For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real — javra

So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?

If Descartes’ demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you don’t think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?

To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes’ demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.

But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.

So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.

Traditional conceptions of dynamics as a matter of how the values of an object’s properties change over time as the result of the action of external forces won’t do

All fine up until the conclusion. Why won’t our theoretical frames do if they can do work in terms of our enactive interests?

Barad to me is saying nothing further than we indeed form Umwelts as “models of our world with our selves also to found in them”. This self-world modelling might just be Bayesian technology. But it’s what we’ve got and so the question is how do we proceed from there having realised there is this technology … and it can always be improved.

Is that what you mean by constructive alternativism? The difference of course may be that I would see that as a Darwinian competition for best model - according to some optimising metric that would be the debatable bit - and alternativism is philosophical cover for anything goes pluralism?

(I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him) — Wayfarer

It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.

So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very “Peircean” structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.

Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4

...should hold more weight than faith in the god-like mechanics of entropy. — Joshs

In the same spirit of making ontic commitments explicit so they can be debated rather than derided, I would point out that I follow the biosemiotic hierarchy on the material cause half of the hylomorphic systems science dichotomy.

So the material half of the equation would run from the most general to the least specified subsumptive order of....

"quantum indeterminacy" > dissipative structure > thermodynamics > mechanics > matter

That is, quantum indeterminacy is the placeholder for whatever potency we can imagine lying beyond the Planck scale of our Cosmos. Our Cosmos is then fundamentally a dissipative structure – a self-organising entropy flow with emergent spacetime order.

You can then restrict this larger view to that of regular "gone to equilibrium" thermodynamics – where the flows can encounter their final heat death. And then restrict the ontology even further to extract the regular classical view of dead matter following Platonic trajectories. And still further to arrive at simple matter imagined as a substance we could rub between our fingers or fling across the room.

So you can appreciate that to say physics really starts with the openness and self-organisation of dissipative structure theory is still a bold metaphysical move even today. But particle physics is there with topological order, QFT, condensed matter physics, etc.

And biosemiosis also now argues this is the "right kind" of material cause to use in its models as it is matter at its most dynamic and lifelike already. That leaves the semiosis so much less to have to do to then play its own causal part in whipping up organisms that exhibit the structure we call life and mind.

This covers with how the material half of the Aristotelean equation is dealt with. But what about the form in hylomorphic form, I hear you ask? :wink:

Well dissipative structure is a triadic ontology. It is the hierarchical story of global constraints shaping local degrees of freedom. What exists is then the dynamical balance that results. So it already includes global form and purpose to quite a large degree.

Again that is the feature not the bug. It leaves feeble life and mind less to have to organise as dissipative structure is "order out of chaos". It provides so much order just for free. But it is confusing as every move towards a suitably complex view of reality always winds up in trichotomies. It can seem – as Peirce was accused – that one just suffers from some trichotomania.

Anyway, form. From the biosemiotic point of view, there is a hierarchy of increasingly more general sign or code that runs... genes < neurons < words < numbers

Now there is clearly something different here. Genes are pretty arbitrary seeming. The whole of biology seems rather accidental more than metaphysically fundamental.

Well in fact there are new arguments for how the Comos couldn't have used anything else but carbon backbones, proton pumps or redox reactions. The space of possibility was far more restricted than might be thought. Yet also, the Cosmos wasn't too fussed seeming about their being any biology. And genes look to have a large dose of contingency about them until we get a proper autopsy on those aliens they found.

Neurons are likewise a perhaps contingent bit of semiotic kit. Words - as puffs of air – again could have been something else. But puffs of air are very low cost, and a vocal tract forces the symbols into serial order. There is the general thing of being cheap to produce and also dimensionally constrained in ways that build in the necessity of articulate choice. Word order is inevitable and so grammar is also inevitable.

Then we get to number. Would any kind of alien have to count? Arguably yes if they get around in flying saucers and generally do engineering. And as the Ancient Greeks felt they discovered, maths speaks with Platonic necessity. You can't just pick and choose the structures that follow rules. Form at that level is more discovered than invented. So we seem to arrive at some kind of matching metaphysical limit, even if it remains a highly debated one.

As you can see, I defend a fairly elaborate but systematic metaphysics. Laugh if you like. Or engage.

A principle of constructive alternativism — Joshs

Sounds grand. What does it actually mean in practice - metaphysical or scientific practice?

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated — plaque flag

Yep. The shift to real people rather than social tokens. Less moralising and more nuance. All part of the social construction of the modern citizen upon which the next chapter of social and economic development was based.

My key commitment is basically that we have actual bodies in an actual world. — plaque flag

And I speak to the homuncular incoherence of leaving out the social construction of the “we” that has an “actual body”.

Probably you want to leave that way framing things behind. I believe I have provided as many pointers as I can to what I view as the right path.

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. — plaque flag

I’m OK with that. Time binding is actually a semiotic concept in my book.

individual living brains are necessary for this social game. — plaque flag

But which comes first? A biologist could reasonably argue that “ultrasociality” first arose in ants and termites speaking the language of pheromones to act like a distributed brain.

The individual ant is more like an individual neuron than an individual brain in this story of chemical messages jumping synapses.

