Hi Brent,

 

   A number of issues here to sort things out. First, there is the Howard Pattee “line of thought,” which is considering the concept of “epistemic cuts” and the role of semiotic/information processing systems in the universe at large and its implications for understanding things like life, consciousness, language, knowledge and the quantum world.  The second line of thought is my interpretation of Pattee’s concept of semiotics and the epistemic cut via the ToK map, shared again here:

 

My point was that when you do that, you see that issues pertaining to quantum mechanics are indeed quite different than issues pertaining to life/cells (or mind/neuro or culture/language). Bottom line: to the extent to which you are saying they are different, I don’t think you get much disagreement from me or likely Pattee, for that matter---however, both do involve some tricky issues between knower(observer) and known(observed). Also, although the relationship between information and the physical world is complicated, I generally agree with you. Energy is the first substance in the ToK language system, and it is the “ultimate common denominator,” from which everything emerges, starting at T = I Planck time and the subsequent unfolding of the Big Bang. What might contribute to some confusion here is that we need concepts to even begin talking/thinking/knowing, and so in that sense, semiotics is “prior” or already part of the equation as soon as we make any claim. That is to know anything at all (including knowing about energy), requires information. I have grown in my understanding on this issue via the distinction between ontology and ontic reality. The former refers to our ideas about reality and how we make sense of it (i.e., the scientific semiotics), the latter refers more directly to the “thing-itself” (the actual thing on the ToK represented by Big Bang). For me, the ontic reality at T = 1 Planck time is Energy, not information. That said, information is a powerful and tricky concept. For example, the deep relationship between information states and 2^nd Law is such that information is a fascinating and foundational concept.  

 

Switching to your point about Dennett, I was never a big fan of Dennett’s work on qualia or his book Consciousness Explained (I MUCH prefer his other works, especially Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), and I agree with the critics that a better title would have been Consciousness Explained Away. As I have noted, I am in complete agreement with the basic Representational Qualia Theory set of claims.

 

I find it much easier to understand qualia via a naturalistic functional representations of animal-environment relationships. This fits directly into what I would call the neuro-cognitive functionalist view of the mind, which I support. This is the idea that the nervous system is an information processing/communication system that coordinates the action of the animal as a whole. In this model, qualia special kinds of representation, namely they the “experienced parts” of a functional representational-guidance system. Integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory are consistent with this model.

 

There are, of course, many and important unanswered questions that come with this view. First, we know that much neuro-cognitive functional representation can take place without qualia, so one functional question is: What does qualia/perceptual experience accomplish? (i.e., Couldn’t animals have just been robots or zombies with no experience of the world?) Like many, I believe that the functional answer will have to do with a central processing and integration function. Namely that qualia/sentient experience allow for “whole brain-animal” communication and interface. Consider, for example, the claim, which I think is reasonable, that the most basic qualia may well be pleasure and pain. (i.e., the first felt experience of being may well have been a “withdrawal and felt-pain association process”). This is interesting because pleasure and pain can be thought of as “whole animal” signals to approach and avoid. Functionally, the experience of them may have been nature’s way of generating a centralized and global communication/coordination (or reaction) system.

 

The evolved functional analysis view does not do much with the hard problem of sentience, which is the “how to build it” or “the engineering problem”. This is problem of exactly “how and why” the neurophysiological behavioral processes result in the first person experience of being. What are the specifiable mechanics that cause my first person view of the world to come on line? As far as I can tell, we only have “neuro-correlational” knowledge about this question, and not much in the way of neuro-causation knowledge. We know that some parts of the brain are involved in some aspects of consciousness. For example, Dahaene and colleagues developed a strong line of research that showed that self-report of a perceptual experience is correlated with a particular kind of 300 millisecond ignition wave of neurological impulses. That is, when someone flashed something very fast, and they can’t see it half the time, but can see it another half, when they see it, there is a clear signature of a back and forth neuro-informational waves between various parts of the parietal and frontal lobe that happens at around 1/3 of a second post image flash. That is super cool. But we have no idea how that kind of wave would ignite perceptual experience, as opposed to other waves (e.g., why does the 300 ms wave do it?). In short, we just don’t know what it is about the neuro-electro-chemical wave activity of brains that could produce a subjective experience. But we have made much progress and boxed lots of things in.

 

Best,
Gregg   

 

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Brent Allsop
Sent: Sunday, May 12, 2019 12:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The "Epistemic Cut", Semiotics, and relationship between Matter and Information

 

Yes, very interesting.  A few questions, though.  I understand stuff like this:

 

‘”This refers to the “unavoidable conceptual separation of the knower and the known” or the difference between “the symbolic record of an event and the event itself””

 

But then you include what seems contradictory to me:

 

“observer/observed entanglement”?

 

Doesn’t “entanglement” imply non separation?  Why even bring up quantum entanglement, at all in any of this?

 

I understand:

 

“the symbolic record of an event and the event itself”

 

But this is very different:

 

“[the] relationship between Matter and Information”

 

It seems to be a very popular idea that information could be more primal than matter.  But to me this seems to be a very mistaken and naive bleating of the heard.  You can’t have information of any kind, unless there is something, physical, that instantiates that information, right?

 

This same bleating seems to be repeating in the consciousness consensus project.  There are far more participants in the “qualia emerge from function”  or that function / information is more fundamental than matter or qualia.  Even IF matter or qualia emerged from some kind of function or information, would this, itself, be a fundamental property of physical matter?  And how can qualia, information, or anything like that, exist, without there being some kind of matter that is that?

