In this conversation we touch on so many aspects of similar fundamental questions as you say Ed. These are the key to develop a common ground. The main difficulty is precisely that we all start from half way up in the explanations giving for granted some assumptions (tautology!). These are the contents of some thoughts expressed by many before us and by many even at present. The way I see these problems is that they themselves emerged as a process of becoming increasingly aware of the centrality of us humans in uttering anything about the world itself.  Descartes himself was one such giant step making by suggesting that we needed something solid to start with avoiding the horrible suspicion that we may be living in an imaginary world created all by ourselves.   This awareness of the danger of our brain (us) determining unbeknown to us the questions and consequent answers generated historically greater insight on to the very nature of the humans mind.  Psychology as a discipline started a few centuries after Descartes.  Hume, Berkeley and so many others started to clarify the traps we posed ourselves.  From thinking about the world and ourselves it has become very clear that the way in which we address universal problems or problems of the universe has to take in account the very ‘us’ being the sole agents.  It follows that, unless we really think that we are constructing a view of the world not just for other humans, but also for a kind of universal mind (God), we must be content with the possibility to say something about the relation between us as thinking being and the world.  This relation impact heavily (theory-laden stuff some people talk about) on the kind of answers.  This is why I suggested to look into the nature of this relation as it appears during personal development and in evolution of species of hominids.  Any other endeavor is bound to have hidden assumptions that by not being recognized simply delay the understanding of how we have come to a certain vision (cosmology) of the world.  My point is that such vision is highly determined by processes of development that simply precede awareness of any kind or degrees.  This approach is shared increasingly by those philosophers and scientists who recognize the human origin of knowledge with all its grandiosity and limitations.  Neurophenomenology is a modern aspect of this process and without thinking that  that is all, it seems to me that the direction undertaken (including Leibniz and all previous thinkers) is one likely to enable us to advance in the clarification of our own existence (Karl Jaspers for example).  I also mentioned Konrad Lorenz, a genius in post WWII science of ethology (Nobel prize) who wrote ‘Behind the mirror’, a superb example of a biologist with clarifying views for modern philosophy (easily accessed in Wikipedia Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge).  This is just a small part of a biological and humanistic perspective available in history of knowledge, which of course includes science and thus any disciplines of it.

How to proceed? If we accept a human centered start (to avoid creating external ghosts) please be patient and follow me into a next small sequences of steps I like to call “Seven steps from molecules to mind”.  Do I feel confident that I can share this with such critical minds like you all? I am old enough to give it a go as long as you are prepared to not jump to any possible opportunity to stop this short journey before pausing a bit and see if contradicts anything you have thought.  Consiliency a la (Frenchism) Wilson is also a small guiding principle I tried to adhere, to avoid leaving out some fundamental feature that could not be incorporated in the view that follows.

I have given these in several places as extended seminars both in Australia and Italy and I have not received serious objections. However I have not written them in a formal extended way and I offer you a summary of what I am proposing not as a finished product but as an attempt to unify so many diverse and apparently incompatible propositions.  I have not invented from scratch anything new. Only put together in a coherent way to see if we can travel along this path without getting lost. In every step I have gathered hundreds of well-accepted points from serious workers in those areas.  Do I still have blanks to fill? Of course and this is the reason I am happy to share these thoughts.

What follow was only part of a blurb for a lecture at the SISSA in Trieste a couple of years ago in front of about 300 scientists of this superb Centre of advanced studies from astrophysics to neuropsychology.  Thus only a program each steps occupying given time several seminars and a full chapter.

In order to start on a simple and solid ground within the Newtonian/Einsteinian universe I will suggest as a first step that the definition of ‘existence’ should imply a univocal relation between existing and being describable as having spatio-temporal coordinates. 

The second conceptual step is that we should view structures formed since the big bang as having became stratified by a variety of processes of assembly of simpler elements into multiple levelled structures by selection processes and with emergence of new ‘physical’ properties.  Consequent to this perspective the ‘rules’ (processes) that govern the interchange of influences at every level are not likely to be the same as those that are involved in bottom-up and top-down influences across the various stratified layers.

The third simple step involves the simple acceptance from Physics of the laws of Thermodynamics and the relation between flow of energy in dissipative systems with local increase in order. 

The fourth step describes how even in the inorganic world, modern non linear dynamics describes the emergence of some transiently stable order and how even in a deterministic world future events cannot be necessarily predicted.

In such universe, biological systems made their appearance, as fifth step, characterised by self assembled dynamic structures, usually enclosed in membranous compartments and maintained by processes of energy flow as dissipative systems which when become transmissible across individual organisms, generated the evolutionary processes at least on Earth.  Living cells with increasing degrees of coupling generated multicellular organisms. Such organisms represent biological active media where each element act as a ‘reaction’ component and the spatial coupling the ‘diffusion’ component of the well described equations that govern excitable cell properties and most biological phenomena.

The appearance of neural organisms endowed by sensory and motor capacity represents a sixth step in the emergence ladder.  This event marked the appearance of distinct structures forming a functional loop between the ‘external mechanical’ world and the inner neural world.  This transition couples the two aspects of the Cartesian dualistic world, one of kinetics, a world of mass in motion and an electrochemical world of neural states.  This primordial sensory-motor loop acquires more prominent properties of circular causality and adaptation with degrees of stability of states.

The last step is the emergence, in evolution, of multiple superimposed neural loops that contribute to a gradual appearance of greater autonomy of such organisms with broadening of its ‘horizon of existence.  This process leads to the emergence of a sense of sentiency and agency culminating with the sense of being individuals with a ‘will’ and self awareness.  As this emergence is associated to a high dependence on social life of the individuals, the emergence of the mental world is inseparable with that of social processes. Science is just a newer and very successful development along this path.

This is my summary but I promise to keep all next conversations simple but I claim I can make sufficiently robust in our discussions.

Consideration of this question should begin with the study of brain activity. Since philosophy also is the product of its activity, you can not avoid the main problem. It is called the problem of demarcation. This is an inherent fundamental problem which is perhaps equal to unavoidable degree of freedom for knowledge system and has significance comparable to the uncertainty principle in physics and Godel's theorems in mathematics.

There demarcation of the first order: we have some areas of science and non-science.

There demarcation of the second order: separated science area divided inside by physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, philology, philosophy (may be?) and so on.

The observer, who defines the boundaries, can be either inside of a certain discipline in the region (and then he is a physicist, biologist, psychologist, sociologist, who says that this is the science and non-science, being in the language of own discipline).

Either he is in a multi-disciplinary position, being a philosopher and not understanding anything in these particular disciplines or understanding something in only one or some of them, performs the demarcation of the first order and second order.

The answers which will be given by a philosopher or a scientist are fundamentally different.

Demarcation of the second order sooner or later will have to be eliminated completely, turning all into a conventional sections within a single system of knowledge like the branches of physics, for example. The obvious objective reasons for this are ripe. Your question is a proof of this.

With the philosophy situation is much more complicated, however as with mathematics. Both of these formal systems are unfairly outcasts of science.

The foregoing is only the beginning of the problem...

I should add that I fully agree with the Penrose's statement that the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond the quantum physics and hence the current state of physics. However, I am confident that problem will be solved. I'm an optimist (-:

Ed Gerck,

First science is a specific method of knowing and  is limited to what its method allow to study

Second science is limited to study only what can be objectified, i.e. reducible to a objective model expressed into an objective language. So science is limited to the study of the machine-like in Nature.  The machine-like in Nature are all aspect that can be reduced to scientific models.

Third humans understand each other through their natural capacities to interpret each other and the use of a common natural language is primordial to this effect but not the only ways.  We are very good at reading each other body languages.  

Fourth, the scientific study of ourself cannot proceed through the normal subjective communication channels (language, body language, arts) that human utilized to interact and so understanding each other intentions.  It has to remain objective, proceed from observation and produced objective descriptions.  It has to exclude all that cannot be objectified.  The whole domain of mind is exactly this what has to be exclude and so it is not an minor difficulty but an epistemological limit.  We have scientifically studied the physiology of our bodies.  We have studied some parallel between what we experience and these physiological processes rendering these experiences possible.  The experience of walking necesarily require legs and a central nervous system, and all kind of systems that can be studied scientifically.  Unfortunatly an experience is not something that exist objectively and so is totally out of any scientific description by method.  The experience side of a human body is totally absent by method of any scientific description of this body.  The very notion of agency is a familiar subjective notion that cannot be objectified and so that cannot be scientifically even defined.  The experience side cannot be part of science although it is obviously real for people but since science IS an objective construct, there is no way to say anything about it although it is obvious for each other and central language and all the arts.  But these are the language of experience while science is a language of the objective.  There is no meeting possible between them.

Fifth, So humans will have to continue understand each other using subjective natural language and the arts as they always did and to continue trying to understand all that can be studied scientifically about that, that part that can be objectified.  

Question a)  the mind , ie our life experience is certainly not an objective knowledge.  It is not even knowledge but action.  

b) the physical model of the brain and of the body is incomplete but this is not really the problem. It has to be objective and living reality has to be subjective and the two do not meet.  

c)  there is no ghost in the machine.  the problem is epistemological, the limit of the method of science.   They is no magic bullet that will change this fact.  It is not a limitation create by a lack of advance but a methodological limiation that cannot be overcome.

d) I did described it.  My whole argument is based on my understanding of the limit of science.  There is no hard problem of consciousness at all, there is only a persistent mis-understanding of what is science and what it can study and what it cannot study.

I think the problem is similar to mirror - reflected image relation.  One can explain how mirror is constructed and how this construction allow image reflection. But it is no possible fully explain the content of reflected image, in the human case it is strongly related with meaning.

And, of course, when talking about reflex, human reflex is active, while mirror's is passive.

Regarding question: a) Yes, the mind is not solely a product of the brain but includes the contribution of something else, but here I am not sure what you mean under 'non physical'; b) as far as I know the physical model of the brain is incomplete, although I am not sure about 'physical' ; c) while describing brain, it is very important to take into account its relation with environment, and in human case, this includes social relations;  d) I think Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is a good framework for  understanding of brain - mind relation.

Of the options I think b) is the one as the others are not really leaving any clear answer.  But probably the answers do not lie in quantum mechanics. The 'classic' hard sciences are necessary but not sufficient at the moment to deal with the complexity just as a couple of hundreds years ago meteorology was beyond physics and chemistry.  Neuroscientists (broadly anybody dealing with the problem in a scientific way) are getting slowly there by 'dissecting' away the multiple layers of brain/body complexity and by extending the understanding of complex system to the gigantic neural nets of the nervous system.  No need to create silos where there is no need.  No need to separate science from philosophy. That was a historical quirk of universities disciplines, not an essential difference of approaches. I think that a scientist that does not addresses 'phiiosophical' issues is simply too narrow minded to deal with new problems, and a philosopher that does not do any science or is conversant with it ,is simply a free thinker about problems but unlikely a discoverer of anything.  The two are simply different level of activity forming a continuum in human endeavor of explorations, where asking correct questions (philosophy) is just as important as using correct tools and  appropriate methods. Mind brain relation?  why not start from the simple event of you moving your finger; best example of mind brain body relation.  I teach that to 3rd year neuroscience with no problems leaving questions of going back some steps from the motor cortex.  A few years ago no one knew where the event started; then in monkeys the pre-motor cortex neurons were see to fire just before the action. Now close to read that activity in paralised people to enable them to move artificial arms by thoughts!  Is this not the correct line of investigation to 'understand' what we are talking about when we use the word mind?  Is it not the mind over body (or over robot) that is the matter here?

The brain does not create the mind,its the mind tat creates the brain. The mind does not exist in the upper part of the body but is distribute throughout the body. The mind is constantly changing and stays connected to the exterior. The brain is just like any other organ that performs its regular functioning of managing the body. Loosing your mind means loosing your self and has an affect on the whole body. The mind is created from a non physical source and is returned back when disembodied.

Whaw ! we have a believer in ancient dualism!  Perhaps his religion has something to do with this belief?  I was hoping to a more updated approach searching for real possible answers, not spitting out a dogma!

Hello everyone,

The comments above show the many aspects of the question, and I  would like to add one more. If you agree, as Costa, that option (b) is the option that expands the physical level,  then we may think of a missing communication link, at least as a virtual interface, expanding our cognitive abilities far beyond the neural functions and capavity found in the brain.

For example, in terms of an extended self, we regularly use our phones as an "external brain" for added memory, alerts, and functionality, where eyes and fingers work as a communication link. This is a virtual interface, as it uses existing interfaces (eyes, fingers) for new communication functions. Books in our bookshelf serve  also in communication to and from our brain, as well as friends, colleagues, students, and family.

In addition to these offline facilities, the entire Internet and tools, such as list servers, search engines and their databases,  are part of our extended phenotype and are likewise linked to our brain,  giving us a mind with much greater memory and higher intelligence, as well as faster response, with  better pattern recognition, inference, deduction, induction, and creativity than our actual neuron capacity , education, training, and lifetime years could physically support.

Our mind is already no longer human, no longer brain-limited. And it can be more. Mutatis mutandis, missing communication transducers, or virtual interfaces,  yet to be found in our brain, could provide other physical means to interface with much more than phones, books, friends, online communities, and the Internet.

In the cases above, an individual mind would  not be isolated or even capable of being isolated,  not even without these potentially missing links, so that a single brain could not explain the mind,  and that is why we have not been able to answer the question.

In other words, an individual's mind is not just caused by that individual's brain, and is not just human. I advance that this hypothesis is already evidenced, as an extended cognitive function including computers and the Internet, even if we have not yet scientifically found (although some contend we empirically  have, such as Pietro Ubaldi) a missing communication link from our brain to and from other realms, whatever they may be.

Communication, as studied in physics. and intetnetworking, including human-machine, could be the actual source of mind, where the brain is merely a "thin terminal" with some (in comparison to the social or machine  network) rudimentary cognitive functions.

This may have found further experimental confirmation in recent research at UCSD, where it is shown that deep sleep is critical to move short term memory learned socially to long term memory, even in fruit flies. In deep sleep, communication interference to the brain would be reduced, reducing overload and allowing reorganization. 

Best regards, Ed Gerck 

Marcello,

Non-believer. This is just the scale invariance of the process, from the equations of quantum mechanics  to split hemispheres. Structuralist things are not wrong. Everything is more complicated than you think. It does not matter how many years the idea if it is the voice of the things older than the Universe. Sorry.

The conversation is most interesting but I fear that if the level is purely on what we think  and say about mind, with little reference to the science of 'neuroscience' with the aid of some clear experimental thinking (which is happening) we are unlikely to do more than add some reasonable repetition of historical arguments , written endlessly in the good literature, rather than adding further advancing clarity. If you are a physics or a philosopher or a chemist or other disciplines please accept the advances made in neuroscience towards a scientific understand of "the mind'. I am a neuroscientist although I do not experiment on the nature of the mind, I follow closely the literature of colleagues and philosophical implications of such studies (for example excellent work on  neurophenomenologyl, extended self, robotics, artificial intelligence and emergence of novel level of functions from simpler neural circuits, the latter being  my very field of research).

Dear Marcello,

Religion does not matter to me but spirituality does and it resides deepen within me. Believing in science is also a belief but all belief does not have a God. Dualism is far greater than monoism  for it has been told and experienced from the beginning of everything. We need energy to perform, energy does not get created from within and this is where dualism begins. Your belief is your dogma, my belief is mine but there is no comparison to belief because it is purely individualistic, just like experience which is individualistic. Neuroscience has the capability of answering a lot of questions but not all questions, in fact I can say that for science, religion, atheism, philosophy. You have to bee a seeker to seek more because the more you observe something the more it changes and that's when we end up with a situation like the Schrodinger's cat. The answer lies within you but you tend to seek it in the others when you yourself know it. The soul cannot be buried even if you try too, for it seeks its rightful place at the right time. The brain is a lump of matter, very unpredictable that has kept neuroscientists busy for a long time. Its like a maze which has no beginning and no end; trapped within it seeking the same answers over and over again. A slime mould without a brain has much better sense than a human brain which is become more egoistic with its narrowing intelligence.

Marcello,

That you are a neuroscientist and I am a physicist - it is the demarcation problem of the second order. Obviously, it is actual.

You only look at the neurobiology. I follow it to a lesser extent, because forced to follow the physics, chemistry, biology, neuropsychology etc. Mind is really simple thing, but formalization of this is not easy because you need a little rewrite physics itself. Definitely, only neuroscientists can not give the answer to this question.

You can consider it my non-authoritative statement. To understand me you will have to familarize with the evolution of dissipative systems and present state of physics from the standard model to cosmology in a rough form.

The brain is physical but the human mind is something finer, that allows us to process and come up with thoughts. Thoughts which is a product of the mind is endowed with something non-physical. It could be triggered from within; when we use expressions like - "a thought struck me". However, it can also be triggered externally based on what we see.

In the later case, the mind can be described as a "secretion of the brain" since the brain processes what the sense organs perceive and generates thoughts.  However, in the former case, the impressions just hit us before the brain comes in handy to process such thoughts.

Dear Ed,

I think the answer is (d) and I will describe why. The problem is a subtle catgory mistake in your first paragraph.

I would forget 'secretion' but take your suggestion that 'mind' (which we could perhaps also call 'the sense of being', or just 'experience') is a RESULT of brain activity. I think that is a good start. And I would also agree that it is likely that just the events in the brain can be considered responsible for this result - everything else is antecedent and contingent.

But you then say that mind defies scientific explanation or model in terms of science. I think the mistake here is to try to find a model process when we are not considering a process, but the result of a process. We have the explanation we want for mind - it is the result of brain processes. We are not sure which processes determine the experience we get, for sure, and there is a lot more work to do, but we are not looking for extra processes or extra causes or more physics. We are just wanting to know which if the processes we know about links directly to this result. And everything in science is linked to the same result of experience, so there is nothing 'outside science' here. It is just that in modern schools they forget to teach the basic metaphysics behind science - that it is grounded in mind or experience, in colours and pushes and spaces that are all features of mind.

My own view is that if we want to understand the events that relate directly to experience or mind we need to identify them individually. And a theory of (dynamic) individuals is a quantum theory, so it going to be a quantum explanation, but it probably does not need to involved complex numbers or Hilbert space. I don;t think it has anything to do with complex neural networks or dissipative dynamics because these are features of aggregates and aggregates cannot experience because they have no single relation to the world - just a list of different relations to each other.

So I think  the problem is nothing to do with science failing in its scope. It is just that people are thrashing around looking for the wrong sorts of events to link to experience. 

Marcello and all,

Please feel welcome to add any reference in neuroscience that you think can help. In my posting above, which is based on the physics of communication, I alluded to work going on at UC San Diego, on extended self and sleep.

However, Marcello,  are you proposing to extend neuroscience outside the neuro circuits found in the brain and body?  Because if the concept of mind includes what we can call  telesense, such as the telesense of an extended self and the telesense of presence (studied in cybercommunications, and routinely experienced by video game players who feel to be "in the action" as well as by just using telnet to "be at" another computer), then one needs to consider what might be the physical support for these telesenses; and there is experimental evidence for other telesenses as well, including touch and pain. Or, are telesenses (including extended self) just some form of benign psychosis?

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Jonathan,

You chose (d) and wrote, "We have the explanation we want for mind - it is the result of brain processes", and ".. we are not looking for extra processes or extra causes or more physics. We are just wanting to know which [of] the processes we know about [in the brain]  links directly to this result."

But, and please consider that I may not have understood you correctly, is not this the status quo, as the question opens with? That there is no question here, it is just that we do not understand the brain well enough.

Otherwise, if you admit that the question does exist and is not a category mistake, as you also mention a possible quantum process, then a quantum process, or its approximation as a classical communication process, which are collective, will not be necessarily limited to the brain boundary -- even if you enlarge that boundary to the whole body in considering brain neurotransmitters (as evidence shows). 

