Third Eye Drops podcast interview

[Bernardo]

Another interview:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gt/podcast/third-eye-drops/id1091861630?i=1000493972867

[River Heraclitus]

I'd like to discuss your take on the combination issue. It starts with your claim that life is what dissociation looks like. (I agree) This dissociation process or inner life occurs with the simplest forms of life.(I also agree) But you also said a neuron does NOT have an inner life and those two claims seem contradictory to me. 

In the interview @ 36:30 you frame the combination problem as tiny bits of consciousness combining to form more complex forms of consciousness which of course is a panphysic view. Here I believe you are framing the combination problem incoherently from the Idealist viewpoint. An Idealist framing the combination issue should not start from "fundamentally separate consciousnesses." They should actually start by claiming that Universal Consciousness dissociates into simple elementary dissociations,

Now in this interview, you were right to say we have empirical evidence for dissociation but we don't know how or why. Therefore there is no reason not to believe that a combination of dissociations can be part of the process. 

Here I believe that just as there is empirical evidence for dissociation there is also empirical evidence for combination. There seems to be separate inner lives going on between a person and the left and right hemisphere of their brain. In this example, If a person saw a lightning bolt you could claim that three individual phenomenal experiences were occurring, Now , if I we refer to each of the three dissociative states as Donald Hoffman does as "conscious agents" then the agents that are the hemispheres and the agent which is the person are both combined and separate. None of them are sharing any first person experience although they can be aware of the others in the third person.

 Another line of empirical evidence that Donald mentioned as promising is organ transplants.It is reported that people with transplants often report phenomenal experiences or memories that seem to transfer from the donor to the recipient through the donated organ which indicates to me that if true, it is evidence that organs are conscious agents.

Regardless if the above is evidence for combination of dissociated agents or is not evidence, I don't see any rational or philosophical reason why this version of a combination theory would oppose your version of Idealism.

A member of the forum said a problem with this combination theory was that it was not parsimonious and required a "humongous" amount of agents compared to yuors but I don't believe that's the case. 

First, your theory only describes dissociations that occur as life in what we perceive as our physical reality. Now, there's a  humongous amount of dissociation happening just on our tiny planet.

 Second, your theory is agnostic about if and how dissociation occurs outside our physical interface. I'm sure your theory could include dissociation occuring outside our physicl interface and be humongous too. 

Third, There is not an issue to say that a dissociated alter and a conscious agent are synonymous. I don't know the mathematics behind Donald Hoffman's account but if his agents are not synonymous, then we just have to come up with agents that are.

Lastly, this view of dissociation/combination opens up the possibility of a more detailed explanatory on how dissociation of Universal Consciousness works. It is both a coming down and bottom up process. Schopenhaur's "one eye" is in every agent, whether simple or complex, Also, there may be almost infinitely more complex dissociations than we are aware of. For example, the sum total of human agents may be combining to create a conscious agent that we can vaguely recognize as something like Jung's 'collective unconscious". That collective unconscious may combine with other dissociations on its complexity level to create an even more complex dissociation and so on.

If there's any philosophical or rational inconsistencies ,variations o agreements on the above view of Idealism, I would be  very happy to hear about them. For me this was the most rational way to fix the inconsistency of why a microscopic organism has inner life whereas a neuron does not. 

On Saturday, October 10, 2020 at 8:06:51 AM UTC+11 Bernardo wrote:

Another interview:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gt/podcast/third-eye-drops/id1091861630?i=1000493972867

[Justin]

...this view of dissociation/combination opens up the possibility of a more detailed explanatory on how dissociation of Universal Consciousness works. It is both a coming down and bottom up process.  

As per my comment on the other thread, the aggregation of slime mold amoeba into slugs lends empirical support to this view. Another video of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w-wCP7-WEw

[River Heraclitus]

Justin, thanks for the info and links. Good to know of more supporting evidence

[David Sundaram]

On Friday, October 9, 2020 at 7:51:21 PM UTC-7, River Heraclitus wrote:

If there's any philosophical or rational inconsistencies ,variations o agreements on the above view of Idealism, I would be  very happy to hear about them. For me this was the most rational way to fix the inconsistency of why a microscopic organism has inner life whereas a neuron does not.

Your analysis-n-synthesis strikes me as being eminently rational, RiberH. Since no one knows everything!, whether it 'correctly' describes what is going on in our conjoint 'reality' will, of course, always remain a matter of opinion.

I think the 'problem' reflected in 'inteliigent' people rejecting theories which clearly integrate a greater range of facts is that 'insecure' people compulsively hang on to their 'comfort zones'. This phenom is illustrated in the case(s) of people who rejected the idea that the earth, hence humanity and hence they themselves wasn't/weren't at the 'center' of 'the reality' of 'the universe'. Same applies to people who reject the Theory of Evolution. Ditto applies to people who think Life really begins with egg-fertilization.

It occurs to me that, even more than the idea that they have a 'conscious' soul, the idea that their soul may be a part of a larger soul-system and so not completely 'individually' self-determining may(?) be an emotional stumbling-block for folks who'd rather think, feel and believe that they are the 'sole' captains-in-charge of their own M@L 'ships'.

However, even if 'correct',  the above is too much of a generalization to be a completely dfeintive in any given case, I'm sure.

[Ben Iscatus]

Another great interview! The explanation of the similarity with Don Hoffman is great (and I think new), his "conscious agents" being the same as Bernardo's "dissociated alters", and the difference being that DH stops at two conscious agents and doesn't go so far as to logically derive the Transpersonal Singularity.

I sometimes wish we had the transcript of these talks. There are some very quotable quotes - for instance near the end, "We are not students in a school, we are leading edge researchers in a laboratory. We are the means by which the universe is apprehending itself and getting a grip on what it's doing to itself ....evil is as much a part of nature as love is."

[Eugene I]

River, I would suggest that instead of posing one scheme (yours/Hoffman's) against the other (BK's), may be we should just remain open to the variety of possibilities, because we do not actually know which one is true, and may be we will never know and can not know. This is because it is impossible to differentiate between conscious living organism and non-conscious philosophical-zombie one. There is even a third possibility that even among humans not all are conscious and some might be simply empty characters of the world movie presented to us by the M@L. From the ethical side though, it is safer to assume that every living organism, may be even down to neurons are conscious by default, because we don't want to hurt any conscious beings.   

