Courtesy of listener Matt Gantner, here's a Scientific American article on "Why Information Can't Be the Basis of Reality."
The author, John Horgan, criticizes information theorists like James Gleick who posit that information is somehow the basic structure of the universe (which seems to be a modern variation on Anaxagoras's idea that mind, or Nous, is the fundamental component). Horgan argues that information requires someone to be informed, i.e. requires consciousness, which is obviously not in any ordinary sense present at the sub-atomic level. This is similar to Searle's "Chinese Room" argument against the idea that "mind" can be understood as symbol manipulation (discussed here).
What do you think? Is Horgan missing something?
-Mark Linsenmayer
It all sounds pretty Hegalian (or at least touches on one of his central issues) to the degree that they are arguing over which is more primary, the information or material that conveys it, or in another way, the perceptions or the perciever (when what really makes sense is to say, its the middle ground, duh!})
For instance a lot of Horgan’s questions could be turned back around, like the following:
“The concept of information makes no sense in the absence of something to be informed—that is, a conscious observer capable of choice, or free will (sorry, I can’t help it, free will is an obsession).”
Well does conciousness make sense without something to be concious of? Or in Horgan’s phrasing, how could their be an informed without information?
And then there is this straw man:
“Matter can clearly exist without mind, but where do we see mind existing without matter? Shoot a man through the heart, and his mind vanishes while his matter persists. ”
Well the body is still existing to another mind. That Horgan concerns himself with the body and mind of one person, while sneaking in the conciousness of a second observer seems a silly oversight.
Of course none of that is to say that all matter could be information, any more than all information could be matter. So while Horgan wants to give matter primacy, it seems obvious that giving the primacy to information is just as problematic, or rather, that the distinction between them is problematic.
And Wheeler seems to make this very claim when offering the following:
“We live in a “participatory universe,” Wheeler suggested, which emerges from the interplay of consciousness and physical reality, the subjective and objective realms.”
This all gets confused though with the idea of information as binary sets. If information consists of binary sets, it must be some second order thing, arising perhaps, from the interplay of these binaries (like the possibility that information, “emerges from the interplay of consciousness and physical reality), in which case would information be primary, even as it “arises” out of other things?
So in response to the Horgan critique, maybe one could say that the universe = information. Information IS the interplay of binaries, which as relations of things to other things ARE what we think of as conciousness, and since conciousness needs what it is concious of in order to be concious (assuming conciousness requires an object at which to direct itself or differentiate itself from), and I really don’t know where I’m going with this, other than to say that Horgan’s claim that information requires an “informed” could be correct with out it following that conciousness must be something seperate from information.
On practical grounds though, such a theoretical model could lead and in fact seems to already have led to some interesting insights into how we can configure computers, scientific models, and other systems.
Naturally, I’m with Horgan on this.
First off, people think consciousness alone defines subjectivity/mentality and is always ‘on’ in animals with a CNS. Unless an organism has sense organs and is actively engaged using one or more of them to emphasize and focus upon the importance of the form of a bit of objective data (information), then most of the time the animal subjectivity is sub- or pre-conscious.
Like driving to work, unless a ball rolls into the street and jars you to full conscious awareness, you may well arrive at your destination mindless of the overall trip – your body’s past event-memory allowed lower mentality to work off of a limited field of information. When we dreamlessly sleep we are non-conscious. So if everyone were on auto pilot or asleep, lots of the cosmic information required to hold everything together is inactive (no conscious yes or no decisions).
But arguably, it is just decided-upon info that is actual and the rest merely possible.
But really, isn’t the data that empirical activity of conscious minds discovers what constitutes information in the article, so that unknown things like the nature of gravity are not yet decided (actualized) informationon, so there is no metaphysical need of gravity.
Maybe semiotics and says info is merely signs. For my vote, it is more likely that the ubiquitous metaphysically ‘objective stuff’ is feelings formed within occasions of subjective experience.
Cool topic! I was thinking about buying this book.
