I asked for your measurable definition - the one that would make sense to a scientist wanting to get on with their scientific inquiry. — apokrisis

Yes, apo. You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides. My very point from the very beginning. Glad we've finally come to an agreement.

Your explanation makes more sense to me than the "epistemic cut" notion. — Gnomon

The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. It was coined by Howard Pattee, who has been influential in biosemiotics. Seems to me an interesting philosophical question would be, ‘does it introduce a duality’? However, the paper answers:

The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut :

This epistemic irreducibility does not imply any ontological dualism. It arises whenever a distinction must be made between a subject and an object, or in semiotic terms, when a distinction must be made between a symbol and its referent or between syntax and pragmatics.

Although it then goes on to acknowledge that the origin of the subject-object distinction - that is, the origin of life - is still a mystery. He also says that 'it is not possible to distinguish the living from the lifeless by the most detailed "motion of inorganic corpuscles" alone. The logic of this answer is that life entails an epistemic cut that is not distinguishable by microscopic (corpuscular) laws.' So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws. The concluding sentence is a question: 'Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?' - thereby providing a glimmer of hope that physical reductionism may not, in fact, provide the answer.

I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings. In that sense, the origin of the epistemic division of knower and known is the outer manifestation of an internal state, namely, that of being a subject:

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe (i.e. described by science), composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. — Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos

So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives.

You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides. — javra

Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. I’m asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion.

So again you splutter and misfire with arguments that abuse the good habits of rational inquiry. Aren’t you weary of your own failure yet? What keeps you going and going?

The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. — Wayfarer

It doesn't seem that simple judging by the reactions. But again, where Peircean semiosis introduces the sign as the mark that marks the cut by bridging the cut, so Pattee took it further by arguing the Peircean sign was in fact the literally mechanical thing of a logical switch.

A switch in a power circuit allows a human to turn the heat off and on. So the switch both creates the cut and bridges the cut. The switch can be flipped from off to on.

Biologists have tended to think of the genes as the information that regulate an organism's sustaining biochemical flows. They are certainly part of that machinery, but not what defines the coal-face of the modelling relationship. It is enzymes that are physically the switches which can turn reactions on and off at a command. Likewise Barbieri was early to narrow the focus to the ribsome as the core switch because it was the enzyme that made the enzymes by understanding the mRNA messages being sent by the genome.

So Peirce was rather hand-wavy in talking about the epistemic cut in terms of "signs". Yet also, science was in its Victorian era. Peirce waved his hands in ways that were as up to date scientifically as it was then possible to be.

Since the DNA code was cracked in the 1950s, biology has just kept getting more exact in terms of what mediates the modelling relation – what creates the cut between the "rate dependent dynamics" of the world and "rate independent information" of a regulatory model that it can then itself also bridge.

The Hard Problem of how mind and matter can interact causally is solved by that. We can point to the enzymes and even the ribosomes. We can point to the molecular machinery that ratchets the nanoscale convergence zone of physics – the scale of entropic balance that is physics' own quantum~classical transition story. (The one without an inserted epistemic cut, but formed by its own emergent or decoherent constraints.)

So if you make this about the "knower and the known", your risk trivialising it as the good old Cartesian dualism of a world with two realms, one real, the other deal. And if you try some other duality, like Sassure's symbol and symbolised, you make the mistake of not understanding that Peirce was pushing the triadic story of a "world", and interpretant, and the third thing of the epistemic cut – the sign, the switch - which is inserted inbetween to allow a model and its world interact to pragmatic effect.

This shows the habit of thought you need to unlearn here. Framing what is said as a triadic claim as if it reduced to a dyadic one. Peirce argued how the world is irreducibly complex because it has the inherent triadicity of a system of relations. A relation has its two ends, but also the bit that connects in the middle.

So you are not hearing what I have been saying for so many years now. You haven't got it.

But I don't complain too much. Most people indeed never get it. You at least felt the need to make an effort. I can thank you for that while still trying to tell the story in even more simple ways.

Seems to me an interesting philosophical question would be, ‘does it introduce a duality’? — Wayfarer

So ... nope. Although it took several years of pressing by Salthe, myself, and other Peircean enthusiasts for Pattee to clear this up.

