It is essential that they are both at one with the world of the collective mind - move smoothly through everyday society - yet also permanently tense, angsty, unfulfilled, etc, because they are also necessarily standing apart from that everyday society as its critic and frustrated “other”. — apokrisis

Looks like you touched on it here.

This collective (embodied) mind(ing) is discussed by various philosophers (Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc.)

The subject is even pretty much dissolved by some thinkers who get labelled pomo, if I understand correctly. So it's a complex situation.

These quotes might help :

The subject that sees objects in the world cannot see itself seeing, Žižek notes, any more than a person can jump over her own shadow. To the extent that a subject can reflectively see itself, it sees itself not as a subject but as one more represented object, what Kant calls the “empirical self” or what Žižek calls the “self” (versus the subject) in The Plague of Fantasies. The subject knows that it is something, Žižek argues. But it does not and can never know what Thing it is “in the Real”, as he puts it (see 2e). This is why it must seek clues to its identity in its social and political life, asking the question of others (and of the big Other (see 2b)) which Žižek argues defines the subject as such: che voui? (what do you want from me?).

It is crucial to Žižek’s position, though, that Žižek denies the apparent implication of this that the subject is some kind of supersensible entity, for example, an immaterial and immortal soul, and so forth. The subject is not a special type of Thing outside of the phenomenal reality we can experience, for Žižek. As we saw in 1e above, such an idea would in fact reproduce in philosophy the type of thinking which, he argues, characterizes political ideologies and the subject’s fundamental fantasy (see 3a). It is more like a fold or crease in the surface of this reality, as Žižek puts it in Tarrying With the Negative, the point within the substance of reality wherein that substance is able to look at itself, and see itself as alien to itself.

https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/#He

What is this fold or crease ? A generalized seeing of the world (before organization in/by signifiers)?

Perhaps you can also comment on the self in relation to the community, as something like the way a body is held responsible. — plaque flag

Self awareness is socially constructed as I say. That is familiar psychology.

Where I would take things forward today - given the emergence of biosemiosis and Bayesian mechanics as new advances - is that the human individual is shaped by four key levels of semiosis. The psyche is constructed by codes in the ascending forms of genes, neurons, words and numbers. Biology is about the first two, sociology about the second two.

So the Bayesian mechanics approach of Karl Friston says all organisms are prediction machines - embodiments of Robert Rosen’s modelling relation - that work to reduce their levels of surprisal. In less jargon, we learn to predict reality in such routine fashion that we can control its flow without ever being surprised.

Of course, there are always going to be surprises. But the goal is to reduce them to the bare minimum needed so that we can navigate life and do stuff like land a plane just by staring at a fixed mental spot even as we are buffeted by winds.

Genes thus exist as the informational machinery needed to encode surprisal in metabolic terms. Genes react to the chemical signals of our interior metabolic worlds to keep everything flowing smoothly in a way that continually rebuilds our physical selfhood.

Neurons are next level in that they are the informational machinery that encode environmental surprise. They are the outward view of our body as it exists in a world of entropy gradients and material uncertainty.

Then words deal with social uncertainty, and numbers encode … Platonic uncertainty.

So the development of language in Homo sapiens allowed us to get organised as social organisms - group minds. A crucial part of being able to function as such is to be aware of the self as an individual player with a collective game.

We model our social environment in a way that allows us to glide to smooth landings and achieve our interpersonal goals with minimal surprises. But it is an always complex game. Not up to soap opera levels of challenge perhaps, but demanding enough to need a large brain.

Then comes the new thing of numbers. The birth of maths, logic and rationality in Ancient Greece, sidelined for a while, and then returning in force with the arrival of science and technology to implement its possibilities in a world rich with the entropic possibilities of unburnt fossil fuel.

A new level of the organism had developed that stands even above the conventional social world of the hunter-gatherer, wandering pastoralist and settled village farmer. We now need to be civilised selves on top of being tribal selves.

The Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction were the efforts to define what it would mean to be selves that were rational, technological, pragmatic, studious, rule following, mechanically disciplined. The Romantic reaction - as Fukuyama notes - was about cranking up the antithesis to the thesis. It polished up the “other” that is the irrational deeper truth of authentic being.

