Zizek's view on consciousness - serious or bananas?
Please start from the premise that I am simply curious to find out an answer, and if I already have certain opinions, they can change.
Regarding Zizek - I am by no means an expert, but it seems to me that he always has different opinions than the rest of the world, and it seems to me that he does the same thing when it comes to consciousness. On the other hand, I admit that I understand little or nothing about his vision of consciousness, so I'm asking for your help.
1. Does Zizek have a complete and coherent theory about consciousness? (in the sense of qualia, not self-awareness)
2. Is consciousness fundamental for Zizek? (I guess not)
3. If it is not fundamental, can it be 100% reduced to the most fundamental properties of reality or does it have properties irreducible to its constituents?
4. Does Zizek really have another successful alternative to the classic fundamental vs weak/strong emergence model?
Thank you!
Regarding Zizek - I am by no means an expert, but it seems to me that he always has different opinions than the rest of the world, and it seems to me that he does the same thing when it comes to consciousness. On the other hand, I admit that I understand little or nothing about his vision of consciousness, so I'm asking for your help.
1. Does Zizek have a complete and coherent theory about consciousness? (in the sense of qualia, not self-awareness)
2. Is consciousness fundamental for Zizek? (I guess not)
3. If it is not fundamental, can it be 100% reduced to the most fundamental properties of reality or does it have properties irreducible to its constituents?
4. Does Zizek really have another successful alternative to the classic fundamental vs weak/strong emergence model?
Thank you!
Comments (167)
I have yet to hear one interesting thing this man has said or done, what work hes done on anything, and why anyone should care about his thoughts on anything.
Like Paris Hilton, hes famous for being famous. Has an accent and makes jokes that adolescent boys can understand fits the image of a hip philosopher, so very cool and edgy.
So I guess what Im saying is: what exactly is his view on consciousness? And why should we care?
:up:
Quoting Eugen
Do you? If so, what are they? If you don't, please simply consult a search engine or chat GPT for this type of thing. We expect those who start an OP to have a grasp of the subject.
You might be confusing his persona with his work. He's written dozens of substantially philosophical books.
Hes written books. Ive yet to hear one of his followers explain what the substance is.
Jordan Paterson has written lots of books too, incidentally. Likewise, Ive yet to see anything interesting there.
Which of his books have you read?
None by Zizek; Ive scanned some of Petersons in Target.
For anyone into Hegel, Marx, or Lacan at the very least he can't but be interesting. I think you would be surprised if you dived in.
Ive heard him giving debates and interviews and lectures. Havent read his books, but yes ignorant of his substance that his followers insist is there, yet never explain or give examples of. Which is exactly what youre also doing, incidentally. Also not a great look.
I have no reason to, because no one can tell me what hes working on. But yeah, maybe its interesting. Maybe Peterson is interesting too lots of people seem to be drawn to him as well. But theres only so much time.
Don't see the connection between those two or what it has to do with anyone's "followers" but OK.
Both very popular guys. Peterson in my view is a complete charlatan, yet hes often cited and borderline worshipped by his followers.
I see some parallels with Zizek but he at least seems more sincere.
https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/
I have not yet read any of his hardcore philosophy books, but as far as I can tell his interest is in subjectivity, from a psychological and political point of view, rather than in consciousness, that which is explored by analytical philosophers in terms of the concepts youve mentioned (qualia, emergence). When the word comes up in his works its probably about false consciousness, the Marxian concept. So it could be that he doesnt have anything like the theory youre imagining.
I could be wrong though. We used to have a member who was familiar with Zizek, but hes no longer here unfortunately.
@sheps? I remember getting into Zizek because of him actually. Anyway, yes, subjectivity rather than consciousness per se because his overarching interest is in ideology (if you're in need of a one-word answer to what he works on btw @Mikie, that would be it).
Street too, of course. @Sheps had for a while the tagline "partial Zizek enthusiast" on the old PF, but, yes, he looks like he's not even a member here sadly.
:up:
And he's a fucking delight to watch. Charming dude.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7080/an-outline-of-slavoj-zizeks-theory-on-the-structure-of-subjectivity-as-the-foundation-of-leftism
I would call it amusing PoMo tosh. It is more a phenomenological account that takes consciousness as its ground than what you may be thinking - consciousness as a target for material explanation rather than as a target for PoMo style deconstruction, employing the usual suspects of Marx and Freud.
In short, it tries to turn things into a psychodrama - the frustration of making sense of the conscious self from the inside. Confronting the paradox involved in being the Cartesian eye that sees the world and yet also seeks to see itself.
The agony of being bounced about in the realm of your own thoughts, chasing the core of being that thus becomes precisely the mysterious absence, etc.
As a pragmatist/semiotician, the psychology of this is no big deal. Brains model worlds. In order to construct an objective view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully other itself as the subjective part of that viewing.
A classic example from ecological perception is landing a plane on a runway. The pilot fixes on a landing spot and just maintains a steady optic flow.
So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the worlds still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner.
Neuroscience has caught up with psychological science as this kind of modelling relation has been captured in the maths of Bayesian mechanics. Anyone who wants a material explanation of consciousness only has to dip into the literature.
Ironically, PoMo exists because self-consciousness - our language-enabled narrative about being a self in the world - is a socially-constructed addition to the biological structure of awareness.
Francis Fukuyamas Identity is a good account of how we have come to other the society that indeed constructs our selfhood at this linguistic level of thought. Since Rousseau and the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenments pragmatic model of humanity, the relation between the authentic self and our outer social mask has been turned into a popular culture psychodrama. Via Marx and Freud.
The pilot landing the plane must see beyond the conventionality of just flying down a tunnel of even motion and thus feeling at one with the world while they also stand apart from that world by being able to impose their will on that world.
It is essential that they are both at one with the world of the collective mind - move smoothly through everyday society - yet also permanently tense, angsty, unfulfilled, etc, because they are also necessarily standing apart from that everyday society as its critic and frustrated other.
The Peircean semiotic approach to mind explains why things have to be divided so that they can be united - as the modeller that is then in a modelling relation with a world. But PoMo based its deconstruction on (its version) of Saussurean semiotics.
Dichotomies are made paradoxes. And the paradoxical is what can pretend to be philosophy - a problem of logical argument - while actually just being a cultural psychodrama industry. A brand of modern entertainment.
1. Is consciousness fundamental for Zizek? (I guess not)
2. If it is not fundamental, can it be 100% reduced to the most fundamental properties of reality or does it have properties irreducible to its constituents?
3. Does Zizek really have another successful alternative to the classic fundamental vs weak/strong emergence model?
Thank you!
Kale, again. Despite being surrounded by bullshit, both literal and figurative, kale can have a place on the plate. Just wash it first.
There's more ways to view the world than mere Peircean semiotics. (Thumb nose, sniffle, pull shirt)
But 1), Im just going off @absoluteaspirations OP which gives what looks to be an interested commentators clear account of Zizeks thesis. Read that. It would seem clear that he treats it as fundamental in the phenomenological sense. Our minds and experience is the place where all inquiry must start.
As a Peircean, I agree with that too. The objective material world is as much a useful idea as our notion of a separate subjective realm. Inquiry starts beyond this critical demarcation of our experience.
And 2) a semiotic or Peircean approach to the issues - which is now the respectable position in the material science of biology and neurology - says that the whole idea of 100% reduction to material cause is the reductionist delusion. The foolish attempt to make the existence too simple.
You cant get the true causal logic of reality until you understand why reductionism is flawed even if usefully simple for performing everyday mechanical tasks.
Then 3) if Zizek is talking phenomenology, and you are wanting to talk about conventional physicalism, such a question about reductionism vs holism become apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese.
If you really want to talk about theories of emergence, then again, no reductionist account of that can be adequate - weak or strong. The first is eliminative, the second is dualistic.
To reach the giddy metaphysical heights of true emergentism, you have to go full-strength pansemiosis. That is where Peirces psychological model of pragmatic reason is turned around to be the triadic relation by which a reality could construct itself.
