hypostatization (reification) — NOS4A2

It is this conflation that I think is near the core of your misunderstanding.

Reification is "unjustifiable imputing of reality" whereas Hypostatization is "unjustifiable imputing of substance". See this excellent blog post on the distinction.

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/01/reification-and-hypostatization-.html

Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. He would be reifying, were consciousness lacking ontological basis. It does have it, just not as as substance. It is more akin to computation. The brain has a capacity to experience like a computer has a capacity to compute. Consciousness and computation are not substances, they are informational properties of substances.

If that's all Apo is saying then I agree, probably. — bert1

He's saying a whole lot more than that. But the cell as a self-defining self, as membrane and contents seems to be the beginning of that caring that gives meaning to anything. Cells have attitude! From that plus many more layers comes the predictive model that includes a self-model that becomes human consciousness

He's talking about self-consciousness, the kind of self you can be aware of and introspect, I believe. — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not a fan of Damasio. Only read his first book. But the answer is simple enough.

Conciousness is what brains do. As modelling, as semiosis, it is neurobiological awareness and self-hood. It is characterised by being “locked into the present tense, the immediate world”. An animal can of course have intentions and expectations, recognitions and plans. But it is being driven by the immediacies of the passing moment.

So this is as far as biology gets with the informational codes of genes and neurons. A sense of self that is firmly rooted in the present and intensely aware of the world in relation to that self, but not aware of objectively being that thing of “a self”. The animal just lives it’s selfhood. It lacks the resources to objectivity that selfhood as a “thing”.

Humans then have the further semiotic codes of words and numbers. We exist as social and now techological creatures because of language and logic. These are tools for objectifying our selfhood. We now have constructed social and technological contexts within which we model ourselves as selves living lives in the moment, but then also living in pasts and futures as actors in social dramas.

So humans are conscious in a far more complex way. We objectivise our subjectivity. We construct a narrative around out being - cultural narratives about perhaps being sensing souls inhabiting meat puppet bodies. Or whatever tale helps organise us as the social creatures we are.

Introspection is thus a learnt and language scaffolds skill. We learn as infants to pay attention to our own actions, feelings, plans, impulses, so as to be able to self-regulate and act within the accepted constraints of our social contexts.

Animals just live nakedly as selves in their environmental contexts. Humans double up their world model so that we are social beings in physical environments. Our behaviour has to make sense to us as bodies in the physical world, and also as actors in the social space we carry around with us everywhere we go.

He's saying a whole lot more than that. But the cell as a self-defining self, as membrane and contents seems to be the beginning of that caring that gives meaning to anything. Cells have attitude! From that plus many more layers comes the predictive model that includes a self-model that becomes human consciousness — unenlightened

Yes, that's what I understand Apo to have been saying for a while. I have no particular objection to that narrative as the origin of a complex self that starts to resemble some of the mental faculties of humans. I just don't think it helps getting from non-consciousness to consciousness. As I said, I think there is an important distinction between the self and consciousness.

That is certainly the important half of it. But to close the explanatory gap, the informational story has the be unified with the entropic story. And that is what has solidified over the past decade with the biophysics.

So meaning is the difference that makes a difference. That then leads to the notion of the mechanical switch that could be on or off, and that then is the informational difference that is also a physically meaningful difference.

Or even more meaningful as a mechanical device is the ratchet. A ratchet is a switch that embeds a direction. It channels the physics of the world in some desired fashion.

And when you get down to the level of enzymes and cell metabolism, you can see a network of switching behaviour, a system of nano-ratchets, that have the physical effect of constructing the living body - a complex of molecular reactions that intrinsically is falling apart as fast as it comes together. But genetic information is the secret sauce that ensures that it keeps falling together slightly faster than it can fall apart.

So biology is something new when it comes to physics. It operates semiotically. It creates a system of regulation that can use mechanical devices - molecular switches and ratchets - to maintain desired states of material order.

Neurons then extend that trick by ensuring behaviour at the organismic level is ratcheting its environment in ways that help the body to continue to hang together rather than do the other thing of fall apart.

