Years ago someone put me on the right track — ucarr

Gilbert Ryle? - https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_ryle.html

I'll repeat my point. Biochemical processes involving nucleic acids and the proteins they interact with are responsible for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of organisms. When you've described those processes, you've described everything that happens in genetics. — Daemon

If that is your point, it is a piss poor one.

But alas, philosophers tend to think that philosophy is the function of the engine. — unenlightened

Not sure what planet you're on.

What do you mean by "no words"? — Daemon

Speechless incredulity.

You are welcome to your opinions but they make little contact with informed thought.

Consciousness is not defined in functional terms, at least not in the relevant sense. — bert1

That's my complaint. You "consciousness" guys are bogged in the mud because you have a dys-functional conception of what its about. The mind can't make causal sense until you adopt a functional, enactive and embodied perspective.

Not everyone. Firstly I don't think genes do (or did) produce life. — Daemon

:joke:

But secondly and more relevant to our discussion, it isn't the informational coding mechanism that does the work genes do: DNA is the mechanism. — Daemon

So you argue along the lines: "That's not a marsupial. It's a kangaroo!"

But when you've described the process in terms of deoxyribonucleic acid etc., you've said it all. There isn't any work for "information" or "semiosis" to do. — Daemon

No words....

It sounds to me like you’re more sympathetic to Dennett’s heterophenomenology than to Ratcliffe’s critique of it. Would you agree? — Joshs

After trying to make sense of Dennett, I long ago decided it was a waste of my time. I now simply have no opinion on his "ideas". Nothing coheres in a way it could be usefully critiqued.

Semiosis can be defined as "the process of signification in language or literature". — Daemon

I'm talking about Peircean semiosis and not Saussurean. So it is about a triadic modelling relation and not a dyadic signification one.

Semiosis doesn't seem like the sort of thing that could produce a mind. Semiosis seems like a product of the mind. — Daemon

Well everyone accepts it is the kind of thing that could produce life. Genes are the informational coding mechanism that brings "brute matter" alive, giving it shape and purpose.

So why can't neurons be the coding trick that repeats this at the higher organismic level that is an intentional body living in its model of the world?

"Consciousness is not just a matter of having a subjective perspective within the world; it also includes the sense of occupying a contingent position in a shared world. From within this experiential world, we manage to conceive of the world scientifically, in such a way that it fails to accommodate the manner in which we find ourselves in it. Hence the real problem of consciousness is that of reconciling the world as we find ourselves in it with the objective world of inanimate matter that is revealed by empirical science.” — Matthew Ratcliffe’s paper

In other words, a science that accounts for experiencing organisms needs a theory of semiosis. It needs to place the epistemic cut (between self and world) at the centre of its inquiry. It needs a general theory of modelling relations to create a meta-theory large enough to encompass both mind and matter, healing the Cartesian rift.

Phenomenology ain't the destination even if it seems the starting point. It might correctly identify the embodied and intersubjective nature of human experience. But as an academic thread of thought, it wanders away into no clear conclusion. It winds up in PoMo plurality and "disclosure of ways of being. Nothing of any great interest results.

I look for phenomenological projects that get somewhere. Like Peircean semiotics, Pattee's epistemic cut, Rosen's modelling relation, systems science approaches in general.

The human mind is the product of four levels of semiosis.

At ground level, there is biology's foundational epistemic cut - the gene~metabolism division by which information regulates entropy. Life as a dissipative structure.

Then also part of biology is neurosemiosis. Genes capture regulatory information over generational timescales, and control only what lies with an organism's own body. Neurons operate to capture regulatory information on the microsecond scale and extend the body's scope as far as the eye can see or ear can hear.

Humans came along and added the further semiotic levels of words and numbers. The first created our intersubjective or sociocultural model of self~world. The second has created our modern scientific and technological model of self~world. The "real world" was enhanced by a "virtual world".

