materialism, via absential materialism, offers an explanation how these supposed immaterial phenomena are really higher-order, emergent properties still grounded in lower-order, dynamical processes that are physical. — ucarr
Deacon is proposing a way of thinking about nature that is very different from previous forms of materialism - is it still materialism? — Wayfarer
MORPHODYNAMIC WORK
Thermodynamic orthograde processes are vastly more likely to appear spontaneously in the universe than morphodynamic orthograde processes. Correspondingly, examples of spontaneously occurring morphodynamic work are rare in comparison to thermodynamic work, and are also easily missed because their form is unfamiliar. To help identify them, we can begin by defining our search criteria by considering some thermodynamic analogies and disanalogies.
Any change of state is ultimately a thermodynamic change, but some thermodynamic changes are more complex than others. In describing forms of work that are more complex than thermodynamic work, we are not implying the existence of some new source of energy or a form of physical change that is independent of thermodynamic change, and certainly not an ineffable influence. Higher-order forms of work inevitably also involve—and indeed require— thermodynamic work as well.
So, surprisingly, this view of self shows it to be as non-material as Descartes might have imagined, and yet as physical, extended, and relevant to the causal scheme of things as is the hole at the hub of a wheel. — Terrence W. Deacon
I don't know if your interpretation of Deacon does justice to that element of his work. It seems to me you're intent on using it to defend the very kind of reductionism that he is seeking to ameliorate. — Wayfarer
Emergent properties have radically different agendas from their lower-order substrates, to which they remain bound and without which that could not exist — ucarr
Mind causes matter to change, move and work. A simple evidence? I am typing this text with my hands caused by my mind. If my mind didn't cause the hands to type, then this text would have not been typed at all.
Mind is immaterial substance. Although I know it is in me, and works for me in being conscious and perceive, think, feel, intuit and imagine etc, I cannot see it, touch it, or measure it. The mind has no physical or material existence, but it works for all the actions of humans as they please or want their bodies to perform or act according to their wills. — Corvus
Without body, the mind evaporates. Where the mind goes to is still a mystery. But one thing clear is that, mind is not body itself, and mind is not material. — Corvus
I am not familiar with the idea you tells, but I quickly scanned the internet search of the term. It sounds like teleodynamics of the ententional sounds like a type of evolutionary theory. I am not sure if evolutionary theory has strong grounds for its claims. It seems to have some interesting points but also many vague parts in the theory too. Anyhow, my standpoint for it is that matter alone, and evolution theory alone seem to have some problems in explaining fully on the mind / body problems. — Corvus
First of all, I'm not an Immaterialist or Idealist --- in the sense of denying material reality. Second, you conflate Material with Physical, whereas I think of them as separate aspects of Reality*1. For me, Material (chemistry) is concerned with the stuff we see & touch. But Physics (energy ; force) focuses on how stuff changes : growing, developing, becoming*2. That is an important philosophical distinction.All of the above: energy, mass and matter are material_physical. Your job, as immaterialist, involves showing the structure of the immaterial making causal contact with the material. — ucarr
Mind is a process or activity like respiration or digestion and not a static thing. Mind-ing is what sufficiently complex brains (which are material-physical systems) do. To ask "where is mind?" is nonsensical like asking "where is breathing?" or "where is walking?" — 180 Proof
Claiming mind is a process or activity like respiration or digestion and not a static thing sounds weird and illogical. And I never said anything about a static thing at all with mind, because my stance is mind is immaterial substance.... you claimed that mind is matter.
— Corvus
I did not "claim" this. :roll:
So you can't answer my questions ↪180 Proof. — 180 Proof
You must first know what you are asking about. :)Okay, I'll move on to someone who has some idea of what s/he is talking about. — 180 Proof
Your "If" statement is implying that it is not a relevant condition for the point, hence your concluding question in your statement is absurd. No one has been denying that brain is the location for the mind. It is a poor logic (again :D)If your brain were removed from your cranium, would you be using your hands to type messages to me? — ucarr
For that info, you must contact a neurologist, and they will be able to provide the info in detail to you. I am not a neurologist, hence I do not have the detailed info off hand.Our conversation here is specifically concerned with the location, structure and functioning of mind in relation to body. If you think we’re wrong in our thesis that mind emerged from matter via upwardly evolving, dynamical processes, then you need to specifically address that claim by pointing out its flaws. — ucarr
Thank you for your advice. I will try to do that. My point was trying to clarify on materialism for its problems in the theory.I think you should deepen your investigation beyond the level of quick scans on the internet. Doing so might empower you to more specifically address perceived flaws in the proffered explanations of the mind/body problem. — ucarr
…you misunderstand me… by confusing "void" (that's metaphysical, not just "physical") — 180 Proof
I'm not "saying" the atomists' void is a "higher-order" anything (that somehow transcends the physical). — 180 Proof
But the significance of what he calls abstentials is that while they have physical consequences, they're not physical in nature. — Wayfarer
With consciousness, Deacon says that sentience — the capacity to feel — arises from a system being self-sustaining and goal-directed. So he sees individual cells as sentient. But, as he explains, an animal's sentience is not the sum of the sentience of its individual cells: the nervous system creates its own sentience at the level of the whole animal. Yet Deacon doesn't get to grips with the hard problem of explaining why and how we and other animals have conscious experience.
