Neuroscience and free will

I said: "I agree that the mere existence of a descriptive law does not somehow oblige the universe to have event X always happen according to the description."

That sounds like agreement with the proposition at issue then.

I'm not sure. Do we agree that the existence of the descriptive law does not oblige the universe to have event X always happen that way, yet it is possible that the event does, in fact, always happen that way?

Those additions (italicised) implicitly contradict that which precedes them: the reason why it is not possible that the events "had to" happen the way that they did is because the laws are descriptive and not prescriptive. To tack onto the contention then that it is "just because the law is possible to develop" is to obfuscate the fact that it is because the laws are not prescriptive (because they are, in fact, descriptive). So, the additions are misleading and have no place here.

What do you mean by "the reason why it is not possible that the events 'had to' happen the way that they did"? Of course it's possible they had to happen that way. It's just that the descriptive law can't be the reason why they had to happen that way.

Do you mean this?

Because the laws are descriptive and not prescriptive, the laws do not contribute to any possible physical reason why the events must have occurred the way they did.

So, no, there doesn't seem to be anything preventing your agreement. Thus, I put the proposition, which follows from previous propositions to which you have agreed, to you again:

The events described by laws do not happen necessarily.

Agreed?

Could you reword the statement without using the word "necessarily"?

~~ Paul

"Someone" reporting in for a reply...

Here's what Paul wrote:


Paul, apparently you did not even read the original article, Popper contra computationalism, to which Sci linked, because it addressed this sort of thing in making the distinction between the "expressive function" aka the "natural meaning" of language, the "signaling function" aka the "functional meaning" of language, and then the two functions which formed the basis of its argument, the "descriptive" and "argumentative" functions of language.

It seems that you haven't done your homework...

Indeed, I did not read the article recently. I'm focused primarily on the conversation with you. I'll worry about the meaning of meaning some other day.

(Meanwhile, it sounds like you could answer my questions.

It depends to a great degree on how you define meaning. If a simple organism can detect light, is it fair to say that the light detection apparatus has the meaning "light in that direction"? Or do you require that it be able to somehow state the meaning of X without actually experiencing/doing X? Does the meaning have to be symbolic? If so, let's say that organism also has a simple neural mechanism that can act like a latch: When the light detection apparatus detects light, the latch is set and lasts in that state for 1 minute. Does the latch represent the light symbolically?)

~~ Paul

What I'm trying to understand is whether Laird believes there are no necessary events.

~~ Paul

It would be interesting to know the answer to that question, as well as a response to your earlier comments that atoms don't contain tornados or computation, yet we have tornados and computers.

I also await to see whether your latch is symbolic of light. You may need to add a second subject into the scenario.

Linda

It makes no difference if I cannot lay out an impossibly complex causal sequence that creates semantic content. The question is: Why would you assume that there is no such sequence?

What to you mean by an affordance? Are you talking about an environmental affordance? Are you asking how semantic content could be useful?

~~ Paul

Here again, is the link  to affordance .  https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27002

Semantic content is very useful to living things in expressing themselves both functionally and socially.  I would consider the semantic content of DNA/RNA/Ribosomes essential for life.

I assume, to a very low degree of probability, that some crazy-ass complex arrangement of stuff, undetected by the Materials Science of the last 300 years, completely explains mind with a physical model.  The theory is not likely to be natural, because there is a very simple way that information science can frame -how it can work in nature.  

I have heard nothing but metaphysical reasons to support your belief.

Occam Razor cuts "promissory materialism clean" out of the realm of data-based science.

Semantic content is very useful to living things in expressing themselves both functionally and socially.  I would consider the semantic content of DNA/RNA/Ribosomes essential for life.

Does DNA contain semantic content in and of itself, or only because humans understand how DNA encodes proteins?

I assume, to a very low degree of probability, that some crazy-ass complex arrangement of stuff, undetected by the Materials Science of the last 300 years, completely explains mind with a physical model.  The theory is not likely to be natural, because there is a very simple way that information science can frame -how it can work in nature.

I don't understand the second sentence. Note that science has failed to explain consciousness with a physical model and philosophy has failed to explain it with any other model.

I have heard nothing but metaphysical reasons to support your belief.

Which belief?

Occam Razor cuts "promissory materialism clean" out of the realm of data-based science.

I have no idea what this means. Nor do I understand why promissory materialism is any less interesting than promissory philosophy.

