From Athena to AI: the past and future of intention in nature by Rick Searle

Dear Rick,

what a wonderful essay and thanks for bringing Englands work to my attention.

Some comments about evolution (I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic):

you mentioned thermodynamics as the source of disorder but mutation as the corresponding evolution process produces new potential informtion. That is new species are generated with completely new properties. But this new information has no goal. Wandering towards a goal (at least locally) is given by the selection (Is the sepcies adapted?). This selection can be a global function where one tried to find the global minimum (or maximimum). But in our world, all species are forming this function via a non-linear interaction.

So in this short form: you need white noise to create something new and you need the selection given by the interaction between the spoecies.

In my essay I tried to develop a model for our brain which models the process of intention. Maybe you are interested to read it?

Best wishes

Torsten

Damned I was logout...

It was me with the highest voting.

Best Torsten

Hi dear Rick

I have remembered Schrodinger's amazing words when I began to read your nice essay. I think you will know this also; about "necessities to link our present opportunities with the wisdom of our ancestors, based on their ability of direct - natural thinking ..." (But who take care this now?) I am inclined to see the main merit of your work here, despite there are many important things also, that no need to repeat for you. Your work just is need to read slowly and good thinking how right we have doing now, in our live or, in the science?

So I just can evaluate it very high, because it calling to return to wisdom and to a morality as well. Hope you will open my article and you will tell some words that will valuable for me, as from maestro!

With best wishes,

Dear Rick

Your favorable words are over of any my expectations! It's very encouraging for me to meet with people who preferring thinking by own head. We know the bosses always are right in life. I think however in the science every thinker must be free to feel himself an small prophet. Then we can cry in our deserts, hoping somebody will passed nearest! Now I'm thinking it may really happen.

Thank you, and my best wishes to you!

Dear Rick,

it seems that the unconventional presentation of your essay obscures its depth to many. However, I could not help but be both impressed and amused at your somewhat subversive framing of the issue---we see the echoes of Pythagoras in today's mathematical universes, the specter of Heraclitus in thermodynamic and information-theoretic approaches, and so on, each providing their part of and path to an answer. (A shame, though, that Epicurus was born too late, his 'swerve'---the clinamen---interrupting the downward fall of atoms having obvious correlations to many present ideas of free will/intentionality.)

Anyway, this essay deserves a much higher rating!

Cheers,

Jochen

Dear Rick,

bravo, you actually managed to draw a line from the pre-Socratics to modern science in a coherent way! Your essay is impressive and enjoyable to read.

In some passages I see connections to other essays which I liked. Your Heraclitus reminds me of Joe Brisendine, and when you wrote that "[o]ur intelligence and decision making (...) emerges in this tension between thought and action, the gap between our internal models of the world and reality itself" I had to think again about the essays of Sofia Magnúsdóttir and Alan Kadin.

I think the views expressed in my own contribution are in line with yours, though I expressed them in a less poetic way and I chose a slightly narrower scope.

Cheers, Stefan

Democritus arose from his seat clearly amused and let out a belch. It appeared he may have already been a little drunk. :)

Dear Sirs!

Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».

New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. 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 Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, 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 and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

An interesting and fun read Rick,

I especially like the Greek philosophers cited, and how that lays a groundwork for modern independence of thought. I'm not certain how much of the got-motivated view people actually believed, but I am sure they were taught and ruled by fear of crossing their will. Better to be an independent thinker, if you are going to be responsible for your actions anyway. Nice that you wove in Tononi (misspelled twice), and so raised the idea of a non-human measure of consciousness.

More later,

Jonathan