Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. — jkop
Moreover, conscious states such as visual experiences have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the experience is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the observer's psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the experience. However, the lack of a single complete description is hardly a problem. — jkop
I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness...
— Joshs
‘Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as the distinction between animate and inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience’ - from a critique of Barad’s agential realism.
↪Tom Storm Barad’s ‘agential realism’. Streetlight mentioned it also. As a form of materialism, it is obliged to deny the ontological distinction between animate and inanimate, per the above — Wayfarer
he issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. — Joshs
But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist — Wayfarer
"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."
Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. — jkop
I have made the case over many years that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature.
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world. — Howard Pattee
With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism — Wayfarer
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object. — Howard Pattee
Enactivists assert a strong notion of world-involvement,
i.e., processes in the environment play more than informational roles in the constitution and actualization of life and mind . To enact a world of significance is to engage in actual acts, which are material events with spreading consequences that are both world-changing and agent-changing. Environmental and biological/cognitive processes are mutually enabled and mutually constituted. They interpenetrate at all scales and they coordinate across scales.
Historicity and the co-constitution of organism and environment are internally related in the enactive approach. Concerns about the conservation of organization are mostly linked to the self-production requirement of autopoiesis (the regeneration of the conditions that continuously give rise to the operationally closed network of processes making up the organism). Concerns about barriers, boundaries, and in general about an organism’s relation to its environment are mostly linked to the condition of self-distinction in the definition of autopoiesis. From an enactive perspective, self-distinction and self-production are dialectically related, that is, they are mutually dependent, though distinct, moments of autopoiesis. You cannot have one set of processes and not the other as long as the organism lives, yet the processes are not the same. All processes subserving self-distinction are themselves products of self-production
And the fact that it turned out inorganic and organic compounds are not fundamentally different is not evidence that the same answer will apply to the HPoC. — Patterner
The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer". — J
Sure, we can describe a subjective experience, but how do we explain its existence, or why it exists in the way it does and not in another? That's the hard problem. — J
If we could build a working brain our of inorganic parts that was functionally equivalent to a working organic brain, wouldn't the non-biological brain be conscious? — RogueAI
Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. — Joshs
The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer".
— J
Ok, please explain to me why we can't talk about all this without using the word 'observer'? — jkop
For example, a feeling of being drunk (its existence and why it exists the way it does) is uncontroversially explained by the effects that alcohol has on our cognitive functions. — jkop
But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. — Wayfarer
leave out the terms "observer" and "experience." Let's look at the result and see what we think. — J
visual ..... have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the ..... is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the .....'s psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the ....... — jkop
m. I think Hoffman learns the wrong lessons from evolutionary theory. — Joshs
I included "logical" because you mentioned "rules" where 22 people are following some rules. So minds follow rules that we call logic as 22 people follow rules that we call soccer.Not so sure about "logical ideas" (maybe just "ideas"?) but otherwise I agree. — J
I don't know what "appearance to a mind" means. It seems to imply that a mind can be independent from some appearance as if something appears to a homunculus in the brain. It seems to me that some appearance is part of a mind, or is a necessary constituent of a mind.At this point we need to make sure it's not just a dispute over terms. What do we want "phenomenon" to designate? I vote for something like "appearance to a mind," so that the 22 people and the soccer game are two different phenomena. On that understanding, I want to say that neurons and consciousness are also two different phenomena, appearing from two different perspectives. But notice that it doesn't really matter how we understand "phenomenon" here. We could go the other way and stipulate that "phenomenon" designates a single event in time, in which case the soccer game and consciousness are now redescriptions of "the same phenomenon." Either way, we're left with the hard problem. I know many people want to do some arm-waving here and say, "Well, it's two different descriptions, what more do you need to know?" but surely the answer is, "A lot. Why are these descriptions as they are? What allows the passage from one description to another? Are we right in believing that the mental-level description is grounded in, but not caused by, the physical-level description? Does the physical-level description have a "translation" into Mentalese? When we encounter something as extraordinary as subjective experience, what else do we need to say about it to fill out the experience? Yes, consciousness is, in a sense, "only" a description of how things look to a subject, but don't we feel it's a lot more than that too -- somehow constitutive of identity?" etc. etc. — J
To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself. — Joshs
And the world would be different without humans and their minds, so I don't see how you've made any sensible distinction between what it means to be subjective vs objective.The world is independent of a map as well so this does not really get at what it means to be objective vs subjective.
