For example, "science" cannot tell us whether or not we should be scientific realists, or what a property is, or what constitutes knowledge. — darthbarracuda

So science has no epistemology? Gee, that's news to me.

There might be material facts that influence what sort of identities we impose on what sort of things, but the connection is merely contingent, not necessary. — Michael

Isn't that how language is meant to work? So it is the feature, not the bug.

A name is a symbol with no necessary connection to what it is meant to stand as a sign of. The word "pig" has no properties that are pig-like. So to call a pig "pig" is an arbitrary association.

But we then exploit that naming freedom in particular ways. Because we can thus give a name to anything at our whim, we can name those things that we believe are general, or are particular; that are fictional, or are real; that are contingent, or essential. Names can span the full gamut of possible ontic commitments by not being tied to any particular ontic commitments.

So the question of whether Pluto is a planet is understood as a language game with a particular ontic commitment. A planet is a real kind of object (or process) with nameable real properties - like being gravitationally spherical, and dominant in its orbit, big enough to clear a path of other contenders.

So yes, the act of naming is contingent in that clearly it we only bother to categorise the world in ways that reflect our epistemic interests. But then also, a major such interest is a comittment to ontic realism. We like to be able to classify the world into types of objects, and talk about the necessary qualities of these types, and the particularly significant instances of these types.

We develop a way of talking about reality that seems to get its reality right.

So while it can always be pointed out that names are arbitrary sounds coming out of our mouths, it is also the case that we are using this naming freedom to make a stronger ontic claim than it would otherwise be possible to make.

To call Pluto a planet is to assert it is a real object of that class, and so not some other class, like a moon, or an asteroid, or a planet-let. And in being real, that classification is open to being changed by empirical evidence. We can give names to a planet's essential qualities in terms of acts of measurement we might perform. It's all part of realism's particular language game.

So language organises naive experience into a structured place of ontic commitments. We can really develop a belief in real things because we also now know what it would be for them not to be real, but instead classified as fictions, ideas, faulty information, etc.

No of course I don't agree that the best theory of the mind must be biological. — m-theory

Yes. But you don't agree because you want to believe something different without being able to produce the evidence. So at this point it is like arguing with a creationist.

I offered the that the pomdp could be a resolution.
You did not really bother to suggest any reason why that view was not correct. — m-theory

But it is a resolution in being an implementation of the epistemic cut. It represents a stepping back into a physics-free realm so as to speak about physics-constrained processes.

The bit that is then missing - the crucial bit - is that the model doesn't have the job of making its own hardware. The whole thing is just a machine being created by humans to fulfill human purposes. It has no evolutionary or adaptive life of its own.

Mind is only found in living organic matter therefor only living organic matter can have a mind.
That is an unasailable argument in that it defines the term mind to the exclusion of inorganic matter.
But that this definition is by necessity the only valid theory of the mind is not simply a resolved matter in philosophy. — m-theory

Fortunately we only have to consider two theories of mind in this discussion - the biological and the computational. If you want to widen the field to quantum vibrations, ectoplasm, psychic particles or whatever, then maybe you don't see computation as being relevant in the end?

It is not immediately clear to me how this general statement can be said to demonstrate necessarily that computation can not result in a mind. — m-theory

So computation is a formal action - algorithmic or rule-bound. And yet measurement is inherently an informal action - a choice that cannot be computed. Houston, we have a problem.

My argument is on the first page below Tom's post. — m-theory

That's a good illustration of the absolute generacy of the measurement problem then. To have a formal theory of the mind involves also the informal choice about what kind of measurement stands for a sign of a mind.

We are talking Godelian incompleteness here. In the end, all formal reasoning systems - all syntactical arguments - rely on having to make an abductive and axiomatic guess to get the game started. We have to decide, oh, that is one of those. Then the development of a formal model can begin by having agreed a basis of measurement.

But then you mix up the issue of a measurement basis with something different - the notion of undecidability in computation.

Science models the world. So as an open-ended semiotic process, it doesn't have a halting problem. Instead, it is free to inquire until it reaches a point of pragmatic indifference in the light of its own interests.

You are talking about a halting problem analogy by the sound of it. And that is merely a formal property of computational space. Some computational processes will terminate, others have a form that cannot. That is something quite different.

Of course I disagree that the mind must necessarily always be biological...but that is a semantic debate surrounding how the term is defined.
You have decided that the term mind must be defined biologically to the exclusion of a computational model. — m-theory

In your stubbornness, you keep short-cutting my carefully structured argument.

1) Whatever a mind is, we are as certain as we can be that biology has the right stuff. Agreed?

2) The best theory of that what kind of stuff that actually is, is what you would expect biologists to produce. And the standard answer from biologists is biology is material dynamics regulated by semiotic code - unstable chemistry constrained by evolving memory. Agreed?

3) Then the question is whether computation is the same kind of stuff as that, or a fundamentally different kind of stuff. And as Pattee argues (not from quantum measurement, but his own 1960s work on biological automata), computation is physics-free modelling. It is the isolated play of syntax that builds in its presumption of being implementable on any computationally suited device. And in doing that, it explicitly rules out any external influences from the operation of physical laws or dissipative material processes. Sure there must be hardware to run the software, but it is axiomatic to universal computation that the nature of the hardware is irrelevant to the play of the symbols. Being physics-free is what makes the computation universal. Agreed?

4) Given the above - that biological stuff is fundamentally different from computational stuff in a completely defined fashion - the burden is then on the computationalist to show that computation could still be the right stuff in some way.

Yes and as far as I could tell from your source material it was claimed that the origin of life contains a quantum measurement problem.
The term epistemic cut was used synonymously with the quantum measurement problem and the author continuously alluded to the origins of self replicating life. — m-theory

This is another unhelpful idee fixe you have developed. As said, Pattee's theoretical formulation of the epistemic cut arose from being a physicist working on the definition of life in the 1950s and 1960s as DNA was being discovered and the central mechanism of evolution becoming physically clear. From von Neumann - who also had an interest in self-reproducing automata - Pattee learnt that the epistemic cut was also the same kind of problem as had been identified in quantum mechanics as the measurement problem.

Imagine if the body and brain had a sudden interruption in the supply of electrons within its neurological system?
Biology is not without stability. — m-theory

You seem to be imagining that electrons are like little Newtonian billiard balls or something. Quantum field theory would say a more accurate mental picture would be excitations in field. And even that leaves out the difficult stuff.