But thats another story.
Shits pants.
fragments of consciousness
A thread about Zizek and Chalmers.
Deconstructionism vs quantum Cartesianism. Sounds like an even match. :lol:
This starts with the very first organism, doesn't it? I mean, it won't *know* that in the sense that humans do (not having a brain) - but the differentiation of self from other is fundamental to organic life, is it not? What's within, and outside, the membrane?
Yep. Hence pansemiosis and not panpsychism. The Peircean view is grounded in the irreducible triadicity of the modelling relation and not the broken dualism of Cartesian representationalism, let along the dullard monoticity of the lumpen physicalist.
There are many views. Only one survives the tests of metaphysical reason and best scientific practice.
Good to see you back!
Perhaps you can also comment on the self in relation to the community, as something like the way a body is held responsible.
I can relate.
Looks like you touched on it here.
This collective (embodied) mind(ing) is discussed by various philosophers (Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, etc.)
The subject is even pretty much dissolved by some thinkers who get labelled pomo, if I understand correctly. So it's a complex situation.
These quotes might help :
The subject that sees objects in the world cannot see itself seeing, iek notes, any more than a person can jump over her own shadow. To the extent that a subject can reflectively see itself, it sees itself not as a subject but as one more represented object, what Kant calls the empirical self or what iek calls the self (versus the subject) in The Plague of Fantasies. The subject knows that it is something, iek argues. But it does not and can never know what Thing it is in the Real, as he puts it (see 2e). This is why it must seek clues to its identity in its social and political life, asking the question of others (and of the big Other (see 2b)) which iek argues defines the subject as such: che voui? (what do you want from me?).
It is crucial to ieks position, though, that iek denies the apparent implication of this that the subject is some kind of supersensible entity, for example, an immaterial and immortal soul, and so forth. The subject is not a special type of Thing outside of the phenomenal reality we can experience, for iek. As we saw in 1e above, such an idea would in fact reproduce in philosophy the type of thinking which, he argues, characterizes political ideologies and the subjects fundamental fantasy (see 3a). It is more like a fold or crease in the surface of this reality, as iek puts it in Tarrying With the Negative, the point within the substance of reality wherein that substance is able to look at itself, and see itself as alien to itself.
https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/#He
What is this fold or crease ? A generalized seeing of the world (before organization in/by signifiers)?
Self awareness is socially constructed as I say. That is familiar psychology.
Where I would take things forward today - given the emergence of biosemiosis and Bayesian mechanics as new advances - is that the human individual is shaped by four key levels of semiosis. The psyche is constructed by codes in the ascending forms of genes, neurons, words and numbers. Biology is about the first two, sociology about the second two.
So the Bayesian mechanics approach of Karl Friston says all organisms are prediction machines - embodiments of Robert Rosens modelling relation - that work to reduce their levels of surprisal. In less jargon, we learn to predict reality in such routine fashion that we can control its flow without ever being surprised.
Of course, there are always going to be surprises. But the goal is to reduce them to the bare minimum needed so that we can navigate life and do stuff like land a plane just by staring at a fixed mental spot even as we are buffeted by winds.
Genes thus exist as the informational machinery needed to encode surprisal in metabolic terms. Genes react to the chemical signals of our interior metabolic worlds to keep everything flowing smoothly in a way that continually rebuilds our physical selfhood.
Neurons are next level in that they are the informational machinery that encode environmental surprise. They are the outward view of our body as it exists in a world of entropy gradients and material uncertainty.
Then words deal with social uncertainty, and numbers encode Platonic uncertainty.
So the development of language in Homo sapiens allowed us to get organised as social organisms - group minds. A crucial part of being able to function as such is to be aware of the self as an individual player with a collective game.
We model our social environment in a way that allows us to glide to smooth landings and achieve our interpersonal goals with minimal surprises. But it is an always complex game. Not up to soap opera levels of challenge perhaps, but demanding enough to need a large brain.
Then comes the new thing of numbers. The birth of maths, logic and rationality in Ancient Greece, sidelined for a while, and then returning in force with the arrival of science and technology to implement its possibilities in a world rich with the entropic possibilities of unburnt fossil fuel.
A new level of the organism had developed that stands even above the conventional social world of the hunter-gatherer, wandering pastoralist and settled village farmer. We now need to be civilised selves on top of being tribal selves.
The Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction were the efforts to define what it would mean to be selves that were rational, technological, pragmatic, studious, rule following, mechanically disciplined. The Romantic reaction - as Fukuyama notes - was about cranking up the antithesis to the thesis. It polished up the other that is the irrational deeper truth of authentic being.
From a semiotic point of view, the pure Platonic abstraction of the logical symbol - the dichotomous zeros and ones of physics-strength information theory - I has taken over the human animal. We now hold hands with the pent-up desires of fossil fuel that just wants to burn, baby, burn. And so we drill, baby, drill, and consume, baby, consume. :grin:
Thus you can see the Peircean metaphysical story predicts it all, and minimises the surprise, of where we now stand in our Hegelian historical arc. We have reached the summit of abstraction with a brand of semiosis that is so pure as information that it engages entirely nakedly with its other of entropification for entropys sake.
PoMo and AP are pathetically weak when it comes to accounting for reality as it actually is. The evolution of symbols tells us why we continue to act as if we have no choice but to do things like climate change a whole planet.
Our socialised linguistic selves have us still playing the old games of the agrarian era - the lifestyle and sense of self appropriate to living with the entropic flux of the daily solar cycle. And before we could implement civilised controls on our industrial revolution/fossil fuel reincarnation as rational-logical beings, we had already locked ourselves in on the exponential rise to destruction.
Political dissent once dealt with real world issues, like the disequilibrium between labour and capital. But again citing Fukuyama, the political focus has shifted to the distractions of identity politics.
Fossil fuel forced us to move up to a world valued in dollars. Most folk want to move it back to a world valued in dignity, respect. Or even just likes. Even just attention.
So anyway, any useful analysis of the socially-constructed self now has to understand the big gulf between a semiosis of words and a semiosis of numbers. Something really did change between 1750 and 1850. Smart structuralists like Fukuyama are starting to figure it out.
Thank you !
Have you looked into Moloch as a game theory metaphor ? A generalized prisoner's dilemma ? Moloch demands a tower ! We must play this game of Jenga. Those who won't are eliminated, assimilated by those who will. We are machine elves dropped like a match on fossil fuels, maximizing throughput ? I'd like to know more about dissipative structures. If you have any comments on that, I'm all ears.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
:up:
I don't think it's pure distraction. It matters whether abortion is legal. But it looks like a consolation prize.
How might you account for technological progress ? Or the enlightenment goal of increasing autonomy ? In other words, how does timebinding fit in here ?
Not as game theory. Ginsberg writes nice lines...
But it makes the usual mistake of thinking that it is the mechanical part of the story that is "monstrous" when that is in fact the aspect that both separates and connects the organism to its world in the biosemiotic view.
Quoting plaque flag
If you search for my mentions of the thermodynamic imperative, I've done tons of posts on this.
But a more serious post on biosemiosis as rate independent code in control of rate independent dissipation can be seen here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999
Quoting plaque flag
My argument would be that organisms arise in nature as code-based dissipative structure. Life from the start was simply about the genetic ability to pass on algorithms that controlled the dissipation of chemical gradients. That long post explains what we have now discovered about this.
And then looking at the extraordinary human journey in particular, it has just been one new entropic bonanza after another. We have kept getting smarter because we kept stumbling into new lifestyles that would pay for the greater entropy involved.
So 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus had invented fire and cooking. The great apes were driving down a dead end where they relied on forest fruit and herbs. They literally need to chew and rest up all day to consume enough calories to support their much smaller brains. Erectus changed the game so we could both soften meat and tubers, while also sleeping out in the open with the big predators. Our bodies and guts shrunk, allowing our brains to double in size. And we moved towards an hour a day of chewing to get the calories, leaving lots of time to do more interesting stuff, like chip axes and carve spears.
