It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon ‐ based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon ‐ based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well. — Bostrom

This claim of multirealisabilty has in fact been deeply challenged by research into the biophysics of life over the past decade.

Everything biological hinges on the ability of informational mechanisms, like genes and neurons, to regulate entropic metabolic flows, like proton gradients and electron respiratory chains. So this biology, this set up, now seems so special, life and mind could only arise with very specific “hardware”.

This familiar assumption of cogsci, and hence 1980s philosophy of mind, now sounds horribly dated.

Sure. That would be one of the things in demand of support to constitute an argument.

Where is it plausible that any amount of computational simulation adds up to be anything like a conscious biological organism?

I realise it is fashionable to take it for granted. But enough science exists to say let’s see a little more evidence and a lot less handwaving.

Could you distill your qualms with Musk's argument? — Posty McPostface

Are you taking the piss?

Again, the claim being made is too confused for QM to be an actual issue. But if the laws of physics are taken as a constraint on the realisation of computational simulations, then you can’t gaily exponentiate that infinite computation ensures anything is then possible.

And that is before we get on to the biological constraints.

Which argument are you finding so impressive then - that we are most likely all the figments of a simulation, or that if this were the case, then the reality beyond our simulation would be "boring"?

If we dismiss the first, what can be said about the second?

I think you are still stuck with the observer issue. The analogy is that we make movies as a heightened reality - life with the boring bits taken out.

But it is a higher intelligence - the clever writer or director - that is constructing these heightened realities for us as their consumers. Sure, the filming process might be boring (well even that doesn't ring true). But the world beyond a Matrix simulation isn't going to be some mindless world - a computational substrate that for no reason, in some fashion that is quite different to the laws of physics as we understand them, also wants to generate these heightened realities with fictional observers within them, and no actual observer without.

If you actually stop to analyse this op-ed for any proper philosophical argument, it is just a bunch of handwaving fragments.

You can sort of see what Musk is going for there. If the ultimate reality is some kind of computational multiverse, then in blind fashion, that might just construct these random simulations of every kind of reality. And by the workings of infinite chance, that will generate bizarre creations like our world where we are simulated people, in a simulated world, complete with simulated physical laws and simulated biological histories.

The laws of physics don't seem to forbid this computational multiverse, you say. Again that is totally questionable given the holographic limits on physical computation. But then, by the light of the hypothesis itself, who could even care about this caveat if those laws are just going to be the simulated features of some randomly generated scenario?

There are just so many holes and loose ends in a short few paragraphs. I see no argument as such. Simply fashionably muddled thought.

Any observer or participants of that shared reality. — Posty McPostface

But are you claiming those observers/participants to be themselves physically real or computationally simulated? You are failing to flesh out the critical part of the argument. Thus there is no "argument" as such.

I think that as long as the laws of physics don't prohibit such a reality from occurring, then it's possible and guaranteed to occur given enough time. — Posty McPostface

That's a view. And I say that anyone who understands biology as well as they understand computation can see why its inadequate as "a sound argument".

So I've asked you to show you understand the biological constraints on "simulating consciousness". But - like Musk - you don't want to clearly commit to having to place your observers/participants on some side of that tricky line.

The argument is that virtual reality tech can be so good that we don't know the difference. Biology can already be fooled by skilled programming. And we can imagine that fooling progressing exponentially - particularly because we can be so willing to immerse ourselves in the "reality" of our fictional movie and gaming worlds. The laws of physics don't even come into it. The nature of our biology has this in-built capacity to learn to believe anything to be real.

But it takes real food to nourish the gamer's body. Real diseases can kill it. At some point, civilisation does interrupt the fantasy being spun exponentially here. As Musk also admits....

Or civilization will end. Either one of those two things will occur.

How so? His argument is sound. — Posty McPostface

So if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then [virtual reality video] games will be indistinguishable from reality. — Musk

Indistinguishable to who? Are you and me going to be actual real witnesses to this shared simulation, or are we simulations of those witnesses and thus part of the simulation too?

You think there is an argument here, rather than the usual hand-waving based on having also watched the Matrix?

At what point is the biology of consciousness shown to be replicable by "computational simulation"?

It feels like we are the biological boot-loader for AI effectively. We are building progressively greater intelligence. — Musk

I think if you understood biology as well as you understood tech, then you would realise how much more amazing the biology still is.

So this is 99% bullshit.

Now human culture is amazing. And we are finding all sorts of ways to evolve and augment that through our tech mastery. Machines amplify our control over material reality, giving us a means to act out our fantasies. AI - or really great pattern recognition machines - is one of those kinds of tools.

But simulation is essentially pointless. Life and mind are about a modelling relation with the world. Simulation appeals because it seems to be modelling without limits. But it is also then modelling without consequences. Someone would have to explain why that would be of any real interest. There is a missing bit to the argument right there.