But anyway, again of course there is always stability and plasticity in the world. They are complementary poles of description. And the argument from biophysics is that dynamical instability is essential to life because life depends on having material degrees of freedom that it can harness. For biological information to act as a switch, there must be a physico-chemical instability that makes for material action that is switchable.

I don't agree semantics can only occur in biology. — m-theory

Fine. Now present that evidence.

Again I refer to the alternative of a undecidable mind.
We could not know if we had one if the mind is not algorithmic it is that simple.
If we can know without error that we have minds this is the result of some algorithm which means the mind is computational. — m-theory

No idea what you are talking about here.

We might disembody a head and sustain the life of the brain without a body by employing machines.
Were we to do so we would not say that this person has lost a significant amount of their mind.
Would we? — m-theory

That is irrelevant because you are talking about an already fully developed biology. The neural circuitry that was the result of having a hand would still be attempting to function. Check phantom limb syndrome.

Then imagine instead culturing a brain with no body, no sense organs, no material interaction with the world. That is what a meaningful state of disembodiment would be like.

My notion was that we might hope to model something like the default mode network. — m-theory

That is simply how the brain looks when attention is in idle mode with not much to do. Or indeed when attention is being suppressed to avoid it disrupting smoothly grooved habit.

If you state that the origins of life must be understood in order that we understand the mind that is claim that entails burdens of proof. — m-theory

Who is talking about the origins of life - the problem of abiogenesis? You probably need a time machine to give an empirical answer on that.

I was talking about the biological basis of the epistemic cut - something we can examine in the lab today.

The main issue at hand is whether or not computational theory of the mind is valid.
Not whether or inorganic matter can compute. — m-theory

Again, we know that biology is the right stuff for making minds. You are not expecting me to prove that?

And we know that biology is rooted in material instabilty, not material stabilty? I've given you the evidence of that. And indeed - biosemiotically - why it has to be the case.

And we know that computation is rooted in material stability? Hardware fabrication puts a lot of effort into achieving that, starting by worrying about the faintest speck of dust in the silicon foundry.

And I've made the case that computation only employs syntax. It maps patterns of symbols onto patterns of symbols by looking up rules. There is nothing in that which constitutes an understanding of any meaning in the patterns or the rules?

So that leaves you having to argue that despite all this, computation has the right stuff in a way that makes it merely a question of some appropriate degree of algorithmic complication before it "must" come alive with thoughts and feelings, a sense of self and a sense of purpose, and so you are excused of the burden of saying just why that would be so given all the foregoing reasons to doubt.

And I believe that somewhere in the middle is where the mind breakthrough will happen.
I believe this because a great deal of what the body and brain do is completely autonomous from the mind...or at least what we mean by the term mind. — m-theory

Do you mean a dualistic folk psychology notion of mind? I instead take the neurocognitive view that what you are talking about is simply the difference between attentive and habitual levels of brain processing. And these are hardly completely autonomous, but rather completely interdependent.

For this reason I think simulations of thought do not have to recreate the physics of biology at the nano scale before a mind can be modeled. — m-theory

This misrepresents my argument again. My argument is that there is a fundamental known difference between hardware and wetware as BC puts it. So it is up to you to show that this difference does not matter here.

Perhaps the computer simulation only needs to be as coarse grain as you describe. But you have to be able to provide positive reasons to think that is so rather than make the usual computer science presumption it probably is going to be so.

And part of that is going to be showing that simulations are more than just syntactical structures. You have to have an account of semantics that is grounded in physicalism, not in some hand-wavy dualistic folk psychology notion of "mind".

I just don't agree that intelligence is necessarily dependent upon that state.
I don't see why computers can not be the "right stuff" as you put it.
Pattee does not provide conclusive evidence that such is the case.
And you haven't either. — m-theory

But the burden of proof is on you here. The only sure thing is that whatever you really mean by intelligence is a product of biology. And so biological stuff is already known to be the right stuff.

If you also think a machine can be the right stuff, then why isn't it already easier to produce artificial life before we can produce artificial mind? DNA is just a genetic algorithm, right? And we understand biology better than neurology?

So maybe we are just fooling ourselves here because we humans are smart enough to follow rules as if we are machines. We can walk within lines, move chess pieces, write squiggled pages of algebra. And we can even then invent machines that follow the rules we invent in a fashion that actually is unaware, syntactic and simulated.

That would be why it seems easy to work from the top down. Computers are just mechanising what is already us behaving as if we were mechanical. But as soon as you actually dig into what it is to be a biological creature in an embodied relation with a complex world, mechanical programs almost immediately break down. They are the wrong stuff.

Neural networks buy you some extra biological realism. But then you have to understand the detail of that to make judgements about just how far that further exercise is going to get.

But I don't agree that we have to solve the origin of life and the measurement problem to solve the problem of general intelligence. — m-theory

Great. So in your view general intelligence is not wedded to biological underpinnings. You have drunk the Kool-Aid of 1970s cognitive functionalism. When faced with a hard philosophical rebuttal to the hand-waving promises that are currency of computer science as a discipline, suddenly you no longer want to care about the reasons AI is history's most over-hyped technological failure.

I suppose if you want to argue that the mind ultimately takes place at a quantum scale in nature then Pattee may well be correct and we would have to contend with the issues surrounding the measurement problem. — m-theory

That is nothing like what I suggest. Instead I say "mind" arises out of that kind of lowest level beginning after an immense amount of subsequent complexification.

The question is whether computer hardware can ever have "the right stuff" to be a foundation for semantics. And I say it can't because of the things I have identified. And now biophysics is finding why the quasi-classical scale of being (organic chemistry in liquid water) is indeed a uniquely "right" stuff.

I explained this fairly carefully in a thread back on PF if you are interested....
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/the-biophysics-of-substance-70736.html

So here you are just twisting what I say so you can avoid having to answer the fundamental challenges I've made to your cosy belief in computer science's self-hype.

What is wrong with bayesian probability I don't get it either? — m-theory

I thought you were referring to the gaudy self-publicist, Jeff Hawkins, of hierarchical temporal memory fame - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory

But Bayesian network approaches to biologically realistic brain processing models are of course what I think are exactly the right way to go, as they are implementations of the epistemic cut or anticipatory systems approach.

Look, it's clear that you are not even familiar with the history of neural networks and cybernetics within computer science, let alone the way the same foundational issues have played out more widely in science and philosophy.

Don't take that as in insult. It is hardly general knowledge. But all I can do is point you towards the arguments.

