Thanks for clarifying. If I understand you correctly then, yes, the first person point of view is indeed a thing. It is the embodiment of a purpose, an intentionality.

And it arises as "consciousness" is not a passive display but an intentional view, as talking about it as a modelling relation is meant to emphasise. In every moment of comprehending the world, the brain is having to dynamically form the sense of self that is then standing in opposition to the world that is to be mastered. Perception is not merely about constructing a view of the world, it is about creating that intentional distinction which is the self experienced as that which is apart from the world with some agential purpose.

Even to eat my dinner, I have to be able to distinguish what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. So there is agency, a point of view just in understanding the world as that which is not my "self".

The connection to top down causality is then that an organism has a point of view from which it can impose "its" wishes and designs - final and formal cause.

So it is not consciousness, nor even attention, which is the locus of top-down causation. It is the very thing of being in a modelling relation with the world where the other aspect that must be constructed is a running sense of selfhood, or autonomy and will.

To keep things simple: in your worldview, does consciousness hold its own top-down causal ability? — javra

I just don't see consciousness in this kind of entitified terminology. There is no agent, just a process exhibiting what we choose to describe as agency.

So "consciousness" is just a loose word that covers everything in most discussions. In my view, most people are talking about attention when they say it. But they also mean self consciousness or the linguistically structured skill of introspection. As a word, it just overclaims and doesn't carve the phenomenon at its structural joints.

Just because you don't think that dissipation is a good purpose doesn't negate it being a purpose. A purpose is the reason why things happen.

So it might be consistent with your faith based understanding that the ultimate purpose is the Good. But again, naturalism says look the world in the face and describe it as it actually is.

And 180 was wrong on a key technical detail. Life and mind arise to accelerate enropification over and above the rate being achieved by "dead matter". That is what intelligence is for. To improve on what dumbness can achieve.

You’ve affirmed that consciousness is there due to unconscious process of mind. — javra

Or rather I have repeated back the terms in which the discussion was being framed. I hope I have made it clear enough how I object to the presuppositions with which those terms are loaded. But just for the sake of conversation, I'm also trying to use the preferred jargon of those I might argue against.

In another thread i argued at length why I would instead prefer the terms attentional level and habit level processing. And one of the reasons was that that allows top-down causality to be a part of both. The difference between the two levels then becomes one of spatiotemporal scale.

Consequently, it is naturally assumed that 'science has shown that the Universe is devoid of purpose' and that 'man is simply another evolved species'. It is what sensible people believe, nowadays. You see that in questions on this forum, practically every day. — Wayfarer

But I have taken care to distinguish my holistic naturalism from that reductionist Scientism. So you are not dealing with purpose as a systems science perspective would understand it.

Nowadays we presume... — Wayfarer

Yes. But the question was how you could claim to know.

Naturalism has its way of supporting belief - inductive scientific reason. You seem to be saying that a religious account would be the correct one here, not the naturalistic. So what method are you using to support that belief? Let's see why it is in fact better than methodological naturalism.

I don't recognise that as 'purpose' — Wayfarer

What could decide whether the naturalist or the transhumanist is correct here?

Purpose is the reason why things are done. Naturalism suggests the most general reason it can. And proof would be that the reason ultimately constrains everything.

But how could transcendent purpose be validated? Is personal revelation or religious tradition enough to talk about purpose in that universalising sense?

But my position is triadic. It goes in three directions.

And how meta of you to reply by demonstrating said special gift.

this is just a further indication that apokrisis promotes a backward ontology. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It just illustrates your special gift of understanding everything backwards.

Surely, even a process can be defined. — Galuchat

I defined the core process. Semiosis or the modelling relation.

What types (i.e., classes) of functions do you think brains execute? — Galuchat

I just gave an example. Object boundary detection. Mach bands.

The Tartu Schools of Semiotics (Moscow) and Biosemiotics (Copenhagen) produced work from many scholars beginning in the 1960s. — Galuchat

Yep. It was happening in Europe too.

