That sounds like Libet: there's still a lot of controversy about these experiments, their findings, their interpretation. — Daemon

Correct. Libet’s experiment is easily debunked. We know that our decisions are often taken after some deliberation, that we commit to a choice after contemplating that choice, which can make our decisions somewhat predictable (with a better performance than just by chance), as in Libet’s experiment, but we also know that we can take decisions in less than a second (eg when driving, or playing blitz chess) so there’s no possible way to reliably predict such decisions.

If you are interested, it would be worth checking out Howard Pattee’s papers on biosemiosis, the epistemic cut and the physics of symbols. His is the most incisive presentation of the crucial ideas. — apokrisis

I’ve now read Cell Phenomenology: The First Phenomenon by Howard Pattee, and I must say it’s top notch. Thanks for this reference.

best technology we know of. — Paul Edwards

Nukes work better though. I don't care about what these enemies of mankind have to say in their defense.

Australia also has the "best technology" we know of - democracy and freedom of speech. — Paul Edwards

I don't think so. They mass murdered the aborigines and gave rise a world-class disinformation enterprise leading the world right into the wall of climate change. They must be dealt with, one way or another.

Ok, will check them out. Thanks.

"An early part of my adventures" was the Kabbalah and its sefirot tree. :-) Of course it's loaded with all sorts of impenetrable mysticism and magic thinking, but there was something to how the whole scheme is conceived which was appealing: a systemic, holistic language usable to describe pretty much everything.

no need for a military intervention in America. — Paul Edwards

Indeed, we should start with Australia, where he’s based and started his malevolent empire. Invading them shouldn’t be too hard. Then dismantle said empire and use the money to fund the next phase: the US and UK.

They already have democracy — Paul Edwards

Formally yes but in fact, Murdock rules them.

Note for the record that Americans, like Afghans, don't speak with one voice either. — Paul Edwards

Most Americans say horrible things of their regime in Washington. They all want it to get fixed, and that's where I come in. I haven't decided yet it's better to kill only the fascists, which would imply a lot of work, or just nuke the whole place and start afresh.

Nobody has a right to intervene militarily in Thailand.

I consider that I have such a right. — Paul Edwards

Hey Paul, nobody here will stop you if you do undertake to liberate Thailand. So go right ahead. I have to get busy liberating Washington DC myself. All American citizens secretly wish for my intervention. Doing London next.

Semiotics goes to the heart of the matter by being clear both about the general nature of the separation - symbols vs matter - and about the means of the interaction, the connection that is a modelling relation. — apokrisis

Right, so it plays the same role in your metaphysics than Saussure and structuralism in mine: a useful language to express systemic relations within any given field.

The separate internal monitoring. Is that not a homunculus? — Daemon

There’s always a “humunculus”. The hypothesis cannot be avoided. Homunculi R us.

If you can explain in a few words, it’d be appreciated.
— Olivier5

:gets popcorn: — bert1

Good one. I mean, i checked the corresponding wiki entry but fail to see the relevance to system thinking. It’s some kind of proto linguistic...

@creativesoul Would that be a direct sort of pain in your behind? — Marchesk

Going deeper in our examination, is the pain in creativesoul’s behind ineffable?

I was also going to remind of the formal duality that has been established between information and entropy. As signal vs noise, order vs chaos, message vs meaninglessness, we can see why information and entropy stand in relationship as the two faces of the same coin, the two dichotomous extremes of the one opposition. — apokrisis

Yes yes, all well known and familiar. Piercian semiotics got me googling though. If you can explain in a few words, it’d be appreciated.

And information is a constraint on uncertainty. — apokrisis

Yes, or a signal standing out from the noise.

My own definition of awareness’s primacy: The tenet that everything which can and does exist (i.e., everything that can and does stand-out in any way) is either directly or indirectly contingent on the presence of awareness ... This tenet of awareness’s primacy thereby results in a stance of idealism. — javra

Okay, so very different from phenomenology’s primacy of perception. I got confused.

