Misplaced Concreteness
andy-k
abstraction not a concrete fact. The logic is inescapable -- that we
perceive an object is a concrete fact, but that the object still exists
when nobody is perceiving it is merely an abstraction. This reminds me
of Berkeley's "Esse est percipi". It might seem obvious to us that the
object should still exist when unperceived, but this feeling of
obviousness is far from indubitable -- if we weren't better informed it
would seem obvious to us that the sun goes around the earth. In this
manner we afford abstractions the status of concrete facts, and
Whitehead coined a phrase for this error -- the "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness".
At about the same time, Einstein was arguing for realism in the quantum
theory. Einstein wanted to believe that Max Born's probabilistic
interpretation of the wave function was due to statistical spread, just
as is the case in thermodynamics, wherein the properties dealt with can
be explained in terms of statistical mechanics. Hence his famous quote
"God does not play dice". He aspired to prove that quantum mechanics was
an incomplete theory, and that some as-yet undiscovered variables lay at
a deeper level.
Nils Bohr was arguing the opposite corner. Bohr claimed that
interactions yield information (i.e. qualities like position, linear
momentum, angular momentum, etc.) about quantum mechanical entities like
electrons, but that nothing can be said about such entities while they
are between interactions (i.e. unobserved). They can't even be said to
"exist" in the sense of being "actual objects", but rather are best
thought of as "possible qualities". This was clearly a challenge to
Einstein's realist position, and Einstein rose to the challenge with a
thought-experiment that has come to be known by the initials of the
people that created it, namely Einstein and his two young colleagues
Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky (hence EPR).
John Bell, much later, showed theoretically that Einstein was wrong, but
Bell's theory also admitted of empirical testing, which would elevate
the exercise from a purely intellectual thought-experiment to proper
science. The technology didn't become available for some years, but Bell
has since been proven right with increasing accuracy (most recently by
Alain Aspect in France). The quantum theory is indeed complete,
probability is a fundamental aspect of the world we observe, and naive
realism must go. (However, at the level of every-day objects naive
realism provides an adequate paradigm, just as Newtonian mechanics does
at this level despite having been replaced by the more accurate paradigm
of quantum mechanics which, of course, encompasses Newtonian mechanics
as a limiting case).
It seems, then, that science is on the side of Whitehead (and
Berkeley?), and the only things that can be considered concrete are
immediate experiences.
Now then, two quantum systems that are undergoing an interaction cannot
be considered separate systems -- rather their distinct wave functions
merge into a unity from which two distinct quantum system become
actualized in subsequent interactions (this is called "quantum
entanglement"). Consequently there can be no distinction between a
system under measurement and the measuring apparatus, and to put it more
bluntly, observer and observed may not be considered distinct. This is
evident at the quantum level, but owing to the minuteness of Planck's
constant it is not at all evident at the everyday level. Nonetheless it
remains valid at this level despite our protestations that the
distinction between subject and object is "obvious" (see first paragraph
above).
Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
It seems that the subject of cognizance is not separate from the objects
cognized, but rather such a distinct subject is fabricated as an
hypothesis and is then erroneously afforded the status of a concrete
fact. There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience.
Ian Phillips
"andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:9Tmeb.1484$z43....@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> A. N. Whitehead repudiated naive realism arguing that realism is an
> abstraction not a concrete fact. The logic is inescapable -- that we
> perceive an object is a concrete fact, but that the object still exists
> when nobody is perceiving it is merely an abstraction. This reminds me
> of Berkeley's "Esse est percipi". It might seem obvious to us that the
> object should still exist when unperceived, but this feeling of
> obviousness is far from indubitable -- if we weren't better informed it
> would seem obvious to us that the sun goes around the earth. In this
> manner we afford abstractions the status of concrete facts, and
> Whitehead coined a phrase for this error -- the "fallacy of misplaced
> concreteness".
You slide here from the point about dubitability to the point about
abstraction.
I don't see why the naive realist could not just claim that when we see
objects we simply see objects that exist when not perceived. Our experience
provides direct evidence of their identity conditions. On this point see
John Campbell's article "Berkeley's Puzzle". You might be able to read it
online at:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jcampbel/pdf_files/Berkeley's%20Puzzle.pdf
I don't agree with this account of the dispute. Bell (and Aspect) may well
have showed that certain hidden variable theories are impossible. However,
hidden variable theories that involve non-locality are fine. This is just
what the pilot wave or De Broglie Bohm interpretation is. Moreover, even if
there are other reasons for rejecting this interpretation (I think there
are - relativistic ones) this does not leave us with only Bohr's view.
There are plenty of other contenders. And one of them is thoroughly realist:
relative state theory - i.e. a sophisticated Everettian approach. A good
question: what would Einstein have thought of _that_?
> It seems, then, that science is on the side of Whitehead (and
> Berkeley?), and the only things that can be considered concrete are
> immediate experiences.
Aside of the above remarks I don't think that even if science was the way
you suggest it is this would necessarily have anything to do with the
psychological realm of perceptions, experiences and attitudes. It is not
clear the two domains are so directly answerable. After all - if physics
tells us that nothing exists except fluctuations in quantum fields this
clearly doesn't mean all object talk is false or wrong.
> Now then, two quantum systems that are undergoing an interaction cannot
> be considered separate systems -- rather their distinct wave functions
> merge into a unity from which two distinct quantum system become
> actualized in subsequent interactions (this is called "quantum
> entanglement"). Consequently there can be no distinction between a
> system under measurement and the measuring apparatus, and to put it more
> bluntly, observer and observed may not be considered distinct. This is
> evident at the quantum level, but owing to the minuteness of Planck's
> constant it is not at all evident at the everyday level. Nonetheless it
> remains valid at this level despite our protestations that the
> distinction between subject and object is "obvious" (see first paragraph
> above).
>
> Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
> It seems that the subject of cognizance is not separate from the objects
> cognized, but rather such a distinct subject is fabricated as an
> hypothesis and is then erroneously afforded the status of a concrete
> fact. There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience.
>
There's far too much here for me even to begin discussing but I guess it's
clear that, e.g., the subject-object distinction's validity - whatever quite
that means - or the distinctness of the perceiving subject - again whatever
exactly this means - is thus going to depend crucially on how one answers
the above points. It's also going to depend on a lot of careful distinctions
being made before it's clear what exactly QM "says" or what one might
conclude (if anything) from that about metaphysics or psychology.
Still, interesting stuff.
Ian
Immortalist
"andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:9Tmeb.1484$z43....@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> abstraction not a concrete fact. The logic is inescapable -- that we
> perceive an object is a concrete fact, but that the object still exists
> when nobody is perceiving it is merely an abstraction. This reminds me
> of Berkeley's "Esse est percipi". It might seem obvious to us that the
> object should still exist when unperceived, but this feeling of
> obviousness is far from indubitable -- if we weren't better informed it
> would seem obvious to us that the sun goes around the earth. In this
> manner we afford abstractions the status of concrete facts, and
> Whitehead coined a phrase for this error -- the "fallacy of misplaced
> concreteness".
>
"[Whitehead] defined it as 'neglecting the degree of abstraction involved
when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain
categoriesof thought' (1929, p.11). More generally it is the fallacy
invloved whenever thinkers forget the degree of abstraction involved in
thought and draw unwarranted conclusions about concrete actuality."
(Daly & Cobb, 1990, p.36)
http://homepages.which.net/~gk.sherman/baaaaadn.htm
REIFICATION: treatment of an analytic or abstract relationship as though it
were a concrete entity. (Young, p. l09) The process of regarding something
abstract as a material entity, Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness," e.g., the mistake of confusing a system, which is a
construct, with the physical entity described in its terms (see general
systems theory). In social systems reification is encouraged by the use of
language and underlies many processes of constructing social reality.
(Krippendorff)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/Reification.html
What is Representationalism? Representationalism is the philosophical
position that the world we see in conscious experience is not the real world
itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an
internal representation. Representationalism is also known (in psychology)
as Indirect Perception, and (in philosophy) as Indirect Realism, or
Epistemological Dualism.
http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/Representationalism.html
==========================
"Direct Realism" (naive realism) is not concerned with Representationalism
but "Indirect Realism" is.
==========================
In other words this is the question of Direct Perception as opposed to
Indirect Perception.
http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/epist/rep.html
J. B. Maund (1975), who was the first to point out the logical confusions
that arise if one tries to use the same descriptive terms of the screen as
of what is selected from the screen; it would be like trying to describe the
state of the phosphor cells on the TV-screen by means of the terms used to
describe what can be seen on it. As ordinary TV viewers we have no immediate
way of referring to the states of the screen except by speaking about what
things appear on it, even though one can actually get close to the screen
and observe the criss-cross matrix, and, if one attends closely enough, one
can ignore what the screen is ostensibly representing. Only a
neurophysiologist will be able to describe the visual field at that level:
for the ordinary observer the field will remain ineffable. The inability to
acknowledge this distinction, which the TV Analogy makes plain, has led some
to use the ineffability-for-the-observer as an excuse for dismissing the
notion of an inner field as occult, when in principle it could be
scientifically described.
http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~elw33/articles/qualia.html
---------------------
Representationalism and Perceptual Error
by Diana Mertz Hsieh
http://tinyurl.com/p8sm
http://www.websyte.com/alan/process.htm
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TKno/TKnoBoro.htm
In 1934 the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner found himself seated at
the dinner table with the eminent philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and
proceeded to explain to Whitehead what behaviorism was all about. Obliged to
offer a challenge, Whitehead uttered the sentence "No black scorpion is
falling upon this table" and then asked Skinner to explain why he might have
said that. Skinner attempted a reply more than 20 years later in an appendix
to his 1957 book Verbal Behavior. He proposed that Whitehead was
unconsciously expressing a fear of behaviorism, likening it to a black
scorpion that he would not allow to intrude into his philosophy. The
skeptical reader may be forgiven for concluding that the reply owed more to
psychoanalysis than to behavioral principles.
Be that as it may, Whitehead had articulated one of the properties of
language that seems to distinguish it from all other forms of communication,
its generativity. Whereas other forms of communication among animals seem to
be limited to a relatively small number of signals, and restricted to
limited contexts, there is essentially no limit to the number of ideas or
propositions that we can convey using sentences. We can immediately
understand sentences made up of words that we have never heard in
combination before, as Whitehead's sentence illustrates.
Michael Tye (1995) presents "a representational theory of the phenomenal
mind", which he probably believes to be consistent with the original and
generally accepted meaning of the term, but careful analysis of his theory
reveals that Tye's view of consciousness is actually a variety of naive
realism, which is in fact the epistemological opposite to
representationalism.
Corrupted Definition of Representationalism by Tye and Dretske
http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/epist/corruption.html
Can Representationalism Be Defended?
http://www.bluejoh.com/dungeon/archives/000425.php
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> At about the same time, Einstein was arguing for realism in the quantum
> theory. Einstein wanted to believe that Max Born's probabilistic
> interpretation of the wave function was due to statistical spread, just
> as is the case in thermodynamics, wherein the properties dealt with can
> be explained in terms of statistical mechanics. Hence his famous quote
> "God does not play dice". He aspired to prove that quantum mechanics was
> an incomplete theory, and that some as-yet undiscovered variables lay at
> a deeper level.
>
> Nils Bohr was arguing the opposite corner. Bohr claimed that
> interactions yield information (i.e. qualities like position, linear
> momentum, angular momentum, etc.) about quantum mechanical entities like
> electrons, but that nothing can be said about such entities while they
> are between interactions (i.e. unobserved). They can't even be said to
> "exist" in the sense of being "actual objects", but rather are best
> thought of as "possible qualities". This was clearly a challenge to
> Einstein's realist position, and Einstein rose to the challenge with a
> thought-experiment that has come to be known by the initials of the
> people that created it, namely Einstein and his two young colleagues
> Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky (hence EPR).
>
A response to Einstein's "indirect realism" not direct realism. But as the
direct realist would ask; why are we framing all this like this in a way to
assert what exists or doesn't exist when we are not observing things?
> John Bell, much later, showed theoretically that Einstein was wrong, but
> Bell's theory also admitted of empirical testing, which would elevate
> the exercise from a purely intellectual thought-experiment to proper
> science. The technology didn't become available for some years, but Bell
> has since been proven right with increasing accuracy (most recently by
> Alain Aspect in France). The quantum theory is indeed complete,
> probability is a fundamental aspect of the world we observe, and naive
> realism must go. (However, at the level of every-day objects naive
> realism provides an adequate paradigm, just as Newtonian mechanics does
> at this level despite having been replaced by the more accurate paradigm
> of quantum mechanics which, of course, encompasses Newtonian mechanics
> as a limiting case).
>
> It seems, then, that science is on the side of Whitehead (and
> Berkeley?), and the only things that can be considered concrete are
> immediate experiences.
>
What do you mean "on the side of?" And are you saying that Whitehead and
Berkeley were "naive realists" when it is common knowledge that Berkeley was
an Idealist not any type of realist.
> Now then, two quantum systems that are undergoing an interaction cannot
> be considered separate systems -- rather their distinct wave functions
> merge into a unity from which two distinct quantum system become
> actualized in subsequent interactions (this is called "quantum
> entanglement"). Consequently there can be no distinction between a
> system under measurement and the measuring apparatus, and to put it more
> bluntly, observer and observed may not be considered distinct. This is
> evident at the quantum level, but owing to the minuteness of Planck's
> constant it is not at all evident at the everyday level. Nonetheless it
> remains valid at this level despite our protestations that the
> distinction between subject and object is "obvious" (see first paragraph
> above).
>
Does this imply that an neural rerepresentaion of the world, through
abstraction, influences those aspects of the external world that were
influenced in the rerepresentational neuronal networks or does it imply
something else?
> Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
> It seems that the subject of cognizance is not separate from the objects
> cognized, but rather such a distinct subject is fabricated as an
> hypothesis and is then erroneously afforded the status of a concrete
> fact. There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience.
>
On solidity:
There is no distinct subject to be found in individual atoms (in reference
to the disappearance of irreducible solidity when atoms are seperated)
"There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience," but the
fundamental building blocks for emergent properties probably reside in those
most truthful events striking us positively.
>
Jonathan
"Ian Phillips" <ian.ph...@magd.ox.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:bld07v$8o6$1...@news.ox.ac.uk...
It's obvious in this discussion the relationship between quantum
and classical states is unclear. This relationship defines
how to proceed.
When a photon strikes the eye, or a leaf, a quantum interaction
has occurred, yet the eye moves as a result and in
a classical way. This "decohering into classical behavior" is a
result not just of part reactions, but of network characteristics.
One must look at system properties to determine how states
will change between the quantum and classical and why.
Coevolving systems tend to fill every niche across both
space and ...scale. The quantum world simply defines
the lowest scale of this natural process. Looking at
quantum behavior to understand any ...larger questions
is like a weatherman trying to predict a storm
with a microscope.....
You'll never get....anywhere in that way.
You must start with the largest scale first to
understand the smallest, not the other way
around. Instead of asking why quantum behavior
exists and how does it effect 'reality', ask how
does classical motion effect the quantum world.
Ask why does classical motion exist, ask why
does our reality exist...
It exists because.....networks spontaneously turn
random/quantum behavior into stable evolving
structures ...more often than not.
The universe turns quantum behavior into Nature...through the
second law. This process of creating order from disorder...
creating networks from increasing complexity, is tentatively
called the fourth law of thermodynamics, ...originally chaos theory...
then the science of self-organization. ..now complexity theory..
and soon to be considered 'the answer' that the sciences, arts
and philosophy have been searching for. As it works equally
as well with ...all of them.
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/Investigations.html
STUART A. KAUFFMAN
A TENTATIVE PHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING
CONSCIOUSNESS
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/Epilogue.html
"Consciousness is associated with the fine grained "decision making"
leading to alternative behaviors within molecular autonomous agents
that spans the quantum and classical realms and is identical to the
persistent propagation of percolating webbed loops of quantum
coherence that simultaneously are persistently losing coherence hence
going classical. The passage to classical behavior is identical to
"mind" influencing "matter." Consciousness is the inner experience
of the agent of this percolating web of persistent coherence
decohering into classical behavior."
>
> Still, interesting stuff.
Sure is!
Jonathan
http://www-chaos.umd.edu/
http://www.pscs.umich.edu/
http://www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm
s
>
> Ian
>
>
andy-k
news:vnk46v2...@corp.supernews.com...
<snip>
> A response to Einstein's "indirect realism" not direct realism. But as
> the direct realist would ask; why are we framing all this like this in
> a way to assert what exists or doesn't exist when we are not observing
> things?
Quite right.
<snip >
> > It seems, then, that science is on the side of Whitehead (and
> > Berkeley?), and the only things that can be considered concrete are
> > immediate experiences.
>
> What do you mean "on the side of?" And are you saying that Whitehead
> and Berkeley were "naive realists" when it is common knowledge that
> Berkeley was an Idealist not any type of realist.
As I said in my post, I find Whitehead's and Bohr's thoughts reminiscent
of those of Berkeley, despite any underlying differences. I don't know
if Berkeley's idealism precludes him from being a direct realist.
Whitehead's notion of "mutual immanence" reminds me of Berkeley's notion
of "ideas in the mind of God", as long as we don't identify "God" with
the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic concept of God, but rather with a kind of
Plotinian conception of God as "the One" that is the substrate from
which everything derives its existence.
> > Now then, two quantum systems that are undergoing an interaction
> > cannot be considered separate systems -- rather their distinct wave
> > functions merge into a unity from which two distinct quantum system
> > become actualized in subsequent interactions (this is called
> > "quantum entanglement"). Consequently there can be no distinction
> > between a system under measurement and the measuring apparatus, and
> > to put it more bluntly, observer and observed may not be considered
> > distinct. This is evident at the quantum level, but owing to the
> > minuteness of Planck's constant it is not at all evident at the
> > everyday level. Nonetheless it remains valid at this level despite
> > our protestations that the distinction between subject and object is
> > "obvious" (see first paragraph above).
>
> Does this imply that an neural rerepresentaion of the world, through
> abstraction, influences those aspects of the external world that were
> influenced in the rerepresentational neuronal networks or does it
> imply something else?
Representationalism (indirect realism) doesn't seem very convincing to
me. I'd have to refer back to Whitehead's metaphysics again, and say I
find something like a form of direct realism more convincing wherein
each experiential instant (Whitehead calls these "actual occasions", or
"actual entities", or "occasions of actual experience") appropriates its
predecessor ("prehends" it in Whitehead's language), so all previous
actual occasions become stubborn facts in the current actual occasion. A
word of caution though -- I may be getting very confused in my attemtps
to understand Whitehead's metaphysics.
> > Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
> > concreteness". It seems that the subject of cognizance is not
> > separate from the objects cognized, but rather such a distinct
> > subject is fabricated as an hypothesis and is then erroneously
> > afforded the status of a concrete fact. There is no distinct subject
> > to be found in immediate experience.
>
> On solidity:
>
> There is no distinct subject to be found in individual atoms (in
> reference to the disappearance of irreducible solidity when atoms are
> seperated)
>
> "There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience,"
> but the fundamental building blocks for emergent properties probably
> reside in those most truthful events striking us positively.
I think the emergentist paradigm is grounded in the primary error of
Cartesian Dualism. Whitehead has eliminated this error, and so we need
not postulate emergentism if we take Whitehead's metaphysics on board.
Thanks for the references and feedback Immortalist. Keep it comin'.
andy-k
"Ian Phillips" <ian.ph...@magd.ox.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:bld07v$8o6$1...@news.ox.ac.uk...
>
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:9Tmeb.1484$z43....@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> > A. N. Whitehead repudiated naive realism arguing that realism is an
> > abstraction not a concrete fact. The logic is inescapable -- that we
> > perceive an object is a concrete fact, but that the object still
> > exists when nobody is perceiving it is merely an abstraction. This
> > reminds me of Berkeley's "Esse est percipi". It might seem obvious
> > to us that the object should still exist when unperceived, but this
> > feeling of obviousness is far from indubitable -- if we weren't
> > better informed it would seem obvious to us that the sun goes around
> > the earth. In this manner we afford abstractions the status of
> > concrete facts, and Whitehead coined a phrase for this error -- the
> > "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
>
> You slide here from the point about dubitability to the point about
> abstraction.
>
> I don't see why the naive realist could not just claim that when we
> see objects we simply see objects that exist when not perceived. Our
> experience provides direct evidence of their identity conditions. On
> this point see John Campbell's article "Berkeley's Puzzle". You might
> be able to read it online at:
>
> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jcampbel/pdf_files/Berkeley's%20Puzzle.pdf
No such luck -- it looks like Mr. Campbell is in the process of setting
up or modifying his website. Anyhow, isn't that a defining
characteristic of the naive realist? If I understand Whitehead correctly
(big IF!) then he is calling naive realism into question on the grounds
of misplaced concreteness -- there can be certainty only of direct
experience, and not of anything abstracted from it. Hence the slide from
dubitability to abstraction -- can the two be separated?
Quite right -- Von Neumann's 1932 refutation of hidden variables was
proved wrong by Bohm in 1952. Your point is well taken -- it was *local*
realism that I was getting at.
> This is just what the pilot wave or De Broglie Bohm interpretation is.
> Moreover, even if there are other reasons for rejecting this
> interpretation (I think there are - relativistic ones) this does not
> leave us with only Bohr's view.
>
> There are plenty of other contenders. And one of them is thoroughly
> realist: relative state theory - i.e. a sophisticated Everettian
> approach. A good question: what would Einstein have thought of _that_?
