:up:To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme. — apokrisis
Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...?
— Agent Smith
Hell no. It’s game over for a species that depends on toilets that flush, energy, food and lighting at the click of a button or app. — apokrisis
Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics — jas0n
Doesn't this require a theory that others exist and write stuff down for you to then read later? How is that any different than trusting scientific theories? Seems to me that many here are using scribbles they see on some paper as the foundation of everything.I'd prefer to quote Popper himself, but I don't have a digital copy. — jas0n
It seems to me that language itself is a technology.A certain kind of pragmatist might take technology as the essence of science/knowledge — jas0n
Right. Seems to me that a proper theory of consciousness would resolve this issue. But then how do we go about doing that if not by our own observations of our own consciousness and the reasoning that goes along with it? It would seem to me that if consciousness is real and in the world, then its functions are part of the world too, and possibly exist in other places in the world (as in other minds).He literally set out to create a ‘science of consciousness’. That is all. He was not dismissive of science merely critical of the physical sciences encroaching upon psychology and such - rightly so imo. — I like sushi
Ontology (relational, actualist) and ethics (eudaimonia praxis) "connect" them for me. From this genealogy, as a consequence, deflation of epistemology (e.g. fallibilism, methodological naturalism, absurdism) preoccupies me.Systems thinking connects my three. What connects yours? Ethics? Equanimity? How to live? — apokrisis
Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined).Husserlian phenomenology is not directly concerned with what is or isn’t. The focus is purely on the experience. The experience is the experience. That is the starting point and it is not finitely reducible.
Meaning whether something ‘exists’ or is ‘imagined’ is of no concern from the phenomenological perspective as the experience (‘real’ or not) is still an experience. — I like sushi
The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). — jas0n
Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational. — jas0n
The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space? — jas0n
Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined). — Harry Hindu
In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.
The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality? — Joshs
“In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies. — Joshs
...peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity... — Joshs
The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention. It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. — jas0n
But you have trouble following a single thread, so maybe don't concern yourself with the idea... — jas0n
'Perspective' is parasitic on the singularity of the body. It's only contingently true that each body 'plays' just one handle here. It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. As 'a' philosopher, I feel like a team of explorers. But folks are confused if you switch gears/masks to quickly. Folks are maybe too attached also when forced to play a single mask. — jas0n
Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke. — jas0n
On the transition from non-life to life
Biophysics finds a new substance
This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.
The key finding: As outlined in this paper (http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf) and in this book (http://lifesratchet.com/), the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.
So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.
This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.
The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.
So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.
So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.
The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.
In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.
A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.
It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.
A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.
This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.
The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.
But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.
It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.
So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.
As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.
And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.
Two would be enough if we could force folk to be have both a self and anti-self. You would have to show a dialectical self-duality by being jasOn and anti-jasOn .... just like the only Superman plot twist that was worth a damn. — apokrisis
Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment. — Joshs
Sense-making is intrinsically affective because it is normative. — Joshs
But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. — Joshs
Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living be-ings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality. — Joshs
A simple name change is too exciting/distracting for some. Using two avatars/handles simultaneously violates the spirit and perhaps not the letter of the rules, so I haven't and won't do it. But if the norms were different, I'd love to try steelmanning my opponents, to outdo them at their own game. — jas0n
I wasn't meaning to offend you; I thought that was what you were referring to; your multiple personas on this site. I have had only one, but it's true I did change the name of that one from John to Janus.
Why so upset, such as even to refer to me as "bitch"? — Janus
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