Regarding: Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR
JB on March 26, 2010 in Cosmological, Uncategorized, the descriptive - Science, the normative - Philosophy No Comments »
Regarding Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR below, is a relevant part of my contribution to a conversation:
Clayton’s post-Dennett debate reflection.
I provide more thoughts re: the Mardi Gras debate here: Philip Clayton vs Dan Dennett
I am very sympathetic to Dennett’s conception of consciousness. That is to say that I am inclined to conceive the soul using a physicalist account and I approach the so-called hard problem of consciousness as difficult but maybe not so very hard. Whatever’s going on in human consciousness, in my estimation, will eventually yield to a naturalist explanation.
The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are a priori positions trying to salvage our a posteriori empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. In my view, both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist positions, at this time, are too strong to defend. While I am not willing to rule either one out, both are “proving too much.”
So, I consider my inclinations to be very much provisional. The problem of consciousness, as I approach it, remains both epistemologically and ontologically open. And these are the necessary and sufficient conditions for any invocation of the heuristic of EMERGENCE. There are insights from both the eliminativist and epiphenomenalist strategies that I find I can reconcile with my own phenomenological perspective, which is inclined toward a nonreductive physicalism. This is not the same thing, though, as reconciling those other positions with each other.
A nonreductive physicalist strategy, to some extent, abstains, or tries to acknowledge both intuitions. In another sense, it seems to suggest, with the eliminativists, that the dynamic constellations of neuronal net physical functionalities, which we might putatively identify as consciousness, are clearly efficacious — thermodynamically, morphodynamically and teleodynamically (which is to recognize a downward causation sans violation of physical causal closure) — and, with the epiphenomenalists, that such efficacies do not otherwise flow from what our common sense suggests is a classical efficient causation but, rather, from minimalist formal and final causations (e.g. tacit dimensions).
In Dennett’s debate with Clayton, as causal layers were explored, Dennett acknowledged the cultural in addition to the mere physical and biological. This acknowledgment is not good enough, however. Because, as is revealed in his and Dawkins’ other writings, they are giving complexity theory a rather short shrift vis a vis genes, memes, symbols, language and coevolutionary dynamics. To equate cognition only with algorithmic or rule-governed computation is the computational fallacy. It is what it is in humans only in relationship to pragmatic and semiotic realities. To characterize genes as active agents or selfish or purposeful is an unhelpful shorthand. They gain their significance only in the context of the same dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities. To equate memes only with replicators, as if they were analogous to parasites, is to isolate them outside of the dynamical semiotic and pragmatic realities that they should presuppose and is the memetic fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. The practical upshot of Deacon’s critique is that social evolution and human consciousness are much more rich and complex, which is to recognize that they require a more highly nuanced triadic semiotic perspective, which then takes us beyond our classical dyadic formulations, like S –> R in behaviorism.
When we run into problems like the “hard” problem of consciousness, problems that for most philosophers of science would be considered still open, both epistemologically and ontologically, problems that then lend themselves to the heuristic of emergence, we cannot know, a priori, whether our explanatory attempts are being thwarted due only to our methodological constraints, epistemologically, or might otherwise be due to some type of in-principle occulting, ontologically. In the latter instance, the problem would remain irresolute in-principle, while, in the former, the problem might remain rather intractable but could possibly be only temporary, later to be resolved with future technological advances. A methodological naturalism presumes the former and eschews the latter but only because to a priori adopt a stance that any given aspect of reality is in-principle occulted would lead us down an epistemic cul-de-sac, shutting down our research programs, arbitrarily foreclosing on future investigation. On the other hand, a philosophical naturalism is no more defensible in its a priori stance, which is that we are necessarily being thwarted only in the methodological sense due to technological constraints. We do not know that. We cannot know that a priori. And we most especially do not know that when it comes to unraveling reality’s limit questions vis a vis any initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos. The same thing remains true regarding the problem of consciousness and the philosophical promissory notes that some have issued regarding their so-called “explanations.”
If, in the first half of the debate, Clayton and Dennett established that they were both, in fact, methodological and not, rather, philosophical naturalists, then that is quite illuminating because a methodological naturalist cannot coherently self-describe as an atheist regarding reality’s limit questions. Instead, the methodological naturalist must self-describe either as an agnostic, a nontheist or as some type of believer, who is wagering in faith, though not without a confident assurance, in things the believer hopes is true regarding reality’s limit questions and humanity’s ultimate concerns. Such a believer may believe there is a God or even gods or even that there is no God. But such a believer also knows that there was an epistemic and existential leap involved. This differs from the philosophical naturalist, who has conflated the otherwise autonomous methodologies of science and philosophy, concluding empirically, logically, practically and probabilistically that there is no God, denying any substantial leaps of faith were involved, affirming that others are clearly — how do they say it? oh, yeah – deluded.
Archiving my comments at NPR:
This is a fascinating discussion. I’d like to reframe it from another angle.
Essentially, we are asking whether or not there can be downward causation without a violation of physical causal closure, such as via some Cartesian ghost-in-our-machine. In my view, science has already answered with a resounding yes, such as in a putative Baldwinian evolution, such as in Terry Deacon’s account of the possible coevolution of language & brain, such as in Peirce’s triadic semeiotic account of the human employment of symbols.
To a certain extent, the above-listed examples do not aspire to a robustly explanatory account but provide us only some useful heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders. What they have in common is the notion of emergence, the presentation of novelty. So, even from a rather phenomenological perspective, we pretty much have established probabilistically THAT there is downward causation. You have advanced this conversation with a rather compelling account of HOW it may operate at yet another level of emergence?
Very interesting. Compelling, as far as I could follow it, at least.
re: “I think I do not agree with either Ursula or Tom, for despite their nuanced efforts, I feel they remain in a stance in which mind is an epiphenomenon of a deterministic brain.”
Ursula can speak for herself, of course. However, in my experience, she is not one to overreach in her claims but is very circumspect. Neither the eliminativist nor the epiphenomenalist account apply to anything she has written, best I can tell.
The hard problem of consciousness stems from our common-sensical notions of wanting to reconcile mental and physical interaction. The eliminativist strategy has been to deny the distinction. The epiphenomenalist strategy has been to deny the interactivity. Both of these stances are “a priori” positions trying to salvage our “a posteriori” empirical experiences of an exclusively bottom-up causality. Ursula’s account seems more consonant with a nonreductive physicalist stance to me?
I flesh this out here:
Regarding: Towards A Responsible Free Will – Stuart Kauffman at NPR
This is not an over-against anything you’ve written, just a suggestion that your account & Ursula’s, in my view, seem congruent but address different emergent levels.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Does the same problem really exist if we suppose that classical nerve activity rather than quantum cohering-decohering-recohering are associated with consciousness? Why doesn’t it suffice to otherwise recognize that human ecological adaptations became distinctly sapient via such a novel hardwiring that, instead of being algorithmic, relatively closed-ended & inflexible, became also, in certain parts of the neural net, noncomputational, somewhat open-ended & plastic, gifting us w/fast & frugal heuristics in response to stimuli & co-evolving w/language? This improved modeling power of reality was thus language-dependent. Our phenomenal experiences of the algorithmic parts of our bodies precisely don’t lend themselves to such modeling because they are language-independent, wired differently, and we thus cannot communicate or talk about such subjective experiences like pain intersubjectively w/o using those funny little icons in hospitals w/smiley or frowny faces. As versatile as this new wiring was, still, its heuristics were probabilistic, its behavioral repertoire finite, our range of motion “free enough” but not in any absolute sense. IOW, wouldn’t a structural morphological explanation be more parsimonious?
Sunday, March 28, 2010 4:45:02 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Another reframing issue. I’ve often wondered if the self-brain was a distinction w/o a difference like the old Sorite Paradox, which asks at what point in the addition of grains of sand to other grains of sand does one obtain a “heap” of sand? The paradox dissolves when one distinguishes between logical & efficient causation, in this case, the logical cause being our linguistic definition of a heap, the efficient cause the act of adding sand grains. There may be similar confusion between the dynamic activity of our brains and our naming of the phenomenal experience of same as self. And this is reminiscent of Zen’s affirmation of “first there is a mountain,” as raw phenomenal experience, its prescinding to “then, there is no mountain” in recognition that our naming exercise is logically caused, not efficiently, and its reaffirmation of “then there is” as one returns to reality w/a 2nd naivete that interacts w/the mountain “for all practical purposes.” In philosophic terms, this Zen strategy amounts to an evasion of the essentialism-nominalism conundrum via a pragmatic appeal, a cashing out of value: We recognize that humans will reify & conceptualize but that not all concepts successfully refer & some cause pseudo-riddles.
Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:04:48 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
This is not an over-against, just a qualifier re: the relationship between “the truth of an idea & the consequences of believing in that idea” and a connection between “what’s true and what we might want.”
Not every formal fallacy of logic necessarily renders the critical thinking involved void of use. Human thinking involves a recursive interplay of ongoing abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying, inferential processes that are not unaided by other faculties, nonrational even. This is to recognize that most critical thinking is informal. While we want to avoid any vulgar pragmatism as a “theory” of truth, pragmatic utility can otherwise serve as an indispensable “test” of truth, alongside other aesthetic criteria like parsimony, facility, symmetry, elegance, beauty. Such criteria are indeed weakly truth-indicative even if not robustly truth-conducive. They may not have a direct bearing, like the wind at our back & in our sails, but they certainly have a storied history of having an indirect bearing, like a sailor who tacks and jibes and progresses against the wind. If what is true is generally useful, the probability of something useful being true improves (better than that which ain’t helpful at all).
Sunday, March 28, 2010 5:51:55 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind issue allow for a non-local aspect of consciousness, such as NDEs where persons describe accurately what is happening in the room, while they are without vital signs?”
Neither non-local CSC nor an immaterial (or immortal) soul seem very likely to me. I don’t really have a horse in the philosophy of mind race. I just enjoy trying to figure out the categories and like to disambiguate the concepts best I can. I do not a priori dismiss the paranormal or psychic phenomena. Neither do I dismiss physicalist or naturalist accounts of the soul.
Sunday, March 28, 2010 6:19:17 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj Seth (sandalwood23) asked:”John, does your view of the brain-mind …?”
To clarify, when I say I’m inclined to a nonreductive physicalism and am affirming a top-down causation, I am drawing a distinction between that and a wholly reductive eliminativist perspective. I don’t hold to a view of consciousness as computational. I am affirming a telic dimension from a semiotic perspective, which recognizes both formal & final causations. This is not the same as the robust telos of theology or classical metaphysics but is, instead, a minimalist telos or a minimalist transcendence. One might think of it in terms of reality’s otherwise tacit dimensions, which can be both ineluctably unobtrusive (hard to see) but still utterly efficacious, like a winding riverbed that redirects the flows of powerful rivers, like cliffs underlying cascading waterfalls, like our own morphological brain-scapes, which might redirect cascading neurotransmitter flows. I suppose this is analogous to what some (Bohm) invoke as an implicate ordering to explain nonlocality and superluminality, but that would be a weak analogue, in my view.
Sunday, March 28, 2010 8:45:38 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
In my view, the best evidence for a noncomputational aspect of the human brain is the fact that we are storytellers or axiom-providers. We know that we are transcending the algorithmic precisely because we propose novel systems with novel axioms in mathematics all the time, because we propose new narratives and metanarratives all the time. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems prove that a system’s axioms cannot be proved within that system, hence our systems and metanarratives are necessarily going to be either complete or consistent, never both. Like Hawking says, the good money is on incomplete. Turing-machines cannot halt, reboot, re-axiom-atize or JOTS [jump outside the system]. Darwin-machines can. Still, however powerful these open-ended processors are, equipping the critter w/enhanced modeling power of reality and expanded behavioral repertoire, they remain bounded & finite & not autopoietic or free in any absolute sense, just free-enough for all practical purposes, like moral agency. Correcting Dennett re: our nonalgorithmic brains still doesn’t get us an absolute free will, just a very powerful probabilistic processor. Still, I see no need to exaggerate the practical import of this vs our folk psychology concepts.
Monday, March 29, 2010 10:38:29 AM
Tom Clark (twclark) wrote:
@John: Here’s Dennett from his fascinating review of Penrose, original emphasis: “So even if mathematicians are superb recognizers of mathematical truth, and even if there is no algorithm, practical or otherwise, for recognizing mathematical truth, it *does not follow* that the power of mathematicians to recognize mathematical truth is not entirely explicable in terms of their brains executing an algorithm. Not an algorithm *for* intuiting mathematical truth–we can suppose that Penrose has proved that there could be no such thing. What would the algorithm be for, then? Most plausibly it would be an algorithm–one of very many–for *trying to stay alive*, an algorithm that, by an extraordinarily convoluted and indirect generation of byproducts, “happened” to be a superb (but not foolproof) recognizer of friends, enemies, food, shelter, harbingers of spring, good arguments–and mathematical truths!” http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/penrose.htm
Monday, March 29, 2010 11:39:32 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Tom Perhaps Dennett proves my point and not his. Humans are able to JOTS [Jump Outside The System] of trying to stay alive through suicide, whether self-sacrificial or not. Dennett, Dawkins et al would counter with the sociobiological tautology of selfish genes and memes, adding genetic and memetic fallacies to this computational fallacy. See The trouble with memes (and what to do about it) by Terry Deacon. But there’s a qualitative difference between human kamikazes and bees that die after losing their stingers. Both are biosemiotic realities but the human employs symbols to model reality. It is precisely this symbol manipulation that allows for the reification of a concept of self and self-transcendence. The most stinging critique (pun intended) of Dennett’s stance comes from Peirce’s semeiotic account. [I attempted this post 5 minutes ago & it was rejected for inappropriate language, hence lost. Trying again. Maybe it's the "suicide" reference?]
Monday, March 29, 2010 12:33:33 PM
And now this from Homebrewed Christianity:
John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 11:52 am:
Ben, this is an excellent recap and faithful to the way I experienced that particular Mardi Gras afternoon (the ONLY person in New Orleans virtually at Claremont and not actually on Bourbon Street; forgive me, Lord.).
I would say that we all need philosophical norms to provide a meta-metaphysical perspective but that essential Christian dogma are not inescapably loaded with any particular scientific, philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions, including such as a soul, metaphysical self or even a wholly autonomous free will. There is a probabilistic middle ground, for example, between absolutely free choices and seemingly free choices that can be established even within a so-called hegemony of the physical. I have imported some of my own reflections on the Clayton-Dennett debate into another discussion we’ve been having at National Public Radio about related matters re: philosophy of mind, where I offer an expanded critique of Dennett that keeps his baby but cleans up his bathwater. Should one go metaphysical, that’s fine as long as it is fallibilist.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
In 2 parts, my ideas re: why CSC appears to be an energy-free lunch
Part 1
We employ abstractions when talking about systems and their features (parts, interactions, functions & environment). When we invoke different types of causation, they can be thought of in terms of these different system features: material, parts; efficient, interactions incl semiotic; final, functions; formal, environment.
What we call information involves the coupling of two systems. Any actualization of information requires a third system, which interprets the causal coupling, which is to say that it exploits the coupling or uses it somehow. We tend to talk about (interpret or actualize) that feature of a system that allows us to most easily predict system behavior or to talk about that feature that most interests us. What we can predict also happens to most interest us.
What we call system levels or hierarchies have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically, situated where we happen to be within a network of systems.