From a semiotic point of view, the pure Platonic abstraction of the logical symbol - the dichotomous zeros and ones of physics-strength information theory - I has taken over the human animal. We now hold hands with the pent-up desires of fossil fuel that just wants to burn, baby, burn. And so we drill, baby, drill, and consume, baby, consume. :grin:

Thus you can see the Peircean metaphysical story predicts it all, and minimises the surprise, of where we now stand in our Hegelian historical arc. We have reached the summit of abstraction with a brand of semiosis that is so pure as information that it engages entirely nakedly with its “other” of entropification for entropy’s sake.

PoMo and AP are pathetically weak when it comes to accounting for reality as it actually is. The evolution of symbols tells us why we continue to act as if we have no choice but to do things like climate change a whole planet.

Our socialised linguistic selves have us still playing the old games of the agrarian era - the lifestyle and sense of self appropriate to living with the entropic flux of the daily solar cycle. And before we could implement civilised controls on our industrial revolution/fossil fuel reincarnation as rational-logical beings, we had already locked ourselves in on the exponential rise to destruction.

Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics.

Fossil fuel forced us to move up to a world valued in dollars. Most folk want to move it back to a world valued in dignity, respect. Or even just likes. Even just attention.

So anyway, any useful analysis of the socially-constructed self now has to understand the big gulf between a semiosis of words and a semiosis of numbers. Something really did change between 1750 and 1850. Smart structuralists like Fukuyama are starting to figure it out.

Thank you !

Have you looked into Moloch as a game theory metaphor ? A generalized prisoner's dilemma ? Moloch demands a tower ! We must play this game of Jenga. Those who won't are eliminated, assimilated by those who will. We are machine elves dropped like a match on fossil fuels, maximizing throughput ? I'd like to know more about dissipative structures. If you have any comments on that, I'm all ears.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics. — apokrisis

:up:

I don't think it's pure distraction. It matters whether abortion is legal. But it looks like a consolation prize.

So the Bayesian mechanics approach of Karl Friston says all organisms are prediction machines - embodiments of Robert Rosen’s modelling relation - that work to reduce their levels of surprisal. In less jargon, we learn to predict reality in such routine fashion that we can control its flow without ever being surprised. — apokrisis

How might you account for technological progress ? Or the enlightenment goal of increasing autonomy ? In other words, how does timebinding fit in here ?

Have you looked into Moloch as a game theory metaphor ? — plaque flag

Not as game theory. Ginsberg writes nice lines...

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

But it makes the usual mistake of thinking that it is the mechanical part of the story that is "monstrous" when that is in fact the aspect that both separates and connects the organism to its world in the biosemiotic view.

We are machine elves dropped like a match on fossil fuels, maximizing throughput ? I'd like to know more about dissipative structures. — plaque flag

If you search for my mentions of the thermodynamic imperative, I've done tons of posts on this.

But a more serious post on biosemiosis as rate independent code in control of rate independent dissipation can be seen here – https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

How might you account for technological progress ? Or the enlightenment goal of increasing autonomy ? In other words, how does timebinding fit in here ? — plaque flag

My argument would be that organisms arise in nature as code-based dissipative structure. Life from the start was simply about the genetic ability to pass on algorithms that controlled the dissipation of chemical gradients. That long post explains what we have now discovered about this.

And then looking at the extraordinary human journey in particular, it has just been one new entropic bonanza after another. We have kept getting smarter because we kept stumbling into new lifestyles that would pay for the greater entropy involved.

So 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus had invented fire and cooking. The great apes were driving down a dead end where they relied on forest fruit and herbs. They literally need to chew and rest up all day to consume enough calories to support their much smaller brains. Erectus changed the game so we could both soften meat and tubers, while also sleeping out in the open with the big predators. Our bodies and guts shrunk, allowing our brains to double in size. And we moved towards an hour a day of chewing to get the calories, leaving lots of time to do more interesting stuff, like chip axes and carve spears.

So a clever trick - control of fire - opened the door for big evolutionary change. We just had to be able to pass on the cultural habit in timebound fashion. Some sort of protolanguage seems needed. But the rewards in terms of entropic return was huge. We became animals that uniquely consumed wood – all this unwanted savannah trees just poking out of the ground – and gained in terms of fat and protein.

Homo stumbled onto further such entropy bonanzas that no one else could unlock. The ice ages created the Mammoth Steppe where great herds of horse, cattle, elephants, etc, were an easy lunch for any critter with spears and teamwork. Sapiens had clearly developed proper grammatical language and a new level of social organisation. When they gate-crashed the Mammoth Steppe around 43 kya, it was curtains for Neanderthals in a few thousand years. The better semiotic tech ruled.