In other words, one may need to search also outside the brain and body to find mind, especially if we consider collective effects, such as the physics of communication in my posting above, either in a classical or quantum formulation  (a quantum formulation may not be necessary here).

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Dear Ed,

I think it is a mistake to consider events outside the brain as 'mind'. In very simple terms the distinction between 'physical' and 'mental' is an epistemic one we understand from childhood. Physical events are those that give us experiences through our sense organs. Because our sense organs are set up to acquire multiple data points in space and time, often aided by our movement or eye movement, we can allocate physical events a place in time and in space. Mental events are those that we are aware of through purely internal brain monitoring processes. Since these cannot make use of movement and distance calibration they can only be allocated a time, and a place 'inside'. So when we talk of mind in the sense of mental events by definition we mean events identified in this internal way. To talk of 'extended mind' just confuses people and adds nothing to the science. 

What is well known in neuropsychology is that all aspects of our sense of the world are concocted in the brain. Colour and flavour and shape and slowness are all internal codes for dynamic patterns. They bear only a useful relation to the dynamics - not a similarity. So feeling that you are in 'tele-contact' is going to be an internal concoction anyway. When you look down a microscope your sense of space suddenly changes, and there are no longer any familiar 3D clues for things. You get used to it and think in a new concocted space. We should not take these illusions as having any true 'outside world' dynamic significance.

When I refer to needing a quantum theory of experience I simply mean that we need to draw up relations in terms of dynamic individual to universe - not aggregate to aggregate. Leibniz showed us how to do this and QFT now gives us equations. In condensed matter many of these relations can have descriptions in terms that do not require use of complex numbers and Hilbert space. We can forget about things like entanglement. We can use things like traditional piezoelectric theory. But we still need a theory of dynamic individuals - much as statistical thermodynamics is a theory of individual modes of action, thereby explaining the black body spectrum etc.

Dear Jonathan ,

'' that 'mind' (which we could perhaps also call 'the sense of being', or just 'experience') is a RESULT of brain activity.''

''We are not sure which processes determine the experience we get''

''we still need a theory of dynamic individuals''

In our cases, human being, this sense of being which you assume only as the result of brain activity as described by processes  or mecanisms.  We have a sense of being right, this is our primary reality as an individual, but that reality is not something such as knowledge but a sense of what we did,do,or can do.  A kind of familiarity with the world not as science describe it but as we deal with it.  Then science is only able to describe bodily processes but this has nothing to do with me as a actor do although it is clear that I need all these processes to proceed with my action.  So science describe a body through processes that are simply reacting mechanisms and my experience which is about my doing through this body but which I know not as process but engage through my doing.

We have created a scientific language , a language for expressing mechanisms which cannot express our living world. This living world, the world of experience is well expressed through our ordinary languages.  This is a language about experience for experiening beings but science is a language for mechanims and nothing in it related to anything experiencial.  How an experiencing being can exist in this world of mechanism and processes?  You have taken the unitary or wholeness of experience as indicating an sense of being can only belong to an unitary physical entity.  But any such entity will be once found totally inactive as any physical entity.  I can easily imagine all sort of such entity that emerged from the activities of many processes but I cannot see it doing anything other than being just a transmission node doing nothing on its own.  In the world of mecanism we can only have transmitting nodes.  

Dear Ed and Johathan and other friends, the conversation is indeed refining. I agree with both I that there is no problem in principle to include mind in the natural world and thus applicability of science to it in any degree in which we think science in other fields helps to find out ‘how things are’ (but please do not invoke here philosophical discussion on what is ‘reality’.  Let’s assume we apply the same concepts as in other parts of science.  The issue arises as to whether we need extending physics to cover mind or we can use the existing disciplines/categories of science to it. I will put to you, indulging on you patience, a comprehensive set of ideas totally compatible with scientific thinking and yet suitable to open a scientific strategy to study the ‘Mind’.

I give a number of introductory lectures in a course of Physiology in which I give an overview of the place of biological beings including humans in the universe starting with the big bang, the appearance f space ad time and of the elements etc till the planet Earth. I remind them of the laws of thermodynamics and how order can be generated by flow of energy in open dissipative systems (reduction of entropy but only locally).  Thus the appearance of ‘life’ on Earth (and perhaps somewere else).  This transition begins to be understood and will be in their lifetime my students, when the process/phenomenon of life will become clear.  Does this means that we need a new physics? The answer depends on how we wish to define or limit the word Physics.  I would include of course all what is in the universe, so chemistry, biology etc are part of an extended concept of physics and therefore science.  In the world of experiencing beings, as you say well, I tell my students that everything that exists above quantum level is somewhere and at some time (even with Einstein relativity theory).  A corollary of this is that the word ‘to exist’ applies to anything that has time space coordinates and viceversa, anything that has space-time coordinates, exists.  Simple and intuitive not too arguable in much of our science.  A consequence of this is that most of transitions of emerging complex structures occurred in time.  From the elements molecules, starts planets, life, neural organisms (important step) and eventually mindful beings. Is as if the world becomes stratifies in superimposed levels of greater complexity contingent on the lower levels.  Thus life in most cases requires oxygen. Removing it organism collapse to their lower levels of atoms.  This does not mean that we understand life by this initial observation.  But is a start.  The living is a dynamic state and this avoids the pseudo philosophical problems of ‘what is life’.  What processes underlie the states of being alive becomes the scientific question.  This almost certainly need physics to be extended to the features and properties of assembled complex ‘living’ structures.  Self-assembly of molecules, chemical reactions, nets off chemical reactions forming primitive ‘metabolic’ processes, all mark the transition between inorganic and organic chemistry.  Then of course living single cells occupied several billion years before the appearance of multicellular organisms. 

Why I say all this, apparently irrelevant to the issue of the nature of the mind?  Because it enables us to avoid conceptual errors of having to choose before time, what kind of scientific tools will be developed suitable for describing the process of life scientifically (almost there) and  next the process of living organisms with  the novel property of being capable of ‘experiencing’.  This property is by the way not all or none. Is graded and has appeared in a graded way in evolution and it does so in every individual living being that can be said to ‘experience’ as grows from a single cell to an adult. 

And here we arrive to the (long) transition between simple animals with a nervous system to thinking organisms with a ‘mind’. About the nervous system in organisms I give lectures in a course on sensory motor systems, in which I describe the two aspects of physics that are involved in describing neural organisms; one aspect/chapter of mechanics/kinetics that relate to the muscle contractions involved in ‘locomotion, a distinctive feature of most animals, at least vertebrates.  The other aspect/chapter is electrochemistry that relates to neural functions.  The simplest organisms with a nervous system consists of ‘sensory neurons’ responding to some physical energy, and ‘motor neurons’ that make the muscle contract.  We go from the external physical world (‘sensing’ many aspects of it but by far not all; evolutionary processes determine what), to an internal electrochemical one (still part of physics!) and back to the external world of kinetics via muscle contractions commanded by motor neurons.  This can be seen as the primordial experiential loop!  It is a loop! And consist in two apparent very different natures. At the time of the birth of modern dualism with Descartes, Mechanics was the only ‘Physics’ contemplated to explain the world as he tried and failed.  The sciences of electricity/magnetism and chemistry were simply not yet born!  Thus dualism was an easy option with mind being the ‘res cogitans’ made of something else, untouchable, invisible and, why not, immutable just t please the Church! and the rest of the world made of res extensa.  Obviously both inner neural and outer aspects are part of the same physical world and part of the same overall discipline we call Physics.

Once the dualism is avoided at the very inception of the neuro-mechanical loop (as I call the primordial sensory-motor loop) conceptually things become less complicated.  The initial organisms with such an interacting neural mechanisms, become increasingly sentient (sensory inputs via sensory neurons) and agent (motor output with motor neurons). I tell also the students that that they all have only a few million sensory neurons and few million motor neurons, but that their entire brain is made of about 40-60 billion neurons in between sensory and motor, called in neuroscience ‘ interneurons’. Conceptually the appearance of interneurons makes part of the nervous system one step at least away from sensory input and motor outputs. This is the beginning of a ‘mind’ an inner process still physico-chemical but hidden from external observation!  We now can penetrate a bit into the nervous system. As it happens as evolution generated higher neural animals, the neuromechanical loop become enriched by further superimposed longer loops further and further away from sensory inputs and motor outputs.  This is the process of emergent sentiency and agency the hallmark of appearance on Earth of experiencing beings. This happens as I said gradually in evolution and during development. Unless one assumes the arrival of some external infusion of a soul, then the emergence of minds is a process like many others.

If mind is what happens inside the nervous system (but always connected with the outside part of the world) then the number of levels of the loops superimposed to the primordial one may have some correlation with the degree of complexity of ‘ minds’. There also little doubt that despite gradual process in evolution they usually occur in small jumps, such as for example the acquisition of some genes for language in hominins and certainly in homo sapiens.

We are from the biological neural point of view like a building with the ground floor having two doors, the entrance (sensory) and the exit (motor).  Above that all the floor that correspond t the acquisition of longer loop made of increasing number of interneurons (much of your brain) further further away from the ground floor. Nothing we know enters  or leave the brain except via the ground floor doors! No wonder is so difficult to know what goes on in the top floors.  How many w are we composed on when we reach adulthood?  Possibly several tens.  The physics, is the features and properties of neuromechanical loops or entire neuro-neural loops entirely internal to the brain, is simply for the time being too complex to be described sufficiently well in its physical entirety.  Emerging properties of the superimposed loops make it the challenge being met of neuroscience with all extra conceptual and technical tools needed.  We just started. Let’s not be too impatient.  I work on a simpler part of the nervous system embedded in the gut wall, the so call other brain in the gut (term I was part in its instruction). The Enteric Nervous System; complex enough and also endowed of a few levels of sensory motor loops is a neuromechanical system, like the rest of the nervous system. I though I would die before answering some most pressing questions of 30-40 years ago. Now technical advances and computer power have given us new tools and even in my late research age (born 1940) I see a glimpse of the answers awaiting the new generation.

The simplified, but not simplistic, idea of the mind being a property emerging from of the increasingly superimposed nature of the nervous system still coupled with the world (including its own body of course), may help in discriminating the steps that are taking us closer to appropriate answers about mind, consciousness self etc etc, avoiding those conceptual views which may divert us towards blind alleys or worse irreversible traps.

A slime mould can escape from a jar, complete a maze, build networks, etc but unfortunately does not have a brain. Its just a stream of cells moving together but deciding based on its awareness of the surrounding.....does it have a mind? Noooo...it needs the brain, so in this case its reflex, intuition, etc. On second thoughts, maybe there are some neural connections in the cells that support this behaviour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eas2zOSKIaQ

More reading on intelligence in micro-organisms without a mind I guess...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299445549_Is_it_Quantum_Sentience_or_Quantum_Consciousness_A_Review_of_Social_Behaviours_Observed_in_Primitive_and_Present-Day_Microorganisms

Article Is it Quantum Sentience or Quantum Consciousness? A Review o...

Dear Marcello, I could not resist the temptation, with all humility, to add an extra dimension to your elegant thinking and explanation, on the Mind.  

The millions of sensory neurons, interacting with billions of interneurons, which output their response to millions of motor neurons, which define our responses to our environment.  Yet these responses, bar spinal reflexes, are "modulated".  The majority of this modulation can be ascribed largely to the activity of "interneurons", whose modulatory activity is weighted by neurochemistry.  All definable by neuroscience.  Yet, these closed "neural loops" too, may be modulated.  

Our internal state, driven by our environment, may modulate these neural processes. "Experience" or memories (defined by synaptic weights) may be altered by extrinsic factors.  Neuromodulators from non-neural sources, may modulate our Minds.  Definable physiological states such as "fight or flight" (adrenalin), depression / ecstasy (serotonin), alter our Minds.  Your original work on opioids and adrenalin, the more recent work on serotonin, together with other neuromodulators (of non-neural origin), must, I believe, be given their rightful place when defining the Mind.  Much is still to be proven.  Perhaps resolvable using our favourite model, the enteric nervous system, with enteroendocrine / paracrine modulators superimposed on the sensory-inter-motor neural loops, in physiologically-credible tests? Or is it already answered in in a more "diffuse" way, in psychiatry.  

Of course Adrian. The neural loops I refer to are made of nerve cells as you well know with transmitters, neuromodulators (all chemical substances, part of the electro-chemistry chapter of physics of neural circuits I was referring to) etc and also surrounded by non neuronal cells with their own chemicals etc etc.  This is why the physics of such systems is complex but still within the range of methodology of science. This is so in my view because like in any other aspect of natural phenomena that are contingent of some underlying processes, so are the processes we regard part of the mental world, ie are subject to similar interventions. Colleagues are everyday applying this method to establish what processes are behind the emergence of a particular state of the brain (still a state of matter/energy ie the broad field of Physics).  By careful dissection of such conditions  the functions/features of a particular level can be identified. This process has just begun and will proceed faster in the next decades. No need to invoke a new philosophy of science or mysterious element or forces beyond the very expected complexity with emerging totally new features with so many loops far from the lower lever of this incredible building which is the animal brain, with ours brain being endowed with some more levels and accompanying unique features. Your input confirms that the thinking is compatible with very widespread and accepted knowledge in neuroscience.

Dear Marcello, Contzen, Vasiliy, Jonathan, Adrian, and all,

With special thanks to Marcello's review posting and all. Although the mind remains ellusive, the neuroscience problem setting seems to be getting  clearer.  The brain in the gut and other discoveries have had much impact already outside of neuroscience. 

As this thread shows, science specialization, although necessary for depth, has not led to a feared fragmentation. Instead, advances are increasingly made at the interdisciplinary interfaces and by cross-fertilization. Cybersecurity, for example, found that infection models in biological cells work well in code cells (ie, programs).

When neuroscience finds that the brain is a distributed function, that social functions can be ascribed to microorganisms, and that billions of cells can interact with an evident external purpose, in an increasingly superimposed system with different parts working in cooperation for that purpose, then this may seem at first sight to certainly go beyond physics.

Yes, the discipline of physics does not concern itself with purpose, but with relationships, causes and consequences and, often, not even with causes (Newton did not pose a cause for gravitation, just the consequence). In physics, most are willing to say that everything has a cause, even the Big-Bang, but physics does not ascribe purpose to anything.

This does not mean that physics denies the existence of purpose, the question has just been delayed in terms of physics. The science became more doable without the purpose question, focusing on investigating testable relationships, by the Scientific Method, even without a known cause. But there is nothing to prevent that purpose be defined and investigated using physics.

Could neuroscience use the same approach in investigating the mind? Take away the question of purpose for now and investigate testable relationships?

Or, although testable relationships can be investigated and help develop the science,  the question of purpose can't be delayed when studying the mind, and this is already an answer. 

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

I doubt if science becomes more doable without purpose...  with a set purpose and agree upon goal, our scientific search can take many radical different paths.  Also allow me to bring in another RG thread/question "why an essential ethics of scientific work has not yet been fully developed? '  to this discussion,  in comparison with other teleological ends.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_an_essential_ethics_of_scientific_work_has_not_yet_been_fully_developed

Dear Susan,

Thank you for bringing the important topics of ethics and the purpose of science, but I was not addressing purpose in a vernacular sense. These topics are not to be understood in a vernacular sense in the natural sciences, or they could easily lead to ideological discussions. This thread is not about that, it is about natural sciences, including physics, phylogenetics, neuroscience and biology. Physics equations do not take into account purpose in anything that is calculated. But, as I wrote in the posting above, there is nothing to prevent that purpose be defined and investigated using physics, albeit as a force, momentum, particle, element of space-time, or other qualified entity, or combination thereof, that can be empirically measured.

For a scientific discussion about physics and purpose, I suggest this RG thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Natures_fundamental_eg_fine-structure_and_cosmological_constants_have_values_in_the_small_highly_improbable_range_that_allows_life_to_exist_Why?_tpcectx=profile_questions

Cheers, Ed Gerck

Naturalising the mind, naturalising the human being as part of the same universe made of the same stuff. This is perfectly compatible with science. It is science. Naturalsing means to study all phenomena, no matter how difficult, as long as the phenomena are deemed to ' exist' is to take place some where at some time.  Clearly part of the properties/features of neural organisms and certainly humans is the appearance of 'behaviour and uncreasingly in evolution with ' some sort of purpose'. The word purpose is not foreign to neuroscience/ psychology.  So if we accept that purposely behaviour is a normal component of animal physiology then the study of it can and must become part of natural sciences.  Of course we nerd to avoid the category mistake of attributing purpose the the world and to irrelevant bits. If purpose is a feature of 'behaviour' and behaviour is a feature of neural organisms then it can only be applied to them and not to anything else such as rock or seas or planets or atoms.  To attribute purpose to these is simply an example of the anthropomorphic tendence of our brain to 'read' the changes in the world as purposely.  This tendency is justified biologically on the bases of ' detecting behaviour of other congeners and other animals to survive better. To extend this ' reading' the mind' to other natural phenomena other than  closely related animals is a simple excessive mistaken extension of this important feature of brained animals.  To be ready to escape, to attack, to mate, to cooperate etc etc all require this ability of brains of more evolved animals to ' read' the next move of others.  Humans then have acquired this skill at the highest level yet with TOM (Theory of Mind) which simply describe the condition in which we mostly find ourselves in  thinking that behind a pair of eyes that look at you there is another thinking being!  This leads to the entire field of neuroethology and social psychology etc.  But for the issue at hand, then since science is eminently a human endeavour it would be hard not to have a purpose as Susan says.  If purpose and searching for meaning are physiological features of some organisms, the purpose and meaning are 'real' ie exist, ie take place somewhere (In some brains I presume) at some times (not at all times) and thus can be subject of scientific investigations.

And yes Ed thank you for having initiated this conversation, one of probably thousand that are taking place in cyberspace (still in time-space cordinates; thus 'real') but that demonstrate how fragmentation of science is more perceived than real.  The tools of keeping broad Physics unified are there but us as individuals struggle because of the excessive need of specialisation.  These discussions can provide the initial links between scientists/thinkers to avoid conversations that often start as if some problems are still at it infancy when other colleagues are well pass to new levels of challenges.

Hello,

Let me elaborate, motivated by the postings above, how, provisionally, an account of purpose could be treated in existing physics.

Let's  grant that purpose and the search for meaning are 'real' for some organisms, in the sense that they exist and can influence the organism as well as the environment where that organism lives, including  socially but certainly in a physical sense as well.

Physics is a description of the real world. Could physics capture purpose in a physical sense?

Let's look first at cause, which is familiar in physics and is often used.  In physics, we say that a perpendicular force can cause friction, for example. All these quantities are well-defined, including "cause". There is definitely a cause-effect relationship that is testable and can be objectively verified. In other words, cause is a useful and rigorous concept in physics. 

Now, let us contrast the phrases "X has cause Y" with "X has purpose Y", in the following cases:

Case #2 is not a difficulty in physics, however, if we are willing to consider the existence of an unproven principle that can predict with 100% certainty what the future holds. In Isaac Asimov science-fiction terms, a time-unllimited (not just 1.12 second) "thiotimoline".

