Month: June 2017

I’m exploring available theories of consciousness that tie themselves in open-minded ways to fundamental physics, that is they don’t automatically exclude themselves from physical explanation by overly reductionist reliance on objects already (accepted as being) defined by physics.

Yesterday, I summarised what I heard from Robert Kuhn’s Physics of Consciousness / Closer to Truth resources. The things I liked the sound of is the general line that there must be something missing from current physics and physical explanations, so it is important that investigations include philosophical / metaphysical questions for physics itself. Dennett I’m already a fan of thanks to his warnings against greedy-reductionism and premature-definitions, and his plea for more repetitive, creative dialogue to allow new explanations to evolve instead of destructive criticism of incomplete explanations of consciousness on the fatal terms already set by objective physical discourse.

Information has always been core to my own developing theses. That is, information pretty obviously seems fundamental to knowledge and epistemology, but increasingly also seems fundamental to physics itself. Those objects we know as particles and fields would seem to be manifestations of more fundamental information, in the limit any “significant difference”. Most recently Rovelli seemed to be arriving at similar views through his Quantum Loop Gravity work – everything and anything being identified as integrals of differences over closed-loops in space-time. Earlier works influencing Einstein involving Mach and before him the likes of Poincaré and Boscovich also suggested this limit of significant difference as fundamental to all the real world physical concepts we deal with.

Also with the cybernetics angle of my work, a systems view of identity suggests that higher level evolved or derived objects, whilst clearly derived from, supervenient on, their more fundamental parts, nevertheless have definitive identity that is more than the sum of their parts.

I feel I’ve been at this position for decades now.

I was naturally intrigued when I came across the words Integrated Information Theory in the field of the science of consciousness. Information and Integration, creative synthesis of information, not simply critical analysis.

Now from my (so far) very brief investigation of IIT I’m finding their choice of terms for axioms and postulates (and subsequent logical maths notation) very tough going, but I am seeing things I find promising:

Firstly, starting on their own terms for conscious experience without any constraint of existing physical models, it does indeed seem to be a new open-minded metaphysics. Secondly, Mach is the source of the fundamental units of experience – and experience is the fundamental “substance” of their model. In my own words ….

Axioms 1, 2 and 5 – Existence, Structure and  Exclusion – say that conscious experience exists with an ontology and each individual experience has distinct identity in space-time.

Axiom 4 – Integration – says that the ontological composition involves integration, that higher “system” objects are not reducible to their component parts.

Axiom 3 – Information – says that consciousness comprises information arising from differentiation, represented by distinct individual differences

When it gets onto its postulates, explanations, graphical examples, cause-and-effect repertoires and the logical relations derived, I’m afraid it loses me, except for the Identity postulate. That is there is an Identity relationship between our subjective experience or qualia and and the axiomatic IIT construct of consciousness. That is this IIT construct IS our experience, not simply the causal explanation of some other subjective mental level.

How’ma doin’?

[Aside – Quality and Irreversible Incorporation – Tad Boniszewski – in there again?]

[And – the other corollary here is that whist these guys are developing IIT in a science and philosophy of consciousness sense, it is quite clearly at a fundamental level. Something that consciousness shares with physics.]

I’ve been sitting on this Physics of Consciousness link for a while, without so far watching the video interviews, because of both the topic and the participants. I’m a bit sceptical I’ll hear anything newly convincing, but I will take a look.

(Also worth linking because of the overall range of material on Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s “Closer to Truth” PBS site generally, but FQXi and Templeton I notice. Is Templeton also the reason Dennett not involved in EES?)

Post Notes:-

David Chalmers – Non-reductionist emphasis, new fundamental role for something like consciousness. Tononi “integrated information theory”. Materialist /identity theory (Penrose /Hameroff) adds nothing.

[My own Tononi / IIT Links here.]

Sean Carroll – Unreconstructed determinist reductionist – simply emergence of useful-category short-hand.

David Wallace – References Dennett, but seems to be an epiphenomenalist – no interaction backward interaction from conscious to physical. But like Dennett he does agree the problem is with our arguments, not with our subjective intuition.

Max Tegmark – Fact is outstanding mysteries of physics do seem to have issues with consciousness. Prejudice regarding the subjective element in objective physics. But, the hard-problem is actually a hard-fact. Consciousness is a real thing, however fundamental or otherwise. Clearly some additional fundamental principle about information processing. (Tegmark seems pretty close to my position, see also Rovelli.)

Bernard Carr – (seen him talk previously at HTLGI) – Sees the limitations of most science seeing consciousness as one-way emergent epiphenomenal from physics, whereas there clearly is interaction. Consciousness is more fundamental than that -William James. Filter, limiter or transducer of information processing consciousness in the brain, (doesn’t actually use the phrase) free-won’t rather than free-will, but … not the creator or consciousness. Consciousness is a primary fundamental element of physics. It’s physical reality that is the secondary manifestation of more fundamental information processing, Carr is not a “panpsychist”, but prepared to countenance effects that science would brand as “paranormal” phenomena. Any way – NOT simple reductionist.

[One to one interview format is much better than conference “debate” formats!]

Paul Davies – Systems view, more than the sum of the parts. (Also a Tononi integrated information reference. No reference to Tononi in Rovelli?) Promising. Not panpsychist, but some proto-conscious stuff must be missing from models – but not necessarily an independent fundamental stuff. Physics and psychic must both arise from same info stuff – form and complexity (“II” must also relate to entropy?)

