On dogs recognising themselves in a mirror. We (humans) are very visually oriented and we know that dogs have an amazingly better sense of smell and this is one of their primary ways of dealing with the world. If the mirror lacks all olfactory presence, then, for a dog, it can't be another dog never mind a version of itself. Very few dogs are interested in T.V. images.
Imagine claiming that humans are not conscious because they cannot recognise a some realistic reproduction of their own smell.
I agree about dogs knowing themselves in the mirror.
My dog brings my wife and I a teddy bear each morning for breakfast in bed. I always indulge him by play acting eating it. He wags his tail and growls lightly as we tussle for the bear, our heads together, side by side. He then takes the bear to the bottom of the bed and cuddles it like a friend. He knows about 145 words, which is less than my last dog.
My understanding of his world is that when he watches across the valley his view is grey scale except for the bright, lightly blue/yellow, form of a deer on the opposite slope. His smells are located. Our smells are in our noses but for him they are out there, in the world, attached to objects. Night is not dark, just less light. The greatest pleasure is the stretch and push of his limbs, the drive down of his body onto his front paws before he gathers his rear. When he has a strong idea almost all else shuts down except the relations of the idea until the idea is executed He is deeply jealous and counts the gifts and strokes given to other dogs and is mortified if he does not get his share. His second greatest pleasure is to be in the pack with my wife and myself, and my children when they visit.
I knew of a genius cat that could turn the heater on. His owners were puzzled at the way they would turn the heater off when they went to bed and it was on when they got up. One night, one of them caught genius cat turning the heater on. The other cat was already in place to take advantage of the heat.
"What I call the Hegel mode of scientific illiteracy, power worship, delusions about knowing the direction of history and pseudo-profundity through linguistic obscurity, keeps manifesting in academe. After all, Hegel’s own career demonstrates that it can be an excellent path to academic status and intellectual discipleship."
I think Hegel becomes more understandable if you think of him as (roughly) 1/3 philosopher, 1/3 religious mystic, and 1/3 poet. Or something like that. And by "understandable" I don't mean you'll actually understand what he wrote, but just that his whole schtick makes a bit more sense.
I'm not so sure I agree with Hoel's point you cite at the beginning, that consciousness is easy to define. I suspect it is more of a mongrel concept that will dissolve into a series of smaller subproblems once we make more advances in the relevant fields. Looking forward to reading more.
I think this is why I struggled with Hegel, Berkley & other philosophers espousing non-concrete concepts conveyed in dense language designed, it would seem, to obfuscate & bedazzle us with admiration. If a chair disappears when there’s no one in the room, that proves that reality is nothing but perception. But the chair does not disappear, is the answer to that. It’s like the question, if a tree falls in a forest empty of people, does it make a noise? To which I say, why the hell does it matter? I lost patience with it in the end.
"A certain amount of philosophising may be unavoidable."
Indeed -- nice to see you acknowledge that, both here and in one of your comments in your "Failings" post. Though one might reasonably wonder how that statement sits with Helen given her various "pithy" comments on the field ("smelling your own farts"). 😉🙂 Generally a bad idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But entirely agree with your, "Thus language is a technology and words are tools." Something of a favourite "conceit" of mine -- an extended metaphor of sorts -- that that is part and parcel of the Biblical "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" [John 1:1]. One can well imagine our distant ancestors going around naming things and how they might reasonably have thought that that was magic, that it was literally creating things out of nothing -- the "Word", language itself, as God. The beginning of symbolic communication as Loren Eiseley put it in his rather poetic "The Immense Journey".
In large part, the reason why I had linked that article asking, somewhat sardonically, whether taxonomy is the world's oldest profession:
Thank you for this article. I retrogressed to this from "Trapped by Philosophy's worst features", having missed several of your recent posts.
I was a scientist (PhD in physiology and biophysics) for about 10 years and always regarded philosophy like maths: a useful tool set but little more than that. Maths was, of course, more useful than philosophy. Like maths philosophy explores non-physical ideas.
