Ok... so you're basically saying that the fundamental-emergent framework can be replaced by another system of reference, by eliminating the ''fundamental". By doing so, emergentism disappears.
AM I right? — Eugen

To return you to your own thread, I was only pointing out that Zizek’s “theory of consciousness” looks to be not an externalist/objective discourse but an internalist/subjective discourse. You want to do physics. He wants to do phenomenology.

I then make the point that a Peircean metaphysics let’s you flip from one to the other. That is why it is metaphysically deeper, more fundamental.

PoMo is stuck in its own distorting hall of mirrors as it is not speaking in ways that connect the subjective to the objective. Reductionist science likewise is a discourse that stands forever outside the subjectivity it might want to describe. It has an observer problem at a fundamental level, as quantum physics so well demonstrates.

So you can’t get a tale of physical mechanism from Zizek’s psychoanalytic babble. Or at least you would be hard pushed to see how he is talking about the kind of psychological mechanisms like the optic flow phenomenon I mentioned.

If you want to understand consciousness or emergence as physicalist phenomena then that is perfectly possible. As I say, Friston’s Bayesian Brain is state of the art as it makes a mathematical strength connection between information and entropy when describing an organism as being in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world.

This is what a systems scientist understands to be proper “strong emergence”. The irreducibly triadic thing of a semiotic modelling relation.

And if you want to employ the full resources of Peircean metaphysics, you can even rewrite cosmology so that it is triadic and not dualistic - split by quantum theory into the disconnected realms of the “real” wavefunction and its “mystic” collapse. You can heal that wound too.

The starting point is to realise that most debates about emergence are rooted in the confusions of reductionist thought. Strong reductionism sets itself up to win out over the warm and fuzzy holist sentiment. Actual emergence can’t even be imagined from within this metaphysical mindset.

You have to read Peirce and other systems thinkers - even Hegel - to understand how reality could arise as a self-organising causal structure.

Emergence is now a word thoroughly corrupted by metaphysical reductionism. And that is unfortunate as it does describe how a crisp structure of reality might develop out of the vague mists of uncertainty - an Apeiron or Ungrund as Anaximander and Schelling put it, before Peirce came along with his own Vagueness and Firstness.

Bro, are you going to ignore all my questions? — Eugen

From now on.

If you have any thoughts on the Chinese Room, I'd be glad to hear them. How is understanding Chinese 'more' than (in this context) reliably translating it ? Searle seems to just assume that the instruction book can't contain intelligence, though it's obviously the brains of the operation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

======================================QUOTE

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle goes on to say, “The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”

@Eugen I hope you enjoyed your encounter with apohotep

What about the virus metaphor then ? AI tempts us to make more of it. — plaque flag

Or is it the Second Law’s way of luring us into building more heat-dissipating data farms? Entropy sits out there chortling. Look, I’ve got these little critters obsessed with flipping silicon switches millions of times a second in ways that use up a shit-load of energy.

Hey, what if I could get them to invent some kind of new money system that required ridiculous amounts of CPU to operate? The value of this crypto could be completely in the minds of those trading - not connected to their physical reality at all. Yet they would all got out and become their own data mining enterprises. Flipping meaningless switches and not thinking about the climate change idiocy of that.

So you can impute mind to the grids of switches. But you may as well grant it to the Second Law that is the ultimate telos of the Big a bang Cosmos.

This is some of what I'm getting at. What do we think this core of being is ? The thereness of the there ? The pure witness ? the givenness of the given ? a glowing plenitude ineffably present ? — plaque flag

Optic flow shows how selfhood is the still centre of its own entropic flow. Dissipative structure is all about the regulation of uncertainty. A vortex is an effective structure imposed on thermal chaos. It is the thing that exists in dynamically stable fashion because it connects an entropic potential to its entropic destiny. A vortex holds still, perennially reforming the same gurgling twist, for as long as it can maintain a greater rate of entropy production - drain your bath faster than would be the case if the bath just had to rely on an inefficient and unstructured glugging at the plug hole.

So life and mind are just dissipative structures like vortexes, with the exception that a code is added to create intelligence. A modelling relation where the vortex can figure out where the entropy gradients are in its environment and go chase them.Tornadoes and dust devils seem almost alive as they are indeed vortexes eating their way along gradients, as if in pursuit of each next self-sustain bite of warm surface air to funnel up into the colder sky above.

You can do the human thing of imagining there is some greater world of “mind” that dissipative structure is heir to. But the human condition is quite transparently prosaic.

Fossil fuel - the concentrated hydrocarbon of ancient Carboniferous swamps and half a billion years of anoxic plankton sediment - couldn’t be entropified as it was locked up in its geological tomb.

