Year: 2023

Rudolf Steiner divides opinion but his thinking is undoubtedly valuable. Think Anthroposophy/Theosophy and Steiner/Waldorf Schools, whether as intended by Steiner or interpreted ideologically by his disciples ever since, but the value in what he actually said and wrote remains. [Feels a bit like Jordan Peterson for a 21st C example – undoubtedly guilty of association with outrageous assertions (for rhetorical effect?), but undoubtedly heart-felt and sincere “authentic” thoughts behind them.]

[Post Note / Aside: also conscious of Steiner again recently thanks to this Matt Segall (@ThouArtThat / Footnotes2Plato) sharing this talk about Steiner’s “Philosophy of Freedom”. And: Thanks to @ChrisPapavassiliou sharing this full text Steiner Library version of TBoNS  below – from which I’ll be able to extract quotes much more simply than the highlight and snip from Kindle labours so far. Update one day?]

Reading these fascinating lectures again, after many years. Saul Bellow’s brief foreword is also good. pic.twitter.com/cwI8Fpoqj5

— ʿAṭṭār (@noonessleep) February 6, 2023

Prompted by this reference to “TBoNS” (1983 Translation) I recalled I had an unread Kindle copy of a later republication as “TBoS” (2017) complete with the Bellow preface and a Barfield review essay. (Barfield is the common ground here, and the source of the Twitter connection, though I have read lots of Bellow too, without noting any connections.) So, I’m reading it.

Anyway as the Tweet suggests it’s a series of 8 lectures from Sept/Oct 1920 by the Austrian/Croatian, in Switzerland, in German. I hadn’t really twigged until remarked explicitly by Bellow that, like all the Vienna Circle and “modern” science machinations, the context is Germany & Europe & The West generally in crisis post WW1. Souls searching for a better way. [Ditto cybernetics post WW2. Whereas, on the contrary in 2023, the awful buzzwords PolyCrisis and PermaCrisis are already being used by some as if distress-marketing an inevitable state of crisis instead of  a cool-headed recognition that what we’re dealing with is complexity and that it has been well understood by many for many generations and is simply excluded by the narrower received wisdom of rational management. I sincerely hope “Critical Systems Thinking” is not going to make the connection to “Crises” – because marketing!]

[Goethe and Schelling influences !
Total convergence again, nothing new under the sun.]

From Barfield’s review:

The Cognitional Mode – I shall start using that.

And right from the off, it’s that fundamental inescapable question – what do we mean by reality, to exist, to really exist, in this, the real world? (And does science even have anything to say about that, and is it therefore inevitably inadequate?)

From Bellow’s preface:

And to be clear, from Steiner, later:

And rather incongruously by Bellow early on:

I say incongruously, because we are right at the start of a book more generally about science, and that other (ultimately) inescapable “hard problem” question is already on the table (even if his conclusion is not quite the one I’d make now. “We shall never know” IFF we stick with our Cognitional Mode.)

And as I noted “IFF” above:

And again, on the metaphysical questions:

[Aside – can’t see any note about this, but publication of the 1983 translation was the occasion for the Barfield review essay, but that essay in the 2017 publication I’m reading has (additional?) notes with 21st Century sources, including Wikipedia?]

Anyway, so far I’ve only read the Bellow and Barfield contributions. So many sources shared with McGilchrist at al. More later maybe.

Been a bid distracted for a couple of weeks with no new deep reading or writing – not really sure why, some dent in motivation I can’t put a finger on, January blues maybe? Some domestic distractions, DIY car maintenance and planning our birthday city-break, probably relevant. Also tried to focus on engagement elsewhere in ISSS and AII and ECO, but inevitably reduced focus on my own projects. Too many foci.

Anyway, as I do every few years, I had announced some on-line housekeeping earlier in January. This was a significant driver:

“[I] have some glitches in [WordPress] Dashboard, Stats, Page & Post Editing and in published Page & Post functions: – (1) loss of Pingbacks – (2) unpredictable behaviour between Classic and Block Editors and advanced editing Plug Ins – (3) unpredictable behaviour losing “sessions” requiring fresh log-ins every few mins between the different functions above. Secure but time consuming!

So I need to do some maintenance to the blog.”

Pingbacks still seem to be dead(?) and I do have a few legacy character-set failures, but the other annoying inefficiency glitches seem to have been resolved simply by re-installing the existing Plug-ins in a natural order. So, even though I did investigate splitting content into older static copies and ongoing content creation on a fresh newer platform, I no longer have any real incentive to switch horses to SubStack, Medium and/or Mastodon. Onward and upward with WordPress on my DreamHost virtual server with the simple 2016 Theme. (Should probably tidy-up email subscription as well as Twitter follow engagements. Maybe just a theme refresh? Oh and I’ve updated DLVR.IT to share the blog notifications automatically to as many channels as possible – eg Mastodon and Discord as well as Twitter and maybe more?)

