We know there is internalness, but it is not obvious from the substrates themselves.. and modelling is a process.. — schopenhauer1

So stop going on and on about material substrates. Start talking about the process ... of modelling ...

but where is this process space occurring? — schopenhauer1

What has physical space got to do with it? The model is about an organism in a world. So it is an abstraction as far as that physical space is concerned.

Then I should hardly need to point out that your talk about "physical space" is itself a modelling interpretation. So you are simply doubling down on the epistemological missteps.

I don't see your way out of the bind. — schopenhauer1

I don't see you doing anything but ducking the question you were asked. Your problem is that you are happy with the bind you are in. You think being stuck in an irresolvable paradox is some kind of good thing. You just keep on shaking that dualism in my face while you avoid answering why modelling wouldn't feel like something, when we both know that the brain actually models and that it indeed does feel like something when it does that.

No, it just doesn't make sense how behavior can have an internalness. — schopenhauer1

Aren't you going to even make a single solitary attempt to justify your position against the claims of modelling?

Why wouldn't an umwelt-style modelling of the world feel like something?

The point of this exercise is to show yourself that you can't in fact come up with convincing reasons why all that activity wouldn't be "experiential" in a basic "animal experience of the world" way. You having nothing concrete to support the prejudices you are expressing.

It is not the behaviour that has "internalness" here. It is the modelling. So again, stop deflecting and focus on the question as it was asked of you. Discover for yourself that you really don't have any concrete reason to deny an "internalness" to a modelling relation between the brain and the world. You might in fact realise that the semiotic story is all about the organismic construction of an "internal and meaningful point-of-view".

So stop treating my position as merely good old materialism.

Semiotics is a metaphysics designed to get beyond both materialism and mentalism - the standard issue Cartesian substance duality. Start respecting that by answering the question it poses for you - why wouldn't modelling a world feel like modelling a world?

I think the point is that when it comes to the question " what is the feeling-like-something ontologically speaking" that the sign relation is where it "bottoms out". What more could we hope to say without positing some additional mental substance; which would be to return to substance dualism? — Janus

You got it.

It is just the same as the equivalent cosmological question of "why anything?" or "what is being?". We can only answer any such question semiotically - via a modelling relation. And modelling in turn relies on measurable counterfactuals. A theory has to impose a falsifiable claim on the reality. And once we get down to asking "why experience?" or "why existence?", what can count for the kind of counterfactuals that would truly make sense of some proper theory?

So I accept a limit to rational explanation in terms of the measurement of counterfactuals. If the question is why is green so greenish, we have pretty much run out of road as we can't even think what other possible alternative could be the case. The question ultimately becomes a hollow one because the modelling relation itself has no counterfactuals it can get a purchase on.

But despite that kind of ultimate barrier, we can then model the world pretty effectively. Neuroscience can give us answers on how experience is constructed as an umwelt to a degree of detail that is well past most people's actual level of interest.

I've been through all this with Schop a number of times, but still there is this plantiff bleat - solve the Hard Problem to my satisfaction. I believe in this stuff called mind. Explain how it gets there - in a world that I also believe is just a bunch of stuff called matter.

He won't be walked back an inch from his Cartesian dualism. He just stands there with his nose pressed against a brick wall complaining.

So stepping back from the business of theorising about both the human mind and the origin of existence itself, we can all marvel that there is anything there to be discussed at all. But then we ought to get back to theory-building if we are actually engaged with these things in a metaphysically interesting way.

Sure we can wade through literature on all sorts of neurobiological concepts.. doesn't get me closer to what experiential process is. — schopenhauer1

Defeatist.

The problem is, you don't even know the problem. — schopenhauer1

Sure I do. You keep running from the question of why all that umwelt-style modelling wouldn't feel like something.

What does that mean? "Self in it"? That makes no sense outside of already experiencing selfhood. — schopenhauer1

I've explained these things 1000 times. Look up umwelt. Look up proprioception. Look up enactive perception. If you want to discuss these issues, you need to educate yourself on them.

Because of precisely what I am inquiring above.. — schopenhauer1

You are just deflecting. If you were serious about wanting to know, you would have learnt enough about how the brain works not to be wasting my time with your Cartesianism.

I didn't mind discussing something new with you - like abiogenesis. But now you are back on your old hobby horse. Boring.

What are you defining as self-modelling then — schopenhauer1

An umwelt is a model of the world with a self in it. It is a world modelled from a point of view that expresses a personal set of interests. So it is a way to understand why experience appears to be imbued with selfhood and thus avoid the usual dualistic and homuncular regress of a self that witnesses its own perceptions in some Cartesian theatre. Selfhood is built into the "picture" from the beginning.

Again that wouldn't be an explanation, just a synonym, an infinite regress)? — schopenhauer1

Again, can you now answer my question instead of continuously deflecting. Why wouldn’t the kind of unwelt modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?

Saying, "Wouldn't processes feel like something" — schopenhauer1

And why wouldn’t the kind of world and self modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?

You’ve never said despite being asked many times now.

I suppose we need to define "spontaneously" then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. I did. The spontaneous part of "spontaneous symmetry-breaking" refers to the fact that any old material nudge is going to tip everything in some collective symmetry-breaking direction. So it says, yes, you need some kind of material/efficient cause to get things going. But the very least imaginable fluctuation is going to do that.

It doesn't have to be a fluctuation of any particular formed kind. It doesn't have to be a fluctuation with any degree of intention. It is the very opposite of any kind of voluntary act. It is a pure accident. Whatever happened, it would have resulted in the same effect.

A classic example of this is a ball balanced on top of a dome. It is going to roll off one way or another of its own accord. Well, it will need a nudge to get going. But there is always going to be some vibration or other that tips the balance.

So in the physics of symmetry-breaking and self-organisation, the notion of "spontaneous" in regards to material/efficient cause is very well defined.

And likewise, the final/formal cause is well understood. If there is a state of organisation that can lower a system's entropy - like a ball rolling of a dome - then finality will drive that to happen. It so wants to happen, that is the reason any old nudge is going to get you started.

It is the usual reciprocal or dichotomous story. The more powerful the entropic urge, the less material push it takes to get things going. Hence you have this sharp contrast between tiny pushes and outlandish effects.