Re: Horgan. Isn’t this just a rehash of “idealism” vs. “materialism”? I like Horgan — he’s one of the few guys I’ll regularly watch on Blogging Heads TV. But one thing that annoys me about him is that he’s quick to dismiss philosophical concepts once they start to violate his vision of “common sense.” (As if quantum theory — which he fully accepts — doesn’t also violate common sense.) I think Horgan’s exchange with a fellow science writer, George Johnson is telling:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/33899?in=13:25&out=18:06
Basically, “Hume is for college, and then you grow up.”
In short, I don’t think Horgan is sufficiently familiar with idealism (and its evolution and various iterations) to credibly dismiss it on the grounds that it’s insufficiently “hard-headed.” Watching Horgan over the years, I think what he means by “hard-headed” is simply short-hand for “what the majority of the scientific community currently accepts as true.” Of course, many “hard-headed” scientists also brushed off plate tectonic theory, and relativity theory, and the Big Bang theory, until, oops, empirical observation caught up with them.
I’m not saying I accept Gleick’s thesis, or idealism. But I find Horgan’s critique glib. I’m more willing to be agnostic about these things, as my limited exposure to physics has made me pretty skeptical of “common sense.”
I found Freeman Dyson’s book review much more interesting, though it doesn’t go down the idealism hole:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/?page=1
In Dan’s link to Dyson’s review of Gleik, the discussion of genetic info being efficacious by non-conscious genes gets to my point in my 1st post.
But I am afraid Dyson’s joy in announcing the repeal of the second law of thermodynamics may be premature. For instance, he is pretty much acknowledging a form of entropy when he says:
“…from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness”
“The idea that mind is as fundamental as matter,” Horgan says, “flies in the face of everyday experience.” He thinks he’s arguing from common sense and the facts of science but it seems to me that he’s actually defending a metaphysical position. As Daniel points out, he seems to be dismissing idealism as if materialism were the only option. But what could be more relevant to an examination of the assertion that mind is as fundamental as matter? The readers of Scientific American are likely to find this attitude quite charming but I think the interesting thing about this information theory is the challenge it poses to the metaphysical assumptions that Horgan takes to be “crushingly obvious”.
It might seem like I’m getting ready to defend idealism but if I did that it would just be a mirror image of Horgan’s mistake. Instead of reducing mind to matter, I’d be reducing matter to mind. But what I think info theory implies – or at least one way to take the implication – is that mind and matter are not two separate ontological categories. Instead, mind and matter are two dimensions or aspects of everything so that the mental doesn’t suddenly appear at some point in the course of evolution. Instead, mind goes all the way down so that even subatomic particles have some small ability to respond within their environment. The idea here is that at this very basic level of existence has a range of “options” so narrow that its “behavior” can be described in terms of fixed laws. Using the exact same scientific data, then, we can reconceptualize the laws of physics as extremely persistent patterns of preference.
It sounds pretty crazy at first, I know. But we don’t have to imagine that atom and stars have minds in any kind of anthropomorphic sense. This is not to suggest that matter has anything like reflective self-consciousness or that a photon deliberately decides to be a particle or a wave. The idea is simply to seriously question the idea that physical reality is completely distinct from mind. I think the idea is that mind and matter evolved together. As the physical forms grow increasingly complex the mental dimension expands proportionally and a broader range of preferences can be expressed. There is still quite a leap in consciousness when we move from the physical level of evolution to the evolution of biological life but, on this view, consciousness does not have to suddenly appear out of nowhere. It was always already there, just as the physical components of life were already there, but now both dimensions have achieved a new level of complexity together.
This is a bit like idealism but it can be contrasted with the kind of absolute idealism wherein all of reality is One unified consciousness. On this alternative view, reality is entirely noetic but not in a unified way. Instead, as William James puts it, everything gets known by something. What you get here is a kind of pan-psychism wherein all of reality has a mental dimension but in various degrees and in endless varieties. On this view, reality is experience, but not a subjective solipsistic sense nor in the absolutist’s universal sense. Instead, reality is experience and experience goes all the way down.