— Harry Hindu
Consider cities and landscapes and most of the environments that people live in. Large parts of our lived world depend on the maps and drawings after which they were built. Those are parts of the actual world, and it is in this sense that the world depends on maps for being such a world. Without maps it would be a different world. — jkop
You said,..as if humans have this special quality of the world being independent from us.
— Harry Hindu
I can't make sense of that. — jkop
I was pointing out that the mind is not special in having things independent of it, so you have failed to make any sensible distinction between what is objective and subjective.The world is objective in the sense that it is independent of us, and available for all of us. Also maps of the world have this objective mode of existing. — jkop
This can be said of anything, not just human bodies and their minds. An apple that is rotten is no longer ripe, yet it is still an apple.That's not what I say. Many humans and other animals are conscious. Consider the events in your physiology when you are having the conscious awareness of a tickle. Others may have similar events, but not those that exist in your physiology. The tickle exists whenever you feel it, and when you no longer feel it, then it doesn't exist anymore. This mode of existing is radically different from the way the world exists or the map — jkop
So sense-making is (part of) reality as it really is?To be a living system is to maintain a normative pattern of interacting with an environment in the midst of changing conditions. Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself. — Joshs
I don't know what "appearance to a mind" means. It seems to imply that a mind can be independent from some appearance as if something appears to a homunculus in the brain. — Harry Hindu
Any appearance in the mind is the result of some measurement in that the brain measures and interprets wavelengths of light and sound and these measurements are the means by which we interact with the world. — Harry Hindu
Personally, I believe that irreconcilable differences between quantum physics and classical physics will be resolved with a proper explanation of consciousness. — Harry Hindu
Sense-making is about pragmatically relevant actions , not concordance with ‘reality as it is’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. This doesn’t make what sense-making reveals as an illusion, or mere appearance as opposed to the really real. It shows us that this is what ‘reality as it is’ IS in itself. — Joshs
I am conscious as I type this. In a couple hours, I will be unconscious. The states are fundamentally different. Aside from differences in brain activity, however, a physical exam of me in each state of consciousness would find very little different.Right, conscious states are different from unconscious states, but are they fundamentally different? — jkop
consciousness, understood as the ability to sense stimuli — Wolfgang
I’ve learned that the principle is called ‘relevance realization’ or ‘the salience landscape.’ It’s a guiding principle for all organic life. But self-aware rational beings might have requirements beyond those of other life-forms - think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Other organisms are not able to consider the nature of existence in the way h.sapiens is, so questions of truth or falsehood don’t arise as part of their ‘salience landscape’. — Wayfarer
Most organisms act to maintain and reproduce their lineage through ongoing responsiveness to life-relevant features of what thereby becomes their biological environment. Con-ceptually articulated ways of life are two-dimensional in the deeper sense that they are oriented not only toward continually maintaining their biological lineage but also toward determining what that way of life is and will be. This sense of two-dimensionality is “deeper” in that it enables those organisms to differentiate how they take their environment to be from how it is.
I meant rewrite the thesis but avoid using those terms. Give a description you believe is accurate but that doesn't have recourse to "observer" or "experience" . — J
And the world would be different without humans and their minds, so I don't see how you've made any sensible distinction between what it means to be subjective vs objective. — Harry Hindu
I was pointing out that the mind is not special in having things independent of it, so you have failed to make any sensible distinction between what is objective and subjective. — Harry Hindu
I am conscious as I type this. In a couple hours, I will be unconscious. The states are fundamentally different. Aside from differences in brain activity, however, a physical exam of me in each state of consciousness would find very little different. — Patterner
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