Also, my unread and/or re-read pile – not just the burgeoning wish-list -has grown to “where to re-start” proportions.

So, back to that Fields/Glazebrook/Levin (2021) paper which I started to review a couple of weeks ago?

Another informal chat from Michael Levin.
(These are very good and this is a good one.)

Chirality (asymmetry / handedness) from individual biochemistry and cells scaled-up to organs and anatomy- bio-electrical gradients – but sounds very bottom-up mechanistic / reductivist? Yes, much more, part of the “space” in which development happens.

Palpation – in slime-moulds – very much as used by Solms. How does it obtain / remember the information about its environment and then act on it. Computational – physical / hydraulic – view. Still difficult for Iain?

One vs two-headed worm body pattern – learned bio-electrically after normal genetic expression attractor.

The pleasurable-experience <exclusive-or> good-memory option? (Similar to the torture and forget thought experiment.) The fact it’s a counter-factual – can’t actually imagine “how” that exclusive situation could be engineered – means it’s really a philosophical question, to hold a strong-intuition position. The latter for me. People saying the opposite are attached to the now, all that’s real, and don’t see long-term value – (unless they’re cheating in the thought experiment and expecting the experience will give them something of value?) Some degree of permanence, continuity of individual identity – yes, I’m with Iain.

Everything is a whole at its own level, not just a sum of its parts (in time or space), hence the continuity. Left-brained autism to think otherwise possible (eg Derek Parfitt). (Schizo-autistic spectrum very similar to loss of right-brain function – per TMWT. Dissociated personality disorders – even total split-brain cases – tell us a lot about integrated / continuity of personal identity.)

Matter and mind as different aspects / manifestations / (phases?) of the same reality – I should say so. Obviously the affect each other – mad to suggest otherwise. Materialists / physicalists are probably those who least understand – appreciate the value of – matter. (That “reality” is information & computation btw. More mentions of Solms, Friston, Fields …)

Interminable, standard problems in philosophy – as a choice between isms / schools – reflects left-right brain choices. Lack of integration.

Me that is. Jeez.

I’ve just found to my horror that I’ve been conflating and confusing Anil Seth and Yuval Noah Harari. Seth is a Cognitive and Computational Neuroscientist of Indian heritage, author of “Being You”. Harari is an Israeli Historian, author of “Sapiens”. Problem is I’ve been conflating my impressions of their work based on their media appearances.

Sorry guys, won’t do it again.

Mentioned very recently – this Solms / Fields / Levin discussion – that Chris Fields is someone I don’t really know much about, but keeps cropping-up in significant references. (Particularly with Levenchuk and AII.)

[Note: this post is a stub to which I’m adding thoughts as I read and listen …]

This paper … :-

Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021, 7(2)
Special Issue: Consciousness science and its theories.
doi: 10.1093/nc/niab013

“Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness.” (2021)
by Chris Fields, James F. Glazebrook and Michael Levin

… is one I’ve linked to in readiness to research Fields a little more.

Also

“A Free Energy Principle for Generic Quantum Systems”
by Fields, Friston, Glazebrook and Levin (2019)

And

“A Mosaic of Chu Spaces and Channel Theory II: Applications to Object Identification and Mereological Complexity”
by Fields and Glazebrook (2018)

Note that’s
Fields & Glazebrook  (2018) >>
Fields & Glazebrook & Friston & Levin (2019) >>
Fields & Glazebrook & Levin (2021)
[Friston being the link to Solms]

That 2021 paper (without Friston or Solms)

• • • Starts from awareness and consciousness (and cognition?) being synonymous with each other – simply the capability of having phenomenal experiences – however basic or minimally structured. (Obviously many levels and axes, but no sense of first-person “I” experience in this working definition? Significant because the point of the paper is the what and why. From higher mammalian primates right down to free-living or facultatively communal unicells, whether pro- or eukaryotic. Not just without brains or neurones, but not even nuclei. “Minimally structured” but “living” and “cellular”.)
    • [And, indeed, the criteria for “having experiences” may be as vague,
      general, and extensible to non-Terrestrial or even artificial systems as plausible criteria for “life” are; but see also an argument that “definitionism” is scientifically pointless.]

