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[Chaosnature]

As babies, the brain is formed, what formed the brain? and at what point was the brain loaded with data?

secondly, i am stating that contrary to what you said the mind and the consciousness are not the same.

[Okisites]

As babies, the brain is formed, what formed the brain? and at what point was the brain loaded with data?

secondly, i am stating that contrary to what you said the mind and the consciousness are not the same.

I applaud and clap, for your question, Chaosnature. I don't think I can answer that satisfactorily.

Well, I am of the view that mind and the consciousness are not the same.

I am of the view that mind is in everything that anyone or anything can think or respond to, but consciousness doesn't resides in the thing, but it is like a phenomena, that is like a correspondence between the different things, or minds(basic things).

[Obvious Leo]

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As babies, the brain is formed, what formed the brain? and at what point was the brain loaded with data?

Obviously this didn't happen. A human being starts out as the fusing of two haploid germ cells containing nothing more than a set of genetic information. After that the human MAKES ITSELF.

I extend this notion to the universe as a whole and this is the main thrust of linear dynamic systems theory.

mind and the consciousness are not the same

I won't be arguing over the meaning of words in this thread.

I am of the view that mind is in everything that anyone or anything can think or respond to, but consciousness doesn't resides in the thing, but it is like a phenomena, that is like a correspondence between the different things, or minds(basic things).

This is also the unanimous view of mainstream science and one with which I completely concur. I suspect by consciousness you mean self-awareness which is regarded as EMERGENT. Self-awareness is not unique to humans and a number of other higher order animals also have it, although to a far lesser extent. Cetaceans, corvids, elephants and some of the higher primates, for example. We just simply have a hell of a lot more of it, but the fact that other advanced species have it to a lesser degree is evidence enough that it is simply an evolved characteristic, not some mysterious supernatural force which requires us to invent a little man in our heads.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 7:12 am to add the following --

Chaosnature. Your very username indicates that we are of one mind, as Okisites seems also to be. We seem to be using different forms of language but we're essentially saying the same thing. I'm not going to start all over again but I'll just throw out some ideas to think about.

The Autopoeietic Human. The self-made man. Human embryology as a precise analogy for the evolution of life generally as well as being a precise analogy for the evolution of an individual species, genus, family, order, or whatever other sub-classifications we choose to use. How we can model this by using the Mandelbrot set. How fractal geometry is entirely non-reductionist whereas the classical mathematics of Newton is purely reductionist.

What happens when we apply this sort of thinking to the universe as a whole? Surely the analogies can be no coincidence. Evolution towards informational complexity is the fundamental self-organising principle of reality itself. So self-evident is this when no exception exists anywhere in the cosmos that bloody obvious is stating the case too mildly. Reductionism has been struck by an asteroid.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 7:24 am to add the following --

Many leading biologists also extend the notion of mind to non-living systems in a far broader definition of the term. I don't do this because I write for a lay readership. It's OK for them to do this when they just chat amongst themselves because they know what they mean by it, but personally I reckon they should use another word. Humans tend to confuse mind with purpose, but it makes no sense to think of the human embryo planning to become a human adult. Nor does it make any sense to think of a fiery ball of ionised plasma planning to become a universe with human beings in it. This is reductionism.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Do you understand the problems of reductionism?

This entire thread is a refutation of reductionism. Perhaps you should read it.

I did read it. And whilst you say you are arguing against reductionism, you make a number of statements that are reductionist:

...the mind is a construct of the body and brain

a human brain in particular…has been massively over-engineered for the simple task of ensuring the survival of the fittest.

Consciousness is an emergent consequence of all this electro-chemical activity

senses cannot be divorced from our minds, if the evidence of biology is anything to go by, any more than our minds can be divorced from our senses.

I regard it as illusory to project the Self as somehow external to the vessel which contains it

We can define the Self as the entire universe of our personal existence which is contained within a self-existent universe and we are then reminded of many ancient theologies which speak of Transcendence and Becoming. Nowadays we recognise such words for what they are and substitute them into the evolutionary paradigms where they belong.

So whilst you say you're opposed to reductionism, the philosophical position you are advocating still appears to be in line with what is broadly described as the 'evolutionary materialism' of the Western secular mainstream.

What would an alternative, non-reductionist view consist of? Well, one would be that mind is not something that can be understood solely in terms of evolutionary and neurological sciences, on account of it being ontologically distinct from the kinds of things that such sciences are able to study. This might suggest that mind is something that is not reducible to 'body and brain', nor to genetic nor neuological factors alone. But rather than elaborate the point again, I refer back to this post, the key point of which is:

If you say that 'this pattern of neural activity represents the image of a fire-truck', what are you actually saying? As soon as you say that it represents something, then you're actually invoking the very thing that you're trying to explain, in order to do the explaining. And that is the precise meaning of 'begging the question'. Your actually using the faculty which you're attempting to give an account of, to account for it. But how could you avoid that in this case? How could you 'explain consciousness' from some point outside of it?

