subject:"\[FRIAM\] Nick's Categories"

I would be astonished if Dave just meant a different point of view.  

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 11:33 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

If by "dualism", you mean Cartesianism, I agree. Hence, referring to "mental 
stuff" isn't useful, especially in models of panpsychism. But if by "dualism", 
you mean duals in the complementarity sense, then I'm not so sure. It can be 
convenient to work in one domain, then switch to its dual when the calculation 
gets too complicated. Is that "explanatory power"? I don't know.

On 2/21/23 10:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The same machine learning can display one behavior after some number of 
> training iterations and others after more.A generative/probabilistic 
> system can display many behaviors from the same training data.   Injecting 
> some noise into the billions of summations would give something like 
> hallucinations.   I fail to see how dualism offers any explanatory power.
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 10:17 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories
> 
> My 1st reaction was "none" - there's no evidence that differing substrates is 
> insufficient to account for differing mental things. That's "supervenience", 
> right?
> 
> However, there might be both robustness and polyphenism in the map between 
> phenomena like "mental things" and generators like "substrates". And, if 
> that's the case, then it's not sufficient to describe a single substrate that 
> generates a mental thing. (And vice versa.) We'd need to partition the gen 
> and phen spaces and show those higher order maps ... at least for any kind of 
> complete explanation. And those partitions may not be crisp. So over and 
> above the simple map and the higher order map, we need some measures that say 
> how crisp the partitions are.
> 
> On 2/21/23 10:05, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Just there are computer codes that can only run on some architectures, there 
>> are physical phenomena that can only be realized on certain substrates.   
>> What evidence is there that something other than differing substrates are 
>> needed to explain mental things?
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>>> On Feb 21, 2023, at 9:49 AM, glen  wrote:
>>>
>>> If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it 
>>> may not be very different from "generalized across different 
>>> architectures". But if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture 
>>> stuff", then it cannot be "generalized across different architectures" 
>>> because a) that implies there exist architectures across which it is NOT 
>>> generalized and b) "generalized" is a function of, dependent upon, 
>>> explicitly in reference to, different architectures.
>>>
>>>> On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>> Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any 
>>>> different from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights 
>>>> generalized to different (analog) architectures.
>>>> -Original Message-
>>>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
>>>> To: friam@redfish.com
>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories Excellent! I appreciate your 
>>>> clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I will do so. I'm 
>>>> still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me 
>>>> claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of 
>>>> claiming some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why 
>>>> Deacon's relevant to one or both of those comments as I read through 
>>>> Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>> On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>>> Glen -
>>>>>
>>>>> Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
>>>>> completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt 
>>>>> from Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
>>>>>
>>>>>   /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the 
>>>>> emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a 
>>>>> complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the 
>>>>> “message”, never bec

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories


If by "dualism", you mean Cartesianism, I agree. Hence, referring to "mental stuff" isn't useful, 
especially in models of panpsychism. But if by "dualism", you mean duals in the complementarity sense, then 
I'm not so sure. It can be convenient to work in one domain, then switch to its dual when the calculation gets too 
complicated. Is that "explanatory power"? I don't know.

On 2/21/23 10:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:

The same machine learning can display one behavior after some number of 
training iterations and others after more.A generative/probabilistic system 
can display many behaviors from the same training data.   Injecting some noise 
into the billions of summations would give something like hallucinations.   I 
fail to see how dualism offers any explanatory power.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 10:17 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

My 1st reaction was "none" - there's no evidence that differing substrates is 
insufficient to account for differing mental things. That's "supervenience", right?

However, there might be both robustness and polyphenism in the map between phenomena like 
"mental things" and generators like "substrates". And, if that's the case, then 
it's not sufficient to describe a single substrate that generates a mental thing. (And vice versa.) 
We'd need to partition the gen and phen spaces and show those higher order maps ... at least for 
any kind of complete explanation. And those partitions may not be crisp. So over and above the 
simple map and the higher order map, we need some measures that say how crisp the partitions are.

On 2/21/23 10:05, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Just there are computer codes that can only run on some architectures, there 
are physical phenomena that can only be realized on certain substrates.   What 
evidence is there that something other than differing substrates are needed to 
explain mental things?

Sent from my iPhone


On Feb 21, 2023, at 9:49 AM, glen  wrote:

If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it may not be very different from "generalized across 
different architectures". But if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture stuff", then it cannot be 
"generalized across different architectures" because a) that implies there exist architectures across which it is NOT generalized 
and b) "generalized" is a function of, dependent upon, explicitly in reference to, different architectures.


On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any different 
from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights generalized to different 
(analog) architectures.
-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories Excellent! I appreciate your
clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I will do so. I'm still a bit 
confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me claiming that "the 
bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of claiming some forms of panpsychism 
are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why Deacon's relevant to one or both of those comments 
as I read through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
Thanks.

On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
Glen -

Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:

  /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a
complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the
“message”, never becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a
set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of
mind in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process
can be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually
meant by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal
structure, the complex dynamical and relational constraints that
maintain an organism far from thermodynamic equilibrium. /

This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution (or 
at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian Duality 
we bandy about here.

Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in his 
2000 Investigations:

  - detect gradients
  - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
  - do work to maintain those constraints

may be relevant (or interesting or both).

On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

The same machine learning can display one behavior after some number of 
training iterations and others after more.A generative/probabilistic system 
can display many behaviors from the same training data.   Injecting some noise 
into the billions of summations would give something like hallucinations.   I 
fail to see how dualism offers any explanatory power. 

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 10:17 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

My 1st reaction was "none" - there's no evidence that differing substrates is 
insufficient to account for differing mental things. That's "supervenience", 
right?

However, there might be both robustness and polyphenism in the map between 
phenomena like "mental things" and generators like "substrates". And, if that's 
the case, then it's not sufficient to describe a single substrate that 
generates a mental thing. (And vice versa.) We'd need to partition the gen and 
phen spaces and show those higher order maps ... at least for any kind of 
complete explanation. And those partitions may not be crisp. So over and above 
the simple map and the higher order map, we need some measures that say how 
crisp the partitions are.

