Hmmm. What would be the great "combiner", then? — Watchmaker
What/who combined the combiners? — Watchmaker
I edited my previous comment to you, just to make it more complete.I'll get back with you next week, Lord willing — Watchmaker
Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings. — apokrisis
My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations — Joshs
If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm. — Prinz
Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. — Joshs
To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter. — Joshs
In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. — Joshs
Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty. — Joshs
That the substance that the universe is composed of is essentially consciousness? — Watchmaker
That's what I think, yes. — bert1
I wonder what the motivation is? I mean, I look around at the world, and I see that some things are conscious, you and me, my dog, and I see that the mechanisms for consciousness are in our brains, we can switch them off and on. I see that some things are not conscious, rocks, dead people or dogs. I think bacteria for example aren't conscious (because we can explain their behaviour through non-conscious processes), but they do have something which is a prerequisite for consciousness, they are individuals, separated from their environment.
This stuff is surely super-important?! Whether we ourselves and other items are conscious or not really matters to us.
So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious. — Daemon
I wonder what the motivation is? — Daemon
I mean, I look around at the world, and I see that some things are conscious, you and me, my dog, and I see that the mechanisms for consciousness are in our brains, we can switch them off and on.
I see that some things are not conscious, rocks, dead people or dogs.
I think bacteria for example aren't conscious (because we can explain their behaviour through non-conscious processes), but they do have something which is a prerequisite for consciousness, they are individuals, separated from their environment.
This stuff is surely super-important?! Whether we ourselves and other items are conscious or not really matters to us.
So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious.
Good question! I assume that Panpsychists are probably trying to unify the traditional mind/matter dualisms, by assuming that both are merely emergent forms of a universal "substance" or "essence: Mind, which is best known in its manifestation as Consciousness. I agree with that motivation, but I personally take a slightly different track. A common retort to notions of universal Consciousness is to ridicule the idea of a conscious atom or grain of sand. Another problem, as you noted, is to make a distinction between Conscious & Subconscious mental processes.So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious. — Daemon
Your post sounds intriguing. I can't really make any sense of it though. Would you mind simplifying all that please? Try to make as simple as you possibly can, as though you were trying to explain it to a 6 year old. — Watchmaker
For Smolin and Marina Cortês at the University of Lisbon, the problems we have [i.e. in the understanding of consciousness] are related in a different way. We can gain a better understanding of quantum reality – but only by accepting that conscious awareness is tangled up with the nature of time.
Together with independent philosopher Clelia Verde, Cortês and Smolin are taking tentative steps towards a new theory of quantum gravity that folds in qualia. It starts with a conviction that the timeless block universe depicted by general relativity is wrong. Instead, Smolin says that we should take our experience of time seriously and recognise that things only exist in the present moment. Nothing persists, things only happen. “For me, time is absolutely fundamental,” he says. “And there is one property that mathematical models don’t have, which is that nature seems to be organised as a series of moments.”
This leads to a very different cosmology, one rooted in present events and the relationships between them, rather than objects sitting in space-time. Each event has a view of the world that provides information about how it fits into the rest of the world – in particular, what its progenitor events in the past were and how it came to be formed from them. In this “causal theory of views”, quantum mechanics and space-time aren’t fundamental, but emerge out of this network of views of events. As events come to be, they make ambiguous possibilities definite; the unknown future becomes the present moment. And in this time-created world, physical laws aren’t fixed like Galileo or Newton supposed, but evolve through time.
Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, takes things further still. Much of the confusion arises, he says, because we forget that all phenomena, whether mind or matter, are related to one another. This relational view, rooted in Rovelli’s research in quantum mechanics, demotes the physical objects that are usually the starting point for fundamental physics. “The best description we have about the world is in terms of the way systems affect one another,” says Rovelli.
In which case, Galileo’s distinction between subject and object is blurred, as everything is both a subject and an object – including observers and their minds. There is no view from the outside. In this way, Rovelli sees the relational universe as a “very mild form of panpsychism” in that there is something in common between mind and matter. “It is the realisation that nature is about things that manifest themselves to one another,” he says. “This takes away much of the mystery of consciousness.”
The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.
nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind — Wayfarer
The fundamental problem is that the microscopic equations of physics are time symmetric and therefore conceptually reversible. Consequently the irreversible concept of causation is not formally supportable by microphysical laws, and if it is used at all it is a purely subjective linguistic interpretation of the laws. Hertz (1894) argued that even the concept of force was unnecessary. This does not mean that the concepts of cause and force should be eliminated, because we cannot escape the use of natural language even in our use of formal models. We still interpret some variables in the rate-of-change laws as forces, but formally these dynamical equations define only an invertible mapping on a state space. Because of this time symmetry, systems described by such reversible dynamics cannot formally (syntactically) generate intrinsically irreversible properties such as measurement, records, memories, controls, or causes. Furthermore, as Bridgman (1964) pointed out, "The mathematical concept of time appears to be particularly remote from the time of experience." Consequently, no concept of causation, especially downward causation, can have much fundamental explanatory value at the level of microscopic physical laws. ....