[Obvious Leo]

So whilst you say you're opposed to reductionism, the philosophical position you are advocating still appears to be in line with what is broadly described as the 'evolutionary materialism' of the Western secular mainstream.

This statement is false and none of the statements you quote are reductionist. They all imply both top-down and bottom-up causation which is the antithesis of reductionism. Reductionism is a method of thinking and thus exists in the mind of the thinker. You are misreading my words, not deliberately, but because you live in a Newtonian world. The modern biologist is not a Darwinian and doesn't live in this world.

How could you 'explain consciousness' from some point outside of it?

I'm not going to repeat myself again because I've been over this many times. There is no bloody point outside. I'm saying the exact opposite. The human organism begins from two haploid germ cells and then MAKES ITSELF, for Christ's sake. At what point in this developmental journey does consciousness suddenly appear? Consciousness is EMERGENT. You can no more define consciousness in terms of matter and energy than you can define the wetness of water in terms of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Does some omnipotent imaginary being make water wet. Can't you see this. It's YOU that is being reductionist.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 10:20 am to add the following --

Emergence simply means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is a non-Newtonian way of thinking the world, because the whole can be constructed of its parts and yet not be defined by them. The parts become subservient to the whole because the whole can determine the behaviour of the parts. The reverse can also occur but you can think a thought which initiates a behaviour which changes the processes within your cell biology. This is about as non-reductionist as it gets because in the Newtonian world the cell biology is entirely responsible for the thoughts you think.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

I can assure you, I don't live in 'the newtonian world'

This statement is false and none of the statements you quote are reductionist. They all imply both top-down and bottom-up causation

Say if 'bottom-up' means 'occuring as a consequence of physical interactions', 'top-down' would be ... ?

The particular quote I referred to was 'Consciousness is an emergent consequence of all this electro-chemical activity'. Just because you label it 'emergent', doesn't mean that this view is not reductionist. If you're describing mind solely in terms of physiological, evolutionary, or biological factors, then it is some type of reductionism. Please don't react like that is an ad hom. This is a philosophical debate, it is not a matter of accusation, but clarification.

Consciousness is EMERGENT.

But what does this add to our understanding? All 'emergence' is, is an explanation of properties and attributes that pertain to something, that can't be seen in their constituent parts, like the wetness of water.

As for organisms being 'self-creating', I am a little familiar with Maturana and Varela's writings on that matter, and also Kaufmann's. I can see how, in the context of the discipline of biology, those ideas are productive and fruitful, but this is a philosophy forum, and I'm not sure how much bearing it has on the philosophical question of the nature of mind and its relationship to the brain. Besides, why is the Universe just such a way, that self-organizing systems - organisms - can arise within it?

When we ask the question, what is mind? What is a brain? or any such question, ultimately we are seeking to explain or define one thing in terms of another. My argument about this is that all such explanations depend on our ability to represent, infer, and so on. WIth your appreciation of Kant, I'm sure you get that. But one of the implications of this is that, all manner of explanations depend on the categories of understanding, and the like, which are in a vital sense prior to empirical judgements about the question we are investigating. So whatever we say about the manner in which the 'electro-chemical processes of the brain gives rise to mind', is dependent on our interpretation of the meaning of those phenomena. And that 'act of interpretation' is not given anywhere in the data about 'what the brain does'. The process of rational inference is not an electro-chemical phenomenon, even though it can be embodied in electro-chemical phenomena. And I say that is because rational inference is ontologically distinct from such phenomena; it is a different kind of thing altogether.

Please consider that question at leisure. Today, I have to paint my swimming pool, and if I don't leave the Forum alone for at least 8 hours, my wife will be facing homicide charges.

[Bohm2]

But what does this add to our understanding? All 'emergence' is, is an explanation of properties and attributes that pertain to something, that can't be seen in their constituent parts, like the wetness of water.

Yes and yet the mental/consciousness/the experiential is different because emergence of liquidity from water molecules or other typical emergent systems are all open to a third person perspective. That is not the case with mental phenomena. We can infer mental stuff indirectly from brain scans, behaviour, etc. and match to our own but that's not the same thing.

And as you mentioned, we haven't the slightest clue how mental stuff emerges from neural/"physical" stuff. But as I tried to argue countless times, we don't have a complete understanding of "physical" as our conception of "physical"/material is open and evolving and we don't know what our future physics/science may discover in 1000s of years (if we are still around). At present, however, it is pretty obvious to me that we are not close to understanding how the brain/neurons/physics can "spit" out mental stuff like consciousness/qualia. And my background in both neuroscience and physics has provided zero answers. An interesting Russellian-type argument on this topic:

It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly. It might well be that mentality is like liquidity: the intrinsic nature of mass, charge and spin might not be mental itself, just like individual H2O-molecules are not liquid themselves, but could nevertheless constitute mentality when organised properly, just like H2O-molecules can constitute liquidity when organised properly (this would be a variation of neutral monism). In short, the problem is that we just do not know enough about the intrinsic nature of the fundamental level of reality that we could say almost anything about it...Thus, even if the intrinsic nature of electrons and other fundamental particles is in fact mental, this does not mean that it should be anything like human mentality—rather, we can only say that the ontological category their intrinsic nature belongs to is the same as the one our phenomenal realm belongs to. This category in the most general sense is perhaps best titled ‘ideal’.

