I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this? — JerseyFlight

Seems simple enough. Society invests in knowledge creation for pragmatic reasons. We need to know how to harness the material resources of the natural world to our advantage.

So there is a purpose behind our concept of what constitutes knowledge.

That raises the question of in whose interests would you be wanting to impose some universal system of education? The objective sounds grand and impressive. But you are so far just presuming it has legitimacy. And that “our education” is the privileging one.

We don't need millions of people asking the privileged question of why we would hold rationality, science or good education in such high regard, you are ignoring the concrete fact that the positive fruit of these categories already exists, — JerseyFlight

You call the fruits positive. That is the presumption I have challenged you to justify.

The fruits at least seem mixed to me.

And the equation with poverty is suspect. Education doesn’t have to cost much. Wealth is as much likely to result in intellectual indolence. Poor countries can churn out well educated people.

Your OP is full of florid statements about the need to produce healthy people and avoid individual pathology. And yet how much attachment is impossible in the modern nuclear family where parents are chasing careers and children are being pushed from birth to be genius achievers?

If you have an argument, it doesn’t feel well constructed so far.

I comprehend what you are asking, it was asked, far more profoundly than you are asking it here, by the Frankfurt School. — JerseyFlight

Perhaps. Or maybe the Frankfurt School gets a lot of stuff wrong. Does it have some concrete successes in terms of high functioning states?

I referenced an exceedingly important text by Allan Schore, in this text he has traced the biological and psychological development of human beings from the early stages of life. This is a major game changer — JerseyFlight

Seems like commonsense parenting. But modern life goes against that. One of my points was the concrete observation that an over-emphasis on “getting an education” is a major thing against actually getting a good one.

We must overcome the psychological desire to prove something about ourselves, we must reach the point of maturity where we are trying to change something in society, not merely prove ourselves in society. — JerseyFlight

This is very abstract. I have no idea what you mean in actionable terms.

So maybe you would bring up your kids exactly as I brought up mine. Maybe you have the same notions of what a well rounded person would be.

If so, all the theory talk is happily redundant.

Right now you are manifesting, not that you have superior will power, but that you have been a beneficiary of society to a higher degree than others. — JerseyFlight

This simply suggests you haven't read what I said.

I said you are being idealist because you are not understanding that Nature is also about the imperative of entropy production - the dissipation of material gradients.

That is where pragmatism is a corrective. It makes us go looking for the reasons why we would even hold rationality, science and a good education in such high regard. Society is training us for something!

As it happens, I indeed had every privilege. I attribute nothing to any will power or natural diligence. In fact I was as lazy as it comes at school or university.

But being detached is just another level of privilege as it means you can walk through any door, take any path that excites your curiosity.

Last time I checked food and water were the basic building blocks of intellectual life. Do you deny this? — JerseyFlight

Again, you just fundamentally misread my position. A mistake you seem to repeat with many posters here.

I frequently cite Maslow's hierarchy of needs. My whole post is emphasising the concrete rootedness of knowledge - the pragmatism of being an organism. So it is quite amazing you attack me with the very points that I've just laboured.

It is not an abstract problem when we talk about poverty and lack of education throughout the world. — JerseyFlight

But I am asking why you would consider that "a problem".

Aren't folk in Africa or India quite happy - if they have sustainable traditional lifestyles? Isn't that what Western anthropological "happiness" researchers find to their amazement? What kind of psychic oppression are you wanting to liberate them from? Are their lives going to be improved by Latin lessons and trigonometry?

So you start off with the presumption that a lack of education is a problem, and that poverty exists because of it.

I reply, dial back the presumptions. First ask why we might think education so vital. Why do you make it sound an inherent good?

Seriously, imagine putting these questions to a million war torn refugees. — JerseyFlight

Jesus. Whose war tore them up? Why are they having to flee? Those are the relevant questions.

If the answer was that it was because of "modern rational civilisation doing the things it does", then you can see where you are going so wrong. Your words are shallow rhetoric meant to tug on the heart strings. (Ironically.)

If we know we are determined by social process and resources, isn't it intelligent to try to intelligently determine this process? — JerseyFlight

Again, what else am I arguing except to actually think about the social constructionism at work here?

You are only telling me to do what I have done.

The puzzle is why you can't see this. Why are you so defensive about your post being critiqued - to the degree that you need to say that what I should have said, and indeed did say, is what I didn't say, but its opposite?

That's a ninja level of dissembling, you would have to agree. :grin:

Pure potentiality for Hegel is also pure freedom. — Gregory

That is what I disagree on. It is too anthropomorphic.

As individual minds, we humans believe that our destiny is to be self-actualising. We should grow to become creating gods. Our power to construct is only limited by our imaginations. And that is (informationally) unlimited.

Semiosis - as the mechanism of Nature - has become unbound in our hands. With words, we can express any idea. With number, we can construct any form. Semiosis promises unlimited means in terms of what we might chose to will into being.

Yet this is one-sided. The other half of Nature's equation is entropy. Material freedom.

Humans in fact can only give physical expression to ideas that fit within thermodynamic constraints. We remain rooted in the fact that semiosis is about information being used to regulate physical dynamics. And doing so with the purpose of rebuilding itself as an actual material system doing informational regulation.

Our minds are a bundle of habits dedicated to the job of rebuilding that bundle of habits - preserving a bunch of neural pathways woven into a network of metabolic paths and organs. The blood has to pump. The fats and sugars have to feed the hungry cells. We are functioning organisms, not immaterial souls.

So the highest form of semiosis might be the most actualised human being. We look around and don't find a better example of life and mind at its most individually potent.

But that means we are the most constrained as well as the most free. That is the paradox of freewill. We all agree to the same things under the force of science and rationality and cultural custom. Or if really pushed, due to hunger, need of shelter, and other things that speak to basic entropic survival as organisms.

So to be supremely rational is both maximising our freedom and maximising our constraint. Or at least, it means we think of freedom as chaos constrained to the point where we can impose our own private will on Nature - within practical limits that we just accept as being out of our personal control.

I would love to fly by flapping my arms. But it is not a failure of freewill that I can't.

And could the further evolution of humans ever arrive at a place where we can contradict the "laws of nature"? We know that is a silly question.

So our actual potency is measurable in terms of entropy dissipation. We have potency as organisms to the degree we can generate enough entropy to pay for a matching amount of purposeful work.

This is the basic metaphysical equation that science has arrived at. Even the Cosmos obeys the same ground rule. It has this organismic structure - see David Layzer's model of the Universe as a dissipative structure.

The end state of dialectics is still a dialectic. The connection is semiosis. The two halves of the equation being balanced are constraint and freedom. Or information and entropy.

Hegel did not negate Aristotle, he merely showed his thinking was 1) a violation of itself and 2) incomplete. That ought to be enough to compel you in the direction of Hegel, because it's basically what your are here saying. — JerseyFlight

I dunno. Hegel has just never grabbed me.

Aristotle is a great as he covered both the organic and mechanical conceptions of nature. He did not finish the job, but he got it properly started.

Then Peirce clicked with me as soon as I actually understood where he was coming from (which took a few years). His story fits the modern scientific view where Nature is in fact a dialectic of the organic and the mechanical. Semiosis pinpoints how mechanical or informational constraints do organise chaotic or organically self-organising nature.

And that is what we have discovered to be the basis of life and mind. It is all about the semiotic machinery that regulates physical dynamics.

Peirce was half scientist - a high level scientist - as well as a founder of modern logic and a dazzling metaphysician.

I've skimmed and dipped into Hegel on many occasions. But it lacks the sharpness I always find in Peirce. So my own philosophical landmarks would be Anaximander, Aristotle and then Peirce.