Monday, March 29, 2010 6:19:26 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Part 2 – or why Emergence isn’t THAT special
That system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Ordinarily, this will be that autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature that tends to exhibit downward causation. (Self-organizing and self-constitution are two different things.)
These autopoietic features of a system will exhibit an entropy decrease. Entropy decreases interest us precisely because they have adaptive significance. They are significant because we can better exploit spatiotemporal order, or regularities, for vital resources.
The total system entropy will always increase but we tend to ignore those system features that serve as energy sinks. Because we ignore those features, from a folk psychology perspective, we tend to buy into the illusion that semiotic processes are a free lunch energetically, somehow transcending the space-time-energy plenum.
Thus CSC, while nonalgorithmic, is not contra-causal. It just looks and feels that way.
Monday, March 29, 2010 6:21:38 PM
John Sobert Sylvest on March 29th, 2010 at 4:07 pm:
Ben, another distinction: I tend to lump metaphysics into the same category as natural theology and natural philosophy, where it is useful in framing up our ultimate concerns, disambiguating our concepts, clarifying reality’s putative initial, boundary & limit conditions, maybe even formulating our arguments thru abductive inference but going no further, chastized by past overreaches, attempts to prove too much or to say more than we can possibly know. With a contrite fallibilism, we explore the nature of our questions and the form of our meta-talk. This critique is not the radical apophaticism that’s exhibited by some of those with overly dialectical imaginations; rather, it affirms metaphysical realism but suggests that our deontologies should then be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. IOW, we might severely question how much normative impetus our metaphysics can claim as we move from what we think IS to what we think OUGHT to be.
What I whole-heartedly affirm is the robust engagement of our analogical imaginations, employing analogies and metaphors in what is a essentially poetic rhetoric that has its starting place within the faith and is thus a Theology of Nature. This is how I receive most of the work of Clayton, Bracken, Haught et al. These are elaborate tautologies filled with nature references and even technical scientific jargon that are nevertheless on par with the psalms, St. Francis’ Hymns to nature and such but brought up to date for our postmodern milieu. They have a tremendous amount of interpretive and evaluative significance and the more consonant with what we already know from descriptive science and normative philosophy, the more taut will be the tautology, which means that, while all metaphors eventually collapse, our metaphors can be rather resilient and versatile. IOW, such theologies of nature find their usefulness among those who have already taken the leap of faith, not unaided by reason and not inconsistent with science, but not so much as argumentation for faith, like the classical proofs which were metaphysical. Such a theology of nature-enlivened imagination can, indeed, recursively help further illuminate our understanding of life, in general, as we believe in order to know.
Anyway, that’s my parsing. As for competing metaphysical tautologies, the way I would adjudicate between those is by asking which one might best foster the normalization of gravity and quantum mechanics. Otherwise, they aren’t terribly interesting or helpful. We know that religion as a value-realization approach enjoys epistemic virtue, just like science. But we can’t deny that they otherwise differ in the amount of epistemic risk; we can only suggest that the increased risks have commensurate rewards.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Kris That sounds right-headed to me. One of the ways we cut through the types of paradox that confront us when logical causes (like concepts) get conflated with efficient causes (like dynamic neural net activity) is to proceed FOR ALL PRACTICAL purposes. As it is, our laws and jurisprudence do recognize different levels of culpability and exculpability and our sentencing guidelines are nuanced to take into account mitigating circumstances. Society writ large has responded to the human sciences and we do take into account formative, deformative and reformative influences and developmental trajectories. I think one practical take-away from discussions like this one is that we could do even better if we can get more citizens educated to a more naturalized humanism and away from their facile folk psychology. IOW, we could advance legislative and judicial reforms much further and much faster and could much more efficaciously treat and reform our prison populations. We don’t need metaphysics to do morality. When people do not agree on basic concepts, those ideas will have very little normative impetus in a pluralistic society anyway.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 11:45:49 AM
John Sobert Sylvest on March 30th, 2010 at 7:29 am:
Well, as Radical Orthodoxy might say, Dennett does have a few rather confessional stances, himself. One way to bust the religious move is to avoid getting so apophatic that one imagines that what is wholly incomprehensible is not, at the same time, partly apprehendable or thinks that a failure to successfully describe a reality necessarily forecloses on one’s ability to successfully refer to it. Each stance has risks and rewards. Perhaps one measure of the amount irony that will attend to any given stance is its risk:reward ratio vis a vis what Lonergan has described in terms of a growth in human authenticity through various conversions?
+++
In my approach to Peirce, I distinguish between 1ns and 3ns in terms of the in/determinate and un/specifiable, respectively. The indeterminacy is epistemic in nature and results from methodological constraints. Any unspecifiability is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary and could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. aha moments, abductions, paradigm shifts). Our semantical vagueness thus treats the modal possibilities of 1ns such that excluded middle holds while noncontradiction folds (in epistemic indeterminacy) and the modal probabilities of 3ns such that excluded middle folds while noncontradiction holds (in ontological vagueness). Which modal realities will later present as the actualities of 2ns, where EM & NC both hold, remains to be seen because we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting and when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results from what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, and issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity.
I say all of this to provide me a framework for grappling with your directionality distinctions. Stipulating to the indexical nature of human knowledge, it would seem that any intentionality that moves from humans in the world reaching toward what is unknown, which we cannot a priori presuppose as either temporarily indeterminate or invincibly unspecifiable, would entail a fallibilist, speculative metaphysic, which necessarily employs both positivist and philosophic methodologies. And it would seem that any reversal of that claim in Dewey’s notions of intending symbols mediating the world back to humans is also an integral part of the same triadic inferential process as 3ns plays its mediating role in an ongoing recursive interplay with 1ns and 2ns. This would thus correspond to the Peircean rubric that the normative sciences (3ns) mediate between phenomenology (2ns or science) and metaphysics (1ns, incl speculative cosmology and highly theoretical physics). This is to say that it seems that Neville is talking about Peircean 1ns and you are talking about 3ns (vis a vis your reversal). And it is also to suggest that, while your insights are indispensable, they are supplemental and not wholly over against Neville’s account, which would be incomplete per your description.
You appear to be making an additional move, as I see it. I appreciate that the context of Neville’s work hereinabove was theological, but my treatment above prescinded from that theological take to the strictly phenomenological, philosophical and metaphysical. In your treatment of 3ns, you are taking an essentially phenomenological category and coloring it with a theological hue, analogically imagining that the world is mediating to us not only our local environs but also expressions of primal reality (reality’s initial, boundary & limit conditions). Thus you are making a distinctly theological turn and have segued from a natural theology to a theology of nature.
The reason I thus characterize your thrust as a theology of nature is because our natural theology is confronted with what is very likely an immeasurable amount of information erasure due to entropic processes. The deeper we go into the structures of matter and the closer we get to t=0 near the Big Bang, the less information available re: our initial, boundary and limit conditions, much less ultimate reality. The world certainly mediates info to us re: our own horizons but any temporal critical realism looks like it will indeed be methodologically constrained if for no other reason than temporality, itself, collapses, a spatiotemporal reality on which we rely in our common sense notions of causation. The human experience of ultimacy remains fraught with mystery as reality appears terribly ambivalent toward us and incredibly ambiguous to us in the symbols it has intended for us. Thus, if with Blake we do see the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wildflower, holding Infinity in the palm of our hand and Eternity in an hour, we are doing a theology of nature. And so it is that I call my own theology of nature a pan-semio-entheism. I make that theological turn with you and take that existential leap even while suggesting THAT Ultimacy is mediating Herself back to me through manifold and multiform symbols (physical signs at that) even if I cannot give a robust account of just HOW that may be so. On that front, I prefer to remain ontologically vague, if only to return the favor to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. This indeed supports a robustly pluralistic approach to the world’s Great Traditions and indigenous religions.
BTW, and that’s also why I characterize Dennett’s confessional stance as a(n) (a)theology of nature, also 
Someone is saying more than one can possibly know, proving too much, taking a leap but not looking over one’s shoulder at the leap and considering its distance and nature.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Regarding the ontologically real POSSIBLE. One can prescind from a robustly metaphysical account (as in the examples above) to a more vague phenomenological approach (which is what Peirce did).
Peirce’s “modal categories” included the possible, actual and probable. Each category employed its own grammar vis a vis such first principles as noncontradiction [NC] & excluded middle [EM]. As we all know, in the actual, both NC & EM hold. In the possible, NC folds & EM holds. In the probable, NC holds & EM folds. What distinguishes this from metaphysics as usually conceived is that metaphysics employs the modal categories of possible, actual and NECESSARY. And THAT is its fatal error. That is what leads to all sorts of castles in the air and angels dancing on pinheads (like Bill O’Reilly, I suppose?).
By prescinding from the necessary to the probable, we are acknowledging our inescapably fallible nature but honoring, at the same time, our slow but inexorable advance of knowledge. We also avoid the types of paradox that will ensue from our presumptions that the concepts we have employed NECESSARILY successfully refer to reality.
This Peircean rigor supports circumspection & keeps me metaphysically agnostic. Stu’s categories work well.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:59:34 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote: I just don’t yet see how an emergence, much as I love it, gives answers to the standard philosophy of mind ! questions I posed in a past blog. Do you? And if so, help please! Stu <<<
Emergence is a heuristic device for properties that defy explanation. So, in principle, if one is in possession of an answer to the hard problem, it wouldn’t be emergent (or hard). There are three ways to look at the possible relationships between levels of complexity. If a lower level completely explains a higher level, then we have reductionism and the strongest relation possible. When speaking in terms of parts & wholes, properties & laws, it is possible that reductionism will not explain a higher level, but we can still maintain supervenience, which is to say that any differences in parts, wholes, properties and laws at a higher level must have corresponding differences at the lower level (covariance without reduction). If a theory explaining higher level properties & laws is, in principle, unpredictable from a theory at a more fundamental level, then we have emergence, which is to say, novelty.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 5:22:18 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Just a point of information: The Catholic church considers science & philosophy (hence metaphysics) autonomous disciplines. It thus has no official position on the soul, a metaphysical concept, or the mind, a philosophical construct, or the brain, a scientific term. It only takes dogmatic positions regarding putative theological realities. For those interested, see Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:36:55 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
The Searle quote reminds me of a quote attributed to Jerry Fodor: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:39:37 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
One may wish to add this to favorite mind-body problem quotes; William James wrote: We are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, “dazu hast du noch eine lange Frist” [for that you've got a long wait], for from generation to generation the reasons adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more refined.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 4:43:30 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
As we consider the dance between continuity & discontinuity, pattern & paradox, chance & necessity, order & chaos, random & systematic, causal & noncausal, determinate & indeterminate, specifiable & unspecifiable, predictable & unpredictable, the grammar of our Peircean rubrics seems to be providing a helpful heuristic?
Of course, this would not be the first walk through the particle zoo for Peirce’s phenomenological modal categories and sign classes. A few years ago, I came across an intriguing post on a rather obscure complexity listserv. From what I could gather, Terry Deacon had derived ten sign classes from Peirce’s nine sign types and this facilitated the formulation of a quark model of signs by Sungchul Ji, PhD. I have been
unable to retrieve that post today but the original link to this conversation was http://necsi.org:8100/Lists/complex-science/Message/6518.html
I’d like to introduce a few more distinctions to see if they can help. Causation transfers information (incl temporal or spatial nonlocal causation). Types of causation associate w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves coupling of 2 systems.
cont
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:14:55 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret the causal coupling or exploit the coupling (use it somehow). System levels (hierarchies) have no ontological status but result from what so happens to be available to us epistemically. An autopoietic, or self-organizing, feature exhibits downward causation & entropy decreases but the total system entropy increases. Physical information (like signs) have a non-zero value only in systems at nonequilibrium with their environment. While prediction requires information in an effect to be computable from information in its cause, unpredictability (unspecifiability) is not the same as indeterminism. Peircean grammar rubrics apply to indeterminacy (re: possibility), which is epistemic in nature & results from methodological constraints, & to unspecifiability (re: probability), which is ontological, or modal, in nature and results from a putative in-principle ontological occulting. One way these would differ is that any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while any due to indeterminacy is potentially temporary & could be conquered with future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts).
cont
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:21:35 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Concluding from the prior 2 posts:
A noncausal reality would be an “apparent” transfer of identical information but this is improbable.
Symmetry requirements in quantum mechanics govern information generation. How might this tie into the rubrics and distinctions I offered in the above posts? “Physical” reality is probabilistic. The category of the Possible is an “objective” reality, perhaps physical but with a zero-value b/c it’s in a state at equilibrium w/its neuronal net environment, hence the Possible comprises a rather tacit dimension that is nonetheless a robustly telic dimension, clearly causal but in the formal sense insofar as it comprises this structural neuronal environment.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 2:37:40 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Quantum Theory seems to recognize both epistemological & ontological limits. In Peirce’s recursive triad of abduction, induction & deduction, one type of abduction is retroduction, whereby we reason backward from known predicates to putative subjects. In our brains, we are able to strip properties from known realities & reassign them to unknown realities. When we reassign them to unknown causes of observed effects, this is an inference to the best explanation, sometimes predicting, for example, a new species or element on the periodic table. When we reassign them to mere abstractions, this is fantasy. Superpositioning and wave-function collapse thus involve only such possibilities as would successfully refer to realities that are physically instantiable, hence mediated by probability, which is why Schrödinger didn’t employ a Unicorn Experiment. Peirce’s grammar guides us re: the “logical” import of signs but we need an additional category to grapple with their “vital” import. When I add a 4th category called value-realization (a cashing-out of practical significance), the wave-function becomes a heuristic device not a physical reality (it ain’t real). Possibilities are, rather, formal causes, physical signs at rest (equilibrium).
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 3:56:50 PM
Moving on, now, to Telos: a Lost Cause
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
I thank Ursula for inviting Deacon & Sherman. Most all that I shared on Stu’s thread re: The Hard Problem: Consciousness was based on intuitions informed by my rather inchoate grasp of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce [CSP]. I won’t reiterate those comments on this thread but I do want to submit them as a relevant reference HERE. What I am most looking forward to is having someone (Prof. Deacon) with a very firm grasp of Peirce to address what CSP called a “minding of matter and a mattering of mind.” I know this can correct my misunderstandings, clarify my proper understandings and provide me a way to articulate my own perspective in a much more accessible form. Anything I’ve gotten correct, so far, mostly comes from articles co-authored by Deacon & Goodenough re: different orders of emergence (Polanyian), thermo- morpho- & teleo-dynamics and so on. Where I’ve gone astray, well, I managed that all by myself. I am so glad to finally “meet” Prof. Deacon and look forward to his & Dr. Sherman’s contributions.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 11:51:43 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
I’d like to offer a distinction between telos and TELOS, where the former entails a downward causation w/o violation of physical causal closure, while the latter is nonenergetic. Classical TELOS is a tautological metaphysical “concept” that adds no new info to one’s system & invites causal disjunction paradoxes. Biosemiotic telos has been a helpful theoretic heuristic (conceptual placeholder) that may fast become a rigorous scientific “term.” Conceptual confusion might arise between them b/c biosemiotic telos relies on but then transcends a formal causation contributed by a system’s environment. This structural environment (formal cause) may be at rest or in equilibrium in relationship to the rest of the system (material & efficient causes). As a “tacit” dimension it might be assigned a zero value re:its distance fr equilibrium hence would mimic what would be a nonenergetic analogue in TELOS, but it’s in an integral relationship to a thermodynamic system, iow, a system feature, and thus robustly efficacious, like a river’s bed & banks, like a waterfall’s cliff, like a mind’s neuronal network. Maybe telos is, in part, non-energetic, while TELOS is, more properly, a-energetic, a lost cause, indeed? Does this make sense?
Thursday, April 01, 2010 12:31:25 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Another distinction: chance & coincidence, which might have a bearing on intent and INTENT. Chance pertains to the future & the epistemically unavailable, while coincidence involves the present or past. Science, is probabilistic and deals w/chance not coincidence. Any weak anthropic principle is trivial; a strong anthropic principle deals w/coincidence. Only if we knew enough about the initial conditions of the cosmos could we do probabilistic thought experiments to test an anthropic principle. Fast forward to the origins of life and next to the emergence of consciousness where a “design inference” is often invoked; the inference may be logically valid but cannot be demonstrated as logically sound b/c it eludes probabilistic analysis & thus is not scientific. The dictionary definition of intent suffices: firmly directed. Reality is firmly directed, intentional, inasmuch as it is probabilistic. To the extent a bounded probabilistic reality presents along a continuum of degrees and exhibits an orderliness, or far from equilibrium decrease in entropy, it might be thought of as virtually free as its intentionality approaches the asymptotes of firm directionality. So would things go re: human consciousness.
cont
Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:19:56 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
INTENT, otoh, like TELOS, would be a metaphysical concept that imagines a platonic-like causation that is absolutely independent of our energetic milieu, confusing an asymptotically far from equilibrium state with a putatively a-energetic reality. This doesn’t demonstrate the anthropic; rather, it demonstrates the anthropocentric.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 1:25:16 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Pankaj Peirce said that the normative sciences mediate between phenomenology and metaphysics. Let me put forth my own parsing. I say that the normative mediates between the descriptive and interpretive to effect the evaluative. This, in my view, is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology. So, we might say science = descriptive, asking: What is that? And culture (we are radically social animals) is evaluative asking: What’s that to us? And philosophy is normative, asking: How might we best acquire or avoid that? Worldviews are interpretive, asking: How do we tie all of this back together (or re-ligate = religious)? Jacques Maritain said that we distinguish in order to unite. I thus suggest that science, culture, philosophy & worldviews are different foci of human concerns, or methods, and as such are methodologically-autonomous (asking different questions) but axiologically-integral (all necessary, none sufficient, in every human value-realization). To your points: 1) Buddhism is interpretive, not descriptive. 2) Science is inherently normative. 3) RE: an emergent consciousness, I am saying more than we know, proving too much. I agree & stipulate that what I offer is strictly for argument’s sake. 4) What cool people, here!
Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:04:34 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Erin no non sequitur for me. Heidegger once asked: Why not rather nothing? which also translates as Why is there something rather than nothing? Some protest that “nothing” is a reification & one that does not successfully refer to reality. Still, another question might beg: Why is there something & not rather something else? Questions beg regarding primal reality & we may not even have the categories & concepts to formulate them. For example, what about the concept of a cause? What could that possibly mean in an atemporal reality where t=0? So, those aristotelian causes, which we invoke in this scientific consideration w/in the space-time-mass-energy plenum in a thermodynamic context which admits to a very broad continuum of intentionality, can also be imaginatively conceived in a platonic-like reality independent of temporal features where there may be “things” but NO THING we can describe. We wonder whether this may be Heidegger’s NO-THING, which may or may not successfully refer to reality? Questions DO beg! maybe more so on reality’s perimeters & less so in its gaps. Religious fundamentalists put gods in gaps. Enlightenment fundamentalists issue explanatory promissory notes. Our discussion differs by having a narrower focus.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 2:50:46 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj yes, yes, yes! I’m a big believer in what I call interpretive pluralism, a radically pluralistic stance toward the values realized by all of the Great Traditions as well as by humanity’s indigenous religions. The different worldviews & religions, as interpretive axes, each an “axiology,” around which our “cosmology” spins when we realize life’s deepest values, have great gifts to offer each other in dialogue. Science, however, tells us what I believe is Everybody’s Story.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 3:03:51 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Indeterminacy (re: possibility) is epistemic & results fr methodological constraints. Unspecifiability (re: probability) is ontological, or modal, & would result fr a putative in-principle ontological occulting. Any ignorance due to unspecifiability would be invincible, while that due to indeterminacy could be temporary & could be conquered w/future methodological improvements (e.g. technological) or epistemic insights (e.g. abductions, paradigm shifts). Which modal reality will later present as an actuality remains to be seen b/c we cannot a priori know when it is that our ignorance is invincible due to an in-principle ontological occulting & when it might otherwise be conquered due to our overcoming of methodological constraints. Of course, we adopt a methodological naturalism precisely because to otherwise presuppose that our ignorance results from an ontological occulting would be to drive into an epistemic cul-de-sac. A philosophical naturalism a priori presupposes that all ignorance results fr what is temporarily indeterminable, epistemically speaking, & issues a metaphysical promissory note for future ontological specificity. It’s a confessional stance, which I begrudge no one (as long as one keeps it to oneself). [smiley]
Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:15:55 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj, in the philosophy of science, there are a host of criteria we can apply to working hypotheses in addition to internal coherence & pragmatic utility. We also look for external congruence, logical consistency, inferential fecundity, interdisciplinary consilience, hypothetical consonance, symmetry, parsimony, elegance, abductive facility and so on. Energy medicine research in the US is guided by an NIH division devoted to Complementary & Alternative Medicine. It is practiced in many clinical settings. It is not a scientific hegemony that segregates it as complementary or alternative but the fact that it meets fewer scientific criteria than conventional medicine. This has much practical import. For example, we have limited fiscal & technological resources & must prioritize our research funding. Also, for a serious illness, I personally would want to have exhausted conventional options before seeking alternatives, precisely b/c of such meaningful criteria. At the same time, energy medicine has a place, a very legitimate place, in my view.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 7:31:49 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Some paradox we can resolve such as in a dialectical synthesis. Some we can dissolve via a paradigm shift, perspective change or conceptual clarification (dis-ambiguation). Some we can evade practically, ignoring it for all practical purposes. There are different types of paradox incl the veridical, falsidical, conditional & antinomial. Some paradox we can exploit transformatively by nurturing its creative tensions. There’s no single prescription for paradox vis a vis what we are to resolve, dissolve, evade or exploit. It all depends. In our modal ontology, where we consider the categories of possible, actual & probable (& necessary), we precisely employ semantical vagueness as we apply first principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle, as they alternately hold or fold.
Thursday, April 01, 2010 8:06:08 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
In this ongoing discussion, I think of Peirce’s inferential triad of abductive hypothesizing, inductive testing & deductive clarifying. It reminds me that we can get caught up in a nonvirtuous cycle of abduction & deduction w/o the inductive rubber of falsification hitting the epistemic road. And Mike’s right; it’s a muddy road. And Phil well described the difficulty we can have in devising helpful analogies. Our human knowledge advances not only via our cognitive propositions (conceptual map-making) but also thru our participatory imagination (think hometown knowledge). We very well know how to get to the grocer then the pharmacy & back home but can find such knowledge difficult to articulate to an inquiring stranger who’s unfamiliar w/our hometown. Peirce’s triad conveys only LOGICAL import. But we are also biosemiotic INTENDERS & thus attend to what has VITAL import. Peirce thus reminds us to cash-out the practical value of our conceptions, to attend to distinctions that make a difference. He notes that our knowledge gains its strength in a way more like a cable, from the intertwining of strands of different informal arguments, than a chain, from the unbroken linkage of a series of formal syllogisms. IOW, we’re fallible.
Friday, April 02, 2010 11:02:00 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
The opening blog post included the following qualifiers: absurd, impossible, unlikely, improbable, chance, impossibly, improbable, probable, tendency, future possibility, predictable & plausible. These correspond to what used to be called scholastic notation, where one designated various assertions as im/possible, im/plausible, im/probable & un/certain. They relate to the modal distinctions I discussed in:
The Hard Problem: Consciousness, where noncontradiction & excluded middle would variously hold or fold. They also speak to the distinctions made between epistemic in/determinacy & ontological un/specifiability. Finally, they also bring to mind the distinctions between chance & coincidence.
Prigogine invites us to consider the giganormous number of bifurcations & permutations that have gone into the universe’s dissipative structures. And while it’s true that the greater this number, the more fragile the structure, it also seems that the more fragile the structure, the more beautiful. This beauty doesn’t seem absurd or implausible, but, w/o knowing the universe’s initial conditions, one can’t really say what’s im/probable.
Friday, April 02, 2010 11:49:49 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
One take-away from my last post is that, while I noted in one of our recent discussions that the weak anthropic principle was trivial and the strong anthropic principle was misguided, our ignorance re: the universe’s initial, boundary & limit conditions also speaks to such an interpretive stance as would disingenuously suggest that, after 13.7 billion years, this world we inhabit is exactly what one should expect! Still, setting aside my confusion re: both cosmic origins & life’s origins & why thermo- & morpho- dynamics present the way they do, once stipulating to the fact of teleo-dynamics, using neo-darwinian evolution as my starting point, it DOES seem to me that Deacon’s account of the co-evolution of language & brain & the emergence of our ROBUST intentionality in consciousness is more than plausible. I’m betting that it “won’t stay a mystery” & is one of the most likely candidates for soon being considered PROBABLE. It already “feels” that way to me, but my grad school focus was neuroendocrinology & I’m thus biased.
Friday, April 02, 2010 12:18:25 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Ergo, I’m inclined to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wave-functions aren’t physical realities. Possibilities, what Peirce called Firstness, in my view, are predicates stripped from subjects & abstracted by our brains. They get applied retroductively (e.g. reasoning backward from known predicates to unknown subjects) & analogically (e.g. metaphors) whenever we encounter the effects of unknown causes, which get ontologically specified, for example, as new species or new elements on the periodic table, or even as a mistaken identity. As neurological correlates, they lie dormant, often “adjacent,” as structures of memory, providing a system environment feature (formal cause) w/a zero-value distance from that local system’s equilibrium, a tacit dimension that is nevertheless utterly efficacious as its nonalgorithmic open-ended processor (material & efficient causes) “works” (i.e. decreasing entropy locally), which is to say, “functions” (final causation) via a telic system feature we call intent, which is variously strong or weak across the phylogenetic spectrum. Symbol employment is novel, gifts us w/the abduction of SELF, a bundle of predicates gathered from others & reassigned to ME, setting us apart as sapiens.
Friday, April 02, 2010 12:45:49 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj, re: using words correctly, in my view, our transition from algorithmic to non-algorithmic processors resulted when closed circuitry got short-circuited in our brain’s hard-wiring, allowing subject-object cleavage, predicate dissociation from subjects, properties to be abstracted away from entities and mis-assigned. We became, in part, open-ended processors. We then exploited the MIS-TAKE as adaptively significant. That’s what an analogy or metaphor is, in a way, a mistake, a mis-assignment of predicates. But it allowed us to enhance our modeling power of reality, making our tautologies more taut, with story-telling. Boon or bane? A non-virtuous cycle of abductive hypothesizing & deductive clarifying becomes a sterile metaphysic unless interrupted by inductive falsification. Will our bio-semiotic leap to symbol-usage preserve or destroy our species? The evidence in favor of boon or bane is mixed. Conversations like this one are indispensable to our survival, in my view. We lack SELF-understanding to our peril, maybe even doom.
Friday, April 02, 2010 3:41:57 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Jane re:causes, only speaking for me: In a sense, we are exploring the relationship between causation & information in biological systems. I associate aristotelian-like causation w/different system features: material = parts; efficient = interactions incl semiotic; final = functions; formal = environment. Information involves a coupling of 2 systems. Actualization of information requires a third system to interpret this causal coupling (or exploit the coupling or use it, somehow). Intent would be associated w/function. Only if one invokes such causations in a platonic sense would one encounter such paradox as causal disjunctions; these are all situated in a thermodynamic system that is far from equilibrium. It’s the formal cause, it seems, that throws people for a loop. I think this is b/c folks are confusing non-energetic (at equilibrium) with a-energetic (having nothing to do w/our space-time-mass-energy plenum). The formal cause is structural, an environmental milieu that matters, including such as physical signs. Nothing spooky.
Saturday, April 03, 2010 1:20:17 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Irv re: Peirce, the heuristic I described is consistent w/Peirce. A lot of folks apply Peircean categories & grammar in complexity theory, systems theory, info systems theory, artificial intelligence theory & such. It’s not so much explanatory as it is heuristic. As a heuristic, I find it powerful, like emergence. Combine such heuristics as Peirce’s triadic semeiotic & emergence & we get new & exciting ways of looking at what are otherwise intractable problems. A combination of Peirce & Emergence would not thus lead one algorithmically to one philosophy of mind vs another; it just makes it easier for different schools of thought to read off the same sheet of music, clarifying those distinctions that might make for pragmatically “real” differences vs those that make for idle, sterile tautologies. It helps me discern what’s at stake in eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, nonreductive physicalism & so on. It does seem, however, to foreclose on a computational (algorithmic) account of consciousness, making an improvement on Dennett’s approach. I’m willing to admit that some nonenergetic aspects of formal causation could be indistinguishable from putative acausal features, but methodologically approach acausal features as epistemic not ontological in origin (but who knows? No one knows, a priori!).
Saturday, April 03, 2010 3:26:43 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Irv see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics for how the semiotic applies to music, theater, art and so on, where it is necessary but not sufficient. I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE], which refers to Robert Cummings Neville, who emphasized axiology or value-realization. It is a naturalized or evolutionary epistemology that recognizes our human encounter with a surplus of meaning. Our signs & symbols include more than words. Our deepest value-realizations transcend the semiotic. A contemplative stance goes beyond our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems). Many of us, as naturalists, are also religious (but not all are also theistic).
Saturday, April 03, 2010 9:33:13 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Irv, Stu may not have been explicitly employing peircean categories but you may recall that I thought his modal distinctions were consistent w/Peirce & a semantical vagueness vis a vis the application of 1st principles like noncontradiction & excluded middle. Also, re: emergence, I, myself, consider it to be an epistemic artefact of where we as observers are situated in relationship to a system and its features. As I said, in my view, that system feature which provides better predictability is the one we tend to call emergent. Sometimes we may be dealing with layers of explanation, not ontological levels? and they may be redundant? For example, folks talk of supervenience (re: emergence), which when called strong is trivial, when called weak is question begging. I also consider the quantum acausal in epistemic terms, hence not a suitable ontic structure for contra-causal free will. Nonalgorithmic CSC, while necessary for Stu’s hypothesis, is thus not sufficient, in my view. Peirce & Emergence as heuristics don’t rule out Stu’s hypothesis, which could be consistent w/both. Only my interpretation, or sneaking suspicion, that our semiotic formal causes are nonenergetic & not a-energetic, lead me to that provisional closure.
Saturday, April 03, 2010 10:11:14 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Irv – I call my own stance a Peircean-Nevillean integral axiological epistemology [PNIAE] and it combines “our problem-solving, dualistic mindset with its empirical, logical, practical & moral foci of concern (and extrinsic reward systems) with a more nondual, relational approach to reality (and its intrinsic reward systems).”
The nondual, relational approach = a contemplative stance. It complements other stances, which include descriptive (science or positivist), normative (philosophic), evaluative, interpretive and so. Such stances (each methodologically autonomous, asking different questions of reality) are integrally-related – all necessary, none sufficient – in realizing reality’s values. As in a symphony, one note or instrument or section may enjoy a certain primacy while others rest, but it is only in relationship to the other notes or instruments or sections that it realizes its purpose and meaning. Or, think of notes in a chord. We do not cling to an individual note – not because it isn’t beautiful, but – because we don’t want to miss the symphony.
Saturday, April 03, 2010 11:19:56 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Irv, to the extent the value one is after is an enhanced modeling power of reality, I would turn to the audience, a community of value-realizers, for their opinion. And, in the audience, I would try to spot those maestros who’ve been the most earnest in their inquiry & faithful in their practice. That would be more distinctly Peircean, a turn to community.
I see what you are driving at with your metaphor vis a vis the ego. And it is on the mark, for example, in the way Thomas Merton approached such things. He employed the concept, “false self,” for that aspect of personhood that resulted from our socialization; it roughly maps over the freudian concept of ego. False Self was an unfortunate use of words, though, because it conveys the same type of notion as ego-less. Merton did not mean to suggest that we might travel without the False Self or ego; rather, in my words, we travel BEYOND it and not WITHOUT it. The contemplative stance does transcend or go beyond the problem-solving stances but not without them. The integrality is preserved.
Monday, April 05, 2010 11:01:40 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
This sounds like Peirce’s appeal to a suitably chastised epistemic optimism and a contrite fallibilism. Perhaps we have come to better realize that features like parsimony, elegance, beauty, symmetry and such have never been robustly truth-conducive but, rather, only weakly truth-indicative. Perhaps we have traded in a modal ontology with such categories as possible, actual and NECESSARY for one that employs, instead, the categories possible, actual and probable. Perhaps we have realized with Gödel that our systems can be either consistent or complete but not both, that we cannot prove our system axioms within those systems. No more a prioristic, rationalistic foundations; no more privileged metaphysics. No more gnostic claims to moral imperatives as we reason humbly together from the best IS we can formulate for the moment to the most universally compelling OUGHT we can derive together at the time, all translated into a language that is transparent to human reason and thus given such a normative impetus as would not rely on appeals to revelations or special pleadings grounded in so-called indubitable metaphysics. The sense of sacredness would derive from our radical solidarity with & compassion for nature & each other.
Monday, April 05, 2010 6:24:09 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Adam – I conceive of 2 challenges: 1) how to devise a more universally compelling morality 2) how to proceed in our speculative endeavors, especially regarding our highly theoretical sciences. Peirce said we should speculate boldly in theoretical matters but proceed more cautiously in our vital affairs (roughly speaking). I like to say that our deontologies should be considered at least as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. What I am driving at is that, for the most part, humankind already knows enough from evolutionary biology & our human arts & sciences to “do” morality. Modern philosophers, for the most part, embrace some type of critical realism, even though some are pragmatic realists, others “weak” foundationalists, others coherentists, etc Slowly, but inexorably, we should be able to get radical fundamentalisms on the wane. This is also to say that I don’t think we need to quickly resolve philosophy of mind’s “hard” problems, choose a given quantum interpretation or renormalize gravity w/quantum mechanics. Laws we observe might be as local, for all practical & theoretical purposes, as those of our neighborhood bridge club? Extrapolating them to anywhere NEAR T=0 is likely illicit, much less BEYOND T=0?
Monday, April 05, 2010 11:05:22 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Everywhere in reality it seems that “the necessary” has suggested itself, while nowhere in reality has it been encountered as a physical instantiation. Haldane said that reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we CAN imagine. Chesterton might’ve countered that we don’t know enough about reality yet to say that it is unknowable. Wittgenstein said it’s not HOW things are but THAT things are which is the mystical. Heidegger asked: Why not rather nothing? But what if ‘nothing” doesn’t successfully refer? Our question becomes: Why is there something rather than something else? Gödel said we couldn’t prove a system’s axioms w/in that system but that doesn’t mean we might not otherwise be able to SEE their truth. How many of us need to travel w/Russell & Whitehead halfway thru the Principia where they prove the axioms that support 2 + 2 = 4 in order to see the truth of those axioms? We don’t a priori know whether the unprovable axioms of a putative TOE will be trivial or interesting, grounded by truths we can taste & see even if not formally prove. We do well to assume we are methodologically constrained, epistemically, rather than occulted-in-principle, ontologically, ever-mindful it’s a pragmatic assumption.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010 12:13:41 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Adam Let me give some soft push-back re: “We need catagories (classes, constellations of ideas) which can help us wrap our thinking around the irreducibility, primacy and unity of experience.”
Maybe you subvert your own critique of the empirical as you press for yet more conceptual map-making? Instead, you could press your logic to a more radical, but still consistent, conclusion, which would indeed resonate with the Buddhist imagination. Buddhism gifts us via our participatory imagination w/practices not conclusions, w/experiences not systems, w/realizations not arguments, stories of unitary reality not ontologies.
See my thoughts here:
One: Essential Writings in Nonduality – a review, where I wrote: “After all, there is no room to presume that folks — who, self-described, would kill the Buddha — are returning from ineffable experiences only to clearly effable about reality, or that they are telling us tales about, what they claim to hold in-principle as, untellable stories. Something else is going on, which is an invitation into an experience and not an initiation into a philosophical system.”
The East, in my view, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our internal milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between sensation & abstraction and incl what we might call our affective attunement to reality. The West, for its part, has gifted us w/insights re: our mastery of our external milieu, incl a better awareness of what takes place between abstraction & judgment and incl what we might call our practical alignment w/reality. Had Einstein & Bohr a better familiarity w/both Eastern & Western philosophy, perhaps they would have realized that, to some extent, they were talking past one another, precisely by committing category errors, Einstein now speaking of the ontic w/the West, Bohr now emphasizing the epistemic w/the East. We thus distinguish between epistemic in/determinacy and ontological un/specifiability. Still, Peirce provided the necessary distinctions, too. Subjective experiences are fine but carry very little NORMATIVE impetus for others until processed in and by community, a turn in religion known as communal discernment, a turn in science involving replication of results & peer review, a turn to community in philosophy we call phenomenology, a Peircean turn to a community of inquiry.
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
re: model & myth
It has always seemed to me that, precisely because of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, any TOE would require both model & narrative. The model would comprise our formal symbol system which describes reality. The narrative would comprise our informal apologetic for why the axioms of our system, even if unprovable, are compelling. Of course, with Tolkien, we’d be searching for True Myth, a story which, not literally true in every way, would nevertheless evoke an appropriate response to “ultimate” reality. One would anticipate a great diversity of expression of such truth, an authentic religious pluralism (vis a vis a constructive pragmatic realism).
Tuesday, April 06, 2010 1:16:39 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Pankaj, re: would you consider Godel’s contribution to be equivalent to that of Nagarjuna?
Considering when Nagarjuna lived compared to Gödel, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, one can only be astounded at his wisdom. In the same vein, as much as I love Peirce, I only discovered him when someone confused one of my disquisitions as being Peircean, when it was otherwise grounded in Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart & Duns Scotus; my interlocutor then described me as an accidental-Peircean. Many years later, I’m now an on-purpose Peircean. Finally, Nagarjuna addressed more than epistemology and theoretic concerns of logical import, but had much to say about praxis & compassion; those latter contributions had great vital import!
Tuesday, April 06, 2010 2:15:42 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
The Western dualistic conceptions of God generally lack that deeper ontological ground, which would be needed to provide for divine interaction with the world. But there are also problems, both with Western fullness of being conceptions of God, such as in the Perennial Philosophy, Thomistic & Neo-Platonic conceptions, and the Buddhist conception of the fullness of nonbeing, with regard to how novelty might arise other than via negations & limitations insofar as pure negations are as utterly indeterminate as pure being. These are precisely problems related to so-called broken symmetry. To be determinate is to be this rather than that. Neville appeals, instead, to Scotus’ realistic theory of common natures, expressed in modern form by Peirce. This leads to an asymmetrical conception of God. Any novelty arises from a creative act ex nihilo, not from limitations of being, with questions begging as to why the world’s not entirely good, leading us not to aspire to repose but to participation in bringing about an alignment. This doesn’t evoke images of a Fall or broken symmetry or of some ontological rupture located in our past but of a teleological striving oriented toward a future, such as in Jack Haught’s aesthetic teleology.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:09:07 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@ECM who wrote: perhaps we should change our views about God’s aesthetics.
Interesting point, Eric. As a point of information, Robert Cummings Neville (a postmodern) following Peirce and Scotus (a medieval) elaborates an asymmetrical conception of God. See Chapter 12 of his Realism in Religion – A Pragmatist’s Perspective (2009 SUNY Press) where he defends this conception at length.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010 7:42:24 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
I realize that the God’s eye view or God’s mind is being evoked metaphorically here and that this thread is not about exploring the nature of God vis a vis any putative god-concepts. So, I offer my discussions below in the vein of expanding our metaphor & not as a theological argument per se. What we are more directly interested in is how truth-indicative are such features as parsimony, elegance, symmetry, simplicity and such. Is there a feature of reality that might be more heavily nuanced than a/symmetry? What about harmony? Wouldn’t it require the shedding of monotony and the appropriation of novelty? A harnessing of asymmetry in the service of complexity? and of aesthetics? In other words, beauty might continue to guide us but needs to be more broadly conceived beyond mere symmetry.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010 9:33:31 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Pankaj right, there are different Buddhist conceptions of nonbeing & my discussion relates to one developed by Nishitani & perhaps the Kyoto school. As a general rule, I do not take away ontological conclusions from the Buddha, himself, including those regarding one’s so-called authenticity. Any experience of unitary being is merely phenomenal & its nondual take-away is epistemic not ontic.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:00:28 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@Pankaj, that was well stated, too. Any putative “ultimate” would very much less lend itself to our conceptual map-making, descriptively, and very much more lend itself to our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagement.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010 10:57:27 AM
Then, I will press forward a tad (as most have moved on). And our participatory, imaginative and interpretive engagements, collectively, get systematized and with great practical effect. These systems are truth-laden — not in the manner in which they conceptually describe the ultimate, but rather — in the manner they foster human value-realizations vis a vis our concerns re: ultimacy. One must inhabit the symbol systems of such systems, existentially, to real-ize their value & truth, as they do not readily lend themselves to mere propositional analysis. This hermeneutical spiral of imagination, interpretation, systematization & practical application might thus ground such a stance as affirms an authentic religious pluralism (& could be interpreted a/theologically or not).
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
Science is inherently normative. The findings of science are indispensable to any moral calculus that aspires to reason from a descriptive IS to a normative OUGHT. There is no need to set aretaic (virtue), deontological (is to ought), teleological (consequentialist, utilitarian, pragmatic) and contractarian ethical approaches at odds. By pulling such threads together, the fabric of our moral fiber can be strengthened. We can recognize, with Sartre, that, since we are similarly-situated in this somewhat universal human condition, the prescriptions (OUGHTS)we devise for this situation we describe (IS) are going to be remarkably consistent, for all practical purposes, even if the interpretations in which we ground them are otherwise very divergent or, sometimes, even relativistic, theoretically speaking. Morality is, then, transparent to human reason. In our increasingly pluralistic society, when different perspectives gather in the public square, and all should be welcome, each has a responsibility to articulate its moral reasoning using concepts and categories that are widely accepted; otherwise, one can hardly expect one’s reasoning to have much normative impetus for others, much less to be universally compelling.
Thursday, April 08, 2010 11:03:31 AM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
@twclark Well said, Tom. While interpretive stances, like various religious & secular ideologies, might assist in augmenting the values to be realized from our moral calculus (a descriptive, normative & evaluative hermeneutical spiral), our moral calculus has all that is necessary & sufficient for moral & prudential judgments even without the “benefit” of special revelations or authoritarian appeals grounded in either god-concepts or atheology. And value-augmentations by interpretive stances rely on an authentic scientific anthropology.
Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:35:40 PM
John Sylvest (John_Sobert_Sylvest) wrote:
re: Can Science Answer Moral Questions?
Category error.
Science doesn’t ask moral questions. Science is a descriptive method. Moral questions are normative, philosophic. Still, while the descriptive and normative are necessary in answering moral questions, they are insufficient and require, also, a culture with its evaluative posits.
Thursday, April 08, 2010 1:28:00 PM
One might also want to take a look at my post:
Theology & Anthropology – body, soul, spirit?
I like many of the distinctions Charles Sanders Peirce offers. He says that we can interpret Occam’s Razor vis a vis the word “simple” in terms of epistemic facility rather than ontological complexity. In other words, it’s not the needless multiplication of ontologies we need to avoid; instead, we need to pay attention to the facility or ease with which an abduction or hypothesis comes to mind when we’re confronted with a problem because that, in my words, is often truth-indicative. He also distinguishes between an argument, the initial abduction or hypothesis formulation, or, in his words, “any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief,” and argumentation, in his words, “an argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premises.” Peirce devised what he called the “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” but he derisively considered formal argumentation, where God was concerned, a fetish. He distinguished, too, between God’s so-called “existence” and God’s “reality.”
In other words, most of our knowledge in life does not proceed from mere formal argumentation via indubitable premises with clearly disambiguated concepts and logical validity to incontrovertible proof. Most of our knowledge comes from a cumulative case-like approach, is very much informal and probabilistic. From a rigorously philosophical approach, formal proofs of God, taken alone, lead only to Scottish verdicts of unproven. Taken together as arguments (facile abductions) along with other evidential, experiential, presuppositional and existential strands, we have quite a strong and resilient cable of belief that is eminently reasonable and existentially actionable, which is to say, with more than sufficient epistemic warrant.
Will it eschew evidentialism, rationalism, presuppositionalism and existentialism in favor of a more holistic perspectivalism but without defining holism in terms of a facile moderation or simple balancing act, acknowledging that certain approaches will sometimes enjoy at least a primacy if not an autonomy? This is to ask, then, if the dual and nondual approaches to reality might better be described as the transdual, which necessarily goes beyond, but not without, our dualistic, problem-solving mind in approaching life’s most important values, primarily, from a nondual approach?
Tim King, at his 
In my view, then, much of the strife on our planet comes from religion masquerading as cosmology, attempting but failing to co-opt the prerogatives of good science and good philosophy with pseudo-religion. Creationism isn’t bad religion; it’s bad science. Theocratic rule isn’t bad religion; it’s bad political science. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t bad religion; they’re grounded in bad anthropology and are bad morality. Such dysfunctional approaches to reality inevitably result when religion departs from its core competency, strays from its distinct role and fails to attend to its own unique contribution, which Merton emphasized was transformation not socialization.
As did Kurt Vonnegut, Thom enjoys his life in this incredible chronosynclastic infundibulum, where all is at once both true and false (this recognizing that Thom has also suspended his disbelief in the silly notion that such concepts as true and false successfully refer). While so-called First Principles, like noncontradiction and excluded middle, certainly entertain Thom, he sees that they only work within formal symbol systems, the axioms of which remain otherwise unprovable within that system, which, itself, remains either incomplete or inconsistent. Incompleteness and inconsistency are concepts which, paradoxically, do appear to make successful references to reality insofar as they add no new information to Thom’s otherwise unintelligible tautological accounts.