Behold,  physics has many such principles! For example, and very fundamental in much of physics, let us consider the principle of least action (also known as the principle of stationary action), which has been long and widely accepted. It is simple, beautiful and general. It applies to classical and quantum mechanics, from quark and atoms to black holes. From this one principle, and a few extra assumptions, one can mathematically derive many  universally observable facts (ergo, previously considered to be unprovable principles), including conservation of energy, conservation of linear momentum, conservation of angular momentum; without limit in the number of such conservation types one can find. The principle of least action has also been considered in psychology, project management, collaboration  and other areas outside of physics. For a reference, please click:

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html

The principle of least action seems to be.a good candidate to address case #2 and define purpose in physics calculations mutatis mutandis how physics defines cause and cause-effect. The above considerations could be used in addressing the question of mind in terms of a natural law model based on physics and mathematics.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

All is well Ed, even your dissection of the concept of cause and effect.  I am not sure we need to dwell too much in the meaning of this important but tricky concept. The emergence of spatio-temporal complexity such as living organisms is in the realm of emergent properties all of which are already conceptually and some time practically understood in their scientific fields). These include self assembly of molecules (field well established), with spatial compartimentalisation as one of the relevant occurrences (bags limited by what have become cell membranes). Chains of chemical reactions in the bags (primitive metabolism also within the  field of chemistry), appearance of catalytic features of some molecules able to self catalyse (Primitive RNA with self duplication properties) and thus keep a chemical memory of previous organism (initially primitive bacteria simply dividing at infinitum.  And we are then in the living organisms stratum of the universe (leaving aside whether is a unique or common occurrence in the universe).  How to approach the subsequente emergence of multicellular organisms is also dealt with in evolutionary terms and existing examples of single cell organisms assembling into multicellular ones (the remarkable slime mold). Then the appearance of excitable cells that can amplify tiny signals from small changes in the environment (sensory neurons) into gigantic kinetic events (motor neurons).  The physico-electro-chemistry of all this is common knowledge in physiology and neuroscience first year of Uni.  For there evolution proceeds as natural selection theory clarifies well.  The mind then also appear as discussed previously in a graded fashion in higher organisms.  The links are all there.  Even Physicist like Feynman geniuses as they are could not really help to clarify the multitude of actual advances made in all this story.  What has been missing is a theory is there is one, to explain the transitions from simpler to more organised spatio-temporal structures with properties that emerge from below but that are not 'implicit' in those.  So going up in the stratification of the universe to result say in the 'Mind" is a process that may not be described sensibly as causes and effects. Rather as emerging properties in some necessary and sufficient conditions.  Their dismantling, ie going down, often forms of 'collapses' are simply not the inverse of the emerging processes. These processes up and down the scale of levels of organization requires conceptual frames still part of 'Physics".  Looking at the symbolic logical description of these processes describe above, what is the suitable mathematics is certainly not obvious but is happening.  Except that the word 'Laws" are less and less used. Physicist of the new generation that include plenty of concepts that include architecture of elements with transitions of states and emergence of phenomena are the best to guide us in this.  Those who study 'circuits with adaptive control systems are naturally aware of the need to explain some of the novel properties of the gadgets (e.g.robotics) or of the organisms neuroscientists) wit more advanced concepts than cause and effect.  But still remaining part of a broader Physics.

Marcello,

The word "law" in physics does not follow the vernacular. In physics, law or natural law designates a conclusion that physicists expect to be extremely hard to change, based on repeated scientific experiments and observations over many years and which have become accepted universally within the scientific community. For example, the conservation laws I cited above. Further, in physics for more than 150 years now, conservation laws are the favored description of nature, over Newton's laws or mechanistic force, element,  and structure  models [1].

State machines, transitions of states and adaptive control systems are first-year engineering subjects, as tools where the objective is to make a calculation using an ad hoc model that is given top down, not to understand something from the ground up or argue the fundamentals. As an example of their limitations,  these tools cannot be used with non-ergodic systems, exactly the systems that can result from learning, like mind. Evolution and social processes involving structural changes are also inherently non-ergodic.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

[1] In many subfields of physics these days, it is possible to read an entire issue of a journal without ever encountering an equation involving force or a reference to Newton's laws of motion. In the last hundred and fifty years, an entirely different framework has been developed for physics, based on conservation laws.

The new approach is not just preferred because it is in fashion. It applies inside an atom or near a black hole, where Newton's laws do not. Even in everyday situations the new approach can be superior. We have already seen how perpetual motion machines could be designed that were too complex to be easily debunked by Newton's laws. The beauty of conservation laws is that they tell us something must remain the same, regardless of the complexity of the process.

Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter, chapter 14, retrieved from

http://lightandmatter.com/html_books/lm/ch14/ch14.html

Yes of course Ed. Agree totally and familiar then with a common terminology

 I teach all mu students in biological sciences the III law of thermodynamics and the conservations laws in general.  The issue facing us is the non ergodic nature of emergent structures with no design we can apply reverse engineering!

The objective/reductionist approaches in studying biological entities is limited to the available sensory faculties that perceive reality and therefore there is a need to seek a new holistic and synergetic approach to understand this disconnect

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301753202_Science_Subjectivity_Reality

Article Science, Subjectivity & Reality

Hello,

In the next weeks, I plan to share, for early comments at RG, a research presentation that touches upon some of the topics we discussed in this and other threads, from the starting viewpoint of Physics. The provisional summary is given below.

[updated on May 9, 2016]

The Big Idea in Science: From Testable Relationships to The Absolute

[This presentation is planned as a hands-on  workshop in the BioLab  program at the La Jolla Riford Library, Calif., at 6 PM,  5 July, 2016, to be confirmed.]

A fundamental merit of natural science, including physics and biology, is being a science of testable relationships. But this is also exactly its fault. Yes, we have multiplied the power of our means of observation and reasoning, but our starting and ending points have remained sensorial, the phenomena and relationships.

In the last 150 years, however, physics has started to go from relative, testable relationships to the absolute, with much success, reaching from atoms to black-holes. This modern view of physics, what we call The Big Idea, was well summarized by Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, who said that our task as scientists is to find in all these relative factors and data that we measure, the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, that is hidden in them [1].

The workshop will chronicle this development arc and illustrate how The Big Idea in Physics can and eventually must spread as The Big Idea in Science, to Chemistry, Engineering, Botany, Biology, Neuroscience, Mathematics, Economics, and even Politics.

This absolute quality we seek when using The Big Idea is, of course, also refutable. Scientifically, any statement must include its refutability, the undeniable possibility that it is false. A "YES" result could be false, which means that it should be understood as "NOT YET FALSE"; a "NO" result could be false, which means that it should be understood as "COULD BE TRUE". Nature remains the ultimate possibility for acceptance or rejection, which is even easier to verify if a statement is  universally valid. Therefore, The Big Idea in Physics also improves the often elusive scientific  trustworthiness, which is important for society, academia, and economic stakeholders.

The workshop includes a simple experiment that is often made complicated and incorrectly explained, and contrast that with its Big Idea solution, intuitive and far reaching.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography: and Other Papers, first published 1949, ISBN 0806530758.

the cognitive neuroscience cannot say anything on conscience, because, as Franz Brentano, has already said, then it was the starting point of Husserl, then of phenomenology: "Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomena includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). Cognitive Neuroscience have therefore requested, aid to the phenomenology. The Neurophenomenology is born by this way. Answering to another question that I asked in ResearchGate I wrote this brief answer about the mind/body dualism which can be interesting in this context: "I think that we can find the first origin of the dichotomy soul/body in the Council of Costantinople in 869 after Christ, where Roman Chatolic Church did abolish the trinity body, soul and spirit, as the components of' human being and leaving the'human being composed only of body and soul. The dichotomy did therefore begin on the theological plan. Surely the modern dichotomy did begin with Descartes and then with Kant till today. Both Descartes that Kant regarded the body, the res extensa as a res mechanica subject only to the laws of physics. A body subject only to the laws of physics is not a living body but is a cadaver. And here comes the spirit, in fact the nodal problem of all the modern and contemporary philosophy is the issue of time that Kant considered the basis of his transcendental schemata, i.e. the relationship between logos and individual. In the nature the time is clearly visible in the growth and metamorphosis of the plant. The plant that is the elementary representation of life is a temporal being. The time is a fundamental feature of life, and therefore of living organisms. In a book I did write in 2014, I called that Res vivens. The res vivens connects the body with the soul. In fact the psyche is a temporal being like the life. There is no space in the mind. The mind is a sense-temporal being, as the body is a space-temporal being. Not only spatial as the res extensa of Descartes."

Hello,

I added a context on refutability in my posting above, on The Big Idea in Physics, to allay a possible inference that absolute meant irrefutable. This is not the case, as with any scientific statement. Cheers, Ed Gerck

I agree with Ed. Daniele Nani suggest a very interesting 'theological' or to say the east metaphysical, interpretation of physics, matter, life, spirits souls etc etc. As a scientist I need not to make such strong distinctions and living being or thinking or dead are made by similar atoms and molecules.  What distinguishes them is the way in which they are arranged and function to generate properties above the molecular, whether simple passive bodies or living bodies and sentient/agents bodies, all still part of physics.  Do not forget that the physics of Descartes , and anything earlier, was only mechanics. Electromagnetic force was not even conceived, let alone used to explain anything relevant to biology or the emergent features of neural organisms. Daniele 'res vines' sound to me as very pres-cientific.

Daniele and all,

With all due respect to the Roman Catholic Church, is it really an imposition to this discussion what the Church has decided or not?  In natural science, we deal with refutables, not dogma. Anything in the sciences can be questioned, irrespective of who said what, or when. 

Marcello's comments are also the recipe for the success of natural science versus what is currently called philosophy. Today, we certainly use Descartes' results and insights, but not based on his authority or seniority, nor the approval seal of some potentate, nor the weight of an organization. If we would have to cite Aristotle in defining what is scientific, we would be wrong. We do not have to  deal with causes or reasons, in science. Newton's gravitation law was scientific albeit he did not advance any cause or reason.

Having said that, a scientific narrative can also be presented as a philosophical subject, mainly regarding how acceptance or rejection of a theory can be based on nature. In the same way, the scientific method can be used to investigate a religious claim, and we can see that in the history of the Church itself. 

Science, natural or formal, has not eliminated metaphysics. Most physicists are willing to accept the existence of things that cannot be proven. Most mathematicians are willing to accept the existence of things without any relation to phenomena — e.g. things that we, at present, cannot observe or construct in the physical world. Science recognizes that whether or not we can observe something directly, contemplating its possible existence may allow us to understand how it might play a role in how the world works.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

''  In natural science, we deal with refutables, not dogma. Anything in the sciences can be questioned, irrespective of who said what, or when.''

What you stated here is true and it is exactly because it is true that science is in big trouble with the Mind problem because it is exactly the type of thing that is not refutable.  Can you refute that you experience something.  No you can't.  It is not an scientific hypothesis.  All of them are knowledge that can be questioned, tested, and potentially refuted.  That you are conscious is not really a statement that can be expressed in the form of an scientfic hypothesis.  It is out of science totally.  It is a sentence that all of us understand and provide meaning to .  We do not do that based on scientific knowledge but based on competent language user and language user make sense of such sentence through reference to their experience through their body interface in engagement with the world.  Science can study all kind of aspect of these body interfaces but science cannot by method say anything about the experience engagement in these persons with other in a world of cultural significance.  It is not the subject matter of the physiological science.  They study essential mechanisms in these bodies that are essential for these bodies to do what the do, but these sciences nor any science can be about the doing, the engagement and these experience of engagement simply because there is nothing objective about engaging the world through your bodily cultural interface.  

'' In the same way, the scientific method can be used to investigate a religious claim, and we can see that in the history of the Church itself. ''

All religions express themself through a poetic language and they all assert that this language is not concrete but it only a pointer to a sacred reality that can only be experience and not said but at the end of a long ascetic process.  Religions are unanimoust in this that they do not intend to specified a concrete knowledge.  The religion of the native or ancient civilisation are fielded with mythical stories and are not remotly intention to be taken as litteral concrete story and the question of litteral truth is not important, like watching a good fiction movie the correspondance with reality at the litteral level is not important.  What is important in the cultural relgious poetic mode of transmission are not at the surface level of the narrative.  So your claim that scientific method can be used to inverstigate such religious narrative does not make any sense.   THis is a myth.

Louis,

The shroud of Turin has been scientifically dated, in a scientific investigation approved by the Church. The process of canonization and the acceptance of non-explained phenomena in the Church follow a scientific method and provide an objective metric for the accepted proofs, if you are willing to accept them. The discussion between the Church and Galileo, contrary to lore but in agreement with Galileo'a daughter records, was essentially scientific and Galileo had to fold on scientific grounds (not just theological). In fact, Galileo was scientifically wrong in claiming that tides were a supporting argument for Earth's rotation. 

On the use of the scientific method to investigate religious claims, this is often at the very basis of rejecting such claims, also in the Church (eg, canonization proceess).

Cheers, Ed Gerck.

Because psychology tends to become a natural science, although it still does not feel humanistic or at least social science. I can hardly agree with the opinion that psychology deals with irrefutable. There happens  that a particular scientist develops a  kind of psychological dogma, but mostly for another reason: some primary assumptions must be accepted in order to enable further construction of a model. The immediate access to the mind is impossible, indeed. Nevertheless, if one designs a roughly correct model of the mind, it can be observed the outcomes of putting the model into work. So, I think that some interesting research on the structure and other features of mind.  See for example the interesting paper by Jesse Bering.

Ed Gerck,

''The shroud of Turin has been scientifically dated, in a scientific investigation approved by the Church. The process of canonization and the acceptance of non-explained phenomena in the Church follow a scientific method and provide an objective metric for the accepted proofs, if you are willing to accept them. The discussion between the Church and Galileo, contrary to lore but in agreement with Galileo'a daughter records, was essentially scientific and Galileo had to fold on scientific grounds (not just theological). In fact, Galileo was scientifically wrong in claiming that tides were a supporting argument for Earth's rotation.''

I agree that science can assist religion in certain ways as you mentioned.  Like can science can assist restorating a painting or assess the age of a painting. In a a limited sense it can assist when the question is a scientific one.  But most of the religious question like the art question are not scientific one and science cannot assist in directly answering those. And religion in general is not about asking question and providing answers. It is more akin to art and poetry than to science.  Most of the human affairs are not scientific one where science can help.  Can science help you understand what a table is.  Since very young age you know what the  word table designate, what to do with a table, to recognize one when you see one and none of that has any to do with science.  Most of what we learn has nothing to do with science.  If your son ask you: ''Dad do you love me''.  You know what to answer and science does not assist you in that answer.  So if science cannot assist us in most of human affair in their most important aspects then it can assist us even less in those that are the highest human values related to art and religion except on very peripheral faction question such as the age of a piece of cloth.

Dear Dr Gerck, 

“A fundamental merit of natural science, including physics and biology, is being a science of testable relationships. But this is also exactly its fault. Yes, we have multiplied the power of our means of observation and reasoning, but our starting and ending points have remained sensorial, the phenomena and relationships.

In the last 150 years, however, physics has started to go from relative, testable relationships to the absolute, with much success, reaching from atoms to black-holes. This modern view of physics, what we call The Big Idea, was well summarized by Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, who said that our task as scientists is to find in all these relative factors and dadearta that we measure, the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, that is hidden in them…

This absolute quality we seek when using The Big Idea is, of course, also refutable. Scientifically, any statement must include its refutability, the undeniable possibility that it is false. A "YES" result could be false, which means that it should be understood as "NOT YET FALSE"; a "NO" result could be false, which means that it should be understood as "COULD BE TRUE". Nature remains the ultimate possibility for acceptance or rejection, which is even easier to verify if a statement is  universally valid. Therefore, The Big Idea in Physics also improves the often elusive scientific  trustworthiness, which is important for society, academia, and economic stakeholders”.

I found your post which includes the above mentioned phrases inspiring and challenging. I am wondering if you can direct me to the source of a quote of Max Planck where he talks of the Big Idea.

I am at present involved in doing my PhD on consciousness and  in one part I have applied the normal scientific method of testing data. However I have also done an analysis of the developing embryo using the comparative method of Goethe as applied by the embryologist van dear Wal which rests on the Anthroposophicc vision of evolution. Basically this involves  the juxtaposition of two isolated but polar objects, where we begin to see "more of the essence of the separate parts. One then becomes aware of the a "broader reality, where the two poles  are in the visible realm, however the middle is in the invisible realm … 

 In  my analysis I used the primary reality as described by others. However this approach allows us to see the embryo with new eyes for the forces behind the visible realm, also start to become visible.

This way of doing science generates hypotheses …. it is tremendously exciting but I need  references to justify the approach I have used. Hence me asking for the reference to Max Plank. Also (if I may) I would like to quote you by using some of the above mentioned phrase.

My best regards - with thanks- Tina

Louis and all,

You write, "If your son ask you: ''Dad do you love me''.  You know what to answer and science does not assist you in that answer." 

Thank you Louis for bringing the question, relevant to scientifically understand the mind, of how to scientifically consider emotions. There is a wide body of research on this, including the research by Freud and the concept of expressive need, which is subconscious and not verbally expressed or maybe even known to the subject.

During the early days of the Internet, our research led us to consider within the physical theory of communication, linguistics,  and cryptography, what do we mean by trust, and trusting something. Is that purely an emotion? When we say "a trusted computer", what do we mean?

Pretty much the same scientific consideration can be applied before answering "Dad do you love me". The response has value to the recipient and must be able to be evaluated by the recipient.  This is a communication process!  In any such process, trust on an assertion or document must depend on factors outside of that process. Self-assertions cannot induce trust. If I say "trust me", why should you trust me? You should not, of course. So, science can indeed assist you in what to say when you want to answer that question.

Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to religion or any other subject that is part of a communication process, even if just in a self-terminated loop, in an internal dialog or including human memory - viewed here as a communication channel from the past to the present. Using this terminology, faults, errors, passive and active attacks, as well as covert influences, can all be modeled scientifically as noise, as that which interferes with the signal. Of course, both signal and noise are usually unknown a priori, but can be mathematically estimated, and noise may be provably reduced even to zero  (ie, as close to zero as desired).  The science exists.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Tina and all,

In a few minutes I will  source that quote by Max Planck, in my original posting above, where the quote first appeared. 

Our work is done for mutual benefit. If you find any of my comments useful, please feel free to quote with source and attribution. RG makes this easier also by providing  each one a home page for context.

While some people think themselves to be skeptical and that things they view  "just happen", others take an even more skeptical approach and ask whether there are forces behind that visible realm.  I prefer the more skeptical approach. 

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Thank you so much .....

Dear Ed,

Since my earlier postings to you appeared on a thread with a different topic, I switch to the more appropriate environment with my latest answer. I apologize to the other members of this thread if this becomes a bit abrupt.  

Anyway:

You said: I find a logical disconnection and obscurity right at the start of what you attribute as Penrose's AI position. It is not even wrong.

Since you brought up both Gödel and AI, I did quote Penrose from his book “Shadows of the Mind”, assuming that you were familiar with it.

Your statement at the end of your posting – Penrose's arguments is, as cited before, that "human consciousness has non-computable ingredients" includes, as you also said, the undefined word consciousness, which to me impart concepts like perception, awareness, cognition and also feelings and emotions.

Rather than belabouring the possible definitions and the various statements regarding “hard” and “easy” problems in biology including recent criticisms of the materialistic world-view and the Darwinian hypothesis, I refer to a recent paper “The Origin and Evolution of Complex Enough Systems in Biology” to be published in the Springer Series Progress in Theoretical Chemistry and Physics, available on my RG page.

Best

erkki

Erkki, 

Welcome to this thread. Thank you for sourcing  Penrose's book in the quote, "Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but the physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally, " although it did not make it more appreciable. I already mentioned some of the issues in this phrase, from a semantic viewpoint. But popular science books are much more lax than scientific papers. I prefer reading Penrose's other view, mentioned above. It is a more definite statement,  the "only" problem is the word consciousness.

Of course, there is a temptation to not define or at least to not limit terms before one starts. Prof. Crick, of DNA fame, at a seminar he was giving at the Salk Institute here in La Jolla, said "there was never a time in the history of biology when a bunch of us sat around the table and said, 'Let's first define what we mean by life.' We just went out there and discovered what it was -- a double-helix." Of course, life is not that, a double-helix.

