Re: MR as ontological, intelligence

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

Hi Dan,

You bring up some great examples, like the maple seed. But I am still
inclined to not use language like "thinking", "intelligence", "awareness",
or "consciousness" except in an entirely metaphorical sense. And, rather
than move linguistically from "awareness" -> "thinking" -> "switching" to
find an appropriate terminology, I would rather begin from a
physical/functional terminology and then see if it is necessary to move in
the direction towards "awareness, etc.". To me, the question is whether this
terminology is inadequate or not. Does it miss something crucial which
requires invocation of a more anthropomorphic terminology? My concern is
that starting off with anthropomorphic terminology almost inevitably leads
one toward some kind of panpsychism or vitalism.

My preference is say that such systems are 1) complex and 2) they have some
genotype. By combination of these two, they have a stability - an identity -
for some period of time. This also gives these systems certain phenotypes.
By virtue of being complex they have degrees-of-freedom and context
sensitivity unavailable to a mechanism. (I think you rightly point out that
such genotypic/phenotypic characteristics are not isolable - they are
entwined in the physical instantiation itself.)

I feel that the behavior which you and John K. characterize as a kind of
"intelligence" or "awareness" is to me just mechanics.But it is not the
mechanics of Newtonian physics; rather, it is the mechanics of the Rosennean
physics of complex and, in particular, anticipatory systems.

For myself, the physical/functional language seems adequate, as long as the
physics is the enlarged realm of Rosennean mechanics.

Regards,
Tim


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Dan
> Fiscus
> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 8:40 AM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: MR as ontological, intelligence
>
>
> Tim and John,
>
> Good conversation you are having! Jumping in here...
>
> And welcome "back" John! I think about your Big Bang theory quite
> a lot and want to read that paper again...
>
> Tim Gwinn wrote:
>
> >>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.
>
> Tim - perhaps if you think of it as intelligence, or even the capacity for
> intelligence it may become more logical or possible. I suggest this as
> assuming such is becoming increasingly important in my own work and
> my own interpretations of Rosen. Still more simplified you could think
> of it as "switching" as in crude decision making and then, again, the
> capacity for switching. I don't mean algorithmic or simple computation
> type switching, as I suggest a kind of logic or switching that arises as
> entangled with, and co-causal with, physical substrate - not as
> independent
> from substrate as algorithms are considered to be. For yet another
> analogy as catch phrase, imagine what "authentic intelligence" would be
> as compared to artificial intelligence - physical instantiation (hardware)
> matters a lot and is mutually causal with the logic or formal intelligence
> (software). Also, details of "local place" and specifics of context matter
> too - it is not something universal across all time and space
> scales. It can
> arise and be amplified into complex forms/processes like life, but only as
> the conditions are right. Usually it is very faint and hard to detect; we
> consider non-living matter to dead and also be "dumb". But I think
> intelligence is part of the "background" nonetheless - everything has some
> level of intelligence, or capacity for it.
>
> [This is mainly me thinking out loud here...all open to debate...]
>
> >>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'.
>
> Again, try intelligence or knowing or etc. Look at a maple seed or other
> seeds that are self-designed by life over millenia for specific
> functions in
> specific contexts. A helicopter-like maple seed "knows" certain things
> about both the plant (life) and its context (the environment). Because the
> hardware is entangled we could say that it "embodies" this
> intelligence - it
> is not separate somewhere, like in some code you could isolate or extract
> or simulate. A maple seed knows about dispersal - the need for dispersal,
> the imperative of dispersal for survival in a changing environment. This
> knowledge is a model of environment (ever-changing) and self = life
> (survival, open-ended evolution as goal) and also the life-environment
> relation (to survive in changing environment must disperse = spread out
> = grow = create plan B's as "we know" many will die and disturbance
> will come to kill the parent plant, given enough time).
>
> Likewise, vines are able to move, climb, find things to climb up; most
> plants "know" to move to orient to the sun, etc. etc. I think the
> intelligence
> of plants becomes much more obivous and tangible when you speed up
> time - plants seem to run on a slower clock than we do. Here is a great
> website with quite a few videos of plants in motion:
>
> http://sunflower.bio.indiana.edu/~rhangart/plantmotion/
>
> There are further extensions to systems even simpler than plants and
> less alive than life itself, as in purely physical systems, but I'll
> save those
> for another post. I also should have mentioned all this makes best sense
> when considering the basic unit of biological life to have both
> ecosystemic and organismic aspects. I.e., life is not the same as
> organism,
> the origin of life was not the origin of the cell but was more likely an
> ecosystemic process of coupled complementary composer-decomposer
> that later generated cells, etc.
>
> A few thoughts...
>
> Dan