At what stage in the measurement process does the universe split? --
this just seems like the old "Von Neumann cut" problem rearing its ugly
head all over again. And what about continuous variables like
momentum -- wouldn't they demand a continuum of universes rather than
discretely splitting universes?
> > It seems, then, that science is on the side of Whitehead (and
> > Berkeley?), and the only things that can be considered concrete are
> > immediate experiences.
>
> Aside of the above remarks I don't think that even if science was the
> way you suggest it is this would necessarily have anything to do with
> the psychological realm of perceptions, experiences and attitudes. It
> is not clear the two domains are so directly answerable. After all -
> if physics tells us that nothing exists except fluctuations in quantum
> fields this clearly doesn't mean all object talk is false or wrong.
Quite right -- object talk is perfectly adequate within the confines of
its domain of validity, but the quantum theory seems to be suggesting
that this domain of validity is restricted rather than all-encompassing.
We err in applying a paradigm beyond its domain of validity, e.g. in
considering an electron to be a smaller version of a cricket ball, or in
considering velocities to add linearly when approaching that of light.
But surely things are different in reverse -- we don't err when we add
velocities relativistically even when those velocities are well below
that of light. Are we justified, then, in dismissing the idea that the
quantum paradigm may have implications beyond the quantum domain?
Continued debate would be greatly appreciated.
Daniel T.
> "Ian Phillips" <ian.ph...@magd.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
Well I managed to bring it up, what useless drivel. Berkeley said that
because he can't conceive of something (unperceived existence in this
case,) it doesn't exist.
To Berkeley, I quote Shakespeare, "There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Like he, or any
human is so god awful important that the universe hinges its existence
on his perceptions... What hubris!
Daniel T.
> You must start with the largest scale first to
> understand the smallest, not the other way
> around. Instead of asking why quantum behavior
> exists and how does it effect 'reality', ask how
> does classical motion effect the quantum world.
> Ask why does classical motion exist, ask why
> does our reality exist...
>
> It exists because.....networks spontaneously turn
> random/quantum behavior into stable evolving
> structures ...more often than not.
I thought of it more because quantum behavior isn't purely random, but
statistical in nature (some events are more likely than others.) When
dealing with such a large number of quanta as we do in the systems we
normally perceive, all the statistical anomalies cancel out leaving us
with the norm.
Keynes
Can you concieve of a universe of unconsciousness? Maybe.
Can a universe of unconsciousness conceive of you? No.
Jonathan
"Daniel T." <postm...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:postmaster-2C223...@news02.west.earthlink.net...
When dealing with behavior, random and statistical are
essentially the same thing. Both are analogous to a gas
where the behavior is random and chaotic. So a statistical
approach is the only way to model it.
Such a chaotic attractor is only one part of an evolving
system. The chaotic provides a base for evolutionary
systems, as in the air, space or electorate. It's
a given, no more. By itself the quantum realm is
as interesting as empty space. It's when that motion
is swept up into a dynamic system that things
get interesting.
It's the combination of chaotic, static and dynamic
attractors that make creation go.
Our reality is not defined by what things are, but by
how the components interact with each other.
Any grand unified theory or universal law must
concern underlying structures common to all, not
particles.
STUART A. KAUFFMAN
LECTURE 5
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT OF A CANDIDATE "LAW"
Coevolutionarily constructible communities of molecular Maxwell Demons,
Autonomous Agents, may evolve to three apparently different
phase transitions:
A) The dynamical "edge of chaos" within and among members of the
community, thereby simultaneously achieving a coarse graining of each
agent's world and maximizing the capacity to discriminate and act
without trembling hands.
B) A "self organized critical" state as a community of coevolving
agents, by tuning landscape structure and coupling, yielding a
power law distribution of speciation and extinction avalanches.
C) A poised position on a generalized "subcritical-supracritical boundary,"
exhibiting a generalized self-organized critical sustained expansion into
the "Adjacent Possible" of the effective phase space of the community.
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/Lecture-5.html
Jonathan
s
Jonathan
> Great comments Ian, many thanks. Replies below:
>
>
> "Ian Phillips" <ian.ph...@magd.ox.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:bld07v$8o6$1...@news.ox.ac.uk...
> >
> > "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> > news:9Tmeb.1484$z43....@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > Aside of the above remarks I don't think that even if science was the
> > way you suggest it is this would necessarily have anything to do with
> > the psychological realm of perceptions, experiences and attitudes. It
> > is not clear the two domains are so directly answerable. After all -
> > if physics tells us that nothing exists except fluctuations in quantum
> > fields this clearly doesn't mean all object talk is false or wrong.
>
> Quite right -- object talk is perfectly adequate within the confines of
> its domain of validity, but the quantum theory seems to be suggesting
> that this domain of validity is restricted rather than all-encompassing.
You have it all backwards! And that is because you are looking
at what things are instead of what they do.
> We err in applying a paradigm beyond its domain of validity, e.g. in
> considering an electron to be a smaller version of a cricket ball,
The error is so simple. The paradigm should be in relative motion, not
particle specifics.
The three realms of interaction are the static, dynamic and
chaotic. As in solid, liquid or gas. As in matter, energy and
light.
Both the electron and ~baseball are in the same realm only
if they both fill the same attractor for each of their defined
systems. As part of the ..same system they clearly fill different
attractors within the paradigm. Comparing the two is
valid in some circumstances, but not others based on the
role each plays for its system. It is the role of the observer
to define the circumstances, the system in advance.
In this way ...all systems are open to analysis with one
mathematics. Whether its a material system, a living
one or intellectual...all can be dealt with in a consistent
and seamless way since interactions and motion are
not dependent on the specific nature of the components.
It doesn't matter if two objects are connected by
two roads, or two forces, when basing the math
on connectivity. With complexity theory one can
analyze a society, an ecosystem or psychology
in the same way.
And all the combined learning of the countless
disciplines can be pooled, for the first time, since
all can now talk to each other in the same
language.
See..
An Introduction to Complex Systems
Torsten Reil, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~quee0818/complexity/complexity.html
> or in
> considering velocities to add linearly when approaching that of light.
> But surely things are different in reverse -- we don't err when we add
> velocities relativistically even when those velocities are well below
> that of light. Are we justified, then, in dismissing the idea that the
> quantum paradigm may have implications beyond the quantum domain?
Only if you also dismiss the role the air plays in our biosphere, or
the people play in a democracy, or the role that space-time
plays in the universe.
It is the logical relationships between classical motion, quantum motion
and thermodynamics that should be examined, as it is
the relationships that define whether creation takes place
or not and defines our reality.
You can easily see those relationships whenever considering
the interaction of the land, water and air. Or in genetics, selection
and mutation. Physics needs to be rebuilt within an ecosystem
framework since that is how nature and evolution works.
Because that's what the universe ...does.
Who care what it is, I want to know what it will ...do... next.
Jonathan
s
Jonathan
"Keynes" <Key...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:fldmnvch552u5rg59...@4ax.com...
Not hubris at all! The universe is ...dependent on our perception.
After all, what has more potential to change the world, a single object
or a single idea?
Modern science considers what is 'real', particles, to be the basis
for its model, in order to understand more complex things.
But it is the logical relationships ....between particles that
define what they are and do. And logical connections
are 'unreal' as they are abstract.
So physics should be based on the 'unreal' in order to
understand reality. Not the other way around.
>
> Can you conceive of a universe of unconsciousness? Maybe.
> Can a universe of unconsciousness conceive of you? No.
Yet the unconscious universe 'conceived' us.
Which is greater, intelligence or that which creates it?
Without one, you can't have the other.
It is the whole that constrains the parts and makes
them more than just particles.
Without consciousness, or more generally, the ability of a
system to act on its own behalf, there can be no universe
as we know it.
Jonathan
s
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
andy-k
news:T96dnd4D-uv...@giganews.com...
>
<snip>
> You have it all backwards! And that is because you are looking
> at what things are instead of what they do.
<snip>
<snip>
> Only if you also dismiss the role the air plays in our biosphere, or
> the people play in a democracy, or the role that space-time
> plays in the universe.
>
> It is the logical relationships between classical motion, quantum
> motion and thermodynamics that should be examined, as it is
> the relationships that define whether creation takes place
> or not and defines our reality.
>
> You can easily see those relationships whenever considering
> the interaction of the land, water and air. Or in genetics, selection
> and mutation. Physics needs to be rebuilt within an ecosystem
> framework since that is how nature and evolution works.
> Because that's what the universe ...does.
>
> Who care what it is, I want to know what it will ...do... next.
Thanks Jonathan. You seem to be quite knowledgeable about chaos theory,
so I'd like to put a question to you. The laws of nature may, if I'm not
mistaken, be represented as attractors in some universal phase space.
This doesn't seem to me to explain why the world is the way it is --
rather it simply provides a different way of describing the way it is.
What we would really need to find out is why the attractors are where
they are in this universal phase space. Are they fixed for all time? If
so, then what determined where these locations are? Or do they evolve
over time (i.e. are the laws of nature really invariant)? If so, then
what determines how this phase space evolves? Are we in need of
postulating some kind of "meta-laws of nature" that can't themselves be
represented in this universal phase space?
Jonathan
The reason the three attractor paradigm exists is due to an inherent
property of randomness. Which is that when random objects
become sufficiently complex in terms of their connectivity
they begin to organize spontaneously.
They do so, and it's a very recent discovery, because regions
of higher fitness also have larger basins of attractions. Meaning
that an object is ...more likely to randomly walk into a
region of higher fitness than one of lower fitness.
Evolution is not a random process, the final probable state
is to organize and create the best possible conditions
for evolution to occur. Randomness is a driving force
for evolution due to the properties that appear when
random elements are connected to each other.
A great page to demonstrate the inherent property of evolution
is above....these ideas really do change everything since
the evolution we all know and love applies to non-living
systems as well....think about that for a moment...
It's not a small discovery! It connects the material and
living worlds into a single co-evolutionary framework.
All these questions can be answered now, see the link below for
the writings of one of the founders of chaos theory. It's great
stuff. The universe is far simpler, more elegant and creative than
most can possibly imagine.
> Are they fixed for all time? If
> so, then what determined where these locations are? Or do they evolve
> over time (i.e. are the laws of nature really invariant)? If so, then
> what determines how this phase space evolves? Are we in need of
> postulating some kind of "meta-laws of nature" that can't themselves be
> represented in this universal phase space?
Yes, the fourth law of thermodynamics. It's not yet fully accepted
but one can see it is truth. It's a universal law of structure
or organization that balances the destruction of the second law.
You see, it's so simple, the second law creates disorder or
more randomness, but that randomness increases connectivity
and generates networks that spontaneously organizes and
evolves. In truth the universe becomes more ordered over
time, not disordered as science has for so long implied.
We haven't been able to see this due to our fixation over
what things are, instead of looking at how they
behave, to form our basic laws.
INVESTIGATIONS
THE NATURE OF AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
AND THE WORLDS THEY MUTUALLY CREATE
STUART A. KAUFFMAN
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/Investigations.html
Jonathan
s
>
>
>
Immortalist
Is a static neural configuration which can upon becoming active produce a
memory in many sense modalities, an representation of something or is it our
personal thing?
> I'd have to refer back to Whitehead's metaphysics again, and say I
> find something like a form of direct realism more convincing wherein
> each experiential instant (Whitehead calls these "actual occasions", or
> "actual entities", or "occasions of actual experience") appropriates its
> predecessor ("prehends" it in Whitehead's language), so all previous
> actual occasions become stubborn facts in the current actual occasion. A
> word of caution though -- I may be getting very confused in my attemtps
> to understand Whitehead's metaphysics.
>
>
>
> > > Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
> > > concreteness". It seems that the subject of cognizance is not
> > > separate from the objects cognized, but rather such a distinct
> > > subject is fabricated as an hypothesis and is then erroneously
> > > afforded the status of a concrete fact. There is no distinct subject
> > > to be found in immediate experience.
> >
> > On solidity:
> >
> > There is no distinct subject to be found in individual atoms (in
> > reference to the disappearance of irreducible solidity when atoms are
> > seperated)
> >
> > "There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate experience,"
> > but the fundamental building blocks for emergent properties probably
> > reside in those most truthful events striking us positively.
>
> I think the emergentist paradigm is grounded in the primary error of
> Cartesian Dualism. Whitehead has eliminated this error, and so we need
> not postulate emergentism if we take Whitehead's metaphysics on board.
>
If the emergence of the quality of property of solidity is to destroyed, one
merely seperates the atoms from the class; minimal relationships for the
emergence of properties such as solid surfaces on the macro-scale.
I don't know if you reference to "emergentist pardigm" address this simple
physics, is it what Whitehead meant?
andy-k
>
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:wqveb.219$y67...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> > > > Now then, two quantum systems that are undergoing an interaction
> > > > cannot be considered separate systems -- rather their distinct
> > > > wave functions merge into a unity from which two distinct
> > > > quantum system become actualized in subsequent interactions
> > > > (this is called "quantum entanglement"). Consequently there can
> > > > be no distinction between a system under measurement and the
> > > > measuring apparatus, and to put it more bluntly, observer and
> > > > observed may not be considered distinct. This is evident at the
> > > > quantum level, but owing to the minuteness of Planck's constant
> > > > it is not at all evident at the everyday level. Nonetheless it
> > > > remains valid at this level despite our protestations that the
> > > > distinction between subject and object is "obvious" (see first
> > > > paragraph above).
> > >
> > > Does this imply that an neural rerepresentaion of the world,
> > > through abstraction, influences those aspects of the external
> > > world that were influenced in the rerepresentational neuronal
> > > networks or does it imply something else?
> >
> > Representationalism (indirect realism) doesn't seem very convincing
> > to me.
>
> Is a static neural configuration which can upon becoming active
> produce a memory in many sense modalities, an representation of
> something or is it our personal thing?
You seem to be asking whether our memories (or perhaps you would accept
a wider perspective and accommodate *all* experiences, not just
memories)
pertain to some "extra-mental reality" or are down to some kind of
solipsism. I feel a very strong prejudice against solipsism, but I don't
feel that forces me to adopt the representationalist line. To quote
Whitehead's example, "I am in the room, and the room is in me". The
"room in me" need not be a representation of the "room I am in" --
Whitehead coins the phrase "mutual immanence" to indicate that each is
*really in* the other, and not just a representation. Again, this
reminds me of Plotinus' claim for the "All-in-All", or direct realism.
> > > > Which brings me back to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
> > > > concreteness". It seems that the subject of cognizance is not
> > > > separate from the objects cognized, but rather such a distinct
> > > > subject is fabricated as an hypothesis and is then erroneously
> > > > afforded the status of a concrete fact. There is no distinct
> > > > subject to be found in immediate experience.
> > >
> > > On solidity:
> > >
> > > There is no distinct subject to be found in individual atoms (in
> > > reference to the disappearance of irreducible solidity when atoms
> > > are seperated)
> > >
> > > "There is no distinct subject to be found in immediate
> > > experience," but the fundamental building blocks for emergent
> > > properties probably reside in those most truthful events striking
> > > us positively.
> >
> > I think the emergentist paradigm is grounded in the primary error of
> > Cartesian Dualism. Whitehead has eliminated this error, and so we
> > need not postulate emergentism if we take Whitehead's metaphysics on
> > board.
>
> If the emergence of the quality of property of solidity is to
> destroyed, one merely seperates the atoms from the class; minimal
> relationships for the emergence of properties such as solid surfaces
> on the macro-scale.
>
> I don't know if you reference to "emergentist pardigm" address this
> simple physics, is it what Whitehead meant?
The "emergentist paradigm" that I was referring to is the hypothesis
that consciousness is an emergent property of matter in a universe that
was initially devoid of consciousness. The incredible success of science
owes a great deal to the propensity to simplify the problem before
trying to solve it. The foremost way that science simplifies the problem
is to disregard all that is subjective (Schrodinger called this
"objectivation" in his attempts to find a better way.) After attempts to
discard subjectivity, including consciousness, we create an objective
and reductionistic scientific model of the world in which consciousness
plays no part, but then we are confronted by the brute fact of conscious
experience all the same. I think we err in trying to find a place for
consciousness in a reductionistic model that has been arrived at by
specifically eliminating it from consideration. Any such attempt just
leads to problems like the interaction problem, the generation problem,
the homunculus problem, the emergence problem, etc. Such
pseudo-problems may be eliminated at a stroke by declining to afford
"objectivation" the status of the only path to truth.
Immortalist
ah, each is a semblence, simulation or partial copy of the_room residing in
the possibility space of all possibilities ready to unfold with the right
conditions?
Culture, by "mutual immanance" could be acted upon by neural representations
which themselves are acted upon by culture.
Neurophisiology is a great subject and they often speak of representations
and rerepresentations when representations are acted upon. I don't think
they are referring to solipsism or realism but are describing the results of
experiments.
Thats some old sounding shit my man are you sure people even talk about
things like this anymore?
Emergence is no longer taboo since we now have verifiable "subsumption" of
parts by the whole which influences by whats coming from the bottom up
combining to be for the top down control. Whitehead would have loved systems
theory.
Reductionism and Synthesis are just two of the wonderful tools we have at
our disposal. Those assholes who fucked our language can piss off because
these words and their concepts aren't taboo, just those assholes who you
mention who pathological abused the terminology. A predator is a
reductionist and a synthesist.
----------------------
Each of Genghis's six tiny legs worked on its own, independent of the
others. Each leg had its own ganglion of neural cells-a tiny
microprocessor-that controlled the leg's actions. Each leg thought for
itself! Walking for Genghis then became a group project with at least six
small minds at work. Other small semiminds within its body coordinated
communication between the legs. Entomologists say this is how ants and real
cockroaches cope-they have neurons in their legs that do the leg's thinking.
In the mobot Genghis, walking emerges out of the collective behavior of the
12 motors. Two motors at each leg lift, or not, depending on what the other
legs around them are doing. If they activate in the right sequence-Okay,
hup! One, three, six, two, five, four!-walking "happens."
No one place in the contraption governs walking. Without a smart central
controller, control can trickle up from the bottom. Brooks called it
"bottom-up control." Bottom-up walking. Bottom-up smartness. If you snip off
one leg of a cockroach, it will shift gaits with the other five without
losing a stride. [The shift is not learned; it is an
(immediate_self_reorganization).] If you disable one leg of Genghis, the
other legs organize walking around the five that work. They find a new gait
as easily as the cockroach.
In one of his papers, Rod Brooks first laid out his instructions on how to
make a creature walk without knowing how:
There is no central controller which directs the body where to put each foot
or how high to lift a leg should there be an obstacle ahead. Instead, each
leg is granted a few simple behaviors and each independently knows what to
do under various circumstances. For instance, two basic behaviors can be
thought of as "If I'm a leg and I'm up, put myself down, " or "If I'm a leg
and I'm forward, put the other five legs back a little." These processes
exist independently, run at all times, and fire whenever the sensory
preconditions are true. To create walking then, there just needs to be a
sequencing of lifting legs (this is the only instance where any central
control is evident). As soon as a leg is raised it automatically swings
itself forward, and also down. But the act of swinging forward triggers all
the other legs to move back a little. Since those legs happen to be touching
the ground, the body moves forward.
Once the beast can walk on a flat smooth floor without tripping, other
behaviors can be added to improve the walk. For Genghis to get up and over a
mound of phone books on the floor, it needs a pair of sensing whiskers to
send information from the floor to the first set of legs.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch3-b.html
------------------------
Is this plane flying the peaople or is the people flying this plane?
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-b.html
------------------------
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-c.html
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-d.html
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:gOmfb.986$my.5...@newsfep1-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > accept a wider perspective and accommodate *all* experiences, not
> > just memories) pertain to some "extra-mental reality" or are down to
> > some kind of solipsism. I feel a very strong prejudice against
> > solipsism, but I don't feel that forces me to adopt the
> > representationalist line. To quote Whitehead's example, "I am in the
> > room, and the room is in me". The "room in me" need not be a
> > representation of the "room I am in" -- Whitehead coins the phrase
> > "mutual immanence" to indicate that each is *really in* the other,
> > and not just a representation. Again, this reminds me of Plotinus'
> > claim for the "All-in-All", or direct realism.
>
> ah, each is a semblence, simulation or partial copy of the_room
> residing in the possibility space of all possibilities ready to unfold
> with the right conditions?
>
> Culture, by "mutual immanance" could be acted upon by neural
> representations which themselves are acted upon by culture.
>
> Neurophisiology is a great subject and they often speak of
> representations and rerepresentations when representations are acted
> upon. I don't think they are referring to solipsism or realism but are
> describing the results of experiments.
I don't have a problem with the idea that neural circuits in the brain
are set up as a consequence of sensory input, and the idea that these
neural circuits generate motor responses. The word "representation" in
this application is not what I'm talking about here. The problem is how
this kind of representation gets to become part of the contents of
experience, and how the contents of experience get to influence this
representation in the brain. It's the use of the word "representation"
to refer directly to the contents of experience that I'm unhappy with.
> > The "emergentist paradigm" that I was referring to is the hypothesis
> > that consciousness is an emergent property of matter in a universe
> > that was initially devoid of consciousness. The incredible success
> > of science owes a great deal to the propensity to simplify the
> > problem before trying to solve it. The foremost way that science
> > simplifies the problem is to disregard all that is subjective
> > (Schrodinger called this "objectivation" in his attempts to find a
> > better way.) After attempts to discard subjectivity, including
> > consciousness, we create an objective and reductionistic scientific
> > model of the world in which consciousness plays no part, but then we
> > are confronted by the brute fact of conscious experience all the
> > same. I think we err in trying to find a place for consciousness in
> > a reductionistic model that has been arrived at by specifically
> > eliminating it from consideration. Any such attempt just leads to
> > problems like the interaction problem, the generation problem,
> > the homunculus problem, the emergence problem, etc. Such
> > pseudo-problems may be eliminated at a stroke by declining to afford
> > "objectivation" the status of the only path to truth.
