Hmmm. What would be the great "combiner", then? — Watchmaker

If I understand your question correctly I would say that would be lifeforms such as us, we do the combining.

What/who combined the combiners?

What/who combined the combiners? — Watchmaker

Well, now you are moving towards issues like infinite regression and the suggestion that the whole system collapses without a 'first cause' or prime mover. Probably the best that the theist community has come up with is the Kalam cosmological argument which has been totally debunked by cosmologists, in my opinion. There is no imperative for a first cause or a prime mover which has any significance to our Universe.

If, for example, each individual different Universe is a bounce or oscillation between linear time epochs of the creation to the destruction of a previous Universe then it makes little sense to ask about a 'first cause' that started the bounce or oscillation as no information passes from linear time epoch to linear time epoch. It could also be said that there may have been so many 'bounces' that the number approaches infinity and therefore the system could be called eternal. So the need for a first cause or a first mind or god would be so far back in linear time epochs to be of no significance to our Universe at all, even if some kind of 'trigger' point for the 'bounce' did happen.
This is also true in the many worlds posit, there comes a point in the multi-verse posit that there are so many Universes that the idea of a creator has no significant value at all, beyond that of a simple spark that starts the fire. The spark (if it ever existed) has little or even no importance compared to the effects and existence of the fire.

I thought it was also worth adding that the theists have the same problem as in, where did god come from. An infinity of earlier gods?
Why should we accept their 'special plead' of no the regression stops at god. How is that different from 'you cannot ask about 'before the big bang,' as there is no before time=0.

I can appreciate that. Again, much of this is way over my head. That is a lot to think about!

I'll get back with you next week, Lord willing.

I'll get back with you next week, Lord willing — Watchmaker

I edited my previous comment to you, just to make it more complete.
Absolutely, we could all do with more time spent thinking, I am no exception to that.
To be continued...next week....providence allowing!

Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings. — apokrisis

My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations of anger contexts. I surmise the view of biosemiotics is in close proximity to Prinz’s.

“Let us say that I have been hurt and disappointed by someone I care deeply about, and as a result
I become angry with them. What form might this anger take? If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm.

Jesse Prinz’s neo-sentimentalist model of emotion occupies a transitional position situated between moral realism and a full-bodied moral relativism. He divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity, supporting an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism t the same time that he claims to maintain a relativistic stance on moral values.
Prinz’s dualist division of knowledge and value, subjectivism and objectivism is incoherent from a Postmodern perspective. Empirical investigation gets its sense and orientation from affectively attuned value systems, which means that in judging an empirical result on the basis of factual correctness, one is making a relativistic moral evaluation. Empirical models are aspects of moral worldviews.

Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter.

In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos
is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. “ In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or
suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.…our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within
traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”( Gergen)

Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty.

My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations — Joshs

Is there the third thing of moral pragmatist interpretations?

My position is that there is neither some Platonic absolute, nor that there is utter contingency. Moral codes would always be entrained to the usual forces of development and evolution - the practical need to be rationally organised in a way that underwrites the persistence of the system in question.

If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm. — Prinz

So for me, this is just debating a false dichotomy. These two options may oppose each other in the usual way - necessity vs contingency. But the whole point of my pragmatic metaphysics is that such dichotomies must be understood as the limits - the contrasts - that make intelligible organisation even possible. You need both contingency and necessity - as complementary, not rival, poles - to frame a rich spectrum of actual options.

That then sets up a model of the world with the internal variety to be able to intelligently match itself to the facts of the world.

Anger, for example, is neurologically opposed to fear - the fight or flight response. The brain is wired to be decisive - when faced with radical uncertainty about threat and harm. It must quickly decide which of two emergency states to "be in". The worst thing would be to act with indecision and risk neither extreme response to what seems like an extreme situation.

Well, in fact neurobiology adds the third option of freezing. Grafted on top - when faced with absolute indecision as the situation offers neither retreat or attack - an animal can just try the other plan of immobility. Playing dead, stopping still, hoping not to be noticed and confusing its threat.

So the ordinary naturalistic explanation - the one based on the pragmatism of an organism that embodies the desire to survive - works fine here.

And nothing really changes even when we regard humans as linguistic creatures constructing a larger sociocultural level of organismic organisation.

Once we become part of some system, with its own natural desire have persistent existence, then the biological imperatives have to framed within the larger context of the social imperatives. Fear and aggression must be culturally modified in ways that fit the fact that individuals are now the cells of the one collective body.

Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. — Joshs

Sure. Woke and redneck communities could both agree on the fact that the woman who won the swim meet by a mile has a penis. Yet draw the different moral conclusions that best fit their community-sustaining way of life.

To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter. — Joshs

Sure. It is also a fact that all facticity is a semiotic construction. Our worlds are Umwelts. Umwelts are how we even exist as the selves that are these selves that exist in the world.

In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. — Joshs

Well in my embodied and social constructionist pragmatic accounts - following the structuralism of the likes of Vygotsky and Luria - neither absolute necessity nor absolute contingency is the issue. It is all about balancing the two tendencies in a way that leads to cybernetic reciprocality. The system must be autopoietic. It has to be able to steer a course by not getting stuck in one or other register.