[Aside – watching this AII presentation with Mark Solms, from exactly a year ago – I’m near the end of this first part, around 1h40m – and he’s emphasising a higher take on consciousness – animals “down to” cephalopods say but also inserting different levels / axes – arousal, awareness aspects of “experience” … phenomenal consciousness vs reflective cognition “access” consciousness, awareness of what we’re aware of. Arousal entails awareness. And I’m now on part 2 (AII#016.2)]

Consciousness is at root “affect” (feeling felt) and “awareness” is intrinsic to it – in fact my summary of the central point of his book:

Consciousness “is” affect.
It’s feeling all the way down.
“How do I feel
about what I know
and what, if anything,
should I do about it?”

Chalmers: “There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will explain experience.” Obviously! because experience is affective not cognitive.

“Something it is like to be” – after Nagel’s (1974) bat – is a construction I struggle with, but Solms uses it a lot. To be like – is a feeling.

Additional references also “getting” the affective angle – Manos Tsakiris and Aikatarini Fotopoulou and Ryan Smith and Casper Hesp and Maxwell Ramstead (folk psychology). Already following the latter on Twitter. Quite a few joint papers with Friston et all in Google Scholar. Stephen Sillett on the original call.

As we know, affective / feeling “beyond-autonomic” homeostasis based on Panksepp and Damasio – 25 year ago – Good vs Bad value system choice. Massive evolutionary survival advantage – choosing by feeling in unexpected “surprise” situations – and then learning. (Anil Seth gets several positive mentions – noted a discussion between Seth and Solms previously).

Awareness – as “a-whereness” (Daniel) – distributed not localised?

In fact the 4-hours of presentation is basically the full thesis of Solms’ book.
End Aside.]

Continuing with the Fields/Glazebrook/Levin(2021) paper:

…

“I write to find out what I think.”
Hanif Kureshi – 1996

BBC Profile.

Loving the hippy, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Bowie school trajectory.

I’m reading David Chalmers’s “Reality+”

My Prejudice

It wasn’t on my list but I received it as a Christmas present. For me Chalmers is to philosophy as Brian Cox is to science; a rock star that gets everyone waving their knickers in the front row, which I admit may cultivate interest in the previously ignorant, but which adds more sound-and-light-show than enlightenment to the subject itself. So it’s a struggle. For me.

Obviously, I’ve been following his virtual worlds – Matrix – pronouncements for decades, along with the Zombie thought experiments and his infamous “Hard Problem” of consciousness, long since debunked as a confusion – like Cartesian duality – that is itself “part of the problem”. Part of the problem of “science” taking a too naive – limited, autistic – view of reality and (like Pat Churchland, one of his early references) in danger of condemning swathes of philosophy to the same limitations. Scientism.

If ever there was a “footnote to Plato” this is it. He famously uses his image of users in a VR suite as his 21st C version of the cave. Easy to find. It only adds to Plato’s understanding if you understand his take on VR, which to be fair is the point of his book.Philosophy and science regularly use simulations to test theories, and test cases which are incidentally or deliberately limited versions of normal reality. Neuroscience and consciousness (science and philosophy) would be nowhere without the #LesionLiterature in its widest sense. A real subject with some missing or artificial feature. Artificial – as in not naturally evolved – is already the stuff of science and philosophy (and indeed engineering in our real world “built environment”). What’s “new” to Chalmers is the technology, VR in the ICT technology sense. Technophilosophy as he would have us call it. New as in 30+ years old. And we get his life history as a gamer kid. He seems also to have discovered virtual meetings during Covid times. In the real world we’ve been doing these for the same 2 or 3 decades?

Anyway, prejudice aside 🙂 How do we know we’re not living in a virtual reality, a simulation, the matrix?

The Value of Virtual Worlds

Sure, the virtual worlds we create are in – part of – the real world, they are additions to our world, but each VR world – even a complex connected system of systems of VR worlds – is a limited version of some part of the whole real world(*).

My summation:
World plus VR = The Reality+plus (creates a new piece of reality)
Each VR = A Reality-minus (is something less than reality)

“Today’s VR & AR systems are primitive […] Virtual environments offer immersive vision and sound, but you can’t touch a virtual surface, smell a virtual flower, or taste a virtual glass of wine when you drink it.”

Indeed, and you can’t get food poisoning from Mazviita’s Lobster either, let alone the pleasure and nutrition from tasting and consuming it. (Excretion? – let’s not go there.) The point is not that they’re technologically primitive, relative to future versions. They surely are. The point is accepted models of physics and sentience don’t support each other – yet(*). People are going to spend a lot of time and money, having a lot of fun in the process of building deeper and better VR & AR experiences. Like most science, failure to achieve a solution to the subjective sentience aspect and the “reality” of others – like the bacteria and toxins in that lobster – will be empirical evidence of a lesson learned. Negative results are always valuable to science. Anyway:

“The central thesis of this book is:

Virtual reality is genuine reality,
or at least, virtual realities are genuine realities.

