Re: MR as ontological

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

Hi John,

See interposed.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:28 AM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: MR as ontological
>
>
> Hi Tim
>
> This does get heavy. I wrestled with accepting it myself for
> quite a while.
> It wasn't until I convinced myself that a viable theory of cosmology could
> even be constructed this way that I finally turned the corner. Perhaps now
> I should be locked up, but I can testify that I am happier and find fewer
> contradictions that worry me. :)
>
> Here's the nub of it: Its all formally aware, therefore the theory can be
> general.
>
> The biggest problem with this is our typically anthropomorphic
> interpretation of "conscious." Thinking as such is very superficial
> consciouisness and not all there is to it. That much is safe. Distinctions
> between human and animal always break down or prove to not be categorical
> but rather relative. Even parrots are now recognized as being
> able to think
> as well as apes and dolphins, without a mammalian brain, which was
> previously thought impossible. 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. Logically that makes more sense, but it also


Here we differ, and I suspect will always differ.:) Positing consciousness
or awareness as some fundamental property or stuff of nature does not seem
at all logical to me.


> causes more
> social trouble, and I think that is the primary reason we have been taught
> to treat it with skepticism. The teaching is so thorough (in my
> case, being
> originally trained in physics) that one is even afraid to think
> out of that
> box. 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. 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.
>
> Anyway, this is certainly a topic that will not easily be agreed upon, so
> we can continue to have fun with it.
>
> >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.
>
> 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.


I would not call it 'awareness'. Nor do I see any reason to suppose that
trees have a capacity for self-representation. I am only willing to cede
that a tree is: 1) an anticipatory system, and 2) it has internal models of
aspects of its environment. Neither of these, apart or together, would I
take as sufficient for the property 'awareness'.

Similarly, I would not consider the sound resulting from one rock striking
another rock as a primitive 'cry of pain'. There are some vague similarities
to 'cry of pain' (i.e., an audible response to the event of two entities
colliding), but this does not induce me to call it such.


> What about quanta?? Why not consider a primitive formal
> awareness there too?


I simply see no reason to ascribe consciousness or awareness to quanta or
any other non-conscious entity.



> This is what Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have
> done (see Hameroff's quantum mind "Tuscon" conferences). The
> panel I set up
> in 1999 that Rosen was to attend also included Stuart Hameroff. I
> wanted to
> explore this ontological link.




I also find Penrose/Hameroff utterly unpersuasive. The claim of
consciousness as based in quantum coherence in microtubules is to me a kind
of last-refuge of the ardent reductionist who realizes the inadequacy of
causal efficacy within a Newtonian framework, but who can see the only way
out of this dilemma as necessarily residing in some deeper level of reality;
in this case, the poorly understood nooks and crannies of sub-atomic
physics.
(For those interested, Hameroff's page is:
http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/hameroff/)



>
>
> >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.
>
>
> I keep putting the idea out there to see what arguments exist that might
> convince me otherwise. So far, I'm just getting more and more convinced. I
> do believe it was Rosen's vision, even if he too had trouble going all the
> way down this road (as Einstein did with quantum theory). The point that
> Rosen did make, is that there are no non-complex systems, except by
> arbitrary definition. He was vague about the relationship between
> complexity and life (IMO), if perhaps they were the same, which he seemed
> to entertain at times, and at other times hold out the safer position that
> they could have some distinctions, but I don't think he provided that
> distinction - they appear fundamentally synonymous to me.


He was quite clear on the last page of Life Itself: "But complexity, though
I suggest is the habitat of life, is not itself life. Something else is
needed to characterize what is alive from what is complex." He then goes on
to describe the relational organization as the additional factor.

However, he does say cryptically in Essays (p. 28):
"To be sure, what I have been describing [invariant graphical patterns,
complex systems, etc.] are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones, for a
material system to be an organism. That is, they really pertain to what is
not an organism, to what life is not. Sufficient conditions are harder;
indeed, perhaps there are none. If so, biology itself is more comprehensive
than we presently know."


> There is a
> distinction between the living/complex phenomena and what constitutes an
> organism, however.


Here I disagree with your division into "living/complex phenomena" and
"organism". To me, the division is "complex phenomena" and
"living/organism".


> Not all complex systems evolve and thus achieve
> organismic status. That requires a special arrangement of entailments. One
> thus could use the word "life" to describe organisms, or more
> basically, to
> describe a fundamental principle of nature. I think Rosen opted for the
> safer position of making "complexity" the fundamental and "life" more
> organismic, but it is at that point just semantics. I think one
> can discuss
> "life form" as organismic and "life principle" as fundamental, but that is
> surely personal preference and will be rejected generally to avoid
> over-interpretation in non-technical usage. So then, I would guess we can
> define life form as a complex system that self-replicates, but to
> my way of
> thinking, the essence of "life itself" is in the complex relationship, not
> the replication as such which is just an amplifier.
>
> >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.
>
> That's on track in my view. What constitutes a system, and what
> is the most
> primitive example? At least there must be some difference in relationship.
> So a system consists of some kind of interaction. The observation of a
> quantum state must be the most primitive interaction we know, and thus the
> simplest case.


I do not see in what way the observation of a quantum state is to be
considered the 'most primitive interaction' and the 'simplest case' unless
one adopts a reductionist view of the world, where quanta are "primitives"
of physical reality. Further, to the degree to which quantum phenomena are
difficult to interpret, hotly argued, and poorly understood, it seems far
from "the simplest case". :)


> In that, there is the state of the observer and that of the
> observed (by definition). Violation of Bell's theorem demonstrates that
> this distinction between two states is in some way arbitrarily perceptual,
> and that there is a non-local reality always linking them. What is unique
> to the interaction is the established state coordinates - space-time
> itself.  That's the relationship. On observation, evidence of the
> interaction appears as an agreement of coordinates, in which the
> states can
> be located in space and time, whereas previously they were not so much
> "undefined" or "spread" as QM originally proposed, but no
> coordinate system
> is established for looking at them. Space-time literally emerges from the
> interaction as contextual information about the interaction. Now
> you have a
> formal system.


As far as I can see, the "formal system" you speak of with contextual
information of a coordinate system is a formal system within the mind of the
human observer. But then this is just another typical human modeling
relation. I do not see in what way this demonstrates anything unique. At
best, it seems to show that a concept of "space-time" as being a wholly
objective framework is erroneous.

On a sidenote, if one accepts the complementarity principle of QM (which I
accept only tentatively), then if one measures the momentum of a quantum
entity, then we do not (and cannot) know its position. But this is a
perfectly valid kind of interaction. Therefore, does spacetime not "emerge"
in that interaction?


> 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.
>
> Sounds crazy, I know. I decided to go crazy.
>


This certainly is a mind-bender. :)


>
> Best,
>
> -jjk

Regards,
Tim