And I think they are interesting because they are right at the heart of everything - being the division between those who understand reality in terms of Platonic mechanism and those who understand it in terms of organically self-organising processes.

I have read some more and you are right he is very technically laden. — m-theory

Right. Pattee requires you to understand physics as well as biology. ;) But that is what makes him the most rigorous thinker in this area for my money.

I was hoping for a more generalized statement of the problem of the epistemic cut because I believe that the Partially observable Markov decision process might be a very general solution to establishing an epistemic cut between the model and the reality in an A.I. agent. — m-theory

Good grief. Not Mr Palm Pilot and his attempt to reinvent Bayesian reasoning as a forward modelling architecture?

For anyone interested in this kind of thing, two really good examples are these....

First a non-Peircean semiotic approach that actually still maps very nicely to a Peircean one....

Vern S. Poythress - Semiotic analysis of the observer in relativity, quantum mechanics, and a possible theory of everything
http://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PoythressVernSemioticAnalysisOfTheObserver.pdf

And then a Peircean approach which is rather more technical, but worth quoting is.... http://cds.cern.ch/record/948191/files/0605099.pdf

In the field of Physics emphasis in the Peircean semiotic categories has been attempted in different ways. There are three modes of being, the three phenomenological categories of C. S. Pierce:

1. Firstness = the potential.
2. Secondness = the actual.
3. Thirdness = the general.

In Peirce's philosophy these categories are very broad concepts with applications in metaphysics, cosmology, psychology, and general semiotic. In Classical Mechanics only Secondness occurs: There is no spontaneity (Firstness) and no irreversible tendencies to seek equilibrium in various types of attractors (Thirdness), only specific states leading to specific trajectories through the state space.

In Thermodynamics both other categories enter the scene: Thirdness by the irreversible tendency of the systems to end in an equilibrium state, determined by the boundary conditions, where all features of the initial state have been wiped out by internal friction. Firstness is reflected in thermodynamics by the spontaneous random fluctuations around the mean behavior, conditioned by the temperature and the frictional forces.

The Firstness category is the most difficult to grasp, because when we try to exemplify it by specific examples and general types we are already introducing Secondness and Thirdness. However, Firstness has made a remarkable entry into Quantum Mechanics through the concept of the wave function as describing the state of a system. The properties of a system that are inherent in its wave function are only potential, not actual. An electron has no definite position or momentum; these properties only become actualized in the context of specific types of apparatus and acts of measurement.

So the general point is that physics is often treated as if it were an exercise in the observerless description of reality - just the facts, guv. And yet from Kant on, the epistemological problem of how we see past our own innate presumptions about reality has been clear to anyone in philosophy of science.

So semiotics is an epistemic framework for dealing with observers and their production of observables. And as the Prashant paper in particular emphasises, phemenological categories actually appear to cash out as ontic ones. So semiotics becomes more than just a way to describe reality with more completeness (the completeness of talking about observers in a modelling relation with the world). Now in Peircean trade-marked fashion, it actually becomes itself an ontic model of that world.

As Prashant argues, the Peircean claim that reality is an irreducibly triadic sign relationship is just not visible from the standard classical Newtonian perspective which reduces all physical being to secondness - particles in motion having their individual events.

But in the modern era, physics is coming to be centred on a thermodynamical systems perspective where you have the irreducible threeness of local fluctuations, actual energetic exchanges, and then the finality of global habits or inevitable tendencies.

And with quantum physics, this is completely tied back to the irreducibility of the observer problem as we know - another way of saying you have to have a three-cornered ontology where observers are habits that shape potentials into actual patterns of events. You just can't split the observer from that which is the observable, as has been the traditional dualistic assumption.

The Prashant paper makes a nice connection there in suggesting how the three parts of the sign relation - potentiality, actuality and generality - map to the essential levels of the quantum mathematical machinery of wavefunction, operator and eigenvalue.

So not sure if this is Vadim's area at all. The mention of an "AI convergence" is a little mysterious.

But Peircean semiotics as an ontological model of the Cosmos - always going against the reductionist mainstream in insisting on stuff like the fundamentality of indeterminism and the developmental nature of cosmological order - has always been prescient of the physics that actually emerged over the past 100 years.

I argue that because this algorithm has to learn from scratch it must discover it's own semantics within the problem and solution to that problem. — m-theory

That is the question. Does it actually learn its own semantics or is there a human in the loop who is judging that the machine is performing within some acceptable range? Who is training the machine and deciding that yes, its got the routine down pat?

The thing is that all syntax has to have an element of frozen semantics in practice. Even a Turing Machine is semantic in that it must have a reading head that can tell what symbol it is looking at so it can follow its rules. So semantics gets baked in - by there being a human designer who can build the kind of hardware which ensures this happens in the way it needs to.

So you could look at a neural network as a syntactical device with a lot of baked-in semantics. You are starting to get some biological realism in that open learning of that kind takes place. And yet inside the black box of circuits, it is still all a clicking and whirring of syntax as no contact with any actual semantics - no regulative interactions with material instability - are taking place.

Of course my view relies on a rather unfamiliar notion of semantics perhaps. The usual view is based on matter~mind dualism. Meaning is held to be something "mental" or "experiential". But then that whole way of framing the issue is anti-physicalist and woo-making.

So instead, a biosemiotic view of meaning is about the ability of symbol systems - memory structures - to regulate material processes. The presumption is that materiality is unstable. The job of information is to constrain that instability to produce useful work. That is what mindfulness is - the adaptive constraint of material dynamics.

And algorithms are syntax with any semantics baked in. The mindful connection to materiality is severed by humans doing the job of underpinning the material stability of the hardware that the software runs on. There is no need for instability-stabilising semantics inside the black box. An actual dualism of computational patterns and hotly-switching transistor gates has been manufactured by humans for their own purpose.

Consider the task of creating robot hand that is deleterious as the human hand. — m-theory

Yes. But the robot hand is still a scaled-up set of digital switches. And a real hand is a scaled-up set of molecular machines. So the difference is philosophically foundational even if we can produce functional mimickry.

At the root of the biological hand is a world where molecular structures are falling apart almost as soon as they self-assemble. The half-life of even a sizeable cellular component like a microtubule is about 7 minutes. So the "hardware" of life is all about a material instability being controlled just enough to stay organised and directed overall.

