Only insofar as 'natural law' is concieved in a very narrow and physicalist way. Physical reductionism of course wishes to reduce everything to physics - that's what it means! - but I think the emerging disciplines of biosemiotics, systems theory, environmental sciences, and so on, are not reductionist in that sense, but are still seeking to be naturalistic (e.g. here). — Wayfarer

You are right, that we could potentially find laws which produce more accurate description of the universe at larger scales. Albeit not focused on living organisms, the second law of thermodynamics is of the variety. Indeed, we haven't found behavior which escapes the constraints of the local physical laws in isolated interactions, but the second law provides probabilistic description extending beyond them, and is time asymmetric, thus it is not expressible through time symmetric laws. It is believed to be dependent on the initial conditions of the cosmos, whose description is irreducible.

On the other hand, this does not mean that any quality of organization is a fundamental law. Some studies pertaining to social organization are considered fundamentally non-explanative, because they are valid only on this planet, in our span of time. Humanities, as such, are too subject particular to be sciences.

Science looks for restrictions imposed fundamentally, explanative mechanisms that apply everywhere, with the power to justify our affairs through high or at least moderately probable outcomes. Anything else implies dependence on low-probability miracle in conventional terms, or organization in particular spatio-temporal regions with some kind of non-entropic design. This is possible, but based on prior experience, it had not been the case so far. Such oddity would not validate all of the conventional theism, but it would suggest origin that cannot be explained by mundane physicalism.

I skimmed through the paper you provided, but I will have to read it in more detail. Even though I concur that it may be possible that the restrictions in sciences are incomplete and we need rectify or expand their repertoire, including levels of organization that apply exclusively at larger scales, this would not merely require a philosophical paradigm shift, but laws that need to be specified in a way qualifying their preconditions and the constraints they impose. They would have to be either demonstrable in controlled manner, or observable with sufficient variation naturally, that the judgement of the precision of the relationship they hypothesize can be ascertained.

I don't have any expert knowledge of biology, but it would seem to me that without homeostasis, which is one of the key attributes of living organisms, there would be nothing able to be selected. The point seems to be that living things have an ability to maintain identity through change, which is not characteristic of inorganic matter. — Wayfarer

I don't think that identity is much more then a useful instrument for sentient decision making, trying to obtain sustainable symbiotic relationship, while needing to understand and evaluate the confinement of its agency. Prebiotic chemistry simply does not have the expressiveness of material organization necessary in order to exhibit constant behavioral agency under change.

What I meant when I said that organisms do not possess invariable homeostasis was that the biological processes through the lifecycle of an individual, or the hereditation of traits and culture through the generations of the species, do not actually maintain complete structural balance. An embryo, infant, and elderly person differ significantly from each other, physiologically, mechanically. Likewise, societies experience social imbalances, organizational shifts. In fact, abstractly speaking, every organism, biological or social, is dying from the moment of its conception. Living admits the failure of equilibrium in order to produce fundamental change over time.

What is particularly important, to our purposes, is that the concept of artefact-making explains how it is possible that life evolved from inanimate matter and yet it is fundamentally different from it. The divide between life and matter is real because matter is made of spontaneous objects whereas life is made of manufactured objects.

Unfortunately, I have not read the book, but for my part, I would need the following clarification to justify this conclusion. Some hypothetical, even fictional examples, of the simplest artefact-making processes that the author conceives, biological or not, that could be bootstrapped by synthetic means and remain henceforth autonomous in their operation. I would then wonder of some examples of the closest sustainable autonomous chemical processes that are not sophisticated enough to qualify as artefact-making, produced synthetically or naturally occurring, and whether the gap from the latter to the former can conceivably be bridged through mundane physical occurrence. Rinse and repeat, until a process with no natural precursors can be found.

It is difficult to assert confidently the conclusion, without knowing what must have occurred in basic original form to qualify for the criteria, and what could have occurred mundanely. The importance of defining such ideas precisely is that we need to express the conclusion in stages that we can evaluate non-intuitively. Obviously contemporary organisms are unlike prebiotic chemistry, but what about viroids, viruses, cyanobacteria, etc. You may claim that viruses and viroids need a host, but originally, it may not have been a cellular host in the sense it is today. That is why when evaluating an idea I try to seek what programmers call "minimum working example", the most elementary hypothetical illustration possible.

...

I will conclude on a friendlier note. Science ultimately relies on unproven and impossible to prove convictions. There is a lot to be said about the circularity of scientific thinking, because inductive and statistical inference, objectivity of empiricism, logical deduction, are all in the final analysis behavioral habits. These habits, insofar as their proponents are still here, can be considered to be effective, but the people who object to the exclusiveness of the scientific method are present as well. This is why we base social action on more practical rules, such as dominance, voting, consensus, etc. Philosophically, I know that I am oversimplifying issues that affect what we consider miraculous and intelligent, and what we consider orderly and mundane. It would conflate the original inquiry even further if I delved into them, and I am being reminded of Socrates's "I believe that I know nothing" and Heraclitus's "no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri

The chemistry that we refer to usually, that we use for artificial synthetic purposes doesn't act in this way with respect to the main reactants, but I am pretty sure that you could make catalysts produce digital effects depending on their kind and concentration. I presume, what is criticized is the plausibility of rendering such effects with the degree of material sophistication in human beings, using self-catalytic and self-reproducing substances. Again, I understand the skepticism, but the argument using "digitalization" of matter seems indirect to me, using intuitively perceivable quality, instead of some concrete measurable characteristic.

It was in response to the question of the plausibility of abiogenesis. It seems obvious to many people that abiogenesis must have occured, by process of the elimination of the alternative explanations, that being 'divine creation', which of course naturalism must abjur. But in the absence of such a creative principle or spark as a higher intelligence, then it is incumbent on those proposing such an alternative to demonstrate how it occured on the basis of what is understood as natural laws, but this they cannot do. — Wayfarer

Have not done is more proper then they cannot do.

You may argue that natural evolution is so complex that it is obviously naive hypothesis. It seems that stages of the evolutionary chain that were previously confounding become explained over time. I am on the fence about it. The main problems currently are the appearance of metabolism and morphogenesis. At the moment, those can be hypothesized to have involved transitions beyond the natural law, which then could be called miracles. They may have also involved improbable events that are within the scope of the natural law, which may be argued to indicate intelligent design of the universe, but not miraculous intervention. The evolution of the central nervous system, which actually is pertinent to your question, isn't that much of a problem (comparatively).

While if creationism is true, it would indeed suggest that our intelligence may be endowed by its creator with possible non-physical component, it would not necessitate it. First, miracles in our origin do not imply that the creator lies outside of the physical reality. Its creative intelligence might be embedded in the physical world itself. But even if we constrain the meaning of physicality to natural behavior without anomalous creative occurrences, or discover that the creator is not ontologically incident with universe, information could still be physical in its present operation. Our genesis may have relied on divine intervention at some point, but that still does not offer compelling practical reason to believe that intelligence and information are not presently entirely physical. While they could be transcendent, this conclusion cannot be made on the basis of our externally shared experience, private intuition aside.

So I'm simply challenging a widely-accepted belief, that life somehow bootstraps itself into existence on the basis of physical causes. Which is, after all, what you proposed with your remark about how physical systems 'spawn'. — Wayfarer

I will again return to the nature of your original inquiry. If you reject naturalism/physicalism to begin with, due to abiogenesis or any other reason, why ask about the arguments behind the physicality of information. At least in terms of our use of information, you might have as well asked why we believe in abiogenesis, or why physicalism. Information basically seems to sidetrack the centerstage of the discussion.

Earlier I suggested that I have vaguely demonstrated, as much as the space, time, and my competence permits, that the information would be at least physical after the inclusion of the abiogenesis as a presupposition. You did not seem to concur, or you didn't find concurring relevant in light of your objections?

Insofar as babies are also a kind of spawn, then indeed, science has been unable to replicate that — Wayfarer

Science never can obtain exhaustive hermetic justification. It is methodological and logically consistent evaluation of experience in continuous progress. Beliefs that lie in the zone of our scientific ignorance can consider themselves admitted by science until it broadens its horizons. But the truth is that such admission does not make them validated by science.

You are suggesting that scientists must discover chain of evolutionary events that is regular under natural law, in order to prove natural selection. First, scientists cannot demonstrate evolution as one continuous process in laboratory conditions, considering that it has taken a couple of billion years to form organisms from organic mud, according to our estimates. Scientists can try to demonstrate stages in isolation. Which they try, but indeed not all stages thus far.

I could counter your insistence for direct proof by arguing that you have to demonstrate the necessity of creative spark by pointing to me where in history the inconsistency with natural law has occurred. Not simply that it is implausible not to be, but demonstrate it in laboratory conditions.

I would say that extrapolating from our experience, it seems questionable to default to creationism due to our present ignorance, but even if we did, such divine creator should not necessarily be benevolent and external to the universe. Note that there is nothing to imply with reasonable certainty, objectively, that the creator is morally purposeful.

Edit:
, but it does necessitate it -> , but it doesn't necessitate it
(the part about dualism and information)

I also have rewritten some paragraphs to make them readable. My writing style still needs work.

If they can evolve, then they must be able to maintain homeostasis and identity over time, in which case they must contain biological information. Conversely if they contain no biological information, then they can't evolve, as there is nothing which will maintain continuity through change. — Wayfarer

I don't believe that natural selection requires invariable homeostasis, at least for its explanation to work technically. It requires sustainability of the entire ecosystem and its internal interactions, which does not only allow for, but also requires coevolution. Identity, just like in our lives, follows a thread of events that remove from the original form and alter it. The maintenance of identity and its ascription to some physical does require some quasi-consistency and interoperation technically, but isn't a matter of homeostatic invariance (as we ourselves transition through many stages in our life cycle), but is more so a matter of necessity and behavioral programming.

And no, I don't believe that science has created an artificial living form de novo. I know they have engineered simple organisms into novel forms, but that's nothing like creating an actual organism from the elements of the periodic table. — Wayfarer

I then think that you are essentially asking that scientists "make a baby". Maybe they will, maybe they wont, eventually. I was referring to self-replicating organic polymers and explaining how they relate to our exploration of the abiogenetic hypothesis. You want complete answer, but science doesn't work like that. Empirical research is commitment to incremental threading through oceans of ignorance. We don't have the capacity to answer questions on demand, just because they can be raised.

First, there is a lot of dynamic state that we have to intellectually reflect on, with minute processing power in comparison to nature's, in large space of hypothetical possibilities, and second, a lot of the data cannot be reliably retrodicted due to entropy. We rely entirely on nature's redundancy (statistical repetitiveness and predictability) when compared to our cognitive apparatus. This is not argument for why someone has to reject non-empirical stances, but it is an explanation of why there is no progress guarantee for empirical comprehension, but people are trying. It is continuously evolving understanding, not a method of immediate inquiry.

When you use the term 'entirely physical', what does that really mean? Does it mean 'explicable in terms of physics'? — Wayfarer

Here, I do actually mean entirely physical, in the matarialistic sense. But note that I claim that pantheism and panpsychism are consistent with scientific empricism, I don't claim that they are necessitated by it. Indeed, I claim that pantheism and panpsychism are logically consistent with methodological naturalism, and compatible with metaphysical naturalism and physicalism. And although thus not actually proven, their admissibility is at least philosophically important, at least to me, because it addresses the primary concerns with physicalism, the issue of hard problem of consciousness (because matter is consciousness itself) and the issue of human genesis (because nature is hermetic in sense that it is divine, not needing creator). This doesn't prove physicalism, materialism, neither pantheism, panpsychism. Only reflects on their internal consistency.

Any degree of personal faith that I may actually have is a separate and rather small matter, but generally, as I said, I am open to the evaluation of all theistic and metaphysical suggestions, while guided by my intuitions and experience. Like everyone else. I have very little commitment to any particular theistic hypothesis, just preferences for various reasons. I am not devout or reverent.