So if we are to generalise successfully to the wider biological frame, of course there must be the suitable parts. But it is the collective whole which defines what could be meant as suitable.

Is human evolution a story of individual hominid genius or collective hominid habit. Paleoanthropology points firmly to the later.

That Og invented the wheel is a modern joke - the first entrepreneur. The history of isolated small human populations - like the Tasmanian aboriginal people - show how the quickly forget much that they once knew. Basic skills like fishing or stitching clothing can just disappear. You need a critical mass to allow the specialisation that keeps innovation alive and developing.

The genius is standing on the shoulders of countless others. Some genius once said that.

Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said. We discussed Kelly at length, remember? And I think why Mead, Cooley and Dewey showed something was also stirring at the turn of the century in the wake of pragmatism, but failed to flower for reasons of wisespread Anglo-world disinterest.

Vygotsky and Luria are more interesting to me. They combined the psychology and the neurobiology. They experimented. They seemed to have a receptive audience as social constructionism ought to be "on brand" following a Marxist revolution. But then shit happened. Along came Stalin. The suppression of the books. The academic seizing on Jewishness and Vygotsky's failure to actually adhere literally to Marxist theology. And tuberculosis.

As a stirring that again failed, it was bigger and thus more tragic.

There is a social history here that goes back to Aristotle at least. And it doesn't feel as if there has been a true paradigm shift yet.

I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place.

Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader. — plaque flag

That is how a computationist would look at it. Biology and neuroscience show that computationalism is simply wrong. Life and mind start from the first meaningful action. The first shifting of an atom for a reason.

Scripts don't write themselves. And they need to be being read from the start of their writing.

I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. — plaque flag

Or you are not following what I've been saying.

So let's get focused on what you say your are here to discuss despite it being a wandering of the thread. You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit?

I am saying this would simply be a bad question arising from a bad metaphysics. And I've made that reply accordingly.

I've tried to argue using concrete examples which you brush away in your haste to just keep moving on in aimless-feeling fashion.

So again, focus. If we have Shakespeare and Newton as our candidate for intellectual hero of the English millennial, how do we decide who wins, who is runner up?

A metric I might toss into the mix is what we are willing to ignore about their personalities – if personalities is indeed key to your putative model.

So Newton was a historical genius in turning physics into maths. He was brave or reckless enough to use dramatically lossy data compression. He even was willing to chuck out the very materialistic metaphysics he just had substantiated with his Laws of Motion to take the opposite tack "action at a distance" in his Law of Gravitation.

We all applaud that kind of relentless genius that can use and abuse metaphysics as he willed. The maths is what mattered. The metaphysics got backfilled to fit. A project going on for both his mathematical triumphs. And even the maths was of foundational importance and is keeping folk busy trying to back fill its metaphysics too. The ghost of departed quantities, and all that.

No wonder Newton is a turning point just in terms of social attitude. He personified something that really did change intellectual history. Where would Kant and the rest be without Newton as that central challenge? The guy had strut.

But what does polite intellectual society then say about his religiosity? Well, it seems excusable for a person of his time if not his genius.

What about his difficult personality? Again, excusable to be impatient with dullards and jealous of those claiming any part of his personal glory. That's just people being people. Maybe he was neurodiverse and so really can't be blamed.

Did did you know he was made Master of the Royal Mint? And he was twice an MP? Oh yeah. A man of the world, a man of action too. That adds to his genius personality index. But wait. That was about social influence and good money. Erm, it seems he was trading up to be a big cog in the Imperial British enterprise. He lost a good chunk of change plunging into a slave-trading venture. Um, move on.

Now let's socially evaluate his career as an alchemist, his occult studies. Oh no. Let's not. Erase that from the collective memory and fix on the bit of the scientist that was the mathematical genius. We don't have to judge the genius personality in terms of his personality after all perhaps.

Now run the same ruler over Shakespeare. Could his peccadilloes even detract from his reputation? Wouldn't he be judged more leniently on that social score because the social realm was itself the one he was addressing where Newton was addressing something intellectually more demanding than that?

Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better.

I'm just illustrating here the reality that it is audiences that rate genius. And they do so in regard to their institutionalised interests. It might then take certain personality traits to succeed in this competitive game. But it is still the audience that takes the view on what it might treat as the proper measure, even just on the "type of person" the genius was.

If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. :naughty:

I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. — plaque flag

The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand.

Language is tribal software. — plaque flag

Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand.

Life and mind science need to be built on the foundation of dissipative physics. As I argued, even the modern industrial world with its particular economic and political structures are comprehensible as "metabolism".

Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve.

And you can't say that about a computer. Well, not until they start telling ChatGTP to go find its own wall socket to plug itself into after the power company cancels over the mounting unpaid bills. Hey computer, go figure it out for yourself. If you are so smart, provide your own metabolic foundation.

let's imagined a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, — plaque flag

Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius?

Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. Deal with Borges’ Library of Babel.

What I'm getting at is (roughy) personality is the yardstick. — plaque flag

A certain kind of inquiring intelligence?