Bear in mind that you are taking a very partial view of current evolutionary arguments. So the idea that life has the global purpose of surviving is being replaced by the idea it serves the greater purpose of entropification or dissipation.

Then also, cooperativity is a necessary part of any level of systematic organisation. So renunciation or altrusistic behaviours can be explained naturally that way.

Finally to the degree that renunciation is not a fit behaviour given the global goals of life, naturalism predicts it will be minimised. And look around. Do you see much renunciation going on in the modern consumer society?

So naturalism makes predictions. And those predictions look confirmed.

It is a substantive difference as the reductionist is claiming that a system is simply constituted of its events while the holist adds that, collectively, those events result in a generalised state of constraint. A global property emerges that restricts those events by becoming their history, their context.

And then the holist will go further in arguing that emergent constraints can actually shape the identity of the events themselves. So collective causality is making the parts which are producing the functional whole. The parts turn out to be emergent too. Holism claims the dependent co-origination of parts and wholes, in the big scheme of things.

Of course the reductionist always chooses examples of systems that do the best job of disguising the holism of nature. Hence billiard balls.

The holism can't be seen easily because we are asked to imagine a set of parts that some person shaped - smooth hard balls and a flat baize table, then the smack with the cue that set the balls in motion, all bounded both by the table having edges and a world with fixed physical laws enforcing energy conservation principles.

A holist is happier with an ecosystem where the collective, emergent, contextual nature of the organisation is now more obvious. The irreducible complexity of a system - the reality of two directions of causality in action - constraints and degrees of freedom - becomes the thing.

You say it is obvious but then psychology shows that isn't true. You can only think and act like an animal if you don't have language to structure thought and action like a human.

Your talk of "mind" is just another ontic construct. We believe it to the extent it helps us make sense of "the world".

You don't seem to realise how anything you might say here is already trapped inside a language game.

The problem is that "the world", "complexities", and "systems" are all things created by the mind. Now you're trying to turn this around, and claim that the world, and complex systems create a mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. But that epistemic problem is accepted as the starting point of pragmatism. That is the bleeding difference here. Pragmatism doesn't pretend to do more than organise experience in a way that minimises our uncertainty and so warrants our beliefs.

We make ontic commitments as abductive hypothesis. And then we believe them because they work so far as we can judge.

So your perspective is no further along than Plato's people in the cave. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well in fact it is.

'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.' ~ Max Planck. — Wayfarer

I both agree and also again make the point that this is really saying "nature" and "mystery" themselves form a dialectical construct. They are a thought made concrete by creating a convincing opposition.

So the "eternal dilemma" is that if there is something definite and unmysterious, like a nature that exists, then logically - by the accepted convention that is dialectical reasoning - there must be its "other" of a mystery which is "why even that existence".

So the issue becomes whether there really is a problem, or the problem is the logic we feel so compelled to apply ... in metaphysical analysis.

Clearly my answer is that it is analysis that is the problem. You need to have also a logic capable of synthesis.

Hegel made the same mistake as Aristotle in how he approached a logic of synthesis. They didn't quite get it. But Peirce - through his logic of vagueness - did.

So Peirce at least offers a metaphysical logic that can - in the mode of scientific reasoning - do the most to minimise mystery. The story of nature can never be absolutely certain. But a logic of vagueness (a triadic sign relation logic) can minimise that uncertainty the best of any logical approach.

You have misinterpreted the point. The 'blind spot' was simply for illustrative purposes - the actual processes involved are of far greater depth and subtlety than that. — Wayfarer

My point was that we can uncover the fact that there are underlying processes. Indeed it is common knowledge as you say. And so after that, treating consciousness as not being about those underlying processes becomes bullshit. The burden shifts to having to justify why there might be anything extra to say.

So here, he seems to be asking, how did the separation between 'observer and observed' originate? Because this is implied in the very origin of life itself. — Wayfarer

Pattee rightly points to the crucial question. But also he didn't accept Peirce's approach - the logic of vagueness - as the way to deal with the issue. That is the further step that Salthe takes.

