[FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Steve Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Feb 21 10:23:56 EST 2023 

Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which 
referenced Christian List's "Levels" 
<http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/> and the points he made (and you 
reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  
*because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to 
understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form duality 
(illusions?).

To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your 
reference to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your 
criticism is that the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?

The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to 
do with the tension between supervenience and entailment. Deacon's style 
*does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder 
and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that 
alone does not make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  
Perhaps I am guilty of courting confirmation bias insomuch as Deacon's 
constructions of homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem to support the style 
of dualism which I suppose appeals to me for reasons I don't understand 
yet or can't articulate.

Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
references rather than open ended descriptions of 
what/why/where/how/when every detail of what he said meant to me.   I 
fail at (avoid) clarity with too much more often than with too little, no?

I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen) 
were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed 
to read him.  The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who 
might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the horse's 
mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on other's 
opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe (2009?) and 
gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in him (I don't 
know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan was making?).   
It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a "blender" 
(presentations with group discussion) on the topic of morphometric 
analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind was on the topic 
of form -> function which had me mildly more receptive to (curious 
about) ideas *like* morphic resonance.  After that I was more like 95% 
dismissive of what he goes on about.  So... now that I wasted another 
minute of your time on *this* paragraph, I apologize for seeming to 
promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or imply that you should 
waste time reading him.    Whether reading Deacon turns out to be a 
waste of time is an open question for me myself.   I have invested quite 
a bit of time and still don't have as much traction as I would like.  I 
think that is because these are steep and slippery subjects in their own 
right, not because his work is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.

I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on 
Molecule-> Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's thinking 
about bits V atoms and supervenience.   To the extent that none of this 
tickles any of your own thoughts or interests in what I assume to be 
somewhat parallel (though maybe not convergent?) lines of inquiry, then 
I suppose it would be a waste of your time to follow it to any distance.

The following bit from the introduction to the essay linked *might* 
characterize what it is I *thought* you might find relevant in the paper 
and in the larger body of Deacon's work: _Information v 
information-transmission_ and _aboutism_ each were reminiscent to me of 
some of your arguments about whether communication actually exists and 
List's arguments about indexicality perhaps.

        /When Erwin Schrödinger (//1944
        <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR24>//)
        pondered////What is Life?////from a physicist’s point of view he
        focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain themselves in
        a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and how they store
        and pass on the information that determines their organization.
        In his metaphor of an aperiodic crystal as the carrier of this
        information he both foreshadowed Claude Shannon’s (//1948
        <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR25>//)
        analysis of information storage and transmission and Watson and
        Crick’s (//1953
        <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR27>//)
        discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. So
        by 1958 when Francis Crick (//1958
        <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR3>//)
        first articulated what he called the “central dogma” of
        molecular biology (i.e. that information in the cell flows from
        DNA to RNA to protein structure and not the reverse) it was
        taken for granted that that DNA and RNA molecules were
        “carriers” of information. By scientific rhetorical fiat it had
        become legitimate to treat molecules as able to provide
        information “about” other molecules. By the mid 1970s Richard
        Dawkins (//1976
        <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR5>//)
        could safely assume this as fact and follow the idea to its
        logical implications for evolutionary theory in his popular
        book////The Selfish Gene//. By describing a sequence of
        nucleotides in a DNA molecule as information and DNA replication
        as the essential defining feature of life, information was
        reduced to pattern and interpretation was reduced to copying.
        What may have initially been a metaphor became difficult to
        disentangle from the chemistry./

        /In this way the concept of biological information lost its
        aboutness but became safe for use in a materialistic science
        that had no place for what seemed like a nonphysical property.///

Just to keep my flog landing on the hide of the horse that may have 
expired several posts ago in this chain: Deacon's introduction of 
*teleo* to this characterization of complex adaptive systems  is the 
*first* example I have found which is even a little bit compelling 
toward understanding "Life Itself" (in the sense of what Schrodinger was 
going on about in 1944)... with enough inspection (or flogging) it may 
fizzle out and become nothing more than wet ash.   For the moment it 
feels like the glimmer of a signal where Sheldrake (and his ken) were 
mostly generating noise (more to the point, wishful thinking?) previously...


On 2/20/23 11:32 AM, glen wrote:
> [sigh] But the whole point of knowing other people is so that they can 
> make your own work more efficient or effective. While I appreciate the 
> *citation* of tomes, to some extent, citation isn't really useful for 
> construction of a concept. It's only useful for auditing constructs. 
> So, rather than go read the teleodynamics website (or sieve 
> Sheldrake's spooky action at a distance stuff), I'll ask you to 
> explain *why* teleodynamics is interesting from a panpsychist stance? 
> (Or to drive my point home about how useless citations are, how is it 
> related to Biology's First Law 
> <https://bookshop.org/p/books/biology-s-first-law-the-tendency-for-diversity-and-complexity-to-increase-in-evolutionary-systems-daniel-w-mcshea/8308564?ean=9780226562261>?)
>
> Or, barring that, I'll add it to my (practically) infinite queue of 
> stuff I should read but probably won't until I have a hook into it. 
> And even if I do read it, I probably won't understand it.
>
> With the Toribio article, I'm motivated to read it because BC Smith 
> hooked me a long time ago. But Sheldrake? No way in hell am I going to 
> invest time in that. Teleodynamics? Well, it's a website. And the 
> website for ninjas is more interesting: 
> http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm

        /On Mon, Sep 12, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote: //
        //My question of how well we can describe graph-based ... what?
        ... //
        //"statements"? "theorems"? Whatever. It's treated fairly well
        in List's //
        //paper: //
        / /
        //Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General
        Framework by //
        //Christian List //http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/////
        / /
        //in section "6.3 Indexical versus non-indexical and
        first-personal //
        //versus third-personal descriptions". We tend to think of the
        3rd //
        //person graph of possible worlds/states as if it's more
        universal ... a //
        //complete representation of the world. But there's something
        captured //
        //by the index/control-pointer //*walking*//some graph, with or
        without a //
        //scoping on how many hops away the index/subjective-locus can
        "see". //
        / /
        //I liken this to Dave's (and Frank's to some extent) consistent //
        //insistence that one's inner life is a valid thing in the
        world, Dave //
        //w.r.t. psychedelics and meditation and Frank's defense of
        things like //
        //psychodynamics. Wolpert seems to be suggesting a
        "deserialization" of //
        //the graph when he focuses on "finite sequences of elements
        from a //
        //finite set of symbols". I.e. walking the graph with the index
        at a //
        //given node. With the 3rd person ... whole graph of graphs, the //
        //serialization of that bushy thing can only produce an
        infinitely long //
        //sequence of elements from a (perhaps) infinte set. Is the
        bushiness //
        //*dense*//(greater than countable, as Wolpert asks)? Or sparse? //
        / /
        //I'm sure I'm not wording all this well. But that's why I'm
        glad y'all //
        //are participating, to help clarify these things. /

>
> On 2/20/23 10:10, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> As the discussion evolves:
>>> But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form 
>>> as a human body.
>>>
>>> I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or 
>>> "intention" ... or even "acting". It's more about accumulation and 
>>> the tendency of cumulative objects to accumulate (and 
>>> differentiate). Perhaps negentropy is a closer concept than 
>>> "interest" or "intention". And, although I disagree that experience 
>>> monism is more primitive than panpsychism, I agree that these forms 
>>> of panpsychism require mechanisms for composition (against which 
>>> James is famous) and other structure.
>>
>> I re-introduce/offer Terrence Deacon's Teleodynamics 
>> <https://teleodynamics.org/> which I do not take to be (quite?) as 
>> difficult to integrate/think-about asSheldrake's Morphic Resonance 
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake>
>>
>> As with Torebeo's essay on BCS' OOO, Joanna Rączaszek‑Leonardi 
>> <https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861>reviews 
>> <https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861> 
>> Deacon's How Molecules Became Signs 
>> <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9.pdf?pdf=button> 
>> giving me a hint of a bridge between the "dualistic" worlds (form V. 
>> substance or body V. mind) we banter about here a lot?
>>
>> I found EricS's recent response very thought provoking, but every 
>> attempt I had to respond directly felt like more "stirring" so am 
>> holding off until/when/if I might actually be able to add coherent 
>> signal to the one I get hints of forming here...
>
>
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