“reality is experience and experience goes all the way down” …and as A N Whitehead says, “Besides experience, there is nothing, nothing, nothing – bare nothingness.”
Whitehead and James describe each moment of reality as a droplet or throb of experience. These experiences are dipolar – physical/mental, or similarly, objective/subjective.
Subjectivity/mentality is the stuff only of a present and momentarily brief occasion (maybe ½ sec in human conscious experiences) that quickly becomes a brute objective/physical fact of the past. In its once future, there is a new becoming in the now present occasion of subjective experience.
(Ontologically/temporally, one might say objectivity is be-ing in the past, and subjectivity is be-coming of the present. But this seems counter to Heidegger, to me.)
As best I can paraphrase ANW, the universe is a welter of megatrillions of split second spatio-temporal (throbs) called ‘actual entities’ or ‘occasions of experiene’ or ‘actual occasions’. During such throbs, subjective experience takes what is and integrates it with what might be. Affective tone (form) of physical feelings now objectified past facts actualized by once subjectively present occasions, together all lure the present actual entity to integrate the affective tones with conceptually grasped possibilities as it desires achieving greater definiteness of the forms. Once the present subjectivity satisfies its appetite, becoming ceases – its be-ing is of objective brute facticity. Its one time future now succeeds it as a new present subjective occasion whose past now includes a new fact – its immediate predecessor.
Speculative metaphysics at its grandest, but maybe just hokey ideas suffering from a mix of inconsistent existents (time, space, concept, feeling, form, mental, physical…). It is how ANW explains the universality of all experience, from quantuum to human consciousness. I am posting this to confirm and perhaps add a little to what David commented about experience going all the way down to an electron.
The small particle occupies a locus of space-time containing an interacting nexus of similar particle-events and exhibits a procession of past/present/future. Its present occasion of experience is far more physical than mental, and lasts maybe a billionth of a second. In its present circumstances, it’s ‘experience’ is of the immediately past occasions in its nexus (protons, neutrinos, whatever the find at cyclotrons…) whose physical energies (analogous to affective feelings in organisms) are ‘subjectively sensed’ and integrated with a new possibility (or a mere repeat of its past). It’s present act is already largely predicted by its physical past, as will also be true for that which succeeds it as its future; but, with all the individual possibilities that affect the interacting ‘particles’ in their own process within a nexus, this present occasion may have taken in a past of energy forms that would most efficiently be integrated in such a sudden new manner that the particle jumps into a higher or lower orbit (or whatever electrons do that make news in quantuum science journals).
I think it might help here to focus on what I like to call “semantic indeterminacy,” which I think shows the seriousness of the problem whatever one’s metaphysical/epistemological persuasion. What makes the sentences in a book “information” is not just its syntax (rules of combination) but semantics: meaning the arbitrary assignments of meanings to symbols. This is clearly requires conventions adhered to by human subjects: “dog” need not mean dog, and dogs can be referred to by any symbols we like. Another way to illustrate this is to take any computer program you like: it has an infinite number of interpretations depending on how we rig up our inputs and outputs to making them meaningful to human beings. The call of duty is also math. But with some tweaking (not of code but hardware) it could be turned into a inefficiently programmed game of tic tac toe. And so on. (Or it could just be call of duty where all greens are replaced with browns and vice versa).
The point is that there is nothing independent of human custom that allows us to take a particular set of patterns of 5 volt charges or the absence thereof and say even that they are 0’s and 1’s, even though they can be conveniently made (in computers) to represent them (in the same way that “dog” is a convenient way to refer to dogs). That’s semantic indeterminacy. You can’t derive semantics from syntax, and you can’t have information without semantics. And semantics requires human subjects. There’s is no subject-independent, metaphysical a-priori correlation between “dog” and dogs, or a certain set of code and Call of Duty. They have to be rigged that way by custom or hardware.