The prevailing wisdom since the Enlightenment is typically assumed to originate with and be validated by science. But there are many conflicts within post-Enlightenment philosophy, which its most ardent proponents never seem to be able to perceive due to their underlying assumptions. Fundamentally these problems revolve around the fact-value dichotomy, also known as the is/ought distinction. Another way of framing that is in terms of the distinction between what can be objectively measured and known, and what can be intuited to be so. — Wayfarer

I understand. I have concurred before that intuition/belief is a valid private/personal argument by its very existence. And science does rely on intuitions, which is why their private validity. But science is consistent to employ them, because they have captured (according to science) the necessarily utilitarian outcome of natural selection.

The problem with private intuitions is that you cannot polemicize them, except for methodological and logical consistency. For anything else (and some may argue to a lesser degree even for that), you have the practical necessity of groundwork on which human interaction to proceed. You have to rely on consensus, which while not a measure of metaphysical truth, just like, say, democracy is not a guarantee of ethical correctness, is necessary for social constructivism. But if our intuitions disagree, we could demonstrate methodological or logical inconsistency, and even then, adapt in incompatible ways.

I prefer to discuss consistency anyways, rather then validity. Validity discussions are ultimately a majority voting tactic, which I believe is of limited use in philosophy. Only in philosophy. Demonstration of consistency does not entice resonance within the group, which is why some people may object to its social usefulness, but I prefer that philosophy is not pursued with direct social aims, but rather pursued logically, where differing intuitions are logically debated and contrasted, rather then shunned by majority consensus. Then again, there is some contradiction in my very intent.

For transparency, I favor compelling (as opposed to voluntary) experience, recognize existence-awareness, and believe in order, which I believe necessitates philosophical explanation that might require concessions for intelligent large scale organization. But pantheism and panpsychism are sufficient philosophical groundwork for explanation to me. I am prepared to discuss the internal consistency of other intuitions, contrast them, theistically, logically, etc. I don't want to oppress anyone, but in everyday decision making, I contend with decisions that are effectively based on different intuitions. That is how society works.

It's an hypothesis based on a metaphysical presupposition, namely, physicalism, that only the physical is real. However I think there are ample grounds for saying that 20th century science has demonstrated that we don't even know what 'the physical' is. That style of thinking grew out of post-Cartesian dualism, which divided 'the world' into the two poles, material and mental. Then scientists and engineers, who couldn't make any sense out of the idea of the mental, tried to dispense with it so as to arrive at the concept of what is only or purely physical. — Wayfarer

Not sure which particular metaphysical concerns you refer to, but I have stated before, that a variation on the pantheistic or panpsychic theme, in my opinion, can explain mental experiences in a physical world, while maintaining that the world is also entirely physical. In such scheme, the deity is physical and coextent with the entire universe, the mind is entirely physical and represents self-awareness of organized intelligent matter. However, no assumption is made, at least on my part, that such deity is antropomorphically and antropocentrically ethical, benevolent, relatable, or that the mental state is morally transcendent and superior in a fundamental sense to the surrounding nature. This is just a hypothesis, or conjecture if you will. It rests on the mandatory inclusion of external experience in the internal worldview, which I mostly agree with, and is thus compatible with naturalism. But overall, I am possibilian, as long as the hypothesis does not contradict the experience available to me personally.

Not a ghost of a chance :wink: — Wayfarer

But do you challenge the logical and internal consistency of my arguments and their consequence from the presuppositions made. I thought that the framework we agree upon when making the original inquiry was naturalism, because there is no point in raising objections to the claims made by naturalism and denying whatever metaphysical presuppositions it makes at the same time, as long as they are consistent.

Otherwise, I have always stated that belief is a valid personal argument, and most of science rests on it. But since there has to be some kind of consensus between people in society to discuss something polemically, to some practical degree at least, and since science has rather prevailing support due to the compelling nature of physical experience, that makes it consensual and in that sense impersonally validated. In contrast, other beliefs are personally validated, but they are not supported by the same degree of consensus. Empiricism also lays objections to such beliefs when they are sustained along the belief in science, because it critiques methodologically the application of different standards when validating different beliefs. It is not infallible critique, but it is food for thought for each individual on their own.

The problem is, it has been shown by quantum physics that entities can be entangled at arbitrarily great distances from each other. — Wayfarer

I think that the mutual information established between the entangled entities is acquired at the expense of new information theoretic entropy. Entanglement can establish correlation after quantum event which involves randomness in the outcome, which as a side effect severs the entities relations to their past. The entanglement depends on additional non-determinism, which is partially subsumed in the relationship established between the entangled entities. Thus it cannot increase our knowledge about remote configurations of matter, unless we deconstruct them first through randomness, so to speak, which is not the subject here. What physicists say is that entanglement cannot be used to communicate - because communication carries information about the historically conditioned outcome somewhere to somewhere else. Mutual information through quantum entanglement destroys the historical connection in both places.

The physical order doesn't 'spawn' anything. — Wayfarer

The hypothesis is indeed not proven. It is the currently best known explanation under naturalism, but one can reject naturalism. If you question the evolutionary hypothesis, which is ok, the problem becomes not how information can be physical in the naturalist framework, but how can information be without evolutionary origin of the central nervous system, or alternatively how can the central nervous system have evolutionary origin. But I am not sure if this was the point of the inquiry. If the critique is that the evolutionary hypothesis is not elaborated precisely yet and thus the appearance of information dissemination faculties is not guaranteed to be explained by it, you are right. It might not be.

But at least, I hope that you will concede in light of my arguments in the preceding post, that given some plausible evolutionary explanation of organic life from prebiotic chemistry under natural law, information could be plausibly physical. It seems that pretty much every question about the metaphysics of the abstract cerebral concepts ends up in questions about human genesis. But this is still important to conclude, in my opinion, if nothing else. That most issues about the abstract notions have answers that rest on the explanation of our genesis, one way or the other.

What hypothesis would you rather discuss? Do you reject the evolutionary hypothesis in the sense that you believe it to be inconsistent with its supporting framework, naturalism, or do you reject it methodologically due to the making of conjecture of this hypothesis while omitting crucial details in its explanation? Do you object necessarily that such explanation can be found, or that alternative naturalistic hypothesis of human genesis can be found, but shouldn't be assumed presently, or you reject methodologically that the naturalistic assumptions can be used for inferring the plausibility of any hypothesis, because they are themselves unproven? Do you seek discussion of the nature of information in a different framework? Ask yourself however, is it better defended to the same objections that you lay at naturalism's door? For example, is its hypothesis of human genesis better substantiated by equally compelling experience of any kind then the evolutionary hypothesis?

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions — Barbieri

I actually am under the impression that abiogenesis is more concentrated around the idea of the first self-replicating polymers, believed to be precursor to the first form of life, and most likely formed at first in fresh water, near steam vents, possibly on the surface of clay minerals, or other catalytic materials, or inside the pores of rocks. The "lightning struck" hypothesis is one of many, and I don't think it garners that much attention as you may think.

The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life — Barbieri

Self-replicating polymer chains can exists and evolve without any other signs of life, and this I believe is proven in laboratory conditions, with environmental factors resembling what we believe to have been at the time. These are just natural formation, and did not contain biological information in the sense in which we understand it. They were organic chains more resistant to their surrounding conditions, and more easily formed from the available organic and inorganic materials. Note that this organic chains still did carry informational value about "what works", but not how to be living. A hypothesized precursor to life, the polymers are suggested to have adapted to proto-cell enclosure later, which may have formed by infiltration of the polymers in some naturally occurring vesicles in bodies of water and transmitted between the vesicles through either contact, or through polymer escaping as viroids. That would have provided some kind of natural selection and organic reproduction at first, although we cannot explain how the metabolic cycle appeared, such that the polymers became capable of reproducing not only themselves, but also the cell membrane along with the polymer inside it. There is no known contradiction/refutation of which I am aware, but neither do we have explanation. The polymer may have started to produce various hydrophilic compounds by secondary reactions in the water and thus form micelles in colloidal suspension.

Edit:
to the first form of life, most likely formed -> to the first form of life, and most likely formed
(the chains, not the cellular life formed)
known contradiction, but we don't have explanation -> known contradiction/refutation of which I am aware, but neither do we have explanation

This is going to start with some explanation about information theoretic concepts, which may seem unrelated at first, but the purpose of their introduction will become clearer later.

Most concepts in information theory are described in terms of degrees of non-determinism. They have nothing to do with semantics of physical expressions. I don't mean necessarily ontological non-determinism, but variation of quantities under the scope of whatever conditions apply. This, of course raises questions about the nature of the context of those conditions and what is non-determinism actually in practice, but I will defer till later.

A key concept, entropy, quantifies non-determinism. Captures the idea, metaphorically, that for some quantities, no matter how much we tried to hedge our bets on all possibilities, the outcomes will remain uninsurable. But this intuition seems to imply a subject, whereas the mathematical definition simply ascribes a relationship between a degree of freedom with which something can behave and degree of precision with which it can be quantified, whether a conscious predictor exists or not.

Another concept, mutual information, intuitively quantifies how much better "hedging" on one variable becomes when the non-determinism of another is eliminated by inclusion in the context. Again, this is just intuition. The mathematical definition simply relates the various outcomes or measurements of one variable to the other. The remaining non-determinism is the conditional entropy of one variable with respect to another. So, in information theory, you do not have object and subject per-se, but connection between the non-determinism of different quantities in the outcome, which is symmetric relation.

The above explanation applies to kinds of fields of application, which are not pertinent here. I am now going to focus to what I consider the notion of information to be in the physical sense, because it pertains to your inquiry. Even though this will not cover all the manners in which the theory is applied in general, the practical and fundamental sense end up being intertwined.

According to our present day natural science, or at least my best understanding, physical stuff is related to physical stuff through interactions that travel with the speed of light. Those interactions are impeded, first, by the propagation delay in the sense that it restricts the rate of roundtrip influence between separated entities, second, by the decay of the probability of interaction at greater distances, and third, by the subsumption of the field excitations after interaction, which means that stuff acts like a shield to other matter in its shadow, at least in the direction of the signal. Gravity is the exception to the last.

So, physical entities are "mutually informed". As long as one entity is close enough to another and not obscured by matter, we can constrain how those two entities coevolve together in a manner that we cannot constrain one entity by itself. This implies mutual information. They are more informed about immediate surroundings and less informed about distant and obscured surroundings. What happens to one particle of given type is generally much loosely specified, but physically restricted systems carry a lot of mutual information between their constituents.

Usually we refer by information to ascription of encoded meaning in the structure of some physical stuff which pertains to the structure of other physical stuff. I will argue that the dissemination of such information follows the same principle as the signaling of physical particles and if we have evolved under the natural law, without scientific self-contradiction, we could hypothesize that we have learned to interpret information by being first exposed to it in the fundamental physical sense and then have learned to encode information by knowing how to interpret it in the first place. Encoding with degree of abstraction, which is rather specific to intelligent life, is where symbolic and abstract representational encoding come into play. Those are not tied to information theory fundamentally, albeit being a particular object of interest for its application. Symbolic encoding requires higher cognitive abilities which are recent in our evolution and are a matter of investigation even more recently. But I don't want to digress yet.

Let us assume that interpretative skills exist for a moment. If we characterize as true being positively ascertainable by compelling impersonal factors, then if some sentence is encoding a true proposition, its expression under the naturalist doctrine must have structure which when interpreted by our brain should result in resonance between our cognitive faculty and certain spatio-temporal physical facts. At least in the sense that our brain's decisions will become more qualified. Those facts may be impossible to articulate through empirical measurements in practice, for social, aesthetic, ethical, etc. concerns, but such sentences have structure which makes the interpreter aware of the disposition of whatever aspects of the physical reality are necessary in order to avoid self-harm and achieve satisfaction, or collaborate to the collective attainment of the same in which it has a part.