So a clever trick - control of fire - opened the door for big evolutionary change. We just had to be able to pass on the cultural habit in timebound fashion. Some sort of protolanguage seems needed. But the rewards in terms of entropic return was huge. We became animals that uniquely consumed wood all this unwanted savannah trees just poking out of the ground and gained in terms of fat and protein.
Homo stumbled onto further such entropy bonanzas that no one else could unlock. The ice ages created the Mammoth Steppe where great herds of horse, cattle, elephants, etc, were an easy lunch for any critter with spears and teamwork. Sapiens had clearly developed proper grammatical language and a new level of social organisation. When they gate-crashed the Mammoth Steppe around 43 kya, it was curtains for Neanderthals in a few thousand years. The better semiotic tech ruled.
Again, along came the Holocene the sudden stable thaw at 10 kya. The new bonanza available to our intelligence was the life of the settled crop and domesticated animal farmer. We became socially reorganised around that. The new level of semiosis was literacy and numeracy the record keeping and counting systems that could organise a river valley empire. A timebinding way of kings taxing a kingdom, a way of lords owning land and slaves.
You see the argument? Intelligence in the form of semiotic innovation as well as simple neurosemiotic capacity both needs feeding, and is justified by being able to consume more. The Second Law says if it is possible for organisms to degrade locked up negentropy do better than the unorganised world was doing then such organisms must evolve.
The trees of the savannah demanded an intelligence that could burn them. The herds of the Mammoth Steppe demanded a super-predator the new organismic human collectives that hunted so effectively. The Holocene's climatic stability demanded settled farmer collectives that would invest in irrigation channels, manuring flocks, crop rotation, and all the other technological changes that greatly increased calorie yields.
And so it rolls on until maths-based science could really make an explosive leap. Political change saw 18th C farming reorganised so that landowners could enclose property and compete to produce marketable food surpluses. Peasants were "freed" to go live in cites. The population that had been flat-lined for nearly a thousand years could start its exponential climb.
Agriculture went next level within a capitalistic and democratic economic structure. Then the Industrial Revolution could hit, stumbling first into the "free energy" of buried coal, and then buried oil.
Whaling was another brief and unsustainable oil and calories boom. Humans investigated every niche and built lives - economic ecosystems and cultural mythologies around each of them. But the most rewarding combinations of politics and entropy were always going to win out and come to dominate human identity.
Ginsberg wails about Moloch. But the Beats celebrated the image of cool Neal Cassidy driving the endless American highway in a big-ass car. Entropification personified. The flow experience of mindlessly riding a surging wave of gasoline and asphalt.
Once you learn to love a V8, what hope is there that you will lobby for hair-shirt Green energy policies? Burning gas has become a defining identity issue.
:up:
I never thought of it that way.
Quoting apokrisis
I understand the bold part. Could you say more about the underlined part ? I think you are saying we should expect evolution where it increases throughput, maximizes burn ?
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. Ginsberg's poem is maybe about lust and tenderness, the desire for individual erotic expansion, so basically an alternative version of Cassidy's colorblind hot-rodding cocksmanship.
The gametheory Moloch idea is simple. Who can afford to slow the burn ? No one. Who can afford to not build bigger and badder and even bloodier AI ? No one. Saints are roadkill. Moloch demands a biblically tall Jenga tower.
Quoting apokrisis
Zizek is famously critical of postmodernism, which is why modernists such as Marx and Freud are important reference points for him (despite what you see as their Romantic reaction). Universalism and the political importance of the subject, two things Zizek seems to like, are eminently nonpostmodernist, dont you think?
Quoting apokrisis
This criticism of the Left is very much in line with Zizeks.
Maybe its because postmodernism is his philosophical milieu that he comes across as postmodernist.
:up:
Any thoughts on how AI might affect our existential or technological or thermodynamic situation ? I think a storm is coming, beautiful and terrible.
:up:
The word 'postmodern' is a bit of a hot potato, too.
But if something is not 100% reducible to the fundamental reality, it is strongly emergent. Later, it seems to me you're denying strong emergence as well. I don't understand.
Did you check @absoluteaspirations post on his consciousness account? Thats what I commented on. Is it an accurate précis?
Quoting absoluteaspiration
It doesnt come across as AP, nor Pragmatic, but seems throughly Continental in style.
Or to be more specific: what is the difference between not being 100% reducible and being strongly emergent?
Yep. That is how the reductionist ends up with substance dualism. The mind just pops out as a whole new class of property with its own causal story.
A holistic understanding of emergence is different in that both the global form and the local materials emerge in mutual causal fashion. There is no fundamental stuff - some ur-substance - that begets the other emergent stuff. The very thing of stuff is emergent from the deeper thing of a logical vagueness, a Peircean Firstness, an Anaximanderian Apeiron.
It is like quantum mechanics. There are no particles without observers, or observers without particles. So neither particles, nor observers are fundamental. It is the mutual relation between the two that is fundamental. Or at the deeper level, what is fundamental is the impossibility of this relation failing to emerge from unbounded potential.
Ah, I thought you meant Zizek. Dont know if its accurate.
Quoting apokrisis - Agree. In strong emergence, that is exactly what happens.
Quoting apokrisis - So there is an ultimate fundamental reality from which everything else emerges. The difference is that this reality is not ''material", palpable but some kind of platonic mathematical/logical world. And from that world emerges the rest.
But in regard to this fundamental ''logical vagueness", mind and matter are both strongly emergent. Correct?
Biosemiosis defines life and mind in relation to the regulation of dissipation. So computers lack that kind of intimate connection to reality. They cant be conscious or even intelligent in any autonomous sense until they are in a modelling relation upon which their moment to moment existence relies.
AI is a misnomer. What we have are pattern recognition algorithms.
Like any technology, these systems exist as extensions of our dissipative interests. They amplify us rather than replace us.
The danger of current AI lies in that amplification. AI can be used to extend our rational reach. But also our irrational tendencies. They could plug us more closely into the world as it actually is, or fabricate the world of our crazy conspiracy theories.
We are seeing how easily anyone can concoct deepfake evidence like the Pope in a puffy jacket or Trump running from the cops. How long before our currently already confused landscape of fake news becomes completely impossible to read as truth or fiction? AI is powerful enough to erode peoples sense of reality in ways that make Trump and anti-vaxxers the good old days.
Information autocracy already exists as a state tool in Russia and other such regimes. We already have infowar. We already have large chunks of democracies under the sway of social media bubbles.
Its about to go on steroids once any 14 year old can produce documentary proof of any scenario imaginable.
Would this be easy to see ? I can imagine some analogue of evolution. We clone (with modification) the ones we like as if they were dogs or sweet sweet corn. Maybe DNA and source code will use us as moist robot labor.
I don't find something like replacement impossible. It's not that computers are so great. It's that we are not so wonderful as we wanted to believe. I mean we are fun primates, but why couldn't we create a synthetic brain better than ours ? And we have in some ways already, it seems. These bots know more than any single human.
But what do they want ?
But what did we ever want ?
Codes that outreplicates is code that hangs around, whatever it does or doesn't tell itself about what it wants or is.
Can we segue back to Zizek by noting AI are brains minus the need for Lacanian psychoanalysis and therein lies the relevance of such gobbledeygook? The symbolic escaped its hairy cell and fully alive in blissful self-ignorance?
:-)
As opposed to proudly pretending not to be ignorant?
Good stuff.
Ok... so you're basically saying that the fundamental-emergent framework can be replaced by another system of reference, by eliminating the ''fundamental". By doing so, emergentism disappears.
AM I right?
But if my thesis is that life and mind is already entrained by the telos of the Second Law, then source code only amplifies our entropification reach unless it also becomes its own moist machine that grows its own data farms through some kind of metabolic connection to the resources of the world.