So you can pretend all you want that information is “out there,” but this is simply a way of concealing from yourself a fundamental problem — of conflating syntax and semantics because it gets one out of a thorny bind. The inventor of the computational theory of mind Jerry Fodor himself realized this and has written about it frequently in the the last few years as a criticism of his own work. It’s is simply naive to use the word “information” in the way that it used by many popularizes of cognitive science.
Being a Hegelian or idealist, incidentally, does not help you out of the problem. Because the same indeterminacy and lack of derivation of semantics from syntax is a problem even if we think of the as both involving contributions from the subject. The problem just becomes a problem of a relationship between two things in the idea-realm rather than its more typical formulation as the mind body problem, where syntax is associated with matter and semantics with mind.
This is an excellent argument against formalism in logic, i.e. focusing on syntax and ignoring the thoroughly contextual character of semantics.
Your point about syntax and semantics is not widely enough appreciated.
However, let me dispute your point about Hegelian “idealism”. Kenneth Westphal is a notable contemporary philosopher who argues for Hegel as a realist. With Westphal I would urge not to read Hegel as an idealist but as an anti-dualist and realist.
It is just not going to work to say we can have information in our heads or in our concepts that bears no fundamental origin or relation in reality itself. Hegel foresaw this problem with Kantian subjectivism and that’s one reason why there’s still contemporary significance to his philosophy.
The idea is that in some sense, nature bears the germ of rationality in the form of patterns, repetitions, and reproductions. Isn’t identity, even if we only call identity the relation of resemblance, the most fundamental germ of what we mean by reason and intelligence?
With this idea we can get the drift of Hegel’s argument that there has to be continuum form nature to reason as more fully developed and manifest in us.
Cheers,
Tom
Geez, Wes, I thought ANW was hard to follow. For someone with no real analytic phil background other than my Phil 102, “Copi’s Logic,” can you paraphrase what you just posted?
I am not dumb, only uninitiated in the terminology you use.
Typo,
‘I’ not ‘P’ in last sentence
Burl, we discuss this on the phil of mind episode; it’s probably easier to get in context. Semantics: what terms mean (relation of symbols to objects). In computers, strings of symbols can elicit actions in a program. Does that program “know what the symbols mean?” It Wittgenstein’s rule-following sense, yes, they do, but all this relation of symbols to other symbols to actions taken by the program (which, to it, are just really more symbols; it doesn’t KNOW that if it sends electric pulse to position B that its arm will raise or that it’ll print something out); it doesn’t know how these things connect to the real world. So you can’t model a human mind with a computer and you can’t model physics and chemistry as just a bunch of information processing.
Hi Burl, sorry — I wrote that quickly and should have explained those terms. See Mark’s response, and: think of syntax as a language’s grammar, semantics as its dictionary.
There are certain rules for the way we order words, for instance, such that they can be meaningful English sentences. “The touches rat red” is a violation of syntax/grammar: to name one problem, an article can’t precede a present indicative active verb in this way. We find such rules in grammar books; but we look to a dictionary for semantics.
In logic, these rules include, for instance, the notion that ~(a & b) makes sense but (a ~& b) does not. Those logical operators never go next to each other. But the semantics here has to do with what meaning I assign to “a” (we use symbols like “a” here because logic abstracts from specific content, but we assume we can make any assignment of any atomic sentence we like to “a” without changing logical relations).
When I’m writing a computer program, I quickly learn when I’ve violated syntax: my code returns an error. Suppose I write a program that essentially says, “if someone presses the ‘K’ key, draw a red pixel at coordinate x, y on the screen.” I might screw up the syntax if I put my “if” and my “then” in the wrong place. But semantics here ultimately has to do with the fact that the keyboard and monitor are connected to the computer in a way that is meaningful for human beings. It’s like the assignment of the meaning dog to “dog.” The code at bottom — the series of 0’s and 1’s that famously compose it, if that’s familiar to you — itself has no way to refer to a red pixel; there isn’t some series of 0’s and 1’s that would give you a red pixel in any hardware setup, or conjure it from thin air. We human beings make those semantic assignments when we determine what electrical pattern coming from the processor will lead to a red pixel appearing on the screen. The same electrical pattern could yield a red pixel, blue pixel, or infinite number of different things depending on the setup. Consequently, the electrical patterns themselves are not “information” any more than the arrangement of empty glasses on a bar counter are “information” — they’re meaningless unless made otherwise by explicit agreement between human beings.