The whole point is that encodings convey mutual information in the same sense in which physical interactions do, but even for obscured and distant physical aspects, abstract as they may be. As a simpler example, I know what a koala looks like, if not for any other reason, because I can google it. A camera used the interaction between its sensor array and the light reflected from the koala's outer surface, then carried this image to electronics and memory in the camera by electricity, then used electrical charge to record the image to flash storage or transfer it to some online storage of the media outlet. Nature restricts matter which makes one piece indicative of another, such that we can create chains of interactions that carry informedness from one entity to a much distant one and eventually convey it to a human being's senses.

You may rightfully ask, what makes my brain interpret information and regard it as such. The screen is in mostly literal state (even though it is flat and pixelated), but the assignment of the taxonomy of the image relies on the interpretation of text. The information in the form of a digital image is directly representational of the actual koala, not very abstract, and the symbolic information in the text which supplements it is. My brain itself encodes information, and it has differing degrees of abstraction, depending on which part of the brain is considered. Some encode highly abstract states of thinking and recollection, whereas other, such as parts of the visual cortex, are comparatively literal. In any case, because of the high degree of interconnectedness, the neural networks are very compact and either represent small aspects a of sensory stimulus, or amalgamate many such aspects.

I can only speculate how the interpretation skill has evolved, but you wouldn't expect more then speculation on this topic anyway. The earth absorbs solar radiation like most planets in the universe, but in our solar system the radiation intensity reach us is of the right amount, and the chemical diversity on our cosmic rock is of the right kind, such that various compounds absorb the electromagnetic into enough chemical energy and resist the residual thermodynamic entropy. As a result, stable conditions are present for the appearance of smaller and then larger systems, whose mutual information gradually permeates way past the normal effective range of immediate physical interactions. Evolution allows retention of state which reflects precedents in order to become responsive to recurrences in a manner that increases sustenance. This begins trivially, with simple polymers, whose very occurrence and statistical reproducibility conveys the conditions that fostered their structure, through protocells and simple bacteria which respond to the proliferation in more complex biomes and the appearance of biotic competition, and then all sorts of tissue specializations. This is all information retention. Not cerebral one, but retention nonetheless. The whole planet is like a memory bank and a processor.

The environment have already taken on interpretative mechanisms with the first reactive single-cellular life. They interpret stimuli, such as indirect food awareness, threat awareness, etc. The question is, how complex, dynamic, and deeply interpretative they could naturally evolve. We cannot say for certain. Too much data is erased and we are not such smart cookies to reconstruct nature's mechanism which had so much to experiment with plausibility to refine. If the evolution hypothesis is right, which to our best knowledge could be in principle, the physical order on our planet spawned interrelation engines, because they are able to retain information about what is distant in time and space. If you don't retain information with the environment, you become probable subject to its entropy and consequently could be subject to special assimilation.

I was trying to get off the forum , but this thread brought me to ask for a few clarifications.

In his theory, Jaynes goes on to explain consciousness, “the human ability to introspect”. Abandoning the assumption that consciousness is innate, Jaynes explains it instead as a learned behavior that “arises from language, and specifically from metaphor”. — Gus Lamarch

Does the above statement imply that the solipsistic question of other people's experience of the mind is meaningless, or is this categorically different question? Jaynes, as a researcher, may not have had interest in such riddle at all, but does he operate under the premise that inquiries about the metaphysics of the mind are meaningless, or are they simply not in the purview his interests?

- Humanity, until the period of the first historical manuscripts, does not present in any form a conception of the understanding of conscience - introspectiveness, which has the capacity to "think about itself -;
- We cannot access and study the habits and psychological functionalities of the ancients in first instance - from 700 BC to 6000 BC - to prove through evidence that they had the mental and conceptual structure that humans post-500 BC, however, there is historical-archeological evidence that strengthens the contrary notion;
- Therefore, the ancient human conscience was not necessarily identical to the current one. — Gus Lamarch

From a brief survey of the topic on Wikipedia. I was surprised that the lateralization of the brain is conjectured to not only encompass creativity and learning, but also the self and others. Very enlightening. Part of the criticism appears to be around the dating of an early literary work, the "Epic of Gigamesh". I wouldn't know either way and I can't judge on that alone. What seemed more justifiably concerning however, was that proliferation and cultural penetration of genetics was very unlikely to happen in just centuries, if I am not misunderstanding the implied timeline. Lactose tolerance/persistence started at about the same time, even earlier, and we are still observing significant amount of intolerant people unevenly distributed around the globe's continents. If this theory is suggesting a new genetic allele, it is either suggesting that it was dominant or that it was highly advantageous, or that not all of us have the ability developed in this regard? If idea was elaborated in terms of graduations, it would allow some people to develop lower IQ for this reason, but if we are talking about one spontaneous mutation, I would expect some non-negligible part of the population would still continue to be unaware of their intents and function like animal species.

Ancient people in the bicameral state of mind would have experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a person with schizophrenia. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question. — Gus Lamarch

Does that give them some kind of substitute cognitive loop, without explicit self-referentiality, or was it incomparably limiting experience? Just to be clear about the distinguishing cognitive aspect - I surmise that we are talking about lack of acknowledged mental agency, not merely lack of auto-psychological skill. I assume that those people did probably understand involvement in situations, just not involvement in mental judgements, if I interpreted the conjecture correctly.

It is reasonably convincing argument, from my uneducated point of view, but personally, it remains a conjecture. It seems probable, maybe could be factual. Looking from the sidelines, I would like more scientific consensus to inspire my confidence and to have more details about the cognitive effects, and the chronological account elaborated. You deem this theory accurate through process of elimination, but this is finicky practice, even if necessary, for lack of proper historical account.

P.S. Thanks. For the interesting and conscientiously presented work.

Please feel free to add to the discussion, and please provide a link to your description of consciousness.
In my understanding, self organization = consciousness. Self organization is a god like term, as far as I can see, in that it can fill all of the explanatory gaps traditionally filled by god. — Pop

Our views differ, in the sense that I do not postulate any new empirical relations. I haven't elaborated much either way, because the point was to defend naturalistically compatible emergence of phenomenological experience. I would concur with you that dynamic systems in nature have attractor points that are more organized then their initial conditions, but I think that this is accepted by contemporary science. As I said, I believe that for the case of the first biological systems, abiogenesis is relying on this idea, when hoping to prove the arrival of organics from pre-biotic chemistry. On the other hand, it is well known that thermodynamic entropy is bound to increase globally. Therefore conditional entropy between systems will increase, and information expressiveness, or order is to be lost. Terrestrial life sustains order, because we still have low entropy energy sources. For biological systems, it is predominantly from solar radiation, and for our technology, it is predominantly fossil fuel and atomic energy.

As I said, it follows a different venue and does not postulate new empirical relations, but if you are still interested, here is the link.

... — simeonz

If the 2 main monist views are either that :-

a) there is only physical Matter/Energy (Materialism) or
b) there is only Thought (Idealism) which can fashion our imaginings and give a perception of solidity,

then an' information layer' as you describe it, which shapes everything, is either close to the Idealist view, or a full embodiment of the Dualist perspective. — Gary Enfield

Interjecting in again, but I should disagree. The distinction between pantheism/panpsychism and metaphysical idealism, the way I see it, is that that the former conjectures mental state articulated by immutable or quasi-immutable constraints, acting on the relations between its constituents, whereas the latter considers these constraints as just cognitive elaborations of ephemeral experiences. Dualism proposes that the immutable constraints exist objectively and permanently, but are not between the constituents of the mind, but between the constituents of another substance that the mind supervenes. Idealism and pantheism/panpsychism are both substance monism indeed, but their treatment of natural law differs. It is epistemic in essence for the former, and ontological for the latter

If anyone responds to this, I want to take a short break, so do not be offended if I don't answer speedily.

Everything is information, and everything is self organizing, so everything is self organizing information! This is the underlying element that materialism does not generally recognize.

I imagine impressions like this is what led people like Planck, and Schrodinger, and others to believe that consciousness is fundamental, and Fritjof Capra to state that "the basic unit of cognition is a disturbance in a state." — Pop

I was not familiar with the concept, before you mentioned it, but self-organization theory appears to convey the idea that a system without innate orderliness will attain order by virtue of the constant influence of factors from the environment. Or, as you said, the internal organization will reflect exterior factors. Note that this is recognized by abiogenesists. That is, they recognize that life emerged due to the availability of factors, such as energy and overabundance of carbon and radiation, among others. Certain supporters go even so far as to conjecture that it was inevitable development to produce life, whatever the contingent initial conditions of the chemical substances were, although I am not sure that I would go that far.

Note that what you called information here, if I have understood you correctly, is probably better termed state. It is a small concern, but I think that conventionally information is considered a relation. And in information theory, there are two related terms, mutual information, and conditional entropy.

I don't want to butt into the discussion. I took a peek and realized that what you describe as consciousness is very similar to how I would describe it in panpsychic and pantheistic terms. That is how I should convey their idea, if I were to elaborate it today. I even wrote a post some days after yours, where I summarized my position. I am merely entertaining the idea as a hypothesis, not a claim. Not even a conjecture.

P.S. Enactivism might be interesting to you, but I should say that I am not familiar with it either.

If I may take a rain check for a while. I need a few days to compose my thoughts.

On a different note, I didn't actually mean illiterate, as in functionally illiterate. When I use words, I sometimes misuse them by intending some non-default meaning, even without qualification, assuming reinterpretation from context. I meant a person rather uneducated, namely for the topic of philosophy.
Ironically, this does imply that my command of English needs some polish. And, so does my command of my native language.

Agree with jgill - your posts are very hard to parse. I think it’s worth the effort, but the longer your posts become, the less inclined I am to keep trying. — Wayfarer

I make the effort to the extent, which my ability and energy afford me. I admit that it is not as good as it could be.

Now I understand you might have a very different perspective, but I think it would help you a lot to map what you’re saying against some of the literature. Preferably, popular sources, rather than peer-reviewed science journals. Use them to illustrate the point - where you agree with them, and where you disagree. I’m sure you have many such sources. One of the things I really get from this forum is finding out about what others are reading. — Wayfarer

I have my philosophy textbook, wikipedia, random articles, Stanford E. P., and this forum. My commitment is rather shallow in this regard. I am authentically curious, but the articulation frequently strikes me much more conjectural and personal then evidential. I usually read hypotheses as a sketch, and gradually piece them together, rather then focus in depth. ( Edit: In principle, the starting points for my ideas are Leibniz and Spinoza, but theirs are theistically or spiritually inclined, whereas mine are rather void in that regard and are predominantly phenomenological.)

But I confess that I am illiterate, by the forum's standards. I always try to emphasize how unremarkable my purview of philosophy is, but it doesn't get across. Maybe because I express myself with overconfidence. For abiogenesis, I could provide some articles, which might be interesting to you, but they are not official sources either. They are found as random reads off the internet as well.

We’re clearly on a different wavelength in some respects, but I think your posts and ideas have a lot of potential, hopefully the back-and-forth of this medium will help you sharpen that up a bit. — Wayfarer

If you would like to elaborate, do you perceive the differences between us as rooted in the technical or the ethical side of things. Is it a matter of innate persuasion, which I have also stated that science is, or experiential conviction? That is, do you consider my proposals too vague, which would be a fair point, or unsound, or ethically inadmissible.

You write very well, but for those of us who have limited capacities for reflecting and processing it might help to break apart and separate very lengthy paragraphs, and/or do a bit more summarizing or condensing. — jgill

Thanks. I start with the notion of a concise response, and end up with a lot of words. There are usually no paragraphs in what I write. A monolithic chunk of text with a few empty lines, to throw off the reader. I'll try to rectify the last post, at least mechanically.

I don't like to belabor myself, but it doesn't come easily. Even after several edits, I usually remain verbose. I sometimes end up summarizing in a finishing paragraph. The problem is, in very long posts, I become spent and may give up. Sorry. The truth is, as I have said before, the forum format, for which I am very grateful also, is mostly for exchange of sketch ideas. But when the perspectives differ, suggestive communication is insufficient, and both parties either have to make things concrete or give up.

You do have interesting insights. Did you say you worked in the health sector? An MD? Nurse? Just curious. — jgill

Well, I haven't. Nothing as noble. My occupation is in the technological sector (software developer).