I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard. — Janus

But you were claiming that inside the institutions as well as outside. And I replied that the institutions institutionalise the competitive space in which the different theories are heard. It would be a problem if they were bad at serving this function. We would know they were bad as nothing was ever allowed to change. They would be museums and not places of quite frantic intellectual competition.

What in fact makes it difficult to be heard is everyone is shouting at once these days. Anyone can shove a pet Theory of Everything on Arxiv. Then belly-ache if everyone else doesn’t immediately drop their own pet theory.

Academia used to be so much smaller. You could immediately ignore anything said by a polytech, or which came out of the colonies.

I’m not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing.

Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology. — Joshs

Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated.

Yet right when Vygotsky/social constructionism was finally filling two shelves at UCL’s Waterstones, along comes the genecentric/cognitive module bandwagon of evolutionary psychology and rolls right over it. Back to the future we go.

Enactivism really took its time showing up too. I had long given up waiting. The Cartesian grip on the Anglo imagination is strong. The enactivists came in swinging as if they were offering the world something unthunk and brand new.

Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it? — Joshs

Not sure that this question coheres well enough for me to give a matchingly snappy answer.

But I’m inclined to “sure”. It is all a pliable and fused kind of story once social construction and neurodevelopment have been co-habiting a brain for 20 or 30 years.

Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby. — plaque flag

Still not sure what goal you are reaching for here. You seem to be arguing that these things are mutually exclusive rather than necessarily complementary. That one most win and thus the other lose - the zero sum game - instead of there being the win-win that comes with a useful division of labour.

The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast.

And isn’t that why you would celebrate a historical figure like Shakespeare. He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think.

The tightness of listening to a single lonely voice, heard and agreed to by the largest imagined crowd, indeed echoing on down the ages, is the kind of high contrast state that eliminates the most ambiguity. We have even the artefact - the canonical work of a play - to cement the lonely utterance in the collective memory. We can refer back at any moment to a spoken truth and interpret it afresh - stage Macbeth in the setting of a modern corporate office or whatever.

So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response.

The question then is who moved more people down the ages. Is Newton greater than Shakespeare? At least in theory we could quantify this in terms of how much movement - cultural or physical - was created by a bunch of plays vs the Principia.

You seem to want to ask how to measure genius, I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. And then less clearly, the kind of thing l’m sure Shakespeare also gestured at in all his words I never actually bothered to read. :smile:

Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My systems science view expects upward acting construction as the “other” to downward acting constraint. So construction comes as part of the holistic equation in some form.

t seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention.

So if your focus is on interpreting an utterance, that suppresses activity across the brain so that all your many perceptual habits - visual, gustatory, object recognition, spatial orientation, whatever - are turned to the task of responding in their learnt habitual way. The words will be decoded in terms of their suitable associations and anticipatory imagery will form.

Stick a person’s head in a scanner and the word “hammer” will light up the motor cortex areas which know what it feels like to initiate the physical act to banging down a nail. Say “wombat” and the visual recognition paths will light up with a suitable state of expectancy for what you might indeed turn your head and see within your visual field.

So understanding is the brain being holistically constrained by attentional focusing to have some narrowed state of sensory and motor priming that “puts you in mind” of the right kind of anticipatory imagery and readiness to act accordingly.

The call of “Kentucky Fried” or “pizza” might even get you drooling in preparation for what you expect is about to arrive on the diner table. Responses that would be more appropriate to “hammer” and “wombat” will also now be equally much suppressed.

Those constructive habits of action are still part of the fabric of your brain, but they will be inhibited rather than excited. The meaning of words is understood in what you now don’t expect or prepare for as much in what you do.

That is why we wouldn’t describe interpretation as simply representational or constructive. It needs a holistic act of focusing that fruitfully limits the brain by suppressing the vast number of inappropriate reactions as much as it appears to stimulate the few right ones.

You can see this happening in real-time with EEG recordings. There is a characteristic P300 positive wave of inhibition that sweeps across the brain 300 milliseconds after some surprise stimulus to narrow focus to the task of interpreting just whatever it is. Then a N400 negative swing of excitation as the suitable pattern-match gets made and the right state of sensory and motor priming is evoked.

So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. The brain isn’t a computer. It is very flexible and organic. It can cut short the time it spends letting a state of deep understanding emerge. Or it can linger until you really start to feel what it would be like to really have a wombat rummaging about at your feet, probably stinking like a wombat and grunting how you might imagine a wombat would, That level of vividness takes about 500ms to conjure up, and so occupies your brain that it “blinds” you to everything else for half a second too.

Or you can do the quicker thing of just responding “subconsciously”. Almost as you hear the word, you have made enough of a connection - “OK, that Australian marsupial thing” - to just skip on and keep going with the sentence. You can get the gist and always come back to let the word expand in your consciousness if you need to double check that “wombat” could really make sense in the context of what was said after that.

Think about thinking. That is our learnt habit of using speech on ourselves - the inner voice. But we often believe we think wordlessly because we can cut short the full act of uttering in our heads - waiting long enough for the full auditory image to arrive - as it is enough to begin shaping the motor intent to the point we could have actually said the words to ourselves, then skip on. We short-circuit to save time as the attention constraining effect of narrowing our state of thought has already been achieved by our getting ready to verbalise some point of view.