[Michael Larkin]

On Saturday, October 10, 2020 at 3:51:21 AM UTC+1 dino....@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to discuss your take on the combination issue. It starts with your claim that life is what dissociation looks like. (I agree) This dissociation process or inner life occurs with the simplest forms of life.(I also agree) But you also said a neuron does NOT have an inner life and those two claims seem contradictory to me...etc.

It occurs to me that in respect of combination, there's a difference between the arising of life from the inanimate (abiogenesis) and the evolition of the simplest, unicellular forms of life into ever more complex multicellular organisms. There's a step change between the inanimate and the animate. What we perceive as inanimate appears to us as having no capcity to exhibit all of the criteria of life (I can remember off the top of my head 5 of the 7 criteria of life I learned at school -- growth, metabolism, reproduction, excretion, and irritability -- there's a fuller exposition here). Some inanimate things, like crystals, can be said to grow, but not in the same way that animate beings do.

We can construct no plausible schema for how the first cell came into being. Before it did, as far as one can determine, everything was inanimate. The first cell was already an enormously complex thing, and presumably already able to exhibit all the usual criteria of life. Today we can find no evidence of anything that is "partly alive", with the possible exception of viruses (which may well have appeared only after the first truly living organism and not represent an intermediary state).

Whatever, I believe that the first cell was the first example of dissociation in the sense BK uses the word, and a unicell cell can only grow so big. There is a difference of opinion as to what is the largest single cell, see here); but in general to increase complexity, organisms have to exhibit an increase in the number of their cells as well as the number and type of relationships between those cells.

Some of the "third way of evolution" people seem to attribute to the cell a wide-ranging ability to "intelligently" direct its own living processes. At times it almost seems as if they're implying that the cell is vastly more intelligent than human beings; but if that's the case, human beings, indeed all multicellular organisms, represent a regression in intelligence or ability to process information.

In any case, what is being combined in multicellular organisms isn't necessarily an association of cells, each of which could live out their lives independently of the whole. Remove a cell from its milieu and it usually dies, because for some at least of its functions, it relies on other cells that remain as part of the whole. Thinking of vertebrates, for example, an excised liver cell can't function without the cells of the vascular system to provide nutrition, carry away wastes, and so on. The functions that an independently viable unicell can perform can't be carried out by a single isolated cell of a vertebrate. Instead, the living functions of the whole are distributed amongst the cells of the the various organs it possesses. Those that remain in the excised cell are only a partial selection of the functions of a free-living unicellular organism.

Of course, sometimes various kinds of vegetative or asexual propagation enable one cell to regenerate a whole organism, but these could be viewed as cases where the unicell, by dint of its previous association within a multicellular organism, possesses information in its genome that enables it to re-constitute the whole.

The thing about organisms, be they uni- or multi-cellular, is that they represent a single entity which acts in its own best interests, however distributed its various functions may be throughout its body: there seems to be a unified aim that governs its behaviour. IOW, it acts autonomously, at least when healthy; only when diseased does it act against its own interests - as evidenced by such things as cancer, and in humans, the counterproductive behaviours of various mental ailments such as schizophrenia, anorexia, OCD and the like.

In the usual evolutionary view, causation always has to be bottom-up; from the simple to the more complex. There can be no telos involved; it can't be known in advance what is being aimed for. Hence the insistence on the random mutation and natural selection of the Darwinian model. There isn't allowed to be a "pull" force rather than a "push" force, so to speak. There can't be a Mind At Large that has the will or desire (be that metaconscious or more instinctual), to explore the possibilties of its own being, which we perceive at least in part as matter and the processes we think of as energy and forces.

The central idea that MAL has, if I may put it that way, could be of a target to be strived for which almost always (disregarding for the moment phenomena such as DID) involves apparently unitary consciousnesses. And for whatever reason, that may involve the intricate interrelationships between what we perceive as cells. It may not be so much that an organism is an agglomeration of cells, each with an individual and independent awareness. It may be more the realisation, within the realm of possibilities of MAL's mental processes, of dissociated, progressively more complex, multicellular entities apparently capable of a degree of autonomy.

If such were the case,  it could mean not so much that complexity arises through combinations of autonomous, less complex organisms; rather, the one thing that remained constant could be the striving in evolution towards an always unitary living being, the individual cells of which contribute to that end.

It's somewhat analogous to the engineer who has the idea of building a machine with a specific purpose right from the beginning. At first he brings together certain parts in a certain way, but they don't work together exactly how he wanted. So he elaborates, adding more and different parts, sometimes even discarding them so that he can get closer to his aim. His earliest efforts would be analogous to free-living unicells, and later efforts to progressively more and more complex interassociations between cells; but generally, (I'm excluding symbiosis from the analogy), at no stage would there be the aim of building a colony composed of separate individuals like ants and termites do. The aim would be to continue to work on producing the "ideal", autonomous living being.

The main apparent discontinuity in what we can perceive is between the inanimate and the animate, marked by the putative phenomenon of abiogenesis, which I take to be the signal of MAL's "decision" to begin to dissociate itself, and that appears to us as animacy.  As I see it, the combination isn't of individuals, but of what appear to us to be the bodies of interdependent, non-autonomous entities that contribute to parts of the functionality of the whole.

The other side of the discontinuity is what appears to us as what we interpret as atoms, energy and forces, which is what physicalists think of as independently existing patterns and regularities of nature from which everything is made up according the possibilities of their interactions. Sensing increasingly that this is a shaky proposition, the only option that panpsychists have is to posit that individual elementary particles (which don't actually exist as such) possess consciousness that in chemical combination can lead to emergence of higher levels of consciousness.

I don't personally think that combination is compatible with idealism. IOW, autonomous animate  wholes don't arise out of combinations of lesser animate wholes. Rather, the aim of autonomous wholes is ever-present and always guides from the top downwards. The cells of multicellular organisms have never experienced autonomy; only multicellular organisms as wholes can experience some degree or other of that. YMMV.             

