I attribute memory; or thinking, or feeling, or seeing, or knowing; to people all the time just based on their self-reporting and other behavior I can observe. That's how we know the world. Mental processes are not special. — T Clark

I'll again propose and argue that his attribution is due to inference - much of it unconscious and hence automatic - and not due to (first-person) observation (which can only be direct - rather than, for example, hearsay). For instance:

Of course I can. Here I go. Watch me. Hey, Javra, what are you remembering right now? — T Clark

What if I answer "nothing" or "a pink dolphin" or something else and it happens to be a proposition that I'm fully aware doesn't conform to the reality of what my current recollections are. These examples are obvious, but then I could answer with a proposition that, thought false, would be easily believable by you - and one which you'd have no possible way of verifying: e.g., "I'm now remembering your last post before this one".

You can infer what I'm remembering - but you do not observe it. Hopefully that makes better sense?

You never see anyone's mind. You can see their behaviour or hear what they say, but you never see the mind except for in a metaphorical sense. — Wayfarer

We infer things all the time without seeing them directly. We know that two black holes collided eight million light years away because of some squiggles on a meter at the Ligo facilities. We believe dark matter, which we can't currently observe directly, exists because of the behavior of normal matter we can observe. I know my children love me and they know I love them, but they can't experience the love I feel directly. Almost everything we know we know indirectly and not as a result of our own direct observation.

I'll again propose and argue that his attribution is due to inference - much of it unconscious and hence automatic - and not do to (first-person) observation (which can only be direct - rather than, for example, hearsay). — javra

As I just wrote in my previous post to @Wayfarer, most of what we know is not based on our own direct observations. People tell us things. We read about things or see them on TV or the internet. When the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device. From those readouts they infer the behavior of the particles.

What if I answer "nothing" or "a pink dolphin" or something else and it happens to be a proposition that I'm fully aware doesn't not conform to the reality of what my current recollections are. These examples are obvious, but then I could answer with a proposition that, thought false, would be easily believable by you - and one which you'd have no possible way of verifying: e.g., "I'm now remembering your last post before this one". — javra

It is a commonplace of all philosophy, at least since Descartes, that all our observations are imperfect and might be anywhere from 99% right to 100% wrong. At the same time, if you and I are both people of good will and both interested in learning about how people think, you're reports of your experience of your mind are likely to be valid, if imperfect.

OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science. — javra

I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. So you seem to be introducing some strong division between "strict theory" and "empirical science". Although I'll degree that in social terms, science does divide between its whiteboard theorists and its lab-coated experimenters. There is a lot of good natured banter between the camps that can also turn to frank hostility when prestige and grants are involved.

But anyhow, it is another social fact that the failure to find supersymmetry – where the expectation was quite high it ought to be showing up at current accelerator energies – is a big part of the reason for string theory, and thus M-theory, suffering a drop in stock price in the current ToE ideas market.

So the interaction between mathematically-robust theory and empirical constraint on belief in that theory is a delicate business. A social game where a community takes a Bayesian view on what smells right and what line of inquiry to invest further in.

To the outside world, science will paint its adventures much more by the book. The funders and managers or science like that. But from the inside, something much more recognisably human is going on.

The ASSC is a very good example of what passes for "science". It is the kind of open mic gathering that can really launch your career. Chalmers and Koch are good examples. Even down to the publicity stunt of betting cases of wine so as to put the drama of big questions in terms every tax-paying science funder can relate to. And puts their names firmly at the centre of the story for years to come.

One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test. — javra

Bollocks. Bayesian reasoning accepts the dog that doesn't bark as part of its baseline of probabilities.

You are trying to defend a methodological purity that would make working scientists laugh – privately, not publicly of course.

I spent some time with the psi research crowd because they were an example of science in fact trying to nail its methods down with absolute textbook rigour. It was a fascinating tale of the social limits of practicing what you preach. The rigour was eventually exceptional. The scope for any "psi effect" was publicly quantified to decimal places.

Yet still the community divided into the skeptics who knew the believers were cheating, they just couldn't show how, while the believers accused the skeptics of using their unconscious bias to suppress the ability of the squeaky clean labs to replicate the effect that the believers could produce on the same gear.