So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws. — Wayfarer

Well no. Quite the opposite. Symbols are that which can escape the limits of physics. They are born where the physics halts. So they rely on physics in the sense of being dichotomously "other" to that physics.

Hence Pattee's dichotomy of rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information. A symbol – or switching device – can't actually escape also being physical. But it can escape the grip of physics by becoming some small and constant cost that an organism can bear.

If you only have to flip a switch, you can attach that switch to anything you like and gain control over it. The light in your bedroom, a pixel on a display, or WW3.

You could launch a nuclear holocaust from the briefcase of codes that your secret service guy totes around for you. It might take the effort of raising your creaky old voice and saying you are the President and you are absolutely serious. The right people have signed the right bits of paper as a double check on your authority and state of mind.

So some grumpy old git. A nuclear arsenal. A lot of ideation. A lot physical entropy. Then the third thing that is the mediating switch which has been stopping it happen until it starts to happen. A world-spanning circuit can get closed with a few puffs of air coming out of an old man's throat.

I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings. — Wayfarer

But absolutely no one in the biosemiotic community of the 1990s was thinking they were making an argument for panpsychism. Although pansemiosis was a lively discussion led by Stan Salthe. And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science. At least this was now proper holism.

So you might go out on your own limb. But I'm not sure where you get the right. Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes.

Your position doesn't even arrive at the metaphysical throat-clearings of Kant. You want to time-machine biosemiosis back to the 17th Century.

So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives. — Wayfarer

Yeah, but split and then connected by what? What did nature insert to get evolution going? Why did a code make a difference to the world?

Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. I’m asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion. — apokrisis

You’ve addressed my analogy via a literalist interpretation of its parts. And deem this a rational argument against the analogy. Remarkable.

The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable and you insist that it be defined in an empirically measurable way to be taken into consideration in the first place - because circles can so be. From your previous comments, this via "counterfactual definitions" - whatever that might mean to you.

Aren’t you weary of your own failure yet? What keeps you going and going? — apokrisis

My failure? As in to convince you? You must take yourself to be the sole arbitrator of the situation. But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy.

But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy. — javra

So this is goodbye. :party:

And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science. — apokrisis

He still wrote a book on Making Room for Creation which seems open to divine agency. From which:

For 300 years, the reigning consensus in the West has been that nature is monist and functions according to a single metaphysics. Furthermore, it has been assumed (and still is by most) that continued research will demonstrate that the same laws and metaphysics will eventually fully describe matters in the chasm that living systems inhabit. To doubt that belief is to exhibit what Haught (2000) calls ‘metaphysical impatience.'

Fair amount of that on display in this thread.

What did nature insert to get evolution going? — apokrisis

I'm saying that organisms are the appearance of intentional agency, even if in rudimentary form. That they are able to act for reasons other than those dictated by physical law. Robert Ulanowiczw seems to support that view:

Accepting process ecology as a legitimate way to describe natural systems would provide significant philosophical and theological opportunities. Starting with the question of free will—it becomes a given in a narrative that posits indeterminacy as an axiomatic attribute of nature. The burden of proof would shift to the determinists, who would then need to demonstrate how neuronal firings make their way through some five hierarchical layers of mind, each with its compliment of indeterminacy, to determine higher-level thought and choice.

Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes. — apokrisis

There's a cardinal difference between what I mean and Cartesian dualism. I'm not invoking a model of there being material and mental substances. I say that the subject of experience cannot be understood as a 'thinking substance' or objectified in the way that Cartesian dualism suggests. Organisms act for reasons that are not solely determined by lower-level laws. The two perspectives implied are the third-person perspective - which is descriptive - and the first-person perspective - which is 'what it is like to be', or put more simply, being.

The Hard Problem of how mind and matter can interact causally is solved by that. — apokrisis

So do you reckon if you'd been the other party in that wager with David Chalmers you'd have won the bet?

Definitions are given. You can't choose them. Not in a conversation.

The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. — Wayfarer

Thanks. Your post clarified that -- to me -- unfamiliar concept : how to divide Monistic (holistic) Ontology into a Dualistic (reductive) Worldview : philosophy into science.