Again, along came the Holocene – the sudden stable thaw – at 10 kya. The new bonanza available to our intelligence was the life of the settled crop and domesticated animal farmer. We became socially reorganised around that. The new level of semiosis was literacy and numeracy – the record keeping and counting systems that could organise a river valley empire. A timebinding way of kings taxing a kingdom, a way of lords owning land and slaves.

You see the argument? Intelligence in the form of semiotic innovation as well as simple neurosemiotic capacity both needs feeding, and is justified by being able to consume more. The Second Law says if it is possible for organisms to degrade locked up negentropy – do better than the unorganised world was doing – then such organisms must evolve.

The trees of the savannah demanded an intelligence that could burn them. The herds of the Mammoth Steppe demanded a super-predator – the new organismic human collectives that hunted so effectively. The Holocene's climatic stability demanded settled farmer collectives that would invest in irrigation channels, manuring flocks, crop rotation, and all the other technological changes that greatly increased calorie yields.

And so it rolls on until maths-based science could really make an explosive leap. Political change saw 18th C farming reorganised so that landowners could enclose property and compete to produce marketable food surpluses. Peasants were "freed" to go live in cites. The population that had been flat-lined for nearly a thousand years could start its exponential climb.

Agriculture went next level within a capitalistic and democratic economic structure. Then the Industrial Revolution could hit, stumbling first into the "free energy" of buried coal, and then buried oil.

Whaling was another brief and unsustainable oil and calories boom. Humans investigated every niche and built lives - economic ecosystems and cultural mythologies – around each of them. But the most rewarding combinations of politics and entropy were always going to win out and come to dominate human identity.

Ginsberg wails about Moloch. But the Beats celebrated the image of cool Neal Cassidy – driving the endless American highway in a big-ass car. Entropification personified. The flow experience of mindlessly riding a surging wave of gasoline and asphalt.

Once you learn to love a V8, what hope is there that you will lobby for hair-shirt Green energy policies? Burning gas has become a defining identity issue.

We became animals that uniquely consumed wood – all this unwanted savannah trees just poking out of the ground – and gained in terms of fat and protein. — apokrisis

:up:

I never thought of it that way.

Intelligence in the form of semiotic innovation as well as simple neurosemiotic capacity both needs feeding, and is justified by being able to consume more. The Second Law says if it is possible for organisms to degrade locked up negentropy – do better than the unorganised world was doing – then such organisms must evolve. — apokrisis

I understand the bold part. Could you say more about the underlined part ? I think you are saying we should expect evolution where it increases throughput, maximizes burn ?

Ginsberg wails about Moloch. But the Beats celebrated the image of cool Neal Cassidy – driving the endless American highway in a big-ass car. Entropification personified. The flow experience of mindlessly riding a surging wave of gasoline and asphalt.

Once you learn to love a V8, what hope is there that you will lobby for hair-shirt Green energy policies? Burning gas has become a defining identity issue. — apokrisis

Yes. Ginsberg's poem is maybe about lust and tenderness, the desire for individual erotic expansion, so basically an alternative version of Cassidy's colorblind hot-rodding cocksmanship.

The gametheory Moloch idea is simple. Who can afford to slow the burn ? No one. Who can afford to not build bigger and badder and even bloodier AI ? No one. Saints are roadkill. Moloch demands a biblically tall Jenga tower.

I would call it amusing PoMo tosh — apokrisis

PoMo style deconstruction, employing the usual suspects of Marx and Freud. — apokrisis

Zizek is famously critical of postmodernism, which is why modernists such as Marx and Freud are important reference points for him (despite what you see as their Romantic reaction). Universalism and the political importance of the subject, two things Zizek seems to like, are eminently nonpostmodernist, don’t you think?

Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics. — apokrisis

This criticism of the Left is very much in line with Zizek’s.

Maybe it’s because postmodernism is his philosophical milieu that he comes across as postmodernist.

.

Fossil fuel forced us to move up to a world valued in dollars. Most folk want to move it back to a world valued in dignity, respect. Or even just likes. Even just attention. — apokrisis

:up:

Any thoughts on how AI might affect our existential or technological or thermodynamic situation ? I think a storm is coming, beautiful and terrible.

This criticism of the Left is very much in line with Zizek’s.

