[FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

[Santafe]

I am wondering, as I read the several posts in this list, how much there is an always-present or always-latent human intuition that keeps trying to unpack itself into formalism, but then leaves the formalizer unsatisfied, with the intuition still in place, so we try again, and go around the tree one more time.

So much of this seems like the itch Minsky was trying to scratch in Society of Mind.  Where “Society” is the word that refers to many common things with Glen’s word “fusion” or “fusing”.  

Dave W’s post is very helpful in allowing one to hear what the Vedic -> Buddhist framing is, in as close to their own terms as one is allowed to ask for (in less than thousands of pages of reading).  

It seems to me there is one easy-to-state choice-difference we can draw between the Vedic approach and Minsky, and that would be w.r.t. to essentialism.  Minsky is an anti-essentialist, it seems.  The components have no property we want the word “conscious” to refer to, but the property is synthetic from relations that constitute the organization of the aggregate.

The Vedics are different, in that they have a foot in each boat (though they would say there is only one boat, and the perception that there are two comes from philosophical systems that are exactly not theirs).  They do want to take the essentialist position: that if there is consciousness at the large scale, that must be because consciousness was a substance property in the microscale too.  So essences must be a constant of the downward eternal-regression.  But if whatever is the measure of consciousness can also change with the scale of aggregation, then the same term that gestures at some essence also gestures at something synthetic, and claims those two are the same kind of thing, hence the term-reuse is okay.

If one thinks of the ferromagnet in such terms, physics becomes a thought-provoking subject.

Curie and Weiss took a certain essentialist position w.r.t. the dipolarity of magnetization.  That there can be magnetization on the macroscale because there was already-realized magnetization at the microscale, which merely needed to be put into alignment to extend macroscopically.  Note that the same thing is _not_ true for having a native volume (liquids contrasted to gases) or having a native orientation (solids contrasted to liquids).  So this version of essentialism is not built into the premises of physics reasoning, but is an explanatory commitment specific to this phenomenon.  

But then we get to this thing about matter that is not like our common experience: two “something”s with opposite signs (the fields around microscopic magnetic dipoles) can add to make a “nothing” (absence of net magnetization in the surrounding space); and that “nothing” really is the full thing that we mean by “nothing” (the un-magnetized vacuum).  

The math gets all this right, to levels for which our pre-existing common language was incapable of taking any positions, so the math deserves to be called the carrier of what we know.  Now, though, we have to feed back a practice with that math into our experience of living, and find out what it is like to get used to the idea, made available to us through that formal vehicle.

Eric



> On Aug 15, 2024, at 15:39, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I can't shake the feeling that "unified" and "unitary" are too simplistic.
> 
>> For example, human consciousness is often said to be unified, in the sense that all the various experiences that one has at the same time occur as components or elements of a single complex experience. [...]
>> Some theories of consciousness, such as the Integrated Information Theory, assume that any form of consciousness must be unitary, but that assumption is questionable. Octopus consciousness, if indeed there is such a thing, might be anything but unified.
> 
> That's why I prefer "fusion". The ganglia (~2 in humans, ~9 in octopuses?) execute functions broadly describable as fusion. But our gut ganglion most likely fuses different perception signals from that of our brains. The fusion in an octopus' central brain is prolly different from that of its arm brains, maybe even higher order (fusion of fusions). So, no, neither the octopus' consciousness nor our consciousness are "unitary". That seems preposterous to me. But "fused"? Yeah ... somehow. Another decent term might be "mixed" or "mixture". That seems more agnostic and general. Maybe fusion is a sub-type of mixing. And allowing that neural structures, down to individual cells and organelles, do mixing (chemical-electrical transduction) but ganglia do fusion gives us a spectrum of integration? Of course, ideally, we'd like to be able to extend a functional description down to dictyostelium signaling. I can't do that even in COVID-induced fever dreams. [sigh]
> 
> On 8/14/24 21:31, Santafe wrote:
>> Cool.  Nepal even has mystical hillsides.
>> My colleage The Mystic has informed me that only we (in “the west” in “the modern era") are degraded and malformed people; all other cultures have Wisdom Traditions.  So any child in one of those Other Cultures already has an understanding of Reality that all of us Westerners are incapable of achieving because we grew up in the absence of Wisdom Traditions.  It kind of reminds me of the Krell in whatever film it was.  (Forbidden planet?)
>> I have often wondered what I am supposed to do with declarations like that one.  I have to accept that it is true, since he has told me that he has an apprehension of Reality, but that it could not explained to me, because that’s not how those apprehensions work.  Hopefully the Noema mag will provide further input, when I can get time to read it.
>> Eric
>>> On Aug 15, 2024, at 2:38, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.noemamag.com%2fexploring-the-boundaries-of-consciousness%2f&c=E,1,f6hmbHpfPiufLBTnPGL0Zf5NrOF9X1mLy7mYkvH0L6IOo2Du9zeRmdstvXcdtY5oDo6Tcg41dsHvEbeG0Q2j9XJCnPr__X1xKqNxB7IXM_PUYtkb&typo=1 <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.noemamag.com%2fexploring-the-boundaries-of-consciousness%2f&c=E,1,JPgTSlb6W5BoLUrZDMDHXpPYcHDxQIowhbHRnbBn9D_s7Owuzgw3iIapMGGo0msXQyFsLwcfkxz5zG4x1AocbX1T_E7qze8Fajc2H8A_rkZ9GB_yCA,,&typo=1>
>>> 
>>> Whaddya know, its on topic.
>>> 
>>> -- rec --
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:11 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>    Claude remarks:____
>>> 
>>>    __ __
>>> 
>>>    << Good Soldier Švejk might respond to questions about consciousness and information determinism with a seemingly irrelevant anecdote, perhaps about a drunk man convinced his goldfish was controlling his thoughts through "information in the water." >>____
>>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
> 
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