You may also be able to help me understand why is applying the notion of physically encoded Biosemiotics to mentally aware Consciousness. He seems to believe that it is a hard science, instead of a soft philosophy*1. We now know that the phenomenon of biological Life is dependent on biological codes, mostly in the form of DNA. But DNA itself is merely a stringy chemical. The code/symbol part is an idea in a human mind. So how could a code or symbol have any physical effect on the emergence of Life & Mind, in a universe of Physics & Chemistry, long before Biology & Psychology?

My interest in Biosemiotics is limited to its possible relationship to my own philosophical notion of Enformationism. A code is an abstract form of Information (SOS = . . . - - - . . . ), that when socially conventionalized, can convey meaning to a mind. But, how a notional code can have the physical effect of animating raw matter into biology, seems to be equivalent to Chalmer's "hard problem" of how raw matter can be enlightened into psychology (awareness). Am I missing something here? The mystery is in the transformation (transubstantiation?) of Material Substance into ethereal Life & Mind : both not tangible things but tenuous processes. That enigma is the motivation for my theory of metamorphizing Encoded Energy (EnFormAction).

Claude Shannon introduced the notion that meaningful Information results from the expenditure of causal Energy into voided Entropy. So, I'm trying to somehow fit the physical notion of Life Codes (Biosemiotics) into the metaphysical concept of Mind Codes (Information). The two should be connected, but the Body/Mind transition point seems to be related to the location of the Epistemic Cut. :smile:


*1. Biosemiotics is the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes. This idea has been strongly suggested by the discovery of the genetic code, but so far it has made little impact in the scientific world and is largely regarded as a philosophy rather than a science.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18365164/

So do you reckon if you'd been the other party in that wager with David Chalmers you'd have won the bet? — Wayfarer

Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

But apparently, the REAL solution to the hard problem is Bosnian Semiotics. Or something like that.


Let's talk about feels and how and why they're generated and whether machines have them/can have them. You brave enough for a little Q&A?

Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained — RogueAI

:lol: From the article:

Critics of Dennett's approach argue that Dennett fails to engage with the problem of consciousness by equivocating subjective experience with behaviour or cognition. In his 1996 book The Conscious Mind, philosopher David Chalmers argues that Dennett's position is "a denial" of consciousness, and jokingly wonders if Dennett is a philosophical zombie. Critics believe that the book's title is misleading as it fails to actually explain consciousness. Detractors have provided the alternative titles of Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away. According to Galen Strawson, the book violates the Trades Description Act and Dennett should be prosecuted.

But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are so motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it.

But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are sufficiently motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it. — Wayfarer

It took a long time for me to ditch the materialist mindset. For me, the biggest obstacle was feeling like a fool for taking "woo"ish things seriously.

That's because Western culture demolished any sober way of thinking about it, mainly due to the authoritarianism of ecclesiastical religion. Don't loose sight of the fact that to express wrong views on the subject would get you a death sentence for many centuries of Christian history. Then Descartes tried to thread the needle with his simplistic depiction of mind and matter as separate substances, and the whole question became deeply confused. But the times, they are a changin'.

But the times, they are a changin'. — Wayfarer

They really are. I'm liking this younger generation of philosophers.

That is quite a well-researched article. If you look at the footnotes, Dennett is really the outlier, there's hardly any one of the others mentioned who agrees with him. But I say that Dennett performs a useful function, because his writing puts all the cards on the table, so that if you criticize Dennett as representative of materialist theory of mind, you can't be accussed of a straw man argument - he really does say this stuff.

The article you mention is by Marcello Barbieri - in my reading of biosemiotics, solely due to Apokrisis (to give credit where it's due) I've learned that Barbieri resigned as editor of the journal Biosemiotics, because he felt that it had become too philosophical and influenced by Peirce. He has initiated what he considers a new approach which he calls 'code biology', that, he says, is more concentrated on the science, less on the philosophy (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him). There's a useful intro to his approach here What is information? (different from your own use of the term). He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo.

(I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him) — Wayfarer

It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.