Peirce just makes Hegel redundant - at least for my purposes in pursuing a systems metaphysics.

This is also pretty Peircean. The difference might be that we would have to switch out the word "consciousness" for something more psychologically general like "semiosis".

So for Peirce, the Cosmos was "mindful" (and matter merely effete mind) in the sense that it was driven by the imperative of every increasing reasonableness.

That translates more to a natural end state of crisp "rational" order. That is, a world that does achieve counterfactual definiteness in the limit.

The human mind is something that is highly specific within existence. So only we are "conscious" in the way that we understand consciousness.

But Peirce started his metaphysics from a psychological beginning - how scientific human minds make sense of the world through a pragmatic process of inquiry. We form a "world" in our minds by a rationalising process of semiosis - an interpretive relation.

And then this linguistic semiosis - rational thought - can be generalised towards pansemiosis. Nature itself can be understood as a system of signs thinking itself into definite being.

It is a little metaphorical when stretched that far. But it is a far better foundation for metaphysics than thinking reality is a dumb accidental machine. It starts us off looking for the dialectical logic by which Nature could bootstrap itself towards crisp counterfactuality out of some prior total vagueness or Tychism.

And that process of semiosis ends in its "other" of global continuity or the holism of Synechism, in Peirce's scheme.

So the generality of Peircean metaphysics is Hegelian in spirit. But he latches on to something new in making this dialectical distinction that is embodied in the triadic modelling relation which is semiosis.

Modern science has arrived at the same place to the degree that it now understands reality as an interaction of information and dynamics. We have two kinds of "stuff" - formal stuff and material stuff. But actually they are the same kind of stuff as information and entropy have been shown to be dual faces of reality at the Planck scale.

Information is signal - the differences that make a difference. And entropy is noise - the differences that don't make a difference. And so at the bottom of all that, there is just difference.

But at the Planck scale, this unity also means that you have absolute smallness (constraint) and absolute hotness (freedom) looking the same. So there is also an effective annihilation of difference as such. Difference only gets born with the Big Bang fracturing the Planck scale symmetry. It grows to have fully expressed dialectical being from that point.

I'm thinking Peirce had read some Hegel? — Gregory

He was certainly reacting to Hegel and read him in depth. But in his own words, he ends up more aligned to Schelling and Duns Scotus.

So he spends a lot of time criticising Hegel ... while sounding quite Hegelian.

Knowing that knowledge is a privileged enterprise empowers us to create a more intelligent species. — JerseyFlight

This is all very idealistic. Knowledge is not something disembodied and abstract. At least not in the form that modern society is privileging it.

Modern society is pragmatic. It wants scientists so it can build machines, harness resources, run a growth-predicated economy. Once it has got that going, then it needs to generate consumption to match. It needs a creative community who invent new ways to waste energy and keep the whole deal going.

So history has been advanced by this general entropic imperative. It is "good" to establish a culture where people think rationally, and better yet, mathematically. That gets the basic structure of economic expansion on a "free world" going. Then because this mode of growth is so successful, society has to also build its creativity to provide a sink for all the production.

With tongue in cheek, I describe this pragmatic view of knowledge a little negatively. But I just want to underline the unthinking positivity with which you characterise human knowledge and intelligence.

Is it good, is it bad, is it is what it is?

I think we at least have to start closer to the pragmatic truth of knowledge. It must be serving a purpose. The question becomes whose?

Is it in fact ours? It may well be. Or you may be talking about some Romanticised image of the actuality.

It is indeed a significant fact of history that humans have shifted up a level from being "emotional" animals to being "rational" beings due to the semiotic power of developing language.

But have we overshot the mark in trying to construct a purely rational society? Or even a purely mechanistic one, now that we have added the semiotics of numerical syntax to that of linguistic syntax?

It could also be that this is just Hegelian inevitability. We are following Nature's course somewhere "good".

It is a live question. And the deeper one to be addressed.

Then we move philosophically into the realization of Becoming. A thing is both itself and it's opposite. Not transformed yet into a third thing, like grey from white and black. But a grey contradiction nontheless. Things are both themselves and something else, however this doesn't mean there is no rest in truth at the end for Hegel. The organic and his discussions of it point to another space, the realm of Absolute truth. Contradiction starts the movement but does not define the destination. Consider the use of the Universal in the dialect — Gregory

I’m liking your exposition. Frankly I find it difficult to draw a sharp line between any of these positions as they all seem to be generally right, but then also then generally wrong in the same way too. Peirce and modern systems science fix the problems in hylomorphism for me.

So the gist that I say is right is the idea that substantial being - actuality - can be understood as a dialectic of “form” and “prime matter”.

But form is not some kind of existent - a Platonic object or schema. It is best understood as a constraint or limitation on being. So it is contextual. It specifies a state of being by reducing uncertainty. A cat is a cat to the degree it’s form is feline and not canine, bovine, piscine, etc.

Form is thus a hierarchy of increasing specification. A top-down exercise in constraint in which Nature moves closer and closer to some mark - some equilibrium state. The Cosmos has its general physical laws. They restrict free action in a way that - through the laws of thermodynamics - results in chemistry. Chemistry then provides a context that restricts free action in a way that biology can arise. Biology produces animals in general and then animals in particular. Evolutionary competition is a contextual constraint that results in increasingly specified variety. There are Indian elephants and African elephants.

So Nature is not starting with ideals. An African elephant didn’t have to exist because that form was part of some Platonic library as a finality. An idea in a divine mind. Nature is instead layers of constraint that themselves result in greater and greater local specificity - to the degree the world can undergo levels of symmetry breaking in which, dialectically, there is a clear division of paths. A fork or a switch such as left elephants isolated in two different breeding populations and now free to be evolutionarily constrained in some way more highly specified by the information of a local environment.

In the same way, the material part of the hylomorphic equation is understood as the opposite of constraint or context.

I have just describe form as an evolving weight of increasingly specific history that impinges on some locale. The context starts of with cosmological generality and develops a local structure. Cats are cats due to a history of evolutionary events that were responses to environmental demands.

Prime matter is then the opposite to formal cause in being understood as constructive accidents. Simple fluctuations that are actions without specific direction. A chaotic ferment of possibilities. What Peirce described as Firstness or Tychism.

So the material aspect of being is understood as the least formed notion of an efficient cause. A random event. A mere accident. But coupled to form, that raw materiality starts to be shaped into some direction. It is incorporated into a constructive flow.

Water falls on a plain in scattered random fashion. The trickles merge into flows. A snaking river forms. It then reaches the sea and breaks up into the fractal branches of a swampy delta. The whole thing is a story of local accidents being shaped by global physical laws. Every drop of water is having to respond to the constraints of the least action principle in terms of finding its most efficient drainage path from the uplands to the ocean. And a variety of actual drainage patterns emerge, like the form that is the snaking river or the fractal fan of the river delta.

This is a sketch of how Nature actually works in hylomorphic terms. So what does that say about the law of identity? Or being vs becoming?

Well it says actuality is this combination of constraints and accidents. A constraint puts a limit on accidents. But it doesn’t eliminate them. In only imposes a dialectical imperative in the sense that it divides being according to the differences that make a difference and the differences that don’t.

So all is difference when it comes to any substantial thing. Every physical object is composed of some collection of particles or degrees of freedom. We can count its information/entropy. Substance is always some bound collection of material accidents.

But the constraints are essential permissive. They constrain what they constrain, and beyond that, all is left free - by dialectical definition.