But that is common knowledge. You yourself are not conscious of the fact that your perception is a stream of momentary saccades which the mind then integrates into a simple unity. Think about 'the blind spot' - I'm sure you know that there is a simple experiment you can perform that shows that there is always a spot in your field of vision that you don't see. But you don't notice you don't see it until you perform that experiment. — Wayfarer

But you see the point. Consciousness ends up being conscious of how it must be the product of unconscious processes. A gap that was being filled can be noticed under special controlled circumstances. The believable explanation is then in terms of some straightforward realist account of the structure of the eye and the role of anticipatory neural processes.

So what consciousness discovers is that it is these anticipatory neural processes that must be causing it. When the processes are absent, there is a blind spot. When they are acting, there isn't - there is a consciously experienced filling in.

As usual, talk of consciousness as an ontic simple implodes as soon as you give it a slight push. The fact that "everyone knows" that there are unconscious processes behind conscious experience should give the game away. The process is the thing, and talk of "consciousness" as the thing is the reification of that process.

It is the metaphysics of physics.

Thanks. To start, I question the value of trying to define consciousness as that already puts it in the class of a thing rather than a process. I don't see consciousness as anything fundamental in the world, just what it is like to be a really complex version of a modelling relation.

That doesn't mean I dismiss the problem of "raw feels" or qualia. It is just that I don't think that is the correct explanatory target. Once you know enough about how the brain executes any function, you can see why it has the particular qualitative character that it does. Mach bands is a good example.

But the question of "why any qualitative character at all - when perhaps there might be just zombiedom?" is the kind of query which already reifies awareness in an illegitimate way. It turns it from being the consequence of a process (a modelling of the world which prima facie ought to feel like something) to being a state of being, a kind of extra glow or ghost or spirit, that then appears to deserve an explanation in terms of being "a fundamental stuff or realm".

To think the Hard Problem actually makes sense is to have already concluded consciousness is an ontic "simple", against all the scientific evidence that it is what you get from an unbelievably complex and integrated world modelling process.

And this approach is familiar to any biologist. Folk used to believe that life must be the result of a ghost in the machine. Life had to be a simple, some kind of fundamental spirit or force of animation. But biology got to work and dispelled the mystery. The body is not exactly a machine. However once we see it as a semiotic relation between information and matter - genes and chemistry - then we can see we are talking about a self-creating process. Rather than life, we are talking about lively. Instead of seeking an explanation of what special thing makes inanimate flesh light up with "life", we understand that it is the unbelievably complex and integrated process that adequately accounts for the flesh being what we would then call "alive".

So that is why I take the approach I do. The metaphysics that worked to fully account for life should also continue on to account for mind. The Hard Problem - which is tied to a metaphysics of simples - just doesn't have the bite that people so easily presume.

So I am starting with the belief that awareness is the outcome of a certain species of systems complexity. And the way to explain that causally is to identify the essence of that complex process. What in general is the organisational trick that explains what the brain is doing in its now vastly elaborated way?

To answer that, one has to look to what metaphysics and science has to say about complex systems. Most of science, and even philosophy, is strictly reductionist. It breaks the complex world down into simples. Which is fine as part of the story, but also limited. Then there is a long tradition of holism or organicism. And that shows reality to be irreducibly complex. Even when things are made as simple as possible, they are still complex in terms of their essential structure of relations. Nothing is atomistic. Everything starts as already a process, some basic kind of relation.

One can start with Anaximander, the first true metaphysician. Apokrisis of course was his term for the "first process" - dichotomisation or "separating out". Then there is Aristotle with his four causes, his theory of hylomorphism, and the true start of systems thinking. Hegel and Kant got it. Then Peirce really managed to crystalise it. And finally the systems approach has become increasingly concrete and mathematically definite through the last century of scientific modelling.

So the basic trick of life and mind is that it is a particular kind of complex organisation - a modelling relation (as the mathematical biologist, Robert Rosen, defined it). Stan Salthe and Howard Pattee are then two of Rosen's circle who fleshed out a full understanding of what this means through the 70s and 80s under the general banner of what was hierarchy theory then. A connection got made to the new thermodynamics of dissipative structures (the follow-on from Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium open systems).