That seminar was exactly about one of our topics -- consciousness, which Crick researched near the end of his life and  called the "second great riddle" in biology. Consciousness, indeed, seems to be a great and exciting riddle, also today. However, Crick did not bother to define or limit what consciousness could be, before he started to research the claustrum as the secret of consciousness  (in his view). Crick did not succeed in linking the claustrum to consciousness, but had he succeeded should  he have called it consciousness? Just like he said, life is a double-helix. The La Jolla sharp shooter's fallacy, first fire the shots then choose the target's eye.

The lesson here, twice, is that we cannot "leave matters of semantic hygiene to philosophers", as Crick said in closing his comments above, or we risk becoming the study subject ourselves. 

 I look forward to see how your definitions work in setting the stage, I downloaded your paper. Thank you for pointing it out.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

We are exactly the subject of research. Including the (scientific) cognition method itself. Psychology of (creative) researchers is the most important, interesting and poorly comprehended component.

Vasiliy and all,

Yes, and thank you Vasiliy, for extending the conversation in this direction. We always run that risk,  of becoming the study subject ourselves. Scientists, like most people, have a vast capacity of fooling themselves. Although as scientists we do strive to communicate objectively in our work, and try to eliminate bias, we are caught in the same social web as everyone else.

But, as in other communication systems, there are ways to combat the influence of bias when we understand it as noise. One of these ways is exactly what we are doing, using another social web (RG)  to feedback a correction signal with sufficient diversity and redundancy  into the web that we are caught in, of our own thoughts.

However, Crick did not accept the negative public feedback that motivated him to respond as reported in that seminar, and even hardened his position on the matter, that "it is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition." This could be a classical case of reactionary, contrarian response in psychology, where feedback is understood as criticism and shame, which can harden positions rather than inform. We also see this often, in a social web such as RG, that negative feedback is heard as criticism, and then rejected with a hardening of positions. In either case, constructively or negatively, the mind can react not only rationally but also in response to expressive needs, i.e. emotional or from the subconscious mind,  to what is perceiveded as public praise or shame.

In this example, we  see that consciousness has less to do with what happens in the brain than one may be willing to admit, as others have observed.  Our thoughts are frequently not ours, and we cannot tell the source most of time, it seems. We cannot ascertain the boundary of our mind, not individually and not even socially. Our own role, consciously or not, seems to be more of a manager of the thought process than its origin. Of course, this is also another denial of consciousness as a product or creation of the human mind, individually or even socially. 

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

You write, "If your son ask you: ''Dad do you love me''.  You know what to answer and science does not assist you in that answer." 

My point was that when you son ask you ''Dad do you love me'', science is of no assistance to you.  The point is not that science did not study this large topic but that what science found is not relevant to your answer.  It is the dad that will answer to his son and he will do it from his heart like all dad.   There is nothing that science has found that is relevant to the answer.  Maybe it is relevant to partly explain why such answer was given but it is not relevant to a dad.  Imagine a dad scientist answer to his son:  ''you know son, I went through a lot of scientific book on the subject and the whole situation is not well understood.  Some people think that dad feel they love their son but it is an illusition caused by natural selection for them to take care of their projenity and so the species will continue.'' Maybe this answer could be defended scientifically but a dad should not give a scientific answer.  He has to give an human answer and it is not his science that help me.  The same point can be made for most human relations.  

I agree that the science of biology never really define what is life and would never have started if it would have waited for such definition. The term  ''Biology'', science of the bios (life) was introduced by Lamarck. Psychology, science of the ''soul'' or psyche or mind.  Again up to today we have no definition of what mind is or consciousness either.   So science in biology has studied concreted processes going on in biological bodies, and multiple aspect of these bodies but never reach ''what it is to be alife''.   The point of all my contributions so far in this thread is that science methodologically can study processes specifiable as models or systems but cannot methodologically provide a model of an living actor from the point of view of this actor because science is objective.  

We can make the hypothesis that all living organism are autonomous biological machinery and to hypothesize that the human biological machinery internally has states that this machinery experience and give to this machinery that the conviction that it is some free will.  But according to this biological machine hypothesis this free will can only be an impression of a piece of machinery that has no clue of all the mechanisms producing this illusion.  Scientifically, only mechanisms and noise and randomness exist.   

There is another hypothesis that can be made which is: science is limited to study mechanisms but not all that exist is of this nature and what is like to be human is not reducible to the mechanism sustaining this reality.  And this reality is accessible by different human languages and arts.  

These two positions have always been articulated in different ways from the early days of the scientific revolution.  There was always scientifics/philosophers holding various versions of the materialist/reductionist hypothesis and there was always scientifics/philosophers holding various versions of the other non-reductionist position.   I call my version of the non-reductionist version: multi-access reality mediation.  Simply said it is to say that your dad reality is accessible to your body interaction in cultural worlds where your mediation with your son take place and these cultural worlds are not accessible to science but are themself mode of mediations other then the scientifico-technical-mathematical mode of access of science.

Louis 

I did not write, "If your son ask you: ''Dad do you love me''. You know what to answer and science does not assist you in that answer." You did. Please clarify otherwise.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

All dad knows what to answer and they tell their son all kind of answers.  ''yes, I love you , etc etc, etc.  '' These dads do not need any scientific knowledge for giving these answers.  These dad do not need to know what are the physiological mechanisms of their body to give these answers.  No they express totally other realities in their answers. I do not say that a scientist cannot say something scientifically relevant about the body of a dad caring for his child but I am saying that it is not relevant to the dad when he look at what to say.  

Louis,

Any communication process is less than 100% efficient. Just knowing this scientific fact can help.

In the theory, the main reduction factor is not syntatic noise, whatever its form. In English, even if you wrt whtht vwls ppl cn ndrstnd y (i.e., even if you write without vowels people can understand you).  The main efficiency reduction factor in communication is mismatched paradigms, also called trust. If when you say "love" your son hears "manipulation" due to past experiences, then you are talking but not communicating.  Please see my earlier reply for details and solution.

Communicating emotions can further benefit from the theory by understanding that communication is not about you, what you say , how you say it, or even how many times you say it. It's about what the other party understands. Words may not be needed. Please see my information and trust theory publications in my RG homepage, circa 1997 to 2001.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

From the antipodes I reenter the conversation, now enriched by Louis, Tina, Erkki and Vasilis.  Of course Ed keeps all under some intellectual control with a sharp ‘mind’.  But the risk of spreading thin and ending expressing views that are no longer from us as experts, is great.  I read with great interest Erkki’s paper on evolution etc.  A remarkable piece.  I know well the work of Crick as neuroscientists after his genetic career. I read much of Penrose, who with Hameroff created a monster suggesting that quantum is the right level to deal with consciousness.  In this conversation seems to me that we all could be ‘mindful’ of the limitation of ‘this’ conversation. The moment in which a big problem is set, big ideas come to mind and the conversation turns more philosophical than scientific.  This does not mean that we should abandon but we should not simply retrace path well trod, in a way rediscovering many wheels.  I do not claim any particular expertise in the study of mind and consciousness.  As careful reader and general neuroscientists however, I know some of the main treads of scientific approaches to the nature of what is behind these two words.  The first observation is that although there are no official experts in the field of mind and consciousness, there are serious investigators that from any definition are actual scientists.  That is to say operate with the very same principles of any other scientists in their own field.  We could take notice of their work and see if they help us in achieving a satisfactory answer.  For this we may have to engage with some simple common and well-accepted knowledge of the kind of scientific fields essential to tackle the problems.  Then we should seek some simplified version of all this and place it in a broader spectrum of scientific knowledge. For this we must avoid too many obscurities or technicalities.  The conversation should be based on the advanced researchers in the field; Although Erkki’s article is fascinating, because of the rather technical nature in places, makes it difficult to accept as a convincing ‘theory’ of evolution of ‘the mind’.  I think good places to start are indeed Francis Crick’s “The astonishing hypothesis”, slightly conflated at the time but clearly setting ideas of how consciousness emerge from a bunch of neurons.  More recently Christopher Koch, good younger colleague of Francis Crick  (The quest for consciousness 2004); Eric Kandel, nobel prize in neuroscience (In search of memory; the emergence of a new science of mind 2006); Gerald Edelmann another nobelist turned neuroscientists (Wider than the sky; the phenomenal gift of consciousness 2004); Joseph Le Doux  (The Synaptic self; how your brain becomes what your are 2003 and some more recent books from him) and the most important experimentally founded research on consciousness by Stanislav Dahaene Consciousness and the Brain, Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts 2014).  I realize is easy to impart lectures. This is not. Is a starting point for a conversation by scientists and thinker to get closer to even put appropriate questions by not ignoring the advances already made.  Plenty advanced philosophers are on the same thread, but I will refrain to name them for now.  These, and other authors, have in common the foundation of science of the brain and are developing and using tools to study the very nature of the mind and consciousness.  Some of us could take a stance saying, no no, I do not agree that these ‘entities’ are part of the world and thus in a way physical.  I do not accept that there is just one universe with lot of stuff in it, but there are two separate stuff one material, extended tangible and the other immaterial, intangible that are so distinct that they cannot be linked by any science!  My simple view is that such colleague is still a Cartesian dualist and I feel that history has left behind Descartes in this and we can go beyond.  So the idea that because of life and consciousness appear to be made of something else that atoms and molecules, and ‘states of mind’ such as ‘fatherly feelings’ appear not to be made of atoms ad molecules, we should abandon ‘science’ to deal with these, is not sustainable.  With some patience we can dissect the science behind these questions without doing injustice to their complexity but remaining within scientific thinking.

Ed,

I have opinion different from you. Moreover, I see that we are talking in a totally different planes. I'm not interested in the meaning that you put in the word "risk", will try to explain in brief why...

At first. Any knowledge of each individual (researcher) is a set of formal and informal, concrete and abstract thinking information.

Michael Polanyi thought that scientific knowledge can be transferred through formal languages only partially, the remaining part will be personal or tacit knowledge of the scientist, which essentially inexpressible. Because to formalize and transfer implicit knowledge is impossible, comparison of this knowledge is impossible also.

Only formalized part of the knowledge of an individual can be compared with a formalized part of the knowledge of another individual. The same applies to any two theories or models. Any theory has an informal part of the "tacit knowledge" at least for its founder (in fact, for each).

Moreover, personal experience of the individual can be denoted by a special term "qualia". It has a medical coloration, however, it rightfully can be extended even to individual understanding of any formal system, as it involves personal perception.

Nevertheless, people somehow are learning to compare individual perceptions even those things which can not be strictly and unambiguous formalized. For example, Schrodinger commented on the difficulty of color perception in his time, and medicine successfully confirm that the vast majority of people handle this task without any calibrated spectrum analyzer. Comparison of color perception is relatively easy.

To see how perception creates problems for sufficiently strict formalized knowledge the theory of relativity is the best example. Formal theory requires individual understanding. Understanding is based on the individual perception of each particular entity of the formal theory down to the low-level beyond labels of terms.

It is not difficult to see from the numerous debates on the RG that the personal perception of many individuals complicates the understanding of spacetime model of RT, sometimes even make it impossible, regardless of how well it corresponds to reality.

Now let me assume hypothetically that there exists the final formal model of consciousness. Certainly, the author understands own model. And what about the rest? Comprehension of consciousness model is a personal act of the individual, as well as comprehension of the theory of relativity, theory of evolution or any other theory.

Subsequently, those who understand some theory can compare own understanding (own perception) of it model with an understanding of other individuals. Anyone who can not see the consistency of some formal model in principle can not adequately judge this model. It all is an overlay of individual perception.

What does this mean in simple words? Understanding of consciousness is the individual act of self-knowledge regardless of study of consciousness on own kind.

The second reason why I do not like the word "risk" associated with the need to demarcate phenomena. For example, when Newton studied light, he subjected own eyes such executions with a wooden needle from which a normal person becomes ill. For what? In order to separate (individual) characteristics of vision and characteristics of the subject of research.

Now I will say a few words about the subject of the study. The mind is a fractal structure. All the research in various branches of science literally are yelling about it. However, I began to pay attention to this relatively recently. This phrase seems innocuous at first glance. But for physics it is much more important than for the subject of discussion.

There is no independent intelligence of the individual. Human as a species has a bundle of mentality (introversion / extraversion, lefty / righty). It is important (like bisexual life) for the existence of our species as a system.

To understand why it is needed it is necessary to imagine of training dynamic system which travels in the adaptive landscape. The whole system is a periodic complex coherent evolving structure with partial separation of functions of individuals. The separation of functions is an integral feature of the holistic properties of the structure.

To partially understand how individual consciousness works, if you have a good imagination, the dynamic control of the aircraft system (especially nonlinear dynamic inversion) is a good primer.

It is impossible to explore and fully understand the separate part of the holistic system in isolation from consideration of the remainder of the system. For this reason, I wrote about the problem of demarcation in the beginning. In order to communicate in common language we need at least synchronize (unify) knowledge and terminology as well as rational get rid of redundancy. The different labels of similar phenomena in different sections of knowledge is bit redundant.

In other thread I recommended you familiarize yourself with the theory of self-organized criticality. This would give an opportunity to understand scale-invariant bidirectional process that manifests itself including in the words of dear Marcello Costa: "This can be seen as the primordial experiential loop! It is a loop! And consist in two apparent very different natures."

Similar to this words of Marcello I once tried start to explain the global evolution principle for own colleagues: "We are from the biological neural point of view like a building with the ground floor having two doors, the entrance (sensory) and the exit (motor). Above that all the floor that correspond t the acquisition of longer loop made of increasing number of interneurons (much of your brain) further further away from the ground floor."

I am please Vasily that you remember my metaphor of the nervous system as a building. I can assure all that it is an appropriate one structurally.  Yes we need to know Polanyi ideas, also some organizing critically a la Per Bak, plenty of non linear dynamics and thermodynamics for sure (in biology especially!), fractals, qualia,  perception, vision ( I do teach lot of this)  and anything is useful to avoid repeating unnecessarily history. I still think we can advance if we aknowledge what has arleady been achieved and be mindful of what can be achieved with humble but clear mind and scientific attitude.

Marcello and all,

Thank you Marcello for the long-waited list of references you suggest in the field of mind and consciousness research in terms of biological neuroscience. The view seems to be congruent with quantum neuroscience, namely, on setting ideas how consciousness emerges from a [sufficiently complex] bunch of neurons. 

This does not seem qualitatively different or new when compared with  the first, old biological view, pre-Crick and pre-Penrose, that the mind is a "secretion of the brain", emerging from a bunch of neurons.

And, if all one can see and dissect in the human brain and body is a bunch of neurons, all three views also seem confirmed ab initio in evidence. 

These three views also include internal communication, such as proprioception, as well as external communication using a variety of physical senses (many more than Aristotle's five). 

The setting seems complete.

The problem, though, is that Nature (the physicists' realm) presents phenomena that are reported from time immemorial and yet not only neither of these views can explain or forecast, the setting itself cannot support. An easy way out is denial, that all these phenomena are illusions of perception, misperceptions, misstatements, misunderstandings, false or falsified measurements. However, it is also possible that inexplicable phenomena are due to yet unknown physics (already, Descartes knew that there are things we ignore we ignore)  out of the ordinary picture of matter.

As recently published in The New York Times [1], in his article "Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery. It’s Matter.", Galen Strawson professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, says,

"It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness."

In Strawson's view, we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” he means what he assumes most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. Says Strawson, "[Conciousness is] the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour."

However, Stephen Hawking's vernacular notwithstanding, physics is not “just a set of rules and equations," as Strawson quotes in support of his statement that physics is limited to mathematics, to the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, to numbers and equations, or to what we can use to build amazing devices. Most physicists do not agree with this, or that physics is silent about the "intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure [of physical reality]." (Strawson,  op.cit.). Physics is not "perfectly and forever silent" on this question, but speaks in chapters. 

Most physicists agree that, indeed, the nature of physical stuff is deeply mysterious and not even subjectively knowable, or must exist in a measurable sense, but we keep researching and making inroads. What was mysterious yesterday and even received strange names, such as quarks, are now part of our models, in a measurable sense that we can use with explanatory and predictive powers in physical reality terms.

Consciousness, at least, is known to exist in a measurable sense. Physics could include consciousness, for example, as a new formal dimension in addition to space and time, so that --instead of a 4D reality -- we live and can describe a 5D reality, with explanatory and predictive powers in physical reality terms. I have reasons for this view, and I am not saying the first word on this. Max Planck and others have shared this view, the "fourth view" as we may wish to call it.

If correct, the fourth view also indicates why the three other views are bound to fail to represent consciousness -- because conciousness lies (at least partially) outside of their impotent reach, as a missing dimension. However, while the second view, biological neuroscience, can help represent brain functions as they interface with the mind, the first view is too blunt for that. The third view seems still viable to represent the mind, also in terms of potential non-computability, but offers substantial ground for work as it is missing an essential dimension, consciousness.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

[1]  http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html

Ed,

I am of the third view, the fourth view tries to naturalize consciousness by transforming it into another dimension of knowledge.  It is probably Spinoza, neutral monism that first proposed this fourth view.  Descartes himself had began on the 3th view.  He made the clever distinction betwee the ''experience of thinking'' and the ''content of thinking''.  The first cannot be doubt, the second is knowledge and is always doubtful like all knowledge.  So he had so rejected this fourth view.  

Louis,

Just keeping tabs:

It was not possible for Spinoza to be first on the fourth view, because neither space-time nor quantum  theories existed at his time, and he did not approach anything using physics. The first who could even be, knowledge-wise, on the fourth view was Max Planck, and his comments support the fourth view. That's why I mentioned Max Planck.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

I return in this stimulating conversation begging your patience to issues dear to my mind (or if you prefer heart a la Greeco-Roman physiology).  How can we begin to answer the question Ed poised to all of us. Ed is not the first to raise this conversation but is allowing many of us to sharpen our thoughts on how we could go forward to place Physics and Mind under one umbrella. I wish to state that I do not think the traditional idealistic perspectives could take us any further that the impasses they created every time, concluding eventually a priory that is impossible to explain mind in term of Physics. For example Strawson quoted in this conversation, as many thinkers of idealists leaning, is still asking the question of what is the ultimate essence of anything.  These thinkers are still searching for a God -given explanation of the universe and what is in it.

A more humble view emerges from understanding of our own biology. Our knowledge starts from an entirely human perspective as evolved animals on Earth, with increasing capabilities to ‘sense the outside world (awareness of the world) and in parallel of its own internal experience (self awareness) and of other congeners (awareness of other individuals with similar minds).  I will leave out the emergence of Life on Earth, as it will prolong this already dangerously long essay, but similar conceptual methodology would apply. 

Humanistic Science

First a simple comment/statement that I hope would be hard to argue. We come to be aware of the world in a gradual manner both as individuals (ontogenetic development from a single cell fertilised ovum) as a species (phylogenetic evolution). These similar, but not identical, processes strongly suggests that, short of some magic external intervention, the emerging conscious self is a very daily event in nature. 

The question is: how does some awareness of the world and of oneself emerges from a bunch of molecules, a bunch of cells, a bunch of neurons and associated muscles and bits of the body.

For this to be a scientific question, must have a possible answers and thus a way to get to them.  Science does not give absolute answers (hard to argue for scientists), only increasing approximations that fit better and better with the shared experience of human kind about the world, we call ‘scientific knowledge (we can discuss this further but not necessarily now for the ongoing argument).  So the question is how becoming increasingly aware of the external world and of ourselves during individual development?

Our personal existence seems to follow this path, from a single cell to a social organism participating to some degree to the acquired shared knowledge, including what we call science. In a way I acknowledge here the initial self-centered view of the world as we grow.  Part of this growing lead us to increasingly viewing the world also from outside ourselves, in a third person kind of way (similar to the personal perspective of visual field to become a shared more objective perspective that can apply to any point of view in space thanks to the discovery/ invention of geometrical perspective).

From a single cell to a thinking brain. 

The processes behind the natural emerging of a person from a cell are indeed complex, multiple.  They appear in a time sequence.  Every intermediate stage is contingent on the previous ones creating some sort of physical stratification of the organisms (not a new concept).  So we individual organisms need to reach the stage of many, many cells before any bodily organ can be formed, including the brain.  Then in most human individuals the brain develops further in a more complex structure, with billions connections, before we can even walk let alone do math.  Then the thinking brain emerges, aware of some aspect of the world and one self.  But these processes still occur in many small steps everyday and naturally!

What is changing during these processes (developmental), and what is the state of affair of the grown organism (anatomy/physiology=how things work)?  These questions can be asked for any stage of the emerging thinking individual. They could apply to the single cell stage, to the middle, eg to a toddler, or to a grown up individual.  The apparent continuity of life of each individual is however made of gradual steps. Several thinkers describe the appearance of novel features, from the assembling of smaller elements in to a specific architecture (spatio-temporal structure), ‘emerging processes’. 

Studying the ‘Mind’ or ‘consciousness’ is still possible to do within science

How does the mind possibly emerge from cells? The methodologies to investigate the underlying processes, whether during development or at a relative steady state in adulthood, are conceptually similar.  The scientific approach is still based on experimental science that has served us very well so far: good quantitative observations; good correlation studies of different parameters; good experimental or natural interventions that change the conditions with associated good recording of the phenomena and their changes; with good questions (testable hypotheses) and new partial answers generated by this process,  a body of increasingly credible explanations (theories) emerge and become a shared cultural value, always slowly developing and self correcting.

How does this strategy deal with the question of what is “Mind”?

A pause to decipher the potential traps behind this apparently simple but deemed impossible question. Let’s not make an a priori requirement that we must deal with incommensurable phenomena.  We may then search for ways to link the apparently different levels of phenomena (cell functions-mind) under a common umbrella. I would still call this umbrella “Physics” although the term will be inevitably used in a broader meaning than high school Physics, because it also will have to include the realms of organic chemistry, biology, life on Earth, animal evolution with neuronal features and all richness of emerging complex organisms and their societies.  

The apparent dualistic nature of world and mind

At what point the apparent duality of matter and mind was recognized. Since the first cultures evidence suggest that humans distinguished well between an external world and an inner world of mind (consciousness-spirit etc) that for many reasons (another discussion) often was deemed to exist in a parallel universe.

Of course was Descartes that formalized this distinction in res extensa and res cogitans.

A simple historical explanation may well remove the need for this distinction in principle.  Descartes tried to explain brain functions memory, intellect and soul using the physics of the time which was purely ‘Mechanics”. The chapter on electromagnetism and electrochemistry simply did not exist. Anything in the nervous system was approximated to a hydraulic system. Not surprising this would not lead to a sensible scientific explanation of the mind or soul.  It took another 100 and more years for Galvani, arguing with the peer Volta, suggested that the nervous system and muscles could work by electricity, a recent new chapter in Physics! It was only in the mid 1800s that the nervous force or fluid was found to be based on electrochemical events in the nervous system.  If the res cogitans, the thinking stuff, is contingent on the formation of the brain, then this stuff is not made of solid or fluid bodies with geometrical dimensions in space.  It would have consisted of electrochemical events that remained hidden to a mechanic, intangible. On the other hand when a person moves a limb by “thinking”, this intangible stuff, actually real electrochemical events studies in neurophysiology, becomes mechanical events when the muscle contracts and becomes subject of mechanics (kinetics) in the world of extended stuff (res extensa).  So the mystery of two words may be simply an historical quirk of misinterpretation that can be easily taken in account and corrected. 

The primitive organism with a nervous system fundamentally transformed some external physical events into electrochemical, sensory neural events (non mechanical at the macroscopic level at least), and eventually back into a world of movements (mechanics) via one of the best studied physiological process of neuromuscular transmission!  From this fundamental arrangement of sensory-motor as a loop, with motor control of movements (agent) feeding back as sensory inputs (sentient) and so on in an evolving time series that is behaviour. 

A primordial sensory-motor loop

This primordial loop represents the transition from mechanics to electrochemistry and back, in a functional loop I call for convenience ‘neuromechanical loop’.  This state of affairs in neural organisms of being simply a simple loop, consisting in an external neural input (sensory) and a neural output to mechanic (motor) did not last long in evolution.  Already in primitive vertebrates (our direct ancestors) the sensory-motor loop had added levels, internal neural lops, made of neurons-in-between (called interneurons).  With evolution of higher vertebrates, the interneurons outnumbered the sensory and the motor neurons.  We humans have a few million sensory neurons and a few millions motor neurons but 40-60 billion interneurons! Much of the brain and spinal cord are made of interneurons. 

The brain as superimposed internal neural loops

Being entirely internal circuits, with an architecture of superimposed internal loops, made the brain architecturally like a high rise building (hence my initial metaphor) with several levels above the lower sensory-motor loop, made of sensory and motor neurons.  Even within the spinal cord there are already several level of internal loop that coordinate the numerous segments of the vertebrate body (us too) say during walking or escaping from a flame.  Naturally from this fundamental architecture of the nervous system, it is not difficult to conceive that the further away, or up, the internal loops are from the lower one the further away they function disconnected from the external world.  As neuroscientists may well agree that there are tens of superimposed loop in the human brain, the internal events (all electrochemical and thus still physical) may well acquire properties very different from the ones that are generated by the lower loops (I could give plenty of examples from lectures to students). This is the key for understanding the emergence of phenomena such as learning, memory, imagining, dreaming, emotional states and more subtle feelings, perception and awareness of ‘qualia’, sense of time sense of space, sense of self, creativity with novel thoughts and actions, language etc.  We are at those levels in the realm of mind! 

The trick is that the very biological neural machine that becomes aware of the world, self and others is also the same one that develop human knowledge of these apparently separate worlds, has often created and still create apparent paradoxes which occupy the ‘mind’ of many philosophers. 

When we are dealing with higher loops internal to the brain, we are far from the external world, but events and associated features (including the emergence of subective experiences) are stillas physical as anything in the rest of the universe. These are not secretions of the brain!(view 1 out!). These are physical states like any other and not just correlated to subjective experiences as the view 2 appear to be portrayed stating.  Certainly no need to invoke quantum mechanics for functional novel properties of neural circuits. And no need to require n physical dimensions.

Paradoxes but no panic

The humble conclusion from al this is that despite of this intrinsic paradox that we study the very machine that does the study, we can still use the same successful approach to this natural phenomenon as for any other phenomenon.  By quantitative observations, by associating events with experience, intervening experimentally, by asking good questions to give (refutable) answers and by explaining the best we can what is contingent to the phenomena studies.  This conceptual procedure is being applied widely in the field of those who ask the kind of questions in this conversation. No need to panic. Simply join the cohort of humans that are already on the journey and no longer debating the ultimate essences of things.

Next time I may with your permission, propose a way to see science within the perspective of scientific humanism I delineated above, accepting the primacy of humanistic origin of knowledge but without underestimating its unique value for human existence. I can also easily give any detailed examples of intangible mental phenomena studies scientifically as consequence of the internal loops at different levels.

I agree with Marcello that Descartes has been misinterpreted. His followers wanted to use his duality as a basis for claiming that the soul was something outside science, outside physics, which would justify continued muddled religious pontification and departments of philosophy separate from departments of science. But for Descartes God and souls were part of physics. In fact physics was Descartes's argument for God. The thoughts presented to a thinking thing are so consistent in pattern, and in a way that cannot be attributed to the thinking thing's own capacities, that there must be some basis or reason outside the thinking thing for this regularity - which he calls God. Descartes only uses the word 'physics' once in the Meditations and in the context of legitimate inferences about God.

Moreover, the important part of physics is change or motion and in Descartes's account all change and motion are due to God since matter is entirely inert extension. As Marcello says, there was no knowledge of electrical (or even gravitational in 1641) force. It turns out that most movement in our world is determined by electrical force and the rest pretty much by gravity. So by God Descartes is, in very simple terms, talking of force. He decides that there must be additional force units in humans, called souls, not present elsewhere and here he is off target, but Leibniz sorts that out forty years later. It turns out that in a sense everything is force units, or at least units of action. Extension was merely a result of aggregation of force units.

Jonathan , good historical interpretation of Descartes. I suspect as other proper historian of Science and Descartes that even if he though that animals were machines (yes according to God's rules or laws)  and probably also humans (making the study of  physiology accepted by the church), he kept the should quite separate if nothing else being mindful of what happened only a few years before to Galileo!  He also though that the should and mind could not possibly fit all in the brain n because there were not enough parts of it to explain the enormous number of mental events (ideas). He of course again did not know of nerve cells or synapses, discovered only a couple of centuries later!.

Apologies for the automatic spelling correction from soul to should in the previous message!

Louis, Marcello, Jonathan, and all,

While I appreciated Louis' comments on Descartes, and still digesting Marcello's longer and beautifully complex comments, Jonathan's useful reentry of Descartes and Leibniz, as well as Erkki's paper, it's perhaps timely to note that Descartes himself attributed his advanced insights to brief but overwhelming  "out-of-brain" experiences, showing to himself that his mind found valid  sensory inputs that were neither self-referential nor from the ordinary world.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

I think that this interpretation of Descartes is common mis-understanding of his position. His dualism is mostly an epistemological one, there is the res extensa what can be mathematically and scientifically known and which is always doubfull and can be revised and there is what cannot be reduced to the res extensa, the act of creating the res extensa, the act of thinking which cannot be doubt.  So he established an epistemological distinction between knowledge that can be doubt and the act of creating knowledge, thinking, which cannot be doubt and which contain and create knowledge.  

Husserl recognized Descartes as the first phenomenologist although Descartes's phenomenology is limited to ''thinking only'' while later phenomenologists such as Goethe will enlarge the phenomenal to all type of experience through action, and not simply thinking. Descartes was putting all that come from the senses in the realm of res extensa, done through physiological mecanisms, like in all animals and automata.  The later phenomenologists accept that all take place through some body mecanisms and that the different sciences can discover these but they claim that human experience, or animal experience cannot be studied through this scientific methodology given that the scientific methodology is an objective approach which a priori reject subjective descriptions.  Phenomenologists , Goethe in particular, distinguish knowing from being engage in action.  THese two realms cannot be merged into each other and the realm of creation of scientific knowledge in particular cannot be reduced to scientific knowledge.  It is Descartes epistemological limit again but in much more sophisticate elaboration.  

Louis,

Sorry, your answer is off-topic on my comment. My comment had nothing to do with Descartes' purported dualism or epistemology. It was not an interpretation or misunderstanding  either. It was about young, 23 year-old Descartes visions and dreams on 10 November 1619, in Bavaria -- his reported source for the rationality he exemplified eighteen years later, after unceasing work, in the "mirabilis sientiae fundamenta"-- the foundations of a marvelous science.  

The visons and dreams were recorded at first by himself in the first person voice, relating these dreams and the interpretation that he gives to them, in Les Olympiques. The original work has been lost, but it was published by Adrien Baillet, in 1691, which was read by Leibniz and repeated by his biographer in the third person.

To wit,

"The vision was preceded by a state of intense concentration and agitation. Descartes overheated mind caught fire and provided answers to tremendous problems that had been taxing him for weeks. He was possessed by a Genius, and the answers were revealed in a dazzling, unendurable light. Later, in a state of exhaustion, he went to bed and dreamed three dreams that had been predicted by this Genius."

More at http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/descarte.htm

The very next day after these visions and dreams, Descartes decides to engage himself in the path which had been indicated to him and to study everything with method to separate the true from the false in human knowledge, after he ponders a question he read in the dream, "Quod vitae sectabor iter?”, or "Which path in life will I choose?”.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Nevertheless all most interesting insights on Descartes. I am enjoying all. I hope you do to.

 Dear Wolfgang, Marcello, and all,

Thank you, Wolfgang! Coming from the literature side, your appreciation for our zeal and style is a good motivation to keep it up. 

Your quote from Karel Čapek, that "we apprehend the world through what we are ourselves, and apprehending the world, we discover ourselves," could well be the physicist's and neuroscientist's motto.

But not if we are unwilling to see in ourselves "the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant," from Max Planck's physics program op. cit., even though this view has been painstakingly emerging for centuries in physics  (e.g., conservation of energy,  conservation of momentum, speed of light independent of source-medium-observer). Not if all we can see in ourselves is fragmentation, becoming and change, even though nature tells us otherwise.

In other words, if our mind does not seem able to apprehend these facts and the absolute, how can we deal with the absolute we are finding in nature?

One answer is to understand that although we find becoming and change everywhere, it is only from our perspective that things appear to change or become. As Leibniz said,

"We have said that the notion of an individual substance includes once and for all everything that can ever happen to it and that, by considering this notion, one can see there everything that can truly be said of it, just as we can see in the nature of a circle all the properties that can be deduced from it." [1]

Leibniz is claiming that everything that exists, already includes all of the qualities and properties that can ever occur to it. Note that other interpreters use will instead of can, which I reject as being prima facie deterministic and, therefore,  against Leibniz body of work.

In other words, the moment a bacteria (a substance, in Leibniz words) is created it contains all of the predicates it can ever have, past, present, and future, at the very moment of its creation. Even if later on the bacteria is hit by a random cosmic ray and mutates, that mutation is within all of the predicates it can ever have, past, present, and future.

Like Leibniz, Einstein views time and space not as autonomous or independent entities but as relations of order, i.e. succession and simultaneity, among phenomena and qualities. Both also view mass not simply as extension but as extension and energy (called force in Leibniz time). Einstein sided with Leibniz in other fundamental scientific ideas as well [2].

Now, it seems clear that if we agree with the Leibniz-Einstein world view, in contrast to Newton's, we must also agree, when considering for example different space-time perspectives with a lead or lag time caused by relative motion or gravity, that one space-time perspective is no more "becoming"  or "change" than another space-time perspective. Therefore, although we find becoming and change everywhere, it is only from our perspective that things appear to change or become. 

Consequently, by apprehending as such the world, our view of consciousness grasps a new perspective, no longer limited to the brain-structure-function view of Crick and current neuroscience, to discover ourselves now willing to understand and see in ourselves the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, the same that we see in nature, now clearly and undoubtedly.

In this view, which I called the fourth-view (see previous postings), consciousness, space, and time are no longer understood as autonomous or independent entities but as relations of order, i.e. succession and simultaneity, among phenomena and qualities.

The absolute is both inside and outside each one of us. No consciousness is alone, function is not ordinarily separable or localized to a single brain or organ. The Crick program of finding the brain organ or bunch of neurons responsible for consciousness falls apart. The Penrose program, that consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex bunch of neurons, is also contradicted. However, both programs can be useful to help understand the different body-mind-brain interfaces.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] Leibniz, §13 of the Discourse on Metaphysics.  

[2] Einstein's Foreword, Max Jammer Concepts of Space, Harvard University Press, 1954  

Reading again Leibniz metaphysics, which I abandoned decades ago as pars of an interesting but obsolete search for god and absolutes, I'll try to extract the salvageable Ed, but I doubt that returning to the absolutes even in Physics we will go much forward and the conversation may well steer away from your most sensible and feasible question about how to deal with the mind in Physics. I do hope you are not retreating back to oldish methaphysics with Leibniz solving the problem of idealist ad materialist in his century by creating eve more prob;ems if I remember well. But promise to find if my memory does not fail me and revise the conversation.

Marcello and all,

We should be able to mine the gold of truth from the ore of Leibniz thoughts, in the same way that we mine the gold of truth from so many other imperfect vessels, including ourselves.

For example,

• The irrational and obsessive alchemy "work" of Newton and his religious views while giving us the first framework for the laws of motion and gravitation;
• the false theory of the tides by Galileo and his obsession in not correcting it against all evidence while giving us the first ideas of changing reference frames and yet keeping the same laws of physics;
• the great Kepler insisting that the solar system must fit in the platonic solids in the name of a "perfection" and yet giving us the foundations for Newton theory of universal gravitation;
• the fixations of Freud yet giving us the insight of the subconscious and its control over the rational mind, a critical insight that is still absent in the homo economicus model that is frequently used today by world governments to predict  behavior and justify wars;
• Einstein, who obsessively, "scientifically" and authoritatively denied the existence of black-holes and yet gave us freedom from time itself;
• John Nash who gave us the Nash Equilibrium and other significant mathematical-social results and yet had to fight the extremes of psychosis;
• and Descartes himself, who gave us many incorrect results and yet also results that we so gladly use every day.

The list goes on and on. Metaphysics was just the old name for physics, that might have been inherited mostly by philosophers when physicists decided that one should follow the dictates of nature rather than that of men, however scholarly learned and quotable they might be.

Let's not focus on the vessel, the brute ore, but the precious and unique content we can extract from it -- even if much work is required. And once we know that the ore is valuable, by the worth we extract from it, then it is not time lost, especially if much work is required, as the more valuable it has become.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

Note: In 1954, Einstein wrote that Leibniz opposition to Newton's view of space was “intuitively well founded” and “actually justified." 

Continuing the conversation and mindful to try to keep it within the realm of what we can achieve without having to resolve all issues that potentially emerge from the initial question,  I would like to recognize that a small diversion on Leibniz can be made profitably. Ed quoting Leibniz "We have said that the notion of an individual substance includes once and for all everything that can ever happen to it and that, by considering this notion, one can see there everything that can truly be said of it, just as we can see in the nature of a circle all the properties that can be deduced from it."

However the full paragraph of Leibniz is actually’ I have said that the notion of an individual substance involves, once and for all, everything that can ever happen to it; and that by looking into that notion one can see in it everything that will ever be truly sayable of the substance, just as we can see in the nature of a circle all the properties that are deducible from it. But this seems to destroy the difference between contingent and necessary truths, to rule out human freedom, and to imply that all the events in the world—including our actions—are governed by an absolute fate. To this I reply that we have to distinguish what is certain from what is necessary. Everyone agrees that future contingents are assured, because God foresees them; but we don’t infer from this that they are necessary”. This most insightful comment reflects the real concern of so many thinkers, even nowadays, that in a deterministic world there is no room for moral responsibility.  Without wishing to avoid this issue I do not think it is relevant to the question put by Ed for a start, about how to comprehend consciousness in Physics. Clearly we would also need to naturalise ‘morality’ to overcome this apparent impasse paradox of free will in a fateful world. Not too many problems there, but not now.

Leibniz referring to the deterministic interpretation of the universe states ‘…the predicate can be contained in the subject’ and overcomes the objections by removing the must from the logical consequence of deduction.  This is still a remnant of truly idealistic positions that attribute to nature the same ‘rules’ of our logic (including Maths) of our thinking processes.  If these processes have emerged in biological organisms, like us, is most unlikely that they ‘are’ the nature of the universe.  Truth and logic applies to human thinking not to the universe.  We may well discuss other times the remarkable, but natural, relation between the thinking brain processes and how well they fit much of what s experienced directly r indirectly of the ‘universe’.  But the issue is still not directly relevant to the initially question poised by Ed.

Also from Ed quoting the 4 D nature of our universe “Therefore, although we find becoming and change everywhere, it is only from our perspective that things appear to change or become“.  This issue is often discussed by philosophers as to whether we need to imagine time for us as fix and we move over it, or we stand still and time flows past us. Irreversibility in thermodynamics is likely to play its role in giving the ‘time arrow’ (plenty of good valid writings on this available in the last decades).

Still from Leibniz (13)‘whatever happens in accordance with its antecedents is assured but is not necessary’.