 

What is the ToK view on this?  Would supporters of the ToK be in anything other than the “no” camp on this “It from Bit” topic?  Would supporters of the ToK be in anything other than the “no” camp on this “Softare = Qualia” topic?

 

I just don’t understand why so many people seem so compelled to try so hard to fit information, or substrate independent function at a more primal / fundamental level than physical matter, when what we objectively observe seems so obviously in opposition to that.  I see no difference between these views and the people that are so compelled to believe the earth is flat, or the earth is the center of the solar system…

 

To think that there can be information or knowledge, without there being something physical that instantiates that information is terribly damaging heresy.  For example, this leads to absurd claims like Dennett makes: “We don’t have qualia, it only seems like we do.”.  If it wasn’t for this kind of heresy, people wouldn’t be so lost, trying to think consciousness is so crazy and “hard”….  And nonphysical / unapproachable via science.  How would the ToK stand on climes like: “We don’t have qualia, it just seems like we do?”

 

 

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 4:43 AM nysa71 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

Gregg,

Very interesting. When you describe biosemiotics, I can't help but think that it sounds similar to what Jung was trying to describe with his archetypes and collective unconscious. Is that a fair comparison?

~ Jason Bessey

On Saturday, May 11, 2019, 10:11:24 AM EDT, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

 

Hi TOK List,

 

  I spent yesterday afternoon reading an interesting book, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Consciousness Instinct. For those who don’t know, Michael Gazzaniga is a famous cognitive neuroscientist. He worked with Roger Sperry on split brain patients and is famous for his “interpreter function” of the left hemisphere. I discuss an early book of his here.

 

  I was finding his newest book interesting, but a bit tedious as the first half is essentially a review of ideas about consciousness, such that I did not learn much. But it took a fascinating turn in chapter 7, which was on the physics concept of complementarity (wave particle duality and observer/observed entanglement) and accelerated in an interesting way in the next chapter on “Nonliving to Living and Neurons to Mind”. He reviews the work of Howard Pattee, who is a retired theoretical physicist turned biologist who pioneered work on biosemiotics and what he called the “epistemic cut.” This refers to the “unavoidable conceptual separation of the knower and the known” or the difference between “the symbolic record of an event and the event itself”. Attached is the page from Gazzaniga’s book that describes it. Here is another description of the epistemic cut, also called “the schnitt”. I had never heard of the term before, but I am very happy to learn of it.

 

  Here is the basics of what Gazzaniga ends up offering, which I think we can make clear with the ToK: Via complementarity and diving into a basic understanding of quantum mechanics following the work of Pattee, Gazzaniga highlights that there is an object/subject duality everywhere. At the level of the quantum, there is the problem of entanglement and superposition. At the level of Life, it refers to how cells operate based on semiotics (i.e., are information processing and communication systems). For some good quotes on how Pattee views the world, see here:  http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/. Here is a choice one:

 

It is my central idea that the essence of the matter-symbol problem and the measurement or recording problem must appear at the origin of living matter. Symbols and records have existed since life existed. If this view is correct, then it is a more hopeful strategy to begin by asking what we mean by the first primitive record rather than question what we mean by our most sophisticated and abstract records. In effect, this strategy forces us to make an objective criterion for a recording process.

 

Why am I excited about this? A couple of reasons. First, given the connections between Gazzaniga’s Interpreter and JUST, especially the JH, he is headed toward a conception of human self-consciousness that lines up directly with the ToK version. But what he is doing is going deep, through neuro-mental objective/subjective sentience, into the layer of the cell, and into quantum mechanics (much like John Torday does). By following Gazzaniga’s line of thought (following Pattee), I can see clearly that what he is advocating for connects deeply to two of the things the ToK System does, that other systems of knowledge do not.

 

  First, unlike all other systems, the ToK INCLUDES the human knower-known epistemic cut. That is, it includes what I call the “H” Factor, which is the Human Knower. The most direct way it achieves this is because of the Justification Hypothesis and systems theory. (Please note here that a theory of knowledge, epistemology, and a theory of justification are almost identical. Via JUST placed on the ToK, I can place the evolution of social into formal into scientific epistemology in context of the universe—see slide two).

 

  Second, the ToK also includes a very specifiable relationship between information/communication/semiotics and the natural, Newtonian, lawfully determined world. That is, it frames and describes the relationship between energy, matter, information, and scientific knowledge in a way that no other system does.

 

  See the attached ToK diagram (slide 1), which places the word “semiotics” at the joint points, because that is another way of conceiving the joint point. That is, Life is Bio-semiotics, Mind is neuro-semiotics, Culture is Language-Semiotics. And then there is the semiotics of scientific knowledge. Enlightenment 1.0 was based in an inert, general, view-from-nowhere knower that could simply observe the fully, lawfully determined behavior that was completely reversable across time. However, this is NOT how the actual world works. The actual world of scientific knowledge embedded in the universe requires clarity about the nature and place of the epistemic cut. The ToK shows us how to do that. It shows us where the Science Human Knower is in the universe of behavior (the “H” factor), and it shows were the observer/observed relations are, from the quantum to the living to the mental to the cultural and to the meta-Cultural knower.  Indeed, the bottom lists “quantum semiotics” as a way to note that physicists had to develop a completely different language system to talk about the science of quantum mechanics (what Alexander calls quantum organics).

 

  My pitch is that with the ToK (Unified Metaphysical Empirical Language) System we finally have a truly holistic picture of the knower/known relationship across the various levels and dimensions of complexity. Thus, we can bridge the epistemic cut and achieve greater clarity on the deepest conceptual problems that have plagued scientists and philosophers since formal epistemologies emerged on the scene in the Axial Age.

Best,
Gregg

 

 

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