One of the biggest conceptual challenges for the philosopher or mathematician is how to deal with change. The future contains the next change but the past has constructed the template onto which this change coalesces (or "decoheres").
The modern, physical idea of change is embodied in Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics. See https://www.eftaylor.com/pub/moore_action.html . The basic idea is that the paths of objects interfere with each other to produce a single, macroscopic, observable path. The future path taken by an object is already mostly determined. This idea explains the once mysterious Principle of Least Action from which much of Classical Physics can be derived. Something like QM interference had to be occurring because the past is always gone and can do little but provide a template, the current form of the world. (Programs/algorithms are complex templates).
The current state of play is that the universe is a four dimensional manifold containing objects that obey the laws of quantum physics. There is currently considerable debate about the dimensionality of time (whether it is a real operator) but this derives from the way all of the textbooks contain the conclusion by Pauli that time is a parameter and not an operator. However, Pauli’s conclusion is for a special case, in the real world time is an operator like space (See for instance, Galapon 2002 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0111061).
A quantum universe immediately creates physical, mathematical and philosophical problems. A measurement decoheres wavefunctions to create wavefunctions of conjoint event/measurements. It is only the final observation by a conscious observer that produces a single reality. In practice the brain is completely entangled and contains almost a single reality. The word "almost" is used because the physical observer is a space-time point, it is the apex of the light cones ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ) stretching into the past and future from the point.
Notice that the physical observer is a space-time point. A space-time point is a four dimensional, geometrical phenomenon that contains a region of space (not just a 3D point). An observation selects events within the 4D point from the infinity of possible events.
This brings us to "mind". Our minds or rather, our Experience, contains colours, sounds etc. that only correlate with events in the brain. The reason they "only" correlate is that they are laid out in time. At any instant there are events in the brain that correlate with the 3D structure of mental events but in an instant there are no mental events. How much could you know in an instant? (My friend Simon has just written an article on this: https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/october-update-ideas-of-time ).
Mental events are, at least, 4D objects. As you might expect, given that the world has at least 4 independent directions for arranging events. The brain is mostly an entangled mass of interrelated measurements at any instant but the physical observer in the brain is composed time extended objects that are not fully part of this mass. In particular the qualia within our Experience are capable of interacting with themselves (such as the present and future of a short word to make a whole word) and each other. Such interactions are unlikely to have any effect except on the "mind" part of Experience.
So why have I gone to such lengths describing this? Its those philosophers and their Epiphenomenalism. If the form of Experience seems unnecessary for the functioning of the body (a la ChatGPT) then what is going on? The obvious answer is that the body is a vehicle for Experience. This is obvious. What are you? A leg? A gut? You are your Experience and this is maintained by your body.
The best American Educator ever was Booker T. Washington; young men must have a skill, trade, profession ~ or they shall have to “live by their wits” (💩💩).
Young men need agency over the world, working with one’s hands- including learning to code- grounds them.
If you want to find a philosopher who earned respect, the only one who has mine ; Ernst Junger.
If you want to understand what’s happening to humanity now and where we’re going- “The Worker.”
It’s also a challenge on every page. There’s so much there even Junger was still understanding it decades later...
As for the present;
Liberalism leads to Nihilism, Russian Nihilism led to Bolshevik nihilism, which led to German nihilism and the Nazis, which led to WW2, to have a peace of Liberalism is to return to the starting point. - Ernst Junger. “The Peace” - 1944, which was to be handed to the Allies if the July plot had succeeded.
We are learning the truth of this now. Indeed in the West we’re likely to play out the Gotterdamerung of the Eastern Front within ourselves, certainly in the United States.
I have to admit I grappled with your original "Consciousness and coherence" post and failed, so thank you for trying again.
Here, I still found your preamble slightly difficult to follow.
Maybe it's because I'm an engineer and the thought of having a theory unmoored from reality is more than a little terrifying in my context.
But from "Living organisms Let’s start with the concrete" this post is crystal clear to me.
