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In 1958, Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger published a small book
entitled "Mind and Matter", wherein he provides a solution to the age-
old dualism of body and mind, which can be discussed in this thread.
Before entering one might read what has already been written in the
preceding threads on "mental causation“, “artificial intelligence“ and
"the hard problem":
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6339202163360784388
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6340564349463117826
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6318195368953810945
Part I
Dan:
Hans-Joachim, I am glad that you posted this. I recently read this
piece in response to our conversations about the role of quantum
physics in explanations of consciousness. I found no indication in
there that Schrödinger felt that quantum phenomena offered a means
of explaining consciousness, or understanding the supposed "Hard
Problem". He rejects dualism early on, and without dualism there is no
"hard problem".
This should be the full set.
http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/religionandscience/mindandmatter.pdf
2
You might remember that I also maintained this simple truth. But here,
Schrödinger makes a subtle distinction: He says that the world "does
not become manifest by its mere existence."
Dan:
He goes on to say later that it makes no sense to speak of a world
that is not a world for a subject, and that goes back to his questioning
of the subject/object distinction. I'll be up to maintaining that there is
nothing "spooky" about the "observer effect". It just amounts to there
being no such thing as pure observation without any effect, at any
level of analysis, be it quantum, biological, sociological or cultural. We
are participants, not observers.
Hans-Joachim:
The same idea was caught by Heidegger without referring to quantum
physics: He spoke about the inexhaustibility of reality and the
astonishment over the fact that there are “open places”, where "nature
opens its eyes and notices that it is there". Without such testimony the
world would be a place of mere presence, closed in itself. So, we
might say that witnessing elevates simple presence to manifested
existence.
Dan:
"The nervous system is the place where our species is still engaged in
phyogenetic transformation: metaphorically speaking it is the
'vegetation top' of our stem. I would summarize my general
hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the 'learning' of the
living substance: its 'knowing how' is unconscious."
Hans-Joachim:
"consciousness is associated with the 'learning' of the living
substance"
Dan:
I'm partial to Emergentism. The problem with Panpsychism is that the
type of consciousness that is required to complete the system, as
something that is intertwined with matter at the deepest quantum level
and has existed through all eternity (or since the first Big Bang,
whichever came first) is so far removed from the notion of
consciousness that we usually employ in daily life that it is difficult, at
least for me, to see the two uses as referring to the same "thing".
What I like about Emergentism is not only it's naturalism, but - and this
is the part rabid spiritualists overlook - it's appeal to miracles, or
"singularities". Christian De Duve, in his account of the evolutionary
process, highlights "singularities". The development of Sex is a
"singularity". The development of the organelles, mitochondria and
chloroplasts, are "singularities" as was the emergence of the
Eukaryota from the Archea and Bacteria. Life is a line of very singular
events.
There is something suspicious in using the idea of "emergence" as an
explanation of origin. It just happened. In retrospect we could identify
the preconditions of the phenomena that "Emerged", but by definition,
we could not have predicted it. It is akin to the formation of a Gestalt.
I much prefer this idea of the unpredictable formation of pattern to the
notion of entelechy, in which the form is always already there, and
simply needs to be realized. That seems too static of a picture, and
doesn't square with the inherent unpredictability and spontaneity of life
and consciousness.
Hans-Joachim:
I agree that our problem of understanding cannot be captured by the
dichotomy of Emergentism versus Panpsychism.
In an earlier thread, we already dealt with Aristotelian versus
11
Hans-Joachim:
Today I found in our most renowned, national newspaper - the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) - a long article entitled "Wie
kommt der Geist in die Natur?" It's a translation from English, written
by the Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch, who is currently
at the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness as well as the
Center for Sleep and Consciousness of the University of Wisconsin-
Madison (which had been mentioned during our discussions
repeatedly). The original article was published April 6, 2017 in
Nautilus (=> http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious).
All the questions & queries we were dealing with during our combined
efforts in this forum are specified therein. This means more or less
that Panpsychism and dual-aspect monism have reached mainstream
media.