The skeptical challenge to the dualist position is: well, you say there is this 'spooky mind-stuff', so where is it? This is where the limitations of the method of objectification need to be made clear. The attributes of the intellect (nous) appear by way of what the mind is able to grasp, in other words, in the operations of reason. They are themselves not an object of scientific analysis, although without the use of reason, scientific analysis could not even start. But as the empiricist instinct is always to proceed in terms of what can be objectively grasped and quantified, then the operations of reason, although assumed by it, are not visible to it. — Wayfarer

We differ here in our perspective, about what is reasonable and unreasonable explanation. Because I admit the hypotheses of panpsychism and pantheism, which are very distinct from dualism in spirit. I also admit dualism, but I always find it the most encumbered with detail of those positions. Not to mention, that it is sometimes linked directly to theism and spirituality, which are nothing bad in principle, but are is extremely loosely implied.

I will argue from the point of panpsychism and pantheism. The brain could be capable of experiencing itself not by sensory perception, but as self-reflection. For the panpsychist position, the constituents of nature might have innate ability to self perceive, which elaborates into collective experience under certain circumstances, and for pantheism , the starting point would be omniscient consciousness that is compartmentalized into epistemically isolated portions (the deity is the ultimately extended mind). In both cases, the qualia is realized by the physical domain. This is not outwards pointing experience, just self-experience, but the state has subsumed both the mental and the physical role, and contentions (forces of interaction) arise natively between the mental parts, not conveyed through transduction from some envelope medium.

For panpsychism, the extent to which a physical process expresses a cognitively viable transaction (producing retention and manipulation of information) determines how much the local awareness coheres and produces collective experience. For pantheism, the global awareness is split from the divine awareness on boundaries that do not belong to the same sentient process. But in both cases, the experience is fragmented and nested in layers. It breaks into vantage points, each one incomplete. Each part can self-reflect, but larger parts subsume smaller ones in a manner, which articulates self-reflection in a qualitatively different way.

The totality is omniscient, but incoherent. It does not entail regard for the constituents. Personality arises as property of self-determination, to whatever extent possible, whose identity becomes specific to each vantage point. It is not aggregated. The awareness of constituents is limited in quantity and quality from the point of view of the aggregates, even if they are not coherent enough to understand that. And the aggregates behave in ways whose motivations might be unrelatable in terms of focus and character to the vantage points below it. For illustration, the blood cells spilled during shaving become subject to destruction that their natural programming objects to, but the individual (with the clumsy hand) cannot understand that significance - instead he sees a potential for a scar. For both pantheism and panpsychism, dullness of the structure results in less self-awareness. This time, not because it is not cohesive after splitting on information processing boundary, but because it is not articulate. It does not secrete as much collective experience, or allocate as much supreme awareness. While those structures may be still aware, it is a poor, inexpressive awareness.

Back to your question, matter experiences itself, but partly in fragments and only partly collectively. That is why, it cannot be aware of itself in detail at the aggregate level, even though it is aware of itself at the individual level. Those conditions that are experienced by our constituents on their own are lost to us, as to the person that we identify as. But the interactions between constituents allow communication (metaphorically), such that a vantage point can receive second hand image of its own state, by virtue of being compelled by the surrounding forces to representation of (parts of) its recent configuration, but possibly through expression that varies based on the manner in which the information was acquired. Hence, we are capable of receiving our state image from surrounding material constituents, which provides the detail of our self-experience that we would otherwise be lacking, but in a manner that realizes itself differently then if we were truly able to self-reflect in full detail.

My brain experiences itself, but not the specialized regions and biological redundancies. It conceives a foggy image of its complete configuration that only figures the high level detail. This includes the information processing aspects, which are captured as collective qualia. And while this qualia does not realize the image of its micro-states, the content that is absorbed as the collective self-awareness uses the sensory organs and material surroundings as additional loopback through which to refine its self-reflection. Piggybacking on devices, such as a recording of fMRI made earlier, played on a monitor, it receives neurological image of its recent state. It still does not have full perception of its constituents, which presently are capturing this image, but since the sensory image now traces physical interaction pathways that constitute information transaction, those are experienced at the collective level in sufficient detail to articulate mental experience and reflection.

Earlier I proposed monistic intersubjectve idealism. Particularly, a form of what I would call unconstrained pantheism, where the creation is fictional. It could shed and gain parts, and the story and rules can change. Merely the epistemic completion suggests that it will be explored with consistency, until the principal content has been extracted. The point here is that the universe is not guided by law, but by motivation to explore it. It doesn't have to be coherent, just provide useful experience for supreme vantage point.

Edit - This is work of pure fiction. Not a strongly supported conjecture.

As @SophistCat mentioned, you could replace conclusions with beliefs, but that may not have changed much. Knowledge, I consider, is just a word for true belief, and we cannot verify which belief is true. That is, in practice, all strong beliefs are considered knowledge by the bearer until proven otherwise. It is meta-scientific distinction.

You may allude to the idea that we test things indefinitely. That is, at least methodologically, science stays open to novel experience, continuously tests and rectifies itself when faced by contradiction. And as methodology, I agree that this is the best approach there could be. But there are two problems. First, those new amendments make the laws accurate retroactively, but does not prove that they are now predictive. And we are not just seeking retrospectively accurate models. Also, since most of the science is probabilistic, even if not in theory like thermodynamics and QM, it would be as a measurement practice, it cannot actually distinguish confirmation from refutation. Therefore, discovery of confirmation or contradiction is substituted for discovery of likely and unlikely occurrences. It seems to come down to belief, or instinct, or naturally coerced resolution, if you will. Science is a state of being scientific.

Proofs in mathematics are said to be discovered, as they are logical possibilities that arguably would exist even if no one discovered them. — Janus

@Banno drew my attention to your response, so I would like to suggest that while we discover separate instances of logical relations in objects and situations, and in us, through the intellectual predisposition to operate our decisions effectively under logical premises, this doesn't seem to change the fact that we are persuaded by instinct to extrapolate those cases to universal laws, without some reliable providential certainty. So, instances of logic are evident (empirically or introspectively, which is still a form of observation of nature), and logical laws are taken on faith. I support reason and science, because I believe in them, having observed their predictions so far, but the emphasis here remains on believe.

P.S.: I also believe in the scientific methodology, as I have previously stated. That is, to learn from experience and to rectify beliefs when confronted with reproducible and reliable contradicting evidence.

In this matter the proposition ‘results from chance’ is itself self-contradictory. — Wayfarer

If by chance, you mean, improbable event, then this is not what is involved. The hypotheses are not presupposing extraordinary occurrences. That wouldn't methodologically agree with conventional empiricism. If you mean that the we rely on ideas whose historical accuracy cannot be firmly supported, then you are correct. We cannot fight the effects of irreversible erosion of remnant evidence for proto-organics whose active proliferation would not have survived the climactic and ecosystemic changes that have transpired henceforth. Science is forced to speculate, and appeal to reason. There is no internal contradiction in doing that, just methodological hermeticism. The same applies to conjectures in morphogenesis, because soft tissue organism do not fossilize in a manner that confers their organ structure. Some ideas can only be hypothesized. Not because science is in contradiction, but because the effects of time and entropy preclude us from recovering the historical account necessary for inspection of scientific consistency. This forces abiogensis to rely on scientific retrodiction (since this is the only form of prediction we have), fossils, sediments, phylogenetic analysis of organisms, and as a last resort, conclusions by elimination. We also need time. Not to create fiction, but to figure out arguments for or against claims. On the other hand, you might mean that the conditions, as hypothesized, even if true, are very particular to earth. That is arguably true. While this may support a theistic argument, it does not necessarily contradict science and support revelation in the sense of incident miracle. I will explain this as it ties into a discussion trend on this forum.

When I am discussing physics and natural sciences, I am not intently contrasting them with theism, just with scientifically incompatible theism. Science is not an overall world view for me, but just a fraction of my world view. Namely, faith in the virtue of experience and its reconciliation with reason. Physics is not in a privileged position over experience and reason to establish rules and maintain them, because it favors a particular mindset. This is what mainstream religion used to do, and this is why I am not instituionally religious. The laws of science evolve constantly. What it tries to do is very narrowly defined and has comparatively little bearing on the condition of the universe. Physics tries to infer from experience predictive ways to reason about state patterns which appear to reproducibly apply to all spatio-temporal vicinities. In other words, it deals with universal constraints that can be observed anywhere, in close proximity around a location. It does not account for the global affairs altogether, aside from those local constraints that apply everywhere.

There are caveats, naturally. Since the universe, by scientific retrodiction is conjectured to have been concentrated, it is pertinent to ask, how the known limitations of local state dynamics would transitively confine, through their consistent following application, the development of matter after it dispersed. This will either confirm or refine our conception of the natural law. The second issue is, that since we know that we cant make the laws fully predictive, at least locally (QM asserts it), the question is whether the present day celestial variety lies within the realm of that cognitive gap we can account for, or are there initial varieties that have spawned it. Without any physically contradicting explanation, we could concur that they were present, either as a starting feature, or because time may protrude back beyond the concentrated stage in additional historical cycles. Another caveat is that laws are now mostly probabilistic, which makes them implicitly global in some sense. The second law of thermodynamics applies to all vicinities, but its strength depends on the size and the volume under consideration. And even then, the result is inclined, not strict, so the pattern that the law postulates makes local sense, but from a global vantage point. The same is true for QM, which applies rather weakly for singular events, but matches much more strongly for spans of time and at greater scales.

From this, I think it is apparent that whether something is a miracle is not dependent on being in agreement with a known physical law, but whether it is in agreement with reproducible pattern of sensory experience. If newly uncovered state dynamic is consistent, the situation would provoke amendment of the scientific expressions that convey the predictive implications. On the other hand, claims for hypothetical material events whose probability for occurring is extraordinarily small according to our prior experience, and whose sensory realization (such as described) cannot be demonstrated, are unlikely to be treated in agreement with science. As I have mentioned before, persuasion in the effectiveness of the scientific methodology is ultimately spontaneous, but I agree much of it. I agree that minimalism when conjecturing from evidence is warranted. That patterns of experience should be interpreted as simply as we can (by cognitive ability) without rendering the power of the interpretation too limited to be useful. The only vindication for detail is how it extrapolates to generalization. This is the methodological convention for science, and I agree with it.

We claim that certain studies are natural, because they investigate the relationship between events using physical law. They trace the connection between initial conditions and particular outcome, trying to establish how the constraints we know derive the typical result with reasonable certainty. Science does not explain how the particular global context was formed. It does not therefore explain the root cause of the initial conditions. Even when sciences seek deeply rooted causes, they only end up in other apriori features. The present day state of affairs may easily fall within the predictive gap of our physical law. Either way, there is scientific contradiction to admit that the initial state of the universe can be supreme design, but any conjecture about the quality and nature of the designer is opposed to scientific minimalism.

Some examples of natural sciences that we talked about. Neurology tries to figure out how the admissible transitions postulated by physics conclude at the biological outcomes that we typically observe with reasonable certainty. (It is far from succeeding.) Morphogenetic studies try to establish how the physical law traces the path of development of life from fertilized egg cell to a developed human being. Abiogenetic studies try to explain the arrival of contemporary organisms from early prebiotic chemistry. In contrast, revelation theism attacks the lack of evidence and criticizes the use of conjectural latitude to reaffirm naturalism and conventional science. The fact is that the early factors and events are obscured. Abiogenesis therefore has to rely on plausibility as argument, of events that are admissible considering the evidence present, but unpoven. Theism considers lack of hard evidence and confident reason scientific impotence, but does not require it of itself, because proof and reason are inessential to its central faith. They even consider its lack vindication of their ontology. In other words, theists start epistemically satisfied without reliance on detailed knowledge of the world and consider themselves in a better position, because their opponents are obviously challenged by their harder epistemic requirements.