I await part 2 with... interest.
On dogs recognising themselves in a mirror. We (humans) are very visually oriented and we know that dogs have an amazingly better sense of smell and this is one of their primary ways of dealing with the world. If the mirror lacks all olfactory presence, then, for a dog, it can't be another dog never mind a version of itself. Very few dogs are interested in T.V. images.
Imagine claiming that humans are not conscious because they cannot recognise a some realistic reproduction of their own smell.
I agree about dogs knowing themselves in the mirror.
My dog brings my wife and I a teddy bear each morning for breakfast in bed. I always indulge him by play acting eating it. He wags his tail and growls lightly as we tussle for the bear, our heads together, side by side. He then takes the bear to the bottom of the bed and cuddles it like a friend. He knows about 145 words, which is less than my last dog.
My understanding of his world is that when he watches across the valley his view is grey scale except for the bright, lightly blue/yellow, form of a deer on the opposite slope. His smells are located. Our smells are in our noses but for him they are out there, in the world, attached to objects. Night is not dark, just less light. The greatest pleasure is the stretch and push of his limbs, the drive down of his body onto his front paws before he gathers his rear. When he has a strong idea almost all else shuts down except the relations of the idea until the idea is executed He is deeply jealous and counts the gifts and strokes given to other dogs and is mortified if he does not get his share. His second greatest pleasure is to be in the pack with my wife and myself, and my children when they visit.
I knew of a genius cat that could turn the heater on. His owners were puzzled at the way they would turn the heater off when they went to bed and it was on when they got up. One night, one of them caught genius cat turning the heater on. The other cat was already in place to take advantage of the heat.
"What I call the Hegel mode of scientific illiteracy, power worship, delusions about knowing the direction of history and pseudo-profundity through linguistic obscurity, keeps manifesting in academe. After all, Hegel’s own career demonstrates that it can be an excellent path to academic status and intellectual discipleship."
I think Hegel becomes more understandable if you think of him as (roughly) 1/3 philosopher, 1/3 religious mystic, and 1/3 poet. Or something like that. And by "understandable" I don't mean you'll actually understand what he wrote, but just that his whole schtick makes a bit more sense.
I'm not so sure I agree with Hoel's point you cite at the beginning, that consciousness is easy to define. I suspect it is more of a mongrel concept that will dissolve into a series of smaller subproblems once we make more advances in the relevant fields. Looking forward to reading more.
I think this is why I struggled with Hegel, Berkley & other philosophers espousing non-concrete concepts conveyed in dense language designed, it would seem, to obfuscate & bedazzle us with admiration. If a chair disappears when there’s no one in the room, that proves that reality is nothing but perception. But the chair does not disappear, is the answer to that. It’s like the question, if a tree falls in a forest empty of people, does it make a noise? To which I say, why the hell does it matter? I lost patience with it in the end.
"A certain amount of philosophising may be unavoidable."
Indeed -- nice to see you acknowledge that, both here and in one of your comments in your "Failings" post. Though one might reasonably wonder how that statement sits with Helen given her various "pithy" comments on the field ("smelling your own farts"). 😉🙂 Generally a bad idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But entirely agree with your, "Thus language is a technology and words are tools." Something of a favourite "conceit" of mine -- an extended metaphor of sorts -- that that is part and parcel of the Biblical "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" [John 1:1]. One can well imagine our distant ancestors going around naming things and how they might reasonably have thought that that was magic, that it was literally creating things out of nothing -- the "Word", language itself, as God. The beginning of symbolic communication as Loren Eiseley put it in his rather poetic "The Immense Journey".
In large part, the reason why I had linked that article asking, somewhat sardonically, whether taxonomy is the world's oldest profession:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171203085825/http://taxodiary.com/2013/07/is-taxonomy-the-oldest-profession/
It is why a good comments section is useful, it provides feedback and potential correction.
Indeed. A quantum leap from Twitter. And even substantially better than Medium, even if it may have a better compensation model.
