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This is anthropomorphism. A thing can’t be selfish unless it has a self. The error in this view is that it is dialectical, it derives from thinking in terms of opposition. That’s a natural way for humans to think, to polarize and then put the poles into contradiction, but it’s often in error or at least provides a limited and biased view. The way I look at it, species don’t compete to fill a niche, the niche attracts the species that fills it. It’s a natural process without contradiction. It’s the same for life or non-life, just that life, via self-replication with variation, has lots more possibilities.
burt - I think we should take some advice from you:
8. Model should not use anthropomorphic analogies unless it also establishes the basis of the analogy in scientific terms.
But I think I’d still pass the test. For instance “blind selfishness” is a term widely used by biologists. It just indicates what Darwin described rather anthropomophically as the “struggle” for life. I don’t think too many scientists would agree with you that animals don’t compete. Game theory is routinely used by scientists to explain animal behaviour. None that I know of use e.g. game theory to expain the behaviour of a landslide or some other non-life event. But still, I’m not against your idea either; I think there’s room for both views. As Euc suggests, emergence is just a result of entropy acting within the physical constraints of its environment - so no anthropomorphic need for a living niche that “attracts the species” either, or a new law of emergence.
You’re misunderstanding what I’m trying to get across. Previous pose went into it a bit. While it’s useful to use anthropomorphic terms to try and get ideas across, it’s also dangerous because the ideas will come colored by the language. Blind selfishness might have a technical definition but probably is just a quick way of saying things (am not a biologist so can’t say for sure). But I would sill say it’s not selfishness without a self that at least partially isolates itself from its environment and conceives of itself as an independent entity. And game theory uses the language of competition, but that’s because it was originally developed to deal with human interactions. When used to describe animal behavior it’s just a descriptive mathematical language that fits because we can interpret the interactions of different gene distributions, or different behavioral strategies as game strategies subject to reproduction, variation, and selection. When I say the niche “attracts” the species to fill it I’m talking in the same way as if I were to say the Earth “attracts” the Moon. Except that the niche is defined by far more complex functional relations.
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 12:24 AM
SocialFabric - 28 March 2012 03:13 PM
Life is an attempt to fight entropy. Entropy ‘seeks’ equilibrium through converting all complexity back to its simplest grand and united and non-selfish form - dissipating heat energy. Life on the other hand ‘seeks’ to establish an equilibrium or homeostasis within the ever more complex arrangements of separated and selfish forms. It’s an interesting dichotomy. Which side is truly the more selfish - the destroyer or the builder; the ‘Grand Reaper’ or ‘Gaia’? Ultimately it just depends on your point of view I guess. So in a sense the selfishness of entropy is in everything and in a sense, if this was not the case, life would have nothing to fight about and nothing to be selfish about.
Again, anthropocentric, it isn’t a fight it’s a dance of functional relations (and note, you can get order out of this with things like dissipative structures which, while exhibiting structure and ordered interactions, also provide the maximum entropy generation). No self, no selfishness at all.
Again I think you’re being excessively PC. Life must ‘deal with’ entropy or become defunct. It must establish an alternative equilibrium - one that comes about by establishing order rather than disrupting it.
Surely a ‘dance’ is just as anthropomorphic as a ‘fight’. If anyone can use an analogy to help the reader understand the underlying science, I think the analogy is worthwhile. If there is a better analogy (e.g. dance rather than fight) then that’s fine. I think your point is a good one.
Finally, don’t forget we are dealing with understanding human consciousness and self here via a consideration of the evolutionary past. What this means is we are trying to start some time in the past and roll the clock forward to arrive at a plausible model. That is, we are trying to be anti-anthropomorphic if there is such a thing (anthropomorphic being running the clock backwards by assigning human nature to earlier species). So we use ideas like primordial consciousness and primordial self. So when I talk about (primordial) self or ego or social claiming or the basic struggle for survival and replication in plantlife or peacock behaviour, it’s with the aim to be anti-anthropomorphic. I think this is legitimate given the topic.
The thing I’m trying to get across is that thinking of the peacock “struggling for survival” is still a human projection. The peacock just does what it does, and its genes get replicated and passed on with variations and if the species survives its a matter of population genetics. Thinking in terms of struggle and competition may be useful, but it infects the concept of evolution in a way similar to the assumption of an intelligent designer (which is a logical error, just as I would claim the use of struggle and conflict language an metaphors is a dialectical error).
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 12:24 AM
Also, entropy isn’t a thing, it’s a measure of disorder. There is a functional relation between the generation of entropy and processing of information.
Yep - entropy (and negentropy) is ‘a label we slap on a process’, as is life and self and ego and consciousness. You said earlier “I suspect ... that consciousness is the source of identity of objects”. It was this statement I thought about when I realised that it is the process of entropy that gives all objects their temporal form or identity. Can you think of anything else? An expanding universe giving rise to entropy perhaps?
I still would not identify entropy with consciousness, but the idea of entropy flow in general I like.
I still would not identify entropy with consciousness, but the idea of entropy flow in general I like.
Ok - let’s move on.
But I am interested in identifying negentropy with life & a non-woo form of primordial consciousness.
If we really tried to define the “struggle” of life (and the struggle of self as an example of life’s adaptations) in more general terms, then I think we’d get pretty close to it in terms of risk management, i.e. a (blindly?) intentional attempt to retain and grow organisational advantage through information management and exploitation, in the face of events that tend towards organisational or systemic disadvantage.
So primordial life and self/consciousness were (blind) “information exploiters”, just as they still are today. This is the deep essence of them. This defines for me the basic process or dynamic at work. Now when we try to look for a material vessel to hold this essence, the modern human brain perhaps being the epitomy of such vessels, logic seems to slip though our fingers. How can something purely informational be explained by a rather static arrangement of real particles? That’s why I suggested earlier to Euc my “way-out” theory, that “in non-life, arrangements of real particles are not controlled by their associated virtual particles (the fields that surround them and hold information about them in terms of mass, charge, movement, shape, etc.) whereas in life the real particles do begin to be molded by the informational fields they are held within. Finally in brains we see the informational fields highly served by the real particles. Just a theory - but at least it is still physicalist and avoids the invention of a (space-time-matter removed) primordial consciousness…”
If real particles are entropic then their counterparts - the virtual particles - are negentropic. The struggle of life would thus be reduced to the virtual particles gaining ascendency (sorry to sound anthropomorphic again but I can’t even imagine the underlying science) over the real particles through their slightly asymmetrical relationship as the universe expands. This could explain what goes on at the mind/body boundary, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. I think it also agrees with what Nhoj and others have suggested before (10th Feb 2011 in philosophy thread called “The foundation of sentience” ended 13th Feb 2011) in terms of consciousness as an “information cloud”. Just to mess things up even further, I can’t really see how this process would not be quantum-mechanical.
But I am interested in identifying negentropy with life & a non-woo form of primordial consciousness.
If we really tried to define the “struggle” of life (and the struggle of self as an example of life’s adaptations) in more general terms, then I think we’d get pretty close to it in terms of risk management, i.e. a (blindly?) intentional attempt to retain and grow organisational advantage through information management and exploitation, in the face of events that tend towards organisational or systemic disadvantage.
The natural tendency in material systems is to move to the regions of phase space having greatest volume, a purely statistical effect. These regions are the regions of greatest disorder and the tendency of systems to move in this way is characterized as the tendency for entropy to increase. The entropy of a system is a measure of the disorder in the system, of the energy in the system that is unavailable to do work. At the same time, within matter and energy flows, dissipative structures can arise, ordered structures that exist in the flow (as a vortex, for example) and owe their structure to the flow. Stability of these structures arises because thermodynamically they provide the maximum rate of increase of entropy. When such structures become sufficiently complex, they acquire the capacity to reproduce and become living systems. The term autopoiesis is useful here, an autopoietic system is one whose cycles of operation act to reproduce the system structure and the basic functions that maintain it. There is no attempt to accomplish anything, only a natural process whose development depends on the richness of the energetic environment. Living systems require a flow of energy to persist and evolutionary processes will lead to a variety of means for acquiring or sustaining this flow.
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
So primordial life and self/consciousness were (blind) “information exploiters”, just as they still are today. This is the deep essence of them. This defines for me the basic process or dynamic at work.
Is it “exploitation” when there is no intent, just systems following out natural law with no capacity to function otherwise?
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
Now when we try to look for a material vessel to hold this essence, the modern human brain perhaps being the epitomy of such vessels, logic seems to slip though our fingers. How can something purely informational be explained by a rather static arrangement of real particles? That’s why I suggested earlier to Euc my “way-out” theory, that “in non-life, arrangements of real particles are not controlled by their associated virtual particles (the fields that surround them and hold information about them in terms of mass, charge, movement, shape, etc.) whereas in life the real particles do begin to be molded by the informational fields they are held within. Finally in brains we see the informational fields highly served by the real particles. Just a theory - but at least it is still physicalist and avoids the invention of a (space-time-matter removed) primordial consciousness…”
And people accuse me of woo. Sorry, but it seems to me that you’re throwing caution to the winds here, what reason is there to think that the fields involved have anything to do with control? This, to me, seems even more of a stretch than assuming an a priori consciousness. BTW, one of the great issues in philosophy of mind and consciousness is how something non-material could have any influence on things material, and how things material could have any access to the non-material, such as an information-field?
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
If real particles are entropic then their counterparts - the virtual particles - are negentropic. The struggle of life would thus be reduced to the virtual particles gaining ascendency (sorry to sound anthropomorphic again but I can’t even imagine the underlying science) over the real particles through their slightly asymmetrical relationship as the universe expands. This could explain what goes on at the mind/body boundary, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. I think it also agrees with what Nhoj and others have suggested before (10th Feb 2011 in philosophy thread called “The foundation of sentience” ended 13th Feb 2011) in terms of consciousness as an “information cloud”. Just to mess things up even further, I can’t really see how this process would not be quantum-mechanical.
The first sentence invokes a hidden symmetry assumption, it isn’t a truism. The second sentence asserts without proof or even an argument that there is an asymmetric relation between virtual and real particles arising from the expansion of the universe. I suspect that your background in physics is a bit shaky.
But I am interested in identifying negentropy with life & a non-woo form of primordial consciousness.
If we really tried to define the “struggle” of life (and the struggle of self as an example of life’s adaptations) in more general terms, then I think we’d get pretty close to it in terms of risk management, i.e. a (blindly?) intentional attempt to retain and grow organisational advantage through information management and exploitation, in the face of events that tend towards organisational or systemic disadvantage.
The natural tendency in material systems is to move to the regions of phase space having greatest volume, a purely statistical effect. These regions are the regions of greatest disorder and the tendency of systems to move in this way is characterized as the tendency for entropy to increase. The entropy of a system is a measure of the disorder in the system, of the energy in the system that is unavailable to do work. At the same time, within matter and energy flows, dissipative structures can arise, ordered structures that exist in the flow (as a vortex, for example) and owe their structure to the flow. Stability of these structures arises because thermodynamically they provide the maximum rate of increase of entropy. When such structures become sufficiently complex, they acquire the capacity to reproduce and become living systems. The term autopoiesis is useful here, an autopoietic system is one whose cycles of operation act to reproduce the system structure and the basic functions that maintain it. There is no attempt to accomplish anything, only a natural process whose development depends on the richness of the energetic environment. Living systems require a flow of energy to persist and evolutionary processes will lead to a variety of means for acquiring or sustaining this flow.
Was that a quote from your thesis? OK - don’t want to argue here again. it’s just perspective. I was comparing modern risk management to the Darwinian struggle and you, perhaps more correctly, are describing the dance of the larger framework you mentioned earlier.
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
So primordial life and self/consciousness were (blind) “information exploiters”, just as they still are today. This is the deep essence of them. This defines for me the basic process or dynamic at work.
Is it “exploitation” when there is no intent, just systems following out natural law with no capacity to function otherwise?
Ok - fair enough point. The intention stance is an evolutionary “good trick” (but I would argue, not a dirty trick).
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
Now when we try to look for a material vessel to hold this essence, the modern human brain perhaps being the epitomy of such vessels, logic seems to slip though our fingers. How can something purely informational be explained by a rather static arrangement of real particles? That’s why I suggested earlier to Euc my “way-out” theory, that “in non-life, arrangements of real particles are not controlled by their associated virtual particles (the fields that surround them and hold information about them in terms of mass, charge, movement, shape, etc.) whereas in life the real particles do begin to be molded by the informational fields they are held within. Finally in brains we see the informational fields highly served by the real particles. Just a theory - but at least it is still physicalist and avoids the invention of a (space-time-matter removed) primordial consciousness…”
And people accuse me of woo. Sorry, but it seems to me that you’re throwing caution to the winds here, what reason is there to think that the fields involved have anything to do with control? This, to me, seems even more of a stretch than assuming an a priori consciousness. BTW, one of the great issues in philosophy of mind and consciousness is how something non-material could have any influence on things material, and how things material could have any access to the non-material, such as an information-field?
Throwing caution to the wind - yes maybe. Assuming control? No - not at all; “being controlled” and intentionally “seeking control” are two different things. I wouldn’t assume “seeking control” comes into this model except by way of the evolutionary good trick. The way an informational field or set of virtual particles could have an impact on real particles is that they’re part and parcel of the same sticky stuff. This is how strings are pictured.
SocialFabric - 30 March 2012 06:17 PM
If real particles are entropic then their counterparts - the virtual particles - are negentropic. The struggle of life would thus be reduced to the virtual particles gaining ascendency (sorry to sound anthropomorphic again but I can’t even imagine the underlying science) over the real particles through their slightly asymmetrical relationship as the universe expands. This could explain what goes on at the mind/body boundary, i.e. the hard problem of consciousness. I think it also agrees with what Nhoj and others have suggested before (10th Feb 2011 in philosophy thread called “The foundation of sentience” ended 13th Feb 2011) in terms of consciousness as an “information cloud”. Just to mess things up even further, I can’t really see how this process would not be quantum-mechanical.
The first sentence invokes a hidden symmetry assumption, it isn’t a truism. The second sentence asserts without proof or even an argument that there is an asymmetric relation between virtual and real particles arising from the expansion of the universe. I suspect that your background in physics is a bit shaky.
Yes - there is an assumption of connectedness, but not a purely (super-)symmetrical connectedness; rather, an asymmetrical connectedness that I suspect is necessary for our universe to “flow”. But yeah - just a theory. I’m not sure where I’ve come across the link between entropy and the universe’s expansion but have to go and not important… Now, why not throw caution to the wind yourself and explain how consciousness provides identity?
SF, an aside. You might want to check out the “Quantum Zeno Effect.” This is the effect that “observation” has on a quantum system. In particular, if you have an unstable quantum system, the probability it will decay depends on the frequency of observation. Observation here is really just interaction with some other system. The theory behind it is that when you observe the system in a particular state, it collapses the wave function to that state, then the clock starts all over again. So the higher the frequency of observation, the less chance for the system to decay. This has been experimentally verified. What might interest you is applying this to a virtual particle. A virtual particle refers to a particle whose existence is solely a function of the Heisenberg relation between energy and time. That is, any amount of energy can spontaneously manifest from the vacuum so long as it’s existence doesn’t persist longer than the associated time derived from the relation dEdT < h (dE is the energy fluctuation, dT is the length of time it exists). For even very light particles popping out of the void, they are allowed to exist for only an extremely short time, but if the particle interacts with another particle during that time the Zeno effect can come into play - a virtual particle has a real material effect.
You might find some of Roger Penrose’s recent books (e.g., The Road to Reality) of interest. No need to buy into his more esoteric speculations, but he gives an excellent background to the basic physics involved.
The natural tendency in material systems is to move to the regions of phase space having greatest volume, a purely statistical effect. These regions are the regions of greatest disorder and the tendency of systems to move in this way is characterized as the tendency for entropy to increase. The entropy of a system is a measure of the disorder in the system, of the energy in the system that is unavailable to do work. At the same time, within matter and energy flows, dissipative structures can arise, ordered structures that exist in the flow (as a vortex, for example) and owe their structure to the flow. Stability of these structures arises because thermodynamically they provide the maximum rate of increase of entropy.
You’re fine to here burt, this all true and even well put, other good examples of dissipative “structures” might be standing waves or candle flames. They are thermodynamically open systems with a constant change in material composition.
But then you jump over the edge.
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
When such structures become sufficiently complex, they acquire the capacity to reproduce and become living systems.
No. It’s true that living systems are thermodynamically open, are animated by changes in entropy and in a constant state of material flux, and are autopoietic in this sense. The word was coined by Humberto Maturana to describe these aspect of life. The point to this is show that despite their “complexity” living things are not “anti entropic” and do not violate 2nd law thermodynamics in any way. Atheists will recognize this as the first argument theist use for god, the idea that the “complexity” of life is thermodynamically impossible. This is the answer to that objection. We see autopoietic structure is thermodynamically legal.
However the word also is really meant to describe the relationship of a thermodynamically open system with an operationally closed system as we see in living things. Standing waves are not operationally closed. This operational closure is the fundamental identifying distinction to be made between self and non-self. The 1st cell wall has as much to do with the evolution of life as the 1st self-replicating molecules. Autopoiesis allowed this to happen, the universe is not thermodynamically closed to it.
What is not true is that autopoiesis is “complex"or leads to “complexity” in the sense that you mean the word or that the word could ever be meant biologically.*
Autopoiesis does not equal “self organization”, it just allows for the possibility of organization in a thermodynamically open system. Also, organization does not equal biological complexity. Autopoiesis does not necessarily lead to “complexity” which in turn does not necessarily lead to reproduction and “life”. This statement above is very misleading.
From widipedia
Though others have often used the term as a synonym for self-organization, Maturana himself stated he would “never use the notion of self-organization, because it cannot be the case… it is impossible. That is, if the organization of a thing changes, the thing changes.”[3] Moreover, an autopoietic system is autonomous and operationally closed, in the sense that there are sufficient processes within it to maintain the whole. Autopoietic systems are “structurally coupled” with their medium, embedded in a dynamic of changes that can be recalled as sensory-motor coupling. This continuous dynamic is considered as a rudimentary form of knowledge or cognition and can be observed throughout life-forms
.
Note these last sentences. I think that all of these notions of “consciousness”, “free will”, “stimulus / response” and more can be summed up in this. We are part and parcel of our environment and have evolved in inescapably close relation with it.
About complexity, the reason I put it in scare quotes is that I don’t want the word to slip by without thinking about it. All of that which is complex, (all of it), are not complex of a piece, but instead are really made of fewer, simpler things. Good tricks that address functions. The lever, the wheel, the inclined plane, the airfoil, the transistor, all the things that can be done with carbon, lipids, rna, the eukaryotic cell, chlorophyll….you get the idea. These are Dennett’s good tricks and scaffolds in lieu of “skyhooks”. These functions really are “primordial” in the sense that they exist immaterial, unbidden in the world until evolutions (aka “design), stubbles across them out of need borne of 100% pure circumstance. So we see that necessity really is the “mother of invention”. These a priori, potential functions are existential in what Dennett would call “design space” or the space of all possible things.
Despite burt’s aversion to reductionism, the idea of “complexity” as a thing unto itself is a myth. It’s exactly like thinking that god made the world 6000 years ago and everything in it, complex, designed as piece. You can toss into that the mistaken notion that life really is thermodynamically impossible were it not for god. The big brainy complex thing that is you is really a whole bunch of brainless things performing a bunch of brainless functions. And purposeless too of course, thermodynamically we are, (temporary), standing waves in the river of time.
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
The term autopoiesis is useful here, an autopoietic system is one whose cycles of operation act to reproduce the system structure and the basic functions that maintain it.
Not just the “structure” but the “topology”, aka the “design” not just the parts!! (parts is parts as we say in the trade, meaning parts are not design, and niether are tools - these are the two mis - takes of the weekend warrior home handy man )
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.[1]
[...] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.[2]
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
There is no attempt to accomplish anything, only a natural process whose development depends on the richness of the energetic environment. Living systems require a flow of energy to persist and evolutionary processes will lead to a variety of means for acquiring or sustaining this flow.
Yes, that is all true.
However, I sense a strong need on burt’s part to associate these ideas with the idea of self organization and his other 1st person self referential ideas regarding “primordial consciousness”. You seem to be a solipsist, is that true burt. Here’s what wiki had to say in criticism of Maturana. I think that criticism is unfair, because of what I wrote above, but others have taken flight with this idea and distorted it to something beyond it’s original intent I think.
There are multiple criticisms in relation to the use of the term in both its original context, as an attempt to define and explain the living, and its various expanded usages, such as applying it to self-organizing systems in general or social systems in particular.[8] Critics have argued that the term fails to define or explain living systems and that, because of the extreme language of self-referentiality it uses without any external reference, it is really an attempt to give substantiation to Maturana’s radical constructivist or solipsistic epistemology,[9] or what Danilo Zolo[10][11] has called instead a “desolate theology.” An example is the assertion by Maturana and Varela that “what we do not see does not exist”[12] or that reality is an invention of observers. The autopoietic model, said Rod Swenson,[13] is “miraculously decoupled from the physical world by its progenitors [...] (and thus) grounded on a solipsistic foundation that flies in the face of both common sense and scientific knowledge.”
The natural tendency in material systems is to move to the regions of phase space having greatest volume, a purely statistical effect. These regions are the regions of greatest disorder and the tendency of systems to move in this way is characterized as the tendency for entropy to increase. The entropy of a system is a measure of the disorder in the system, of the energy in the system that is unavailable to do work. At the same time, within matter and energy flows, dissipative structures can arise, ordered structures that exist in the flow (as a vortex, for example) and owe their structure to the flow. Stability of these structures arises because thermodynamically they provide the maximum rate of increase of entropy.
You’re fine to here burt, this all true and even well put, other good examples of dissipative “structures” might be standing waves or candle flames. They are thermodynamically open systems with a constant change in material composition.
But then you jump over the edge.
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
When such structures become sufficiently complex, they acquire the capacity to reproduce and become living systems.
No. It’s true that living systems are thermodynamically open, are animated by changes in entropy and in a constant state of material flux, and are autopoietic in this sense. The word was coined by Humberto Maturana to describe these aspect of life. The point to this is show that despite their “complexity” living things are not “anti entropic” and do not violate 2nd law thermodynamics in any way. Atheists will recognize this as the first argument theist use for god, the idea that the “complexity” of life is thermodynamically impossible. This is the answer to that objection. We see autopoietic structure is thermodynamically legal.
However the word also is really meant to describe the relationship of a thermodynamically open system with an operationally closed system as we see in living things. Standing waves are not operationally closed. This operational closure is the fundamental identifying distinction to be made between self and non-self. The 1st cell wall has as much to do with the evolution of life as the 1st self-replicating molecules. Autopoiesis allowed this to happen, the universe is not thermodynamically closed to it.
What is not true is that autopoiesis is “complex"or leads to “complexity” in the sense that you mean the word or that the word could ever be meant biologically.*
Autopoiesis does not equal “self organization”, it just allows for the possibility of organization in a thermodynamically open system. Also, organization does not equal biological complexity. Autopoiesis does not necessarily lead to “complexity” which in turn does not necessarily lead to reproduction and “life”. This statement above is very misleading.
Well, I was speaking loosely, autopoiesis is indeed distinct from complexity but unless you’re going to take the view that even elementary particles are autopoietic entities (going with Whitehead’s process philosophy, for example) a certain degree of complexity is required in a system before it can be autopoietic. I’m quite aware that it is also distinct from self-organization. In a conversation, once, Karl Pribram said that self-organization is bottom up, autopoiesis is top down. That’s always given me what I think is a good view: a system can self-organize to the point where top down constraints appear, conforming the system into an autopoietic nexus.
Though others have often used the term as a synonym for self-organization, Maturana himself stated he would “never use the notion of self-organization, because it cannot be the case… it is impossible. That is, if the organization of a thing changes, the thing changes.”[3] Moreover, an autopoietic system is autonomous and operationally closed, in the sense that there are sufficient processes within it to maintain the whole. Autopoietic systems are “structurally coupled” with their medium, embedded in a dynamic of changes that can be recalled as sensory-motor coupling. This continuous dynamic is considered as a rudimentary form of knowledge or cognition and can be observed throughout life-forms
.
Note these last sentences. I think that all of these notions of “consciousness”, “free will”, “stimulus / response” and more can be summed up in this. We are part and parcel of our environment and have evolved in inescapably close relation with it.
We’re in agreement that we are immersed in our environment, but taking that as explanatory about consciousness, free will, and so on, might be ignoring the part of your quote that uses the analogy of “sensory-motor coupling.” That isn’t always stimulus/response, the devil is in the functionality involved in the coupling.
eucaryote - 31 March 2012 11:51 AM
About complexity, the reason I put it in scare quotes is that I don’t want the word to slip by without thinking about it. All of that which is complex, (all of it), are not complex of a piece, but instead are really made of fewer, simpler things. Good tricks that address functions. The lever, the wheel, the inclined plane, the airfoil, the transistor, all the things that can be done with carbon, lipids, rna, the eukaryotic cell, chlorophyll….you get the idea. These are Dennett’s good tricks and scaffolds in lieu of “skyhooks”. These functions really are “primordial” in the sense that they exist immaterial, unbidden in the world until evolutions (aka “design), stubbles across them out of need borne of 100% pure circumstance. So we see that necessity really is the “mother of invention”. These a priori, potential functions are existential in what Dennett would call “design space” or the space of all possible things.
Wow, you sound like a Platonist!
eucaryote - 31 March 2012 11:51 AM
Despite burt’s aversion to reductionism, the idea of “complexity” as a thing unto itself is a myth. It’s exactly like thinking that god made the world 6000 years ago and everything in it, complex, designed as piece. You can toss into that the mistaken notion that life really is thermodynamically impossible were it not for god. The big brainy complex thing that is you is really a whole bunch of brainless things performing a bunch of brainless functions. And purposeless too of course, thermodynamically we are, (temporary), standing waves in the river of time.
I wouldn’t want to reify complexity, it’s no more a thing than is entropy, just a convenient term as a measure.
eucaryote - 31 March 2012 11:51 AM
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
The term autopoiesis is useful here, an autopoietic system is one whose cycles of operation act to reproduce the system structure and the basic functions that maintain it.
Not just the “structure” but the “topology”, aka the “design” not just the parts!! (parts is parts as we say in the trade, meaning parts are not design, and niether are tools - these are the two mis - takes of the weekend warrior home handy man )
Yes, the topology. Want a 2300 year old theoretical model of an autopoietic system: the Chinese 5 element theory. Has the topology described by a 5-pointed star inscribed in a circle.
eucaryote - 31 March 2012 11:51 AM
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.[1]
[...] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.[2]
burt - 30 March 2012 10:54 PM
There is no attempt to accomplish anything, only a natural process whose development depends on the richness of the energetic environment. Living systems require a flow of energy to persist and evolutionary processes will lead to a variety of means for acquiring or sustaining this flow.
Yes, that is all true.
However, I sense a strong need on burt’s part to associate these ideas with the idea of self organization and his other 1st person self referential ideas regarding “primordial consciousness”. You seem to be a solipsist, is that true burt. Here’s what wiki had to say in criticism of Maturana. I think that criticism is unfair, because of what I wrote above, but others have taken flight with this idea and distorted it to something beyond it’s original intent I think.
There are multiple criticisms in relation to the use of the term in both its original context, as an attempt to define and explain the living, and its various expanded usages, such as applying it to self-organizing systems in general or social systems in particular.[8] Critics have argued that the term fails to define or explain living systems and that, because of the extreme language of self-referentiality it uses without any external reference, it is really an attempt to give substantiation to Maturana’s radical constructivist or solipsistic epistemology,[9] or what Danilo Zolo[10][11] has called instead a “desolate theology.” An example is the assertion by Maturana and Varela that “what we do not see does not exist”[12] or that reality is an invention of observers. The autopoietic model, said Rod Swenson,[13] is “miraculously decoupled from the physical world by its progenitors [...] (and thus) grounded on a solipsistic foundation that flies in the face of both common sense and scientific knowledge.”
As in earlier post (dinner was great), I do make a distinction between autopoiesis and self-organization, I think both concepts are required. Don’t know where you get the solipsist idea….
SF, an aside. You might want to check out the “Quantum Zeno Effect.” ... You might find some of Roger Penrose’s recent books (e.g., The Road to Reality) of interest. No need to buy into his more esoteric speculations, but he gives an excellent background to the basic physics involved.
Hi burt - sorry been busy & have to fly, but am familiar with the above.
Came across the panpsychism thread yesterday with Andy. Found it interesting but would have asked about his comment on 18 March “Well, not really. I see the omega point more as Barrow and Tipler see it in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, where if I understand them correctly the dependence is mutual, which is how I’d see it a priori. For me, subject and object are equal and opposite, locked in a complementarity that admits no asymmetric priority. ” My question is that if O & S are perfectly symmetrical then how can they interpenetrate with each other? They would effectively be complementary separate worlds wouldn’t they? The other question I would put would be about his “Photonic Theory of Consciousness”. Surely a photonic theory is a virtual particle theory (in the sense of photons being part of standard model’s interactions) that obviates the need for consiousness as a fundamental entity separate from space, time or matter? Catch you later…
[ Edited: 01 April 2012 04:32 PM by SocialFabric ]
SF, an aside. You might want to check out the “Quantum Zeno Effect.” ... You might find some of Roger Penrose’s recent books (e.g., The Road to Reality) of interest. No need to buy into his more esoteric speculations, but he gives an excellent background to the basic physics involved.
Hi burt - sorry been busy & have to fly, but am familiar with the above.
Came across the panpsychism thread yesterday with Andy. Found it interesting but would have asked about his comment on 18 March “Well, not really. I see the omega point more as Barrow and Tipler see it in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, where if I understand them correctly the dependence is mutual, which is how I’d see it a priori. For me, subject and object are equal and opposite, locked in a complementarity that admits no asymmetric priority. ” My question is that if O & S are perfectly symmetrical then how can they interpenetrate with each other? They would effectively be separate worlds wouldn’t they? The other question I would put would be about his “Photonic Theory of Consciousness”. Surely a photonic theory is a virtual particle theory (in the sense of photons being part of standard model’s interactions) that obviates the need for consiousness as a fundamental entity separate from space, time or matter? Catch you later…
Well, I wouldn’t agree with their subject/object comment. Second law of trialectics: everything contains the seed of its apparent opposite. An image I’ve used before is a circle with a distinguished point at the top labeled consciousness/energy. An arrow along the circle in a clockwise direction comes out of that point and is labeled “matter;” and an arrow coming out of that point in the other direction is labeled “mind.” At the bottom of the circle is a movable vertical slash labeled “Cartesian Cut.” On that cut (which is really a high dimensional boundary) is a Maxwell Demon who takes anything crossing the boundary and categorizes it as “me” or “not-me.” If the cut moves all the way around in the clockwise direction we have the undifferentiated “self” immersed in a world of external objects. If it moves all the way around in the counter-clockwise direction we have the world-as-mind. The Maxwell Demon doesn’t understand that the two sides of the cut are really part of the same circle.
Don’t know anything at all about a photonic theory of consciousness.
SF, an aside. You might want to check out the “Quantum Zeno Effect.” ... You might find some of Roger Penrose’s recent books (e.g., The Road to Reality) of interest. No need to buy into his more esoteric speculations, but he gives an excellent background to the basic physics involved.
Hi burt - sorry been busy & have to fly, but am familiar with the above.
Came across the panpsychism thread yesterday with Andy. Found it interesting but would have asked about his comment on 18 March “Well, not really. I see the omega point more as Barrow and Tipler see it in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, where if I understand them correctly the dependence is mutual, which is how I’d see it a priori. For me, subject and object are equal and opposite, locked in a complementarity that admits no asymmetric priority. ” My question is that if O & S are perfectly symmetrical then how can they interpenetrate with each other? They would effectively be separate worlds wouldn’t they? The other question I would put would be about his “Photonic Theory of Consciousness”. Surely a photonic theory is a virtual particle theory (in the sense of photons being part of standard model’s interactions) that obviates the need for consiousness as a fundamental entity separate from space, time or matter? Catch you later…
Well, I wouldn’t agree with their subject/object comment. Second law of trialectics: everything contains the seed of its apparent opposite. Don’t know anything at all about a photonic theory of consciousness.
At the time it seemed like u were Andy’s strongest backer. Andy had a link to his Prague slide presentation on his website. Love that 2nd law!
In the article, a neurobiologist at the U of Ariz is quoted as saying that insects have “the most sophisticated brains on this planet.”
Also, another researcher at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego offers:
The difference between the memories of a fly and a human might be a matter of degree. The human can store a lot more memories and can therefore maintain a more sophisticated personal narrative of his past and present. But van Swinderen believes “it could be exactly the same mechanism in a fly and a human.” Although there is still no evidence to decide either way, the result could be consciousness. (Read about the ingenious studies on the fly’s brain. Those scientists are so clever!)
Also, from last month’s National Geographic on bumblebees:
“Each bee has a brain the size of a grass seed, but the insects are able to harvest efficiently by solving one of math’s great puzzles: the traveling salesman problem…The bees studied…use spatial memory, rapidly refining routes through trial and error.”
If insects do turn out to be conscious, what are the implications?
There’s a fly on the windowpane and you don’t like flies. The fly watches you approach with a swatter but by the time the swatter hits the window the fly is gone. The fly was conscious of your approach, and conscious of the swatter’s 55mph trajectory.
As the swatter approached was the fly thinking, “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Surely any kind of rumination would result in the fly’s death.
Is this why samurai were interested in Zen? Could this be why the dawn of self-consciousness is called ‘the fall of man?’
Sayings that suggest the evolutionary advantages of not being self-conscious:
In the article, a neurobiologist at the U of Ariz is quoted as saying that insects have “the most sophisticated brains on this planet.”
Also, another researcher at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego offers:
The difference between the memories of a fly and a human might be a matter of degree. The human can store a lot more memories and can therefore maintain a more sophisticated personal narrative of his past and present. But van Swinderen believes “it could be exactly the same mechanism in a fly and a human.” Although there is still no evidence to decide either way, the result could be consciousness. (Read about the ingenious studies on the fly’s brain. Those scientists are so clever!)
Also, from last month’s National Geographic on bumblebees:
“Each bee has a brain the size of a grass seed, but the insects are able to harvest efficiently by solving one of math’s great puzzles: the traveling salesman problem…The bees studied…use spatial memory, rapidly refining routes through trial and error.”
If insects do turn out to be conscious, what are the implications?
There’s a fly on the windowpane and you don’t like flies. The fly watches you approach with a swatter but by the time the swatter hits the window the fly is gone. The fly was conscious of your approach, and conscious of the swatter’s 55mph trajectory.
As the swatter approached was the fly thinking, “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Surely any kind of rumination would result in the fly’s death.
Is this why samurai were interested in Zen? Could this be why the dawn of self-consciousness is called ‘the fall of man?’
Sayings that suggest the evolutionary advantages of not being self-conscious:
1. He who hesitates is lost.
2.
2. The fly gets inevitability and evitability in the most fundamental of ways. The fly, seeing shallowly into the future, chooses evitability. This is the fundamental algorithm. We choose life, but then given the alternative, we really have no choice.
)
