What, Why & How do we Know ?
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. A CalTech based group I’d not noticed before. I see Dennett is president-elect, and Chalmers and Metzinger are members at large, Ned Block and Christof Koch are past presidents.
Next conference is June 2006, St Annes College Oxford.
I continue to be fascinated by the developments at the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group (BCS Cybernetics Group or BCSCMSG for short) despite the dense specialist jargon making proceedings all but unintelligible to any lay reader like myself. Here is the synopsis of papers presented at the BCSCMSG Symposium 10 as part of CASYS’05 (Computing Anticipatory Systems 2005 Conference) in Liege in August earlier this year.
My principle fascination, and reason for following proceedings over several years (and blogging many previous references), has been the apparent fundamental nature of information underlying reality itself, as part of my specific interest in modelling and communicating information about reality, at least in so far as humans can know and communicate reality.
Paraphrasing … the BCSCMSG current mission is to establish the Evolutionary ‘Anthropic’ Semantic Principle, by which the fundamental physical foundations of computing as used in brains, can be realized. The human brain is a universal computational semantic machine and [the Diaz-Rowlands re-write of the Nilpotent Dirac Equation of] quantum physics provides a natural model and modes by which human natural language is realized to allow the human race to comprehend the evolutionary cosmos. No less.
The philosophy of mind and mind-matter angles, of what can be known about reality (epistemology), the processes of knowing of it (consciousness et al), and what any independent reality might be (ontology), is clearly relevant to the modelling of information about reality. Suspending disbelief it is also possible to accept that quanta (as the smallest significant differences that can exist between anything) are probably the most fundamental building blocks of information as well as the building blocks of “matter”.
Despite also accepting mind (consciousness) as emergent from brain physiology (matter & processes) what is mind blowing is the idea that the emergence (clearly complex and multi-layered) can have a causal and direct reductionist explanation that is also based on quantum mechanics. (Why not ? says Josephson. Yes, “microtubules” say Hammeroff and Penrose. No, “that’s mere pixie-dust” say the Churchlands, Blackmore and Dennett. Sceptical says Deutsch. Who needs reductionism and causality say Deutsch and Chalmers.) Quantum mechanical effects in brain-mind processes, not to mention in the wider DNA-life processes themselves – how weird can this get ?
OK, so holographic universe (Talbot); multiple interfering universes (Everett / Wheeler / Deutsch); are believable at the quantum scale, universes or states with small differences, small departures from coherence. OK too, non-locality, action-at-a-distance, anticipation, future actions travelling ahead faster than light, can also be credible at similar quantum scales and near coherence maybe ? (Even the practicioners working with these “models” struggle to accept these as everyday “paradigmatic” world-views.)
It’s all there to be read about. Quantum mechanics based mathematics behind everything from seemingly abstract things like fundamental number theory and mathematics itself and theories of computation, through physics naturally, to large-scale coherence in processes in brains and macro-cosmological feedback loops in the cosmos itself.
And if that’s not weird enough, it even comes with a bootstrapping mechanism to create something (ie everything) from nothing.
The nothing that is, that is.
Watch that space.
Hope these people also turn up at Tucson2006.
Thanks to Matt Poot on MoQ-Discuss for picking up this Toronto Globe and Mail best seller list from Sunday 9th October.
Well, well, well. Robert Pirsig’s ZMM is a non-fiction best seller in October 2005, sharing the list with James Frey, Jared Diamond, Bill Bryson and Malcolm Gladwell. (Dan Brown is top of the fiction list fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it.)
(Interesting, searching for Pirsig / best-seller I find the Wikipedia page is well linked with current Pirsig material, including my own.)
(This June 2005 page from the American Association of Booksellers also has ZMM in their best seller list – perrenial they say – though it’s under travel books !)
(And an interesting current reading list from Zug, a “comedy” site (!) includes Douglas Adams, Aldous Huxley and Scott Peck as well as both ZMM and Lila – dense with ideas they says – Comedy ?)
After a week away, I’m back in the UK, and heard BBC’s Start The Week for the first time in ages; Andrew Marr introducing Robert Fisk, Bjorn Lomborg, Simon Winchester and Clare Carolin. An excellent edition.
Ostensibly focussing on natural disasters like the current Pakistan earthquake, and the place of humans in the grip of nature, in fact Robert Fisk started on about his new book “The Great War for Civilisation”. Specific interest for me, apart from Fisk’s own insights including three interviews with Bin Laden, is his view of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and the history of Middle East conflict. Understanding background to the Balfour Agreement is the reason I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s Bible and the Sword, and of course Sykes-Picot is a main thread in my obsession with hero T E Lawrence.
Much maligned Lomborg is focussing on priorities in the way we address global natural and economic issues, in obtaining “value” for our efforts, rather than diving headlong into a too negative reaction to “global warming”. 40,000 dead in one telegenic earthquake is just two days worth of curable, communicable diseases in East Asia, for example.
Winchester’s book “A Crack in the Edge of the World” concerns persistent human occupation of dangerous natural locations, and the long learning curve before peoples abandon untenable locations like New Orleans, Beirut and San Francisco, and on the contrary the pull of these locations whose beauty stems from being close to the edge. (Another angle is the religious / political response to handling natural disasters – blaming theistic wrath vs employing pragmatic management … Lisbon, Christians and Voltaire, Krakatoa and Moslems, San Francisco and Rationality included … interesting.)
Spookily I was flying over central Pakistan and Afghanistan local time Saturday morning. Anyway, lots of grist to the connectedness of values applied to both nature and culture. Which is the main contribution to the loss of 40,000 in Pakistan – the natural earthquake or the cheap construction of public schools – and how much of the latter is corrupt conspiracy or ignorant cock-up ? Twas ever thus.
BTW – Travel is Torture – etymology of travel, travail (hard work), trapalium (instrument of torture)
(Exhibitions bring the world to people, so they don’t have to travel the world.)
Thanks to Sam for this satirical alternative theory of the miracle that is creation. One of many thankfully; restores your faith in humanity. As Sam says, irony is essential. Absolutely.
It’s a well hit site, with endless fun to be had following all the many links in the comment thread. Some excellent, well-executed images – like this one.
Interesting looking paper here at Paedia by Chris Long, brought to my attention by David Morey over at MoQ-Discuss.
Here at KMTheory.com published by Don Mezei is a Unified Theory of Knowledge which uses, and which Don claims was originally inspired by Pirsig‘s Lila and MoQ. As well as introductory quotes from E O Wilson and Erwin Schroedinger there is this apt one from Ernest Becker
“I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of [humanity’s] knowledge is not to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure.”
Right from my “let’s synthesise” school of thought. Clearly a good fit with Psybertron’s aims and approach to the matter. There is a difference between an arbitrary view that says all views are relative and have equal value and one that says that two views that don’t agree are necessarily mutually exclusive. Apparent opposites are often just two aspects of the same thing – a kind of complementarity.
The “theory” paper is brief and succinct with some creative graphical models of the whole of ontology / epistemology. Worth some consideration.
And strangely enough, just yesterday, David Chalmers reviewed Jaegwon Kim’s “Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough” and accused him of being a “closet dualist”. The quote in the blog post title is from Kim’s closing paragraph.
My only problem with Chalmers response here is the keeping score aspect of pigeonholeing people. If Kim is a physicalist, as I claimed to be (believing I’d invented it at the time), I’ll need to understand in what sense that made him a “dualist”, and why the pigeonhole is in any way relevant to the quality of his explanation of consciousness.
I may never work out why these guys see saying one thing as being equivalent to denying something else. Anyway, to be fair to David, he does use the idea of “sympathy” with any given pigeonhole, rather than exclusive occupation – at least he allows himself this view, so I must assume he sees it valid for the rest of us too, Kim included. (In the comment thread, he links via a paper of his own to Chrucky’s summary of C D Broad’s taxonomy of these mind-matter relationship pigeonholes – small world, I’ve linked to Chrucky several times before. Anyway – apart from the limitations of “material” and “substance” in this arena, it looks useful. It needs a broader “physical” update – I wonder where Kim stands on this ? Must read I guess.
Having read Kim’s own sample material and synopsis – I see he makes it a stark choice between – reductionism and epiphenomenalism. (I see he also makes use of “supervenience” and has written about this previously – like David has – must get to grips with the concept.) The stark choice – choosing reductionism – seems to me more a matter of not-epiphenomenalism – ie saying that a bottom-up causal explanation of the mental by the physical and a mental causation of the physical both exist, and simply positing a broad definition of “reductionist” to cover that. But I could be wrong.
Even more interesting a Ross & Spurrett paper also referenced in the comments seems to fight against reductionism precisly for reason of the problems caused to philosophy itself (!) though it goes on to admit that this fails to address the metaphysical challenge, which they go on to consider. Interesting in the wider sense, is that
(a) the two issues of explanation (reductionist or otherwise) and causation (mental or otherwise) bubble up as the real issues again, whether we were talking about the mind-body problem or not; and
(b) the paper starts with a tidal flow and backwash, pseudo-cyclic / dynamic metaphor for the evolution of a philosophical basis for scientists to take seriously. Sound familiar ? Interesting too, in his own closing remark, that David’s blog post appears (light-heartedly anyway) to dismiss the sociological / psychological aspects tainting any worthy philosophy.
Following my earlier rant on synthesising dualism, materialism and idealism, I came across this Searle paper linked from the Tucson 2006 “Towards a Science of Consciousness” conference programme. I’m guessing the paper is not new, but it’s undated.
Strangely I agree almost entirely with his own introductory words about the relationship between brain and consciousness – and if we were limiting ourselves to meat-based brains only – I’d completely subscribe to his “biological naturalism” tag myself – I simply chose to call it “physicalism” or “naturalism”. He says …
All of our mental phenomena are caused by lower level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the brain as higher level, or system, features … biological naturalism.
At the same time I find his arguments against “property dualism” simply unnecessary. Again, the only problems are all the implied only’s and merely’s, and in this case because’s rather than if’s …. here Searle’s own summary of what at property dualist believes (and he doesn’t) …
(1) There are two mutually exclusive metaphysical categories that constitute all of empirical reality: they are physical phenomena and mental phenomena. Physical phenomena are essentially objective in the sense that they exist apart from any subjective experiences of humans or animals. Mental phenomena are subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by human or animal agents.
(2) Because mental states are not reducible to neurobiological states, they are something distinct from and over and above neurobiological states. The irreducibility of the mental to the physical, of consciousness to neurobiology, is by itself sufficient proof of the distinctness of the mental, and proof that the mental is something over and above the neurobiological.
(3) Mental phenomena do not constitute separate objects or substances, but rather are features or properties of the composite entity, which is a human being or an animal. So any conscious animal, such as a human being, will have two sorts of properties, mental properties and physical properties.
I say
(1) They are “mutually exclusive” because the nature of categories / classification / taxonomy / ontology is to deem things to be either distinctly in or out of any given category. But there is nothing to stop anyone better defining better catgories.
(2) “Because” seems to be question begging. This is true only if property dualism is literally true as described.
(3) Surely we all seem to agree there is not distinct mental and material “stuff” or substance. Stuff of any kind is pretty ethereal when you get down to fundamental nature / physics anyway, so that doesn’t help. Searle himself says ….
(This form of [bottom-up causation] …. is common in nature; for example, the higher level feature of solidity is causally explained by the behavior of the lower level elements, the molecules.)
And why stop at molecules ? The fact that we’re having any debate at all suggests we all agree that the mental and the material have some distinguishing features, properties (or aspects I would say). We also all seem to agree there exist some relationship(s) between these two things – whatever it is that distinguishes them and whatever it is they have in common. All we really need to debate is a useful working “basis for class membership” for being mental and not being mental, a definition of the mental “aspect” – and of course any useful subsets, and relevant overlapping sets based on other aspects, like physics and biology, etc.
It’ still a matter of levels and the quality of causal expalantion.