I am tentatively theistic, possibilian, misotheistic. I conjecture things like telepathy, or zodiac influences, good and bad energies in the world, etc. But my ideas are tentative, reevaluated, doubted, and if they survive the test of experience and contemplation, increase in detail and confidence. My conjectures aim to become more articulate from detail that I accumulate. I am not looking to gain fundamental wisdom that refrains from elaboration of my world view by facts. I call this epistemically positive attitude. I employ fixed set of persuasions, indeed, but all my ideas are under constant attack, and my experiences are given time to convince me or dissuade me. In contrast, conventional mainstream theism can argue in a manner that appears epistemically satisfied, prior to experience, and experience appears to be gained mostly introspectively. The knowledge of material relations is considered antithetic to the ideal proposed. I consider this attitude epistemically negative. I am sorry if I come off antagonistic, but this is how I see things about most theistic proposals.

I will again try to articulate, to the best of my knowledge (which is not very ample), why RNA may have formed naturally over time. Its arrival is currently conjectured to have happened in stages. Such stages of increasing complexity can be synthesized in laboratory conditions, but one problem that exists is that the chemical concentrations supplied, the thermal and mechanical conditions are not naturally present today. The hypothesis is, that because the intense geothermal activity, the frequent moon cycles, the carbon dioxide concentration in the air and water, and the stronger sun radiation, those conditions may have existed for a while. Linking the stages is another challenge, as the retention of the intermediates, i.e. nucleobases, nucleotides, pre-RNA compounds, short RNA or RNA-DNA hybrid chains, is not natural in unprotected aqueous environment. Several hypotheses exist. My understanding here is shallow, and I will advise you to double check, but apparently the properties of certain solids, particularly clays or crystals, identify them as bonding agents of carbon compounds, which become retained on such surfaces, a sort of locale for the emergence of organic film. Those newly formed prebiotic organic substances, being protected from dissolution in the surrounding water by their solid host, are compelled to react with each other and polymerize over time. It was a staged process of attainment of structure. While chance was involved at each stage individually, those surfaces show in laboratories that they are sufficiently conducive to polymerization, thus would be able to effect a starting point for primitive self-replicating compounds over time. Another not so different hypothesis is that the pores of rocks served as areas, which concentrated and retained intermediate organic substances together, prevented them from diluting in the surrounding environment, and partially protected them from reacting with other proliferate chemical agents. This may have provided early substitute for cellularization, and hence fostered the appearance of longer polymers (which are less stable) and eventually metabolic cycles (which is indeed thornier topic). And a hypothesis exists that isolation was provided by same phase separation. This is possible in emulsions, or coacervates, which are substances that form droplets in other liquids. Those droplets might have recombined through fussion and fission, which would allow them to exchange reactants over time, allowing for early form of natural selection. It is also possible that cellularization existed before self-replicating polymers, offered by simple organic amphiphilic compounds. This could have provided a stage for the arrival of RNA-like polymers later, either distributed by vesicle or possibly as a kind of viroid.

I am not the person to answer questions about this topic. But to me, it appears that there are semi-plausible conjectures. As I explained, they depend on the hypothetical initial conditions. If I wanted to emphasize a weakness, I would attack the appearance of enzymic metabolism. Even though, as I said, any attack without a known historical account is proof by your opponent's ignorance, which I do not condone. But, still, it appears to be a weak link, or at least I haven't encountered plausible natural explanations. Attacking morphogensis is similar, but even if the detail is not clear, there is reasonable expectation of growth in complexity under the proliferation of forms during the Cambrian era. Language is maybe insufficiently explained, as a phenomenon that evolved quickly, under presumed environmental stress, but in just single species.

But whether they are ‘possible state configurations’, or not, science still presumes an order. F doesn't equal MA only on certain occasions; ‘hey, that cannonball missed, the law wasn’t working today’. And if their 'configurations' couldn't be expressed in maths, then likewise, hard to see how science could get a foothold. — Wayfarer

The local factors of two spatio-temporal regions may be symmetric or asymmetric. By extrapolation of those conditions to the state of the entire universe, we construct the notions of complete chaos (no redundancies), or complete order (uniform, or vacant state). We ask what demands our case to be situated so particularly between them. It is epistemically reasonable to investigate, but it may be ontologically unintelligible question to ask. There is no guarantee that our understanding, from our limited experience, can be made compatible with the actual ontological perspective. It may be incommensurate with it, so to speak. We could be witnessing all the necessary phenomena that provide the meaning, but since the very meaning is unrelatable to the view and objectives that we have, our human ethics, etc, we may not appreciate it. Even if we were conveyed this meaning in explicit terms that we can interpret, we may still not appreciate it. Hence, complete disorder or order may be extrapolation that we just investigate by epistemic habit and compulsion.

Both nominalists and platonists should however agree that homomorphic and amorphic micro-state dynamics exist. I believe that their disagreement is about phenomenology, and about the implications on phenomenology on epistemic issues. That is why I turned to the philosophy of the mind initially. Because I felt that the merger of phenomenology and epistemics here is unclear. The contention seems to be between conjecture for direct disclosure of underlying design through mental experience and conjecture for representational comprehension of regularities through situated interactions. If we assume no causality from our mental state to its material vessel, or no distinction between substances of mind and matter, the same combinatorial account should be epistemically compliant with both views.

Your posts are hard work, although they’re worth the effort — Wayfarer

I was too verbose and conflated when it came to the requirement for "reproduction of the local transition patterns ". I meant that symmetries of the micro-state transitions are necessary for the emergence of predictive systems. Representational morphisms demand it. I wanted to be relativistic as well, so I proposed that spatial structure was causally inferred by independently specified micro-state timeline dynamics. The truth is, that the state should be described in some structure, manifold, such as Minkowski space, whose symmetries have different criteria, but unfortunately, I am not qualified to elaborate them.

The ‘mechanism’ is not simple at all. The process by which DNA replicates, and the operation of the human brain, are two of the most complex processes known to science. The idea is simple, but I don’t think that supports your point! — Wayfarer

I treated the problem in two parts, but I aimed to argue that abstract conceptual cognition, at least hypothetically, could occur without the presence of some binding agent that conveys the essence of patterns in nature directly to us, making them self-evident. First, I argued that the sophistication of our cerebral structure is sufficient for neurological processes to emergently develop conceptualization. That through the presence of linguistic skill, acquired through genetic propensity for vocal semiotics and learned behavior, along with our complex perceptual system and vast neurological capacity for processing and storage, we can encode associations, such that we can hypothetically account for abstract cognition at the level of synaptic activations.

On the other hand, the arrival of such complex nervous system naturally is much more complicated. Not just because of DNA. Self-replicating polymers are conjectured to have appeared, because organics are demonstrably chemically active and polymerize easily, and although labile in unprotected environment, the presence of solid catalytic surfaces where the matter is deposited or rock pores, could have retained them for longer durations. The process of self-replication is possible with short chained RNAs or RNA-DNA hybrids (chimeric polymer). They can form double stranded structure. The strands would then have been disassociated during particular phases of naturally occurring energy cycles in the environment (hot and cold conditions of hydrothermal vents, or high and low tides). Cellularization is a problem, but early emphaphilic compounds may have served the role of today's lipids. But how we have arrived at a metabolic cycle in the first prokaryotic cell, is a difficult question. Even if we can design metabolism that boots from prebiotic chemistry, all the fantastical stories would depend on our assumptions about special conditions and events that we can never verify. It is too complicated to arbitrate if locales of primordial earth were so very different from today's world. And we cannot magically circumvent the erosion of evidence produced from the action of entropy, that leaves us with stretches in our imagination. My objections to the hypothesis of supernatural events are, first, that they are too narrowly specified (theistically determined, etc), to the point where the details are frequently not essential for the required effect, and second, if they were indeed produced by intervention of omnipotent agency, I fail to conceive why the omnipotent agent couldn't make the regularities in nature more coercive to evolution, instead of making impromptu changes after the fact. In any case, we cannot give confident account scientifically for many stages of evolution, such as the first appearance of metabolism. morphogenesis, and partially, about language and its effects. So, any hypothesis is possible, as long as its elaboration of detail is relevant to the question being answered and is otherwise conservative (Occam's razor), and its presuppositions are also articulated.

The question that occurs to me, is whether you see yourself as pursuing philosophy as distinct from science, or whether you think there is no difference and that one subsumes the other. — Wayfarer

Human experience is integral part of knowledge and should not be neglected. I don't propose that there is universal formula for being correct. But people should not forego their experience. Science and philosophy need to attempt to reconcile, bilaterally.. With justified skepticism on both sides.


Edit:

I took the liberty of doing some very serious editing. So, for anyone who has read the content, if you decide, you may want to reread it, or at least I hope should not be surprised. Mostly it was for stylistic reasons - decided to rephrase some sentences, add clarifications, removed one clarification that didn't make sense.

I have a rather layman understanding of 20th century physics, but this is evidently important question for QM. Without philosophically meaningful description of probability, using propensities as subject matter is vague.

I have some conclusions of my own that I will propose.

Basically, the mathematical definition, specifically the one about expectation, aims to compute utilities over collections of instances. It deals with other quantities as well, but those are usually advisory, and the central notion is the mean. There is no need for non-determinism or incomplete knowledge to use probability. You could compute means over populations in some country or over the last month's orders of a company, etc. As long as you know the frequencies in advance, by direct measurement, the results are infallible.

When you don't have the ability to measure probability directly, because you either lack knowledge or there is genuine non-determinism, there are multiple avenues to take.

One involves past experience and statistics. The root of confidence in any kind of inductive practice is our history, both personal and collective, both recorded and genetic. Every time we achieve success, we experience confirmation bias and further ourselves, socially and as genetic viability. This develops and reinforces our habit, culture, and heritage. Like anything in nature, statistical induction will either work or will not, but from what we have seen, in most cases, had we decided not to trust the probabilistic consistency of nature, or the uniformity of nature, we would have had retroactively lost from the outcome. So, our actions are justified only in retrospect. Statistical thinking is in our natural programming, social convention, and habit.

There are other ways to extract distributions. You can seek trivial probability events (certain) and derive the rest of the distributions for related properties by first principles. For a dice roll, considering that the dice is symmetric, and since the roll is a certain event, each side would be presumed to roll with equal sixth chance. Similarly, if you toss three coins, you can derive the outcome chance of each configuration by independence. Starting with certain event and following symmetry and independence arguments, you can derive a lot of event chances.

The last method involves Bayesian thinking, where starting with particular distribution, either of the initial conditions in some stochastic process, or initial constraint on the present event, you reevaluate your probability constantly.

So much for now. Article on the Stanford E. P. that deals with statistics. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/statistics

What I'm questioning is the degree to which the designation of these capacities as 'biological' is relevant. Certainly they're relevant or useful for the study of biology but the questions philosophers ask are existential and cannot necessarily be addressed in biological or biomechanical terms. Given all the facts of evolution, existence is still an existential predicament for human beings; that is what philosophy is concerned with. — Wayfarer

The laws of biological and chemical order, may or may not have unifying underlying platonic causes. I honestly could not conjecture either way. Alternatively, nature might just have possible state configurations, with restricted transitions, or predetermined timeline of states, or even (more in tact with relativistic physics) collection of timelines for state components whose spatial ordering arises effectively by virtue of the patterns expressed in the otherwise unordered configuration components. The point is, that configurations don't need relatable logic. Aside from their combinatorial essense, which exposes codetermination in the state configuration, the relationships between the state components don't require abstract meaning. For a system inside this state to actually establish homeostasis or allostasis with the environment, the prerequisites are reproduction of the local transition patterns according to a spatial state ordering that could explain causally the chronology of each component, symmetry of the component transitions (low entropy) and change (abundant energy). Neurological, physical and physiological state can be formed by obeying correspondence with the environment into the predefined constraints on the evolution of the state space.

We could also ask about mental experience after that. As I have answered before, this could be explained in many ways, but only as speculation. I do favor the idea of emergence or compartmentalization of some innate reflection potential that applies universally to the state, by combining granular experience potentials from each component in increasing capacity for self-determination when they operate in some coherent fashion (such as in our brain), or by subdivision of the overall experience potential of the universe into smaller identities that maintain particular object constancy around components that operate coherently (such as in our brain), etc.