Salthe coined the idea of infodynamics. Pattee really sharpened things with his epistemic cut. And then this particular group of systems biologists heard about Peircean semiotics - which had pretty much been lost until the 1990s - and realised that they were basically recapitulating what Peirce had already said. So as a group they did the honourable thing and relabelled themselves bio-semioticians.

There were other allied groups around. Dozens of them. I was part of Salthe and Pattee's group - having looked around and found they were head and shoulders above the rest. But there were plenty of other important theoretical circles, like second order cybernetics, or generative neural nets, or complex adaptive systems, or dissipative structure theorists, or general system theorists, or .... well really, dozens and dozens.

So what is really the story is that there is a systems perspective. Instead of life or mind being ontic simples - animating spirits - they are understood in terms of a particular species of complexity. And the job is to seek explanations in those terms. Once you get that and start looking around, you find there are a whole range of people and groups who have been feeling the same elephant. They might all use different jargon. But they are arriving at the same kind of insights.

Again, this is only my perspective, but I find Peircean semiosis is the best way to zero in on the esssence of systems causality. It has a set of features I could list. And indeed I am always mentioning them.

But for now, in this thread, the key point is why I reject the usual demand of "answer the Hard Problem". Framing that as the crucial question is already to presume that the answer has the form "consciousness is an ontic simple, a substance". It gets to be like being asked "when did you stop beating your wife?".

The proper question we ought to be asking is what kind of fundamental system or process is a brain (in a body with a mind)? That is, we know the brain with its embodied modelling relation with the world is a really complex example of living mindfulness. It meets your working definition in terms of "the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by a psychophysical being which produce personal and social behaviour."

But boil down an actual human that has grown up as a set of interpretive habits in the world into the simplest description of the trick involved, and you get the general thing that is the irreducible triadic relation described by Peircean semiosis.

And I also put all my money on this being a pan-semiotic deal as fundamental physics is arriving at the same irreducible triadic process as the causal explanation of how existence itself could come to be. A story of constraints and degrees of freedom emerging from the symmetry-breaking of fundamental indeterminism.

Or going right back to Anaximander, the dialectical process of apokrisis which organised the formless and boundless chaos of the Apeiron.

Why not say something interesting rather than make lame garbled posts like that?

I have always stressed that my position - being naturalism - is anti transcendence and pro immanence.

And that is why materialism becomes inadequate. You need pansemiosis to deliver the "other" of general laws and constraints. You need information as a real causal thing to complement matter as the other real causal thing.

But he seems to be saying objects consist of conscious agents - that objects are constituted by conscious agents, not that objects are constituted by the perception of them by conscious agents. You see the distinction? It seems very like panpsychism, but then he denies that, also. Complicated. — Wayfarer

And he also says the conscious agents are constructing MUI icons. So no "objects", just their signs ... that somehow then have a background of process that actually, really, executes the necessary functionality.

Nothing adds up. That's my point. He says this is not idealism, or panpsychism or anything else. But then it also sounds just like that.

Hence my conclusion. He is another of many crackpots. Even university departments are full of them.

I think the realist view is that the domain of perception - the world we see - is the real world... — Wayfarer

Yes, that is a valid criticism. And the first thing they try to disabuse you of when you start studying perception and psychophysics. It is routine science itself.

Now, for you, as a naturalist, that completely undermines the basic premise of your outlook... — Wayfarer

Only if you never take a blind bit of notice of anything I have ever said. But carry on....

But you were saying there was a conscious choice to believe in the reality of something like your keyboard. We had to agree to agree somehow. It's not really a choice if I can't then make a choice about that belief. I would hardly qualify as an agent.

As a theory, realism removes that kind of problem. The world is what it is, and then I am free to act and make choices or form beliefs within those constraints. There is nothing further to have to explain about you being in the same position.

But once you start down the crackpot road, the inconsistencies just keep multiplying at each step. You are now arguing for beliefs we can't not believe, choices we can't in fact make, etc.