This is the FAZ-article:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/eine-loesung-fuer-das-
harte-problem-des-bewusstseins-15397757-p2.html?
printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_1
Regarding dual-aspect monism see
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Milan/papers/Dual-
aspect-Atmanspacher.pdf
Some weeks ago we discussed about Kant and the thing in itself. Now
this topic returns in the form of Arthur Schopenhauer’s succinct
response to Kant saying "We can know the thing-in-itself because we
are it" (you find it just after the headline "In order to give both
phenomena their proper due, a radical change of thinking is
15
required").
Actually, in Dual-Aspect Monism, the subject/object distinction is
elevated to a conception about intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of
matter. It reminds me of our discussion on Emergentism and
Panpsychism, finally finding Emergentist Panpsychism in the
literature. Similarly, we discussed Dualism and Monism, just to come
across Dual-Aspect Monism in the end.
It's about consciousness in a very general and basic sense, not in the
sense we use the word when we speak about humans. Regarding
that difference, she argues that it should be easier to see how to get
one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from
another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious
particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious
matter: The 'combination problem' should be less hard than the
original 'hard problem'.
Regarding dual-aspect monism, I referred to an article of H.
Atmanspacher. The title is "Dual-Aspect Monism à la Pauli and Jung".
W. Pauli was one of the founders of quantum physics. He became a
close friend of C.G. Jung in 1931/32, and their cooperation lasted for
decades.
Interestingly, Schrödinger quotes C.G. Jung in his third chapter (The
Principle of Objectivation, p 119): "All science, however, is a function
of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest
of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as
an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart
from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this
being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the
subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to
apparent non-existence." And then Schrödinger adds saying "Of
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http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?
pid=diva2%3A1046024&dswid=-6586
Panpsychism has been confronted with the mockery, that it would
imply even rocks to experience an interior psychic life with all the
conscious richness of human desires, fears, evaluations, thoughts,
emotions, choices, and dreams. To counter such (unjustified) attacks
the term Panexperientialism has been coined, which means that
individual cells, individual molecules, individual atoms, and even
individual subatomic particles, such as photons or electrons,
incorporate nothing but a capacity for ‘feeling’, i.e. a degree of
subjective interiority.
It is exactly this general interiority, which I had in mind, when I
conceptualized imaginary space(s) to coexist with physical space
everywhere. The basic idea is presented in my article "Sadhana and
Interiority“: http://www.crimsondawn.net/crimson7/node/315
(also contained in http://anandamargabooks.com/portfolio/crimson-dawn-
microvitum/ as well as in https://www.amazon.de/Microvita-Exploring-New-
Science-Reality/dp/1524691135).
I agree that particles can't experience anything except forces, which is
not self-evident, as we can imagine situations where an exposure to
forces doesn't mean necessarily to experience them. Suppose you
are lying in an operation theatre and the surgeon opens your belly.
The force that is applied on your tissues is the same, whether you are
conscious or not, i.e. whether you experience the pain or not.
Nevertheless, Panexperientialism maintains, that even subatomic
particles are able to experience the forces which they are exposed to.
21
read this chapter many years ago, and what I remembered of it, prior
to rereading it, was the notion of there being only one consciousness,
ultimately. When I reread it, what struck me was that Schrödinger
ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. He does not resolve the
antimony between the One and the many, and seems to suggest that
it is not resolvable:
"To me this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role
of mind. On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the
whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant
accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total
effect."
"(2) that energy and the experience of energy is one and cannot be
differentiated into its aspects"
I'm not sure. I think our understanding of the concept of energy is
based on our experience of energy, in the same way that our
understanding of the concept of "life" is based on our experience of
being alive. To think conceptually is to differentiate, but the basis of
our conceiving is our own experience.
Hans-Joachim:
Indeed, chapter 4 doesn't provide a positive outlook. Rather it's an
account of paradoxes, antinomies and absurdities. Most of all he
complains that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly
understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind,
the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in
it.
Nevertheless, I have two remarks:
Firstly, I think that Schrödinger’s „arithmetic paradox“ is actually
exactly the same as what Hedda Hassel Mørch calls „the combination
problem“. But while Schrödinger seems to be quite desperate, Hassel
Mørch has more hope to find a yet undiscovered solution.
Secondly, Schrödinger sees only two ways out of the described
dilemma, that is either Spinoza‘s or Leibniz‘s approach. While he
favors the former, he ridicules the latter from the very beginning. This
is understandable in light of the limited literature available at his time.
