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life, thought, and structure.
slime-moulds and cyber-punks.

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life, thought, and structure.
unenlightened armature righter Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Location: Wales Total Topics: 67 Total Posts: 8563	#1 Posted 02/21/12 - 8:09 PM: Subject: life, thought, and structure. Over here, (#352 onwards) I found myself following a train of thought that I would like to summarise, clarify and perhaps extend a little, if anyone would like to help me explore, about the ways and sequences in which various mental faculties of humans relate to and arise from, or evolve from, more primitive forms of life and even from the properties of inert matter. Inert as say, a rock. The idea of causation seems to require that matter is dependent on its past - that's what inertia means, roughly, the tendency to carry on as before. So it was pointed out to me that a rock may, and probably must to some extent carry in its own structure some record of its past, in the form of bedding planes and fossils, for example. I am careful to say 'record' and not yet 'memory' for reasons that will become apparent, I hope. Now consider a sensor. A sensor (Think of a movement sensor on an outside light, for example) is not inert, but active. By no means necessarily alive, or part of a living system, but active and a consumer of energy. A sensor is sensitive to something, such that it reacts differentially to its presence or its absence, and in this way it makes a behavioural distinction between the two. "If movement, light on, else, light off." A purely mechanical version would be those odd water features involving a little bucket that fills gradually and then tips over and empties, and when empty, rights itself, and gradually fills again. "If full, tip..." If someone can think of an inorganic and natural example, that would be neat... I should add here, that by a 'sensor' I mean something that is meta-stable, that can work to distinguish more than once. My movement sensor is also sensitive to being run over by a bus, but probably only once. Now take an enormous leap, to a simple life form like an amoeba. A hive of sensitivities, both internal and external, and a DNA record, that quite unlike the fossil record of the rock is itself active, and whose activity is to recreate itself. Still, I would say, not memory in anything like the human sense, but certainly in the computer sense, though perhaps a read only memory. Computers would be much cheaper, if only they could do what an amoeba can do. And here is Banno's slime mould, which, it is suggested, can learn from the environment in the sense of adapting its behaviour, and this integration of sensors with some sort of recording thereof and sensing and reacting in turn to that record, constitutes a functional memory. So I arrive at a functional notion of memory as a record of sensor activity, which can be read by sensors, and this functioning integrates the past as record (now memory proper) and the present as sensory activity. Please note that no mention has been made of awareness, consciousness, thought, or intention. However, I hope from here, to go on to speculate about how 'anticipation' as an imagined future might be built upon this primitive learning function in more complex organisms, and this might then eventually allow for these things to develop, because, after all, that is what seems to have happened, if evolutionary theory is at all correct.
Kelvin wreckless burrito Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Jul 06, 2011 Total Topics: 34 Total Posts: 1056	#2 Posted 02/22/12 - 2:21 AM: The amoeba is recreating itself. It is a model of anticipation. So is the movement sensor. It senses for the purpose of x. Inert entities don't use energy. They can only be the objects of action. The distinction is generally thought of as a facet of thought. In a naturalistic framework, anticipation isn't accepted as real. The naturalist is just stuck with the fact that the distinction is pervasively built into language, and is doomed to labeling some portion of his or her speech as fictional. The contrary point of view which has the substance of reality basically being thought (the mind of God scenario, for instance), doesn't have the problem of identifying a point at which the universe stops being a line of falling dominoes and starts circling back on itself, creating hybrid active/inert entities. The whole thing is understood to have purpose. That viewpoint is also plagued by a conflict, though. One way to put it is that purpose can only be conceived relative to purposelessness. I don't know if the computer example works as a model of universal memory. I guess it depends on how you're thinking of it. A computer actively creates its memory. It will only store a piece of information if the program tells it to. Otherwise its storage capacity would be exhausted pretty quickly. It could start overwriting, but it would be a pretty short-term memory. As for inorganic anticipitory systems, I tried the electromagnetic dynamo that creates the earth's electromagnetic field when I was reading Rosen's book. I eventually ditched it... it doesn't work. It is, in a sense, cycling back on itself to create something new, but it's not a closed system. The field it creates doesn't circle back and fortify the process by which it was made. I think I may have been thinking tangentially to what you were saying?