The effect is compounded by the fact that we are mostly always going to say the kinds of things we usually would say to ourselves anyway. There is even less need to linger. We can even think on automatic pilot. Just let the routines run.

Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of things — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what is missed is that language is used as the trick that structures our own thoughts as much as it communicates our state of mind to another. To be able to speak its to have the ability to self-constrain in ways that are like being “spoken to” by your society, your culture, your peers, your tribe.

We did not evolve as thinking selves that then needed to tack on speech to express a headful of clever private thoughts. We evolved as animals whose behaviour could be organised from an emergent higher level of socially constructed meaning. We evolved to be listener’s of what we were meant to be doing so as to function in a communal fashion. Once we got into that habit of constantly reminding ourselves through a “self-regulating” inner voice, then we started to find ourselves with a headful of clever private thinking.

Any time there was some socially approved course of action, that would automatically bring to mind it’s “other” of what we thus shouldn’t be doing, or even thinking as a possibility. But of course, that then raises the very possibility of going against the group mind and doing something for selfish and private reasons.

The “voice of conscience” will be ringing in your guilty head. Very loudly if you have a strict upbringing where you were always being told by parents, teachers and priests. Yet the very fact of being socialised as a general constraint on your thought and behaviour will shape up matching degrees of freedom in your thought and behaviour. In being strongly focused on what not to do, you become strongly focused on what you might indeed do. And so the private self emerges as other to the public self.

Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even.

The sciences that think they study the human mind think they need to study the human individual. You have to get into sociology, anthropology and child development to hear about how the human mind is in fact linguistically constructed.

Would you say though that this is very different than what Shakespeare was doing ? — plaque flag

You could make a case that he spoke to the metabolism - the economic and political order - of his time. He may well have crystallised views of history and customs from an English perspective that informed the notion of what it was to be a member of that society. He was an influencer pushing the zeitgeist to its sharper focus. And that sense of identity was important as Europe was changing from feudalism to nation states. Larger identities were needed to bind the local fiefdoms into mobilised kingdoms.

So at the level of words, he was helping the reorganisation of a nation as it made a major upgrade to its metabolic basis by becoming centralised in its politics and moving towards the trade that which would alllow it to grow its population with imported food by beginning to export manufactured goods.

Did Shakespeare understand this or did he just pocket the proceeds from being nifty with a quill and rhyme? Was he brilliant at capturing the currents of his time, but didn’t actually claim to be standing right outside of the system to see it as indeed a system?

We can tell Anaximander and Aristotle were doing that. Metaphysics is different. It isn’t holding up a mirror to a time and place in the way that is of everyday human interest. It is to step back as far as possible by having a method that systematically abstracts such historical contingencies until only the pure structure of “being” is being contemplated.

But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy. — javra

So this is goodbye. :party:

I'm not sure the highest levels of personality (of symbolic life) can be adequately captured from the outside. — plaque flag

Well that is my current research interest. To model life and mind at all their levels in organismic language.

Biology speaks of metabolism. I would show how political and economic structure is simply metabolism scaled up. There is a literal identity and not just a metaphorical one. As structure, they are the same.

So maybe you could have the goal of exploring all the ways individuals could be different. I am accounting for the fact that all natural structures must be essentially the same.

The bonus is that structuralism also explains why difference grows unboundedly as the constraints of “sameness” become increasingly general or abstracted.

So structural holism contains thesis and antithesis. A world that is just constructed of the atomic individual fails even to account for the local degrees of freedom that compose it.

Right, but I think of neuroscience as (roughly) software running on human hardware. — plaque flag

Computional analogies are certainly the rough cut. But even so, why does that make a difference – except in being a lossy compression of what I said?

A forger could be a genius too, or not. If not, then I doubt there would be much trouble detecting forgery. — Janus

Finding refuge in the Gettier problem? Sly dog.

I know what I see in works and how I judge their greatness, but that is not something I can explain; — Janus

I agree. I couldn't see the fuss about Picasso when I was just looking at the pix in the book. But then there was the big exhibition in Aussie and in real life the paintings really worked. So there is something that lifts an artist above the crowd.

But you can also analyse what it is – like the way it works when seen from both near and afar. It's not a little flat image but something that seems to lift off the canvas because the details are not overworked. From a distance, it seems precise. From close up, it becomes the opposite.

My daughter is an artist (as was my mother) so we are looking both at the paintings and why they succeed.

If you don't recognize that people generally tend to become attached to their theories and defend them dogmatically, in science just as anywhere else, then all I can say is that I wonder what planet you've been living on. — Janus

But you were talking about the "dogmatic" institutions – you know, the places that can house so many contradictory dogmas.

Have you spent any time in science departments or at science conferences? Or even had to work at the coalface of ideas?

If you are talking sociology, there is this curious - but explicable - dynamic where the greatest hatred is reserved for those just beyond your circle. Your inner circle are your back-slapping chorus. Your outer ring becomes your treacherous rivals for the prize. Then beyond that, you are back into the general crowd of folk "doing science, but no threat to your career prospects" and hence its all friends again as you turn your collective hatred on the metaphysicians or the government funding agencies.