Simply pointing to the neural activity associated with sentience is not enough to answer this question. What we need to know is why this activity feels pleasant or painful to the animal, instead of being an absence of feeling. In my view, Deacon's error is not that he has no answers to such questions (no one does), but that he fails to recognize them. — Evan Thompson
I'm not an Immaterialist or Idealist --- in the sense of denying material reality. — Gnomon
Your confusion seems to be based on your misunderstanding that my stance is some sort of an idealist. I am not an idealist
I am more in the direction of a dualist. A dualist accepts both mind and matter as different substance… — Corvus
But if they say, mind is not made of matter, then it is a pointless view. Because, of course it is not. In that case, they would be saying only matter is made up of matter, which is a tautology. — Corvus
Numbers, logical laws, principles, even scientific laws, are not existent as are chairs, tables, mountains, etc, but they are real as constituents of the meaning-world; perhaps they can be conceptualised as noumenal realities, as distinct from phenomenal existents. — Wayfarer
Do thoughts exist outside of the minds thinking them?
Do minds exist outside of the brains substrating them? — ucarr
Your questions and posts have been mostly based on the false assumptions and misunderstandings on the other party's stance. — Corvus
No I don't think I was going on sentiment at all. I was just letting the OP know why he was confused when he posts an addlepated questions like "I’m in your corner, but so far you have nothing to go on but sentiment. You could benefit from some more reading, starting with the book this thread is about. You may not agree with it, but considering Deacon’s arguments would be instructive. — Wayfarer
, when I have never denied the existence of brain for the precondition of mind.If your brain were removed from your cranium, would you be using your hands to type messages to me? — ucarr
I have never denied the existence of brain for the precondition of mind.
He also seem to think I was an idealist, which was not the case. If someone is not materialist, then it doesn't automatically place him into a position of being an idealist. — Corvus
Mind causes matter to change, move and work. A simple evidence? I am typing this text with my hands caused by my mind. If my mind didn't cause the hands to type, then this text would have not been typed at all. — Corvus
The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. It is not even the buzz of neuronal events that take place in your brain as you read them. What a sentence means, and what it refers to, lack the properties that something typically needs in order to make a difference in the world. The information conveyed by this sentence has no mass, no momentum, no electric charge, no solidity, and no clear extension in the space within you, around you, or anywhere. More troublesome than this, the sentences you are reading right now could be nonsense, in which case there isn’t anything in the world that they could correspond to. But even this property of being a pretender to significance will make a physical difference in the world if it somehow influences how you might think or act.
Obviously, despite this something not-present that characterizes the contents of my thoughts and the meaning of these words, I wrote them because of the meanings that they might convey.
:ok:Fair point. I don't agree much with ucarr either. I'm talking more about Deacon, which I give ucarr the credit for causing me (and no, that is not a matter of material causation!) to read more of. — Wayfarer
It is certainly an interesting writing in your quote. It sounds like a depiction of close link or cooperation between matter and ideas, rather than a standard materialism.This is very much the kind of observation that Deacon starts his book with:
The meaning of a sentence is not the squiggles used to represent letters on a piece of paper or a screen. It is not the sounds these squiggles might prompt you to utter. — Wayfarer
Do thoughts exist outside of the minds thinking them?
Do minds exist outside of the brains substrating them? — ucarr
The bottom-up account of such entities is that they are the product of lower-level processes, beginning at the level of physical and chemical interactions…
Deacon is concerned with just this issue. How intentional acts can have physical consequences, even though intentionality itself is not accomodated by physicalist accounts. That is the explanatory gap he's wanting to bridge.
I'm more open to the platonist perspective on this question that Deacon says he is. — Wayfarer
…I have never denied the existence of brain for the precondition of mind. — Corvus
The bottom-up account of such entities (minds and their thoughts) is that they are the product of lower-level processes, beginning at the level of physical and chemical interactions, which evolve in such a way as to give h. sapiens the ability to produce such ideas. This is the mainstream consensus.