Maybe it’s because postmodernism is his philosophical milieu that he comes across as postmodernist. — Jamal

:up:

The word 'postmodern' is a bit of a hot potato, too.

the whole idea of “100% reduction to material cause” is the reductionist delusion. — apokrisis

But if something is not 100% reducible to the fundamental reality, it is strongly emergent. Later, it seems to me you're denying strong emergence as well. I don't understand.

Zizek is famously critical of postmodernism, — Jamal

Did you check @absoluteaspiration’s post on his consciousness account? That’s what I commented on. Is it an accurate précis?

Zizek agrees with the argumentative technique of Immanuel Kant's transcendendental idealism. For example, he believes that the subject only emerges once a Rational Being imposes ideal forms onto the objects of bare perception. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he understands the imposition of these forms as the subject unconsciously repeating the scene of a traumatic encounter. However, at the outset, this is a "primordial repression" of an encounter that is imputed to be traumatic only in hindsight. The subject that emerges in this way has to be further "hystericized" before it can become the subject engaged in emancipatory struggle. — absoluteaspiration

It doesn’t come across as AP, nor Pragmatic, but seems throughly Continental in style.

↪apokrisis
the whole idea of “100% reduction to material cause” is the reductionist delusion.
— apokrisis

But if something is not 100% reducible to the fundamental reality, it is strongly emergent. Later, it seems to me you're denying strong emergence as well. I don't understand. — Eugen

Or to be more specific: what is the difference between not being 100% reducible and being strongly emergent?

But if something is not 100% reducible to the fundamental reality, that's strong emergence. — Eugen

Yep. That is how the reductionist ends up with substance dualism. The mind just pops out as a whole new class of property with its own causal story.

A holistic understanding of emergence is different in that both the global form and the local materials emerge in mutual causal fashion. There is no fundamental stuff - some ur-substance - that begets the other emergent stuff. The very thing of “stuff” is emergent from the deeper “thing” of a logical vagueness, a Peircean Firstness, an Anaximanderian Apeiron.

It is like quantum mechanics. There are no particles without observers, or observers without particles. So neither particles, nor observers are fundamental. It is the mutual relation between the two that is “fundamental”. Or at the deeper level, what is fundamental is the impossibility of this relation failing to emerge from unbounded potential.

Did you check absoluteaspiration’s post on his consciousness account? That’s what I commented on. Is it an accurate précis? — apokrisis

Ah, I thought you meant Zizek. Don’t know if it’s accurate.

Yep. That is how the reductionist ends up with substance dualism. The mind just pops out as a whole new class of property with its own causal story. — apokrisis

- Agree. In strong emergence, that is exactly what happens.

The very thing of “stuff” is emergent from the deeper “thing” of a logical vagueness, a Peircean Firstness, an Anaximanderian Apeiron. — apokrisis

- So there is an ultimate fundamental reality from which everything else emerges. The difference is that this reality is not ''material", palpable but some kind of platonic mathematical/logical world. And from that world emerges the rest.
But in regard to this fundamental ''logical vagueness", mind and matter are both strongly emergent. Correct?

Any thoughts on how AI might affect our existential or technological or thermodynamic situation ? I think a storm is coming, beautiful and terrible. — plaque flag

Biosemiosis defines life and mind in relation to the regulation of dissipation. So computers lack that kind of intimate connection to reality. They can’t be “conscious” or even intelligent in any autonomous sense until they are in a modelling relation upon which their moment to moment existence relies.

AI is a misnomer. What we have are pattern recognition algorithms.

Like any technology, these systems exist as extensions of our dissipative interests. They amplify us rather than replace us.

The danger of current AI lies in that amplification. AI can be used to extend our rational reach. But also our irrational tendencies. They could plug us more closely into the world as it actually is, or fabricate the world of our crazy conspiracy theories.

We are seeing how easily anyone can concoct deepfake evidence like the Pope in a puffy jacket or Trump running from the cops. How long before our currently already confused landscape of fake news becomes completely impossible to read as truth or fiction? AI is powerful enough to erode people’s sense of reality in ways that make Trump and anti-vaxxers the good old days.

Information autocracy already exists as a state tool in Russia and other such regimes. We already have infowar. We already have large chunks of democracies under the sway of social media bubbles.

It’s about to go on steroids once any 14 year old can produce documentary proof of any scenario imaginable.

So Joscha Bach's computationalist theory of mind would be wrong in your opinion, right?

.

