp epistemic cut between these categories makes it difficult to imagine how life began and how these two categories evolved at higher levels. The epistemic cut appears to be a conceptual as well as a topological discontinuity. It is difficult to imagine a gradual cut. The problem arises acutely with the genetic code. A partial code does not work, and a simple code that works as it evolves is hard to imagine. In fact, this is a universal problem in evolution and even in creative thought. How does a complex functioning set of constraints originate when no subset of the constraints appears to maintain the function? How does a reversible dynamics gradually become an irreversible thermodynamics? How does a paradigm shift from classical determinism to quantum indeterminism occur gradually? At least in the case of thought we can trace some of the history, but in the origin of life we have no adequate history. Even in the case of creative thought, so much goes on in the subconscious mind that the historical trace has large gaps.

I will state at the outset that I have not solved this problem. — Howard Pattee

I've read that paper about half a dozen times since you first pointed it out to me. I think it cautiously supports dualism in recognizing the distinction between the 'inexorable laws of physics', and 'the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain [that] do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey.' Granted, he says that Descartes' proposed model consigns the relationship of these two domains to 'metaphysical obscurity' - no argument there. But the duality still exists and is acknowledged by him. The dualism of self-other - the 'epistemic cut', being one manifestation of it - is clearly a deep metaphysical issue.

I'm not asking you to 'solve' this problem - who could? - but when I see the claim that life 'holds no metaphysical mystery', I'm going to object.

Oh, and I don't think David Chalmers is some world-conquering genius. I think he makes a simple point, and it's amazing that he's made a career out of it. But that in itself says something.

The ability to have an experience. I know this doesn't explain any more than the previous "definition". But that's because this can't be simplified. — khaled

What would you say is the distinction between the ability to have an experience and the ability to experience?

I've also pointed you in the direction of Nick Lane's The Vital Question as a good contemporary view on abiogenesis. The picture of how life could have got started in the way I describe is explored there. — apokrisis

If you really do take into account Aristotle's four causes, then the question of 'how' only addresses two of them.

I think it cautiously supports dualism in recognizing the distinction between the 'inexorable laws of physics', and 'the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA... — Wayfarer

But does Pattee think that?

What is relevant to this thread is the point I have already tied to make. Yes, there is a dualism at the heart of everything in some strong sense.

But then there are the two completely different paradigms trying to "resolve" that. And panpsychism/idealism/eliminativism/etc represent the mainstream mechanistic response - an attempt to reduce a dualism to a monism.

Meanwhile triadic systems thinkers see a dualism as a dichotomy. It is in fact the very thing nature must produce as a fact of historic development. Reality itself is an evolutionary process.

So sure. Science hasn't done its job until it can account for the emergence of critical dualisms - in particular, this general semiotic one of matter and symbol. The job isn't done until there is an account of abiogenesis.

And what Pattee provides is robust basis for having this particular discussion. He ain't no closet panpsychist. I can tell you that for a fact.

I'm not asking you to 'solve' this problem - who could? - but when I see the claim that life 'holds no metaphysical mystery', I'm going to object. — Wayfarer

It is more that there is an odd contrast where public opinion no longer finds the problem of life to be sufficiently mysterious, while it also clings on to an exaggerated mystery in regard to the problem of mind.

Even on PF, who still thinks biology needs vitalism to explain anything - close an explanatory gap?

Yet talk about mind and the explanatory gap is the only thing that needs explaining. Who would pick up a neuroscience or psychology textbook to find the answer on that?

Biosemiotics takes the position that life and mind are pretty much synonymous as phenomena. They share the same basic systems explanation.

That is another reason for being dismissive of the Hard Problem. It logically either applies to both or neither. They are not two kinds of things but different semiotic levels of the same thing.

This is indeed the reason I gravitated towards Pattee and his circle in the first place.

Within neuroscience and the science of mind during the 1980s/1990s, there was a very strong division between the computationalists and the dynamicists. Another paradigmatic duality. And both sides were very persuasive that theirs was the proper lens to view the brain through.