throng Profester. Usergroup: Members Joined: Aug 12, 2008 Location: Downunder. Total Topics: 58 Total Posts: 1193	#3 Posted 02/22/12 - 2:44 AM: A sensor behaves as dictated by conditions, so the water in the tipping jar becomes sensitive to the condition of the jar, just as the much as jar behaves according to the water in it, so it is hard to determine exactly where the order of predestined behaviour decends into random conditions, or if not random, the point at which nothing can be determined to be a sensor. How the DNA strand came to be, is as you say a huge leap, but it was certainly a pivotal moment in the universe, just as the jar has a 'pivotal moment' if you will (as does the water collected therein.)
unenlightened armature righter Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Location: Wales Total Topics: 67 Total Posts: 8563	#4 Posted 02/22/12 - 11:52 AM: Kelvin wrote: The amoeba is recreating itself. It is a model of anticipation. So is the movement sensor. It senses for the purpose of x. Inert entities don't use energy. They can only be the objects of action. The distinction is generally thought of as a facet of thought. In a naturalistic framework, anticipation isn't accepted as real. The naturalist is just stuck with the fact that the distinction is pervasively built into language, and is doomed to labeling some portion of his or her speech as fictional. Good points. I think the sensor itself only has the anticipation of the human that designed it, but DNA and reproduction seems to qualify. I need to think about this though. Neglecting for a moment recent evidence of environmental influences on gene expression of a neo-Lamarkian nature, I don't think that there is much anticipation or even learning at this level. Rather, I think one has an unintentional and unadapted copying. I think I will maintain that the amoeba or its DNA does not anticipate or intend anything, but simply does its distinctive thing, rather as genes have no self and cannot really be selfish, these are metaphorical short-hands. The apparent anticipation is like the apparent design, a result of natural selection.
unenlightened armature righter Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Location: Wales Total Topics: 67 Total Posts: 8563	#5 Posted 02/22/12 - 12:02 PM: Natural selection itself constitutes a sensor that distinguishes fit from unfit, and as a natural inorganic process that distinguishes and sorts, I offer Chesil Beach as an example: wiki wrote: Varying with the Bank's unbroken increase in height, to 14.7 metres (48 ft), above mean high water, the size of the flint and chert shingle varies from pea-sized at the north-west end (by West Bay) to orange-sized at the south-east end (by Portland). It is said that smugglers who landed on the beach in the middle of the night could judge "exactly where they were" by the size of the shingle. I think it is uncontroversial to say that a process that sorts stones by size is making distinctions of size. I wonder if you could explain Rosen's notion of anticipation a little, It may be rather different to the way I am using the term.
unenlightened armature righter Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Location: Wales Total Topics: 67 Total Posts: 8563	#6 Posted 02/22/12 - 4:30 PM: I'll say something about where I think I'm going with all this. Somewhere between the mechanical sorting that happens on the beach, and our conscious contemplation thereof, some powerful magic has occurred - which is short-hand for saying 'something I don't understand'. And I think there is a powerful reason why it is not understood, which is that thought itself is a mechanical process. So I am taking a mysterian view of consciousness, and a non-mysterian view of thought. I don't know yet if this line can be fruitfully trodden, but it seems to me that thought can possibly be understood by thought, only as a mechanical process of inputs and outputs and memory and processing of encoded information. And so we 'reconstruct' in the computer, this small fragment of what a human life is, and sometimes think we have captured and understood something that we have not touched at all, which is the magic of being alive, rather than the mechanics of thought.