As we know meanwhile, however, Leibniz elaborated his thoughts in
letters, which he wrote to about 1.300 partners. Comprising 20.000,
they are all stored at the Leibnitz Archives in Hannover; only a fraction
of this material has been edited and published up to now. It is
expected that a complete edition will be available by the year 2050.
However, letters made available in the last 60 years already shed new
24
Hans-Joachim:
Dan - what you say is true, and there is hardly anything to add. Only
one thing: Leibniz's Monadology has been extended, and there is a
Quantum Monadology developed by Teruaki Nakagomi. His papers
can be found, next to other useful articles, in a periodical called
Neuroquantology (=> https://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/
journal/index).
Also, even, if you would like to read these 20.000 letters, you would
not be able to do so, as most of them are still unpublished. They have
been kept for 300 years in various archives, withstanding wars,
famines, firestorms etc.; so it needs a lot of care to prepare them for
publication.
In 2016, Leibniz's 300th obit was celebrated in Hannover, and I went
there to get a glimpse of it (=> https://www.flickr.com/photos/
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30954202@N05/31039335711/in/album-72157675343260882/).
In the 17th century, science and philosophy were not run in the way
as it is done nowadays. What I know about misconceptions and later
corrections on his Monadology is from Hubertus Busche's "Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz: Monadology", Akademie Verlag, 2009 (https://
www.amazon.de/Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Monadologie-Klassiker/dp/
3050043369).
I don't think that you can be more knowledgable about Leibniz's
philosophy than Busche, particularly as he didn't write the book alone,
rather it's a compilation of various authors...
Speaking disrespectful about him might reveal some lack of
understanding. Please consider that Leibniz may have been the first
computer scientist and information theorist. Early in life, he
documented the binary numeral system (base 2), then revisited that
system throughout his career. He anticipated Lagrangian interpolation
and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator
anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1961, Norbert
Wiener suggested that Leibniz should be considered the patron saint
of cybernetics.
In 1671, Leibniz began to invent a machine that could execute all four
arithmetic operations, gradually improving it over a number of years.
This "stepped reckoner" attracted fair attention and was the basis of
his election to the Royal Society in 1673.
Leibniz was groping towards hardware and software concepts worked
out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while
mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in
which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a
rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital
computers replace Leibniz's marbles moving by gravity with shift
registers, voltage gradients, and pulses of electrons, but otherwise
26
mentions Julian Huxley. The Baldwin Effect was dismissed for many
years in evolutionary theory because it was viewed as trivial or too
metaphysical, or both. The first time I came across a description of it
was in a book by Richard Dawkins, "The Ancestors Tale". That shows
just how close to mainstream the idea has come, because Dawkins
represents something close to the epitome of a materialist, non-
metaphysical position.
Schrödinger, Mind and Matter p.101: “But is it not absurd to suggest
that this process of evolution should directly and significantly fall into
consciousness, considering its (evolution's) inordinate slowness not
only compared with the short span of an individual life, but even with
historical epochs? Does it not just run along unnoticed?
No. In the light of our previous considerations this is not so. They
culminated in regarding consciousness as associated with such
physiological goings-on as are still being transformed by mutual
interaction with a changing environment. Moreover, we concluded that
only those modifications become conscious which are still in the stage
of being trained, until, in a much later time, they become hereditarily
fixed, well-trained and unconscious possession of the species."
I want to separate this portion off from the rest because it is beautiful,
and it is a continuation of the above:
"In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution.
This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it
develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from
consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of
evolution."
In placing consciousness at the cutting edge of evolution, Schrödinger
shifts the concept of evolution from blind determinism to exploration
and freedom, and in our case, moral responsibility:
28
Dan:
I was going to mention Dennett's thought on the Baldwin Effect, but if I
had done that, I would have mentioned two of the "Four Horsemen" in
the same post, and that might have made some individuals nervous.
Just for fun, I want to suggest this rather academic and cognitive
description by Dennett:
"Thanks to the Baldwin effect, species can be said to pretest the
efficacy of particular different designs by phenotypic (individual)
exploration in the space of nearby possibilities,“ which means that can
“play“ in that space. Schrödinger might describe it as an encounter
with novelty, and use the metaphor of the growing top of a plant,
which, in some cases, when viewed with time-lapse photography,
appears to be actively exploring its environment.