It always is going to come back to the way humans actually reason and how brains actually operate. Which is why I highlight Friston and his Bayesian brain model of epistemology.

A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text? — javra

Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?

I can see how it makes sense as a utterance from the familiar point of view of the Western philosophical tradition grew out of the theologisation of Ancient Greek metaphysics. The hylomorphism of matter~form transformed into the Cartesian divide of res extensa~res cogitans. Neuroscience came along with its challenge to finally understand the mind as embodied modelling – the Bayesian prediction machine – but people clung fast to the Hard Problem that arises from believing consciousness equals a representation of the world, not a relation in which the semiotic Umwelt of the self in its world is the neurobiological construction ... that is in turn socially extended when the further encoding machinery of speech and maths happens along.

So you ask a question directly from your point of view. You ask it in righteous fashion. It would be a grave discourtesy for me not to stand in your shoes and thus be forced to agree with anything you might say.

But sorry. I've spent too much time with scientists and natural philosophers. I can see where you are coming from and I speak from a viewpoint that enjoys the advantages we call the third person.

Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text? — javra

Same tactic keeps repeating. And this is instructive. It is the only argument that sustains the Hard Problem. The insistence that there is a first person point of view that has primacy.

But listen again to my third person description based on the semiosis of the modelling relation.

Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. It is the construction of an Umwelt.

Until you start to deal with this as the primal fact – the co-arising of the self and the world as the dichotomy that drives the Cartesian division within the model itself – you aren't going to have a clue where I am coming from.

Semiosis is an empirical theory of the "conscious self" around which a world of experience is made to dance – for good pragmatic purpose.

Science is now seeing this as the way to account for the self as a product of the "world" it constructs, the totality that is its Umwelt, so that it can then function "selfishly" within the actual real world in a reliable and largely automatic or unconscious and unthinking fashion.

We infer things all the time without seeing them directly — T Clark

Of course. I acknowledged that we can infer that there are minds, but that the mind is not an object for us.

the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device. — T Clark

Right. And there is controversy about what these particles are, whether they're really particles or actually waves, or excitations in a field. Instrumentalists say, it doesn't matter, shut up and calculate.

But all of that is irrelevant to the question at hand. At least objects - a lump of matter, a marble or a bullet - can be described objectively. You and I can pick it up, weigh it, ascertain its attributes and qualities. But consciousness is nothing like that. You can say to me, I'm depressed, or I'm happy, and I will know what you mean, because I too am a conscious being, and I know what it is like to be conscious or happy, so I will infer that I feel the things that you feel. But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. I could put an object in a lunar lander and send it to the moon, but there is no way to pack and send a feeling, an emotion. It can only exist as a state of being, but what that being is, is precisely what eludes objective description.

Science – including psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience – can only address empirical givens by definition. — javra

FWIW, I'm in agreement, as I hope is also evident from what I've said above.

Useful crib on scientific method:

Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.

Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.”

The demand for quantitative prediction places a burden on the scientist. Mathematical theories must be formulated and be precisely tied to empirical measurements. Of course, it would be much easier to construct rational theories to explain nature without empirical validation or to perform experiments and process data without a rigorous theoretical framework. On their own, either process may be difficult and require substantial ingenuity. The theories can involve deep mathematics, and the data may be obtained by amazing technologies and processed by massive computer algorithms. Both contribute to scientific knowledge, indeed, are necessary for knowledge concerning complex systems such as those encountered in biology. However, each on its own does not constitute a scientific theory. In a famous aphorism, Immanuel Kant stated, “Concepts without percepts are blind; percepts without concepts are empty.” — Edward Dougherty

At issue is the question of how this is applicable to the question of the nature of conscious experience (and remember, that is the question.) It may be asked, where is the rigour seen in scientific analysis, when it comes to the kind of first-person analysis that the objection is suggesting? David Chalmers does actually address this:

To explain third-person data, one needs to explain the objective functioning of a system. For example, to explain perceptual discrimination, one needs to explain how a cognitive process can perform the objective function of distinguishing various different stimuli and produce appropriate responses. To explain an objective function of this sort, one specifies a mechanism that performs the function. In the sciences of the mind, this is usually a neural or a computational mechanism. For example, in the case of perceptual discrimination, one specifies the neural or computational mechanism responsible for distinguishing the relevant stimuli. In many cases we do not yet know exactly what these mechanisms are, but there seems to be no principled obstacle to finding them, and so to explaining the relevant third-person data.