Ok, then replace state with experience or process. — schopenhauer1

Right. So now you are asking what was the first internal experience? :lol:

But perhaps if you understand your question to be, "what was the first internal process?", you can see that life - being organismic - is already the internalisation of some process. Being an organism is already to have crossed a clear line in becoming a subject.

So you can either make the happy dualistic leap from material state to mental experience, which simply jumps to either side of the process view, or you can stop and consider what is actually being said in process terms.

And semiotics is the science of meaning. It is about the process of semantics. That Pattee paper should have grounded you in how that cashes out. It is all about a sign relation that allows modelling to regulate environmental or material instability in a way that produces local autonomy.

That is then the "analogy" (its actually much stronger than that) which allows you to talk about semiotics as a general process. Life and mind are levels of the same trick. One level involves the machinery of genes. The other, neurons and even words.

So your "mentalism" becomes as redundant as vitalism. There just is no mystical substance in need of a proper explanation. To ask for an explanation of "mind" or "experience" is to be already making a category error.

How is this story analogous to the first internal state (i.e mental state)? — schopenhauer1

You are presupposing that mental states are a thing. And so you presuppose their dualism to physical states. The whole state-based conception of reality is where you have already gone wrong.

You are trapped by your own habits of thought. So I can't talk you out of that. You have to talk yourself out of it. You would have to learn to think in a different fashion.

Once we grant thoughts themselves an ontological status, the next question becomes, can we apply objective criteria to the claims expressed by these thoughts? — Read Parfit

I'd point out how this all stems from analytic philosophy taking a Newtonian view of ontology. And that sets things up for an odd dualism that is at the heart of your OP.

So the assumption is that everything ontic can be reduced to states of affairs - some collection of particular individuated things. And then all these things have simple Newtonian relations. Each is an element of reality with some inherent property. You have then a calculus of relations where each element affects any other element in a fixed, determined and mechanical way. It is a world of straight lines of action with no deviations possible.

And so it is a world of logical operations too. Happily for AP ontology, physics is computational. One state of affairs maps onto the next state of affairs in utterly predictable and deterministic fashion because all causality is merely syntax. There are laws that set the rules. There are elements with properties that have to obey those rules. And that's it. Get computing.

Thus AP ontology is dualistic. Physics and logic are mirror images of each other in that both are about syntax determining what is possible in terms of reality. If you have A, it is going to give you B - so long as you know the rule that applies to your world of elements.

This is why AP winds up in modal realism. Unicorns might not exist in our world, but they could have evolved in some other world with the same natural laws. So they are a definite possibility. On the other hand, solid gold planets are impossible objects in worlds with our laws. Their gravity would collapse them into black holes.

It all does sort of makes sense.

But also it doesn't. And @Wayfarer is right to highlight how it is all about syntax, and semantics gets left out.

AP just really struggles with semantics - just as classical Newtonian physics really ended up struggling with its story of a world of concrete observables that left out any physical account of the observers making sense of their observations. Not to mention how Newtonianism created a mystery in regard to how the laws could exist in a fashion where they did determine every state transition of a collection of material elements. And the leaving out of the observers who discover the laws, and the manner in which laws might be properly real, were of course a connected problem.

So AP ontology leaves you with this weird thing where all that seems to be going on when a brain is having thoughts is some collection of physical events. You have a bunch of neurons "firing". Something energetic is happening at synapses. If it is energetic, it must obey physical law - the standard universal syntax of Newtonian physics.

But also - dualistically - the physical pattern of activity is being caused by a second logical syntax. There is some kind of computational program being run. The brain is doing information processing. The physics now just instantiates the pattern. It gives the software some hardware.

However - from the AP point of view - the story is still safely Newtonian. There is some system of rules in play which determine each step of any transition from one state to the next. The ontology is mechanical in exactly the way classical physics imagines ontology. So the logical level of reality seems to safely parallel the material level of reality in this fashion. And then AP tries to get on with business without mentioning the gap.

Syntax is syntax after all. And physics is treating the material world as a logical pattern - rule-bound computation acting on elements with predicates. So why not believe the reverse? All possible logical patterns could be materially real. And so - in some sense - all logical patterns are real. If a brain imagines a unicorn or Pegasus, then that gives these individuals an ontological-strength claim to existing. They exist as a logical pattern in some set of circuits. The idea has happened materially.

Again, it sort of makes sense. Yet clearly, it is all rather out of whack. There is a dualism that is getting fudged. You have a realm of matter and a realm of form, with nothing properly connecting them.

In the Newtonian view, the laws provided the rules, and so the form of any material change. But where do these laws live? How do they act on the material?

In the computational view, the algorithms provide the rules, and so the form of any informational change. But why does it take such an atypical state of materiality to allow that to be the case? You just won't find computer circuitry appearing naturally in nature. A set of digital circuits wouldn't appear in any world just left on its own without the intervention of some human-scale imagination and a machine constructing culture.

A brain of course evolved. But brains are not machines or computers.

So we have this AP ontology that reduces existence to the syntactical. Everything is a logical pattern. Even physics - because, hey, Newton told us that back about 400 years ago. Thus to exist is this thing of being a material state of affairs - a collection of elements arranged in a pattern and deterministically controlled by a syntax. And then even a logical state of affairs exists as something real because it too is a collection of syntactically-controlled elements - that is thus always implementable as some material state of affairs. And so - the fudge arriving - the gap between the informational version of reality and the physical version of reality can be ignored.

Any blueprint for a machine could be turned into some actual machine. And thus the gap between the logical or informational, and the material or physical, is a fairly theoretical one that ontology can afford to ignore.

It sort of works as a rough approximation of reality. Both Newtonian physics and Turing computation are really great ... for building a world of machinery.

But science of course has moved on, both in physics, but especially in biology. And this is returning us towards a more sophisticated Aristotlelian "four causes" ontology. AP feels so last century now. You are dealing with a historical curiosity is all.

But lipids don't form spontaneously — Metaphysician Undercover

They form membranes spontaneously. You forgot, or never understood, what was said.

By removing that non-physical aspect, intent, from finality, you are left with nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

Godless nonsense I’m sure. :grin:

I agree with most of what you say, by the way.