~~ Paul

Yes, exactly. It brings both under the same umbrella. Note though that this goal is set in the context of a discussion with a physicalist, borrowing the conceptual framework of another physicalist or at least atheist (Prof. Swartz), with the higher goal of demonstrating why/how free will is viable/unproblematic even under physicalist assumptions (which Prof. Swartz affirms) - at least, to the extent that it is or can be manhandled into being.

Thus, in this framework, GCDEs are merely descriptive (and hence not prescriptive) - from which follow certain... uncomfortable... consequences for the physicalist (but which are not uncomfortable for Prof. Swartz, who embraces them). Those consequences are slowly becoming apparent in this thread...

Ah I need to read the Prof. Swartz stuff in more detail. Admittedly I also think a lot of what we're saying is "immaterialist" only insofar as "materialist" refers to a particular reductionist paradigm.

The material[ism] of varied older civilizations/cultures would accommodate much of what we've said regarding causation.

Yes, I think so. I think it is useful under both physicalism and the consciousness-based causation paradigm for which you are advocating to dissolve the distinction between those "conditional 'laws'" whose conditions pick out many (or all) events and those which pick out only one: in both cases the distinction is unjustified - in the case of physicalism because nothing necessitates the events in either case, and in the case of consciousness-based causation because the same fundamental ontological agent (consciousness) 'selects' events (/GCDEs) in both cases.

Under other paradigms which are less... "causally monistic" I guess is the word... it might be less useful to blur this distinction.

I wonder if we need a public google page for references...even for myself I need to keep doubling back...

As I've acknowledged throughout this thread: yes, it's hard to imagine what else could bind them, but then, we philosophising humans are not always known for the infallibility of our imaginations. Just ask Quentin Meillassoux about Immanuel Kant...

This paper might be of interest...I am working my way through it but it does give a proposal for something "agent-like" that isn't an agent...

But is that really any different than that which you're proposing and I'm supporting in this exchange? I mean, couldn't "acting as a cause unto themselves at the same time as making relevant a chain of efficient causes" be reasonably interpreted as that which we've "alternatively" suggested: supplying an original inner/final cause, which 'fossilises' into an efficient cause, from out of their own beings?

I'm open to the idea that it is different, but perhaps you can elaborate further as to how/why.

To elaborate on the difficulty I'm having, nothing in the following quote seems to contradict the potential I see for the libertarian perspective to be compatible with however you'd label the one you're advancing:

It does seem to come down to explaining things from the right perspective, but I do think too much writing about free will accepts the causal picture assumed by modernity. [So] I think the difference is placing the agent in a world where the rest of causation works very similarly to the conscious decision maker. Why I wanted to start with something simple originally, like a brick going through a window - the ideal is to have the seemingly miraculous folded into a picture of the world entire - sort of like Kripal saying the Supernatural is instead Super Natural.

Re that which I've emboldened: I really like this. Maybe I'm becoming a little rhetorically audacious, but... it suggests "an eternal unfolding" or a "perpetual self-actualisation" - there is a sense of recursion there: past choices are not definitive but rather feed into an ongoing process in which the self reveals itself - or rather becomes itself.

This actually is very much Whitehead's philosophy, this continual growth via self-actualization of the individuals but also all of the Real.

That's the joy of good and genuine ideas - you find them mirrored in different words by different people.

It's also what I think can realistically be accomplished on a forum - synthesizing writers who may have prior commitments to positions like theism/atheism of a certain kind.

Oh, my comment was specifically and solely related to the adjective "predictive" in "predictive modeling". I was simply flagging (amenability to) "predictability" as taking us out of the metaphysics and ontology of causation and into its epistemology. I wasn't intending to detract from your idea of "neither absolutely necessary nor absolutely contingent", nor of your suspicion that our complete picture will draw upon material and formal causation, all of which is purely metaphysical/ontological and does not depend on epistemology. I just think that it's helpful to separate out issues of metaphysics/ontology from those of epistemology.

Nicely put.

Thanks!

I posted that little sketch because I'm quite sure human consciousness evolved, regardless of whether there are some mental properties of matter. I very much doubt that full-blown human consciousness is a fundamental property. But primarily I was asking what people mean by meaning and symbology.

~~ Paul

I suggest a basic reading of a modern semiotic expert.  C. S. Peirce is were modern concepts begin.

 Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semiotics, which he also called semeiotics, meaning the philosophical study of signs, in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. ... This specific type of triadic relation is fundamental to Peirce's understanding of "logic as formal semiotic".

 n 1886, he (Peirce) saw that Boolean calculations could be carried out via electrical switches,[10] anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years.