A cat is a cat if it sufficiently conforms to some general contextual definition. It could be a black cat or a cartoon cat. A cat in a story or a real cat just over there. Definitions are globally tight but locally open. A cat is a cat to the degree it isn’t a horse or an alligator. Or more narrowly, to the degree it isn’t a civet or a leopard. And so on. A black cat is a black cat to the degree we can ignore the tuft of white on its throat as a difference not making a difference, at least when stacked up against the big difference in it not being a white or grey cat.

So the law of identity can only logically claim that A = A to the degree that there is no difference that makes a difference. And yet logically, there will be always differences. Especially as we dig down towards the material ground of that instantiated being where the hierarchy of constraint is becoming attenuated.

Peirce realised this meant that logic has to include vagueness as a category to balance the idea of existence as having counterfactual definiteness. The principle of non contradiction can fail to apply when material differences become a matter of indifference. So identity and contradiction are emergent properties of Nature. They are relative.

The laws of thought were framed for a world presumed to be fully actualised - crisply formed in every detail. Bivalence rules all things.

But Peirce built a new picture based on a hylomorphism, a dialectic, of constraints and freedoms. Everything is formed only to the degree that it needs to be crisply or sharply identified as some actuality. But that very act of formation - of the informing of Nature - already includes the “other” of Nature’s indifference. What isn’t forbidden is free to happen. And must happen, indeed.

Some actual entity or structure is thus an equilibrium balance. It is a collection of differences that is specified to whatever degree pragmatically fits the context. The differences that matter are in balance with the differences that don’t. The thing in question has stable being to the degree its flow of becoming is not making a substantial seeming difference.

Rivers wriggle about the landscape the whole time. Even the continents flow over geological time due to plate tectonics. Things are building up and breaking down due to multitudes of accidents, but also they are expressing physical laws like the principle of least action.

As Peirce says, it becomes vague when a river becomes some different river, a continent some other land mass. Identity is sort of maintained and was also always sort of an illusion. Nature - at a physicochemical level - just has a looser actuality. A lower grade of substantiality in terms of being mechanically divided into A and not-A.

I've assumed it had more mundane characteristics in terms of light traveling a tiny distance and the four universal physical constants. — jgill

The three Planck constants (Boltzmann's k reduces to the others) anchor everything, as Okun's Cube shows.

So the reason the Planck scale has the Planck temperature is that the Planck distance covered at the speed of light, and hence marking the Planck time, gives you an event with the energy density of the Planck frequency. :grin:

I assume your first sentence above refers to an inability to measure below certain limiting dimensions. — jgill

Yes. I'm treating the Planck scale as the cut-off. Obviously we don't really know what goes on. But we have some pretty good arguments.

but DNA replication is supposed to be high precision machinery - like the best of atomic clocks - and any malfunction should manifest itself in catastrophic failure in an organism — TheMadFool

Not really. Genes can jump about and still function. The genome parasitising itself is a neat extension of Darwinian competition that Crick himself suggested.

So biology isn't actually machinery even if it produces some remarkable machinery.

Check this and wonder how something so nifty could have evolved....

My personal view is that junk DNA, although not carrying information for proteins, serve a purpose... — TheMadFool

Sure. The article says its a mix of actual junk (all the parasitic transposons) and epigenetic machinery. I think the cited split was 45/55.

...but why does orange 'give way' even after it has become visible in a particular yellow-to-red flow of becoming? — SaugB

But colour experience is a psychological construct. It is a reading we impose on nature.

So yellow is produced by the brain as a measure of the relative absence of "blue" wavelength light, and an even balance of "red" and "green" wavelength energies. It is a complicated judgement.

Then orange as a hue is a reddish-yellow. Or yellowish-red. It is a further judgement about a "position" on the spectrum of "colour experience" the brain is constructing.

The physical world itself is just wavelengths that are shorter or longer - contracted or stretched - in some continuous fashion. Or at least that is our scientific conception of the world.

So the whole business of primary hues and secondary blends is a bad analogy for talking about the continuity of change.

What happens when you ask the story of how yellow turns into blue? Why does it have to pass through white to get there?

Blue certainly doesn't look like whitish yellow, or even blackish yellow. Cripes, blackish-yellow doesn't even look blackish-yellow. It looks brown!

So colour experience might get the question going. However it potentially also very misleading as colour experience has quite a weird dimensionality once you delve into the psychophysics.

"Flagged for low post quality. Moved to the lounge." — Noble Dust

:grin:

...is Woke Privilege a thing on PF? Is there a structural disadvantaging of other views that some entitled posters find it uncomfortable to confront?

Peter Lynds had a paper published in the Foundations of Physics Letters some time back in which he proposed there are no instants of time. — jgill

The Planck scale gives us a pretty dialectical answer on the notion of instants and distance.

The Planck scale - in representing the shortest possible frequency of energy - arises at the point where spinning on the spot and moving in a direction have the same size. The quantum of action is defined by the first fundamental difference - the first beat of a wavelength. Or the possible distance transversed by a light-speed particle making a single rotation.

So the action starts from the point where symmetry and asymmetry, the reversible and the irreversible, have just become "a thing". The particle can go on spinning "on the spot", so sticks out as that part of the world which is just oscillating. And the particle can go on travelling in a direction that sticks out as that part of the world where the distance just keeps getting longer.

The Planck scale is the birth of the dialectical contrast between the reversible and the irreversible as an actualised physical reality.

So Bergson was right about durations. Or if we are to talk about point-like "instants", then we have to recognise that they must already have this internal dialectical structure. An instant already marks the point where irreversibility AND reversibility have just entered the world as "a thing".

But the problem is why does any process of becoming end where it end and not end before? For me, it has to be because of some fragility to the transitory phases, and not because they are 'elusive.' — SaugB

If you are talking about a flow, then it has a direction. It is approaching some destination by departing some place.

But that then already adds the presumption the flow is marked by an irreversibility. If the flow is a spinning on the spot or movement that wobbles back and forth, then the flow is cancelling itself out. A reversible flow becomes the effective absence of a flow. It becomes indistinguishable from what we might call stasis.

On the other hand, if a flow has a direction and that is made irreversible by marking some spot that it reached, then the symmetry of "becoming" is broken. We say a change has happened. An event occurred. That is now in the past. The change has become and is now a fact about being.

Now our marking some spot is an act that might merely interrupt a flow. If the flow was from yellow to orange to red, what was stopping it continuing on elsewhere, or instead reversing itself back to yellow before we had time to check?

Or if the flow comes to its own stop, what's that about? At most it says the flow, as a direction, has ceased to have that irreversible story. The flow now spins or jitters on the spot. It is what physics would call a harmonic oscillator. It is in a constant state of becoming still, but of the symmetrical kind where the differences aren't making an irreversible difference.

So the stopping and starting points might be something we arbitrarily impose on flows so as to make an irreversible measurement that allows us to describe the world in terms of directions and points or stages transversed,

And nature itself would seem to stop and start, depending on whether a flow was symmetric or asymmetric, oscillating or getting somewhere always different.

So a self-consistent metaphysics can be constructed from a pure story of "becoming" because a flow already has the contrasting possibilities of being either reversible or irreversible.

That has major implications for our physicalist model of time of course. It seems both like another "dimension" at the micro level - a symmetric and reversible direction - but also a flow with a generalised irreversible and asymmetric direction, the one marked by the thermodynamic arrow of entropy production at the macro scale of observation.

Time (and energy) symmetry is thus basic to being able to explain particle physics in terms of quantum harmonic oscillators, or stable spin states resulting from locally broken symmetries.

And thermodynamics is then basic to explaining a Cosmos that on the macroscale is evolving in a direction marked by its cooling and expansion. A journey that is irreversible even if it does eventually peter out in the indifferent stochastic symmetry of a generalised Heat Death at the "end of time".

