Dear "Everything List" (and "Psyche-B"),
Here is the promised 'fundamental principle of the Chalmers kind'. Note:
there is no magical emergence here. There is no panpsychism here. There is
no dualism here.
If there is apparent logical circularity, it is of a kind far less
problematic than alternate views in that it includes empirical
self-refutation. It is scientifically quite reasonable although rather
unique in that science _itself_ has to change, NOT discover any new
natural laws - it merely has to properly understand the difference between
description and explanation and that each is valid science in its own
domain. The former domain is description of the behaviour of appearances,
the latter domain is descriptions of underlying structure predictive of
the appearances themselves. That they were ever the one scientific domain
has been our mistake all along.
You will find apparent contradiction in what lies below. In one place a
'constitutive primitive' is required. At that same time an 'atomistic'
explanation is later eschewed. That these two positions can be held
simulataneously seems a contradiction.... but that is not the case... and
the reasons are the subtlties contained in (5) below - the 'constitutive
primitive' is not a thing, but an event that acts 'as-if' it was a thing -
or that appears behaving 'thingly' to us. Things are thus all 'as-if' or
virtual constructs.
I do not claim TPONOG to be perfect... I claim it merely to be somewhere
closer to the right answer than any we have thus far and is completely
seamlessly compatible with all science done thus far.
If you follow where this principle points, as i have for many
years...through physics to chemistry to cell biology to cognition and
phsychology.... you end up being predictive of what is going on in brain
material and in particular the source of its phenomenal contents.
Firstly: You end up concluding that the universe is a form of 'wild-type'
calculus - (literally a mathematics..and the ONLY instantated
mathematics).
Secondly: They key to understanding how brain material generates
phenomenal consciousness, given that all appears merely as space and
charge with some mass options attached, making it a quintessentially
electromagnetic condensed phase phenomenon.... is the realisation that
describing a universe in which electromagnetism of certain kinds delivers
phenomenal consciousness is NOT the description delivered BY phenomenal
consciousness....it is a separate but intimately inter-related description
of underlying structure.
You also get to understand why this issue has been so problematic (see (e)
below) for science....because...It is the deep phsyics of the biology of
excitable cells that holds the key empirical route to understanding what
the universe is made of (NOT observations of what happens in a
supercollider or in the cosmos though a telescope)....which means that the
top two "Science" journal June '05' issue '125' questions:
1) What is the universe made of?
2) What is the biological basis of consciousness?
are actually the same question, have their empirical evidence in brain
material, and the only reason we haven't answered them both already is
that (1) was posed by cosmologists, (2) was posed by neuroscientists and
the twain simply do not meet, for no good reason than historical accident
and scientific culture - for the cosmologists handed the neuroscientists
their explanatory toolkit centuries ago and haven't been back since.
Neuroscience has all the evidence and can't see it. Cosmologists have the
purview and can;t see any evidence! A cultural problem of the 'chinese
puzzle' kind.
I have CC'd this to the Psyche-B list. It is highly relevant to them and I
thought they may be interested in the discussion and might appreciate a
critical gnaw on a juicy bone. To me, a 'Theory of Everything' and the
process of sorting out consciousness are necessarily unified scientific
activities. In that unification the answers await us.
regards,
Colin Hales
=========================================================
The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis (Version_0)
"It is a fundamentally necessary and implicit fact of the natural world,
regardless of any particular constitutive structural primitive(s)
comprising the natural world that any persistent collaborative subset of
them, say X, howsoever organised and howsoever considered in any arbitrary
grouping, creates an innate perspective from the point of view of being
such a collection; a perspective that is necessarily of the remainder of
the natural world, not_X".
Remarks
1. The principle is quite general. No particular constitutive primitive
has been assumed.
2. The principle says absolutely nothing about the visibility of that
innate perspective. The visibility circumstances, character and content
are entirely separate considerations with options dependent upon the
particular constitutive primitives under consideration and their
particular arrangement.
3. The entire collection of constitutive primitive(s) literally is the
universe (the natural world).
4. The entire collection of constitutive primitive(s) is what Kant called
the noumenon or the 'ding an sich'. Others (such as Ernst Mach) might call
it the 'underlying natural world' or 'underlying reality'.
5. The simple approach to this is that 'being' occurs at the moment any
persistent structure (say X) arises, for in so doing it implicitly
automatically and naturally creates everything that is not that structure
(not_X). Automatically created at that instant is a perspective of not_X
from the point of view of X and vice versa, for not_X must be as
persistently expressed as X, or neither would exist. This necessarily
precludes any and all atomistic formulations of constitutive primitives.
Put more simply: the only viable constitutive primitives are events, not
things.
6. The event of the coming into existence (coalescence, condensation or
coherence) of any persistent structure X within a total collection of
constitutive primitives, U, cannot occur without perfect symmetrical
cooperation from all of the rest of the constitutive primitive(s) not_X.
Put another way, X and not_X exist as perfectly inverse equals that
literally express each other.
7. The principle makes no claim that all matter involves some form of mind
or that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind or that
the constituents of the universe are sentient in any way. No such claims
are needed. In particular Cartesian 'mind stuff' is unnecessary and
irrelevant. As such the principle cannot be said to be panpsychism.
However, it would seem to have panpsychist characteristics in that the
resultant properties involved in the creation of mind are naturally built
into the circumstances of the fabric of the universe.
Some rough corollaries:
a) It is intrinsically meaningless that the constitutive primitive(s)
themselves may ever be directly revealed in any contrived perspective view
provided through making use of the potential for rendering the perspective
visible in some fashion.
b) As a result of a), it can be asserted that all empirical laws are
descriptions of the behaviour of the contents of a visible perspective
view thus provided and that the process of provision of empirical laws
fundamentally includes the perspective view (literally: the constitutive
primitives that render a perspective visible) within its descriptions. The
generalisations that are empirical laws can never stand alone outside the
context of the empiricist (observer).
c) As a result of b). Empirical laws play no causal role in the
machinations of the universe, nor does the observer play any active role
in creation of the universe. This role is under the sole purview of the
interactions of the constitutive primitive(s). This makes all empirical
(mathematical) models of the universe causally inert and merely metaphor
for constitutive primitive behaviour in certain aggregations.
d) As layers of organisation are stripped away (eg humanity, human, organ,
tissue, cell, molecule, atom, atomic particle, subatomic particle......an so
on), any visible perspective view of the behaviour of the remaining
organisational layers shall necessarily reveal visible behaviour more
closely aligned with to the behaviour of the real underlying constitutive
primitive(s). This process shall act as a guide to the most likely forms
of the class of viable constitutive primitive(s) involved in the universe
in which humans are embedded.
e) Because we know that, from the perspective of being a human, that there
most definitely is a perspective view of the rest of the universe, we
necessarily exist in a universe constructed of constitutive primitive(s)
of a kind that enables the visible perspective possible when such
constitutive primitives are organised in the fashion it self-reveals as
brain material. That perspective view is what we call 'phenomenal
consciousness'. As a result of a), b), c) we can also conclude that
science constrained to contents of consciousness, such as 'The Neural
Correlates of Consciousness' paradigm, will never explain phenomenal
consciousness because it is a meaningless expectation based on the
assumption that constitutive primitives and contents of consciousness are
identities.
==================================================================
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Received on Sat Jun 23 2007 - 23:52:49 PDT