I take it you're an asshole cyclist — AmadeusD

And I take it you're an asshole, full stop.

FTR, I hate New Zealand. It's an awful country in almost all ways except landscape. — AmadeusD

So why live there?

Nothing you have said makes any sense.

This is really getting into the weeds but the NZ context is that bus lanes are being created by taking out roadside parking and the margin of the road where cyclists would normally pedal.

So from a cyclist point of view, they are being asked to share with buses rather than the other way around.

National multimodal transport policy 10 years back was anticipating a transition to the building of separated cycleways and a lot of that was being built under previous governments, helped by the fact the Green Party was part of the coalition.

You seem to be under the impression NZ is going to magically become rich in the next few years. — AmadeusD

You think roads and carparks are cheap national investments? Do you think that countries get rich by not being focused on the long term economics of their infrastructure investments?

Where would NZ be economically if it hadn't made its big push with dams and electricity grids in the 30s. Or the earlier very rapid moves into rail systems, tram systems and coastal shipping?

Do you know anything about NZ's actual past or present, let alone how badly it is handling its future?

You want public infrastructure as good as it used to be? A proper three waters upgrade for instance? Wellington might want that you think. Not the current story of both centralising the decision and then pushing the cost and delivery back onto local government. The ratepayers who won't understand why suddenly they are getting charged for water when so little is being done to fix their own network.

NZ could have just got on with its big infrastructure investments like Auckland light rail, Lake Onslow pumped hydro, the new Cook Strait ferries it had already ordered. But instead short-termism rules. Voters are encouraged to think that public finance should indeed be run like a house-hold budget. Money can only be printed by banks to inflate house prices.

Cyclists are some of the least respectful people I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with on the political front. — AmadeusD

You seem spectacularly uninformed about the country you live in. Talkback radio level. Why would your views deserve respect when they are so lacking in content?

The general idea of setting up bus lanes in NZ cities is to prepare main commuting routes for eventual conversion to light rail networks. Or at least some kind of rapid transit corridor. It reserves the road space that these projects will need.

In the meantime, anything that encourages more cyclists and bus passengers, less motorists in SUVs, is a step in the right direction so far as urban planning is concerned.

So it is all part of the plan to reinstall the rails and cycles that were the dominant transport mode just a century ago. But the car lobby will be the reason governments get nervous and keep pulling the plug.

Although now even a light-rail and cycleway cancelling government is having to resort to congestion charging. Small cities like Christchurch, Queenstown and Tauranga are starting to get commute times to match the legendary traffic snafus that already 20 years ago had spoilt Auckland as a place worth living.

It's utterly insane that cyclists are legally allowed in bus lanes. — AmadeusD

Why? Bus drivers are at least professional and trained to be attentive. They are not texting or day-dreaming like the average car commuter. What's the problem?

Here in NZ, cycles are legal on footpaths — AmadeusD

Erm...

It’s illegal to ride a cycle on footpaths unless you’re delivering mail or the cycle has very small wheels (wheel diameter less than 355 millimetres). As well as people walking, footpaths can be used by people on push scooters, e-scooters, skates, skateboards, and other similar ways of getting around.

https://www.nzta.govt.nz/roadcode/code-for-cycling/paths-cycle-lanes-and-bus-lanes

That's odd. I thought it took two to make a fight. — Ludwig V

That was my point. Left and right used to be about social and economic policy settings. A debate over the right national system. Now it has shifted to identity politics. Are you siding with woke or MAGA? Personal crusades. Should you even be allowed to exist with those views within a shared social system.

Of course, when I'm driving, I get annoyed at the pedestrians and other cars that are in my way. When I'm walking, I get annoyed at the other pedestrians and cars that get in my way. — Ludwig V

So motonormativity is in fact a generalised modern impatience. A reflection of accelerationism in a society addicted to faster/cheaper/more.

What is being rejected is a reduction of colour to mere percept, because doing so fails to account for the use of colour terms in our everyday lives. — Banno

And the problem here is this bogus notion of "our everyday lives". As humans we are semiotically organised across at least four levels of reality encoding. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. At least four levels of "language" are involved in constructing our "everyday mentality".

So much is assumed by this idea of there actually being this thing of our "everyday lives". It reeks of the social privilege that it claims to transcend.

I want to say that the person devoted to some variety of Scientism labors under a strong fact-value distinction and claims that any sort of normative or value-laden predication must be false, and that the phenomena in question are then ultimately arbitrary. — Leontiskos

Agreed. And an excellent definition of Scientism. Semiosis aims to be a science of meaning. And so it assumes that anything we value as an idea or habit must have pragmatic value as "a way of life". Even if it doesn't meet the approval of Scientism.

But as I argued earlier, semiosis is balanced precariously between idealism and realism. It is having to make its own case as something beyond either of those two monisms. The thing that is different in its triadic structuralism.

My bold claim is just how quickly this project has been progressing these past 50 years.