So on the whole, we try to follow the social rule. And then the creative exceptions are what make that workable. The system needs us to be doing both things. And always decisively as much as we can. It wants us to be obviously either following rules or breaking rules, as that is what gives the larger social organism the requisite variety it can then winnow in terms of its Darwinian success or failure.

Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty. — Joshs

Are you arguing towards my pragmatic position then?

The moral constraints are the long-term habits of a society - a society which by definition proves them as the correct habits because it has survived so far by applying them.

But a society that never produces moral variety is soon going to wind up in a dead end as it is not generating the variance with which to continue to adapt to changing circumstance.

So I would see blaming and shaming as discourse aimed at asserting social norms - calling on established collective habit, speaking up for the familiar social order that has stood the test. Call-out culture in practice.

But then tolerance, empathy, forgiveness, etc are the other side of the coin. Functional societies are also pragmatically easy-going about individual foibles and eccentricities. They don't call them out but simply pretend not to notice, or laugh them off.

That the substance that the universe is composed of is essentially consciousness? — Watchmaker


That's what I think, yes. — bert1


I wonder what the motivation is? I mean, I look around at the world, and I see that some things are conscious, you and me, my dog, and I see that the mechanisms for consciousness are in our brains, we can switch them off and on. I see that some things are not conscious, rocks, dead people or dogs. I think bacteria for example aren't conscious (because we can explain their behaviour through non-conscious processes), but they do have something which is a prerequisite for consciousness, they are individuals, separated from their environment.

This stuff is surely super-important?! Whether we ourselves and other items are conscious or not really matters to us.

So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious. — Daemon

I wonder what the motivation is? — Daemon

There are a number of different motivations depending on the panpsychist, I think. Some panpsychists take a very conceptual approach think that it impossible to make sense of the idea of the emergence of consciousness because the concept does not seem to admit of degree. Goff and Antony develop this line of reasoning.

Panpsychism can be motivated by an examination of the various binding problems, when we look for candidates in nature that can fulfil the binding function, we can see that space relates its contents, and fields are also present at every point in space, so perhaps consciousness is a property of space. This has some intuitive appeal for me as it fits with the phenomonology quite well.

Some panpsychists do think that consciousness emerges, and is reducible to a kind of function, it's just that this function occurs in everything, so consciousness is also in everything. The IIT is an example of this. The IIT is a very different kind of panpsychism, and very differently theoretically motivated.

Some panpsychists are motivated by idealism. Timothy Sprigge is one of these. If you think of Berkeley, but take out the role God plays in maintaining the existence of the external world of ideas, and substitute panpsychism - everything exists in a vast web of mutually perceiving and mutually defining subjects, then I think that is close to Sprigge's view.

Some panpsychists are no doubt motivated by spiritual views, they have already come to the conclusion that consciousness is present at the start of everything, and think that everything after that point will therefore also be conscious, as all subsequent existing things are modifications of the original conscious substance.

One can also come to panpsychism by an examination of psychological causation and the problem of overdetermination - the only causation we actually know happens is psychological - we cause out arm to go up, for example. But this seems to compete with other, physical, causal accounts involving neurons firing. One way out of this puzzle is to reduce physical causation to psychological, and assert that what we normally refer to as forces in the world are actually wills, and the behaviour of matter is determined by how it feels. The slogans might be 'matter does what it does because of how it feels' and 'how matter feels is determined by what it does'.

Panpsychism is attractively monistic. If the basic starting properties in a typical physical explanation of the world (e.g. mass, charge, spin, extension, whatever the latest list is) are not enough to explain everything, one way to fix this is to add a starting property, namely consciousness, especially if the alternatives are more theoretically problematic.

Another way to come at panpsychism is by process of elimination. Consciousness either (a) doesn't exist, or at least isn't what it appears to be (eliminativism) (b) emerged (was not around at the start and arrived on the scene later - this is the majority view I suspect), or (c) was here from the start and exists in everything. Pick the least problematic option. This is the Churchill approach - "Panpsychism is the worst theory of conciousness apart from all the others."

And there's more motivations, and many sub-variants...

I mean, I look around at the world, and I see that some things are conscious, you and me, my dog, and I see that the mechanisms for consciousness are in our brains, we can switch them off and on.

Well, maybe. When we switch consciousness on and off, are we switching consciousness? Or are we switching identity on and off? How could we tell the difference between non-consciousness and non-existence, phenomenologically?

I see that some things are not conscious, rocks, dead people or dogs.

I understand your intuitive starting point. But can these distinctions be maintained? Philosophers will want answers to the following questions: What are you seeing exactly? And what follows from that about consciousness? Why aren't people and dogs conscious? How do you know? What constitutes evidence for consicousness?

I think bacteria for example aren't conscious (because we can explain their behaviour through non-conscious processes), but they do have something which is a prerequisite for consciousness, they are individuals, separated from their environment.

