You sound threatened somehow.

I think that's quite a mad philosophy. — Agustino

And I find your replies trivial.

So the direction of desire is towards madness and the mad is the most successful of us all? :s — Agustino

Why do you have to drag Trump into every conversation? But yes I guess.

So, in all the common interpretations of QM, including "no-collapse" interpretations, there always is a tacit reference to measurement operations, and the choice of the setup of a macroscopic measurement apparatus always refers back to the interests of the human beings who are performing the measurement. The processes of either "decoherence", or "collapse" of the wave function, (or of "projection" of the state vector), amount exactly to the same thing from the point of view of human observers. — Pierre-Normand

Yep. Decoherence - at the level of heuristic principle - says all the troubling indeterminacy disapears in the bulk behaviour. So that probabilistic view gives us an informal account of collapse that fits the world we see.

Of course, the existing quantum formalism doesn't itself contain a model of "the observer" that would allow us to place the collapse to classical observables at some specific scale of being. But then either one thinks that is the job of a better future model - which seems the metaphysically reasonable choice. Or one can go crazy with the metaphysics and say every possible world in fact exists - a "solution" which still does not say anything useful about how world-lines now branch rather than collapse.

So the main reason for supporting MWI is that it is ... so outrageous. It appeals because it is "following the science to its logical conclusion" in a way that also can be used to shock and awe ordinary folk. Scientism in other words.

But again, how does this change anything? — Agustino

Simply put, if the error is external, then the mind simply has to make a better effort at knowing the world truly. But if instead the error is internal - the mind has to create the structure of its perceptions - then more effort may only put the mind at an even further distance from the thing-in-itself.

And this in fact fits with psychological science. It also ceases to be a problem once you give up rationalist dreams of perfect knowledge and accept the pragmatism of a Peircean modelling relation with the world.

So a striking fact of cognitive architecture is that consciousness is in fact "anti-representational". The brain would rather live with its best guess about the actual state of the world. It would like to predict away all experience if it could - as that way it can start to notice the small things that might matter most to it.

This would be Kantianism in spades. It is not just a generic structure of space and time, or causality, that we project on to existence. Ahead of every moment we are predicting every material event as much as possible, so we can quickly file it under "ignore" when it actually happens.

In this sense, we externalise error. Through forward modelling or anticipatory processing, we form strong expectancies about how the world "ought to be". And then the world goes and does something "wrong", something surprising or unexpected. The damn thing-in-itself misbehaves, leaving us having to impose some revised set of expectations that then becomes our new consciousness of its state of being.

(And until we have generated some new state of prediction, we are not conscious of anything for the half second to second it can take to sort out a state of sudden confusion - or in extreme situations, like a car crash, our memory will be of time slowed or even frozen with a hallucinatory, conceptually undigested, vividness. It is another psychological observation that childhood experience and dreams have this extra vividness because there is not then such a weight of adult conceptual habit predicting all the perception away and rendering it much more mundane.)

Anyway, as I was saying, Kant was right in understanding that the brain has to come at the world equipped with conceptual habits of structuration if it is to understand anything - in terms of its own pragmatic interests.

But Kant was still caught up in the rationalist dream of perfect knowledge. And so the gap between mind and world was seen as some kind of drama or failure. We have the right to know the world as it is - and yet we absolutely can't.

Peirce fixed this by naturalising teleology. Knowledge exists to serve purposes. And so what was a rationalist bug becomes a pragmatistic feature.

Oh goody! We don't have to actually know the world truly at all if the real epistemic aim is to be able to imagine it in terms that give us the most personal freedom to act. The more we can routinely ignore, the more we can then insert our own preferences into the world as we experience it. Consciousness becomes not a story of the thing-in-itself but about ourselves whizzing along on a wave of satisfied self-interest.

So Kant turned things around to get the cognitive architecture right. But because he still aspired to rationalist perfection, he wanted to boil down the mind's necessary habits to some bare minimum - ontic structure like space, time and causality.

This simply isn't bold enough. Brains evolved for entirely self-interested reasons. Which is why an epistemology of pragmatism - consciousness as a reality-predicting modelling relation - was needed to fully cash out the "Kantian revolution". The thing-in-itself is of interest only to the degree that it can be rendered impotent to the mind. The goal is to transcend its material constraints so as to live in the splendid freedom of a self-made world of semiotic sign.

(Of course, living beings can't actually ignore the world. They must live in it. But the point here is the direction of the desires. Rationalism got the natural direction wrong - leading to rationalist frustration and all its problems concerning knowledge. Pragmatism instead gets the direction right and thus explains the way we actually are. There is a good reason why humans want to escape into a realm of "fiction" - and I'm including science and technology here, of course. As to the extent we can do that, we become then true "selves", the locus of a radical freedom or autonomy to make the world whatever the hell we want it to be.)