This allows for degree, perhaps. A nervous system that models the world in a very useful and detailed way so that it can respond effectively to a wide variety of circumstances is, perhaps, more conscious than a nervous system that models the world in a much simpler (but still useful) way. — bert1

Sure. So a cockroach has a nervous system. But it’s “consciousness” would be different not just in degree but in kind as its nervous system is more about a collection of fixed habits and thus a lack of specific memories.

Large brained animals have attentional processes layered on top of acquired habits. So you could think of our habits as like a state of being aware that is stretched out over the weeks, months, even the lifetimes, it takes to acquire those habits. A habit is a model used to regulate our world that is a sort of extended smear of adaptive neural change or state update.

And then that habit is also something which results in an appropriate action being unthinkingly emitted - fire and forget - when triggered by the right environmental circumstances.

So a cockroach - to the degree it lacks attentional processes - might be regarded as having an attenuated form of that unthinking, emitted habit level of “consciousness”. That would seem a fair extrapolation.

Then attention is a new ballgame. That is about the nervous system forming a novel and specific state of response in about half a second. And the action that follows is voluntary and deliberative. Thought and working memory are involved.

So the nervous system is working on two levels of world modelling.

Habit is like an appreciation of a single moment of neural adjustment fixed over long periods of space and time. It is a generalisation constructed from multiple similar instances and capable of handling an envelope of similar situations.

Attention is then more a snapshot of the here and now - a fitting of a bespoke model to a time and place that spans about half a second of processing. So it feels like what it is like to be rooted in some spot in the world, faced with that exact sensory situation, once only. While any consciousness in terms of habit is what it feels like to be facing much the same situation at any time or anywhere.

So yes, we can imagine differences in degree. But also differences in kind.

I should add that smart invertebrates do have some degree of attentional processing. A jumping spider will stop and scan the world to sum up a plan of how to approach its prey. It builds up a mental picture of how the world actually is from a place and time so it can figure out how to creep around behind and get close enough to pounce.

This is remarkable given how little brain matter a jumping spider has. But it shows the evolutionary values of first having a solid general base of unthinking habit, and then also a more plastic “here and now” neural modelling response.

This is important if we are making the case against Panpsychism. Consciousness is not merely just the fact that a nervous system is modelling the world. We can see that there is a logical organisation to that modelling.

It is all about constructing contrast. And being “intensely aware” is already a contrast between two kinds of processing - habit and attention. The more that we can experience the world in general terms, the more we can also do the contrasting thing of modelling it as something highly “here and now”. The switch between the voluntary and the automatic is something that is also noticeable as part of the overall “flow of awareness”.

I found an interesting theory - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205215001604

A likely reason for all the junk DNA is that DNA would become parasitic on itself. Individual segments would start copying and pasting themselves into the genome if they can get away with it. That would be just selection at work. The genome would become host to its own parasitic segments and so become bloated.

Then to explain why this happens to some genomes and not others, this paper argues that the genome has a delicate epigenetic network whose balance would be disturbed by this junk DNA inserting itself randomly. Mostly such defects would get edited out by evolution if the fitness of the genome was thus compromised.

But if a bit of parasitic DNA spawned a shower of copies, and these got inserted in a way that kept the global epigenetic network in balance, then the genome would still be fit and sudden bloating by multiple segments would be invisible to the forces of selection. The genome would be stuck with this parasitic load.

So it is a neat suggestion. The paper has a lot of good general background too.

Another relevant article is - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-junk-dna-what-makes-humans-unique/

This talks about how the difference between ape and human brains is more about the epigenetic timing of cell division and growth schedules than the expression of any particles coded proteins.

That means there's no clear-cut definition of genes and ergo, genomes. Biology, unlike physics, appears to be more fluid. Perhaps the issue will be resolved once we define "gene" and "genome" in a better way. — TheMadFool

Biologists knew that already. Cracking the genome was the easy bit. The hard work starts with working out how the information regulates the physics.

Yes, I was thinking along those lines, wondering whether multifunctional swiss knives qualify as an instance of complexity. — TheMadFool

A knife that is equally bad for every job? :chin:

One problem though: it's generally believed that evolution evinces a progress from simplicity to complexity... — TheMadFool

Again, this is where I admire the crystal clarity of Howard Pattee. He identified the epistemic cut as the definition of life. So even the simplest RNA soup counts as already irreducibly complex. There is just nothing in the physics that explains what is going on anymore. You have to see how information has now entered the room.

but if you take the idea of algorithmic complexity and apply it to the universe then, since the universe began, according to a science book, by fixing the value of just six numbers (referring to known physical constants), doesn't that mean the graph of complexity is showing a downward trend? After all there are more bits of information in our genome than in there are in just six numbers? — TheMadFool

The Big Bang was an ultimately simple state - a vanilla bath of boiling hot radiation. And the Heat Death will also have an ultimate simplicity - a vanilla bath of radiation so cold and thin that its just a rustle of zero degree photons.

It's the bit in between where complexity arises via a series of symmetry breakings. The Higgs field switched on mass and suddenly there were all these sluggish particles cluttering up the vacuum. The vanilla radiation bath became a cosmic dust bowl.

From there, it just got worse. The dust particles - hydrogen and helium atoms - clumped and caught fire. Stars emerged as fusion furnaces making the light elements. A reprocessing by super-novae then produced all the heavy elements to.

Next came planets and even planetary biofilms - at least on Earth there is life.

So yes, simplicity led to complexity. But simplicity gets to win in the long run.

I'm trying to find some way for a smaller genome to pack more punch than a larger one. — TheMadFool

The way to dig into that is consider the proteome. How many different proteins does any organism actually use? Do humans beat lungfish on that score?

Assuming a one-to-one correspondence between genes and proteins would mean that there are at least 20,000 proteins corresponding to roughly 20,000 genes for humans. The proteome can be larger than the genome, especially in eukaryotes, as more than one protein can be produced from one gene due to alternative splicing (e.g. human proteome consists 92,179 proteins[citation needed] out of which 71,173 are splicing variants[citation needed]).

On the other hand, not all genes are translated to proteins, and many known genes encode only RNA which is the final functional product. Moreover, complete proteome size varies depending on the kingdom of life. For instance, eukaryotes, bacteria, archaea and viruses have on average 15,145, 3,200, 2,358 and 42 proteins respectively encoded in their genomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteome

Yes, I've been trying to get my hands on a good definition of "complexity" with no success. — TheMadFool

One good way to think about it is the simplexity vs complicity distinction that Stewart/Cohen made in their readable book, The Collapse of Chaos.

Algorithmic complexity is another more mathematical way of framing the issue - the search for the most compact program that could generate some particular bit string.

The 1990s saw this issue hammered out in a variety of ways. The Santa Fe school was famous for its Complex Adaptive Systems approach.

So there is a large literature on this core issue. Again, I take the semiotic approach of theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee. A complex system is described as one that has an "epistemic cut" - an internal informational model of what it ought to physically be.

So life and mind are complex systems on that score. Physics and chemistry can only produce complication.

Does it work like that?

Information theory proves that a "two bit" code can already encode infinite variety. A binary on/off switch is already capable of unlimited semiosis.

So a four bit genome vs a five bit genome essentially makes no difference in terms of its raw ability to encode information.

A binary code is all that is actually needed - at least for a physics-less notion of Turing computation or Shannon message transmission.

DNA then makes use of a "three bit" codon structure as it actually has to manipulate physics while doing its informational thing. It takes three DNA bases to spell out the name of a particular amino acid.

With four bases and a triplet codon ... well there are plenty of accounts of the story...

