The Naive Theory of Consciousness
I was reading through the 1957 edition of Encyclopedia Americana when I came across the article on Consciousness written by professor John Frederick Dashiell. In it is a delightful passage:
Even seventy years ago psychologists were sounding the alarm on the slovenly use of language regarding this topic. Im afraid not much has changed.
The problem with the Hard Problem of Consciousness is its question-begging character and its tendency to hypostatization (reification). It assumes the existence of conscious experience. The language often treats it as actual, if not fundamental.
According to David Chalmers* it is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. He says it is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis. In order to develop a proper theory of experience, it might be better to take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time.
The problem is: when we look around for what it is Chalmers is talking about we come up empty-handed. The language isnt helpful when it comes to pointing to what it is in the world the word experience signifies. Despite the claims, nothing arises, nothing emerges, nothing gives rise to anything else. Rather than something it is like, there appears nothing it is like.
Our Naive Theories of Consciousness
Chalmers believes there is an explanatory gap between two states in his naturalistic dualism, the biological states and the states of experience. We need some sort of explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere, he says.
But upon an objective analysis we find there is only one state and it is wholly biological. Again, nothing has arisen from this state, forever discounting the claim that it gives rise to something. Rather, instead of two different states, we have two different accounts of one state. Our problem seems to be that both accounts are naive, one practically, the other fundamentally.
Practically (and ethically) we do not have the means to examine a conscious being without altering his consciousness. This is a sort of measurement problem. Perhaps one day we could devise methods and instruments to overcome this burden. For now, the theory resulting from this analysis is practically naive.
The fundamentally naive view will not be able to over come its own burden without conceding to the practically naive view, which may become an informed view. When a conscious being reports on his experience, anyone from any angle but his own can confirm he is reporting on his biological state, found as it is in a particular environment. We can see that a vast majority of his biology, and indeed a majority of himself, is hidden from him. What he is able to perceive of it is limited by his perceptual periphery, the fact that most of his sense organs point outwards toward the rest of the world and not inwards towards the mass where all the business of experience is occurring. Finally, given the complexity of every movement of his biology, he is unable to verify which feelings and experiences result from which biological movements.
Since the theory of his own consciousness is a theory about his own conscious state, which is a direct 1-to-1 ratio with himself, a biological state, should he rely on what little data his perception has offered to inform his theories, they remain limited. He might as well form a theory of digestion from the butterflies in his his stomach. His theory is a fundamentally naive one, and the way to bridge Chalmers gap is to walk back across it to the other side.
* David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
Consciousness, properly an abstract term which, like happiness, graciousness, or thoroughness, refers to some quality of the human being taken in abstracto. However, the hypostatizing tendency of human thinking has led to its use as if referring to something existential. Since a man may be conscious, it is easy to fall into the assumption that he may have consciousness, then that something like a consciousness exists. This tendency to hypostatization has been strengthened by another circumstance. Much psychological interest has been in the description of ones experiences when he is conscious, his feelings, perceptions, emotions, thoughts; and to arrest such experiences in mid-career, to hold them in static for detailed description, incurs the danger of misapprehending these cross-sectional snapshots as stable and enduring things.
Even seventy years ago psychologists were sounding the alarm on the slovenly use of language regarding this topic. Im afraid not much has changed.
The problem with the Hard Problem of Consciousness is its question-begging character and its tendency to hypostatization (reification). It assumes the existence of conscious experience. The language often treats it as actual, if not fundamental.
According to David Chalmers* it is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. He says it is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis. In order to develop a proper theory of experience, it might be better to take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time.
The problem is: when we look around for what it is Chalmers is talking about we come up empty-handed. The language isnt helpful when it comes to pointing to what it is in the world the word experience signifies. Despite the claims, nothing arises, nothing emerges, nothing gives rise to anything else. Rather than something it is like, there appears nothing it is like.
Our Naive Theories of Consciousness
Chalmers believes there is an explanatory gap between two states in his naturalistic dualism, the biological states and the states of experience. We need some sort of explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere, he says.
But upon an objective analysis we find there is only one state and it is wholly biological. Again, nothing has arisen from this state, forever discounting the claim that it gives rise to something. Rather, instead of two different states, we have two different accounts of one state. Our problem seems to be that both accounts are naive, one practically, the other fundamentally.
Practically (and ethically) we do not have the means to examine a conscious being without altering his consciousness. This is a sort of measurement problem. Perhaps one day we could devise methods and instruments to overcome this burden. For now, the theory resulting from this analysis is practically naive.
The fundamentally naive view will not be able to over come its own burden without conceding to the practically naive view, which may become an informed view. When a conscious being reports on his experience, anyone from any angle but his own can confirm he is reporting on his biological state, found as it is in a particular environment. We can see that a vast majority of his biology, and indeed a majority of himself, is hidden from him. What he is able to perceive of it is limited by his perceptual periphery, the fact that most of his sense organs point outwards toward the rest of the world and not inwards towards the mass where all the business of experience is occurring. Finally, given the complexity of every movement of his biology, he is unable to verify which feelings and experiences result from which biological movements.
Since the theory of his own consciousness is a theory about his own conscious state, which is a direct 1-to-1 ratio with himself, a biological state, should he rely on what little data his perception has offered to inform his theories, they remain limited. He might as well form a theory of digestion from the butterflies in his his stomach. His theory is a fundamentally naive one, and the way to bridge Chalmers gap is to walk back across it to the other side.
* David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
Comments (156)
If you looked around for a charge, you'd also come up empty handed. A charge is potential energy. It's an analysis of what's possible. It's not an object. Events arise from a charge in pretty much the same way I picked out black paint because I like how it looks.
Can we measure charge?
Not directly. The idea of charge is closely related that of force. They're both calculations based on things we can directly measure.
It is not unreasonable to look at every synapse impinging on a neuron as a sense organ which that neuron uses to detect the state of the neurons providing the outputs to those synapses. If 'sense organ' is broadly construed in such a way, then much of what is being sensed by neurons is the result of earlier information processing by other neurons, and there is much 'internal sensing' going on.
I'm fairly confident that such a neuron by neuron quanitification of sensing would lead to the conclusion that there is actually more sensing of internal than external going on, and I think such is necessary for our phenomenal consciousness.
I'm pretty sure you can directly measure electrical charge with an electrometer.
I think you're right, and I'm sure there is much internal sensing, like pain. I mostly meant he is unable to match the internal movements and biological states to those sensations with observation and measurement, but point taken.
That is a safe assumption.
Why?