On 2/21/23 10:05, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Just there are computer codes that can only run on some architectures, there 
> are physical phenomena that can only be realized on certain substrates.   
> What evidence is there that something other than differing substrates are 
> needed to explain mental things?
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Feb 21, 2023, at 9:49 AM, glen  wrote:
>>
>> If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it 
>> may not be very different from "generalized across different architectures". 
>> But if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture stuff", then it cannot 
>> be "generalized across different architectures" because a) that implies 
>> there exist architectures across which it is NOT generalized and b) 
>> "generalized" is a function of, dependent upon, explicitly in reference to, 
>> different architectures.
>>
>>> On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any 
>>> different from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights 
>>> generalized to different (analog) architectures.
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
>>> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
>>> To: friam@redfish.com
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories Excellent! I appreciate your 
>>> clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I will do so. I'm 
>>> still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me 
>>> claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of 
>>> claiming some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why 
>>> Deacon's relevant to one or both of those comments as I read through 
>>> Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
>>> Thanks.
>>>> On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> Glen -
>>>>
>>>> Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
>>>> completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt 
>>>> from Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
>>>>
>>>>  /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the 
>>>> emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a 
>>>> complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the 
>>>> “message”, never becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a 
>>>> set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of 
>>>> mind in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process 
>>>> can be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually 
>>>> meant by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal 
>>>> structure, the complex dynamical and relational constraints that 
>>>> maintain an organism far from thermodynamic equilibrium. /
>>>>
>>>> This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible 
>>>> resolution (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of 
>>>> the Cartesian Duality we bandy about here.
>>>>
>>>> Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
>>>> homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems 
>>>&

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories


My 1st reaction was "none" - there's no evidence that differing substrates is 
insufficient to account for differing mental things. That's "supervenience", right?

However, there might be both robustness and polyphenism in the map between phenomena like 
"mental things" and generators like "substrates". And, if that's the case, then 
it's not sufficient to describe a single substrate that generates a mental thing. (And vice versa.) 
We'd need to partition the gen and phen spaces and show those higher order maps ... at least for 
any kind of complete explanation. And those partitions may not be crisp. So over and above the 
simple map and the higher order map, we need some measures that say how crisp the partitions are.

On 2/21/23 10:05, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Just there are computer codes that can only run on some architectures, there 
are physical phenomena that can only be realized on certain substrates.   What 
evidence is there that something other than differing substrates are needed to 
explain mental things?

Sent from my iPhone


On Feb 21, 2023, at 9:49 AM, glen  wrote:

If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it may not be very different from "generalized across 
different architectures". But if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture stuff", then it cannot be 
"generalized across different architectures" because a) that implies there exist architectures across which it is NOT generalized 
and b) "generalized" is a function of, dependent upon, explicitly in reference to, different architectures.


On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any different 
from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights generalized to different 
(analog) architectures.
-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories
Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I 
will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me 
claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of claiming 
some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why Deacon's relevant to one 
or both of those comments as I read through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
Thanks.

On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
Glen -

Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:

 /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a complex
set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the “message”, never
becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a set of abstract
symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind in a dualistic
Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can be viewed, in some
sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant by abstraction: it
embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the complex dynamical
and relational constraints that maintain an organism far from
thermodynamic equilibrium. /

This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution (or 
at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian Duality 
we bandy about here.

Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in his 
2000 Investigations:

 - detect gradients
 - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
 - do work to maintain those constraints

may be relevant (or interesting or both).

On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which referenced Christian List's 
"Levels" <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/>  and the points he made (and 
you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  *because* they tie in to 
my own twisty turny journey of trying to understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form 
duality (illusions?).

To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your reference to 
it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your criticism is that the 
website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?

The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to do with 
the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's style *does* 
depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder and louder 
which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that alone does not 
make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  Perhaps I am guilty of 
courting confirmation bias insomuch as

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Just there are computer codes that can only run on some architectures, there 
are physical phenomena that can only be realized on certain substrates.   What 
evidence is there that something other than differing substrates are needed to 
explain mental things?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 21, 2023, at 9:49 AM, glen  wrote:
> 
> If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it may 
> not be very different from "generalized across different architectures". But 
> if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture stuff", then it cannot be 
> "generalized across different architectures" because a) that implies there 
> exist architectures across which it is NOT generalized and b) "generalized" 
> is a function of, dependent upon, explicitly in reference to, different 
> architectures.
> 
>> On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any 
>> different from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights 
>> generalized to different (analog) architectures.
>> -Original Message-----
>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
>> To: friam@redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories
>> Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to 
>> explore. I will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it 
>> in the context of me claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or 
>> the context of claiming some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll 
>> figure out why Deacon's relevant to one or both of those comments as I read 
>> through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.
>> Thanks.
>>> On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
>>> Glen -
>>> 
>>> Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
>>> completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
>>> Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
>>> 
>>> /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
>>> emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a complex
>>> set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the “message”, never
>>> becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a set of abstract
>>> symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind in a dualistic
>>> Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can be viewed, in some
>>> sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant by abstraction: it
>>> embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the complex dynamical
>>> and relational constraints that maintain an organism far from
>>> thermodynamic equilibrium. /
>>> 
>>> This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution 
>>> (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian 
>>> Duality we bandy about here.
>>> 
>>> Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
>>> homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in 
>>> his 2000 Investigations:
>>> 
>>> - detect gradients
>>> - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
>>> - do work to maintain those constraints
>>> 
>>> may be relevant (or interesting or both).
>>> 
>>> On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Glen -
>>>> 
>>>> FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which 
>>>> referenced Christian List's "Levels" 
>>>> <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/>  and the points he made (and you 
>>>> reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  *because* 
>>>> they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to understand the 
>>>> paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form duality (illusions?).
>>>> 
>>>> To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your reference 
>>>> to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your criticism is that 
>>>> the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?
>>>> 
>>>> The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to do 
>>>> with the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's style 
>>>> *does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder 
>>>> and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that 
>>>> alo

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories


If, as EricS has argued, "mental stuff" is an equivalence class, then it may not be very different from "generalized across 
different architectures". But if "mental stuff" is disjoint from "architecture stuff", then it cannot be 
"generalized across different architectures" because a) that implies there exist architectures across which it is NOT generalized 
and b) "generalized" is a function of, dependent upon, explicitly in reference to, different architectures.

On 2/21/23 09:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any different 
from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights generalized to different 
(analog) architectures.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I 
will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me 
claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of claiming 
some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why Deacon's relevant to one 
or both of those comments as I read through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.

Thanks.

On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:

Glen -

Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:

 /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a complex
set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the “message”, never
becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a set of abstract
symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind in a dualistic
Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can be viewed, in some
sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant by abstraction: it
embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the complex dynamical
and relational constraints that maintain an organism far from
thermodynamic equilibrium. /

This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution (or 
at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian Duality 
we bandy about here.

Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in his 
2000 Investigations:

 - detect gradients
 - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
 - do work to maintain those constraints

may be relevant (or interesting or both).

On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which referenced Christian List's 
"Levels" <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/>  and the points he made (and 
you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  *because* they tie in to 
my own twisty turny journey of trying to understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form 
duality (illusions?).

To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your reference to 
it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your criticism is that the 
website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?

The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to do with 
the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's style *does* 
depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder and louder 
which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that alone does not 
make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  Perhaps I am guilty of 
courting confirmation bias insomuch as Deacon's constructions of 
homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem to support the style of dualism which I 
suppose appeals to me for reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.

Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
references rather than open ended descriptions of what/why/where/how/when every 
detail of what he said meant to me.   I fail at (avoid) clarity with too much 
more often than with too little, no?