So semiotics provides a rich new framework for understanding life and mind in naturalistic terms - ones where the self~world distinction is bridged from the start and so doesn't build in a dualistic Hard Problem.

Science examines the examinable, measures the measurable, and this very much relies on that basic public availability. By contrast, phenomenology attempts to describe how we experience; and the only agreement possible in that consists in the fact that we all experience, and can reflect on the general character of that experience; so we have here two different arenas of sense-making; that is all I've been saying. — Janus

You've circled back to your original unwarranted presumption that descriptions can be trusted because ... well things look like what they look like! The only issue for you is whether these descriptions are of private stuff or public stuff.

Do you really have nothing to say at all about epistemological fundamentals? You just damn science because ... naive realism?

It is a model-dependent assumption that your pain is "in here" and the prickly rose bush is "out there".

How do you check the truth of this? How do you solve the Kantian riddle and so secure the foundations of your epistemology, rather than just claim it is plain obvious commonsense?

If you could explain clearly, of course. — Janus

I've said plenty. It's up to you to make a case worth considering.

Would you understand it?

It's a simple basic distinction; no metaphysics involved. — Janus

You keep telling yourself that. Good old commonsense obviousness.

The impasse that follows when you fall into the logical hole of dualism.

For me, employing a triadic systems perspective, the hard problem reduces to the general issue that any rational theory will have when it encounters a lack of measurable counterfactuals.

In other words, if you paint yourselves into a corner, you find that you are stuck. So find a better approach to painting the floors of your rooms.

I find it amazing that people cannot see that the so-called "Hard Problem" only arises when a third person account (science) is expected to be able somehow to capture the qualitative reality that is first person experience. It's simply a category error; a conflation of different arenas of sense. — Janus

But that righteous amazement is due to your epistemic framing of things as first person subjective vs third person objective.

You have to believe in an all-seeing God to think that talk about a third person point of view. Do you think such a view exists in any real sense? If you do, then you are simply building dualism and transcendence into your ontology. It is an input rather than an output of your confident arguments.

So I don't even accept your position that first vs third POV is a meaningful epistemic distinction let alone a self-evident ontic fact.

It is in taking the Cartesian hard problem seriously that Kant, and then Peirce, moved on to arrive at an immanent ontology where all talk about any point of view reduces to semiotics - the triadic logic of a modelling relation.

If you believe in the Hard Problem as a slam dunk argument, then you are simply stuck at the simple reactive level of Cartesian dualism. You have drunk the Kool-Aid and feel secure in the familiar cultural trope of an unbridgeable divided between matter and mind, body and spirit.

Try to imagine a world instead where subjectivity and objectivity are reciprocal limits on a common ground. They are not two kinds of realms, worlds, substances, points of view, modes of being, etc, etc. They are instead the immanent bounds on the possibilities that are thus given shape in-between.

This would be Peircean pansemiosis. It will regard both the "material world" and "immaterial mind" as reified fictions - even if they are obviously pragmatic fictions because humans find this constructs so useful for creating their everyday social worlds.

But if you want to get beyond these everyday folk notions of how reality is structured, you have to pull up your big boy pants.

When dismissing the hard problem, I'm not sure Apo has grasped what it is. I say this tentatively, because I find it incredible. I feel bad saying this, because it is exclusionary. It's almost disqualifying people from the conversation, which feels bad. — bert1

A textbook example of Dunning-Kruger in action. The less folk know about brain function, the more they feel confident the Hard Problem is a slam dunk.

However there is an acknowledgement of 'the unconditioned' in the perennial philosophies. It's a subject of dispute whether this is ever a real object of experience. (I don't expect to solve that here.) — Wayfarer

As I said, there are Mach contrast bands that highlight the boundaries of shapes in object perception. They are unconditioned in the sense that consciousness - that is, attentional effort - cannot alter their givenness. Like all the Gestalt phenomena and familiar library of visual illusions, they are in a sense hardwired into the brain and operate at the level of pre-conscious - that is sub-attentional - habit.