That part would make sense, but the part about a democracy is completely irrelevant to it. — Terrapin Station

OK. But how would a nation state have legitimacy unless it claims to speak for the people who constitute it? So being a democracy would seem perfectly relevant in being the most transparent possible way of legitimatising that operational sense of national identity.

What's not obvious is the notion that you cannot have legimitate power and a democracy in a nation state without a national identity. — Terrapin Station

I'm disagreeing with Fukuyama's assertion that if not-P, then not-Q is true. That conditional rather seems to be a complete non-sequitur with zero support. — Terrapin Station

But the positive claim here would be that you can't have "a nation state" unless there is some identity that indeed characterises that nation as being that nation. The legitimacy resides in that identity and fulfilling those goals. If there is no identity, then there is no nation to speak of.

So regardless of whether the identity is "land of the free", or "land of the white and powerful", it is obvious surely that any claimed legitimacy flows from the national story of what a country is about?

You seem to think that I'm asking questions about identity. I'm not. I'm challenging a purported logical implication. — Terrapin Station

Is it logical, or even factual, that any nation doesn't have a concern for its identity? Every country wants to tell some story about who it is and what defines it. It is a human necessity.

You are saying that a nation doesn't have to have some foundation myth, some positive sense of self. Yet anthropology tells you want a dumb position that is. Humans just are that way. To suggest that an abstract kind of statehood would be possible is like trying to persuade the world to speak Esperanto. :)

Therefore, why should it be axiomatic that "marginalized groups" cannot do this balancing act too? Or to put it another way, how is wanting to be recognized an attack upon the "public shared space" by default? — Valentinus

Marginalized groups increasingly demanded not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal to dominant groups but also that the broader society recognize and even celebrate the intrinsic differences that set them apart. — Fukuyama

So if we zero in on this, what would be the democratic ideal then?

I'm not familiar with your definition of "public shared space". But I take it to be an idealised notion of a commons where we all get serviced by a standard civic infrastructure and show some standard balance of tolerance~consideration. So get up close, and does this public shared space rightfully carry the higher demand that we recognise, celebrate and even perhaps love all our differences? Doesn't this in itself undermine the public right to form your own communities or in-groups in the "usual way" - the usual way involving what you as a community stand against, as well as what you stand for?

So there is a problem if we expect the public shared space not to organise itself in the normal social fashion with signifiers to separate the in-group from the out-group. There are always going to be haters and prejudices just because that is how social dynamics generally works. It is nature in action, so to speak.

The job of a public shared space is to then provide a "neutral" arena where the rules of etiquette are minimal enough that there is both a practical respect or tolerance for difference, but also a maximal possibility for free self-expression by communities, whatever size they happen to be.

Militant SJW types are criticised for being intolerant of intolerance. And I think Fukuyama would have a point that identity politics extremists do go too far in that direction. That would be a legitimate complaint. (Just as the dominant mainstream would possibly make the matching mistake of tolerating intolerance that "goes too far" ... too far by some prevailing balancing norm...)

So it is not axiomatic that marginalised groups can't understand what a balanced public shared space would look like. But it is one thing to want equality - or indeed, demand not to be actively oppressed - and another to want to be "recognised and celebrated" for whatever differences you might have to express.

Thus the functional neutrality of the public shared space could be under attack from both directions as Fukuyama argues. What do you think about the marginalised also having some right to be "celebrated". Is that necessary to the underlying social compact?

...he is against identity politics and sees it as a danger for a functioning democracy as both sides, the left and the right has embraced this kind of politics. — ssu

They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community. — Valentinus

The problem would seem to be the internet. The new shared public space without a stabilising "memory" to fix some sort of useful social goal in mind.

It is quite normal and indeed functional to have polarities or dichotomies. And the most productive divisions are those that are metaphysically complete - as in same vs different, competition vs co-operation, one vs many, integration vs differentiation, particular vs general. So a healthy society will be expressing some constructive balance of its tensions.

However, social discourse has changed in some essential way as it has moved from the old civics media age to the new social media age. As with everything, the internet disintermediates. It removes all the intermediaries that stand in the middle and "slowed things down". This removal of the middle ground can be free-ing. But it can also remove a lot of the machinery that represents some kind of collectively-adaptive memory. Sometimes things are being slowed down for good reason. Public institutions frame long-term truths and goals. They are designed to change slowly so that societies can be pointed towards long-term aims.

The social media internet strips out the kinds of checks and balances the old media had. Again, the old media had a lot of problems. It was in the pocket of the corporates and the states. On the other hand, governments and big business also represented institutional interests. They were part of the wisdom stabilising their societies in pursuit of relatively agreed long-term goals.

So the central question for me is about the nature of the internet as the new underpinning infrastructure of social discourse. Will it develop a sufficiently cohesive sense of purpose? Will it rise above the memes and hypes enough to develop far-sighted constraints?