So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very “Peircean” structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.

Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4

Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese — apokrisis

I don’t have a professional interest in the subject, but I’ve found a couple of his articles useful, and the subject is generally interesting. Glad it’s something I’ve learned about.

He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo. — Wayfarer

Just reading that now. It's very interesting and easy to read and understand. Many thanks for the link. Might help me understand Apo better. I read a Pattee article as well which was easy to follow too.

The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable and you insist that it be defined in an empirically measurable way to be taken into consideration in the first place — javra

This characterises a lot of debate on consciousness. Some people really want a functionalist definition, the trouble is that isn't what is meant. If we start with a non-functionalist definition then we have a problem built-in (whether it's 'hard' or not) - how to get structural and functional concepts (which are the currency of scientific discourse) to connect to a definition which does not specify any structure and function. It's much easier if we start with quantifiable and measurable concepts that are amenable to scientific enquiry.

The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable — javra

Substantiated how?

The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable — javra

Substantiated how? — Isaac

Since I don’t want to start this debate from scratch, here’s a different, albeit terse, argument:

A proposition: No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed “the mind’s eye”.

This proposition can be readily proven false by any empirical information to the contrary (which, as empirical information, can thereby be verified by anyone who so pleases).

Till the just given, falsifiable proposition is proven false, it remains substantiated.

No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed “the mind’s eye”. — javra

↪Gnomon
The article you mention is by Marcello Barbieri - in my reading of biosemiotics, solely due to Apokrisis (to give credit where it's due) I've learned that Barbieri resigned as editor of the journal Biosemiotics, because he felt that it had become too philosophical and influenced by Peirce. He has initiated what he considers a new approach which he calls 'code biology', that, he says, is more concentrated on the science, less on the philosophy (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him). There's a useful intro to his approach here What is information? (different from your own use of the term). He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo. — Wayfarer

Thanks for that information. :joke:

Barbieri's interest in Information is for its role in Biology. Whereas my focus is on its multifunction roles in Ontology, Epistemology, Physics & Psychology*1. But the article does provide some useful info on how specific applications of the General Information concept can be perceived as A> "too philosophical" or B> "too scientific", depending on the interests of the observer.

Apparently, prefers to err in the direction of B. Which may explain his disdain for my more A approach. He'll probably disagree with that explanatory dichotomy, though. That's because he & I seem to make the "epistemic cut" in different places : current state vs original state, or matter vs mind, or code vs cause. But that's OK. Narrowly-focused Biosemiology is probably closer to becoming a hard science, than my own wide-angle philosophical musings. :smile:

*1. Information : What is it?
Originally, the word “information” referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacon’s book about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, “The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe.” Claude Shannon’s Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html

If minds are brains (and I presume you think mental states are brain states) why are only some parts of the brain conscious?

If minds are brains — RogueAI

Who said anything about minds being brains?

I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.

My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question.

Unlike my seeing a moving hand when I look at it, I’m not seeing a mind’s eye in the brain images provided.

What I am seeing are individual slides empirically depicting a certain set of a brain's functions which are inferred to correlate with empirically evident self-reports concerning something that might or might not in fact be. For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real, one would expect exactly such empirically physical processes to occur in the philosophical zombie’s brain despite the philosophical zombie having no such thing as a minds eye. In short, I am not seeing the mind’s eye in the illustration.

A less complex way to address the same conclusion: to affirm that one is seeing the mind’s eye in these illustrations of a brain is in full parallel to affirming one sees in these illustrations what the mind’s eye is focusing on and thereby seeing. Both are brain functions; therefore, both ought to be seen in these illustrations. However, neither are empirically witnessed by us.

In other words, these illustrations of a brain’s functioning so far do not falsify the proposition which was provided. The proposition therefore so far remains substantiated.

Who said anything about minds being brains?

I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.

My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question. — Isaac

So minds and brains are different? What are the differences?

For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real — javra

So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?

If Descartes’ demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you don’t think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?

To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes’ demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.

But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.

So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.

Your arguments in no way address the stipulation that we do not empirically witness the mind's eye.

Besides, wasn't it a "goodbye" between us?

I can't quit you!