But it's strikingly at odds with your metaphysics. — csalisbury

It probably isn't given it is a view that comes directly from Stan Salthe, the one person to have had the greatest personal influence on any metaphysical position I might have. Actually, a wise old bird is the best description I can imagine for Salthe.

Of course one's metaphysics can be separated from one's practice. If your passion is [non-metaphysical-x] all the more power to you - but your passion seems to be metaphysics, no? — csalisbury

Hey, I live a life too. I raise a family, play a role in a community, etc. Metaphysics is a hobby. Well, having a sound understanding of how the world actually works - socially and physically - has also been a paying gig. But I'm not some kind of theory nerd who reads dense textbooks all day. Pretty much the opposite all my life in fact. I have to start an argument to get interested enough to check if my facts might be right. :)

As I explained to Read Parfit, both the evidence and the logic indicate that the correct direction for speculation is into the nature of the non-physical, and how the non-physical "soul" brings about the existence of living physical bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

So do lipids have eternal souls that bring about their existence in nature? Tell us more.

You don't seem to understand the scientific version of hylomorphism - the kind where global organisation can form "spontaneously" to meet some finality. The word spontaneous is used here to denote that there is no particular local material/efficient cause that produces the global organisation. Instead there is some generalised finality being served which does the trick.

In the case of lipids forming micelles, the finality is the usual one of entropy minimisation. The lipid molecules have no choice but to find the configuration which is the least energy-demanding possible. And any kind of nudge or fluctuation at all is going to be enough of a local material push to set that chain of dominoes falling to its inevitable conclusion - a micelle arrangement with all the hydrophobic tails tuck up inside, safely far from any surrounding water.

So for a modern biological Aristotelian, we have our notions of final/formal cause that make measurable sense. We have a second law of thermodynamics. We can apply it universally in a way that explains micelles and vesicles as spontaneous necessities. They are forms of material organisation that can't not happen as even the most "non-physical" nudge - the faintest possible accidental fluctuation - is going to tumble everything in that direction. The outcome is almost Platonically pre-destined.

But what is the story for your scholastic Aristotelianism? What about nature does it manage to explain in a way that has any pragmatic use these days?

What does the Bible say about the origin of lipids, and hence micelles and vesicles? Point us to the relevant chapter and verse.

Only thing I would change is the language - not 'accumulating' practical 'wisdom' - but just finding a way to live practically. — csalisbury

Not that it matters, but there were the usual technical reasons for the choice of words. We accumulate wise habits like sedimented states of thought. And a lifecycle view of that kind of habit-taking recognises that it almost inevitably winds up in senescence. We become so fixed in our wise ways that our capacity to learn new particular things dwindles. Every novelty gets assimilated to the existing totality.

So wisdom becomes itself another stage rather than an endpoint. To be completely adapted to the world as you could know it creates its own new vulnerability of being completely surprised by some real environmental shift.

So the best we can do is grow to be pragmatically wise. And that will be such a sediment of habits that we are exposed if circumstances are changed radically. Like happens all the time in nature.

So what was the interpretive context the protein was already situated in? — schopenhauer1

It would have to be some dissipative process that the protein could regulate. So for example, a really primal step would be the appearance of protein that could act as a hydrogenase enzyme switch - convert protons into H2 molecules and vice versa.

So the basic reaction - which happens when acid water meets an iron rich substrate - is there already. All you need is iron atoms bound up in the right protein conformation to begin to have a knob that controls the reaction in a meaningful direction. There is a little bit of something - which can be used in directed fashion to harness energy and begin building complex carbohydrate structures - for evolution to get its teeth sunk into.

It is like a switch floating around in an already active soup. A network of these switches can assemble to create a complexly structured flow - with switch building becoming itself an increasingly complex part of the construction process.

So the first steps are not very "informational" perhaps. They are not the leap to completely symbolic semiosis as we see with RNA. But Peircean semiosis itself recognises grades of semiosis - the three steps from iconic to indexical to fully symbolic.

So the earliest biological structure would have been merely a switch pointing a way in indexical fashion. The interpretive context would be of the most minimal possible kind.

But then what else would you expect right at the beginning?

The question I want to ask is if you believe the DMN, or rather the ingrained habit of self-conscious, can be unlearned to a significant degree, say with the methods I've mentioned and perhaps a sustained mindful attention? — praxis

Again, I would highlight the two different ways of framing what is going on.

The overly biological view would be that good concentration is an evolved brain function. Some folk are naturals. Other people have some kind of weakness. We could diagnose them with a disorder like attention deficit even. Give them drugs.

Then the view I'm taking is that concentration is the human learnt habit of being able to attend to essentially boring things that the brain isn't naturally designed to be interested in. If you are a radar operator watching a screen where nothing much happens all day, then why wouldn't your mind wander? It is wired to do just that.

This is a fact of neurology down to the micro-scale. If you have an image stabilised on your retina, it fades within a second, no matter how hard you try to keep seeing it. The nervous system is designed to discount that which doesn't vary right from the first step in sensory processing. To stay aware of some constant visual stimulus, our eyes have to be kept dancing over it in micro-saccades. We must introduce motion to create some sense of interest down at the front-line of vision.

So to the degree there is ever a problem, it is down to a social demand about the ability to self-regulate. It is just part of our culture - a useful part of course - that we can pay attention to stuff that brains are not evolved to find exciting.

Concentration is thus itself a skill to be learnt, a habit to be developed. We have to learn little tricks to keep us on task. Having a strong awareness of the penalties for failure can become quite a motivating part of the deal. Finding ways to insert brief refreshing breaks is another way to keep the brain on task.

And some people do have a stronger or weaker biological ability to stay focused, just as we all vary in the precise balance of our neurology. Another feature of humans is that we are more highly lateralised and that the brain's attentional networks are lateralised so that left brain leads for endogenous focus - tunnel vision in pursuit of plans - and right brain is the mode we switch to for vigilant focus, or an open-minded alertness where we don't know what is about to happen, but are ready to catch whatever it is very fast. So some people may be just better at one than the other, or just better at switching clearly between one and the other.