The US might seem a hot mess for sure. But what is happening in India, or Ghana, or Chile? What does the new world order look like in terms of developing a modern institutional form?

I'm not assuming it is working, or not working. There sure is plenty of dysfunction any time you turn on the news. However that would seem the critical question. Trump and social justice warriors and all the other nonsense could be the true end of the old Enlightenment dream. Or it might be the noise masking the real deeper world social changes that will manifest.

Identity politics is clearly a symptom - but of what exactly?

Maybe the silliest part of Fukuyama's position would be the attempt to frame it still as a left vs right kind of thing. That feels so stale - the US dealing with its own "reds under the bed" existential threat. Or Europe still dealing with its industrial era class wars.

And then every generation has to discover what is going to be the agenda for social change. That is natural. So you have arguably the trajectory of 1950s counter-culture, 1980s slacker culture, 2010s inclusiveness culture. There is some kind of thread in breaking the mould, mainstreaming individuality, collectivising the consequences.

What is happening in the US seems a bit of a sideshow. How much is explained just by the particular kind of urban~rural divide that characterises the states? Is that such a thing anywhere else in the world?

So it seems complicated. But the left vs right lens probably tells us very little of interest.

Social discourse in general has embraced the internet. And that is going to look like something for a start - disruptive, disintermediated, ADHD. Worldwide, bigger things are going on. And in claiming both left and right are embracing identity politics/demolishing democracy, Fukuyama is mashing up the progressive and the conservative, the inclusive and the privileging, the young and the old, the urban and the rural, and all the other natural polarities that are the historical dynamics that need to be more clearly understood.

They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community. — Valentinus

Sure. I take it as basic to social structure that there is always a tension between the individual and the collective, the competitive and the co-operative. That dynamic is in itself the healthy one that a well-adapted social system is going to foster.

So my point was really that churches fit the democratic/enlightenment scheme because they are essentially pro-social. They foster community more than division. And then once the balance tips, we start calling it a cult, a sect, or whatever. That church is now seen as a divisive threat to the general public fabric.

So in the bigger picture, the modern version of religious tolerance is a way to neutralise churches as political forces. It gets them out of the workings of the state and gives them a community building role, along with sports clubs and all the other community level institutions.

I think this just helps to define the line when it comes to the assimilation vs multiculturalism debate. As a modern society, there is some optimal balance we would want to strike.

We can kind of sense how much diversity, how much homogeneity, is a healthy balance. And we wouldn't thus think that either diversity or homogeneity in themselves were the desirable goals. A sophisticated political position would be wanting more of both, not more of just one or other. And beyond that, more of both up to some understanding of what the long term social goal would be.

37
Another fatal flaw committed by Fukuyama through assigning a divisive animus to all forms of self identification, per se, is that it provides no explanation why all forms of life protected by the Establishment of Religion clause have failed to destroy the country yet. The whole point of setting up a shared public space this way was in order to allow groups to withdraw from it as much as they like as long as those actions do not cancel the shared public space. — Valentinus

This is an interesting point. But aren't churches different because they express the other side of the coin rather strongly - the push for identity-suppressing social cohesion? They are tools for conformity and so "safe" in that sense.

So, she may have been rather more like Ildefonso (and less like Victor, the feral child) than habitually portrayed. — Pierre-Normand

The whole feral child literature is a minefield of romanticisation. The writer, Maxim Gorky, described meeting Keller in less glowing terms: "[She] made an unpleasant, even grim, impression on me. She appeared to be an affected, very temperamental and extremely spoilt girl. She talked about God and how God disapproved of revolution. In general, she reminded me of those blessed and holy nuns and 'pilgrim women' whom I have seen in our villages and convents."

This is an issue I studied pretty closely as the evolution of the human mind was my original interest. In practice, there is no clean separation between the biological and sociocultural stories.

No ape can learn proper fluid grammatical speech. They can only get as far as mastering several hundred signs. So their linguistic skills, even when brought up by humans, only reaches the indexical level of semiosis, not the properly syntactic. That means humans do have neurobiological adaptations that underwrite grammatical fluidity.

On the other hand, those evolutionary changes would have to be minor in structural terms. They would mostly concern a reorganised vocal tract - one, that like the human hand is designed for precision manipulation, is pre-adapted to syntactically-organised articulation. And then an expansion of the cortical pre-motor areas that would add the "top-downness" to fluidly control complex grammatical speech acts. Vocalisation in apes is centred instead on the "emotional" part of the cortex - the cingulate. That is the part of our brains that still shouts shit and fuck in fairly simple and inarticulate fashion.

