I’ve declared I’m in “Just Write Something” mode and am avoiding reading wherever I can until I’ve broken the back of the writing projects.
Still, I keep adding new references to my book list, and people commenting on what I’ve said or written often share some other paper or video link “have you seen this?” – with or without any obvious relevance to anything I’ve said or written. That long Friston interview was an example. 4 hours running time (!) a full day of listening, thinking and capturing notes to discuss with the person that shared it. In a sense, all dialogue is distraction, but it is also creative – of evolving ways of expressing the ideas. But reading is always a distraction from writing and is only worth it if there is also creative input.
As well as the book list, there are always references to papers and articles – I always try to bookmark or download, even if I have no intention of an immediate read. With the books, adding to the list is usually it for now, but one or two are irresistible, so I acquire a copy, even if with no immediate plan to read. Expanding the “Library of Unread Books”.
And I thought I really ought to own a copy of this. With “We Are As Gods” premiering already in the US, tatty second hand copies are getting more expensive to acquire. One on it’s way.
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Post Note: Lo and behold, this from “We Are As Gods” just a few days later.
Dust off those Whole Earth Catalogs you’ve been saving. You’ll definitely want to thumb through them after watching WE ARE AS GODS, the @StewartBrand documentary coming out Sept 6 in US & CA to rent or buy on iTunes, Prime Video etc. Did you pre-order yet? https://t.co/O63yX1gJpXpic.twitter.com/C5FjnvSx1U
— We Are As Gods – On Digital Sept 6! (@WeAreAsGodsFilm) August 30, 2022
An old quote, given my threads on formal logic vs chaotic approach to knowledge, from The Secret History by Donna Tartt (p.28) :
I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from the subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
(Nope – update – marking as deleted, deleting the content and changing the title hasn’t stopped the spam hits, so these are not new search hits on the text, but must be externally indexed links to the permalink – so now hard-deleted. And – update – that appears to have worked – so I can leave this post to rest in peace.)
My own metaphysics is information-based and I know I’ve made a link or two to “The Information Philosopher” site before. I didn’t know any more about the “Bob Doyle” who curates the site in terms of his own philosophical thinking (*), BUT …
… as a resource of collected links, people and publications it is mind-bogglingly huge and well organised / indexed with descriptive pages – a veritable Wikipedia of Information Philosophy. Marvellous resource – general Google search hits on relevant topics eg on “Bertalanffy and Ergodic” invariably throw up masses of hits on these pages.
[Although local installations of Google’s search engine were withdrawn a decade ago, he uses Google with his site as a constraint filter in all his links and on-site searches. Better than inbuilt blog searches I reckon. Almost certainly means all searches lead to greater Google indexing of the local content too. Neat?]
Anyway. Learning the fact that Boltzmann coined the idea of the “ergode” back in 1877 – picked-up by Gibbs (of free-energy fame) and Ehrenfest – through Wiener, Bertalanffy, Shannon et al – to chaos theory and the likes of Stuart Kaufmann, much referenced by … Karl Friston only yesterday.
Nothing new under the sun, all roads lead to systems thinking.
(*) That is a very comprehensive “about” page. Clearly a man after mine own – very positive relationship with Dennett for example, and author in 2009 of:
Robert O. Doyle,
“Free Will: it’s a normal biological property,
not a gift or a mystery,”
Nature, 459, June 2009, p.1052.
I’ll say! And …
Free Will:
The Scandal in Philosophy.
Published in June 2011.
Exactly how I feel. The continued “mystification” of conscious will is a dreadful meme holding back so much human value.
I wonder, any relation to John C Doyle? (Otherwise may explain my earlier confusion over a Dennett / Doyle relationship?)
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[Post Notes:
Actually only made one link to Information Philosopher before. Where I primarily noted the scale of the resource, and the fact I’d come across it following up a Frank Ramsay reference. But purely coincidentally the same post, a quite important one in terms of consolidating my agenda about a year and a half ago, also includes a very positive “holding out for a hero” reference to John C Doyle.]
Significant here because the band’s name and origins, as well as the theme of their latest musical “Quality – What is Good and What is Not?“, arose from Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, band founder Steve Rogers favourite book.