Deacon is concerned with just this issue. How intentional acts can have physical consequences, even though intentionality itself is not accomodated by physicalist accounts. That is the explanatory gap he's wanting to bridge. — Wayfarer
I believe that only by working from the bottom up, tracing the ascent from thermodynamics to morphodynamics to teleodynamics and their recapitulation in the dynamics of brain function, will we be able to explain the place of our subjective experience (mind and its thoughts)* in this otherwise largely insentient universe. — Terrence W. Deacon
Reframing the concept of sentience in emergent dynamical terms will allow us to address questions that are not often considered to be subject to empirical neuroscientific analysis. Contrary to many of my neuroscience colleagues, I believe that these phenomena are entirely available to scientific investigation once we discover how they emerge from lower-level teleodynamic, morphodynamic, and thermodynamic processes. Even the so-called hard problem of consciousness will turn out to be reconceptualized in these terms. This is because what appeared to make it hard was our predisposition to frame it in mechanistic and computational terms, presuming that its intentional content must be embodied in some material or energetic substrate. As a result, the vast majority of descriptions of brain function tend to be framed in terms that not only fail to make the connection between the cellular-molecular processes at one extreme and the intentional features of mental experience at the other; they effectively pretend that making sense of this relationship is irrelevant to brain function. — Terrence W. Deacon
The current paradigm in the natural sciences conceives of causal properties on the analogy of some ultimate stuff, or as the closed and finite set of possible interactions between all the ultimate objects or particles of the universe. As we will see, this neat division of reality into objects and their interaction relationships, though intuitively reasonable from the perspective of human actions, is quite problematic. Curiously, however, modern physics has all but abandoned this billiard ball notion of causality in favor of a view of quantum processes, associated with something like waves of probability rather than discretely localizable stuff.
an animal's sentience is not the sum of the sentience of its individual cells: the nervous system creates its own sentience at the level of the whole animal. Yet Deacon doesn't get to grips with the hard problem of explaining why and how we and other animals have conscious experience. Simply pointing to the neural activity associated with sentience is not enough to answer this question. What we need to know is why this activity feels pleasant or painful to the animal, instead of being an absence of feeling. In my view, Deacon's error is not that he has no answers to such questions (no one does), but that he fails to recognize them. — Evan Thompson
Here he's expressing the idea that physics itself has undermined physicalism, insofar as this was conceived as being reliant on the existence of 'ultimate objects'. Instead, it suggests a process-oriented approach associated with "waves of probability" — Wayfarer
…how this can be described as materialism escapes me. — Wayfarer
… anything that exists does so as a consequence of the adaption of bottom up processes to top-down constraints. — Terrence W. Deacon
The other subtle point is that constraints themselves, which are central to his model, are top-down by nature. Top-down constraints impose order and coherence within a system by providing a framework or set of rules that guide the behavior of its parts. They are essential for ensuring that the system functions in a coherent and organized manner. In his model, anything that exists does so as a consequence of the adaption of bottom up processes to top-down constraints. — Wayfarer
Apparently you "know" what I say, but not what I mean. Our communication problem may be that you are thinking like a Scientist, while I am trying to think like a Philosopher. Consequently, when I talk about a metaphysical Causal Principle (e.g. Energy) producing changes in Matter, I place it in a philosophical category more like metaphysical Essence (identity ; meaning). That's because Potential/Energy/Essence has no material properties : mass, hardness, plasticity. Energy's primary property is Causation. So, I'm making a philosophical distinction, not a scientific classification.I'm not an Immaterialist or Idealist --- in the sense of denying material reality. — Gnomon
You know I know this. You’ve told me repeatedly that you’re invested in the material, the physical, the in-between and the meta-physical. Am I mistaken in believing you think metaphysical principles immaterial yet causal, as in the case to “it from bit?” If I’m not mistaken about this, then you need to show how metaphysical principles “enform” matter with attributes only known in the abstract a priori.
It won’t due talking about potential energy as causal potential somehow manipulating matter. Such a description is too vague to be of use to anyone but you in salesman mode promoting your Enformaction Theory. — ucarr
A wavy photon zooming through the Aether has the potential for mass, and can transform into mass, but while traveling at lightspeed (zero mass), is not massive like a bullet. Ironically, Some physicists and physicalists like to imagine it metaphorically as a little ball of matter. Radar photons are a focused field of statistical possibility. Like all sub-atomic "particles" a photon is non-local, until it interacts with matter, in which case the probability wave "collapses" into a point. At which point it is no longer a photon. :smile:Radar is not a pulsating machine gun shooting bullets (matter) & spaces (absence) at a target. Or is it? — Gnomon
Are photons a new concept for you? — wonderer1
It seems undeniable that the gap between actions and intentionality is meaning. Meaning is purely conceptual and logical. If I see rain coming down, then I will close the window.…I have never denied the existence of brain for the precondition of mind.
— Corvus
As a favor to me, can you respond to this post by talking about the operations of mind as they relate to brain as a precondition of mind? Immediately below I’ve quoted Wayfarer in order to explain why I’m asking this favor of you. — ucarr
This is a contradictory view, and I feel that this is an incorrect explanation of his Absential materialism. Your claim seems to have gone this way.The waveform as physical phenomenon is a fog of mass-energy in the mode of a mathematically determined cloud of probability describing the range of possible positions of an elementary particle. An apt physicalization of a fog of mass-energy is a gravitational field. When two gravitational fields interact, they generate meaning physically. Meaning, a narrative about a narrative, in its physical manifestation, is absential materialism. Meaning is about-ness signified in a language.
The physical generation of meaning via interacting gravitational fields suggests a bounded infinity of fate within a specified universe as bounded by interacting gravitational fields. If collapse to black hole density is possible in such a universe, then what will happen phenomenally_historically is pre-determined by said black hole density. Infinite gravity seems to mean that what can happen must happen. — ucarr
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