So yes. All humans share the same neurology and will find a givenness that seems to contrast significantly with all that is willed, imagined, subject to point of view, or otherwise amenable to attentional control.

And this is another way of deflating the Hard Problem. What is good for the givenness - the unconditionedness - of the experience of Mach bands is good for the experience of seeing red. We should think about both examples in the same way as they are the result of the same neurocognitive principles.

So for example, I said Mach bands are designed not to be noticed. And unless you have been alerted to them by Gestalt psychology, you likely never would. You are not meant to as they are part of the sensory habits that construct a state of meaningful attentional perception. To then attend to them as “features of the world” is to wrongly assign them to the world model part of the self-world modelling equation. The Mach bands are really the self part of the neural model - a structure imposed on the world to reflect a self-interested point of view.

And all the classic examples meant to motivate the Hard Problem - the lament about the unconditioned nature of primary experience - are the same. The redness of red is only a problem because we get together in a little community of philosophers of mind and say, well what about Locke, Berkeley, Descartes and Kant? How are we going to solve this riddle that there is something ineffable and fundamental about these qualia thingies?

But that is placing the redness out in the world as something now grabbing our attention and not seeing it - as enactive neuroscience would see it - as something that is part of our own active imposing of meaningful felt structure on the world. I mean, on our “world”.

Folk are so in love with the Hard Problem that they will still boggle at the “experience of red” even if they accept it is not meant to be “experienced” in the attentional sense. But what is good enough for Mach bands ought to be good enough for hue perception. It ought to deflate the over-inflated place the Hard Problem has had in philosophy of mind.

The sense of self is an example of consciousness. It seems to me that the sense of self cannot be epiphenomenal, since it most certainly has real world effects. You might say there is a neural correlate to the sense of self, but, as experienced, the sense of self is not a neural correlate. — Janus

There are neural correlates, biological correlates, social correlates, philosophical correlates ... correlates to reflect each and every level of semiosis involved in being a "conscious brain".

Or to put it another way, consciousness is not a thing, any more than the brain is a thing - an entity with some singular account that might explain it.

So what aspect of selfhood do you want to discuss? Autonomy as a general organismic concept - the Bayesian mechanics view? Biological embodiment - as in how I know how to chew my food without at the same time eating my tongue? Socially constructed identity - such as what anthropology says about the difference in conceptions of selfhood when comparing Ifaluk islanders and a Wall St options trader?

The sense of self is no mystery. It is the obvious and necessary corollary to having a sense of the world. The self~other distinction is primary at all levels of the sciences of life and mind. It is the epistemic cut that defines the boundary between bios and abios.

So you don't experience a sense of self. You can only experience a sense of the self as being "other" to the world. Or as semiotics would correct, to "the world". An umwelt. The world you construct for yourself so as to be the self at the centre of your world.

In modelling terms, consciousness is your brain's model of the world with you in it.

But to find that answer, you have to drop the idea that the "sense of self" can make sense as some kind of mysterious standalone entity that flits about like an inhabiting spirit. The self only appears to the degree it is set in semiotic opposition to the world it wishes to control.

My understanding of phenomenology is that it is concerned with describing and gaining a better understanding of the "as experienced". Science cannot do this because the " as experienced" is given subjectively. Is it so hard to understand that there are different kinds of investigations, each with their own methodologies, and each valid within their own ambits? — Janus

Cross cultural anthropology tells us all about the many myths and scripts that folk concoct to encode their "way of life". The way you think you are must match the world as you mean to live in it.

So the sense of self is not a free creation. It is evolutionary, embodied and functional. It is tied to the business of living and thriving. And it has to be analysed in that ecological/naturalistic framework.

This means there are any number of invalid "investigations". To be precise, absolutely all investigations that don't start from a naturalistic, life science, point of view.