Then feral children stories are confounded by the fact that brains in humans also have a prolonged sensitive period for getting familiar with the regularities of speech. It takes about seven years for those parts of their brains to myelinate. So a lack of exposure to speech during infancy becomes a permanent handicap. This is why feral children fail to learn speech when taken back into civilisation and the conclusion was that they were autistic. Which could also have been true.

So when it comes to a scientific answer, nature doesn't offer an easy clean-cut experiment. You can't have a simple before an after where you can demonstrate the impact of a chimp learning syntax, or even a naive human infant learning syntax at a later age, after the brain has lost most of the necesssary plasticity.

This creates a fertile ground for people to project their wishful thinking on.

However, the story became very clean-cut for me once the question is framed in terms of biosemiotics. The similarities between genes, neurons and words as syntactical codes, grammars of regulation, just leap out.

Having said that, there are some real puzzles about exactly how quickly Homo moved from being pre-linguistic to fully linguistic. It is striking that fire was being used 800,000 years ago. Likewise spears 400,000 years ago. And Australian aborigines showed boats of some kind were being used to island hop maybe 80,000 years ago. Yet fully symbolic culture only shows around 40,000 years ago. It remains a really interesting question how to map the evolution of completely modern speech to that reasonably lengthy cultural curve.

In short, the pace of change is too fast to be a matter of biological evolution, and also too slow from the sociocultural point of view.

Of course, climate and lifestyle may play a big part in nudging progress along. But we can speculate about a more indexical protolinguistic stage to bridge the gap. The early grammars may have had to luck into their modern simple subject-verb-object logical format. The final step could have been a stumble into that last abstracting, and indeed reductionist, linguistic habit.

the case of (pre-linguistic and pre-tamed) Helen Keller... — Pierre-Normand

I'd mention that Keller didn't lose her hearing and sight until she was two. So she started off with a normal development.

She also had a family language of sorts - some 60 signs. Shakes of the head meant yes or no, pushes and pulls meant go and come. Her father was mimed as putting on a pair of glasses, her mother by tying up hair. Ice cream was a shiver.

So the drama of her finger-spelling "awakening" was overplayed.

This culture isn't merely a possession but also a way of being; and the inhabiting of a symbolically mediated culture is a very specific way of being. — Pierre-Normand

A great way of putting it.

He describes his pre-linguistic past as him being stupid. — Harry Hindu

So your own cite says the difference was like night and day. And yet you want to shrug your shoulders and say there's no big deal. Language is just a more complex form of symbol system.

What I have denied is that you become self-aware, or conscious, after leraning language. — Harry Hindu

So are you saying animals aren’t conscious then? You can’t have it both ways.

No, it proves that he can refer to his self in the past, — Harry Hindu

But it is his post linguistic past which he refers to in that video segment. And I’ve already cited the telling way he describes his pre linguistic past.

The rest of your post doesn't reject anything I've said — Harry Hindu

I've shown that language ain't "just a tool" as you claim. If we are looking for something that explains the mental chasm between social animal and encultured human, then language accounts for that. If you can offer some alternative causal mechanism, go for it. If you believe that "complex thought" pre-exists language, where is the evidence for some radical neurobiological-level change?

If you go back and look at the video between about 14:00 and 18:00, you'll see that had ideas about himself and even goes about describing his gardening at a hospital and his relationship with his boss. — Harry Hindu

Yeah. After he learnt language. So proves my point.

Language is a tool. — Harry Hindu

I can see you are emotionally attached to your dismissive position. But think about it. Genes, neurons, words (and numbers) are all examples of something similar - syntactical machinery. A way to accumulate regulatory information in a hot and messy world.

So as "a tool", language wasn't any old tool. It was another of those epochal developments in the story of the evolution of life and mind. There is a good reason why humans suddenly became so explosively different from other large brained, highly social, animals.

Language makes more complex ideas communicable. — Harry Hindu

It makes that complexity possible as those ideas can now develop at a cultural level. There is a cultural-level means to accumulate them in an evolutionarily ratcheting fashion. We can inherit the memes of our grandparents, and indeed a thousand generations of our ancestors.

Why would you resist this obvious fact?

This still doesn't dissolve the distinction. It just redifines objective and subjective into adaptive points of view versus the world itself. — Marchesk

But I wasn't trying to dissolve the distinction necessarily. I was responding by trying to make the best sense of it in my lights.

So what I reacted to was @Sam26's simple acceptance of a dualistic ontology where the subjective would be "facts of the mind" and objective would be "facts of the world".

One part of my reply was that all facts are "facts of the mind". This is the semiotic view where "facts" are the signs that form our experiential Umwelt - the world as we construct it, and so the "world with us in it" as its interpreters.

So facticity is generally on the side of the "mental", or informational. And objective vs subjective simply become two opposing extremes of how we regard these facts or signs. We assign some experiences to our "self" as being highly personal, voluntary, variable, unsharable, etc. And other experiences as being "objective facts of the world" as they are highly invariant, recalcitrant, sharable, involuntary, etc.