I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature — Howard Pattee
And so what I'm saying is that this is also the manifestation or appearance of mind, or "the subject", albeit in rudimentary form. And that the subject can't be accounted for in physical terms, it doesn't emerge from the physical and is not constituted by it. — Wayfarer
Hence Peirce being objective + idealist. That expresses the idea that all these familiar dualities - such as objective and subjective, real and ideal, etc - are the reciprocal limits of the one larger ontic relation. — apokrisis
The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device?
Presumably 'aliens' and cockroaches, with their differing nervous systems and cultures, would experience the universe differently than we do. But it's the same universe? — jas0n
How could you make a comparison? How could you assume a perspective that can see from all those completely different perspectives at once, so as to compare whether they’re seeing ‘the same thing’? — Wayfarer
You’re operating from inside ‘the naturalist assumption’. — Wayfarer
nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind
— Wayfarer
The alternative to Panpsychism is pansemiosis. So all we really require for time to have temporal structure is that physical reality boils down to a Peircean story of constraints on possibilities.
The past is the Cosmos’s memory in being everything that has definitely happened and so a history of all the possibilities eliminated. That is very mind-like - for any neuroscientist - in that it accounts for the past as an accumulation of behavioural habits.
Then the future, by definition, is all the possibilities that remain. The future is the continuously updated space of the possible - what can happen next given all that has happened already.
This is George Ellis’s evolving block universe theory, for example.
It is mind-like in a general pansemiotic way, but - like a biosemiotic view of consciousness - doesn’t then dive headlong into Cartesian substance dualism and all the confusion that results from doing that. — apokrisis
This article explores the idea of a numerical order to events in space, regardless of time. It fits with the idea that mind, consciousness, a block universe, semiotics (even the quantum realm) are all composed according to perceived or calculated value/significance/potentiality - as five dimensions of relational structure. — Possibility
Peirce talks about a habit-taking tendency to events, and the interaction of actualising qualities into facts, after somehow transitioning from dimensionless to determined potentiality. — Possibility
Sure. I agree that 4D spacetime is just advanced accountancy. But then that applies to the three spatial dimensions as much as the one temporal dimension. If time is reduced to a numerical sequence that represents Planck units of change, then space likewise is a numerical sequence of Planck unit of location. I don't see that leading anywhere for the usual reason - one has to include Planck energy in this picture as well. — apokrisis
That application, in my understanding, relies on a five-dimensional structure. — Possibility
What I’m suggesting is that what enables us to explore and understand this four-dimensional structure at all is by reconfiguring reality according to value/significance/potentiality. — Possibility
I’m not sure I understand what form you think this extra dimension takes. It sounds like a larger embedding dimension for GR - such as a brane. Or it could be a compactified internal one. Or even a fractal internal one.
That is to say, the whole Euclidean/Newtonian conception of a dimension is up for grabs once we get to the bleeding edge of physics these days. — apokrisis
Well my view is that the thermodynamic finality driving the show is what needs to be built into the physics. And quantum decoherence is one of the ways that is being done, as is the de Sitter cosmology that builds in a conformal spacetime geometry - a holographic closure that brings an end to effective space, time and energy.
So Peirce can be said to have envisioned the Cosmos as a dissipative structure. And Big Bang cosmology is cashing out that metaphysics as physics.
The difference is obviously that the Heat Death does not seem such a triumphant cosmic achievement from a human self-centred view.
It would be puzzling that all of history would be so marvellously organised to eventually result in … us. But now the future only holds the relentless onwards project of finishing off the infinite nothingness of a cosmos that is its fully matured condition as a universalised heat sink. — apokrisis
There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’. — Possibility
The answer to the Experience-Truth Gap in philosophy of perception is not to split the object of perception in two – postulating one object that is unreal but is actually perceived, and a second object that is real but ‘lies behind’ the first and is only inferred.
Rather than two objects, the answer is time. The percipuum is not a temporal particular. It occurs across a time- span which has at its ‘back end’ a memory of the immediate past (which Peirce calls the ponecipuum) and at its ‘front end’ an expectation of the immediate future (the antecipuum).
This time-span - of effectively infinitesimal duration - forms a ‘moving window’ in which each new perception enters the mind at the ‘front end’ in the form of anticipation just as the most recent falls back into memory. This internal structure is what endows the perception with its meaning.
https://core.ac.uk/download/29202694.pdf
There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’.
— Possibility
But there is a very obvious reason.
Any claims about quality have to be qualified by quantification. And that is both the scientific method and Peircean pragmatism.
We can’t ignore the fact that theory and measurement go together as a system of mutual constraint. That is the basis of universal reasonableness which Peirce recognised himself. — apokrisis
The last person you could cite in support of an unmoored metaphysics of value, quality or idea would be Peirce. His whole thing was about how any claim about qualities hat to be, in practice, supported by acts of quantification. — apokrisis
Quality in a formal relation to logic. — Possibility
The key is to find a logical system that supports variable quality without constraining potentiality. Mathematics is not that system. — Possibility
It is Peirce’s triadism that can help to ground what may seem ‘unmoored’, by insisting on a relational structure of three aspects where only one or two are argued. — Possibility
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