Well, that's very interesting. You have the start of a theory, or at least line of enquiry. I would question whether we can explain their behaviour through non-conscious processes - when we get to the level of forces, we end up saying 'that's just what happens'. But if those forces are wills, we can go, perhaps, one step further into something we can understand - 'because that's what they will'. Conversely, lets take humans. If we can explain bacterial behaviour in terms of non-conscious processes, why can't we do the same with humans? Maybe Apo has an answer - that human behaviour cannot be explained in the kind of bottom-up way that perhaps bacterial behaviour can. And I suspect Apo will say the same about bacteria - there is top down stuff going on there too which is necessary to understand bacterial behaviour. But even if he is right, I don't see how that entails consciousness.

This stuff is surely super-important?! Whether we ourselves and other items are conscious or not really matters to us.

Indeed.

So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious.

I don't think panpsychists do lose the distinction. I can conceive of a rock that isn't conscious.The concept of non-consciousness still has meaning, even if I think that nothing is in fact non-conscious.

I haven't read this entire thread, but as far as I saw panprotopsychism wasn't mentioned. I think Bertrand Russell coined the term, meaning that percepts arise from matter at a very basic level of emergence. The matter is not intrinsically conscious, but it is characteristic of matter to evince image (wavelength) and feel (vibration) fragments which complex minds are then built from.

So from an evolutionary perspective:

Basic properties of perception, most generally feeling and appearance, are inherent in matter. When the structure of organic matter evolves towards more complex physiology, percepts also evolve into more complicate forms as an essential facet of this matter’s structure. A more complex brain will ineluctably evolve more complex perceptual forms akin to human imagination, emotion and thought. These are probably not the only types of intellectual percept structures possible, but in this schema matter mutates as a more or less integrated perceptual field, not merely as nonconscious machinery.

So consciousness is neither an epiphenomenon nor a separate realm of substance, both of which are more dubious notions than panprotopsychism I think.

... dichotomies must be understood as the limits - the contrasts - that make intelligible organisation even possible. You need both contingency and necessity - as complementary, not rival, poles - to frame a rich spectrum of actual options. — apokrisis

:fire:

So I'm wondering what is gained by losing the distinction between conscious and not conscious. — Daemon

Good question! I assume that Panpsychists are probably trying to unify the traditional mind/matter dualisms, by assuming that both are merely emergent forms of a universal "substance" or "essence: Mind, which is best known in its manifestation as Consciousness. I agree with that motivation, but I personally take a slightly different track. A common retort to notions of universal Consciousness is to ridicule the idea of a conscious atom or grain of sand. Another problem, as you noted, is to make a distinction between Conscious & Subconscious mental processes.

So, in my own attempts to understand how conscious Mind could evolve from mindless Matter, I merely reversed order of primacy. Many philosophers have found the notion a universal Mind reasonable. So, to present it as a philosophical principle instead of a religious doctrine, I substitute the more technical-sounding term "Information". The word originally referred to the contents of a human mind in the form of intangible Thoughts & Ideas & Feelings. But Claude Shannon stripped the word of its conscious connotations, and defined it as an empty container for any meaning you want to put into it. That abstract definition works well for the purposes of programming general-purpose computers, but not so good for the self-programming & self-conscious human mind.

My thesis tracks the evolution of the human mind back to the original Singularity (imagined as a creative evolutionary program), and even one step farther to a hypothetical "Programmer", traditionally known by philosophers as the generic "First Cause". And the common "substance" all the way up is generic "Information" (EnFormAction ; the power to enform). Which takes on many real forms along the way : Potential, Energy, Forces, Mass, Matter, and Mind. For those who are not familiar with cutting-edge Information theory -- in Physics & Philosophy -- that scenario will seem even more ridiculous than the mystical-sounding Panpsychism theory. But, I prefer to call it "Information Realism". It retains the distinction between Conscious Minds & insensible Matter, but unifies them as diverse forms of evolutionary emergence back to a common ancestor, the hypothetical Prime Mind. :nerd:

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind :
So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/

Consciousness : Emergent or Fundamental?
Most scientific and religious worldviews take the ontological status of Consciousness for granted. But when those belief systems are in conflict, their unstated presumptions are key to resolving the problem. Modern Science typically assumes, as an unproven axiom, that consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. In other words, the human mind is a product of brain processes. And that hypothesis of mind as mechanical output makes sense from the the perspective of philosophical Materialism. But most religions are based on the principle of Divine Consciousness or Spirit or Will as the primordial creative force of the world. Unfortunately, centuries of debate have shown that it will never be easy to resolve such a stark black & white opposition of opinions.

Philosophy, though, is undaunted by irresistable forces and immovable objects. It thrives on head-knocking controversies. A recent post on the Quora Forum formulated this general topic as a technical question : " is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe like gravity . . . ?" In other words, is mind essential to reality instead of an accidental emergence? Or restated in religious terms, did God create the material world by simply imagining it? Put another way, the question may be posed as "What is the basis of reality, matter or consciousness?" Here, it sounds more like a functional distinction between shape-shifting intangible Energy and stable palpable Matter, or like the difference between Mind and Body.
BothAnd Blog, post 7

Your post sounds intriguing. I can't really make any sense of it though. Would you mind simplifying all that please? Try to make as simple as you possibly can, as though you were trying to explain it to a 6 year old. — Watchmaker

A six year old is never going to grasp this, and any attempt to reduce it so that they can would be analogous at best.