This Karl Friston interview is long and wandering (almost 4 hours!) and a bit distorted by the somewhat affected (?) naïve “Theory of Everything” – everything including the kitchen sink – agenda of interviewer Curt Jaimungal, but anyway … some very rough mental notes:
Deflationary view – hooray. The very point. Using / understanding general intent of simplifying view (of FEP-based systems view) and not having to worry about complexity in possible detail. (See overfitting and internal<>external independence – later.)
Mathematics and computation origins – and philosophy – Andy Clark, Richard Feynman, Kolmogorov, Helmholtz, Gibbs free-energies.
Chaos and meta-stable attractors.
Levels of Sentience – good.
Sensing external world, holding a “representation” of the external world, having self-awareness of the self and the model held of the world and self, etc. (Sentience does NOT mean feeling pleasure and pain.)
Thing – recognising one generally, starting from thing <> no-thing / not-thing – Markov chains / boundaries / blankets. Circular causality implied by that dynamic definition of a thing – maintaining its steady state.
Statistical “surprisal” theory, Bayesian probability densities. Minimising free-energy or prediction error.
Influence as causation?
Sean Carroll says causation is illusion – yawn.
(This whole thesis is about explaining causation – only kind presumed is elementary in simple control-theoretic sense – in the if-this-then-than logic of the maths …) Is the axis always time? (Yawn again – time & causation fundamentally pretty weird ab-initio – so only dependencies here are to intuitive sense other than independent variable in the maths, again. Underlying Langevin equation of state flows > Path Integrals, many “equivalent” representations. (Sabine also used the “confusion” over causation to diss alternative descriptions of “free” conscious will. Fact is no-one has “definitive” model of causation beyond the maths – no scientist, no politician.)
Flows up or down / parallel to probability / concentration gradients and flows across / along iso-probability contours. Many special cases of the general. Human scale is intermediate between hot / random-fluctuation / quantum scale and cold / cosmic / stable scale.
Schrödinger ? Yes.
Warnings about Free-Energy theories – Emperor’s clothes / impenetrable difficulty – oh yes. Hidden simplicity, lost at typical human levels – quite funny.
Back to ToE question? … interesting that Friston does address the question … but falls back to basic Markov blanket point in statistical mechanics, thingness, partitioning “things”. Deflationary again. His “Deflationary Theory of Everythingness” – very good!
Algorithmic complexity. Jamesian / Bayesian belief structures. Prediction errors / Surprise minimisation / Uncertainty resolution. [Post note – Meta-surprise. The explore<>exploit distinction sometimes intentional exploration of the uncertain IS the goal, not the surprise.]
Existential “goodness” – processing new information thermodynamically efficiently. Yay! Battery powered miniaturisation – versus super-computed complexity. Quite analogous to Occam. Avoiding “overfitting” data, locally, today. (This right scale – complexity / simplicity / frequency / time-base – very much John Doyle?) (There’s no prediction in Roulette – dummy! – other behaviours / incentives too.) But yes – leaving latitude in play. Game theory involves multiple “test” moves as well as optimisation moves – eg if there really is some skewed chance in the casino’s wheel.)
Newcombs paradox. Yawn again! Question is always about genuine “population” stats or a single psychological choice. See games again.
Zipping … is a good analogy.
AGI (re-)generative models currently “a long way from these principles”.
Jordan Peterson !?!?! The “Tao” between order and chaos – again the right middle scale is the point. Sure. Self-organised criticality … Stuart Kauffman … towards the “edge of chaos”. Repertoire of dynamics needed to give you that “latitude”.
Architectural decisions in model structure, which must itself “learn” – structural learning. (Where I started mid-80’s)
McGilchrist question. (Ross-Ashby reference in his answer.) Iso-morphism between the world and our internal model (Bernado Kastrup too – hmmm) “sufficient” iso-morphism. (No acknowledgement of McG in the answer / discussion?) Architectural iso-morphism – the gist – Yay! (It’s Solms that takes Friston into actual brain / mind processes.) And nothing about hemispheric hypothesis. Curt asks a long question about L-R asymmetries … Friston doesn’t really have a view on McGilchrist – architectural connectivity not physical geometry / shape. (Need Solms here. But McGilchrist doesn’t have a view on Friston-Solms yet either.)