The real world is more like Turing's reaction~diffusion systems if you want to get technical.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif#/media/File:Reaction-Diffusion.gif

So far the Measurement Problem and String theory are left dangling in a scientific void. — jgill

Where is measuring a practical problem? Decoherence tacks statistical mechanics onto quantum mechanics and recovers a world that is close enough classical at most physical scales of practical interest.

You can do engineering fine without worrying about the quantum if your world is human scale in terms of time, distance and energy.

String theory is measurable if we could instead engineer a collider powerful enough to recreate a quantum scale of time, distance and energy. So there is a neat inverse connection here. We are stuck in our classical realm for all intents and purposes. Which is lucky for both us and our engineering projects.

And computational science can say a lot about limit-state physics by simulation. If it is good enough for mathematical proof, why not for maths' less rigorous kid brother?

There are other ways to skin the cat.

bingChat could not find evidence to support the notion that Wall street in fact hires philosophy PhDs. Maybe they do. — jgill

Google's first hit brings up the annedotes....

We hired a Philosophy graduate on our risk program a year back, while working in London. His knowledge about the financial industry was perhaps less than that of his peers at LSE or Oxbridge who studied financial and economics related degrees but he really wanted this job because he was curious.

During the 2 year graduate program he progressed much quicker than his peers. He learned coding at the job as well as all the fundamental financial principles.

He understood everything at a first go, while his peers, who knew the definitions from university, but struggled to match it with what they saw happened in real world situations.

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-big-wall-street-banks-sometimes-hire-philosophy-majors

The second hit was.....

The measure of a man, according to Plato, is what he does with his power. Wall Street’s Bill Miller has taken the adage to heart, donating $75 million to philosophy—a branch of study that has been critical, he says, to decisions he has made in his career.

Miller (officially William H. Miller III), an investor famous for beating the Standard and Poor’s 500 index for 15 years in a row, was a graduate student for three years in Johns Hopkins University’s PhD program. His gift to the school, announced yesterday (Jan. 16), will nearly double the size of its philosophy department—bumping the full-time faculty from 13 to 22 professors, and creating new courses and scholarships for graduate students. It’s the largest gift to any college’s philosophy department ever recorded.

https://qz.com/1181741/wall-streets-bill-miller-gave-johns-hopkins-philosophy-department-75-million

So seems legit.

Not at $36,000 for being hauled up Mt Everest. The less expensive climbs take their tolls in different ways. My back and shoulders testify to that. — jgill

Mt Everest is evidence of all that could be wrong about the Romanticism that gets turned into Commercialisation.

My "birth" mountain behind the ex-family sheep station has become internet famous. For decades, I could climb it alone. Last time, I had to scoot past about 400 people. There was no room even to stand near the top. And this was me starting early in the off season to beat the crowds.

I can't be any clearer than that. — Janus

Art schools make it their business to these days. They teach the process of making works. They sell their courses to worried parents by pointing out the creative process is exactly the same as for producing any culturally-relevant artefact.

Just like philosophy PhDs are sold as a route to Wall Street – critical thinkers able to break out of the box! – so fine arts is sold because so many employers must want the socially savvy graduate who can tickle the zeitgeist for a few dollars more.

. I'm not aware of any attempts to forge a Pollock except for something that happened here in Sydney when I was at art school in the early seventies. — Janus

I had to wait a nanosecond, but Google coughed up....

Forgery Experts Analyze a Fake Jackson Pollock Painting

This is Thiago Piwowarczyk and Jeff Taylor of New York Art Forensics. And this is a Jackson Pollock or at least it looks like one. But it's actually a fake. Here's how they figured it out.

There is a lot of claims of Jackson Pollock drip paintings and our laboratory was able to identify over 100 fakes. So we can say that we found more fakes than there authentic Jackson Pollocks out there.

The first step when we receive a painting, we try to establish something called the provenance. The provenance is a chain of ownership and custody of an artwork from the contemporary ownership all the way back to its manufacturing.

[In this case, the documentation itself was forged!]

The next step is a close-up visual analysis. So we're looking close to the painting to try to find anachronistic materials and techniques, something that would be uncharacteristic for a given author or a given time.

It's a very, very thin layer. [Jeff] Yeah, look at how many colors I count that aren't in the drip layers. Look at these underlying colors. We got a yellow, a green. And neither of them appear in the drip patterns. That's done with a brush. Yeah, it's rather strange 'cause when Pollock starts doing the poured paintings, he really doesn't brush much anymore.

Then you see here, Thiago, I got two holes right here. Just that distance. And they're repetitive. You have a series of smaller holes and that indicates that this canvas was, at certain point, stapled. And a stapled canvas will not be a thing in 1956.

https://www.wired.com/video/watch/anatomy-of-a-fake

And so on until spectroscopy identifies the acrylic binders not available until the 1960s and other giveaway details about the artefact itself, nothing about how no one would misjudge this as an actual Pollock just because his genius is unmistakable.

A debate which would be all the more vigorous if humans did not have such a tendency to dogmatize knowledge, and if institutions of learning did not have such a tendency to exclude conjectures which are perceived to be outside the currently accepted orthodoxy. — Janus

I don't recognise this caricature from what I have seen inside the said institutions of learning. This is wishful thinking.