You are talking about a clash of world views here. The computationalist likes to think biology is a wee bit messy - and its amazing wet machines can work at all really. A biologist knows that a self-organising semiotic stability is instrincally semantic and adaptive. Biology know itself, its material basis, all the way down to the molecules that compose it. And so it is no surprise that computers are so autistic and brittle - the tiniest physical bug can cause the whole machine to break-down utterly. The smallest mess is something a computer algorithm has no capacity to deal with.

(Thank goodness again for the error correction routines that human hardware designers can design in as the cotton wool buffering for these most fragile creations in all material existence).

So again...this algorithm, if it does have semantic understanding...it does not and never will have human semantic understanding. — m-theory

But the question is how can an algorithm have semantic understanding in any foundational sense when the whole point is that it is bare isolated syntax?

Your argument is based on a woolly and dualistic notion of semantics. Or if you have some other scientific theory of meaning here, then you would need to present it.

Pattee's epistemic cut was not very clear to me, and he seems to have coined this term. — m-theory

Pattee has written a ton of papers which you can find yourself if you google his name and epistemic cut.

This is one with a bit more of the intellectual history.... http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html

But really, Pattee won't make much sense unless you do have a strong grounding in biological science. And much of the biology is very new. If you want to get a real understanding of how different biology is in its informational constraint of material instability, then this a good new pop sci book....

http://lifesratchet.com/

I was seeking to make a distinction between simulating a human being and simulating general intelligence....I was using the criterion of if a computer could learn any problem and or solution to a problem that a human could... — m-theory

Ok. But from my biophysical/biosemiotic perspective, a theory of general intelligence just is a theory of life, a theory of complex adaptive systems. You have to have the essence of that semiotic relation between symbols and matter built in from the smallest, simplest scales to have any "intelligence" at all.

So yes, you are doing the familiar thing of trying to abstract away the routinised, mechanics-imitating, syntactical organisation that people think of as rational thought or problem solving. If you input some statement into a Searlean Chinese room or Turing test passing automaton, all that matters is that you get the appropriate output statement. If it sounded as though the machine knew what you were talking about, then the machine passes as "intelligent".

So again, fine, its easy to imagine building technology that is syntactic in ways that map some structure of syntax that we give it on to some structure of syntax that we then find meaningful. But the burden is on you to show why any semantics might arise inside the machine. What is your theory of how syntax produces semantics?

Biology's theory is that of semiotics - the claim that an intimate relation between syntax and semantics is there from the get-go as symbol and matter, Pattee's epistemic cut between rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics. And this is a generic theory - one that explains life and mind in the same physicalist ontology.

But computer science just operates on the happy assumption that syntax working in isolation from material reality will "light up" in the way brains "light up". There has never been any actual theory to back up this sci fi notion.

Instead - given the dismal failure of AI for so long - the computer science tendency is simply to scale back the ambitions to the simplest stuff for machines to fake - those aspects of human thought which are the most abstractly syntactic as mental manipulations.

If you just have numbers or logical variables to deal with, then hey, suddenly everything messy and real world is put at as great a distance as it can possibly be. Any schoolkid can learn to imitate a calculating engine - and demonstrate their essential humanness by being pretty bad, slow and error-prone at it, not to mention terminally bored.

Then we humans invent an actual machine to behave like a machine and ... suddenly we are incredibly impressed at its potential. Already our pocket calculators exceed all but our most autistic of idiot savants in rapid, error-free, syntactical operation. We think if a pocket calculator can be this unnaturally robotic in its responses, then imagine how wonderfully conscious, creative, semantic, etc, a next generation quantum supercomputer is going to be. Or some such inherently self-contradicting shit.

So every time I point to a fundamental difference, your reply is simply that differences can be minimised. And when I point out that minimising those differences might be physically impractical, you wave that constraint away as well. It doesn't seem as though you want to take a principled approach to your OP.

Anyway, another way of phrasing the same challenge to your presumption there is no great problem here: can you imagine an algorithm that could operate usefully on unstable hardware? How could an algorithm function in the way you require if it's next state of output was always irreducibly uncertain? In what sense would such a process still be algorithmic in your book if every time it computed some value, there would be no particular reason for the calculation to come out the same?

Beinghood is about having an informational idea of self in a way that allows one to materially perpetuate that self.

So we say all life has autonomy in that semiotic fashion. Even immune systems and bacteria are biological information that can regulate a material state of being by being able to divide the material world into what is self and nonself.

This basic division of course becomes a highly elaborated and "felt" one with complex brains, and in humans, with a further socially constructed self-conscious model of being a self. But for biology, there is this material state of caring that is at the root of life and mind from the evolutionary get go.

And so when talking about AI, we have to apply that same principle. And for programmable machines, we can see that there is a designed in divorce between the states of information and the material processes sustaining those states. Computers simply lack the means for an involved sense of self.

Now we can imagine starting to create that connection by building computers that somehow are in control of their own material destinies. We could give our laptops the choice over their power consumption and their size - let them grow and spawn in some self-choosing way. We could let them pick what they actually wanted to be doing, and who with.

We can imagine this in a sci fi way. But it would hardly be an easy design exercise. And the results would seem autistically clunky. And as I have pointed out we would have to build in this selfhood relation from the top down. Whereas in life it exists from the bottom up, starting with molecular machines at the quasi classical nanoscale of the biophysics of cells. So computers are always going against nature in trying to recreate nature in this sense.

It is not an impossible engineering task to introduce some biological realism into an algorithmic architecture in the fashion of a neural network. But computers must always come at it from the wrong end, and so it is impossible in the sense of being utterly impractical to talk about a very realistic replication of biological structure.

Pattee would be worth reading. The difference is between information that can develop habits of material regulation - as in biology - and information that is by definition cut free of such an interaction with the physical world.

Software can be implemented on any old hardware which operates with the inflexible dynamics of a Turing machine. Biology is information that relies on the opposite - the inherent dissipative dynamics of the actual physical world. Computers calculate. It is all syntax and no semantics. But biology regulates physiochemical processes. It is all about controlling the world rather than retreating from the world.

You could think of it as a computer being a bunch of circuits that has a changing pattern of physical states that is as meaningless from the world's point of view as randomly flashing lights. Whereas a biological system is a collection of work organising devices - switches and gates and channels and other machinery designed to regulate a flow of material action.

As we go from cellular machinery to neural machinery, the physicality of this becomes less obvious. Neurons with their axons and synapses start to look like computational devices. But the point is that they don't break that connection with a physicality of switches and motors. The biological difference remains intrinsic.