The foundation of existence consists of three aspects, and it doesn’t really matter what you name them. Take away one leg of a tripod, and there is no stable configuration to place one of the remaining legs in relation to the other. We’re not really looking for something ‘fundamental’, so much as a stable, concrete foundation. And we won’t find that kind of stability as a monism or dualism.

There is no central, immoveable aspect to be found, either - we can only assume (without foundation) the potential of our existence in relation to a paradox: the possibility/impossibility of some absolute (logic, goodness, power, etc). And yet, to differentiate this possibility and/or impossibility as complementary in relation to our own mind enables the formation of a stable, triadic relation of reality, inclusive of self.

There is a symmetry here in physics: any ‘real’ object has three (spatial) aspects, and anything less than this is potential or virtual - which is not to say it doesn’t exist at all, or is imaginary, just undefined, unstable as such. An electron is defined by its orbit, or a localised energy potential relative to a nucleus. It is the atom, as a stable triadic structure of electron, proton and neutron (differentiated potentials), which forms a concrete foundation to three-dimensional reality.

A similarly stable, triadic relation can be found at every dimensional level. Ignore one of the three aspects, and the system is uncertain, inaccurate. Give one primacy, and the structure is unstable.

To say that ‘consciousness is fundamental’ would be inaccurate. Consciousness is A) a triadic system in itself with three fundamental aspects to it, and/or B) one of three equally fundamental aspects of a broader system.

In terms of the former, what we consider to be ‘consciousness’ is contingent upon: 1) an ongoing, integrated event, such as life; 2) a differentiated event or consolidation of ‘other’ events; 3) an ongoing, variable structure of relation (ie. interaction, observation, measurement) between 1 and 2. So consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to a measurement or event.

In terms of the latter, ‘consciousness’ exists in necessary relation with ‘non-consciousness’ as perceived limitations relative to a third, variable potentiality. The question is, where does one perceive their own potentiality? As absolute consciousness, or as this third variable? And IF this third variable, then what can we do about that? How do we attain stability at the level of potentiality? The answer is to re-configure conceptual structures until they are reducible to a stable triadic relation inclusive of self, rather than a linear continuum (a la Peirce).

As I mentioned the other day, there's quite a good article in the current New Scientist A New Place for Consciousness. It mentions panpsychism, David Chalmers, Lee Smolin, and all the usual suspects. (It is paywalled but I'm a subscriber).

There's a passage about Lee Smolin as follows:

For Smolin and Marina Cortês at the University of Lisbon, the problems we have [i.e. in the understanding of consciousness] are related in a different way. We can gain a better understanding of quantum reality – but only by accepting that conscious awareness is tangled up with the nature of time.

Together with independent philosopher Clelia Verde, Cortês and Smolin are taking tentative steps towards a new theory of quantum gravity that folds in qualia. It starts with a conviction that the timeless block universe depicted by general relativity is wrong. Instead, Smolin says that we should take our experience of time seriously and recognise that things only exist in the present moment. Nothing persists, things only happen. “For me, time is absolutely fundamental,” he says. “And there is one property that mathematical models don’t have, which is that nature seems to be organised as a series of moments.”

This leads to a very different cosmology, one rooted in present events and the relationships between them, rather than objects sitting in space-time. Each event has a view of the world that provides information about how it fits into the rest of the world – in particular, what its progenitor events in the past were and how it came to be formed from them. In this “causal theory of views”, quantum mechanics and space-time aren’t fundamental, but emerge out of this network of views of events. As events come to be, they make ambiguous possibilities definite; the unknown future becomes the present moment. And in this time-created world, physical laws aren’t fixed like Galileo or Newton supposed, but evolve through time.

There is also mention of Rovelli's relational model:

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, takes things further still. Much of the confusion arises, he says, because we forget that all phenomena, whether mind or matter, are related to one another. This relational view, rooted in Rovelli’s research in quantum mechanics, demotes the physical objects that are usually the starting point for fundamental physics. “The best description we have about the world is in terms of the way systems affect one another,” says Rovelli.

In which case, Galileo’s distinction between subject and object is blurred, as everything is both a subject and an object – including observers and their minds. There is no view from the outside. In this way, Rovelli sees the relational universe as a “very mild form of panpsychism” in that there is something in common between mind and matter. “It is the realisation that nature is about things that manifest themselves to one another,” he says. “This takes away much of the mystery of consciousness.”

Not mentioned in this article, but Andrei Linde says elsewhere:

The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.

What occurs to me, then, is that it is actually the perception of time which introduces an irreducibly subjective element to scientific observation. It is the mind that provides any sense of connection between two temporal events. Even though there are countless objectively-existent temporal events - from the orbits of the planets to the half-life of elements - nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind - they're not inherent in the observed phenomena. Absent mind, there is no time, because there's no perspective, and hence no scale in terms of which the concept of duration is meaningful. (cf. also Kant metaphysic of time.)

So - time enters the cosmos via consciousness, but for that reason, it is not solely objective, as it is mind-dependent, so it can't be empirically defined in absolute terms. It's a strong argument for transcendental idealism, in my view.

nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind — Wayfarer

The alternative to Panpsychism is pansemiosis. So all we really require for time to have temporal structure is that physical reality boils down to a Peircean story of constraints on possibilities.