Kelvin wreckless burrito Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Jul 06, 2011 Total Topics: 34 Total Posts: 1056	#7 Posted 02/22/12 - 5:12 PM: unenlightened wrote: Good points. I think the sensor itself only has the anticipation of the human that designed it, but DNA and reproduction seems to qualify. I need to think about this though. Neglecting for a moment recent evidence of environmental influences on gene expression of a neo-Lamarkian nature, I don't think that there is much anticipation or even learning at this level. Rather, I think one has an unintentional and unadapted copying. I think I will maintain that the amoeba or its DNA does not anticipate or intend anything, but simply does its distinctive thing, rather as genes have no self and cannot really be selfish, these are metaphorical short-hands. The apparent anticipation is like the apparent design, a result of natural selection. There's more to the amoeba's reproduction than copying DNA. It has to grow large enough to split into two organisms. This requires eating and excreting, metabolizing, maintaining favorable pH and osmotic pressure.. broadly speaking, it has to survive long enough to reproduce. An amoeba's body performs the same basic functions ours do... just in a simpler way. Instead of organs, it has organelles.. little pods that may perform more than one of the functions our separate organs do. Inherent in all these concepts is purpose. Energy is being used to accomplish something. You can say that the creature doesn't operate according to final cause, but in speaking about what it is, we pervasively use concepts that imply exactly that. All the little parts of the creature are fed and protected by each other. It's a recurring metaphor from single cell to biosphere... if you follow any sequence of actions, its a trail that circles back to its origin. All these circular trails converge in a closed system which acts so that it can continue to act. Rosen's point is pretty simple, but after poo pooing him for a while I finally got why his message is startling. Acceptance of naturalism along with the rise to prominence of physics in science led to a situation where the word life has no meaning. There's no way to distinguish life from non-life. Biology has become a subset of physics. It would seem to make sense to just drop the use of the word since it apparently doesn't refer to anything real, but we didn't, and it doesn't appear that we're going to anytime soon. We continue to use the word as if we know what it means. "What the hell is going on here?" Rosen asks. All his travels through Aristotle and Kant led him to the conclusion that the word life refers to closed systems like the amoeba. As you said, it's a metaphor. But before we say that biologists are poor in intelligence because they aren't distinguishing reality from metaphor... are we pretty sure metaphor isn't pervasive in science? And we could use the most basic meaning of science here. Stray notions that accompany this line of thought include the idea that the structure we're really seeing when we look out at the universe is the structure of thought. Or it's vaguely similar to what Banno's been suggesting: that word and thing are identical. There is such a thing as a living amoeba. It's the one scooting itself around when you look through the microscope. The inert amoeba just sits there. It's dead. On 02/22/12 - 5:53 PM, photographer responded: As you've indicated, physics doesn't do alive or dead. doesn't this make Rosen just plain wrong? On 02/22/12 - 6:34 PM, Kelvin responded: Wrong about what? On 02/23/12 - 4:59 PM, photographer responded: Naturalism doesn't find life meaningless, it seeks an abiotic origin. A different kettle of fish.
photographer φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Aug 22, 2010 Total Topics: 52 Total Posts: 3066	#8 1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 02/22/12 - 5:17 PM: Subject: I might understand this from a slightly different angle... I would say that there is thought in life and thought about life. In the latter, reflective thought, we can come to a theoretical understanding of thought which may well be mechanistic. But I'm very skeptical that we will get to the root of what the late Heidegger referred to as 'knowing-awareness' this way. However, I'm somewhat leery about using the word "consciousness" to describe this awareness, as the term is so caught up in the tradition of a metaphysics that fails to distinguish between the lived and the reflective. Edited by photographer on 02/23/12 - 4:52 PM
Kelvin wreckless burrito Usergroup: Sponsors Joined: Jul 06, 2011 Total Topics: 34 Total Posts: 1056	#9 Posted 02/22/12 - 5:18 PM: unenlightened wrote: I'll say something about where I think I'm going with all this. Somewhere between the mechanical sorting that happens on the beach, and our conscious contemplation thereof, some powerful magic has occurred - which is short-hand for saying 'something I don't understand'. And I think there is a powerful reason why it is not understood, which is that thought itself is a mechanical process. So I am taking a mysterian view of consciousness, and a non-mysterian view of thought. I don't know yet if this line can be fruitfully trodden, but it seems to me that thought can possibly be understood by thought, only as a mechanical process of inputs and outputs and memory and processing of encoded information. And so we 'reconstruct' in the computer, this small fragment of what a human life is, and sometimes think we have captured and understood something that we have not touched at all, which is the magic of being alive, rather than the mechanics of thought. Computers were invented specifically to mimic thought. It's been noted that the bursting success of the technology led to a situation where it's details are used as a model for actual thought, just as the psyche was cast in geological imagery when geology was the cool new thing.
unenlightened armature righter Usergroup: Administrators Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Location: Wales Total Topics: 67 Total Posts: 8563	#10 Posted 02/22/12 - 6:40 PM: Kelvin wrote: There's more to the amoeba's reproduction than copying DNA. It has to grow large enough to split into two organisms. Thanks for that. So would he say that the parts 'anticipate' each other? The DNA anticipates the cell growth? If so, that is a somewhat different usage to mine, I think. Kelvin wrote: There's no way to distinguish life from non-life. Yes, I think that is crucial, but my approach here is not really to look at life as such, but at the nature of the mechanical, and the question for me is whether thought is mechanical; I already grant, at least for the time being that life is not. We philosophers tend to imagine that thought is the crowning glory of life and the universe, but perhaps our thoughts are all mundane stone sorting, and the crowning glory is the way skin heals itself.

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