On closer inspection, this isn't a very good distinction. Is the yellowness of the marigold a fact of the world or a fact of the mind? Is your yellow, my yellow? Why does physics say nothing is actually yellow and that it is all just some kind of information processing trick in your brain?

Semiosis cleans that up. Yellow is a sign that we construct to interpret the facts of the world. It doesn't represent the reality, but it does do the job of mediating an embodied modelling relation with the world as we then can act in a purpose-serving way which has predictable material consequences. I know when the banana is ripe enough eat just at a quick glance.

So that is part of the answer. Objective vs subjective is not that robust a dichotomy principally because it is the jargon favoured by the tradition of dualism and AP theories of truth. Bad philosophy. Semiotics says it is really just a way we categorise experience. We split facticity into that which is, overall, highly personal - "on the side of the controlling self" - and highly impersonal, or "on the side of the resisting world".

And then, the other part of the answer was about a general attempt to shift from a passive to an active understanding of "mind".

Dualism has its cultural force because people find it easy to think about mind as a kind of conscious substance. It is a psychic stuff that feels, thinks and senses. Semiotics paves the way for seeing mind as an action of interpretance, a constantly adapting modelling relation. Every moment of consciousness is some other possible state of attentional focus - some actualised point of view - quickly to be replaced by whatever viewpoint strikes the best adapted state in the next.

So there is no stuff that is conscious, as if consciousness were the property of a substance. There just is a flow of viewpoints that have a coherent past and an orientated future. This is what neuroscience tells us. It is how brains work. The emphasis is put on the relating rather than the existing, where it belongs in a process view.

This model of mindfulness as a semiotic process can then be applied to the subjective~objective distinction. At one extreme is the absolute locatedness of whatever it is that I'm experiencing at this place and moment in space and time. That is the subjective pole. Then at the other extreme would be what I - or any reasoning person - would believe to be the general case at the end of a process of exhaustive inquiry. The most disembodied view we could imagine arriving at - the one as if we stood outside everything. This is of course the Pragmatic theory of truth offered by CS Peirce. He defined objectivity in these terms.

So I was giving my grounds for rejecting the standard dualistic distinction of subjective vs objective, and offering the alternative triadic metaphysics of semiotics or the pragmatism of modelling relations.

Yeah. Anything to avoid admitting we need to do metaphysics when using metaphysical terms in our good old "everyday".

It means that words develop in everyday uses, and those uses can tell us much about what words/concepts mean. — Sam26

So a pair of technical terms are developed within metaphysical discourse. And instead of applying dichotomous rigour to clarify the intelligible basis of those terms, we should ... go listen to ordinary folk to see how they bumble about with them?

Sounds legit. :lol:

If we can't generally agree on a basic definition there is no way to continue the discussion, is there? — Sam26

But are you looking for some everyday meaning - when everyday meanings are never sharply demarcated anyway? Or are you seeking a well-founded philosophical distinction? In which case clearly it is the metaphysical-strength claims the words might invoke that are in contention. You can't avoid that by some kind of ordinary speech manoeuvre.

By entymology, they are a technical contrast, not everyday terms. Didn't they gain their modern understanding by Kant problematising the issue?

He says that "I" changed and "I" was stupid. Which shows that he had an "I" before language that was different. — Harry Hindu

He can say that now .... retrospectively. Equipped with a language that is suitably tensed.

And the surprising thing about his reply was how indescribable that language-less and unnarrated past state was to him.

But then that is not so surprising. Our own autobiographical memories only start to form about the time we really begin to master the habit of self-narrative talk and self-regulatory thought. So before the age of about three, we don't have a narrative style of memory. We weren't able to organise our experience so it was telling a running story about our "self".

It's not necessarily dualistic. — Sam26

If you are talking as if there really is a fundamental division between the mental and the real, the self and the world, the subjective and the objective, then it is dualistic until you can explain how it is not.

If you instead employ it as a common manner of speaking, and don't in fact accept the standard ontic committment that motivates it, then - like me - you could present the alternative ontology you would defend, and hence the alternative language you would prefer to employ in serious discussion.

I don't think you can escape the metaphysical by choosing those words though. — Sam26

Escape? I am being explicit about the metaphysics which I am making an ontic commitment to in expressing a linguistic preference here.

I see a conflict if you want to both use dualistic terminology and yet claim that you might as well just be talking physicalism. This is what leads to all the problems with theories of truth.

A triadic modelling relations approach - semiotics - is the consistent way to make sense of what is going on. Rather than the mind receiving the truths of the outer world into its inner world, minding is about forming embodied and adaptive points of view. Mindfulness is the larger thing of that relation in action.

Yeah. To speak of “mind” is to slip into a substance ontology. It treats the mental as some kind of dualistic realm or stuff. I would take a process ontology view where “minding” is an embodied action. The brain is conscious in that it is continually forming a series of distinctive attentional viewpoints.