This sort of explanation is common throughout many different areas of science. For example, in the explanation of genetic phenomena, what needed explaining was the objective function of transmitting hereditary characteristics through reproduction. Watson and Crick isolated a mechanism that could potentially perform this function: the DNA molecule, through replication of strands of the double helix. As we have come to understand how the DNA molecule performs this function, genetic phenomena have gradually come to be explained. The result is a sort of reductive explanation: we have explained higher-level phenomena (genetic phenomena) in terms of lower-level processes (molecular biology). One can reasonably hope that the same sort of model will apply in the sciences of the mind, at least for the explanation of the objective functioning of the cognitive system in terms of neurophysiology.

When it comes to first-person data, however, this model breaks down. The reason is that first-person data — the data of subjective experience — are not data about objective functioning. One way to see this is to note that even if one has a complete account of all the objective functions in the vicinity of consciousness — perceptual discrimination, integration, report, and so on — there may still remain a further question: why is all this functioning associated with subjective experience? And further: why is this functioning associated with the particular sort of subjective experience that it is in fact associated with? Merely explaining the objective functions does not answer this question.

I think the moral is that as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data, and vice versa. That is, the third-person data alone provide an incomplete catalog of the data that need explaining: if we explain only third-person data, we have not explained everything. Likewise, the first-person data alone are also incomplete. A satisfactory science of consciousness must admit both sorts of data, and must build an explanatory connection between them. — Can we construct a science of consciousness? David Chalmers

I think that this is what Edmund Husserl was proposing with his model of the 'phenomenological reduction', perhaps @Joshs might comment on that.

As I just wrote in my previous post to Wayfarer, most of what we know is not based on our own direct observations. — T Clark

Yes. In absolutely full agreement. (Ergo the importance of trust and the significance of betrayal (of trust), including that of willful deceptions.)

It is a commonplace of all philosophy, at least since Descartes, that all our observations are imperfect and might be anywhere from 99% right to 100% wrong. At the same time, if you and I are both people of good will and both interested in learning about how people think, you're reports of your experience of your mind are likely to be valid, if imperfect. — T Clark

OK to this. As a reminder, I'm a diehard fallibilist. But it equivocates between empirical observations (which, yes, could in principle could include hallucinations - hence being technically fallible) and inferences, with these being optimal conclusions drawn from that which is observed (and since no one is omniscient, everyone's inferences could be potentially mistaken at times - hence being technically fallible).

Now I maintain this too is a fallible observation (a rabit-hole of philosophy, kind of thing) but, pragmatically, something that we all immediately know as a brute fact that we cannot rationally - nor experientially - doubt: we are as that which apprehends observables (including our thoughts, with some of these being our conscious inferences). Long story short, this is a direct experiential awareness of our own occurrence (again, as, I'll for now say, "first-person observers") Here is made absolutely no claim as to what we, as such, in fact are - be it entities/substance, processes, both, or neither. It doesn't matter.

In contrast to this direct experience of what is, we have inferences we live by. One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view.

We, hence, cannot observe other's consciousness and its factual activities - such as, for one example, what the consciousness remembers via the workings of its total mind.

None of this needs to be appraised for day to day interactions. But we are philosophically debating this very point, so I've mentioned it.

We infer things all the time without seeing them directly
— T Clark

Of course. I acknowledged that we can infer that there are minds, but that the mind is not an object for us. — Wayfarer

This exchange started with me saying that we can observe more than seven billion minds from the outside. Those minds are objects to us, or at least we can study them as outside observers.

there is controversy about what these particles are, whether they're really particles or actually waves, — Wayfarer

There is no controversy - they are both particles and waves.