When we agree, concerning what is and is not, we can create objects. When we do not agree, all we have is processes which have varying descriptions depending on one's perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now the focus switches to agreement. Private wishes are not good enough. It has to happen that we desire the existence of the same object for it to be the case.

So right now I'm wishing you have no keyboard. I'm imagining that pretty hard. Did it happen?

...our MUI (multi-modal user interface) is species-specific. So it generates a shared pool of 'icons' which are common to us h. sapiens. — Wayfarer

But this seems to entangle two causal metaphysics in illegitimate fashion. If it is about the material facts of evolution and genetics where a mental model is being selected for its fit to a world, then that world is a reality standing beyond some species of agents.

As I say, I am OK with the first MUI bit of Hoffman. He says that is compatible with a realist interpretation. But then it is the attempt to jump to an idealist ontology - conscious realism - that it all falls apart.

So if we, as Homo sapiens, are forming a collective "MUI reality" by being conscious agents, rather than by being forced to adapt physically to a physical reality, then how does that work exactly? How does it fit in with lions and every other creature forming a different reality, not just a different interpretation of the one reality?

I'm sure another handwaving answer could be created. But that is how it goes with crackpot theorising. The need for further outs keeps multiplying as soon as you try to take the "theory" seriously.

By contrast, a good theory of reality does the opposite. More and more gets explained as you take it seriously and try to poke holes in it.

It's really not that difficult. We are conscious, we are active, therefore we are conscious agents. The conscious agent decides, chooses; one's own actions. Where do you find the mysterious handwaving? — Metaphysician Undercover

Where does one start? :)

Perhaps here. With your version, what happens when your conscious choice about the facts of reality conflict with my choice as a fellow agent?

I really don't think he's a crackpot, — Wayfarer

Perhaps not. But science does have social standards around these kinds of things. So in that context, that is how I would judge him.

And I would admit that within computer science, Hoffman would get more of a shrug. Computer scientists are used to making sci-fi like claims about what they can deliver with technology. The field has its own norms on this score.

I can see how consciousness creates or constructs experience... — Wayfarer

Well please tell me. I thought most people would say consciousness IS the experience. Or maybe the experience of the experience. But how could it be the cause of the experience? What does that mean?

So you or your family have never taken even an aspirin? You or your family have never had a vaccination? Honestly?

Anyway, it is good at least that you might live consistent with your theories. That way they will certainly be put to the test of real life.

It takes lifestyle changes, good food, good water, proper movement, low stress. — Rich

Yeah, but those are physical things that we all agree are the way to help prevent disease getting started.

Biology - being semiotic - is self-regulating. It has an immune system that knows what is "self", what is "other", at a molecular level. So it can self-repair if it isn't overloaded by attacks on its system. And I have no quarrel with the idea that the modern consumer lifestyle - lived at a pace to suit an economic system predicated on free growth - isn't very healthy. Even if people in developed nations in fact live longer because they can also afford clever medical interventions to keep failing bodies on the road.

So if you or your family did get cancer, would you go to a hospital that uses medicines rather than faith healing? That was the actual question.

Would you submit your fate to these representatives of a corrupt materialistic metaphysics or seek treatment from someone expert in adjusting faulty holographic consciousness fields?

If you get cancer, are you going to go to a regular doctor, one indoctrinated by the Deep State and a corrupt shill of Big Pharma, or to your holographic holistic spirit doctor with a dream catcher and crystals spread around the office?

How deep do your own convictions run in practice? What do you think the respective mortality rates are?

It is because the science industry nowadays controls the educational process, and this is what is drummed into everyone from elementary school. It is not an accident. There is a mega industry that is being protected and watchdogs everywhere to protect it. — Rich

Yep. It's a conspiracy. Pass the tin-foil hat.

All due respect, there is a change in perspective required. You're arguing from a position of dogmatic realism. — Wayfarer

Of course I say a change in perspective is needed. And it is not so simple as replacing one species of substance monism - material realism - with another, conscious realism. Dogmatic idealism is indeed much worse than dogmatic realism as at least (reductionist) realism gives us useful theories of the world. Idealism just waves its lofty hand at everything and merely aims to "explain it away".