Information and form in the Aristotelian sense can be seen as broadly synonymous. Comes from latin informare: give form to, and also educate (metaphorically as in giving form to a mind, shape a mind through education).

Just attempting to think coherently and to express myself clearly. You should try it one day. We'd miss your mind farts though.

Whether qualia exist or no, they are of no use if they cannot enter into the conversation. — Banno

You’ve been talking about them qualia for weeks. FYI.

Be aware that Christian theology appropriated many of these ideas from Greek philosophy, and then adapted them so they would confirm their dogma. And now such ideas are tacitly rejected BECAUSE of their association with that dogma. It's a tangled web. — Wayfarer

Indeed, the important point is that panpsychism is a (at least) 2000 yr old mythology. Doesn’t make it false but it cannot claim to be original thinking.

primacy of awareness — javra

How would you define this?

[

If one accepts both a) the primacy of awareness in one form of another, together will all that this entails (e.g., goal, and thereby telos, driven behaviors), this as an idealist would; and b) the logical necessity that life - and, thereby, the first-person awareness it can be deemed to necessitate - evolved from nonlife; what other conceivable, logically consistent inference could one arrive at other than that of panpsychism? — javra

A psychism limited to certain life forms.

He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, — New Advent Encyclopedia

At the begining was the word, and the word was with God. John 1

The structure is everything. There's a very large difference between a car and a pile of parts. It will cost you time, skills and money to change the latter into the former.

About truth, I think...


Come waste your millions here
Secretly she sneers
Another corporate show
A guilty conscience grows

And I'll feel a guilty conscience grow
And I'll feel a guilty conscience grow

She burns like the sun
And I can't look away
And she'll burn our horizons
Make no mistakes

Come let the truth be shared
No one ever dared
To break these endless lies
Secretly she cries

She burns like the sun
And I can't look away
And she'll burn our horizons
Make no mistakes

And I'll hide from the world
Behind a broken frame
And I'll run forever
I can't face the shame

No, "the subjective experience of thinking" is a poetical description of the thoughts, I say. You won't be able to clarify it in concrete terms, saying "here's some", and "here's some more", "that thing isn't some" etc. — bongo fury

"The subjective experience of thinking" is required for any of your thoughts to have any meaning for and to other subjective beings, such as other posters here or people in your life. If you'd tell them you are not actually a subject but a mere object, a machine composing your sentences mechanically, rather than based on human observation and reason, not many people would take said sentences seriously. (not saying they do now...)

(There's a thread out there on machine poetry, if you're interested in that...)

Sure - pending literal clarification of the poetry. If you are going to then apply logic to it, anyway. Poetry has different (no less exacting) standards. — bongo fury

You do it again! Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts.

Thoughts are "poetry" you say? That is not even beautiful poetry... Logic makes for boringly predictable poetry as well. :vomit:

But has nothing additional to the components. — khaled

The structure is additional.

A thing doesnt have to be conscious to have it. — frank

So that's the important difference? That means it applies to anything alive? Eg like plants too are tenacious and stubborn in their own way?

Are you simply trying to say "You can't know what a car is used for just by studying its components"? Yes, obviously, no one is debating that. However if you DO know everything there is to know about cars and you were asked "what happens when the key turns", your explanation (while likely to be very techincal and complicated) has to be reducible to "the car turns on". — khaled

But you will never know everything there is to know about anything, so this is a false, unrealistic premise.

What is important is that the components do not, by themselves, contain the information you need to explain the function of the whole. The really useful information is at a level higher then that of components: it's in the way they are connected with one another to form a whole functional structure. It's a question of form, not hyle. And then about how this form interacts with other forms.

