Re: MR as ontological(?)

["John M" <***>]

John and Tim,

this encounter is getting out of (my?) hands and also longer than
I can reasonably include it all. So keep your copies for refernece,
I will include only passages I want to reflect to.
Please excuse my list-rationalizing.
Regards
John Mikes

----- Original Message(s) ----- (What's left of them)
From: "John Kineman" <***>
and "Tim Gwinn" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Sunday, August 16/17, 2003
Subject: Re: MR as ontological


[JJK]:
>There is an awful lot of hubris about human
> consciousness and much of the need to call it unique in nature stems
> directly from the habit of viewing nature mechanically. From that view, it
> becomes a necessity to exclude formal awareness, but then one is left with
> the glaring contradiction of the scientist him/herself. So then we assume
> that there is something qualitatively different that "emerges" or is
> imparted externally. Rosen details all this very well. The other
> alternative is that it is / was always part of nature and that it evolved
> with the organism.
[JM]:
"evolved" is the verb that scares me, like: 'adapt' as 'develop qualia for a
reason'. As I look at nature, in the total interconnected- (influenced)-
ness
ALL kinds of changes occur and those survive which are more viable in
the ever changing environment they are in. A species can survive 1 biilion
years if it is not killed by the changes in circumstances and a more viable
variant did not occur (emerge?) to take over its niche. Or a better CNS in
a variant gives more survival capabilites - or more proliferational skills
and the 'original' expires, as the reductionist geneticists say: "developed
new capabilities that improve its fitness". Changes go slowly in many
generations so the wrong view and conclusion is pardonable.
But of course I am a layman, not biologist, not geneticist.
Such changes come in many aspects, organism "evolves(?)", limbs
get different, CNS changes, all in millions of years.

[JJK]: cont'd.....
>... But it makes so much sense that the problem of psyche is related to
> the same kind of problem appearing in quantum phenomena that even the top
> physicists have discussed it seriously.

[JM]:
Physicists, the super-scientists, try to kidnap the mind. Q-science,  the
linear reductionist sophistication about the paradoxes of the mechanical
and relativistic views presumes (eg. John Sarfatti to me some years ago)
that with a cute Q-machine my thoughts will be readable (what that would
have done to Orwell) because the 'mind' is all equational physics. It is
the 'photons' running back and forth when "the light goes up in the mind".
I was an avid reader of the Q-Mind list (Hameroff et al.) and others years
ago and saw arguments concluding in: "That's it". or: "learn your homework".
I don't believe in the solvability of the unlimited variables wholeness and
unrestricted continuous changes by Q-science EQUATIONS, (not even
in Steve Kercel's hyperset format). All work with limited (quanti) models,
functions, settings, systems. Tools for the old paradigm. - As seen now.

[JJK]:
>I now see these are all problems of
> ontological entailment, and thus it also connects to the problem of the
big
> bang (another origin of a system that otherwise must be whole). The
> separation of these origins from the resulting system is part of the false
> mechanical view that Rosen demolishes. Complex systems entail their
> origins, when considered in the whole. This has the most profound
> implications imaginable.

[JM]:
amen

[TG]:
> >On second thought, I suppose it might be possible to extend this to any
> >living organisms which are anticipatory systems. Trees dropping leaves in
> >anticipation of winter is one example I recall Rosen using. In those
cases,
> >I might be able to consider that the tree is engaged in an MR of sorts
with
> >certain aspects of its environment.

[JM]:
Deciduous trees drop their leaves because the change from hot summer to
colder-wetter fall induces chemical changes that release the leaf-stem.
They don't 'anticipate' winter, but those which did not change to such
mechanism could nbot survive the frost and disappeared.
Except for the pines (evergreens). Now it is logical to draw conclusions of
anticipation, in hindsight.

[JJK]: (the 'right' is not to my interjected remark)
> Right. And thus do trees have minds?? If we skip the anthropomorphic
> phobias, there is no reason to doubt that trees have a capacity for
> self-representation, which we can also call a primitive kind of formal
> awareness. What about quanta?? Why not consider a primitive formal
> awareness there too? This is what Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have
> done (see Hameroff's quantum mind "Tuscon" conferences).

[JM]:
Self-representation? I tried to formulate it (proposed as def. for ccness):
"acknowledgement of and response to information" ie. pan-sensitivity.
That goes to G.B.Shaw and a quantum as well. Different complexities.
(Info means acknowledged difference - from reading HM statement in
the Times to an EM potentialshift in the field).
Then there are the characterisations of the divers complexities glore.
Self-reflective is used by some including awareness.
We know so little about nature! eg/ the collective mind of insects, or a
chemical sens(itivity)(e) for plants? Coordination in fish-schools and
bird flocks? our 64 senses and the 'feeling of self' vs foreign? etc.

[JJK]:
>The panel I set up
> in 1999 that Rosen was to attend also included Stuart Hameroff. I wanted
to
> explore this ontological link.
>
[TG]:
> >I think I'm having that same difficulty in going further down the road.
:)
> >I am unable to see how this notion extends to the general interactions of
> >non-living systems. This is where I get lost.

[JM]:
My feeling is that one should not go 'further down' the road without the
knowledge of all influencing factors (and we don't know them all) and
try to explain the complexity on the bases of the limited model we use.
I feel justified in my scientific agnosticism about the new ideas we
start to think in, no matter how much help RR's clear words represent.
He relaxed the borders of a reductionist science (math. biology) to
arrive at the 'origins': general ideas. He also would have needed the
bottom-up way to detect all those factors that acted, then disappeared
during the route to the top qualia what we see. I started from the other
end: the generalization of bases, and similarly, got stuck in the middle,
the unfollowable, unseeable intermediates.

Let me skip JJK/s long passage around 'life' with my (unfounded) view
that I, as coming from parts distinct from biology, do not 'fetishize' the
term, which is so 'close' to our feeling superior in nature. Biologists do
insist, even in life's fundmental nature, RR wrote about it in a way I
could not reproduce - combined with complexity. I hold it a peculiar way
of changes in nature, not necessarily more complex than cosmology,
but exceptional for us because it is about us. AI, AL, VR, and other
letters<G> start to wash away the religious fervor of life's exceptionality.
And there are the viruses. Lichen colonies. Theories for origination of it.
Cairn-Smith et al.  Our 'model' of life is IMO a reductionist limited one.

[TG]:
> >About as close as I can come is recalling in FM where Rosen discusses how
> >striking the realization was to him that the observables that we might
> >observe and measure of a given system may or may not be relevant*****
> >***** to how
> >another system "sees" the first system when it interacts with it. But I
am
> >not sure if such cases show that the second system has an MR with the
first
> >system in any sense, since it has nothing to do with models or
anticipation.
> >But perhaps this is off-track of where you are heading, anyway.

[JM]:
I have cut the passage by *-s at the point to where I agree and from where
it shows an anthropomorphic errand for a 'system'. The RR statement is
correct. TG restricts the 'system' to rather mentally active ones.
>From the long end-passage of

[JJK] in QM thoughts, the finishing par is:
>.....So the most basic percept is a complex system that is
> formally aware of states. If that is true, then everything is formally
> aware, but we do have to be careful to consider what the awareness is of.
> Rocks, for example, are formally aware of quantum states, not rocks.
> Evolutionary organisms can preserve this ontology, thus producing
> occasionally thoughtful humans.

[JM]:
change 'aware' to 'sensitive' and nobody will find it funny. BTW how do
you know what a rock "thinks" of itself? I never asked one, but know
for sure that it did not study QM. It responds in its own way.

> Sounds crazy, I know. I decided to go crazy.
>
> Best,
>
> -jjk

With best regards
(in anticipation(!) of being clubbered)
John Mikes