Neuroscience - as a branch of medicine - was actually very backward and untutored in its metaphysics so was failing to figure it out. It wasn't seeing how these were the two aspects of the one semiotic whole.

That led me to complexity theory and hierarchy theory as a more abstract level of discussion. And then I stumbled into the Theoretical Biology crew who had a 20 year head start because they had been forced to explore exactly the same issue as a reaction to the mechanistic triumphs of the Crick-Watson 1960s.

Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and others had hammered out the answers that resolved the neuroscientific dilemma.

As it happens, neuroscience did eventually rediscover much the same answers. You had Friston's Bayesian Brain, the enactive turn in cogsci, etc.

And as another wrinkle to the tale, the Theoretical Biology crew was undergoing its own next step transition. The sudden wealth of Peirce scholarship was revealing the guts of the answer had already been laid down with greater metaphysical generality by 1910.

Salthe was the one pushing a semiotic rewrite of hierarchy theory. I was an eager student. Pattee was sternly resistant.

We all went our own ways after a few years. And suddenly Pattee came out with his own blizzard of papers about biosemiosis. He has seemed unpersuaded. Then he was leading the charge. The paradigm shift had clicked for him too. And he has the razor intellect to make the best case.

So there is a really intricate social history here. I was in fact in contact with another dozen such camps at least, all roughly pursuing the same quarry. Second order cybernetics was its other whole thing. I was close with Friston and his Bayesian Brain. There was Walter Freeman and his chaos approach. Scott Kelso and his complementary nature approach.

The point is that this is science in action - multiple camps of overlapping activity, often rediscovering the same truths in different jargon and believing it is wholly original.

And then there is public opinion in action - hooked on ancient science debates recycled in dumbed-down format. The audience of the Chalmers, Krausses and other carnival buskers. :smile:

If you really do take into account Aristotle's four causes, then the question of 'how' only addresses two of them. — Wayfarer

And?

The Theoretical Biology crew - especially Salthe - push the fact that the systems science approach requires science to take teleology seriously. And indeed, in the laws of thermodynamics, that is just what has happened. Life and mind are now to be grounded in the science of dissipative structure.

Neither. I sharply disagree with the part about there being a metaphysical division between humans and all non-human life. — javra

I was referring to Mental quality, not a different kind, or value, of Life.The metaphysical distinction I was making is a Qualitative difference -- a matter of degree -- rather than a Quantitative difference -- two separate things. A Metaphyiscal difference instead of a Physical difference. As a Quale, it is also a matter of opinion. :smile:

Quale : a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.

Life and mind are now to be grounded in the science of dissipative structure. — apokrisis

Yeah I'm afraid 'dissipative structures' will never provide a philosophical rationale as far as I'm concerned. It's engineering speak.

BTW, how do you rate Stuart Kaufman in the overall spectrum?

Yeah I'm afraid 'dissipative structures' will never provide a philosophical rationale as far as I'm concerned. It's engineering speak. — Wayfarer

In fact, it is anti-engineering speak. It is natural process speak.

A tornado is a classic dissipative structure. The interest of engineers is piqued more by the fact that the fluid mechanics involved represents the outer limits of computability.

It doesn't get more metaphysical than to deal with the formally non-computable.

But whatever. :roll:

BTW, how do you rate Stuart Kaufman in the overall spectrum? — Wayfarer

Big fan. The whole Santa Fe complex adaptive systems bandwagon was an important stepping stone.

So I was mostly involved with the backroom guys labouring in obscurity. There was bugger all funding for the systems science tradition.

But then this was this new mathematical physics that was gaudy and caught the public eye, while also being hugely important in terms of the techological payback. You had the computer-based breakthroughs of chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, complexity theory, network theory, fractal mathematics - anything where you could start with a seed algorithm and run it through enough cycles to produce a self-organising pattern.

So that was a case of valuable new science hitting the public immediately between the eyes. It did produce a popular paradigm shift.

However it also seems to say that "more is different". Complexity is a matter of emergence. Create enough interactions and even randomness becomes organised.