>
> Thats some old sounding shit my man are you sure people even talk
> about things like this anymore?
I am.
> Emergence is no longer taboo since we now have verifiable
> "subsumption" of parts by the whole which influences by whats coming
> from the bottom up combining to be for the top down control. Whitehead
> would have loved systems theory.
>
> Reductionism and Synthesis are just two of the wonderful tools we have
> at our disposal. Those assholes who fucked our language can piss off
> because these words and their concepts aren't taboo, just those
> assholes who you mention who pathological abused the terminology. A
> predator is a reductionist and a synthesist.
Emergence _per se_ isn't taboo at all -- it just fails to account for
the brute fact of conscious experience, and Whitehead was directly
addressing the issue of experience. Neuroscience talks about the
Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) but there is a conspicuous
absence of plausible hypotheses to explain the existence of this
correlation -- we still end up with dualism or at best dual-aspect
theory (and dual-aspect theory is just another way of saying that we
don't yet understand the underlying reality that gives rise to the two
disparate aspects). Whitehead turns the idea on its head, if I'm not
misinterpreting him, and talks about the physical aspects of experience.
So where science has set out to deliberately ignore half the problem
(the experiential half), Whitehead has retained both halves and
reconciled them.
Keynes
<Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>Neurophisiology is a great subject and they often speak of representations
>and rerepresentations when representations are acted upon. I don't think
>they are referring to solipsism or realism but are describing the results of
>experiments.
>
So there is a virtual reality in our heads.
Is there also a virtual-virtual reality necessary to interpret the
first? Or do we need a virtual-virtual-virtual reality?
Is it turtles all the way down?
It appears that the so-called virtual reality theory is bogus.
The transition from electro-chemistry to some magical but
unexplained state of virtual reality explains exactly nothing.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:ID8fb.29$Eb4....@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
So there's a kind of dynamic equilibrium going on between the evolution
of order and the evolution of disorder. But this still leaves me with
the question of why these "regions of higher fitness" are where they are
within the phase space -- we seem in danger of entering an infinite
regress if we need a higher-order phase space to describe the evolution
of such regions.
Immortalist
[Steven Brazzale]
- In trying to
- understand what gives rise to conciousness, one doesn't want to know
- what makes a person "appear" concious; one wants to know what gives rise
- to the actual phenomena - I must therefore put my own personal
- conciousness on the stage. But I cannot do this. I cannot stand outside
- my own conciousness and look at it and its workings. The best I can
- manage is some reflections on myself, but then I am looking at myself in
- some detached way, that is not much better than observing someone elses
- inferred conciousness. We cannot conciously observe our own
- conciousness as a whole.
[McCrone]
Exactly. The so-called Hard Question is the demand that we don't just want a
story of the mechanism, we want to feel the being of the mechanism via the
theoretical explanation. To use your analogy, it is like saying you haven't
satisfied me with your account of a car engine unless I now know what it is
like to *be* that car engine.
Put in this extreme way, the Hard Question cannot be satisfied for a theory
of anything - to me, it seems more plausible to know enough about bats
almost to have an idea of what bat consciousness is like than truly to be
able imagine being a non-conscious car engine. But as you say, no matter how
complete an explanation you might have of some system, you would still be in
the position of a comprehending mind trying to put itself in the shoes of
another entity rather than for a moment really *being* that entity.
If I would go further, I would say that the key feature of a satisfying
theory of anything is that you feel fully oriented to the subject, not that
you have all its detail in mind at once. If I were a mechanic, I would say
yes I understand car engines intimately - but what would be in my head at
that precise moment? It would be a feeling of confidence - a knowing from
past experience that I could deal smoothly with further engine-related
questions or thoughts. I would say ask me anything and I will give you
either a precise answer or be able to use my wealth of experience to at
least give a plausible line of speculation. I've got a feel for what makes
engines tick that sometimes goes beyond even my capacity for putting the
knowledge into words.
Why the Hard Question is the Wrong Question
This is a thread of discussion about the Hard Question - how could any
theory about the brain explain subjective "feels"?
http://tinyurl.com/px06
>
>
> > > The "emergentist paradigm" that I was referring to is the hypothesis
> > > that consciousness is an emergent property of matter in a universe
> > > that was initially devoid of consciousness. The incredible success
> > > of science owes a great deal to the propensity to simplify the
> > > problem before trying to solve it. The foremost way that science
> > > simplifies the problem is to disregard all that is subjective
> > > (Schrodinger called this "objectivation" in his attempts to find a
> > > better way.) After attempts to discard subjectivity, including
> > > consciousness, we create an objective and reductionistic scientific
> > > model of the world in which consciousness plays no part, but then we
> > > are confronted by the brute fact of conscious experience all the
> > > same. I think we err in trying to find a place for consciousness in
> > > a reductionistic model that has been arrived at by specifically
> > > eliminating it from consideration. Any such attempt just leads to
> > > problems like the interaction problem, the generation problem,
> > > the homunculus problem, the emergence problem, etc. Such
> > > pseudo-problems may be eliminated at a stroke by declining to afford
> > > "objectivation" the status of the only path to truth.
> >
> > Thats some old sounding shit my man are you sure people even talk
> > about things like this anymore?
>
> I am.
>
You might want to take a look at some "New Stuff"
http://tinyurl.com/px0z
>
>
> > Emergence is no longer taboo since we now have verifiable
> > "subsumption" of parts by the whole which influences by whats coming
> > from the bottom up combining to be for the top down control. Whitehead
> > would have loved systems theory.
> >
> > Reductionism and Synthesis are just two of the wonderful tools we have
> > at our disposal. Those assholes who fucked our language can piss off
> > because these words and their concepts aren't taboo, just those
> > assholes who you mention who pathological abused the terminology. A
> > predator is a reductionist and a synthesist.
>
> Emergence _per se_ isn't taboo at all -- it just fails to account for
> the brute fact of conscious experience, and Whitehead was directly
> addressing the issue of experience. Neuroscience talks about the
> Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) but there is a conspicuous
> absence of plausible hypotheses to explain the existence of this
> correlation -- we still end up with dualism or at best dual-aspect
> theory (and dual-aspect theory is just another way of saying that we
> don't yet understand the underlying reality that gives rise to the two
> disparate aspects). Whitehead turns the idea on its head, if I'm not
> misinterpreting him, and talks about the physical aspects of experience.
> So where science has set out to deliberately ignore half the problem
> (the experiential half), Whitehead has retained both halves and
> reconciled them.
>
Emergence is merely one part of "system dynamic" as words are parts of
sentences.
If an object is a set of processes that sustain some regularity within some
range then consciousness is an object.
I used to have a strange theory about the weight of memories and
experiences. There would be the atoms that were moved when the nerve cells
moved in learning. But this is again different then your usage here.
>
Immortalist
> On Sat, 4 Oct 2003 12:54:36 -0700, "Immortalist"
> <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> >Neurophisiology is a great subject and they often speak of
representations
> >and rerepresentations when representations are acted upon. I don't think
> >they are referring to solipsism or realism but are describing the results
of
> >experiments.
> >
>
> So there is a virtual reality in our heads.
> Is there also a virtual-virtual reality necessary to interpret the
> first? Or do we need a virtual-virtual-virtual reality?
> Is it turtles all the way down?
>
There's probably a reality in our heads: "mutual immanance!"
In one of his papers, Rod Brooks first laid out his instructions on how to
make a creature walk without knowing how:
There is no central controller which directs the body where to put each foot
or how high to lift a leg should there be an obstacle ahead. Instead, each
leg is granted a few simple behaviors and each independently knows what to
do under various circumstances. For instance, two basic behaviors can be
thought of as "If I'm a leg and I'm up, put myself down, " or "If I'm a leg
and I'm forward, put the other five legs back a little." These processes
exist independently, run at all times, and fire whenever the sensory
preconditions are true. To create walking then, there just needs to be a
sequencing of lifting legs (this is the only instance where any central
control is evident). As soon as a leg is raised it automatically swings
itself forward, and also down. But the act of swinging forward triggers all
the other legs to move back a little. Since those legs happen to be touching
the ground, the body moves forward.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch3-b.html
> It appears that the so-called virtual reality theory is bogus.
> The transition from electro-chemistry to some magical but
> unexplained state of virtual reality explains exactly nothing.
>
Said the Democrat to the Republican talking about the Republican Party!
Keynes
I seems to me that our approach to ultimate reality takes a
wrong turn going into physical materialism. Yes we need to
grow and count bananas (but only at meal times).
The answer to all human problems is surely in human minds.
Hypothicizing an 'external' reality can't begin to address the
reality that we actually know and live with all the 'time'.
Modern common sense appears to be on a great snipe hunt.
I won't be left holding the bag.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:WHOfb.168$VH6...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > brain are set up as a consequence of sensory input, and the idea
> > that these neural circuits generate motor responses. The word
> > "representation" in this application is not what I'm talking about
> > here. The problem is how this kind of representation gets to become
> > part of the contents of experience, and how the contents of
> > experience get to influence this representation in the brain. It's
> > the use of the word "representation" to refer directly to the
> > contents of experience that I'm unhappy with.
>
> [Steven Brazzale]
> - In trying to
> - understand what gives rise to conciousness, one doesn't want to know
> - what makes a person "appear" concious; one wants to know what gives
> - conciousness on the stage. But I cannot do this. I cannot stand
> - best I can manage is some reflections on myself, but then I am
> - looking at myself in some detached way, that is not much better than
> - observing someone elses inferred conciousness. We cannot conciously
> - observe our own conciousness as a whole.
McCrone goes on to say:
"So for this and other reasons, it has been disappointing to see how
much philosophical hand-wringing has been caused by the Hard Question.
An adequate theory of consciousness is one that will leave me feeling
throughly orientated to the job of answering questions about features of
consciousness. This is the way minds actually are and so this is the
kind of understanding we should be aiming for, not the mythical hope of
suddenly getting the whole story alive in our heads at a single
instant."
McCrone is flying dangerously close to behaviorism. There seems no
requirement for the actual experiencing of data at all, but merely the
processing of information, which still leaves us with the brute fact of
experiencing to account for. He goes on to say:
"The problem/question only makes sense if you are already assuming
consciousness to be a digitally-bounded entity, ie: that it is either
present or it isn't present in the system in question. Even if you feel
it right to talk about degrees, or shades, or levels, or styles of
consciousness, your use of the term is still implying that you already
believe it to be a bounded entity and therefore something that arise
immediately once some threshold state or process has been breached."
McCrone is criticizing the now traditional position of assuming a
non-conscious material world, and then positing that some subsystems in
that world have attained to conscious experience. This is not at all the
Whiteheadian position, but rather a problem that arises out of what
Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This "emergence
problem" doesn't arise in Whitehead's metaphysics because he makes
experience primary rather than emergent, and matter is merely the
"externalized" aspect of the contents of experience.
> > > Thats some old sounding shit my man are you sure people even talk
> > > about things like this anymore?
> >
> > I am.
> >
>
> You might want to take a look at some "New Stuff"
> http://tinyurl.com/px0z
This "new stuff" is still grounded in a materialistic and reductionistic
paradigm.
> > Emergence _per se_ isn't taboo at all -- it just fails to account
> > for the brute fact of conscious experience, and Whitehead was
> > directly addressing the issue of experience. Neuroscience talks
> > about the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) but there is a
> > conspicuous absence of plausible hypotheses to explain the existence
> > of this correlation -- we still end up with dualism or at best
> > dual-aspect theory (and dual-aspect theory is just another way of
> > saying that we don't yet understand the underlying reality that
> > gives rise to the two disparate aspects). Whitehead turns the idea
> > on its head, if I'm not misinterpreting him, and talks about the
> > physical aspects of experience. So where science has set out to
> > deliberately ignore half the problem (the experiential half),
> > Whitehead has retained both halves and reconciled them.
>
> Emergence is merely one part of "system dynamic" as words are parts of
> sentences.
>
> If an object is a set of processes that sustain some regularity within
> some range then consciousness is an object.
>
> I used to have a strange theory about the weight of memories and
> experiences. There would be the atoms that were moved when the nerve
> cells moved in learning. But this is again different then your usage
> here.
I think a great part of the problem is in the variety of ways that the
word "consciousness" is defined -- so many academics end up arguing at
cross-purposes. In his seminal paper on the Hard Problem, Chalmers makes
the point that so many academic papers mention consciousness in their
title, but the body of the text addresses something other than
consciousness, and he refers to this as a "bait-and-switch" ploy. This
is the danger when we can't agree what consciousness is before we start
discussing it. It confused me for some time when reading William James'
essays "Does Consciousness Exist?" (wherein he concludes that it doesn't
exist), and "A World of Pure Experience" (wherein he proposes, like
Whitehead, that experience is the basic stuff of the world). Today we
seem to identify consciousness with experience, but James and Whitehead
don't do this.
Immortalist
It seems true that we should at least slow down a bit before going around a
curve. But to have even went out on the road to drive straight and turn, is
respectable in an existentialist sense, for having the courage to do so.
> The answer to all human problems is surely in human minds.
> Hypothicizing an 'external' reality can't begin to address the
> reality that we actually know and live with all the 'time'.
>
then when we communicate with another person we hypothesize about 'external
reality' by default?
there will likely come a time in the near future when the complexity of
human being will be as simple mechanically as a box of crackers' jacks with
the included surprise.
> Modern common sense appears to be on a great snipe hunt.
> I won't be left holding the bag.
>
At least you will feel the bag in your hands, see it there if you look, and
hear it if you crumple it.
The best way to find an ideas' weakness is to attempt to defend it!
>
>
>
>
>
>
Immortalist
Auto mechanics can repair cars very well without knowing what it is like to
be a car or what driving feels like to the car parts.
It is better to start somewhere than no-where, in order to evolve these
ideas and axioms from their black boxes where it's a gamble. What if
behaviorism comes to be the most proovable theory? Scientist a more prepared
than philosophers right?
> "The problem/question only makes sense if you are already assuming
> consciousness to be a digitally-bounded entity, ie: that it is either
> present or it isn't present in the system in question. Even if you feel
> it right to talk about degrees, or shades, or levels, or styles of
> consciousness, your use of the term is still implying that you already
> believe it to be a bounded entity and therefore something that arise
> immediately once some threshold state or process has been breached."
>
> McCrone is criticizing the now traditional position of assuming a
> non-conscious material world, and then positing that some subsystems in
> that world have attained to conscious experience. This is not at all the
> Whiteheadian position, but rather a problem that arises out of what
> Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This "emergence
> problem" doesn't arise in Whitehead's metaphysics because he makes
> experience primary rather than emergent, and matter is merely the
> "externalized" aspect of the contents of experience.
>
Seems like saying we can have written communication without letters and
numbers and in english. What part emergence plays is diminished by nearly
none by human ideas.
But the current researchers, and those after them, will likely be the ones
to figure it all out whatever it sounds like under close logical scrutiny.
First we fuck up in order to have something to work with, just like W. did.
---------------------
More from McCrone:
...despite being in a state of almost continual conceptual revolution, the
physical sciences have managed to develop a coherence as a scientific
discipline.
By contrast, there is almost no cohesion to the mind sciences and certainly
no track record of solid, cumulative progress. Instead of a Standard Model
for the mind, there is a theoretical vacuum, a conceptual void filled only
by stale philosophical arguments and creaking computer metaphors. Rather
than developing a common culture of explanation, psychology and neurology
stand sharply divided, sharing little but a reluctance to tackle the big
questions about consciousness head-on.
...psychology has busied itself in the foothills of its subject, preferring
to create theories of behaviour, or at most, computer models of isolated
thought habits and mental sub-systems. Psychologists have measured the
mind's performance inventively and exhaustively, but they have yet to get
under the covers and account for the machinery that produces our mental
experience.
[Neurology has been even more cautious.]
Neurologists deal daily with the brain material that is the stuff of the
mind. But for a variety of reasons, it is not the done thing for
neurologists to attempt to extend their understanding of brain anatomy and
physiology into actual theories of consciousness. The reasons for this are
complex. For a long time, so little was known about the brain that there was
not much that neurology could usefully say. But also, neurology saw itself
as an arm of the medical sciences. As a discipline, its first responsibility
was to the alleviation of disease and human suffering. So neurology had to
present a sober, practical public face. Researchers could not afford to be
seen as being motivated by anything so trivial and vain as personal
curiosity or dreams of grand theories.
The severity of this ban should not be underestimated. Quite literally, open
speculation about consciousness could be enough to wreck a promising brain
scientist's career. Benjamin Libet, the Californian neurophysiologist whose
experiments on the half second it takes to "form" consciousness will prove
so central to our story, originally made his name with some very straight
research-studies of nerve cell discharge mechanisms. Libet admits he did not
dare even begin his controversial experiments on the timing of mental
experience until he had safely gained tenure as a professor and so could not
be sacked. And even then, the pressure from his peers was such that for
thirty years he kept his silence about any theoretical conclusions that
might be drawn from his work. Libet just published the bare results, saving
any private thoughts he might have about the nature of consciousness for a
slim, speculative paper published only in 1994, long after his retirement.
The contrast in attitude with fundamental physics could hardly be greater.
There, the field's record of success has bred a confidence that encourages
the most freewheeling speculation. Theories of Everything (TOEs) abound. The
outrageousness of an idea is almost a badge of honour. But
neurology-especially during the 1970s and 1980s-has cultivated an ethic of
abstemious self-denial. Only a few neurologists either too old or too famous
to care, such as the Nobel prize winner, Sir John Eccles, could risk their
standing to talk about how the brain might produce the mind.
...Neurology's creed of self-denial is important because it raises the
question of whether explaining the mind is actually a difficult task-or
whether scientists have just not been trying in a particularly organised
fashion.
Missing Bonus chapter on nutty quantum theories
http://tinyurl.com/5z16
[if the nuerosurgeon asked you "how is your mind field today" would feel
safe under his scalpal?]
>
Jonathan
For the same reasons solar systems and galaxies find their places.
A gravity well and a fitness hill are analogous as both depend
on the combination of short range and long range forces.
The same description of a fluid, short range order combined
with long range disorder. It's related to the concept of
transient length, such as people being quite alike close
together, but quite different at long distances.
>we seem in danger of entering an infinite
> regress if we need a higher-order phase space to describe the evolution
> of such regions.
The regions evolve across space and ...scale, from the galactic
to quantum. Once the possibility space of a constrained
system is fully filled, the system generates emergent new
properties, or evolutionary steps, that redefine the fitness
landscape. As in from earth to plants to animals to
intelligence to....
New possibility space is endlessly created.
Jonathan
s
>
>
>
>
Keynes
<Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>"Keynes" <Key...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
>news:u8k3ov4vm73f9prrc...@4ax.com...
>> >
>>
>> I seems to me that our approach to ultimate reality takes a
>> wrong turn going into physical materialism. Yes we need to
>> grow and count bananas (but only at meal times).
>>
>
>It seems true that we should at least slow down a bit before going around a
>curve. But to have even went out on the road to drive straight and turn, is
>respectable in an existentialist sense, for having the courage to do so.
>
>> The answer to all human problems is surely in human minds.
>> Hypothicizing an 'external' reality can't begin to address the
>> reality that we actually know and live with all the 'time'.
>>
>
>then when we communicate with another person we hypothesize about 'external
>reality' by default?
>
>there will likely come a time in the near future when the complexity of
>human being will be as simple mechanically as a box of crackers' jacks with
>the included surprise.
>
>> Modern common sense appears to be on a great snipe hunt.
>> I won't be left holding the bag.
>>
>
>At least you will feel the bag in your hands, see it there if you look, and
>hear it if you crumple it.
>
>The best way to find an ideas' weakness is to attempt to defend it!
>
OK. I think that consciousness is primary, not matter.
I'm not a solitary solipsist, so I admit 'external' things.
It's what the things are and how they arise where I differ.
Even science admits that the physical products of nature,
and the laws governing them are actually processes in
space-time, and not 'things'. They are patterns of energy,
and energy is nothing but variations of potentials in space-time.
At no instant are there any 'things' but only points of unfinished
process.
Yet we can't be conscious of space-time. All we can see
are changes in the immovable now, not space or time.
Materialism is a one sided view that overlooks our own
incomprehensible being. Materialism is circular thinking.
"There is a world outside, and I know it because I can
see and feel it here inside my brain, which is also material
and external."
Thought is probably an electro-chemical process in a brain.
But we are not our thoughts or our brains. The brain is an
ordinary material computer, humbled by a hand calculator,
a thermometer, a watch, a calendar or a yardstick -- all tools used to
describe a reality that we can't even percieve, but only
concieve in our flabby brains. The brain is a machine.
The body is a machine. Living things are machines.
Atoms are machines. Everything is a machine of lawful order.
But where is consciousness? When is consciousness?
What are it's weight, shape and color? Where does it
come from? Where does it go? Or isn't it always
right here and now?
The material world and even our thoughts and feelings are
all nothing but objects of consciousness. No consciousness,
no things. Yet the common view is that things preceeded
consciousness. Suddenly things got complicated enough
to make this magical, indefinable, ungraspable thing called
consciousness. The very thing that gives the only light
to all 'physical reality'. Can you believe that?
When science can put consciousness into even an imaginary
conceptual box, then we may start to pay attention to it's
vague and incoherent pronouncements. But I have to laugh
to see the measurers and the counters, the gatherers and
the spoilers, all rushing and bumping around with empty
shopping carts looking for the aisle of truth, not realizing that
they had it all the time.