Also, as in the schoolyard, "play" runs a continuum from "competitive"
to "cooperative".
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, I agree with that notion, but the question is whether such "plays"
need awareness, interiority, subjectivity - or whether they can run
simply externally, without witnessing their own standing?
At least that's what humans are doing: Before acting externally, we
can consider some consequences, playing with an action in our
mental space, checking for more possibilities with the help of our
imagination.
I don't mean that plants have a comparable richness of interiority, but
they should have something similar, in a rudimentary sense. And
that's where intelligence and the divine enter into the "play" of mere
chances.
Dan:
I think that you can equate that "play" with awareness, Hans-Joachim.
30
dictatorial power over our minds, neither the power of bringing it to the
fore, nor the power of annihilating it."
It involves the difference between "lived time" and "objective time", or
the difference between Kairos and Chronos. When Schrödinger
speaks of the unidirectionality of time in the context of entropy, he
incorporates time into mind or subjectivity.
"The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and
kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the
latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action."
Chronos is time as a quasi-objective frame in which events are given
determined places, while kairos places the emphasis on the events
themselves, as making time. The conception of time in physics,
including Einstein’s (minus the 'statistical theory of time'), is akin to
Chronos. Time as a quasi-objective frame can be run backward or
forward mathematically. There is nothing inherently directional about
physical objective time until you consider entropy, or the 'statistical
theory of time'. And with entropy, you have dynamic systems, which
are productive and do not simply repeat ad infinitum. You move from a
closed system of time to an open system of time, and time becomes
intimately bound up with process, rather than standing apart from
process and restricting it.
A time without direction and entropy is a time which makes no
difference. The Newtonian and Einsteinian equations can be run
forward or backward in time. The system is determinate. Nothing new
emerges. The system is closed, like Laplace's clockwork universe.
That all changes with entropy. I get the sense, and it may be wishful
thinking, that Schrödinger had some intuition of what was to come out
of Chaos and Complex Systems Theory when he talked about
33
Dan:
That transformation of quantity to quality is not located between the
level of biochemistry and mental content. There are several
successive and interpenetrating levels of organization between those
two, and it's in that complex that the transformation occurs. You've got
the basic level of autopoiesis which defines the living system as such
in the environment, which defines it through its structure and function.
Right there, you have a transformation of quantity to quality through
the determination of what is relevant in the environment to the
organism, that is, the portioning of relevant "chunks" from the
quantitative continuum, which is the environment, carved out by the
organism as „meaningful", to the organism. You find that at the level of
the simplest unicellular organisms.
Each successive level of organization, from multi-cellularity on up
through social and cultural structures in us are but further refinements
of that basic partitioning of "self" and world, which is the
transformation of quantity to quality.
If you place the point of transformation from quantity to quality
between biochemistry and mental content, you put much more
explanatory weight on biochemistry than belongs there. It might in
theory be possible to conceive of biochemical structures that are
sufficiently complex to account for mental content or meaning, but that
complexity will be "borrowed" from the successive levels of
organization, the biological, organismic, neurological and ultimately
cultural. One could say that a sufficiently complicated biochemical
process occurring in a sufficiently complicated biological structure, set
within a sufficiently complex social and cultural context would
correlate with some mental content, but the organization of that
biochemical process would be better described in the terms of those
higher levels of organization.
The same issue comes up in descriptions of mind being the product of
35
Gotthard Günther
Hans-Joachim:
Before, I read about Gotthard Günther only once - in Peter Sloterdijk's
"Die Sonne und der Tod". Now, I can find more in a number of
interviews. It's very interesting - and it's directly related to our previous
topic, robots and AI.
In summary, Günther's polycontexturality theory represents a formal
theory that makes it possible to model complex, self-referential
processes, which are characteristic for all vital processes, non-
reductionistically and without logical contradictions. In his works, he
designs a parallel-network calculus, which he introduces into the
sciences as polycontextural logic (PCL).
The basic idea of this calculus is to mediate individual logic systems
by means of new operators introduced in his previous works. PCL is
characterized by distribution and mediation of various logical
contextures, whereby intra-contextual all rules of the classical
propositional logic strictly apply, whereas inter-contextual new
"transjunctional" operations that do not exist classically are to be
introduced. This makes it possible not only to model self-referential
processes logically without contradictions, but also to bring them, in
principle, to implementation.