…and those reasons ·for its truth· are based only on the principle of contingency or of the existence of things, that is, on what is or what appears the best among a number of equally possible things.

Also Leibnitz in (8) states ‘Furthermore, if we bear in mind the interconnectedness of things, we can say that Alexander’s soul contains for all time traces of everything that did and signs of everything that will happen to him—and even marks of everything that happens in the universe, although it is only God who can recognise them all’.

Leibniz indeed foresees the overcoming of pure mechanistic determinism that was popular and made almost convincing by Laplace, by that has been proposed within the modern field of non-linear dynamics (from Poincare’ still in the 19th Century to Lorenz and May in the mid 20th Century, with its well-accepted deterministic unpredictability (more of this if needed and certainly in the brain science!).  Leibniz had to negotiate his very sophisticated thinking within the straightjacket of the theological centrality of the Christian God imperant at the times. For this he remains a giant.

Having said all this in awe of Leibniz I read with some concern the statement when Ed writes ‘to discover ourselves now willing to understand and see in ourselves the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, the same that we see in nature, now clearly and undoubtedly’.  This after linking his reasoning to Leibniz’s views, attributed also to Einstein (not convinced that he was a full idealist). Your conclusion that ‘No consciousness is alone, function is not ordinarily separable or localized to a single brain or organ’ is a strong one and more a metaphysical stance than a reasoned strategy within some shared metaphysics.  Even Leibniz fell in the common trap of the so commonly not acknowledged anthropomorphism when he states ‘it is very evident that created substances depend on God, who conserves them and indeed produces them continuously by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts’.

Metaphysics, as I think you seem to say, is simply a term to indicate some assumptions accepted for a start when we do anything and certainly whet we do science. Thus everybody have a metaphysic, whether acknowledged or implicitly assumed.  So the choice of which metaphysics to accept for a start is indeed a crucial one.

Because the nature of consciousness seems so profoundly different than other natural phenomena it attracts more attention of those who search for an adequate metaphysic to cope with this new challenge.  My suggested approach poise that we may not need to change the term of reference of science if we start to accept that being in the state of being conscious is a ‘natural one’.  If so then, even accepting a degree of correct intuitions of previous giants of thinking such as Leibniz, Descartes etc., as well as the eventually incorrect statements of equal giants such as Galileo, Newton, Freud etc quoted by Ed, we may be able to advance sufficiently in a path of investigations till these hit some obstacle too large to fit within the suggested metaphysics of science.  So then rather than asking ‘what is consciousness’, which is a very biased question of essence, we could safely start to ask ‘how does the state of being conscious comes about’.  Although these questions appear equivalent, the first hides an idealistic expectation to find an absolute truth about some substance (the soul of Leibniz (8) for example), the second is more palatable and more importantly, feasible.

The approach proposed within neuroscience, does not require changing the metaphysical assumptions any more than for any other issue of scientific investigations when apparent ‘complex’ phenomena are attempted to be ‘reduced’ to some more understood phenomena (the dreaded ‘reductionism’).  But fear it not. I will attempt in another addition to the conversation to deal with this issue pointing to a resolution much closer to accepted views than assumed.

Back to the core of the arguments.  Consciousness is a name that simply refers to the state of being conscious of every being that is capable of being in such state. In our language we have ample examples of entities created simply by our tendency to ‘nominalise’ the world’.  We use an initially vague word and then believe that it refers to some existing entity.  If we avoid this category error we must then stop searching for what ‘consciousness’ is and start to investigate in what the state of being conscious consists in.

Then being conscious becomes a particular state of clusters of nerve cells that form the brain and its connections with the surrounding ‘universe’.  If it is a state then can be studied, as all other physical states, by establishing in which conditions necessary and sufficient such state to occur.  Then if most such factors become known we can say that we do know what it is that we refers as for an organisms to be in a conscious states.

For this there is no need to invoke substances unless we return in search of absolutes in metaphysics. Once established the necessary and sufficient conditions for an organisms to be in the state of being conscious, we will be able to see if other organisms have this ‘property’.  If such property emerges in steps, as I argued on good developmental and evolutionary evidence, then the being in that state may become as graded as many other states of the matter (+energy of course) in physics.

Marcello,

''Consciousness is a name that simply refers to the state of being conscious of every being that is capable of being in such state. ''  

You will recognize that this sentence absolutly said nothing.  

'' we must then stop searching for what ‘consciousness’ is and start to investigate in what the state of being conscious consists in.''

This is as old as Spinoza, neutral monism, physiological parallelism, and this strategy is based on the hypothesis is that of an isomorphism between certain neural

excitations and certain ''aspect of consciousness'', a graal search of   the NCC, the “neural center of consciousness”.

''For instance, it has been said that there exists such an isomorphism between

the firing of C–fibers and the awareness of pain. This has led philosophers to

hold that pain is the firing of C–fibers, the awareness being a mere epiphenomenon.

According to these, given time, we will come to recognize pain for

what it really is (the firing of C–fibers).''

http://www.gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/koenderink/Awareness.pdf

Don't you see that all that what science can study is from the 3th person perspective, it is knowledge and that what I experience is not knowledge for me   When I walk, I experience my effort of walking in certain ways, whatever the scientist monitoring my body will find will be 3th person knowledge of what is going on, never what is going on for me, but for then under many 3th person perspective that are not mine.   All interesting.  If my body get damage and I am not able to walk, this knowledge might help restoring my walking.  Thanks to science.  But in term of telling me what I do or feel when I walk, that is not knowledge but doing.

Marcello,

As we wait for your next addition to the conversation you posted above, maybe we can take out metaphysics and determinism from the conversation.

On purpose, I did not add these topics, as they are out of scope in physics. Let's deal with mind in terms of physics only.

I also note:

 Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] Object-oriented programming (OO or OOP) is a programming language model organized around objects rather than "actions" and data rather than logic. I'll provide later further context on OO as it relates to the Leibniz views, bilogical entities, and the mind.

I do appreciate your patience in dealing with a mere neuroscientist that is also good reader of philosophy of science and all the rest.  I begin to feel that you are happy to push the envelop of the conversation at a level that may risk loosing me, but because of my limitations not yours.  Yet yet I still hope that we can converse at a level that does not imply some sort of supremacy based on how to quote more authoritative basic knowledge.  I promise Ed I will get back to you with some questions of how in physics, irreversible reactions or at least, highly improbable events, as they happen in biology are dealt with and whether the idea of a continuously appearing novel structures such as biological beings can be seen in the kind of mathematical models (which I accept are foundations of much science thinking) you seem to propose. But on the meantime I would like to avoid some misunderstanding with Louis.  Of course my first sentence was meant   to point to a tautology.  So no need to search for definition of consciousness , as is likely to be always a form of meaningless tautology. It hides false profundity like “ I am who I am” kind of statements.

But more seriously indeed Spinoza tried to resolve the difficulties as you say and developed the idea of isomorphism.  I am not sure what I suggested is exactly what he said.  But the idea would not be tested properly by choosing wrong ‘ correlates’ or wring levels of isomorphism.  The classic example of pain being the same (isomorphic) with ‘firing of C fibres’ is an example of overtly wrong level of comparison or association.  I promise to give a much more pertinent example of possible isomorphism between neural states and associated existential states not just for humans with the expected attributes of ‘consciousness’ but also with humble lower vertebrates which also have hints of existential experience which are due or associated or isomorphic with the state of their nervous system.  No need now to argue about localization of a consciousness centre or similar phantasies.

Your other important issue, also classically regarded as an obstacle to deal with qualia or first person experiences, of science being a third person activity or phenomena need some discussion. I will put to you that all experiences are first person for a start (referred also as subjective) and that third person experiences, assumed to be potentially objective, emerge from a degree of sharing of both the physiological machinery (Konrad Lorenz’s idea) and the external conditions that activate such biological machinery.  Thus the divide subjective-objective becomes part of a common process. Even Einstein wrote ( I am still searching for the quote) that no matter how distant and hidden is the nature of investigated events in the universe, they all have to be brought within the ‘common senses’ of single humans in the form of vision, sound, touch smell or taste.  Then within the higher neural circuits, many internal loops above the ground floor (primordial sensory-motor loop), is where the conceptual frames also shared using language, symbols and thus math are constructed and become shared cultural wisdom.

But this is only a small preamble of a more detailed conversation hopefully clear enough to be seen as a genuine step  forward in what appears too often a hands up in despair.

Marcello, Louis and all,

Marcello, you wrote, "get back to you with some questions of how in physics, irreversible reactions or at least, highly improbable events, as they happen in biology are dealt with and whether the idea of a continuously appearing novel structures such as biological beings can be seen in the kind of mathematical models (which I accept are foundations of much science thinking) you seem to propose."

Very well said and set, and in my view these questions are among the most fundamental we can try to answer from the viewpoint of physics, and thereby hope to expand.  The fundamentals are also where we can all more readily converge, from different specialties. Concepts from object-oriented programming  (OO or OOP) can help here, to bridge from Leibniz views as I alluded in my previous posting, and I will be providing  a starting point to this paradigm and our conversations in my next posting.

Louis, based on linguistics [1] and the Internet [2], which arguments also apply socially and biologically, one can scientifically say that what you think you do feel when you walk, that can be  knowledge but not doing or otherwise, and you have no way to tell or even see a reason to doubt.

In psychology, it is known that simple conversations can create false memories, complete with your new "emotions", new "thoughts", new "acts", and  other people's "reactions", all realistically "true", for quite different events in the past. This can frequently happen to anyone of us without much consequence, but can become pathological for bipolar disorder and other mental patients, who I meet every week as a volunteer in a public health facility, as their memories become more and more corrupted and they lose grasp of reality, which creates more false memories, and so on.

Also, applying Descartes method of reasoning, any certainty that what you perceive as your own thoughts, acts, or emotions, are truly yours can be contradicted by following his analysis. It is not 100%, by far.

I look forward to your contributions.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] viewed as a computed and persistent  output in a social network.

[2] viewed as network of networks that is open-ended, non-hierarchical, and not centrally controllable, where any party can only control their end,  and no one is closer to an "edge" than any other, where there is no center, and continuously appearing novel structures can always be added  overtly or covertly, or removed, without any of objective or subjective awareness whatsoever. 

Marcello and all,

Object-oriented programming (OO or OOP) can provide further context as it relates to the Leibniz views, biological entities, the mind and AI.

Historically, a computer program has been viewed as a logical procedure that takes input data, processes it, and produces output data. This reminds us of an old view how our mind works.

OO is a programming language model organized around objects rather than "actions" and data rather than logic.

OO makes models of the various concepts in the problem area and applies them. These models ("objects") are given functionality ("methods") that allow them to autonomously perform various actions, also learning and potentially improving nonergodically with behavior changes.

Each object can also hold information in various degrees of encapsulation and privacy, other objects can inherit different traits from it, it can exhibit polymorphism and can mutate, can have dormant properties, and can be cloned (including information and methods, selectively). 

All of this is defined the moment the object is created (instantiated), defining all that can (no determinism, what will happen is open-ended) happen to it. [1]

As explained by Steve Jobs, "objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here."

Here’s the example given by Jobs: If I’m your laundry object [stored and working in Silicon somewhere],  you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out [for example, online] and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco [which I can update on the go according to your preferences, expected delivery date, and day traffic conditions]. I  go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.”

Jobs continues, "You have no idea how I [the object] did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level," finalizes Jobs.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] This reminds us of Leibniz entities, which we can see now as a high-level description encapsulating complexity and where, at that high level, there is no "becoming and change" -- even if observers may perceive becoming and change. For example, simultaneous events here may not be simultaneous when viewed from another reference frame. Although this is in agreement with Einstein's spacetime theory, it has been a long-standing philosophical riddle especially when applying the Leibniz entity view to biological entities and mutations, which was one of your questions. I suggest that the old riddle is now solved also in biology -- even though we find becoming and change everywhere, it is only from a low-end perspective that things appear to change or become. 

In this conversation we touch on so many aspects of similar fundamental questions as you say Ed. These are the key to develop a common ground. The main difficulty is precisely that we all start from half way up in the explanations giving for granted some assumptions (tautology!). These are the contents of some thoughts expressed by many before us and by many even at present. The way I see these problems is that they themselves emerged as a process of becoming increasingly aware of the centrality of us humans in uttering anything about the world itself.  Descartes himself was one such giant step making by suggesting that we needed something solid to start with avoiding the horrible suspicion that we may be living in an imaginary world created all by ourselves.   This awareness of the danger of our brain (us) determining unbeknown to us the questions and consequent answers generated historically greater insight on to the very nature of the humans mind.  Psychology as a discipline started a few centuries after Descartes.  Hume, Berkeley and so many others started to clarify the traps we posed ourselves.  From thinking about the world and ourselves it has become very clear that the way in which we address universal problems or problems of the universe has to take in account the very ‘us’ being the sole agents.  It follows that, unless we really think that we are constructing a view of the world not just for other humans, but also for a kind of universal mind (God), we must be content with the possibility to say something about the relation between us as thinking being and the world.  This relation impact heavily (theory-laden stuff some people talk about) on the kind of answers.  This is why I suggested to look into the nature of this relation as it appears during personal development and in evolution of species of hominids.  Any other endeavor is bound to have hidden assumptions that by not being recognized simply delay the understanding of how we have come to a certain vision (cosmology) of the world.  My point is that such vision is highly determined by processes of development that simply precede awareness of any kind or degrees.  This approach is shared increasingly by those philosophers and scientists who recognize the human origin of knowledge with all its grandiosity and limitations.  Neurophenomenology is a modern aspect of this process and without thinking that  that is all, it seems to me that the direction undertaken (including Leibniz and all previous thinkers) is one likely to enable us to advance in the clarification of our own existence (Karl Jaspers for example).  I also mentioned Konrad Lorenz, a genius in post WWII science of ethology (Nobel prize) who wrote ‘Behind the mirror’, a superb example of a biologist with clarifying views for modern philosophy (easily accessed in Wikipedia Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge).  This is just a small part of a biological and humanistic perspective available in history of knowledge, which of course includes science and thus any disciplines of it.

How to proceed? If we accept a human centered start (to avoid creating external ghosts) please be patient and follow me into a next small sequences of steps I like to call “Seven steps from molecules to mind”.  Do I feel confident that I can share this with such critical minds like you all? I am old enough to give it a go as long as you are prepared to not jump to any possible opportunity to stop this short journey before pausing a bit and see if contradicts anything you have thought.  Consiliency a la (Frenchism) Wilson is also a small guiding principle I tried to adhere, to avoid leaving out some fundamental feature that could not be incorporated in the view that follows.

I have given these in several places as extended seminars both in Australia and Italy and I have not received serious objections. However I have not written them in a formal extended way and I offer you a summary of what I am proposing not as a finished product but as an attempt to unify so many diverse and apparently incompatible propositions.  I have not invented from scratch anything new. Only put together in a coherent way to see if we can travel along this path without getting lost. In every step I have gathered hundreds of well-accepted points from serious workers in those areas.  Do I still have blanks to fill? Of course and this is the reason I am happy to share these thoughts.

What follow was only part of a blurb for a lecture at the SISSA in Trieste a couple of years ago in front of about 300 scientists of this superb Centre of advanced studies from astrophysics to neuropsychology.  Thus only a program each steps occupying given time several seminars and a full chapter.

In order to start on a simple and solid ground within the Newtonian/Einsteinian universe I will suggest as a first step that the definition of ‘existence’ should imply a univocal relation between existing and being describable as having spatio-temporal coordinates. 

The second conceptual step is that we should view structures formed since the big bang as having became stratified by a variety of processes of assembly of simpler elements into multiple levelled structures by selection processes and with emergence of new ‘physical’ properties.  Consequent to this perspective the ‘rules’ (processes) that govern the interchange of influences at every level are not likely to be the same as those that are involved in bottom-up and top-down influences across the various stratified layers.

The third simple step involves the simple acceptance from Physics of the laws of Thermodynamics and the relation between flow of energy in dissipative systems with local increase in order. 

The fourth step describes how even in the inorganic world, modern non linear dynamics describes the emergence of some transiently stable order and how even in a deterministic world future events cannot be necessarily predicted.

In such universe, biological systems made their appearance, as fifth step, characterised by self assembled dynamic structures, usually enclosed in membranous compartments and maintained by processes of energy flow as dissipative systems which when become transmissible across individual organisms, generated the evolutionary processes at least on Earth.  Living cells with increasing degrees of coupling generated multicellular organisms. Such organisms represent biological active media where each element act as a ‘reaction’ component and the spatial coupling the ‘diffusion’ component of the well described equations that govern excitable cell properties and most biological phenomena.

The appearance of neural organisms endowed by sensory and motor capacity represents a sixth step in the emergence ladder.  This event marked the appearance of distinct structures forming a functional loop between the ‘external mechanical’ world and the inner neural world.  This transition couples the two aspects of the Cartesian dualistic world, one of kinetics, a world of mass in motion and an electrochemical world of neural states.  This primordial sensory-motor loop acquires more prominent properties of circular causality and adaptation with degrees of stability of states.

The last step is the emergence, in evolution, of multiple superimposed neural loops that contribute to a gradual appearance of greater autonomy of such organisms with broadening of its ‘horizon of existence.  This process leads to the emergence of a sense of sentiency and agency culminating with the sense of being individuals with a ‘will’ and self awareness.  As this emergence is associated to a high dependence on social life of the individuals, the emergence of the mental world is inseparable with that of social processes. Science is just a newer and very successful development along this path.

This is my summary but I promise to keep all next conversations simple but I claim I can make sufficiently robust in our discussions.

Very nice summary Marcello!

Regarding step 3, do you think that the simple law of thermodynamics is enough to go from physical systems and formulate biological ones?

I venture to respond to your question.  Of course is not sufficient to have a ‘law’ in nature for something to happen.  The law tells us that there cannot be any perpetual motion engine or that overall entropy increases.  So the real difficulty has been to come up with an explanation of just how, despite this rule, something somewhere some times in the universe emerges with greater order.  Here I simply refer to the ideas of Ilya Prigogyne, amongst others, about the emergence of a local order resulting from energy flowing in and being exported in part as heat (disorder according to the the III Law) when there is a continuous flow of energy that keeps the events (reactions) away from reaching equilibrium.  One such example example in chemistry of course are the classic Belousov-Zabothinski reactions that result in spatio-temporal patterns with some degree of stability which appeared when first observed to go against the expected path to equilibrium. Certain salts that change colour depending on their composition, once mixed in a Petri dish produce oscillations that proceed for several hours instead to going directly to equilibrium according to the classic laws of thermodynamic. Such systems were described as dynamic dissipative systems and their physico-chemical rules were described as active or excitable media. The rules of these media in general follow the diffusion- reaction equations which we will find again and again in all biological systems including the excitable cells such as neurons and muscle (the equations of Hodgkins and Huxley of the biophysics of nerve cells are of this type). These active or excitable media follow rules where elements can quickly release energy, by falling or burning (reaction), that need a period of rest before being active again (refractory period), that recover slowly the original level of energy from outside (external flow of energy), and that are able to influence neighbouring similar elements (diffusion).  Importantly the dynamic events in such media not only give rise to very interesting spatio-temporal patterns, but follow rules which are quite different than those of classic mechanical events.  For example two waves that collide in such excitable media annihilate each other rather than summate. 