-------------------------------------------------------
Let's take some materialist views. Happiness is best,
and happiness can be produced in a brain with chemicals
or direct electrical stimulation. Therefore everyone should
wear happy caps to nudge the brain into permanent happy patterns.
Death is scary. We don't need to die. We can be hooked
up to artificial hearts, kidneys, IV tubes, and live flat on our
backs unconscious or staring at the ceiling for thousands of years.
Let's do it. Right now we only do this for the terminally ill,
magnifying their agony and angst, and those of their loved ones
for only a few weeks or months. Until the emotions or the
money runs out, whichever comes first.
There is a scientific materialist solution to every problem.
Some of them are not even horrible, but simply annoying.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:9uwgb.1$rZ...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > requirement for the actual experiencing of data at all, but merely
> > the processing of information, which still leaves us with the brute
> > fact of experiencing to account for. He goes on to say:
>
> Auto mechanics can repair cars very well without knowing what it is
> like to be a car or what driving feels like to the car parts.
>
> It is better to start somewhere than no-where, in order to evolve
> these ideas and axioms from their black boxes where it's a gamble.
Absolutely right. Science must simplify before attacking the problem,
and has been impressively successful within its domain of validity.
However, its primary simplification is that of alienating subjectivity,
which limits its domain of validity to the objective. In attempting to
tackle our experiential aspect, it goes beyond that domain, and
consequently gets into all sorts of pseudo-problems.
> What if behaviorism comes to be the most proovable theory? Scientist a
> more prepared than philosophers right?
Behaviorism is a testable hypothesis, and so we can do science with it.
This is all very well, but behaviorism ignores the very thing we're
discussing here -- our experiential aspect. Science can get a long way
without addressing this issue.
> > McCrone is criticizing the now traditional position of assuming a
> > non-conscious material world, and then positing that some subsystems
> > in that world have attained to conscious experience. This is not at
> > all the Whiteheadian position, but rather a problem that arises out
> > of what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This
> > "emergence problem" doesn't arise in Whitehead's metaphysics because
> > he makes experience primary rather than emergent, and matter is
> > merely the "externalized" aspect of the contents of experience.
>
> Seems like saying we can have written communication without letters
> and numbers and in english. What part emergence plays is diminished by
> nearly none by human ideas.
Emergence is a word used to describe phenomena that were initially
nothing but possibilities allowed by the boundary conditions, and that
have become actualities as part of the unfolding of processes. I have no
problem with the use of this word as applied to the objective aspects of
the world we experience -- I'm simply calling into serious question the
applicability of this idea to any attempts to account for experience
itself.
> > I think a great part of the problem is in the variety of ways that
> > the word "consciousness" is defined -- so many academics end up
> > arguing at cross-purposes. In his seminal paper on the Hard Problem,
> > Chalmers makes the point that so many academic papers mention
> > consciousness in their title, but the body of the text addresses
> > something other than consciousness, and he refers to this as a
> > "bait-and-switch" ploy. This is the danger when we can't agree what
> > consciousness is before we start discussing it. It confused me for
> > some time when reading William James' essays "Does Consciousness
> > Exist?" (wherein he concludes that it doesn't exist), and "A World
> > of Pure Experience" (wherein he proposes, like Whitehead, that
> > experience is the basic stuff of the world). Today we seem to
> > identify consciousness with experience, but James and Whitehead
> > don't do this.
>
> But the current researchers, and those after them, will likely be the
> ones to figure it all out whatever it sounds like under close logical
> scrutiny. First we fuck up in order to have something to work with,
> just like W. did.
I wouldn't describe it that way. I'd prefer to say that we create
hypotheses that are adequate to our needs, until we no longer find them
adequate and so are prompted to modify them or replace them. Thus
science is always provisional, but converges (in many cases but not in
all cases) onto hypotheses that, taken to their limit might be
considered the underlying "reality". But again I have to return to the
point that science, by its very nature, has excluded subjective
experience from its domain of validity.
McCrone gives us two choices -- consciousness is either a "thing" or a
process. The very basis of this choice is grounded in reductionist
materialism, and consequently he overlooks other possibilities like
that of Whitehead and James. The rest of the chapter just seems to be
saying that the Hard Problem has not been addressed by hypotheses
implicating the quantum theory, and this seems a strange statement from
somebody that started out by deriding the Hard Problem.
Immortalist
Has science found any object that isn't some sort of process? I suppose
words are primary to it's environment the function sentence, but the
sentence is primary to the secondary function called paragraphs. Science may
or may not find actual objects.
> Yet we can't be conscious of space-time. All we can see
> are changes in the immovable now, not space or time.
>
Am I claiming that we can be conscious of space-time? If there is a form of
consciousness possible that can do so, we will likely discover it and build
it.
Some think they can deny phenomenolism as the last refuge of the
*foudationalist* and they think they have topple kant and all. but
self-organizing systems and complexity theory are showing them that they may
be wrong.
Phenomenology was the last attempt to save Kant's dualism before that
endeaver failed, but I like it because of the fall into absolute scepticism
and a return to Descartes method of doubting everything.
> Materialism is a one sided view that overlooks our own
> incomprehensible being. Materialism is circular thinking.
> "There is a world outside, and I know it because I can
> see and feel it here inside my brain, which is also material
> and external."
>
The evidence of the senses and tests of the senses in relations with the
external world provide at least some evidence not none as you claim. I
thought materialism was a part of all the brain/mind gibberish in which life
is like a machine but fails to discriminate between degrees of machine-hood.
> Thought is probably an electro-chemical process in a brain.
> But we are not our thoughts or our brains. The brain is an
> ordinary material computer, humbled by a hand calculator,
> a thermometer, a watch, a calendar or a yardstick -- all tools used to
> describe a reality that we can't even percieve, but only
> concieve in our flabby brains. The brain is a machine.
> The body is a machine. Living things are machines.
> Atoms are machines. Everything is a machine of lawful order.
>
> But where is consciousness? When is consciousness?
> What are it's weight, shape and color? Where does it
> come from? Where does it go? Or isn't it always
> right here and now?
>
Columbus hasn't landed on that shore yet, be patient. I also wouldn't put
all my eggs in the basket of this un-trailed territory. If we look at a car
not running and setting still we could make the same claims and ask where is
this "driving?" We drive and observe others driving so even if we can't
explain how a particular duration of this "driving" is an object we happen
to be moving along to fast to see as one "thing."
> The material world and even our thoughts and feelings are
> all nothing but objects of consciousness. No consciousness,
> no things. Yet the common view is that things preceeded
> consciousness. Suddenly things got complicated enough
> to make this magical, indefinable, ungraspable thing called
> consciousness. The very thing that gives the only light
> to all 'physical reality'. Can you believe that?
>
Actually that sounds like something a Chalmers would be aroused by. The
"mutual immanance" of nueral activities may be proceeded by the "mutual
immanance" of prior events in the world. And still "mutual emulation" is
possible.
> When science can put consciousness into even an imaginary
> conceptual box, then we may start to pay attention to it's
> vague and incoherent pronouncements. But I have to laugh
> to see the measurers and the counters, the gatherers and
> the spoilers, all rushing and bumping around with empty
> shopping carts looking for the aisle of truth, not realizing that
> they had it all the time.
>
Oh I see, sorry I didn't mean like that but really; what will our world be
like if we learn to emulate the now/consciousness and it is cheapened like
hamburglers or computer chips. Just a strange thought but I wasn't thinking
about different ways acedemics can catologue consciousness in differing
personal frames of reference.
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> Let's take some materialist views. Happiness is best,
> and happiness can be produced in a brain with chemicals
> or direct electrical stimulation. Therefore everyone should
> wear happy caps to nudge the brain into permanent happy patterns.
>
How about a brain tumer taken out so the guy can crack a nut for many years
longer than the way things were leading of their own accourd.
> Death is scary. We don't need to die. We can be hooked
> up to artificial hearts, kidneys, IV tubes, and live flat on our
> backs unconscious or staring at the ceiling for thousands of years.
> Let's do it. Right now we only do this for the terminally ill,
> magnifying their agony and angst, and those of their loved ones
> for only a few weeks or months. Until the emotions or the
> money runs out, whichever comes first.
>
The image of the clunker 1930s robot is probably what human phisiology will
look like to the "new flesh" we be in now/then.
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/2387/migration.html
> There is a scientific materialist solution to every problem.
> Some of them are not even horrible, but simply annoying.
>
"just so" stories abound as SFred might say.
>
>
>
>
>
>
Immortalist
> "Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:vo6be3l...@corp.supernews.com...
> > "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> > news:9uwgb.1$rZ...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> > >
> > > McCrone is flying dangerously close to behaviorism. There seems no
> > > requirement for the actual experiencing of data at all, but merely
> > > the processing of information, which still leaves us with the brute
> > > fact of experiencing to account for. He goes on to say:
> >
> > Auto mechanics can repair cars very well without knowing what it is
> > like to be a car or what driving feels like to the car parts.
> >
> > It is better to start somewhere than no-where, in order to evolve
> > these ideas and axioms from their black boxes where it's a gamble.
>
> Absolutely right. Science must simplify before attacking the problem,
> and has been impressively successful within its domain of validity.
> However, its primary simplification is that of alienating subjectivity,
> which limits its domain of validity to the objective. In attempting to
> tackle our experiential aspect, it goes beyond that domain, and
> consequently gets into all sorts of pseudo-problems.
>
And then that is question, prodded and pillfered, evolving beyond your
dilemma incorperating unknown axioms and defeating many paradoxes of common
sense.
>
>
> > What if behaviorism comes to be the most proovable theory? Scientist a
> > more prepared than philosophers right?
>
> Behaviorism is a testable hypothesis, and so we can do science with it.
> This is all very well, but behaviorism ignores the very thing we're
> discussing here -- our experiential aspect. Science can get a long way
> without addressing this issue.
>
What if behaviorism comes to be the most reasonable theory in the near
future, acknowledging that it is already falsifiable? What if the fact go
south for you, do you remain fixed in this perspective? Behaviorism is some
old shit though better to abandon the word in an anal retention sublimating
repressions and alliooooooo.
>
>
> > > McCrone is criticizing the now traditional position of assuming a
> > > non-conscious material world, and then positing that some subsystems
> > > in that world have attained to conscious experience. This is not at
> > > all the Whiteheadian position, but rather a problem that arises out
> > > of what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This
> > > "emergence problem" doesn't arise in Whitehead's metaphysics because
> > > he makes experience primary rather than emergent, and matter is
> > > merely the "externalized" aspect of the contents of experience.
> >
> > Seems like saying we can have written communication without letters
> > and numbers and in english. What part emergence plays is diminished by
> > nearly none by human ideas.
>
> Emergence is a word used to describe phenomena that were initially
> nothing but possibilities allowed by the boundary conditions, and that
> have become actualities as part of the unfolding of processes. I have no
> problem with the use of this word as applied to the objective aspects of
> the world we experience -- I'm simply calling into serious question the
> applicability of this idea to any attempts to account for experience
> itself.
>
Are you claiming that experience is not the result of or identical to some
processes? The account for experience itself is a great research goal and
when scientists find themselves with the appropriate technology to produce
it they won't be hindered by anything except naive politicians.
Our goal is to emulate experience loc. We will not be hindered by pety
concerns about the correctness of such. It seems a lie that researchers no
longer seek an explaination of experience or "feels like it feels."
Certainly not me anyway, experience is the main priority for the emulation
of being with materials we have.
It is exillerating when we hear reports from people who have had contact
with that isolated and tormented sect: nuero-scientists. McCrone claims you
can't know what nueroscience knows unless your carreer can be threatened if
you talk about what at least some know.
What is this third option? If not a thing, function, or process, then what
can you pull out of an old moldy sack jack?
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:jjPgb.20700$4D.10...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > problem, and has been impressively successful within its domain of
> > validity. However, its primary simplification is that of alienating
> > subjectivity, which limits its domain of validity to the objective.
> > In attempting to tackle our experiential aspect, it goes beyond that
> > domain, and consequently gets into all sorts of pseudo-problems.
>
> And then that is question, prodded and pillfered, evolving beyond your
> dilemma incorperating unknown axioms and defeating many paradoxes of
> common sense.
I've read this half a dozen times, but I can't seem to derive any
meaning from it.
> > Behaviorism is a testable hypothesis, and so we can do science with
> > it. This is all very well, but behaviorism ignores the very thing
> > we're discussing here -- our experiential aspect. Science can get a
> > long way without addressing this issue.
>
> What if behaviorism comes to be the most reasonable theory in the near
> future, acknowledging that it is already falsifiable? What if the fact
> go south for you, do you remain fixed in this perspective? Behaviorism
> is some old shit though better to abandon the word in an anal
> retention sublimating repressions and alliooooooo.
J.B. Watson, in his 1913 treatise on behaviorism, completely denied the
existence of consciousness. It wasn't until Ryle's book "The Concept of
Mind" in the 1950's that consciousness ceased to be a taboo subject in
psychology. How can a branch of science that denies the existence of
something then account for that something?
Ignoring behaviorism for the moment, and widening the issue to science
in general (and perhaps neuroscience in particular), there may well come
a time when science succeeds in accounting for consciousness, but right
now there is no sign of anything happening on that front.
I regard the situation as similar to looking for a black cat in a dark
room. Some think there's no cat in the room and so look elsewhere,
whilst others are convinced there is a cat in the room and continue
searching. We won't know who's right unless a cat is found, and there's
no sign of one yet.
But that shouldn't prejudice anybody against searching for it -- many
scientific breakthroughs have come about whilst looking for something
completely different, so scientific investigation is hardly ever without
its fruits.
> > Emergence is a word used to describe phenomena that were initially
> > nothing but possibilities allowed by the boundary conditions, and
> > that have become actualities as part of the unfolding of processes.
> > I have no problem with the use of this word as applied to the
> > objective aspects of the world we experience -- I'm simply calling
> > into serious question the applicability of this idea to any attempts
> > to account for experience itself.
>
> Are you claiming that experience is not the result of or identical to
> some processes? The account for experience itself is a great research
> goal and when scientists find themselves with the appropriate
> technology to produce it they won't be hindered by anything except
> naive politicians.
It's that old black cat again.
> > I wouldn't describe it that way. I'd prefer to say that we create
> > hypotheses that are adequate to our needs, until we no longer find
> > them adequate and so are prompted to modify them or replace them.
> > Thus science is always provisional, but converges (in many cases but
> > not in all cases) onto hypotheses that, taken to their limit might
> > be considered the underlying "reality". But again I have to return
> > to the point that science, by its very nature, has excluded
> > subjective experience from its domain of validity.
>
> Our goal is to emulate experience loc. We will not be hindered by pety
> concerns about the correctness of such. It seems a lie that
> researchers no longer seek an explaination of experience or "feels
> like it feels." Certainly not me anyway, experience is the main
> priority for the emulation of being with materials we have.
Excellent -- and may you make many breakthroughs in the process.
> > McCrone gives us two choices -- consciousness is either a "thing" or
> > a process. The very basis of this choice is grounded in reductionist
> > materialism, and consequently he overlooks other possibilities like
> > that of Whitehead and James. The rest of the chapter just seems to
> > be saying that the Hard Problem has not been addressed by hypotheses
> > implicating the quantum theory, and this seems a strange statement
> > from somebody that started out by deriding the Hard Problem.
>
> It is exillerating when we hear reports from people who have had
> contact with that isolated and tormented sect: nuero-scientists.
> McCrone claims you can't know what nueroscience knows unless your
> carreer can be threatened if you talk about what at least some know.
>
> What is this third option? If not a thing, function, or process, then
> what can you pull out of an old moldy sack jack?
Opening the conversation with McCrone you quoted Steven Brazzale who
said:
"In trying to understand what gives rise to consciousness, one doesn't
want to know what makes a person "appear" conscious; one wants to know
what gives rise to the actual phenomena - I must therefore put my own
personal consciousness on the stage. But I cannot do this. I cannot
stand outside my own consciousness and look at it and its workings. The
best I can manage is some reflections on myself, but then I am looking
at myself in some detached way, that is not much better than observing
someone else's inferred consciousness. We cannot consciously observe our
own consciousness as a whole."
McCrone doesn't directly address Brazzale's point, but rather uses it as
a premise to dismiss the Hard Problem, which is a real shame because
Brazzale has an excellent point. The Hard Problem exists only because
science is attempting to study consciousness with a method that has been
created by explicitly ignoring consciousness.
The "third option" as you put it is the approach taken by the likes of
James and Whitehead -- to consider the most primary units of the world
as units of pure experience, not units of some kind of non-experiential
substrate called "matter" that even physicists no longer believe in.
Immortalist
> "Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:vo8t9m4...@corp.supernews.com...
> > "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> > news:jjPgb.20700$4D.10...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
> > >
> > > Absolutely right. Science must simplify before attacking the
> > > problem, and has been impressively successful within its domain of
> > > validity. However, its primary simplification is that of alienating
> > > subjectivity, which limits its domain of validity to the objective.
> > > In attempting to tackle our experiential aspect, it goes beyond that
> > > domain, and consequently gets into all sorts of pseudo-problems.
> >
> > And then that is question, prodded and pillfered, evolving beyond your
> > dilemma incorperating unknown axioms and defeating many paradoxes of
> > common sense.
>
> I've read this half a dozen times, but I can't seem to derive any
> meaning from it.
>
Though science or other human goals have their imperfections, through trial
and error we eventually stumble upon truth.
>
>
> > > Behaviorism is a testable hypothesis, and so we can do science with
> > > it. This is all very well, but behaviorism ignores the very thing
> > > we're discussing here -- our experiential aspect. Science can get a
> > > long way without addressing this issue.
> >
> > What if behaviorism comes to be the most reasonable theory in the near
> > future, acknowledging that it is already falsifiable? What if the fact
> > go south for you, do you remain fixed in this perspective? Behaviorism
> > is some old shit though better to abandon the word in an anal
> > retention sublimating repressions and alliooooooo.
>
> J.B. Watson, in his 1913 treatise on behaviorism, completely denied the
> existence of consciousness. It wasn't until Ryle's book "The Concept of
> Mind" in the 1950's that consciousness ceased to be a taboo subject in
> psychology. How can a branch of science that denies the existence of
> something then account for that something?
>
> Ignoring behaviorism for the moment, and widening the issue to science
> in general (and perhaps neuroscience in particular), there may well come
> a time when science succeeds in accounting for consciousness, but right
> now there is no sign of anything happening on that front.
>
What would constitute a sign for you? Do you mean researchers stop
researching if no one is looking? How fast should these people be making
discoveries before you could say they were moving along properly enough to
be a real science, aside from the surgeons that is who have real discoveries
frequently.
> I regard the situation as similar to looking for a black cat in a dark
> room. Some think there's no cat in the room and so look elsewhere,
> whilst others are convinced there is a cat in the room and continue
> searching. We won't know who's right unless a cat is found, and there's
> no sign of one yet.
>
Good thing most of us don't stop searching where we havn't searched yet
instead of your suggestion of stopping or slowing participation in the ideas
of neuroscience.
> But that shouldn't prejudice anybody against searching for it -- many
> scientific breakthroughs have come about whilst looking for something
> completely different, so scientific investigation is hardly ever without
> its fruits.
>
There's the trial and error part for sure, many things show when we put the
light where it hasn't shown the wrong answers yet.
>
>
> > > Emergence is a word used to describe phenomena that were initially
> > > nothing but possibilities allowed by the boundary conditions, and
> > > that have become actualities as part of the unfolding of processes.
> > > I have no problem with the use of this word as applied to the
> > > objective aspects of the world we experience -- I'm simply calling
> > > into serious question the applicability of this idea to any attempts
> > > to account for experience itself.
> >
> > Are you claiming that experience is not the result of or identical to
> > some processes? The account for experience itself is a great research
> > goal and when scientists find themselves with the appropriate
> > technology to produce it they won't be hindered by anything except
> > naive politicians.
>
> It's that old black cat again.
>
We have more than your mystery which arises when you frame the problem in
your way. Like saying the auto-mechanic doesn't know about cars because his
experience is not wraped up in the network of processes resulting in
driving. But a little common sense indicates that the network of processes
called driving exists. I personally think we have alot more than your
framing of the issue. Your claim that the black cat is as doubful as what
the cat principle supposedly casts into doubt.
You are ignoring the available evidence and fighting against self-evident
concepts.
>
>
> > > I wouldn't describe it that way. I'd prefer to say that we create
> > > hypotheses that are adequate to our needs, until we no longer find
> > > them adequate and so are prompted to modify them or replace them.
> > > Thus science is always provisional, but converges (in many cases but
> > > not in all cases) onto hypotheses that, taken to their limit might
> > > be considered the underlying "reality". But again I have to return
> > > to the point that science, by its very nature, has excluded
> > > subjective experience from its domain of validity.
> >
> > Our goal is to emulate experience loc. We will not be hindered by pety
> > concerns about the correctness of such. It seems a lie that
> > researchers no longer seek an explaination of experience or "feels
> > like it feels." Certainly not me anyway, experience is the main
> > priority for the emulation of being with materials we have.
>
> Excellent -- and may you make many breakthroughs in the process.
>
Is a resurrection machine possible if the clone called your next moment
casts the current clone to the past?
>
>
> > > McCrone gives us two choices -- consciousness is either a "thing" or
> > > a process. The very basis of this choice is grounded in reductionist
> > > materialism, and consequently he overlooks other possibilities like
> > > that of Whitehead and James. The rest of the chapter just seems to
> > > be saying that the Hard Problem has not been addressed by hypotheses
> > > implicating the quantum theory, and this seems a strange statement
> > > from somebody that started out by deriding the Hard Problem.