I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you
(Glen) were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed to read him.  
The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who might not have ever bothered to get 
the word from closer to the horse's mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely 
on other's opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe (2009?) and gave the 
lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in him (I don't know if anyone ever figured 
out what the point the fan was making?). It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a 
"blender" (presentations with group discussion) on

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Sorry, I probably glossed over something.   How is the "mental" any different 
from a computer program or a set of neural net edge weights generalized to 
different (analog) architectures.

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2023 9:26 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to 
explore. I will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in 
the context of me claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the 
context of claiming some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out 
why Deacon's relevant to one or both of those comments as I read through 
Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.

Thanks.

On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:
> Glen -
> 
> Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
> completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
> Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:
> 
> /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the 
> emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a complex 
> set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the “message”, never 
> becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a set of abstract 
> symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind in a dualistic 
> Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can be viewed, in some 
> sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant by abstraction: it 
> embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the complex dynamical 
> and relational constraints that maintain an organism far from 
> thermodynamic equilibrium. /
> 
> This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution 
> (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian 
> Duality we bandy about here.
> 
> Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
> homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in 
> his 2000 Investigations:
> 
> - detect gradients
> - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
> - do work to maintain those constraints
> 
> may be relevant (or interesting or both).
> 
> On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> Glen -
>>
>> FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which referenced 
>> Christian List's "Levels" <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21103/>  and the 
>> points he made (and you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person 
>> descriptions  *because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying 
>> to understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form duality 
>> (illusions?).
>>
>> To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your reference 
>> to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your criticism is that 
>> the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?
>>
>> The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to do 
>> with the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's style 
>> *does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder and 
>> louder which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that alone 
>> does not make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  Perhaps I am 
>> guilty of courting confirmation bias insomuch as Deacon's constructions of 
>> homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem to support the style of dualism which I 
>> suppose appeals to me for reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.
>>
>> Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
>> references rather than open ended descriptions of what/why/where/how/when 
>> every detail of what he said meant to me.   I fail at (avoid) clarity with 
>> too much more often than with too little, no?
>>
>> I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you 
>> (Glen) were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you 
>> needed to read him.  The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* 
>> who might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the horse's 
>> mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on other's opinions 
>> and judgements of him until he came here to SFe (2009?) and gave the 
>> lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in him (I don't know if 
>> anyone ever figured out what the point the fan was making?). It just so 
>> happened that at SFx we were holding a "blender" (presentations with group 
>> discussion) on the topic of morphometric analysis) that very same night (or 
>> week

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories


Excellent! I appreciate your clarification as to why it might be useful to explore. I 
will do so. I'm still a bit confused as to why you mentioned it in the context of me 
claiming that "the bot" (e.g. ChatGPT) has a body. Or the context of claiming 
some forms of panpsychism are monist. Maybe I'll figure out why Deacon's relevant to one 
or both of those comments as I read through Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay.

Thanks.

On 2/21/23 09:13, Steve Smith wrote:

Glen -

Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt from 
Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:

/One important implication of the proposed scenario for the emergence of 
autogen is that in the process of transferring a complex set of constraints 
from substrate to substrate, the “message”, never becomes an abstract and 
immaterial “thing” – or a set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple 
substance of mind in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the 
process can be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant 
by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the complex 
dynamical and relational constraints that maintain an organism far from 
thermodynamic equilibrium. /

This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible resolution (or 
at least explication) of the tension between the duals of the Cartesian Duality 
we bandy about here.

Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems in his 
2000 Investigations:

- detect gradients
- construct constraints to extract work from gradients
- do work to maintain those constraints

may be relevant (or interesting or both).

On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which referenced Christian List's 
"Levels"   and the points he made (and 
you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  *because* they tie in to 
my own twisty turny journey of trying to understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form 
duality (illusions?).

To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your reference to 
it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your criticism is that the 
website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?

The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to do with 
the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's style *does* 
depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder and louder 
which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that alone does not 
make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  Perhaps I am guilty of 
courting confirmation bias insomuch as Deacon's constructions of 
homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem to support the style of dualism which I 
suppose appeals to me for reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.

Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
references rather than open ended descriptions of what/why/where/how/when every 
detail of what he said meant to me.   I fail at (avoid) clarity with too much 
more often than with too little, no?

I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen) were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed to read him.  The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the horse's mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on other's opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe (2009?) and gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in him (I don't know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan was making?). It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a "blender" (presentations with group discussion) on the topic of morphometric analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind was on the topic of form -> function which had me mildly more receptive to (curious about) ideas *like* morphic resonance.  After that I was more like 95% dismissive of what he goes on about.  So... now that I wasted another minute of your time 
on *this* paragraph, I apologize for seeming to promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or imply that you should waste time reading him.    Whether reading Deacon turns out to be a waste of time is an open question for me myself.   I have invested quite a bit of time and still don't have as much traction as I would like.  I think that is because these are steep and slippery subjects in their own right, not because his work is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.


I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on Molecule-> 
Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's thinking about bits V atoms 
and

Good question. Sorry if I made it seem like using "mental" as a name for an equivalence
class is bad. I don't intend to say it's bad. I do intend to assert that most people (in my
experience) who use the term do mean to distinguish between mind and body. And that would be OK
*if* they gave some clear method for differentiating ... or at least a handful of examples of each
class (mostly mental, mostly body, close to the fuzzy boundary). What's bad is the assumption that
when they speak the word, the concept evoked in the audience is anything at all similar to the
speaker's concept. That assumption is what's bad, like EricC (seemingly) making the assumption I
know what he means by "mental stuff".

The same problem rears its head in the ambiguity of "dualism". Nick and EricC seem to use it to
mean "2 things". Dave and Stephen seem to mean "2 Janus-like faces of the same thing".
SteveS seems to use both meanings, luckily peppering each usage with plenty of context, which helps determine
which meaning he's using at the time.

If we all used "dualism" in the latter sense, then I might shut up, because there'd be no need to clarify.
Accusing someone of that kind of dualism isn't much of an accusation. I can imagine a "triplism" that would
appeal to Catholics and graphics programmers ... maybe "pentalism" for some witches? Personally, I'm a
"pluralist". There are many ways you can cut the ambience into aspects. But that doesn't preclude me being, a
monist, because I rely on parallax and aspect-orientation.

But when some of us use the word "dualist" to mean "not monist", that requires
an intervention.

On 2/21/23 06:02, Santafe wrote:

On Feb 20, 2023, at 10:46 AM, glen wrote:

By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are implicitly
asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no such difference, in my opinion.
Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you
finally get that snap of understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about some
concept you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels cognitive, not
bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily
details. (The illusion is a byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations
of abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, they aren't. You wouldn't,
*could not*, have arrived at that state without your body, or if you had a different body.

Why is it bad to give “mental” a term, to refer to patterns of activity in
bodies that can be distinguished by some criteria?

Surely there are cognitive activities I can engage in, that depend in essential
ways on the particular human cortex in context, that are not produced by nerve
nets in jellyfish. To say that the classes of patterns are distinguishable is
not to suggest that they are non-bodily at all.

The fact that all this is rendered in language, which is pervasively structured
around the subject perspective (whether in relation to linguistic constructs
for objects, or as a reporter of “introspection”) contextualizes “mental”
references within other stuff that offers less flexibility of stance than our
language for some other inter-object relations. But if we see our language as
an un-fully-seen thing, and thus a place of hazards, this doesn’t seem worse
than any other unfinished business. Were it not for the philosphers, I am not
sure “mental” would even have got its distracting connotation of
“non-corporeal”. Maybe it would, and I’m just being obtuse.

Eric

Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at a
*similar* understanding, but not the same.

On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:

On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:

I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.

Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism
entails.
Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on everything you do being
"body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the empirical question of what types of bodies
do "psyche", and where those types of bodies can be found.
You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.
Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at
least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do mental
stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ affect how
he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of living in the
world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just
something he says.
Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt trampled
beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially interesting in
its own right.

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Steve Smith


Glen -

Attempting a balance between succinctness and 
completeness/contextualization/relevance I offer the following excerpt 
from Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay about 3 pages into the 7-page work:


   /One important implication of the proposed scenario for the
   emergence of autogen is that in the process of transferring a
   complex set of constraints from substrate to substrate, the
   “message”, never becomes an abstract and immaterial “thing” – or a
   set of abstract symbols, which seem to be a staple substance of mind
   in a dualistic Cartesian picture. On the contrary: the process can
   be viewed, in some sense, as an opposition to what is usually meant
   by abstraction: it embodies, in a concrete physi- cal structure, the
   complex dynamical and relational constraints that maintain an
   organism far from thermodynamic equilibrium. /

This quotation is my attempt to acknowledge/identify  a possible 
resolution (or at least explication) of the tension between the duals of 
the Cartesian Duality we bandy about here.


Another correspondent offline offered the correlation between Deacon's 
homeo/morpho/teleo-dynamics and Kauffman's reflections on living systems 
in his 2000 Investigations:


   - detect gradients
   - construct constraints to extract work from gradients
   - do work to maintain those constraints

may be relevant (or interesting or both).

On 2/21/23 8:23 AM, Steve Smith wrote:


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which 
referenced Christian List's "Levels" 
  and the points he made (and 
you reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  
*because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to 
understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form duality 
(illusions?).


To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your 
reference to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your 
criticism is that the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?


The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to 
do with the tension between supervenience and entailment.   Deacon's 
style *does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over 
again, louder and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong 
reasons.  But that alone does not make what he's saying wrong, or even 
wrong-headed.  Perhaps I am guilty of courting confirmation bias 
insomuch as Deacon's constructions of homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem 
to support the style of dualism which I suppose appeals to me for 
reasons I don't understand yet or can't articulate.


Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
references rather than open ended descriptions of 
what/why/where/how/when every detail of what he said meant to me.   I 
fail at (avoid) clarity with too much more often than with too little, no?


I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen) 
were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed 
to read him.  The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who 
might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the 
horse's mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on 
other's opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe 
(2009?) and gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in 
him (I don't know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan 
was making?). It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a 
"blender" (presentations with group discussion) on the topic of 
morphometric analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind 
was on the topic of form -> function which had me mildly more 
receptive to (curious about) ideas *like* morphic resonance.  After 
that I was more like 95% dismissive of what he goes on about.  So... 
now that I wasted another minute of your time on *this* paragraph, I 
apologize for seeming to promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or 
imply that you should waste time reading him.    Whether reading 
Deacon turns out to be a waste of time is an open question for me 
myself.   I have invested quite a bit of time and still don't have as 
much traction as I would like.  I think that is because these are 
steep and slippery subjects in their own right, not because his work 
is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.


I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on 
Molecule-> Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's 
thinking about bits V atoms and supervenience.   To the extent that 
none of this tickles any of your own thoughts or interests in what I 
assume to be somewhat parallel (though maybe not convergent?) lines of 
inquiry, then I suppose it would be a waste of your time to follow it 
to any distance.


The following bit from the introduction to the essay linked *might* 
characterize what it is I *thought* you might find relevant in the 
paper and in the

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Stephen Guerin

Steve,

Deacon's three dynamics in your image directly map to Stu's three processes
around constraint processes for Autonomous Agents (living system) in
Investigations (2000).
- detect gradients
- construct constraints to extract work from gradients
- do work to maintain those constraints

Here's a later paper by Logan describing the interaction of Deacon and Stu
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264895121_EME_Logan-KauffDeacon

Relatedly, Alicia Juarrero has an upcoming book this summer on constraint:
"Context Changes Everything:
How Constraints Create Coherence"

As an aside, Alicia had some issues with Deacon accusing him of academic
plagiarism on her earlier works. Point is there's a community of interest
in the constraint and living systems space.

As you've been subjected to my babble for 15 years:  constraint
dissipation, construction and maintenance is a lens I've been thinking
about and how least action, dual fields and symmetry breaking
(constraint/information) relate to these processes the mechanism of dual
diffusion. this lens is "ententional" in deacons language where the
organism is just a partial dual inthe definition of a living process. Also
related to me to EricS and Harold's ecological perspective on life which
we've talked about.

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 8:23 AM Steve Smith  wrote:

>
> Just to keep my flog landing on the hide of the horse that may have
> expired several posts ago in this chain: Deacon's introduction of *teleo*
> to this characterization of complex adaptive systems  is the *first*
> example I have found which is even a little bit compelling toward
> understanding "Life Itself" (in the sense of what Schrodinger was going on
> about in 1944)...
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Steve Smith


Glen -

FWIW,  I'm still chewing on your assertions of 5 months ago which 
referenced Christian List's "Levels" 
 and the points he made (and you 
reinforced) on Indexicality and first/third person descriptions  
*because* they tie in to my own twisty turny journey of trying to 
understand the paradoxes of mind/body   substance/form duality 
(illusions?).


To give a nod to the Ninja's website (or more to the point, your 
reference to it and comparison to teleodynamics.org) I assume your 
criticism is that the website(s) is more rhetorical than informational?


The relevance of Deacon's Teleodynamics in my thinking/noodling has to 
do with the tension between supervenience and entailment. Deacon's style 
*does* depend a bit on saying the same thing over and over again, louder 
and louder which can be convincing for all the wrong reasons.  But that 
alone does not make what he's saying wrong, or even wrong-headed.  
Perhaps I am guilty of courting confirmation bias insomuch as Deacon's 
constructions of homeo-morpho-teleo dynamics seem to support the style 
of dualism which I suppose appeals to me for reasons I don't understand 
yet or can't articulate.


Since I am not normally succinct, I restricted myself to a handful of 
references rather than open ended descriptions of 
what/why/where/how/when every detail of what he said meant to me.   I 
fail at (avoid) clarity with too much more often than with too little, no?


I did NOT link Sheldrake's Wikipedia page because I thought you (Glen) 
were unfamiliar with him and his stance/assertions and that you needed 
to read him.  The link was more for completeness for *anyone else* who 
might not have ever bothered to get the word from closer to the horse's 
mouth.  I myself dismissed him 100% and relied entirely on other's 
opinions and judgements of him until he came here to SFe (2009?) and 
gave the lecture(s) where one of his fans stuck a knife in him (I don't 
know if anyone ever figured out what the point the fan was making?).   
It just so happened that at SFx we were holding a "blender" 
(presentations with group discussion) on the topic of morphometric 
analysis) that very same night (or weekend) so my mind was on the topic 
of form -> function which had me mildly more receptive to (curious 
about) ideas *like* morphic resonance.  After that I was more like 95% 
dismissive of what he goes on about.  So... now that I wasted another 
minute of your time on *this* paragraph, I apologize for seeming to 
promote Sheldrake's work in your direction or imply that you should 
waste time reading him.    Whether reading Deacon turns out to be a 
waste of time is an open question for me myself.   I have invested quite 
a bit of time and still don't have as much traction as I would like.  I 
think that is because these are steep and slippery subjects in their own 
right, not because his work is a worthless collection of bits and pixels.


I offered Rączaszek‑Leonardi's essay on Deacon's much larger work on 
Molecule-> Sign as a slightly more accessible intro to Deacon's thinking 
about bits V atoms and supervenience.   To the extent that none of this 
tickles any of your own thoughts or interests in what I assume to be 
somewhat parallel (though maybe not convergent?) lines of inquiry, then 
I suppose it would be a waste of your time to follow it to any distance.


The following bit from the introduction to the essay linked *might* 
characterize what it is I *thought* you might find relevant in the paper 
and in the larger body of Deacon's work: _Information v 
information-transmission_ and _aboutism_ each were reminiscent to me of 
some of your arguments about whether communication actually exists and 
List's arguments about indexicality perhaps.


   /When Erwin Schrödinger (//1944
   
//)
   ponderedWhat is Life?from a physicist’s point of view he
   focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain themselves in
   a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and how they store
   and pass on the information that determines their organization.
   In his metaphor of an aperiodic crystal as the carrier of this
   information he both foreshadowed Claude Shannon’s (//1948
   
//)
   analysis of information storage and transmission and Watson and
   Crick’s (//1953
   
//)
   discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. So
   by 1958 when Francis Crick (//1958
   //)
   first articulated what he called the “central dogma” of
   molecular biology (i.e. that information in the cell flows from
   DNA to RNA to protein structure and not the reverse) it was

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Santafe



> On Feb 20, 2023, at 10:46 AM, glen  wrote:
> 
> By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are 
> implicitly asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no 
> such difference, in my opinion. Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny 
> that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you finally get that snap 
> of understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about some 
> concept you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The shift 
> just feels cognitive, not bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is 
> an abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily details. (The illusion is a 
> byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations of 
> abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, they 
> aren't. You wouldn't, *could not*, have arrived at that state without your 
> body, or if you had a different body.

Why is it bad to give “mental” a term, to refer to patterns of activity in 
bodies that can be distinguished by some criteria?

Surely there are cognitive activities I can engage in, that depend in essential 
ways on the particular human cortex in context, that are not produced by nerve 
nets in jellyfish.  To say that the classes of patterns are distinguishable is 
not to suggest that they are non-bodily at all.

The fact that all this is rendered in language, which is pervasively structured 
around the subject perspective (whether in relation to linguistic constructs 
for objects, or as a reporter of “introspection”) contextualizes “mental” 
references within other stuff that offers less flexibility of stance than our 
language for some other inter-object relations.  But if we see our language as 
an un-fully-seen thing, and thus a place of hazards, this doesn’t seem worse 
than any other unfinished business.  Were it not for the philosphers, I am not 
sure “mental” would even have got its distracting connotation of 
“non-corporeal”.  Maybe it would, and I’m just being obtuse.

Eric



> 
> Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at 
> a *similar* understanding, but not the same.
> 
> On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:
>> On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:
>>> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
>> Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism 
>> entails.
>> Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on 
>> everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the 
>> empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where those 
>> types of bodies can be found.
>> You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.
>> Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West, 
>> unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at 
>> least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do 
>> mental stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ 
>> affect how he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of 
>> living in the world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more 
>> than just something he says.
>> Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt 
>> trampled beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially 
>> interesting in its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts 
>> to attribute identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate 
>> stuff seems directly on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways his 
>> behaviors change when he becomes engaged in those habits.
> 
> -- 
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
> 
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FRIAM Applied

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Santafe

want to acknowledge Glen’s formulation here, too, which is helpful and seems 
both reasonable to the point, and specific enough to explain why Mind and not 
just-any essentialism.

It’s interesting: I know just what people mean when they talk this way about 
computing’s universality (so, like Seth Lloyd here 
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-Scientist/dp/1400033861
).  I would of course use the same language informally, but I would never use 
the same short-hand if I were trying to be careful about the ontological or 
epistemologial commitments entailed in things I was saying.

To me (as I think to Glen), matter does what it does, and each whole thing is a 
completely good model only of itself (obviating the point of having a model).  
Relative to that, I would say if trying to speak carefully, that computing as 
an equivalence class of real, material phenomena, occupies some different 
category.  The equivalence class is “the thing”.  It is not meant to be a full 
identification with all of any of the phenomena, but rather a collection of 
signs, conventions for manipulating them, and programs for mapping them to 
patterns in particular phenomena, that can be integrated without 
contradictions.  It is just their finiteness (or smallness of infinity) that 
makes a test for consistency possible, and that makes them _intentionally_ 
incomplete as models for any more-infinite actual phenomenon.

There seem to be many things that have sort of an analogous status in this 
world of abstractions, as things brought into existence only when the world of 
abstracitons is brought into existence.  “Number” seems of a similar kind to 
“having algorithmic structure”.  It doesn’t seem to me like a closed question 
how we should refer to “their type”, but in a middle-out sort of way, it seems 
quite reasonable to grant them a different place in experience and cognition 
than many other categories.  And of course, there is a long tedious harangue we 
can pursue describing them (what “number” “is”, and so forth).  So it is much 
more than nothing, to put behind referring to them that way.

Eric

> On Feb 20, 2023, at 10:31 AM, glen  wrote:
> 
> While I appreciate DaveW's historical ensconcing, I think there's a different 
> answer to EricS' question. When/if I feel generous to people who talk about 
> the mind and thinking, I liken it to computation, in the trans-computer sense 
> of portability ... the idea that you can run the same computation on 
> different machines. The essentialist tendency, in that seemingly small 
> domain, is well-exhibited by Turing's universal machines and, I think also, 
> the conception that reality is information (another monism, I guess). I even 
> see this in DaveW's attempt to reframe N=1 experimentation (scientific 
> introspection), as an attempt to discover just how *expressive* that 
> computation (someone's mind) can be. It's essentialism because it is a 
> feature of all possible worlds. Even if our universe had no humans or 
> animals, computation is still present. It's the only essence because it's the 
> only feature present in all possible worlds.
> 
> My hitch, which prevents me from authentically playing that game, is that 
> semantics requires full grounding. There is no such thing as pure 
> portability. The same computation *cannot* occur on different machines. At 
> best, you can shoe horn equivalence classes, like "for all intents and 
> purposes, the DaveW computation is similar enough to the EricS computation", 
> whereas "the Scooter computation (my cat's thinking) is similar to the Dorian 
> computation (my other cat's thinking)".
> 
> Of course, this all hinges on some particular, maybe perverse, understanding 
> of "computation". But it's a much more wranglable word than "mind".
> 
> On 2/20/23 04:10, Santafe wrote:
>> So there are things in DaveW’s very helpful post below about which I am 
>> genuinely curious.  My tendency is to analyze them, though I have a certain 
>> habitual fear that asking a question in an analytic mode will come across as 
>> somehow disrespectful, and that is not my intent.
>> The description below sounds to me very much like “essentialism”.  If we 
>> have long human experience that water is wet, and if after many hundreds of 
>> millenia being human (and longer bring primates etc.) we take on some good 
>> reasons to describe water as being made of H2O molecules, the essentialist 
>> habit is to suppose (to take as a philosophical premise?) that there must be 
>> some attribute of wetness about each molecule, which is then amplified when 
>> many such molecules make the bulk that even ordinary people experience as 
>> water.  (One could go on a branch and argue that special people also 
>> experience each individual molecule as itself and can attest to its wetness, 
>> and one could try to push the analogy that far, but I want to focus above on 
>> the essentialist premise as a kind of “mind-set background”.)

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-21 Thread Santafe

Thank you Dave,

It’s helpful to have this comparative analysis, of what different doctrinal 
streams of thought consider central to their system and the worldview (or 
world-experience) it enables in the participants in that system.  

A couple of weeks ago, there was a seminar in Princeton,
https://csr.princeton.edu/events/2023/mind-and-representation-approaches-german-idealist-and-buddhist-philosophies
which one of my colleagues attended was very excited about.

When I ask why, mostly what I get back was along the line of “my tribe isn’t 
being so disrespected by the other”, where “the other” here is various stripes 
of western philosophers, and if I had to give my own name to his tribe, I would 
say something like “religious enthusiasts” though not in a tropey sense; more 
like William James, Bernie MgGinn, 
https://divinity.uchicago.edu/directory/bernard-mcginn
and such.  There is, in it, not only a recurring theme that mysticism really is 
just better than everything else, but also a certain adamance about “the East” 
as developed, and “the West” as somehow heathenish and primitive.  I can’t tell 
how much of that is anchored in the fact that there are much longer and more 
socially embedded traditions across Asia, which have accumulated good things to 
think about, and whether parts of it are a kind of fetishism.  WIthoug 50 years 
(and a motivation to do so) to pursue all this stuff (and probably without 
myself being someone who experiences religious enthusiasms), I will never put 
in the work to be able to have an opinion.  I’m old enough now that I don’t 
have that many years to put into anything new, anyway.

Granting that it is fine for him to be emotionally bouyed that his tribe is no 
longer being disrespected, when I ask “Yes, but why are they your tribe in the 
first place?”, I get back much less about what he may actually have _learned_ 
at such a meeting, as I get back much less of conveyable understanding when I 
ask the question in general.

But there sort of seems to be one claim that maybe I understand, and it would 
be the reason I would have been interested to attend the Princeton thing, had I 
been there, and to listen in even without any expectation that I would have any 
idea what they were saying (not so different from decades of interdisciplinary 
stuff at SFI).  Contrast that with my _not_ being interested to attend a 
convocation of Catholic bishops debating whether they need a more regressive 
Pope the next time.  The assertion would be this: 

It seems quite believable to me that there is some kind of ontology to “being a 
subject”, which is expressed in all our language formulations of subject roles, 
and whatever styles of cognition people have that bring such language and its 
associated patterns of experience into being.  It is not unreasonable to me to 
leave open that people who have spent a long time worrying about this (and not 
really worrying about most mechanistic things, so they have a lot of extra 
time), could have put together something in their systems that would be 
clarifying.  It also seems the default expectation, to me, that it would be 
encoded in culturally-couched formulations that would be completely 
incomprehensible taken as constructs in language conventions outside their own. 
 Like many languages, one would have to get into habits of using it, and live 
in whatever way those habits induce, and then decide what is or is not the 
content or insight.  I always imagine that insight is insight, and that someone 
claiming to have done that should be able to express some of it in 
purpose-generated language for new conversations.  But people have different 
aptitude for doing that, in any area, so maybe the ones I have asked just don’t 
explain things that way.

The handy things about meetings among the insiders is that, if there is at 
least some small difference among them, the exchange can lead to a generative 
conversation.  For an outsider, even if he is not understanding anything (and 
has no illusion that he is understanding), there is at least something to 
witness.  When the exchange reduces to one insider and one outsider, the 
outsider can’t really sustain anything from his side, and the insider is 
reduced to proclaiming.  That probably doesn’t do so much good for anybody.

Eric

> On Feb 20, 2023, at 9:39 AM, Prof David West  wrote:
> 
> Great question, and one that may not be answerable directly. There is 
> definitely a sense of essentialism in some contexts, Shinto for example, and 
> other forms of animism. In Vedic philosophy I am less sure. The origin myth 
> states that Mind (purusa) and Matter (prakrti) were once separate and apart 
> but a cosmic accident caused them to become infused. Mind-Matter, like 
> space-time, is 'one thing' not a combination of two: neither is an attribute 
> of the other.
> 
> Mind-Matter and Karma, Mind-Matter acting in accordance with "propriety" 
> anteceded human beings by eons. "Propriety" in

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-20 Thread Eric Charles

nteracts with the new chatbot thingy, and ends up being stalked
> by it, the bot declaring and persuing his enternal love.  Now, a lot of
> audiobits are spilled on explaining how the bot could have managed such a
> conversation without any body considering the possibility that the techy's
> probing triggered the intervention of some human, and that that human was
> teasing the living shit out of the techy.  A reverse Turing Test?
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Monday, February 20, 2023 8:46 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories
>
>
>
> Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the word
> "dualism", the "psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist. Experience
> monism is a kind of panpsychism. When I asserted that there is something
> that it is like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a difference between
> "psyche" and ... matter or whatever else there may be. I'm asserting that
> whatever it is to be dirt is the *same* as whatever it is to be human.
>
>
>
> By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are
> implicitly asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no
> such difference, in my opinion. Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny
> that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you finally get that
> snap of understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about
> some concept you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The
> shift just feels cognitive, not bodily. But I would maintain my stance that
> this is an abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily details. (The
> illusion is a byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical
> implementations of abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such
> things feel, they aren't. You wouldn't, *could not*, have arrived at that
> state without your body, or if you had a different body.
>
>
>
> Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive
> at a *similar* understanding, but not the same.
>
>
>
> On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:
>
> > On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:
>
> >> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
>
> >
>
> > Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of
> panpsychism entails.
>
> >
>
> > Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on
> everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the
> empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where those
> types of bodies can be found.
>
> >
>
> > You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.
>
> >
>
> > Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
> unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at
> least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do
> mental stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism
> /does/ affect how he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way
> of living in the world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/
> more than just something he says.
>
> >
>
> > Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt
> trampled beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially
> interesting in its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts
> to attribute identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate
> stuff seems directly on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways
> his behaviors change when he becomes engaged in those habits.
>
> >
>
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

[sigh] But the whole point of knowing other people is so that they can make your own
work more efficient or effective. While I appreciate the *citation* of tomes, to some
extent, citation isn't really useful for construction of a concept. It's only useful
for auditing constructs. So, rather than go read the teleodynamics website (or sieve
Sheldrake's spooky action at a distance stuff), I'll ask you to explain *why*
teleodynamics is interesting from a panpsychist stance? (Or to drive my point home
about how useless citations are, how is it related to Biology's First Law
?)

Or, barring that, I'll add it to my (practically) infinite queue of stuff I
should read but probably won't until I have a hook into it. And even if I do
read it, I probably won't understand it.

With the Toribio article, I'm motivated to read it because BC Smith hooked me a
long time ago. But Sheldrake? No way in hell am I going to invest time in that.
Teleodynamics? Well, it's a website. And the website for ninjas is more
interesting: http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm

On 2/20/23 10:10, Steve Smith wrote:

As the discussion evolves:

But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form as a human
body.

I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or "intention" ... or even "acting". It's
more about accumulation and the tendency of cumulative objects to accumulate (and differentiate). Perhaps negentropy is a closer
concept than "interest" or "intention". And, although I disagree that experience monism is more primitive
than panpsychism, I agree that these forms of panpsychism require mechanisms for composition (against which James is famous) and
other structure.

I re-introduce/offer Terrence Deacon's Teleodynamics
which I do not take to be (quite?) as difficult to integrate/think-about asSheldrake's
Morphic Resonance

As with Torebeo's essay on BCS' OOO, Joanna Rączaszek‑Leonardi
reviews
Deacon's How Molecules
Became Signs giving
me a hint of a bridge between the "dualistic" worlds (form V. substance or body V. mind) we
banter about here a lot?

I found EricS's recent response very thought provoking, but every attempt I had to
respond directly felt like more "stirring" so am holding off until/when/if I
might actually be able to add coherent signal to the one I get hints of forming here...

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

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Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-20 Thread Steve Smith



As the discussion evolves:
But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form as 
a human body.


I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or "intention" 
... or even "acting". It's more about accumulation and the tendency of 
cumulative objects to accumulate (and differentiate). Perhaps 
negentropy is a closer concept than "interest" or "intention". And, 
although I disagree that experience monism is more primitive than 
panpsychism, I agree that these forms of panpsychism require 
mechanisms for composition (against which James is famous) and other 
structure.


I re-introduce/offer Terrence Deacon's Teleodynamics 
 which I do not take to be (quite?) as 
difficult to integrate/think-about asSheldrake's Morphic Resonance 



As with Torebeo's essay on BCS' OOO, Joanna Rączaszek‑Leonardi 
reviews 
 
Deacon's How Molecules Became Signs 
 
giving me a hint of a bridge between the "dualistic" worlds (form V. 
substance or body V. mind) we banter about here a lot?


I found EricS's recent response very thought provoking, but every 
attempt I had to respond directly felt like more "stirring" so am 
holding off until/when/if I might actually be able to add coherent 
signal to the one I get hints of forming here...-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

But the bot *does* have a body. It just doesn't take the same form as a human 
body.

I disagree re: panpsychism revolving around "interest" or "intention" ... or even "acting". It's 
more about accumulation and the tendency of cumulative objects to accumulate (and differentiate). Perhaps negentropy is a closer 
concept than "interest" or "intention". And, although I disagree that experience monism is more primitive 
than panpsychism, I agree that these forms of panpsychism require mechanisms for composition (against which James is famous) and 
other structure.

I don't think I'll be able to attend Thursday until/unless I lose my revenue-generating 
gig. We have a standing meeting every other Thursday at 9am PST and many other sporadic 
meetings across Thursday mornings. Thursday seems to be a "nothing else happens that 
day" day. Meetings are universally bad. But they are a sign you're not totally 
irrelevant. 8^D Now, Wednesday? Yeah, I could probably do many Wednesdays.

On 2/20/23 08:44, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:

Glen,

Thank you for writing.  I would take the minimum conditions of pan psychism to be that 
every object (i.e., every thing to which a noun may be applied) has interests and acts in 
accordance with those interests.  From the point of view of the "experience 
monist" (wtf) , panpsychism is an empirical assertion that needs to be explored in 
the usual way: by diligent observation and careful delineation of terms.

"Experience Monism" is itself a much more primitive position, so primitive that 
my former student, now mentor, Eric Charles doubts that it is worth asserting.  It 
asserts only that experience is all we have and that, to the extent that we talk of 
events beyond experience, we are, in fact, talking about structures in experience.  Thus, 
when we assert that something is real or true, we are obligated to describe the 
properties of that experience, the experience of realness or truthity.

Is it true that dirt has interests and acts in accordance with them?  Maybe.  
We'ld have to see. If not, though, there are many quasi telic process in nature 
that raise that sort of question.  My favorite is the manner in which an icy 
puddle defends 32 degrees as its temperature.  Does a n icy puddle have an 
interest in remaining close to 32 degrees?

It would be great if you could "stop by" some Thursday morning   I miss your 
regular input. Much tho it drives me nuts.

By the way, there was a podcast called Hard Fork, I believe, in which a techy 
type interacts with the new chatbot thingy, and ends up being stalked by it, 
the bot declaring and persuing his enternal love.  Now, a lot of audiobits are 
spilled on explaining how the bot could have managed such a conversation 
without any body considering the possibility that the techy's probing triggered 
the intervention of some human, and that that human was teasing the living shit 
out of the techy.  A reverse Turing Test?

Nick

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2023 8:46 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the word "dualism", the 
"psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist. Experience monism is a kind of panpsychism. When I 
asserted that there is something that it is like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a difference between 
"psyche" and ... matter or whatever else there may be. I'm asserting that whatever it is to be dirt 
is the *same* as whatever it is to be human.

By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are implicitly 
asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no such difference, in my opinion. 
Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you 
finally get that snap of understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about some 
concept you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels cognitive, not 
bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily 
details. (The illusion is a byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations 
of abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, they aren't. You wouldn't, 
*could not*, have arrived at that state without your body, or if you had a different body.

Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at a 
*similar* understanding, but not the same.

On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:

 > On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:

 >> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.

 >

 > Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism 
entails.

 >

 > Given that I don't believe

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-20 Thread thompnickson2

Glen, 

Thank you for writing.  I would take the minimum conditions of pan psychism to 
be that every object (i.e., every thing to which a noun may be applied) has 
interests and acts in accordance with those interests.  >From the point of view 
of the "experience monist" (wtf) , panpsychism is an empirical assertion that 
needs to be explored in the usual way: by diligent observation and careful 
delineation of terms.  

"Experience Monism" is itself a much more primitive position, so primitive that 
my former student, now mentor, Eric Charles doubts that it is worth asserting.  
It asserts only that experience is all we have and that, to the extent that we 
talk of events beyond experience, we are, in fact, talking about structures in 
experience.  Thus, when we assert that something is real or true, we are 
obligated to describe the properties of that experience, the experience of 
realness or truthity.  

Is it true that dirt has interests and acts in accordance with them?  Maybe.  
We'ld have to see. If not, though, there are many quasi telic process in nature 
that raise that sort of question.  My favorite is the manner in which an icy 
puddle defends 32 degrees as its temperature.  Does a n icy puddle have an 
interest in remaining close to 32 degrees?

It would be great if you could "stop by" some Thursday morning   I miss your 
regular input. Much tho it drives me nuts.  

By the way, there was a podcast called Hard Fork, I believe, in which a techy 
type interacts with the new chatbot thingy, and ends up being stalked by it, 
the bot declaring and persuing his enternal love.  Now, a lot of audiobits are 
spilled on explaining how the bot could have managed such a conversation 
without any body considering the possibility that the techy's probing triggered 
the intervention of some human, and that that human was teasing the living shit 
out of the techy.  A reverse Turing Test? 

Nick

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2023 8:46 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the word 
"dualism", the "psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist. Experience monism 
is a kind of panpsychism. When I asserted that there is something that it is 
like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a difference between "psyche" and 
... matter or whatever else there may be. I'm asserting that whatever it is to 
be dirt is the *same* as whatever it is to be human.

By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are implicitly 
asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no such 
difference, in my opinion. Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny that 
people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you finally get that snap of 
understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about some concept 
you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels 
cognitive, not bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an 
abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily details. (The illusion is a 
byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations of 
abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, they 
aren't. You wouldn't, *could not*, have arrived at that state without your 
body, or if you had a different body.

Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at a 
*similar* understanding, but not the same.

On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:

> On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:

>> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.

> 

> Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism 
> entails.

> 

> Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on 
> everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the 
> empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where those types 
> of bodies can be found.

> 

> You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.

> 

> Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West, 
> unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at 
> least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do mental 
> stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ affect how 
> he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of living in the 
> world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just 
> something he says.

> 

> Steve's discussion about what it would feel li

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories


That's unfortunate. I'm trying to say that any 1 thing has nothing in common with any other thing. 
But we shouldn't be too hard on people who are tricked by abstraction into believing in nonsense 
like "communication" or "morphic resonance". But maybe I'm not as familiar with 
Sheldrake's other ideas beneath the paranormal stuff?

On 2/20/23 08:11, Prof David West wrote:

I am hearing echoes of Rubert Sheldrake in your last sentence

davew


On Mon, Feb 20, 2023, at 8:46 AM, glen wrote:

Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the
word "dualism", the "psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist.
Experience monism is a kind of panpsychism. When I asserted that there
is something that it is like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a
difference between "psyche" and ... matter or whatever else there may
be. I'm asserting that whatever it is to be dirt is the *same* as
whatever it is to be human.

By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are
implicitly asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There
is no such difference, in my opinion. Now, while I am often a moron, I
don't deny that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you
finally get that snap of understanding while running, or taking a
shower or whatever, about some concept you've been working on, it
*feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels cognitive, not
bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an abstraction, a
sloughing off of the bodily details. (The illusion is a byproduct of
focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations of
abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel,
they aren't. You wouldn't, *could not*, have arrived at that state
without your body, or if you had a different body.

Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could
arrive at a *similar* understanding, but not the same.

On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:

On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:

I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.


Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism 
entails.

Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on everything you do being 
"body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the empirical question of what types of bodies 
do "psyche", and where those types of bodies can be found.

You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.

Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West, 
unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at 
least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do mental 
stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ affect how 
he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of living in the 
world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just 
something he says.

Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt trampled 
beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially interesting in 
its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts to attribute 
identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate stuff seems directly 
on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways his behaviors change when 
he becomes engaged in those habits.




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Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

2023-02-20 Thread Prof David West

I am hearing echoes of Rubert Sheldrake in your last sentence

davew


On Mon, Feb 20, 2023, at 8:46 AM, glen wrote:
> Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the 
> word "dualism", the "psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist. 
> Experience monism is a kind of panpsychism. When I asserted that there 
> is something that it is like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a 
> difference between "psyche" and ... matter or whatever else there may 
> be. I'm asserting that whatever it is to be dirt is the *same* as 
> whatever it is to be human.
>
> By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are 
> implicitly asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There 
> is no such difference, in my opinion. Now, while I am often a moron, I 
> don't deny that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you 
> finally get that snap of understanding while running, or taking a 
> shower or whatever, about some concept you've been working on, it 
> *feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels cognitive, not 
> bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an abstraction, a 
> sloughing off of the bodily details. (The illusion is a byproduct of 
> focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations of 
> abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, 
> they aren't. You wouldn't, *could not*, have arrived at that state 
> without your body, or if you had a different body.
>
> Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could 
> arrive at a *similar* understanding, but not the same.
>
> On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:
>> On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:
>>> I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
>> 
>> Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism 
>> entails.
>> 
>> Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on 
>> everything you do being "body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the 
>> empirical question of what types of bodies do "psyche", and where those 
>> types of bodies can be found.
>> 
>> You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.
>> 
>> Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West, 
>> unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at 
>> least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do 
>> mental stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ 
>> affect how he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of 
>> living in the world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more 
>> than just something he says.
>> 
>> Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt 
>> trampled beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially 
>> interesting in its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts 
>> to attribute identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate 
>> stuff seems directly on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways his 
>> behaviors change when he becomes engaged in those habits.
>> 
>> 
>
> -- 
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>
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Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories

Despite the ambiguity both Nick and DaveW rely on when they use the word "dualism", the
"psyche" in panpsychism need not be dualist. Experience monism is a kind of panpsychism. When I
asserted that there is something that it is like to be dirt, I'm not implying there is a difference between
"psyche" and ... matter or whatever else there may be. I'm asserting that whatever it is to be dirt
is the *same* as whatever it is to be human.

Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at a
*similar* understanding, but not the same.

On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:

On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:

I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.

Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism
entails.

Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on everything you do being
"body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the empirical question of what types of bodies
do "psyche", and where those types of bodies can be found.

You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.

Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at
least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do mental
stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ affect how
he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of living in the
world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just
something he says.

Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt trampled
beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially interesting in
its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts to attribute
identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate stuff seems directly
on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways his behaviors change when
he becomes engaged in those habits.

--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ

Re: [FRIAM] Nick's Categories