[FRIAM] Nick's Categories
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Feb 21 12:13:56 EST 2023
Glen -
Attempting a balance between succinctness and
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt
from Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
/One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a
complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the
“message”, never becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a
set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind
in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can
be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant
by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the
complex dynamical and relational constraints that maintain an
organism far from thermodynamic equilibrium. /
This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify a possible
resolution (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of
the Cartesian Duality we bandy about here.
Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems
in his 2000 Investigations:
- detect gradients
- construct constraints to extract work from gradients
- do work to maintain those constraints
may be relevant (or interesting or both).
On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>
> Glen -
>
> FWIW, I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which
> referenced Christian List's "Levels"
> <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/> and the points he made (and
> you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions
> *because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to
> understand the paradoxes of mind/body substance/form duality
> (illusions?).
>
> To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your
> reference to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your
> criticism is that the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?
>
> The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to
> do with the tension between supervenience and entailment. Deacon's
> style *does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over
> again, louder and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong
> reasons. But that alone does not make what he's saying wrong, or even
> wrong-headed. Perhaps I am guilty of courting confirmation bias
> insomuch as Deacon's constructions of homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem
> to support the style of dualism which I suppose appeals to me for
> reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.
>
> Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of
> references rather than open ended descriptions of
> what/why/where/how/when every detail of what he said meant to me. I
> fail at (avoid) clarity with too much more often than with too little, no?
>
> I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen)
> were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed
> to read him. The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who
> might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the
> horse's mouth. I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on
> other's opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe
> (2009?) and gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in
> him (I don't know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan
> was making?). It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a
> "blender" (presentations with group discussion) on the topic of
> morphometric analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind
> was on the topic of form -> function which had me mildly more
> receptive to (curious about) ideas *like* morphic resonance. After
> that I was more like 95% dismissive of what he goes on about. So...
> now that I wasted another minute of your time on *this* paragraph, I
> apologize for seeming to promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or
> imply that you should waste time reading him. Whether reading
> Deacon turns out to be a waste of time is an open question for me
> myself. I have invested quite a bit of time and still don't have as
> much traction as I would like. I think that is because these are
> steep and slippery subjects in their own right, not because his work
> is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.
>
> I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on
> Molecule-> Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's
> thinking about bits V atoms and supervenience. To the extent that
> none of this tickles any of your own thoughts or interests in what I
> assume to be somewhat parallel (though maybe not convergent?) lines of
> inquiry, then I suppose it would be a waste of your time to follow it
> to any distance.
>
> The following bit from the introduction to the essay linked *might*
> characterize what it is I *thought* you might find relevant in the
> paper and in the larger body of Deacon's work: _Information v
> information-transmission_ and _aboutism_ each were reminiscent to me
> of some of your arguments about whether communication actually exists
> and List's arguments about indexicality perhaps.
>
> /When Erwin Schrödinger (//1944
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR24>//)
> pondered////What is Life?////from a physicist’s point of view
> he focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain
> themselves in a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and
> how they store and pass on the information that determines
> their organization. In his metaphor of an aperiodic crystal as
> the carrier of this information he both foreshadowed Claude
> Shannon’s (//1948
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR25>//)
> analysis of information storage and transmission and Watson
> and Crick’s (//1953
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR27>//)
> discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule.
> So by 1958 when Francis Crick (//1958
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR3>//)
> first articulated what he called the “central dogma” of
> molecular biology (i.e. that information in the cell flows
> from DNA to RNA to protein structure and not the reverse) it
> was taken for granted that that DNA and RNA molecules were
> “carriers” of information. By scientific rhetorical fiat it
> had become legitimate to treat molecules as able to provide
> information “about” other molecules. By the mid 1970s Richard
> Dawkins (//1976
> <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9#ref-CR5>//)
> could safely assume this as fact and follow the idea to its
> logical implications for evolutionary theory in his popular
> book////The Selfish Gene//. By describing a sequence of
> nucleotides in a DNA molecule as information and DNA
> replication as the essential defining feature of life,
> information was reduced to pattern and interpretation was
> reduced to copying. What may have initially been a metaphor
> became difficult to disentangle from the chemistry./
>
> /In this way the concept of biological information lost its
> aboutness but became safe for use in a materialistic science
> that had no place for what seemed like a nonphysical property.///
>
> Just to keep my flog landing on the hide of the horse that may have
> expired several posts ago in this chain: Deacon's introduction of
> *teleo* to this characterization of complex adaptive systems is the
> *first* example I have found which is even a little bit compelling
> toward understanding "Life Itself" (in the sense of what Schrodinger
> was going on about in 1944)... with enough inspection (or flogging)
> it may fizzle out and become nothing more than wet ash. For the
> moment it feels like the glimmer of a signal where Sheldrake (and his
> ken) were mostly generating noise (more to the point, wishful
> thinking?) previously...
>
>
> On 2/20/23 11:32 AM, glen wrote:
>> [sigh] But the whole point of knowing other people is so that they
>> can make your own work more efficient or effective. While I
>> appreciate the *citation* of tomes, to some extent, citation isn't
>> really useful for construction of a concept. It's only useful for
>> auditing constructs. So, rather than go read the teleodynamics
>> website (or sieve Sheldrake's spooky action at a distance stuff),
>> I'll ask you to explain *why* teleodynamics is interesting from a
>> panpsychist stance? (Or to drive my point home about how useless
>> citations are, how is it related to Biology's First Law
>> <https://bookshop.org/p/books/biology-s-first-law-the-tendency-for-diversity-and-complexity-to-increase-in-evolutionary-systems-daniel-w-mcshea/8308564?ean=9780226562261>?)
>>
>> Or, barring that, I'll add it to my (practically) infinite queue of
>> stuff I should read but probably won't until I have a hook into it.
>> And even if I do read it, I probably won't understand it.
>>
>> With the Toribio article, I'm motivated to read it because BC Smith
>> hooked me a long time ago. But Sheldrake? No way in hell am I going
>> to invest time in that. Teleodynamics? Well, it's a website. And the
>> website for ninjas is more interesting:
>> http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm
>
> /On Mon, Sep 12, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote: //
> //My question of how well we can describe graph-based ...
> what? ... //
> //"statements"? "theorems"? Whatever. It's treated fairly well
> in List's //
> //paper: //
> / /
> //Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General
> Framework by //
> //Christian List //http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/////
> / /
> //in section "6.3 Indexical versus non-indexical and
> first-personal //
> //versus third-personal descriptions". We tend to think of the
> 3rd //
> //person graph of possible worlds/states as if it's more
> universal ... a //
> //complete representation of the world. But there's something
> captured //
> //by the index/control-pointer //*walking*//some graph, with
> or without a //
> //scoping on how many hops away the index/subjective-locus can
> "see". //
> / /
> //I liken this to Dave's (and Frank's to some extent)
> consistent //
> //insistence that one's inner life is a valid thing in the
> world, Dave //
> //w.r.t. psychedelics and meditation and Frank's defense of
> things like //
> //psychodynamics. Wolpert seems to be suggesting a
> "deserialization" of //
> //the graph when he focuses on "finite sequences of elements
> from a //
> //finite set of symbols". I.e. walking the graph with the
> index at a //
> //given node. With the 3rd person ... whole graph of graphs,
> the //
> //serialization of that bushy thing can only produce an
> infinitely long //
> //sequence of elements from a (perhaps) infinte set. Is the
> bushiness //
> //*dense*//(greater than countable, as Wolpert asks)? Or
> sparse? //
> / /
> //I'm sure I'm not wording all this well. But that's why I'm
> glad y'all //
> //are participating, to help clarify these things. /
>
>>
>> On 2/20/23 10:10, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> As the discussion evolves:
>>>> But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form
>>>> as a human body.
>>>>
>>>> I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or
>>>> "intention" ... or even "acting". It's more about accumulation and
>>>> the tendency of cumulative objects to accumulate (and
>>>> differentiate). Perhaps negentropy is a closer concept than
>>>> "interest" or "intention". And, although I disagree that experience
>>>> monism is more primitive than panpsychism, I agree that these forms
>>>> of panpsychism require mechanisms for composition (against which
>>>> James is famous) and other structure.
>>>
>>> I re-introduce/offer Terrence Deacon's Teleodynamics
>>> <https://teleodynamics.org/> which I do not take to be (quite?) as
>>> difficult to integrate/think-about asSheldrake's Morphic Resonance
>>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake>
>>>
>>> As with Torebeo's essay on BCS' OOO, Joanna Rączaszek‑Leonardi
>>> <https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861>reviews
>>> <https://c1dcs711.caspio.com/dp/6e93a00069a6c46c407e42c6b540/files/3503861>
>>> Deacon's How Molecules Became Signs
>>> <https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9.pdf?pdf=button>
>>> giving me a hint of a bridge between the "dualistic" worlds (form V.
>>> substance or body V. mind) we banter about here a lot?
>>>
>>> I found EricS's recent response very thought provoking, but every
>>> attempt I had to respond directly felt like more "stirring" so am
>>> holding off until/when/if I might actually be able to add coherent
>>> signal to the one I get hints of forming here...
>>
>>
>
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