So the microphysical basis of cognition is not simply an abstract notion of meaning as informational bits. Each bit has a physical cost associated. Each bit is also a ratcheting choice. Matter is being moved in an organismically desired direction by a code-controlled switch.

Hence no explanatory gap. The molecule can be a message. Unity is found in the Janus-faced switch that has its feet straddling the divide between the genetic and neuronal models and the falling apart entropic world that the models are instead quietly ensuring keeps falling back into the material patterns that we call bodies and selves.

The usual excuses and promises. You either have an argument or you don’t.

Hence — apokrisis

Hence!

Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. — hypericin

A great technical point. But isn’t he? He does jump around in what explanation he actually would favour. Sometimes it’s consciousness as a property of information - or finite state automata. Sometimes it is dual aspect monism where consciousness is a fundamental property of material being, like charge. Yet always it is as a substantial property - something that inheres in something with definite substantial being.

His logic leads him to need to site consciousness in microphysics somehow. But even physics is confused whether it’s essential substance is entropy or information. Chalmers just swims along with that conventional confusion. His answers don’t really stray very far from monism. He just wants to shoehorn dualism into his monism and so “close the explanatory gap”. :lol:

Hence — bert1

You are so low effort. This is where you identify the explanatory gap in terms of how a switch fails the task of connecting model to world in pragmatic fashion. Where are the unaccounted causes at this microphysical level of analysis?

But the model isn't consciousness

Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. — hypericin

True. But at the end of the day, he doesn't claim to be able to explain first person data. He wants science to do that. :smile:

Assertions ain’t arguments. So move to strike, m’lud.

Consciousness is the capacity to experience. A model of the world used to make predictions is a model of the world used to make predictions. The one isn't the other. They're conceptually distinct.

...meaning is the difference that makes a difference.... — apokrisis

Indeed.

Hey Apo!

We both know our positions differ in remarkable ways. But the quote above shows the most important similarity between our views. The pivotal role of meaning...

All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience... after-all.

What is it like to be a bat?

It is the sum total of meaningful correlations drawn between different things by the bat.

Consciousness is the capacity to experience. — bert1

Define experience in a way that could break out of your hermeneutic circle.

What are its measurables from the microphysicalist perspective you want to take as a Panpsychist?

What useful role does consciousness play outside of “experiencing”? In what sense is it causal precisely?

:up:

Consciousness is the capacity to experience. — bert1

"Consciousness is experiencing." seems a more realistic statement to me.

Someone under anesthesia might be said to have the capacity to experience, but that person isn't at that moment either conscious or experiencing.

Or even more meaningful as a mechanical device is the ratchet. A ratchet is a switch that embeds a direction. It channels the physics of the world in some desired fashion. — apokrisis

Wait a minute, how does "desire" enter this scenario? "Desired fashion", implies that the channel, or direction is chosen. What do you think acta as the agent which does the choosing?

The organism is defined by its capacity for such agency or intentionality. As a bare minimum, an organism must have the kind of modelling relation with the world that counters the prevailing entropifying tendencies of that world.

As I said, step one to even being an organism and hence expressing agency is to be able to direct the metabolic traffic in the direction of continuing to fall together and so resist falling apart.

Are these things that hard to understand? :confused:

I can accept that distinction, but I think it’s a distinction without a difference when it comes to dualism. It seems to me property dualists have merely adopted the language of physics in order to smuggle in their substances.

Are these things that hard to understand? — apokrisis

No, not hard for me to understand at all, that all seems very evident to me. I think it's difficult to understand the wording though, when we use words of human intention like "desire", to refer to such fundamental biological activities. "Desire" seems to be attributable to the whole, in general use, but here you use it as if a tiny part of the organism possesses desire. But more precisely, you use it as if the parts are directed by desire.

When we look at "desire" as an attributed of the whole, as what directs the tiny "ratchets" or switches, then what can we attribute this desire to in the coming into being of organic matter? Suppose that each tiny part of the living organism, when it comes into being, is directed in this sort of way, by a desire toward some end, then where does this desire toward an end come from? We do not see it in inanimate objects, they possess no tiny ratchets directed by desire. So when the living organism came into existence, and its parts were directed by desire, where did this desire come from?