The balancing act is reflected in neurotransmitter differences. Dopamine is part of maintaining endogenous or internally-directed focus. Nor-adrenaline is for jumpy alertness as it boosts signal-noise ratios. It makes neurons more likely to fire, and so both more sensitive to stimuli and more likely to produce false guesses.

So there is no simple story. But the simple story is that humans in general, especially in this modern age, live with this high expectation about being able to concentrate when the brain would naturally be bored. And then within this, individual humans would struggle with their own individual biological differences in how the balances of their nervous systems happen to have been set up during neuro-development.

Where does meditation fit in? Well it would train both the social and the biological aspects of concentration as much as they are trainable.

It is a skill you can learn to switch between a left brain and right brain style of attention. We learn to do it in simple fashion just by looking up and to the left when wanting to search our memory or imagination in vigilant brain manner. It wakes up the right brain enough to emphasise that style of processing.

So biofeedback training is also a thing. If we train hard enough, we can establish top-down voluntary control over what would be normally some very low level and automatic stuff - like our heart rate or attentional settings.

And as you say, if being self-conscious is a social self-regulatory habit we have learnt, a cultural overlay, then we can somewhat unlearn that as a further cultural habit - the kind meditation is meant to represent as a higher state of self-mastery and enlightenment.

As you likely know, the inner voice can't actually be shut off. But we can learn to just keep on ignoring it every time it catches our attention. We can get into the habit of letting every itching beginning of a speech act go the instant it begins to clearly form. We can even let the babbling go on somewhere at the back of our mind by keeping our senses focused on the blue patch on the wall or whatever - keep returning our attentional focus to some neutral and un-comment worthy point of focus so that the inner voice has as little to work off as possible.

I had some zen training as a kid and I must confess I found it very hokey for these reasons. It just seemed another obvious trick you had to learn to play with your own neurology. My approach to life was always to chase my curiosities rather than worry about controlling them in some culturally arbitrary fashion. So I was never a good fit with meditation as an approach to anything. But in terms of neuroscience and cultural anthropology, how it works does not seem a vast mystery, just a very complex story of balances and interplays.

Anything within the limits, being not the limits themselves, which is the entirety of "the real" would be excluded from the dichotomy under the designation of "jointly exhaustive" — Metaphysician Undercover

Together they exhaust other possible limitations to that aspect of reality.

And don't forget that what follows after a dichotomous separation or symmetry breaking is the arrival at the stable equilibrium of a triadic hierarchical state of order. You get an ending to the breaking when the two limits are in equilibrium with the contents they thus now contain.

Again, because you can't be bothered to study how all this works, you keep falling woefully short of any understanding. I have to keep explaining basic stuff again and again.

That's because I normally use "dichotomy" in the more general and common way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. You think it is a simple division. And the process view says it is irreducibly complex. Things only reach stability once the separating into polar opposites has arrived at a hierarchical balance where there is also now a connecting spectrum of concrete possibility.

This leads to the idea that things which are opposed to each other, like hot and cold, form a dichotomy. But notice how all things which are warm are excluded from that dichotomy. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. All things warm are now specified in concrete fashion because they are related to the extremes of a dichotomy. There is the hot in one direction, the cold in the other. So now the warm has its own definite and measurable location somewhere on the spectrum of possibility just established.

Dichotomies are incompatible with your process philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

What do you understand about process philosophy? A big fat zero so far.

Why? — darthbarracuda

What @Bitter Crank said.

Also, if you say an obsessive pursuit of truth is some kind of grand delusion, who would disagree with that diagnosis - to the degree you aren't being well paid and enjoying high status for doing that?

But who would damn you for a life devoted to accumulating practical wisdom?

So why not focus on that?

I don’t quite follow your meaning when you say that neurology celebrates the efficient brain. Do you essentially mean that this is optimal for health and function? — praxis

No. I was meaning informationally efficient. Predictively efficient.

Ideally the brain should be so good at predicting its world that it doesn't even need to waste time finding out what actually happened. The more the brain can afford to ignore in terms of the available information contained in its environment, the better it is doing its job.

This of course is counter-intuitive to ordinary views about consciousness. It seems that to be highly evolved is to have an ever greater span of conscious awareness. The larger your attentive bandwidth, the better.

Yet the opposite is the basic driver of the neurocognitive equation. Less is more. We have a very limited working memory, and an even more constricted spotlight of attention, by design. Humans have large brains and use them to discount even more of the world than other animals.

One finding - might be a bit old now - is that monkey primary visual cortex (V1) has a proportionately smaller central foveal representation. The visual cortex gives more weight to what's happening in the periphery of the field of vision.

But humans devote a lot of V1 to just the pin-point size fovea. Everything outside that tiny central spot gets much less attention by comparison. And the logic is that humans use all their extra smarts to be already knowing where they should be looking. Less is more. What we can predict, we can discount. And the result is that what doesn't get discounted has far more informational significance. It is already more meaningful as what we didn't expect.

When working to improve our skills in some activity, such as stair climbing, we necessarily focus our attention on the activity and often to good effect, so it seems there must be more to the story. — praxis

Of course. We have to attend and learn when any skill is new. And then as fast as practical, the skill is made a smoothly integrated automatic habit - a thing we can now do without deliberative thinking.

It is literally a story of short-circuiting our reactions. When we attend, everything is looping right up the brain hierarchy so that the prefrontal cortex and other highly plastic and unspecialised higher brain areas are involved in figuring out how to do things - like drive a car or climb the stairs.

Then as there starts to be some success at that, the mid-brain begins to short-circuit those long and slow loops. It begins to emit the same response in a speedy template fashion. It knits together the complex set of instructions that the higher brain has been helping forge into just a memory that can tell the motor centres exactly what to do.

That is why you can do really smart and skilled things in a fifth of a second when attention would still be fumbling about in its experimental fashion, trying to see which bit has to happen exactly when.

I understand this learned habit of self is neurologically located in the DMN (default mode network). — praxis

You would need to distinguish now between a biological sense of self and a social sense of self.

So yes, all animals need an embodied sense of self just so they can move and act. They need to know where their bodies end and the world starts. They need to know if they turn their heads sharply, it was not the world that suddenly lurched. So for sure there is a neurology which maps the embodied self in proprioceptive fashion.