The past is the Cosmos’s memory in being everything that has definitely happened and so a history of all the possibilities eliminated. That is very mind-like - for any neuroscientist - in that it accounts for the past as an accumulation of behavioural habits.

Then the future, by definition, is all the possibilities that remain. The future is the continuously updated space of the possible - what can happen next given all that has happened already.

This is George Ellis’s evolving block universe theory, for example.

It is mind-like in a general pansemiotic way, but - like a biosemiotic view of consciousness - doesn’t then dive headlong into Cartesian substance dualism and all the confusion that results from doing that.

You're wanting to provide an explanation grounded solely in the physical.

Note this from Info Philosopher's profile page on Pattee:

The fundamental problem is that the microscopic equations of physics are time symmetric and therefore conceptually reversible. Consequently the irreversible concept of causation is not formally supportable by microphysical laws, and if it is used at all it is a purely subjective linguistic interpretation of the laws. Hertz (1894) argued that even the concept of force was unnecessary. This does not mean that the concepts of cause and force should be eliminated, because we cannot escape the use of natural language even in our use of formal models. We still interpret some variables in the rate-of-change laws as forces, but formally these dynamical equations define only an invertible mapping on a state space. Because of this time symmetry, systems described by such reversible dynamics cannot formally (syntactically) generate intrinsically irreversible properties such as measurement, records, memories, controls, or causes. Furthermore, as Bridgman (1964) pointed out, "The mathematical concept of time appears to be particularly remote from the time of experience." Consequently, no concept of causation, especially downward causation, can have much fundamental explanatory value at the level of microscopic physical laws. ....

I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature — Howard Pattee

And so what I'm saying is that this is also the manifestation or appearance of mind, or "the subject", albeit in rudimentary form. And that the subject can't be accounted for in physical terms, it doesn't emerge from the physical and is not constituted by it.

The confusion that results from Cartesianism is purely and simply the problem of treating 'res cogitans' as an object or substance, a literal 'thinking thing' and then wondering where or what it could be. But that is the error of 'objectification' or reification. So in addition to the biosemiotic view, another perspective is required, which I think is provided by non-dualism or idealism. (Shouldn't forget that Peirce was an objective idealist.)

And so what I'm saying is that this is also the manifestation or appearance of mind, or "the subject", albeit in rudimentary form. And that the subject can't be accounted for in physical terms, it doesn't emerge from the physical and is not constituted by it. — Wayfarer

Sure. But from the pansemiotic view, both matter and mind - realism and idealism - are each just as much a construct of modelling as each other. And the trick is to turn that Cartesian duality into the reciprocality of a modelling dichotomy.

Hence Peirce being objective + idealist. That expresses the idea that all these familiar dualities - such as objective and subjective, real and ideal, etc - are the reciprocal limits of the one larger ontic relation.

So when a physicist talks about particles or the dimension of time, that is just as much a "pragmatic fiction" as when others talk about minds, intentions, feelings, subjectivity, selves.

But at least physicists more or less understand this is the game they are playing.

So what pansemiosis has to account for is neither the physical reality, nor the mental reality, but instead, the deeper reason why this has emerged as the opposing extremes of the general discourse about reality.

Reality makes the most sense when we divide this way - the Cartesian split.

And yet then that doesn't make any sense if your metaphysics doesn't also show how the two sides to reality are in fact complementary halves of the one larger story.

That is what is missing from your account. And that is what I say semiosis was designed to fix.

Hence Peirce being objective + idealist. That expresses the idea that all these familiar dualities - such as objective and subjective, real and ideal, etc - are the reciprocal limits of the one larger ontic relation. — apokrisis

which is alive already.

And anyway - that's not the point. The point I was making was about the subjective nature of time itself, how it is not something that exists inherently in the universe independently of any mind.

The universe and the observer exist as a pair. You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device?

The 'correlation' approach that I associate with this is ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.' I find it plausible enough to consider. Maybe the universe-in-itself (if you could peel back all our models and see it naked) is doomed to be a point-at-infinity. Perhaps the 'pure witness' is a similar construction.

In the quote above, there's (1) a neglect of intelligent non-human life and (2) a neglect of gradations of consciousness. Presumably 'aliens' and cockroaches, with their differing nervous systems and cultures, would experience the universe differently than we do. But it's the same universe? Right? So it's hard to get around some kind of 'substrate' or 'raw stuff' which is mediated by 'consciousness.' Let's imagine that humans accidentally destroy themselves in a nuclear war, so that all intelligence life in the universe is gone for a few million years, till a species elsewhere attains enough 'consciousness' to do physics. Let's say they discover records of our own physics and translate them successfully. In what manner did the record of our physics exist between our extinction and their achievement of culture (in the absence of consciousness? ) We could easily sharpen this thought-experiment so that all life is temporality absent from the universe.

Presumably 'aliens' and cockroaches, with their differing nervous systems and cultures, would experience the universe differently than we do. But it's the same universe? — jas0n

How could you make a comparison? How could you assume a perspective that can see from all those completely different perspectives at once, so as to compare whether they’re seeing ‘the same thing’? You’re operating from inside ‘the naturalist assumption’. That is what needs to be called into question - which is a difficult thing to do, I acknowledge.