But once a critter got semiotically smart enough to find a reason to drill and burn - and indeed, could scale that entropic project exponentially by the invention of a culture of consumption limited only by its own population - then this is exactly what had to happen. That kind of still self at the centre of its own whirling vortex had to erupt in the form of collectives of humanoids.

Happiness for us humans is flow states - like Neal Cassidy steering the Magic Bus of hippies across the wide American expanse with his feet on the wheel.

Running a trail or any other skilled activity is the joy of being the still centre of an energetic flow, regulating chaos and uncertainty in a way that keeps building the core self that outpaces its world in terms of delivering what the Second Law demands even faster than it knew was possible.

A vortex holds still, perennially reforming the same gurgling twist, for as long as it can maintain a greater rate of entropy production - drain your bath faster than would be the case if the bath just had to rely on an inefficient and unstructured glugging at the plug hole. — apokrisis

I was recently thinking about just this structure, which is really as beautiful as it gets. Philosophers used to talk about whether rivers could be stepped in twice. Vortices are better. Correct me if I am wrong, the but the main idea of dissipative structures is right here.

The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. — plaque flag

Searle nailed it even better when he talks about simulated carburettors. You need actual meaningful dissipation to count as being real.

If you read my post on biophysics, you should be able to see how real symbol processing is not about flipping switches for flipping’s sake. The switches are ratchets that keep pointing the dissipative system in the direction it is designed to go.

A metabolic reaction could go either way. An organic molecule could form and as easily fall apart. Genetic information flips the switch so that the structure keeps reforming - at the cost of another small jolt of energy expenditure. The discharge of a few ATPs.

So switching creates the information patterns. But it also ratchets the metabolic discharges in a way that produces the still self surfing it’s own entropic flow.

In semiosis, switches have a foot in both camps - what we call the mental and the physical. There is thus no explanatory gap. The switch is acting simultaneously on both sides of the equation, getting mental and physical work done.

Computers are by design software patterns physically isolated from their thermal worlds. The computer is always plugged in, always cooled, always operating in a fashion that ensures it has no physical limitations on its Turing Engine mechanisms.

So computers are not functioning semiotically as organisms. They are engineered not to be doing that. And no amount of extra computing capacity or data is going to change that designed-in fact.

Time to stop worrying about the fantasies of machines becoming conscious. The legitimate concern is how humans are drifting away from a pragmatic relation to their entropic realities as a cultural trend.

A modelling relation where the vortex can figure out where the entropy gradients are in its environment and go chase them. — apokrisis

:up:

Yes, that makes sense.

You can do the human thing of imagining there is some greater world of “mind” that dissipative structure is heir to. But the human condition is quite transparently prosaic. — apokrisis

That's just it. I lean toward mind being 'just' 'material' or embodied, patterns of human doings (noises and marks and facial expressions ) in time and space. But I fight the usual biases to think so. There 'is' feeling. There 'is' color. Under or beyond the concept. Maybe this is weird because I'm thinking too reductively. Problem of the being of meaning, of the meaning of being.

Happiness for us humans is flow states - like Neal Cassidy steering the Magic Bus of hippies across the wide American expanse with his feet on the wheel.

Running a trail or any other skilled activity is the joy of being the still centre of an energetic flow, regulating chaos and uncertainty in a way that keeps building the core self that outpaces its world in terms of delivering what the Second Law demands even faster than it knew was possible. — apokrisis

:up:

Time to stop worrying about the fantasies of machines becoming conscious. — apokrisis

Just to be clear, I'm 'worried' instead that we humans are not conscious, that we are 'only' computers.

You need actual meaningful dissipation to count as being real. — apokrisis

:up:

Ignoring AI for a moment, do you think it possible in principle to create simple synthetic life, such a nanobots that make copies of themselves ?

but here's a key example ? — plaque flag

A vortex is universal. It is the marriage of the Cosmos fundamental degrees of dynamical freedom - rotation and translation. If you flatten the chaos of 3D into the holding pattern of a 2D plane, then the third dimension can be used to create the focal direction of the motion. Force can be projected in a meaningful fashion.

Vortexes organise the universe all the way up to black holes with their accretion disks, spiralling galaxies and even wheeling galactic clusters.

But the other standard entropic pattern is fractal fracturing. A crumbling over all scales. An inverse story of force being projected in a single direction and splintering in a way that allows it to completely fill a 3D space with its dissipated energy.

The physicalist’s dichotomy that gives us the structure of the materially dissipating world.

But the other standard entropic pattern is fractal fracturing. A crumbling over all scales. An inverse story of force being projected in a single direction and splintering in a way that allows it to completely fill a 3D space with its dissipated energy. — apokrisis

:up:

That is awesome. Thanks ! Beautiful stuff.

There 'is' feeling. There 'is' color. Under or beyond the concept. — plaque flag

Yep. Theory can only reach as far as the counterfactual. We have to accept that as the pragmatic limit of explanation - or the modelling relation.