What makes sense to me is that there is emergence on 2 levels (extrinsic and intrinsic). But our scientific tools/cognitive structures appear to be barred from having access to the intrinsic stuff except with respect to our own as argued by Lockwood:

Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.

[Obvious Leo]

Say if 'bottom-up' means 'occuring as a consequence of physical interactions', 'top-down' would be ... ?

Exactly the same thing. Occurring as a consequence of physical interactions but working back down the causal chain. An example is the easiest way to illustrate this point. This is a causal chain from your cell biology to your mind, although it can easily be extended all the way down the causal chain to the sub-atomic particles which make up your matter. Our universe is completely deterministic and completely non-reductionist as you will see.

Your cells need water in order to be able to perform their metabolic functions efficiently. It'll take all day to go through all the intermediate organisational levels but this is not difficult so I'll take the shortcut. The cell sends a chemical message via a complex network of structures which are embedded within each other like matryoshka dolls. In complexity theory these are known as hierarchies of informational complexity, although think hierarchy with a pinch of salt because they are all interlinked top-down-and bottom-up. You can think of an organ as such an organisational level. The message reaches the brain and this is why I use water as an example. 99% of brain function is performed without consciousness performing any role. If your cells needed potassium di-methyl acetate you'd never get to know about it. The message would be sent automatically back down to the liver which is the body's chemical factory. However it goes to the brain first, except for in some exceptional instances where another neuronal system in our guts takes care of it.

This doesn't happen with water because we lose water to the environment continuously and this water needs to be replaced. Unlike plants we can't do this automatically. If plant cells need water they'll just help themselves if it's available. They can't decide not to take water. However if a human needs water he needs to perform a conscious behaviour, like going to the tap and getting some. Thus our cell biology directs our behaviour by making us thirsty. This behaviour is not mandated by the cells in the Newtonian sense because if we don't want to drink water we don't have to and if no water is available we can't. We can die of thirst by an act of will if we choose and all manner of peculiar consequences will accrue for both body and mind as a reward for our stupidity. So we walk to the tap and drink a glass of water. Our sensation of thirst goes away almost immediately so the information of water goes back down the causal chain very quickly. However it can take quite some time for the water itself to find its way all the way back to the individual cells. It's a hell of a lot more complex than what I've presented here but that's the basic principle of how an autopoietic network operates. The message going back from the brain will follow a different path through the network than the one that came up from the bottom and literally millions of these things are going on at once, all of which affect the others. This is where the non-linearity comes in and this is as non-Newtonian as it gets.

As you can see, this is a process philosophy and not a reductionist one and the same principles can be applied to every event in the universe, both living and non-living. Interstellar clouds of gas and dust make stars and vice versa, producing ever more complex atoms at each iteration. The entire system tends towards complexity. A ball of ionised plasma took 13.8 billion years to evolve into a sufficiently complex system for us to have a conversation in. The really interesting question is where does it go from here because this is one without an answer. Because of minds.

Just because you label it 'emergent', doesn't mean that this view is not reductionist.

Yes it does. Emergence doesn't exist in Newton's world and neither does it exist in modern physics, which is purely Newtonian despite their claim to the contrary. They force it into a Newtonian paradigm with the use of mathematical constants and by denying the existence of a physical time. There can be no such thing as a constant in a relativistic universe and this is why their models make no sense.

I didn't intend to be ad hominem and I apologise without reservation. I sometimes allow my frustration at having to repeat myself get the better of me and I routinely forget that what seems bloody obvious to me may not be so to somebody else. So intuitive is this way of thinking the world that it is literally impossible to remember the way I used to think without forcing myself to it and it feels all wrong and frankly stupid. The universe is alive and our journey is through time alone, along with the rest of reality. I find it very difficult to think spatially.

As for organisms being 'self-creating', I am a little familiar with Maturana and Varela's writings on that matter, and also Kaufmann's. I can see how, in the context of the discipline of biology, those ideas are productive and fruitful, but this is a philosophy forum, and I'm not sure how much bearing it has on the philosophical question of the nature of mind and its relationship to the brain. Besides, why is the Universe just such a way, that self-organizing systems - organisms - can arise within it?

To get this you really need the Mandelbrot set and a bit of fractal geometry. I don't regard body, brain and mind as different things but rather as a single autopoietic network in a constant dynamic flux. This can then be enfolded within other networks like family, community, nation, species, biosphere etc. These groupings are entirely arbitrary and nothing more than modelling tools, but there's more than enough philosophy in it to last our species forever. The only way to get a true grasp on the nature of physical reality is through biology, the science of life, because it is only in this framework that the true absurdity of reductionism is apparent. Autopoiesis defines the human mind as itself becoming It defines a human life as a journey through time in which the self evolves towards informational complexity. It defines our biosphere in the same way and in my philosophy I extend this concept to the universe itself. This is as non reductionist as one could possibly wish for because I define the universe also as itself becoming, just as Spinoza did and Einstein wanted to do, and many other philosophers have hinted at for millennia. In the eastern philosophies this has always been a recurring theme. The circular causality which underpins all of non-linear dynamics finally unites the uber-Mandelbrot set with the Universal Turing Machine that is our universe in the ultimate expression of birth and renewal. If this is not philosophical enough for you then you're a hard man to please.

why is the Universe just such a way, that self-organizing systems - organisms - can arise within it?