And that is still a reductionist sounding take-home. It doesn't actually make contact with the biosemiotic story with its epistemic cut between symbols and matter. It is just matter being busy on its own in essentially meaningless ways.

So it was the rapid rise of the new complexity maths that was this other camp in neuroscience - the dynamicists opposed to the computationalists. It was very important to learn how self-organisation is an inherent part of nature, not some unexpected add-on.

And talking of dissipative structure, that was part of this bottom-up, mindless, self-organisation story too.

However, seen from a semiotic perspective, the fact that inorganic physics could produce so much "order from chaos" for free also then meant that any semiotic regulation of the material realm had in fact far less it needs to do.

The material world already wants to fall into its dissipative structure patterns - vortices, tributaries, etc. And so information - DNA, neurons, words - only has to provide some well directed nudges to tip the balance.

That was the point where biosemiosis could click into place as an unmysterious story - once you understood the triadic nature of the relation.

:up: I got Kaufmann's book, At Home in the Universe, from Amazon, way back when. Found it hard to understand, but very much liked what I could understand.

//oh, and there's a bunch of very interesting videos on just these questions on the Santa Fe Institute's website. Just re-read Andromeda Strain.

Human memory is a jumble

Your logic is all over the shop... — apokrisis

That's where I like to be, all over the shop, it means I'm on top of the situation. You are a master at changing the subject. So even when I'm all over the shop you duck into a worm hole and pop up somewhere else.

I make the obvious point that similarity and difference are terms relative to each other. — apokrisis

In reality, this is not really true. And all it takes is a bit of thought about what similarity is, and what difference is, to understand that. Look, let's take "the same" as an absolute. Now, different means "not the same". And similar also means "not the same" but in a different way. They both mean "not the same", but in completely different ways. "Different" signifies the absolute, "not the same" in an absolute sense. "Similar" however, requires a judgement of sameness in some respect. It is a qualified, or relative form of "not the same". So "similar" takes us to a completely different category from "different", because it requires not only the initial judgement of "not the same", as an absolute judgement, but it also requires a relative judgement, it is in some respect "the same". Therefore "different" is an absolute sense of "not the same", while "similar" is a relative sense of "not the same".

Therefore "different" is an absolute sense of "not the same", while "similar" is a relative sense of "not the same". — Metaphysician Undercover

I see what you mean. But that is part and parcel of the constraints-based approach here.

Sameness (or synechism in Peircean parlance) is the global condition. All are within one. A continuity. A lack of differentation.

So sameness is about wholeness and the single general large scale state. It maps to the bounding constraints in other words. A constraint is an ultimate measure of sameness. It constitutes "the same".

And then difference is the local exception to the general rule. In hierarchical terms, it is down there at the ground level as the grain of atomistic action. It is the many within the one. It is something plural rather than singular simply because that is how our hierarchical model of any system works.

So the point you make only confirms the position I argue. It picks out that even you are working with the same systems perspective without realising how it informs the very grammar of this discussion.

You can't help but think of sameness as singular and difference as plural. Or sameness as exception-less because difference is about exceptions. Or sameness as continuity because difference is discrete.

But differences still then divide into differences that make a difference and differences that don't. A state of constraint is disturbed by the one and indifferent to the other.

So difference can never be eliminated - all part of the story that absolutes are only approached in limiting or asymptotic fashion. But large differences are likely to matter - in being large and so challenging the prevailing singular state of sameness. And small differences are likely not to. They all just blur into each other and so look like a continuity of sameness.

Now, don't get me wrong, I understood what you meant, but I was pointing out that both of us understood it even though it doesn't pass your criteria of a definition. — khaled

I never asked you for a formal and rigorous definition. I asked you to describe the thing's properties such that I could understand what you think it does. In the end, I just asked for anything that could shed light on how you're using the word.

If, as you say, you understood what I meant, then mission accomplished. Except that this isn't about what I think consciousness is... This is a looooong attempt to get you to talk about what you think it is in a way that I can understand. But I'm not sure you know what you think it is.

However you seemed to pretend that they don't so I wanted to see how you would define them without any ambiguity at all which is the standard you set for me and failed to keep yourself. — khaled

A little ambiguity is a large progression from total ambiguity.