But now I am talking about self-conscious as a social construct. And this is about seeing the self as "a self". It is the habit of stepping back from all that is going on in "your" head and seeing it at an objectifying remove as the thoughts, perceptions, memories and feelings running through the experience of a person.

So when you think of yourself in this fashion, that is going to be a habit of thought that also lights up the part of the brain that help make that effort of self-visualisation a vivid experience for you. But it is still a social habit and not a genetic faculty.

The brain did not evolve a biological self-consciousness. Although - being highly social creatures, like all the great apes - we did definitely evolve the kind of imaginative skills that help make it an easy narrative skill to master.

We were pre-adapted by having highly developed social modelling abilities - the ability to model our fellow hominids as social actors with thoughts and desires. So we did have a biological ability to read the minds and intentions of others - the famous theory of mind "module". But what I am saying is that the final touch - the ability to step outside our own heads to model ourselves in that fashion - couldn't happen until symbolic language came along and allowed society to create that as a new self-regulating habit of thought.

If so, it would seem that neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to live as attentively as possible, without the burden of an overactive DMN. — praxis

The DMN story was way overplayed in my view.

Animals don't get bothered by extraneous thinking. They just react as automatically as possible. Attention would keep its sticky mitts out of things without having to be told.

But humans are supposed to be always narratising. That's the irony. It becomes an ingrained habit of thought. We can't shut up. The inner voice has been trained to start making some comment about something during every conscious moment. Whatever catches our attention in any instance has to be treated as a possible departure point for some "intelligent" remark.

So attention can't be literally shut off. Even if what we are doing can be handled entirely automatically - like driving your car on a familiar journey - your narratising mind is going to want to wander. It will latch on to anything random and ruminate about that.

Even in deepest slow wave sleep your inner voice will be trying to say something meaningful out of blind habit.

So the DMN is rather a neurocognitive artifact.

A well drilled brain wants attention put in idle. It would otherwise just get in the way of smooth and rapid performance. Attention would always be trying to invent some nifty new experimental way of doing stuff, and causing the brain to balls up what it actually needs to be getting on with doing.

But humans have learnt this further habit of chattering away in the head in watchful self-regulatory fashion. It itself is now a habit that just runs automatically of its own accord. So sometimes the inner voice is getting called in because something needs to be figured out attentively. And a lot of the time it can be allowed to wander off in distracted reflective thought with no great purpose.

It is not in competition for resources as such. It isn't going to be overactive and a burden in a normal and well-adjusted person. But that is all part of the social training. It is why we get told off in class for daydreaming. And why some might demonise this DMN as something that endangers our modern standards of cultural self-regulation and responsibility bearing.

First they train us to narratise to the point it is an unstoppable habit. Then they tell us off when we let our minds narratise in automatic fashion. The demand is that we ought to be in attentive control of what the inner voice is pondering about an any instant, no matter how little actual demand there is for attentional control at that precise moment.

Society cuts self-regulation no slack in the modern world.

The tie, Bob says, is green, even though it looks blue. After a few days, John gets the hang of this way of talking. John has learnt a new way of talking. — StreetlightX

And interestingly, almost a Platonic way of talking. Conception sees beyond mere appearance.

Or more pragmatically, the mind seeks out a way to impose stability on the flux of experience. It is trying to describe the essence that endures.

And even more pragmatically - accepting now that experience is a phenomenal umwelt organised by a mediating system of signs - we do end up knowing only our concrete symbols of things. Green is something we can reliably recognise, no matter what its current guise.

Importantly, this 'how' involves what Sellars refers to as a normative dimension of knowledge claims, an 'ought-to-say' over and above a mere 'is'. — StreetlightX

Again, the pragmatic story. Knowledge - in the linguistically-structured sense particular to humans - is what a community sharing a language, a system of linguistic sign, would come to agree the meaning of in the long run. To say "green" would have a socially-constrained interpretation. And to be a functioning part of a linguistic community is to be able to participate as a native in its linguistic habits.

So yes. There is a normative ought that emerges at the sociocultural level. But it is a soft "ought" in being just a constraint. There is still an irreducible freedom or creativity about what any particular speech act might actually mean.

That too is a key aspect of semiosis. Essences or generalisations are limiting but not completely restrictive.

Do you think this admits of a purely physical solution? — Wayfarer

Or it could be that Pattee is adopting a useful rhetorical position in which the glass is half-empty rather than half-full.

It is definitely part of his character that he pushes the expected scientific attitude of: "Well, we don't really know yet. And we may never actually know the answer on abiogenesis because we haven't got a time machine to go back and see what may have been some of the accidental steps along some actual sequence of events."

Pattee set himself apart from his mostly far more easy-going theoretical biology colleagues on this score. There are always plenty happy to believe they have the answer - RNA world, or whatever. And Pattee's chosen role was to be the one bringing clarity to the actual question to be answered. So he was always saying, hold up, not yet. You will have to go deeper than that to count as a final theory.

So what you are hearing is the kind of rigour that makes science a metaphysically-responsible exercise worth doing.

It is certainly not any kind of semi-religious wavering - the thought that the causes of life and mind might not have a naturalistic explanation. I never heard Pattee make the faintest nod in that direction. And the subject did come up as others in his circle, like Robert Ulanowicz, were openly theistic.

Pattee would be the most hard-nosed of materialists and so resisted Peircean metaphysics and semiotics pretty strongly - until he was converted and came out with his late flood of papers arguing the case elegantly.

That the epistemic cut, or the distinction between the semantic and the physical, will be erased in due course? — Wayfarer

But the cut exists. The abiogenetic issue is how could it have evolved as it seems there is a significant gap to leap.

And now - in just the past decade - that gap has shrunk dramatically, as Nick Lane and Peter Hoffman can tell you from their frontline position in experimental biology.

With Hoffman, the gap is pretty much literally not there. At the quasi-quantum nanoscale, where the entropic costs of converting thermal gradients to negentropic work falls effectively to zero, life is left with no choice but to get started.

The epistemic cut simply is lying there on the floor ready to be picked up. It doesn't need to be created anymore. You couldn't avoid stumbling into its grip if you are some passing biochemical process. The likelihood of life not breaking out falls to some improbably tiny number that we might as well call zero.