This departure aside. I am pushing the idea, if you will, that nothing works for simply fundamental reasons, and without elaboration of the particular context and history, there are layers on top of layers, where the puzzle is bewildering to investigate. How we expose the fundementals will depend on what we can work out about the details that were produced situationally and in consequence. Only then we can remove them from the picture and discover what is left.

For example, if the human cognitive apparatus was indeed produced in stages of increasing sophistication and it is still organized in hierarchical manner that is pivotal to efficient feature extraction and denoising of raw sensory input, we didn't simply happen to grasp our circumstances overnight, because of secretion of knowledge into us, but there was gradual accumulation of faculties in our design (whether inspired by natural forces or not) and those faculties, and not platonic forms, serve as landing pad for the knowledge that sits on top of them.

That is why I asked if you would agree that our basic cognitive functions, to pick up symmetries, patterns, etc, are articulated in our brain, i.e. visual, auditory, somatosensory cortex, and whether you allow that we may have derived those faculties from evolution. This is complex area beyond my competence that I won't fully explain, science cannot explain it exhaustively either, so if you would agree, it advances the question on faith. The same applies to stages of evolution in general. Even an unicellular organism, such as choanoflagellates, is a rather complicated biological system. It is possible to envision chemistry evolving to bacterial and later protist lifeform, but this includes many difficult stages. Self-replicating polymers, chemical encapsulation in micelle, metabolism (homeostasis by staged reactions, separation of exothermic and endothermic reactions, separation of decomposition and synthesis reactions, production of organic catalysts) for which we don't have much in the way of historical account, aside from stromatolite fossils, and which we are attempting to reenact by guessing the conditions. Or multicellular life that may have began as slime molds, and the nervous system that may have appeared as nerve nets. We discover this by phylogenetic analysis to some degree, but process of elimination that you can contest is also involved, because we lack fossils. Because lifeforms were soft tissue, depriving us from the crucial account of early morphogensis and cell differentiation, including cephalization, we cannot account for those confidently. In fact, cell and tissue differentiation is still actively studied. Language, which is crucial in my account, seems to have been driven by signalling advances, when our predecessors were forced by ecosystemic changes to move from the tree branches to the tall grass-ridden ground and to start to communicate opportunities or threats.

Going back to the article on the indispensability of mathematics, and the problem of mathematical knowledge, why do you think the fact that we have an apparent innate ability to grasp mathematical proofs is said to be 'a challenge to our best epistemic theories'? Why do you think it was felt necessary to provide an alternative account of mathematical knowledge which sidesteps that challenge? What do you think the philosophical issue at stake is here? — Wayfarer

I am reading Benecerraf's Mathematical Truth, which was referred to by the Wikipedia article you quoted. I still cannot grasp the entire argument, and the author quotes another paper that pertains to the incompatibility between platonism and rationality specifically, but to the best of my understanding, knowledge according to the text is a synthetic condition, i.e. provoked, and abstractions are analytic, i.e. applied as template. The claim is that the theory cannot be married to our knowledge in some apparent and explained sense, because their character is incompatible.

Consider the implication of the insertion of 'simply' in this sentence. Abstract ideas comprise practically the entire, vast, and diverse body of human culture. — Wayfarer

The designation of some amalgamation of diverse kinds of experience and extrapolations is not that surprisingly complex in principle. The appearance of such faculty is astounding, but its operation seems to rely on crudeness itself. The brain is very ample structure, and any token word is probably encoded in a redundant fashion. Thousands of neurons and millions of synapses may be employed for a single concept (or a notion), for making associations with multitudes of sensory experiences and linguistic terms, creating significant semantic backup. So, when I said simply, I meant that the mechanism is simple. Involving human culture concerns being extended and situated in your ecological and social environment. Here, from empiricist perspective, I would consider the idea of social evolution, where experience aggregates collectively and the social dynamics evolve in parallel to the individual. The personal and the social organisms evolve together and interdependently.

P.S.; Benacerraf: Mathematical Truth

She would have no chance of grasping the 'concept of prime'. Fast forward 6.9 million years (and some), h. sapiens appears. H. sapiens has some ability to grasp the 'concept of prime'. H. Sapiens was the consequence of huge evolutionary leap, namely, the development of the huge hominid forebrain. But what about 'the concept of prime' has evolved or changed in those millions of years? Answer: nothing. — Wayfarer

First, to talk about conceptualization, rather then instinct and notion, we need the development of language or some kind of signs. First, because otherwise we could not express definitions abstractly, and second because it appears that people started to conceptualize after they became capable of communicating their thoughts. So, assuming communication, abstract ideas are simply codification of experience attributes and behavior directives with appropriate linguistic structure. Prime numbers, specifically, are actually rather simple consequence of developing the concept of operations, which are quantity relations. They arrive at the scene when you ask, can I solve my linear equation in terms of integers. Algebraic necessity is sufficient for their introduction, but they can be observed in practice as the inability to achieve certain counts from subdivision of a rectangular area into congruent sub-rectangles. Equations themselves are regularities expressed through other regularities. They are predictive apparatus, for area estimation, for time keeping, for example. Solving equations attempts retrodiction - the estimation of conditions by their effects - which was frequently necessary. People conceptualized the problem, as something of a recurring event in their lives. It was both necessary to do so and apparent through self-reflection on their experiences.

The ability to calculate, to speak, count, imagine, and so on - these evolved, no doubt. — Wayfarer

So, we agree then that, without obvious internal contradiction, we could have developed innate biological capacity to discern objects in their environment, remember objects, ascertain relations, such as distances, congruence, similarity (using continuous integration of visual and auditory, and tactile cues, present and in memory), and detect simple patterns. So, at least, I hope that we can agree, that whether it is sufficiently elaborated by science or history, according to the empirical account, this is possible?

But the subject matter of those abilities - how can that be 'explained' in terms of 'evolutionary development'? — Wayfarer

I cannot fully explain how our brain functions, because we honestly don't have enough data, but it is considered to be broadly allocated for creative and quantitative tasks, so to speak. These features are apparently unevenly distributed between the hemispheres, as was established by tests performed on people where the brain was partially surgically separated to alleviate epilepsy symptoms. Both features are embodied in billions of nodes and trillions of connections. Assuming similar structure to A.I. that synthesizes images, the brain can constantly probe for proto-ideas, trying to make new ones from variations of old ones. Simultaneously, it tries to categorize sensory experience and decompose it into basic factors, which serve as seeding ground for those new concepts to emerge and be reincorporated into the neuronal structure themselves. In other words, the environment provides us with cues, which we then use to boot our own construction of new amalgemations of these features, but in abstract linguistic terms. I say, abstract terms, because even though language also breaks down to some experience or observation pattern, it can decode layers of meaning in stages, whereas literal form associations would limit us to hybridization of direct experience. Features that are more frequently encountered or more frequently used are more likely to be revisited. Therefore, we are bringing up many candidate concepts, which are extrapolations (I speculate, literally, as synaptic input extrapolations) of their linguistically expressed relation to observed patterns, and we either fit them in the scheme of things or discard them quickly from memory. Why do you perceive our ability to generate such candidate ideas of the type 'my experience or observation 1 and similar in structure, my experience or observation 2 and similar in structure, and so forth' as insufficient?

Note that even today's A.I. can generate images that amalgamate structure and detail from different training data. (Although I have to confess that it is both aided by us in its ability to discover isometry and similarity and is much simpler. But I assume that we have decided to admit the possibility that the discovery of isometry and similarity could have developed as evolutionary contingency.. Rightfully or not.)

P.S.:
Aside from synaptic extrapolations, such as linear extrapolation, another generalizing faculty that I presume the brain is capable of is induction through recursive feedbacks, which should be essential for some indefinite concepts that generalize from finite cases/experiences by some rule application ad-infinitum. For example, the abstract "for every" (for all). I envision as its precursor the cerebral expression of "everything" (e.g., in the universe), which could be encoded by applying "more", starting from something already big like "many". In other words, a feedback loop functions analogously to mathematical schema. Language allows unification of experiences in the brain by token signs or symbols, linear or ramped extrapolation allows generalization through simple trend reproduction, and feedback allows extrapolation through induction or recursion. I also said that some ideas are rejected from long term memory. I believe that the criteria for retention of any notion, abstract or otherwise, is its effectiveness, which has two components, compactness and generality or range of applicability. Compactness depends on its own complexity as neurological structure (how much space in terms of neurons and synapses it allocates) and it follows that ideas that mesh well with previous notions will be easier to retain, because they reuse a lot of the preexisting structure of other ideas. Generality or applicability not only reinforces the concept through recall, but it also serves compactness. It may have historically developed from the need for compactness, as innate biological trait that considers the relative ability of new information to displace old information in the long term. I think that today we favor generality and simplicity consciously, because through self-reflection, we have gradually come to explicate, articulate and appraise the notions evident value.

You have to account for the fact that our brain is capable of detecting isometries, similarities, etc, which is product of marriage between ourselves and our environment through long evolutionary process. In other words, there is apparent phase of alignment of the cognitive apparatus to some world qualities, which aren't purely analytic.

(We had an exchange with @Banno recently, where I presupposed observational capacity. To think of it, since I presupposed it before the conception of higher order abstractions, it may have appeared a moot point to insist that concepts in modern mathematics can be analytic, since the apparatus that performs the basic processing of the sensory information is developed in a clearly situated historical fashion.)

I will try to illustrate the empirical account of our ability to handle the aforementioned geometric mappings, from an evolutionary standpoint, by going back to the annoying umbrella analogy again.

I have never witnessed rain. I am basic reactive organism that doesn't employ universals yet, but is capable of situational memory through reproduction of rote learned responses to electromagnetic, mechanical and chemical stimuli from my surrounding environment. I have two choices for reactions. I am not very creative here. I either open my umbrella or not. My only job then is to arbitrate between those options at any time. I don't open my umbrella and it pours. I get cold, I may die. I used my umbrella, I am dry, and take no risk for my apparently fragile health. I open my umbrella when the weather is sunny, I get less sun. My vitamin D levels decrease, I may die. I close my umbrella after the rain stops, I get sunshine, good calcium absorption. Organisms that will always open their umbrella when it rains and close it when it doesn't will proliferate. The umbrella is a reaction, but in being correspondent to the elements, it also encodes the complex external phenomenon. I don't recognize this phenomenon because of its special character, but merely because I receive stimuli that map to prior experience in sustenance-positive fashion.

The concluding extrapolation is that basic cognitive faculties that allow us to ascertain certain repeating qualities of the environment from early organic history to modern day organisms can be traced back to basic reactive relations. But assuming that trial and error can explain our perceptual system, it would allows us to discover repeating features by their expression derived in our neurological structures.

Whether the material relation through chemical, electromagnetic and mechanical interaction isn't facilitated by underlying unifying causes that proliferate platonically is undecided. I don't think we could ascertain that much. For example, linearity might exist independently, in the sense that the laws in Newtonian physics are independent conceptual reality, but lines might be just token ideas that we have developed to express a set of conditions that govern the world as we see it, by whatever virtue our material sense relation happens to be, which requires speculations.

Benecerraf was probably concerned that even if we can achieve correspondence between our mental representations and the environment, which was rather glossed over, we couldn't argue the soundness of our abstractions from experience. I think that he makes the claim that belief is contingency that is formed from reasons not possible to define analytically, and abstractions cannot be given apriori empirical account. So, we believe numbers are a good model for physical aggregates. For example, counting discrete collections with numbers, every time we add one further object, we get a larger aggregate. But can we argue that this is a good argument to make use of them? I think that given the above basic cognitive capacity and some basic intuitions (rationality, induction, etc), we can. But Benecerraf would apparently disagree.

Edit: I may misunderstand the argument that he makes.

From the same link

Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. — Wikipedia

I am left with the impression that this is utilitarian model of knowledge. I propose that only the basis of mathematics, such as predicate logic, induction, probability, are derived by use, and the rest can be extracted by vain observation of nature or articulated on top of other abstractions, without seeking actual non-epistemic benefit from those models. I believe that the work of Riemann in topology originally lacked applications and found most of its practical uses later.