. I'm sure you mean "won't help you predict that this monster would form in the process of evolution". — khaled

No, I mean you could not figure out what this molecular machine does, based on knowing its components only, not anymore than you could predict what a car does based only on a description of its parts. Even if you had a good description of the STRUCTURE of the car / protein, you'd need to know additional stuff about the environment of the car / protein to understand its function. Like you'd need to know that a certain fuel has to be added in that hole at the back of the car, that a key needs to be inserted to start the car, that roads are somewhat included in the concept of car, etc. And someone would have to teach you how to drive the car.

In the case of the HSP 60-10 complex, it turns out it's a molecular machine to fix other molecular machines. We know this by looking at how it works in a cell, not by looking at it's atoms.

Proteins are the building block of life, but they are very unstable, and can mis-fold (or fail to fold properly) when the cell is too dry or hot. Misfolded proteins are like loose cannons for the cell. So HSPs 'fix' them. Here is how we think it works for HSP60/10:


The "polypeptide" (equivalent to an unfolded or misfolded protein) gets in the basket (HSP60); some fuel is added then the lid (HSP10, here noted GroES) is put on; then more fuel is added and the polypeptide folds correctly; then the lid goes off etc. ATP is the fuel. The system is polyvalent: it can fix a large number of proteins, not just one type.

If you want to think about thoughts, and speak about them, you have to realize that anything you say about thoughts can apply reflexively, to itself, because what you say about thoughts is still thoughts. So if you're thinking about saying that thoughts are useless, for instance, or illusions, or mere physical spasms, then this very idea of yours becomes itself a useless illusion or spasm.

Reason cannot undermine reason. Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts. No amount of clever thinking will ever prove that there is no such thing as clever thinking.

So to answer your question, no need to torture the language in order to demean what you are trying to explain; that's like shooting yourself in the conceptual foot. Usually, common English offers a variety of decent starting points, and it's a Frenchman talking. "Neuronal activity" is perfectly fine and clear, if you are talking about objectively observable neuronal activity. "Thoughts" is a perfectly fine word too, about the subjective experience of thinking...

No apology is needed when you shoot yourself in the foot.

Can you conceive of a clone of your self acting in the exact same way you do but without conciousness?

If no then you would be implying that consciousness is necessary for our function, that it natrually comes out of the particles that make us up. In this setup "consciousness" is akin to "temperature". — khaled

Consciousness may be necessary for our function, and yet totally different from temperature in that it may require an actual dedicated mechanism, an organ, a structure, in order to happen rather than just piling things up with no particular structure.

Perfect knowledge of how atoms operate will lead you to understand how "clusters" of them operate. If you could predict accurately all the motions of every single atom you would have been able to predict the second world war. — khaled

This sentence is simply not true: combination of things adds information that was not present in the things being combined. No knowledge of atoms will ever allow you to predict this monster:



Chaperone proteins "Heat Shock Protein 60" and HSP10 (the cap), so called because their molecular mass is approximately 60 and 10 kDa. This means that the whole complex composed of two "baskets" (HSP60) and two "caps" (HSP 10) is more than 8000 times larger than methane, the simplest organic compound (CH4, of molecular mass 16).

This is an example of a chaperone protein, that is to say a protein that helps other proteins. In this case it helps them take or recover their correct shape after they have been damaged by heat.

Maybe but I don't think there are. — khaled

Based on what? Your ignorance or your knowledge? If knowledge, of what? What is there objectively or logically, that makes it impossible for new combinations to fold or unfold in a new way, and for new phenomena to appear as a result?

Life emerged. It wasn't there at the beginning. Atoms are not alive. If emergence of something as complex as life can happen, then I see no reason to exclude the emergence of consciousness from the realm of possibilities.

I'm pointing out that the ability to talk is not indicitive of consciousness. — khaled

So what exactly is indicative of consciousness?

The two are similar in that they're both understood to have intentionality or ententionality. — frank

Yes, there is an implicit intentionality in all life: the will to survive etc. which is not unlike the multilayered intentionality of any conscious thought.

How does Ententionality differ from or brings a nuance to Intentionality?