Topology of flat sensors vs long-thin processors (Axons). Computation architectures. Yay! Split of whatness / thingness and whereness / relational-properties. Good point.
NOTHING so far on the advertised “What Is Life, Consciousness, the meta-Hard Problem”? (Sound getting out of sync with video)
Speed and granularity (and density / sparseness of connectivity) of processing on multiple levels. 90% of our sensorium generated by ourselves and fellow humans – so that model clearly very important to our world view. Shared narratives, language, etc but also at many levels.
Hierarchies? Yes – layers of granularity.
[Pause at 2h13m] [Continuing ...]
Shared narrative to get along? Religion?
Shared narrative to be able to communicate (but again, see games) No strong view on the religion question, beyond societal norms on beliefs implied by the shared narratives – simpler is easier to share of course (memetics – Yay!)
Deity as the simulator???
Does he believe in free-will? Yes – autonomous dynamics is emergent. (Better developed by Solms.) And Yes, our own “sensorium” – awareness of our experience. My perceptions, my predictions, my needs, my surprises.
Self-fulfilling prophecies? Sure the world we perceive is filled-in (partially constructed) my our predictions. Fulfil and realise. But false inferences and delusions too. Schizophrenia and Autism?
We’re getting well into things Friston wouldn’t claim current expertise, but being asked “what he believes” (although he has psychiatric experience).
Interviewer’s experience of a panic attack? Schizophrenia? Hearing a voice and worrying about it. Even talked to his doctor about it! – where is this going for this interview – afraid of his own mind? Sleeping drugs? Huh? Now giving psychiatric advice! Does have colleagues that have had deep psychotic “episodes”. Group talking therapies. Discord group suggested by interviewer.
[Two interviews stitched together at 2:45]
Our own existence? Actually similar to the (circular) self-fulfilling prophecy.
At last the question about “generative” model. Model whose consequences are observable by the model.
Donald Hoffman on consciousness? (Gerry Edelman previous colleague) No opinion.
Penrose-Hameroff (Orch-OR)? Entertaining, like other QM theories of consciousness – but sceptical of explanatory value. AND REMINDER Friston himself is not proposing any theory of consciousness. (Solms is.)
Sentience – sentient behaviour – is found at our intermediate scales – important. Life as self organisation to some non-equilibrium states – at neither quantum nor cosmic scales.
Templeton challenge of FEP vs IIT as far as theories of consciousness.
(I don’t see them as conflicting. Addressing different aspects.)
Starting with what it means to be alive? Moving in a way that is in the service of sampling evidence, information and resources for its own existence. Sentience and consciousness? – Reflexive vs reflective-planned responses. I / me involved in the generative model. etc Agent that plans and selects its attention. Self-awareness at higher level, etc (Elaborating the levels of sentience from earlier.) Ad infinitum – in a meta sense.
The Meta-Hard Problem? After Andy Clark. Why does the hard problem matter, why is it a puzzle that interests us? Our model must include counterfactuals – must include philosophy and metaphysics. (Chiara Marletto) The existence of the philosophical zombie as a meme, says a lot about the kind of generative we must have. The fact we can have this thought experiment suggests we cannot be zombies.
Idealist or Physicalist? Bat for either side. (Same model as mine – what we can know is always between reality and us – my triad. There are unavoidable implicit assumptions somewhere in our metaphysics. EXCELLENT!.)
Epistemic ontology – Yay!
Unlimited Scaling of Holons / Partons? Mathematically no constraint. Practical changes in speeds/frequencies/time-constants and predictability of processes at larger and smaller scales. Markov blanket states – internal / external independencies. Proof by induction.
The Meaning of Life? Deflationary – the meaning is in the existence – the existential imperative. Know thyself? (Aspiration, motivation, “attractive states” – Maslow?) Optimism bias in selecting our attention depending on agency is real. Interviewer Curt expressing interest in these levels of motivation – we really must rehabilitate Maslow. Beyond Self-actualisation to serving the gods, etc … Achieving congruence in the stack, acting to minimise cognitive dissonance.