Because it cannot be otherwise. The universe didn't have to organise itself in the way it did but it had to become more complex. This is a fundamental law of complexity because this is simple cause and effect. Simple systems become more complex and this process cannot stop until the whole process starts all over again. Life on earth didn't have to bring forth homo sapiens but if the right conditions obtain it must become more complex until a single species emerges at the top and becomes the uber-predator. This is absolutely mandated by the complexity paradigm and then the evolution must stop. It stops because the the uber-predator has seized control of the whole network and the future can no longer be self-organising. The future becomes designed.

If you're still looking for some more philosophy to ponder on there's plenty more where this lot came from.

When we ask the question, what is mind? What is a brain? or any such question, ultimately we are seeking to explain or define one thing in terms of another. My argument about this is that all such explanations depend on our ability to represent, infer, and so on. WIth your appreciation of Kant, I'm sure you get that. But one of the implications of this is that, all manner of explanations depend on the categories of understanding, and the like, which are in a vital sense prior to empirical judgements about the question we are investigating. So whatever we say about the manner in which the 'electro-chemical processes of the brain gives rise to mind', is dependent on our interpretation of the meaning of those phenomena. And that 'act of interpretation' is not given anywhere in the data about 'what the brain does'. The process of rational inference is not an electro-chemical phenomenon, even though it can be embodied in electro-chemical phenomena. And I say that is because rational inference is ontologically distinct from such phenomena; it is a different kind of thing altogether.

I can argue against this until the cows come home but never briefly. You open up a whole new Pandora's box of worms, red herrings and mixed metaphors which must await another time. I have a wife with similar inclinations to yours. However I strongly suggest you read as much as you can on systems theory. This is an entirely new way of thinking the world and it's taking the world of science by storm. I know whereof I speak because I've been working with it all my life and I not exaggerate when I say that this is the biggest philosophical breakthrough in the history of our species.

Regards Leo

[Felix]

Obvious Leo said: "The universe didn't have to organise itself in the way it did but it had to become more complex."

I'm afraid I still don't see your "it had to become more complex" conclusion. It seems to be an article of faith... "this is necessary," seems awfully anthropomorphic.

[Bohm2]

However I strongly suggest you read as much as you can on systems theory. This is an entirely new way of thinking the world and it's taking the world of science by storm. I know whereof I speak because I've been working with it all my life and I not exaggerate when I say that this is the biggest philosophical breakthrough in the history of our species.

Nobody is denying that macro-micro, synergistic/systems theory/self-organization stuff is not important. And I'm also sympathetic to emergence but what is being questioned is whether this is enough to "spit" out the mental/experiential. Let me ask you this. How do the causal and structural relations between the chemical/physical/neuronal stuff magically give rise to full-blown consciousness/qualia/the experiential, when the former stuff itself appears impotent to do so? And the liquidity from water molecules analogy is not a good analogue for the emergence of consciousness experience/subjectivity for reasons mentioned previously as noted by Chalmers:

A low-level microphysical description can entail all sorts of surprising and interesting macroscopic properties, as with the emergence of chemistry from physics, of biology from chemistry, or more generally of complex emergent behaviors in complex systems theory. But in all these cases, the complex properties that are entailed are nevertheless structural and dynamic: they describe complex spatiotemporal structures and complex dynamic patterns of behavior over those structures. So these cases support the general principle that from structure and dynamics, one can infer only structure and dynamics.

Consciousness and its Place in Nature
http://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf

So the systems view/theoretical biology isn't being neglected. It just hasn't got us to the promised land of bridging the gap of the so-called "hard" problem. The explanatory gap that exists between conscious experience and the physical nature of the organism (as presently understood) is not closed merely by observing that complex systems have self-organizing properties or synergistic downward/upward causation. Anyway, that's the argument.

[Obvious Leo]

Obvious Leo said: "The universe didn't have to organise itself in the way it did but it had to become more complex."

I'm afraid I still don't see your "it had to become more complex" conclusion. It seems to be an article of faith... "this is necessary," seems awfully anthropomorphic.

No, Felix, this is not an article of faith despite the fact that I express it in such an emphatic way. There are no articles of faith in my entire philosophy. It contains nothing that needs to be believed because all of its principles can be derived from only two basic axioms. I don't regard these as articles of faith but simply as self-defining statements which cannot be refuted with the tools of human reason.

1. The universe is everything that exists.

2. All effects are preceded by causes.

My entire philosophy can be deduced solely from these two statements in a sequential sequence of logic and no further assumptions need to be made. It is a model of exquisite simplicity but it uses the tools of many different sciences, as well as many different philosophies. This is why it took me forty years to complete it.