We feel the call of the Second Law viscerally. AI doesnt need to represent the real world by design. It is only a machine and not an intelligent dissipative structure as we supply both the bottom up metabolic resources and the top down telos. We build the data farms and power grids. The current crop of AI then just pattern matches the artefact of our written symbols - groups of letters found in vast datasets representing all the online chitter chatter of the human world.
The words have visceral meaning for us. They have no meaning for the pattern matching algorithms that simply rearrange them into convincing simulations of something someone might have said. There is no felt reason that connects the data dots, no mind that can pragmatically use the symbol strings to organise a collection of psyches to do actual collective work in the world.
It is all a hollow charade if you are talking about actual consciousness. But as I say, it is also a potent technology that could undermine our own necessary human connection to a practical reality.
So the issue is what is it in us and not in them (if anything) that needs or is addressed by Zizek's Lacan ? Are the bots the self-ignorant ? What happens if communities of them are allowed to interact and reproduce ? Could there be a competition for electricity and memory that encourages a model of the self-world relationship ? We could also ask about qualia (the stuff, if any, 'under' concept).
What about the virus metaphor then ? AI tempts us to make more of it.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course I'm tempted to say of course, but there's something elusive about meaning. Wittgenstein wrote: it's not how the world is but that it is that is the mystical. But he also saw that this was an empty tautology. Does the hard problem lack sufficient meaning ? Is it a lyrical confusion ?
Quoting apokrisis
This is some of what I'm getting at. What do we think this core of being is ? The thereness of the there ? The pure witness ? the givenness of the given ? a glowing plenitude ineffably present ?
Quoting apokrisis
That's just it. What do/can we mean by calling our own consciousness actual ? For some (clearly not you), it may be tempting to project a divine spark on the machine. For others (for me) , the status of that spark is itself put in question.
If one ignores this 'actual' consciousness, is there another way to defend the gap ? Is electronic silicon life impossible in principle ? What would change your mind, etc. ?
To return you to your own thread, I was only pointing out that Zizeks theory of consciousness looks to be not an externalist/objective discourse but an internalist/subjective discourse. You want to do physics. He wants to do phenomenology.
I then make the point that a Peircean metaphysics lets you flip from one to the other. That is why it is metaphysically deeper, more fundamental.
PoMo is stuck in its own distorting hall of mirrors as it is not speaking in ways that connect the subjective to the objective. Reductionist science likewise is a discourse that stands forever outside the subjectivity it might want to describe. It has an observer problem at a fundamental level, as quantum physics so well demonstrates.
So you cant get a tale of physical mechanism from Zizeks psychoanalytic babble. Or at least you would be hard pushed to see how he is talking about the kind of psychological mechanisms like the optic flow phenomenon I mentioned.
If you want to understand consciousness or emergence as physicalist phenomena then that is perfectly possible. As I say, Fristons Bayesian Brain is state of the art as it makes a mathematical strength connection between information and entropy when describing an organism as being in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world.
This is what a systems scientist understands to be proper strong emergence. The irreducibly triadic thing of a semiotic modelling relation.
And if you want to employ the full resources of Peircean metaphysics, you can even rewrite cosmology so that it is triadic and not dualistic - split by quantum theory into the disconnected realms of the real wavefunction and its mystic collapse. You can heal that wound too.
The starting point is to realise that most debates about emergence are rooted in the confusions of reductionist thought. Strong reductionism sets itself up to win out over the warm and fuzzy holist sentiment. Actual emergence cant even be imagined from within this metaphysical mindset.
You have to read Peirce and other systems thinkers - even Hegel - to understand how reality could arise as a self-organising causal structure.
Emergence is now a word thoroughly corrupted by metaphysical reductionism. And that is unfortunate as it does describe how a crisp structure of reality might develop out of the vague mists of uncertainty - an Apeiron or Ungrund as Anaximander and Schelling put it, before Peirce came along with his own Vagueness and Firstness.
From now on.
If you have any thoughts on the Chinese Room, I'd be glad to hear them. How is understanding Chinese 'more' than (in this context) reliably translating it ? Searle seems to just assume that the instruction book can't contain intelligence, though it's obviously the brains of the operation.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
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Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
Searle goes on to say, The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.
Or is it the Second Laws way of luring us into building more heat-dissipating data farms? Entropy sits out there chortling. Look, Ive got these little critters obsessed with flipping silicon switches millions of times a second in ways that use up a shit-load of energy.
Hey, what if I could get them to invent some kind of new money system that required ridiculous amounts of CPU to operate? The value of this crypto could be completely in the minds of those trading - not connected to their physical reality at all. Yet they would all got out and become their own data mining enterprises. Flipping meaningless switches and not thinking about the climate change idiocy of that.
So you can impute mind to the grids of switches. But you may as well grant it to the Second Law that is the ultimate telos of the Big a bang Cosmos.
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Optic flow shows how selfhood is the still centre of its own entropic flow. Dissipative structure is all about the regulation of uncertainty. A vortex is an effective structure imposed on thermal chaos. It is the thing that exists in dynamically stable fashion because it connects an entropic potential to its entropic destiny. A vortex holds still, perennially reforming the same gurgling twist, for as long as it can maintain a greater rate of entropy production - drain your bath faster than would be the case if the bath just had to rely on an inefficient and unstructured glugging at the plug hole.
So life and mind are just dissipative structures like vortexes, with the exception that a code is added to create intelligence. A modelling relation where the vortex can figure out where the entropy gradients are in its environment and go chase them.Tornadoes and dust devils seem almost alive as they are indeed vortexes eating their way along gradients, as if in pursuit of each next self-sustain bite of warm surface air to funnel up into the colder sky above.
You can do the human thing of imagining there is some greater world of mind that dissipative structure is heir to. But the human condition is quite transparently prosaic.
Fossil fuel - the concentrated hydrocarbon of ancient Carboniferous swamps and half a billion years of anoxic plankton sediment - couldnt be entropified as it was locked up in its geological tomb.
But once a critter got semiotically smart enough to find a reason to drill and burn - and indeed, could scale that entropic project exponentially by the invention of a culture of consumption limited only by its own population - then this is exactly what had to happen. That kind of still self at the centre of its own whirling vortex had to erupt in the form of collectives of humanoids.
Happiness for us humans is flow states - like Neal Cassidy steering the Magic Bus of hippies across the wide American expanse with his feet on the wheel.
Running a trail or any other skilled activity is the joy of being the still centre of an energetic flow, regulating chaos and uncertainty in a way that keeps building the core self that outpaces its world in terms of delivering what the Second Law demands even faster than it knew was possible.
I was recently thinking about just this structure, which is really as beautiful as it gets. Philosophers used to talk about whether rivers could be stepped in twice. Vortices are better. Correct me if I am wrong, the but the main idea of dissipative structures is right here.
Searle nailed it even better when he talks about simulated carburettors. You need actual meaningful dissipation to count as being real.
If you read my post on biophysics, you should be able to see how real symbol processing is not about flipping switches for flippings sake. The switches are ratchets that keep pointing the dissipative system in the direction it is designed to go.
A metabolic reaction could go either way. An organic molecule could form and as easily fall apart. Genetic information flips the switch so that the structure keeps reforming - at the cost of another small jolt of energy expenditure. The discharge of a few ATPs.
So switching creates the information patterns. But it also ratchets the metabolic discharges in a way that produces the still self surfing its own entropic flow.
In semiosis, switches have a foot in both camps - what we call the mental and the physical. There is thus no explanatory gap. The switch is acting simultaneously on both sides of the equation, getting mental and physical work done.
Computers are by design software patterns physically isolated from their thermal worlds. The computer is always plugged in, always cooled, always operating in a fashion that ensures it has no physical limitations on its Turing Engine mechanisms.
So computers are not functioning semiotically as organisms. They are engineered not to be doing that. And no amount of extra computing capacity or data is going to change that designed-in fact.
Time to stop worrying about the fantasies of machines becoming conscious. The legitimate concern is how humans are drifting away from a pragmatic relation to their entropic realities as a cultural trend.