> >
> > It is exillerating when we hear reports from people who have had
> > contact with that isolated and tormented sect: nuero-scientists.
> > McCrone claims you can't know what nueroscience knows unless your
> > carreer can be threatened if you talk about what at least some know.
> >
> > What is this third option? If not a thing, function, or process, then
> > what can you pull out of an old moldy sack jack?
>
> Opening the conversation with McCrone you quoted Steven Brazzale who
> said:
>
> "In trying to understand what gives rise to consciousness, one doesn't
> want to know what makes a person "appear" conscious; one wants to know
> what gives rise to the actual phenomena - I must therefore put my own
> personal consciousness on the stage. But I cannot do this. I cannot
> stand outside my own consciousness and look at it and its workings. The
> best I can manage is some reflections on myself, but then I am looking
> at myself in some detached way, that is not much better than observing
> someone else's inferred consciousness. We cannot consciously observe our
> own consciousness as a whole."
>
If he wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomenon, why must he
put his own personal consciousness on the stage? It is still possible that
we will learn to know what gives rise to the actual phenomenon with current
methods and further research.
But at some point we will begin to mutually emulate this "that gives rise to
[experiences]" to the degree that clone laws will be required and peoples
"giving rise to" will be a piratable object in code.
Given enough time, say a thousand or a million years, and this problem of
yours will be answered easily and producable at will and device. But all of
this may not move fast enough for some.
> McCrone doesn't directly address Brazzale's point, but rather uses it as
> a premise to dismiss the Hard Problem, which is a real shame because
> Brazzale has an excellent point. The Hard Problem exists only because
> science is attempting to study consciousness with a method that has been
> created by explicitly ignoring consciousness.
>
McCrone is cool because he makes an issue of what you say is completely
lacking in these kinds of sciences. Consciousness. I am not sure about his
response but was using his example of "what it feels like to be a car
driving."
> The "third option" as you put it is the approach taken by the likes of
> James and Whitehead -- to consider the most primary units of the world
> as units of pure experience, not units of some kind of non-experiential
> substrate called "matter" that even physicists no longer believe in.
>
Isn't this what systems theory is all about? The qualities that appear when
networks of processes appear in patterns? Complexity theory is just now
making it into acedemic acceptance, how long before the spirit of all
processes are accepted as experiences? Some networks of processes have a way
to monitor this time/change spirit, and some networks of processes don't
have that potential configuability.
Music of the brain, music of the world, all patterns of networks of process.
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:qVchb.888$7b5...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> > "Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:vo8t9m4...@corp.supernews.com...
> > >
> > > your dilemma incorperating unknown axioms and defeating many
> > > paradoxes of common sense.
> >
> > I've read this half a dozen times, but I can't seem to derive any
> > meaning from it.
>
> Though science or other human goals have their imperfections, through
> trial and error we eventually stumble upon truth.
Yes.
> > > What if behaviorism comes to be the most reasonable theory in the
> > > near future, acknowledging that it is already falsifiable? What if
> > > the fact go south for you, do you remain fixed in this
> > > perspective? Behaviorism is some old shit though better to abandon
> > > the word in an anal retention sublimating repressions and
> > > alliooooooo.
> >
> > J.B. Watson, in his 1913 treatise on behaviorism, completely denied
> > the existence of consciousness. It wasn't until Ryle's book "The
> > Concept of Mind" in the 1950's that consciousness ceased to be a
> > taboo subject in psychology. How can a branch of science that denies
> > the existence of something then account for that something?
> >
> > Ignoring behaviorism for the moment, and widening the issue to
> > science in general (and perhaps neuroscience in particular), there
> > may well come a time when science succeeds in accounting for
> > consciousness, but right now there is no sign of anything happening
> > on that front.
>
> What would constitute a sign for you?
The first thing that must happen for conscious experience to be subsumed
into the scientific enterprise is that scientists should provide a
reliable means of determining whether an object consciously experiences
or not. As long as this criterion remains unmet, all we can have is
speculation -- there is no means for empirical testing.
> Do you mean researchers stop
> researching if no one is looking? How fast should these people be
> making discoveries before you could say they were moving along
> properly enough to be a real science, aside from the surgeons that is
> who have real discoveries frequently.
Why are these questions relevant to our discussion?
> > I regard the situation as similar to looking for a black cat in a
> > dark room. Some think there's no cat in the room and so look
> > elsewhere, whilst others are convinced there is a cat in the room
> > and continue searching. We won't know who's right unless a cat is
> > found, and there's no sign of one yet.
>
> Good thing most of us don't stop searching where we havn't searched
> yet instead of your suggestion of stopping or slowing participation in
> the ideas of neuroscience.
I've made no such suggestion. There's a need for *all* avenues of
inquiry, and any particular avenue should not be dropped until there is
consensus that it either violates the laws of deductive logic or
contradicts empirical evidence.
> > But that shouldn't prejudice anybody against searching for it --
> > many scientific breakthroughs have come about whilst looking for
> > something completely different, so scientific investigation is
> > hardly ever without its fruits.
>
> There's the trial and error part for sure, many things show when we
> put the light where it hasn't shown the wrong answers yet.
Yes.
> > > Are you claiming that experience is not the result of or identical
> > > to some processes? The account for experience itself is a great
> > > research goal and when scientists find themselves with the
> > > appropriate technology to produce it they won't be hindered by
> > > anything except naive politicians.
> >
> > It's that old black cat again.
>
> We have more than your mystery which arises when you frame the problem
> in your way. Like saying the auto-mechanic doesn't know about cars
> because his experience is not wraped up in the network of processes
> resulting in driving. But a little common sense indicates that the
> network of processes called driving exists. I personally think we have
> alot more than your framing of the issue. Your claim that the black
> cat is as doubful as what the cat principle supposedly casts into
> doubt.
My framing of the issue is meant to open up the inquiry, not restrict
it. Why are you so hostile to the admission of philosophical approaches
to the problem in addition to the scientific approaches that you
promote?
> You are ignoring the available evidence and fighting against
> self-evident concepts.
I don't understand why you should think this.
> > > Our goal is to emulate experience loc. We will not be hindered by
> > > pety concerns about the correctness of such. It seems a lie that
> > > researchers no longer seek an explaination of experience or "feels
> > > like it feels." Certainly not me anyway, experience is the main
> > > priority for the emulation of being with materials we have.
> >
> > Excellent -- and may you make many breakthroughs in the process.
>
> Is a resurrection machine possible if the clone called your next
> moment casts the current clone to the past?
When an "actual occasion" (to use Whitehead's term) appropriates its
predecessor, that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual
occasion. Talk of resurrection and cloning seem out of context here.
> > > What is this third option? If not a thing, function, or process,
> > > then what can you pull out of an old moldy sack jack?
> >
> > Opening the conversation with McCrone you quoted Steven Brazzale who
> > said:
> >
> > "In trying to understand what gives rise to consciousness, one
> > doesn't want to know what makes a person "appear" conscious; one
> > wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomena - I must
> > therefore put my own personal consciousness on the stage. But I
> > cannot do this. I cannot stand outside my own consciousness and look
> > at it and its workings. The best I can manage is some reflections on
> > myself, but then I am looking at myself in some detached way, that
> > is not much better than observing someone else's inferred
> > consciousness. We cannot consciously observe our own consciousness
> > as a whole."
>
> If he wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomenon, why must
> he put his own personal consciousness on the stage?
Because we don't have access to anybody else's consciousness.
> It is still possible that we will learn to know what gives rise to the
> actual phenomenon with current methods and further research.
>
> But at some point we will begin to mutually emulate this "that gives
> rise to [experiences]" to the degree that clone laws will be required
> and peoples "giving rise to" will be a piratable object in code.
Perhaps, but first we need some reliable way of determining whether an
object is conscious or not.
> Given enough time, say a thousand or a million years, and this problem
> of yours will be answered easily and producable at will and device.
> But all of this may not move fast enough for some.
It moves as fast as it moves, and science may or may not eventually
provide the answer -- is there any reason to abandon philosophical
inquiry while we wait?
> > McCrone doesn't directly address Brazzale's point, but rather uses
> > it as a premise to dismiss the Hard Problem, which is a real shame
> > because Brazzale has an excellent point. The Hard Problem exists
> > only because science is attempting to study consciousness with a
> > method that has been created by explicitly ignoring consciousness.
>
> McCrone is cool because he makes an issue of what you say is
> completely lacking in these kinds of sciences. Consciousness. I am not
> sure about his response but was using his example of "what it feels
> like to be a car driving."
A large section of the field of Consciousness Studies attempts to make a
scientific issue of consciousness -- McCrone is far from a lone crusader
here, and I applaud their attempts.
> > The "third option" as you put it is the approach taken by the likes
> > of James and Whitehead -- to consider the most primary units of the
> > world as units of pure experience, not units of some kind of
> > non-experiential substrate called "matter" that even physicists no
> > longer believe in.
>
> Isn't this what systems theory is all about? The qualities that appear
> when networks of processes appear in patterns? Complexity theory is
> just now making it into acedemic acceptance, how long before the
> spirit of all processes are accepted as experiences? Some networks of
> processes have a way to monitor this time/change spirit, and some
> networks of processes don't have that potential configuability.
>
> Music of the brain, music of the world, all patterns of networks of
> process.
How are we to determine whether any aspect of a self-organizing physical
system does or does not experience the unfolding of its processes?
1Z
>
> The first thing that must happen for conscious experience to be subsumed
> into the scientific enterprise is that scientists should provide a
> reliable means of determining whether an object consciously experiences
> or not.
Well, we already have a reliable means of determining whether a *subject* does:
ask them.
Why do we need to make the subjective objective ? Can't we
have a science that bridges the two ?
>As
> How are we to determine whether any aspect of a self-organizing physical
> system does or does not experience the unfolding of its processes?
To think that there is some question as to
whether a pond or hurricane might just possibly be conscious
you first have to believe that conscious experience can be separated from
other aspects of mentality. How likely is that ?
Immortalist
> > > > Our goal is to emulate experience loc. We will not be hindered by
> > > > pety concerns about the correctness of such. It seems a lie that
> > > > researchers no longer seek an explaination of experience or "feels
> > > > like it feels." Certainly not me anyway, experience is the main
> > > > priority for the emulation of being with materials we have.
> > >
> > > Excellent -- and may you make many breakthroughs in the process.
> >
> > Is a resurrection machine possible if the clone called your next
> > moment casts the current clone to the past?
>
> When an "actual occasion" (to use Whitehead's term) appropriates its
> predecessor, that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual
> occasion. Talk of resurrection and cloning seem out of context here.
>
>
>
Resurrection or cloning could produce either simulations or "mutual
simulations" we call emulations. I think resurrection would mean "at least
emulated to the required degree that it is identical.
"that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual occasion." seems a
cool principle but if we had the data to not only resurrect someone but set
that persons life going from any point in his life, this memory doesn't seem
necessary. Acknoledging of course that the networks of processes and their
configurable neural substrates contain everything necessary for remembering
any point in life, or contains everything that a person is or can think. So
we have to learn about just a few entire brain configurations to det the
persons entire life in motion from that point when the configuration was
detected and then set into an "actual occaision." I don't see how mutual
occaision negates it's own synonyms.
> > > Opening the conversation with McCrone you quoted Steven Brazzale who
> > > said:
> > >
> > > "In trying to understand what gives rise to consciousness, one
> > > doesn't want to know what makes a person "appear" conscious; one
> > > wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomena - I must
> > > therefore put my own personal consciousness on the stage. But I
> > > cannot do this. I cannot stand outside my own consciousness and look
> > > at it and its workings. The best I can manage is some reflections on
> > > myself, but then I am looking at myself in some detached way, that
> > > is not much better than observing someone else's inferred
> > > consciousness. We cannot consciously observe our own consciousness
> > > as a whole."
> >
> > If he wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomenon, why must
> > he put his own personal consciousness on the stage?
>
> Because we don't have access to anybody else's consciousness.
>
When we sign or talk we have "some access" to another persons consciousness.
We can get in the general mood and see it from their perspective through
empathy.
We learn to read and manipulate this skill further.
We imagine logically consistent science fiction scenarios.
We may learn to plug our brains into external information processing
devices.
We may learn to connet two brains together to less or greater degrees of
topologial mapping.
We may learn how to focus the connection in particular areas and by pass the
degree of empathy we know read each others experience by.
If we over time perfect these ways of interface there will probably be still
skepticism in these affairs even if the skeptic actually was the experience
when connected.
Immortalist
"1Z" <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:fd762132.03101...@posting.google.com...
By "Process Realism" -direct-ontology- feelitbaaaaabyyyy!
ABSTRACT: The paper argues that causal systems and spatial patterns are
species of the same genus, namely pattern, and that a clear view of spatial
patterns throws light on some aspects of the ontological nature of causal
systems. In particular, it is argued that all patterns (and systems) depend
on a fiat delimitation of something which in itself is a unity without
borders. (Pattern_realism) is true.
["Every science studies systems of some kind, whether natural (physical,
chemical, biological, or social) or artificial (technical). Moreover most
sciences study nothing but systems"([ 1] p.1). I agree whole-heartedly.
However, in my view, systems make up some special species of the genus
pattern. ]
PATTERN AS AN ONTOLOGICAL CATEGORY
http://hem1.passagen.se/ijohansson/ontology5.htm
Keynes
>"andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message news:<bVrhb.3
>
>>
>> The first thing that must happen for conscious experience to be subsumed
>> into the scientific enterprise is that scientists should provide a
>> reliable means of determining whether an object consciously experiences
>> or not.
>
>
>Well, we already have a reliable means of determining whether a *subject* does:
>ask them.
Sure. I just program the turing machine to claim consciousness.
>Why do we need to make the subjective objective ? Can't we
>have a science that bridges the two ?
>
Only when we understand subjectivity. Not likely.
>
>>As
>> How are we to determine whether any aspect of a self-organizing physical
>> system does or does not experience the unfolding of its processes?
>
>To think that there is some question as to
>whether a pond or hurricane might just possibly be conscious
>you first have to believe that conscious experience can be separated from
>other aspects of mentality. How likely is that ?
Very likely. Anyone can do it.
Human consciousness is accessable to our own investigation.
Right now we know for sure that much of human activity is
performed unconsciously. This includes learned habits and skills
which *must be performed unconsciously to succeed - walking,
talking, sports, bike riding, performing music, etc, etc.
Conscious attention is necessary to form a habit or a skill but
afterwards it is a hindrance to performance. Attention is
difficult to direct, and that's what makes schooling so tedious
and difficult for students, unless they have an interest in the
subject. So here, emotion seems to aid or to oppose the
direction of conscious awareness.
Thinking itself is an unconscious act. We can be conscious of thought,
but consciousness doesn't *produce the thoughts. They just appear
magically in a sort of a string of associations, unwilled and
undirected. We can be conscious of emotions, but they are produced
as responses to circumstances and operate continually whether we
are conscious of them or not. All the senses operate all the time,
but we are very seldom conscious of them.
Conscious awareness is our being, but it is very loosely connected
to a body or a mind, whose actions are continuous but largely
unnoticed, and therefore unconscious.
Thinking, emotion and sensation are occasional objects of conscious
awareness. Conscious awareness is continuous, but it's objects are
this and that. Awareness can be directed in many cases, but not
easily and not for long. It will fly from flower to flower with a
will of it's own.
The directing of conscious attention is the aim of some forms of
meditation. In those processes one learns that thought does not
depend on consciousness, although one's attention is often drawn
to thought magnetically. This 'natural' state can be overcome with
practice, and attention can be directed to sensations unmediated
by the binary grid of conceptualization. Intuition then bypasses
verbal dissection to give a more satisfying sense of being.
Among other things.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:bVrhb.3$YI1....@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
>
> > > moment casts the current clone to the past?
> >
> > When an "actual occasion" (to use Whitehead's term) appropriates its
> > predecessor, that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual
> > occasion. Talk of resurrection and cloning seem out of context here.
>
> Resurrection or cloning could produce either simulations or "mutual
> simulations" we call emulations. I think resurrection would mean "at
> least emulated to the required degree that it is identical.
>
> "that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual occasion."
> seems a cool principle but if we had the data to not only resurrect
> someone but set that persons life going from any point in his life,
> this memory doesn't seem necessary. Acknoledging of course that the
> networks of processes and their configurable neural substrates contain
> everything necessary for remembering any point in life, or contains
> everything that a person is or can think. So we have to learn about
> just a few entire brain configurations to det the persons entire life
> in motion from that point when the configuration was detected and then
> set into an "actual occaision." I don't see how mutual occaision
> negates it's own synonyms.
If I understand you correctly then you're suggesting that if we start
with a lump of "matter" (i.e. some substance devoid of experience) and
organize it in exactly the same manner as somebody's brain, then it
should automatically begin experiencing as if it were that very person
with all the memories that person had at the time when the brain was
logged for copying (assuming no restriction on technology).
Whitehead's metaphysics propose that the most fundamental units that
constitute the world are units of experience, so there is no "substance
devoid of experience". Whatever "matter" we start with will have had its
own prior occasions of experience, and when assembled into a facsimile
of somebody's brain, not having had the prior occasions of experience of
that particular person, it would not emulate or simulate that person.
> > > If he wants to know what gives rise to the actual phenomenon, why
> > > must he put his own personal consciousness on the stage?
> >
> > Because we don't have access to anybody else's consciousness.
>
> When we sign or talk we have "some access" to another persons
> consciousness. We can get in the general mood and see it from their
> perspective through empathy.
>
> We learn to read and manipulate this skill further.
>
> We imagine logically consistent science fiction scenarios.
>
> We may learn to plug our brains into external information processing
> devices.
>
> We may learn to connet two brains together to less or greater degrees
> of topologial mapping.
>
> We may learn how to focus the connection in particular areas and by
> pass the degree of empathy we know read each others experience by.
>
> If we over time perfect these ways of interface there will probably be
> still skepticism in these affairs even if the skeptic actually was the
> experience when connected.
If it ever comes to this then I don't see how skepticism could be
maintained.
Immortalist
Then if you agree with Whitehead does this mean you and he don't believe it
is possible that you can exist now? Or are you claiming that it is not
possible for human consciousness to begin at a particular time?
If the developing embryo discovered this being are you saying that no matter
how advanced our technology we could not do likewise. What does the
ontological category of embryo have that negates that humans couldn't do the
same?
But as for the first spark, the first act of experienceing will be machine
contingent but from there on its autopoetic of self-assembling.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:WwDhb.874$Cw3...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > start with a lump of "matter" (i.e. some substance devoid of
> > experience) and organize it in exactly the same manner as somebody's
> > brain, then it should automatically begin experiencing as if it were
> > that very person with all the memories that person had at the time
> > when the brain was logged for copying (assuming no restriction on
> > technology).
> >
> > Whitehead's metaphysics propose that the most fundamental units that
> > constitute the world are units of experience, so there is no
> > "substance devoid of experience". Whatever "matter" we start with
> > will have had its own prior occasions of experience, and when
> > assembled into a facsimile of somebody's brain, not having had the
> > prior occasions of experience of that particular person, it would
> > not emulate or simulate that person.
>
> Then if you agree with Whitehead does this mean you and he don't
> believe it is possible that you can exist now? Or are you claiming
> that it is not possible for human consciousness to begin at a
> particular time?
Excellent questions Immortalist.
Do I exist right now? Well the answer depends on what I consider myself
to be. If I consider myself to be the actual occasion that prehended its
predecessor, then I exist fleetingly -- i.e. until I'm prehended by the
next actual occasion and thereby become nothing more than a memory. But
if I consider myself to be some abiding entity that persists over a
series of actual occasions, then I'm guilty of the Fallacy of Misplaced
Concreteness -- there is nothing in any actual occasion that corresponds
to this "me".
Does human consciousness begin at a particular time? I can take the
question to refer to either phylogeny or to ontogeny, but since your
next paragraph mentions the developing embryo I guess you must be asking
about the latter. I don't know how Whitehead would have answered such a
question, but I'll have a bash at it anyway ...
The developing embryo grows from cells that themselves have experiential
correlates, or actual occasions (I believe this would be consistent with
Whiteheadian metaphysics.) The embryo itself, as an actual occasion,
would be prehending some of those correlates. As it grows, the
experiential content of the actual occasions associated with the embryo
would become progressively richer. At what point one might refer to this
field as "human consciousness" is up for grabs.
> If the developing embryo discovered this being are you saying that no
> matter how advanced our technology we could not do likewise. What does
> the ontological category of embryo have that negates that humans
> couldn't do the same?
>
> But as for the first spark, the first act of experienceing will be
> machine contingent but from there on its autopoetic of
> self-assembling.
Forgive me for asking, but did you just get back from the bar, or is
English not your native language? (sincere questions, no sarcasm
intended.)
Immortalist
So "properly placed correctness" would be like saying that the motion I see
on the wall from an old noisy movie projector comes not from any single
picture in and along the film strip but is "time_contextual" or in a context
of individuals passing by the shutter fleetingly?
If so it seems the mis-placing would be like the fallacy of composition.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composition.html
attributing qualities of the context to the text or pre-text even though at
least some strange attractors tecelate the same pattern on all scales,
usually each level of scale [pretext-text-context/micro/meso/macro] has it's
own rules and the elements or components are not self-similar to the
features which come flickering of them
> Does human consciousness begin at a particular time? I can take the
> question to refer to either phylogeny or to ontogeny, but since your
> next paragraph mentions the developing embryo I guess you must be asking
> about the latter. I don't know how Whitehead would have answered such a
> question, but I'll have a bash at it anyway ...