The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. — Wayfarer

It doesn't seem that simple judging by the reactions. But again, where Peircean semiosis introduces the sign as the mark that marks the cut by bridging the cut, so Pattee took it further by arguing the Peircean sign was in fact the literally mechanical thing of a logical switch.

A switch in a power circuit allows a human to turn the heat off and on. So the switch both creates the cut and bridges the cut. The switch can be flipped from off to on.

Biologists have tended to think of the genes as the information that regulate an organism's sustaining biochemical flows. They are certainly part of that machinery, but not what defines the coal-face of the modelling relationship. It is enzymes that are physically the switches which can turn reactions on and off at a command. Likewise Barbieri was early to narrow the focus to the ribsome as the core switch because it was the enzyme that made the enzymes by understanding the mRNA messages being sent by the genome.

So Peirce was rather hand-wavy in talking about the epistemic cut in terms of "signs". Yet also, science was in its Victorian era. Peirce waved his hands in ways that were as up to date scientifically as it was then possible to be.

Since the DNA code was cracked in the 1950s, biology has just kept getting more exact in terms of what mediates the modelling relation – what creates the cut between the "rate dependent dynamics" of the world and "rate independent information" of a regulatory model that it can then itself also bridge.

The Hard Problem of how mind and matter can interact causally is solved by that. We can point to the enzymes and even the ribosomes. We can point to the molecular machinery that ratchets the nanoscale convergence zone of physics – the scale of entropic balance that is physics' own quantum~classical transition story. (The one without an inserted epistemic cut, but formed by its own emergent or decoherent constraints.)

So if you make this about the "knower and the known", your risk trivialising it as the good old Cartesian dualism of a world with two realms, one real, the other deal. And if you try some other duality, like Sassure's symbol and symbolised, you make the mistake of not understanding that Peirce was pushing the triadic story of a "world", and interpretant, and the third thing of the epistemic cut – the sign, the switch - which is inserted inbetween to allow a model and its world interact to pragmatic effect.

This shows the habit of thought you need to unlearn here. Framing what is said as a triadic claim as if it reduced to a dyadic one. Peirce argued how the world is irreducibly complex because it has the inherent triadicity of a system of relations. A relation has its two ends, but also the bit that connects in the middle.

So you are not hearing what I have been saying for so many years now. You haven't got it.

But I don't complain too much. Most people indeed never get it. You at least felt the need to make an effort. I can thank you for that while still trying to tell the story in even more simple ways.

Seems to me an interesting philosophical question would be, ‘does it introduce a duality’? — Wayfarer

So ... nope. Although it took several years of pressing by Salthe, myself, and other Peircean enthusiasts for Pattee to clear this up.

So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws. — Wayfarer

Well no. Quite the opposite. Symbols are that which can escape the limits of physics. They are born where the physics halts. So they rely on physics in the sense of being dichotomously "other" to that physics.

Hence Pattee's dichotomy of rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information. A symbol – or switching device – can't actually escape also being physical. But it can escape the grip of physics by becoming some small and constant cost that an organism can bear.

If you only have to flip a switch, you can attach that switch to anything you like and gain control over it. The light in your bedroom, a pixel on a display, or WW3.

You could launch a nuclear holocaust from the briefcase of codes that your secret service guy totes around for you. It might take the effort of raising your creaky old voice and saying you are the President and you are absolutely serious. The right people have signed the right bits of paper as a double check on your authority and state of mind.

So some grumpy old git. A nuclear arsenal. A lot of ideation. A lot physical entropy. Then the third thing that is the mediating switch which has been stopping it happen until it starts to happen. A world-spanning circuit can get closed with a few puffs of air coming out of an old man's throat.

I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings. — Wayfarer

But absolutely no one in the biosemiotic community of the 1990s was thinking they were making an argument for panpsychism. Although pansemiosis was a lively discussion led by Stan Salthe. And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science. At least this was now proper holism.

So you might go out on your own limb. But I'm not sure where you get the right. Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes.

Your position doesn't even arrive at the metaphysical throat-clearings of Kant. You want to time-machine biosemiosis back to the 17th Century.

So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives. — Wayfarer

Yeah, but split and then connected by what? What did nature insert to get evolution going? Why did a code make a difference to the world?

where art differs from mountain climbing is that it is an adventure which yields tangible results that others may or may not relate to and value. — Janus

So art produces artefacts which are indeed the concrete signs of ideas. I agree. Mountain climbing is definitely the more personal pursuit and less social pursuit. Art is literally a way of speaking to others about ideas and feelings of a certain kind. It is intrinsically the communal thing - the social organism thing - of forming a generalised and shared worldview.

Moving the body has neurobiological meaning. It has its signs - like sweat and endorphins. But art is part of the human social construction game. It is about the representation of conceptions at the level of our collective social consciousness.

And I would agree that art has moved from dealing in representational artefacts to conceptual artefacts. So rather than just capturing perceptual likenesses of socially meaningful people and occasions, it claims to challenge our ideas about social identity itself. You could say that is stepping into philosophical territory by presenting society with art works in a gallery and demanding we show our seriousness in terms of putting a hard number in terms of dollars on the dose of useful philosophising thus delivered.