But all of that is irrelevant to the question at hand. — Wayfarer

And I say no, and that's as far as this argument ever goes.

But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. — Wayfarer

But these are all subjective qualities. Your notion of the material world is being described in how “it” feels to “you”. It is harder or softer, drier or wetter, hotter or colder, heavier or lighter than the flesh and blood self that wants to prod away at it. The world as you are imagining it is the one that is subjectively related to yourself as the centre of that world.

Science comes along and ends up saying quite different things from its mathematically an empirically abstracted viewpoint. The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity.

The idea of objects with qualities gets radically deconstructed, showing the degree to which your neurobiology lives within in its own broad brush and self-centred view of physics as it is at the scale of humans living on planets at a time when the Universe is generally almost at its cold and empty heat death.

OK to this. As a reminder, I'm a diehard fallibilist. But it equivocates between empirical observations (which, yes, could in principle could include hallucinations - hence being technically fallible) and inferences, with these being optimal conclusions drawn from that which is observed (and since no one is omniscient, everyone's inferences could be potentially mistaken at times - hence being technically fallible). — javra

Stephen J Gould wrote, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Does that agree with your position or disagree with it?

Going back to my previous comment including the example, even many (most?) of our empirical observations are inferences and not direct observations. That may have been less true in Pierce's time.

pragmatically, something that we all immediately know as a brute fact that we cannot rationally - nor experientially - doubt: we are as that which apprehends observables (including our thoughts, with some of these being our conscious inferences). — javra

Again, how much of what we know is a brute fact?

One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view. — javra

Again - many of what you call "brute-facts," we do not observe from a first-person point of view.

We, hence, cannot observe other's consciousness and its factual activities - such as, for one example, what the consciousness remembers via the workings of its total mind. — javra

In my view, we can study other people's and our own minds using the same methods we use for many of the things we know in our daily lives.

As I noted in my last post to @Wayfarer, it is unlikely you and I will get any further with this discussion. I've participated in similar ones many times, I'm sure you have too, and it never goes any further than this. This is probably a good place to stop.

I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. — apokrisis

When so loosely understood, what then isn't?

Take metaphysics. It is inferred theory and it is tested against a rubric of reason, it has deductive predictions from postulates and inductive confirmations of these predictions. And, it must conform to the observable world to be taken in any way seriously.

So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... boring as this might be, again, because it is not empirically testable (to be lucidly clear, your metaphysics very much included), and this because it has no empirically falsifiable hypothesis to test.

I'll try to leave our disagreement at that.

A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text? — javra

Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view? — apokrisis

Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows?

FWIW, I'm in agreement, as I hope is also evident from what I've said above.

Useful crib on scientific method: — Wayfarer

:up: Cool. Thanks

Stephen J Gould wrote, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Does that agree with your position or disagree with it? — T Clark

It agrees quite well. BTW, I have fond memories of Gould's various takes on sociobiology - albeit with some disagreements in some of the details.

Going back to my previous comment including the example, even many (most?) of our empirical observations are inferences and not direct observations. That may have been less true in Pierce's time. — T Clark

I think you are here erroneously conflating, or maybe fully equating, science to physics. A category error.

Again, how much of what we know is a brute fact? — T Clark

This question is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the proposition it is in reply to. All the same, there is no metaphysics that is both consistent and does not utilize a brute fact. Matter for materialists, as one example of this.

One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view. — javra

Again - many of what you call "brute-facts," we do not observe from a first-person point of view. — T Clark

If I remember right, I've only called one's own conscious being a brute fact to one's own conscious self. What are you here referring to?

All the same - though I do have my reason for so calling one's own conscious being a brute fact - if possible, due to the complexities involved, I'll retract my so claiming it to be with a "my bad". While I hold that it's not explainable in terms of more fundamental facts, I very much know that it's occurrence and form is dependent on a physical substratum of body and (in animals) brain - together with environment. Hence, the complexities.

As I noted in my last post to Wayfarer, it is unlikely you and I will get any further with this discussion. I've participated in similar ones many times, I'm sure you have too, and it never goes any further than this. This is probably a good place to stop. — T Clark

Alright. Thanks for the heads up.