>
> The developing embryo grows from cells that themselves have experiential
> correlates, or actual occasions (I believe this would be consistent with
> Whiteheadian metaphysics.) The embryo itself, as an actual occasion,
> would be prehending some of those correlates. As it grows, the
> experiential content of the actual occasions associated with the embryo
> would become progressively richer. At what point one might refer to this
> field as "human consciousness" is up for grabs.
>
---The developing embryo grows from cells that themselves have experiential
correlates, or actual occasions.
---The embryo itself, as an actual occasion, would be prehending some of
those correlates.
here we observe subsumption architecture or the "prehension of correlates?":
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch3-b.html
---As it grows, the experiential content of the actual occasions associated
with the embryo would become progressively richer.
---At what point one might refer to this field as "human consciousness" is
up for grabs.
Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are as possible
as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this "progressively richer" we might
come on to something.
>
>
> > If the developing embryo discovered this being are you saying that no
> > matter how advanced our technology we could not do likewise. What does
> > the ontological category of embryo have that negates that humans
> > couldn't do the same?
> >
> > But as for the first spark, the first act of experienceing will be
> > machine contingent but from there on its autopoetic of
> > self-assembling.
>
> Forgive me for asking, but did you just get back from the bar, or is
> English not your native language? (sincere questions, no sarcasm
> intended.)
>
DaDa -joeMammasMamma
The possibility space of all possibilities reveal some laws of physics and
potential forms. If there are X number of possible processes and a lesser
number in actuality in the universe do these possible but not occuring
processes able to "progressively richer" with their network of correlates?
>
andy-k
>
> Resurrection or cloning could produce either simulations or "mutual
> simulations" we call emulations. I think resurrection would mean "at
least
> emulated to the required degree that it is identical.
>
> "that predecessor becomes part of memory for the actual occasion."
seems a
> cool principle but if we had the data to not only resurrect someone
but set
> that persons life going from any point in his life, this memory
doesn't seem
> necessary. Acknoledging of course that the networks of processes and
their
> configurable neural substrates contain everything necessary for
remembering
> any point in life, or contains everything that a person is or can
think. So
> we have to learn about just a few entire brain configurations to det
the
> persons entire life in motion from that point when the configuration
was
> detected and then set into an "actual occaision." I don't see how
mutual
> occaision negates it's own synonyms.
Aha! The penny's only just dropped as to why you go by the handles
"Immortalist" and "Reanimater". Now I have a better idea of where you're
coming from. Sorry to have been so slow.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:ATEhb.957$Cw3...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > myself to be. If I consider myself to be the actual occasion that
> > prehended its predecessor, then I exist fleetingly -- i.e. until I'm
> > prehended by the next actual occasion and thereby become nothing
> > more than a memory. But if I consider myself to be some abiding
> > entity that persists over a series of actual occasions, then I'm
> > guilty of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness -- there is nothing
> > in any actual occasion that corresponds to this "me".
>
> So "properly placed correctness" would be like saying that the motion
> I see on the wall from an old noisy movie projector comes not from any
> single picture in and along the film strip but is "time_contextual" or
> in a context of individuals passing by the shutter fleetingly?
>
> If so it seems the mis-placing would be like the fallacy of
> composition.
> http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composition.html
>
> attributing qualities of the context to the text or pre-text even
> though at least some strange attractors tecelate the same pattern on
> all scales, usually each level of scale
> [pretext-text-context/micro/meso/macro] has it's own rules and the
> elements or components are not self-similar to the features which come
> flickering of them
Whitehead speaks of the Fallacy of Misplaced *Concreteness*, not
Misplaced *Correctness*, but I think the movie projector analogy is
quite apt.
There is certainly a hierarchy of information processing in Genghis, but
that wouldn't necessarily confer a single consciousness on Genghis, any
more than we could confer a single consciousness on a pile of sand as it
reconfigures itself.
You're getting very close to what has been regarded as a flaw in
Whitehead's metaphysics, namely the Combination Problem. This was also
highlighted earlier by William James as an objection to panpsychism,
though later in life James seems to have adopted panpsychism or
something very like it. And even earlier than that, it was highlighted
by Kant as an objection to Leibniz' monadology (very similar to
Whitehead's metaphysics.)
The question is how a multiplicity of actual occasions can contribute to
a single actual occasion (combine.) David Ray Griffin gives this problem
some attention in his article in JCS 4.3, referring back to an article
by William Seager in JCS 2.3. I like their approach, though I wouldn't
like to have to explain the details of it (there's enough there for a
whole new thread.)
> ---As it grows, the experiential content of the actual occasions
> associated with the embryo would become progressively richer.
>
> ---At what point one might refer to this field as "human
> consciousness" is up for grabs.
>
> Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are as
> possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this "progressively
> richer" we might come on to something.
Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody else's
lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that lifetime
event-for-event?
> The possibility space of all possibilities reveal some laws of physics
> and potential forms. If there are X number of possible processes and a
> lesser number in actuality in the universe do these possible but not
> occuring processes able to "progressively richer" with their network
> of correlates?
We need a change of perspective here -- I think the phase space of all
possibilities is particularly relevant (see Julian Barbour's book "The
End of Time",) but from Whitehead's perspective this would not be a
phase space of all possible configurations of material systems. It would
be the phase space of all possible configurations of *experience*. Any
particular "lived world" would then be a trajectory through that phase
space, the transition from one point to the next consisting of the
prehension of that point by its successor plus whatever is specific to
the successor. Thus we have the potential for actual occasions of
increasing richness.
Immortalist
But consciousness is part of a larger class of processes or networks of
processes. "Walking" is to be somewhat anologically synonomous with
consciousness but the main point about "prehended correlates" being
identical with "subsumption architecture" remains valid and sound.
Walking becomes irreducable and the legs brains are irreducable.
> You're getting very close to what has been regarded as a flaw in
> Whitehead's metaphysics, namely the Combination Problem. This was also
> highlighted earlier by William James as an objection to panpsychism,
> though later in life James seems to have adopted panpsychism or
> something very like it. And even earlier than that, it was highlighted
> by Kant as an objection to Leibniz' monadology (very similar to
> Whitehead's metaphysics.)
>
> The question is how a multiplicity of actual occasions can contribute to
> a single actual occasion (combine.) David Ray Griffin gives this problem
> some attention in his article in JCS 4.3, referring back to an article
> by William Seager in JCS 2.3. I like their approach, though I wouldn't
> like to have to explain the details of it (there's enough there for a
> whole new thread.)
>
How can letters which could be actual occaision combined into words which
are an actual occaision at the contextual level to the letters.
On up a hierarchy of groups of actual occasions which have a movement in a
function which is the word. Words as actual occasions when combined and
ruled by the traffic function sentence which itself becomes a memer of the
class paragraph occaision. Actual occasions and contextual functions. [cars
moving along a highway]
how can three notes on a piano sound out an irreducable chord?
>
>
> > ---As it grows, the experiential content of the actual occasions
> > associated with the embryo would become progressively richer.
> >
> > ---At what point one might refer to this field as "human
> > consciousness" is up for grabs.
> >
> > Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are as
> > possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this "progressively
> > richer" we might come on to something.
>
> Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody else's
> lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that lifetime
> event-for-event?
>
Then you have found a minimal duration of moments for the ontology of the
self?
Then the potential changes that can take place during the next moments
require the entire life to take place?
If the body could be duplicated well are you saying if the atomic
configuration is nearly identical to me and it begins proceeding through
moments with memories that it doesn't have these memories really through
this scaffoulding or shoe horn effect?
How would one argue that the particular history is the only way to get to
this configuration and then the next?
>
>
> > The possibility space of all possibilities reveal some laws of physics
> > and potential forms. If there are X number of possible processes and a
> > lesser number in actuality in the universe do these possible but not
> > occuring processes able to "progressively richer" with their network
> > of correlates?
>
> We need a change of perspective here -- I think the phase space of all
> possibilities is particularly relevant (see Julian Barbour's book "The
> End of Time",) but from Whitehead's perspective this would not be a
> phase space of all possible configurations of material systems. It would
> be the phase space of all possible configurations of *experience*.
So then there are possible configurations of experience that may not have
been an actual occaision?
> Any
> particular "lived world" would then be a trajectory through that phase
> space, the transition from one point to the next consisting of the
> prehension of that point by its successor plus whatever is specific to
> the successor. Thus we have the potential for actual occasions of
> increasing richness.
>
Here I would like to ask if Whitehead saw the limits of "increasing
richness" which is now proven to be "The Braess's Paradox":
---------------------------------
A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the
logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs. Economists now reckon
that commercial products are best treated as though they were services. It's
not what you sell a customer, its what you do for them. It's not what
something is, it's what it is connected to, what it does. Flows become more
important than resources. Behavior counts.
Network logic is counterintuitive. Say you need to lay a telephone cable
that will connect a bunch of cities; let's make that three for illustration:
Kansas City, San Diego, and Seattle. The total length of the lines
connecting those three cities is 3,000 miles. Common sense says that if you
add a fourth city to your telephone network, the total length of your cable
will have to increase. But that's not how network logic works. By adding a
fourth city as a hub (let's make that Salt Lake City) and running the lines
from each of the three cities through Salt Lake City, we can decrease the
total mileage of cable to 2,850 or 5 percent less than the original 3,000
miles. Therefore the total unraveled length of a network can be shortened by
adding nodes to it! Yet there is a limit to this effect. Frank Hwang and
Ding Zhu Du, working at Bell Laboratories in 1990, proved that the best
savings a system might enjoy from introducing new points into a network
would peak at about 13 percent. More is different.
<><><> On the other hand, in 1968 Dietrich Braess, a German operations
researcher, discovered that adding routes to an already congested network
will only slow it down. Now called Braess's Paradox, scientists have found
many examples of how adding capacity to a crowded network reduces its
overall production. In the late 1960s the city planners of Stuttgart tried
to ease downtown traffic by adding a street. When they did, traffic got
worse; then they blocked it off and traffic improved. In 1992, New York City
closed congested 42nd Street on Earth Day, fearing the worst, but traffic
actually improved that day.
Then again, in 1990, three scientists working on networks of brain neurons
reported that increasing the gain-the responsivity-of individual neurons did
not increase their individual signal detection performance, but it did
increase the performance of the whole network to detect signals.
Nets have their own logic, one that is out-of-kilter to our expectations.
And this logic will quickly mold the culture of humans living in a networked
world. What we get from heavy-duty communication networks, and the networks
of parallel computing, and the networks of distributed appliances and
distributed being is Network Culture.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch2-g.html
>
Immortalist
var msg="The materialistic starting point is from independently existing
substances - matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its
external relations of locomomotion and the mind suffers modifications of its
contemplated objects. There are in this materialistic theory two sorts of
independent substances each qualified by their appropriate passions. The
organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realization of
events disposed in an inter-locked community. the event is the unit of
things real.........ALFRED WHITEHEAD....";
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:Sd6ib.47$yR6...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > but that wouldn't necessarily confer a single consciousness on
> > Genghis, any more than we could confer a single consciousness on a
> > pile of sand as it reconfigures itself.
>
> But consciousness is part of a larger class of processes or networks
> of processes. "Walking" is to be somewhat anologically synonomous with
> consciousness but the main point about "prehended correlates" being
> identical with "subsumption architecture" remains valid and sound.
>
> Walking becomes irreducable and the legs brains are irreducable.
If I understand Whitehead correctly, there is no "larger class of
processes or networks of processes" than experience. All other processes
(e.g. walking) describe what is happening to the *contents* of
experience. Experience is absolutely primary.
> > You're getting very close to what has been regarded as a flaw in
> > Whitehead's metaphysics, namely the Combination Problem. This was
> > also highlighted earlier by William James as an objection to
> > panpsychism, though later in life James seems to have adopted
> > panpsychism or something very like it. And even earlier than that,
> > it was highlighted by Kant as an objection to Leibniz' monadology
> > (very similar to Whitehead's metaphysics.)
> >
> > The question is how a multiplicity of actual occasions can
> > contribute to a single actual occasion (combine.) David Ray Griffin
> > gives this problem some attention in his article in JCS 4.3,
> > referring back to an article by William Seager in JCS 2.3. I like
> > their approach, though I wouldn't like to have to explain the
> > details of it (there's enough there for a whole new thread.)
>
> How can letters which could be actual occaision combined into words
> which are an actual occaision at the contextual level to the letters.
>
> On up a hierarchy of groups of actual occasions which have a movement
> in a function which is the word. Words as actual occasions when
> combined and ruled by the traffic function sentence which itself
> becomes a memer of the class paragraph occaision. Actual occasions and
> contextual functions. [cars moving along a highway]
>
> how can three notes on a piano sound out an irreducable chord?
What you're referring to here are relationships between the contents of
experience. What Whitehead makes absolutely fundamental are the moments
of experience themselves.
> > > Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are as
> > > possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this
> > > "progressively richer" we might come on to something.
> >
> > Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody else's
> > lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that lifetime
> > event-for-event?
>
> Then you have found a minimal duration of moments for the ontology of
> the self?
>
> Then the potential changes that can take place during the next moments
> require the entire life to take place?
Yes.
> If the body could be duplicated well are you saying if the atomic
> configuration is nearly identical to me and it begins proceeding
> through moments with memories that it doesn't have these memories
> really through this scaffoulding or shoe horn effect?
>
> How would one argue that the particular history is the only way to get
> to this configuration and then the next?
Every molecule of a body is itself the physical pole of an actual
occasion -- i.e. it is an experience that has prehended its predecessor.
Over the whole lifetime of that body there has emerged an over-arching
actual occasion that comprises the accumulated experience of that body
over the whole of its lifetime.
If you just acquire all of the right molecules and assemble them in the
correct configuration to make a perfect copy of that body, you would
have an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the accumulated
experience of *that* body over *that* lifetime -- i.e. *not* an
experiential copy of the physical body you've copied.
> > We need a change of perspective here -- I think the phase space of
> > all possibilities is particularly relevant (see Julian Barbour's
> > book "The End of Time",) but from Whitehead's perspective this would
> > not be a phase space of all possible configurations of material
> > systems. It would be the phase space of all possible configurations
> > of *experience*.
>
> So then there are possible configurations of experience that may not
> have been an actual occaision?
Nature is perpetually creative -- actual occasions are created anew
every instant, and any particular actualization means that there are a
multiplicity of possibilities that have remained unactualized.
This bit reminds me of Bergson's notion of Creative Evolution (is
Wordsmith following this thread?)
> > Any
> > particular "lived world" would then be a trajectory through that
> > phase space, the transition from one point to the next consisting of
> > the prehension of that point by its successor plus whatever is
> > specific to the successor. Thus we have the potential for actual
> > occasions of increasing richness.
>
> Here I would like to ask if Whitehead saw the limits of "increasing
> richness" which is now proven to be "The Braess's Paradox":
The kinds of process you are addressing are processes that go on amidst
the *contents* (i.e. the physical poles) of experience. When Whitehead
talks of "process" he is extending the concept to a much wider scope.
Processes that are evident over a sequence of actual occasions are
merely the "precipitate", if you will, of the Whiteheadian kind of
"process".
The latter, more encompassing, mode of process is called "eternal", not
in the sense of "everlasting", but in the sense of being "outside time"
as we normally conceive of it. Our concept of time is part of the
precipitate -- i.e. part of that subset of Whiteheadian process that you
are treating as the whole of process.
These ideas are very reminiscent of Heraclitus (it would be a pity if
Wordsmith isn't following this thread).
andy-k
>
> "The materialistic starting point is from independently existing
> substances - matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications
> of its external relations of locomomotion and the mind suffers
> modifications of its contemplated objects. There are in this
> materialistic theory two sorts of independent substances each
> qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point is
> from the analysis of process as the realization of events disposed in
> an inter-locked community. the event is the unit of things real."
Here Whitehead is rejecting the idea of independently existing
substances (mind and matter) in favor of an alternative to substance
dualism and even to materialistic monism. He is promoting an organic
ontology that consists of events (actual occasions of experience) in a
constant state of change (process, modification, passion) and that
interlock (mutual immanence) to yield the organic wholeness. Actual
occasions of experience are the fundamental units of reality in this
ontology.
Immortalist
> "Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:voj87d8...@corp.supernews.com...
> > "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> > news:Sd6ib.47$yR6...@newsfep1-gui.server.ntli.net...
> > >
> > > There is certainly a hierarchy of information processing in Genghis,
> > > but that wouldn't necessarily confer a single consciousness on
> > > Genghis, any more than we could confer a single consciousness on a
> > > pile of sand as it reconfigures itself.
> >
> > But consciousness is part of a larger class of processes or networks
> > of processes. "Walking" is to be somewhat anologically synonomous with
> > consciousness but the main point about "prehended correlates" being
> > identical with "subsumption architecture" remains valid and sound.
> >
> > Walking becomes irreducable and the legs brains are irreducable.
>
> If I understand Whitehead correctly, there is no "larger class of
> processes or networks of processes" than experience. All other processes
> (e.g. walking) describe what is happening to the *contents* of
> experience. Experience is absolutely primary.
>
prehended correlates are not experiences then?
>
>
> > > You're getting very close to what has been regarded as a flaw in
> > > Whitehead's metaphysics, namely the Combination Problem. This was
> > > also highlighted earlier by William James as an objection to
> > > panpsychism, though later in life James seems to have adopted
> > > panpsychism or something very like it. And even earlier than that,
> > > it was highlighted by Kant as an objection to Leibniz' monadology
> > > (very similar to Whitehead's metaphysics.)
> > >
> > > The question is how a multiplicity of actual occasions can
> > > contribute to a single actual occasion (combine.) David Ray Griffin
> > > gives this problem some attention in his article in JCS 4.3,
> > > referring back to an article by William Seager in JCS 2.3. I like
> > > their approach, though I wouldn't like to have to explain the
> > > details of it (there's enough there for a whole new thread.)
> >
> > How can letters which could be actual occaision combined into words
> > which are an actual occaision at the contextual level to the letters.
> >
> > On up a hierarchy of groups of actual occasions which have a movement
> > in a function which is the word. Words as actual occasions when
> > combined and ruled by the traffic function sentence which itself
> > becomes a memer of the class paragraph occaision. Actual occasions and
> > contextual functions. [cars moving along a highway]
> >
> > how can three notes on a piano sound out an irreducable chord?
>
> What you're referring to here are relationships between the contents of
> experience. What Whitehead makes absolutely fundamental are the moments
> of experience themselves.
>
But I was reveiwing some Whitehead and there was this concrescence portrayed
one way I couldn't find on the internet, in a way that could describe the
hierarchy of experiences, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters
[satisfaction].
concrescence -- a dipolar process involving an interplay between physical
feelings and mental valuations (PR 108) in which prehensions of early phases
are contrasted in later phases. In short, it is the production of novel
togetherness (PR 21.)
satisfaction -- the final stage in concrescence when it perishes as an
experiencing subject and becomes an object.
http://grad.cgu.edu/~combsc/glossary.html
Events appear as indefinite entities without clear demarcations and with
mutual relations of baffling complexity. They seem, so to speak, deficient
in thinghood. (PNK 73)
http://grad.cgu.edu/~combsc/event.html
Concrescence is the name given to the process that is any given actual
entity; it is "the real internal constitution of a particular existent" [PR
320]. Concrescence is the growing together of a many into the unity of a
one. The initial phase of a concrescence is composed of the separate
feelings of the disjunctively diverse entities that make up the actual world
of the actual entity in question. Subsequent phases effect the growing
together, the concrescence, of these many separate feelings into one unity
of feeling, which is termed the satisfaction of that actual entity.
"Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many
things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item
of the 'many' to its subordination in the constitution of the novel 'one'"
[PR 321]. With the attaining of its satisfaction an actual entity is
completed and perishes--i.e., it becomes a datum for fresh instances of
concrescence. . . .
http://www.websyte.com/alan/termin.htm
http://www.hyattcarter.com/glossary.htm
Concrescence ... "The many become one and are increased by one." So said
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the more incredible minds of the Twentieth
Century. This is the nature of creativity, the nature of nature, if you
will. The universe is expanding. Atomic event by atomic event, an actual
occasion at a time, the universe as we know it is collecting and adding to
itself. Each new moment in space and time is a summation of all that came
before, all that is, weighed against an almost infinite number of
possibilities of what the universe is to become. This constriction of
possibilities toward the ultimate goal of a new event in space/time is a
process called concrescence.
http://www.concrescence.com/deep.htm
‘Concrescence’ is the name for the process in which the universe of many
things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item
of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel one.
The most general term ‘thing’—or, equivalently, ‘entity’—means nothing else
than to be one of the ‘many’ which find their niches in each instance of
concrescence. Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual
‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concrescence’ and ‘the novel thing’:
when we analyse the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence.
‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete,
in abstraction from which there is mere nonentity. In other words,
abstraction from the notion of ‘entry into the concrete’ is a
self-contradictory notion, since it asks us to conceive a thing as not a
thing.
http://www.hyattcarter.com/process.htm
Whitehead and the Copenhagen Interpretation
http://www.nyx.net/~stmiller/Thesis/4.html
The final chapter of Whitehead's book, Process and Reality
http://www.hyattcarter.com/god_and_the_world.htm
third chapter of Whitehead's book, Religion in the Making.
http://www.hyattcarter.com/body_and_spirit.htm
more stuff--
http://www.hyattcarter.com/whitehead.htm
http://www.btinternet.com/~process/pro-web.htm
There are no fundamental "things," or "objects" in the world of Whitehead.
Whitehead's ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only
processes.
Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions.
Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same
form: that of the human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise
later. He once remarked to a friend that Immanuel Kant had written his books
in the wrong order: he should have started with his aesthetic Critique of
Judgment. Whitehead follows his own advice. He founds his world on
aesthetics, and treats physics as superstructure.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
The Contextual Index of Process and Reality
http://pweb.cc.sophia.ac.jp/~yutaka-t/process/context.htm
http://www.isp.ucl.ac.be/staff/Weber/papers/papers.html
>
>
> > > > Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are as
> > > > possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this
> > > > "progressively richer" we might come on to something.
> > >
> > > Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody else's
> > > lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that lifetime
> > > event-for-event?
> >
> > Then you have found a minimal duration of moments for the ontology of
> > the self?
> >
> > Then the potential changes that can take place during the next moments
> > require the entire life to take place?
>
> Yes.
>
Then you claim to know that only the embryo can bring forth experience and
no other activity in the universe can do so?
>
>
> > If the body could be duplicated well are you saying if the atomic
> > configuration is nearly identical to me and it begins proceeding
> > through moments with memories that it doesn't have these memories
> > really through this scaffoulding or shoe horn effect?
> >
> > How would one argue that the particular history is the only way to get
> > to this configuration and then the next?
>
> Every molecule of a body is itself the physical pole of an actual
> occasion -- i.e. it is an experience that has prehended its predecessor.
> Over the whole lifetime of that body there has emerged an over-arching
> actual occasion that comprises the accumulated experience of that body
> over the whole of its lifetime.
>
OK then we will resurrect you with molecules but the prehended part will be
a shortcut to the necessities.
More importantly how can one claim that all over-arching actual occaisions
must prehend only you mentioned predacessors? Arn't thos predocessors just
one way to get to the overarching actual occaison.
Do you support an infinite regress as consituting justification.
> If you just acquire all of the right molecules and assemble them in the
> correct configuration to make a perfect copy of that body, you would
> have an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the accumulated
> experience of *that* body over *that* lifetime -- i.e. *not* an
> experiential copy of the physical body you've copied.
>
But if both are configured exactly alike arn't they the same? Are you
claiming these occaisions are reflected in any other way than a change in
configuration?
Then you are proposing dualism? Somehow these magical experiences ride along
aside the necessary configuration and potential changes? Your proposing a
spirit that is something other than possible in particualr circumstances?
>
>
> > > We need a change of perspective here -- I think the phase space of
> > > all possibilities is particularly relevant (see Julian Barbour's
> > > book "The End of Time",) but from Whitehead's perspective this would
> > > not be a phase space of all possible configurations of material
> > > systems. It would be the phase space of all possible configurations
> > > of *experience*.
> >
> > So then there are possible configurations of experience that may not
> > have been an actual occaision?
>
> Nature is perpetually creative -- actual occasions are created anew
> every instant, and any particular actualization means that there are a
> multiplicity of possibilities that have remained unactualized.
> This bit reminds me of Bergson's notion of Creative Evolution (is
> Wordsmith following this thread?)
>
It should because isn't that where Whitehead got the idea?
These unactualized possibilities have only one way to become actual: the
embryological process? But we can create duplicate embryological processes
or shortened versions that can skip steps and fill them in in other ways.
>
>
> > > Any
> > > particular "lived world" would then be a trajectory through that
> > > phase space, the transition from one point to the next consisting of
> > > the prehension of that point by its successor plus whatever is
> > > specific to the successor. Thus we have the potential for actual
> > > occasions of increasing richness.
> >
> > Here I would like to ask if Whitehead saw the limits of "increasing
> > richness" which is now proven to be "The Braess's Paradox":
>
> The kinds of process you are addressing are processes that go on amidst
> the *contents* (i.e. the physical poles) of experience. When Whitehead
> talks of "process" he is extending the concept to a much wider scope.
> Processes that are evident over a sequence of actual occasions are
> merely the "precipitate", if you will, of the Whiteheadian kind of
> "process".
>
I am not ready to accept the evidence for the discrimination between
processes by such a shakey notion as experience as a criteria when all
processes may have a feel or over-arching class of activities.
> The latter, more encompassing, mode of process is called "eternal", not
> in the sense of "everlasting", but in the sense of being "outside time"
> as we normally conceive of it. Our concept of time is part of the
> precipitate -- i.e. part of that subset of Whiteheadian process that you
> are treating as the whole of process.
>
Oh, thats why they don't talk much Whitehead in systems theory. I wondered
about that.
> These ideas are very reminiscent of Heraclitus (it would be a pity if
> Wordsmith isn't following this thread).
>
Whitehead explicitly states that he considers Heraclutus doctrine of flux.
Immortalist
Yes this statement by Whitehead led me to discover 7 process fallacys back
in 95.
Whitehead has not shown how an experience can result from only one
particular run of events and not another that leaves the occaisions
identical. I call it the "process one run fallacy" as a slight varient of
the "process location fallacy"
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:Jqsib.29$yM1.1...@newsfep1-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > substances (mind and matter) in favor of an alternative to substance
> > dualism and even to materialistic monism. He is promoting an organic
> > ontology that consists of events (actual occasions of experience) in
> > a constant state of change (process, modification, passion) and that
> > interlock (mutual immanence) to yield the organic wholeness. Actual
> > occasions of experience are the fundamental units of reality in this
> > ontology.
>
> Yes this statement by Whitehead led me to discover 7 process fallacys
> back in 95.
>
> Whitehead has not shown how an experience can result from only one
> particular run of events and not another that leaves the occaisions
> identical. I call it the "process one run fallacy" as a slight varient
> of the "process location fallacy"
For Whithehead an experience doesn't result from a run of events -- a
run of event is a run of experiences. There would be no such thing as a
run of events that is not also a run of experiences.
Immortalist
What are experiences and where do they come from?
So a run of events has and "pre-established" harmony with a ghost?
How so?
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:Jqsib.28$yM1.1...@newsfep1-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > processes or networks of processes" than experience. All other
> > processes (e.g. walking) describe what is happening to the
> > *contents* of experience. Experience is absolutely primary.
>
> prehended correlates are not experiences then?
The contents of any actual occasion of experience may be regarded as
having a physical pole and a mental pole, but both poles are part of the
*experience*. Experience, being fundamental, is prehended by subsequent
experience. "Physical correlates" is just another way of talking about
the physical pole of experience.
> The most general term 'thing'-or, equivalently, 'entity'-means nothing
Some great reference here thanks Immortalist -- it's going to take me
some time to work my way through them.
Victor Lowe writes of "the danger of reading too much into the term
'feeling' ... to be 'felt' means to be included in an integrative,
partly self-creative atom of process, as part of the internal essence of
that process." Shimon Malin writes "Feeling is a relationship between
the one who feels and that which is felt. It is this meaning of the word
'feeling' that is generalized to encompass the relationship of any
actual entity as a process of self-creation with any other actual entity
that exists in its universe as a 'stubborn fact.' " And all of this
reminds me of Thomas Nagel's notion of consciousness as "what it feels
like to be a ...".
Concrescence, then, is what is happening when a multiplicity of actual
occasions agree on content -- the agreed upon content becomes the
"concrete" of their shared world (the objective pole), but it is still,
at its most fundamental level, *the content of experience*. The "fallacy
of misplaced concreteness" is the error of treating abstractions as if
they had concresced.
> > > > > Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are
> > > > > as possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this
> > > > > "progressively richer" we might come on to something.
> > > >
> > > > Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody
> > > > else's lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that
> > > > lifetime event-for-event?
> > >
> > > Then you have found a minimal duration of moments for the ontology
> > > of the self?
> > >
> > > Then the potential changes that can take place during the next
> > > moments require the entire life to take place?
> >
> > Yes.
>
> Then you claim to know that only the embryo can bring forth experience
> and no other activity in the universe can do so?
No. My claim is that if I understand Whitehead correctly then there is
*nothing but* experience, whether it is the activity of the embryo or
the activity of the humble mitochondrion.
> > Every molecule of a body is itself the physical pole of an actual
> > occasion -- i.e. it is an experience that has prehended its
> > predecessor. Over the whole lifetime of that body there has emerged
> > an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the accumulated
> > experience of that body over the whole of its lifetime.
>
> OK then we will resurrect you with molecules but the prehended part
> will be a shortcut to the necessities.
>
> More importantly how can one claim that all over-arching actual
> occaisions must prehend only you mentioned predacessors? Arn't thos
> predocessors just one way to get to the overarching actual occaison.
>
> Do you support an infinite regress as consituting justification.
Any actual occasion is the product of its predecessors, along with
whatever it contributes of itself. However, if we take the phase space
approach, then there may be a multiplicity of trajectories that converge
upon any particular actual entity within that phase space (this is
andy-k thinking out aloud, not Whitehead.)
I like this idea, but I suspect it won't afford a simple way to confer a
person's lifetime of experiences upon a clone -- I suspect that any of
the alternative trajectories would be equally as complicated as the
original lifetime of experiences. If you argue the contrary, however, I
would have no other reply than "I suspect". If you suspect differently
then we must simply leave it at that.
> > If you just acquire all of the right molecules and assemble them in
> > the correct configuration to make a perfect copy of that body, you
> > would have an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the
> > accumulated experience of *that* body over *that* lifetime -- i.e.
> > *not* an experiential copy of the physical body you've copied.
>
> But if both are configured exactly alike arn't they the same? Are you
> claiming these occaisions are reflected in any other way than a change
> in configuration?
Configuration isn't everything -- it's just the physical pole of an
actual occasion of experience. For Whitehead experience is more
fundamental than physical configuration, not vice versa.
> Then you are proposing dualism? Somehow these magical experiences ride
> along aside the necessary configuration and potential changes? Your
> proposing a spirit that is something other than possible in particualr
> circumstances?
No dualism here -- Whitehead was a monist, but the basis of his monism
is neither mind nor matter, it is experience.
> > Nature is perpetually creative -- actual occasions are created anew
> > every instant, and any particular actualization means that there are
> > a multiplicity of possibilities that have remained unactualized.
> > This bit reminds me of Bergson's notion of Creative Evolution (is
> > Wordsmith following this thread?)
>
> It should because isn't that where Whitehead got the idea?
Sound like it might be right, but I haven't looked into the influences
that led Whitehead to create his metaphysical system.
> These unactualized possibilities have only one way to become actual:
> the embryological process? But we can create duplicate embryological
> processes or shortened versions that can skip steps and fill them in
> in other ways.
You're not thinking big enough -- you'll have to be more adventurous if
you want to understand Whitehead. *Everything* experiences, not just
embryos. There is nothing *but* experience. There is no underlying
non-experiential "matter" in the world, there are only experiential
perspectives upon the world. Look up Leibniz' monadology if you want the
simple version (but remember that Leibniz was a child of his time, so
don't balk at his terminology.)
> > The kinds of process you are addressing are processes that go on
> > amidst the *contents* (i.e. the physical poles) of experience. When
> > Whitehead talks of "process" he is extending the concept to a much
> > wider scope. Processes that are evident over a sequence of actual
> > occasions are merely the "precipitate", if you will, of the
> > Whiteheadian kind of "process".
>
> I am not ready to accept the evidence for the discrimination between
> processes by such a shakey notion as experience as a criteria when all
> processes may have a feel or over-arching class of activities.
Good, because there is none. Whitehead constructed a metaphysical
system, not a scientific one. It is simply a "logically possible"
scenario, but breath-takingly consistent and rigorous, as you'd expect
from a mathematician. If you wish to undermine it then the only way
to proceed would be to identify a logical flaw.
> > The latter, more encompassing, mode of process is called "eternal",
> > not in the sense of "everlasting", but in the sense of being
> > "outside time" as we normally conceive of it. Our concept of time is
> > part of the precipitate -- i.e. part of that subset of Whiteheadian
> > process that you are treating as the whole of process.
>
> Oh, thats why they don't talk much Whitehead in systems theory. I
> wondered about that.
I can't see systems theorist having much time for Whitehead's
metaphysics -- they'd be interested in those processes entailed in the
physical pole of experience, to the exclusion of those processes by
which it's entailed.
> > These ideas are very reminiscent of Heraclitus (it would be a pity
> > if Wordsmith isn't following this thread).
>
> Whitehead explicitly states that he considers Heraclutus doctrine of
> flux.
It' quite a confidence booster to know that I'm making the right
connections then.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:YkMib.6$rL2....@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > a run of event is a run of experiences. There would be no such thing
> > as a run of events that is not also a run of experiences.
>
> What are experiences and where do they come from?
>
> So a run of events has and "pre-established" harmony with a ghost?
>
> How so?
Experiences are the fundamental building blocks of the world. Asking
where they came from is like asking where the world came from -- maybe
there was a big bang for experiences? -- maybe they always were (I think
this would be Whitehead's position, since his process philosophy entails
*atemporal* processes.)
Immortalist
So if we have a two minute movie of a dot travelling once across the screen,
the travelling is relative agreement or slight difference but not enough to
leave the polar region [necessary range] from similarity.
But this is emergence through concrescence or emergence by another name or
two names "concrete essence?"
Where was these experience before now?
>
>
> > > > > > Therefore Whitehead would claim that resurrection machines are
> > > > > > as possible as embryos. If we learn to manufacture this
> > > > > > "progressively richer" we might come on to something.
> > > > >
> > > > > Interesting thought -- but how would one manufacture somebody
> > > > > else's lifetime of experiences without having to re-live that
> > > > > lifetime event-for-event?
> > > >
> > > > Then you have found a minimal duration of moments for the ontology
> > > > of the self?
> > > >
> > > > Then the potential changes that can take place during the next
> > > > moments require the entire life to take place?
> > >
> > > Yes.
> >
> > Then you claim to know that only the embryo can bring forth experience
> > and no other activity in the universe can do so?
>
> No. My claim is that if I understand Whitehead correctly then there is
> *nothing but* experience, whether it is the activity of the embryo or
> the activity of the humble mitochondrion.
>
Then Whitehead would not make the claim that the particulat course of events
is necessarily and sufficiently the only way to produce the same experience?
>
>
> > > Every molecule of a body is itself the physical pole of an actual
> > > occasion -- i.e. it is an experience that has prehended its
> > > predecessor. Over the whole lifetime of that body there has emerged
> > > an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the accumulated
> > > experience of that body over the whole of its lifetime.
> >
> > OK then we will resurrect you with molecules but the prehended part
> > will be a shortcut to the necessities.
> >
> > More importantly how can one claim that all over-arching actual
> > occaisions must prehend only you mentioned predacessors? Arn't thos
> > predocessors just one way to get to the overarching actual occaison.
> >
> > Do you support an infinite regress as consituting justification.
>
> Any actual occasion is the product of its predecessors, along with
> whatever it contributes of itself. However, if we take the phase space
> approach, then there may be a multiplicity of trajectories that converge
> upon any particular actual entity within that phase space (this is
> andy-k thinking out aloud, not Whitehead.)
>
Emergence only makes claims about "products" too, whats the difference?
Are you now claiming that "the possibility space of all possibilities" is
misplaced concretness?
> I like this idea, but I suspect it won't afford a simple way to confer a
> person's lifetime of experiences upon a clone -- I suspect that any of
> the alternative trajectories would be equally as complicated as the
> original lifetime of experiences. If you argue the contrary, however, I
> would have no other reply than "I suspect". If you suspect differently
> then we must simply leave it at that.
>
Then your claiming that the present organization of brain/body is not alone
sufficient for this self even if properly set in biological motion but
originating from ten minutes of stiring chemicals?
So what I am at this moment is not enough for the next when in the world?
>
>
> > > If you just acquire all of the right molecules and assemble them in
> > > the correct configuration to make a perfect copy of that body, you
> > > would have an over-arching actual occasion that comprises the
> > > accumulated experience of *that* body over *that* lifetime -- i.e.
> > > *not* an experiential copy of the physical body you've copied.
> >
> > But if both are configured exactly alike arn't they the same? Are you
> > claiming these occaisions are reflected in any other way than a change
> > in configuration?
>
> Configuration isn't everything -- it's just the physical pole of an
> actual occasion of experience. For Whitehead experience is more
> fundamental than physical configuration, not vice versa.
>
So if I completely duplicate you biological in a few minutes and initiate
biological metabolism it will not be experiencing because it didn't
accumulate these dualistic ghosts of experiences.
If I replace all the parts one at a time on a car and then start it and
drive away are you saying it doesn't drive because it didn't go through that
particular assembly line etc...
>
>
> > Then you are proposing dualism? Somehow these magical experiences ride
> > along aside the necessary configuration and potential changes? Your
> > proposing a spirit that is something other than possible in particualr
> > circumstances?
>
> No dualism here -- Whitehead was a monist, but the basis of his monism
> is neither mind nor matter, it is experience.
>
In the beginning there was experiences? How did they get hear?
>
>
> > > Nature is perpetually creative -- actual occasions are created anew
> > > every instant, and any particular actualization means that there are
> > > a multiplicity of possibilities that have remained unactualized.
> > > This bit reminds me of Bergson's notion of Creative Evolution (is
> > > Wordsmith following this thread?)
> >
> > It should because isn't that where Whitehead got the idea?
>
> Sound like it might be right, but I haven't looked into the influences
> that led Whitehead to create his metaphysical system.
>
>
>
> > These unactualized possibilities have only one way to become actual:
> > the embryological process? But we can create duplicate embryological
> > processes or shortened versions that can skip steps and fill them in
> > in other ways.
>
> You're not thinking big enough -- you'll have to be more adventurous if
> you want to understand Whitehead. *Everything* experiences, not just
> embryos. There is nothing *but* experience. There is no underlying
> non-experiential "matter" in the world, there are only experiential
> perspectives upon the world. Look up Leibniz' monadology if you want the
> simple version (but remember that Leibniz was a child of his time, so
> don't balk at his terminology.)
>
Now the frame expands and any view not outside its umbrella is cast into
negation?
We have experiences and we can be pretty sure alot of animals have
experiences but where else can you verify in any way some experience?
I am trying to think if this is all a "religious gamble" or the "highest
possible being" argument modernized.
>
>
> > > The kinds of process you are addressing are processes that go on
> > > amidst the *contents* (i.e. the physical poles) of experience. When
> > > Whitehead talks of "process" he is extending the concept to a much
> > > wider scope. Processes that are evident over a sequence of actual
> > > occasions are merely the "precipitate", if you will, of the
> > > Whiteheadian kind of "process".
> >
> > I am not ready to accept the evidence for the discrimination between
> > processes by such a shakey notion as experience as a criteria when all
> > processes may have a feel or over-arching class of activities.
>
> Good, because there is none. Whitehead constructed a metaphysical
> system, not a scientific one. It is simply a "logically possible"
> scenario, but breath-takingly consistent and rigorous, as you'd expect
> from a mathematician. If you wish to undermine it then the only way
> to proceed would be to identify a logical flaw.
>
I have already found about 5 styles of attack but desire not to till I
understand these aspects of his theory better.
How would you completely state this metaphysic in 5 or 10 short propositions
so I can attack?
>
>
> > > The latter, more encompassing, mode of process is called "eternal",
> > > not in the sense of "everlasting", but in the sense of being
> > > "outside time" as we normally conceive of it. Our concept of time is
> > > part of the precipitate -- i.e. part of that subset of Whiteheadian
> > > process that you are treating as the whole of process.
> >
> > Oh, thats why they don't talk much Whitehead in systems theory. I
> > wondered about that.
>
> I can't see systems theorist having much time for Whitehead's
> metaphysics -- they'd be interested in those processes entailed in the
> physical pole of experience, to the exclusion of those processes by
> which it's entailed.
>
Can you give better examples of Whitehead pole?
Immortalist
Strange comparison with building blocks. Chemistry hasn't changed much since
quantum mechanics was discovered. The chemistry works whether there are
things or just processes.
Why does Whitehead's metaphysics negate the possibility that the two
extremes at either end of the spectrum aren't "processes" and "unicorns?"
>
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:%L4jb.3$2C.1...@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > 'feeling' ... to be 'felt' means to be included in an integrative,
> > partly self-creative atom of process, as part of the internal
> > essence of that process." Shimon Malin writes "Feeling is a
> > relationship between the one who feels and that which is felt. It is
> > this meaning of the word 'feeling' that is generalized to encompass
> > the relationship of any actual entity as a process of self-creation
> > with any other actual entity that exists in its universe as a
> > 'stubborn fact.' " And all of this reminds me of Thomas Nagel's
> > notion of consciousness as "what it feels like to be a ...".
> >
> > Concrescence, then, is what is happening when a multiplicity of
> > actual occasions agree on content -- the agreed upon content becomes
> > the "concrete" of their shared world (the objective pole), but it is
> > still, at its most fundamental level, *the content of experience*.
> > The "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" is the error of treating
> > abstractions as if they had concresced.
>
> So if we have a two minute movie of a dot travelling once across the
> screen, the travelling is relative agreement or slight difference but
> not enough to leave the polar region [necessary range] from
> similarity.
>
> But this is emergence through concrescence or emergence by another
> name or two names "concrete essence?"
>
> Where was these experience before now?
Hmm ... all I can say at this point is that I must be a complete failure
at explaining Whitehead's metaphysics as I understand it, or else you
wouldn't still be asking such questions.
> > > Then you claim to know that only the embryo can bring forth
> > > experience and no other activity in the universe can do so?
> >
> > No. My claim is that if I understand Whitehead correctly then there
> > is *nothing but* experience, whether it is the activity of the
> > embryo or the activity of the humble mitochondrion.
>
> Then Whitehead would not make the claim that the particulat course of
> events is necessarily and sufficiently the only way to produce the
> same experience?
I don't know how Whitehead would have answered that question, but my own
attempt was in the rest of that paragraph.