See how strongly we hold onto these reifications? No, an analog voltmeter allows a little bit of current to go through a wire that's in a magnetic field. That moves the needle. If there's a lot of current, we deduce that there's a lot of voltage. Voltage itself is potential. With the same voltage (from a dynamic source like a generator), all sorts of events are possible, the determining factor being the load.
But if you conclude from this that voltage doesn't exist, you're likely to become a member of the 110 Club.
Thanks for the lesson, but I'm pretty sure I wrote "electrometer".
An electrometer is just a high precision voltmeter.
Yes I am.
Are you coming to a point here, frank?
I have merely established that I am conscious. The term "conscious" describes me. I exist, sure, but we have not established the existence of anything else.
Are you browsing encyclopedias as a hobby or for fun? :grin:
Sorry. I couldn't help it. It just triggered my imagination. :smile:
Quoting NOS4A2
But it is something existential. It refers to the human existence as well as to all life.
Quoting NOS4A2
It's not an assumption. It's not a construction of the mind. It's something that can be experienced. What is a construction of the mind is the concept of consciousness. Together with the effort to be accurately defined, described, explained and proved. If it cannot be scientifically explained and proved --see the hard problem of consciousness"-- does not mean that it does not exist, that it is not a reality. And this is because science, as we know it, in its current state of evolution and development, does not accept the human experience among its tools of analysis, investigation, kinds of proof, etc.
Quoting NOS4A2
Right. In psychology --the conventional one, at least the one I know from studies in my college years-- consciousness is taken for granted. Well, this is better than denying its existence, isn't it? :smile:
OK, this is as far as your quotation of this professor.
Quoting NOS4A2
True. And for a good reason! :smile:
Quoting NOS4A2
I agree.
Quoting NOS4A2
Where does this refer to? Who is "we"? And how is it connected to the title of the topic "The Naive Theory of Consciousness"?
Quoting NOS4A2
Well, I would rather say "connection" or "interaction" rather than "gap", since the latter refers to distance, esp. between two things of a similar nature. But these states are totally different kinds of things, of a totally different nature. They can only be connected in the way fear is connected to adrenaline.
Quoting NOS4A2
Do you mean that consciousness is a biological process and/or of a biological nature?
Whose viewpoint is this? Yours or Chalmers'?
Anyway, whatever is the case, I wonder what this "objective analysis" is ...
Quoting NOS4A2
In what way "examine a conscious being"? I assume you mean examine the contents of a being's consciousness, right?
Well, this reminds me of quantum theory ... (From the little I know, of course.)
But consciousness is not a case of particles that we can examine in a laboratory ...
On the other hand, it's true that I cannot examine your consciousness. Not even your thoughts, emotions, ... anything of this sort. I can only examine your state of consciousness, --i.e. if and how conscious you are. Not its contents. As I can't examine your thoughts, emotions, anything of this sort.
So, what I have gathered from all this is that all (the existing) theories of consciousness are naive.
Is this the main point of the topic or is there some other conclusion?
I picked up the entire 1957 Americana Encyclopaedia collection at a garage sale, all 30 volumes. They came with a very nice cabinet.
What is this "something that can be experienced"? All these references to "something", for instance, "there is something it is like", but once we look there is nothing. Simply saying it is existential doesn't convince me much, I'm afraid. It seems to me that if you want to explain and prove this "something" it must first exist. But, as I said, it can only be assumed in a series of question-begging assertions.
This is evident in the paradoxical notion of "p-zombies", that there is some missing element in one of two identical beings. All that is possible is first to assume this element, and then further assume that this element can be missing.
The point was that abstractions are all over the place. Science is full of them. Charge is an example of an abstraction that is often misunderstood. We could pursue that if you're interested.
Otherwise, just know that Chalmers did not think consciousness is an object like an apple. He knew it's an abstraction.
I'm not interested in pursuing anything irrelevant.
If Chalmers doesn't think consciousness is an object, element, aspect, or entity, then why does he speak about it like it is?
He thinks it's a property, like spin charge and mass
Oh, you're right. He does think it's an object. The Hard Problem is about how to locate that little Soul Bean in the human head. :up:
Dashiell's image of random snapshots does not reflect the way Chalmers frames what is to be explained:
Quoting D Chalmers, The Meta-Problem of Consciousness,
From the quote, it is hard to know what Dashiell would say to "something it is like to be that system, from the first-person point of view". With the concern expressed by 'reification', I am guessing he would align with the 'illusionist' against the 'realist' in Chalmer's article on the meta-problem.
Or perhaps Dashiell is viewing the matter as a behaviorist where 'the first-person point of view' is an epiphenomenon within an epiphenomenon.
What about the computer you're writing this on? The house you're sitting in while writing it? The products you use every moment of every day? How were they made? By unconscious automata? Did they spontaneously form from the aggregation of materials? Of course not. They were built by human designers and inventors.
'Reification of consciousness' is definitely a problem, but it is not Chalmer's problem. The root of reification is 'reify' meaning 'to make a thing out of', from the Latin root Res, 'thing'. And it was Descartes that designated the mind as 'res cogitans', literally a 'thinking thing' (not even thinking being.) This has had many profound and deleterious consequences, crystallised in the depiction of the mind as 'the ghost in the machine'.
I think what your OP demonstrates is the failure to grasp Chalmer's argument.
Yep. That's the weasel argument. We happily accept the idea of a physical quantity a measure of "stuff" or substantial being, such as charge. And so the linguistic trick is get us thinking of a quality qualia in a similarly physicalist and countable way. Little jolts of experience like the feeling of red or smell of a rose flashing through the mind.
The sleight of hand works as our folk metaphysical notions of physical quantity are as suspect as our ones about mental qualities.
Something fundamental like charge is treated as if it were like a measure of some fluid stuff that flows. It is already pictured and talked about in an overly concrete fashion. Then Chalmers takes that folk physics and applies it to the mind as if consciousness is also a quantity of this atomistic stuff called qualia, or isolated flashes of experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
But Chalmers was a big hit because he was "making it respectable to be a Cartesian dualist again". That was literally the gleeful response of the philosopher sat next to me when Chalmers gave the hard problem talk that made his name.
Descartes may have wanted to locate this special experiencing spirit stuff in the pineal gland of the brain. Chalmers agreed that was silly. But then said well maybe its somehow located in "physical information" or is another "dual aspect" property of particles, like charge.
He became hand-waving when pressed. It was enough that he could convince an audience that dualism could still be treated as a respectable possibility in metaphysics. People were entertained for a few years there. And the "quantum consciousness" folk found it useful in their attempts to get some traction.