What's the problem? Is deflection your only defence?

That's what allows thought, and life. — tom

Nope. It is the semiotic interaction between the realms of sign and materiality that allow that.

Computation explicitly rules out the interaction between formal and material causes. So to actually build a computer, the dynamics of the material world must be frozen out at the level of the hardware. Computation is the opposite of the organic reality in that regard. And biophysics is confirming what was already obvious.

And that is before we even get into the other issue of who writes the programs to run on the hardware. Or who understands that the simulations are actually "of something". Or that error correction is needed because what the computer seems to be saying must be instead that kind of irreducible instability which is the real dynamical world intruding. (Oh shit, my quantum entanglements keep collapsing or branching off into other worlds.)

But keep on with the computer science sloganeering. I'm well familiar with the sociology of the field. No one cares if people talk in scifi terms there. It is the name of the game - always over-promise and under-deliver.

It is how these principles are related to what is outside the category, how we relate an epistemology to an ontology for example, which is where we should make such judgements of good and bad. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you mean ... exactly what I said then?

Ie: Holism is four cause modelling, reductionism is just the two. And simpler can be better when humans merely want to impose their own formal and final causality on a world of material/efficient possibility. However it is definitely worse when instead our aim is to explain "the whole of things" - as when stepping back to account for the cosmos, the atom and the mind.

At the risk of repeating myself, it has been proved that all real universal computers are equivalent. The set of motions of one can be exactly replicated on the other. It has further been proved that any finite physical system can be simulated to arbitrary accuracy, with finite means, on a universal computer. The brain can thus be simulated on a universal computer, whether it is itself universal or not. Whatever a brain can do, a computer can do. There is nothing beyond universality. — tom

Still this dualistic crackpottery.

A computational simulation is of course not the real thing. It is a simulation of the real thing's formal organisation abstracted from its material being.

This should be easy enough to see. A computer relies on the physical absence of material constraints. It is cut off from the real world in that it has a power supply it doesn't need to earn. It doesn't matter what program is run as the design of the circuitry means the entropic effort is zeroed in artificial fashion. The whole set-up is about isolating the software from dissipative reality so it can do its solipsistic Platonic thing.

A brain is quite different in being organically part of the material world it seeks to regulate via semiosis. And you can see this in things like the way it is fundamentally dependent on dissipative processes and instability.

Where a computer must be made of Platonically stable or eternal parts - logic circuits frozen in silicon - the brain requires the opposite. It depends on the fact that right down at the nanoscale of cellular structure everything is on the point of falling apart. All molecular components are self-assembling in fluid fashion. So they are constantly about to break apart, and constantly about to reform.

And in having this critical instability, it means that top-down semiotic constraint - the faint nudges to go one way or the other that can be delivered by the third thing of a molecular message - become supremely powerful. This is the reason why a level of sign or biological code can non-dualistically control its world. It is why the "software" can regulate the materiality of metabolic processes, and on a neural scale, the material actions of whole bodies.

So science has looked at how organisms are actually possible. And the answer isn't computation but biosemiosis.

Computers are abstracted form. So they have the fundamental requirement that someone - their human masters - freezes out the material dynamics of the real world so they can exist in their frozen worlds of silicon (or whatever super-cooled, error corrected, machinery a quantum computer might get made of).

And organisms are the opposite. They depend on a material instability - being at the edge of chaos - that then makes it possible for top-down messages to tip stochastically self-organising processes in one direction or another.

As I say, that is what makes multi-realisability an issue. A Turing Machine can indeed be made out of anything - tin cans and string if you like.

But biology - in only the past 10 years - has shown how organic chemistry may be a unique kind of "stuff" that can't be replicated or simulated by simpler physical machinery (circuitry lacking the critical instability that then gives semiosis "something to do").

It is a happy fact that Turing himself was on to it with his parallel work on chemical morphogenesis. He was an actual genius who saw both sides of the story. But sadly UTMs have given licence to decades of academic crackpottery as hyped-up computer scientists have pretended that the material world itself is "computable" - as if an abstracted simulation is not the opposite of existing in a world of material process.

By saying that human beings create a group-mind, without attributing this unity to God, you assign to the human race the property of God, and commit the sin of the fallen angel. — Metaphysician Undercover

Cripes. So social constructionism is the work of the Devil.

I would also readily grant that mental abilities can be multiply realized in a variety of biological or mechanical media ... — Pierre-Normand

I have to say that the latest understanding of biophysics at the nanoscale is now a serious challenge to multirealisabilty. Organic molecules have physically unique properties that allow them to flourish in a dissipative environment and function as various kinds of functional components. So the biologists don't have to grant the computationalists any kind ground at all anymore if life and mind are semiotic processes rather than information processes.