Now I understand what was meant with "black box"! Rudolf Kehr
opened that thing, and it looks much "worse" than what I had
presented to my audience in 2012 (From imaginary Oxymora to Real
Polarities and Return). Here's Kehr's paper:
http://www.vordenker.de/rk/rk_Catching-Transjunctions_2010.pdf
It was written in order to present Günther's idea of transjunctional
operators!
39
Hans-Joachim:
I understand that the whole becomes more than its parts only by
virtue of "transjunctional" operators, which allow correspondence
between otherwise inkompatible systems. In Google, I find
applications of such operators only on logics and sociology. Do you
have other references at hand?
I'm thinking of transjunctional operators to allow for multiple
correspondences between Nicolai Hartmann's four levels of reality, i.e.
the inorganic, the organic/biological, the psychical/emotional and the
intellectual/cultural level.
Wikipedia defines an integrative level as a set of phenomena
emerging from pre-existing phenomena of a lower level. The concept
arranges all material entities and all processes in the universe into a
hierarchy based on how complex the entity's organization is. When
arranged this way, each entity is three things at the same time: It is
made up of parts from the previous level below. It is a whole in its own
right. And it is a part of the whole that is on the next level above.
Typical examples include life emerging from non-living substances,
and consciousness emerging from nervous systems.
Interestingly, ideas connected to integrative levels can be found in the
works of both materialist and anti-materialist philosophers.
Dan:
One facile critique of Emergentism is that it is in fact materialism. Your
comment addresses that oversimplification.
Hans-Joachim:
In summary, Günther's polycontexturality theory represents a formal
theory that makes it possible to model complex, self-referential
processes, which are characteristic for all vital processes, non-
40
mistake.
Norbert Wiener said "information is information, not matter or energy.
No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present
day." And Günther added: "information is information, not spirit or
subjectivity." No idealism which does not admit this can survive at the
present day.
By the way, Heinz von Foerster and Gotthard Günther were
collaborators at the State University of Illinois.
Dan:
Hans-Joachim - What type of information is Günther talking about
here? Information as defined by Shannon? If it is not Information from
"information theory", how is it different from meaning? Information as
meaning ties information to subjectivity.
This "polycontextural logic" is fascinating stuff. I only took a brief look
at it. It answers a weakness in"fuzzy logic" that has bothered me, that
the truth value between 0 and 1 is relative to a particular dimension,
or „context", in which case it is again either 1 or 0. There is a theory of
logic in Buddhism called "Apoha" which was developed to address the
Buddhist rejection of a theory of concepts based on universals ("no-
self", no context-free essences). One of the explanations of Apoha is
that it involves a use of violations of the law of the excluded middle.
The classic example of how meaning is handled in Apoha is: "a cow is
not a non-cow", and this is taken to be more than trivially true. It
involves double negation in a productive way. Somebody save me a
bit of work and reading by describing "transjunctional operators" and
the way they handle negation. It sounds very similar.
42
Hans-Joachim:
Dan, this field is completely new to me; before, I never knew anything
about polycontexturality theory, Gotthard Günther, Heinz von Foerster
or Rudolf Kaehr!
Dan:
I have just a tiny bit of familiarity with von Foerster. I put down what I
had been reading of his because it seemed to relativistic, but I
probably jumped the gun in my judgement. The other two I have never
heard of. "Fuzzy logic" as a topic has gotten some airplay in this
group, as some major advancement. I never bought it. The space
between 0 and 1 is not some vague grey area between truth and
falsity. It seemed a gross oversimplification to say that a proposition
was .7628....true. That position on the continuum between 0 and 1 is
defined by a context. A proposition judged to be relatively true is true
in a particular sense, again, in a context. It sounds like Günther nailed
that down.
Hans-Joachim:
I didn't see fuzzy logic to play an important role in these papers. Yes, it
deals with the three-valued logic (with truth values 0, 1/2, 1),
developed by Jan Łukasiewicz in 1920. And it rejects the tertium non
datur of classical logic.
Dan:
But, what does Günther mean by "information"? Is this information as
defined by Shannon, or is it a more general use of the term?