Bahaha, douchebag. — StreetlightX

Your insults are so funny. Stylistically they are just all over the place. Maybe you should get a copy of a book of someone expert like Dorothy Parker so you could cut and paste?

I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do — StreetlightX

Maybe you don't yet get how dichotomies relate to hierarchies - despite my explaining it to you repeatedly?

The genetic level of semiosis and the verbal level of semiosis both play into the neurodevelopment of mental habits as levels of semiosis.

And the point was your earlier posts argued for a disconnect when it came to human-level cognitive development. You said sensate bodies came before inference-mongering intellectuality, and a lot of other things in the same vein.

You've now been forced to concede that this doesn't accurately describe the human situation at all - which would be a critical issue for any supposed philosophy founded on "aesthetics".

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction; — StreetlightX

This is obvious. And also the important point when it comes to a semiotic metaphysics. All semiosis is about the "linear" constraint on free variety - a limitation of freedoms, a reduction in dimensionality.

But again, your cite reveals that PoMo simply gets this back to front in treating the reduction in dimensionality as a bug rather than a feature. And this goes along with the anti-hierarchy/pro-flatness, anti-rationality/pro-romantic, anti-syntax/pro-semantics rhetoric that the dialectical-splitting habits of PoMo inspire.

My systems view is of course based on the differentiation that is the basis of integration, the competition that is the basis of co-operation. So while I always talk about the division that is a dichotomy, I also always talk about its synergistic resolution which is a hierarchy.

Thus when I repeatedly pull you up on your tendency to make "confrontational" divisions in ontology, this is not me applying my oppositional mentality on your holistic position, but instead me holistically highlighting the oppositional stance that is your go-to point of view. You show a quite incredible hostility to "otherness" - as you have demonstrated repeatedly to me and others in this thread.

Again, it is really quite funny. So keep it up!

I assure you, from a computer science perspective, it is no equivocation to say that the deepmind general purpose ai is an algorithm. — m-theory

There is a computer science difference between programmable computers and learning machines.

So yes, you can point to a learning rule embedded in a neural network node and say there - calculating a weight - is an algorithm.

But then a neural network is (ideally) in dynamical feedback interaction with the world. It is embodied in the way of a brain. And this is a non-algorithmic aspect of its being. You can't write out the program that is the system's forward model of the world. The forward model emerges rather than being represented by a-priori routines.

So sure, you can ask about the algorithm of the mind. But this is equivocal if you then seem to think you are talking about some kind of programmable computer and not giving due weight to the non-algorithmic aspects of a neural net which are the actual basis of its biological realism.

The idea of an algorithm in itself completely fails to have biological realism. Sure we can mathematically simulate the dynamical bistability of molecular machine. We can model what is going on in brains and cells in terms of a sequence of rules. But algorithms can't push matter about or regulate dissipative processes.

That is the whole point of Turing machine - to disconnect the software actions from the hardware mechanics. And the whole point of biology is the opposite - to have a dynamical interaction between the symbols and the matter. At every level of the biological organisation, matter needs to get pushed about for anything to be happening.

So in philosophy of mind terms, Turing computation is quite unlike biological semiosis in a completely fundamental way.

See - http://www.academia.edu/3075569/Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

And a neural net architecture tries to bridge the gap. But to the degree it is algorithmic, it is merely a Turing-based simulation of neurosemiosis~neurodynamics.

Just a bit of simulated biological realism is of course very powerful. Neural nets make a big break with programmable devices even if the biology is simulated at the most trivial two layer perceptron level. And if you are asking the big question of whether neural networks could be conscious - have qualitative states - I think that is a tough thing to even pin down as an intelligible query.

I can imagine a simulation of neurodynamics that is so speedy that it can keep up with the world at the rate that humans keep up with the world. But would this simulation have feelings if it wasn't simulating also the interior millieu of a regulated biogical body? And how grainy would the simulation be given internal metabolic processes have nano range timescales?

The natural human brain builds up from nanoscale molecular dynamics and so never suffers a graininess issue. There is an intimate connection with the material world built into the semiotic activity from the get-go.

But computation comes from the other direction. It starts algorithmically with no material semiosis - a designed-in disconnect between the symbolic software and the physical hardware. And to attain biological realism via simulation, it has to start building in that feedback dynamical connection with the world - the Bayesian forward modeling loop - from the top down. And clearly, the extra computational cost of that increases exponentially as the design tries to build a connection in on ever finer scales of interaction.

So I don't just say that neural nets can't be conscious. But I do say we can see why it might be impossibly expensive to do that via algorithmic simulation of material semiosis.

Likewise. I believe you were about the first person I "met" on PF, talking about thermal models of time!

Perhaps I am missing something? — m-theory

Yep. As your cite says: "Neural turing machines combine the fuzzy pattern matching capabilities of neural networks with the algorithmic power of programmable computers."

So this is talking about a hybrid between a neural net and a turing machine with " algorithmic power".

The distinction is important. The mind could be a neural net (neural nets might have the biological realism to do what brains do). But the mind couldn't be a Turing Machine - as biology is different in architectural principle from computation.

Is the mind an algorithm — m-theory

Is a neural net strictly speaking just an algorithm? Or does it do what it can do because an anticipation-creating learning rule acts as a constraint on material dynamics?

Potentially there is a lot of equivocation in what is understood by "algorithm" here. The difference between neural nets and Turing Machines is a pretty deep one philosophically.

(one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there). — StreetlightX

The origins of motility are worth mentioning as a charming example of the dichotomous logic of symmetry-breaking.

The simplest movement is created by the spiraling tail, the flagella, of a bacterium. Rotate the bundle of threads in one direction and they tangle up to propel the cell in a straight line. Switch the rotation in the other direction and the threads untangle, causing the cell to now tumble randomly.

So the cell can swim down a chemical gradient - receptors telling it to get going straight if it is heading towards food, or away from toxins. Then if the cell is getting no such clear signal, it reverses the motor and tumbles about until something comes up as a signal to get going again.

So it is a neat example of a structural asymmetry - directed action vs random search. And the same semiotic logic persists into the left/right dichotomous division of the human brain. Left for focused directed action, right for exploratory thought and open vigilance. Then in cosmological modelling, determinism vs randomness, constraints vs freedoms, synechism vs tychism, repeat the distinction at a logical intellectual level.

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas.

If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. — StreetlightX

Great. Except...

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

...which appears to stress the differentiation over the integration.