Arguing is too strongly put. I am expressing opinion. Namely, that only the very fundamentals of mathematics are situated cognition, but most of it relies on modelling through observation and contemplation.

I am a little moody and out of sorts, so I apologize that I made no attempt to reply. I will give my brief account of Benecerraf's argument, from what I could surmise so far.

It is key that the author specifically distinguishes knowledge from theory. The first conjecture he makes is that mathematical knowledge is obtained by experiencing such situations that produce belief (causally). Assuming that I interpret the paper correctly, the belief is expressed extensionally, as the potential evidence that would be considered in agreement or disagreement with the experiencing subject. Whether the belief is justified or not in some communicated sense is not relevant, because it is defined by the circumstances that compel it. Although, this point is developed at a much higher level then what is necessary for me to expound its empirical meaning, particularly what solicits some persuasion and how it is embodied, it appears to be deliberately extensionally situated and not intensionally represented. Anyway, the argument is made, I think, that truth in abstract theories is evaluated in terms of the congruency between the conclusions and the discovered facts. In other words, we synthesize theories intensionally and then check their validity by observing situations that agree with their prerequisites and we make determination if the inferred theorems match with the states of affairs, according to some rational interpretation (i.e. Tarski's interpretation). (If the theory is logically consistent and we always observe situations that meet its prerequisites part way, we could speculate that rational logic is not good qualitative control.) If I have understood the conclusion correctly, since we have no limitations imposed on how we synthesize abstractions intensionally, and we have no analytic correspondence between our state of belief and the extension of the facts which will compel us to believe or dissuade us from believing, abstractions cannot be explained as beliefs. In other words, theoretic intensions and persuasion extensions cannot be matched apriori.

(Made an edit to express the conclusion in what I consider slightly better terms.)

Analogy,
My umbrella is designed to guard me against rain. Does it therefore rain if I have opened my umbrella? It needn't be. I might be checking to see if it works. (The object is designed as such, but my action of raising it is ultimately independent of my need for it). I run towards the visor of a building with newspaper over my head. Is it raining? The object is not designed as such, but under the present circumstances, my behavior with it indicates that I am in need of cover (my behavior is a belief indicator).

It is a rather difficult text and I am not on that same level. The author makes reference to another paper, "Platonism and the Causal Theory of Knowledge" by Mark Steiner. If someone has access to it and could elaborate its content, it might shed light.

I don’t see how any uncertainty in knowing the foundation of truth necessarily makes truth contingent. Again, my Jesus example. The Jesus in my story may not know where his intuitions came from, and may never know (in which case they are unknowable to him or perhaps to any human being); nevertheless, God put those intuitions in him; so they are not just a construct, and not contingent. — Acyutananda

As I have articulated in another post, intuitions are discovered contingently, but truth is only one possibility behind their conception. There are wrong intuitions. So, when we deal with mathematical abstractions, we usually use a small number of primitive intuitions for which we have consensus and large volume of experience and derive the remaining features of our models in accordance to those intuitions, without proliferating science with myriad of novel intuitions. For example, real numbers as complete ordered set, or completion of the rational numbers, are not exactly prima-facie concept and their soundness is doubted, because we are trying to justify it empirically. As long as we believe in inductive empirical reproducibility, objectivity of sensory experience, rationality of nature, statistical discovery of utility, we can assess the soundness and uses of various concepts. But I agree that those basic intuitions we trust blindly and without justification... (And I should say, not necessarily to a good conclusion.)

All I'm saying is for moral relativism to be true, the word "morality" in America must mean the same thing as the word "morality" in Iran for instance. Only then can we say morality is relative to culture - the same thing (morality) is culturally determined (in America homosexuality is ok but in Iran it's immoral). If, on the other hand, the word "morality" means different things e.g. in America it might have a meaning associated with equality and in Iran the word maybe associated with the Quran then Americans and Iranians aren't talking about the same thing are they? — TheMadFool

But how would Wittgenstein handle international relations, culture exchange, global politics? In the end, aren't we all one society with internal boundaries?
That is, morality may have local meaning, but that does not preclude it from being integrated into a global system of meanings that arbitrates and rejects.

The syntactical or neurological processing of what? An action on someone's part would seem to require some fiat on their part... as if my feeling a surface somehow required my consent. — Banno

A computer can produce mathematical proofs through syntactical processing and it does not need any fiat at all. I meant action in the sense we talk about in mechanics - some process. But the point was that only the representation needs to be manipulated in accordance to the logic and algebraic rules of the abstraction, in syntactic or neurological terms, and that we don't need to test soundness through its application and involvement in an actual situation. We can derive and confirm soundness through observation that has no relation to any sense of utility. We don't need to be practically involved. We can be observers from a remote perspective. For example, by watching the stars in outer space.

The conceptualization of mathematical abstractions from experience may appear similar to any other form of cognition, but in specific detail, the involuntary subconscious impulses to sensory information become subject to contemplated analytical effort by the observer. Yes, it is still basically neural networks firing, signaling through synapses, cascading neuron activations, but the part of the subject that we would call reflex gives way to the part that we would call intent. At least in contemporary mathematics and sciences. Some primitive mathematical practices may have appeared so early, that it may have been a reflex for a wile.

And I do agree that fundamentals in logic, mathematics and sciences may be situated cognition, i.e. proper behavioral alignment with the environment. But this applies to few ideas - logic, induction, probability, etc. The rest, I conjecture, can and are derived by model extraction without first hand practical experience.

The rhetorical question I’m posing is, why is mathematical Platonism out of fashion?Why is it that many serious mathematicians and philosophers seek to discredit it, and to explain our ability to mathematise in naturalistic or reductionist terms? It’s really rather a specialised question, and one I am barely qualified to consider, considering how technical many of the arguments are. — Wayfarer

Yes. In retrospect, I realize that I got a little carried away from the topic. I got stuck on the issue of the nature of experience. I'll think about whether I can research and contribute something more topical later (edit:...or much later).

I will try to briefly summarize my take on each idea. Those are my interpretations, so you could argue with them or not, but I am not sure that any of them coincide completely with Spinoza, or Leibniz, or some established authority.

Panpsychism proposes that nature is self-cognizant. The problem is how do the constituents of matter enact mental coherence and unity between each other, to form singular consciousness. But if some kind of emergentistic view applies, then matter simply perceives matter and captures knowledge and ideas by representation. This representation automatically traps the abstractions that homomorphically approximate the environment (also panpsychic matter). Pantheism is very close, but emergentism follows more naturally, because the deity is capable of self-awareness (possibly unrelatable to our understanding) and the material constituents just capture local fragmented perspectives of it.

Substance dualism keeps the ideas in the mind separate from the physical world. The brain and the world are a computational device. The mind is the actual carrier of experience. The problems that it faces are - where and how is the mind created, is the knowledge captured in a supervening manner preserved after the physical embodiment is disassociated, what happens when the body is mentally impaired or the amount of bodies decrease, etc.

I may be coining the term idealistic existential monism, but the idea is that our identity is fictional and our experience of the world happens within the confines of single cognizant entity that also creates it. (Edit: We are the split personalities of a deity that willingly experiences disassociative identity disorder. This is similar to pantheism, but doesn't require allocation of cognizant potential to matter. In fact, I see no apparent obstruction to creating and destroying identities in this hypothesis, because they serve only as epistemic device to the creator.) The problem here is primary motivation, but cognition and understanding is trivially possible.

Enactivism is as close to what was referred on the forum as intersubjective idealism. Each person is a creative force, but the collective effort is contingent and self-regulating. How it self-regulates constitutes the challenge for this hypothesis.

Edit. Obviously, you are free to amend and adapt my take on the ideas or propose your own.

Do you agree that abstractions "in the mind" can be formed differently according to each of those hypotheses?

'm not familiar with this term 'possibilian' and I can't find it on the Web. Perhaps you could explain? — Wayfarer

Possibilianism is mostly concerned with theistic claims, but it is essentially attitude open towards the exploration of unproven claims, as long as they are suggested hypothetically.

Which 'question' do you mean? What question do you think I'm posing that 'can't be answered without some kind of speculation?' — Wayfarer

The question about the nature of experience. What explains having experience and hence knowledge. How does it form - does experience emerge from the innate ability of the material substance to be self-cognizant of its configuration (panpsychism, emergent materialism, pantheism), does it emerge by virtue of connection to higher cognitive self (substance dualism), does it emerge as creative fictional introspection (idealistic existential monism), or does it emerge through collaborative enactment (enactvism). Those are some ideas. All of those ideas explain science in different manner and with somewhat different consequences. Some justify the attitude of empiricism completely, and others explain this attitude, but do not justify it.

Isn't this 'biological reductionism'? That being the effort to 'explain' reasoning and mathematical capacity in terms of purported underlying regulative biological systems? — Wayfarer

I wasn't trying to be ambivalent towards people's preconceptions, or indifferent towards my own preconceptions. I elaborated my rational and empirical, but possibilian persuasions. I explained how I reconcile those qualities of attitude. Such as, why a rational empiricist can be possibilian, which could then allow this discussion to progress further, without being divided between people of different persuasions. I made a case, hopefully epistemically justified, that possibilianism is natural consequence of rational empiricism, for philosophical subjects which lack clear determination. And I challenge you to make a case on your end for epistemic justification of empiricism, if you felt it was necessary or you felt that my claims were inherently condescending towards yours.

First, my persuasions demand to be recognized and reconciled. I cannot become irrational, simply because I see chance to be in this forum. I can not become rejecting of my sensory experience, simply because I have the opportunity to do so now. This is not how I have structured my personality. If I were to switch mine with yours, I would be just Wayfarer's doppelganger, and we would agree on more subjects, but this is not how my nature works. And believe me, whether rational empiricism is right or not, this is not how my nature works.

But, as a rational, empirically trusting (to a point) person, I do realize that my knowledge has limits, and those limits lie in my own intuitions. That is, I realize that I have attitudes without justification, but hold to them until proven wrong. Then, it seems to me that it would be hypocritical to deny any explanation for philosophically indeterminate subjects, whether it would be theistic or not, dualistic or not, even if it is a creative conjecture. My only conditions were, that we keep the discussion hypothetical, to keep it open to everyone, out of political necessity this time. I also proposed that we try to explain how our hypotheses contrast with each other, their compatibility and incompatibility, their similarity and dissimilarity, consider any possible internal inconsistencies, internal redundancies, or internal sources of incompleteness and vagueness, where by internal, I mean self-exposed or self-confessed.

The conceptual difficulty here is that science itself relies on the cogency of rational argument to establish any kind of explanatory framework. You can't examine the nature of rational thought from some point outside of it, treating it as an external or objective phenomenon, because any such explanation is already an exercise in rational thought. This point is discussed in some detail in Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism & the Fear of Religion. — Wayfarer

As I have stated in our previous discussions, while there might be a different point of view from the outside, of which I confess, I am not aware, I don't feel that I am compelled by this hypothesis or by epistemic necessity to explain my knowledge. I am not denying that the universe is partially intellectually cognizable, thanks to the fact that it is inherently orderly. Paraphrasing what you stated in some earlier conversation, in rational empiricist terms order is that which explains. But my cognition is just reproduction of order within order, which captures a measure of what the explanation is. The full explanation rests on its own existence, not mine. I don't require that I can explain orderliness through my cognition, because that suggests that my cognition, which is just homomorphic fragment of order within order, is central to the nature of order, and not contingent to the complete picture of orderliness. Orderliness is its own nature. It doesn't require to be explained by me. It justifies itself, however it does. I could synthesize such a construction, where order has underlying explanation, from a greater vantage point, which I somehow antropomorphize. Meaning, it becomes explained in terms that reduce in complexity to my own complexity. Sure. But that just embeds our universe in a super-universe. If I could hypothesize a final antropomorphically cognizable universe, what would distinguish it from ours? Do I do that, just because I cannot fully grasp my own? What I am getting at, is that nature explains itself to itself, but no to me.