You are treating "as experienced" as if it were something pre-existing to be discovered by an inquiry. But an experiencing human mind is structured by language and culture. Those are the causes of its design. And the detail has been shaped by the pragmatics of the communities, tribes and peoples living in whatever kind of world they have managed to make for themselves by learning to think and feel in certain prescribed ways.

This is social constructionism 101. Every self experiences the world as precisely the kind of world that would naturally find just such a self in it.

Well, that was up until modern times when it also became possible to find the self as very much alienated from the world it found itself thrust into. :smile:

since phenomenological description is not concerned with that. — Janus

Jeez, I must have missed that restriction back when I started out on the phenomenological side of things.

Right, and that is precisely why I've been pointing out that neuroscience studies only brain function and has no substantive warrant to make dogmatic claims (as opposed to educated conjectures) about the origins of consciousness. — Janus

But in what sense does consciousness actually exist? After you actually study mind science, you find that talk about habitual and attentional processes makes simple sense. But "consciousness" is just a vague term that disappears up its own arse in helpless expressions like "the feeling of what it is like to be aware".

It is not a diss to say science studies function. It is instead a crucial point that the conscious brain is completely rooted in the biological need to be functional. There is no explaining consciousness if it doesn't in fact serve a natural purpose but is instead regarded as some kind of epiphenomenal glow or accidental ghostly extra. So telling the world that you are studying brain function means you are not dicking around but dealing with the real causes that have produced it in evolutionary terms.

One cannot get to phenomenology from naturalism if one begins from a concept of pre-relational intrinsicality and tries to add phenomenological intentionality on top of it. One has to instead open up Firstness and reveal it as a derived abstraction. — Joshs

Sounds like an elaborate excuse for not having an answer. If Husserlian intentionality is worth a damn, it would have something to say about Mach bands versus misfires in object recognition.

Science can take the phenomenology and run with it. Seems you can't. Worse yet, you seem to think one needs to make the move from naturalism to phenomenology when it is the other way around. The naturalism of neurosemiosis and social constructionism is how we explain the way folk might tend to view their "conscious experience" the way they do.

One does not unsee the mysterious figure. — Joshs

Sure you can. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I see my black cat lurking in the shadows. Then I turn and see it is a black shopping bag. One global state of interpretance is completely replaced by its other.

That speaks to a top-down driven, selective attention and object recognition based neurocognitive explanation of the phenomenology. I can go immediately to right kind of neuro-causal account of my experience.

But the Mach bands are quite different. Once my attention has been drawn to the fact that the contrast line between the sky and the building has a glimmering edge - that "can't really be there" - I can't just wish it away with the same kind of conceptual shift in point of view. And that sends me towards a different neuro-causal account - one based on preconscious or habitual neurocognitive routines.

This is an important reverse engineering distinction. Stephen Grossberg made much of it in his pioneering neural network models of perceptual processes. The step from phenomenology to a computational simulation could follow...

One has now constituted a different phenomenon, but idealizes the changes by dubbing this process of perceptual transformation as my seeing the ‘ same’ object correctly now but incorrectly before. — Joshs

You are just talking right past the crucial distinction I highlighted.

As realists, our belief in persisting real objects makes our conformity to the ‘ facts’ of the real external thing the arbiter of correctness. But from a phenomenological vantage , the difference between illusion and correctness is a function of the inferential compatibility between one moment of perception and the next, which is relatively stable over time but never self -identical. — Joshs

Now you simply state something any neurocognitive account would take as obvious. And is certainly part of a semiotic approach.

So again, what special thing does Husserlian intentionality tell us about the mysterious shadow/Mach band distinction I have highlighted here?

It is a psychological fact in need of an explanation. In neurocognition, it leads to talk about the difference between habitual and attentional processes - the combination of upwards and downwards "computations". The question can lead somewhere enlightening.

I simply ask what specifically does Husserlian intentionality add here that we don't already know?