What? You want personal enlightenment for free? Go climb a mountain! :grin:

When Jackson Pollock produced the first drip paintings many people claimed a monkey could have produced them. To me this is nonsense, no one since Pollock has produced drip paintings that remotely compare to his. — Janus

Experts certainly like to think they would immediately recognise his unmistakable signature and couldn’t be fooled when some “lost work” suddenly appears on the art market.

Not for them the lab tests to check out the canvas and pigments for their authenticity. No need but to stand back and see the mark of genius imprinted on the flecks and splatter.

Individual experiences cannot be compared, so in that sense they "drop out of the conversation" — Janus

A convenient inconvenience for Romanticism? Or what a system metaphysics predicts when it talks of the duality of constraints shaping degrees of freedom?

The more there is a shaping social order, the more individualistic we must become. Paradoxical or instead how complexity evolves?

But the fact that we have these incomparable experiences does not drop out of the conversation, because many people do enjoy them, and it is arguable that they can recognize the marks of such experiences in art works and in the reports of others. — Janus

Yes. The social function of romanticism was to point to the sublime. It was the other half of this dichotomistic move towards greater system’s complexity. We should all learn this trick of being not just individual, but incomparably individual.

Hey kids! it’s 1974! Everyone must wear flares! Put away the Kerouac, get hip to Castaneda. Been there, laughed at that.

The Enlightenment was pushing the same metaphysics. Adam Smith’s rational economics was about mass consumption via individualised labour specialisation.

It all comes back to the same recipe for complexity. Differentiate so as to integrate. The greater the variety, the more general must be the laws that bind it.

That is the social value of art as self expression. It is another way of getting humans to think and act like individuals so that what they collectively produce is an ever-enlarging space of cultural meme.

Prove that you can stand out as a social influencer because of your incomparable individuality? Ker-Ching! Social media will rain you with dollars.

But everyone wants his paintings which are of a particular subject he arrived at early on, so he cannot explore his creative ideas to his satisfaction but must keep producing the product others want — Janus

I know the dynamic well. That is how a system works. It needs to impose stability on what it finds useful. It is another reason that individuality - as something apart from its social context - is a dangerous and angst-generating fiction.

Audience building is what pays the bills. Every influencer know that.

By contrast, no one makes any money out of being a poet. — Janus

But a lyricist? Even I would pay more for a song with good lyrics.

Why do poets get a bum deal then? A Tennyson could make a fortune in Victorian book publishing days. Pam Ayers managed to sell in more recent times.

And yet there is so little general agreement today. I'm currently reading a book by John Hands, in which he talks about all the objections to the standard model of the Big Bang in cosmology and how proponents of alternative models find difficulty in getting their work published on account of the almost religious dogmatism with which the BB model is considered to be just simply fact. — Janus

Always the splitters complaining about the lumpers, and the lumpers complaining about the splitters. I wouldn’t take too much notice. The worry would be if all the voices fell silent. Instead there is a vigorous debate going on and big things keep getting discovered.

We probably agree on one thing, which is that any plausible metaphysics will be based on, or at least in accordance with, the findings of the sciences. — Janus

Metaphysics makes the guesses. Science checks them out. So yep.

The only thing that could derail this natural philosophy enterprise is Descartes’ demon. And so far, so good, pragmatically speaking. If we are someone’s computer simulation, we haven’t stumbled upon any glitches in the matrix that I can think of.

You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides. — javra

Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. I’m asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion.

So again you splutter and misfire with arguments that abuse the good habits of rational inquiry. Aren’t you weary of your own failure yet? What keeps you going and going?

You’re laughing because you, in contrast, have certain knowledge of what consciousness is and isn’t in an empirically measurable way. — javra

I laugh as what else can one do when being pestered by someone so incapable of following a straight line of thought.

I asked for your measurable definition - the one that would make sense to a scientist wanting to get on with their scientific inquiry. I offered the kind of pragmatic definition a scientist would use - verbal reports of acts of attention. But for some reason you don’t want to go there.

I ask what more would you want to say. You get all huffy and evasive. Answer my questions, you keep demanding. What question was that I have to say.

So stamp your feet and splutter away. But I’ve lost interest.

One of the complexities here is that the human nervous system models in some sense the human nervous system. — plaque flag

No. Neuroscience does that. The view of the neural level of world-making from a verbal and mathematical level of world-making.

The form of the complexity is well specified. The semiosis is hierarchical. Each level of organismic order arises with a more abstracted code and a more abstracted world.

A conception of philosophy looks to be an 'existential' (at base 'irrational') specification of the cognitive hero. — plaque flag

I can’t tell if you mean this ironically. Our positions are poles apart if I am emphasising the socially constructed and communal nature of rational inquiry, and you are pushing the Romantic image of the individual genius.

You might want to ask more questions of those you disagree with, answer those questions you’ve been asked by them, and address the replies you've already been given. — javra

So you think I should take you more seriously? You believe this is a discussion to be cashed out in propositional logic?