At the moment, I am reading Nick Lane’s new book “The Vital Question, Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life.” — Read Parfit

Another really important popular science account - maybe even more important as a glimpse into the future of biology - is Peter Hoffman's Life's Ratchet. See http://lifesratchet.com/

Notice the quote "speculation far outpaces evidence in many of the book's passages". — Metaphysician Undercover

Who would'a thunk? Science has to generate speculation to give its experiments something to knock down.

I guess some folk still believes science works the other way. First up pops some significant experimental fact, some inconvenient laboratory truth, and everyone gathers around to invent a new theory.

But the efficient way to search for answers is to have formed a clear idea of what you might be looking for.

If you read Lane, you might be impressed by the way science works to narrow the options. It used to be thought that life would have to start with little fatty vesicles - spontaneously developing proto-cells.

But in considering the problems of life beginning on boiling hot ocean floor vents, that narrowed attention to luke-warm alkaline ones. And that in turn threw up the speculative possibility that the porous mineral structure of those vents already gave you the kind of reaction chambers you need. Even before fatty vesicles, the right kind of material constraints would be in place to get the barest form of metabolic reaction going.

Of course the only way to judge the reasonableness of such speculation - which ran ahead of the experiments now being done by Lane and others - would be to actually read his book.

A revolutionary concept, I guess.

Look at me! Listen to me! I have truth, I am the truth! In actuality there cannot be a lover of truth but only lovers of opinion, and more specifically their own. All of this is a charade - ironically, the lover of truth is in a state of profound self-delusion. — darthbarracuda

I am not criticizing truth in this circular manner, I am simply saying that truth as it is truth in and of itself is worthless. — darthbarracuda

You seem caught up in your own version of the liar's paradox.

"It is true that truth isn't true but a delusion. Listen to me. I'm telling you the truth. Therefore I'm deluded. Therefore what I said isn't true."

We get the same self-defeating rants from the anti-totalisers who make anti-totalising their totalising philosophical viewpoint.

Pragmatism offers the quiet exit door from these kinds of standard pathologies of thought. Walk out now and never look back!

He seems to make a stark dichotomy between "physical laws" and "local constraints". So were local constraints always in the picture in his view or were they created by the physical laws? — schopenhauer1

You seem not to understand that laws are simply constraints that are universal - baked into the fabric of the Universe as a result of its history of development.

So all biology is ruled by the laws that express the cosmological imperative to thermalise. They can't break that law and have to live within it. They are .... constrained by it. The constraint is a holonomic one, to use the technical term.

But then - as Pattee says - life and mind arise by being able to construct their own localised non-holonomic constraints. These would be the various barriers, gates and switches that make it possible to regulate material flows of entropy - to put any available entropic gradients to good use and do negentropic work.

So it is all about nested hierarchies of constraints. It begins with the most general. And then localised complexity is free to develop within those global bounds. Life and mind go the step further in being able to construct self-interested structures that do work. And they pay for that by always having to accelerate the local production of entropy. They have to exist by doing the second law's job more efficiently than happened to be the case at some particular spot in the Cosmos.

There is nothing forbidding the acceleration of entropy rates by negentropic structure. And what isn't forbidden by natural law is almost sure to happen. Indeed, it must happen if it is actually possible.

That inevitability is why we tend to call it "a law".

Presumably, emergent theories claim that new properties are created from the processes of a lower order and cannot be reduced. I don't really see that problem with proteins per se. — schopenhauer1

How does a protein function as a biological message? How is that emergent from some "lower order" rather than that being an emergent result of there being a larger interpretive context. And enzyme tells a metabolic reaction to hurry up. A membrane tells a metabolic reactant to wait there.

Barriers, gates and switches are all physical devices. But they have no meaning that emerges from within themselves. Their meaning is emergent due to a holism of the whole system operating to meet a goal.

So Pattee was focused on the classic issue of abiogenesis. How could life get started unless life - in that holistic sense - already existed? What is the point of a protein if its folded structure doesn't already mean something in terms of some functional system?

If the fundamental property of a biological protein is to "act like a switch", that can't in fact be a property until it is useful from a holistic and functional point of view to have a part that behaves just like that.

So your notion of emergence is the wrong one - the bottom-up/supervenience story that bedevils material reductionists. Pattee is talking about a top-down systems causality where the whole shapes the parts it needs due to a functional holism.

It is the constraints-based view of metaphysics. That is the critical intellectual leap you are being asked to make.

OK, let's start from the beginning again — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Let's see if you can just remember the definition of a dichotomy as that which is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". So there is a process of separation towards reciprocally-matched limits. Two contrasting limits on "the real" emerge into view according to the distance each can each put between itself and its "other".

They are defined in such a way that the one excludes the other in opposition. — Metaphysician Undercover

Don't forget that they are also jointly exhaustive. So you have to have these two (the assertion about the mutuality of a pairing). And also only these two (the assertion about the exhaustion of any further possibilities).

You make the right noises about dichotomies only then to collapse everything back to your happy simplicities of pairs of terms that are then neither mutual nor exhaustive anymore so far as you are concerned.

I know it is a little bit complicated. But it ain't that complicated.

So here is the problem I have, which I've been trying to relate to you. If we model reality in this way that you are proposing, how would we distinguish between, and identify, the two defining elements, the container and the contents, within the thing which is being modelled? — Metaphysician Undercover

This is some other confection of misunderstanding you are attempting to concoct as a distraction.

Keep starting from the beginning until you accept how a dichotomy actually works - mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Dwell on that truth deeply. Really soak up the meaning in a way you can't forget or deny. Then maybe you will have the logical wherewithal to take a next step.

1. What is the main point between the physical laws and control constraints? When do the local constraints get in the ontological ecosystem? He mentions them as if they are already existent along with the physical laws (or at least how I interpreted it). How do the local constraints come into the picture if all were originally physical laws? — schopenhauer1

So some constraints are global. And other constraints can then be local. Where's the problem?

The Cosmos has its universal constraints on action or uncertainty. Physical systems, like stars or rocks or waterfalls, then express more local or particular constraints. And then organisms can even construct their own local and particular constraints via the symbol~matter deal of biosemiosis.

2. What is the emergent property of protein (what he calls enzyme) folding? I know he talks about strong and weak bonds, but that didn't seem to answer the question. — schopenhauer1

Your question doesn't make sense.

3. I guess what is the main point regarding biosemiotics in regards to experience? — schopenhauer1

Experience should be understood as an organismic sign relation.

But there seems to be a third category; emotional motivations that are not understood by the conscious mind. — EnPassant

True. So habits are the mid-brain doing its thing of automating responses so "you " don't have to think about them, or attend to them. That is one aspect of what people label the unconscious, or subconscious, or preconscious.

And as well as this "how" of unconscious, or rather non-attentive, behaviour, there is the "why" - the motivation or valuing that gets labelled as emotion, in opposition to "conscious reasoning".

So now the neurological basis of that is about the brainstem and limbic system - amygdala, hypothalmus, etc. And that is its own complex story.

But primarily, the emotions can be understood as perception of the internal state of your own body and physiology. Are you hungry, thirsty, excited, tired, in pain, etc. So it is hardly unconscious. Like all perception, the question is whether you are attending and so focused on how to respond to the signals.

I could just as well be staring out the window and not seeing what my eyes are seeing because my mind is far away concentrating on something else. But seeing isn't then part of the subconscious mind. It just means attention blocks out awareness for what doesn't currently matter.

All the sensations - internal or external - are "there". But attention acts as a filter that focuses on a foreground by blanking out a background. Whether some aspect of what is going on is conscious or unconscious is down to a dynamical balance of selection/repression.

But a second aspect of this emotion story is the habit/automatism one. Emotions do seem to break through unbidden because the brain does have to know when to jerk attention towards significant events. And as importantly, our physiological state has to start reacting as soon as possible to deal with whatever is about to happen.

So if we hear heavy footsteps coming up behind us on a dark night, we instinctively get all the right reactions starting up as soon as the possible significance of this is realised at an automatic level - heart beats faster, digestion slows to divert blood to the muscles, cold sweat begins, nor-adrenaline pumps in the brain to create an aroused alertness.

Conscious or attentive awareness of the world takes about half a second to develop. It takes that long to focus and work out what is going on in an intellectual fashion. But habits - as learnt response - can simply be emitted in reflexive fashion. We can react in a simple startled fashion in about a tenth of a second, and in quite a well-honed smart fashion - the kind of skilled moves involved in sport - in a fifth of a second.

So the brain is set up to respond fast in learnt habitual fashion - to generate an appropriate flood of emotional feelings - and then let lagging attention swing into place to check whatever it was that just gave us a surprise. We might either then start to calm down, or decide we really need some kind of conscious action plan.

Thus the key dynamic in neurobiology is the divide between attention and habit. Do we need to focus on something in a whole brain reasoning fashion, or do we basically understand exactly how to react from a lifetime of experience? The brain is set up so that everything first goes through the fifth of a second loop that pretty much equates to an unconscious level of processing. Then only if it matters does it break through to become the subject of slower reacting, but far more explorative and remembered, attentive processing.

Emotions, as perceptions of internal state, are just like perceptions of the external world in being new information filtered in this two-stage fashion.

And then emotions as orienting responses - or appropriate shifts in physiological state to match the level of challenge in the world - is about what happens down at a reflexive or habitual level of response without waiting for attention to catch up and say it is the proper thing to do.

So emotion becomes attached to the events of the world as judgements about how aroused or relaxed we need to be in the next moment or so. And emotions are also news about our physiological needs - hunger, thirst, lust, etc - that are drives that need satisfaction. If habit isn't already delivering and the need is growing, then time for attention to be interrupted and focus on the fact.

Sometimes people act without understanding their motivations. That seems to be a kind of unconscious mind. — EnPassant

Now we are into yet another different level of explanation - one that ain't strictly neurobiological but linguistic and socio-cultural.

Humans have narrative consciousness, or language-structured self-consciousness. A good way to direct attention is to speak to ourselves in our heads as if we are addressing a person - our self.

So this is another habit(!) we learn. We construct an integrated tale about who we are, what we are about. There is this whole life story about the reasons we would do this or that which is all part of the learnt apparatus of being a self-regulating member of a human society.

So we are meant to be able to explain the reasons for our behaviour to others at all times. It is just part of the routine. And yet the neurological truth is that much of the reason we do things are down to habits and instincts we have learnt as our reliable ways to deal with the world with minimal attentive effort.

The neurological level need is to be efficient and think as little as possible about life. If you know the right kinds of things to do, just do them without stopping to think and debate. Focusing attention on any skilled action - even climbing the stairs - and you can set up the kind of wrestle between two processes with different basic rates (a fifth of a second vs half a second) that causes you to stumble and misfire. When it comes to action or output, one or other level of processing has to be in charge for the moment.

So on the whole, as a general rule, neurobiology will be wanting to respond to everything at the most habitual and automatic level first. We get a big tick from our biological self if we are successfully "unconscious" when getting stuff done. That is what an efficient and well-adapted brain looks like.

But then we get a conflicting socio-cultural message as, at that level, we are meant to be self-conscious selves, completely in charge and attentively regulating every action that issues from us. We are held responsible. And we better be ready with articulated reasons for everything.

If we do stumble even on something so trivial as climbing a flight of steps, blame has to be assigned for the failure. Maybe a dog barked and distracted us. Maybe the step wobbled. Maybe - if we are really forced to confess our guilt - we were being "inattentive".

Society is built on this kind of expectation. We are all selves, and that entails a conscious level responsibility for every action that results. That in turn sets up this great social concern and mystery when it comes to "unconscious" behaviour or thought. We have this dangerous inner world with its own mind. Mostly it seems to go with the flow, obey our narrative about our motivations. But there is lurks, always ready to betray us.

Again, it all comes back to a natural division of labour - the dichotomy of attentive-level and habit-level processing. And neurology celebrates the efficient brain that learns to get by as inattentively as possible, while sociology demands the impossible thing of a brain that is attentively responsible for every single detail of its behaviour. The unconscious thus looms large and mysterious in the popular imagination.

You talk about the discrete and the continuous as if there is some real difference between them. — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct.