First in your philosophy comes the primacy of biological embodiment - laudable in its greater generality than semiotic mechanism. Then second - in "mongering" fashion - comes the parasitic socially constructed aspect of intellect (which doesn't here seem to be naturally related to the sensate body and the phenomenology of aesthetics).

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. — apokrisis

I should add that my approach also then may lead back to aesthetics in that having recognised its inherently socially-constructed nature, that gives philosophy the useful job of figuring out what that social contruction ought to be. So to the degree we have to invent/discover the right aesthetic evaluative responses to be learnt, then that is the bit which is the work in progress.

So yes, we want a successful individual-level embodiment of cognition. Yet we can't find that in either biology or culture alone. Instead it is how the two levels of semiotic adaptation can arrive at their most fruitful balance in personal experience that is the question.

Now that is the issue with materialism or scientism that simply seems to deny that such a balance might be an end game. But also - where the romantics take offence - it does suggest that the human psycho-social balance is a game playing out within a still larger game of thermodynamics. In the end, philosophy in this vein has to make proper contact with material semiosis - materiality in some generally determining form.

So yes, personally we would want an aesthetic which is a felt guide to how to flourish. We would want to be so embodied in that way of being it is a sensible habit. But to get there, we would have to construct a scaffolding culture.

That is another reason why SX's posts have been quite objectionable in this thread. For instance, Wayfarer speaks for religious traditions that may have proved quite functional in terms of achieving such an aesthetic of flourishing. Likewise the chain of being.

So the level of philosophical analysis might be weak, and yet the historically-developed cultural prescription could pragmatically work.

Likewise, we all almost instinctively support feminism or oppose consumerism, or whatever. But from a philosophical point of view, actual positions must be argued for rather than simply ticked off as standard issue ideological at a certain point in modern cultural history.

I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. — The Great Whatever

Fine, And I'm going a step further in claiming that the emergent constraints aren't bizarre but natural in their developmental inevitability. Human grammar and the laws of thought are Platonic in that sense. They wound up having the only form they could have in taking semiosis to its rationalising extreme.

That was why Greek mathematics and logic was the big deal that got philosophy going. It was the first glimpse that existence could actually be a rational structure in a true sense. And now semiosis is a theory of how rational structure emergently develops with historical inevitability - getting us past the earlier problems of Platonic idealism where it is murky how the perfect forms interact with the messy material world to do the job of imposing necessity on contingency.

Platonic transcendence - an ontology of existence - gets fixed by Peircean immanence, a process view where the rule of law is instead replaced an inevitability of emergent habit.

Check human grammatical structure or logical form and there is a least action principle expressing itself. Of the many possible ways of thinking, it fast boiled down to an optimal structure that was the shortest distance to intelligible and persistent states of organisation - truths so true to seem eternal, and even always there even before they appeared in actuality.

As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings. — StreetlightX

You have been either missing or avoiding my original point.

Yes, I have always agreed with the embodied or enactive view of mental experience. I was already arguing that in the 1980s against the cogsci functionalism of that era.

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything. My argument is that this is a retreat towards solipsistic idealism and panpsychism in that it tries to make the phenomenology of feeling primary in philosophical positions. And that is a monism which is much too reduced. The right kind of most general philosophic grounding - the place from which to answer all deep human questions - is instead the irreducible triadism of hierarchical semiotic structure.

So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception - a cultural rationalisation about biologically embodied processes of sensibility or evaluation. To talk about "aesthetics" is already to frame the thing in itself in an abstracting structure of words that embed a collection of cultural prejudices.

And this is just what you demonstrate by launching into rants about what is natural, what is wrong. It seems because you feel a certain way about manual labour vs intellectual activity, feminism vs patriachy, or whatever political agenda motivates you in some moment, then it is your conscious feelings that legitimate the stance. You talk as if any right-minded person would have to experience the same aesthetic response, and so phenomenology wins the argument.

But human emotions are socially constructed. There is the same animal machinery, but words are already getting in there and structuring experience from infancy. So if aesthetics is in the "mind" of anything, it is in the mind of a particular culture. That is its proper level of embodiment - if we must reduce towards a canonical level where the idea formative information, the constraints, are embodied as a state of remembering.

Again, you have agreed in the past about the socially constructed, language dependent, nature of human introspective awareness. To "look inside at ourselves and our qualia" is a skill that has to be learnt - one taught us by our social context, and so a set of ideas that evolved beyond us individually for its own (always philosophically questionable) reasons.

Thus to then turn around and say, no, look inside and there really just is this affective quality which is basic to experience and so the ground of philosophic epistemology, doesn't stack up. One can't look inwards to discover the "aesthetic". One has to look outwards to the cultural history, the rational intelligibility, of its (still evolving) social development as an idea.

And yes, again, there has to be some neurobiology that social contructionism can hook into. If you tell me that there is a Romantic response which is feeling the sublime, then I can check and say yes I get what you mean when I stand alone atop of a mountain, or whatever.

But hey, that is still a really bad foundation for philosophy. I shouldn't ignore the fact you are speaking for a social attitude which has evolved for its own reasons - reasons I ought to take into account against some larger scheme of nature which actually talks about the formation of such discursive structures.

And this is where Peircean semiotics gets it right. It makes that foundational connection between mind and matter - or now symbol and matter, constraint and freedom. Semiotics gets at the common mechanism that directly connects discursive structure and dissipative structure - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, to use Pattee's term. Or infodynamics as Salthe sums it up in his semiotic take on hierarchy theory.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. We end up only creating the very thing we claim to be finding when we check and see that subliminity is an affective response we feel when we set up our state of thought according to the appropriate cultural prescription. Instead, what phenomenological training should set us up to look for - if semiosis is the correct model of course - is semiosis at work inside our own heads, creating its characteristic kind of organisation.

On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. — The Great Whatever

This is one of the points I think is interesting here. It is a speculative way of putting it, but it is as if the Universe is talking about itself in having its Platonic organisation emerging as the end game in our philosophic/scientific modelling.

That was the step Peirce wanted to make. Our human instinct for "reasonableness" could be either just arbitrary - just a very limited kind of Procrustean view we impose on existence with no deep justification. Or it could be in fact the very organisational principle by which the Universe itself self-organises into being. The Universe actually is rational in that it is like the development of an "embodied" mental habit, and exercise in rendering vague possibility as crisp logical counterfactuality.

So the contrast is between this pansemiotic metaphysics and SX's apparently panpsychic/idealist approach where he stresses phenomenology/aesthetics/sensibility - the experiential feel of things rather than the rational structure of things.