A sociological side-show in other words.
:confused:
But it is simply a fact that particles have aspects about them that determine their behavior that are not their shape or location. This is not a weasel argument, its a fact of reality. Why does an upquark behave differently in an electro-magnetic field than an electron? It certainly isn't its location, or shape. Matter has causally relevant "properties" anyway you slice it. Otherwise nothing would happen.
What am I not grasping?
Like any grammatical modifier the word conscious lends us information about another word in the sentence (say, a man) and therefor applies to whatever thing in the world that word signifies (the conscious man). The word conscious signifies that thing and must be a direct 1-to-1 ratio with that which the word describes, or else the modifier is false.
Adding the suffix -ness to the adjective conscious turns the subject of analysis from the conscious man to the state or quality of being conscious. What is it that is being conscious? The man, but men are physical, so we abstract out the man. This slight linguistic maneuver might provide us with a new subject of abstract thought to analyze absent what it used to signify, but unmoors us from the world, entering us into the paradox of a state or quality of nothing in particular, and leaving us with a noun which signifies neither person, place, nor thing. Our theory of consciousness has quickly been inflated to include new nouns and new nothings.
Its all in the grammar. Chalmers almost exclusively uses noun-phrases like consciousness, experience, mind, which grammatically signify a person, place, or thing. He could say Im just being abstract about the conscious man, and that would be the end of it. But that would refute his own theory, men being physical, biological, and all that. Rather, he posits these nouns and whatever it is they signify as fundamental features of the world, ontologically independent of physical properties.
I suspect Dashiell was a behaviorist, but I suppose he would be eliminativist today.
I never liked Nagels formulation because it seems to me to apply to any system, conscious or otherwise. There is something it is like to be a football.
More importantly, it doesn't address how "something it is like" ends up being able to influence the behavior of the particles that make up the brain so that we write about it.
There is an irony involved in your citing the arbitrary quality of 'being like a football' since it relies upon the commonly received notion that footballs do not experience their being. To that extent, you are using the concept you wish to excise.
But the quantum spin that stands behind EM charge is a geometric property more than a material one, wouldnt you agree? The geometric structure of intrinsic spin is both what the quark and lepton share, as well as what makes them different.
There is nothing it is like to be a football, then?
You were using the idea to make a distinction between what might be a problem of experience between beings who care about it with an object you are confident does not share the problem.
That's not at all the same thing as what it is like to be a bat.
I wouldn't, spin and charge are two separate properties of particles. Physicists have actually managed to model the behavior of some particles by separating them into "quasi-particles" in which one has the spin and one has the charge.
https://www.sp.phy.cam.ac.uk/research/1d-transport/SCseparation
They do this by treating them as two different phenomenon of the particle, not necessarily related.
A panpsychist like Chalmers might disagree. Conscious experience, to him, is fundamental after all. It does not supervene on the physical properties.
Please cite the text to support this statement.
:clap: :100:
Quoting NOS4A2
:sweat: :up:
Which one?
30 volumes!! I just checked it in Wiki: 45,000 articles, 6,500 contributors, 9,000 bibliographies, 150,000 cross-references, 1,000+ tables, 1,200 maps, 4,500 images. Quite impressive!
First published in 1820! At that time, my country was still under the Ottoman occupation! :grin:
Enjoy!
Quoting NOS4A2
Well, one has to use ... something! :smile:
Words like "something", "thing", etc. function as wildcards, passe-partouts. They are used for lack of ... something more concrete. I guess they are OK, as far as they help expressing, explaining, etc. ... something.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, I guess this is often the case.
Separate but connected. Spin breaks local chiral symmetry and charge breaks global translational symmetry. So an electron combines the two in that it is a handed fermion that can then exchange photons as translational momentum.
The point being that the account of a "fundamental particle" is to be found in the patterns of geometry rather than in the qualities of material substance. An electron is a fundamental structure of relations that emerges due to a context of constraints.
Physics thinks in terms of form rather than matter now.
Quoting Francis
Appealing to topological order only reinforces the point I just made. It demonstrates that "particles" are emergent regularities of nature that result from symmetry breaking.
My own view is this. We do need to use something, and that something is whatever physical thing the word conscious describes. That thing is the object we need to analyze because it is that thing we are speaking about when we speak about a conscious thing. So in my opinion we need to abandon the question begging and the reification, not only because they are fallacious, but because they tend to lead us to false conclusions.
What is it like to be a football? What are you thinking of? Round (or oval if you're a septic), inflatable, ect? Is that what you mean?
I'm just confused by the statement that "there is something it is like to be such-and-such". It refers to the same thing too many times for me. There is something (the football) it (the football) is like to be the football (the football). It can be applied to literally anything, is all I'm saying.
Yeah I see, the meaning of the figure of speech is opaque to some, and unhelpful in getting the concept across sometimes.
And frankly, I suspect that one of the issues is that, at least on our own human case, we are confusing self-consciousness thinking that I am thinking, or experiencing that I am experiencing, such that I can tell you "I am seeing a blue car racing toward us", is perfectly understandable and common, with consciousness, which would "just" be experiencing.
To be conscious is to be aware that I am reading these letters right now, or that I move my eyes, I'll see a light, but removing the propositional form.
We alter between these two meanings and find it difficult to imagine that we don't have a clue what it would be like to be a bat, in part because bats don't appear to show self-awareness. We do.
And also, another issue is that we still persist with this nagging idea of "dead and stupid matter", that that thing out there which makes our rocks and rivers, can't possibly think, no matter how it is configured.
But modern physics makes it evident that matter is not this way, it's not this block of concrete stuff, it's much more sophisticated than these notions. Still, seeing matter in this way shouldn't cause us to believe that matter so-organized must think, but at the same time, we should also stop short of concluding that matter cannot think.
The latter view is extremely less likely, but, should be noted anyway.
You can do the same for, the famous example being, a bat. You can learn many of the same things that you learned about a football. But, of course, there are other things. And other kinds of things. It has life processes. Respiration, metabolism, circulation. You can learn about its wings, body shape, and everything else that gives it the ability to fly. You can learn about its echolocation. What frequency it uses, how its ears work, etc., etc. And you can learn all there is too know about the particles that the bat is made of, and how their properties gave rise to all those other things.
However, in the end, you will [I]not[/I] know everything there is to know about the bat. You will not know what it is like to [I]be[/I] a bat. A bat has consciousness. It has an inner life. None of your learning will have told you what those things are like. And he chose the bat because we really can't imagine what it's like to be a bat. As he put it:All of that is what is meant by "There is nothing it is like to be a football to a football" and "There is something it is like to be a bat to a bat."