We want to answer why red is red, why there is a something and not nothing. But this is then bumping up against the limit of the counterfactual.

We can point to the brain’s opponent channel processing algorithms and say why red isn’t green. It is written right into the receptive fields of the cone cells. Red light turns it on and green light turns it off.

But then why red as red? There is now no evidence in terms of a cone cell that could be doing all the same algorithmic things and yet produce some other experience for a good reason.

So counterfactual reason comes with its counterfactual limits. Science halts when there is no difference that can be observed in terms of a measure that a theory might suggest.

Or as Bateson put it - the semiotician’s motto - we have to have a difference that makes a difference. That is what separates meaning from noise. At the limit of inquiry lies the vagueness of differences not making a difference. Anything might be possible and thus nothing can be certainty. Or as Wittgenstein put, nothing can be said.

And that’s alright. You still have all of neuroscience and all of cosmology to cross before you can claim to be anywhere close to reaching this confounding boundary to the possibilities of human knowledge.

Just to be clear, I'm 'worried' instead that we humans are not conscious, that we are 'only' computers. — plaque flag

We are organisms. We are in a pragmatic modelling relation with reality. We beat all other known organisms by modelling reality at four levels of organismic organisation - genes, neurons, words and numbers. We are capable of conscious surprise at truths on all levels from chemistry to abstract mathematical patterns.

Do you think any computer was ever surprised by anything? When we have good reason to think that about some dumb box, plugged into a socket and mindlessly radiating its heat, then perhaps something new might be up.

Do you think any computer was ever surprised by anything? When we have good reason to think that about some dumb box, plugged into a socket and mindlessly radiating its heat, then perhaps something new might be up. — apokrisis

I don't think so. I'm just curious about the boundary, what might count as surprise.

What you are writing is helpful and appreciated, just to be clear.

Or as Bateson put it - the semiotician’s motto - we have to have a difference that makes a difference. That is what separates meaning from noise. — apokrisis

:up:

Yes. I think you see what I am getting at. There 'seems' to be a residue that can't be scraped. But maybe it's nonsense to say so. Weird stuff.

Perhaps this residue is what is meant by vagueness.

here 'seems' to be a residue that can't be scraped. — plaque flag

Or is it that there is some uncertainty that can’t be constrained?

Dictionaries try to constrain the meaning of words so that we must come to share the exact same interpretation. But in the end, we can only converge on a pragmatically “good enough” agreement in our collective behaviour. There is always a “residue” that is left vague and unspecified.

But that is a feature, not a bug. It makes minds - as interpreters of signs - creative, flexible, efficient, fault-tolerant. All the things the vagueness intolerant computer can’t cope with.

Of course, computer architectures can shift from pure Turing machines and try to implement neural-like systems. Even a small step in this direction creates a powerful new technology.

The gap becomes that between the living organism - where the genetic information is in such intimate relation with its biochemical milieu that it is controlling it at the quantum decoherence level - and the neural network simulation which still fakes any actual involvement with a physical world.

Thus AI can swim as if it were a real creature in the realm of pixels on a LED display. Humans will read it as really thinking and acting, judging by pictures and print on a display. But it is Searle’s carburettor. Nothing depends on the computation moving any atom or particle with quantum level precision in the real world. Life uses genetics to move electrons and protons with military precision.

So life constantly faces the chance of a surprise every time an electron quantum tunnels across the seven of so iron-sulphur receptors of a respiratory chain protein. Error would release so much energy too fast that it would blow the protein up. Life has skin in the game at the quantum level.

All AI systems are simulations of neural like processes operating in the sterile and risk-free environment of a metal box with a surge protected power supply and cooling fans. They interact with the world by switching pixels off on on. Maybe there will be a human there to interpret them. But who - on the AI side - knows or cares?

Chalk and cheese. Where do we see technology being able to reach down into entrails of the nanoscale quantum chemistry? The entropic forces of the battering storm of water molecules would blast any fabricated hardware apart in a millionth of a second. Only a self-repairing biology can ratchet this wild and utterly alien physical environment.

To make artificial life, we would in fact have to make real life. And real life already makes itself, thank you very much.

I’ve checked this guy out on YouTube and he gesticulates and salivates less these days when he talks which makes him a more likeable communist in my eyes. The last thing people want is communists spitting at each other when talking …hydration is becoming scarce these days so I urge all communists to save their saliva.

As to his ideas of consciousness I’m not surprised he agrees with some of the latest neuroscience ideas although with a bit of bite of his own as is customary of him.

I meant to add that Peirce defined vagueness logically as that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply (and then generality as that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply).