> > Any actual occasion is the product of its predecessors, along with
> > whatever it contributes of itself. However, if we take the phase
> > space approach, then there may be a multiplicity of trajectories
> > that converge upon any particular actual entity within that phase
> > space (this is andy-k thinking out aloud, not Whitehead.)
>
> Emergence only makes claims about "products" too, whats the
> difference?
>
> Are you now claiming that "the possibility space of all possibilities"
> is misplaced concretness?
No, though it may be.
> > I like this idea, but I suspect it won't afford a simple way to
> > confer a person's lifetime of experiences upon a clone -- I suspect
> > that any of the alternative trajectories would be equally as
> > complicated as the original lifetime of experiences. If you argue
> > the contrary, however, I would have no other reply than "I suspect".
> > If you suspect differently then we must simply leave it at that.
>
> Then your claiming that the present organization of brain/body is not
> alone sufficient for this self even if properly set in biological
> motion but originating from ten minutes of stiring chemicals?
>
> So what I am at this moment is not enough for the next when in the
> world?
What's this all about then?
> > Configuration isn't everything -- it's just the physical pole of an
> > actual occasion of experience. For Whitehead experience is more
> > fundamental than physical configuration, not vice versa.
>
> So if I completely duplicate you biological in a few minutes and
> initiate biological metabolism it will not be experiencing because it
> didn't accumulate these dualistic ghosts of experiences.
>
> If I replace all the parts one at a time on a car and then start it
> and drive away are you saying it doesn't drive because it didn't go
> through that particular assembly line etc...
Your questions highlight my failure to convey the radically different
approach that Whitehead takes.
> > No dualism here -- Whitehead was a monist, but the basis of his
> > monism is neither mind nor matter, it is experience.
>
> In the beginning there was experiences? How did they get hear?
Try the other tack then: in the beginning was a world without
experiences -- how did it get here? We must start with some kind of
fundamental stuff -- for Whitehead it's experience.
> > You're not thinking big enough -- you'll have to be more adventurous
> > if you want to understand Whitehead. *Everything* experiences, not
> > just embryos. There is nothing *but* experience. There is no
> > underlying non-experiential "matter" in the world, there are only
> > experiential perspectives upon the world. Look up Leibniz'
> > monadology if you want the simple version (but remember that Leibniz
> > was a child of his time, so don't balk at his terminology.)
>
> Now the frame expands and any view not outside its umbrella is cast
> into negation?
>
> We have experiences and we can be pretty sure alot of animals have
> experiences but where else can you verify in any way some experience?
Try the other tack then: where can you verify in any way no experience?
> I am trying to think if this is all a "religious gamble" or the
> "highest possible being" argument modernized.
I don't regard it that way -- it's more a way of trying to account for
change and for experience without entailing all sorts of
pseudo-problems.
> > Good, because there is none. Whitehead constructed a metaphysical
> > system, not a scientific one. It is simply a "logically possible"
> > scenario, but breath-takingly consistent and rigorous, as you'd
> > expect from a mathematician. If you wish to undermine it then the
> > only way to proceed would be to identify a logical flaw.
>
> I have already found about 5 styles of attack but desire not to till I
> understand these aspects of his theory better.
>
> How would you completely state this metaphysic in 5 or 10 short
> propositions so I can attack?
lol! Get hold of a copy of "Process and Reality" and see if you can
answer your own question.
> > I can't see systems theorist having much time for Whitehead's
> > metaphysics -- they'd be interested in those processes entailed in
> > the physical pole of experience, to the exclusion of those processes
> > by which it's entailed.
>
> Can you give better examples of Whitehead pole?
When I speak of "poles" of experience I just mean that parts of the
contents of experience can be regarded in different ways -- either as
"internal" mental states or "external" physical objects, but they're
really just the same experiences.
"Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:vorbdh4...@corp.supernews.com...
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:gP4jb.4$2C.2...@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > Experiences are the fundamental building blocks of the world. Asking
> > where they came from is like asking where the world came from --
> > maybe there was a big bang for experiences? -- maybe they always
> > were (I think this would be Whitehead's position, since his process
> > philosophy entails *atemporal* processes.)
>
> Strange comparison with building blocks. Chemistry hasn't changed much
> since quantum mechanics was discovered. The chemistry works whether
> there are things or just processes.
>
> Why does Whitehead's metaphysics negate the possibility that the two
> extremes at either end of the spectrum aren't "processes" and
> "unicorns?"
I think maybe the materialist paradigm is so entrenched that anything so
radically different as Whitehead's metaphysics will be inaccessible to
many. Well, I tried.
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:gP4jb.4$2C.2...@newsfep2-gui.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > where they came from is like asking where the world came from --
> > maybe there was a big bang for experiences? -- maybe they always
> > were (I think this would be Whitehead's position, since his process
> > philosophy entails *atemporal* processes.)
>
> Strange comparison with building blocks. Chemistry hasn't changed much
> since quantum mechanics was discovered. The chemistry works whether
> there are things or just processes.
>
> Why does Whitehead's metaphysics negate the possibility that the two
> extremes at either end of the spectrum aren't "processes" and
> "unicorns?"
I've integrated this post with your other to keep them together.
Immortalist
You have done a great job of explaining Whiteheads position in my opinion.
>
>
> > > > Then you claim to know that only the embryo can bring forth
> > > > experience and no other activity in the universe can do so?
> > >
> > > No. My claim is that if I understand Whitehead correctly then there
> > > is *nothing but* experience, whether it is the activity of the
> > > embryo or the activity of the humble mitochondrion.
> >
> > Then Whitehead would not make the claim that the particulat course of
> > events is necessarily and sufficiently the only way to produce the
> > same experience?
>
> I don't know how Whitehead would have answered that question, but my own
> attempt was in the rest of that paragraph.
>
>
>
> > > Any actual occasion is the product of its predecessors, along with
> > > whatever it contributes of itself. However, if we take the phase
> > > space approach, then there may be a multiplicity of trajectories
> > > that converge upon any particular actual entity within that phase
> > > space (this is andy-k thinking out aloud, not Whitehead.)
> >
But we observe convergence all over the place, in similar evoltionary
designs in vastly different species, convergence upon social trends by
zillions of wanna-bees, convergence upon particualar ideas that required the
times but the people who got the same idea were not related nor
communicated.
"product of its predecessors" hmmmmm this doesn't really seem exclusionary
since if we fool the process and put the proper simulant in there and it
does what the predacessor did with major differences between the two, will
the identical process be halted by process rules of ontology? Or will the
actual occaision occur anyway convergently?
> > Emergence only makes claims about "products" too, whats the
> > difference?
> >
> > Are you now claiming that "the possibility space of all possibilities"
> > is misplaced concretness?
>
> No, though it may be.
>
Illustration of the "possibility space of all possibilities" idear.
http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch14-a.html
>
>
> > > I like this idea, but I suspect it won't afford a simple way to
> > > confer a person's lifetime of experiences upon a clone -- I suspect
> > > that any of the alternative trajectories would be equally as
> > > complicated as the original lifetime of experiences. If you argue
> > > the contrary, however, I would have no other reply than "I suspect".
> > > If you suspect differently then we must simply leave it at that.
> >
> > Then your claiming that the present organization of brain/body is not
> > alone sufficient for this self even if properly set in biological
> > motion but originating from ten minutes of stiring chemicals?
> >
> > So what I am at this moment is not enough for the next when in the
> > world?
>
> What's this all about then?
>
If the actual occaision necessarily requires the predecessor occaision is
this enough or do we need more from a dual place?
>
>
> > > Configuration isn't everything -- it's just the physical pole of an
> > > actual occasion of experience. For Whitehead experience is more
> > > fundamental than physical configuration, not vice versa.
> >
> > So if I completely duplicate you biological in a few minutes and
> > initiate biological metabolism it will not be experiencing because it
> > didn't accumulate these dualistic ghosts of experiences.
> >
> > If I replace all the parts one at a time on a car and then start it
> > and drive away are you saying it doesn't drive because it didn't go
> > through that particular assembly line etc...
>
> Your questions highlight my failure to convey the radically different
> approach that Whitehead takes.
>
So what you said before somehow makes a valid differentiation between basic
processes and experiencial processes?
What happens when someone gets a organ transplant with an organ that comes
from some other ontology?
>
>
> > > No dualism here -- Whitehead was a monist, but the basis of his
> > > monism is neither mind nor matter, it is experience.
> >
> > In the beginning there was experiences? How did they get hear?
>
> Try the other tack then: in the beginning was a world without
> experiences -- how did it get here? We must start with some kind of
> fundamental stuff -- for Whitehead it's experience.
>
Why do we need experience or something else to be fundamental stuff?
I think that what we can do with what we know so far should not be hindered
by impasses and stale mates over how things got here.
>
>
> > > You're not thinking big enough -- you'll have to be more adventurous
> > > if you want to understand Whitehead. *Everything* experiences, not
> > > just embryos. There is nothing *but* experience. There is no
> > > underlying non-experiential "matter" in the world, there are only
> > > experiential perspectives upon the world. Look up Leibniz'
> > > monadology if you want the simple version (but remember that Leibniz
> > > was a child of his time, so don't balk at his terminology.)
> >
> > Now the frame expands and any view not outside its umbrella is cast
> > into negation?
> >
> > We have experiences and we can be pretty sure alot of animals have
> > experiences but where else can you verify in any way some experience?
>
> Try the other tack then: where can you verify in any way no experience?
>
I observe attributes of experience in humans and other animals and this is
some sort of evidence. But I have to go further into mediate inferences to
imagine some experience outside these concrete examples.
Human hyperactive predator/prey "agency"-detection instincts probably see a
shadow move or a branch twig crack and attributes experience to these
phenomenon because those who made the mistake - mad the gamble, even when
wrong, survived and reproduced more. Now we have an instinct to attribute
experience to anything unknown - by default.
>
>
> > I am trying to think if this is all a "religious gamble" or the
> > "highest possible being" argument modernized.
>
> I don't regard it that way -- it's more a way of trying to account for
> change and for experience without entailing all sorts of
> pseudo-problems.
>
So we have an ontological argument of the highest possible being
[experience]? Which if concieved must exist? Or is it the greatest possible
being with the religious wager [inductive certitude]?
>
>
> > > Good, because there is none. Whitehead constructed a metaphysical
> > > system, not a scientific one. It is simply a "logically possible"
> > > scenario, but breath-takingly consistent and rigorous, as you'd
> > > expect from a mathematician. If you wish to undermine it then the
> > > only way to proceed would be to identify a logical flaw.
> >
> > I have already found about 5 styles of attack but desire not to till I
> > understand these aspects of his theory better.
> >
> > How would you completely state this metaphysic in 5 or 10 short
> > propositions so I can attack?
>
> lol! Get hold of a copy of "Process and Reality" and see if you can
> answer your own question.
>
I thought you said it was pretty basic. All we have talked about here
probably would fit in five or so changing propositions.
>
>
> > > I can't see systems theorist having much time for Whitehead's
> > > metaphysics -- they'd be interested in those processes entailed in
> > > the physical pole of experience, to the exclusion of those processes
> > > by which it's entailed.
> >
> > Can you give better examples of Whitehead pole?
>
> When I speak of "poles" of experience I just mean that parts of the
> contents of experience can be regarded in different ways -- either as
> "internal" mental states or "external" physical objects, but they're
> really just the same experiences.
>
Two of the most influential monisms of the 19th Century, both aspect
theories, were dual-aspect monism and mind-stuff theory.
In Nanna, and in the more important Zend-Avesta (1851), Fechner sketched out
a dual-aspect, monistic, pan-psychical mind/body view. In a famous metaphor,
later adopted by Lewes, Fechner likened the universe, which is at one and
the same time both active consciousness and inert matter, to a curve that
can be regarded from one point of view as convex and from another as concave
yet still retains its essential integrity. In line with this approach to
mind/body, Fechner laid out a future program for psychophysics -- to
demonstrate the unity of mind and body empirically by relating increase in
bodily energy to corresponding increase in mental intensity.
Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the
brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor
apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a
process of reasoning, from the one to the other. Since this is an objection
that can be just as effectively urged against epiphenomenalism, which rids
itself of only half the problem of interactionism, other 19th century
thinkers turned, as had their predecessors, to monism as the view of last
resort.
Dual-aspect monism was the brain child of George Henry Lewes (1817- 1878).
Born in London, Lewes was one of the most versatile and brilliant minds of
the century. A writer, actor, biologist, philosopher, and psychologist, his
interests ranged across a staggering array of topics. He was the author of a
still widely read Biographical History of Philosophy (1845/1846). His
Physiology of Common Life (1859/1860) converted the young Pavlov to the
study of physiology, and his five-volume Problems of Life and Mind
(1874/1879) constituted a major contribution to the psychology of the
period.
In The Physical Basis of Mind [10], which forms the third volume of Problems
of Life and Mind, Lewes articulated the classic modern formulation of double
aspect theory, dual-aspect monism. In presenting his position, Lewes went
well beyond the theories of his predecessors, supplementing the double
aspect notion with a view that has come to be called neutral monism. Neutral
monism involves the claim that there is only one kind of "stuff" and that
mind and body differ only in the arrangement of that stuff or in the
perspective from which it is apprehended.
Borrowing a metaphor from Fechner, Lewes characterized the relation of mind
to body as a curve that maintains its identity as a single line even though
characterized at every point by both concavity and convexity. Mental and
physical processes, in other words, are simply different aspects of one and
the same series of psychophysical events. When seen from the subjective
point of view (e.g., when someone is thinking), the psychophysical series is
mental; when seen from the objective point of view (e.g., when someone
observes what is going on in the thinking person's brain), it is physical.
In the argument for the dual-aspect view, however, Lewes's innovation was by
no means restricted to his neutral monism. Mental and physical descriptions,
he went on to assert, employ terms which are not intertranslatable. The
visual experience of a large elephant can not be adequately described
through statements that characterize either the laws of light or the
mechanisms of the nervous system. Mental terms, in other words, cannot in
principle be replaced by physical terms. In making this claim, Lewes
transferred the domain of discourse from metaphysics to language and
provided what is still the best argument against extreme reductionism and
the replacement of psychology by physiology.
Mind-stuff theory, which is logically akin to Lewes's dual-aspect monism,
involves a number of related ideas. The first of these is that higher
properties of mind, such as judgment, reasoning, volition, or the continuous
flow of consciousness, are compounded from mental elements (pieces of
mind-stuff) that do not in themselves manifest these higher properties. The
second is that even the most basic material elements possess a small piece
of mind-stuff such that when these elements are combined, mind-stuff is
similarly combined. Thus, for example, when molecules come together at a
level of complexity sufficient to form a brain and nervous system,
correlative mind-stuff forms consciousness. And finally, in contrast to the
dual-aspect monism of Lewes, which construes both mind and matter as aspects
of a neutral substance, mind-stuff theory takes a position of psychical
monism, arguing that mind is the only actual substance and that the material
world is nothing more than an aspect under which mind is apprehended....
The idea that consciousness is compounded of mental elements which do not
themselves possess consciousness was widespread during the 19th century.
Thus, for example, in a passage roundly criticized by William James [see
figure 11], Herbert Spencer (1870) went so far as to suggest that "there may
be a single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds of
consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element with itself
and the recompounding of its compounds with one another in higher and higher
degrees: so producing increased multiplicity, variety, and complexity"
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Table.html
...Searle considers Dennett to be an extreme reductionist, who virtually
denies that consciousness exists. Penrose falls into the trap of thinking
that the apparent dualism between mind and body can be overcome by showing
that consciousness is driven by undetected gravity waves emanating from the
cytoskeleton. By comparison, Chalmers' error is more egregious, Searle
believes, because his conception of the dualism between body and mind allows
consciousness to be expressed through whatever form the universe of
potential informational relationships enable it to assume. Searle thinks
that Chalmers' "dual aspect" theory-an attempt to combine functionalism and
property dualism-is essentially absurd.
I think that Searle is right to insist that any credible theory of
consciousness must remain reasonably close to the scientific evidence about
brain structures and functions. But I think that this criterion can be
satisfied without assuming or asserting that brain structures or processes
cause consciousness. I believe that it would be more appropriate and
heuristically useful (and potentially less liable to the charge of
reductionism) to conceive of consciousness as the phenomenological result of
the interaction of brain and behavior...
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~tdalton/articles/Searle.html
andy-k
> "andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
> news:6_pjb.6864$pz5.1...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
> >
> > > > with whatever it contributes of itself. However, if we take the
> > > > phase space approach, then there may be a multiplicity of
> > > > trajectories that converge upon any particular actual entity
> > > > within that phase space (this is andy-k thinking out aloud, not
> > > > Whitehead.)
>
> But we observe convergence all over the place, in similar evoltionary
> designs in vastly different species, convergence upon social trends by
> zillions of wanna-bees, convergence upon particualar ideas that
> required the times but the people who got the same idea were not
> related nor communicated.
I'm using the term in a different sense.
> "product of its predecessors" hmmmmm this doesn't really seem
> exclusionary since if we fool the process and put the proper simulant
> in there and it does what the predacessor did with major differences
> between the two, will the identical process be halted by process rules
> of ontology? Or will the actual occaision occur anyway convergently?
It will still be a product of its predecessors, but of different
predecessors that converge onto the same actuality.
> > > Then your claiming that the present organization of brain/body is
> > > not alone sufficient for this self even if properly set in
> > > biological motion but originating from ten minutes of stiring
> > > chemicals?
> > >
> > > So what I am at this moment is not enough for the next when in the
> > > world?
> >
> > What's this all about then?
>
> If the actual occaision necessarily requires the predecessor occaision
> is this enough or do we need more from a dual place?
Whitehead claims that whatever any actual occasion inherits from its
predecessor is simply "brute fact" for it. However, the current actual
occasion, though restricted by this inherited brute fact, has a number
of subsequent "possible occasions" (my terminology, not his) that may it
may be prehended by, and so it has a contribution to make "of itself" as
to which of these possible occasions becomes actual. Thus Whithead
allows for a certain "creativity" within an actual occasion.
> > > > Configuration isn't everything -- it's just the physical pole of
> > > > an actual occasion of experience. For Whitehead experience is
> > > > more fundamental than physical configuration, not vice versa.
> > >
> > > So if I completely duplicate you biological in a few minutes and
> > > initiate biological metabolism it will not be experiencing because
> > > it didn't accumulate these dualistic ghosts of experiences.
> > >
> > > If I replace all the parts one at a time on a car and then start
> > > it and drive away are you saying it doesn't drive because it
> > > didn't go through that particular assembly line etc...
> >
> > Your questions highlight my failure to convey the radically
> > different approach that Whitehead takes.
>
> So what you said before somehow makes a valid differentiation between
> basic processes and experiencial processes?
No -- basic processes *are* experiential.
> What happens when someone gets a organ transplant with an organ that
> comes from some other ontology?
Do you mean from some other body? If so, then this is an interesting
question. My guess would be that the experiential history of the
transplanted organ would be integrated into the recipient. However, it
wouldn't follow that the recipient would consciously experience that
history -- the only thinking organ is the brain.
> > > > No dualism here -- Whitehead was a monist, but the basis of his
> > > > monism is neither mind nor matter, it is experience.
> > >
> > > In the beginning there was experiences? How did they get hear?
> >
> > Try the other tack then: in the beginning was a world without
> > experiences -- how did it get here? We must start with some kind of
> > fundamental stuff -- for Whitehead it's experience.
>
> Why do we need experience or something else to be fundamental stuff?
Because there is something rather than nothing. Why is there something
rather than nothing?
> I think that what we can do with what we know so far should not be
> hindered by impasses and stale mates over how things got here.
Agreed.
> > > We have experiences and we can be pretty sure alot of animals have
> > > experiences but where else can you verify in any way some
> > > experience?
> >
> > Try the other tack then: where can you verify in any way no
> > experience?
>
> I observe attributes of experience in humans and other animals and
> this is some sort of evidence. But I have to go further into mediate
> inferences to imagine some experience outside these concrete examples.
>
> Human hyperactive predator/prey "agency"-detection instincts probably
> see a shadow move or a branch twig crack and attributes experience to
> these phenomenon because those who made the mistake - mad the gamble,
> even when wrong, survived and reproduced more. Now we have an instinct
> to attribute experience to anything unknown - by default.
We need postulate nothing more than information processing to account
for such behavior. Why, then, should you attribute experience to
anything other than yourself?
> > > I am trying to think if this is all a "religious gamble" or the
> > > "highest possible being" argument modernized.
> >
> > I don't regard it that way -- it's more a way of trying to account
> > for change and for experience without entailing all sorts of
> > pseudo-problems.
>
> So we have an ontological argument of the highest possible being
> [experience]? Which if concieved must exist? Or is it the greatest
> possible being with the religious wager [inductive certitude]?
I don't primarily conceive of my experience, I simply experience. It
would be bizarre to deny it.
> > > How would you completely state this metaphysic in 5 or 10 short
> > > propositions so I can attack?
> >
> > lol! Get hold of a copy of "Process and Reality" and see if you can
> > answer your own question.
>
> I thought you said it was pretty basic. All we have talked about here
> probably would fit in five or so changing propositions.
No, it's not pretty basic. I wouldn't insult Whitehead's metaphysical
system by trying to condense it into five or ten short propositions.
Great links, thanks Immortalist.
Immortalist
philosophy. I see that I do not know whether my veiws conflict with his and
more time is needed for me.
"andy-k" <spam....@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:0YNjb.7957$pz5.1...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
andy-k
> Thanx much for your conversation about particular aspects of
> Whiteheads philosophy. I see that I do not know whether my veiws
> conflict with his and more time is needed for me.
You're welcome -- our conversation has made me think new thoughts too.