So why there should be a fixed semantics for the brain is frankly baffling. In the case of behaviors, not so: e.g., an electrical pulse traveling down a nerve moves the finger. Alter the wiring and the same brain state will move your toe. We get something analogous to the computer rigging I described above. But what of the feeling of pain? Given the whole setup it’s clear that pricking my finger will cause a certain behavior via intermediate brain activity, in the same way that it would be clear to someone analyzing a certain mechanical system that pushing a lever will, let’s say, open a door. The intervening hydraulic mechanical system shows me why in terms of physical forces. And all I have to do is examine those forces to predict the result. But I could never deduce some subjective feeling of pain associated with the intervening mechanism in either system. Where it’s clear from wiring that pin prick will cause behavior x, there’s nothing to tell me why it is that it produces pain rather than pleasure. I can visually traverse the nerve from finger to brain and back, but I can’t traverse it from finger to brain to “pain” and then back. Pain is not a visible part of the mechanism. And there’s no divine dictionary that we can inspect to see that pain is naturally assigned to a given brain state. We know that pain is correlated with certain brain states because of a) the reports of other subjects b) the fact that we have had the same experience. Those correlations are just correlations: they say nothing about the mechanism, about why there should be such an assignment written into things (when all other semantic assignments we know about are arbitrary, and all other syntactic systems we know about can be given multiple interpretations).
So the idea that semantics arises out of syntax (and one and only one set of meanings for a particular system), when we know that every syntactical system has multiple interpretations, is not now a workable idea (as intriguing as it is; hence the persistence of the mind body problem). See: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/#DoeSynExpSem
And for more on syntax and semantics in this context, see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#5.1
Not being able to get semantics from syntax seems to present a problem for our historical notion of the universe where in “conscious” things came from “non-conscious” things. Or at least as we understand the universe temporally as not having life at some time t1, and then having it later on at time t2.
Unless the idea of a universe before consciousness is akin to God hiding fossils in the ground (or that our traditional idea of time is inaccurate), it seems to present a problem, especially in the face of a dualism. It’s one thing to have a mind/body split, but to have one precede the other seems a bit strange (not that strangeness is any measure of truth or accurateness).
At bottom, the argument for syntax seems to be that all processes are syntactical. The way humans assign meaning would itself be syntactical, and could conceivably be reproduced by a programed entity (like a robot, or a genetically/socially engineered human) so that it would seemingly “freely” assign meaning, despite doing so according to complex and perhaps unpredictable rules.
So when Wes you say, “Those correlations are just correlations: they say nothing about the mechanism,” that seems to entirely endorse the idea that true, pure semantics is actually impossible, and that despite are daily semantical doings, such displays of meaning-making are really derivative of some form of rule following.
I am also confused, how can a correlation be arbitrary? If the correlation were arbitrary, how would it hold? And if it did not hold, why would it be considered a correlation (I’m thinking here of the example of correlating pain with a certain brain state). Regardless of whether someone else is in fact able to correlate my pain with my brain state x, what keeps us from thinking it is true in principle?
What if we stop thinking of intelligence as “consciousness” versus a nonconscious material ‘presence’? In Hegel’s anti-dualistic argument, the most fundamental sense of intelligence or reason is identity, and identity in the concrete ‘non-ideal’ natural world can only be a relation or resemblance between one and another entity. We can see that nature bears the germ of rationality in the formation of patterns, reproductions, and repetitions, all of which involve the basic sense of what we come to realize or cognize as relations of identity. It’s not ultimately coherent to deny that there is a continuum between nature’s patterns and the self-realization of rationality in us.