I agree.
Chalmers proposes the concept of "naturalistic dualism" as an alternative to traditional Cartesian Dualism. According to this view, consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, irreducible to physical processes, but it is still causally linked to the brain and the physical world. Chalmers suggests that consciousness may be a fundamental aspect of reality, akin to space, time, and matter, but which may not be fully explicable within physicalist scientific frameworks.
I agree with him, although I know it's not very satisfactory from an engineering perspective.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, it's annoying that he's gone on to become a tenured academic at New York University, author/editor of half a dozen anthologies on philosophy of mind, and that rarest of things, a well-known philosopher. You'd think we could have expected something better from a Bronze Medallist at the International Mathematics Olympiad.
Quoting NOS4A2
The point of the paper you're quoting. This passage by Dashiell is very similar to Gilbert Ryle's criticism of Descartes' in his famous book, The Ghost in the Machine:
Here, I take it that the word 'existential' means 'existing'. So he's accusing Chalmer's of 'reifying consciousness', of making it out as some thing. But Chalmers doesn't do that.
Quoting NOS4A2
That is because it is not visible to the objective sciences, which is not a shortcoming of Chalmer's theory, but the point, which you're not seeing.
Quoting NOS4A2
Presumably, you would agree that there is a difference between a non-sentient organism, such as a tree, a simple sentient organism, such as a fish, complex sentient organisms such as elephants and primates, and complex, rational, sentient beings, such as humans. All can be understood through the perspective of biology, but biology does not necessarily extend to, or explain, the nature of what differentiates the complex-sentient and rational-complex-sentient beings from trees and comb jellies. They are subjects of experience - something which is not plausibly deniable. At issue is what it is that gives them this quality of subjective awareness.
I think there is an important sense in which this isn't true. Yes, in principle we could learn all sorts of details, but I think it most likely that forming a comprehensive mental model of something as complicated as the processes occurring in the brain of a bat are well beyond the cognitive faculties of humans.
I'm speaking as an electrical engineer who has designed a system that other engineers find very difficult to wrap their head around, but that system is utterly trivial by comparison with a mammalian brain. I don't think there is any good reason to credit humans with the capacity to fully grasp what is going on in such complicated systems as the brains of mammals.
I do agree, but I do not need to add mental properties. Their biologies are different. Their positions in space and time are different (the principium individuationis). This accounts perfectly for what differentiates the complex-sentient and rational-complex-sentient beings from trees and comb jellies.
The simple reason why I cannot know what its like to be a bat is because I am not a bat. I am not of the same biology. I am a different thing. This also accounts for why I cannot see from your perspective, which is the perspective of your particular and discrete biology. We do not need to stir in fictions like experience, consciousness, and mental properties, because all states of experience (as Chalmers called them) are states of the body.
Its why I cannot conceive of the p-zombie, and the conceivability of p-zombies is one of his strongest arguments. It just falls apart unless you beg the question regarding experience, and reify the ghosts.
We are biologically identical, to all intents and purposes. Sure, science can tell our DNA apart but from a biological perspective, we're both members of the same species, and all our fundamental biological traits are identical.
Quoting NOS4A2
States only experienced by a conscious sentient being. Not an anaesthetized being, nor a corpse.
Quoting Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos
Awfully loose usage of "identical" there.
It's still dualism. And it still relies on confusing people by treating qualities as quantities.
Quoting Wayfarer
It doesn't even make metaphysical sense. :grin:
Quoting Wayfarer
I've never denied his talent for climbing the greasy pole of popular opinion. He gives the crowd what it wants.
Exactly.
We are biologically identical in a way that you and an orangutan is not.
Not if your metaphysics is physical, it don't.
The law of identity, the fact that Im here and youre there, the fact that you do not have a single cell I have, proves there is nothing about us that is identical.
If Im to avoid question-begging and deification, Ill have to say the states and the conscious being are the same. Altering the state alters the consciousness for this reason, for instance with anaesthetics and death.
I cannot assume inner lives because whenever we take a peak inside there is nothing of the sort in there. What we can see and what we can confirm is that there is biology in there, and this biology, its complexity, and the whole range of movements it makes are largely imperceptible to everyone involved. The fact that the phenomenology and the actuality differ so much suggests the one is unable to grasp or comprehend the other.
That we're not the same people means nothing to a biologist.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'll happily accept deification, thanks!
Quoting apokrisis
You don't get academic tenure for that, and his books are certainly not written as crowd pleasers.
I've come to realise the cogency of the 'philosophical zombies' argument, having always dismissed it up until now. The point of the argument is that if there were a creature that looked and acted like a human being, there would be no empirical way of telling whether they were subjects of experience or not. It shows that consciousness cannot be solely explained by physical processes because the physical processes that can were exhibited by those creatures the absence of subjective experience would provide no way of telling whether they were really subjects of experience or not. I still don't like the argument much, but at least I think I get it.
I know what you mean. There are cases however, where the word "thing", although very general, is unsuitable. For example, I wouldn't use it to say "a conscious thing", since the word "conscious" refers to beings, living entities and the word "thing", although very general, normally refers to an object, i.e. something material, inanimate. I wouldn't say "conscious being" or "conscious creature" either, because it would be a pleonasm, since beings/creatures are conscious anyway. In these cases, I believe the word "entity" is more suitable, since it covers both living and non-living cases. So, I would say "speaking about a conscious entity" or, better, "speaking about consciousness".
Quoting NOS4A2
Right.
I am attracted by the idea that the emergence of life IS the emergence of sentience in the Universe. I found an Evan Thompson paper on that Could All Life be Sentient? (which I'm in the process of reading.)
But I agree that AI, no matter how powerful, is insentient, although clearly it can mimic some aspects of sentience. I've been using ChatGPT since the day it came out, and I can imagine it becoming ever more person-like in its responses - it already 'apologises for the confusion' and says 'thanks for providing additional context' and things like that. I rather like the idea of, say, having an AI guide to Plato's Dialogues, which would read the text on demand, and then also provide commentary from authors of your choosing. I'm sure all this is going to be happening soon.
I was thinking similarly re Heidegger. You could choose the AI guide of your preferences - the existentialist reading or the post-modern reading, say, and do immediate contrasts from the text. Do we need to get out more often?
(Anyway, we're derailing, I will shutup now :yikes: )
Youd be surprised. Bums on seats matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
And who did Chalmers nick that from?
Quoting Wayfarer
But why spin this epistemological argument as if it were a ontological one?