The three-letter nature of codons means that the four nucleotides found in mRNA — A, U, G, and C — can produce a total of 64 different combinations. Of these 64 codons, 61 represent amino acids, and the remaining three represent stop signals, which trigger the end of protein synthesis.

Because there are only 20 different amino acids but 64 possible codons, most amino acids are indicated by more than one codon. This phenomenon is known as redundancy or degeneracy, and it is important to the genetic code because it minimizes the harmful effects that incorrectly placed nucleotides can have on protein synthesis.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-information-in-dna-determines-cellular-function-6523228/

So the general message would be that DNA had sufficient resources to combine enough amino acids in enough ways to be able to build an unlimited number of proteins. The information encoded could be turned into molecular machinery that self-assembled and started to physically constrain chemically-energetic processes.

The complexity that matters here is not the computational one (where a binary code would already be enough to represent every combination possible - and combination isn't actually complexity at all).

Rather it is all about the semiotic issue of being able to generate a sufficient variety of molecular machinery to regulate a metabolic world in the name of a general organismic goal (living, breathing, surviving).

Complexity from an adaptive systems perspective is all about the fact a semiotic relationship is in play - that encoded information is constraining physical dynamics.

If there is no semiosis happening, then the system isn't actually complex. Only complicated.

What do you think of the clip? — TheMadFool

God awful frankly. :grin:

The fact that there is only 1% difference doesn't mean that a 2% difference would be just as dramatic.

The difference between apes and humans was the evolution of some small changes.

A key one was a reshaping of the vocal tract so that it could be used to make clearly articulated sound sequences - a proto-code in the sense that an alternating pattern of consonants and vowels is a super-effective medium for sending an informationally-structured message.

So apes have throats, tongues and lips. But the human growth schedule tweaked our vocal tract so that it could "bite" sounds off. Our vocalisation was digitised in that we could easily make 30 or 40 very brief, but easily distinguished, noises. And from there, language could take root.

It might have been a 1% level change to what the genes had to code for. But it unlocked another whole possibility of informational semiosis - the linguistic one that encodes human culture.

So what would a 2% change unlock in an alien? What else did deGrasse have in mind?

As it happens, in humans, words were topped by numbers. And speaking by writing. So that first innovation is still unfolding to reveal its further delights.

The 1% genetic change isn't done. And by the same token, the memetic change - our linguistic culture - may in turn have barely got started as the source of stored information shaping us as creatures.

Meanwhile back to the brain and what the 1% was responsible for there.

An important growth schedule change was in the degree of neural "top-downness". The spindle cell and mirror neuron type stories we read about. The human brain grows both larger due to its prolonged growth spurts and it also produces more neurons that feed downwards from higher to lower levels.

This is all part of the constraints-base logic of biology. The way to get smarter is to be able to apply more context to what is being experienced. The more you can predict what your sensory inputs ought to be, the less you need to try to figure out what surprising thing just happened.

And this applies to both sensory perception and motor control. So humans are more equipped for making and using complex tools. The 1% grew more top-down connections to control our hands and also our vocal cords.

But de Grasse is pretty rubbish here. He doesn't explain anything.

By chance, early homo evolved a slightly different vocal tract. Probably for making a wider variety of expressive emotional calls. And to go with that, there was a shift to higher level control over those vocalisations.

Apes make emotional grunts and whoops through the cingulate cortex - tightly tied to the limbic areas that do emotion. Humans over-ride the cingulate (except for involuntary swearing and the like) by shifting control up to the prefrontal where the vocalisation can instead be generated using the rational expressive structure of syntactical habits.

So early homo looks to have undergone a slight genetic set of tweaks to be able to make an interesting variety of crisply structured noises. Not yet meaningful in the sense of an actual language, but pragmatic in that it helped co-ordinate the intensely social life of a tool-using hunter-gatherer.

And then it is a small step to actually inventing a working grammatical structure, a first habit of communicating, and thus thinking, symbolically (rather than iconically or indexically).

We don't know it actually happened this way. But it is the reasonable speculation given data points like brain endocasts, the sudden appearance of symbolic art, the controversy over whether Neanderthals had hyoid bones, etc.

And certainly, it was the invention of symbolic and syntactic speech that was the revolutionary deal. A brand new encoding machinery to follow on from the long-established one of DNA.

Given what I said in the preceding paragraph and it's true that genotype determines phenotype, it must be that more complex organism should possess larger genomes and more genes. — TheMadFool

Rather than genes determining everything, it is better to say that they constrain it.

To determine everything suggests a one to one relationship - one bit of genetic information to fix one bit of phenotypic physical structure.

But as others have said, far less information is needed to simply constrain physical growth processes. The genes can switch growth phases on and off. The growth itself can then be random - as in the fractal branching patterns of a capillary network.

Or rather, the information can be considered part of the environment - the constraints the physical context exerts.

So a capillary will make its decision to branch by sensing the degree of shear force being exerted by the blood flow. Genetics will set some general optimal value to aim at. The physics of what is happening on the ground creates the feedback signal which allows this value to be targeted by the branching.

The actual pattern of branching is not determined, just generally constrained by a global optimal value.

This is why the human brain could evolve so quickly from the ape brain. It was a simple matter of letting cell growth run on a few divisions longer. Just a small adjustment to the growth clock.

But then also, human brains were left more open to the influence of environmental information. As newborns, humans are especially helpless as the brain is still just laying down tissue. Even as teenagers, the higher areas of the cortex are still immature by the standards of other large brained animals.

So as a genetic trick, our nervous system is exposed to growth-based learning or adaptation for far longer before it gets myelinated - insulated and hardwired into place. The environment contributes much more to the final shape of the circuits. Which is important as humans want their brains shaped by another whole level of information - human linguistic culture.

Not that I am saying this is the reason for the basic paradox of the article. Folk are still searching for a solid reason why DNA doesn't more directly correlate with phenotype complexity.

I googled out of interest and the only hint seems to be that larger cell types in slower growing animals seems to correlate with chunky genomes. But not enough is known about what is actually junk DNA, what is epigenetic DNA, to answer why smaller or larger genomes might be evolutionarily favoured as different responses to different circumstances.

There is an open question to be answered here.

However the human brain is the most complex chunk of matter in the known universe in terms of its density of connectivity, especially when scaled for body mass. And also it is a prime example of the way that genes only need to regulate growth in a broad brush way. The bulk of the information can be provided by a tissue or organ learning to adapt its fit to its environment.

So phenotype expression is the product of nature and nurture always. Two sets of constraint acting to produce the outcome. Genetic information and environmental information - the environment being both the internal economy being experienced by the capillaries and the external world, and even culture, as it impinges on the body and nervous system.

It depends on the level and type of anaesthesia. But as the following shows, the safe goal is aiming to reduce brain activity to 60% to 40%, not to zero.

And awareness with paralysis can happen. Awareness with just forgetting is what light anaesthesia is about by design.

Recent advances have led to the manufacture of monitors of awareness. Typically these monitor the EEG, which represents the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex, which is active when awake but quiescent when anesthetized (or in natural sleep). The monitors usually process the EEG signal down to a single number, where 100 corresponds to a patient who is fully alert, and zero corresponds to electrical silence. General anesthesia is usually signified by a number between 60 and 40 (this varies with the specific system used).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia_awareness

Peirce divided signs into three categories - icons, indexes and symbols. That works pretty well.

the initial indeterminateness of which you speak is to be thought of as the ball balanced at the apex of the dome, — jkg20

For reference, this is a standard poser - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton%27s_dome

What, though, stops the ball from just going straight back to a balanced initial state, i.e. even if the symmetry of indeterminateness is broken, randomly or otherwise, what stops it from simply reestablishing itself? — jkg20

You can see that in this example, once the ball starts to accelerate under gravity, it is not going to be able to fluctuate back. So the point is really that given a state of perfect symmetry, even the most infinitesimal asymmetry is going to get massively amplified.