Embodied Cognition? The “matter” of our actions in the world – yes a symmetry between internal and external – almost interchangeable, arbitrary which is which. Desire paths – the external world responds to / learns from its inhabitants. (My favourite is the course of a river constrained by the river bank that it is itself creating.) A “dance” – game theory again. Circular causality.
Overall impression – overfitting was the one “new” idea I picked-up in this context. Interesting to hear so much elaboration and reinforcement through questions from another agenda, but the core is already there. Curt was clearly strongly affected by it – interesting in itself.
(But then so do many people of faith who also value humanity. And obviously, in other terms I identify as a lot of other things too: male, husband, father, grandfather, British, engineer, philosophical researcher, etc, etc. But identity is a whole other topic, so let’s stick to the point about holding a worldview ….)
Does that make me an Atheist? (Well kinda, maybe, probably, but that’s jumping the gun on a metaphysical question, below.)
As a Humanist, I’m also a Free-Thinker. (Part of what used to be called the Free-Thought movement.) By freedom of thought and expression we humans are able to understand the world and our place in it – our freedoms and responsibilities- by means of Reasoning unencumbered by dogmas, religious, rational or otherwise.
So I’m also a Secularist. How we humans govern our affairs collectively, not just our individual reasoning in the world, should also be free from – or at least free to democratically question – any established body of teachings, however rationally benign. (Governance – literally cybernetics – is central here, and “the best kind of democratic government” is a whole other topic.)
Does that make me a Rationalist? Not in the narrow sense that all our Reasoningbe based on logical relationships – “ratios” – between objectively quantifiable values. I sometimes claim New Rationalist as a label for a more broadly defined reasoning that includes much wider palette of human values, but Humanismis itself a good label for that too.
So what about the Metaphysics? I’m a Naturalist so I am essentially Non-Theist. That is, all of that free-thinking reasoning about the world, and the place of humanity within it, is itself part of the natural world without appeal to any supernatural forces or agents beyond it. My world-view has no need of a supernatural, omniscient, omnipotent agent or being to explain it. I’m pretty certain about that – subject to as much free-thought reasoning as we can bring to it – but that doesn’t mean my world-view proves the non-existence of any god. So I’m not literally Atheist. Neither am I Anti-Theist, since Theists & Theologiansare human too. I prefer to define myself in terms of what I’m for, not what I’m against, and there’s a lot to be gained from dialogue with those who think different. It also means I’m neither Agnostic nor Gnostic. I cannot be neutral about the metaphysics of such a naturalist world-view even if for most practical purposes metaphysics can be ignored. Not much is sacred in this world other than nature itself, of which humanity is a part – Sacred Naturalism (say?). A whole other topic.
And what about Science? So, if we ignore the Metaphysics, for practical purposes, that Free-Thought reasoning looks a lot like Science. As a body of knowledge about the natural world, that established by Scienceis unbeatable, but as we get closer to the limits of what the methods of science can know, we cannot ignore our Metaphysics which cannot itself be science. In Sacred Naturalism, where reasoning about the Naturalworld involves human values beyond the narrowly Rational, there are aspects of nature that lie beyond objective scientific orthodoxy. These subjective, qualitative values and direct experiences, may be thought of as spiritual, sacred, even divine, but still entirely natural even if beyond orthodox science.
So WHY Humanist?
That’s answered above, so in summary:
In terms of understanding how the world works, there is no more advanced species in the observable cosmos and there is nothing better placed than humanity to solve the world’s problems, even those problems we humans create for ourselves and our ecosystem. Freethought, together with a reasoning that respects human values and rejects dogma, is the most powerful resource we share with our fellow humans in that quest for a better world.
Post Note: The reason for the fresh re-statement?:
I’m a humanist because as a free-thinking secularist, life decisions should be based on human values, freedoms & responsibilities beyond narrow limitations of *either* rationality *or* dogma. https://t.co/XrvNCNMEKk
Also in stating the worldview above, the key topics that define the “What, Why and How do we Know?” agenda here on Psybertron are laid bare as “whole other topics”:
And a few lines further down – Mark Solms was part of the event too! Co-host of a whole morning plenary on “Dreams” – which is of course where he started.