The question of how these relatively simple systems that are still constrained by the III Law (step3) and that form temporary dynamically stable structures (step 4) become ‘biological’  (step 5) has not been answered yet.  We know that ‘life’ on Earth appeared some 3.8 billion years ago.  An entire cohort of scientists is working on this from numerous angles. A general consensus is that living cells consists in some simple nets of chemical reactions referred to as primordial metabolic systems, enclosed by membranes that compartimentalises an otherwise open primordial ‘soup’. The process that is put as central to these two aspects is the properties of self-assembly of molecules.  For example all cell membranes are formed spontaneously in the right conditions (easy to teach from textbooks now).  Similarly there is a consensus that even the remarkable DNA and RNA primordial molecules have properties of self-assembly and even some self-catalysing features that led to their ability to self replicate (the birth of genetic processes).  All these processes, or similar, must have occurred on Earth at some time, and perhaps still occur in the depth of the hot oceans vents. Of course only those processes that led to the emergence of dynamically stable structures ‘survived’ or were ‘selected’. What we see at any time is thus a process of natural selection of emerging structures.

I hope this clarifies that) the III law is simply a constrain, like all the other fundamental laws of physics, being necessary but not sufficient to explain the emergence of order. Increasing order appeared on Earth which itself can be regarded as a giant dissipative system with multiple examples of stable dynamic ordered structures. How life emerge on Earth thus is already an experimental question rather than philosophical.

The reference to Prigogine and the Brussels School is well taken. The problem, it seems to me, relates to the proper constraints under which self-organization on a microscopic level does indeed develop. This has been the focus of a rather intensive debate recently involving fundamental criticism of the Darwinian doctrine.

I enclose a recent summary of this debate with some suggestions to its resolution.

Errki,

I have been enjoying your paper "The Origin of Complex Enough Systems". In a central argument to support your thesis, in section 4, you wrote  "Evidently, as the laws of chemistry stipulates, larger and larger assemblies of molecular and macro-molecular structures evolve for plausible biological processes – and after some 500 million years iteration of the same process will produce more and more adaptation all in concert with the second law."

The quote would read that a not-yet-existing biological process forebodes chemical reactions channels into larger and larger assemblies that produce more and more adaptation not as thermodynamically guided but guided by the not-yet-existing biological process. This appears as an impossible causation. While the quote could be rewritten, it does seem to be a failing central argument that makes the thesis implausible.

Further, the argument's critical path "for plausible biological processes" is not stipulated in chemistry and it does not need to be due to or for biological processes, which also seems to contest the argument itself.

Laboratory experiments provide compelling evidence that amino acids (NH3), and the hydrocarbons methane, ethane, and propane can be formed abiotically via the Strecker synthesis. Moreover, in addition to complex, carbon-containing organic molecules that we see in meteorites and where an exo-biological origin cannot be ruled out, it has been experimentally verified that radiation-induced, abiotically, non-enzymatic formation of proteinogenic dipeptides in interstellar ice analogs is facile, as reported in The Astrophysical Journal [1]:

"The hypothesis of an exogenous origin and delivery of biologically important molecules to early Earth presents an alternative route to their terrestrial in situ formation. Dipeptides like Gly–Gly detected in the Murchison meteorite are considered as key molecules in prebiotic chemistry because biofunctional dipeptides present the vital link in the evolutionary transition from prebiotic amino acids to early proteins. ...Our results indicate that the radiation-induced, non-enzymatic formation of proteinogenic dipeptides in interstellar ice analogs is facile. Once synthesized and incorporated into the “building material” of solar systems, biomolecules at least as complex as dipeptides could have been delivered to habitable planets such as early Earth by meteorites and comets, thus seeding the beginning of life as we know it."

In other words, the beginning of life on Earth, as we know it, could have been extra-terrestrial and  could also have been (including the origin of same extra-terrestrial life that seeded us) entirely caused by interstellar ice processes, reproducibly and governed by the laws of physics.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

[1] R. I. Kaiser, A. M. Stockton, Y. S. Kim, E. C. Jensen, and R. A. Mathies, The Astrophysical Journal, 765:111 (9pp), 2013 March 10, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/765/2/111 (attached below).

Dear Ed,

Thanks for your positive comments and the "dipeptide" reference. Yes, indeed life on earth could have come to us via extra-terrestrial means, as also Crick postulated. My point, however, is that one lacks an intrinsic self-referential physical law at play, which underlies evolution in general. To me the Rosenberg quote is not convincing, since the second law does not promote self-organisation just as a coincidence of lucky molecular combinations.

The Nagel book concerns the impossibility of spontaneously created life forms, which did stir hard criticism by the establishment. The present hypothesis of a communication phase between molecular aggregates, cells and organisms is a property, see also Deacon, which is not intrinsic to present chemical and physical laws.

I have always been surprised how the genetic code just appeared on the stage without being based on a fundamental microscopic principle. I agree with Mayr that the concepts of biology necessitate processes governed by evolved programs. Today physics cannot provide such a bona fide law for a Neo-Darwinian evolution.

Errki,

Mayr's point that physics is not complete is not new, it dates back to Aristotle. And that is what drives physics, the desire to explore and find out how things work, that is why we are constantly looking for new frontiers -- and the challenges come from every direction. For example, the 1827 botany observation of the Brownian motion that came about 80 years before Einstein explained it using known physics, which closed the contentious debate on the continuous theory of matter in physics -- let there be atoms and molecules! 

The domain of the mind has been put outside of physics for too long already,  and was particularly damned after metaphysics became a synonym for pseudoscience. However, we have no qualms to talk about metamathematics, and use it, as studied in Modern (1960) Algebra. If mind has an effect that we can measure, and it has, then it belongs to physics.

Of course one can always invent new names in order to publish yet another book, to find yet another market angle.  However, this leads to unnecessary fragmentation. The time of the old guilds is over, where knowledge was fragmented on purpose, for control and financial gain, social need and progress notwithstanding.

Everyone can play in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and any other science, as this very list exemplifies, as the modern "DIY citizen" movement also exemplifies (especially in biology and genetic research; we have two well-equipped DIY citzen Biolabs in public libraries, in La Jolla and San Diego, plus more in people's garages). Although more dispersed, this idea has also served us well in the past - rise Fermat, Boole, and Hedy Lamarr, and witness!  

In that, modern philosophy behaves as an old guild, where only the guild members can be heard, and has lost its way as Mayr himself admits. Yet, Mayr blithely ads new words (e.g., teleology) whereas the concept is already well-known and well-describable in physics (e.g., see  my posting a couple weeks ago, on cause and purpose in physics), see also the well-known Principle of Least Action in physics.

Mayr does what he has rejected in philosophy, while promoting a doctrine explaining phenomena by final causes, known a priori. But this doctrine is not deniable, hence it is not scientific. It is not a good theory. We discussed this in RG, in the thread

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Natures_fundamental_eg_fine-structure_and_cosmological_constants_have_values_in_the_small_highly_improbable_range_that_allows_life_to_exist_Why?_tpcectx=profile_questions

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed and Erkki, I also enjoyed the substantial paper on The Origin of Complex Enough Systems. I look easily for agreement with people like you, far more knowledgeable on some of the difficult symbolic thinking used in physics (as you both are much more versed in Math than me and I am sure many other interested readers).

I agree with Erkki about the assessing the emerging of ‘living states’ from lower ‘physicochemical states’.  The conceptual difficult in this transition is more self-inflicted than real.  Any aggregation of matter with any dynamic novel states is fundamentally a mystery until we can describe and ‘perhaps repeat the process experimentally.  There is no need to postulate all the time new ‘Laws” except describe the new processes base on the previous and lower level one. This is true whether ‘life is endogenous to the Earth or come from other places, as I do teach my students.

So about the issue of mind and physics I fully agree with Ed that if states of mind do have an effect in the rest of the world and of course they do (as you say Ed), then Physics is the suitable conceptual frame to be in in order to know more about this state(s).

All points then to the approach of scientific investigations.  If they have already started is essential to be aware of what is being done. If not done yet then we may well point the sensible direction(s) for feasible experiments. What we cannot do (or better should not do) is to revisit the already well digested philosophical foundations of science.  Nagel on one side and Piattelli-Palmarini on the other decided to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution theory. They are welcome to do so of course but we should see through  a simple need for them to be players in a world of science that has already overcome them!  Even Mayr pushes a view that is simply a gimmick to hold authority beyond evidence. 

We must choose carefully also our doubts.  Some stones are there to keep crossing gaps.

Hello all,

Philosophy and science seem to offer two very different ontologies (theories about what is out there) and epistemologies (ways to figure out what is out there). According to scientific epistemology, things (e.g., weight, force, information, color, sound, mind, consciousness, alternate realities, visions of the future, deja vu, reincarnation, sudden cures, heaven, sdruffs) do not exist just because they are reported (or even experienced) by a single person -- i.e., scientific ontology is objective, at least as a goal. Philosophical epistemology is subjective from the start, in that things can exist ontologically when purportedly experienced or reported by a single person.

Even beyond the specific fields of philosophy and science, there seems to exist a fundamental dichotomy between the realms of subjective and objective views. A subjective view is independent for each individual, who are free to change, and is not directly measurable by others. To contrast, if something is objective (e.g., as in physics, the radioactive decay rate of an element), then (a) no one can change it, (b) anyone can measure it directly, and (c) it may change but not in a way that anyone or any group, however large, powerful or long-lived, can control, avoid, or even predict.

There is also the intersubjective. When two or more individuals are needed to define a view, as a medical diagnosis that depends on a physician but also on the patient, or stock market prices, an intersubjective view is defined. As more individuals agree, as in philosophy, neuroscience, a cohort study, or a market rally, the intersubjective view can gain strength but it would be a mistake to discard the fundamental dichotomy in the case of a majority or even unanimous view, ignore (a,b,c) above as objective view requirements, and consider the view as objective. 

The contrasts between subjective, intersubjective, and objective are often seen as a 'conflict', especially in the two latter cases when majority views are involved and, quite commonly, between philosophers and scientists. 

Centuries of work have not reduced these ‘conflicts’.  This further motivates the conjecture that such a solution is not possible, as different subjective or individual views cannot be directly harmonized among themselves, nor can an objective view be directly harmonized with different subjective or intersubjective views.

We raise the conjecture of 'impossibility' in order to motivate a new approach, that 'gives up the old fight' by fully recognizing the informative and limiting value of the observed fundamental dichotomy described above (i.e., considering it akin to a natural law) while, nonetheless, using coordinate transformations in an abstract Unifying Theory (UT)  to reach a new image-space with an abstract stance and no dichotomy. The UT coordinate transformation provides a complete solution as it works both ways with:

This is not about limiting oneself to axiomatic representations, following "scientific purity", playing semantic games, voting, polling, consensus, finding the intersection region in a Venn diagram, authority-based choice, or some statistical process of regression, inference or modelling.

Although we do not need to limit ourselves to Fregean logic and semiotic theories, the "abstract stance" used in the image-space in an UT can be motivated and well-understood by using Frege's semiotics in terms of "seed-thought" or "root-idea".

An abstract stance is a representation of a "seed-thought" or "root-idea". An abstract stance should be succinct, formally valid (i.e., is well-formed, can be uniquely parsed) from any observer stance, and define something by the relationships it obeys. An abstract stance can be expressed in any desired way, such as in human language, logical or mathematical equations, machine code, graphs, or even architecture. For example, using Frege's famous discussion of what is "enough content", we can express an abstract stance for it, as a human representation of Frege's root-idea about it:

"Sentences that have enough content are those that are adequate to the task."

These are the first motivations to use an abstract stance as the image-space in the Unifying Theory. The intuition is that we are looking for a root-idea that is valid as expressed in any observer stance, hence unifying all stances at their common root-idea.

Historically, it is often the case that new ideas emerge from areas of tension, solving the conflict and allowing previously irreconcilable ideas to interact fruitfully, with no remaining paradoxes. So we hope for the UT. 

Whether Unifying Theory (UT) exists, under general conditions

A first question arises whether an UT solution, as described above, exists. A second question is whether we can show what an UT solution is, in concrete terms. We solve both questions by providing a concrete example, under general conditions, also answering a thread question by Vasiliy. We show that a 'conflict' (as described above) is always resolvable when using UT.

Consider a general 'conflict' situation as described above (i.e., where the "thing" under study is the same for all observers, but different individual views cannot be directly harmonized among themselves, nor an objective view can be directly harmonized with different individual views).

The 'conflict' can be broken down atomically as a 'conflict' between two views, where either view is objective or individual. In case of a conflict, this can be treated mathematically as just one case, as follows. 

Observers are in possibly different ambient spaces (including their respective stance) with some total dimension M, due to both observer and ambient, with M likely different for each observer. An entity is defined in some (possibly unknown) number N of dimensions  (the "thing" under study). For two observers with views in conflict, their representations of the same entity differ.

While the representation difference may be due to the fundamental dichotomy mentioned in the Introduction, which must be accepted, we ask whether a mathematical theory would, irrespective of the conflict, allow an UT solution to embed the two views in a different space, which can register the intrinsic properties (or invariants) of each view, while mostly ignoring the embedding as extrinsic properties of the ambient space and observers. 

This problemhas been solved in mathematics by Gauss, Riemann and others, under quite general assumptions, by means of a manifold (a manifold is a topological space that is locally Euclidean). Therefore, using a meta-mathematical argument in Modern Algebra  (1960) terms, an UT solution exists in this example as a manifold..  

This approach is not about limiting the representation to axiomatic presentations or following "scientific purity", but following, as said by Max Planck, that "Our task is to find in all these [relative] factors and data, the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, that is hidden in them."

Likewise, the task of an UT solution is to find the universally valid, the invariant that may be hidden in the factors and data, in often conflicting views.

As a concrete example, let us show how an UT abstract object can be used to resolve a  'conflict' as described above, under general conditions, as follows.

Take any two square shapes in a Cartesian plane, which we know can be mapped 1:1 onto each other. There is no 'conflict' here. However, a square shape in a Cartesian plane cannot be mapped 1:1 to the surface of a sphere, although both are limited, two-dimensional surfaces, even if both have the same exact area. The 'conflict' arises as an embedding clash -- the flat square shapes are embedded in 2D whereas the surface of the sphere is also two-dimensional but is embedded in 3D.

The UT solution here is to create an abstract object, using the mathematics of a manifold, whereby a resolution of the 'conflict' can always be found (under quite general assumptions). The embedding clash is extrinsic to the "thing" under study and no longer relevant.

Generalizing, where 'conflict' is defined as given above, it is straightforward to see that an UT solution can be used in:

As an example of using (1) and (2) together to arrive at better, more coherent objective and subjective views, objective stances can be created using one or more subjective instances, and vice versa, as we discussed and demonstrated in many examples in 1998 [1], regarding the concepts of trust and information.

Although we apply this new approach to a particular problem that has no satisfactory solution today, of mind and consciousness, the abstract UT approach is general and can be used in other areas, with or without a ‘conflict’, such as in linguistics, ethics, international relations, workplace relations, class conflict, party politics, and legal theories.

An (abstract) Unifying Theory

UT is an abstract, non-partisan (e.g., philosophy vs science), non-methodology-bound (e.g., Quantum Field Theory vs Superstring Theory) concept which the group might wish to explore as a unifying theory (UT) for the interaction between the properties of mind and consciousness, and the set of real-world problems which are to be represented.

To introduce UT, we begin by defining terms:

• Mind exists and is defined by the need to establish an extent of trust -- where trust is understood as qualified reliance and assurance on information [1] -- in various communication processes, with multiple  internal and external inputs, including memory (a communication channel from the past), proprioception, physical senses, with chemical, electrical, and neurological signals, all subject to ‘noise corruption’ in various aspects including environmental, genetic, epigenetic, age, gender, and pathological, adjoined by a manifold of outputs in open- or closed-loops, where 
• Consciousness exists and is defined by the processes for effecting such assurances. While mind is about what things are, about inputs and outputs that can be deconstructed in terms of various processes, as "matters of X" within an extent of trust, consciousness is about how they work together in the verification of assurances.

More generally, we recognize that a “consciousness chain” or “consciousness network” of one or more minds can exist whose purpose is to “distribute the verification of assurances”, even abiologically (e.g., using technology devices, religion sources, spiritual connections, cultural traditions, judicial law). Such verification assurance distribution (VAD), unlike ‘assurance verification pertaining to an individual’ (AVI), requires notions common to system design and correction channel capacity considerations in communication theory, of bandwidth, noise, redundancy and diversity, repudiability, dynamic and static revocation, suspension, renewal, acquisition, avoidance and management of race conditions, compromise recovery, fail-safe, availability, privacy, security, auditing, and management of risk to compensate, for example, in the case of inadequate or ‘costly’ procedures.

Even in such a simple theory, assurance verification validity at the individual level (AVI) is not an overly-variable or entirely subjective quantity, as a purely philosophical treatment would indicate: the degree of variability is limited to the "legal fact" or “social agreement” (affirmative fact exists, or does not exist) established when a using party ("relying party") accepts it, or not, as useful. Thus, there is at least an intersubjective framework, if not objective, that constrains each person's AVI. This introduces the possibility of "AVI islands", where a given ‘assurance verification pertaining to an individual’ (John's AVI) may be disjoint from another's (Mary's AVI), resulting in miscommunication and even total semantic failure. It is possible that Mary's AVI is not useful to John.

Therein arises the systemic purpose for recognizing 'verification assurance distribution' (VAD) in the UT, which is to provide a "metric space" whereby many procedures, which handle consciousness chain(s), may be (multiply) used to measure whether a given ‘assurance verification pertaining to an individual’ (AVI) is indeed useful, or not. The metric is an expression of relative certainty for a specific real-world problem, and application context, given all available knowledge of the operational sensitivities (e.g., vulnerabilities). 

In scientific terms using Quantum Field Theory (QFT) [2] as a non-limiting example, the individual mind is a ‘particle’, localized, whereas consciousness is the ‘field’ associated with that particle, which fills the ‘space’ and can interact with other particles (minds) according to the metric space. In other words, we want to be able to make precise definitions of when two AVIs, each pertaining to a different individual or the same individual at different times, are“close”. To give the basic idea, suppose we regard the AVI to be defined by a list of all the observables – S, a multidimensional sum of matrices of elements, each with their respective coefficients. We can then say that two AVIs are at a distance epsilon in “AVI space” if the largest (or other metric) absolute difference between these coefficients is epsilon. Of course, we could use this to define a distance in terms of other metrics and other definitions of AVI, perhaps with less matrices and elements, whatever suits us.  This is the same situation described by QFT for a physical system where the electron is a particle, localized, and the associated electrostatic field fills the space and can interact with other particles according to the metric space.

In philosophical terms, the individual mind is the ontology whereas consciousness is the epistemology.  We could use this to define different models by changing the pair (ontology, epistemology). Again, the mind is localized whereas the consciousness is not necessarily so.  To consider consciousness as ontological rather than epistemological would be to limit it.

Where Does the Genetic Code Come From?

Responding to this thread question by Errki, in the UT the genetic code (if any) is at a much lower level in the ontology, encapsulated in the wetware. All we talk about and use is the higher-level interface with various inputs and outputs. It does not matter how the lower level works, could be bio- or Silicon-based, a finite-state machine with a lookup transition table,  or even a real-time software simulation.

Thus, UT can be used with human, biological, AI, and any other input/output processor that is sufficiently capable to (a) provide the needed extent of trust, and (b) effect the required assurances, in order to consistently define mind and consciousness in diverse environments. Complexity does not appear as a requirement, but simplicity and the reuse of patterns can be useful as known from system design principles.

Extension to Other Theories

Separation of ‘assurance verification pertaining to an individual’ (AVI) as mind, localized, from ‘verification assurance distribution’ (VAD) as consciousness, not necessarily localized, as a metric space that supports references and measurements involving the self and other minds in various endo and exo communication processes, may be useful to the exposition of other mind and consciousness theories as well, not just the UT as summarized here.

Cheers, Ed Gerck

[1] (Gerck, 1998) Information was defined following Carlson ("Communication Systems", McGraw Hill, 1968) in abstract form -- information is that which is transferred from a source to a destination; if what is transferred already exists at the destination then the transfer is zero, no information was sent. The basic idea is that information is surprise, as a measurement of the uncertainty regarding what is received. We then defined trust in abstract form -- trust is that which is essential to a communication channel but cannot be transferred using that channel. The basic idea is that trust is essentially communicable but requires one or more parallel channels in order to be communicated. For example, self-assertions (e,g., “trust me!”) cannot induce trust. In simple terms, trust can be instantiated as “reliance inferred from a party’s observed behavior”, “reliance on a party for matters of X”, “qualified reliance on information”, and many other observable instances (see ref.). Trust is not one "big bag" but as many bags as needed, called "matters of X". Trust on "matters of X" is measured by its extent, as area under a curve. The larger the extent of trust on "matters of X", the larger the amount of trust on "matters of X". See Ed Gerck, “Toward Real-World Models of Trust: Reliance on Received Information”, at http://mcwg.org/mcg-mirror/trustdef.htm

[2] Quantum field theory (QFT) is a remarkably successful physical framework, describing particle physics, critical phenomena, and certain many-body systems. Superstring theory is also closely based on QFT.

Ed,

Where does the genetic code come from in your Unifying Theory?

Errki,

Thank you for the question. To avoid fragmentation, I just added the question and answer to the original posting on the UT. Please refer to the posting.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

Dogmatic representation only begets excessive axioms but not closer to understanding. This is the main problem for most attempts to construct of some unified theory (UT). There is a huge amount of experimental data that can not be ignored when constructing UT. It have priority.

Even linguistics is also subject to simple mathematical laws.

Of course, linguistics creates a various problems, as you have noticed. For example, look at these phrases:

"Нравственность. Мораль и нравственность. Мораль и этика."

(original)

"The morality. Morality and ethics. Morality and ethics."

(direct machine translation)

"Мораль. Мораль и этика. Мораль и этика."

(backward machine pass)

In russian the individual inner (self-referential autopoiesical) quality "нравственность" more clearly apart from the external (outer system) influence.

Even such information can benefit. For example, when you analyze numerous translations, critical analysis and research of some popular works of art. That's all - elements of "objectivity".

The "conflict" will never be resolved. This "conflict" is scalable like a Brownian motion, on whatever scale you look at him. It is necessary to incorporate it to the theory (just as it was done at the level of QM). However, I already talked about this at the beginning of the thread (demarcation problem).

Moreover, a relativistic view on the spatiotemporal position makes senseless even in the classical meaning any certainty of own identification in isolation from consideration of the evolutionary process.

It is an evolutionary process gives meaning to spatiotemporal reference point (origin) that manifests itself in the history of cognition of the world from ancient cosmogony to modern views.

We are constantly expanding outlook. At the same time, along with its expansion, the reference point is moving away from us (along with the gradual loss of our egoism weight in the cosmological perspective). All the time we are continuosly beginning to realize oneself only as part of still larger object.

Quite understandable asymptotic limit and uncertainty are on the other end of this run at the same time.

Vasiliy,

I appreciated your question and example, from linguistics as an area that often exemplifies in concrete form many aspects of mind and consciousness.

The "conflict" is always resolvable. To avoid fragmentation, I just added the question and answer to the original posting on the UT. Please refer to the posting.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Ed,

Any language itself contains information, not just carries it. It is a certain level of formalization, up to mathematics. This has been discussed in other topics.

I gave an example of one issue (however, very important to this topic) in order to show how the diversity of languages and ways of thinking helps to more accurately understand the essence of some formalized objects and phenomena.

So, at a certain stage fragmentation, on the contrary, makes easier to see. It works on the same principles as the stochastic resonance.

In addition, the structure of weakly formalized languages has a repetitive regularity organization. It is similar to the symptoms that occur in many physical phenomena. All this gives a clue to understanding the processes of self-organization. It all has to do with entropy and information theory.

PS: I often participate in forum discussions to route own thoughts in the right direction, but more often I listen. From the outside it may seem like a random posts, but for me they are links in a chain of reasoning. They have tied through the RG topics. This is also an example of a way of thinking.

There are several important traces leading to a common point. Entropy takes key significance for me (because of physics of all processes).

Ed,

I do not quite agree with your assessment: the genetic code (if any) is at a much lower level in the ontology, encapsulated in the wetware. All we talk about and use is the higher-level interface with various inputs and outputs. It does not matter how the lower level works, could be bio- or Silicon-based, a finite-state machine with a lookup transition table, or even a real-time software simulation.

My point is that evolution starts already on the ("lower") level of molecular aggregates forming the cell and its position in the hierarchy of the biological organization, including the genetic program, the identification of the cell, e.g. as a neuron or a cell belonging to the astroglial network.

Since your question formulates various queries all of them pointing at some kind of gap in the physical laws, my suggestion concerns the self-referential property of physical laws like gravitation and its generalization to propositional logic and the Gödel paradox.

I do not know if your UT theory carries any ideas along these lines, particularly if you can overbridge the higher and lower level interfaces and explain the origin of the “in vivo” level.

Ed 10

Ed, about the two postulated scientific epistemologies of subjective vs objective.  I think there is no real argument that this is a key to advance beyond the search for a ‘correct’ way to unify our knowledge.   You say that ‘Centuries of work have not reduced these ‘conflicts’ and proceed to suggest a way out proposing an abstract UT. Of course it would be great if you succeed.  But if not then you may be adding another methaphysical suggestion to the many around.  I still think is more realistic to accept that we start from humans, including their abstractions.  This human centred perspective is simply the consequence of accepting our place in the universe as humble biological resultant of evolutionary processes that emerged with life on Earth (one off or not is not the issue here).  Next sensible step is to ask how did we become convinced that there is such think as objective knowledge?  Short of solipsism is better to search for an explanation that does not contravene the very personal nature of any experience.  The so called objectivity emerges from two processes (usually occurring in parallel).

The first is still a personal process and relates to the biological value (evolutionary adaptation) of ‘experire’ which is the developing of a neurally based biological machinery that is suitable to live in a particular environment (with oxygen gravity etc etc).  The simple view that the nervous system at all levels works as a kind of ‘model’ of the external world is not new but still useful.  This is probably why the ‘rules’ of the world detected by this machinery, are actually suitable to explain (up to a point) the world.  From the need to standing up against gravity (mediated by neural process relatively well known that occurs at ‘middle’ levels of the nervous system) to the Newtonian Gravity, there is only a difference of degree of complexity of such adaptive model.  Every one develops some ‘rules’ to ‘explain’ many of the ‘ physical laws’ at a personal level.  Throwing a stone, jumping from a tree, fishing, grasping a tool etc etc. All even before language may have appeared in hominids.

The second parallel process is the sharing of experiences, which enable some of such ‘experire’ of ‘rules’ to became interpersonal and eventually ‘objective’.  According to the simplified, but not simplistic, model of our brain constructed as superimposed loops of neural circuits (see previous conversation points), everything that happen up in the higher levels, capable of experire more abstract rules of the external world, has to enter at the ground level (sensory inputs) and must go out as motor outputs (muscle movements).  In other words there is no telepathic communication between brains as far as we know. Experiences of each of us, occur at a particular time and place.  Experiences are momentaneous (short duration) states of the brain-individual, as we all know ageing with most philosophers, uniquely personal.  So, how to solve the conundrum of shared knowledge given this personal experience? The most sensible answer is that all shared experience must be based on 1)having similar brain mechanisms (and this is the case in congeners including humans) and 2) having actually similar experiences.  This is the case whenever two (or more) individuals are in the same place, at the same time, say looking at a sunset or seeing a rabbit crossing our path.  We can point the experience ‘item’ to another person and that is the simplest of all sharing I can imagine.  At the Newton level the sharing become more complex of course but is still based on similar sharing, and is limited to those fewer humans that have acquired similar neural circuits (of some math at least). But even at this more abstract level the sharing requires interchanging of experiences.

In this perspective objectivity is a shared experience which s more or less robust the better is shared and the better is suitable to ‘explain’ the world.  So, no longer a mystery of how to bridge the extreme solipsism.  Of course this biological/ social view of objectivity may risk becoming ‘relative’ and may lead to deny the profound effectiveness of science (starting with Greek Physics) in being a ‘mode’ of the universe, certainly better than any other human generated phantasy or imagination.  But also as such is not closed, is open to develop further and is largely self correcting, unlike other ‘cosmological’ view based on “pre-scientific’ believes.  So Ed, if you can propose a UT that will encounter fertile ground by providing better explanations of the universe, including us in it, would be fantastic.  To expect this to come from an impersonal abstract entity, not from your very human brain, would be deceiving ourselves.  If your, or Erkki’s ideas, or mine for that, can be shared and tested at some appropriate level, then they are part of the human exploration. If not our ideas may risk to being simply that.

Christian, getting back on the issue of you critique of the sentence.

"In order to start on a simple and solid ground within the Newtonian/Einsteinian universe I will suggest as a first step that the definition of ‘existence’ should imply a univocal relation between existing and being describable as having spatio-temporal coordinates.

This statement is not meant to give a fundamental ‘law’ of the universe.  In the very large (limit of the universe) or very small (quantum world) aspects of the universe this need not to apply (and it doesn’t). Mine is a starting point to try to include the issue of describing the mind in physical terms; the issue raised in this conversation by Ed.  As a first step, in my suggested seven steps to the ‘mind’, it simply proposes that anything that is relevant, from the molecules up to us biological beings, can be describes in  spatio-temporal coordinates.  This process is what we do when we observe directly (meaning in the moment of our feeling and being in the present; another aspect of conversation but bear with me for now) or indirectly by some action to bring it into the common senses and the present.  For example observing something with a microscope or a telescope or any other tool to extend our sensory inputs.  When we do so when we are more complete in our description we usually give spatio-temporal coordinates of a particular state of matter.  Because of the temporal dimension these observed/selected chunk of universe can e described as 4 dimensional objects.  For example you and I are 4D objects, with a beginning (if we agree we come to be from a fertilised egg) and an end (when we die).  When I say we ‘are’ I mean in a simple way that we ‘exist’ and thus we have such spatio-temporal coordinates.  As a Physiologist and Anatomist is easy t regard for example an organ such as the heart also as a 4 D object. The geometry of it includes the spatial features (anatomy) and functional features (rules of changes in time) which is Physiology.  Thus my statement that anything of which we say it ‘exists’ must have spatio-temporal coordinates.  Conversely if any chunk of the universe  is found to have spatio-temporal coordinates, then is postulated to ‘exist’ ie can be observed and studied.  Of course to observe must be brought in to our direct experience of the present and here (the here and now of many philosophers). To do this most often, such experience (observation) requires several preparatory steps, just like a good dish of ravioli, using some tool to transform some ‘hidden’ phenomenon (ie not directly ‘experienceable’) into an experienceable one.  Well this is the way in which I think we have and are doing all our scientific advances’ and these are an extension of the physiological way in which we acquire shared experiences in all our existence.  Then we are ready after some of the other steps I listed some conversation ago, to tackle the issue of where just is the ‘mind’ where is it, ad what is it. The ‘what is it’ question; is a state of the brain. Where? in the brain (more details if we wish are becoming available). When ? usually when one is awake.  Is it an existing spatio-temporal structure or object? Yes by my simple definition. How can we study it?  Like any other phenomenon hidden to our immediate experience and only after transforming it in 4 D experienceable chunks.  This is what advanced neuroscience is attemptying to do. Having just started (because too many thing happen in the brain and are mostly fast, too many too small ad hidden to simple ‘recordings’), our knowledge is still far from satisfactory. But is happening ad no real mystery about ultimate exlanatins of mind.  Just a slogging through of hard experimental science, associating state of matter to features/properties, with explanations that fit (consistent) with previous knowledge including all the rules and Laws of the processes underneath the level of brain functions.

Errki and all,

First, my assessment regarding the genetic code was casuistic, it only applies to my posting on the Unifying Theory, which (arbitrarily, albeit for simplicity) does not start ab initio but from a given framework capable of sustaining the mind (as defined in UT). 

That framework is open-ended in UT. It could be biological, abiological, or a mixture of both, and a genetic code is not required in any case, not even for the "in vivo" choice. Of course, as UT supports, the mind as well as the consciousness would have different capabilities in each case.

Although I did not try to explain there the origin of the “in vivo” level where that framework may operate, I think it is possible that UT theory, using your words, could overbridge the higher and lower level interfaces. The "in vivo" level also has its framework, which is abiological by definition.

You wrote, "My point is that evolution starts already on the ("lower") level of molecular aggregates forming the cell and its position in the hierarchy of the biological organization, including the genetic program, the identification of the cell, e.g. as a neuron or a cell belonging to the astroglial network."

I agree with your point; as far as we usually assume, biological evolution starts as you say. It could also have started not on Earth, or in space itself, as Anaxagoras said in ancient Greece, and Arrehnius, and modern research seems to indicate, such as in icy interstellar dust and comets (the dipepitide paper we talked about). It could also have started in multiple ways but only a certain specific position in the hierarchy allows sentient life on the human level, which starter would likely develop earlier than the Earth was even formed. In that case, we could expect more homogeneity regarding sentient life in our level than our ET films indicate. 

Continuing into your last two paragraphs, which I deeply enjoyed, I agree that certainly there are gaps (and islands) in the physical laws we know. We may assume that there are no paradoxes in Nature, as we are reasonably late in the game to not have seen any, and we haven't so far. Goedel's paradox is a human  invention, and is not actually a paradox because, of course, it is resolved in the meta-system he used. Moving ahead, and using the Unifying Theory, I see  UT as a neutral tool to advance that program as formulated by Max Planck ca. 1947, but much older than Planck, of course, of starting from our relative factors and data but looking for the absolute, the universally valid, the invariant, that is hidden in them. For example, what is absolute in gravitation?

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

PS: I just finalized a general lint and update on the UT posting, the new version is available at the same place, just reload the page please.

Vasiliy,

Thank you for your comment, that any language itself contains information, and sequence.

Any language also contains cultural and historical values, often of biological and consciousness significance, possibly harmful to communication on multi-cultural environments. These were some of the reasons that led Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist, to create Esperanto. 

I thought of an experiment using your earlier feedback data point in Russian. If the translation loop is done not in Russian to Russian, but using Esperanto or another quite different language as an intermediate language, one could expect a different result. It is not clear to me that it should necessarily be worse than using what could seem to be a natural choice, of Russian to Russian. Frequently, as we can see in spell-correction disasters, the same language has many matching diversions for a single word, as they are part of the same ethymological family, with similar spelling but widely different in terms of sense. Poets and humorists love to play in this space. The lighting and the lighting-bug difference, for example, of Mark Twain fame.

Cheers, Ed Gerck 

Marcello and all,

Thank you Marcello, for your comments on my UT posting. I enjoyed your neuroscience review of how we can experience what seems like an objective reality. From this perspective, as you wrote, "objectivity is a shared experience which [i]s more or less robust the better [it] is shared and the better [it] is suitable to ‘explain’ the world."

Of course, as you also say, such stance "may risk becoming ‘relative’ and may lead to deny the profound effectiveness of science (starting with Greek Physics)".

Exactly. And objectivity is actually much more elusive than one may fear. For example, a fact, even a scientific fact, is not "what is positively true" or "what was objectively verified" or "what was experienced by a lot of people", but "what I was once willing to believe".  What a difference! The first three definitions are behind most hard errors in life and natural science. The last definition puts the subjective as the most secure stance where, like Descartes, if everything I see could be an illusion then I have to rely on myself first, before I decide what I consider by sheer absence of doubts to be a fact, but even that is dangerous for a lapse in my logic or knowledge, or just because I ignore what everyone else ignores. Thus, that determination cannot be static and must be dynamic. History changes,  facts change. 

But, alas, although the subjective stance exists (Cogito, ergo sum) and seems to be the most secure for the self, it stands absolutely incommunicado.

This is a gapping security hole and where the objective stance plays well. If something is objective, then (a) no one can change it, (b) anyone can measure it directly, and (c) it is not necessarily immutable, it may change but not in a way that anyone or any group, however large, powerful or long-lived, can control, avoid, or even predict.

In physics, we have many things that are objective. As a classical example, the radioactive decay rate of an element, for any element. It obeys properties (a), (b) and (c).

So, the objective stance objectively exists, and it is not at all a "shared experience which is more or less robust the better it is shared and the better it is suitable to ‘explain’ the world" -- it is the reverse. It does not depend on whether it is suitable to explain the world; often it does not seem suitable. It does not get more robust when it is shared; it does not change its robustness even when no one knows about it. It is not a shared experience, it is must be a direct experience by definition (b).

There is also the intersubjective stance, necessary to correctly understand a medical diagnosis or the stock market, for example, which includes the agents but is neither subjective nor objective. Here, your neuroscience considerations could fit well, as a possible definition of an intersubjective stance in terms of a "shared experience which is more or less robust the better it is shared and the better it is suitable to ‘explain’ the world".  

There is also the abstract stance, which is neither an impersonal entity nor from a source other than our very human brain. Although we do not need to limit ourselves to Fregean logic and semiotic theories, the "abstract stance" can be well-understood by using Frege's semiotics.

An abstract stance is the human representation of a "seed-thought" or "root-idea".  For example, let's use Frege's famous metric for "enough content" to express an abstract stance as a human representation of Frege's seed-thought in this regard:

"Sentences that have enough content are those that are adequate to the task."

This stance is not objective as there are no specific object fulfilling conditions  (a) and (b) above; it is no intersubjective either, as it does not depend on more than one person nor on a social agreement; and is not subjective as the self is not the sole arbiter whether a sentence has enough content.

All four stances are useful, and not using one of them means that you are potentially not representing or using reality well,  as reality has more "to say" and "to hear" than your lexicon allows.

Of course, there are even more stances than these four, and the list goes on to infinity (please see my RG home page, the 1998 reports on identification theory; much of the above is also referenced in my RG home page and the 1998 paper on trust that is referenced in the UT posting).

Cheers, Ed Gerck  

Thanks Ed for your careful explanation of your view. Nevertheless I might add a few comments.

I am not sure what you mean by human invention. We are children of evolution and Gödel’s theorem(s) is (are) rooted in the often forgotten development of self-reference.

In fact there is a striking analogy between "Gödel" and gravitational interactions, see chapter 4 in the enclosed paper. This property seems to be intrinsic to our Universe, see my ZEUS scenario in the same paper. To be a bit provocative: one can perhaps comprehend Natures paradoxes as the driving force behind evolution.

Ed,

I gave a specific example in which the (encyclopaedic) meaning of the terms is important. Once I thought about - how the text (in which I reason about this term) be able for understanding by someone who speaks english? This is a higher level of abstraction and formalism, not a question of cultural values of language.

This applies to all languages, of course. Esperanto exactly bad in this sense, because all this mass of information may be lost in it or overly complicates the messages. In any case, it is problem of balance of alphabet size and structure of message. In addition, Esperanto as artificial phenomenon has no evolutionary past, it is not natural (although I am not quite right - Esperanto has no any phoneme, which would not be in Russian or Polish).

For transmission of such information unambiguous correspondence links of the term and its formal description betwen languages is necessary. For example, Wikipedia has to deal with it much better than simple translation. For my example, when you click on the link to the english version of the article, you get a german(!) word which has an encyclopedic description of the concept in english. But I do not like even this description as it is. But this is a claim more to Hegel.

This term hides the simple mechanism of origin of morality and ethics, as a social phenomenon of the human (or even every) civilization. However, Hegel's thought is too distant from the biological level by virtue of the fact that he moved from a society (and too high-level category of rights) to the person. It's funny that the hippies in his simple slogan "make love not war" feel it much clear.

The mechanism of origin of morality has all attributes of bidirectionality (autopoiesis), as well as all processes of ordering systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sittlichkeit