Thank you for this article. I retrogressed to this from "Trapped by Philosophy's worst features", having missed several of your recent posts.
I was a scientist (PhD in physiology and biophysics) for about 10 years and always regarded philosophy like maths: a useful tool set but little more than that. Maths was, of course, more useful than philosophy. Like maths philosophy explores non-physical ideas.
One of the biggest conceptual challenges for the philosopher or mathematician is how to deal with change. The future contains the next change but the past has constructed the template onto which this change coalesces (or "decoheres").
The modern, physical idea of change is embodied in Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics. See https://www.eftaylor.com/pub/moore_action.html . The basic idea is that the paths of objects interfere with each other to produce a single, macroscopic, observable path. The future path taken by an object is already mostly determined. This idea explains the once mysterious Principle of Least Action from which much of Classical Physics can be derived. Something like QM interference had to be occurring because the past is always gone and can do little but provide a template, the current form of the world. (Programs/algorithms are complex templates).
The current state of play is that the universe is a four dimensional manifold containing objects that obey the laws of quantum physics. There is currently considerable debate about the dimensionality of time (whether it is a real operator) but this derives from the way all of the textbooks contain the conclusion by Pauli that time is a parameter and not an operator. However, Pauli’s conclusion is for a special case, in the real world time is an operator like space (See for instance, Galapon 2002 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0111061).
A quantum universe immediately creates physical, mathematical and philosophical problems. A measurement decoheres wavefunctions to create wavefunctions of conjoint event/measurements. It is only the final observation by a conscious observer that produces a single reality. In practice the brain is completely entangled and contains almost a single reality. The word "almost" is used because the physical observer is a space-time point, it is the apex of the light cones ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone ) stretching into the past and future from the point.
Notice that the physical observer is a space-time point. A space-time point is a four dimensional, geometrical phenomenon that contains a region of space (not just a 3D point). An observation selects events within the 4D point from the infinity of possible events.
This brings us to "mind". Our minds or rather, our Experience, contains colours, sounds etc. that only correlate with events in the brain. The reason they "only" correlate is that they are laid out in time. At any instant there are events in the brain that correlate with the 3D structure of mental events but in an instant there are no mental events. How much could you know in an instant? (My friend Simon has just written an article on this: https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/october-update-ideas-of-time ).
Mental events are, at least, 4D objects. As you might expect, given that the world has at least 4 independent directions for arranging events. The brain is mostly an entangled mass of interrelated measurements at any instant but the physical observer in the brain is composed time extended objects that are not fully part of this mass. In particular the qualia within our Experience are capable of interacting with themselves (such as the present and future of a short word to make a whole word) and each other. Such interactions are unlikely to have any effect except on the "mind" part of Experience.
So why have I gone to such lengths describing this? Its those philosophers and their Epiphenomenalism. If the form of Experience seems unnecessary for the functioning of the body (a la ChatGPT) then what is going on? The obvious answer is that the body is a vehicle for Experience. This is obvious. What are you? A leg? A gut? You are your Experience and this is maintained by your body.
The best American Educator ever was Booker T. Washington; young men must have a skill, trade, profession ~ or they shall have to “live by their wits” (💩💩).
Young men need agency over the world, working with one’s hands- including learning to code- grounds them.
If you want to find a philosopher who earned respect, the only one who has mine ; Ernst Junger.
If you want to understand what’s happening to humanity now and where we’re going- “The Worker.”
It’s also a challenge on every page. There’s so much there even Junger was still understanding it decades later...
As for the present;
Liberalism leads to Nihilism, Russian Nihilism led to Bolshevik nihilism, which led to German nihilism and the Nazis, which led to WW2, to have a peace of Liberalism is to return to the starting point. - Ernst Junger. “The Peace” - 1944, which was to be handed to the Allies if the July plot had succeeded.
We are learning the truth of this now. Indeed in the West we’re likely to play out the Gotterdamerung of the Eastern Front within ourselves, certainly in the United States.
Philosophy is the history of portentous guesses: I like it.
Magnífico!