"Norbert Wiener said "information is information, not matter or energy.
No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present
day." And Günther added: "information is information, not spirit or
43
subjectivity. No idealism which does not admit this can survive at the
present day."
I would like your thoughts about what Günther means by information. I
think that the first wave of cyberneticists kept faithful to Shannon's
definition, while the second wave played more loosely with the idea. I
think Wiener used the term ‘information' in the looser sense.
Hans-Joachim:
Günther wrote a few articles in English:
Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations. University of
Illinois, Engineering Experiment Station. Technical Report no. 4.
Urbana: Electrical Engineering Research Laboratory, University of
Illinois (1962), and
Cybernetics and the Transition from Classical to Trans-Classical
Logic. Illinois University Biological Computer Laboratory BCL Report
3.0. Urbana: Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois
(1965).
But I didn't find a translation of his 200 pages book "The
Consciousness of Machines".
The topic is quite challenging, and we might open a new discussion
on these things as well.
Regarding information, Günther writes that it is principally impossible
to reduce the cybernetic concept of information to purely material-
energetic categories. This is exemplified by the fact that information
can be conveyed by any means, which shows its independence from
specific carriers.
Also, he writes that in fundamental discussions about information, one
should conceive not only the immediate factum of information, but the
entire process of communication by which information is conveyed.
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Dan, you already managed to find a link to a translation of "Geist und
Materie". Couldn't you try to also find a translation of "Das
Bewusstsein der Maschinen" (the consciousness of machines)?
Dan:
"Also, he writes that in fundamental discussions about information,
one should conceive not only the immediate factum of information, but
the entire process of communication by which information is
conveyed."
That makes "information" co-extensive with pretty much everything if
you have a process view of reality. It wouldn't be "Shannon"
information, which by definition is not "meaning". I could do a search
for "the consciousness of machines" in English, but I don't want to
commit to reading it.
Hans-Joachim:
Don't worry, Günther doesn't conclude that machines do have
consciousness. The title is more a kind of provocation, as people are
afraid of machines dominating mankind.
Let me quote from its last page, where he says:
“So nothing mythical happens in the robot brain, and actually it doesn't
have any consciousness of its own. If the ideas described in this book
can really be carried out, this would mean nothing but that man has
managed to detach some of his consciousness processes from his
organism and transferred them to another medium. A mechanism
doesn't generate consciousness, even if its working rhythm is trans-
classical.“
Dan:
45
Dan:
It looks very interesting, Hans-Joachim. That triad, "I" "You" and "It",
has been coming up a lot in things I've been reading by he
Pragmatists, and it is also a central idea in the question of the
constitution of "objectivity" among some of the Phenomenologists.
Hans-Joachim:
These citations are basically about the fact that cybernetics is based
on semiconductor technology, which is again based on solid-state and
quantum physics. With the advent of such technologies, a new type of
machines has evolved, which cannot be compared to Leibniz's wind
mill. In his book, Günther doesn't say that such machines could
develop a consciousness as it is known to us; he says that they might
develop another type of self-reference, which will be new and
complementary to our consciousness.
Dan:
I haven't had any luck finding an English translation of "the
consciousness of machines". If you keep going, perhaps you will
produce one! What are you working from, a hard copy in German? I
did find a few articles by Günther in English which I've bookmarked.
Hans-Joachim:
I found the book at http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/
gg_bewusstsein-der-maschinen.pdf
There you can also find a complete bibliography:
http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_bibliographie.htm
I think, the questions we were dealing with in these threads are
preconfigured and partially answered in these articles.
Dan - the question of information vs. communication is dealt with at
48
http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_inf-comm-many-val-logic.pdf
There he writes:
“In fact, the success of the theory, which Shannon and his
collaborators developed, depends on a careful separation of the two
(information and meaning) and on the exclusion of the concept of
meaning from the formulas describing the laws that govern the
transmission of information from its sources to its recipient. It is
obvious that this approach is inadequate both for philosophic
anthropology and for the theory of culture which the Humanities try to
develop.“
Dan:
So do you have any access to German/English translation software?
Hans-Joachim:
I was using the Google translator, but it needs lots of amendments.