How could you make a comparison? How could you assume a perspective that can see from all those completely different perspectives at once, so as to compare whether they’re seeing ‘the same thing’? — Wayfarer

I think it's basically an extension of the grammar we already use between humans. Other humans are different enough already to see the world differently. Note that I don't expect the experience of the aliens or cockroaches to be similar, and I agree that consciousness is grammatically uncheckable, so I'd operationalize it in terms of indicators of intelligence, but that's a tangent.

All I'm saying is that if we picture the universe to contain intelligent non-human life, then of course their nervous systems are reacting to or interpreting the same universe. A cockroach on the sidewalk, if it has consciousness, is even more obviously experiencing the same little piece of spacetime as me.

You’re operating from inside ‘the naturalist assumption’. — Wayfarer

I think my position is more general than that. I'm willing to put all current physics on the side of the model. Let's say that 'electron talk' is the mediated content of consciousness, a product perhaps of an unknown-stuff-mediating brain. Where is the 'real' brain? That one that dreams an image of itself? If there's no stuff 'out there,' then it's hard to explain the apparent synchronization of our 'dreaming.'

nevertheless the awareness of the temporal duration between events seems always to be brought to the picture by the observing mind, because it requires memory and expectation, which can only be provided by the mind
— Wayfarer

The alternative to Panpsychism is pansemiosis. So all we really require for time to have temporal structure is that physical reality boils down to a Peircean story of constraints on possibilities.

The past is the Cosmos’s memory in being everything that has definitely happened and so a history of all the possibilities eliminated. That is very mind-like - for any neuroscientist - in that it accounts for the past as an accumulation of behavioural habits.

Then the future, by definition, is all the possibilities that remain. The future is the continuously updated space of the possible - what can happen next given all that has happened already.

This is George Ellis’s evolving block universe theory, for example.

It is mind-like in a general pansemiotic way, but - like a biosemiotic view of consciousness - doesn’t then dive headlong into Cartesian substance dualism and all the confusion that results from doing that. — apokrisis

I can see how temporal structure rendered as a linear continuum would simplify the ideas you’re navigating here.

But there’s a more complex dimensional structure to block universe, panpsychism and other ‘universal consciousness’ theories that often either gets reduced relative to temporal events, or extended to the notion of unconstrained possibility, with ‘mind’ as an unexplained mediating factor. But few venture to suggest what this mind consists of. Peirce talks about a habit-taking tendency to events, and the interaction of actualising qualities into facts, after somehow transitioning from dimensionless to determined potentiality.

This article explores the idea of a numerical order to events in space, regardless of time. It fits with the idea that mind, consciousness, a block universe, semiotics (even the quantum realm) are all composed according to perceived or calculated value/significance/potentiality - as five dimensions of relational structure.

This article explores the idea of a numerical order to events in space, regardless of time. It fits with the idea that mind, consciousness, a block universe, semiotics (even the quantum realm) are all composed according to perceived or calculated value/significance/potentiality - as five dimensions of relational structure. — Possibility

I didn't see where it claims 5D relations. But anyway, it doesn't sound a promising approach.

Sure. I agree that 4D spacetime is just advanced accountancy. But then that applies to the three spatial dimensions as much as the one temporal dimension. If time is reduced to a numerical sequence that represents Planck units of change, then space likewise is a numerical sequence of Planck unit of location. I don't see that leading anywhere for the usual reason - one has to include Planck energy in this picture as well.

Space is our measure of locatedness - a local lack of energetic change, or degree of energy conservation. Time is our measure of global change. It is the backdrop rate at which the cosmos cools and expands - the prevailing temperature of the cosmic microwave background - that gives us our "fixed" yardstick for the amount of change potential, or energy, that might be represented in any localised concentration of warmer mass.

So space sees energy conservation. Time sees energy expenditure, or entropy dissipation.

In the intuitive metaphysical view, spacetime is all tied to the third thing of its energy contents rather than something mathematically abstract like numerical sequences.

That doesn't mean the Sorli, Fiscaletti, Klinar paper you linked might not offer a model of spacetime that has advantages for some purposes. It may prove a useful way of looking at things.

But as I say, it looks to be moving away from what it purports to describe, rather than towards it. What I look for as the next natural step in time modelling is nailing the connection with energy in a formal way.

Quantum mechanics already treats time and energy as complementary variables linked by the Heisenberg uncertainty relationship. The maths works. But also QM still uses a Newtonian absolute time in that maths. So the relation is heuristic rather than a formal part of the maths. Only the spatial side of QM is nailed down as a purely relational deal - a reciprocal dichotomy - that is the location~momentum uncertainty of events.

Peirce talks about a habit-taking tendency to events, and the interaction of actualising qualities into facts, after somehow transitioning from dimensionless to determined potentiality. — Possibility

So what I was highlighting in mentioning the evolving block universe approach was the way that passing time - history - removes energetic free possibility. The exponential cooling and spreading of the universe since the Big Bang fast limits local possibility. The future is steadily being shrunk to its last unspent degrees of freedom by the universe's generalised entropification.