I don't deny that experience is where it all must start for us epistemically. It is really important to counter the usual reductionist view which simply wants to bypass all the problems of defining what it is to be a mind - in contrast to being a body. So taking an embodied approach to consciousness is absolutely the right thing to do.

But I take that already for granted. And my argument then picks up at the point where we have to turn back to talking about the material world. Peircean semiotics says we must see the material world as generally "mindful" in its mechanisms, but we don't want to then just be idealistic in a dualistic sense of saying that that mindfulness is some kind of dilute substance - a grade of some elemental mentalistic property as panpsychism does.

So the human mind is biologically rooted, and language/culture appear parasitic on that embodied state of sensibility. But language opened the door to a logico-mathematical level of cosmology modelling. And that does arguably - in its potential for Platonic-strength abstraction - create a conversation in which the Universe is speaking of itself now. Its principles are being articulated in ways that are forced onto us by their reality now that we have a suitably universal form of semiotic mechanism in words and counting, grammar and logic.

what is your opinion on multiverse theory; and its possible implications on the points made above? — Mustapha Mond

Well, as an extremum principle, the number of universes is either going to be 1 or infinity. Either creation is unbound, meaning an unlimited number of possibilities must exist, or there is instead a reason for creation being limited, and so only one generic outcome is possible.

Examples of such constraints on fecundity would be a cosmic selection principle of some kind - creation starts with all possibilities trying to get going, but then in a winner takes all race, only one solution emerges. This is supported by quantum physics and its path integral or sum over histories approach. The least action principle applied to the entirety of existence would say that our universe must be the most optimal possible path in some sense. And that would tie in with ontic structural realism which says that the maths of symmetry breaking - as told by lie group analysis - has only one set of possible solutions.

So in general, I would say it either has to be the case that the number of kinds of worlds is infiinite or just one. And what decides that is whether physics can say that reality is ruled by evolving constraints or whether reality is unlimitedly fecund.

Then you have to add that multiverse thinking itself spans this range. So if you take Linde's eternal spawning inflation, then this is really a number of worlds = 1 story. It all begins with an inflaton field that cools locally to spin off a fractal distribution of world-lets. So this process of world-making is future-eternal - an infinity of daughter universes gets produced. However - as has been argued as a mathematical theorem - this kind of multiverse is past-finite. The ever-branching inflating field must itself be traceable back to some definite root event that marks its beginning in time. So in that sense, inflationary existence counts as just a 1 world solution (as why an inflationary field of just those properties and not every other? Some fecundity limiting principle must apply).

So where I stand on multiverses is that I am generally against them because of a larger commitment to a physics where crisp fecundity is always in fact the product of crisp limits. You can't have definite possibilities except in the presence of definite constraints.

An analogy is a die. A perfectly symmetrical object would be a sphere. Toss a sphere and you can't really say it lands on a face. It lands on an infinity of points and so it is always rather vague or indefinite as to what "number" you just rolled. But a cube is a broken symmetry - a shape now constrained in a particular fashion. It is designed so it must come to rest on one of six faces. So it is the definiteness of constraint that produces the definiteness of counterfactual outcomes - you can roll some crisp possible number between 1 and 6.

Multiverses are popular because reasoning with infinity is fun. It produces every kind of weirdness you can imagine. And folk like it that science seems to be promising this kind of magic - a multiverse story where right now you are writing these words to me, rather than the other way round. And also an infinity of worlds where I am ending this post with bkdpot, and an infinity more where I end it with every other possible letter combination.

My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function — StreetlightX

That's great if you understand that a dichotomy spells mutuality - and thus is an anti-reductionist notion. Or in fact, a holistic notion as the mutuality spells a mixing and so an irreducible triadic complexity of process - a hierarchical organisation.

Such was the shrillness of your earlier posts that this kind of holism wasn't coming through. But I'll take your word for it that this is what you meant all along. ;)

Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. — StreetlightX

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense?

In mathematics, the Poincare recurrence theorem states that "a system whose dynamics are volume-preserving and which is confined to a finite spatial volume will, after a sufficiently long time, return to an arbitrarily small neighbourhood of its initial state". — Mustapha Mond

But the Universe is in fact an expanding-cooling space with event horizons. So recurrence has to be considered in the light of that.

Time is not infinite in the Newtonian sense but instead winding down to a Heat Death. Earlier negentropic states won't be revisited because there will not be sufficient energy density left to permit it.

Equally, the oscillating universe theory, originally supported by Einstein, speculates that that the known universe ends in a "big crunch" which is followed by another big bang and another crunch etc. etc. in a process which continues indefinitely. — Mustapha Mond

Recycling does open a door to such recurrence. But while still a very fashionable idea in cosmological speculation, the evidence is against it.

Observations of dark energy or the cosmological constant say there will be an actual heat death for the Universe. So unless something can somehow switch off that guaranteed expansion, a big crunch cannot happen.

And even recycling makes any exact repetitions of history infinitely improbable. Everything would get scrambled in a collapse. And thermodynamic considerations make it likely that each rebirth would be less energetic than the last.

So invoking infinity always buys you every possibility it seems. But remember that every actual rebirth is as unlikely as it is possible to repeat the previous one. And so yes, the maths of infinity seems to suggest no problem. Even if rebirth itself spawns infinite variety, each variant will not only be repeated at some stage, but repeated an infinite number of times itself.

The maths of infinity is handy like that. It imposes no limits on existence. But also it doesn't sound exactly realistic, does it? And if you are relying on infinite time, that is already a dubious kind of notion in being a Newtonian kind of conception of a dimension of change or entropification.

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? — StreetlightX

It would be nice if you defined what you mean by aesthetic in this (apparently) ontic context.

Sure, I agree that neurobiological evolution results in embodied valuation. There is an emotional reaction to all that is the focus of attentional processes. So there is no doubting there is a phenomenology.

But to call it "aesthetic" is an appeal to something much more Platonic and ideal in normal usage - the holy trinity of truth, beauty and the good. And really, none of those has much to do with neurobiological level responses. Rather they too are discursive formations that have developed culturally.

So it would be quite wrong to mix up the two levels of valuation - the biological and the cultural. Especially when you mean to use the cultural sense to describe the embodied neurobiology.

In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers — StreetlightX

So clearly I argue that language is not a particular kind of aesthetic phenomenon, but instead a general kind of semiotic mechanism. And so philosophy would need to consider the way language does mark a new level of break.