And the beauty is that the onus is on computationalists to show that life and mind are "just information processes" now if they want to keep pushing that particular barrow. This is no longer the 1970s. :)

Peter Hoffman has done a great book - Life's Ratchet - on this.

Of course, if you managed to formulate an argument that the brain is not computationally universal, and that it could not be programmed (e.g. by training), and that therefore the mind could not be an abstraction instantiated on a brain, then you might have a point. — tom

You ought to check Robert Rosen's Essays on Life Itself for such arguments. Also Howard Pattee's paper, Artificial life needs a real epistemology.

But even just from a good old flesh and blood neuroscience perspective, where's the evidence that the brain is actually any kind of Turing machine (even if you believe that any physical process can be simulated by a UTM)?

Reductionists are generally materialist. If there are such philosophers as 'reductionist dualists', I would be interested to hear about them. — Wayfarer

Chalmers?

No, I meant that hearing people speak, and reading books are acts of sensation. Don't you agree? — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not. All my senses actually see is squiggles of black marks. My cat sees the same thing.

To interpret marks as speaking about ideas is something very different. It is to be constrained not by the physics of light and dark patterns but by a communal level of cultural meaning.

So without being a substance dualist, the semiotician has all the explanatory benefits of there being "two worlds" - the one of sign, the other of matter.

I don't read books, or speak to people to gain access to any "group-mind". — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. I mean who needs a physics textbook to know about physics, or a neuroscience textbook to know about brains? Just make the damn shit up to suit yourself.

Hah! Knocked it out of the park.

I don't understand the bad reputation which reductionism has received. If it's the way toward a good clear understanding, then where's the problem? — Metaphysician Undercover

I always say it is fine in itself. It is only bad in the sense that two causes is not enough to model the whole of things, so reductionism - as a tale of mechanical bottom-up construction - fails once we get towards the holistic extremes of modelling. You need a metaphysics of all four causes to talk about the very small, the very large, and the very complex (the quantum, the cosmological, the biotic).

a dualist reductionist would not meet the same problem. The dualist allows non-spatial substance. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Olde fashioned magick! Dualism is just failed reductionism doubling down to make a mystery of both mind and matter.

I don't see this need. We hear people talking, we read books. These are perceptual activities. Why can't we treat them like any other perceptual activity? — Metaphysician Undercover

You meant conceptual activities really, didn't you? :)

Or at least some of us read books and listen to people talk to gain access to the group-mind. It kind of defines the line between crackpot and scholar.

But again this is reductionist to the extent that you're treating the subject - namely the human - in a biologistic way — Wayfarer

All modelling is reductionist ... even if it is a reduction to four causes holistic naturalism. And as I say, even the brain is a reductionist modeller, focused on eliminating the unnecessary detail from its "unified" view of the world. The brain operates on the same principle of less is more.

As far as free will (or won't) is concerned, the point from the perspective of a humanistic philosophy is not understanding the determinative causes of human actions from an abstract or theoretical point of view, but what freedom of action means. — Wayfarer

Yep. But that is covered by my point that neuroscience only covers the basic machinery. To explain human behaviour, you then have to turn to the new level of semiosis which is linguistic and culturally evolving. So you can't look directly to biology for the constraints that make us "human" - the social ideas and purposes that shape individual psychologies. You do have to shift to an anthropological level of analysis to tell that story.

(And I agree that the majority of neuroscientists - especially those with books to sell - don't get that limitation on what biology can explain.)

Isn't that 'the genetic fallacy'? Anyway, I'm Buddhist and an outed dualist. — Wayfarer

As it happened, Libet told me about his dualistic "conscious mental field" hypothesis before he actually published it in 1994. So I did quiz him in detail about the issue of his personal beliefs and how that connected to the way he designed and reported his various earlier brain stimulation and freewill experiments.

So I am not making some random ad hominen here. It is a genuine "sociology of science" issue. Both theists and aetheists, reductionist and holists, are social actors and thus can construct their work as a certain kind of "performance".

And believe me, the whole of philosophy of mind/mind science came to seem to me a hollow public charade for this reason. For the last 50 years (starting from the AI days) it has been a massive populist sideshow. Meanwhile those actually doing real thinking - guys like Stephen Grossberg or Karl Friston - stayed well under the radar (largely because they saw the time-wasting populist sideshow for what it was as well.)