Ecological and evolutionary arguments can show why things like color are not arbitrary. But then as a theist I hold to a more fundamental teleological reality, which also points towards a diverse and multifaceted world. — Leontiskos

OK, theism would be our sticking point then. I doubt I could have had a more atheistic upbringing. :smile:

But pursuing that line would be futile unless you were defending some point where a deity must intrude into the workings of nature. If God is unnecessary for consciousness, fine feelings, or the Platonic necessity of mathematical patterns, then where is His role in causality?

Natural philosophy can push the need for divine cause pretty much completely out of the picture. Especially if even the Cosmos is a Big Bang evolutionary story – the telic inevitability that comes with it describing a natural thermodynamic arc of an ultimately hot and small event falling endlessly into a heat sink – a Heat Death just as ultimate – of its own creation.

Once the entire history of the Universe is reduced to the dialectical simplicity of a "great inversion" – the hot/small halving and doubling its way to the cold/large – then any divine intervention or finality is really pushed to the fringe. Efficient and final cause are now the start and finish line of the one larger "motion" of a mutualised symmetry breaking.

The Planckscale as the supposed efficient cause – the triggering quantum event – is also just as much the final cause in that it is indeed as hot or energy dense as it is spatiotemporally small. And the same applies at the Heat Death when the Planckscale is just inverted to become 1/Planckscale. The de Sitter vacuum state of being as large as it is cold and devoid of energetic potency.

So all causality appears to be wrapped up in this physics. It is pure internalism. No divine hand needed either to light the blue touch paper, nor call time in a final judgement.

Of course Scientism struggles to articulate this as a story of the Big Bang because it is so bad at recognising final cause. The principle of least action and action at a distance are still a bit embarrassing to talk about, even if they are essential to normal physics.

But Natural Philosophy encourages the idea that the Cosmos is a Darwinian event, and even a structualist story – in particular, a dissipative structure story. And I like the idea that pansemiosis is another way of labelling the physics of dissipative structure. Although it responds just as well to other labels like systems science, infodynamics, hierarchy theory. Plenty of folk quietly feeling the same elephant.

But anyway, that would be my next challenge. Where does any divine cause seem needed in a Cosmos that keeps seeming to be explained in the terms of a self-organising structure of relations?

If it can be shown that the Cosmos is not just some random thermal event, but instead the self-organising story of a world managing to exist because it constructs the very heat sink upon which its existence is contingent, well where is even a God of the gaps a necessary character in the collective narrative?

Motonormativity, a term coined in a recent study, describes an unconscious bias in favour of cars and motor transport generally. It is the automatic prioritization of the needs of cars over the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, which results in an inability to make impartial judgments. Curiously, the study found that even non-drivers harbour this bias. — Jamal

While I might strongly agree with the general sentiment about cars having taken over and social pushback being required, it also has to be pointed out the perils of this kind of woke framing of the situation.

I've a big interest in green politics and so in transport reforms. And what is plain is how the car lobby simply expresses a thermodynamic preference. Petrol and tarmac lets us all individually rocket at great speed to anywhere we might wish to go. It is a huge liberation of the human spirit. A tremendous adventure. Cruising around in cars and legendary road journeys were the stuff of my youth, when you could get a licence at 15, the roads felt empty, and speed radars were only just being invented.

So it is quite natural that - if it is possible – blatting about irresponsibly is one of life's great joys. Then faced with that, transport planners and urban authorities know that giving free reign to this luxury good is very bad in a world limited in its ecological and social capital. We need a long term plan to get this genie back in its bottle.

And it gets very frustrating that the gap between what seems obvious commonsense and popular preference just grows exponentially. The planners at first though rationality would prevail, then that if they started to build cycleways, pedestrian precincts and walkable neighbourhoods – pushing them through local politics in increasingly sly fashion – that people would suddenly wake up to this new better world and thank them, demanding much more of this kind of thing much faster.

But now the experts have had their sensible plans thrown back in their faces by the market realities so many times that "motonormativity" would be a new way of framing matters. The unwashed public is guilty of the moral sin of not just an irrational preference, but this is a bias – a decision – so socially internalised that their culture must be remade from root. The experts are justified to go even harder in a crusade that doesn't merely seek to persuade or cajole or entice, but socially shames and stigmatises. Any level of action becomes possible once the moral right is clearly on your side and not on theirs.

Again, I completely sympathise with the side that can see the sense of rolling us all back to a more sustainable world. But also the move to this kind of moralistic framing – motonormativity as the code word for a defective mindset – is a problematic political position.

It sets the state against the individual when really the real opponent is the wider political and economic settings that prevail in a society. Someone is building all those fast cars, promoting the notion of open roads and infinite parking. Someone is stopping the true social and environmental costs being factored into the price of participation.

If you build a world where capitalism has no social brakes, then you get the world that deserves. Impatient drivers and frustrated transport planners are a tiny part of that larger story.

And the criticism concerning wokeism is that it is a turning of individuals against individuals by harnessing the amplification of social media. The polarisation of society into competing online mobs obsessing over finer and finer social distinctions. A diversion of political energy away from the larger story of how we all have to cooperate to share the one planet.