They can’t be “conscious” or even intelligent in any autonomous sense until they are in a modelling relation upon which their moment to moment existence relies. — apokrisis

Would this be easy to see ? I can imagine some analogue of evolution. We clone (with modification) the ones we like as if they were dogs or sweet sweet corn. Maybe DNA and source code will use us as moist robot labor.

Like any technology, these systems exist as extensions of our dissipative interests. They amplify us rather than replace us. — apokrisis

I don't find something like replacement impossible. It's not that computers are so great. It's that we are not so wonderful as we wanted to believe. I mean we are fun primates, but why couldn't we create a synthetic brain better than ours ? And we have in some ways already, it seems. These bots know more than any single human.

But what do they want ?
But what did we ever want ?
Codes that outreplicates is code that hangs around, whatever it does or doesn't tell itself about what it wants or is.

Can we segue back to Zizek by noting AI are brains minus the need for Lacanian psychoanalysis and therein lies the relevance of such gobbledeygook? The symbolic escaped its hairy cell and fully alive in blissful self-ignorance?

you might get more responses if your post was more than "Go and research Zizek for me so I don't have to." — bert1

:-)

↪Mikie Proudly declaring your ignorance. Not a good look. — Jamal

As opposed to proudly pretending not to be ignorant?

So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the world’s still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner. — apokrisis

Good stuff.

Ok... so you're basically saying that the fundamental-emergent framework can be replaced by another system of reference, by eliminating the ''fundamental". By doing so, emergentism disappears.
AM I right?

Maybe DNA and source code will use us as moist robot labor. — plaque flag

But if my thesis is that life and mind is already entrained by the telos of the Second Law, then source code only amplifies our entropification reach unless it also becomes its own “moist” machine that grows its own data farms through some kind of metabolic connection to the resources of the world.

We feel the call of the Second Law viscerally. AI doesn’t need to represent the real world by design. It is only a machine and not an intelligent dissipative structure as we supply both the bottom up metabolic resources and the top down telos. We build the data farms and power grids. The current crop of “AI” then just pattern matches the artefact of our written symbols - groups of letters found in vast datasets representing all the online chitter chatter of the human world.

The words have visceral meaning for us. They have no meaning for the pattern matching algorithms that simply rearrange them into convincing simulations of something someone might have said. There is no felt reason that connects the data dots, no mind that can pragmatically use the symbol strings to organise a collection of psyches to do actual collective work in the world.

It is all a hollow charade if you are talking about actual consciousness. But as I say, it is also a potent technology that could undermine our own necessary human connection to a practical reality.

Bro, are you going to ignore all my questions? :lol:

Can we segue back to Zizek by noting AI are brains minus the need for Lacanian psychoanalysis and therein lies the relevance of such gobbledeygook? The symbolic escaped its hairy cell and fully alive in blissful self-ignorance? — Baden

So the issue is what is it in us and not in them (if anything) that needs or is addressed by Zizek's Lacan ? Are the bots the self-ignorant ? What happens if communities of them are allowed to interact and reproduce ? Could there be a competition for electricity and memory that encourages a model of the self-world relationship ? We could also ask about qualia (the stuff, if any, 'under' concept).

AI doesn’t need to represent the real world by design. It is only a machine and not an intelligent dissipative structure as we supply both the bottom up metabolic resources and the top down telos. We build the data farms and power grids. — apokrisis

What about the virus metaphor then ? AI tempts us to make more of it.

The words have visceral meaning for us. — apokrisis

Of course I'm tempted to say of course, but there's something elusive about meaning. Wittgenstein wrote: it's not how the world is but that it is that is the mystical. But he also saw that this was an empty tautology. Does the hard problem lack sufficient meaning ? Is it a lyrical confusion ?

The agony of being bounced about in the realm of your own thoughts, chasing the core of being that thus becomes precisely the mysterious absence, etc. — apokrisis

This is some of what I'm getting at. What do we think this core of being is ? The thereness of the there ? The pure witness ? the givenness of the given ? a glowing plenitude ineffably present ?

It is all a hollow charade if you are talking about actual consciousness. — apokrisis

That's just it. What do/can we mean by calling our own consciousness actual ? For some (clearly not you), it may be tempting to project a divine spark on the machine. For others (for me) , the status of that spark is itself put in question.

If one ignores this 'actual' consciousness, is there another way to defend the gap ? Is electronic silicon life impossible in principle ? What would change your mind, etc. ?