This has some relationship with the famous Libet experiments, doesn't it? They showed that the body moves before the subject is aware that they want to move it. — Wayfarer

Yep. So what the experiments illustrate is that we have "free won't", rather than freewill. As long as we aren't being hurried into an impulsive reaction, we can - the prefrontal "we" of voluntary level action planning - pay attention to the predictive warning of what we are about to do, and so issue a cancel order.

So part of the habit-level planning for a routine action is the general broadcast of an anticipatory motor image. As part of the unity of experience, the sensory half of our brain has to be told that our hand is suddenly going to move in a split second or so. And the reason for that is so "we" can discount that movement as something "we" intended. We ignore the sensation of the moving hand in advance - and so then we can tell if instead the world caused our hand to move. A fact far more alarming and deserving of our attention.

So Libet was a Catholic and closet dualist. As an experimenter, that rather shaped how he reported his work. The popular understanding of what was found is thus rather misunderstood.

If you turn it around, you can see that instead we live in the world in a way where we are attentionally conscious of what we mean do to do in the next second or so. Then at a faster operating habitual level, the detail gets slotted in - which includes this "reafference" or general sensory warning of what it is shortly going to feel like because our hand is going to suddenly move "of its own accord". But don't panic anyone ... in fact just ignore it. Only panic if the hand fails to get going, or if perhaps there is some other late breaking news that means mission abort - like now seeing the red tail spider lurking by the cornflakes packet.

So the Libet experimental situation was extremely artificial - the opposite of ecologically natural. But it got huge play because it went to the heart of some purely cultural concerns over "the instantaneous unity of consiousness" and "the human capacity for freewill".

The purpose of the digital computer analogy also was to show that, in this case also, individual transistors, or logic gates, or even collections of them, need not have the high level software instructions "translated" to them in the case where the implementation of this high level software specification is a matter of the whole computer being structured in such a way that its molar behavior (i.e. the input/output mapping) simply accords with the high level specification. — Pierre-Normand

Real computers are structured in hierarchical fashion. So once you start to talk about operating systems, languages, compilers, instruction sets, microcode and the rest, you are talking about something quite analogous to the organic situation where the connection from "software" to "hardware" is a multi-level set of constraints. Functions are translated from the level of programmes to the level of physical actions in a way that the two realms are materially or energetically disconnected. What the software can "freely imagine" is no longer limited by what the hardware can "constrainedly do".

Where the computational analogy fails is that there is nothing coming back the other way. The physics doesn't inform the processing. There is no actual interaction between sign and matter as all the hierarchical organisation exists to turn the material world into a machine that can be ignored. That elimination of bottom-up efficient/material cause is then of course why the software can be programmed with the formal/final fantasies of us humans. We can make up the idea of a world and run it on the computer.

So the computer metaphor - at least the Universal Turing Machine version - only goes so far. The organic reality is rather different in that there is a true interaction between sign and matter going on over all the hierarchical levels. Of course, this is more like a neural network or Bayesian brain architecture. But still, there is a world of difference between a computer - a machine designed to divorce the play of symbols from the play of matter - and a mind/brain, which is all about creating a hierarchically complex, and ecologically constrained, system of interaction between the two forms of play.

Computers are not "of this world" so can be used as devices to freely imagine worlds.

Brains are devices constrained by a world. But in making that relationship structurally complex, brains gain the functional degrees of freedom that we call autonomy and subjective cohesion. (The freedom to actually ignore the world being a central one, as I argued.)

That is the well-known philosophical conundrum of the 'subjective unity of experience'. There is a vast literature on that, but it remains mysterious. — Wayfarer

It's not that mysterious once you accept that the unity is mostly being unified by what it successfully ignores. (Which is also what makes the computer analogies being used here fairly inappropriate.)

So attentional processing "unifies" by singling out the novel or surprising. And it does that by suppressing everything else that can be treated as predictable, routine, or irrelevant.

Well I say attention "does it". But of course it is anticipatory modelling and established habit that defines in advance the predictable, routine, or irrelevant. So attention-level processing only has some mopping up to do.

Thus the mind does have its strong central division into habit and attention. Everything that can be dealt with without clear conscious knowledge gets sorted out in 150 to 300 milliseconds by "automatic" habit. Then anything left over becomes a focus of "conscious" attentional processing - which takes 300 to 700 milliseconds to form and stabilise. With attention we are now talking about reportable awareness as - having managed to remove so much unnecessary sensory detail from the picture - we have a small enough "point of view" to retain as a persisting state of working memory.

So when it comes to something like the question of how does one lift one's arm, the usual way is without even attentionally deliberating. Attention is usually focused in anticipatory fashion on some general goal - like getting the cornflakes off the top shelf. Then habit slots in all the necessary muscular actions without need for higher level thought or (working memory) re-presentation. It is only if something goes wrong that we need to stop and think - start forming some different plan, like going to get a chair because our fingers can't in fact reach.