Define experience in a way that could break out of your hermeneutic circle. — apokrisis

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. In any case it's not my job to define 'experience' by fiat. The definition, or concept of consciousness, I take to be a given. One place it is given is in dictionaries. The definition is not up to us. Philosophers can attempt to refine and clarify a little perhaps, if a dictionary definition is not quite clear enough or we want to isolate a particular sense, but basically the definition of consciousness is public property. I think "the capacity to have experiences" captures the relevant sense fairly well.

If you want to define the word differently, please go ahead, but then we may not end up talking about the same thing.

What are its measurables from the microphysicalist perspective you want to take as a Panpsychist? — apokrisis

What is the 'it' you are referring to? Experience? I'm not a microphysicalist. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking.

What useful role does consciousness play outside of “experiencing”? In what sense is it causal precisely?

That's a good question. I'm not sure, but I'm considering the possibility that all causation is psychological, or at least reducible to the psychological. So the difference that consciousness makes is that without it, nothing would happen at all. I've been meaning to start a thread about that for a while to think it through, but haven't got to it.

Holism and its downward causation should resolve your confusion. The whole shapes its parts in accord with its global desires. The parts reconstruct that whole by expressing that desire at the microphysical level of falling together rather than falling apart.

So the genome encodes the necessary directions. The metabolism ratchets the flow that maintains the resulting fabric of the organism.

In any case it's not my job to define 'experience' by fiat. The definition, or concept of consciousness, I take to be a given. — bert1

Of course you do. You can speak the words. But you can’t tell us what you mean. That would be to provide an actual argument in this forum.

I'm not sure, but I'm considering the possibility that all causation is psychological, or at least reducible to the psychological. So the difference that consciousness makes is that without it, nothing would happen at all. I've been meaning to start a thread about that for a while to think it through, but haven't got to it. — bert1

Jesus wept.

Holism and its downward causation should resolve your confusion. The whole shapes its parts in accord with its global desires. The parts reconstruct that whole by expressing that desire at the microphysical level of falling together rather than falling apart. — apokrisis

The problem is that the microphysical is known to be prior in time to the larger and more complex physical "whole", as simple life forms are prior in time to complex life forms. So it is impossible that downward causation from the complex whole can construct the simple parts which exist prior to the complex whole. Therefore the "desire" which shapes the simple parts must be prior to the physical parts, as well as prior to the physical whole.

The problem is that the microphysical is known to be prior in time to the larger and more complex physical "whole" — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. Only reductionists think that way.

As Stanley Salthe puts it, hierarchically organised systems come to be the contexts of their own microphysics. That is what Peircean semiosis is all about.

...constraints from the higher level not only help to select the lower level-trajectory but also pull it into its future at the same time. Top-down causality is a form of final causality’

(Development and Evolution 1993, p.270)

...constraints from the higher level not only help to select the lower level-trajectory but also pull it into its future at the same time. Top-down causality is a form of final causality’

(Development and Evolution 1993, p.270)

Elementary discrete dynamical systems move forward one step at a time, iterating a function. With feedback from "above" that iteration could become a composition sequence of many functions, not simply an iteration of an unchanging function. This kind of stuff is right down my alley. I'll have to give it a look. Thanks for elucidating this concept. :cool:

Check Scott Kelso perhaps. His Dynamic Patterns models this kind of stuff in equations…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224982322_Dynamic_Patterns_The_Self-Organization_of_Brain_and_Behavior

Check Scott Kelso perhaps. His Dynamic Patterns models this kind of stuff in equations… — apokrisis

I'm liking the first paragraph. It shows 'he gets it'. For a long time starling murmurrations have seemed to me the best succinct way of conveying my view of the goings on in our brains.

Nope. Only reductionists think that way. — apokrisis

It's scientific knowledge, often referred to as "fact", commonly known as evolution. Complex organized structures have evolved from less complex microscopic structures. Therefore it is well known that the complex organized structure is posterior in time to the microscopic organized structure, and so cannot be the cause of the organization which exists within the microscopic organized structure. You can call science "reductionist thinking", in a derogatory way if you like, but that in no way proves the scientific knowledge (knowledge derived from empirical evidence) to be wrong, it's just a type of ad hom. .