Your source claims that systems are open, not that they have no definition. In fact he claims the exact opposite. — Isaac
He suggests that biological systems reverse the direction of the second law, the flow uphill of it. — Isaac
It is temporary and doesn't defy any physical law. — Isaac
The system and the internal are the same thing. — Isaac
No, there are no hidden internal states. Internal states are definitionally those which are not hidden. — Isaac
A 'Hidden State' in active inference terms is just a node in a data network which is one (or more) node(s) removed from the network carrying out the inference.
'S' are hidden states. They're not hidden from 'us' (the organism), they're right in front of us, I can see then touch them, feel them. They're hidden for the network doing the inference because that network can only use data from the sensorimotor systems ('o' and 'a' in the diagram) with which it has to infer the cause of that data (the external states). I probably should use the term 'external states' but that gets as much flack from the enactivists who then bang on about how it's not really 'external' because we form an integrated network with our environment. So I could call then 'nodes outside of our Markov Boundary', and no-one would have the faintest idea what I was talking about...So 'hidden states' seemed the least controversial term... Until now. But this... — Isaac
[It] must instead engage in a reflective move that allows it to explore and assess the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions of the latter. — Joshs
It seems odd to say that scientists as a group are blinkered by some presupposition (that is nonetheless clear enough for Mr Zahavi to see without trouble), and yet assume that the mere mention of the problem is sufficient for phenomenologists to shed presuppositions like unwanted clothing in a heatwave.
What is it about the mind of a scientist that shackles them in chains so unbreakable, yet as gossamer in the hands of the philosopher? — Isaac
When did I say systems have no definition? — Metaphysician Undercover
There is no such thing as a "discrete system" — Metaphysician Undercover
So simply by the definition of a discrete system we've got, of necessity, an internal state, an external state, a Markov boundary, and two different probability functions on either side of that boundary. — Isaac
Right, therefore contrary to your claim, these supposed "open systems" are not subject to the laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics being a law of physics. — Metaphysician Undercover
The constitution of the system doing the inferencing is hidden from that system. — Metaphysician Undercover
Notice that it shows both internal and external "S", when you say "S" is a hidden state. — Metaphysician Undercover
Science , like philosophy , is a culturally constructed niche. — Joshs
Postmodern sciences, along with postmodern philosophies, abandon realism — Joshs
I'd have to say neither. — Isaac
Attempts to supplant natural human subjectivity with mechanistic necessity.
— Mww
Again, on point, but is any philosophical text less attempting the same thing. — Isaac
... then it seems likely to me that when...
Postmodern sciences, along with postmodern philosophies, abandon realism
— Joshs
...they merely replace it with another culturally constructed presupposition.
To assume otherwise requires us to believe that modern philosophy has miraculously broken free of ten thousand year old shackles. — Isaac
The simple idea that we just directly see what's there doesn't seem to be sufficient here. — Isaac
I get it that we don't always see what's there, In fact most of what is in the visual, auditory, olfactory and somato-sensory fields is generally not noticed; and I know this simply by self-reflection; I don't need scientific experiments to tell me that.