A crackpot thinker is anyone who fools themselves into believing a non-explanation is better than a real explanation. Just call existence a hologram, or a simulation, or a mental field, or whatever. Create a word that might sound as if its stands for a real idea, then look satisfied.

That is what Hoffman does with "conscious agents". It is meaningless hand-waving once you stop to ask what that could actually mean.

No, only a mistaken conception of it. — Wayfarer

No. Read what he says again. Because "regular physics" can't seem to account for brains with minds, we should disbelieve that it does account for worlds with material structure, like brains. We should now start over by positing "generalised consciousness" as an explanation even of material structure. And then, hey guys, this is how it all works ... mumble, mumble, mumble - networks of conscious agents!!!

Classic crackpot reasoning.

It's all relative as they say. Motion doesn't make sense without space and time, and space and time don't make sense without motion.

That is why symmetry principles are the deeper level of explanation for physics. It is about the very way a symmetry could even be broken.

The simplest notion of space has those two irreducible symmetries - translations and rotations. Those define the motions that don't make a (relative) difference in the global scheme of things. They are inertial and energy conserving. And so they are the baseline of any action.

The misconception probably at work in this thread is the usual folk physics idea that the natural state of things is to be at rest. You start by assuming stillness to be the rule, motion to be the exception. No motion without a cause, as Aristotle famously argued.

But since Newton made it explicit, any "rest" or zero velocity is just a relative state of inertial motion. To see a body as standing still is an observation that requires fixing the global context that could make it so.

It is like watching a car go past. I can make that car stationary relative to me by running just as fast alongside it. A lack of motion is just a point of view.

This then became really obvious after mechanics was relativised and spacetime united. It was shown that lightspeed was an upper bound on motion. So rest became relative to c. That is, scaled by 1/c.

The idea of "being at absolute rest" as the baseline metaphysical condition of things has been replaced by the understanding that rest is just another relative state of motion. It is the least amount of motion possible, just like c is the most, for any object with inertial mass.

So the invariance people sought in the concept of absolute rest is now found in the more basic question of what could even disturb the state of a spatiotemporal system in a way that is detectable. And translations and rotations are intrinsically undetectable. You can't look at a point and tell if it is spinning or moving, or instead, if it is standing still and you are the one doing the moving and the rotating.

It now takes an acceleration - some relative energy change - for this symmetry between an observer and the observed to be broken in a way both can experience.

Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world." — Wayfarer

Yeah. Hoffman says to solve the problem of consciousness, we must get rid of the world. So onwards to idealism. And then the handwaving about conscious agents that he says saves him from solipsism.

Human minds have a memory of the feeling. That is a critical thing that semiosis at the socio-linguistic level adds. The self is a socially constructed habit of thought which then serves as the anchor for remembering what it was like to be that self.

You missed the point. Even metaphysics reasons counterfactually. So if green isn't green, what else would it be? At some stage you might sound as though you are asking an intelligible question but really it isn't.

Can you find where conscious agents gets a serious definition? I couldn't. So that's where the handwaving becomes a frantic blur.

If you are interested in a deeper level explanation of inertial motion, then the standard physics route is spelt out by Noether's theorem.

Note that both constant motion in a straight line is inertial, and so is a steady rotation. And both reflect the basic symmetries of space - translations and rotations. So energy is conserved - it costs nothing to keep on moving forever in these ways - as essentially the motions make no difference in the world. They look the same if you somehow shifted your moving line or spinning point a little to the left or right. That is, it is all Galilean relative. It could be that the background spatial frame moved as a whole rather than your line or dot.

So inertial motion is intimately connected to the fundamental fact of symmetry maths that differences that don't make a difference ... well, don't make a difference. They are cost less or energy conserving. The rolling ball can roll forever, the spinning top can spin forever, as really - within their inertial frame - no one can tell which is really moving, the ball/top or the space that is the background. It is all (Galileanly) relative.