My ‘naive’ perception of a mysterious figure in the distance center that turns out on closer inspection to be nothing but a shadow is no different than the ‘naive’ perception of mach bands. — Joshs

Hardly. One is an easy mistake to make - a high level act of interpretation. The other is found to be constitutive of interpretations themselves.

You can unsee the mysterious figure. But you can't unsee the Mach bands. And having noted this interesting difference in your qualitative experience, you would then look to its separate causes.

What answer does Husserlian intentionality give us here?

Phenomenology doesn’t begin from objective causality, it deconstructs it by grounding it in structures of intentionality, which is is neither objective nor subjective in a traditional sense. — Joshs

I find phenomenology useful to the extent one might start there to reverse engineer the social and biological causes.

So one of my best remembered examples - which started me off in the right direction - was my first psychophysics class where we learnt about Mach bands in visual perception. Then I walked out into the bright light and immediately could see them marking the sharp edges of the surrounding buildings.

That already said almost everything about both the biological and social aspects of consciousness.

The Mach bands existed so my biology would model the world as a pragmatic Umwelt. The contrast lines were designed not to be noticed introspectively. They were a way to simplify my confused impressions to a simple and predictable narrative. The goal of my neurology was to arrive at skilled and unthinking habits.

At the same time, sociology demanded that I take notice of them - add them to my self-narrative as a cultural creature. I could introspect and find these outlines to sharpen grays into blacks and whites. I could learn to see the "illusion" behind my naive phenomenology ... and start to worry about mind~body dualism when I went off to philosophy class.

So sure. Phenomenology is fine if it begins a process of reverse engineering the causes.

And sure, it is neither objective or subjective in the traditional sense. I'm always saying that it is not that, but instead, semiotic. And semiotic on both the biological and sociological levels.

In fact neuroscience cannot describe consciousness, but only brain function. Describing consciousness is the function of phenomenology. — Janus

Do we want to "describe" or do we want to model the causality?

And which do you think has the better hope of engaging with the causality?

Even the worst, most reductionist, most mechanical, neuroscience model is at least some kind of testable theory. (Well, until you get down to panpsychism or something that suggests no observable counterfactuals.)

But where does phenomenology connect with causality in accounting for consciousness as the phenomena it decides is its subject of study?

And don't actual neuroscientists on the whole only claim to be studying brain function or cognition - as "consciousness" is such a vague term loaded with cultural baggage?

Does neoliberalism deem monetarism as an essential part? — ssu

Are you claiming it doesn't? :yawn:

But monetary policy is actually the perfect example of things heading for a collapse, not something "balanced". — ssu

That how Hegelianism goes. I say balance, you say unbalanced, and we wind up agree that the systems view is all about pendulum swinging and its dynamical balancing act.

So failures of balance are what show balance could even be considered a goal. We found ourselves being tugged in two directions - as will always be the case in a hierarchical system. Social systems are composed of individuals working collectively to generally shared ends ... and also pursuing specific personal goals.

A "well balanced" system is not the one that exactly splits the difference but instead maximises the expression of both tendencies, as well as historical circumstances allow.

It's called a win-win. I thought you were Finnish for some reason. Aren't they good at that?

Define what the global constraint of money supply is, because I don't know what you mean. — ssu

Global = general. Global = macro.

So what does the math of hierarchy theory say about the impact of Donald Trump compared to Joe Biden? Or is it something inconsequential? Or rubbish? — ssu

In what sense have either of these dudes had an impact on the global economy - in the sense of launching a considered economic policy aimed at some distant useful target?

Fucking things up may be counted as an impact I guess. The asteroid had an impact on the dinosaur. But a hierarchy theory approach makes a clear distinction between information and entropy.

QFT describes particle fields. Shortly interacting. It doesn't describe bound states very well (unless very specific conditions are specified). So to find out about quarks and leptons you can do the same as for bound quark states. Bound systems like atoms and molecules are not modeled by QFT. Aggregates of particles that form life can best be described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but to say that even the appearing of a bacteria can be described is too much already. — EugeneW

Sure. And do you see the general theme that emerges here?