So my choice of words here would reflect my neuroscience. The mind is not a thing but a succession of views.

So is the issue that there are claims we might make about the state of the world and claims we might make about the state of our mind, and it is always some mind making these different categories of claim?

My general definition of “subjective” would be claims that are viewpoint dependent, and “objective” would be claims that are viewpoint independent. So the problem arises when there is some collective of minds, and thus potential viewpoints, involved in judging claims about a shared world.

To the degree the minds are alike, as when speaking the same language in a historically constrained fashion, then they are essentially speaking for the one viewpoint. That seems pretty subjective, even if many minds might also appear capable of many views.

Yet also we can conclude that for language use to arrive at a historically constrained stability, there must be something invariant or mind independent to force a collection of viewpoints to a position where meanings are shared. Or at least shared to a point where the remaining uncertainties make no practical difference.

Ergo, a pragmatic account of truth claims.

Still no reaction to this, eh? — Harry Hindu

The thesis I'm defending is that we can grant consciousness to neurology. And that involves a fundamental self~world distinction. However humans have the further thing of a metacognitive awareness of that lived self~world distinction. Language allows us to see that is the case - that we are individuals, or actors in a larger social context. We fit our own existence into a running narrative. And that is a metacognitive habit of self-consciousness that makes all the difference in the world.

So if you take the case of Idefonso, what does it really tell.

First off, he was raised in a linguistic context. Even lacking speech himself, that context would have shaped a set of expectations that couldn't otherwise have been the case. Even our pet cats and dogs, with their much tinier brains, learn they need to scratch at doors and find other ways to communicate with us in our highly structured human environments.

So as this blog notes, Idefonso was...

...a profoundly deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language

Schaller found herself in a class for ‘Reading skills’ that was little more than a warehouse for all the deaf students...

"I went to the door to walk out and was actually turning the handle to leave, when I see this man who looked so frightened. He was holding himself as if he were wearing a straightjacket. He was backed up in a corner, protecting himself. I saw that he was studying mouths, he was studying people. Even though he was frightened, he was still watching: what is happening, what is happening?"

...One problem for Schaller’s efforts was that Ildefonso’s survival strategy, imitation, actually got in the way of him learning how to sign because it short-circuited the possibility of conversation. As she puts it, Ildefonso acted as if he had a kind of visual echolalia (we sometimes call it ‘echopraxia’), simply copying the actions he saw:

"He’d just try to form signs and copy what I was doing. But his facial expression was always, is this what I’m supposed to do?"

Then eventually the teaching clicks and we have that sudden biosemiotic realisation that changes everything...

All of a sudden, this twenty-seven-year-old man-who, of course, had seen a wall and a door and a window before-started pointing to everything. He pointed to the table. He wanted me to sign table. He wanted the symbol. He wanted the name for table. And he wanted the symbol, the sign, for window.

The amazing thing is that the look on his face was as if he had never seen a window before. The window became a different thing with a symbol attached to it. [emphasis added, GD] But it’s not just a symbol. It’s a shared symbol. He can say “window” to someone else tomorrow who he hasn’t even met yet! And they will know what a window is. There’s something magical that happens between humans and symbols and the sharing of symbols.

That was his first “Aha!” He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed. Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don’t mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table and the table was shaking loudly from his sobbing.

And then the really interesting question. Looking back, what was his consciousness like before he had the means to fit it into a running, linguistically structured, narrative?....

"It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.”

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language."

Hmm. Telling, hey?

It looks like you try to represent one particular moment in human history as the universal one. In the vast majority of known cultures “awareness of self as an individual actor” never existed. It is a relatively new Western invention. — Number2018

Sure. Socratic philosophy secured the modern Western cultural image of what it is to be a self-actualising individual. The culture of human selfhood has continually evolved.

But you are missing the point if you don't look for the change that made the difference. At some moment, we became a species with a symbolic culture. And the paleoanthropological record says that was a fairly abrupt transition. Suddenly folk were wearing beads, painting caves and setting out their camps with ritualistic order.

The lens through which I look at this transition is biosemiotic. The major transitions underpinning life and mind are down to the evolution of serial coding mechanisms that can be used, in abstract fashion, to regulate material dynamics. In the words of Howard Pattee, this is the epistemic cut. Life depends on being able to step back from itself - using a syntactical/informational machinery like genes, neurons or words, in particular - so as to be able to regulate the entropic flows that constitute that self.

So this is why language is the key. It opened up a new level of semiosis that simply did not exist before. There is no point fluffing around with other things. Language is core, just as the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of neural signalling, have been core to making sense of biological life and animal-level mind.

