There's Apokrisis 'pansemeiosis' which puts meaning as fundamental, or near-fundamental, and then, by stages, as complex systems evolve, they gain more of the constituents of consciousness (attention, predictive ability, some other stuff (can't remember)) until eventually we have a creature that can be said to be fully conscious.
Personally I don't think that touches the hard problem, — bert1
Nothing can exist except by being a system that marries Aristotle’s four causes in bottom-up “material” construction and top-down “immaterial” constraint fashion. — apokrisis
Nothing can exist except by being a system that marries Aristotle’s four causes in bottom-up “material” construction and top-down “immaterial” constraint fashion. — apokrisis
I think that since intention is personal, the immaterial final cause acts in a bottom-up freedom fashion. — Metaphysician Undercover
I wonder if those could be conceived as analogous to the fundamental existence-enabling constraints identified in cosmology (e.g. Martin Rees' 'six numbers')? — Wayfarer
:fire: :100:The constants of nature are ratios or balances. So they are “fundamental numbers” that emerge from processes in opposition.
The take home is that physics sounds reductionist to most ears, but it is actually structuralist in its metaphysics.
Reality is neither fundsmentally classical, nor even quantum. These are just the two matched limit state descriptions ... — apokrisis
Unlike [the] other constants, which have units associated with them, α is a truly dimensionless constant, which means it is simply a pure number, with no units associated with it at all. While the speed of light might be different if you measure it in meters per second, feet per year, miles per hour, or any other unit, α always has the same value. For this reason, it's considered to be one of the fundamental constants that describes our Universe.
It's a philosophical point - that the value in question is invariant, doesn't change over time, has no units associated with it //and furthermore that it exists only as a measurement//. — Wayfarer
Think of a mathematical constant like pi, e or phi. Are they values or are they ratios? — apokrisis
Nothing can exist except by being a system that marries Aristotle’s four causes in bottom-up “material” construction and top-down “immaterial” constraint fashion. — apokrisis
The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds . . . that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal toil lume naturale. . . . The value of Facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real – the object of its worship and its aspiration.
The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one's being, and will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they [are] ideal and eternal verities. — C S Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, HUP 1992
And the point about the 'fine structure constants' is not that they're 'spooky' but that they're irreducible - no reason can be given for why they are just as they are — Wayfarer
And Peirce, as you well know, obtained to a form of scholastic realism. — Wayfarer
Hence you aren’t a structuralist or systems thinker. — apokrisis
But my structuralist or systems metaphysics is saying that they are irreducibly complex. Thus not reducible to monistic simples. However capable of being reduced or explained as an inevitable relation, such as is represented by a ratio. — apokrisis
Yes, the properties of matter are not adequate to produce or explain subjective experience. — Eugen
:100:Currently not understanding exactly how matter and energy interact to create a subjective experience does not negate the observed fact that matter and energy can interact to make a subjective experience. — Philosophim
To say that something is "irreducibly complex" is to say that it cannot be represented by a ratio. — Metaphysician Undercover
By assuming only one boundary which separates "being part of the system" from "being not part of the system", anything which changes its status must cross that one boundary. But this renders certain aspects of reality as unintelligible, such as the entropy demanded by the second law,. — Metaphysician Undercover
That's right. I see significant flaws in systems theory. — Metaphysician Undercover
As you are an Aristotelean – albeit of the scholastic stripe – it is surprising you don't immediately get all this.
Aristotle is the inspiration for the systems science movement. He analysed the irreducible complexity of nature in logical detail with his four causes, hylomorphic substance, hierarchy theory, etc. — apokrisis
His hylomorphism spells out the basic Peircean triad of potentiality/actuality/necessity – the dichotomy of pure material potential and pure formal necessity which combine to create the third thing of actual or substantial material being. Prime matter plus Platonic constraints are the bottom-up and top-down that give you the hierarchy of manifest nature. A world of in-formed stuff.
The four causes expands this analysis to reveal the further dichotomies to the fundamental dichotomy.
The bottom-up constructive causes and top-down constraining causes are split by the dichotomy of the general and the particular. — apokrisis
This is the Siegel’s neat point about alpha. It speaks to the fact that the Cosmos evolves into a dichotomous story of atoms in a void. — apokrisis
I've seen your Aristotelian influence. you conflate formal cause with final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover
The pure potential of matter cannot properly act as a cause, so you need to place intention, final cause at the base of the "bottom-up constructive cause'. — Metaphysician Undercover
But this is inconsistent with the common notion of "emergence", because it is teleological and emergence is not. — Metaphysician Undercover
The issue is that the fine-structure constant are ontologically prior to anything evolving whatever. If they were different in some slight degree then there would be nothing to evolve. — Wayfarer
I just did the exact opposite of distinguishing them as the general and the particular when it comes to the downwardly acting constraints of a system.
The desire is the generality as it only cares for the achievement of its end, and not the particularity of the form needed to achieve it. — apokrisis
Of course chance and spontaneity – as the character of pure material potential - must be entrained by top-down finality to produce an in-formed stable state of actualisation. — apokrisis
Get to grips with the true Aristotle — apokrisis
But you need to get a grip on the true reality. Final causation is very clearly bottom-up. It is basic and fundamental to every action of organic matter, as purpose driven activities. You know that. So why do you claim final causation to be top-down, when you know that the purposefulness of living activities stems from the very existential base of the material organism? — Metaphysician Undercover
Talk about muddled blathering. Intention, will, is proper to the individual — Metaphysician Undercover
But finality is known to be a bottom-up cause, as the will, the cause of motion of the individual. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is just your special pleading for a theistic metaphysics. You haven't dealt with my naturalistic argument. — apokrisis
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