Jeff Tollaksen – new to me – and not sure I get anything newly intelligible, other than it’s a problem with our tools or particle-properties models – Hammer / Nail metaphor? Quantum miracles! Hmmm.

Don Page – also new to me – “sensible quantum mechanics” and “mindless sensationalism”. Interesting, “sensible” is a parameter I use. Speculative framework rather than a theory or thesis. Limitations of explanations in descriptive physics are everywhere, not just with consciousness, so “hard-problem” is an unfair categorisation for lack of explanation of subjectivity.

The death of Robert Pirsig last month triggered a good deal of new correspondence on his work, his Metaphysics of Quality as well as his novels, “ZMM” and “Lila“. My own summary of his MoQ, or more correctly the world-view implied by his metaphysics, I have previously presented here:

I’ve expressed my (limited) appreciation of the French Post-Modernists (PoMo’s) by dubbing myself a PoPoMo, but it is often difficult to talk directly about Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Žižek et al and still be taken seriously. It is fashionable to knock the Foggie-Froggies, and just this past month we are reminded of the infamous Sokal hoax by a back-firing pastiche on supposed “gender-based science”. The scientistic meme is to ridicule anything that looks like pseudoscience and to brand as pseuds those whom science misunderstands.

Foucault I’ve actually linked to Pirsig previously, since reading his “Les Mots et Les Choses (1966)” (translated oddly as “The Order of Things”), but as a PoPoMo I’d kinda put PoMo behind me. One persistent thread arising from the renewed interest in Pirsig is a conversation with Janet Abbey (Seymour Blogger @AbbeysBooks) who is a much read French-PoMo scholar who became very enthusiastic about parallels and connections between Pirsig and Foucault. As a consequence, we’ve both been reading / re-reading Foucault’s “Lectures on the Will to Know“. Based solely on his first introductory lecture (9 Dec 1970) the following is already apparent. As with ancient Greek philosophy, post-modern French requires linguistic care, there are terms – concepts – that don’t translate simply into English – not just English language expression but anglophone thought itself.

Foucault majors in his introduction on the Connaître vs Savoir ambiguity in our knowledge, and of course knowledge and epistemology are a major part of my Psybertron blogging project which is why I’ve picked-up on Foucault before. This little graphic summarises what I read from 9 Dec 1970

[Most developed recent version here.]

There is much to infer from this picture in general as well as specific to Pirsig’s MoQ. Certainly the human side of knowing; Connaître as in being familiar with a concept, knowing someone or something by name, as opposed to (say) the “biblical” knowing of another person.

Specifically, the Pirsig connection is in connaitre as radical-empiricism, direct experience in the absence of any mediating conceptual model. The “quality” of immediate subjective interaction, involvement or immersion in something before any intellectual attempt to conceptualise, define or document.

The Will to know obviously echoes Nietzsche, but we’re really talking about how we act on our desire to know something, anything, the processes of coming to know, rather than the Power side of Nietzsche’s equation, Bacon’s knowledge as power. Foucault says himself “it is possible to resolve semantic questions completely ONLY at the end of the journey“. Dan Dennett constantly warns us all, including his scientist friends, to hold off on our definitions, to suspend judgement. Real knowing of the actual world is Connaître by participation. Savoir is a model we construct individually and collectively after we think we know, or as a hypothesis to test if we do know.

In Pirsig, this is the tension between his alternative intellects of the Subject-Object Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Quality, mediated or compromised by the social patterns or shared knowledge we construct.

(See here for more discussion on this Pirsigian view.)

I’m sure I’ll elaborate further when I’ve read more of Foucault’s “Will to Know” and I’m sure I’ll hear more from Janet Abbey on the subject.

But for now, a final aside, a piece of work I heard about only yesterday. Most of my thinking is based around a memetic view of what is going on as our “knowledge” evolves, and as a consequence I have a particular interest in how media propagates memes, particularly modern social media connections between all forms of online media. The idea is older than Marshall McLuhan, that the medium drives the message, what we know is largely moulded by the medium used to communicate it. It’s not that social media is new, but that it is fast, effectively instantaneous on evolutionary timescales. The evolution of what we know is massively distorted. The medium selects the messenger and the message. The problem is not the players it’s the game. The gap – the tension – between the truly experienced knowledge and instantly constructed social knowledge is massive. So massive that James Williams speculates that “digital technologies are making effective politics impossible“. Absolutely! This is the main driver of my own epistemological agenda – when it comes to making decisions on our behalf, what, why and how do we know?

It’s not so much a post-fact world, but a world where facts are ever more difficult to get a grip.

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[Post Note: And many more Pirsig resources coming to light.

• • The Motorcycle is Yourself
    – Tim Wilson revisits his interview with Pirsig.
  • Paul Kennedy interviews Tim Wilson
    – reflecting on the above at CBC Ideas.
  • Forest for the Wood – reflects on reading Lila
    (Ha, “new knees and hips” stream of consciousness!)]
  • Zen and the Art of a Higher Education
    – Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the LARB.

[Post Note: And an example to prove a point. Neil deGrasse-Tyson’s latest book. I have him in the same part-of-the-problem league as Dawkins and Cox, but his title tailor-made for the short-attention-span generation “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry“. Don’t expect any lasting useful facts, just persistent catchy memes.]

Ant McWatt in SciPhi journal (2017):
Four Thousand Holes in Brexit Lancashire.

Ant McWatt in Philosophy Now (2017):
Robert Pirsig & His Metaphysics of Quality.

Ant McWatt in Bozeman Magazine – News & Media (2018):
McWatt-Pirsig correspondence archive to MSU Bozeman.
Ditto in MSU News.