But that's not what I'm talking about anyway; I'm saying that what we are immediately aware of, we are immediately aware of; that's just what we experience, and I'm not attempting to draw any further conclusions from that. — Janus
The sciences continually revise the terms and inferential relations through which we understand the world, which aspects of the world are salient and significant within that understanding, and how those aspects of the world matter to our overall understanding. — Joshs
What is it about the mind of a scientist that shackles them in chains so unbreakable, yet as gossamer in the hands of the philosopher? — Isaac
refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
If sll you meant was that yhr boundaries overlap, then I don't see how that forms a criticism. Systems can be defined. They therefore had thst which is the system and thst which is not. If they don't have those two categories they are not defined. — Isaac
Christ! Is this going to be one of your stupidly arrogant "all maths is wrong" arguments all over again. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy increases during any spontaneous process in an isolated system. Living systems are not isolated systems. The only truly closed system is the universe so any part of it decreasing entropy is not defying the second law. This is physics basics I learnt in school. — Isaac
Mathjax error, my apologies. I've corrected it, so thanks for pointing it out. The Mathjax 's' is the hidden state, not the normal type 's'. — Isaac
...modern philosophy has miraculously broken free of ten thousand year old shackles. — Isaac
the scientist as detached observer, an all-seeing eye, in a world of objects theoretically intelligible in terms of their primary attributes, describable in terms of Cartesian algebraic geometery — Wayfarer
it appears to me that you responded with logically consistent intelligibility. I have no choice but to seriously admire that response, arising as it apparently does from one human, and directed toward another, constructed from neither consideration of brain machinations nor philosophical predications as a product of them. — Mww
While it is certain that each form of necessity belongs to its own domain, holding sway only within it, it still remains to be acknowledged which came first. — Mww
your hidden states are an interesting concept. I might find a place for them. — Mww
he begins from the actual contextual discursive engagements from which such grand ideas are generated. — Joshs
what we are immediately aware of, we are immediately aware of; that's just what we experience — Janus
As I said before it's just two different ways of looking at it. — Janus
I'll have a go at that. — Wayfarer
But if in reality, there is an overlapping of the things which you are applying the theory to, then these things cannot be adequately understood as discrete systems. — Metaphysician Undercover
You can "define" anything, anyway you want, but if that definition is not represented in reality — Metaphysician Undercover
you define systems as being distinct or discrete, but the things which you apply the theory to are not really that way, they overlap, and share, etc — Metaphysician Undercover
You insist on "discrete systems", but now you deny "isolated systems". How could there be a discrete system which is not isolated from other systems? — Metaphysician Undercover
it is quite obvious that we need to assume internal hidden states as well — Metaphysician Undercover
The composition, or constitution of the system doing the inferencing is hidden from it — Metaphysician Undercover
That's only a problem for accounting practices(notions of mind/consciousness/meaningful experience) when and if they are based upon one of the aforementioned dichotomies. — creativesoul
as an elemental part of all meaningful experience(consciousness; thought; belief; etc.). — creativesoul
What you've not answered is why we shouldn't assume that the philosophers providing these alternative accounts have any fewer (if different) unexamined preconceptions. — Isaac
But then by the same token, so do the replacement philosophies. — Isaac
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong. — Does Reason Know what it is Missing?
Then isn't that somewhat trivially tautologous? — Isaac
It seems that you want to say that we do not directly perceive anything at all. That seems to be based upon current knowledge regarding how our relevant biological machinery works. Good stuff, by the way. It's as though the denial is based upon the fact that so many different autonomous biological structures are necessary and involved in a timely(albiet virtually negligible increments) fashion.
That's only a problem for accounting practices(notions of mind/consciousness/meaningful experience) when and if they are based upon one of the aforementioned dichotomies. — creativesoul
I'm not really sure what you mean here? — Isaac
As best I can tell, there's no problem with someone accepting most, if not all, of your explanations and simply noting that you've done a great job of teasing out all of the nuance regarding how biological machinery works autonomously as an elemental part of all meaningful experience(consciousness; thought; belief; etc.). — creativesoul
Are you perhaps suggesting that some parts of meaningful experience are not mediated by how the underlying biological machinery works? — Isaac
....you're still operating within the science paradigm. Philosophy is a different way of thinking or being — Wayfarer
The primary target of this paper is sentience. Our use of the word “sentience” here is in the sense of “responsive to sensory impressions”. It is not used in the philosophy of mind sense; namely, the capacity to perceive or experience subjectively, i.e., phenomenal consciousness, or having ‘qualia’. Sentience here, simply implies the existence of a non-empty subset of systemic states; namely, sensory states. In virtue of the conditional dependencies that define this subset (i.e., the Markov blanket partition), the internal states are necessarily ‘responsive to’ sensory states and thus the dictionary definition is fulfilled. The deeper philosophical issue of sentience speaks to the hard problem of tying down quantitative experience or subjective experience within the information geometry afforded by the Markov blanket construction.
The meta-problem of consciousness (Chalmers (this issue)) is the problem of explaining the behaviors and verbal reports that we associate with the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. These may include reports of puzzlement, of the attractiveness of dualism, of explanatory gaps, and the like. We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem. Our solution takes as its starting point the emerging picture of the brain as a hierarchical inference engine. We show why such a device, operating under familiar forms of adaptive pressure, may come to represent some of its mid-level inferences as especially certain. These mid-level states confidently re-code raw sensory stimulation in ways that (they are able to realize) fall short of fully determining how properties and states of affairs are arranged in the distal world. This drives a wedge between experience and the world.