[Ben Iscatus]

Very thoughtful post, Michael. Thank you. From what you say, I get a sense of an idea of a complex organism composed of (engineered from) many simpler ideas.  

[Dana Lomas]

we are leading edge researchers in a laboratory. 

The issue with this of course is that if by 'we' it is taken to mean that the cutting edge of understanding is strictly human-centric, and there are no other 'alters' focused in other constructs that we can learn from, it seems a kind of hubris that may well be fatal. 

[Dana Lomas]

Rhetorical question: doesn't 'evil' imply meta-cognition? In other words, knowing that our actions are creating suffering, yet we intentionally carry on with such actions, can be considered 'evil', whereas, the ants eating an earthworm alive, or the praying mantis devouring its mate during copulation, or any other number of such examples, are not meta-cognitive acts, and thus can't be considered evil, as they can't reflectively ponder it in a way so as to act otherwise.

[Eugene I]

Rhetorical question: doesn't 'evil' imply meta-cognition?

Of course it does. 

[beheren...@gmail.com]

Neurons aren’t alters for the same reason a rock isn’t an alter.

Transplant evidence shows one bit of consciousness affecting another bit. Where is the empirical evidence that an organ has a separate consciousness?

Split-brain cases, like Dissociative Identity Disorder, show disassociation can happen and then be re-integrated. Where is the empirical evidence that each half of a brain is fundamentally and originally a separate consciousness?

If everything can be explained by disassociation why posit disassociation plus combination?

[beheren...@gmail.com]

Did you really think you were going to get away with asking a rhetorical question in this forum 😂

[Dana Lomas]

Just wondering why, while he may not have meant to imply as much, in this interview BK depicts evil as being intrinsic to nature at large, by saying that "evil is as much a part of nature as love is"? And does 'love' imply metacognition too, and have nothing to do with the non-metacognitive state?

[beheren...@gmail.com]

But in context, he was saying that there is no problem of evil because it is just instinctual non-metacognitive mind at large. He was arguing there would be a huge problem of evil if mind at large is metacognitive.

[David Sundaram]

On Saturday, October 10, 2020 at 9:00:18 AM UTC-7, Dana Lomas wrote:

Rhetorical question: doesn't 'evil' imply meta-cognition? In other words, knowing that our actions are creating suffering, yet we intentionally carry on with such actions, can be considered 'evil', whereas, the ants eating an earthworm alive, or the praying mantis devouring its mate during copulation, or any other number of such examples, are not meta-cognitive acts, and thus can't be considered evil, as they can't reflectively ponder it in a way so as to act otherwise.

IMO, anyone who was fully meta-conscious would 'see' that there is no such thing as 'evil', that 'evil' is the projection of a soul that is still caught up personal-preference based 'judgment'.

Here's a fully (IMO) meta-conscious statement touching on the subject: "It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!" (Luke 17)

 What we have here is a "black or white" framing of the issue of 'non-meta' vs 'meta' consciousness, such that a number of follk who are just partially meta-conscious begin and continue to deludely believe and speak as though they are fully meta-conscious, instead of humbly aiming to become more so.

Reminds me of old-time scientists who believed and animals (as a category of being) didn't have 'feelngs' (didn't suffer pain etc,) the way 'humans' do.

Check out https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/vivisection-outrage/ for some history pertaining to the idea of human 'meta'-consciousness

[Ben Iscatus]

Rhetorical question: doesn't 'evil' imply meta-cognition? In other words, knowing that our actions are creating suffering, yet we intentionally carry on with such actions, can be considered 'evil', whereas, the ants eating an earthworm alive, or the praying mantis devouring its mate during copulation, or any other number of such examples, are not meta-cognitive acts, and thus can't be considered evil, as they can't reflectively ponder it in a way so as to act otherwise.

You're quite right, Dana. The quote is out of context, for BK there is no problem of evil for the reasons implied in your RQ. You'll hear this at the end of the interview.

[Dana Lomas]

Then perhaps just a debatable choice of phrase on BK's part to say that  "evil is as much a part of nature as love is". But surely there is still a 'problem' of evil, for insofar as metacognition would be inevitable, then evil would also be inevitable, as there will always be those who would use metacognition to that end ~ at least until it's reflectively pondered and learned that what goes around comes around. And just as instinct evolved into metacognition, surely metacognition can evolve to resolve the problem ... or so it seems.

[beheren...@gmail.com]

Yes evil is still a problem -  but not a philosophical problem for Bernardo’s metaphysics.

‘evil is as much a part of nature as love is"

Well, this equating of love and evil seems to suggest that love is also not possible in the non-metacognitive instinctive natural world of mind-at-large.

Is metacognition a requirement for love?

[Ben Iscatus]

Well, this equating of love and evil seems to suggest that love is also not possible in the non-metacognitive instinctive natural world of mind-at-large.

Is metacognition a requirement for love?

Maybe we tie ourselves in knots here because evil is not the opposite of love. Fear is the opposite of love. Evil is the opposite of good. I think evil and good, requiring self-reflection, are metacognitive judgements. Fear and love are instinctive and don't require metacognition. 

[Dana Lomas]

Perhaps then more apropos to say that horrific experience is as much a part of nature a beatific experience, which seems undeniable. What's love got to do with it? Does the carefree lioness that devours the elephant alive, concurrently also feel love in caring for her offspring? May have to file it away under TGM :)

[Dana Lomas]

 Fear and love are instinctive and don't require metacognition.

This feels about right.

[beheren...@gmail.com]

Agreed :)

[Dana Lomas]

In my experience, falling deeply in love can be highly suffering prone. If it were truly metacognitive, I'd not have risked it.

[Dana Lomas]

Speaking of falling in love ... Mongolian throat singing with one's daughter

[Lou Gold]

 Fear and love are instinctive and don't require metacognition.

This feels about right.