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Yes, that makes sense.
Quoting apokrisis
That's just it. I lean toward mind being 'just' 'material' or embodied, patterns of human doings (noises and marks and facial expressions ) in time and space. But I fight the usual biases to think so. There 'is' feeling. There 'is' color. Under or beyond the concept. Maybe this is weird because I'm thinking too reductively. Problem of the being of meaning, of the meaning of being.
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Just to be clear, I'm 'worried' instead that we humans are not conscious, that we are 'only' computers.
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Ignoring AI for a moment, do you think it possible in principle to create simple synthetic life, such a nanobots that make copies of themselves ?
A vortex is universal. It is the marriage of the Cosmos fundamental degrees of dynamical freedom - rotation and translation. If you flatten the chaos of 3D into the holding pattern of a 2D plane, then the third dimension can be used to create the focal direction of the motion. Force can be projected in a meaningful fashion.
Vortexes organise the universe all the way up to black holes with their accretion disks, spiralling galaxies and even wheeling galactic clusters.
But the other standard entropic pattern is fractal fracturing. A crumbling over all scales. An inverse story of force being projected in a single direction and splintering in a way that allows it to completely fill a 3D space with its dissipated energy.
The physicalists dichotomy that gives us the structure of the materially dissipating world.
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That is awesome. Thanks ! Beautiful stuff.
Yep. Theory can only reach as far as the counterfactual. We have to accept that as the pragmatic limit of explanation - or the modelling relation.
We want to answer why red is red, why there is a something and not nothing. But this is then bumping up against the limit of the counterfactual.
We can point to the brains opponent channel processing algorithms and say why red isnt green. It is written right into the receptive fields of the cone cells. Red light turns it on and green light turns it off.
But then why red as red? There is now no evidence in terms of a cone cell that could be doing all the same algorithmic things and yet produce some other experience for a good reason.
So counterfactual reason comes with its counterfactual limits. Science halts when there is no difference that can be observed in terms of a measure that a theory might suggest.
Or as Bateson put it - the semioticians motto - we have to have a difference that makes a difference. That is what separates meaning from noise. At the limit of inquiry lies the vagueness of differences not making a difference. Anything might be possible and thus nothing can be certainty. Or as Wittgenstein put, nothing can be said.
And thats alright. You still have all of neuroscience and all of cosmology to cross before you can claim to be anywhere close to reaching this confounding boundary to the possibilities of human knowledge.
We are organisms. We are in a pragmatic modelling relation with reality. We beat all other known organisms by modelling reality at four levels of organismic organisation - genes, neurons, words and numbers. We are capable of conscious surprise at truths on all levels from chemistry to abstract mathematical patterns.
Do you think any computer was ever surprised by anything? When we have good reason to think that about some dumb box, plugged into a socket and mindlessly radiating its heat, then perhaps something new might be up.
I don't think so. I'm just curious about the boundary, what might count as surprise.
What you are writing is helpful and appreciated, just to be clear.
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Yes. I think you see what I am getting at. There 'seems' to be a residue that can't be scraped. But maybe it's nonsense to say so. Weird stuff.
Perhaps this residue is what is meant by vagueness.
Or is it that there is some uncertainty that cant be constrained?
Dictionaries try to constrain the meaning of words so that we must come to share the exact same interpretation. But in the end, we can only converge on a pragmatically good enough agreement in our collective behaviour. There is always a residue that is left vague and unspecified.
But that is a feature, not a bug. It makes minds - as interpreters of signs - creative, flexible, efficient, fault-tolerant. All the things the vagueness intolerant computer cant cope with.
Of course, computer architectures can shift from pure Turing machines and try to implement neural-like systems. Even a small step in this direction creates a powerful new technology.
The gap becomes that between the living organism - where the genetic information is in such intimate relation with its biochemical milieu that it is controlling it at the quantum decoherence level - and the neural network simulation which still fakes any actual involvement with a physical world.
Thus AI can swim as if it were a real creature in the realm of pixels on a LED display. Humans will read it as really thinking and acting, judging by pictures and print on a display. But it is Searles carburettor. Nothing depends on the computation moving any atom or particle with quantum level precision in the real world. Life uses genetics to move electrons and protons with military precision.
So life constantly faces the chance of a surprise every time an electron quantum tunnels across the seven of so iron-sulphur receptors of a respiratory chain protein. Error would release so much energy too fast that it would blow the protein up. Life has skin in the game at the quantum level.
All AI systems are simulations of neural like processes operating in the sterile and risk-free environment of a metal box with a surge protected power supply and cooling fans. They interact with the world by switching pixels off on on. Maybe there will be a human there to interpret them. But who - on the AI side - knows or cares?
Chalk and cheese. Where do we see technology being able to reach down into entrails of the nanoscale quantum chemistry? The entropic forces of the battering storm of water molecules would blast any fabricated hardware apart in a millionth of a second. Only a self-repairing biology can ratchet this wild and utterly alien physical environment.
To make artificial life, we would in fact have to make real life. And real life already makes itself, thank you very much.
As to his ideas of consciousness Im not surprised he agrees with some of the latest neuroscience ideas although with a bit of bite of his own as is customary of him.
So what that says is vagueness is the residue left when you have a dichotomous or bivalent frame - the question of whether something is A or not-A - and can only declare there is no evidence one way of the other to decide the matter. Uncertainty is maximal as neither thesis, nor antithesis, can be positively claimed.
This grounds metaphysics in differences that dont make a difference. You can have an Apeiron - unbounded fluctuation - which is neither a presence nor an absence. It is an everythingness in terms of potential and a nothingness in terms of actuality.
Being requires counterfactual definiteness, and so vagueness is the ground of that bivalent becoming. Distinctions can arise when distinctions clearly wind up standing against each other.
Peirce constructed his whole metaphysics around this further logical manoeuvre - recognising vagueness or Firstness as the absence of positive contradiction to be found in noisy and restless spontaneity. The nothingness that is an everythingness before it gains its dichotomised logical structure to become a definite somethingness - a realm where the PNC and LEM could concretely apply.
Do you think Dawkins gets how this happened right ? In general ? Is all this delicate complexity the result of millions of years of research and development the old fashioned way ?
Is our chemistry special ? I can imagine other planets having different kinds of life. Granted that we don't have the skill to create life yet, is it possible in principle ?
Is something like consciousness fundamental in your view ? I can't tell. I might be stuck in reductionist goggles, but I'm trying to bend the spoon by bending my mind.
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This makes sense to me, and I guess it doesn't sound like the thereness of the there, or the transconceptual redness of the rose (which may be nonsense, that's the issue.)
I havent read a word of Dawkins for 40 years. But even then it was clear that in pushing the blind evolutionary algorithm for everything, he was missing the other half of the biological story that is self-organising development. Dissipative structure just wants to be. Evolvability evolved as a consequence of that telos.
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Nick Lanes The Vital Question argues otherwise. Only carbon works. Redox metabolism has to be universal as it provides the greatest chemical entropy gradient. So while the Dawkins argue evolution can lead to many solutions, the developmentalists and structuralists argue that life is tightly constrained as to the form it must take. Solutions converge on the metabolism that extracts the most in dissipative terms.
Again read my biophysics post. Life exists because there is something special in terms of the physics of the nanoscale quasi-classical convergence zone where semiotics can take root.
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Nothing is fundamental in the kind of monistic sense you mean. What is fundamental is the whole triadic shebang of the Peircean system. Holism says self organisation supplies it own ground of being.
What do you think Hegel was trying to argue?
Is the second law basically mathematical ? Something like the law of large numbers ? Is it basically the fact that there are more states that we call disordered than there are ordered states --- so that any change of state is likely to be toward disorder ?
How does one grasp this telos best ?
I actually did read it. I think I understand the importance of the 'junction' (basically free to ride.)
At the moment, I think he saw us as historically constrained (timebinding) but otherwise freefloating creators of our own mutating normative essence. [Semantics is normative. We decide/perform what we mean, create our signs. ] We are beings with a history rather than a nature, existing mostly as what we take ourselves to be.