The idea is that in some sense, nature bears the germ of rationality in the form of patterns, repetitions, and reproductions. Isn’t identity, even if we only call identity the relation of resemblance, the most fundamental germ of what we mean by reason and intelligence?
With this idea we can get the drift of Hegel’s argument that there has to be a continuum from nature to reason as more fully developed and manifest in us.
Cheers,
Tom
Sorry I pasted in the rest of that by accident. This post should just read:
What if we stop thinking of intelligence as “consciousness” versus a nonconscious material ‘presence’? In Hegel’s anti-dualistic argument, the most fundamental sense of intelligence or reason is identity, and identity in the concrete ‘non-ideal’ natural world can only be a relation or resemblance between one and another entity. We can see that nature bears the germ of rationality in the formation of patterns, reproductions, and repetitions, all of which involve the basic sense of what we come to realize or cognize as relations of identity. It’s not ultimately coherent to deny that there is a continuum between nature’s patterns and the self-realization of rationality in us.
I’m not quite sure I understand the point you’re making, could you elaborate Tom?
@ Ethan:
Sorry if this post seems too general/abstract.
Here are the basic points I want to argue:
What exactly do we mean by rationality, i.e. intelligence, i.e. thought? I believe that in the modern world we’ve come to assume that these are ultimately defined by human utility, but this assumption goes unrecognized. This is an important point made by Heidegger. The hidden metaphysical assumption of modern thought is essentially this: nature is merely brute, present ‘stuff’ and ‘mind’ is a by-product of animal and then human utilization of the stuff that is present. This picture — this enframing — is generated and reinforced by modern utilitarian normativity: thou shalt not think cosmologically, thou shalt be locked inside one’s own ‘mind’, thou shalt be humbled into the service of technological concerns.
Thanks for framing the terminology and clarifying, Mark and Wes. I have read a good bit of analytic philosophers, though admittedly superficially, so my comprehension is scant and does not endure over time.
Given the “Metaphysics of the Alphabet” of the 20th Century logical positivists, analytic philosophers and linguists like Chomsky and Pinker have severly altered the focus of ‘the love of wisdom’. I never understood how bright minds could ever believe that linguistics was the metaphysical ultimate – reality itself. Such viewing of the abstractions of syntax and logical symbols is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – taking the abstract to be the actual reality.
In the first link Wes posted above there is “syntax underdetermines semantics.” You needn’t tell this to a poet – it is their entire stock and trade.
In the second link which is all about Searle (as is he) and his magnum opus thought that ‘A machine cannot do everything a human can.’ We witness profundity never before visited upon mere mortals. He is quoted in the link saying “Computation exists only relative to some agent or observer who imposes a computational interpretation on some phenomenon. This is an obvious point. I should have seen it ten years ago, but I did not.” Hot Damn! Thanks, Dr. Searle, for realizing there is a purpose for humans after all!
In a video interview of Searle’s colleague, Hube Dreyfus, he says that AI failed to understand the importance of the body in human experience. Whitehead didn’t. 50 years before Merleau-Ponty added arms and legs to Husserl’s bracketed phenomena, ANW urged that it is our ‘withness of the body’ that we know the world (and contra Hume, causal efficacy). He also saw where logical positivism was making the fallacy I mentioned above and how it led Frege, Husserl, and a whole century of philosophy off course, thus evoking Ignatius Reilley from Bourbon Street to exclaim in _Confereracy of Dunces _ “What this world needs is a proper geometry and theology!
To my brief previous post that paraphrases ANW’s actual occasion, I will add a detail For a presently becoming occasion of experience, the physical objective actualities of now past occasions is taken in as many feelings, each with its affective tone (= subjective form). These forms give evidence of degrees of definiteness of realized universals (eternal objects, Platonic Ideals, potentialities for actualization).
The mentality of the occasion consists in entertaining propositions whose subjects are any number of the physical data taken, and whose predicate is the universals partially realized in the predicates.