I don't think present day philosophy of mind has much going for it, really. It places severe a priori limits on the nature of knowledge. Sure we have much better science and technology but are we superior in wisdom to the ancients? — Wayfarer

This gets us to the fundamental distinction between my point of view and yours, which ties beautifully with @Jack Cummings 's question about optimism and pessimism. I see a board of chess on which human beings serve purpose. In the game, they receive the gift of overtaking other pieces, which is just the virtue of their function, but at their level of abstraction or sense of meaning, it appears the logical conclusion of the game. But it is completely unrelated to the game's objective, which wouldn't translate to them at all, and never will, because a pawn has a different sense of purpose. The game has its own unrelated purpose. The game will find its objective, but the pawn will not appreciate it. You see a classroom, where human beings are challenged by lessons, aimed to teach them fundamental truths of a greater vantage point. From my purview, there is no greater wisdom then getting a sense of your identity in the moment, while appreciating your limitations, continuously adapting, hoping that the game is not over for you. To you, there is no greater error then the assumption than the lesson is understood, before reaching a self-evident self-explanatory conclusion. You are ontological optimist and I am ontological pessimist. You believe in benevolent antropocentric antropomorphic universe, I believe in every men as its own universe, clashing against the tides of the exterior motives, trying to adapt without losing its dignity and personally established purpose.


Edit: As I said, I do intend to come back and try to outline my take on a some hypothetical propositions in broad strokes. It might take a day or two. Not that I am that knowledgeable, but we need some kind of enumeration of major ideas.

I made some crude editing.
(I wrote the text in an external editor, then pasted it in a hurry. It was originally displayed on a wider content area.)

The question can't be answered without some kind of speculation, obviously. But we have to distinguish between tentative proposals about the nature of our mental experience and bold assertions. Such assertions have the right to exist, as all innate convictions, or persuasions, but we want to keep the discussion open and should treat all ideas as hypothetical.

I want to address a methodological question, if I may. Whether the speculation should be in sensory or extrasensory terms can turn into its own entire debate, but we have to articulate what constitutes an intuition. I have many times advocated on the forum, that ultimately, all of our epistemic efforts rest on preconceptions, persuasions, whatever we want to call them. That we don't access any self-evident facts, but only have attitudes that establish sustainable epistemic allostasis, guided towards epistemic homeostasis

In this regard, it serves well to divide our mental experiences into two aspects. Those that we consider to determine ourselves, and those that we recognize as extrinsically compelled. Essentially, we ascertain that there are boundaries on our personal freedom. The division, even if partly psychological, is not phenomenally inconsequential and it does maintain continuous character. From our point of view thus, some persuasions are self-regulated, consciously or subconsciously, while others are compelled from uncontrolled sources. Some of those which are privately controlled are sustained and some are contradicted by subsequent experience with the externally compelled ones.

Which leaves the question, how to preemptively outgrow your labile persuasions before their character is exposed by external forces. Or otherwise put, which persuasions are evidently bad. There isn't a single way to address the question. Maybe all persuasions eventually perish and are philosophically vacuous. (This is what I consider the argument for absurdism.) But lets limit the scope a bit. One way to thread towards persistence is to be open to experience. Your purview expands and hopefully your lability decreases. The second way to rectify defects is to reconcile contradicting persuasions. For example, I am persuaded to believe in reason. I am also persuaded to believe in sensory experience. But the overall picture of my sensory experience can contradict my reason, in which case I will have to rectify this incompatibility. You have to follow methodological balance that guarantees that you are open to knowledge, while maintaining and improving the quality of your knowledge.

Although this sounds simple, the problem is that you cannot directly infer fundamentals. You can rely on external cues for corrective, but not for synthetic guidance. We don't have some privileged capacity for inferring structure from experience, unless it subclasses the structure we already have. We start with blind assumptions and experiment. Those innate impulses to synthesize or reassign priorities work differently from sorting within the preestablished mental order. It relies on continuous trial and error. If a fundamental persuasion makes no positive difference to the individual, or even detracts from their experience, it should be consequently eliminated.

This does not always happen, however. If a systemic phenomenon, or fragment of the collective behavior contributes functionally, or catalythically, or becomes absorbed, it might not be removed. Objective truth can be overshadowed by group interdependencies. A persuasion may also be sustained overdue for its utility, such as the attainment of happiness. Happy persuasions might be deemed more important then the predictive ones. Such importance is not its own justification however, because in the long term, it vanishes if it is not provisioned by predictive sustenance.

But even stoic persuasions are not directed through a faultless process. As I said, the synthesis of fundamentals depends on trial and error. Sometimes we will spontaneously discover sustainable fundamental idea, such as rationality, the inductive method, statistical inference, objectivity, etc and maintain it henceforth. Or, we will spontaneously discover some unsustainable persuasion. In which case, assuming no group function to justify its existence, either the idea, the specimen or the species will be repressed from reproducing. But failing to affirm some belief also indirectly contributes to the reproduction of the emerging sustainable persuasions.

The point I am trying to make is, that persuasive impulses are not subject to reason at their prima-facie stage, because they represent openness to experience. Sometimes, they mask social signaling, but other means of social interaction eventually tend to displace them. Primitive intuitions are, in a sense, defended by their very existence, for however long it lasts. I don't propose that everyone should defend any spurred belief for the sake of the value of spontaneity. People who believe in the apparent primacy of empiricism and rationality should support the epistemics they choose, including through the politics of banishment of extrasensory claims in science. Active political position helps in the discovery of social value.

But the nature of the mind is a special subject of philosophy. It lacks determination. And I believe that we have to concede that if philosophy was always conservative, we wouldn't make the progress to our present day epistemic understanding. We should approach the question from a hypothetical point of view and debate the consistency of arguments, impartiality, interrelationships with other intuitions, and not treat our conjectures as privileged. Within reason...

I will try to come back for discussion of possible hypotheses. I have said before, I am not literate. But I can try to discuss a few ideas in broad strokes. Emphasizing the distinction between the interactionist and supervenience account of substance dualism would be useful, and how the former can be confirmed or refuted empirically. I think we should discuss some kind of empirically compatible hypothesis, such as property dualism, panpsychism, pantheism or emergent materialism. We should probably also discuss some type of idealistic existence monism (we are all fiction in the mind of the diety) and enactivism.

I disagree. Each concept has a place in a language game. — Banno

The syntactical or neurological processing is undeniably an action. Symbolic inference using a deduction system is an action. Thinking is an action. In that sense, mathematics is alive, not stationary. And formal models are sound with respect to the matching between those evaluations made using rules and the facts of the real world. I got the impression that you consider the subject matter of a model, i.e. its interpretation, to be some action in itself. In other words, I thought that you might suggest that before we formalize stationary physical relations around us, we first discover them in terms of applications, uses, and activities. That without some active involvement on our part, it is insufficient to simply observe physical features in order to derive conceptualization. I was trying to clear out in what precisely sense you meant your remark.

TheMadFool, incidentally, Fool's question was about "2", not 2, so I don't see that emancipate's syntactic answer was improper, nor Isaac' plonk, but moreover @frank's lawnmower is a semantic example. — Banno

When TheMadFool quoted the numeral, I assume that they meant to emphasize the syntactical nature of the symbolic constant. Not to prompt interpretations that do not conform to the algebraic requirements posed by the axioms of arithmetic.

A better way to approach it is to forget about meaning and look to use. Knowing what a number is consists in being able to count, to add, to subtract, to do the things that we do with numbers; not with a definition set out in words. — Banno

I am not sure how you mean it. Human beings, I believe, are capable of classification according to features and of mental homomorphic representations without explicit involvement of applications, just by physical assessment. There is obviously always some action involved, because observation or measurement are usually tied in to some action, but the concept is not always action-oriented. It depends on the concept, and how we mean it.

For example, integers and natural numbers, as most discrete mathematics, are fundamentally tied in with counting. They are procedural by the very essence of their design, because without discrete generating processes, discretisation has no subject matter. There are other ideas involved, such as the equivalence of objects, but counting is the central idea. Real numbers are also inspired by a process, i.e. measurement, a.k.a. geometry. Analysis explains how we bridge the gap between counting and geometry through sequential approximations. In this sense, the intuition for real numbers is also procedurally inspired, but the subject matter of physical relations that we conceptualize through analysis and analytic geometry is not the actual application of a process, but the features exposed through the application of a process. Obviously, geometric intuition, as the name implies, is derived from the need for measurement, and obviously measurement is how we establish the relations in question, but unlike natural numbers where the procedure is the actual concept, geometry describes characteristics independently of the process involved in their determination. Still, I admit that you could argue that at the very fundament of physics, the determination of any geometric feature is connected to the time it takes for bosons to reach from one point to another, so you could argue that all manners of measurement processes are actually fundamentally related. But I would consider this argument belongs to a more fundamental discussion that deals with the static vs dynamic as a distinction in nature.

On the other hand, there are several other ways in which you could mean that actions are relevant here. First, counting specifically (for small quantities) may have preceded conceptualization historically, which may have appeared even before language did. So action may have preceded abstraction, because conceptualization, which apparently was sprung as a faculty linguistically, was not available and rote learned behavior was pertinent. Second, to establish the practicality of concepts, we evaluate their utility, which is usually ascribed to process application, i.e. uses as you put it. Lastly, inference itself is a procedure and usually well exemplified by correspondent real world process.

Edit.

I should have also stated that weighing gravitational mass and measuring time may have also had influence on the development of analysis. Thus, the study may have unified multiple procedurally unrelated subjects. Weighing and geometric measurement could have been seen as a totally separate aspects. However, now we know that inertial and gravitational mass coincide, and we can describe inertial mass, as well as other properties, such as energy, momentum, etc, through the trajectories of motion, and thus geometry. Frequency, albeit a general concept itself, encompassing all sorts of periodic phenomena, usually manifests as mechanical and field waves, either related to momentum and thus to the geometry of motion, or directly to geometric distances between sequential wave peaks and troughs. The measurement of distance itself, originally considered a subject of isometric application of a fixed template object, today is expressed as the rate of travel of electromagnetic signal in a fixed amount of time. Time in turn is measured relative to the period of electromagnetic wave that is emitted by specific energy transition in the electron configuration of an atom. What I mean by all this, is that currently, considering all our knowledge of physics, we can tie most applications of real numbers to the process of electromagnetic radiation.

So my attempt was successful. — emancipate

The problem is, that you demonstrated that syntax could be abused, not that concepts with strict semantics behind the syntax can be used in innovative ways. Strings can actually be ordered lexicographically, but are something called free monoid, and their ordering is not well-ordering. Natural numers are sigularly generated (by the successor relation) commutative monoids and are well-ordered.

That is, "intuitions are not objectively 100% reliable." — Acyutananda

Simple materially implied intuitions can become very reliable. When they have been ratified from experience for generations and convention has reached consensus, there aren't a lot of variables left in their definition that provoke further refinement. That is why mathematics focuses on simple pervasive intuitions and builds the rest from them. This is what distinguishes it from physical sciences that are much more susceptible to constant amendment.

I should mention, we don't need abstractions to match the world exactly. We don't expect them to. We just need them to match it sufficiently to be useful. As I said, approximately, probabilistically, homomorphically. Any actual ball in the physical world is not precisely spherical. No matter the interpretation, the contact surface of a basketball is not exactly equal to 4 pi r^2, where r is half the longest distance between two atoms of the ball. The reason the interpretation is irrelevant, is because no two basketballs are exactly the same, and hence the formula could never be accurate for all of them. But, with some latitude and sense of utility, this is good enough approximation that captures much of the character of the real objects using a significantly simpler description. We are not trying to turn the objects into literal mental images, but just to handle them efficiently.

What I mean is, that if you try to create a basis, x_1, x_2, ..., such that each string can be represented as a sum of i_1 * x_1 + i_2 * x_2 ..., you will need infinite number of x's. Not to mention that the operation is not commutative. This is not the same concept. It does not follow the same algebraic rules. It is a counter-example of arithmetic.