So what that says is vagueness is the residue left when you have a dichotomous or bivalent frame - the question of whether something is A or not-A - and can only declare there is no evidence one way of the other to decide the matter. Uncertainty is maximal as neither thesis, nor antithesis, can be positively claimed.

This grounds metaphysics in differences that don’t make a difference. You can have an Apeiron - unbounded fluctuation - which is neither a presence nor an absence. It is an everythingness in terms of potential and a nothingness in terms of actuality.

Being requires counterfactual definiteness, and so vagueness is the ground of that bivalent becoming. Distinctions can arise when distinctions clearly wind up standing against each other.

Peirce constructed his whole metaphysics around this further logical manoeuvre - recognising vagueness or Firstness as the absence of positive contradiction to be found in noisy and restless spontaneity. The nothingness that is an everythingness before it gains its dichotomised logical structure to become a definite somethingness - a realm where the PNC and LEM could concretely apply.

We are organisms. We are in a pragmatic modelling relation with reality. We beat all other known organisms by modelling reality at four levels of organismic organisation - genes, neurons, words and numbers. We are capable of conscious surprise at truths on all levels from chemistry to abstract mathematical patterns. — apokrisis

Do you think Dawkins gets how this happened right ? In general ? Is all this delicate complexity the result of millions of years of research and development the old fashioned way ?

Is our chemistry special ? I can imagine other planets having different kinds of life. Granted that we don't have the skill to create life yet, is it possible in principle ?

Is something like consciousness fundamental in your view ? I can't tell. I might be stuck in reductionist goggles, but I'm trying to bend the spoon by bending my mind.

So what that says is vagueness is the residue left when you have a dichotomous or bivalent frame - the question of whether something is A or not-A - and can only declare there is no evidence one way of the other to decide the matter. Uncertainty is maximal as neither thesis, nor antithesis, can be positively claimed. — apokrisis

:up:

This makes sense to me, and I guess it doesn't sound like the thereness of the there, or the transconceptual redness of the rose (which may be nonsense, that's the issue.)

o you think Dawkins gets how this happened right ? — plaque flag

I haven’t read a word of Dawkins for 40 years. But even then it was clear that in pushing the blind evolutionary algorithm for everything, he was missing the other half of the biological story that is self-organising development. Dissipative structure just wants to be. Evolvability evolved as a consequence of that telos.

Is our chemistry special ? I can imagine other planets having different kinds of life. — plaque flag

Nick Lane’s The Vital Question argues otherwise. Only carbon works. Redox metabolism has to be universal as it provides the greatest chemical entropy gradient. So while the Dawkins argue evolution can lead to many solutions, the developmentalists and structuralists argue that life is tightly constrained as to the form it must take. Solutions converge on the metabolism that extracts the most in dissipative terms.

Again read my biophysics post. Life exists because there is something special in terms of the physics of the nanoscale quasi-classical “convergence zone” where semiotics can take root.

s something like consciousness fundamental in your view ? I can't tell. I might be stuck in reductionist goggles, but I'm trying to bend the spoon by bending my mind. — plaque flag

Nothing is fundamental in the kind of monistic sense you mean. What is “fundamental” is the whole triadic shebang of the Peircean system. Holism says self organisation supplies it own ground of being.

What do you think Hegel was trying to argue?

Dissipative structure just wants to be. Evolvability evolved as a consequence of that telos. — apokrisis

Is the second law basically mathematical ? Something like the law of large numbers ? Is it basically the fact that there are more states that we call disordered than there are ordered states --- so that any change of state is likely to be toward disorder ?

How does one grasp this telos best ?

Life exists because there is something special in terms of the physics of the nanoscale quasi-classical “convergence zone” where semiotics can take root. — apokrisis

I actually did read it. I think I understand the importance of the 'junction' (basically free to ride.)

What do you think Hegel was trying to argue? — apokrisis

At the moment, I think he saw us as historically constrained (timebinding) but otherwise freefloating creators of our own mutating normative essence. [Semantics is normative. We decide/perform what we mean, create our signs. ] We are beings with a history rather than a nature, existing mostly as what we take ourselves to be.

Any thoughts on Stuart Kauffman ? He seemed legit in a couple of video lectures.

What is “fundamental” is the whole triadic shebang of the Peircean system. Holism says self organisation supplies it own ground of being. — apokrisis

If it fits in at all, where does consciousness fit in ? Does it play a crucial role ? Perhaps you've already said it and I didn't understand.

But in the end, we can only converge on a pragmatically “good enough” agreement in our collective behaviour. There is always a “residue” that is left vague and unspecified. — apokrisis

If you are interested, Brandom is great on Hegel (and it address what's above.)
***************
Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.

All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
...

There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions. This normative sort of necessity is not only compatible with freedom, it is constitutive of it. That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about. Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of selfconsciousness Hegel calls “Absolute knowing.”