That unknown, or uncertainty, or vagueness as you term it, is part of my stance. — javra

Well, yup! :lol:

All definitions are capable if being wrong as they all may incorrectly describe usage. — bert1

Sure. But if that definition isn’t being offered, as in this case…

And if the term is meant to be meaningful as a scientific definition rather than, say, just a woolly catch-all word with no clear ontological commitment except Cartesian dualism in sight…

You can see my problem now can’t you?

I paint and draw and I also write poetry; when asked why I do these things I say in regard to the first "to discover how I see, and how I feel and understand beauty and aliveness in terms of tone, colour, intensity and calm in terms of visual composition". — Janus

But I can say I play sport and climb mountains for that same reason. Not so much with a focus on visual composition but for the intensity of the experiencing.

Is that “art”. Well I don’t mind terms being stretched in useful ways as well as being narrowed in useful ways. I’m not here to die in the ditch for a definition. I will just point out that your talk of solitary art does acknowledge the social context which can justify your painting and drawing as that kind of thing rather than some weird scratching and smearing at a surface which might make you a rather suspect character in out tight little community.

If no one related to it it wouldn't matter to me because I know what it means to me. — Janus

No one likes to think of art as a business or trade. But then no one likes seeing the sausage getting made. :razz:

Rationality is a collective enterprise, but it is a method not a set of conclusions; conclusions are matters for individuals. — Janus

So you assert. But I find Peirce’s theory of truth a more useful view. Conclusions are more about what we could all agree. Truth is the limit of a community of inquiry. So no beetles in boxes allowed.

Is Shakespeare a better philosopher than Peirce ? Why or why not ? — plaque flag

What would Shakespeare have said? What would Peirce have said? From their points of view, what do you suspect would be the answer and why?

We can use a word like “philosopher” widely or narrowly. But with that freedom comes the responsibility to not employ it confusingly and thus render our utterances vague.

Back to the drawing board — javra

You just switched from “conscious of x” to “first person awareness”. Are we talking about a thing or a process, counterfactually speaking here?

I was talking about a process.

And then when you make claims about consciousness of x - as something more than attention+reporting - is consciousness of the presence of a colour the same as consciousness of some bit of text? And is consciousness of a lump of rock the same as consciousness of a bit of text?

Are these all exactly the same propositions in your book or are there telling differences that might cause you to qualify your meaning in speaking about “consciousness” as a process.

Yes, you do need to back to the drawing board and do some work on your definitions so that there could be a less amateur discussion here.

Capable of being wrong rather than not even wrong.

Still not even an attempt to define your use of consciousness here then? You had many chances now. That says you can’t do it.

how on earth could I when you address the proposition of "I am conscious of this text" as neither having a truth-value nor being without one. — javra

Let me insult you again. You continue to weasel your way out of the requirement to provide a counterfactual definition to fit your counterfactual proposition. Technically, your position becomes not even wrong, simply vague.

Now for more of your weaseling to pretend you are upholding your end of the proffered exchange.

I swear I'm not trying to be difficult. I really want to clarify the issue. — plaque flag

Think of it this way. Imagine a lake damned up behind dirt mounds. The second law describes how it wants to run down to a more general equilibrium but can’t right now. You with a digger can hasten this project. And the second law doesn’t mind if you stick a turbine generator in the flow. More energy is going to be lost than you can extract, even if turbines can be approaching 90z efficient. Besides anything you extract will be used or lost in transmission pretty soon.

So organisms can strike a bargain and dip their ratcheting machinery in the entropy flows they can unlock.

The Universe is more of problem to explain in entropy accounting as in fact the total entropy does not change if you count the negentropy of the ever growing spatial expansion that cancels out the entropy of the ever cooling material contents.

Hence the idea of the free lunch, the quantum fluctuation out of nothing. And hence justification for the deeper vagueness-based story I’m telling when it comes to the Cosmos itself rather than the parasitic colonisation of convenience entropy flows by the machinations of living and mindful organisms.

Kojeve's book on Hegel makes explicit this 'getting on' the escalator by assuming that a certain kind of conceptuality is the king's highway. Given that first step, the rest follows. But that first step is 'irrational.' — plaque flag

First steps are abductive. Rationally constrained to be that which could scale in general fashion as a causal account.

So I disagree. It is the deduction of the consequences that follow that needs to have its conclusions baked in by logic. And then from there, we are back into the real world of inductive confirmation. The evidence either inclines us towards our hypothesis or it doesn’t. We learn and move on.

If that magisterial view of rational inquiry seems a bit sweeping, well it works. So believe it until a better method comes along.

What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction. — Wayfarer

Why not?

To precisely demarcate what personal conscious is is not to define one's personal consciousness in ways that are measurable. Nor does metaphysics mandate that what is shall itself be measurable. — javra

You do a lot of weaselling to avoid supplying a definition to the term that I must give a yes or no answer on.

I’ll help you out. Do you mean something more than attending and reporting if I agree I am conscious of the text? If more, what exactly?

But then, in this thread about the science of consciousness you’ve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether “I am conscious of this text” is a truth-baring proposition. — javra

I gave you the answer. Your question suffers from logical vagueness. Affirming yes or no would make no useful difference.

It remains up to you to define consciousness in terms that pragmatically means anything measurable if you are indeed talking about “the science” of it. Or even just it’s metaphysics.