The mistaken assumption that the statement is somehow reducible is leading to strange inferences in light of scientific findings. — Leontiskos

Agreed. But the semiotic position would be that "red" is reducible to some kind of sign relation we have with the world.

This ought to help clarify the stakes. The brain evolved to make sense or its world in terms that increased a species fitness. So there is no reason to think red exists as part of some wavelength frequency detection device.

But given that the brain's colour centre is sited right in the shape and contour decoding path of the object recognition region area, there is reason to believe that hue discrimination is all about the ecologically-relevant function of making shaped objects pop out of their confused surroundings.

Red is a useful sign that here is an object that now sticks out like a sore thumb as it is covered by a surface with a rather narrow reflectance bandwidth. Everything around it is kind of green, because well that is a sign that plants have their own evolutionarily optimal setting for the photopigments used in photosynthesis. And then red is the natural contrast that plants would used to signal the ripe fruit they want dispersing.

So all qualia ought to be reducible in this ecologically semiotic fashion. The logic should be clear from the environments we evolve in. Organisms are engaged in sign relations with each other, with other organisms, and with a world in terms of all its pressing threats and urgings.

This is why physics doesn't answer the crucial question. And nor does treating the signs as world-independently real – actual idealistic qualia.

But a science of sign relations is possible. And that reduces what we sense and feel to ecological and evolutionary explanations.

You should look into Pinter's book. — Wayfarer

It's not even in the university library system and I doubt I will learn anything new for the $82 price tag.

You would have to summarise what he adds to a biosemiotic approach that would seem useful and new.

Pragmatism is the art of being finely balanced on the metaphysical knife edge between the competing pulls of lumpen realism and lumpen idealism.

Even as cognitive science moves itself towards that precise middle ground between the two, folk seem still able to slither away down their preferred side and proclaim victory for their chosen lumpen view.

So enactivism is being misused as the gateway drug to idealism now. And QBism apparently too.

Who or what presses these buttons, and to what end? — Wayfarer

The model does. You have your embodied self-world relation and I have mine.

At a neurobiological level that means you push your buttons and I push mine. But then at a sociocultural level of semiotic order, we get to push each other’s buttons as we argue over the acceptable community model of our collective reality. :grin:

His account often mentions, and is compatible with, QBism, which is not the realist theory in the sense that you insist on. — Wayfarer

So much the worse then. If he were more focused on the nervous system in terms of its actual mechanical interface with reality, he might instead say something more interesting about how the new discoveries in quantum biology explain stuff like how noses can read scents off chemical structures.

And that's a blatant ad hom, he's just a shabby opportunist. — Wayfarer

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then likely it is a duck. Or in this case, another ducking quack.

Recall Hoffman is a cognitive scientist — Wayfarer

Sure. But he has a book to sell, a name to make. There is a social incentive for him to angle his story so as to attract the audience he does.

And it is certainly correct that the neural correlates approach flounders to the degree it represents Cartesian representationalism – the story that the brain is somehow generating a "display" of reality.

That way of thinking about the problem of consciousness just bakes in the Hard Problem. It begins with the unbridgeable divide as its premise. A display needs someone looking at it. Experiencing it. Homuncular regress is the only option once you trap yourself into a neuroscience of "mental display".

Which is why enactive and Bayesian approaches are rooted in the notion of semiotic interpretance or an embodied relation, not in Cartesian display.

Do you see the difference? Especially now from the biosemiotic view – the one that makes good on Pattee's epistemic cut as an actual level of biological machinery – we can see that it ain't all about the "information processing taking place in the firing neurons". Our theory of consciousness has to incorporate the action taking place across the epistemic cut – the action at the mechanical interface between "ourselves" and "the world".

At some point – the point where the Hard Problem dissolves as some kind of fundamental causal issue – you have sensory receptors and muscle effectors coming into the picture.

The neurons of the central nervous system terminate in mechanical switches that are regulating entropic or metabolic flows. The energies of the world are being transduced into information – news about the degree to which the world is proving predictable or surprising in terms of the general brain model. The intentions of the mind are likewise being given effect as mechanical actions. Muscles are twitching in coordinated fashion, driven by that same self~world model.

This is the way that cognition is actually embodied. This is how it penetrates the whole body and lives in intimate contact with the actual world. Sure there is all this neural information processing. But then just as real is that there is all this mechanical interfacing going on. And that is where the rubber meets the road.

And who has that theory?

I mean we all know there are motor neurons and sensory receptors. But start looking for the neuroscientists who are getting into the detail of that mechanical interface – that epistemic cut – in the same fashion that biologists are now getting into the (staggeringly complex and hierarchically organised) interface between the body's genetic information and its frontline molecular machines.

There's no theory that explains the relationship in a principled way as far as I am aware. — bert1

As if you have the expertise to judge.

That there are circumstances in with each fails. — Banno

Fail in what way exactly? Less glibness and more precision please.