That simple systems become more complex is a simple consequence of my second axiom, namely that all effects are preceded by causes. It may take some hard thinking to see why this is so but this thinking would be much helped if you take my advice and read up on non-linear dynamic systems theory. It sounds like a mouthful but I can assure you it isn't difficult. The basic principles are so intuitive and the examples are such everyday truths that we simply take them for granted. You don't need to understand the fractal mathematics behind it, although compared with classical maths it's not all that hard, but just the philosophy that underpins it. Many of the cliches in our everyday life could fit perfectly into this theory. **** happens. What's done is done.Tomorrow never comes. There are lots more which could come under the general category of homespun wisdom. All brains and no sense is one my Dad was fond of and which could easily be applied to physicists who would have to be the dumbest geniuses on the planet. It's not their fault because they were trained to think that way by Newton.

It's hard to fully understand the extent to which Newtonian thinking has influenced the world of science and the world of knowledge more generally. We all had it crammed into us from the first day we started school without ever realising it. My model is not just a new way of doing science, it's an entirely new way of thinking the world, except that it's not. This is the way everybody used to think the world before Newton but before Newton there was no science as we know it today. Once we model our sciences mathematically it is the mathematical system itself which determines our thinking. The philosophy of mathematics is a very deep philosophy and not well understood in the western world. The great mathematical philosophers were the Persians. They learned it from the Indus cultures but the Persians were the first to formalise it in a methodical way. All of western mathematics came from the Persians after the crusades but they only stole the tools, not the philosophy, which they regarded as godless heathenism.

Many western philosophers came close to the Persian way of thinking. Leibniz was one and Spinoza was one and arguably Kant was one but the latter two were non-mathematical thinkers. Some of the mathematicians got close too, especially Peano, Cantor and Godel. Kant and Spinoza were essentially intuitive thinkers as I am, but Leibniz was a very mathematical thinker and it is no coincidence that he and Newton loathed each other. They were contemporaries and they both invented the same mathematical system at the same time without reference to each other. Both were convinced that the other was using this powerful new tool incorrectly and Newton won the chocolates, primarily because he he could use it so well to model the world of the observer. Leibniz was a philosopher first and mathematician second whereas Newton was an alchemist first and mathematician second who never read a philosophy book in his entire life, which set the pattern for science. It was a paradigm shift in conceptual thinking which changed the world and it led very quickly to modern science. It was not until Einstein that its flaws were revealed because the world of the observer is not the real world. The penny should have dropped once the speed of light was observed to be a constant because this is patently impossible. This observation could not be of the true world. The spacetime paradigm was just Ptolemy all over again. They would rather accept that the universe made no sense than look for the flaw in the logic.

It would have been difficult for them to discover this flaw 100 years ago although every philosopher in history managed to. But once human psychology became a genuine science it should have been self-evident that we don't see the world with our eyes, we see it with our minds. We construct our world in our heads and we construct it on the basis of our assumptions. We see space and we assume it is real. But it ain't, Felix. The observer spatialises time, just as Einstein did, but once we can see the universe as an event instead of as a place, the whole bloody lot falls neatly into place. Reality is simply a journey of information through time and everything that the observer observes is emergent from this PROCESS. All the mysteries evaporate. And I mean ALL.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 6:27 pm to add the following --

Bohm. I'm not trying to be awkward but you seem to be asking an impossible question. Aren't you asking me to explain a non-linear dynamic system in a reductionist way. I honestly don't know what you mean. If you're looking for a mechanism for emergence there is no such thing. The emergent entity simply has properties that the constituent parts don't have. In a temporal only world which regards consciousness as a process the "hard problem" simply doesn't exist. Don't forget Chalmers' work is pretty dated and basically Newtonian. There's no possible way that the non-linear can be explained in the language of the linear, and take my word for it, although the reverse is possible it's by no means easy.

If I've misunderstood you please forgive me and see if you can pose your question in another way. I'm just a simple country lad and we Aussies drink far too much beer to grasp things quickly. Is this something to do with dualism?

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection…In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.

Well, interesting, and I think I have encountered that Lockwood essay on the other philosophy forum. But I want to bring out a very difficult but important point in regards to your post and this quote in particular.

When we talk of something like 'the bit within our skulls', we are clearly engaged in the process of objectification. That is, we are placing ourselves in the role of being 'the observer', who is analysing or looking at 'the thing which does the thinking' - the brain, as object of knowledge. That seems natural - for the naturalist. 'Hey, what's in there? What is doing that?' OK, I am being a bit facetious there. But it seems to me that this whole approach is wrong-headed from the start. And 'the start' in this case, goes back several hundred years, to Comte, and Positivism, and the general impulse to subject philosophical questions to scientific scrutiny.

Stand back a bit more from the whole panorama of brain science, physics and the rest. What is the nature of thinking? Who is it that thinks? Actually all of what we need to inquire directly into such questions is available right before us, in our own minds and bodies. No equipment, no apparatus, is necessary for that. What is necessary is the ability to pay very close attention to the reality of our existence. I think that, along with a few other things, is what 'philosophy' really ought to mean, but I think it is generally lost sight of, in our fascination with science and technology.

[Autopoesis] defines a human life as a journey through time in which the self evolves towards informational complexity.

There are many fine sentiments in your posts, generally, and when I voice criticisms, it is not because I want to simply shoot them down. I like your 'forum persona' a great deal. But I think your general orientation is more towards biological sciences than what I regard as philosophy as such (which in my case is generally pre-modern, Eastern, and traditional philosophy . I have little interest in the Anglo-American analytic philosophers and not much more in current Continental philosophers, or in philosophy as it is now taught at University.

Another brief digression - consider the character of Socrates. I consider him religious, but he was condemned to death for atheism and undermining religion. The Buddha also is regarded as atheist by many Hindus and Christians. (Incidentally, I am Buddhist.) I am bringing all this up, because these distinctions between what is philosophy, science, religion, theology, and so on, are very hard to distinguish and articulate. We all come at them from our own life-experience and research and often what we mean by certain key terms is completely different to what others understand by them. This is especially so in the cultural mixing pot which is today's world.

All that is by way of framing my response to your above quote. I am sorry, but I don't regard 'informational complexity' as a worthy goal in itself. It might be a necessary by-product of biological, cultural and technological evolution, and it might be necessary for us to execute many of the things we need to do in our complex world. (Incidentally, I am also a technical writer.) But, contrarily to that, I think the aspiration of any of the classical philosophies is towards 'divine simplicity'. That is: not being complex, not being composed of parts, being all of a piece. (Lennon and McCarney's 'Fool on the Hill' comes to mind.) Ultimately, as the guru said to the hot-dog salesman, the goal of philosophy is to 'make me one with everything'. It is to find something in oneself that is not subject to change, dissolution and decay. And that is not something that can inherently be understood in terms of 'informational complexity'.

Now I know you're not necessarily going to get that idea. But I think you ought to look more into the Buddhist side of Maturana and Varela. You know Varela was one of the founding members of the Mind~Life Institute, which is chaired by the Dalai Lama. That is why I pointed you to that page of William Irwin Thomson. Here is an image of Varela discussing some aspect of brain science with the Dalai Lama:

The universe didn't have to organise itself in the way it did but it had to become more complex.

The universe didn't have to exist! Of course, being a 'natural philosopher', you assume its existence, and that is quite a safe assumption. But notice that this is what it is.

You open up a whole new Pandora's box of worms, red herrings and mixed metaphors which must await another time.

What I have opened up there, is a discussion of the nature of meaning, representation, and syntax, and the like, and how that could be 'explained' with reference to 'electrochemical processes' in the brain. It is actually a very direct way of short-circuiting thousands of words of tortuous neuro-babble. I say it again: consider the relation between such things as syntax, rational inference, grammar, and representation, and the 'hardware' of the brain. If you think you can account for those things, on the basis of neural chemistry, then you have far too much work to do, to be engaging in idle chatter.

The Universe is all that exists

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[Obvious Leo]

On the wetness of water. If I allow myself some frivolous speculation it's possible to imagine how this can be explained bottom up, in principle at least. Water is a very simple molecule which contains only 3 atoms. I don't pretend to play in the playpen of others and although I know the principles of fractal geometry very well I'm not fluent in the use of the tools. Whether this would be modelled with a binary network ( I doubt it ) a cellular automata network ( possibly, but which elements?) or some other network, who knows? whether the attractors are strange attractors, phase attractors or some diffrent attractor I don't know. Do these attractors combine in a 1 dimensional phase space (I doubt it ) a 6-dimensional phase space (this seems possible) or a 10-dimensional phase space ( my head hurts ). Note of course that these phase spaces are simply mathematical entities not to be confused with Cartesian spaces which are also just mathematical entities in my model.

So getting from the atoms to the molecule looks plenty hard enough. That's the last step and at least two sub-networks would need to be reduced first. Getting the properties of the atoms from the subatomic particles should be easier because they're simpler but I wouldn't have a clue where to start, but I'm willing to guess a cellular network for this (elements unknown) and possibly only two attractors, maybe 3.( also type unknown) The easiest of all should be getting the subatomic particles from the fundamental quantised temporal intervals because this will have to be a binary network with simple switching logic gates. However how different networks encode for different particles won't be easy to model, but this all somehow seems possible with current computer algorithms if we get the right geeks on the job. I very much doubt that any currently used genetic or evolutionary algorithms will do it beyond this fundamental level but I truly know bugger-all about it. I'm just an ideas man, not a technician. Such advanced algorithms simply don't exist, I'm fairly sure of that.

They certainly won't get water explained in my lifetime but I guess it's possible in the lifetime of my grandchildren, if anybody could be bothered. I think most folk will be just happy to say that water's wet and leave it at that. Who gives a **** why it's wet? However the human mind is a network of trillions of atoms layered in countless integrated networks, most of which can't even be identified, let alone reduced. Nobody in their right mind would attempt it and every computer on earth working for a billion years wouldn't do it. Nobody will care, Bohm. Consciousness emerges. Of course they wouldn't start with the human anyway, but more likely a fruitfly, which is no intellectual giant. Even then I'm not sure what could be learned from it. I see no point in doing a reductionist analysis on a non-reducing system. It ain't gunna happen.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 8:13 pm to add the following --

Q. I'll have a go at your post in the morning. There are points of agreement and points of disagreement worth following up. For the moment I must attend to the demands of she who must be obeyed.

Regards Leo

[Chaosnature]

At present, however, it is pretty obvious to me that we are not close to understanding how the brain/neurons/physics can "spit" out mental stuff like consciousness/qualia

I think we are ignorantly reluctant to learn, what we should observe within our environment is the brain capacities of other living creatures and how much of it is actually utilized if we cannot observe the same within ourselves.

Firstly, the brain spitting our mental stuff like consciousness/qualia is still classed by me as reductionism, this is what quotidian is battling against on this topic in this forum. (Reductionism is a serious issue stunting our evolution. This is what I presume Quotidian line of questioning was pointing out in previous tread “do we know the real problem caused by reductionism?”)

One of the main reasons our brain capacities are not getting used up is because our studies and development is ultimately based on a reductionist template. When we use these templates, limits are set and therefore evolution is stunted.

I have written several articles regarding similar topics in the past; I am with Quotidian on this debate. “There is a reason for every thing” is one of the basic principles I follow; there is a reason for the automatic design of the brain capacities which is unused, this space ends up useless by the time we have spent our life time on this planet. The 2 sections of our brain (left and right hemisphere) require 2 types of information to be fed into it, of which one hemisphere has been greatly reduced. Our current educational system has not incorporated enough right hemisphere learning system into its curriculum. As a matter of fact we are meant to be operating as in priority from the right to left not left to right hemisphere.

Spirit 1st before physical, as this is what birth teaches us.

@ Leo; I appreciate your heavy grammatical construction of English however you need to pay attention to the fundamentals. Simplicity is the key to unlocking these secrets. Complexity inevitably courses confusion.

Physics has failed to reveal the answers to most of our line of questioning because it is faced with overwhelming information and also because it has locked out spirit out of its studies, which to me is understandable as the name implies physics (science of the physical) I however think there should be a proceeding higher level subject to pick up our learning from where physics stops. Mathematicians and physicians (or the higher level physics) should use philosophy as the bases of their fundamental equation constructions, it use to be like this and for some reason it stopped.

How do you study the fourth, fifth or higher dimension when you are locked in ignorance within a three dimensional state of vibration?

One of the keys is the study of vibrations and frequencies, every physical tangible material is in a state of vibration, in fact there is no such thing as a solid matter, and it’s our perception thanks to our brains that makes it seem so. Wave particles intersect to form an atom, the point of intersection is the 1st form of material.

Coagulation of waves through specific frequencies makes up what we see as solid materials. My point here is what we should be studying is what is coagulating these waves? Genetic information is only a blue print; there is still a force that directs the construction of life using these blue prints, so I asked again what is responsible in inputting that initial information through genetics into the brain?

Leo says; that simple systems become more complex is a simple consequence of my second axiom, namely that all effects are preceded by causes

Effect and causes, causes forms our experiences, the similar line of question still remains, what and why the effect?

-- Updated August 5th, 2014, 8:09 am to add the following --

Intent and purpose comes into play, these two elements comes into reasoning and questioning.

Do we understand our intent and purpose ?? wether indivually or collectively.

[Obvious Leo]

When we talk of something like 'the bit within our skulls', we are clearly engaged in the process of objectification. That is, we are placing ourselves in the role of being 'the observer', who is analysing or looking at 'the thing which does the thinking' - the brain, as object of knowledge. That seems natural - for the naturalist. 'Hey, what's in there? What is doing that?' OK, I am being a bit facetious there. But it seems to me that this whole approach is wrong-headed from the start. And 'the start' in this case, goes back several hundred years, to Comte, and Positivism, and the general impulse to subject philosophical questions to scientific scrutiny.

Perfect agreement. Although the natural philosopher unifies science and philosophy as the same discipline, he still needs different tools for the object under study. For example, we can learn much about the way that the human eye detects light by studying the physical structures of the eyeball. This will tell us nothing about human perception because we don't see with our eyes, we see with our minds. I don't regard reductionism as useless by any means, I simply mean that by its very nature it is non-explanatory.

Stand back a bit more from the whole panorama of brain science, physics and the rest. What is the nature of thinking? Who is it that thinks? Actually all of what we need to inquire directly into such questions is available right before us, in our own minds and bodies. No equipment, no apparatus, is necessary for that. What is necessary is the ability to pay very close attention to the reality of our existence. I think that, along with a few other things, is what 'philosophy' really ought to mean, but I think it is generally lost sight of, in our fascination with science and technology.

Once again complete agreement. Standing outside and looking in is a very natural thing to do, and this is the "observer problem" in physics. The universe has no outside so the observer observes the world from inside out, in other words from the present into the past. I've spoken of this before, and gave a silly contrived example, but this is physical law and a straightforward conclusion from a finite speed of light. When the mind constructs a Cartesian space this is what it's doing, looking into the past of its external environment. In the case of cognition a similar thing occurs except that we're looking into our internal environment. We can't be aware of a thought before we've thought it. Although we intuitively conflate awareness and cognition together they are two entirely separate things and they are separated by time, as the Libet experiments have shown, usually about 200 milliseconds for simple cognition. We decide to get up for a glass of water before we become aware of having made this decision. So what!! The "hard problem" and the homunculus and the soul and Descartes' facetious dualism are just bogus Newtonian thinking. Events occur in time, not in space, which means they occur sequentially. Simple cause and effect means that effects are preceeded by causes and can't be contemporaneous with them. Awareness is just an effect because it is the perception of its own cause. With bi-directional causation the confusion evaporates. Non-linearity simply means that the thought causes its own awareness and the awareness causes the next thought. The causal chain, both up and down, is staggeringly complex but not mysterious.

All this is just the observer problem all over again. We can't examine the mind from the outside looking in and I regard all the various manifestations of these age-old questions as simply cock-headed Newtonian thinking. The Buddhist knows all about looking at the world from inside out, so you should know this better than most, Q, although Buddhism is not free of reductionism and neither is it free of Ptolemaic rationalising.

I have little interest in the Anglo-American analytic philosophers and not much more in current Continental philosophers, or in philosophy as it is now taught at University.

Although I've read them all I concur completely. Western philosophy has advanced little since Plato, although Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza all made useful contributions to drawing Plato out a little more clearly. I also have quite a regard for Russell, who understood the philosophical flaws in classical mathematics very well, although he was born too early to be able to resolve them. If I were to pick a major source of influence from philosophy I'd probably go for the Persians, my beloved autodidacts and polymaths. I also have an enormous regard for Albert Einstein, the most intuitive natural philosopher of them all. His genius lay in his instincts and his epitaph will be one of his own famous quotes " It is a miracle that human creativity can survive formal education." It didn't. The miracle didn't happen for Albert, but he nevertheless bequeathed humanity its two greatest gifts in the history of science, one in each of his models. SR gave us the equivalence of matter and energy while GR gave us the equivalence of time and gravity. The confected Minkowski spacetime disallowed him from seeing that all four of these could also be unified and quantised equivalently. The story of Albert Einstein is both farce and tragedy and I can't help regretting that Voltaire is no longer around to write it. The unification of Albert's two great unifications is what my philosophy does, and I can prove it quite unambiguously and exquisitely simply. It is this proof which has been holding be up for some years because I fully understand my obligations if I am to expect my model to be regarded as a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Now I know you're not necessarily going to get that idea. But I think you ought to look more into the Buddhist side of Maturana and Varela. You know Varela was one of the founding members of the Mind~Life Institute, which is chaired by the Dalai Lama. That is why I pointed you to that page of William Irwin Thomson. Here is an image of Varela discussing some aspect of brain science with the Dalai Lama:

I studied Buddhism quite extensively as a young man, in no small part because it was fashionable to do so, and I followed where it led into many other eastern philosophies. Without question such modes of thinking changed me and informed the way I subsequently read the western philosophies. That it didn't happen the other way around was entirely a matter of circumstance, but one I've always been grateful for. The fog of classicist thinking lifted only slowly but it lifted inexorably. However,Q, there can be no question that Buddhism is teleological, and therefore reductionist by definition. Life can have no purpose any more than the universe can have a purpose. Purpose is a construction of the human mind and thus only minds can have purpose. Many allow others to define their purpose for them, but to the natural philosopher once again this is reductionist. To this inveterate contrarian the mind must define its own purpose and anything less is a cop-out.

The universe didn't have to exist! Of course, being a 'natural philosopher', you assume its existence, and that is quite a safe assumption. But notice that this is what it is.

"It is what it is" is one of those fashionable slogans which should be tattooed on everyone's forehead. I am not a contrived simulation which exists in the mind of an omnipotent "other". If I were unable to accept that I live in the world of reality then I would have put an end to the charade long ago.

What I have opened up there, is a discussion of the nature of meaning, representation, and syntax, and the like, and how that could be 'explained' with reference to 'electrochemical processes' in the brain. It is actually a very direct way of short-circuiting thousands of words of tortuous neuro-babble. I say it again: consider the relation between such things as syntax, rational inference, grammar, and representation, and the 'hardware' of the brain. If you think you can account for those things, on the basis of neural chemistry, then you have far too much work to do, to be engaging in idle chatter

I hope I've managed to answer most of this above. I have plenty of work to do, Q, a fact I am keenly aware of, but I don't regard this as idle chatter. Ideas do not evolve in a vacuum and the currency of ideas is words. I join forums such as this to get feedback, which we biologists call selection factors, because feedback not only refines one's ideas but it also forces one to learn how to express them. Plato had most of philosophy sorted out millennia ago but he also gave us the greatest tool for our craft. The Dialogue.

Regards Leo