Symbology is really not a course of study.

 
Harvard: No Symbology Here
By Macy Halford
September 15, 2009

Why are there no professors of symbology in the world?
John Langdon, the professor of typography who is also the inspiration for Dan Brown’s super-sleuth Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard, explained yesterday onSlate that all the real-life academics who pursue lines of study similar to the fictional Langdon’s—interpreting religious iconography, deciphering codes made of symbols—already have perfectly fine titles to describe what they do. So we have “professors of religious iconography,” “professors of cryptography,” and plain-old “art historians.”

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and I even know someone who teaches philosophy of symbolic forms.
Symbology vs the verity of encoded protein assembly instructions (that have functional meaning and are modeled in detail) is like a Marvel Comics story vs Cal Tech PhD course.

I suggest a basic reading of a modern semiotic expert.  C. S. Peirce is were modern concepts begin.

What does he have to say about DNA?

~~ Paul

What does he have to say about DNA?

~~ Paul

As he died in 1914, I'm guessing he would have little to say about DNA.

However, this turn in the conversation has triggered some deja vu for me and I'm pretty sure, without looking, that we went over this same ground in that long debate on DNA code with LoneShaman on the Skeptiko forum. I seem to remember posting something about Biosemiotics in relation to the DNA code. Here's something from Howard Pattee that might (once again) be relevant.

Biosemiotics recognizes that life is distinguished from inanimate matter by its dependence on material construction under the control of coded symbolic description. This distinction between matter and symbol extends from the origin of life throughout all of evolution to the distinction in philosophy between brain and mind and the distinction in physics between laws and measurements. These distinctions are an epistemic necessity that separates the knower from the known. The origin of life requires understanding the origin of symbolic control and how inanimate molecules becomes a message. 


...

Physics usually assumes human observers. The origin of life question is: How did this separation, this epistemic cut, originate? As Hoffmeyer (2000) has pointed out, the apparently sharp epistemic cut between these categories makes it difficult to imagine how life began and how these two categories evolved at higher levels. The epistemic cut appears to be a conceptual as well as a topological discontinuity. It is difficult to imagine a gradual cut. The problem arises acutely with the genetic code. A partial code does not work, and a simple code that works as it evolves is hard to imagine. In fact, this is a universal problem in evolution and even in creative-thought. How does a complex functioning set of constraints originate when no subset of the constraints appears to maintain the function? How does a reversible dynamics gradually become an irreversible thermodynamics? How does a paradigm shift from classical determinism to quantum indeterminism occur gradually? At least in the case of thought we can trace some of the history, but in the origin of life we have no adequate history. Even in the case of creative thought, so much goes on in the subconscious mind that the historical trace has large gaps.I will state at the outset that I have not solved this problem. In fact, even after decades of effort I have not made much progress other than clarifying the problem.

What does he have to say about DNA?

~~ Paul

Peirce is deceased, so he doesn't have anything specific to say at this time.  

  Biosemiotics claims that the genetic code (1) is a real code and (2) has been the first of a long series of organic codes that have shaped the history of life on our planet. The reality of the genetic code and the existence of other organic codes imply that life is based on two fundamental processes--copying and coding--and this in turn implies that evolution took place by two distinct mechanisms, i.e., by natural selection (based on copying) and by natural conventions (based on coding). It also implies that the copying of genes works on individual molecules, whereas the coding of proteins operates on collections of molecules, which means that different mechanisms of evolution exist at different levels of organization. This review intends to underline the scientific nature of biosemiotics, and to this purpose, it aims to prove (1) that the cell is a real semiotic system, (2) that the genetic code is a real code, (3) that evolution took place by natural selection and by natural conventions, and (4) that it was natural conventions, i.e., organic codes, that gave origin to the great novelties of macroevolution. Biological semiosis, in other words, is a scientific reality because the codes of life are experimental realities. The time has come, therefore, to acknowledge this fact of life, even if that means abandoning the present theoretical framework in favor of a more general one where biology and semiotics finally come together and become biosemiotics. -Marcello Barbieri

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...ng_of_life

Some others with biosemiotics creds:
https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/p...-Alexander

 Biosemiotics discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be integrated into the scientific study of nature. This groundbreaking book shows how the linguistic powers of humans imply that consciousness emerges in the evolutionary process and that life is based on sign action, not just molecular interaction. Biosemiotics will be essential reading for anyone interested in the nexus of linguistic possibility and biological reality.

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books...32926.html