Before there were neurons, sure there were hormones. Chemical messaging was taking place. But what was transformational was the development of a spiking neuron as a generalised, universal, form of information representation. A message wasn't coded by some particular chemical lock-and-key signalling. A neuron's spiking rate could become a means of representing any kind of abstract event - the sight of something, the smell of something, the sound of something.

Brains developed because there was an epistemic cut in which the world was modelled in terms of a standard symbolic code. You could point to the fact there were always precursors to that, and also always continuing elaboration once the first most primitive nervous systems emerged, but the rubicon was crossed when the neuron evolved as a universal means of encoding regulatory information. Just as life began when there were genes that allowed for the displaced regulation of cellular metabolisms.

So the evolutionary continuity we seek is a biosemiotic one. It is obvious that something happened to turn a smart social ape into a modern encultured human being. You could speculate that it was just a general biggering of the brain - but the paleo evidence is against that. And once you have framed the question as a semiotic one - once you see how a new level of coding machinery would have to make a difference - then it just becomes obvious that is the core story. Language underpins the crucial mental shift. The rest is culture studies.

I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently. — macrosoft

Yep. That is what I would mean by calling it a habit that is formed. It becomes routine or automatic. The relationship is maximally meaningful in becoming maximally certain. And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution.

Does meaning involve anything like a correlation or an attribution. Me don't think so. Meaning is not attributed, rather we are there and in the thick of it, so to speak — bloodninja

But meaning is attributed because there is a sign relation involved. The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. A good gardener will be reading the dirt for its particular qualities. Does is display the signs of being fertile, loamy, acid, bony, whatever? But the worried parent of a child scrabbling in the soil might just see "bad dirt" and nothing more.

So meaningfulness is neither in the mind, nor in the world. It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. Everything is suitably categorised according to useful habit. It is meaningful in being a bridge between a self, with its desires, and a world, with its possibilities. The sign encodes a relation in which self and world are semantically connected.

In other words, it's not that the dirt lacks meaning and then we attribute it meaning through our gardening activity or some correlation, rather we can only ever garden on the basis of this 'meaning' thing. Thus prior to any attempt to attribute or correlate, meaning already is. — bloodninja

The mistake is to get hung up on trying to assign meaning to either side of this relation rather than to the relation itself. Meaningfulness arises where there is this semiotic connection that itself marks off a clear distinction - an epistemic cut - between "a self" and "the world".

There would be any number of points of view of what "dirt" is. How could it be defined in any truly mind-independent sense? We could talk about agglomerations of clay particles, ecologies of bacteria. But those are all words with meanings. They are the signs of "things that constitute that kind of world we are talking about". They are ways we have organised our experience so as to make the best kind of sense of the world ... when construed as a host of constructive possibilities we might exploit.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, people that speak the same language would have the same sense of self, but that isn't the case. — Harry Hindu

Not so. The claim would be that it is sharing the same culture which results in sharing the same style of selfhood. Language in a general fashion allows culture to even exist. But simply speaking English doesn't mean there aren't then many national and regional styles of selfhood and self-regulation.

So the point is that language enables that leap - the one to a cultural level of semiotic organisation. Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.

But every language serves that purpose. And every culture can then write its own version of the script. A Japanese sense of self can be quite different from an American one - or at least to the degree that American culture hasn't overtaken the traditional Japanese mindset.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, then at what point in our learning a language do we become self-aware? What words or grammar rules trigger this self-awareness? — Harry Hindu

There is plenty of research on the development of self-regulation in children if you are interested in the characteristic stages. But you are pushing for a simplistic reading of the argument. If a self-aware style of cognition is something learnt, then there is no fixed moment when it clicks into place. It is always something that is developing.

Words and grammar just give access to this new world of possibility.

And long before infants have any mastery of speech, they are already embedded in a world where they are being treated as psychological individuals - especially if they are middle-class and Western. A social demand is being placed on them. So the learning of the way to think is already begun.

It seems to me that we use language to point to what is already there. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are just scribbles that refer to these things that exist prior to our labeling them for communicating. — Harry Hindu

Sure, our sensations are already there. And even our intentions and reactions. But then self-awareness - the metacognitive level where we see our selves as selves - is the unbiological thing of learning to see all that through the eyes of a detached spectator. We say, there "I" go, experiencing certain qualia, having certain thoughts, feeling certain things.

Our mentality shifts up to a sociocultural level where everything is happening to a spectating self - a self that is understood as a contrast to the collective. We now see ourselves living in a world of the like-minded, and so see ourselves as "one of that kind of thing".

Clearly there was a huge evolutionary advantage in developing that language-enabled detached understanding of the self as a "self", and hence a free actor within a socially-constrained setting. It set up a whole private vs public dynamic. We could become self-regulating in the service of larger cultural goals once we learnt the trick.