From John Cobb’s “Glossary of Process”:
The use of the term “proposition” suggests a connection with logic. Whitehead emphasizes that propositions play a vast role in experience beyond the one they play in logic, but logic may be a good place to begin. We can start with a common statement, such as “The dog is brown.” “The dog” refers us to what Whitehead would describe as a very complex “society” of “actual occasions.” “Brown” refers us to an “eternal object.” The statement brings these together.
Now we note that, for Whitehead, the statement points us to a potential. The potential is not the statement but the dog itself as brown. Propositions exist in the real world as what Whitehead describes as “lures for feeling.” Some of the propositions are realized in the world, some are not. The latter may be called false, but “false” propositions may be more 47 John B. Cobb, Jr.
important than true ones. For example, they may describe the way things should be and move us to action.
This fairly common-sense understanding of propositions gives way in Whitehead to a more precise and powerful one. The problem with the statement “The dog is brown.” is that the logical subject already contains descriptors. Suppose what we thought was a dog was in fact a wolf. Judging such a proposition then becomes difficult. The more precise statement of the proposition is “That or it is doggy and brown.” “That” or “it” simply indicates the entity about which we want to speak, the logical subject of the proposition. One connects to that entity, whatever it may be, certain eternal objects, which Whitehead calls the “predicative pattern.” One is holding up the possibility that they characterize that object. The note of potentiality remains, but the prehension of the predicative pattern is tied to or integrated with the prehension of a particular entity.
Roots, Rock, Frege
With all this as lead in, the following link shows how ANW sees propositions in all their concreteness. Among other things, they are lures for feeling of the SECOND subject of the proposition – the subject entertaining the proposition.
ANW’s propositions are nothing like those logical positivists’ vacuous abstractions of words, symbols, and logical operators if they were, my dog could not be conscious. Asshole philosophers that are happy with that possibility can go to hell – on this, Searle and I agree.
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2770
Correction to line 1 in last para
With all this as lead in, the following link shows how ANW sees propositions in all their concreteness.
Near the end of his article Horgan says, “Part of me would love to believe that consciousness is not an accidental by-product of the physical realm but is in some sense the primary purpose of reality.” Consciousness is reality’s primary purpose or it’s an accidental by-product? We have only those two options?
I appreciate Wes’s input on the syntax-semantics distinction but doesn’t it beg the question of a broader conception of consciousness to frame the question in terms the verbal and conceptual meanings of self-conscious creatures like ourselves? Isn’t the question about the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous and exist in various non-human forms? The shark has no definitions and doesn’t know what “hungry” means but in some broader sense of the term the smell of blood in the water is “meaningful” to the shark. He is able to respond “intelligently” in some broader sense of that word too. The single celled organism also has some small ability to respond. But that’s where most people draw the line. In our culture, extending any kind of awareness to inorganic, physical reality is just too weird for most people. But it’s really just a different description, a different way to think about the same facts.
If we reject Horgan’s dilemma as too stark and say consciousness is neither a by-product nor reality’s sole purpose. Between those horn there is an another idea; consciousness is embodied all the way down. I guess I like the aesthetics of that idea. There is an expanded notion of evolution so that it isn’t just a biological theory but extends a line of continuity from the big bang to the next great idea.
Thanks,
Wes makes an excellent case against formalism in logic, i.e. focusing on syntax and ignoring the thoroughly contextual character of semantics. His point about syntax and semantics is not widely enough appreciated.
However, let me dispute the point about Hegelian “idealism”. Kenneth Westphal is a notable contemporary philosopher who argues for Hegel as a realist. With Westphal I would urge not to read Hegel as an idealist but as an anti-dualist and realist.
It is just not going to work to say we can have information in our heads or in our concepts that bears no fundamental origin or relation in reality itself. Hegel foresaw this problem with Kantian subjectivism and that’s one reason why there’s still contemporary significance to his philosophy.
The idea is that in some sense, nature bears the germ of rationality in the form of patterns, repetitions, and reproductions. Isn’t identity, even if we only call identity the relation of resemblance, the most fundamental germ of what we mean by reason and intelligence?
With this idea we can get the drift of Hegel’s argument that there has to be a continuum from nature to reason as more fully developed and manifest in us.
Cheers,
Tom
@ David Buchanan
This is excellent:
“If we reject Horgan’s dilemma as too stark and say consciousness is neither a by-product nor reality’s sole purpose. Between those horn there is an another idea; consciousness is embodied all the way down.”
Except that I would reformulate it this way:
We should reject Horgan’s dilemma as too stark: we need not believe that either (a) reason is a pure by-product or (b) achieving thought is reality’s purpose. Between those horns there is an another idea: reason is embodied in the repetition and differing of nature all the way down.
Cheers,
Tom
Hi David,
This is interesting, but what you advocate (if that’s the right word) sounds like a neo-Schopenhauerian concept of the World as Will. I don’t mean that as a critique, but I wonder if you agree there’s a resemblance.
Are you saying all experience is conscious experience?
*Are you saying all experience is conscious experience?*
This question to David was #16 this morning, but now #20.
I think it even went from #15 last nite to #16 this morning.
There is a bug in the combox indexing.
Nevermind, I see there really are 21 entries – I guess the coffee was weak this morning. I am reading James’ “World of Pure Experience,” where I think he posits the neutral monism of pan-experience which has objective/mental aspects all at once.
James’ “World of Pure Experience”…sheesh
On Heidegger’s insightful suggestion we should get rid of the terms “mental”, “consciousness”, and “mind” because they carry too much subjectivist baggage which hinders us from understanding what in the world itself makes it intelligible.
Resugence of the Ancient Concept of Science?
Mark is right to compare Gleick to an ancient Greek like Anaxagoras. I would also suggest Aristotle. Gleick’s proposition is meta-physical and aesthetic in the sense that he appreciates the organization of nature into patterns in a non-utilitarian, i.e. non-modern (postmodern?) way.
The Modern Attitude Toward Nature: Skeptical, Ascetic, Utilitarian, Subjectivist
Horgan’s response is a great example of the encrustation of Cartesian dualist subjectivism and Humean skeptical subjectivism into modern utilitarian dogma disguising itself as objectivity about nature. Horgan argues that there is no information without information-for, and there is no being-for in nature as such, therefore one must deny in oneself the tempting but sinful idea that reason is continuous with nature. Here Horgan also betrays the concealed asceticism in the modern utilitarian idea of science: in order to develop the most useful scientific applications and technologies we must deny ourselves the indulgent metaphysical and aesthetic intelligence of Greek philosophy.
A Possible Way Out of Dualism?
I suggest we follow Heidegger and try to ween ourselves off terms like “mind” and “consciousness” which are weighted with subjectivist baggage. The continuity between nature and reason is to be found in temporal terms like pattern, repetition, reproduction. In nature pattern, repetition, reproduction are unselfconscious, whereas in human culture these temporal movements become self-reflective and free via human historical development.
Cheers,
Tom
@ Ethan:
Sorry if that seems just as obscure. I’m trying to put the argument together in clearer way and will post again later.
Cheers,
Tom
Tom
Lookin’ forward to it. You know, ever since the dawn of speculative thought around the axial era 3(?) millennia back, we have tried to figure out what kind of *stuff* we move around in. I wonder if fish do the same thing?
I am attracted to Heidegger’s Being as an ultimate, but confess I have not absorbed his various terms and qualifications. But I am pretty dense, as I have been reading process phil stuff for several years now and still get hung up on some basic notions.
For example, I do not know why I cannot prehend the past actual occasions of another mind. I understand I cannot read his/her present becoming occasion of mind, but what about once it is settled and objectified as a brute fact.
Any process folk out there in PEL country know the answer?
Bohm’s active information – watch all 5 of this processist’s thought.
Then ask Dr. Cobb http://www.processandfaith.org/askcobb/