Dear "Everything List" (and "Psyche-B"), Here is the promised 'fundamental principle of the Chalmers kind'. Note: there is no magical emergence here. There is no panpsychism here. There is no dualism here.
If there is apparent logical circularity, it is of a kind far less problematic than alternate views in that it includes empirical self-refutation. It is scientifically quite reasonable although rather unique in that science _itself_ has to change, NOT discover any new natural laws - it merely has to properly understand the difference between description and explanation and that each is valid science in its own domain. The former domain is description of the behaviour of appearances, the latter domain is descriptions of underlying structure predictive of the appearances themselves. That they were ever the one scientific domain has been our mistake all along. You will find apparent contradiction in what lies below. In one place a 'constitutive primitive' is required. At that same time an 'atomistic' explanation is later eschewed. That these two positions can be held simulataneously seems a contradiction.... but that is not the case... and the reasons are the subtlties contained in (5) below - the 'constitutive primitive' is not a thing, but an event that acts 'as-if' it was a thing - or that appears behaving 'thingly' to us. Things are thus all 'as-if' or virtual constructs. I do not claim TPONOG to be perfect... I claim it merely to be somewhere closer to the right answer than any we have thus far and is completely seamlessly compatible with all science done thus far. If you follow where this principle points, as i have for many years...through physics to chemistry to cell biology to cognition and phsychology.... you end up being predictive of what is going on in brain material and in particular the source of its phenomenal contents. Firstly: You end up concluding that the universe is a form of 'wild-type' calculus - (literally a mathematics..and the ONLY instantated mathematics). Secondly: They key to understanding how brain material generates phenomenal consciousness, given that all appears merely as space and charge with some mass options attached, making it a quintessentially electromagnetic condensed phase phenomenon.... is the realisation that describing a universe in which electromagnetism of certain kinds delivers phenomenal consciousness is NOT the description delivered BY phenomenal consciousness....it is a separate but intimately inter-related description of underlying structure. You also get to understand why this issue has been so problematic (see (e) below) for science....because...It is the deep phsyics of the biology of excitable cells that holds the key empirical route to understanding what the universe is made of (NOT observations of what happens in a supercollider or in the cosmos though a telescope)....which means that the top two "Science" journal June '05' issue '125' questions: 1) What is the universe made of? 2) What is the biological basis of consciousness? are actually the same question, have their empirical evidence in brain material, and the only reason we haven't answered them both already is that (1) was posed by cosmologists, (2) was posed by neuroscientists and the twain simply do not meet, for no good reason than historical accident and scientific culture - for the cosmologists handed the neuroscientists their explanatory toolkit centuries ago and haven't been back since. Neuroscience has all the evidence and can't see it. Cosmologists have the purview and can;t see any evidence! A cultural problem of the 'chinese puzzle' kind. I have CC'd this to the Psyche-B list. It is highly relevant to them and I thought they may be interested in the discussion and might appreciate a critical gnaw on a juicy bone. To me, a 'Theory of Everything' and the process of sorting out consciousness are necessarily unified scientific activities. In that unification the answers await us. regards, Colin Hales ========================================================= The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis (Version_0) "It is a fundamentally necessary and implicit fact of the natural world, regardless of any particular constitutive structural primitive(s) comprising the natural world that any persistent collaborative subset of them, say X, howsoever organised and howsoever considered in any arbitrary grouping, creates an innate perspective from the point of view of being such a collection; a perspective that is necessarily of the remainder of the natural world, not_X". Remarks 1. The principle is quite general. No particular constitutive primitive has been assumed. 2. The principle says absolutely nothing about the visibility of that innate perspective. The visibility circumstances, character and content are entirely separate considerations with options dependent upon the particular constitutive primitives under consideration and their particular arrangement. 3. The entire collection of constitutive primitive(s) literally is the universe (the natural world). 4. The entire collection of constitutive primitive(s) is what Kant called the noumenon or the 'ding an sich'. Others (such as Ernst Mach) might call it the 'underlying natural world' or 'underlying reality'. 5. The simple approach to this is that 'being' occurs at the moment any persistent structure (say X) arises, for in so doing it implicitly automatically and naturally creates everything that is not that structure (not_X). Automatically created at that instant is a perspective of not_X from the point of view of X and vice versa, for not_X must be as persistently expressed as X, or neither would exist. This necessarily precludes any and all atomistic formulations of constitutive primitives. Put more simply: the only viable constitutive primitives are events, not things. 6. The event of the coming into existence (coalescence, condensation or coherence) of any persistent structure X within a total collection of constitutive primitives, U, cannot occur without perfect symmetrical cooperation from all of the rest of the constitutive primitive(s) not_X. Put another way, X and not_X exist as perfectly inverse equals that literally express each other. 7. The principle makes no claim that all matter involves some form of mind or that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind or that the constituents of the universe are sentient in any way. No such claims are needed. In particular Cartesian 'mind stuff' is unnecessary and irrelevant. As such the principle cannot be said to be panpsychism. However, it would seem to have panpsychist characteristics in that the resultant properties involved in the creation of mind are naturally built into the circumstances of the fabric of the universe. Some rough corollaries: a) It is intrinsically meaningless that the constitutive primitive(s) themselves may ever be directly revealed in any contrived perspective view provided through making use of the potential for rendering the perspective visible in some fashion. b) As a result of a), it can be asserted that all empirical laws are descriptions of the behaviour of the contents of a visible perspective view thus provided and that the process of provision of empirical laws fundamentally includes the perspective view (literally: the constitutive primitives that render a perspective visible) within its descriptions. The generalisations that are empirical laws can never stand alone outside the context of the empiricist (observer). c) As a result of b). Empirical laws play no causal role in the machinations of the universe, nor does the observer play any active role in creation of the universe. This role is under the sole purview of the interactions of the constitutive primitive(s). This makes all empirical (mathematical) models of the universe causally inert and merely metaphor for constitutive primitive behaviour in certain aggregations. d) As layers of organisation are stripped away (eg humanity, human, organ, tissue, cell, molecule, atom, atomic particle, subatomic particle......an so on), any visible perspective view of the behaviour of the remaining organisational layers shall necessarily reveal visible behaviour more closely aligned with to the behaviour of the real underlying constitutive primitive(s). This process shall act as a guide to the most likely forms of the class of viable constitutive primitive(s) involved in the universe in which humans are embedded. e) Because we know that, from the perspective of being a human, that there most definitely is a perspective view of the rest of the universe, we necessarily exist in a universe constructed of constitutive primitive(s) of a kind that enables the visible perspective possible when such constitutive primitives are organised in the fashion it self-reveals as brain material. That perspective view is what we call 'phenomenal consciousness'. As a result of a), b), c) we can also conclude that science constrained to contents of consciousness, such as 'The Neural Correlates of Consciousness' paradigm, will never explain phenomenal consciousness because it is a meaningless expectation based on the assumption that constitutive primitives and contents of consciousness are identities. ================================================================== --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