Why jump from arguing that a flesh and blood person could in fact be a secret zombie to the conclusion that fundamental particles must therefore have the feels?
Perhaps it should be called the hard problem of biology, but then it wouldnt have that nice spiritual ring to it.
The pressure of a gas in a container is literally determined by the billions of individual particles bouncing into the walls. Of course, we don't calculate pressure particle-by-particle, because that's far too unwieldy. Still, that's what's happening.
We can explain why we reach for things in the same way. Vastly more unwieldy, since we have photons hitting retina, signal traveling along optic nerve to brain, triggering of physically stored information from previous instances of the same patterns of photons hitting the retina, action potentials, muscle contractions, and a million steps I didn't write down.
But none of that suggests why that system has a subjective experience of the event. And that's not at all the same question as why that system is aware of the event, of itself, and it's own awareness. Lacking the subjective experience and awareness would not stop the photons from hitting the retina, the signal from traveling along optic nerve to brain, from the triggering of physically stored information from previous instances of the same patterns of photons hitting the retina, from creating action potentials, from muscles contracting, or the million steps I didn't write down.
The answer doesn't have to be something like panprotopsychism. But particles interacting in the only ways they can, according to their properties and the four forces, don't have these characteristics, and don't need them to bring about those interactions.
Quoting NOS4A2You may pursue a spiritual route if you wish. Not my cup of tea. I don't have a problem with that new name, but it doesn't help explain what I just said above.
It's not ontological. It's about whether an explanation of functional consciousness also explains phenomenal consciousness. No ontological conclusions are being drawn from it. It's about whether the job of science ends at explaining function.
If we do not assume inner lives, like Chalmers does, consciousness can be reduced to biology. In fact consciousness and biology are one and the same. The hard problem disappears and all that remains are the easy problems.
Panpsychism is an ontological claim. The evidence is that standard physicalism or functionalism fail to explain consciousness - which is an epistemic claim.
This is naive theory of consciousness. You are unable to connect your inner life to your inner biology. You cant see or feel past your senses to what is actually there and what is actually occurring, so you rely on what little fleeting sensations they offer you as as facts.
As someone who studied both neurobiology and systems science, I can say that what we know is that life and mind are properties of systems that are biosemiotic. They have the new thing of internal codes with which to form an organismic modelling relation with their environments.
So the basic trick of it all is currently understood science. Genes and neurons result in Bayesian brains that model the world in predictive fashion. The reason it feels like something to be conscious is that we are busy modelling the world - a world in which our self is the enactive anchor of that model.
Any discussion of the hard problem has to deal with the current best theory as it stands. But studying contemporary neurobiology is so hard. :roll:
Zombies go back to GF Stout in the 1930s as an argument against epiphenomenalism. Chalmers retreaded them as philosophical zombies. That is, to legitimate a new epistemic line of attack which he then didnt follow through to the right conclusion.
The right conclusion, IMHO, is that what folk claim as a special problem for theories of consciousness is simply the general problem of all epistemology. Our understanding of reality - the pragmatic modelling relation we have with it - fails when theories run out of counterfactuals.
Theories have to have facts that can properly support them in the sense that those same facts can be known to be otherwise. Falsified, in short.
So we can chase the feeling of seeing red all the way down to the neurobiology of opponent channel processing. A cone cell switches on when it exposed to dominantly red spectrum, and then signals the opposite when exposed to dominantly green spectrum. A neural correlation for reported experience is available in a way that makes complete explanatory sense.
But then the next step - why does that red response feel just like red at that moment, and not anything else - cant be answered, as the anything else is not being presented as a counterfactual of some further level of neural mechanicsm.
The theory has run out of road as a matter of its logical construction. And that is a general epistemic issue all theories share.
We can ask cosmology, Why anything? Why not just nothing?. It seems like a gotcha for the same reason.
To compound the methodological confusion, folk who push such rookie epistemic doubt then like to invent their substitute counterfactuals, like suggesting particles must have feels even if in principle of course that could never be detected. Or brains are occupied by spirits even if in principle no material evidence of spirit stuff could ever be recorded.
So science - as pragmatic reality modelling based on counterfactual logic - accepts its epistemic limits.
All the Hard Problem acolytes simply fail to understand that what they gleefully parade as the special problem for consciousness studies is just the usual problem for all rational epistemology.
They use this misunderstanding to push theories like Panpsychism - theories that are formally constructed in the mould of theories that arent even wrong - and also as an excuse not to invest time in contemporary theories of mind based on semiotics and the modelling relation.
But why is any experience at all correlated with that? Why can't that happen without an experience with it?
Panpsychism is not the conclusion of the p-zombie argument. The conclusion is that a functionalist will have to explain how an explanation of functional consciousness also explains phenomenal consciousness.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know what "standard physicalism" has to do with this topic. The stance of a functionalist is that explaining function also explains phenomenal. Chalmer's p-zombie argument shows that the functionalist will have to explain how that works.
I think functionalism is mostly defunct at this point, so it's not a major bone of contention.
Something to be aware of, in thinking about this subject, is that neuromorphic hardware seems to be rapidly approaching a level of technological development that will dramatically increase the cognitive power of AIs as well as dramatically reduce the power consumption of AIs compared to the sort of systems making news today.
It appears inevitable that at some point in the not too distant future physical systems which are much closer analogies to a CNS will be feasible to build.
I'm inclined to agree that sentience won't arise in the sort of systems we see today, but I think it is highly likely that we ain't seen nothin yet.
As for the facing the hard problem of consciousness argument, it is aimed specifically at the kind of physicalism paraded about by Daniel Dennett et al, and I think it does a perfectly good job of puncturing it - something that I dont think this particular OP comes to terms with in my view.
Always the same refrain. And always the same answer.
I provided you with a counterfactually-framed theory "consciousness" is a neural model of a world with "us" in it. There is no life or mind no organism without this general natural thing of a neurobiological modelling relation, a process of semiosis that produces a felt Umwelt.
So now you have to give a good counterfactual reason for why it wouldn't "feel like something" to be modelling the world from a point of view. Where is the scope for reasoned doubt.
The fact you simply don't understand the science is not a reasonable source of such doubt.
That's why all that remains in the realm of groundless speculation and faith. I'm with you in thinking that this will always be an important part of human life, but I also think it's important to be intellectually honest enough to call a spade a spade.
If we want to entertain metaphysics that can be taken seriously as philosophy and not remain as just faith-based speculation, then we must look to science; it's the best we have.
How about phenomenology? Does that belong in the realm of 'groundless speculation and faith'? Kant and Heidegger? Indian philosophy? All depicted as 'groundless speculation and faith' because they can't be accomodated in your procrustean bed of anglo positivism.
I don't deny the possibility, but I don't think the evidence, even for the likelihood, is before us now.
You are talking nonsense. Chalmers uses the the p-zombie argument to arrive at the precise variant of panpsychism which he holds as doing the least violence to his classical notion of "microphysics" the notion that is now defunct since biophysics discovered what is actually going on in biology at that physical scale.
Also, I fully acknowledge the importance of groundless metaphysical speculation and belief in human life: many people simply need something more to believe in, and their lives would be impoverished without that.
I don't know how many times I will have to tell you this before it finally sinks in, and you stop with the emotively driven knee jerk accusations of "that's Positivism". :roll:
Calling it a neural model doesn't explain anything, though? Its like when Dennet calls it an illusion. HOW and WHY are a bunch of atoms able to, together, create a model of the world that manifests itself as such a thing like the sensation of pain?
There is zero reason given our current understanding of physics and chemistry to believe such a thing would ever happen to matter how complex their behavioral pattern was.
Scientific method implements the pragmatist metaphysics that took the problem of subjectivity seriously. It starts by accepting the Kantian limits on knowledge.
So if we are "only modelling reality", then science is how we make the best of that situation by creating a general rational approach to the causal narratives we are wont to spin.
Science has the remit of working within the Kantian limits. Peirce fleshed that out as methodological practice.
Quoting Wayfarer
The human condition is perfectly explainable by systems science. Exhibit A would be Nate Hagens's superorganism work...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339604726_Economics_for_the_future_-_Beyond_the_superorganism
Study the goddam theory.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029#:~:text=Bayesian%20mechanics%20involves%20modelling%20physical,are%20coupled%20to%20that%20environment.
But Peirce also includes idealist and vaguely spiritual sentiments that you yourself are inclined to reject (the subject of Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, which starts with an analysis of Peirce's platonist musings on science).
I always appreciate your perspective on systems science and semiotics and have learned much from it, but I don't see it as the final word. And speaking of final words, I'm logging out for a month or two to concentrate on a writing project. Sayonara.
Nice image!
Schelling was even worse. But every generation of rationalists has to struggle to rise above the various irrationalities taken for granted in their time.
Folk used to have the cultural sureties of the Church to make peace with. Nowadays it is the physical reductionism you so bitterly detest.
And the Hard Problem is a reductionist thesis. For those in mind science, the Hard Problem is indeed just one of those social fixations you have to learn to get along with. It is easier if you seem to agree, and just get on with your own thing.
But actually read Schelling or Peirce rather than latch on to the odd phrase here and there.
No, I'm not:
"Chalmers (1996) set out five arguments against the view that there is an a priori entailment from physical facts to mental facts and so for the view that zombies are conceivable. ...the point being that his opponents will have to give us some idea of how the existence of consciousness might be entailed by the physical facts, when (assuming the other arguments work) any attempt to demonstrate such an entailment is doomed to failure (1996, p. 104)." ---SEP
He doesn't argue against materialism in this paper. He explains that the conceivability argument is a potential threat to a materialist view. In this paper, he's examining a Hegelian fusion of materialism and dualism. And please note the spirit in which you were supposed to examine the argument presented:
"In this article I will present an argument for panpsychism. Like most philosophical
arguments, this argument is not entirely conclusive, but I think it gives reason to take the view
seriously. [b]Speaking for myself, I am by no means confident that panpsychism is true, but I am
also not confident that it is not true[/b]. This article presents what I take to be perhaps the best
reason for believing panpsychism. A companion article, The Combination Problem for
Panpsychism, presents what I take to be the best reason for disbelieving panpsychism."
But it is Chalmers who owes us an account of why we should believe in his blithe assertions about micro-physical facts.
He treats these epistemic constructs - facts as understood from a classical physics perspective - as if they can indeed do real ontological work, as in proving p-zombies are conceivable.
But biosemiosis now has the better facts of biophysics.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/68661
This makes Chalmers entire argument obsolete - like debating angels on a pinhead. The micro-causes of life and mind have now been demonstrated to be micro-semiotic rather than micro-classical physical.
The Nate Hagens paper I linked to then shows how the argument pans out at the macro-biosemiotic level - the human fossil fuel-driven super organism currently consuming the planet.
It you want to try to re-run the Hard Problem when stacked up against a proper explanatory model of both the micro and macro, then be my guest.
What do you make of the emphasis on the 'first person' point of view that started this discussion?
Are you cancelling that as not germane to the methods available to us or saying that is a category mistake?
Semiosis says our pragmatic modelling constructs the self as it constructs the world. This is the essence of its notion of the Umwelt.
So in chewing my food, I manage not to chew my lips and tongue. At the level of subconscious neural habit, I am alive to this difference. I can forward model the muscular actions I make when chewing to know where my tongue should be at a microsecond and millimeters scale as my apparently unthinking molars and incisors come chomping down. Food is then the helpless other which is getting masticated with no such ability to self-preserve its state of material organisation.
My mouth operates with a first person subjectivity even when I feel I am at my most thoughtless, eating lunch while reading a book. It is only when this forward model - the one that anticipates the world as flashing teeth crisply othered from masticated food - breaks down do I find that I am indeed in sudden pain and having to pay attention to the torn skin of a bitten tongue tip or side of the cheek.
The pain is a useful semiotic sign. It forces me to be careful until the damage has had some chance to start to heal.
So again, even in the most mundane of cognitions, the othering that separates self from world is an intrinsic part of the model itself. The division into first person and third person is the very basis of how the Bayesian Brain computes.
It is not a tacked on Cartesian representation that leaves the self as the mysterious experiencing homunculus of dualism. It is the enacted model of a semiotic relation where world and self co-arise as our experiential condition.
Self starts where the world leaves off, and vice versa. One is characterised by its goals and anticipations. The other is characterised by being the third person subject to this first person sense of intentionality.
Very interesting. I need to ponder before attempting a reply.
The self isn't consciousness. Again, why can't this self-anchored modelling happen without consciousness?
It does feel like something to do that, but not because doing that peculiarly necessitates feeling like something. It feels like something because panpsychism is true.
Could you explain Apo's point to me?
The usual assertions sans support. :yawn:
It is almost certainly impossible to explain @apokrisis's point to his satisfaction, but I might manage to provoke him into saying something more, just to put me right.
