Joe,

Rereading my post, I think it sounds more critical than I meant it to be... I really was impressed by your essay, and it deserves a 10, a rating I don't give lightly. And I'm far from an expert in any field of science, though I try to make sure my writing is accurate. Heidegger I do know fairly well, since he was very important to me in grad school back in the 70's. I'm very glad you know his work, and delighted to find someone with that background doing biochemistry. The truth is I can hardly read "Philosophy" any more, since the world itself is so much more interesting. It often seems to me that while our knowledge has grown exponentially since 1900, we still seem to conceptualize the world largely in terms that were familiar in the 19th century.

You say, "What I really want to retain from Being and Time are all the resources we need to combat all of this neo-dualism that has cropped up in phil mind" - Yes, this is where Being and Time really succeeds, as still the deepest critique of the Cartesian/Kantian tradition. And he did it by articulating the many "equiprimordial" elements involved in what seems like the perfectly simple idea of "self". I get your point about taking self-awareness as a "teleological" explanation of what makes us humans so different, and you're right that it's implicit in all our experience, from a very early age. And I'm intrigued by your comment about "the dimensional context of experience" that's hidden by dualism... I hope to discuss that further!

Thanks - Conrad

Conrad, Mark, Stefan, everyone else who expressed interest in further discussion--

Thank you all for considering my ideas and it would be my pleasure. I can be reached at josephbrisendine@gmail.com and feel free to reach out anytime. Meanwhile I'll get back in touch once I have properly considered everyone else's entries.

Best,

Joe

Hi, Joseph, congratulations, this is an excellent essay. Both for the ideas in it, and the writing. Many of the things you mention resonate with the ones I chose to focus in my essay (comments from you would be most appreciated). I still get wound up by the anthropic reasoning, though. I understand that conditioning on our existence rules outs a-priori possible evolutions of the universe that do not give rise to us. I also understand that perceiving ourselves makes all things related to ourselves interesting. I do not understand, however, in which way anthropic reasoning provides explanations - and I do care for explanations, whatever those may be!

In any case, this is an old problem I've been having for ages, it's not your fault, I'll just have to keep thinking. In any case, thanks for the great read!

inés = one more sign without meaning about to fall apart.

    Hi Ines that was a lovely compliment!

    I had noticed and enjoyed your essay a great deal as well, I will definitely share my thoughts on it with you on your page. But first allow me to say that there's a sense in which you're right, anthropic reasoning explains nothing. If we insist that an explanation must be a mechanistic explanation, which means that it should tell us clearly how to construct the phenomena in question, then we should conclude that anthropic reasoning doesn't furnish explanations. In science, we typically adhere to the spirit of Feynman's "what I cannot create I do not understand", and we don't consider a phenomenon explained until we have a mechanistic explanation. I didn't do the best job explaining this difference in the essay becuase, frankly, I have only just recently begun to piece these thoughts together myself, whereas when discussing thermodynamics and biochemistry I was just presenting things I've understood for years. But anthropic reasoning does provide a different kind of "explanation" for phenomena, although I would also be fine with using a different word for what we mean in this case. My idea was that the explanations it provides are the kinds of explanations contained in stories, which might also be considered what a "teleological explanation" does. Rather than tell you how a thing works and what conditions are required for its stability, a story provides some simplifying narrative that assigns a reason for the existence of the phenomena simply in terms of its continuity with the rest of reality that we perceive. In ordinary life, I think we accept these kinds of explanations all the time, and only when we have the circumspection required by science do we even notice that they aren't very good explanations, or more precisely that the sense of that word in science and in everyday life is not really the same. So I think your instincts are correct! As with almost any situation where the results of science conflict with our ordinary understanding, the problem arises because of ambiguities in language that we don't notice until they conflict with our capacity to interpret the results of experiments. Anyway I hope that helps and I'd be happpy to discuss this or anything else with you further in the future, because your essay also has some ideas in it which I have never considered before but which really impressed me. I'll mention them on your essay's page though.

    Joe

    I think you are right, I am expecting from anthropic reasoning something it cannot quite provide. I just wish I could benefit more from the things it can actually provide. I promise to work on it, and if needed, come back to you...

    Thanks for the great explanation!!

    inés.

    Gee I think it all depends on what you mean by that, and what you include or don't as part of the "spark."

    Dear Joseph,

    your essay is remarkable for the degree of personal participation that you put in your story-telling, both in tone and in contents.

    However, if I were to summarise some of the main points you make, I'd have some difficulty with one which is quite central: the value of the self. On one hand you attribute much higher sophistication and 'computational capability' to the robot with self-awareness (following mainly Aaronson?); on the other, you regard the pretended certainty and stability of the self as a "wonderful irony of the history of philosophy". Maybe the conflict is only apparent? I'd be curious about a final word from you on the issue. (I read your text twice, but didn't go through the comments in your blog. Apologies if you have already covered the issue.)

    Thank you and best regards!

    Tommaso

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2824

      Thanks for the kind words Tommaso!

      I'm happy to try to clarify my position. As you intuited, I think the tension is only apparent. I think the gain in computational complexity due to the ability to use "anthropic reasoning" has been demonstrated clearly by Aaronson, just as you say, and that this complexity gain is the "teleological" explanation for our self-awareness. This doesn't mean, of course, that this caused us to become self-aware, as this would be like saying that photosynthesis was discovered "so that orgaansms could use sunlight." only a mechanistic explanation actually tells you how to create something and allows you to infer it's actual cause for existence. A teleological explanation does tell you, however, why it is that once there were self-aware animals they quickly out-learned non self-aware animals, just s it tells you why, once there were photosynthetic organims, they quickly covered the earth. So that's the powerful part of our selfhood. My claim is that it is powerful but also unstable. The sense of its instability can be found everywhere in our experience if we pay attenntion to it, but then my contention is that it also follows logically from understanding how biology increases its thermodynamic efficiency in line with natural selection. If you want to compute things near the Landauer limit, your band gaps have to be as close to kT as they can get without being overcome by noise. Our self-awareness then is the source of our superior understanding of nature and our ability to share information so readily, but the "free energy of formation of self-awareness" appears to be very small, and easily overcome. I hope that all makes sense!

      Thanks also for taking the time to read and consider my ideas, it is very rewarding to know that they were seriously considered by another intellect!

      Joe

      Dear Joe --

      A lot going on in this lovely piece.

      A question, since you anchor meaning in "information relevant to survival".

      Say I simulate an evolutionary process on my computer. The symbols the machine processes have meaning for me, of course. But could they also have meaning for each other? (E.g., could the symbol equivalent to a deleterious simulated environment have "meaning for" the symbol equivalent to a simulated organism? If the agent ignores it, that agent's symbol will die/become less common).

      Yours,

      Simon

        Hi Simon! Thanks for reading my essay and I have to say I'm a little starstruck because I'm a big fan of your work!

        As to your question, I wanted to define meaning more along the lines of attention, I actually had Heidegger's notion of "care" in mind when I was trying to decide what made information meaninfgul. In biology, that's generically connected to survival but then, even for most animals it can be about much more then mere survival. Sexual selection, in particular, appears to be capable of creating very exotic forms of meaning, and for us most meaning is only dimly related to survival.

        In essence my thinking was that mutual information was the first component of meaning, becuase a structure has to be capable of interacting with or detecting certain degrees of freedom in it's environment. Then I think the structure should also be capable of responding in a counterfactual manner, so if the environmental degrees of freedom being detected had taken a different value the structure would have computed a different response. That's how I would technically describe the act of paying attention to and responding to information, which is really what I wanted to say makes information meaningful. The e. coli example might have blurred that point since the bug is behaving that way "in order to" survive, but it's really the fact that it's sensing-computing-acting that causes the sensed degrees of freedom to be meaningful to the structure.

        Finally then, as to the digital agent, if it ignores the symbol then the symbol is not meaningful to it, even if it dies as a result. If a large number of such agents are simulated and they also have some adaptive and reproductive capacity in their programing, then the ones that learn to pay attention to that symbol will in time take over the population. That's how I would depict the relationship between survival and meaning. Natural selection drives information increases in genomes at the population level by selecting for structures that have the fittest meaningful environmental relationships, meaning the ones that pay attention to what matters the best.

        Hope that's clear and thanks again!

        Joe

        16 days later

        Dear Joe,

        Fascinating essay! I found particularly enlightening your discussion of what you identify as a "wonderful irony of the history of philosophy", that selfhood would be the "most certain fact of all". Your example of someone without memory clearly drives home the point that the only thing that can be taken for certain is the (conscious) perception of the present instant, which may or may not come with the "thin veneer" of selfhood.

        Later in your essay, you identify the importance of feedback loops, a theme I also take up in my essay (where I postulate that conscious agents and regular physical laws "resonate" together and co-emerge within the infinite domain of all abstract structures). I like the way you put it: "We are interested in this world which is our home, and it repays us by being interesting. 'In this sense all things are indebted to us.' "

        Overall, I think your essay is well written, interesting, to the point and thought provoking. Congratulations, and good luck in the contest!

        Marc

          Dear Joseph,

          With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of the highest rating.

          I'm glad that you have your own position

          «this "sweet spot" in its parameter space it also where its thermodynamic efficiency is greatest, or equivalently where it can process the most information at the minimum energetic cost, a point I have also argued from my own research as a protein designer.»

          « Structure is never simply structure then, but rather information which may be potentially transmitted from one environment to another and thus shared, becoming mutual information. It was not made to last, but rather to be transmitted. It is a sign, signifying nothing in itself;»

          «If Newton's Principia Mathematica is the logical starting point for modern science, for modern hilosophy Descartes' Meditations surely plays a dual role.»

          Your questions are very close to me

          «but can we actually give a mathematical criteria for when the amount of macro-state degeneracy leads an "aims and intentions" desciption to be more efficient than a thermodynamic description?»

          «I'm definitely not criticizig because I don't think I know the answer either, but it seems like it would be fun to think about.»

          You might also like reading my essay , where it is claimed that quantum phenomena occur in the macro world, where is no measurement problem due to the dynamism of the elements of the medium in the form of de Broglie waves of electrons, where parametric resonance occurs and solitons are formed, which mechanism of work is similar to the principle of the heat pump.

          I wish you success in the contest.

          Kind regards,

          Vladimir

            5 days later

            Dear Joseph Murphy Brisendine!

            Meet up the New Cartesian Physic, based on the identity of space and matter. You need it, because it showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

            New Cartesian Physics has enormous potential in understanding the world. To show this potential I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

            Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I have to do the same in your theme

            sincerely,

            Dizhechko Boris

            Vladimir,

            Thank you for the kind words, I've been swamped the past few weeks as I'm trying to complete my dissertation and schedule my defense, but I promise to read and respond to your essay before the contest closes tomorrow as well!

            Joe

            I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to read my essay once more, and say that this has been a rewarding experience for me. I'm particularly glad to have found the appreciation of like-minded intellects, and I learned a great deal from the other entries which have helped to clarify my own thoughts enormously. If I could do it over, with everyone's feedback, I'm sure I could have done much better! But growth is the gift of being, and I am indebted to everyone who earnestly engaged with me. Thank you also to FQXI for sponsoring such a timely and vital discussion.

            Joe

            Marc

            I do apologize that I somehow missed your comment until just now! Thank you though, and best of luck to you as well!

            Joe

            6 days later

            Joe,

            Too many essays and too little time! I am sorry I did not get to this during the contest.

            First, you have a clear writing style that tells a story that alone makes this a very good essay.

            Second, you talk about thermodynamics beyond just noise in communication. This sharp temperature boundary that life thrives is center to understanding the formation of life.

            You get a little too much into human intentions for my taste (I start at minimum and stay there), but how you walk as through step is wonderful.

            All the best,

            Jeff

            Thanks for the compliments Jeff, and believe me I didn't get around to nearly as many of the essays as I would have liked, I'm less bothered about the contest and happier to know that my ideas find even a small receptive audience. I focused on human intentions in the second half of the essay because I felt that's what we really want from this essay topic, and why this question intrigues us: at bottom it's about whether our intentions can be "reduced" to the laws of physics and if so what that means. I tried to indicate, first, that modern thermodynamics can explain the emergence of intentionality but second, and perhaps more importantly, that our experience of the world is not demeaned by being explicable in terms of mathematical laws. Indeed, I think this explicability is proof that we belong in nature, and my hope is that understanding physics and how humanity emerges naturally would ultimately make us feel less alienated within nature. Getting the physics right should be first ad foremost, but we should not forget why our effort matters and what we hope to accomplish while doing that.

            Thanks again for taking the time to read and reply!

            Joe

            12 days later

            Hi Joe,

            thank you for this excellent essay. You're covering a lot of ground in a short space but nevertheless manage to remain very clear.

            I really like what you did with memory and selves. It comes with interesting questions. Does a pushdown automaton have more selfhood than a DFA, or does it start a little higher up the food chain than that? Conversely, is there a point at which excessive memory (perhaps compared to some other dimension) decreases selfhood? There are certainly clinical cases of people with perfect recall and it appears to be impeding them in more ways than one.

            It is true that the self is very much unstable, and I like the irony you point out, but at the same time it just keeps coming back! You don't really hear stories of people who suddenly just went blank (except perhaps in a Brian Catling novel). This process persistence is interesting in itself.

            One thing I am unsure of: if plants are every bit as subtle and ingenious as animals, can we really conclude that they are mindless? I think I might be missing something in how you define a mind. Given the same purposefulness and barring access to their internal experience, I would tend to grant them the same mindfulness. They might not have motility, which might annoy Merleau-Ponty (and then again, rhizomes can cover quite some ground), but at first sight I wonder, only partly facetiously, if the distinction is not somewhat "kingdomist"?

            PS: there appears to be a few of the participants who are around New York here, maybe we should organise some form of get-together :)

              Write a Reply...