When so loosely understood, what then isn't? — javra

It is your interpretation that is sloppy. The Peircean and Bayesian argument is that this is the most generalised view of rational inquiry. The same basic epistemic arc of predict and measure is what evolution elaborates from biology on up.

So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... — javra

Despite your boundary policing, natural philosophers and systems scientists are quite comfortable with this thought.

If it makes you uncomfortable, well um …

Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows? — javra

Comfort yourself however you like. You had no argument you could make.

You had no argument you could make. — apokrisis

The posturing guru speaketh. Bravo!

What about when we ascribe adjectives to our mind? Are we in error when we do that?

As for the rest, we all know that he who presents the most ostentatious posturing wins. Much like those chimp ancestors of ours. So, go for it. — javra

The posturing guru speaketh. Bravo! — javra

You started with the ad homs after quickly running out of arguments. And sadly they are not even witty, let alone cutting.

The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity — apokrisis

Indeed. One of the principle reasons materialism has fallen into disfavor.

Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics?

Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. — apokrisis

Does anything that produces/utilizes a "Bayesian model of the world" have a self and/or consciousness? Also, why do some brain processes involve consciousness while others don't?

What do you think of this?

"Microorganisms demonstrate conscious-like intelligent behaviour, and this form of consciousness may have emerged from a quantum mediated mechanism as observed in cytoskeletal structures like the microtubules present in nerve cells which apparently have the architecture to quantum compute. This paper hypothesises the emergence of proto-consciousness in primitive cytoskeletal systems found in the microbial kingdoms of archaea, bacteria and eukarya. To explain this, we make use of the Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness which evaluates the rise of the degree of consciousness to conscious behaviour in these systems supporting the hypothesis of emergence and propagation of conscious behaviour during the pre-Cambrian part of Earth's evolutionary history. Consciousness as proto-consciousness or sentience computed via primitive cytoskeletal structures substantiates as a driver for the intelligence observed in the microbial world during this period ranging from single-cellular to collective intelligence as a means to adapt and survive. The growth in complexity of intelligence, cytoskeletal system and adaptive behaviours are key to evolution, and thus supports the progression of the Lamarckian theory of evolution driven by quantum mediated proto-consciousness to consciousness as described in the SOM of consciousness."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29254105/#:~:text=Abstract,the%20architecture%20to%20quantum%20compute.

Are microorganisms conscious? What do you think of the "Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness"?

You might find this analysis of the Chalmers-Koch bet insightful. (The author, Gerald R Baron, is a theistically-inclined philosopher of religion who publishes on Medium. I find his material pretty good quality, see for instance his two previous articles on Arthur Eddington.)

An entertaining read.

Well … We will someday hold that horizon in our hands, by gosh! We just need to run faster toward it, that’s all.

BTW, I am here officially making a bet with anyone who so wishes on a case of wine (need not be expensive) that no one will ever hold the horizon in their hands, like ever. Any takers? (As to time-frames, maybe its best to make it within our own lifetimes.)

-------

Obviously, this bet would apply only for those of us who are not horizon-eliminativists, and thereby for those of us who maintain that the horizon does in fact occur.

The good thing about both IIT and GNWT is that they take experience as something real. This is what Strawson called a physicalist realist position. Some continue to deny conscious experience as real — the Eliminativists. But Koch, Tononi and others don’t agree with this most silly of conclusions. It shows the degree to which the physicalist dogma can force some into extreme philosophical or metaphysical positions.

How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, but thankfully it's well on its way to the ash heap of history.

How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, but thankfully it's well on its way to the ash heap of history. — RogueAI

Yes. But in @apokrisis's poignantly expressed questioning:

Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view? — apokrisis

:razz:

OK. I'll bugger off now.

How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, — RogueAI

It’s the only honest form of materialism!

Yeah, materialism does seem to entail it.

Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics? — Wayfarer

I don’t believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. I believe in a science of life and mind - of biosemiosis.

Is consciousness a substance or a process? Have you got it clear what kind of "scientific" account you are even committed to?