We tend to focus on all the hot and complex action that is still possible on the surface of lump of rock orbiting a furnace radiating at 5800 degrees K. Given that the Sun pours out all this energy, and the average temperature of deep space is down to about 3 degrees K, that is a steep entropy gradient to exploit. A drop of 5797 degrees.

But the time that matters in the bigger picture is the rate at which the universe itself cools - the drop from the Planck temperature to the absolute zero of the Heat Death.

So temperature, rather that numerical sequence, is the issue.

Sure. I agree that 4D spacetime is just advanced accountancy. But then that applies to the three spatial dimensions as much as the one temporal dimension. If time is reduced to a numerical sequence that represents Planck units of change, then space likewise is a numerical sequence of Planck unit of location. I don't see that leading anywhere for the usual reason - one has to include Planck energy in this picture as well. — apokrisis

I agree that this accountancy is applied to all four dimensions - that’s kind of my point. These three aspects (location, change and energy), all reduced to number sequences, presents a prediction at the Planck scale - a mathematical variation to be applied from one four-dimensional structure to another. That application, in my understanding, relies on a five-dimensional structure.

I agree with you that the fourth dimension is change, structured according to time/effort/attention, and is all about energy/entropy, the direction of temperature, etc. What I’m suggesting is that what enables us to explore and understand this four-dimensional structure at all is by reconfiguring reality according to value/significance/potentiality.

That application, in my understanding, relies on a five-dimensional structure. — Possibility

I’m not sure I understand what form you think this extra dimension takes. It sounds like a larger embedding dimension for GR - such as a brane. Or it could be a compactified internal one. Or even a fractal internal one.

That is to say, the whole Euclidean/Newtonian conception of a dimension is up for grabs once we get to the bleeding edge of physics these days.

What I’m suggesting is that what enables us to explore and understand this four-dimensional structure at all is by reconfiguring reality according to value/significance/potentiality. — Possibility

Well my view is that the thermodynamic finality driving the show is what needs to be built into the physics. And quantum decoherence is one of the ways that is being done, as is the de Sitter cosmology that builds in a conformal spacetime geometry - a holographic closure that brings an end to effective space, time and energy.

So Peirce can be said to have envisioned the Cosmos as a dissipative structure. And Big Bang cosmology is cashing out that metaphysics as physics.

The difference is obviously that the Heat Death does not seem such a triumphant cosmic achievement from a human self-centred view.

It would be puzzling that all of history would be so marvellously organised to eventually result in … us. But now the future only holds the relentless onwards project of finishing off the infinite nothingness of a cosmos that is its fully matured condition as a universalised heat sink.

I’m not sure I understand what form you think this extra dimension takes. It sounds like a larger embedding dimension for GR - such as a brane. Or it could be a compactified internal one. Or even a fractal internal one.

That is to say, the whole Euclidean/Newtonian conception of a dimension is up for grabs once we get to the bleeding edge of physics these days. — apokrisis

As I’ve said before, my approach to this is qualitative, so I agree that classical conceptions of ‘dimension’ don’t work at this level, but the quality or idea of dimensionality does rationally subsist, regardless of form. So, in all honesty, I don’t think it matters.

Well my view is that the thermodynamic finality driving the show is what needs to be built into the physics. And quantum decoherence is one of the ways that is being done, as is the de Sitter cosmology that builds in a conformal spacetime geometry - a holographic closure that brings an end to effective space, time and energy.

So Peirce can be said to have envisioned the Cosmos as a dissipative structure. And Big Bang cosmology is cashing out that metaphysics as physics.

The difference is obviously that the Heat Death does not seem such a triumphant cosmic achievement from a human self-centred view.

It would be puzzling that all of history would be so marvellously organised to eventually result in … us. But now the future only holds the relentless onwards project of finishing off the infinite nothingness of a cosmos that is its fully matured condition as a universalised heat sink. — apokrisis

This view is still constrained by a linear, anthropocentric relation to a four-dimensional universe. So it’s effectively a similar heuristic reduction to the one we made in forming our initial, naive understanding of time. The future of Heat Death you describe IS the most probable - mathematically speaking and given an essential perspective of cosmology that renders itself invariable.

But the truth is that our perspective as such is neither essential, nor invariable, and this numerical order we rely on is a value structure we have only arbitrarily applied to our statistically variable measurements/observation of the world. It’s a paradigm shift the likes of which we haven’t encountered since Copernicus - and he at least had mathematical values to rely on.

In The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli documented the dismantling of our assumptions in relation to what we call ‘time’, and reconfigured this four-dimensional reality, not as objects in a linear relation to time, but more accurately as interacting events. There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’. Particularly if we differentiate it as a triadic relational structure: value, significance and potentiality. But I get that physics doesn’t venture this far without a lifeline that assumes, for instance, that value IS significant... to us.

There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’. — Possibility

But there is a very obvious reason.

Any claims about quality have to be qualified by quantification. And that is both the scientific method and Peircean pragmatism.

We can’t ignore the fact that theory and measurement go together as a system of mutual constraint. That is the basis of universal reasonableness which Peirce recognised himself.

Hell, his job was to define the standard metre - with all the metaphysical sophistication that such an idea represents.