At the bottom, what is basic is fluctuation, excitation, instability. And that (Peircean firstness) is then given is substantial form by downward-acting constraints. Stability is imposed from on high to create the materiality that can then compose ... the realm that embodies those downward-acting constraints.

If preon particle fields are a thing, then they are only a vacuum expectation until some kind of constraining horizon is imposed on their observables. A "concrete" excitation that might be claimed as a particle is only a virtual possibility until some kind of classical frame has been imposed on the situation.

Hierarchy theory says reality is a tower of constraint acting to stabilise instability. So down at the bottom, is whatever can be imagined as the most radical form of instability still framed by some most minimal form of metric constraint.

And that might be a hot quantum fluctuation. Down at the Planck scale, the Planck length defines the Planck frequency and hence the Planck temperature. The least possible space also houses the most possible energy density.

But which one do you want to point to as fundamental - the metric constraint or the energetic violence.

Or do you indeed need to find your fundamental "atom" in the systematic relation between these two opposing things?

Well, especially in history you do find the tension of the individual and the group certainly. But not perhaps in the way you would want it. — ssu

The way I want it is analysis based on the maths of hierarchy theory, not Great Men of history fables.

On the deepest level individual preons... — EugeneW

I'm trying to get you to think what you mean by calling individual preons the deepest level of existence. But I'm not succeeding.

From an economic history point of view, that's just hogwash — ssu

I'm sure you can back that up with a specific example. If not, I can give you a starter.

Why did neoliberalism deem monetarism an essential part of its "naked market" architecture? Why are central banks using the global constraint of money supply to bound the local competitive behaviour of market actors? How does this fail to fit the hierarchy theory metaphysics I've outlined?

And why is the early success of neoliberalism in destroying older forms of social cohesion - like the cosy post-war accomodation between US unions and US corporations - now turning into a big problem to do with a generalised erosion of social cohesion and planetary ecology?

It's my specialist subject too. So happy to help.

Yep. We have well and truly left the world of material objects and are now talking about stacks of QFT fields.

At what point do we then give up talking like atomists when we are discussing hierarchical organisation?

Arran Gare is a good source on the philosophical history of systems science. Here is his paper on Bogdanov - https://philarchive.org/archive/GARABA-3

Isn't math our tool for mapping this stuff? — Garrett Travers

Sarcasm still doesn't work on the interwebs, does it?

Noether's theorem.

GST was founded in 1933. — Garrett Travers

Sure. And Aleksandr Bogdanov published his Tektology just before, Cybernetics came along just after.

Geometry and charge. Without mass. — EugeneW

So ... just symmetry.

Sounds kinda mathy.

Correct me if I am wrong, but General Systems Theory covers this concept in detail, does it not? — Garrett Travers

Yep. Hierarchy theory gets reinvented once a generation at least. :up:

How does this fit into your military metaphor? You talk about constraints from above. How do the feedback loops constrain the chemistry? — T Clark

Enzymes regulate the rate of a reaction. So the soldiers are like all the chemicals ready to get going. Then their sergeant - as a higher level of constraint - gives the stop/go signals. The soldiers are released until they are halted again.

Hierarchy theory is all about feedback and cybernetic control. Feedback loops are a hierarchy theory concept.

Now this brings to mind other things you've written in past discussions - about semiotics and information. I'll have to go back and reread some of those. Are we talking about the same kind of thing? — T Clark

Yep. Semiotics is about the use of symbols and models to regulate a system. So it is the extra bit that marks the cut between physics and biology. It is indeed the bit that you can't find within physics.

The distinctions made are quite artificial. Preons collect in quark and lepton structures, behaving according to laws we can find out by isolating them or premeditating them by using the preon laws. — EugeneW

What are preons made of?