Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I
will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me
claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of claiming
some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why Deacon's relevant to one
or both of those comments as I read through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
Thanks.
On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
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...
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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