Does not feel right to me. It needs to be rephrased as "Instinctive fear and love don't require metacognition." Instinctive fear results in fight or flee and instinctive love results in attraction and attachment. OTOH aware fear causes one to be more alert when crossing a street and aware love causes one to seek to reduce suffering. 

[Justin]

 If everything can be explained by disassociation why posit disassociation plus combination?  

 I have responded to this in a new thread.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

I don't think Hoffman has said that conscious agents can combine to create "bigger" conscious agents, just that the mathematical definition of a 2-bit conscious agent also holds for a higher-bit conscious agent. That fact of his model does not imply a progression from lower to higher bit agents or vice versa. Although it does seem to imply (to me at least) that, mathematically speaking, there is no essential difference between any-bit agents, and perhaps that conscious agents are "self-similar" at all scales of resolution.

[beheren...@gmail.com]

‘I don't think Hoffman has said that conscious agents can combine to create "bigger" conscious agents’

I thought he did.

[River Heraclitus]

I don't know much about Hoffman's conscious agents. It doesn't change my argument if he uses combination or not. I really like his interface metaphors and all that though. My issue is strictly philosophical and any supporting evidence for a metaphysical theory is nice for what it is worth - ie it may lead you to believe one theory more than another. 

Eugene - I don't think I'm "posing one scheme over another.  My main reason for my posts was to try to show dissociation and combination are not mutually exclusive. Both happen and there is evidence for both. I'm a huge fan of BK for many years (check out my Quora posts) but I just think it's almost contradictory to say that life is what dissociation looks like and that bacteria have inner life but a neuron etc does not. 

And one final question (definitely not rehtorical) - Why can't Hoffman's conscious agents - whatever they are be BK"s dissociated alters.

[beheren...@gmail.com]

I disagree that you are disagreeing :) You are simply adding a metacognitive option onto the instinctive reactions which is surely always the case for any reaction.

“Does not feel right to me. It needs to be rephrased as "Instinctive fear and love don't require metacognition." Instinctive fear results in fight or flee and instinctive love results in attraction and attachment. OTOH aware fear causes one to be more alert when crossing a street and aware love causes one to seek to reduce suffering.”

[Lou Gold]

Yes AND I was doing so in the context of the initial question: "Is metacognition a requirement for love?" It seems that it is.

[Dana Lomas]

I'd suggest that metacognition can augment both fear and love, but both are surely functional absent metacognition. But I agree that for love to transcend its strictly instinctual function it seems metacognition is required. So for example, while a lioness may feel some degree of love in caring for her offspring, such that they survive and thrive as a species, I'm not sure that they feel compassion as such. 

Speaking of love, it's a topic which for the most part BK does not address. There's occasional mention of the perennial mystical 'awakening' experience and its correlation to the metaphysical notion of the primacy of consciousness, but seldom, if ever, any mention of the unconditional love component that almost always accompanies such experience. Also he talks of feeling an affinity for the Vedic/Vedanta tradition, which holds the triune of satchitananda ~ i.e. being-consciousness-bliss ~ as being the inextricable, immanent attribute of Brahman, and yet there seems to be no correlate to this in the immanent attributes of M@L, at least not the bliss aspect of that compound word. What's up with that? Where's the bliss and unconditional love in M@L? Does it relate to Will, which seems to be unconditional as well, in that, as far as one can tell, it does not preclude the conceiving of any ideation whatsoever, if the profound ever-evolving diversity and novelty of its phenomenal manifestations are any indication.

[Eugene I]

Why can't Hoffman's conscious agents - whatever they are be BK"s dissociated alters.

River, they definitely can be. However, BK top-down model stops at metabolizing organisms, but Hoffman's model seems to go to the most elementary atomic conscious agents whose interaction is governed by primitive mathematical rules. I can see it as a significant difference.   

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

To be more precise, I don't think Hoffman's theory of networked conscious agents either assumes or concludes that, metaphysically speaking, conscious agents combine to create more complex conscious agents. 

That being said, Hoffman does often talk about the dynamics of the agents in that way, i.e. they can combine to create bigger ones. However I suspect that, when pressed, he would say the combination language is an artifice of our conceptual interface and not any fundamental aspect of his theory.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

" but I just think it's almost contradictory to say that life is what dissociation looks like and that bacteria have inner life but a neuron etc does not. "

I am not following the logic here.  Why would that be contradictory?

BK seems to have a strong suspicion that metabolic processes correspond with a dissociated alter. A neuron clearly does not metabolize. 

Hoffman may say that, when we get down to the icons of a bacterium or a neuron, our interface has largely "given up". Most likely neither of them correspond to any distinct conscious entities. 

[Aeringa Voyno]

A neuron most surely does metabolise. You could even excise it and place it in a nutritive medium, and it would survive there, spatially disconnected from its brain of origin.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

"A neuron most surely does metabolise. You could even excise it and place it in a nutritive medium, and it would survive there, spatially disconnected from its brain of origin. " 

Ah well then I stand corrected! So maybe, in BK's view, a neuron would correspond to a dissociated alter with inner life. Has he stated that it does not?  

[Ben Iscatus]

So maybe, in BK's view, a neuron would correspond to a dissociated alter with inner life. Has he stated that it does not?  

Yes, he has (i.e. it does not have inner life). A neuron has no independent means of survival. It is entirely dependent on its host. But if it dies, the host continues to live.

[River Heraclitus]

Eugene - 

Can't you see that your argument above is a "rookie mistake" (quoting Hoffman) similar to one that BK often accuses people of making. BK was arguing that Goff and the lady interviewer were (unconsciously) arguing from a presuppositional physicalist paradigm. In the interview BK equates combination with panpsychism but in panpsychism PHYSICAL plus consciousness combine to form a more complex consciousness organism. So BK's was arguing from a semi physicalist paradigm when he said "combination" was incoherent because electrons (note: Bk did not use unmetabolized life) combining to produce consciousness is incoherent - which obviously we all agree with.

Remember, BK's use of Dissociative Identity Disorder (to which he heavily depends on to support Universal Consciousness dissociation) is only a physical analogy for conscious dissociation - it has nothing to do with actual Universal Consciousness dissociating, that happens outside of our space/time interface. Metabolism is also a space/time interface analogy. For example, let all of us "BK Idealists" agree that as BK claims " life is what dissociation looks like" to us dissociated alters. OK now let's look at life. Life does not begin with metabolism. Seems to me to begin it there is arbitrary because life can be further reduced to say DNA strands, Why can't this be the basic unit of conscious dissociation in the life/physical interface. Seems more rational to me. There's more evidence too (because there is evidence for both dissociation AND combination) I honestly think BK is stuck in his position because "combination "looks like" panpsychism but it is not - no physical involved at all (except as metaphors)

BTW - I'm probably missing something here but don't all cells metabolize? Isn't there neuronal metabolism ect.? I know it depends on the whole physical system of the organism but don't All living cells and organisms depend on some system. As BK agrees to  - everything in our physical interface is only arbitrarily divided into things.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

Remember, BK's use of Dissociative Identity Disorder (to which he heavily depends on to support Universal Consciousness dissociation) is only a physical analogy for conscious dissociation - it has nothing to do with actual Universal Consciousness dissociating, that happens outside of our space/time interface. Metabolism is also a space/time interface analogy. For example, let all of us "BK Idealists" agree that as BK claims " life is what dissociation looks like" to us dissociated alters. OK now let's look at life. Life does not begin with metabolism. Seems to me to begin it there is arbitrary because life can be further reduced to say DNA strands, Why can't this be the basic unit of conscious dissociation in the life/physical interface. Seems more rational to me. 

While space-time and matter are not accurate representations of an underlying mental reality, a dynamic process such as "metabolism" or "dissociation" could be. Just as with evolution, we do not need to presuppose the existence of physical DNA strands or genes to coherently believe that the evolutionary algorithm, i.e. mutation/variation, selection, reproduction, is in some way accurately representing the dynamics of conscious agents and states. Of course it is extremely difficult to dispense with the concept of spatial geography or linear time (even more so) when conceptualizing or verbalizing these processes, but that's also exactly what we should expect from such an evolutionary process. 

[Eugene I]

River, your arguments seem to make sense. My view is even more agnostic. For every appearance we see we (from inanimate objects to humans) we can never know if there is or there is not a conscious agent or alter that experiences what it is like to be that object or human (per Chalmers P-zombie argument). It can even be a scenario where if M@L or its "free-running" alters want to experience what it is like to be a tree, or a neuron, or a human, than there will be an alter representing that tree or neuron or human, if neither M@L nor any alters are interested in such experience, those trees and neurons and humans will be unconscious. So I don't thing there are any rules written in stone (like "every metabolizing organism, or neuron, or human, always has to be conscious"). 

[Michael Larkin]

There's a slight confusion in that living organisms do more than "metabolise"; I think BK uses that word rather informally, but I take it as referring to all the behavioural criteria of life that an autonomous organism exhibits -- which I may have mentioned earlier includes such things as taking in nutrition, growing, reproducing, excreting, possibly locomoting, reacting to stimuli and so on.

"Metabolism" is defined as: "noun: Biology, Physiology. the sum of the physical and chemical processes in an organism by which its material substance is produced, maintained, and destroyed, and by which energy is made available".

All cells metabolise, to be sure, but only single cells or groups of cells that can live autonomously can be said to be organisms in their own right. Notice that the definition refers to the organism, which is a whole. If it's multicellular, there may be many differentiated cells organised into tissues and organs, and in sum, those contribute to the metabolism of the whole organism. Many organisms comprise only one cell, and the metabolism of that one cell is sufficient to support all the necessary criteria of life. That plainly doesn't apply to cells within tissues and organs, which can't exist autonomously:  they can only be cultured in suitable media expressly designed to support them, i.e. that provide all the metabolites that are usually supplied in situ by other kinds of cells.

Hence unicellular microorganisms such as Amoebae, Paramecia, Vorticellae and so on are autonomous living entities. Hela Cells, neurons, gut or liver cells aren't autonomous. Excise them and they won't last long without a suitable culture medium. they are parts of a whole, and only the whole is an autonomous unit. That's one reason why I tend to think in terms of a top-down telos rather than a bottom-up combination of separate individuals that somehow come to differentiate into specialised cells.

It's kind of a mirror of the combination problem of consciousness. IMO, consciousness operates from the top down, not the bottom up. First there is the idea of a particular multicellular organism in the mind of M@L, and then only later does it come to be through whatever evolutionary process (not Darwinism) might pertain.

[beheren...@gmail.com]

Thanks Michael, I think you have really helped to clarify this discussion. Really useful points.

[Aeringa Voyno]

Yes, thanks for the post, Michael, I think I understand the distinction better now.

Still, it doesn't feel that straightforward to me. The farther we get from human/mammalian life, the blurrier things become. While it is true that excised vertebrate tissue can't survive on its own for long, pieces of a sponge or broken-off sprigs of many plants can. Many parasites or symbionts, on the other hand, are extremely reliant on their hosts or partners - they are not self-sufficient on their own. And if the endosymbionsis hypothesis is correct, the ancestors of our mitochondria had been free-roaming organisms before they shed their autonomy. But even human organisms aren't entirely autonomous or self-sufficient - try surviving in a desert (or a barren rock in space) devoid of other life or its products at the very least.

[Ben Iscatus]

 Many parasites or symbionts, on the other hand, are extremely reliant on their hosts or partners - they are not self-sufficient on their own. And if the endosymbionsis hypothesis is correct, the ancestors of our mitochondria had been free-roaming organisms before they shed their autonomy.

It's hard not to think dualistically. But if we substitute "idea" for "organism", a complex idea composed of (engineered from) earlier ideas would bring your thinking more in line with idealism.

[Michael Larkin]

Yes, you have a point that I hadn't time to explore when I posted earlier -- I was tired and just about to go to bed.

It all depends what one means by "autonomous". In a sense, no organism is entirely independent. They all rely on the environment in which they subsist in one way or another. The environment of at least one phase of the life-cycle of parasites happens to be other living organisms, without which they will die. Only the parasite benefits from the relationship, and a successful parasite is usually one that doesn't kill its host unless killing it is a way for it to disperse or propagate itself.

Symbionts are an interesting case. They may actually take part in the metabolism of the organism in which they are located: indeed, it may be a two-way relationship, with both parties benefitting. Some organisms may suffer or even die without that relationship. I suppose that could be said even of human beings, who may have problems with inadequate support from the microorganisms in their gut if they have the wrong kind of diet, for example.

So what really distinguishes one organism from another when they live closely together? Thinking about it, I'd say it could be the fact that their reproductive cycles are distinct. Gut bacteria need us, and we need at least some of them, but we don't share our reproductive processes. Humans produce humans; bacteria, bacteria. However intimate the relationship, however much interdependency there might be, that seems to be so. If you can think of a counterexample, I'd be interested to hear it.

It's true enough that some organisms can regenerate themselves, or at least parts of themselves. Some amphibia can regenerate severed limbs; but I don't think in that case anyone would argue that the regenerated limb is an entirely new and autonomous organism. Earthworms are a bit more interesting; they can regenerate whole earthworms from severed parts. Is an earthworm regenerated from another earthworm an autonomous entity? I should note that you can't cut an earthworm in two and always expect both parts to regenerate into a whole new earthworm. It depends how far down from the head you cut it. Go too far, and the tail end will grow another tail end and so be a defective earthworm. If an "organism", even a single cell of it, is capable of regenerating a whole other "organism", then I'd say that the autonomous unit is one or a minimum number of cells rather than what one usually thinks of as the whole.

Regeneration is an asexual process whereby cells divide mitotically. It doesn't involve the sexual process, whereby cells with a reduced number chromosomal sets (often haploid, i.e. one set) come together to form a zygote with (at least) two sets of chromosomes. Having said that, even some animals are parthenogenetic, i.e. can reproduce asexually without fertilization, e.g. stick insects. Some animal species can reproduce both sexually and parthenogenetically, but only rarely do they rely exclusively on parthenogenesis. The more one investigates, the fuzzier things seem to get. Maybe in some cases the thing about having distinct reproductive cycles isn't quite enough to pin down what autonomy actually is.

Thing is, if you observe a bunch of stick insects all derived from the same parent through parthenogenesis, you will see them each going about their own lives independently. They don't all stay close together and march in lock step. I'd say that each of them is autonomously capable of exhibiting all the criteria of life. Their connection is a biological one and they might all share the same genetic makeup, but that doesn't necessarily make them any the less individuals capable of making their own way in the world.

I'm not sure I've been able to exhaustively crack the autonomy issue. In most cases, it's plain enough what the autonomous unit is. One thing seems reasonably clear: autonomy is a real, self-evident phenomenon in a lot of cases. The question is whether in those cases where it's harder to pin down, we'd be talking in terms of something like "distributed autonomy" if I might put it that way. In a sense, I suppose that a whole species could be considered as a global autonomous unit. And if species, why not genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain?

This is getting philosophical and maybe I've said enough for now :-).  

[Eugene I]

It sounds to me like we are trying to define for M@L which of its ideations are allowed to become conscious alters and which are not allowed based on our own rational reasons and theory. I don't think it works that way, and in any case we can never verify/falsify our theory (per Chalmers P-zombie argument). And why is it so important anyway? Why don't we just say: at our current stage of knowledge we simply do not know the answer?   

[Dana Lomas]

Yes, it somehow seems problematic to simply define what constitutes a 'subject' solely in terms of a phenomenal representation, for a subject, in essence, can only be truly known by being it. 

[Aeringa Voyno]

Ben,

I'm not entirely sure why you'd think my phrasing implies dualistic thinking? (Although maybe it does?)

Michael,

getting philosophical is the very purpose of this forum, isn't it? ;) In any case, I'm certainly enjoying this contemplation of biodiversity and how it might relate to Idealism and dissociation processes.

I certainly agree about no biological organism being completely independent. All physical life seems to be embedded in and dependent on dynamic ecosystems which are often parts of even greater ecosystems. In that sense, autonomy appears to be a continuum rather than a strictly binary property. So why can't dissociation be just as gradual, and why shouldn't it be able to occur in layers, whirlpools within whirlpools, or "smaller" whirlpools "dancing" together to "give birth" to a "larger" whirlpool?

So what really distinguishes one organism from another when they live closely together? Thinking about it, I'd say it could be the fact that their reproductive cycles are distinct. Gut bacteria need us, and we need at least some of them, but we don't share our reproductive processes. Humans produce humans; bacteria, bacteria. However intimate the relationship, however much interdependency there might be, that seems to be so. If you can think of a counterexample, I'd be interested to hear it.

Off the top of my head, I can't come up with a counterexample. However, an organism's genome isn't always "walled off" from other organisms' genetic material, as horizontal gene transfer is a rather widespread phenomenon, and it also occurs across species. Then, there's also the chimerism phenomenon, providing a further exception to the linear "one zygote - one adult organism" rule.

Having said that, even some animals are parthenogenetic, i.e. can reproduce asexually without fertilization, e.g. stick insects. Some animal species can reproduce both sexually and parthenogenetically, but only rarely do they rely exclusively on parthenogenesis.

There are even quite a few species of purely parthenogenetic lizards, i.e. pretty "sophisticated" vertebrates.

Of course, as Eugene and Dana said, none of it tells us anything about what it is, or might be like to be any of these lifeforms. But if we are willing to speculate about physical life, the formation and development of alters and/or their relationship with this organic domain, I think we need to consider all the blurry "grey areas" as well as the more clear-cut cases ;)

[Ben Iscatus]

I'm not entirely sure why you'd think my phrasing implies dualistic thinking? (Although maybe it does?)

Aeringa, as I see it, when we talk of cells and organisms, we are drawn towards thinking physically instead of mentally. But that may not be the case for you.

[River Heraclitus]

ASHVIN -Dissociation (DID -Dissociated Identity Disorder) only occurs in our physical spaxe-time interface, it's apples to apples. Materialists have no issue with it. There are no logical steps that Universal Consciousness dissociation must occur because of DID. BK's argument is that IF Universal Consciousness exists then DID is a good analogy to use for showing that we are dissociated alters. BK has many more good arguments for Idealism and he makes a strong case even without DID. Metabolism and evolutionary processes are also space-time specific ie usually presupposed in a materialist framework.They do not presuppose an Idealist reality. So you are correct when you say my proposition that DNA strands can be the marker for dissociation is also arbitrary. There may be more basic units of life than DNA, yet to be discovered. If so, they would become the markers for the analogy. Philosophically, if we agree with BK that if life is the space - time marker for dissociation and a bacteria has inner life then it follows that a neuron, a heart, a hemisphere of the brain and a human also have inner lives of their own. 

One cavate - I've just read Ben Iscatus"s argument and it is a good one but it seems to me a better one for Ben to use would be DNA sequencing as the marker. After all (more or less - there are some exceptions) all organisms from one cell to trillions have a unique DNA code in cell. So saying a particular code causes the dissociation seems more explanitory than saying it is metabolism. I still don't buy it but the DNA marker seems a much tighter argument.

 

EUGENE - Agnostic is a good way to describe true skepticism but I take Matt Dillahunty's philosophy that our beliefs should reflect the reality of our senses unless we have good empirical or other solid evidence that reality is otherwise. I really like his philosophy of skepticism but in practise, I don't believe he is skeptical enough of the bad sciences and the physicalist ontology he is immersed in so he "skepticizes" from those two faulty paradigms. 

Anyway, I've come across most of the scenarios you mentioned and you are right saying there might not be any written rules or maybe there are rules beyond our comprehension. So even though they are interesting and may be true, they remain outside of my belief system. Having said that, I do speculate a lot, especially about reality outside our space-time interface. BK has convinced me that Idealism is the most probable paradigm but that raises more questions about reality than answers. Chalmers never posited even for a second that P- Zombies might be ontic. They were only ever invented as an aide for thought experiments in the Philosophy of Mind. (even after saying that , they could still be real.)

[Aeringa Voyno]

Ben,

well, we do need some kind of terminology if we want to specify that we're talking about "what-we're-used-to-perceiving-as-lifeforms-in-this-world-of-chairs-trees-and-meatbags-we-call-physical", even though it's all forms in Consciousness and their dynamics. But yes, there's always the danger of getting tangled up in less than helpful concepts.

[Ashvin Pandurangi]

River - would you agree that Darwinian evolution is the way some evolutionary dynamic in the field of universal consciousness presents itself in our physical interface? If not, then I am definitely curious as to why.

If so, then I am not sure why the process of dissociation as described by DID cannot also correspond to a dynamic in the field of universal consciousness.

[Michael Larkin]

getting philosophic the very purpose of this forum, isn't it? ;)

Of course. I was being a touch ironic :-)

However, an organism's genome isn't always "walled off" from other organisms' genetic material, as horizontal gene transfer is a rather widespread phenomenon, and it also occurs across species. Then, there's also the chimerism phenomenon, providing a further exception to the linear "one zygote - one adult organism" rule.

Well, I'd guess that epigenetic factors , chimerism, etc. don't affect the status of organisms as autonomous entities.

I'm not an academic biologist, but many moons ago I did study the biological sciences at university, where I specialised in parasitology, specifically platyhelminths -- tapeworms and trematodes. Some of those bad boys have amazing life cycles, with several larval stages, often in different intermediate hosts. It's hard sometimes to say that there's a continuum of one organism from egg to adult.

You might like to check out the life cycle of one trematode, Dicrocoelium Dentriticum.

This beast has no less than two intermediate hosts and four different larval forms. It kinda puts the caterpillar-chrysalis metamorphosis to shame. It's not just one egg that eventually and rather circuitously produces one adult, but one of the stages (the sporocyst) is asexually multiplicative. Hence one egg can eventually produce many larvae.

It all seems so contingent; the life cycle depends on a number of events, such as a snail eating the egg, an ant one of the larval stages (the cercaria), and, eventually, a sheep the ant. How on earth such a complicated sequence of events could have evolved by random mutation and natural selection is a mystery that nobody ever explained to me. It's even more intriguing because the behaviour of ants is changed when they're infected. Instead of retiring to the nest at dusk, they climb grass stalks near the top of which their mandibles clamp, making them easier to ingest by grazing sheep. One of the cercaria infects the brain of the ant, you see, and that's what changes its behaviour. How devious is that?

In the case of such complicated life cycles, it's hard to define what the "organism" is when there's a bewildering array of different morphological forms. Most people think in terms of adult -- meoisis - sex cells -- fertilization -- zygote -- back to adult when they're talking about living organisms, but in the world of trematode parasites, that's far too simple a view.

I guess what I'm indicating is that in some cases, autonomy may apply not to one morphological form, but to a plethora of forms. For Dicrocoelium, one individual might, in a sense, be considered to encompass everything from one egg to many different larvae to potentially many different adults in many different sheep.

I sense that some might be rather frowning on this biological diversion and thinking that I too am being dualist or even materialist. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We can't help but experience living organisms as distinct appearances on the screen of our perception. What we perceive may not be reality in itself (whatever that might be), but I think it must at least mirror to some extent some of the potential in the mind of M@L.

BK states that he is an analytical idealist, and also a reductionist thinker. For him, I suspect that whatever reality is, it must be compatible with the empirical observations upon which we build our models of the world. Those models aren't the actual truth, which we're continually refining and can't help but formulate our concepts about in terms of language.

I believe there is something it is like to be an organism, however disparate and dispersed it may seem to us. However much I might wish to comprehend and express reality as it actually is, all I can do is use the main tool I have, which is language. But no one should think that I don't have an at least some inner appreciation of the absolute marvel of (probably) dissociated existence. I do, but I just wish I could convey that better than I can.

[Ben Iscatus]

Great stuff, Michael. The trematode is a very complex and rarefied idea in MAL's mind. Unfortunately, it's unpleasant.

[Aeringa Voyno]

Oh, yes, this Dicrocoelium fluke looks like a (admittedly morbidly) fascinating example of biological complexity and intricacy. (I, too, studied biology once, although I never finished my degree for various reasons. My particular passions were, and maybe still are, Herpetology and Palaeontology ;) )

It all seems so contingent; the life cycle depends on a number of events, such as a snail eating the egg, an ant one of the larval stages (the cercaria), and, eventually, a sheep the ant. How on earth such a complicated sequence of events could have evolved by random mutation and natural selection is a mystery that nobody ever explained to me. It's even more intriguing because the behaviour of ants is changed when they're infected. Instead of retiring to the nest at dusk, they climb grass stalks near the top of which their mandibles clamp, making them easier to ingest by grazing sheep. One of the cercaria infects the brain of the ant, you see, and that's what changes its behaviour. How devious is that?

Do I understand it correctly, that of all the metacercariae inside the ant's body, only one single larva would invade its brain? This is not just devious, it also raises a whole bunch of questions, some of them pretty much unanswerable from our human point of view. How do the larvae "appoint their Chosen One"? Do they experience themselves as a single unbroken alter at this stage? How does the ant experience this kind of "possession"? (And how do ants experience being part of their hive anyway?)

What we perceive may not be reality in itself (whatever that might be), but I think it must at least mirror to some extent some of the potential in the mind of M@L.

Absolutely! Contemplating biological life and the multitude of forms it takes is, I believe, not much different from seeking meaning in myths or dream imagery, in a sense. Some of us human alters may better relate to archetypal stories about more-or-less fictional human (or human-like) characters, while others see Nature pointing Beyond with myriads of fingers, branches, antennae and tentacles. And no matter the story, one can always get lost in letters - get attached to particular interpretations and models, ignore (or worse) what one considers weird or alien, lose That Which Sees out of sight... It can happen to theologians, philosophers and natural scientists alike. And who can blame them? Some of these forms are frightening. Formlessness, unboundedness, can be positively dreadful, too.

[Michael Larkin]

Yes, only one worm makes its way to the brain. From the Wiki article:

The second intermediate host, an ant (Formica fusca in the United States[13]), uses the trail of snail slime as a source of moisture. The ant then swallows a cyst loaded with hundreds of juvenile lancet flukes. The parasites enter the gut and then drift through its body. Most of the cercariae encyst in the haemocoel of the ant and mature into metacercariae, but one moves to the sub-esophageal ganglion (a cluster of nerve cells underneath the esophagus). There, the fluke takes control of the ant's actions by manipulating these nerves.[14] As evening approaches and the air cools, the infected ant is drawn away from other members of the colony and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Once there, it clamps its mandibles onto the top of the blade and stays there until dawn. Afterward, it goes back to its normal activity at the ant colony. If the host ant were to be subjected to the heat of the direct sun, it would die along with the parasite. Night after night, the ant goes back to the top of a blade of grass until a grazing animal comes along and eats the blade, ingesting the ant along with it, thus putting lancet flukes back inside their host.

I'm unsure whether the sub-oesophageal ganglion is actually part of the brain of ants, but it's in the head and at least close to it. It may not be that the worms "choose" one to infect the ganglion: it could be that a) there's only room enough for one cercaria and/or b) the first one to get there in some way inhibits the attraction of any of the rest, so to speak. IOW, it may be that they all experience such an attraction, but only the first one to get there succeeds and the rest encyst in the haemocoel as metacercariae.

Whatever, it's still a remarkable phenomenon, and there are many variations on the digenian trematode theme. In some species the cercaria may be free-swimming in water for a while as it seeks out the next host, as indeed might the miracidium, which is the first larval stage after the egg. Or the free-swimming cercaria (rainwater could be enough) might encyst in the open pending ingestion by a suitable host.

In another example I can remember, one larval stage of the trematode Leucochloridium paradoxum infects the antennae of snails where it wiggles about and looks like some kind of tasty tidbit for a bird -- see this YouTube video. There are quite probably myriads of other bizarre examples out there.

One last point: there may be paratenic hosts, which aren't the normal target of any stage of the life cycle, but nonetheless the parasite may be able to get inside them and wait up pending its real target coming along and ingesting them. Again, from Wiki:

Paratenic host - an organism that harbors the sexually immature parasite but is not necessary for the parasite's development cycle to progress. Paratenic hosts serve as "dumps" for non-mature stages of a parasite in which they can accumulate in high numbers. The trematode Alaria americana may serve as an example: the so-called mesocercarial stages of this parasite reside in tadpoles, which are rarely eaten by the definitive canine host. The tadpoles are more frequently preyed on by snakes, in which the mesocercariae may not undergo further development. However, the parasites may accumulate in the snake paratenic host and infect the definitive host once the snake is consumed by a canid.[11] The nematode Skrjabingylus nasicola is another example, with slugs as the intermediate hosts, shrews and rodents as the paratenic hosts, and mustelids as the definitive hosts.

These little buggers can be tremendously adaptable and tenacious, as you can see!

[Justin]

Fascinating stuff.

 I'm just starting on Merlin Sheldrake's book Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. It has a lot about the role of Mycorrhizal fungi within the roots of trees and plants and the communication channels thereby created (otherwise known as the 'wood wide web'). Another example of inter-alter enmeshment.

[Lou Gold]

Folks might want to add the works of Monica Gagliano to the reading list on plant communications.

[Ben Iscatus]

I'm just starting on Merlin Sheldrake's book Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures.

Me too. Looks amazing.

[Aeringa Voyno]

Michael,

yes, I read the Wiki article and this little detail struck me as particularly fascinating. Limited space sounds plausible, though I wonder if some kind of cooperation might be involved. After all, all of the metacercariae benefit from this "arrangement".

Of course, all these sophisticated adaptations are a rather ghastly business. Although I recall having read somewhere a while ago of the hypothesis that parasitic relationships tend to evolve into mutually benefecial symbioses over long periods of time (mycorrhiza was given as an example). I'll need to do more reading on that matter.

Justin and Lou,

thanks for the tips, I'm definitely ordering the fungi book, and will certainly delve into Gagliano's work! ;)