I didn't want to write a wall of text like the one you wrote only for you to say something like "'apprehend' is an ambiguous word so I don't get what you mean". — khaled

You're projecting. You did not provide any information. It's not possible to answer your question because it's about something you do not describe at all. I wasn't nitpicking details. There was nothing other than a deferment to another ambiguous word.

For instance: When a white blood cell attacks bacteria is it doing pattern recognition? It clearly doesn't just attack indiscriminantly — khaled

I covered this above (the answer would be no):

Obviously things like the ballness of the ball (recognising a ball as a ball irrespective of its colour, size, proximity, material, etc.) aren't freebies. There is some element of optimised recall (pattern-matching) that requires me to have already been trained to recognise a ball in terms of its other properties, most of which will be quite contingent (such as the nane 'ball') on things that have nothing to do with the phenomenon. This training relied on a general openness to information in my early environment in which I learned to associate contingent and non-contingent properties of balls with certain combinations of phenomena. — Kenosha Kid

So clearly I'm not using the term "pattern-matching" in a way consistent with your counter-example.

You made a claim that neurological progress will lead to some theory of consciousness (not in that particular quote but earlier). I asked you how? In order to answer that question you need to define what you mean by consciousness and what you mean by neurological progress, as you are the one making the claim. You defined the latter but not the former. — khaled

The field of psychology is not up for grabs. I don't have an exotic take on the field that is distinct from the field itself: if I did, I would be misrepresenting it. (Which I may well do as well, accidentally.) Your idea of consciousness, by contrast, entertains panpsychism, i.e. is not constrained even to that which is amenable to scientific study, let alone that which is studied in a particular field. This is why your notion of consciousness required illumination: you were asking questions about a thing that is not identical to modern, scientific descriptions of it, nor with any certainty similar to any other particular notion.

Consciousness-as-brainstates actually supports the statement that neurological progress will lead to a theory of consciousness, but I think it makes no sense and your continued reluctance to mention it again makes me think you think so too. — khaled

I'm happy to reaffirm it here and now.

You would need to explain how consciousness as "consciousness of something which (somehow) results from pattern recognition (whatever that means)" is related to neurological progress. — khaled

For sure, and that's what we have neuroscience for. I'm not going to reproduce every paper, which is what I suspect you're suggesting my burden entails, or even send you links you probably won't read, but check out Isaac's Halle Berry detector description on the Quining Qualia thread for a great example.

For consciousness as "consciousness of a subset of consciousnesses" I don't see how neurology has anything to do with that. It vaguely reminds me of the neural binding problem but that's it. — khaled

So for instance in no-report problems, you can track what the brain is paying attention to and compare to what the consciousness is paying attention to. Your eyes might physically move to focus on a secondary stimulus but, when asked, you will report no awareness of it. In terms of accounting for the difference, neurology seems to be the *perfect* framework in which to explain it, as it deals with the transmission of information between different parts of the brain responsible for different tasks.

no explicit dissolution or even mention of the hard problem, — bert1

The whole idea of an “epistemic cut” is precisely how Pattee phrases what others call “the hard problem”.

Well, here's the problem: this associates, or reduces, logical causation to a physical state. Whereas physical and logical causation operate on completely separate levels. — Wayfarer

What's the problem? That it conflicts with a belief? That's par for the course. Although I wonder what you mean by "completely separate". As in, there's no neurological activity related to rational thinking at all?

It's not a matter of conflicting with belief. A rational inference, for example a syllogism or simple arithmetic proof, is bound by logical necessity. If A>B, and B>C, then A >C. (Forgive my simplistic example, but I believe it will suffice for the point at issue.)

Logical necessity is not dependent on any particular configuration of physical states, because you can encode logically necessary statements such as the above in any number of different physical forms. It could be represented by different symbols, in different forms, and even in different media. So how could such an idea as a rational inference be the same as a 'brain state'? How could it be that every brain is in 'the same state' when it says 'A>B....' etc?

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form - which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism v Naturalism