...
Qualia – just like dogs and cats – are part of the inferred suite of hidden causes (i.e., experiential hypotheses) that best explain and predict the evolving flux of energies across our sensory surfaces.
...
Schwarz’ imaginary foundations are purpose-built to fill that role. They are purpose-built to be known with great certainty, while not themselves being made true simply by states of the distal world. Creatures thus equipped would be able, were they sufficiently intelligent, to assert that despite holding all the phenomenal facts fixed, how the world really is might vary, even to the point of there being nothing at all bearing the properties so confidently represented as being present.
...
We suggest that ‘imaginary foundations’, far from being a highly speculative addition to standard accounts of hierarchical Bayesian inference, are in fact a direct consequence of them. They arise when mid-level re-coding of impinging energies are estimated as highly certain, in ways that leave room for the same mid-level encodings to be paired with different higher-level pictures, including ones in which nothing in the world corresponds to the properties and features at all (as we might judge in the lucid dreaming case).
...
That puzzlement finds its fullest expression in the literature concerning the ‘explanatory gap’, where we are almost fooled into believing that there’s something special about qualia – that they are not simply highly certain midlevel encodings optimized to control adaptive action.
...
From the PP perspective, [qualia] are just more predictively potent mid-level latent variables in our best generative model of our own embodied exchanges with the world. They are not some kind of raw datum on which to predicate inferences about the state of body and world. Rather, they are themselves among the many products of such inference.
...
But in another sense, this is a way of being a revisionary kind of qualia realist, since colors, sights, and sounds are revealed as generative model posits pretty much on a par with representations of dogs, cats, and vicars.
...
Our distinctive capacities for puzzlement then arise because, courtesy of the depth and complexity of our generative model, we are able to see that these groupings (the redness of the objects, the cuteness of some animals) reflect highly certain information that nonetheless fails to fully mandate specific ways for the external world (or body) to be. We thus become aware that these states, known with great certainty, seem to belong to the ‘appearance’ side of an appearance/reality divide (see Allen (1997)).
...
It is realist in that it identifies qualia with distinctive mid-level sensory states known with high systemic (and 100% agentive) certainty.
...
Our own qualitative experiences, this suggests, are not some kind of raw datum but are themselves the product of an unconscious (Bayesian) inference, reflecting the genuine (but entirely non-mysterious) combination of processes described above.
We present and defend a solution to the meta-problem....
So? They only need to be defined systems for the model to work, not closed ones. — Isaac
Who says the definition is not represented in reality? — Isaac
Overlapping and sharing in no way prevents a system for being defined, and it only need be defined to have internal and external states, to have probability functions performing gradient climbing equations against entropy. — Isaac
Easily thus. "Everything within the cell membrane is the system, everything outside of it is not". Nothing about the fact that my newly defined 'system' exchanges molecules with the system outside of it, prevents it from being defined as a system and therefore being modelled as performing this gradient climbing function. If you can't explain how you think the openness of systems prevents this model then simply repeating that it does doesn't get us anywhere. — Isaac
Internal states are literally defined as those which are not hidden. It's just the definition of the terminology. — Isaac
Then it is an external state as far as the system is concerned. — Isaac
I didn't mean to say nothing was going on. — Isaac
I think that the scientific and the philosophical domains are not so very different from one another, and so the question of which came first is not answerable by declaring 'philosophy!' or 'science!'. — Isaac
All ideas are culturally embedded narratives. All of them. — Isaac
You frequently seem to have this dichotomy on how you express these ideas which makes them unconvincing. You'll talk a lot about unexamined preconceptions, culturally embedded narratives, the ephemeral nature of what is real... (all ideas I'm very sympathetic to). Until....
Until it comes to your personal favorites. Then the rhetoric suddenly changes. Now it's all 'actual', 'must', 'is', 'are'... You begin by saying that ideas are shackled by unexamined presuppositions, culturally embedded narratives, etc, then proceed to announce replacement concepts as if they were the unshackled 'Truths' of the way things are. — Isaac
All ideas are culturally embedded narratives. All of them. That includes Heidegger, that includes Rouse, that includes Zahavi, that includes the idea that all ideas are culturally embedded narratives... All of them — Isaac
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