Re: where mind begins and ends

["Daniel A. Fiscus" <***>]

Hi Rosen listers,

Back from beach vacation and read 10 days worth
of your conversations. Good food for thought as
usual.

Jumping in from this thread about mind/brain, I
have a few comments inspired by the recent topics
overall.

First, the two issues of 1) interface or boundaries
between mind and brain and 2) where does an organism
start/end combine to call to mind my revised and
imaginary quote from Descartes, had he had an
ecological education:

"I think...

only as long as I have a steady incoming stream of
energy, oxygen, food, water and nutrients coming
in by way of food, drink and inhalation. And once
I am done with the material parts of these
"thinking materials" I send them back out into the
environment where they become not so much waste as
food for the plants and microbes and soil who all
in turn feed me again in the next living and
thinking cycle.

Therefore I am - we are - ecosystemic."


Also back to some of the comments about fabrication
and origin of life etc. I remind all again that
organisms are not self-sufficient. No single
organism nor even single functional type of organism
(autotroph, heterotroph, etc.) is truly self-causing.
Yet if you assemble a minimal complement that
includes autrophs and heterotrophs as an interdependent
living community - now you have something that is
self-causing and needs no other life, only energy
and materials and correct context. So I think Judith
said you can't take the environment out of the organism,
which is a great comment. And I would add you can't
take the community out of the organism either.
Community is an inseparable and fully necessary aspect
of life and life-environment relation, in my opinion.

Also on continual emergence, ongoing creation and
origin of life...it seems to me that we don't have to
restrict ourselves to some idea of creating an organism
like a cell or microbe. In fact, I would predict this
to be impossible and also "bad" from the ethical,
conscience, should/ought, moral angle. Not to mention
dumb and egotistical. It would be like trying to redo
the Mona Lisa or some other such singular creative
event. But on the upside by lettinggo of the cell or
organism view of life, we could perhaps see much more
potential for creation of life. I think of life as a
process or quality or potential that could involve
many type of organizational forms. Like in the common
phrase that something can "take on a life of its own".

And to protect against the dangers RR and others have
raised, I think the best bet to be to act from love,
with love, in love. So if there is some process that
one loves, then it could be natural and "safe" or
"good" to want that process to "have life" or live on
or "live long and prosper" (I'm another Trek fan).
And if one loves and wants a future for some process,
one would need to ensure that the context for that
process could continue to exist long term, or forever,
also. This is the environment of the life form.

For example, I love ecology and environmental science
and I would like these to live on. So I am now trying
to raise the issues of sustainability, fossil energy
dependency, non-recycling materials dependency and
environmental emissions and footprint of the processes
of environmental science. As it operates now, academic
enviro. science and ecology are themselves not
sustainable, have not really taken on a life of their
own, do not have an open-ended evolutionary future.
Instead, they operate more like a machine that will
run down and have to stop when its gas tank runs dry
or lack of oil/grease cause it to wear out. As an
aside, few in academic enviro/ecological science want
to hear this or talk about it.

But the point of the analogy is that I could work and
enlist help to "give life to", "breathe new life into"
environmental science and ecology as cultural, social,
community processes.

Lastly, on the thread of material entailment I was
reminded that I have heard that the four casues of
Aristotle are considered by some to operate in parallel
and be interdependent and entangled. This as opposed
to merely linear and/or linearly hierarchical or to
operate in serial or sequence as in final -> formal ->
efficient -> material cause, or the reverse for a
bottom up linear series. I think in the RR
metabolism-repair model this entanglement is present
in the form of an ambiguity or dual role for one of the
functions or mapping being both an efficient and a
material cause (I forget which at the moment).

My hunch, inkling, issue here is that I consider
material and material cause to be essential, even if I
don't have any better formal or math representations
to offer beyond Tim/David on material entailment.

Modeling requires material, energy, physical "stuff"
for its process - it requires "building blocks" or
"modeling clay" of some kind or other. And for life
modeling over eons and billions of years it requires
such materials to be found, acquired, ingested,
assembled, utilized, ("thinking materials") and then
discarded, emitted into the environment so that a
new, improved, updated model can be built (partly
or largely based on the prior version or its aspects
that "worked"). These material aspect of modeling is
to me crucial, it is also a link to nitty gritty
details of sustainability like energy and matter and
food needs, and it is also why, ultimately, all
modeling is inherently ecological.

Some assorted thoughts...thanks for all of yours...
now for a snack to recharge the thinking materials...

Dan



>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Judith Rosen
>   To: ***
>   Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 8:33 AM
>   Subject: Re: where mind begins and ends
>
>
>   Dave Macy wrote: ...while speaking with a guy who had a
>   Ph.D. in philosophy he asked, "where is the beginning and ending of
>   organism?"  I still think it's a pretty good question.
>
>   It IS a good question, but the thing about it that sets off experimentalists and 
> reductionistic scientists is that it seems to be self-contradictory to think of a 
> discrete system, like an organism, in terms of environmental connectedness. 
> Particularly since we take organisms out of their natural (evolutionary) habitat all 
> the time and they do just fine (er, that is... as long as we maintain their particular 
> basic requirements... which refers back to aspects of their environment, doesn't it).
>
>   The perspective RR offered was one that tied it all together in a scientific manner: 
> He said that organisms incorporate multiple aspects of their evolutionary environment 
> into themselves. He referred to such incorporated aspects as "information" encoded into 
> their organization. There is also information regarding the relation between 
> environment and "self". [In this situation, "self" can refer either to aspects of the 
> individual (organism) or to species aspects (organism as part of a whole species) . One 
> example would be reproductive information of both genders encoded into each individual 
> when the species is bi-gender. This can be seen in things like male deer going into rut 
> at the same time of year that female deer are about to go into estrous.] Collectively, 
> he referred to all of this encoded information as a set of "internal predictive models".
>
>   What this means is that there are semantic elements to organism that cannot be 
> understood without taking into account knowledge about the referents. In each species, 
> that means evolutionary environment and whole species (interestingly, the 
> chicken-and-egg conundrum disappears when we do so). The aspects of organism structure, 
> behavior, etc which reflect this information will be unfathomable without an 
> understanding of these relational aspects. How do we make sense of gills unless we take 
> into account an environment of water, for instance?
>
>   So what it boils down to is that you can take the organism out of its environment, 
> but if you want to understand the "why" of things regarding that organism, you have to 
> recognize the fact that you can't take its environment out of IT.
>
>   Judith