People betray their substance ontology by talking of consciousness as a fundamental simple. A property or quality. They will talk indeed of "qualia" and "phenomenology" as if they are very sciency bits of jargon. They get enthusiastic about quantum conscious, panpsychism, information theory, and other crackpot proposals because that sounds like science "heading in the right direction".

But I understand life and mind as processes. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing – like the "redness" of red – and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".

So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings – aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.

Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. We are supposed to always be giving full attention to everything and holding it in memory long enough to report exactly what happened in the event we had to offer a full narration in a court of justice.

But the brain evolved not to pay attention to the world as much as possible by sensible design. And until humans wrapped themselves up in the new collective habit of narrative self-regulation, that is all brains did. Act as "unconsciously" as circumstances would allow. Stopping to note every passing detail was not what "being conscious" was about.

So any scientific theory of consciousness starts with accepting we are dealing with an evolved process not a fundamental substance. And then the first practical bit of business would be deflating the overly socially-constructed notion of consciousness that everyone employs.

After that, the real science could begin.

As I have said, biosemiosis, the modelling relation, Bayesian mechanics, are what I regard as the right kind of approach. They say life and mind arise out of material being, but they have a difference. There is some mechanism or algorithm by which they can grow out of a physical substrate.

This clicks into place when the material ground is understood in the language of dissipative structure. Matter poised at criticality is a source of instability that can be tapped to do stuff by forms that can impose the constraints of mechanistic stability.

An engine can capture an explosion of petrol vapour and force it to turn a crank. A source of physical instability can be harnessed to give a stablised output. Information (as structural negentropy) can regulate the flow of entropy.

So where nature exhibits physical criticality - as it does at the quasi-classical nanoscale – there is an instability which can be fruitfully ratcheted to support a living and mindful organism. There is something a mechanism or algorithm can latch on to and start to proliferate.

The job of science thus becomes creating a generalised theory of such a mechanism or algorithm. Identify the exact design of this essential scrap of form from which wild and complex growth can result. Discover the very thing that makes an organism an organism.

And that is what biosemiosis/the modelling relation/Bayesian mechanics are about. Writing the specifications of the self-organising growth algorithm that allowed this thing we call life and mind to take hold on a material substrate and begin to grow – to develop and evolve.

Friston does want to make it as precise and objectified as physics. He offers differential equations that sum up the central trick of the modelling relation. He calls it Bayesian mechanics so that it can sit alongside classical mechanics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

And regardless of how you judge his actual formula, at least we know this is what a science of life and mind would look like if it were to achieve the same kind of general format as the physical sciences.

You seem to think science must give some kind of account of all your attended and reported experiences and feels as if they were atomised "states of being" – qualitative stuff. But life and mind are processes that exist parasitically on the Universe as itself a process. There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure.

And the discovery that there is just the one kind of negentropic growth algorithm that explains how evolution could take hold – the algorithm that is the semiotic and Bayesian modelling relation – is the kind of huge simplification we were hoping for from science.

I don’t believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. — apokrisis

Right - that's because it's not a thing. Which is what I said.

A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. You're building a general theory of everything, drawing on elements of semiotics, biology, and C.S. Peirce. But ultimately you return to physicalist explanations:

There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure. — apokrisis

We're on a road to nowhere.

A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. — Wayfarer

You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in?

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. — apokrisis

You think highway hypnosis is something unique about you?

Have you arrived home after a drive and not remembered the details of the drive? Almost everyone who drives has had this common experience, a phenomenon that has come to be called highway hypnosis...

You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in? — apokrisis

Like I said - it's a Philosophy Forum. There are distinctions between the subject matters of science and philosophy, although those distinctions tend to be philosophical rather than scientific, meaning not easily discernable according to scientific criteria.

I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. Peirce was active in the so-called 'golden age of American philosophy', roughly contemporaneous with Josiah Royce, William James and Borden Parker Bowne, all of whom were broadly idealist, in keeping with the zeitgeist. That was all to be rejected by the ordinary language philosophers of the 20th century and the ascendancy of scientific naturalism as the 'arbiter of reality'.

Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope.