Re: A few theories on consciousness...

[John M <***>]

Judith,
you made my day! A good laugh: Here we are in the
midst of 'the quagmire' and I decided when I started
to read your lengthy (no?-)response NOT to reply in
details (=dissect the topicalities). 
Susan Greenfeld wrote excellent papers - not as a
pharmacologist what she is professor of. Not that I
fully agreed with them (surprize, surprize). 
I feel glad to assume rightly the "70s', however there
are ~30+ items I may pick from your text later on. It
all depends on the non-quagmire quagmire to come.

Have a good day 
John


--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> 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 
=== message truncated ===