He had already foreseen the possibility that the geometry of space was non-Euclidean by arguing measuring the angles of a very large triangle would reveal if it did not add up to 180 degrees and so was curved.

He co-wrote a pioneering psychophysics paper that looked at people’s ability to judge fine differences in small weights.

The last person you could cite in support of an unmoored metaphysics of value, quality or idea would be Peirce. His whole thing was about how any claim about qualities hat to be, in practice, supported by acts of quantification.

While we are at, his theory of perception follows the naturalistic evolving block universe approach.

The answer to the Experience-Truth Gap in philosophy of perception is not to split the object of perception in two – postulating one object that is unreal but is actually perceived, and a second object that is real but ‘lies behind’ the first and is only inferred.

Rather than two objects, the answer is time. The percipuum is not a temporal particular. It occurs across a time- span which has at its ‘back end’ a memory of the immediate past (which Peirce calls the ponecipuum) and at its ‘front end’ an expectation of the immediate future (the antecipuum).

This time-span - of effectively infinitesimal duration - forms a ‘moving window’ in which each new perception enters the mind at the ‘front end’ in the form of anticipation just as the most recent falls back into memory. This internal structure is what endows the perception with its meaning.

https://core.ac.uk/download/29202694.pdf

The guy just didn’t miss a trick, did he? :lol:

There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’.
— Possibility

But there is a very obvious reason.

Any claims about quality have to be qualified by quantification. And that is both the scientific method and Peircean pragmatism.

We can’t ignore the fact that theory and measurement go together as a system of mutual constraint. That is the basis of universal reasonableness which Peirce recognised himself. — apokrisis

The last person you could cite in support of an unmoored metaphysics of value, quality or idea would be Peirce. His whole thing was about how any claim about qualities hat to be, in practice, supported by acts of quantification. — apokrisis

In practice, sure, and likewise with claims about quantity to be supported by acts of qualification, ie. observation. And yet theoretical physics. Objectively, there is no primacy here: there is quality, logic and form. And whether we quantify quality by measurement or qualify a quantity by observation, potential information is subject to the same level of constraint in practice.

But prior to quantifying quality (applying it to reality), we can consider it as potentiality in the form of a paradoxical relation. Quality in a formal relation to logic. We’re not ignoring anything here. Qualitative potentiality, prior to application, is no less reasonable than quantum potentiality.

Eventually, yes, it does interact with a logical form, just as quantum potentiality interacts with a qualitative form, a measurement device. This doesn’t preclude theoretical physicists from generating unqualifiable theories about the logic of reality. So speculation on unquantifiable theories about quality would be no less reasonable, despite the sense of it being ‘unmoored’. The key is to find a logical system that supports variable quality without constraining potentiality. Mathematics is not that system.

The Tao Te Ching is an example of what I’m thinking of. The extent of quantification is in the individual Chinese characters as qualities, ideas, which have a variable meaning in relation to each other within the language. To a self-conscious observer in formal relation to the language as a logical structure, the ideas make sense and the theory is supported in practice. But it’s quantifiable ONLY in this linguistic configuration. When we try to translate the text into English, the theory becomes uncertain and subjective. It is no longer configured as quality in potential relation to a logical form. There are parallels to be drawn here with the many interpretations of quantum physics.

It is Peirce’s triadism that can help to ground what may seem ‘unmoored’, by insisting on a relational structure of three aspects where only one or two are argued.

Quality in a formal relation to logic. — Possibility

Hey. That’s my argument! :grin:

The key is to find a logical system that supports variable quality without constraining potentiality. Mathematics is not that system. — Possibility

But mathematics models the relation.

Metaphysics arrives as its ultimate qualities via the dialectic or dichotomy, which is a reciprocal or inverse relation. So in Yin-Yang fashion, this is a self-quantifying approach to qualities. Thesis and antithesis meet synthesis in the degree to which each it’s not its “other”.

To be discrete is not to be continuous. And vice versa. And this dichotomisation of possibility is mathematically expressed as a reciprocal relation. Discrete = 1/continuous. And continuous = 1/discrete.

Each is the limit on its other. Each is the unit which is thus the basis of measurement or quantification in regard to that other.

I can measure discreteness in the world to the degree I can measure no continuity. And vice versa. And that is expressible as the simplest mathematical relation.

It is Peirce’s triadism that can help to ground what may seem ‘unmoored’, by insisting on a relational structure of three aspects where only one or two are argued. — Possibility

Note how the mathematical expression requires the three things that include the unit 1 as its identity element or swivel. It represents the symmetry that connects and which then gets broken.

If we write it out in full, it becomes clearer.

Discrete/1 = 1/continuous. The unit 1 as the symmetry breaking pivot that inverts the relation is present on both sides, but switches sign from being the denominator to the numerator.

Try this reciprocal function on any metaphysical dichotomy that takes your fancy and see how it works.

The familiar ones are chance-necessity, matter-form, flux-stasis, whole-part, one-many, infinite-infinitesimal, atom-void, local-global, rotation-translation, digital-analog, figure-ground, signal-noise, and so on an on

It is the universal trick that allows measurement. We can only ever ground an act of measurement in terms of a claim of what is, within the context of all that it is thus not.