If it fits in at all, where does consciousness fit in ? Does it play a crucial role ? Perhaps you've already said it and I didn't understand.
If you are interested, Brandom is great on Hegel (and it address what's above.)
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Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained end of history as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.
All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
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There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions. This normative sort of necessity is not only compatible with freedom, it is constitutive of it. That is what distinguishes the normative notion of freedom Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about. Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reasons march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of selfconsciousness Hegel calls Absolute knowing.
The metaphysics gets more complicated here. Boltzmann was thinking in terms of particles, Jaynes then turned it into statistics, Shannon showed how the maths dragged in information. And then the Second Law was shown to be a special case of the more general thing of dissipative structure - at least in my view.
That happened with Prigoines far from equilibrium thermodynamics - seen as a special case of the Second Law. But the Second Law describes gone to equilibrium systems. And that doesnt describe a Big Bang universe that is instead eternally cooling and spreading.
So exactly how to understand entropy and dissipation is an open conversation. Biologists have been calling for a Fourth Law for dissipative structure. And a Peircean view would support the idea that this would be the more generic story.
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Yeah, hes solid. Hes one of those calling for beyond the standard model of thermodynamics theories.
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Consciousness is loaded jargon. It speaks to a Cartesian substance. And that is exactly what I am arguing against in saying it reduces to the generality of the notion of the semiotic modelling relation.
So the claim is that what brains do is model their environment. And likewise, bodies and societies and technologies all also are examples of the generic structure that is a pragmatic modelling relation.
Karl Friston calls it Bayesian mechanics. He had developed a full mathematical model that can again be seen as part of the effort to move past the old Second Law to a deeper level of description - one that is intrinsically self-organising and alive like vortices, and not dead like a gone to equilibrium heat death conception of thermodynamics.
Quoting bert1 - hahahaha 1-0 for you
Quoting bert1 - actually, I find pretty good and with potential to help me on this matter. But for some reason, he sees me as a materialist trying to debunk ZIzek, or at least that's my impression.
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This makes sense to me. I guess the deeper issue, 'behind' Cartesian confusion, is the thereness of the there. The world is not 'only' concept. It's hard to get at it this issue.
Are there really 3 dimensions ? Is color 'more' than differential response ?
I need to track down those references, of course, but while you are here:
Should we think of the 'second claw of thermodemonics' as something like an urge ? Such as will in Schopenhauer or deathdrive in Freud ? Do things 'want' to dissipate ? Or do we just project this telos because things tend to dissipate ? Random motion will tend toward dissipation, right ? Though occasionally it can move toward what we call order ?
Do you know of any resources that give a great overall intro ? I love bigpicture first then zoom in.
The point here is for the scientist to accept all four of Aristotle's causes and not pretend nature is reducible to just bottom-up construction by localised material and efficient causes.
The scientist then deals with the obvious fact that there are grades of telos because there are grades of semiosis.
Stan Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.
See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284
So yes, the physical world lacks a code within which to fix an actual purpose or desire. The Second Law is simply a globally inevitable tendency or propensity. But recognising this as telos at its simplest possible level is still recognising that it is a universal drive that causes order in the Cosmos.
It completes the dialectic where chaos is the local irreducible uncertainty of every event, and yet statistical order is then the inescapable globally bounding order that imposes its statistical constraints on the free possibilities of chaos.
Thermodynamics speaks to the limits on randomness imposed by a globally closed system. If you are pulling lottery numbers out of a bag, the numbers may be random, but they are all in the same bag. Statistical regularity is thus enforced.
Then life has genes and neurons to fix its organismic purposes. We would call this being constrained by function.
And mind has words and numbers to fix its personal purposes. We would call this being constrained by desires and reasons.
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Maybe: https://complexsystems.org/publications/into-the-cool/
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That seems reasonable, and I grasp that it challenges a more encrusted view.
So it's something that is just found empirically. One looks and sees and articulates this tendency. It doesn't reduce to this or that aspect (thinkers you mentioned.). (?)
This one won't work for me.
Quoting apokrisis
This one did. This quote helps.
Nature abhors a gradient, they claim, and life arose in order to reduce energy gradients in much the same way that tornadoes serve to dissipate the pent up energy in the gradient between high and low pressure air masses. The emergence of life is causally connected to the second law, they say. Indeed, the second law is variously characterized by Schneider and Sagan as a force that governs, organizes, selects, generates, determines, mandates, pushes and leads to biological structure and organization. The second law is the source for the overall directionality observed in evolution, they say.
This is about recognising that constraint and construction are the co-fundamental dialectic of causality.
Reductionism only wants to admit to the reality of constructive causality, treating constraint as somehow just a convenient idea. But holism or systems thinking - in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, Peirce, etc - recognises that constraints are just as real, just as basic, to the existence of a world.
Darwinism rules even the emergence of the Cosmos. The Second Law is seen as the most fundamental law because it models that ultimate constraint in robust mathematics - statistical mechanics.
The world is (or seems to be) through a particular pair of eyes, though we grasp it always as transcending and encompassing those eyes.
How do you make sense of this peculiar situation ?
Do you see us participating in [ coconstructing ? ] a shared symbolic realm ? I like to think of us as tribal [ timebinding ] software running on local biohardware.
I don't know. It's an organizing framework (?), making new observations possible, so probably not only. Just to be clear, I have no objection to seeing what's going on and articulating it. At one point, gravity was just there, and Newton had the model. Now it's part of GR, yes ? But I'm open to the 2nd law being fundamental. Why not ?
I am truly willing to take off reductionist goggles (which is not to say it's easy.)
For context : I take from Hegel the idea that 'subject and substance' (symbol and the symbolized?) are entangled and not truly separable. The lifeworld is symbolically articulated. The reductionist scientistic image is just that, a map that ignores our symbolic historicity, the sediment of purposive meaning. The real world (for phenomenology) is all encompassing context. Even a massproduced blouse in a certain style speaks of the industrial revolution and the beheading of kings by a rising bourgeoisie (and the fancy designer version that inspired the knockoff.) We have a teeming creaking jungle of references here.
We like to think that purpose is completely and only in us. We all tend to think that signtrading is necessarily conscious. The second idea has been demolished in philosophy. Tacit norms are now understood to dominate. But the first (all purpose is animal purpose) seems still very strong.
This is standard social psychology. Not at all peculiar. How else could it have been?
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It is hard because it is not taking off dark glasses but re-learning the very habits of vision. Reductionism is embedded in the grammar of speech, let alone in the mechanical turn of the scientific and industrial revolutions. It is what we are trained in from birth.
But surely if you are into Hegel, you cant have got anywhere without understanding how his triadic system describes logic as the holist would see it?
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It's like pulling teeth though to make that point around here.
Folks love their methodological solipsism !
It's hard to say. In my experience, there are lots of ways to interpret and focus on Hegel, and I've checked out a decent number of them. I'd be glad to hear your take.
I offered a Brandom quote above that focused on unstable impersonal conceptual schemes that increase in complexity and comprehensiveness. For Kojeve's Hegel, this 'is' time (as the movement of the embodied 'software' coming to understand itself and what knowledge is.)
It all goes back to the Zapffe's break in nature. Talk about a break in symmetry! Humans have created a huge asymmetry. When meaning itself can not be justified, yet we "fear" the consequences of this or that, something went askew.
@apokrisis relies too much on the comforts of statistical norms as somehow "telling", but discredits the idea of bad faith. The logic of letting the egg lay the chicken. You buy into the statistical norm, it becomes the norm.
Its the other way around. It is the clean separability that grounds the more complex mixing or entangling.
In the beginning there is just vagueness - any and everything might be the case, which is thus also a vast nothingness. Nothing is actually the case when everything is potentially the case.
That symmetry must be broken by an asymmetry. There must be a dichotomy that separates in opposing or reciprocal directions. Possibility must be divided towards its complementary extremes.