So - as I have argued through the thread - the key is the hierarchical and semiotic organisation of top down constraints over bottom up degrees of freedom. And even a simple action like lifting an arm is highly complex in terms of its many levels of such organisation.

I can lift a hand fast and reflexively if I put it on a hot stove. Pain signals only have to loop as far as the spine to trigger a very unthinking response.

Then I can lift the hand in a habitual way because I am intending in a general way to have my routine breakfast.

Or then I can lift my hand in a very artificial way - as perhaps in a laboratory experiment where I am wired up with electrodes and I'm being asked to notice when my intention to lift the arm first "entered my conscious awareness".

At this point, it is all now about some researcher's model of "freewill" and the surprise that a familiar cultural understanding about the "indivisibility of consciousness" turns out to be quite muddled and wrong.

Not that that will change any culturally prevalent beliefs however. As I say, the mind is set up to be excellent at ignoring things as a matter of entrenched habit. A challenge to preconceptions may cause passing irritation, but it is very easy for prejudice to reassert itself. If - like Querius - you don't like the answer to a question, you just hurry on to another question that you again only want the one answer to.

My question is is math deserving of this respect and trust? Could it not be flawed? What does a mathemstical analysis of a given subject deprive us of? Are there some areas of study where math is harmful instead of beneficial? — TheMadFool

Maths is a model of reality as a perfect syntactical mechanism. It predicts the patterns that will be constructed as the result of completely constrained processes. So if reality is also spontaneous and vague in some fundamental way, maths can't "see" that. It presumes an absolute lack of indeterminism to give a solid basis to its story of determinism.

This isn't a big problem because humans using maths as a tool can apply it with "commonsense". And when humans are actually building "machines" - as they mostly are in maths dominated activities - then the gap between the model and the world being created is hardly noticeable.

The key issue when it comes to applying commonsense is the making of measurements. We have to use our informal judgement when plugging the numbers meant to represent states of the world into our models or systems of equations. So it is outside the actual maths how much we round numbers up, how we spread our sampling, etc, etc. Garbage in, gabage out, as they say.

The flipside of all this is then when we are dealing with a world that is complex and it is not absolute clear what to measure. Or worse still, the world may be actually spontaneous or vague and relatively undifferentiated, and so every definite-sounding measurement will be dangerously approximate.

So the issue is no that maths simply fails to apply to some aspects of life. If you are talking ethics or economics for example, game theory gives some completely exact models which can be used. However then they have to presume a world of machine humans - perfectly rational actors. Thus judgement then has to come in about how much one can rely on this particular modelled presumption. Can the actual model work around the issue by adding some further stochastic factor or is the real world variance in some way "untameable".

So maths works well when the world is made simple - as when building machines. And then complexity can cause fatal problems for this mechanistic modelling when the complexity makes good measurement impractical. For a chaotic system, it may be just physically impossible to measure the initial state of the world with enough accuracy.

Then where the metaphysical strength issues really bite is if the world is actually spontaneous or vague at a fundamental level - as quantum physics says it is.

The final source of indeterminism is the semiotic one - the issue of semantically interpreting a sign or mark. We can both see a word like "honesty" or "beauty" written on a page as a physical symbol. But how do we ever completely co-ordinate our understandings or reactions to the word?

So clearly, to the extent that human lives revolve around the common understanding of systems of signs, there is an irreducible subjectivity that makes maths a poor tool for modelling what is going on. That would be why philosophers would put aesthetics and morality in particular beyond the grasp of such modelling.

However as with the probabilisitc modelling of chaotic and quantum processes, that is not to say maths couldn't be applied to semiosis. Instead, it may be the case that we just haven't really got going on trying. It is not impossible there would be a different answer here in another 100 years.

Indeed, I view consciousness as indivisible .... — Querius

So you say. But I've asked you to show how mind science could have got it so wrong then.

So do you agree there are these three levels as I've described? Or do you dispute it? If so, on what grounds?

If there is not an "I" who encompasses all three levels, how can you overview and be aware of those three levels? — Querius

So do you agree there are these three levels? Or do you dispute it?

My point was that you are talking a monadic substance approach to consciousness - the usual outcome of reductionist simplicity.

I said consciousness - as what it is like to be in the usual human modelling relation with the world - is a complex hierarchically-structured process.

And all that was by way of dealing with the original point - what we would really mean by "top down acting consciousness". To remind you, I was explaining how constraints depend on semiosis and that in fact our human interaction with the world has at least three distinct levels (and so at least three distinct levels in which those constraints are evolving).