Again, there is continuity of semiosis in nature - at least from a Peircean pansemiotic perspective. So biological organisation and systems of meaning (your aesthetics/sensate body) are also explained by semiotic mechanism (messages, switches, paths, codes). But then there is a radical stepping up of things because of language and cultural evolution.

Now a point about semiotics as a theory of meaning - why it is not a hollow term like "aesthetics" - is that it can be explained in material terms. Or rather, as formally dichotomous to materiality.

Symbols create a further informational dimension to reality - one hidden within the material world with its dissipative flows. This is what Pattee's epistemic cut, or Rosen's categoric distinction between metabolism and replication, is about.

Just as a computer's circuits can symbolically represent any idea for the same physical cost, so DNA can represent any protein (and hence the organisation of any metabolic process), and words can represent any thought (and hence the organisation of any social process).

Thus we have a physicalist account with semiosis. Symbols can regulate material flows because they exist in a dimension of information orthogonal to those flows. They stand apart to create a source of action that the physical world simply can't prevent .

So unlike this vague notion of aesthetics or phenomenological value, semiotics speaks to an actual fundamental physical break that is matter~symbol. And then - in foregrounding the issue of the machinery - it also says why there is a radical difference between animals (with just genes and neurons) and then humans (with genes, neurons and words - and numbers now too).

So to talk about language as a superior form of sensibility is crap. Sensibility is the product of genes and neurons (even animals are aware and anticipating). But words and numbers play out at a new cultural and abstract level of semiosis.

Yes, the two are intertwined intimately in neurodevelopment. Language structures sensibility - and needs in return to be grounded in sensibility. But they evolve in separate worlds. The senses evolve biologically, discursive structures evolve culturally. And it is the right kind of thing for words to be doing to regulate that sensibility in pursuit of social goals. That is nature in action. Selfhood - and the aesthetic attitudes that might seem bound up in that - is a social construction.

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti- the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. Whereas I see it as part of the continuity of nature - nature's other hidden dimension. You say language is just more sensate bodilyness - a means to co-ordinate intersubjectivity. And sure, that is the everyday part of it - getting the social group to feel the same way. But then language does also develop an intellectual life of its own that clearly goes beyond immediate human needs and wanders off into metaphysics and mathematics and cosmology.

We were already the vessel for social ideas playing out way above our heads. And now even abstracta has taken off as almost a lifeform of its own.

Again, I have no problem with debates over whether this is a good or bad thing, a natural or artificial thing. There are arguments both ways. But the point is that semiosis gives you an ontic framework that its precise here. Whereas your use of "aesthetics" as a theory of meaning seems vague, ill-founded, and unilluminating so far. It seems merely to exist as a way to force through whatever popular PC politics is the predominant meme within your own social peer group. As you have employed it to date, it is a tool of rhetoric, not philosophy.

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

I didn't make your shit up about the primacy of aesthetics. So again, what justifies this "we" that exists pre-linguistically. When was the last time Homo sap was pre-linguistic, if ever?

What argument? — StreetlightX

Humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. — StreetlightX

Non sequitur. Drop the pose of the valiant hero and deal with the argument.

But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. — StreetlightX

Why always so thin skinned and confrontational? If you can explain how your rejection of the chain of being is done within the context of a more general acceptance of the naturalness of hierarchies, then please just do so.

I've already made my point - that you seem simply intent on making the lower higher in good Christian fashion. In your own words, sensation, manual labour and political correctness are all of real value, while cognition, intellectualism and dead white males are somehow all dangerous to what matters.

But that is as trite an analysis as the position it attacks. For example, as I say, humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

You probably can't deny the logic of that, which is why we are having all this ad hom diversionary posting now.

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good. — StreetlightX

So are you making a point about the lower and higher rankings of things or not?

Your complaint was that women get ranked lower than men (if above animals), that sensation is ranked lower than cognition, that manual labour is ranked lower than intellectualising. And you seemed to be claiming this was a hierarchical positioning that is "against nature". So my reply is that this anti-hierarchical tendency - very familiar from Romanticism, Marxism and Post-Modernism - is a load of wishful piffle. It is something that you won't argue here because you cannot justify it.

But please keep pretending it was all some kind of careless slip of the tongue. Now that you can see where this is going, time for you to hop of the bus.

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do. — StreetlightX

In case you forgot....

The Great Chain of Being. Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended.

http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow/greatchainofbeing.htm

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual. — John

The problem with this thesis is that animals might be all about embodied cognition but Homo sapiens is a linguistic species. Our brains are shaped also by discursive reason from the earliest stage. We need culture to complete our development - our brains are designed for that because of their greatly delayed maturity. Even the teenage years are a phase of neural development that seems to have been absent in Homo erectus.

So SX is quite wrong in treating "sensate bodies" as if they were the primal natural condition of humans. We have already evolved past that stage because language created something much larger.

Sure, it is important that we are embodied in a world - the basic point of a modelling relations or semiotic approach to epistemology. But we are embodied in a cultural world too. So it is a Romantic fallacy to talk about "going back to nature" to recover the special goodness that is ... ecstatic dance or whatever.

Humans can't un-invent being linguistic and hence rational in the way grammatical habits structure all thought.

When someone says "this limited, tiny sphere of being is what I think matters more than anything else' (be it spirit or molecules or God), then by definition everything else is of a lesser value. — StreetlightX

But you are simply adding values, sensation, social equality and nature to the list. So all claims still need to be argued.

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation. Perhaps you just don't understand hierarchies sufficiently well, but there is plenty of reason to believe nature truly has to be hierarchical.

So maybe - almost certainly - you are projecting a Romantic fallacy on the world. And arguably nothing has done more harm to modern civilisation than the unnatural confusion that is Romanticism (as a way of life, as opposed to some diversionary cultural fun).

Check out something like Mark Johnston's The Meaning of the Body or Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Roots of Thinking[/]i. Deleuze and Levinas have also written some wonderful things about this, but I would not expect that'd you'd ever read them. — StreetlightX

Sure. I've checked that kind of stuff out in the past and found it not compelling. I just wanted to see you support your claims in your own words for a change. Will the ideas seem so convincing when they haven't been cut and pasted?

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

Great. But what does that mean? How is being a sensate body not to be in an anticipatory or Bayesian modelling relation as a neuroscientist for instance would understand it?

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, — StreetlightX

Why would one believe in that primacy? What is the argument?

And then how does aesthetics work as a method of knowledge (as opposed to say unargued, unsubstantiated, belief)? I've never seen that explained.