So a deterministic view of the physics says the ball can’t move. It ought to be stuck where it stands forever. Thus strict determinism shows itself to be incomplete. Some element of chance must be introduced into the metaphysics. A clinamen or swerve as the Atomists put it.

But the point of mentioning this example is to illustrate the principle of making the material/efficient cause - the first triggering event - so trivial, so random, that it barely seems like any proper cause.

The system was ready to tip. So “anything” was going to tip it.

So, it looks like the future, whatever it is, at least must be something that is both real, yet does not arise from indeterminateness. That looks like it contradicts the kind of triadicism described, which requires that all reality arise from indeterminateness. — jkg20

Again, this particular example is only mentioned to show the way the future was already built into the initial state as a potential - a gravitational potential in this case.

It is the same as with an entropic gradient. An ordered state is inevitably going to arrive at a messy state. The future is ordained in that sense.

To understand spontaneous symmetry breaking, we are shifting the burden of causal explanation as much as we can from the initial conditions to the final outcome. That was the take home message I meant. That is the contrast with normal causal stories.

However, ‘vagueness’ is not ‘nothing’. It’s still something - just something not very definite. Maybe something like a range of possibilities, out of which something definite condenses. — Wayfarer

Not just something but everything. And everything is nothing by another name.

The metaphor I use is the white noise static of a TV screen. A state of everything and nothing at the same time. But start to constrain the static, turn the noise into a signal, and it potentially contains every TV program ever made, or which ever could be made.

Thanks. I spent a decade of confused groping after the basic principles while with the neuroscience types. Then I met up with the theoretical biologists and found they had had it elegantly worked out all along.

They themselves were just then assimilating the new scholarship on Peirce and realising he had got it in an even more basic way a century earlier.

Funny how these things work out. :up:

The triadicism is boot strapping. So all three aspects arise together.

That leads to the obvious question, arise out of what? The Peircean answer would be out of vagueness. Out of pure indeterminacy itself.

This isn’t a perfect answer. But it certainly begins things in the most minimal possible notion of a set of initial conditions. And the causes of the development of structure can be considered to be finality acting from the future.

Another way of looking at this is spontaneous symmetry breaking. The breaking always formally demands a fluctuation that triggers the change. But absolutely any and every fluctuation would suffice to trigger the avalanche or rock the ball off the apex of the dome.

So as an efficient cause, it is the least special imaginable. On the other hand, the fact that things were so poised that they would break so easily means that the finality was mighty strong. The change really wanted to happen. The future was beckoning.

by observing reality through the medium of a dialectical awareness — JerseyFlight

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

I’m always arguing that metaphysics relies on dialectics. So we could be on a similar tack here. Especially if it is not the standard misrepresentation of Hegelianism you mention.

One cannot say that all models are equal, I understand that you did not specifically say this, but this would seem to be a possible implication of your statement. — JerseyFlight

Maybe it would have been better to draw your implications from what l did say rather than what I didn’t?

Even if I had been favouring transcendence over immanence, the implication would have to be that I had reason to find one model better than another.

You agree that some models are so divorced from the premises of reality that they offer no value to reality? — JerseyFlight

I’m a pragmatist. So theories are free constructions. What matters is they are definite enough to be tested.

That is an obvious problem with a theistic theory that says whatever happens, it was god’s will. The worst kind of theory is one that isn’t even wrong.

But any theory that is posed with counterfactual force is then fine as it can be found wrong. It can fail.

So it is not that the premises have to be “real”. That smacks of naive realism. And all models rely on abstraction - some kind of construct that allows acts of measurement.

Thus my initial comment. A materialist conception of reality is a social construct. Harrison’s account of the history of science clearly illustrates that.

Could it be that you claim to be a supporter of immanent metaphysics, but are using as your prime bit of evidence a physicalism that is in fact based on a transcendent notion of mathematical law? That would be ironic, wouldn’t. So how do you answer?

What makes the supernatural, religious dichotomy, which you have admitted is just a technique, an actual alternative? — JerseyFlight

You're speaking gobbledygook.

So how do you go about verifying or testing your so-called, transcendent models? — JerseyFlight

Try focusing on the fact that my commitment is to an ontology of immanent causality, not a transcendent one. I'm not another of your closet god-botherers that you seem so curiously desperate to confront.

I believe transcendence fails, for a wide variety of reasons. And I am impressed by how well immanent approaches are doing.

And the fact that we can say anything meaningful at all about Being is the surprise here.

But just because one can promote the success of one's ontology, doesn't mean one fails to recognise the epistemic fact that one is always "just modelling".

Is this all too complicated for you?

It will be one of the most bizarre things I will have ever heard if you try to tell me that precision is the result of the projection of spiritual being, which it sounds very much like you are saying? — JerseyFlight

Nothing like what I was saying.

The interjection of supernaturalism into the process is unnecessary. — JerseyFlight

So why do you keep interjecting that hopefully into every discussion?

At some point, it becomes absolutely undecidable which is real, and which is the counterfeit. That knowledge is lost to the universe. — hypericin

Presumably the authentic bill is issued by a central bank that keeps records of the total legal tender in circulation. So that information exists. The knowledge isn't lost to the universe.

Then so far as the central bank is concerned, it just has to cut up one of the two bills.

Which one doesn't matter. But what does matter is that one is erased so that the records are kept right.

This is very close to an argument from ignorance. — JerseyFlight

It is nothing like that.

Further, it is a mere assertion, you are simply demanding that you have the right to invent transcendence and assign being to it from the premise of matter. — JerseyFlight

Nothing like what I said.

The dichotomy here is false, a mere abstract derivation, it is not found in nature. — JerseyFlight

Right. That is why I say it is a way to sharpen our models of nature in a rational fashion. If we don't set up our arguments counterfactually, they can only ever produce vague conclusions - no matter how decisively we may reject or accept either alternative.

You seem to have an awful lot to learn about epistemology.

If you accept the premise that reality is constructed, then you must submit to the conclusion that your idea of transcendence is a construction — JerseyFlight

You seem to have an awful lot to learn about reading comprehension. I never said reality is constructed. I said our models of reality are socially constructed.

Are you that unfamiliar with epistemology?

To avoid this conclusion I offered you the chance to connect the dots and show how you escape the dilemma of your own logic. Your reply was merely to appeal to idealism, this is not a solution. — JerseyFlight

Again, I never said anything remotely like that.

You are dealing with the figments of your own imagination as seems to be the usual case.

If there is an admission of construction, then how do you get from this to transcendence? — JerseyFlight

What kind of a question is that? Immanence and transcendence are logically derived as the dichotomous alternatives. Either the causes of being are internal to that being, or they are external.

A choice of views that are arrived at by reasoning and not due to some emotional attachment.

There is something else that must be said here to clarify the context of what's going on. Where you have the upper intellectual hand against your opponent, you would no doubt pounce on his ignorance. This is not deserving of respect, it is the technique of all Christian apologetics. However, you no doubt find it very hard to pass off your idealism on a thinker like myself, and this is because I can discern that the polemic you leverage is itself constructed of sophistical, abstract precepts that merely give the appearance of progress in the direction of mysticism, but in reality, it is just a special pleading exercise in the absolute negative. Your own fantastical precepts, as an anti-philosophical tactic, are not even disclosed, and even if they were you would fallaciously exempt them from your negative criteria. This is not philosophy, this is modern sophistry. — JerseyFlight

Someone's not taking their meds again. :razz:

Early modern science, as a commitment to the discovery of universal truths, was very much a product of the monotheist tradition, — Wayfarer

Peter Harrison wrote this great summary...
https://www.academia.edu/16420900/The_development_of_the_concept_of_laws_of_nature

His account shows just how socially constructed our notions of reality are - even as "objective science". And exactly where immanence got replaced with transcendence.

Study of mechanical processes was considered to be about the manipulation of nature, not nature itself. This was consistent with the Aristotelian tendency to regard the operations of nature as analogous to that of an organism rather than a machine, and was also in keeping with Aristotle's assumption that the cosmos was eternal - that is to say, not a created artefact.

As we shall see, the early modern conception of nature as a machine and a divine artefact would make possible a novel union of physics as the study of nature with mechanics as the study of artificially induced motions

What is interesting about this passage is the manner in which Kepler invokes the divine will and his belief in a creator as the justification for, and indeed the foundation of, his realist mathematical astronomy. The reality of mathematical relations in the universe is asserted on the basis that God has instantiated these relations in the created order. In fact Kepler attributed Aristotle's inability to conceptualise a world founded on mathematical principles to the fact that the Greek philosopher had not believed that the world had been created.

A mathematical natural philosophy that was unacceptable to Aristotle, Kepler wrote, is "acceptable to me and to all Christians, since our faith holds that the World, which had no previous existence, was created by God in weight, measure, and number, that is in accordance with ideas coeternal with Him."

All of this makes possible the conviction that mathematical laws are not just human constructions and devices for calculation, but rather describe the real relations that obtain between physical objects in the universe.

A key characteristic of the notion of laws of nature was the idea of an external imposition of order onto the world. Such a perspective contrasted with theAristotelian view that attributed order to the intrinsic properties of natural things.

So not only was this new conception at odds with Aristotle's idea that mathematics be kept separate from natural philosophy and his insistence on maintaining a distinction between artificial and natural motions, it was also inconsistent with the Aristotelian view of matter and causation. The idea of divinely imposed laws was more consistent with the recently revived matter theory of the ancient atomists and with its modern modification, the corpuscular hypothesis.

Unlike the ontologically rich Aristotelian world, the sparse world of atoms or corpuscles was unpopulated by the qualities, virtues, active principles, and substantial forms that had once invested nature with significant causal agency. This was a causally vacant cosmos that would be receptive to the direct volitions of the Deity. It was also a world that required constant creative attention.

What on earth? Matter is what we find existing, this is not an "attitude," or "postulate." — JerseyFlight

Perhaps you are not stopping long enough to understand what is being said here.

@Wayfarer is correct to point out that "the physical" is itself a socially constructed term. It posits certain metaphysical commitments. We never get to see the world "as it is". We only construct an understanding based on the models that seem to work.

So science took a big turn towards a certain notion of the physical when it moved from an Aristotelean doctrine of substantial being and adopted a view based purely on material and efficient cause. The new idea of brute matter in an a-causal void was formed. And to go with that re-purposing of ancient atomism, there had to be a rather religious take on the accompanying "mathematical laws of nature" that now animated this "base matter".

Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, etc, could only posit immutable and universal laws as the complement to brute material being because that made sense in the context of a creating God. Everything could only be controlled and regulated if there was a divine mind acting behind the scenes to give physical reality its mechanical form.

It is the big irony of the Scientific Revolution. Organised religion made uber-materialism thinkable because the whole question of what moves dumb matter could be shoved into the cupboard marked "mathematical necessity".

It was only with time that the divine mind underpinning this new metaphysics got side-lined. Scientific materialism then became the sound of one hand clapping so far as metaphysics went.

But of course, scroll forward to the various shocks and revisions of 20th C physics, and even materialists have stopped thinking of matter being so material. Matter is energy. Energy is spacetime curvature, quantum temporal uncertainty, information entropy, or some other "shit" now.

Aristotelean form and finality are causes having to be smuggled back into the scientific discourse.

However anyway, you went off at the deep end without seeming to think that @Wayfarer might be doing his usual thing of criticising Scientism - a particular brand of scientific metaphysics which wants to reduce reality to just material/efficient cause.

I don't have a problem with deism, pantheism or other kinds of vague theism, just so long as they are not false postures for monotheism or organized religion. — JerseyFlight

This seems like a vote for the more Aristotelean brand of physicalism then. Immanence rather than transcendence.

@Wayfarer likewise is always citing Buddhism, never Christianity, as far as I remember. So I think you have read his own metaphysical commitments quite wrong - even if I would place him on the idealist side of the immanence camp.

I would say that you also immediately tried to pigeon hole me the first (and only) time I replied to a post of yours. I don't mind that. It was funny. But it might be worth knowing just how far off the mark you seem to be in guessing people's backgrounds and hobby horses.

No real project, just an interest in feasible alternatives to monisms and dualisms in the philosophy of mind. — jkg20

I'm trying to think of a simpler way to sum it up. So from a philosophy of mind point of view, monism would say either all is physics or all is mind.

Physical monism has to then invoke epiphenomenalism, eliminativism, or other arguments that explain away the rather primary fact what we do experience the world. Consciousness remains a thing.

Idealist monism then says all is mind, but has to find ways to account for the fact the physical world also appears to remain a thing.

Dualism is thus always lurking in the monistic approaches. Unless we are willing to just be eliminativist, or just be idealist, we are stuck with a fundamental dichotomy of some kind. And so we might say there are two kinds of stuff (as in Cartesianism), or matter has two inherent aspects (as in panpsychism).

Triadicism - as in Hegelian dialectics, or the tradition of the Unity of Opposites generally - says fine. We can't get away from the fact that Nature always seems to divide into its poles of being. This has been the story for metaphysics on every question ever asked.

Is reality deterministic or probabilistic, stasis or flux, form or matter, discrete or continuous, one or many, part or whole, organic or mechanical, etc, etc? We always end up being pulled strongly in two opposite directions when we try to drill down to the fundamental.

A triadic way of thinking then takes that familiar fact and turns it back on itself to say that this then tells us Nature is the product of emergent process, of systematic structure. A synthesis or unity of the opposites.

The oppositions are instead complementary states of being. Each is related to its other by a reciprocal or inverse relation. Continuity is measured by the degree to which it is not discrete. And the discrete to the degree it is a lack of the continuous.

So a metaphysical-strength dichotomy is not reality split into dualistic halves. It is reality becoming divided towards the opposing limits of the possible. And then the actuality of reality is that which now stands as the third thing - the relation that is defined by that complementary state of affairs.

A metaphysical contrast has been produced. And now a spectrum of states inbetween two bounding extremes has been revealed.

Triadicism is thus this general way of thinking. It arrives at the desired goal of a unity - a "monism" - by accepting the inevitability of duality and showing how dichotomies are what actually allow a world of complex relations.

Simplicity is arrived at not by identifying the right fundamental substance (ie: matter or mind), but by accepting that all existence is based on the irreducibly triadic logic of a systematic relation.

This is the Peircean point. He showed how it was a logically irreducible relation. He showed how to put an end to substance-based ontology and move on with the holism of a triadic relational model.

Now we come to applying that triadicism to the problem of mind specifically.

The problem becomes to identity the right dualism - the one that is complementary in a fashion that can result in a formal unity. And following the lead of biology, neurology can also view the two halves of this whole as a semiotic interaction between information and dynamics. Physics controlled by symbols. A modelling relation.

So life and mind are made part of a continuum. But also, the steps in terms of the semiotic machinery - from genes, to neurons, to words - are pretty major divisions.