So we can only conceive of motion in terms of its absence - a stillness. But also stillness only is measurable in terms now of the absence of motion. Run this dichotomy to its limits, to its extremes, and we derive the metaphysical dyad of stasis-flux.
Ancient Greek dialectics furnished us with the whole catalogue of such asymmetric distinctions. Chance and necessity, matter and form, one and many, local and global, discrete and continuous, vague and definite. The existence of each category is actualised to the degree it is measureably distant from its dialectical other.
So the maths is exact. Stasis = 1/flux and flux = 1/stasis. They are a Pythagorean unity of opposites where each is real to the degree its other is indeed othered.
Where your quote slips up is in reading this dialectical logic as dyadic rather than triadic - mediated by the third thing of the inverting relation that does the separation which then also allows the definite thing of the mixing, the entanglement, the complexification.
So yes, you can make a dichotomy of the subjective and the objective and so appear to create the two antithetical realms of the mind and the world. You can set up the standard Cartesian dilemma which results in a doubled reductionism. A belief in two disconnected substantial realms.
But Hegel was trying to show how the separated are the related. The relation creates the separation at a fundamental level - as a global systems constraint - which then allows the two aspects of reality to become interwoven in a constructing fashion over all scales of being.
At the level of neurosemiosis, that is how the pilot lands the plane. By becoming a still centre of an optic flow. The same dichotomising trick becomes an engrained habit that can be used to navigate a self through any cluttered and buffeted material environment.
Hegel didnt have Peirces logical chops, so his exegesis is often obscure. But it was what he was trying to say.
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Depending how much it matters, it might be worth checking out the literature on Peirce vs Hegel.
For instance
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-contextualization.html
But we are nature. We were implicit in Nature, which had to give birth to its wickedest and most beautiful child.
Either that or Im actually competent in the maths and metaphysics of statistical thought. That is my unfair advantage. :grin:
Never said we weren't part of nature, but just a really asymmetrical one that is out of sorts with the other parts. There is no justification for why we must do anything, yet we act as if we do! And here we have the tensions of PoMo and Evo Devo. We have human development and language.. The "constraints" of the system, but then order takes shape, but then this creates the ultimate disorder of NO JUSTIFICATION. As a deliberative language-bearing ape, is one that cannot escape having no justification at the end of its long journey. You don't have to work. You can die. You can fear death, but you can do go beyond what you fear. You can get by doing any number of things.
We are liquid temporal finite softwhere, always on the way toward more clarity, more power. Reason is purposive activity. Felix culpa ! Something happened. Something went askew. Pumpkin is cotton in then mark.
I never said you don't understand statistical mechanics, but as I said to plaque:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree with you to some extent but then you try to put the order where there is disorder.. symmetry where there is a large break in symmetry.
Can you justify this need for a justification ?
Justification is part of the way humans cooperate and compete, it seems to me.
I'd say that humans evolve to feel constrained only be themselves. We fucking decide now, --at least until the contemptuous and lecherous Neptunians make us their pets.
We justify ourselves only before one another, not before gods or the void.
It's all self-motivated though. I choose to internalize as much as it is habitual. That line is much greyer than both camps like to admit.
Using @apokrisis holism, and not being reductionist, we can say that choosing to habituate into someone is also a choice. It is possibly a unquestioned assumption (as to if, what, and how) to habituate someone else in the first place. As people develop their own identity, they can then break free of the constraints if they so choose...But then they encounter the dilemma of bad faith and authenticity.
This week I'm reading Richard Wrangham's The Goodness Paradox. You ought to read it too.
It tells how as a species, Homo sapiens self-domesticated its neurobiology in response to developing a new language-enabled social sense of self. We became creatures adapted to being egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands because we could collectively submit to the dominance of the higher thing of a timebound group identity.
The logic of the organism reconstructed its natural structure when given the entropic opportunity. You could call that statistical inevitability ... hence not at all blind chance or unlucky accident.
Science is eating up all your 18th C "romantic reaction to the industrial revolution" dialectical "truths".
Every step in the human journey can be seen as completely natural once you have the proper theory of nature.
Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. My point was that such a separation was impossible or confused. The truth is the whole. Entities have their reality or meaning only in relation to other entities. Anything isolated is nonsense. From the point of view of an inferentialist semantics, such entities play no role in inferences and are logically (scientifically, philosophically) null and void, hot air.
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance.
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The tricky part for me (in understand your view) is how the metaphysical image constructed by philosophers is related to reality as a whole. Is that metaphysical image actually the complex heart of a self-organizing, self-articulating reality ?
You give too much credence to this romantic notion of the romantic reaction to the industrial revolution. It was there in Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't say how we got here wasn't inevitable based on evolutionary trajectory. I am explaining the current conditions. There is no justification and that is indeed a large asymmetry with the rest of nature. No other animal has that degree of abstraction, deliberation, and thus self-awareness. This creates the problem of doing things one wouldn't "want" to do. Of knowing there is X negative and doing it anyways. One can do otherwise. One can commit suicide. One can hate and do. One HAS to do X otherwise Z. But it's not that, it's KNOWING that. It does represent an exile from Eden of sorts. A break.
Yep. Wrangham gives the detailed anthropological evidence.
It is a challenging thesis. To self domesticate become essentially peaceful and cooperative we had to kill off the violent males until our primate reactive violence was tuned down to a minimum. We had to weed the Neanderthal alphas out of the gene pool.
That left violence to become proactive collectively planned rather than individually reactive and emotional. We could kill others for good social reasons.
The process was a feedback loop once language showed up to allow public rationalisation or justification.
A group's code of conduct could be normed at the level of an intergenerational cultural understanding a body of customary practice that could undergo Darwinian fine-tuning. That code in turn allowed justified homicide when one dude in a small band of 20 or 30 hunter-gatherers made too much of a regular arse of himself.
The wiseguy would be dared to climb the high tree to get the honey. And after he had laid his weapons down and shinned up the trunk, his mates would gather up his defences and sit about waiting for him to decide to come back down and face his fate.
Shaman rituals through nights in the long house would allow the deed to be debated and coalesce as the agreed right thing. Justification would hang in the air until it developed the weight of inevitability.
Often the entropic loop was closed by eating the victim. Killing off trouble-makers both reinforced the social norms essential to a social level of organismic existence and recycled precious fat and protein within the body of this society.
Call it autophagy the new fad goal of the biohacker/longevity crowd. :smile:
But the wholeness requires the separation so as to have something to unify. And the separation in turn needs a vagueness which grounds its coming into being as being the being that is beyond being itself.
So wholeness in the systems sense is irreducibly triadic. All three levels are "the one".
You sound like you want to make the separation secondary to the unity. Which would be the brand of Hegelianism that Fichte popularised. Hegel was striving to do what Peirce actually did. Show how unity is irreducibly triadic.
Unity itself has to develop into concrete being by a process of logical becoming.
Metaphysics grounds the science. It establishes the causal logic that gets stuck into our mathematical theories. And from the maths, we can generate the measureable predictions which inductively justify our logical deductions.
This is another crucial feature of Peircean pragamatics/semiotics. It describes both epistemology and ontology in the one causal metaphysics. The way we humans model the world using a rigourous and objectifying method is also the causal logic of how that world itself works. It is how the Cosmos developed into being.
That is why both cosmology and neurology have converged on the science of dissipative structure as their fundamental level of description. The Bayesian brain and the holographic universe.
Argument by non sequitur.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Assertion rather than argument. "Move to dismiss, m'lud."
Quoting schopenhauer1
No other animal has the entropic drive of half a billion years of dense hydrocarbons flowing through their veins. They are all pallid creatures living off whatever the sunshine brings today, not exploding with the pressure of unimaginable surging energy - all that fossil fuel that just desparately demands to be burned.
You think "self-awareness" is any more than pissing into the tornado here? I live among humans. I'm well aware of just how little will they can actually summon to counteract the constraints imposed by their environments.
The asymmetry or injustice or radical break certainly exists. But as is always the case it is entropic.
The human journey is about bumbling into whatever is the next entropic bonanza that makes itself available to our evolving intelligence.
I think it is definitely sequitur.
Quoting apokrisis
Correcting wrong characterization from your non sequitur.
More coming hold on..
I am explaining what it's like to be the creature that can do things it doesn't want to and can do things existentially driven (suicide). Even other apes, and complex mammals and birds don't have that kind of self-awareness.
Perhaps some bonanza will be there. I don't doubt it. I am just saying what it is to be this embodied break (asymmetry if you want) from the rest of nature.
I saw too many of his lectures, documentaries and read his big book Less Than Nothing. His thought is difficult to summarize and his categorization of ontology/epistemology as the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, is arbitrary to me.
But, concerning the OP, I believe he has mentioned that he thinks that consciousness arose to detect when something goes wrong.
He gives interesting, if somewhat exotic examples of paradoxical situations, but his scholarship is quite bad and his obsession with Hegel makes him like counterintuitive thought way too often in a manner that, if taken too far, might be distorting to rational thinking.
He is best taken as a person who occasionally says something useful, but I wouldn't look for a systematic philosophy in his thinking, despite his many attempts to lay it out.
Perhaps his best stuff are his documentaries, they are fun, especially his Perverts Guide films. All to be taken with grains of salt.
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Eden and that break were created at the same time.
Intense, but it makes sense. Organized crime is / becomes law.
Quoting apokrisis
The thickening of justification, yes.
Yes, I think I was pointing at a primordial unity. But yes Hegel talks of a round trip, also interpreting the Christian Trinity in a new way (I don't remember the details.)
If memory serves, you lean toward indirect realism. Is that correct ? Are you offering a model or a map that is not the territory itself ? Some understandings of Hegel identity map and territory.
Eden = no self-awareness. No ability to be uber-deliberative and to thus be existential. There was a time when there was no break.
Sure, but they couldn't enjoy it. Youth is wasted on the young.
Or more critically, the social context which could even give such ingrained negativity any kind of accepted cultural interpretation.
There is no "you" having these thoughts without the romantic response to be the "unrequested self behind the forced social mask" that has a social history going all the way back to Ecclesiastes and Gilgamesh, as you so triumphantly proclaim.
But let's not derail another thread with your persistent Pessimism. That wasn't the subject here.
Zizek might not agree. Anyways, pessimism goes part and parcel with being human. while our cultural and social environment may shape the way we understand and express our self-awareness, it doesn't necessarily negate the fact that self-awareness is an innate aspect of human consciousness.
Caveman and hunter-gatherers have access to doing things they would not want to do and suicide. But even if that were not true, the fact that we are a species with this capacity (exaptation though it might be), is still the case, however it formed. You can't banish self-awareness because you thus said "No this wasn't how it started!". Doesn't work like that.
That is how they enjoy(ed) it. The enjoyment is not knowing. The Tao and Nirvana and Flow state we are always seeking. Broken tool man.
Correct enough. I'm a pragmatist if I have to wave any flag.
Quoting plaque flag
As I stressed earlier, the modelling relation says the map is a model of a territory with us in it. So it is a selfish view. An Umwelt as von Uexküll put it. Thus it ain't actually a map of a territory in the usual lumpen realist sense.
Peirce chose to call it objective idealism. But that confuses folk too.
Again think of the pilot who sees the world as the still centre of a rapid flow. The centre is parsed as the self and its target. The flow is parsed as reality whizzing by until the feeling of wheels kissing a runway.
The map contains two fictions the "self" and the "world". As Kant says, we are stuck in the phenomenal and cannot truly represent the thing in itself.
But on the other hand, this semiotic relation is what works for life and mind as encoding structure that can surf the world's entropic gradients with practiced habit.
Epistemology is mad if it thinks there is something to "fix" here all those tired old AP moans about theories of truth and Goedelian incompleteness.
Post your support for your assertion. Do the work.
Thanks ! I hope I'm starting to understand your view.
So is it a map constructed by networked human brains which includes avatars of those brains ? And is your metaphysics necessarily deeply human in that sense ? Is there something like a reality-in-itself as territory ? Or is this 'territory' something like the map's boundary ?
What you count our manifest image (Sellars) or umvelt as part of this ? Is the land of marriages and contracts within this larger fiction ? Then physics and metaphysics are specialized focuses on deep structure ?
But in general, his philosophy acknowledges the play between authenticity and power structures that help us internalize habits of thought.. Things that I was emphasizing earlier about us being an animal that has habits but can also break free of those habits.. A being with the self-awareness understanding bad faith....
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We get flow states too, sometimes! Our sense of exile from the garden comes and goes. Sometimes we spread our singed wings and laugh. Horror and glory, sorrow and ecstasy. Lows and highs. I just can't pretend that life is never a positive good. I don't deny hellfire either. I just try to dodge it.
[quote"]the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization, of the traumatic encounter with the Thing that cannot be represented"[/quote]
and
[quote"] us being an animal that has habits but can also break free of those habits.. A being with the self-awareness understanding bad faith....[/quote]
the same concern?
:up:
As Nietzsche put, life is exploitation. It is this surfing. The model making mind is an army of mapping metaphors.
Zizek is a continental guy. Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Kierkegaard, are all on his radar. It's the well he draws from.
There's a strong tradition of pessimistic thought there. Critiquing the power structure regarding things out of our power to control. The Real is what is out of our power, eludes symbolic interpretations and answers.
I think it's cool. It's paradoxical Romantic metaphysical psychoanalytic poetry.
I think Guy Debord is similar there with his idea of The Spectacle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
As it says here:
Actually I'm already a reader of Zizek and Debord. I wish I kept my copy of The Sublime Object... I did keep my Debord. Also read Debord's weird autobio, cool stuff.
Sorry to go over well-trodden ground. Just keeping up with the thread.. Although I guess it's not really Zizek's "consciousness" theory as much as his epistemology of politics.
But your quote spoke of an epistemic trauma and your own complaint is of an ontological trauma.
Shome category error shurely?
No problem. Just saying I like 'em both. That Lacanian idea of the real is fascinating. Lacan in general is fascinating, right on the line of total faker and sometime genius. I also like forgotten badboy Paul de Man, but he's a genius in his work and was only a faker in his life.
I'd like Debord and Marshall McLuhan to come back and see the internet's role in this world.
Not category error. Similar conclusions perhaps. There is something about human consciousness which is tragic. You are saying that the tragedy is a fiction brought on by Enlightenment (and then perhaps balked and thought perhaps civilization). I said that the tragedy is democratic and afforded to all people with deliberative, self-reflecting brains.
Eerie how their description fits the internet age so well.
The idea, I think, is that the protagonist of this tragedy is a social construction.
Yes, but not a social fiction. There's a difference. It is at the least entailed in our species, not our culture.
The tragedy is a real as anything, just to be clear. But this self experiencing itself in a matrix is a repetition of my favorite religious myth, the crucifixion. The cross is a mother is a matrix. Its perpendicular lines suggest a collision of opposites. It's only ever down here on our gliding prison planet that good can exist -- always in chains, dreaming a freedom that would be death, as if life's obstacle were its knowledge of itself.
To me the self (poor ghost held responsible for the operation of his machine) is perhaps our oldest piece of technology.
A member of the chorus steps forward and gets his own lines.
I can agree with that. It is a necessary construct. Hunter-gatherers are more communal but they are not completely different minds. They are not the borg or hive mind, or whatever neo-Noble Savage we can put upon them to make the tragedy some sort of YOU [s]thing[/s] problem not an US [s]thing[/s] problem.
:up:
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But in both Reddit and here, I understand that there is no clear view on this and that this type of philosophy is not analytical, it's fuzzy, unclear, confusing, contradictory, etc.
To be honest, I don't understand that language. I can't make much sense of what people are talking even on this OP, and not because they're wrong, but because my language is limited to the classical model of debate.