Babies are discovering their bodies and how to control them after just a couple of months - well before any linguistic abilities arise. — Harry Hindu

Yes of course. It is basic to cognition that organisms must reach that first semiotic level of being able to distinguish self from world. We must have a habitual sense of where "we" start and where "the world" ends. Language is not required to learn how not to chew your tongue instead of your food.

So there is a sense of self that is part of biological level consciousness. And social creatures - dogs, chimps, dolphins - will also have a social sense of self. That understanding of being part of a collective will shape "their world" and so their notion of being the kind of "self" that makes sense in that world.

However, the question is what makes humans so different, such a sudden and rapid departure. And the evolution of symbolic/grammatical speech explains that. Why it was important is because it opened the door to the new thing of abstract and transmissible culture. Rather than merely being just selves in a world, we became "selves" seeing that we are selves in a world. Selfhood became a central fact of our psychological being - and hence, all our actions and experiences became filtered through that new culturally evolving lens.

We became self-anthropologists.

Dogs don't run from their own bark, or jump at feeling themselves bite their itch. They can distinguish between their own bodies and actions and others. — Harry Hindu

Well when it comes to dogs and cats, their tails often seem to have a mind of their own. And also get chased and attacked like a foreign object. :)

But again, this is about grades of biosemiosis. The self~world distinction is basic to life itself. An organism is defined by know what is self, what is not self. So the argument here is that humans achieved a huge jump via the evolution of linguistic structure. Selfhood could now become a cultural level thing. We could now look at ourselves abstractly as social players always having to make individual choices. Our "world" expanded to include a rich overlay of taboo, memory and custom that only abstracting language could grant access to.

There are just different levels, or degrees, of self-awareness that result from differences in brain structure, not from differences in language. — Harry Hindu

If that were so, you would be able to point to the vast differences between chimp and human brains.

There are vast differences between chimp and human vocal tracts. So yes, something had to evolve biologically. And there are some subtle neuroanatomical differences too. The hominid brain was being reorganised for a good million years for a culture of skillful tool use - a pre-adaptation for the trick of grammatically-organised symbolic speech when that kicked in with reasonable suddenness, judging by the abrupt appearance of symbolic culture about 40,000 years ago.

So the story would be the usual case of both slow gradual change and then also sudden rapid advance. There is no need to be either a lumper or a splitter in some absolute sense. However, it is crucial - when it comes to an understanding of "consciousness" - to accept that the evolution of language was transformative of what we would understand as mentality. We can't just think of humans as being bigger-brained animals. We were also the first of the creatures to be organised by the symbolic structure of language and the world of abstracted cultural development that allowed.

I emphasize the unknown and say this implies we should be agnostic about those points. — Relativist

Fine. Be as agnostic as you like. Meanwhile the field of quantum interpretation moves on. The current trend towards quantum information approaches make admirable sense to me.

The thing identified by the law of identity is not necessarily particular, but when we apply that law to the sense world, — Metaphysician Undercover

OK. But I am talking physicalism. There is no room for a Platonic world where forms exist as universals. Universality would be what emerges from the inevitability of certain overarching structures ... the structures that can bring stable formal constraint to material uncertainty, per the OP.

But if it were the case that all things were united as one, "the universe" this would falsify relativity theories because it would mean that there is an absolute frame of reference. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It just says spacetime ain't absolute. And we already know that. The container is shaped by its contents. So the next step for physical theory has to be one that includes energy and gravity into the fundamental level description.

Structural realism says that the absoluteness, the unity, is to be found in that relation, somehow.
Spacetime doesn't have some inherent fixed order. That organisation emerges in reciprocal fashion from a relation that exists between energy density and spacetime curvature. So it is about the absoluteness of the three fundamental Planck constants, and the essentially dimensionless web of relations they then weave.

But identity is necessary for any logic to proceed — Metaphysician Undercover

Even if this were the case, the issue would be how do you produce that identity - the particularity that is what it is to be individuated in a physicalist realm of spacetime and energy? If you are concerned with ontology, you can't simply just claim identity as a brute fact of existence. And so OSR - piggybacking on condensed matter physics - can offer a theory of how identity can arise as localised acts of individuation.

Essentially it’s just stay neutral. — schopenhauer1

Don't be obtuse. I said it was a balance. The ideal balance is a win/win. And to justify your Pessimism, you are always trying to construct a world that is lose/lose.

The world of work is soul-less and meaningless. And the world of play is then an essentially meaningless distraction from the meaningless world of work. Oh misery me. Alas, alack. What a moral "dilemma" we seem to have.

How is that even answering — schopenhauer1

I told you how it was answering. I pointed out that the morality would concern the balance of two contrasting impulses, both entirely natural. I gave you a second scenario to make that point.

But whatever.

I pointed out that the morality would concern the balance of two contrasting impulses, both entirely natural. I gave you a second scenario to make that point.

Diddums that you then start whining rather than answering.