But when you describe the way that existence really is, you claim that there is no way of distinguishing between them within real existing things. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are you talking about. This is modelling. So to the extent that we know the thing-in-itself, the dichotomy of the discrete and the continuous is the conceptual division that would describe a separation of the real - whatever that is noumenally speaking - towards its "real" phenomenological limits.

Thus if we are talking about our ontic commitments, then containers and contents are both equally "real" in that modelling sense. Likewise our notions of the continuous and discrete as the limits on possible existence.

This stands in contrast to more reductionist or monistic schemes that would want to make one or the other the "real". Or indeed, dualistic schemes that take a substantial rather than a process view of dichotomies.

So your problem is that you conflate the phenomenal and the noumenal in this discussion. It is one of the ways you keep tangling your feet.

because the two are fundamentally inseparable, and therefore cannot be identified individually. — Metaphysician Undercover

Back to front. The two are fundamentally separable because they can be individuated in terms of a reciprocal relation to each other. And by that same token, the two are fundamentally connected by being the two poles of that reciprocal relation.

Blood pressure is complex plumbing. — frank

Why do I bother.

Hey, you brought it up, not I. It is your subject, look: — Metaphysician Undercover

Err, reality as a process.

It's not my fault that when I try to engage you on this subject, you simply tried to change the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

I just tried to prevent you going down your same old rabbit hole of non-process assumptions.

But when things are related, and one is designated as the largest, and another is designated as the smallest, it is not the case that the largest contains the smallest. They are considered, and compared as separate entities, or else this relation could not be established. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh. The relationship is precisely what is established by the discrete being part to the whole that is continuity. The relationship is that of the downward acting constraints to the upward constructing elements or individuated degrees of freedom.

The nearest thing would be to draw a number line, but that would be a representation... — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean like a representation of a .... continuous, just waiting to be broken, space?

They both coexist and there is no way of saying that one is the contents and the other the container because each, the continuous and the discrete, seem to have features of container as well as features of contents. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are getting it ... by trying so hard to get it wrong! Spectacular. My job is done.

You originally seemed to suggest that an analysis of an organism does not lend itself to talk of states. — frank

Nope. My point was that talk of "states" usually already presupposes a particular metaphysical point of view - a mechanical or computational one.

And indeed, talk of states does become problematic when talking about organisms as if they were merely finite state automata.

So it would be helpful if the OP had tried to define how state is intended to be understood - in some hand waving way that defies definition in fact, or as something that can be given a usefully precise set of ontic commitments.

That was my point. Not something else.

Homeostasis is in fact all about states. The state of blood pressure, the state of glucose and O2 supply, etc. — frank

Un huh. Well I did biology and it was all about managing the instability of those things.

And how do organisms regulate their blood pressure or glucose levels? In some sense they sense their own state of being. They can make measurements that encode something of significance about how they "are right now" compared to how they imagine they "ought generally to be".

And the fact that there is this interpreting of measurements business going on is where things start to get interestingly complex. What happens if your body is misreading its glucose signals - something about its instrumentation is out of whack - and so homeostatically it is chasing a misguided target?

So yeah, in a very loose way you can talk about "states" of the body's vital signs as if they were something clearly physical - the kind of readings a doctor's instruments would provide. But that kind of Newtonian physicalist ontology doesn't really get you very far in understanding how the biology actually works.

And the same applies in spades when it comes to neuroscience and "states of mind".

Yes. — frank

So is a flux itself a state of balance according to you? Help me understand your understanding of homeostasis here.

Well if applied to antinatalism.. — schopenhauer1

...which wasn't the subject under discussion here.

you’ve said it’s not tenable because the majority will simply stampede over it with their preferences and thus can’t be a true ethical theory. — schopenhauer1

I have indeed pointed out the unintended irony that in eliminating those unwilling to breed, that would strengthen the impulse to breed of those remaining by definition. To the extent that wanting kids is a genetically or memetically evolved trait, antinatalism would act like the culling hand of selective breeding, removing an undesirable trait from a population and so increasing the general propensity to have children.

For antinatalism to win the race, it has to be all or nothing. The whole population has to be convinced it should halt. For reproduction to win out, even a little bit of breeding is enough to keep the game going.

So at best, antinatalism is a Pyrrhic gesture, the stance of the dedicated absurdist. The real "ethical" choice is being made at the collective population level. And that may also lead to human extinction anytime soon. Death of the species by perfectly natural causes. :)

Do you understand what homeostasis means then?

Don't you think that talk of flux, and talk of fluxes held in deliberate equilibrium balance, constitute two different "states of affairs". ;)

Flux is a state. — frank

Flux is a state of what though? And why have you suddenly changed the subject from homeostasis, or the intentional regulation of fluctuations, in pursuit of some stable - and in fact, "far from equilibrium" - equilibrium condition?

Stability is the outcome of equal opposing forces. — frank

Yep. Equilibrium is a state of all forces, or sources of fluctuation, arriving at some steady persisting balance. It is an outcome of a system being closed or bounded in a fashion that allows it to be so. And also some mind, some point of view, which no longer sweats the uncertain details.

The particles of an ideal gas at equilibrium are still in furious motion. But the state of the system can be completely determined by its macro-properties, such as temperature and pressure. At equilibrium, the kinetic details get averaged away. The actual state - some account of every individual particle - doesn't matter. The effective state is enough so far as the physical model is concerned.

So we do have our very mechanical notions of statistical states. But they in turn still rely on holistic and rather mental notions - like points of view that apply suitable cut-offs in terms of when the fine-grain details cease to matter.

The number 12 is not in a state of flux. It can't be. A mind can be in the state of contemplating the number 12. Yet 12 is apparently something beyond any individual mind. We believe that because a person can be wrong about what 12 is. — frank

We suddenly seem to be discussing Platonism. Are you completely abandoning homeostasis, which I agree is a great starting point for highlighting an organic approach in contrast to a mechanical one?

That sounds like a position stripped of all nuance. Maybe you are thinking of Jamesian pragmatism?

I read the tail end of this discussion here and thought just your pragmatism is harder to apply to value theory. — schopenhauer1

Maybe read the discussion then. It's not about value theory. Or at least no version in which values would be something with an objective or transcendent existence.

I can see you are approaching the paper with a completely open and unbiased mind. :up: