Glen -
Attempting a balance between succinctness and
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt
from Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
/One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a
complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the
“message”, never becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a
set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind
in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can
be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant
by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the
complex dynamical and relational constraints that maintain an
organism far from thermodynamic equilibrium. /
This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify a possible
resolution (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of
the Cartesian Duality we bandy about here.
Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems
in his 2000 Investigations:
- detect gradients
- construct constraints to extract work from gradients
- do work to maintain those constraints
may be relevant (or interesting or both).
On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
Glen -
FWIW, I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which
referenced Christian List's "Levels"
<http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/> and the points he made (and
you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions
*because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to
understand the paradoxes of mind/body substance/form duality
(illusions?).
To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your
reference to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your
criticism is that the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?
The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to
do with the tension between supervenience and entailment. Deacon's
style *does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over
again, louder and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong
reasons. But that alone does not make what he's saying wrong, or even
wrong-headed. Perhaps I am guilty of courting confirmation bias
insomuch as Deacon's constructions of homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem
to support the style of dualism which I suppose appeals to me for
reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.
Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of
references rather than open ended descriptions of
what/why/where/how/when every detail of what he said meant to me. I
fail at (avoid) clarity with too much more often than with too little, no?
I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen)
were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed
to read him. The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who
might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the
horse's mouth. I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on
other's opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe
(2009?) and gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in
him (I don't know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan
was making?). It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a
"blender" (presentations with group discussion) on the topic of
morphometric analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind
was on the topic of form -> function which had me mildly more
receptive to (curious about) ideas *like* morphic resonance. After
that I was more like 95% dismissive of what he goes on about. So...
now that I wasted another minute of your time on *this* paragraph, I
apologize for seeming to promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or
imply that you should waste time reading him. Whether reading
Deacon turns out to be a waste of time is an open question for me
myself. I have invested quite a bit of time and still don't have as
much traction as I would like. I think that is because these are
steep and slippery subjects in their own right, not because his work
is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.
I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on
Molecule-> Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's
thinking about bits V atoms and supervenience. To the extent that
none of this tickles any of your own thoughts or interests in what I
assume to be somewhat parallel (though maybe not convergent?) lines of
inquiry, then I suppose it would be a waste of your time to follow it
to any distance.
The following bit from the introduction to the essay linked *might*
characterize what it is I *thought* you might find relevant in the
paper and in the larger body of Deacon's work: _Information v
information-transmission_ and _aboutism_ each were reminiscent to me
of some of your arguments about whether communication actually exists
and List's arguments about indexicality perhaps.
/When Erwin Schrödinger (//1944
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR24>//)
pondered////What is Life?////from a physicist’s point of view
he focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain
themselves in a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and
how they store and pass on the information that determines
their organization. In his metaphor of an aperiodic crystal as
the carrier of this information he both foreshadowed Claude
Shannon’s (//1948
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR25>//)
analysis of information storage and transmission and Watson
and Crick’s (//1953
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR27>//)
discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
So by 1958 when Francis Crick (//1958
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR3>//)
first articulated what he called the “central dogma” of
molecular biology (i.e. that information in the cell flows
from DNA to RNA to protein structure and not the reverse) it
was taken for granted that that DNA and RNA molecules were
“carriers” of information. By scientific rhetorical fiat it
had become legitimate to treat molecules as able to provide
information “about” other molecules. By the mid 1970s Richard
Dawkins (//1976
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR5>//)
could safely assume this as fact and follow the idea to its
logical implications for evolutionary theory in his popular
book////The Selfish Gene//. By describing a sequence of
nucleotides in a DNA molecule as information and DNA
replication as the essential defining feature of life,
information was reduced to pattern and interpretation was
reduced to copying. What may have initially been a metaphor
became difficult to disentangle from the chemistry./
/In this way the concept of biological information lost its
aboutness but became safe for use in a materialistic science
that had no place for what seemed like a nonphysical property.///
Just to keep my flog landing on the hide of the horse that may have
expired several posts ago in this chain: Deacon's introduction of
*teleo* to this characterization of complex adaptive systems is the
*first* example I have found which is even a little bit compelling
toward understanding "Life Itself" (in the sense of what Schrodinger
was going on about in 1944)... with enough inspection (or flogging)
it may fizzle out and become nothing more than wet ash. For the
moment it feels like the glimmer of a signal where Sheldrake (and his
ken) were mostly generating noise (more to the point, wishful
thinking?) previously...
On 2/20/23 11:32 AM, glen wrote:
[sigh] But the whole point of knowing other people is so that they
can make your own work more efficient or effective. While I
appreciate the *citation* of tomes, to some extent, citation isn't
really useful for construction of a concept. It's only useful for
auditing constructs. So, rather than go read the teleodynamics
website (or sieve Sheldrake's spooky action at a distance stuff),
I'll ask you to explain *why* teleodynamics is interesting from a
panpsychist stance? (Or to drive my point home about how useless
citations are, how is it related to Biology's First Law
<https://bookshop.org/p/books/biology-s-first-law-the-tendency-for-diversity-and-complexity-to-increase-in-evolutionary-systems-daniel-w-mcshea/8308564?ean=9780226562261>?)
Or, barring that, I'll add it to my (practically) infinite queue of
stuff I should read but probably won't until I have a hook into it.
And even if I do read it, I probably won't understand it.
With the Toribio article, I'm motivated to read it because BC Smith
hooked me a long time ago. But Sheldrake? No way in hell am I going
to invest time in that. Teleodynamics? Well, it's a website. And the
website for ninjas is more interesting:
http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
/On Mon, Sep 12, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote: //
//My question of how well we can describe graph-based ...
what? ... //
//"statements"? "theorems"? Whatever. It's treated fairly well
in List's //
//paper: //
/ /
//Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General
Framework by //
//Christian List //http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/////
/ /
//in section "6.3 Indexical versus non-indexical and
first-personal //
//versus third-personal descriptions". We tend to think of the
3rd //
//person graph of possible worlds/states as if it's more
universal ... a //
//complete representation of the world. But there's something
captured //
//by the index/control-pointer //*walking*//some graph, with
or without a //
//scoping on how many hops away the index/subjective-locus can
"see". //
/ /
//I liken this to Dave's (and Frank's to some extent)
consistent //
//insistence that one's inner life is a valid thing in the
world, Dave //
//w.r.t. psychedelics and meditation and Frank's defense of
things like //
//psychodynamics. Wolpert seems to be suggesting a
"deserialization" of //
//the graph when he focuses on "finite sequences of elements
from a //
//finite set of symbols". I.e. walking the graph with the
index at a //
//given node. With the 3rd person ... whole graph of graphs,
the //
//serialization of that bushy thing can only produce an
infinitely long //
//sequence of elements from a (perhaps) infinte set. Is the
bushiness //
//*dense*//(greater than countable, as Wolpert asks)? Or
sparse? //
/ /
//I'm sure I'm not wording all this well. But that's why I'm
glad y'all //
//are participating, to help clarify these things. /
On 2/20/23 10:10, Steve Smith wrote:
As the discussion evolves:
But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form
as a human body.
I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or
"intention" ... or even "acting". It's more about accumulation and
the tendency of cumulative objects to accumulate (and
differentiate). Perhaps negentropy is a closer concept than
"interest" or "intention". And, although I disagree that experience
monism is more primitive than panpsychism, I agree that these forms
of panpsychism require mechanisms for composition (against which
James is famous) and other structure.
I re-introduce/offer Terrence Deacon's Teleodynamics
<https://teleodynamics.org/> which I do not take to be (quite?) as
difficult to integrate/think-about asSheldrake's Morphic Resonance
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake>
As with Torebeo's essay on BCS' OOO, Joanna Rączaszek‑Leonardi
<https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861>reviews
<https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861>
Deacon's How Molecules Became Signs
<https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9.pdf?pdf=button>
giving me a hint of a bridge between the "dualistic" worlds (form V.
substance or body V. mind) we banter about here a lot?
I found EricS's recent response very thought provoking, but every
attempt I had to respond directly felt like more "stirring" so am
holding off until/when/if I might actually be able to add coherent
signal to the one I get hints of forming here...
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