So for Hanover, "the pen is red" is not true. I think it is. — Banno

So Umwelt realism? But even this doesn't work epistemically as we have access to more than the way we talk about than just "how it all is for us". We have neurobiological talk. We have physics talk.

As linguistic communities – or rather that more general thing of semiotic communities – we can talk "objectively" not just about our socially-constructed notions of being "selves" with "experiences", but as selves that are part of larger metaphysical and scientific communities of inquiry.

Dumbing things down to beetle in a box, private vs public reference, is fine for lumpen everyday chatter in communities that are in fact rooted in the Cartesian division of "self and world". You can thank a couple of millennia of Christian scholarship for the fact you find such a socially ingrained habit of thought to be your constant default ontology.

But if we are being serious about the issue the OP raises, a more sophisticated and less sophistic metaphysics would prevent what matters from dropping out of the conversation.

I guess it has to be pointed out that "internal" and "external" are not the very same as "subjective" and "objective", and neither is the same as "private" and "public". — Banno

That's a nice little collection of dialectical distinctions. So what is general to them all? Have you thought about that or did you immediately stop right there for some reason?

Where do you see the agreement exactly? I mean, nice try....

So not sophistic enough for your taste? — Banno

Interesting way of putting it when it was your position being criticised for its sophism.

Sure you can have your own philosophical platform of "everyday commonsensicalism" where science and metaphysics just drops out of the conversation as "all us ordinary folk just agree on our language use".

But right there you are already faced with the difficulty that everyday speech in fact enshrines this odd metaphysics of a lumpen realism entwined with an equally lumpen idealism. Folk just comfortably talk about bodies with minds and minds in bodies, worlds with selves and selves in worlds.

Do you really want to shut up shop on philosophical inquiry at this everyday level and call it a day ... for everyone?

The beetle in the box is about the pragmatic limits of inquiry. But it isn't about those limits in terms of sloppy everyday commonsensicalism. It is about the hard limits imposed once counterfactually structured inquiry – Peirce's critical commonsensicalism – runs out of differences that can make a difference. Quite another kettle of epistemological fish.

So as in the case of agreeing to name red as red, despite the apparent counterfactual possibility that Bob may be "really seeing green" and Alice "really seeing blue", we can see why this possibility would come to seem an uncheckable one and thus rightly "fall out of the the conversation". There is no clear way to justify the claim one way or the other. Bob, Alice and Banno can't huddle together and compare notes in any fruitful fashion.

There is some kind of reflecting surface that has a narrowly constrained luminance property, robust under varied lighting conditions, and there are these three folk at least agreeing they would classify the perceptual experience under the one socially-constructed label. Whether the perceptual experience is really the same, and so counterfactually might not be the same, becomes irrelevant to the level at which the conversation is being conducted – the everydayness of given names to colours. Further inquiry looks blocked as counterfactuals are imaginable but not presentable.

But this is an extreme case. We can see that by how quickly things change as soon as we introduce any measurable counterfactuality at all. As in adding luminance information to the wavelength information.

You say that shade is primary red. The pure exemplar case as far as you are concerned. Bob says well it looks a tinge pink to him. And Alice says to her it looks a touch scarlet. What you see as being neither a little darker nor lighter than bang on central, they say sure, it's red. But a red that is a bit white, or a bit back. As you assert, it is not at all blue or green. But for some reason we could hope to discover, we do have a luminance disagreement that can be the subject of a discussion.

We could start checking eyeballs and optic tracts. Humans show surprising variation in their visual hardware. The colours out of two different eyes can be noticeably tinged for some. So it becomes perfectly possible to dig in deeper with the neuroscience and start accounting for that linguistic disagreement in terms of its more foundational neurocognitive basis.

Even the Hard Problemers are happy with science doing that as this is just then one of the Easy Problems science is so good at tackling. :razz:

But if everyone agrees that the fire engine over there is primary red – or even pure pink or pure scarlet, as we get very used to naming colours where about the first thing we are presented with in life is a crayon set and the expectation we will learn to speak about these sticks of wax in socially correct fashion – then our utterances lack counterfactuality. They lack explicit dialectical structure. The path to further inquiry is blocked as we assert no difference that could make a difference. Red is red just as the chair is a chair, the dog a dog, and lasagne is what awaits on the table for lunch.

So the beetle in the box story is simply about the limits of pragmatic inquiry in general. It applies to any scientific account as science demands theories expressed in the counterfactual logic which can thus be confirmed or denied in terms of the consequences that result. Does Nature answer yes or no to the well-put hypothesis?

Consciousness is not some unique problem for science. It is as bad for particle physics when faced with the apparently possibility of there being fundamental particles with no properties at all. What can one reasonably say or do to judge such a hypothesis one way or the other. It drops out of the conversation on standard pragmatic grounds.

But here we are discussing your defence of the idea that everyday language is already quite enough for you, and thus for anyone. If ordinary folk talk about minds in heads and heads on bodies with apparently no hesitations or qualms, then that becomes the agreeable metaphysics and everyone else can shut up and bog off.

Metaphysics is booted out of philosophy. Science is respected but expected to mind its own parochial concerns. Philosophy is reserved for ... well what exactly? Logic chopping and the polemics of ethics?

So yeah. Stop fobbing people off with this trite argument that the redness of red falls out of the conversation, and thus all the counterfactually grounded explanation that leads up to the arrival at such a limit also must drop out of the conversation.

That was the part of the conversation that was in fact the large discussion worth having. It was the metaphysics and the science that had already lifted the game in an interesting way.

What gives our words stability is their place in our common, shared talk of what is around us. — Banno

This may suffice for everyday life. But it would be a weird way for more ambitious communities of inquiry to organise. :roll:

But we can't check, because we don't have a consciousness-o-meter. — bert1

And yet in practice, there are procedures developed by neurologists to determine brain death in hospital situations.

To determine brain death, electrocerebral inactivity (ECI) should be demonstrated on EEG at a sensitivity of 2 μV/mm using double-distance electrodes spaced 10 centimeters or more apart from each other for at least 30 minutes, with intense somatosensory or audiovisual stimuli.

Brain scans can tell if you are thinking about tools or animals. Whether you are day dreaming or focused. Happy or in pain. Not yet an exact science and may never be, but further along than you seem to suggest.

Also you aren’t allowing for how theory would actually be structured to account for consciousness.

The Bayesian Brain is a high level theory of biosemiosis. It covers life and mind in a general fashion as enactive modelling relations. If correct, the story would have to apply to any life or mind that appears anywhere in the universe.

To then look inside your head as a human, with a modelling relation that has an architecture shaped by both its neurobiological and sociocultural habits, is then a very low level exercise. There is the particular way mammalian brains are structured into “modules” that specialise in different aspects of the world model. There is the everyday random way that what you had for breakfast might be playing on your mind as your belly grumbles.

A scientist might have a “theory” about whether you had a typical brain architecture - and make predictions about your possible neurodiversity based on that - but a theory about random thoughts that might arise is not really what you ought to expect. The measuring process to achieve that - the control over your life and experiences up to that date - might be considered a little too intrusive for that to be a desirable exercise.

So you are coming at what science can be expected to do in a simple-minded fashion. Your demands are epistemically naive. Science isn’t magic. Theories are themselves woven into hierarchical frameworks that serve pragmatic interests. Knowledge is knowledge when it is organised to cope with the general to the degree that generality is useful, and the particular to the degree that can matter as well.

That is why - to understand the mind from a neurocognitive viewpoint - there is first so much to learn. There is no one answer to the question you have - give me a theory that tells me both what consciousness is and also why I am experiencing exactly what I am experiencing right now. A theory that collapses the general and the particular, and which is somehow then useful to anyone.

Also: are there some books that you would suggest to explore this topic? — boundless

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question is excellent. And Peter Hoffman’s Life’s Ratchet.

Lane has lots of YouTube talks on his book.

Eric Smith is great - https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?si=X8ksxZNJjOLdjlj5

Loren Williams talks on the evolution of the ribosome - https://youtu.be/AF0VmMvE1yI?si=msA7LgpLvKx6AfYn

The area has got interesting in just the past decade as a flood of new techniques are cracking open the questions.

Seems to me that even if there may be no kind of access to a single perspective-independent view of the world, an organism benefiting from fitness payoffs will need perceptual faculties that are synchronized to and can differentiate the actual structure of the world. — Apustimelogist

Well said.

but I question whether it even makes sense to say there is only one "veridical" way for an organism to be perceptually coupled to the environment. — Apustimelogist

A biosemiotician would agree that every organism would have its own umwelt. There is as much evolutionary variety right there as we would expect. Some of us are dichromats, and some trichromats. Evolution can decide the better fit over time. And indeed, as troops of stoneage foragers, there is the argument that evolution favoured an active mix as dichromats can detect food sources from a greater distance, while trichomats do a better job at nimbly processing them up close.

But then as to a general rule of coupling, we can argue for the Bayesian Brain and its optimisation principle. The best way to be coupled to an environment is one that minimises information uncertainty about environmental constraints on negentropic action. Or in other words, to be able to see through to the behaviours that ensure the repair and replication of the embodied organism.

For example, apokrisis theory is that a system is conscious if and only if it models its environment and makes predictions based on that model — bert1

It's not my theory. I just say it is the best available theory. And you missed a vital part of it. That the modelling has a purpose. The purpose – in the broadest sense – is to build a body. Construct an organismic state. Become a dissipative structure that exists in a modelling relation with its world, an informational relation that has this particular kind of material outcome.

So this is the easy way to tell the difference between an organism and just a machine. The model and the environment are tied into this entropic feedback loop. The better the predictions, the more able the organism is able to repair and reproduce.

So this theory could in principle perhaps be used to create an artificial consciousness, and the theory would predict that the resultant creature would be conscious. — bert1

This theory accounts for why AI and Alife are such overhyped projects. It puts a finger on what is missing. The software doesn't have to earn its own keep. The "AI" is not building and maintaining its own embodied and enactive organismic state.

Some factory in Taiwan made the chips. Some dude in California plugged the server into the wall. Some utility company supplied the electric juice for as long as the bill got paid. The AI did nothing at all to produce or maintain the fabric of its being. There was no actual modelling relation in the biosemiotic sense.

If we get scifi, we can imagine AI being created that then takes over control of the human world and entrains it to its own entropic purpose. It sets the world to work building more chip fabs, datafarms and power stations. Humans would just mindlessly clone AI systems in exponential fashion at the expense of their own social and ecological fabric. Big tech would attract all available human capital to invest in this new global project.

Oh wait ... [Checks stock market. Gulps.]

the 'appearance' of 'proto-intentionality' must have been a possibility — boundless

Sure. The field of abiogenesis has plenty of suggestions on the matter. In general, one looks for a dissipative chemistry that could become colonised by some of the organic gunk it produces that proves able to function as a primitive information capturing code.

If for example a thermal vent is already producing organic molecules via minerals like greigite - rich in the same iron sulphur clusters that became woven into enzymatic reaction paths - then already there is a lot of the structure in place to get life going.

So it is not in principle a puzzle. It is putting together some particular evolutionary story that becomes the difficulty, not having a Time Machine.

Here’s a typical article on that - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrothermal-vents-and-the-origins-of-life/3007088.article

Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us. — Manuel

And yet all we have in our brains is neurons firing. Somehow that give rise to both the "subjective affects" and the "objective properties". If we see red as pure quality, and ballness as simple quantity, we are still left with the deeper fact that all that is happening in our heads is neurons firing. Just in different corners of the brain, as we can tell from the damage we can do by plunging something blunt into the "colour centre" as opposed to another spot that is the "object recogntiion centre".

Our philosophical positions are constrained by some pretty basic neurobiological facts. Somehow it is all just "neurons firing". The mystery to be cleared up starts there.

And that is the current neurobiological approach. Shifting the conversation to the enactive and embodied modelling relation that explains the neuron firing in terms of their neural architecture. How what they are doing is imposing a capacity for Bayesian reasoning on the world.

The idealists will complain that this leaves consciousness under-explained. The realist will dismiss it as instead an irrelevent complexification to them.

But because both camps agree that science should stay out of philosophy, at least they can agree on that.

Meanwhile, the science rolls on at a good lick. Sharpening our understanding of how things are.

There is this article about colour concepts and experience. Maybe it is of interest. — Lionino

The article makes my point that we have to acknowledge why there is this idealist/realist tension when talking about perception – why the redness of red is a Hard Problem quandry advanced by one side, and why the ballness of balls is matchingly put forward as something quite untroubling to the lumpen realist tendency.

As Peacocke points out, red just seems to be a psychological construct as all we can do is point to it when asked. It is out there in the world in some generally agreed way, but also essentially private like the good old beetle in the box.

But if asked to point to the circle in a collection of shapes, we can reach out and get our hands around it. A blind person could learn to discriminate circularity as a general concept. We can speak to the general essence of being circular as well as pick out suitable particular examples. The circle is the one with no pointy corners and smoothly symmetric like a ball.

Then as we continue on from shapes to objects, we all know that we can really get our hands around balls. We can feel their shape, weight, texture, even taste and scent. If circles where a bit Platonic as concepts, balls take on a hylomorphic and Aristotelian richness. Ballness becomes the essence of a very large class of possible objects.

And the fact that we are imposing this concept on nature – we sure as heck make all kinds of material balls – becomes what seems most salient. We have now swung across to the other extreme of the spectrum to the position that is most comfortable to the lumpen realist. The realm of chairs, kitchen utensils, puppy dogs and other medium size dry goods.

So idealists will focus on the redness of red to make their essentialist case. And realists will focus on the "ballness" of balls to make their accidentalist case. They will say sure folk can classify balls as a category, but plainly there is no such thing as ballness as a "real essence".

So perception gives both camps what feels like a strong ground in this argument between idealism and realism. But I say we have to dig deeper to get past the superficial language games. Any philosophical account must provide some unifying position on perception so that the redness of red and the ballness of balls can be understood under a single theory of cognition. Such as that of a biosemiotic modelling relation.

Our experience of red and of balls has to be either equally surprising or equally unsurprising. One way or another, we are asking them both to fit the same metaphysics.

Evade away. :up:

How have I not done so?

(This answering a question with a question is just so handy. Always be evading. :up: )

That reminds of this 2008 conference on a general pansemiotic take of "The Evolution and Development of the Universe".

Here is Salthe's summary of his contribution....

I distinguish Nature from the World. I also distinguish development from evolution.

Development is progressive change and can be modeled as part of Nature, using a specification hierarchy. I have proposed a ‘canonical developmental trajectory’ of dissipative structures with the stages defined thermodynamically and informationally.

I consider some thermodynamic aspects of the Big Bang, leading to a proposal for reviving final cause. This model imposes a ‘hylozooic’ kind of interpretation upon Nature, as all emergent features at higher levels would have been vaguely and episodically present primitively in the lower integrative levels, and were stabilized materially with the developmental emergence of new levels.

The specification hierarchy’s form is that of a tree, with its trunk in its lowest level, and so this hierarchy is appropriate for modeling an expanding system like the Universe. It is consistent with this model of differentiation during Big Bang development to view emerging branch tips as having been entrained by multiple finalities because of the top-down integration of the various levels of organization by the higher levels.

Salthe is then accused of being too materialistic by other more idealist contributors. So you can see a range of opinion exists. Horace Fairlamb, for instance, still sees wiggle room for the emergence of mind as "true novelty".

So pick from it what suits your taste.

I'm not evading. — Banno

Yes you are. Have been for years. It's the language game you've developed to protect your language games. :up:

More questions answered by questions. So more evasion as you dare not risk a good faith reply in a public forum. :up:

But I think you lean towards a physicalist interpretation of the inherent ambiguity implicit in the ‘epistemic cut’, so as to avoid the suggestion of being non-scientific or being tarred with the brush of philosophical idealism. — Wayfarer

Why would I care if pragmatism is my judge in these matters? It ain't me who is all caught up in this particular culture war.

And as a ‘science of meaning’, semiotics is not nearly so reducible to predictive formulae as are those of physics. — Wayfarer

Did I mention Friston's Bayesian Brain? Did I mention Hoffman's Ratchet?

The science has been moving along at quite a clip. The genetic code wasn't even cracked when I was born. Now we have 3D animations of armies of molecular machines at work, harvesting entropy to rebuild bodies.

I'm not sure what more could be expected in terms of astoundingly swift progress.

So - how does 'the conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature' support the idea that this is a physical theory? — Wayfarer

Sure. That is why we biologists have always said biology is bigger than physics. It is large enough to also include semiosis as the new science of meaning.

Pattee himself then puts his finger on how it is a mechanics of information processing – switches, levers, ratchets, latches – that physically gives effect to his epistemic cut. With that, the missing connection is made. Physics gets drawn up into the mothership of pansemiotics.

So if I were to argue that living organisms in whatever form they take, amount to the emergence of intentionality, I don't think I would be saying anything at variance with the passage quoted above. — Wayfarer

I dunno. Pansemiosis is keen to extent intentionality to even the physical sphere as "tendency". That covers the Second Law's extremely general imperative of "thou shalt organise to entropify" as the global tendency of Nature.

Stan Salthe pushed this hard. Pattee himself was rather diffident in these conversations, being ironically more of a hardline physicalist within the biosemiotic camp. Salthe was a full-on Peircean internalist.

I'm not at all sure what that could mean. I, and I think most folks, do not attach numbers to roundness in any intrinsic way. — Banno

Shapes appear to take up a quantity of space and time and materiality in a way that colours don't. Yet both are constructs of our neurobiology. Hence why hue discrimination is what gets rolled out as the mystifying topic and not shape discrimination.

Touch, smell and taste are more "direct" than sight. — Banno

Why the scare quotes? Did you want to make the neurobiogical point here?

If perception is essentially indirect, and yet also pragmatic, then we have to defend that as a way of speaking in terms of some intelligible spectrum that covers both the more "direct" and the more "indirect" poles of this dialectic.

I have argued that this nuance is what your approach lacks. It doesn't even begin to recognise it. And when reminded of it, starts looking for reasons to look past it.

So far as we are addressing a philosophical question, it's not an issue of mere physiology. — Banno

So the Hard Problem is not thrown down as a challenge to the metaphysics of physicalism? You want to pretend that somehow idealism or epistemology in general are somehow "not philosophical topics"?

How much more bullshit do you intend to produce?

But showing that the word "red" is public, not private, does show that there is more to "red" than what has here been called "mental percepts". — Banno

And once again, my question to you. Why might this need to be shown for redness as a quality and not ballness?

As a space and time occupying shape, folk usually find it unproblematic that "the ball" refers to a real thing rather than a private qualia. But for "redness", they become all suddenly twisted about whether it is something that exists "out there" in the world, or something that exists "in here" within the privacy of their minds.

So something is up and your language games story doesn't generalise very well. But perhaps you might have a go at showing otherwise?

I'm not holding my breath of course. Time has taught me only to expect further evasion.

This question is at least in part about the use of the word "red". — Banno

But I just asked you to show how your answer on that applies consistently across the board in terms of perceptual discrimination and object recognition. Why for instance do people think redness speaks to a qualitative difference while roundness speaks to more a quantitative difference.

In their speech, people show that they find the redness of red some kind of deep puzzle – a Hard Problem – yet the ballness of balls is taken to be an Easy Problem. How is this accounted for in your language games approach ... or whatever your approach is meant to be.

I don't find folk being able to reliably hand you red objects or round objects a particularly enlightening fact here. It indeed seems quite irrelevant to the sense of mystification that OPs such as this express.

That is why I say first there is an actual issue. And second, the proper way to start deflating it is not to divert the discussion into the pragmatics of language use but to dig into the neurobiology that could show how hue discrimination is really just another tool in the armoury of shape perception. So if you have a problem with one, you would have to feel that it is equal to any problem you might have with the other.

It's the right start. You are only offering a cheap way to handwave the problem away.

But you have a chance to refute me by showing how folk ought to just shut up and be satisfied by having it pointed out to them they can reliably pick out red objects or round objects or whatever else gets asked for. Metaphysically, this is all there is to know on the matter.

By accident means 'for no reason'. There's the nub of the issue right there. — Wayfarer

Or no particular reason. It wasn't prevented. A fluctuation was possible.

How we understand "accident" is not as simple as you suggest.

But here, are you imputing intentionality, which is the specific attribute of organisms, to 'switches' and 'motors'? — Wayfarer

Switches and motors are only produced because they serve a purpose. Same with the enzymes and kinesins.

An actual light switch doesn't seem proto-intentional as clearly the lighting circuit, and the national power grid it is connected to, don't turn themselves on and off, let alone self-construct themselves as an entropic project of nature.

But enzymes and kinesins are functional little critters. They are embedded in the self-interested metabolic economy of an organism. It matters if they are "off or on". They only get built or degraded, deployed or withdrawn, to the degree they serve the purpose of the organism as a whole.

So that even despite your rejection of physicalist reductionism, you're still employing a reductionist model. You're denying or flattening out the distinction between the mineral and organic domains by imputing intentionality to chemistry. — Wayfarer

You have forgotten Pattee's epistemic cut and so have lost your bearings in this argument.

For example, a plant growing towards light exhibits a form of directed, goal-oriented behavior. His philosophy is teleological, meaning he believes that all living beings have inherent goals or purposes. — Wayfarer

Yep, that is all well and good. But then what is the mechanism? What mediates between the modelling and the world? Is this where he starts waving his hands?

In contrast, what I've gleaned from your posts is that life is treated as a model, — Wayfarer

You mean life embodies Rosen's modelling relation, or Peirce's semiosis? There is an epistemic cut that both separates and then connects in a fashion that allows an organism to build itself while degrading the world.

It is 'life seen from the outside', as it were. — Wayfarer

But it is only when we start to see life from the outside that we can start claiming to see life from the inside as well. If we can claim to stand outside its materiality, that is the modelling presumption – the Umwelt – that places us inside what we call "the realm of the mind".

And this dialectical claim only arises in humans once they have reached a linguistic and numeric level of semiosis. We become self-conscious as that has become the new structure of our world model.

We are now – mostly unconsciously – being shaped by our existence as socially constructed beings. The parts of the larger whole that is the human social organism doing its self-making entropic thing.

And to function as the individual parts of this new greater whole, we have to be objective about the fact of our own sentient existence so as to be able to place ourselves within the larger socialised subjective state that is our collective cultural Umwelt.

As subjects, we objectivise ourselves so as to function as the machinery of entropifying switches that becomes the epistemic cut upon which the collective consciousness of a tribe or civilisation becomes founded.

Philosophy, and existentialism in particular, is concerned with the living of life, rather than its objective description — Wayfarer

There you go. As an individual, you go to school and get suitably programmed for the function that society has in mind. Told who you "really are" and how you "ought to think and behave". So as to best serve the larger system that is now in charge of the entropy project in a way that appears to transcend the usual evolutionary and environmental limits.

Your complicity with "existentialism" is bringing about the opposite of what you imagine. You are objectivising yourself so as to fit the larger requirements of your society.

Or worse yet, learning just how to be a bad fit. Ending up both living in that society and feeling unhappy and confused about how its all panning out. :razz:

A pretty clear explanation, showing the underpinning assumption that there must be a "something" to which "red' refers. Why should this be so? Look to the use of the word, to pick out red pens and red faces. That's what counts. — Banno

Does talk about pens and faces refer to "somethings"? Does talk about circles and squares refer to "somethings"?

Can you run this argument in some way that is consistent across all examples of perceptual discriminations and object recognitions so that is sounds less like a closet idealist speaking, more like an actual pragmatist.

The language game approach fails to engage with what folk are actually interested in when it comes to perception. And so it fails to give them a better way to think about the cognitive realities of what are going on.

An enactive or ecological approach to perception speaks to what really matters. How mental experience is a modelling relation or Umwelt.

The account that works for the redness of red has to work just as well as that for the roundness of round, or the pencilness of pencils.

No one ever seems to have a problem with shape perception, yet they do with hue perception. If they can see how each ought to be equally troubling, and hence equally untroubling, then something has been achieved.

So show how your approach does that.

but I do not have found the explanation of how the epistemic cut and/or the 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place. — boundless

Why can’t it have appeared “by accident”? In the usual evolutionary fashion.