Virtual worlds need not be second-class realities.

[And we can’t rule out the possibility we might already be living in a virtual – simulated – reality.]”

Sure, they’re “real” but (see my own summary above) inevitably limited versions of other realities – different classes – we’re setting up a taxonomy of realities. And we’re back to the same fundamental problem as the many worlds / multiple universes speculations. The root of both ontology and epistemology – what do we mean by existence in this – the/our – world? Illusions are real too. We run out of meanings for the words we have. Chalmers prefixes his “realities” with “genuine” – genuinely real. This is never ending race to the grounding of physics itself. Properly, genuinely, in actual fact, physically, real – anyone? I’m with Deutsch – everything we can conceive of is – in some sense – real, part of the real world. It’s the sense we’re lacking.

As my prejudiced position said above, without properly understood, properly modelled, living sentience in ourselves and others, AI / VR / AR will fall short of expectations.

Chalmers thought experiments will make you think if you’ve not thought them before, and by promoting VR & AR for experimentation in real world applications will expose more people to more of the possibilities as well as the limitations. I will skim later chapters to see what’s new, but I’m sceptical, so please alert me if you find anything I’ve missed.

=====

(*) Which isn’t to say I don’t believe artificial life and sentience cannot be engineered, they can and will be (see previous post), but they will be real life and sentience – artificially evolved – when that happens.

=====

Chris Fields and Mark Solms clearly seem to be aware of each other’s work even if this is the first time they’ve communicated. As the tweet says it’s a very informal chat facilitated by Mike Levin (interesting Tufts connection with Dan Dennett in my context.)

Here is an informal conversation I had this week with two *very interesting* scientists — Mike Levin and Chris Fieds — about artificial consciousness …https://t.co/0suzRVGLWQ

— Mark Solms (@Mark_Solms) January 17, 2023

Mark is someone I’ve already talked about a lot – proper “neuro-psychological” (systems & Friston-free-energy) understanding of consciousness – building on where I’d got to with Iain McGilchrist and all the #LesionLiterature before that.

Chris Fields is of interest for all the references [29][31][32] by Anatoly Levenchuk and others in the #UpperOntology field. I didn’t actually know much about him until this exchange. (And of course I am reminded now that Chris, like Anatoly and Karl Friston, are scientific advisory board members of AII – ever convergent “systems” world!)

So far just rough notes on the informal dialogue
(apparently the first of two):

• • #HardProblem an absurdity arising from the exclusion of our subjective “machinery” from all considerations.
  • John Wheeler’s star in the ascendant in the “fundamental information” camp.
  • Carlo Rovelli the poet-laureate of the relational view of quantum theory.
  • Karl (Friston? or Carlo?) making positive statements about using our knowledge (of consciousness) to engineer “sentient machines”. Feynman “if I can’t create it, I don’t understand it” (Maybe we already have? Just haven’t convinced people – may take multiple (typically 3) human generations (like Kuhn / Kondratiev)
  • Other than observed behaviour what evidence of sentience are we expecting anyway?. Addressed for many decades in sci-fi – novel embodiments of the kind of sentience we seem to ascribe exclusively to humans.
  • Exchanging first-person felt “affect” by artistic means?
  • Psychedelics – LSD & Psilocybin experience and perception; not thought and conception, intellectual deduction.
  • Different “living” needs compete with each other on different timescales – where they “think” (actively infer) free resources (energy and material) are available based on felt sensations of needs / expectation-gaps / surprises. It’s more complex than deciding which need is most important and ignoring the others, a balanced mix on different time-bases. An optimisation landscape where sometimes exploration is more valuable than exploitation in immediate-needs-satisficing (sufficiently satisfying).
  • Physical face-to-face / get-to-know conference / symposium of like minds on “what criteria” would convince more widely of subjective states of conscious sentience. Thoughts as experience of “feelings”? (And exists by degrees.) Maybe using VR / Video-game resources (and biometric monitoring, and  prosthetics, and body-swaps / mannequins?) to demonstrate (#LesionLiterature is full of such “games” with subjects).
  • Bonding with another “being” is about shared existential “struggle” not the physical mammalian biology – so no reason why the “artificial” could not also provide such – more than empathy – bonding. The dawning of self (unity) distinct from our parts. [System<>not-System – Markov blanketed boundary of distinction.]
  • Formally – the whole of evolution is one self-organising system of which we are a “component”.

Looking forward to Part 2 !!!