What persists all the way through a full-on triadic metaphysics is the agreement that all reality is founded on the logical irreducibility of a triadic, or systematic, or hierarchical, relation. The only monism that makes sense is one based on a unity of opposites. And dualism simply speaks to the fact that opposites must arise so as to construct that unity as an actualised state of being.

To wrap it up, we have to wind up having something concrete to say about qualia, the explanatory gap, the feeling of what it is like to be conscious, the ineffability of experience, the reality of freewill, etc. All the usual problematic that obsesses folk.

My position there is that neurobiology explains "consciousness" fairly straightforwardly at a neural level. The brain models the world from a selfish organismic perspective. It is no surprise that such an elaborate exercise in modelling would feel like something. It would feel exactly like being a self in pragmatic and regulating interaction with a world.

Life embodies that interaction between information and dynamics. Genes are a model of the body. And a regulation of metabolism is that body getting made.

The nervous system allows the organism to then extend that regulation of physics out into the environment. Neurons encode our surrounds in terms of its physical potentials and effects. That way we can weave them into our ongoing state of being.

But humans then have the further social level of semiosis that comes with language. And this is where the social construction of the human mind kicks in. We don't just nakedly experience the world through our own eyes. We learn to see ourselves as others see us. We learn to see ourselves as "selves", with "consciousness", and "freewill", and "qualia", and "spirit", and "thoughts".

A further categorisation is forced upon us in a sharp distinction between the objective reality "out there" and the subjective reality "in here".

An animal mind just lives in its world. And that world is a semiotic umwelt. It is essentially a subjective world - the world as the animal learns to construct it for itself.

But humans - for functional social reasons - learn to distance themselves from their subjective umwelts. We are taught to regard our perceptions as veridical representations of the actual world (especially once backed up by the mathematically encoded ideas of science :grin: ). And then by the same token, see even our selves as split off into their own metaphysically objective sphere of being. The ghost in the machine. The spirit or res cogitans.

A crazy dualistic metaphysics gets invented as a cultural meme. But this dichotomy exists because it is pragmatically useful. It becomes the basis for a new level of social complexity. Human societies could get organised so that information now regulates physics as agriculture and then technology.

So the argument here is that we find ourself with all this philosophy of mind dualistic bullshit. The neurobiologist has to wonder why wider society is so stuck on humans being lodged halfway between the animal and the divine. Yet the reason why the basic problems of philosophy of mind persist is that it is functionally necessary for humans to think that way about themselves. It has become the basis for the modern technological way of life and the romantic reaction that that mindset must engender as the "complementary balance".

The scientific revolution was the birth of a still further level of semiosis - one based on number. We learnt to view the world as objectively a machine. And that was an excellent way to think about reality. It led to the industrial revolution pretty smartly. Engineering was the way to unlock the vast resources of buried fossil fuels. Life's story - information regulating physics - could vault to a whole new scale of being.

But if all physical reality is a machine (and no longer the Aristotlean notion of a holistic, triadic, system) then now "the mind" becomes a real ontological problem. There is no longer any place in this imagined objective world for the other half of things. So that has to now have its own spiritual realm ... or something.

Anyway. My point is that a triadic perspective is logically basic. Peirce in particular showed how complexity is irreducible. We can't actually arrive at something simpler, such as a dualism or monism.

And this same demonstration that reality has a triadic irreducibility was there in Aristotle or even Anaximander. It remains the key thing linking modern systems theorists - the hierarchy guys, the cyberneticians, the neural networkers, the condensed matter physicists, the biologists and ecologists, the enactive psychologists, the social constructionists and semioticians, etc, etc.

But culturally we remain mired in the wrangles between realists and idealists, monists and dualists, because that is a functional viewpoint for modern society. Not because they are real scientific problems.

It is easy to see how the dualist framing arises as a meme with social payback. It constructs the individual as "a free agent" operating in a liberal "open market". New levels of "world construction" and "physics regulation" can flow from such a mindset.

And of course that then brings its discontents. There is the Romantic backlash that asks "is that all there is"?

So a mathematical level of semiosis feels rather dysfunctional in fact for us humans. We no longer feel so seamlessly embedded in our world in terms of our latest version of a socially constructed level of "consciousness".

From a philosophy of mind perspective, there is thus something actually worth talking about. What can we learn from the earlier grades of semiosis - genes, neurons, words - to make better sense of this latest transition to a numerical interaction with nature?

But fat chance while philosophy of mind generally fails to move past the simplicities of monism and dualism, realism and idealism. :meh:

The difference is that neural representationalism assumes an input-output data processing story. The display of a polished picture of reality is meant to be the supreme aim of the whole exercise. And the further thing of an “observer” seems required.

But Friston is talking of a generative or forward-modelling neural architecture. The game for the brain is to predict its inputs. And thus be able to ignore them! Rather than consciousness being about representing the world in some bright and vividly experienced fashion, instead it is an effort to be successful at not having to notice anything about the world.

Of course, by doing this, the brain sets itself up to be capable of being surprised. It’s predictions get contradicted. And then attention can take over from habit to figure out and learn how to be better at prediction the next time around.

So it is a truly radical flipping of how we conceive of cognition as a process.

On triadicism, Peirce certainly had trichotomania. But what I am talking about is hierarchical organisation. All complex systems have a triadic structure of relations. A cybernetic feedback story between a local set of degrees of freedom and a global state of constraint.

It’s the same thing behind all complexity, whether we are talking of condensed matter physics or neural network architectures.

The best place to start on the pure theory of this would be Stan Salthe’s two books, Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution. Or von Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory as the classic.

If you tell me your actual project, I might be able to give you more relevant references.

You should check Pattee’s “epistemic cut”. In a way, the mind is a state of information. It is virtual in being a model of the world. But it only stands apart from the world so as to regulate that world. And regulating the world is what it is all about.

I gave this detailed account of how life closes its own “explanatory gap” - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

The mystery for biosemiosis is how the information - stuck in its virtual world - could in fact control physical processes. The mind-body problem in a nutshell. It is only in the past decade or so that biophysics and the science of molecular machinery has been able to deliver the surprising answer.

The key is making the physics so finely balanced that “immaterial” information can muster just enough of a nudge to switch it one way or the other.

Grasp this as also the fundamental principle of cognition and how “minds” can causally connect to the world is easy to see.

Neuroscience hasn’t cottoned on to the term. But I highlighted the Bayesian Brain work. Or you could look up enactivism as the psychological level version.

A way to think about is is that semiosis is a series of levels based on coding mechanisms. So life is semiosis based on DNA. Then neurosemiosis would be based on neural encoding. And humans then of course add linguistic encoding on top of that. We have a socially constructed level of “mindfulness” because of language and cultural semiosis.

The key thing to understand here is that semiosis - as I am using the term - is all about information regulating physics. So that is why it is not something you would implement on a computer. A computer, by design, has no clue about its hardware. Life and mind are all about managing the world in a way so as to sustain the physical flows that create their hardware.

Chalk and cheese. But neural network inspired computer architectures are at least trying to create machines that can learn about their worlds to the degree they can predict their “sensory” inputs and so simulate the behavioural habits of organisms with nervous systems. And the Friston article gives a good summary of that (although he skips Stephen Grossberg’s adaptive resonance approach).

Another thing to watch out for is that in linguistics and continental philosophy, semiotics is usually understood to mean Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics - a dyadic model. I am talking of the triadic semiotics of CS Peirce. That is the cognitively relevant one as a “science of meaning”.

We don't know what consciousness is. — TheMadFool

That’s easy for you to say. :wink: