DishBrain and the free energy principle in Neuron
Brain cells in a lab dish learn to play Pong and offer a window onto intelligence https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/10/14/1128875298/brain-cells-neurons-learn-video-game-pong?sc=18&f=1128875298
Comments (86)
For a start, the brain cells did not "learn to play pong", they just avoided "a chaotic stream of white noise". It was the experimenters who turned this into a game. That is, the dishbrain had no intent to play pong.
And is it a sign of my age, that I laughed at the need to explain to the reader how to play pong?
Same thing. (insert appropriate smiley)
Still, not bad for @apokrisis, @Isaac, and anyone else in the free energy camp.
Indeed. Wait and see...
I did have a little wow! moment when I heard about this. 'A mini brain,' yep, things continue to get more and more interesting in science. If a mini brain can make decisions enough to be able to position the line (bat) to deflect the white dot on the screen, then surely a mini brain would be a good candidate to win as the republican party nominee for the next president of the United States, as a valid alternative to the micro brain currently called DJ Trump.
I missed this yesterday.
Yes, I saw this in preprint some months ago (last year even, I think). I forgot all about it and here it is in full published majesty. It's a good piece of work.
Much misinterpreted already, and it's only been published for a few days, but, that's neuroscience...
The dishbrain was not a simulation (or even an approximation) of what the actual brain does when you learn to play pong, although the article might suggest that. Is this your objection?
Dishbrain. That should be a good insult - it's all the better for its obscurity.
It is a point of interest how much you can do with a preference for order and predictability any order, however arbitrary.
Sellars has that just-so story in "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" in which he derives the idea of natural law from the observation that some of the persons in nature (old man river, old man mountain, that sort of thing) are set in their ways, the way people get, and thus predictable, the way some people are. (Big Lake is freezing over again, like he always does this time of year.) He suggests we recognized the efficacy of habit first and derived the idea of mechanical determination from that. (A sort of corollary to the 'theory' that we derive the idea of force from our own efficacious action.)
DishBrain is able to identify habits or tendencies in the "ball" and to develop matching habits or tendencies or propensities. For what purpose? In an earlier age, we might have heard this described as a manifestation of the death drive, the will to become mechanical, but maybe Freud was on the right track in seeing life as paradoxically trying always to reduce irritation and excitation, or to predict it well enough that it ceases to be experienced as surprise. (See, @Isaac, I do listen. Did you know you're a closet Freudian?)
I didn't. I shall seek a cure immediately.
No, I was thinking more of the Chinese Room and extended cognition. In order to play pong the dishbrain had to be wired up to a screen that did a fair amount of interpretation for the neural signals to play pong.
Trump as the political incarnation of free energy.
For us, children of the scientific revolution, such anthropomorphic inversion would seem odd: we expect simple natural systems to exhibit simpler and more consistent regularities than human minds. And yet, this just-so-story has a ring of... plausibility to it.
Trump would baulk at all definitions or concepts of the word 'free.'
Trump as a smaller brain than a mini brain, satisfies me more, than your comparison with what random energy may manifest into, if given enough time and interactions with the nuances of current USA politics.
The question is whether it might be possible to say that the brain cells were forming intentions of any sort.
The brain cells avoiding a stream of white noise is reminiscent of the description of Skinners
rats as avoiding aversive stimulation. While
one can employ a reductive s-r level of explanation in the the case of Skinners animals, it is now assumed that much more is going on in between stimulus and response in animal reinforcement. The same may be the case with the dishbrain.
Well, the real brain is also "wired up" to the screen - just not in the same manner. But that doesn't even begin to describe the differences between the two cases.
The dish brain experiment was meant to isolate one basic mechanism of brain function - it wasn't meant to simulate the entire complexity of the brain, nor even that minuscule part of it that would be called upon to play Pong.
Freuds understanding of life drew inspiration in part from physical models ( hydraulics, etc) in which equilibrium is static , and change within a psychic system requires an extraneous source of motivation in the form of the push or pull of instinctive drive.
In contrast, contemporary dynamical systems and autopoietic approaches assume that equilibration is not driven toward static balance but a dynamical tension characterized by incessant activity and change. That is, equilibration tends in the direction of an increasingly active, increasingly organized organism, rather than a drive toward mechanical equilibrium ( the death drive).
Part of the logical difficulty with Skinner's approach was that what was considered an averse stimulation was no more than that which the organism avoided. The explanation of Dishbrain's behaviour in terms of free energy doesn't suffer a similar circularity. Dishbrain just grows in the laziest way possible.
My point is that explanations in terms of intent do not apply to dishbrain. Talk of intent is part of a different language game.
(There are often odd carriage returns in your posts; just mentioning it in case you were not aware. Presumably your device or browser?)
Quoting Banno
I dont understand the function of intent in living systems the way that eliminativists like Dennett do. In their language game intent is reduced to a glorified form of s-r, the combined behavior of numerous dumb bits. Placing living neurons in a dish is a whole new ball game in comparison with silicon chips. We can try to force what is taking place in the dishbrain into the strictures of computational patterns of 0s and 1s or some such thing, but I think this misses much of what is most interesting about self-organization in even the simplest living systems.
Quoting Banno
Nope, a combination of fat fingers on an iphone touch keyboard and the fact that I compose most of my comments while hiking in the woods.
Keep hiking. We can put up with the odd returns.
What's missing is the intent to make some actual change in the world.
A biosemiotic view of Dishbrain, and predictive coding in general, is that it is meaningless unless it is driving some pragamatically useful result for the organism.
The wee beastie has to be rewarded by being fed and sustained, not simply by being assaulted by "a nicely organized" burst of electrical activity, rather than "a chaotic stream of white noise", if it "got it right".
So biological realism would involve the 800k cell Hebbian network being in control of its environment in some self-sustaining and homeostatically-bounded fashion.
It's intent would be to live. It would be modelling the world for a reason.
:up:
I see. Static bad; dynamic good.
Serves me right for needlessly poking Isaac.
I'm not convinced that a thermostat intends to keep the temperature stable. Nor that a virus intends to reproduce. My suspicion is that for some act to count as intentional, the organism might in some sense have done otherwise.
Consider Anscombe's two lists, both of the very same items, but one a receipt printed by the register after your purchases, the other the list you brought with you to remind yourself of what you wanted to purchase. Which is intentional? The shopping list clearly satisfies the intent to make some change in the world, but in addition there are ways it might have been otherwise that do not apply to the receipt.
You sound a little vague and uncertain about borderline cases. And the fact that you can't simply deny intent is support for my position.
Quoting Banno
Yep. It's all about the growth of reasonableness. Intent is the development of counterfactuality.
It can start off simple. A bacterium swims purposefully down a chemical gradient in pursuit of a food concentration by twirling its flagella in one direction so that they entangle and propel it in a straight line. But when they lose the scent, they instead flip the switch to spin them the other way. The flagella untangle and the bacterium tumbles randomly, until a new chemical gradient is discovered.
Quoting Banno
Let's not waste time with irrelevancies if the subject is what "intent" means to the biologist or neurobiologist.
Biosemiosis recognises grades of intent such that we have teleomaty, or material tendencies; teleonomy, or biological functions; and teleology, or organismic purposes.
Again, what is key is that any notion of intent is clearly tied to its pragmatic utility. Choices get made that change the world to organismic advantage.
And the beauty of the free energy framing of the issues is that it places this counterfactuality in the context of homeostasis.
The fulfilled or unfilled intent is not the primary thing. The first task is to strike the dynamical balance where no specific intent is felt because all typical desires are being smoothly met. Sources of dissatisfaction can then be felt as problems with that smooth homeostatic flow.
So in leaping to Anscombe, you would be just importing a bunch of unexamined thought habits into this neurobiological discussion.
Although that might serve to restore your own sense of homeostatic rightness about the world.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Banno
Im sympathetic to the idea that a brain in a dish is too close to the idea of a brain in a vat for it to qualify as having intentionality in the same sense as a natural organism. But can we rule out the idea there is in some sense a structural coupling taking place between the dish brain and the environmental stimuli that the experimenters have drummed up? More importantly, could these cells be creating a primitive form of normative pattern of functioning , a kind of anticipation,
via this coupling? If so, then the pragmatic usefulness of the dishbrains behaviors is driven by its striving to maintain a patterned self-consistency.
But what purpose does this coupling serve? Is it a striving to avoid the white noise as an aversive stimulus or negative reinforcer?
Where did such a preference come from? It can only be a relic from the genetic bauplan of what makes a neuron useful in an actual embodied relation with its world.
If we are to dissect intent, then we must remain sensitive to its proper semiotic definition.
More starting from, than leaping too. If the biologist's use of "intent' does not match the philosophers, then perhaps they are talking about something quite different
The borderline cases are the interesting ones. It won't do to just assume a linear progression from dishbrains to shopping lists. There's too much that might be lost in the detail.
Again, it seems there is more to intent than just use. A thermostat uses a heat pump to maintain the temperature, but it doesn't intend to do so.
Quoting Joshs
This is not dissimilar to the whole system response to Searle's Chinese Room - it's the whole room, book and all, that understands Chinese, not just the fellow implementing the program; and so arguably it is the whole experiment that has the intent. But then again, perhaps the intent has its origin in the folk who designed the experiment.
But to my eye the question is, if we choose to say that the dishbrain intends to move the paddle to stop the ball, have we extended the use of "intend" too far? So far that we have lost some worthwhile distinctions. For instance, we commonly only attribute culpability in cases of acting intentional - is the dishbrain now culpable for any negative consequences of its intent?
Isn't the language around intent distinct to that around use, including, as Josh says, normative features?
Sure. You can go off and do your own thing. But why start from a neurobiological example that speaks to natural philosophy and its ontology of the organismic?
Especially if you eventually want to found your own philosophical useage in biological realism rather than whatever. An ontology of the world as a set of atomic facts or medium sized dry goods. That kind of AP world made safe for predicate logic.
What you denigrate as Quoting apokrisis is the bread and butter of intentionality.
A shame, since the conversation was almost interesting.
1. It learned (to play Pong).
2. The brain seems reducible to electrochemistry (chemical-based electricity i.e. the brain is fundamentally electronic). Frankenstein's the wretch!
:yawn:
One thing the pop article made me wonder about was the notion of coherent/white-noise in relation to a dishbrain. The technical side going on in this set of sentences:
is where the meat of the argument would be. "That information and we allowed it to...", "sent signals indicating", and "chaotic/organized electrical activity" -- in some way I wonder if it'd been any different if the dishpan was hooked up to a series of lights and if the experimenter had just shocked the cells or anytime it guessed the wrong light -- but there's a lot of intentional conduct being implemented by the experimenters, and I wouldn't know how to tell if it's the cells in the dish-brain or the cells in the bone-pan that's making the inferences.
These sorts of experiments have already been done long ago. Neuronal networks don't seem to care if they're electrocuted, burnt, stamped on or otherwise 'punished' (this is not strictly true, but it sounded better rhetorically). The point about the noise wasn't to provide some form of negative feedback (picking white noise at random), it was to prove that unpredictable feedback was indeed a negative feedback constraint (as opposed to, say dopamine circuits in a larger cortex).
The playing of Pong was the trivial part of the experiment (though important to the demonstration of the set up), the important bit was that the cells avoided uncertainty (noise) even at a level of network complexity so low that other feedback systems, such as neurotransmitter availability, are still miles away.
It demonstrates Friston's model because uncertainty avoidance has been shown to be capable of driving feedback, and as such other forms of feedback seem more like multipliers than drivers (which is what Friston's model would predict).
But there is no evidence that the universe itself had any intent in the forming of sentient life. It happened because it could happen. The mini brain was created from human intent.
Quoting Banno
Do you not think that intention requires the system to be self-aware and be able to 'judge' based on phenomena such as instinct, rather than simply choose from a list of alternate actions based on a conditional input?
The organic computer combined with the quantum computer will I think become very important to the future direction transhumanism may take.
heh, yeah, glad I just asked :D.
So no instant-karate-brain-chips in the next year or so, I suppose, but one step closer to the cyberpunk future.
I would be comfortable in saying that if what the dish-brain is doing is generalizing from particular events, and thus using memory to anticipate for the sake of maintaining normative directions ( the norm being whatever consistency of coordinated neural activity is repeating itself ), then this represents a primitive form of intending. I am defining organismic intention here as a responsiveness to its environment involving capacity to discriminate and respond flexibly and appropriately to aspects of its circumstances that matter to its self-maintenance.
When you ask where the dish-brains preferring to avoid white noise comes from, might we not distinguish between a specific and general source of motivation? In the most specific sense, motivation is tied to pre-determined sensitivities to environmental features , as well as a pre-determined capacities to act on those features. As a result the world looks and matters very differently to a bacterium or an ant or a human. The particularities of preference come from these unique capacities to sense and respond, but in a more general sense preference is always for the sake of the continuation of whatever coupled system of organism-world interactions is repeating itself as a normed process.
So specific preference is dictated by direction of sensory-motor use, and use , beyond specific goals , is in the service of the preservation of self-consistency of change in the face of potential interruptions and perturbations. I dont think the striving for self-consistency needs a genetic bauplan of what makes a neuron useful in an actual embodied relation with its world. Rather, self-consistency is what Piaget called the most general organizing principle of life.
A thought experiment, if you will. Suppose Fred trains dishbrain to recognise the face of someone he wishes to be rid of. Further he links dishbrain to a gun and trains it to target and shoot - a step not too far from playing pong.
Now if we are to say that in some small degree, dishbrain intends to shoot, are we to also say that dishbrain is to some extent culpable? Is dishbrain an accomplice to Fred's plot?
I think that stretches credulity. I think it worth recognising a difference between our language around cause and effect and our language around intent and responsibility.
Hence my preference for something along the lines of anomalous monism, in which our intentions are not reducible in any direct way to physical states.
@Isaac? Any thoughts?
(Again, my complaint is not against the experiment, but the way in which it is reported as "teaching a dishbrain to play pong", with all the intentional implications thereof.).
Doesnt fly. Old hat.
Biosemiosis fixes things by showing why life and mind are based on this epistemic cut. We now have a testable theory of the modelling relation that accounts for how it works, whether we are talking semiotic codes at the level of genes, neurons, words or numbers. Intentionality can be understood genetically, neurally, verbally and numerically.
No point trying to breath life into ancient history. :grin:
I commend Mary Midgley to you, as antithetical to your scientism. Challenge yourself.
...says the guy who never does...
Is it "accounts for ..." or is it "may be able to account for ..."?
You and @Joshs (but @Isaac I think to a lesser degree) are always talking as if this is all a done deal, as if all we needed was the theory, as if having a theory you can imagine testing is the same as testing and confirming it, as if saying you could in principle fill in the details of an account is the same as actually filling in those details rather than the giant IOU it actually is.
All well and good if you're laying the groundwork for a research program, but am I wrong to think there's rather little in the way of observation to support all this theory? I'm not denying the elegance of the theory, or at least the bit of it I understand, but does it have anywhere near the body of support that, say, QM or evolution by natural selection has?
To be clear: not critiquing whatever science there is here, which you are vastly more competent to judge than I am. I am questioning whether you are in so secure a position that you are entitled to be as dismissive of doubt as you generally are. Insofar as people ask questions in order to better understand what you're pitching, of course you should be answering, 'yeah that's it' and 'no that's way off' you're the world's leading authority on your own position.
But this forum is not exclusively dedicated to your views, so insofar as you or @Joshs answer the sorts of questions philosophers talk about with "Shiny new theory says X" without assuring us that shiny new theory has much claim to truth, why should we listen to you? You guys have preferences among theories, good for you; let us know when you have overwhelming evidence.
Yes, you are being challenged to challenge precisely this. So tell me, how does biosemiosis fail the task? What does it lack or overlook exactly?
If Dishbrain is meant to be a test of the Bayesian Brain approach, then at least the "philosophical" reaction ought to take its modelling relation thesis seriously and not just wander off into the thickets of yesteryear's armchair AP musings.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Spectacularly. You are talking about what has arisen in first theoretical biology, and now theoretical neuroscience, as a meta-theory.
As I have said often enough, biosemiosis as "the mechanism" of bios life and mind has really hit pay-dirt now that we have the tools to see what is happening down at the nanoscale of the body and brain's molecular machines.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/68661
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But how can you assess the evidence if you haven't understood the paradigm shift?
Wouldn't dream of it. I'm not competent to.
But if, on my next day off, I wandered over to the Life Sciences building at the local state university, and asked everyone I met there about biosemiosis and Friston and Salthe and all the rest, they would all assure me that it is universally accepted except perhaps for a handful of dinosaurs on the verge of retirement and as well-supported as, say, evolution.
Is that what you're telling me?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Metatheories dont have to invalidate each other. Biosemiotics ties together the physical, biological and psychological on the basis of a unified overarching scheme that doesnt so much contradict rival approaches as attempt a grand synthesis that it hasnt occurred to others to try before ( that is, not before Peirce, Piaget and a handful of others). I think what the profs at your local state university will say about Friston and biosemiotics is that in every era of science there emerges a certain network of powerful organizing ideas that inspire, in different ways , a young generation of researchers in a variety of fields, regardless of whether they embrace every aspect of these frameworks. This is the role that free energy and biosemiotics is playing today in interdisciplinary work across the spectrum of biological and neuropsychological theorizing. (I could add enactivism to this list). Its not a question of such ideas simply being proved or discarded. They are more formidable than that. In some form or another they will remain with us, and even when they give way to a new set of motivating assumptions, their role in making the next steps in thinking possible will be evident.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Many competing theories can justifiably claim empirical validity and truth. Each can have evidence supporting it. It is thus not simply a question of whether one metatheory is more true than another but whether one is true in a more useful way relative to certain aims and problems. You would have have a hard time finding a theoretical biologist or neuroscientist denying that biosemotics or free energy are devoid of evidence. Your preference must be made on the basis of whether the conceptual shift required to make the evidence supporting these ideas attractive is one you are willing or able to make.
Of course not. That would be like asking house painters what they thought about abstract expressionism.
The meta-theory of the biological and neurological sciences is still deeply reductionist. Especially where it is dominated by medical and pharmaceutical funding.
You would have to strike on folk who indeed research at the meta-theoretical and inter-disciplinary level like the Salthes and Fristons of this world.
That is why this is as much about metaphysics as physics. What is Friston saying when he claims to have created Bayesian mechanics as a new branch of physics? What is Salthe saying when he rejects Darwinian evolution?
You are talking about the tiny few who are seeking to shift paradigms rather than the vast majority who simply hope to assimilate more facts to the prevailing theoretical structure.
Like me, you would have to seek the right people out. This isn't about a weight of evidence. It is about a willingness to stand apart from the herd.
Salthe paid the price career-wise for being too openly metaphysical. Friston stuck closely to the mathematical route and has been rewarded. He only started to make his bold claims a couple of years ago. And he couches them in terms of engineering. Society is going to get paid in terms of technological results as DishBrain is trying to sell.
Even in science, there are strong constraints on what you are allowed to believe. And the money is in the reductionism that produces the machines.
So if your local life sciences department is in general anti-reductionist, then something very weird is going on there.
Thank you both for forthright answers.
@Joshs, your describe something that sounds like a research program a la Lakatos, which seems pretty reasonable. My grasp of the philosophy of science is just strong enough to find that plausible but not strong enough to quibble. I do wonder though, whether we are the right audience for your cheerleading, not being scientists who may do research developed around the core of your suggested program. Why us?
I don't know what you're describing, @apokrisis, but it sounds somewhat more I'm not sure how to put this messianic.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm sure this is meant to suggest what we benighted AP folks call a "category mistake," but it sounds a lot like contempt.
Quoting apokrisis
At least there is, it seems to me, a natural audience for what Josh has to say; it's just not us. You, on the other hand, are a voice crying in the wilderness. No point talking to the herd; they won't listen and wouldn't understand if they did. So why us?
I'll take obscure 80s crime flicks over Freud.
Quoting Moliere
No, but they might progress to pac-man.
I agree with the anomalous monism, but I think where I might be slightly more sympathetic to @Joshs's position is that, if I've understood it correctly, anomalous monism allows for this overlapping layer of language (and associated consents) measured by felicitous usage rather than correspondence with some physical description of the world. Here your quibble about 'intent' as used in law is valid as it doesn't matter one jot what the neurons of the defendant are doing, it matters only what the defendant, as a person, is doing.
My counter-quibble is that sometimes it does matter what the neurons of the defendant are doing, cases have bee acquitted on grounds of mental incapacity and the expert witnesses in those cases are often neuroscientists attesting to exactly the kind of reductionism about intent that Dishbrain is the extreme end of "He cannot have intended to murder X because the neurons forming that intent were disrupted in their activities by a tumour".
So there is, I think, an uncomfortable leak in the otherwise watertight irreducibility of our terms like 'intent'. What to do about that leak, I don't know, but I think those acquitted of crimes they had no 'intention' of committing are probably grateful for it.
As to Dishbrain, I'm personally quite comfortable in saying that it didn't intend to play Pong, having no concept of 'playing Pong' toward which to direct its actions.
For me, the idea of Dishbrain 'intending' to avoid uncertainty is the exact opposite of what the experiment shows (and what Friston predicted). The experiment, insofar as it supports the free energy principle, demonstrates that it is a physical necessity that self organising systems such as a cortex of neurons will act on the world to avoid uncertainty. That's the beauty of the theory, they can't not (and remain self-organised). I don't think such a physical necessity matches they way we normally use 'intent'. It might show that there's no physical basis behind our word at all, but that's fine, I don't see there needs to be.
Neuroscience is oddly divided, in my experience. If you did take such a survey, you wouldn't so much get a dozen different meta-theories as you'd get one or two meta-theories and 90% shrugs, or a muttered "we poke X, Y happens - we're now developing a drug to poke X".
Neuroscience can be incredibly, frustratingly mechanistic. Mainly, to be fair, because the brain is so fiendishly complicated that trying to distil it into any kind of meta-theory is a nightmare whereas treating it like a mechanical 'black box' can yield a surprising amount of well-cited papers along the "we poked X and Y happened" lines.
As to the 10% remaining (probably less, to be honest) - would they all agree with Friston? Well, in my experience (which is limited to a couple of British Universities and the journals I read, so not representative), there'd be little disagreement about the fundamentals such as the basics of predictive modelling in general. The hierarchy of ascending cortices Friston uses is disputed - some take a more multiple equal processing approach. The degree to which cellular-level uncertainty avoidance manifests in behaviour is often swamped, not by competing meta-theories, but by a 60 year-old obsession with the role of neurotransmitters in affect (low on Serotonin, anyone?). So I think basically you'd get little disagreement at the neural network level, but a lot of muddy water when extrapolating out into behaviour. Once the super-stardom of neurotransmitters fades, I think we'll see support more in line with the bigger theories, but it's like convincing music aficionados that other bands are at least as good as the Beatles. Hard work.
One of the aspects fo the free energy principle that's often misunderstood is that it describes the consequences of self-organisation as much as it models reality. As such, although there are predictions and experiments such as this one to support them, there is also a big chunk of the theory that simply not disputable - not because of the weight of evidence, but because, like mathematics, it's just re-arranged the equations to say something interesting. You can dispute that it's interesting, but you can't dispute that that if Y=X then also X=Y, if you see what I mean. Friston's basic free energy gradient equations are just re-arrangements for Bayesian optimisation of entropy gradient climbing expressions. It's more a description of what it means to avoid entropy (remain organised) than a modelling assumption, in that sense.
:cool:
That sounds plausible. Also wouldn't be surprising if the role of neurotransmitters was overestimated because we got to them first, because there were tractable problems about their role we were able to address before we could make any headway on neuronal networks. That means there will be a step coming at which neurotransmitters will likely be given too steep a discount, before the pendulum swings back to finding a harder-to-reach role for them.
This is all just science journalism though. One thing I always have in the back of my mind is that science can cheerfully proceed this way, iterating and refining, and at multiple levels individual experiments can be repeated but done better, theories can be replaced by other theories within the same program or paradigm, programs and paradigms can be replaced by others. The latter shifts can be difficult to explain, but should engender, always, more and better science. A scientist can expect her field to move over the course of a career, and must expect to say, "When I was in grad school thirty years ago, we all thought ..., but now ..." Philosophy moves, but not quite like this. For what sorts of values for X would a philosopher say, if X, then we'll all have to start thinking about Y differently? It happens, but much less often, so there must be a different mechanism here. (Assuming it's something besides fashion.)
Quoting Isaac
Right, and that has to do with interpretation, but this is so complicated, because there's science-engendering generality and interpretation, and there's public-facing, also general (at least because detail-poor) interpretation, which is in some ways close to application. Scientists who can be very clear about 'what this means' for the field, can be very wrong about 'what this means' for non-scientific purposes. Down in the valley of the nitty-gritty, the generality of the program is still a constraint, but non-scientific generality is worse than useless; in philosophy, those two sorts of generality should be nearly the same (because of "saving the appearances"), and when they aren't philosophers say the same sorts of things scientists say: you think you have knowledge but here's what's really happening when you think you know something (philosophy); you think you see things but here's what's really happening when you think you see something (science).
Quoting Isaac
And maybe in that sense no more than a reworking of Kant, who knew enough to expect the subject of knowledge to have a sensorium, but not enough to expect the subject of knowledge to be self-organizing, with all that entails. Such an enriched Kantianism might be interesting, but it's not really comparable to the original. You could as well say that the subject of knowledge must have arisen through evolution by natural selection.
It's just not at all clear and @apokrisis is right about this at what point we are really passing from a priori to a posteriori. Kant's conditionals are supposed to be awfully strict, meaning they are intended to rely to the greatest extent possible only on logic and not on how the physical world happens to be.
Point being, it is interesting to know how an organism might acquire knowledge, not least because we are organisms. It is less clear that only an organism can be the subject of knowledge, but if you're a biologist that's exactly what you're going to assume because you only study the natural world, not the possible world. Kant's concern was knowledge, not the knowledge of organisms.
But there is this grey zone, and I take it this is where apo's grand synthesis lives, in which we consider what a possible natural world could be, and that means, to begin with, showing that the actual natural world can be described without remainder as such a world. It's just not clear to me what else this is: it's definitely not science, because you can only do science with the actual natural world [hide="*"](@Andrew M "Unperformed experiments have no results.")[/hide], and this level of generality is somewhere above what usually defines a research program; but it's not just interpretation either because there's more here than the science of the actual natural world.
Well put. His achievement is to take the general prediction-based view of brain processing and turn it into differential equations. So he gives a mathematical basis that offers some unity to the field.
Outside of neuroscience, the view had taken hold that the brain must be some kind of input-output, data-crunching, computer. The mathematical basis was Turing Universal Computation. The metaphysics was homuncular Cartesian representationalism. Philosophy of mind was in love with the modular cognitive science model.
But Friston offers a maths more suited to the actual neurobiology of the brain as a model of its environment that acts to predict its inputs. This is the metaphysics of Peircean semiotics or Rosens modelling relation. And it fits the general enactive or embodied turn of cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind.
Mind science was tracking down this road since Helmholtz until the computer revolution derailed it in the 1950s. A new mechanistic paradigm was forced on to it. And now it has returned to that more naturalistic paradigm.
I dont know that mind science had much of a chance between Helmholz and the rise of embodied approaches in the 1990s. After turning its back on James, it quickly embraced positivist behaviorism. It took the computer revolution, along with Chomsky , Shannon and Bruner , to make talk of internal intervening variables acceptable again. Mind science had to wait another 40 years to free itself from its rationalist bias of first-generation cognitivism.
The deep paradigm shift is from reductionism to holism.
A mechanistic and atomistic view of the world is that it is composed of stable bits of stuff. It is constructed bottom up and complexity emerges as a property at a higher level.
The rival view is that the world is fundamentally a state of instability that then gets organised by the emergence of top-down constraints. It is order out of chaos.
This systems science metaphysics has been around since philosophy began anywhere, and Aristotles hylomorphism is the usual cite. But Peirce gives us a view rooted in logic itself. He achieved the trick of unifying epistemology with ontology and so vaults us way past Kant.
So my grand synthesis indeed connects everything in this Peircean pattern.
You have what we believe about causation itself. An organismic causation replaces the more usual mechanistic one. The world does not begin in a state of atomistic fixity. It begins in a state of pure fluctuating uncertainty - a vagueness or quantum foam.
That is pansemiosis. It sounds remarkably like quantum field theory or ontic structural realism. Somethingness emerges via a self-limiting constraint on everythingness.
Then the new thing is biosemiosis. Now we find that life and mind are not mechanical constructions but systems of semiotic constraint. Codes can stabilise the instabilities of metabolisms and unlock entropy gradients.
Life and mind dont require a stable world to thrive. They instead exist by seeking out criticality - the edge of chaos - because where the world is at its most tippable, that is where being a system which has a memory has the greatest advantage. Instability is the power source that the encoded information of biology harnesses.
Robots struggle to walk as they are designed mechanically. Animals can walk without thinking as "surfing instability" is what is designed in to their bodies and nervous systems from the ground up.
Being right on the point of always toppling is the efficient way to get around. You just have to master the trick of using instability to your advantage.
So you have the absolutely general metaphysics of pansemiosis, You have the paradigm shift in life and mind science that is biosemiosis.
Then you have the enactive turn in cognitive science that also flips the mechanical paradigm on its head, but has yet to catch up in terms of producing a fully fledged neurosemiosis. But a shift to a prediction-based ontology - one that is all about regulation of uncertainty - is clearly near enough the same thing. All that is missing is the Peircean branding.
Putting a Peircean spin on it all still brings you blank looks in metaphysics, let alone physics, biology or neurology. Yet for me, in the late 1990s, hooking up with Pattee, Salthe and their little community of theoretical biologists who were just discovering Peirce, it was like finally arriving home. Everything finally clicked into place at a metaphysical level under the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Dissipative structure theory was showing that open systems were more generic than closed or "gone to equilibrium" ones.
Hierarchy theory was a mathematical framing of what systems science had been trying to say.
The DNA revolution in biology was becoming properly understood in terms of a semiotic modelling relation.
A whole bunch of stuff fell into place, with Peirce proving to have a triadic model of logic that argued reality could not be organised any other way.
And now biophysics has come to the party in a big way with its molecular machines, while Friston has cashed in on enactivism and infodynamics with his free energy formalism.
It just keeps rolling.
I started looking for embodied approaches in the 1980s and I found a ton of such work. I was shocked by how much had already been figured out. So I was fairly bemused when suddenly enactivism was being touted as this exciting new thing.
A fair point, anomalous monism is after all monism. Quoting Isaac
If the tumour caused his body to move, puppet-like, and against his volition he committed the murder, this would be a correct description. Perhaps the tumour brought about a rage in which the act was done without intent to kill. That we drop intent in such cases should make us more wary of attributing intent to dishbrain.
Again the intentional behaviour and language sits on and yet remains distinct from the physically causal description of events. As you say, Quoting Isaac
This view is in apparrent contrast to Quoting Joshs
If you insist on a mechanical understanding of physical causation, then of course you are going to wind up with this kind of half-arsed AP dualism.
Get your physics right, and things start to work. You will realise that you can't escape finality or "intent" once you've had your nose rubbed in the principle of least action.
Quoting Banno
The biological notion of intending that I had in mind is not
at the level of physical causal description. It is similar to Joseph Rouses assertion that non-linguistic animals display an authentic rather than merely ersatz form of intentionality. His argument hinges on the assumption that animal intentionality is conceptually-based , even though it is non-linguistic.
He explains that while some animals respond to
stimuli in rigidly inflexible ways, many organisms can change their behavioral patterns in flexible, instrumentally rational responses to novel or conflicting patterns of multiple cues and can make further adjustments shaped by the outcomes of their own earlier efforts. Call this difference between rigid and flexible responsiveness to environmental cues (which may be a difference in degree rather than kind) the sphex/flex distinction; to describe it initially in terms of causality, rationality, or intentionality may beg key questions.
Rouses biological notion of intentional conceptuality applies to the following: Some organisms also respond to some features of their environment in ways that support a distinction between merely taking them up, and taking them as relevant under an aspect, as meant, or under a description, such that they can mistake them.
In the following quote, Rouse presents John Haugelands argument against Rouses claims for animal
intentionality. In reading this, I now realize that dishbrains generalizing and discriminating capabilities certainly dont exceed Haigelands depiction of ersatz intentionality.
Haugelands (1998) arguments against the possibility
of a biologically based understanding of human intentionality make this mismatch especially clear, for his line of argument also provides a decisive consideration against treating expert chess play, and other forms of skilled perceptual-practical responsiveness, as nonconceptual. Haugeland argued that biological functioning can only differentiate the patterns in the world to which it normally responds, even if those patterns are gerrymandered from the perspective of conceptually articulated understanding. For example, a bird whose evolved perceptual responses are to avoid eating most yellow butterflies, except for one oddly mottled pattern of yellow, would not thereby be mistaken about the color of the mottled yellow ones. We identify the birds responses as almost in accord with a conceptual category we endorse (yellow), but the birds behavior itself provides no basis for concluding that it was striving but failing to accord with that classification.
Moreover, even if the birds response patterns were de facto coextensive with conceptually significant features of the world, as in always and only avoiding eating yellow butterflies, those patterns would not then display an intentional directedness toward the butterflies color, for that coincidence would merely be a de facto contingency. For Haugeland, intentionality or conceptual understanding must introduce a possible gap between what some comportment is directed toward and the manner or content of that directedness such that a mismatch between the two accounts for the possibility
of error. The birds pattern of behavior is only a complex pattern of response to actual circumstances. The single pattern of what the birds do in varying circumstances cannot then generate a dual pattern that could differentiate what they are responding to from how they take it to be. Individual birds can malfunction with respect to species-normal patterns of discrimination and response, but there is no further basis for concluding that the overall response pattern within the population aims for but falls short of something different than what its members actually, typically do.
I don't.
But what is under discussion here is Friston's Bayesian mechanics. And now intent in its most generic sense is the thing being modelled.
So you might not accept grades of intent. The currently most cited neuroscientist does.
See for example....
It might be simpler to ask what you think of anomalous monism.
Quoting Banno
Im thinking that a biologically rooted account of intentionality such as that of Rouse is neither physical nor mental in the sense that anomalous monism distinguishes these, but rather something mid-way between them. Or maybe it simply abandons the assumption of ontological physicalism that Davidsons non-reductive physicalism retains. Not sure.
Of kind. But of the kind that begins at the level of biophysics, where the question is: how does a molecule function as a message?
So it is about the origins of intent or finality. The question of abiogenesis.
It's just that this:
Quoting Joshs
seems to make use of Davidson and Anscombe's notion of intent being "under a description" rather than countering it or offering an alternative.
So as a borderline case, it sits to the other side of a virus in my view. The only semiotic intent on show would seem to be that of the experimenters who claim DishBrain to be playing Pong.
Slap some stems cells on a slab and poke them with electrodes. Thats not an organism in the biosemiotic sense.
It just demonstrates that biology has the kind of molecular machinery to grow its predictive processing structure in even the most brain in a vat circumstances.
I kind of yawned right from the start as I remember folk pushing neural chip tech like this in the 1980s.
Quoting apokrisis
For you, does intent enter at the level of molecular messages or symbolic representation in an organism? You seem to be implying both.
The problem for life and mind is how to resist entropification. The body is a regulated metabolic state - a flow of chemistry that is having to constantly build itself back up as it is constantly being broken down.
That sounds scary. But this instability is the dynamical feature and not the mechanical bug. The semiotic modelling relation thrives on finding the tippable conditions that then cost next to no energy to tip in some intended direction. The direction that keeps rebuilding the organismic self.
So the foundation is intentional from the level of the enzyme or any other bit of molecular machinery. The chemistry is poised and going both ways in any reaction. An enzyme is a switch to tip the rate in the right direction.
Thus life and mind are intentional right where organic chemistry starts. This just doesnt seem impressive as it speaks to a foundational desire to create a stable and predictable metabolic flow. You might protest that intention means something else.
But even at the level of human linguistic and technological semiosis, homeostasis comes first. Speech and engineering are ways of constructing a well-regulated world for the kind of selves that would feel at home in such an environment.
A dualist might indeed think of intent in terms of individual choice or preference. That is the standard Cartesian representational notion of the experiencing soul. It seems a given that humans with their freewill stand in vivid contrast to Newtonian physics with its blind determinism.
But the semiotic understanding of intent is all about homeostasis or practised habit. The mind exists to do stuff as mindlessly as it can get away with.
This is the deep metaphysical truth that Fristons approach now foregrounds.
You cant read this as intent because you are still stuck in an outdated paradigm of how biology and neurobiology might function.
Quoting Banno
Is it implying or have I not explicitly said how it applies all the way up from that first threshold point?
You're right about that.
If what you are addressing is "how to resist entropification" then it is far from clear that you are addressing intent at all. You appear to think eliminative materialism or something similar has been demonstrated, confirmed. But that's not so. The discussion remains ongoing.
Are we on your view mistaken to talk in intentional terms? That would be quite an overreach. I'll leave you to it.
And hence my agreement with 's assessment.
As usual, not one thing you say engages with the position I argue. The good old wombat technique. :grin:
Well, in this case, that's right, since Quoting Banno...The promise of progress, lost?
Are we on your view mistaken to talk in intentional terms?
Stop trolling. How can you construe my talking in terms of intentionality as not intending to talk in those terms?
I might ask, Banno, have you stopped beating your wife?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.11543.pdf
and yet when I asked
Quoting Banno
you replied
Quoting apokrisis
leaving me to conclude that being an organism was essential to having intent. Does it go all the way down to the chemical level, or begin at the level of an organism?
I suppose this is consistent in some fashion, but I don't see it. Perhaps intent goes all the way down to chemicals but culpability starts near viruses?
But more than that, there seems to me to be something peculiar in talking about the intent of chemicals. Something like attributing democracy to chalk. A misattribution of kind.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not. Don't answer if you think I am.
Quoting Banno
Davidsons distinction between ways the mind grabs onto the world in terms of non-propositional vs propositional, pre-conceptual vs conceptual meaning , is rejected by McDowell , Rouse and others who argue that perceptual experience in humans and animals is already conceptually articulated. As Rouse explains, Davidson understood perception as a merely causal prompting of discursive judgment in thought and talk. If Davidson were right, McDowell picturesquely proclaimed, conceptual thought could only be a frictionless spinning in a void.
For Rouse et al, being under a description doesn't require linguistic representation. A situated perceptual mapping will do just fine. More specifically, what is required for conceptual intentionality is a robust capacity to discriminate and respond flexibly and mostly appropriately to subtle, often disguised aspects of actual circumstances that matter to a species-characteristic way of life, including novel behaviors by other organisms. Moreover, these perceptual discriminations and motor-behavioral responses are not distinct but correlated subsystems of the organisms overall way of life. They instead constitute an integral entanglement of the organisms physical and behavioral repertoire with its selective environment.
Do you really not understand or are you just mucking about?
Read this post where I explained it carefully...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/68661
Quoting Banno
Strawman. It should be clear enough that I said the intent lay in the enzyme's regulation of a chemical process.
The reaction can and does go both ways. The enzyme is the bit of molecular machinery that adds a switch which gives the reaction a functional direction.
If you see a switch on a wall, that speaks to intentionality right? Whether the switch is on or off must mean something to someone.
What is quite spectacular so far as biology is concerned is to be discovering just how much life is based on molecular engineering. We used to think cells were more or less bags containing a soup of chemicals. Toss in a few enzymes to speed up or slow down parts of the cycle.
But over the past 20 years, there has been a complete revolution of thought. It is regulation or semiosis all the way down to even the quantum level of chemistry.
DishBrain says neural networks shows that biology has some neat little semiotic tricks up its sleeve. But drill down to the foundational scale and you find life is so skilled at building systems of physics-regulating switches that is doing quantum-tunnelling to manage its chemical environment.
Not quite what I had in mind with 'Davidson and Anscombe's notion of intent being "under a description"'. You are familiar with Davidson's example of flicking the switch turning on the light and alerting the burglar? One act, but flicking the switch is intentional while alerting the burglar isn't. Anscombe seems to have made a similar point - that one description of an event may be intentional, and another of the very same event, not.
I've no clear idea of what a non-linguistic description might be, but what you said does not seem to touch on the point that dishbrain does not intend to move the paddle.
Indeed, from what you have said it is not clear that Rouse's account of Davidson is quite right... " the mind grabs onto the world in terms of non-propositional vs propositional, pre-conceptual vs conceptual meaning"?
Stepping back again from that discussion, I suppose there is no contradiction or inconsistency in claiming that dishbrain intends to move the paddle to hit the ball. I suppose we might one day find our courts embroiled in deciding if one of dishbrain's descendants is culpable for some crime. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.