If we are talking about the neural level, for example, then that means the top-downness is to do with attentional and intentional brain processes.

But if we are talking about human "self-consciousness" - the self-regulatory awareness of the self as a self - then the source of those higher level constraints come from right outside of individual biology and development. That level of selfhood is socially constructed and linguistically encoded.

Of course everything is then functionally integrated. We hang together pretty well despite these multiple levels of constraint.

So again, are you disputing that there are these three levels of organising constraint that make up the complex process that is being a "conscious human"? If not, present the evidence that contradicts my sketch of the scientific analysis.

All you have done so far is kept jumping to new questions and evading any detailed consideration of the technical arguments already put to you.

But my position deals with your "I" on three Pragmatic levels - genetic, neural and linguistic. All three are explained semiotically as habits of regulation that are produced by more general contexts.

So you can continue to talk confusedly about some singular notion of the experiencing self, but I've already explained the complex nature of "being a human mind" in terms of the empirical facts.

If there is no "I" who perceives and understands the facts of social science, then how can you be aware of the facts of social science? — Querius

Maybe "I" am a social scientist. That is "I" understand and perceive the world in a fashion that is a particular educated habit of some human community. Those in the know will point and say, see, there's a guy whose read his Mead, his Vygotsky, his Harre. He is one of us. And so that is how "I" in turn can recognise "myself".

So I'm not a social scientist in some romantic, intrinsic, ineffable fashion. I can instead see that is "what I am" by all the same objective criteria by which anyone would "be a social scientist". It is not any kind of problem that the source of "my identity" in this regard would be completely communal and so reliant on linguistic structure.

Of course, we humans are also all animals. We are genetically and neurally individual. So if you start to break "consciousness" down into its actual semiotic levels of organisation, there is also no problem in talking about awareness in the kind of "raw feels" way you are concerned with now. You can try to imagine the human mind without its cultural/linguistic habits - and find that science says there is now no introspection or "off-line thinking" going on, just what we might call "extrospection", or living "mindlessly" for the present.

So my objection is that you are just bundling all the complexity into some simplistic and dualistic notion of a mental stuff that is somehow the object of perception. The brain produces a display of data ... and a wee homuncular Querius sits perched in the pituitary gland, or somewhere, soaking up the ever-changing panorama being neurally represented.

You are arguing here as if there is some problem to do with the soul of the machine. And yet a living/mindful system is not a machine (in the literal sense) and so we don't need to worry about souls or other mental stuff that might animate the inanimate.

But the key point is, to reify the self as an object of perception, as something constant and changeless, is a perceptual error. — Wayfarer

Yep. Of course the feeling of being conscious always involves the feeling of intentionality or the feeling of there being a point of view in play. So by logical implication - if you are habituated to believe in a reductionist causality - the act of experiencing requires then a subject who "has" the experience. Which then sets things up nicely for the usual homuncular regress.

Reductionism has no choice but to fall into the trap because it has done away with the richer model of causality which could cash out the self as simply a generic dynamical context. Some accumulated weight of habit which thus gives mental events a probable direction.

I cannot doubt my existence. I exist. Undeniably so. — Querius

Of course you can't doubt it ... given that you are in existence as a socially constructed self regulatory habit of thought.

And indeed, you are reading right from the script in protesting your existential essence in these terms.

Modern romantic mythology requires that you be solipsistic being in this regard. You have been soaked in a Nietzschian ideal of selfhood from the earliest exposure to popular culture. So nothing could insult you more than the suggestion you might actually be a habitual product of some time and place in the developing story of human history.

Heard it all before a million times. But I stick with the facts of social science.

There are two possibilities here: — Querius

You are ignoring the third possibility that consciousness is just a bad word in that is sounds like it is talking about something substantial, and that is not the right way to think about it. You are presuming something that doesn't warrant presuming, and then getting angry when others point that out.

When I choose to raise my arm, certain neural changes occur. Okay. But again, how does that work? — Querius

What you are neglecting is that the "I" here is a socially constructed concept enabled by the learnt semiotic habit of speech. So the top down causality has to be traced back now to human social concepts about autonomously regulated behaviour. In the final analysis, in is not you pulling the strings. You are just responding with the various degrees of freedom formed for you due to your particular cultural upbringing.

So you do have freewill ... or rather society set you up from childhood with the habits of rational self-regulation. You then creatively fill your society's purposes (or you get locked up, or in various ways, physically constrained.

In other words, this semiosis business has multiple levels. There are at least three levels of regulatory code we are talking about here - genetic, neural and linguistic. Each code supports an even richer level of evolving downward constraint over material action.