Everything that needs saying has already been said by someone somewhere.
(Wish I’d made more effort to attend Tucson when I had the chances – was actually living in the US South at the time 2005/6/7/8 – that early 2006 post above, I mention moving to our new address!)
Cybernetics, like anything else, evolves, so I’m never talking about specific systems theory(ies). I’ve described my own journey every which way through systems engineering to systems thinking under the cybernetic umbrella. I have a nothing new under the sun attitude to any topic, whereby changing language may change the focus on details, but for the main part it’s really expressing a different view of the same underlying conception.
Because I settled on Cybernetics as my key word pretty early on in my Psybertron researches, and because Systems Engineering was merely my day job, I’ve tended to place Norbert Wiener at the centre of my systems constellation. He authored the book with that title as well as being one of the founders of the Macy conferences. Despite my “first cybernetics” focus from the outset on systems of human organisation and decision-making, I’ve also had a strong information and processes (ie computation) focus, so the likes of Shannon, Turing and von-Neumann feature prominently too, the latter also being part of the original Macy conferences. As well as the US axis, the British Ashby, Beer and Pask contribution has been acknowledged, though someone suggested I didn’t give enough credit to Bateson. He too was part of that founding Macy group.
I’ve also had a clear evolutionary thread – everything evolves, as I’ve already said – and in my case thanks to Dennett, like a thousand others I’ve bought the information and computation view to evolution beyond biological genetics – the bridge between the physical and the psychological. It was only through recent Friston-Solms work I reallyjoined-up my cybernetic “systems thinking” with the thinking of evolution as universal computation – even though I’ve had an information / computation metaphysics since I started.
Bridging the physical (biological) with the psychological has been the primary philosophical consideration. The shortcomings of science when it comes to conscious will – I did mention Dennett. Solms and particularly McGilchrist have been very important recently in characterising what those shortcomings are and where their solutions lie.
The backdrop to all of this in the 21st C has been the God vs Science wars – faith vs rationality, whether we think of faith as blind or more broadly pragmatic, and rationality as based solely on relations between objective quantities or including more broadly qualitative and categorical reasoning? One consequence of this “war” has been a much wider polarisation whereby if you’re “anti-God” you are Science-led in everything – as if scientific rationality is the only yardstick of wider knowledge, and thus making it much harder to point out that it isn’t. The polarisation reinforced by the thin-end-of-a wedge response to any concession from the pro-science camp.
Funny thing is I have a part-read copy of von-Bertalanffy’s (1949) “Problems of Life” because it is ex-libris the Library of the Rationalist Press Association. It’s the (1952) version published by Watts and Co – founder of the Rationalist Press whose legacy is now managed by The Rationalist Association & New Humanist, of which I am an active member and until recently served on the Board of Trustees. Very much part of the “free-thought” movement, promotion of rational, natural and secular humanism countering the every-day effects of super-natural & dogmatic faith-based religions. I’ve already found the Sacred Naturalism middle-ground – the common ground between these seemingly incompatible spheres is actually enormous – but that’s a story for another day.
What I had failed to join-up was that, as well as being part of that secular free-thought movement, was von-Bertalanffy’s role in positing General Systems Theory. And what I only just then recalled is that von-Bertalanffy is a significant source reference in McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things” – particularly for talk of systems as organismic rather than mechanistic machines. Those of us with a fundamental information bent do happily talk of algorithms and computing machines – but we really do mean the organismic “soft-machine” kind. This is exactly how Friston > Solms resolves organic, emergent subjectivity through Markov-Blankets and Active-Inference with causation of wholes more than determined by their parts. It’s another bridge I’m trying to build – when we talk of systems and information processing no-one needs to think of electro-mechanical computing machines – computers. (After all, for most of history, computers were humans.)
So, anyway, I’m reading von-Bertalanffy more closely again – lots of good stuff already. (He even mentions ergodicity, or does he?!) Standby.