The fundamental unit of consciousness is the 'fuck given', or as Gregory Bateson put it, "a difference that makes a difference". The negative space of this is a difference that doesn't make a difference. Thus for example one might say "I don't mind whether the cheese in my sandwich is cheddar, or cheshire." It makes no difference to me. So the beginning of mind is not the particle that doesn't mind what happens to it, but the living cell, that for yeast, say, tells the difference between sugar that it ingests and alcohol or CO2 that it excretes. The difference makes a difference to the cell response, which is an active one rather than the inanimate passive reaction that happens differentially between molecules.
Cool, thanks! Looking forward to it.
That's convincing as it stands, certainly, but could you say something about D'Amasio? I've only just started the book, but the summary is that not everything has a mind, and not every mind has a self, that "self" is a particular sort of process found in some minds but not others. He's talking about self-consciousness, the kind of self you can be aware of and introspect, I believe. Jibes with your general approach or heading in some other direction?
I've set out my own views numerous times on the forums over the years, but I'll do so again at some point if you really want me to. I'm also aware that both you and 180 have asked me what evidence I have for, say, a rock to be conscious. That's of course a perfectly good question and I haven't answered it yet. Starting a thread is a considerable commitment for me, so I can't do it too often. My next one may well be on evidence for consciousness, and the criteria for admission as evidence, and whether that criterion is necessarily theory-laden. It'd be interesting to get your views on that. It's way easier to do brief criticisms and questions about other people's views than set out one's own. Probably a bit anti-social, but I think that's inevitable for this kind of format to an extent.
It is this conflation that I think is near the core of your misunderstanding.
Reification is "unjustifiable imputing of reality" whereas Hypostatization is "unjustifiable imputing of substance". See this excellent blog post on the distinction.
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/01/reification-and-hypostatization-.html
Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. He would be reifying, were consciousness lacking ontological basis. It does have it, just not as as substance. It is more akin to computation. The brain has a capacity to experience like a computer has a capacity to compute. Consciousness and computation are not substances, they are informational properties of substances.
He's saying a whole lot more than that. But the cell as a self-defining self, as membrane and contents seems to be the beginning of that caring that gives meaning to anything. Cells have attitude! From that plus many more layers comes the predictive model that includes a self-model that becomes human consciousness
Im not a fan of Damasio. Only read his first book. But the answer is simple enough.
Conciousness is what brains do. As modelling, as semiosis, it is neurobiological awareness and self-hood. It is characterised by being locked into the present tense, the immediate world. An animal can of course have intentions and expectations, recognitions and plans. But it is being driven by the immediacies of the passing moment.
So this is as far as biology gets with the informational codes of genes and neurons. A sense of self that is firmly rooted in the present and intensely aware of the world in relation to that self, but not aware of objectively being that thing of a self. The animal just lives its selfhood. It lacks the resources to objectivity that selfhood as a thing.
Humans then have the further semiotic codes of words and numbers. We exist as social and now techological creatures because of language and logic. These are tools for objectifying our selfhood. We now have constructed social and technological contexts within which we model ourselves as selves living lives in the moment, but then also living in pasts and futures as actors in social dramas.
So humans are conscious in a far more complex way. We objectivise our subjectivity. We construct a narrative around out being - cultural narratives about perhaps being sensing souls inhabiting meat puppet bodies. Or whatever tale helps organise us as the social creatures we are.
Introspection is thus a learnt and language scaffolds skill. We learn as infants to pay attention to our own actions, feelings, plans, impulses, so as to be able to self-regulate and act within the accepted constraints of our social contexts.
Animals just live nakedly as selves in their environmental contexts. Humans double up their world model so that we are social beings in physical environments. Our behaviour has to make sense to us as bodies in the physical world, and also as actors in the social space we carry around with us everywhere we go.
Yes, that's what I understand Apo to have been saying for a while. I have no particular objection to that narrative as the origin of a complex self that starts to resemble some of the mental faculties of humans. I just don't think it helps getting from non-consciousness to consciousness. As I said, I think there is an important distinction between the self and consciousness.
So meaning is the difference that makes a difference. That then leads to the notion of the mechanical switch that could be on or off, and that then is the informational difference that is also a physically meaningful difference.
Or even more meaningful as a mechanical device is the ratchet. A ratchet is a switch that embeds a direction. It channels the physics of the world in some desired fashion.
And when you get down to the level of enzymes and cell metabolism, you can see a network of switching behaviour, a system of nano-ratchets, that have the physical effect of constructing the living body - a complex of molecular reactions that intrinsically is falling apart as fast as it comes together. But genetic information is the secret sauce that ensures that it keeps falling together slightly faster than it can fall apart.
So biology is something new when it comes to physics. It operates semiotically. It creates a system of regulation that can use mechanical devices - molecular switches and ratchets - to maintain desired states of material order.
Neurons then extend that trick by ensuring behaviour at the organismic level is ratcheting its environment in ways that help the body to continue to hang together rather than do the other thing of fall apart.
So the microphysical basis of cognition is not simply an abstract notion of meaning as informational bits. Each bit has a physical cost associated. Each bit is also a ratcheting choice. Matter is being moved in an organismically desired direction by a code-controlled switch.
Hence no explanatory gap. The molecule can be a message. Unity is found in the Janus-faced switch that has its feet straddling the divide between the genetic and neuronal models and the falling apart entropic world that the models are instead quietly ensuring keeps falling back into the material patterns that we call bodies and selves.
Hence!
A great technical point. But isnt he? He does jump around in what explanation he actually would favour. Sometimes its consciousness as a property of information - or finite state automata. Sometimes it is dual aspect monism where consciousness is a fundamental property of material being, like charge. Yet always it is as a substantial property - something that inheres in something with definite substantial being.
His logic leads him to need to site consciousness in microphysics somehow. But even physics is confused whether its essential substance is entropy or information. Chalmers just swims along with that conventional confusion. His answers dont really stray very far from monism. He just wants to shoehorn dualism into his monism and so close the explanatory gap. :lol:
You are so low effort. This is where you identify the explanatory gap in terms of how a switch fails the task of connecting model to world in pragmatic fashion. Where are the unaccounted causes at this microphysical level of analysis?
True. But at the end of the day, he doesn't claim to be able to explain first person data. He wants science to do that. :smile:
Indeed.
Hey Apo!
We both know our positions differ in remarkable ways. But the quote above shows the most important similarity between our views. The pivotal role of meaning...
All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience... after-all.
What is it [s]like[/s] to be a bat?
It is the sum total of meaningful correlations drawn between different things by the bat.
Define experience in a way that could break out of your hermeneutic circle.
What are its measurables from the microphysicalist perspective you want to take as a Panpsychist?
What useful role does consciousness play outside of experiencing? In what sense is it causal precisely?
"Consciousness is experiencing." seems a more realistic statement to me.
Someone under anesthesia might be said to have the capacity to experience, but that person isn't at that moment either conscious or experiencing.
Wait a minute, how does "desire" enter this scenario? "Desired fashion", implies that the channel, or direction is chosen. What do you think acta as the agent which does the choosing?
As I said, step one to even being an organism and hence expressing agency is to be able to direct the metabolic traffic in the direction of continuing to fall together and so resist falling apart.
Are these things that hard to understand? :confused:
I can accept that distinction, but I think its a distinction without a difference when it comes to dualism. It seems to me property dualists have merely adopted the language of physics in order to smuggle in their substances.
No, not hard for me to understand at all, that all seems very evident to me. I think it's difficult to understand the wording though, when we use words of human intention like "desire", to refer to such fundamental biological activities. "Desire" seems to be attributable to the whole, in general use, but here you use it as if a tiny part of the organism possesses desire. But more precisely, you use it as if the parts are directed by desire.
When we look at "desire" as an attributed of the whole, as what directs the tiny "ratchets" or switches, then what can we attribute this desire to in the coming into being of organic matter? Suppose that each tiny part of the living organism, when it comes into being, is directed in this sort of way, by a desire toward some end, then where does this desire toward an end come from? We do not see it in inanimate objects, they possess no tiny ratchets directed by desire. So when the living organism came into existence, and its parts were directed by desire, where did this desire come from?
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. In any case it's not my job to define 'experience' by fiat. The definition, or concept of consciousness, I take to be a given. One place it is given is in dictionaries. The definition is not up to us. Philosophers can attempt to refine and clarify a little perhaps, if a dictionary definition is not quite clear enough or we want to isolate a particular sense, but basically the definition of consciousness is public property. I think "the capacity to have experiences" captures the relevant sense fairly well.
If you want to define the word differently, please go ahead, but then we may not end up talking about the same thing.
Quoting apokrisis
What is the 'it' you are referring to? Experience? I'm not a microphysicalist. I'm not sure exactly what you are asking.
That's a good question. I'm not sure, but I'm considering the possibility that all causation is psychological, or at least reducible to the psychological. So the difference that consciousness makes is that without it, nothing would happen at all. I've been meaning to start a thread about that for a while to think it through, but haven't got to it.
So the genome encodes the necessary directions. The metabolism ratchets the flow that maintains the resulting fabric of the organism.
Of course you do. You can speak the words. But you cant tell us what you mean. That would be to provide an actual argument in this forum.
Quoting bert1
Jesus wept.
The problem is that the microphysical is known to be prior in time to the larger and more complex physical "whole", as simple life forms are prior in time to complex life forms. So it is impossible that downward causation from the complex whole can construct the simple parts which exist prior to the complex whole. Therefore the "desire" which shapes the simple parts must be prior to the physical parts, as well as prior to the physical whole.
Nope. Only reductionists think that way.
As Stanley Salthe puts it, hierarchically organised systems come to be the contexts of their own microphysics. That is what Peircean semiosis is all about.
Elementary discrete dynamical systems move forward one step at a time, iterating a function. With feedback from "above" that iteration could become a composition sequence of many functions, not simply an iteration of an unchanging function. This kind of stuff is right down my alley. I'll have to give it a look. Thanks for elucidating this concept. :cool:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224982322_Dynamic_Patterns_The_Self-Organization_of_Brain_and_Behavior
I'm liking the first paragraph. It shows 'he gets it'. For a long time starling murmurrations have seemed to me the best succinct way of conveying my view of the goings on in our brains.
It's scientific knowledge, often referred to as "fact", commonly known as evolution. Complex organized structures have evolved from less complex microscopic structures. Therefore it is well known that the complex organized structure is posterior in time to the microscopic organized structure, and so cannot be the cause of the organization which exists within the microscopic organized structure. You can call science "reductionist thinking", in a derogatory way if you like, but that in no way proves the scientific knowledge (knowledge derived from empirical evidence) to be wrong, it's just a type of ad hom. .
That you think a distinction between evolution and development would solve the problem indicates that you haven't recognized the problem. To begin with, to evolve is what life does, it is essential to our nature. So if your theory of "desire" as a directing force within the microphysical aspects of living organisms, explains the reality of development, but cannot account for the reality of evolution, then it falls short of being an hypothesis which is consistent with the evidence.
But the specific problem I was trying to bring to your attention is the issue of generation, the coming-to-be of living organisms. Consider the nature of reproduction if you will. When the seed, or embryo, is being developed, it is a part of the parent, so according to your hypothesis, it is being directed by the desire of the whole, which is the parent. We could say that this is the desire to produce another similar organism, and this desire drives the mechanisms which produce the seed.
After the seed is separated from the parent and begins to grow on its own, as a separate individual, it is a distinct whole, yet it is still directed by the very same desire, the desire to produce a similar organism (similar to the parent). Now this desire, the desire to produce a similar organism, which directs the parts in their various activities clearly pre-exists the existence of the individual itself, this distinct whole, which is the growing seed.
This is the nature of all forms of reproduction. The desire which directs the parts (if we are going to explain their activity in this way) always pre-exists the individual whole which is composed of those parts. The "desire" comes from the prior organism and is imparted to the new organism in the act of reproduction. That it is the same "desire" is evident from the fact that the very same type of organism as the parent is produced, and that same "desire" is responsible for the organism coming into existence as the specific type of organism which it is. Therefore we can conclude that this "desire" which you talk about must always pre-exist the organism itself (the organism being the whole), because it is the reason why the organism exists as the whole which it is, an organism. Do you comprehend the logic, and agree with this principle, that the "desire" you refer to must pre-exist the whole, as the cause of the whole being the type of thing which it is?.
Evolvability had to itself evolve by distinguishing itself from development. Replication with difference had to become distinct from homeostatic repair.
So "to begin with", the difference between the two started off vague. Calling it either evolution or development would be difficult at the first ribosomal state of abiogenesis.
But as soon as life started to establish any repair or replication capacities, the dichotomy rapidly strengthened as life had to be able to do both things homeostatically rebuild itself, but also creatively replicate itself with a judicious measure of "requisite variety".
Your habits of thought just aren't atuned to the subtleties of biological causality. You are being too reductionist in thinking evolution explains everything.
Did you read the rest of my post, and get to the "specific problem" with your "desire" theory, or did you just get stuck on the irrelevant, if not arbitrary, distinction between evolution and development.
Which premise would that be? Do you disagree that organisms are generated, that they come into being, and they have a beginning?