The broader question I am asking here is about the interaction problem wrt emergentism. — Querius

In a nutshell, information can regulate physicochemical instability. If the physics is delicately poised - what they used to call on the edge of chaos - then an almost immaterial nudge can make the switch between competing states.

This is the biosemiotic basis of life. The fact that this is happening right down at the nanoscale of cellular processes is a recent biophysical discovery. Everything is constantly on the verge of falling apart, so by the same token, only needs the slightest regulatory nudge to reform. Top down informational control of living processes is possible because the physical machinery has critical instability - in complete contrast to the reductionist expectation that bodies must be built from strong and stable materials.

So that is the basic principle - empirically demonstrated.

And then brains are just higher level information generators, supplying the regulatory nudges that manage the critical instabilities that are a muscular body in purposeful interaction with an environment.

So forget "consciousness" with all its antique Metaphysical connotations.

If you want the modern scientific story, we are talking about semiosis - the ability of rate independent information to regulate rate dependent dynamics. A system of signs (or a model) can act top down to manage a sea of critically unstable physical processes in such a way that organised and meaningful behaviour arises from a mess of potential chaos.

The point I made already though, is that this top-down form of constraint is not acting as causation, top-down, it is passive. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not passive. Individual neuron firing is actually being suppressed or enhanced.

It's also not purely top-down of course. As I've said often enough, it is the interaction that counts. So you can't really treat selective attention as "a thing" that floats above the action. Instead it is a rapidly evolving balance of activity across the brain - a global act of integration~differentiation.

But critically, it is a wave of purpose forming action. To attend is to be already intending.

And also it is memory and expectation based. So the brain knows how to make sense of the current world because there is this "top-down" weight of prior experience to direct things. And I put top-down in quotes to show I am talking about a hierarchical story where the higher level stuff acts on a larger spatiotemporal scale, so avoids your vicious circularity that comes from thinking a process like attention or consciousness happens "all at once" in a flash.

This is what I was arguing in the case of your army analogy in the other thread. What you call "the army", consists of a structure of static constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. There is no need for constraints to be considered as passive or static. But certainly - if you follow hierarchy theory - they do play out on a larger spatiotemporal scale. So from the point of view of the soldier, the army is forever the same. But of course the army also changes over sufficient time. It is only ever relatively static or passive.

The cause of the army is bottom-up, each individual coming in and choosing to do one's part. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well this just comes back to your own mystical beliefs about freewill. So I can repeat the same argument and you will avoid it just as swiftly. Anyway, the individual soldier is a soldier because army training has pruned away all the unhelpful civilian freedoms he might have had as a raw recruit. And if the soldier felt he had "freewill", that is one of the first things that boot camp was designed to hammer out of him.

Eventually indoctrination will lead the soldier to learn some narrowed set of habits and so will of course "choose" to behave in military fashion. That will even carry over in civilian life. Everyone knows this.

You have the dubious claim that conscious intention is the top. Can you offer any support for this assumption of yours, that conscious intention is the top? In what context is intention the top of anything? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's standard neuroscience I would say. Attention acts top down by applying a state of selective constraint across the brain. You can hook an electrode up to a retinal ganglion cell and watch it in action. Or an EEG can record the fact as it happens in general fashion as a suddenly spreading wave of suppression - the P300.

So, as far as neuroscience goes, folk wouldnt talk about it as consciousness (too many unhelpful connotations for the professionals). But top down integrative constraints are how the brain works.

Note that this is still basically a biological perspective which understand life it terms of underlying thermodynamic and other physical laws. — Wayfarer

Of course. It would have to be otherwise I would be in trouble.

So life|mind is an example of radical emergence ... which is also in a deeper sense just more of the same.

The signal characteristic of bios is that it is negentropic complexity that is thus the precise "other" of entropic simplicity. No one would mistake an organism for a rock. And yet still, on close inspection, negentropy is only possible because it accelerates local entropy production. So it's purpose is completely aligned with the second law and the universal arrow of time. Yet it is also completely different ... when we start describing it in its own apparent terms at its own emergent scale of being.

Now this physicalist understanding of life - as biosemiotic dissipative structure - is completely uncontroversial in theoretical biology circles (at least the ones I choose to circulate in ;) ). And there is no reason not to think it extends also to explain mindfulness as a physicalist phenomenon.

The big challenge for semiotics is instead about heading in the other direction - explaining the Cosmos itself in pan-semiotic terms. That is still a speculative Metaphysical venture, and not yet on the agenda in any open way amongst physicists. Although David Layzer has been pushing the dissipative structure story there for a long time now.

Isn't this contradictory to say that constraints are responsible for freedom? I don't know how that could work — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. And I've already explained it to you in this thread as in umpteen other threads.

