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Hi John M.
I have some comments, interspersed below: ----- Original Message ----- From: John M To: *** Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 11:12 AM Subject: Re: [ROSEN] A few theories on consciousness... Hail to the New List-Owner! Thanks! I really appreciate that (especially after the last few
turbulent days on the list)!
I hope it is not the line of the 'new deal' to expand the frequently diluted and erring topical variety of this list into another (I believe: not RR-originated) topic, like the elusive 'consciousness'? No, I won't be officially expanding the list into areas
that Robert Rosen wasn't interested in. However, that leaves an awful lot of
topics!!! He was interested in anything that reflected aspects of complexity
(analogous or otherwise) and he was interested in anything that aspects of
complexity were applicable to. Consciousness was definitely on the
menu.
That would be
disasterous, however if I may ask: did RR have some identification for this historical noumenon? Yes. He said it was an emergent property of a sufficiently complex
brain (which itself is dependent on a sufficiently complex living
organization). He said "mind is to brain what life is to organism". And, of
course, they are all connected in essential ways.
Just look
at the Tucson yearly Conferences over a decade and a half, where thousands of professional researchers of the "field" (which one? Ccness branches into a lot) did not agree even how to identify this monster. I know! That's why I posted that article. I think no one in that
article is on "the right track" (although that lady scientist, whose name I
forget just now, is closest).
I made a definition in 1992 and it still lingers with no
real refutation, (This is the 6th discussion list for it) generalizing that beast into ALL of the wholeness: Acknowledgement of - and response to - information. (Of course it requires a definition of info, not like the Shannon-type - briefly: recognized difference etc. where I vocabularized 'difference' as 'existence', but let's not go into this here). It covers from an anion, attracted to a + charge, all the way to G.B.Shaw. Not a 'human' (or bio) attribute. I don't define it the same way as you do (which surprises no one,
right?!) I would define acknowledgement of and response to information as
"perception". All living organisms have that capability. I would further argue
that what is happening in non-living systems (anion attracted to a + charge) is
simply interactivity (as opposed to "reactivity"-- which bothers me as a term
because it focuses on that which reacts TO something else instead of the
relation which is the critical part of the interaction between various
interactive parties). From my father's work, one of the things
I've concluded is that the nature of the universe is interactive. I think
that's what "relational" means. The capacity for interaction is universally
built into all systems because it's part of the fabric of the universe, itself,
as a system (space and time, etc.) The capacity for interactions to have
causal consequences is one of the fundamental Laws of Nature, it seems to
me. That's the essence of complexity.
Another of the Laws of Nature, according to Robert Rosen, is the
fact that the entailments of interactions are consistent, such that inferential
entailments from models are analogous to causal entailments in systems. He
concluded this from his study of Anticipation in living organisms: When it
became clear that organisms are acting in ways that can only be understood as
"model-based"... it meant that even single-celled organisms are somehow
responding to encoded information in such a way as to initiate system changes in
time for "predicted" environmental changes. Encoded information about the
environment constitutes "a model".
In that article I posted, the lady scientist made a distinction
between mind and consciousness, which I found interesting. I tend
to reverse the distinction she was using between them because I think
of consciousness as "conscious awareness" in the human sense of it. I have
always equated mind with intelligence and I see a clear difference between
intelligence and conscious awareness. (To reiterate my own definitions:
intelligence is the ability to think (and learn) whereas Conscious awareness is
the ability to think and learn about thinking (and
learning) She uses consciousness as more of a medical term (where a
sleeping human being is "not conscious") and I have always thought of it more as
a description of the type of mind.
Every smart researcher includes in his Ccness whatever he feels as needed to his theoretical stance. I am on the side of 'process' - it is NOT a thing. Please, Judith, if you quote RR in this respect, try to find words from at least the 70s or later, since IMO the RR-theory of the total's complexity started to shape up and be casted into words in his later period. You're right: It was after his time in Santa Barbara, working with
Robert Hutchins' "Center For the Study of Democratic Institutions." That was the
early 1970's. So he began putting it all together after that. The first years in
Nova Scotia were what generated the books "Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical,
Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations" and "Fundamentals of Measurement
and Representation of Natural Systems". Mind you, he was quite proud of the fact
that he never discovered anything that negated his earlier work; in that way he
was very different from Rashevsky. I think part of the reason my father didn't
have that experience is because he didn't write anything down until he was sure
of it-- he did NOT speculate and pretend it was science.
In any case, there wouldn't be all that much to quote from before
the 70's on the subject of consciousness because he was focusing on life and
organism (as well as why science had so much trouble learning about such
systems). Consciousness has to do with anticipation in some direct way. He
described the conscious mind as a second anticipatory system that interacts with
the organismal one. But, the breakthrough of Anticipation in
organisms had to be developed enough in his mind for him to be able to see
the connections emanating from the consequences of it. He wrote the book on the
subject in the mid-1970's.
The concept of anticipation is one of the most radical of his
theoretical developments, and yet, strangely enough, it's the one being utilized
the most-- I don't get that! It's entirely incompatible with the current
foundations of science but I guess so few people ever look at the
foundations that this incompatibility doesn't strike
them.
Let me pass on arguing with certain parts in the text you submitted. It is an ongoing struggle of really well eucated and talented minds and I am still in it on 4 (5?) lists for its diverse aspects. It may be another quagmire for this list. I hope I did not start it already!!!!!! Nah! Discussion isn't what creates a quagmire; it's abusiveness that does that. Judith
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