Well, I've seen you attempt to explain your understanding of hierarchical organisation, and like the one above, which I commented on, they all end up with a vicious circle. — Metaphysician Undercover

But as that vicious circle is locked up, biting its own tail, inside the small world of your own imagination, I can't feel unduly worried.

I mean you could read a book about it - Stan Salthe wrote a pair of splendid ones - but I've no evidence you actually put any effort into researching the positions you take.

Why is it that e.g. a bacterium avoids death? Does it fear death? Does it even have a concept of death? — Querius

Is this a serious question? Are you now arguing here as a theist and so have some dualistic concern about bacteria having souls and freewill?

Or do you guys assume that ‘striving to survive’ is just one of those things that ‘emerges’ due to a ‘limit’ or some similar 'cause'? — Querius

If teleological talk frightens you for some reason, you can think of it as simply a way of characterising the imperative to grow and reproduce.

And why would freedom be constructing constraints anyway, this is opposed to its nature? — Metaphysician Undercover

How is it opposed to its nature if the constraints are responsible for its nature?

Which is really more laughable, the vicious circle, or the attempt to avoid it? — Metaphysician Undercover

Obviously the attempts to avoid it. Or rather, the failure to understand how hierarchical organisation is not viciously circular at all.

No-one? Are you sure? Tell me, what is the universe floating in? — Querius

What do you mean by "float"? In what sense could that be a property the Universe is said to possess.

But how does this apply to a universe floating in nothingness? Assuming that this universe has a certain shape, we cannot coherently say that ‘nothingness’ causes the shape of this universe, because nothingness cannot have causal power, cannot constrain anything. — Querius

Already your cosmological speculation has started to go very wrong. No-one says the universe floats in nothing, let alone that this would be what gives it a shape.

In general relativity, the shape is flat unless otherwise deformed by its material contents. And because those material contents are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, they will spread themselves about in a way that minimises the deformation.

As Wheeler so famously put it, "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve." Which is the holistic view in a nutshell. Each is in complementary fashion the cause of the other.

But this movement towards complexity didn't have any autonomous teleology since the complex molecules, or their parts, didn't have any organic function. It is only when early replicators not only were passively selected by environment pressure according to fitness, but also began to strive to survive and replicate, that they could be considered alive. They then had teleology in the sense that their parts became functional organs and they acquired autonomous behaviors. — Pierre-Normand

That is essentially it. But I would add that chemical evolution would be teleological in carrying out the wishes of the laws of thermodynamics. So molecular complexity would arise because its was being successful at accelerating local entropification rates. Chemical evolution would be functional in that (inorganic) sense.

And then the big shift is the development of a semiotic code or system memory - the RNA or whatever that created the epistemic cut between the "program" and "the world". Now you have the new possibility of local functional autonomy. The organism can mean something to itself.

So the inorganic realm is still teleological (in the dilutest fashion). Where it is different is mostly that it lacks local autonomy in the semiotic sense. The telos is the general or "ambient" one of the how the complexly stratified physio-chemical realm of the planet's surface is serving the second law. Life and mind are then actually something new in internalising that telic imperative symbolically, and by doing so, managing to entropify the world at an even greater rate.

Thus, the alphabet of life -- what is being varied, mutated and selected by environmental pressures -- doesn't consist in meaningless nucleotide sequences. It rather consists in functional (and thus meaningful) elements of anatomy, physiology and behavior. This teleology is manifested in the structure of whole organisms, and their organs, only in the ecological context of the holistic forms of life that they instantiate. From the moment of abiogenesis onwards natural selection became a top-down (and teleological) causal process. — Pierre-Normand

Yep. That was the point. Life has meaning because ... there is death as its contrast. So because of biosemiosis or a new symbolic level of action, an organism could become a survival machine. While of course being constrained by the general purposes of the second law, it could also now think its own prime purpose was to flourish and multiply. As a direction in nature, it could point counterfactually away from entropic death and decay and towards negentropic life and growth ... for a time at least.

And even when the body dies, the genome persists into the next generation. The functional information gets transmitted and not lost. What the genes pass on is hardly meaningless noise but the essence of what it means to live again in this world.

So that makes the very idea of "random mutation" rather an obvious conflict. Sure, people used to talk about mutation in terms of "hopeful monsters", but I hope they don't even mention the phrase to school kids anymore.

In fact mutation itself is a highly constrained or tuned thing in nature. Evolvability itself has to evolve. The degree to which the organism exposes its essence to the vagaries of fate has to be a careful choice as the history packaged up in a genome is hard-won information.

Which is why "random mutation" no longer explains anything in modern biology. It is just the start of the unravelling of what has turned out to be a very complex part of the whole evolutionary deal.