Page 60:
“Hegel's boldness entails in conceiving the materiality of being as
reflection itself - a materiality which precedes thinking and manifests
itself as such. According to him, substance and form are perfectly
equal to each other (at least as far as the foundation of dialectics is
concerned). They are logically the same. Reflection and irreflexivity
constitute a pure exchange ratio. This means that it makes no
difference whether we say: "matter has the property of
reflection" (dialectical Materialism) or whether we formulate "the mind
has the property of materiality" (objective Idealism). We deeply
believe that there is a very essential and fundamental difference
between the two statements. But this difference just imposes us on,
because when we reflect, that reflection is entrapped into an individual
consciousness, an Ego. To be an Ego means having taken sides
49
against the world, which is repelled from our own subjectivity as the
Other, as the embodiment of the object-domain. The fact that we can't
help otherwise is undoubtedly certain; because that would mean, to
give up one's own Ego, which can't be expected meaningfully. But if,
as Hegel says, the whole world and its history is, from the very
beginning, self-reflection, then we obviously are not entitled to take
our unilateral and biased state of reflection as the logical yardstick for
a worldview that wants to do justice to the nature of reality.“
On page 64 he quotes from Oskar Lange's "Totality, Development,
and Dialectics" (1960):
"Both these concepts are at variance with experimental knowledge
and scientific method. The mechanistic view negates the experimental
fact of the existence of totalities having unique properties and
patterns. On the other hand, finalism introduces 'beings', which are
experimentally unverified and unverifiable. A strict and
methodologically correct approach to the problem of totality and
dialectic development was, nevertheless, made difficult by the
absence of a thought apparatus – concepts and principles of their
operation adequate to the task. At present, such apparatus is
beginning to be formed as a concomitant of the new science of
cybernetics."
Page 66:
“Western literature is full of petty fears that the machine will ultimately
enslave man.“ In contrast, the Russian scholar Novik explains:
"A kingdom of machines, even self-reproducing, cannot become
independent, self-contained, without depending on man as the prime
mover of cybernetic machines ... The automaton is no more than a
link in a close chain: man - nature. This link can become progressively
longer and more complicated, but it does not become the entire chain.
The automaton cannot occupy any other space in the universe except
50
53
Mind and Matter, chapter 6
Hans-Joachim:
Coming back to Schrödinger's "Mind & Matter", I would like to
highlight his conclusion in chapter 6, where he says:
Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations
and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to
remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some
primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is
therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors
of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent
theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have
found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the
terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very
useful for our remembering the fact in a well-ordered pattern, tends to
obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the
theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some
sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual
qualities; which, of course, they never do.
For further investigations, it might be useful to study P.T. Morgan's
"The Experience of Consciousness" (=> https://books.google.de/books?
id=oFGNCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA623&dq=conn%27s+translational+neuroscience+
%22Morgan%22&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvtZSq96zZAhWHKOwKHS_aAtI
Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=conn's%20translational%20neuroscience%20%22
Morgan%22&f=false)
In Box 28.1, Morgan directly refers to Schrödinger's Mind and Matter,
54
cannot tell the human from the computer? In other words, rather than
measure whether a computer becomes sentient, or experiences
thoughts or consciousness, the test would measure whether others
believe that it does.
On page 72, Günther wrote that "it would be ... quite impossible that
on planet Earth self-organizing living beings emerge, which call
themselves in self-reflection "humans", and claim to have a "mind", if
not all reflection components of what we call consciousness and mind
are already in that hypothetical gas cloud and its surrounding space-
time dimension, from which our solar system was supposed to have
originated." Interestingly he doesn't speak only about the gas cloud,
rather he adds the surrounding space-time dimension. And this is, in
my view, the crucial point: Space-time has the potential to develop
sentience, provided that we accept it to have a complex structure.
Once, sentience is established, an "observer" can be established, of
whom Frank Wilczek said: "The relevant literature [on the meaning of
quantum theory] is famously contentious and obscure. I believe it will
remain so until someone constructs, within the formalism of quantum
mechanics, an ‘observer’, that is, a model entity whose states
correspond to a recognizable caricature of conscious awareness. That
is a formidable project, extending well beyond what is conventionally
considered physics."
After all, this project is well on its way - and it has even reached
mainstream thinking, as could be seen in Hassel Mørch's article.
Although there is tough opposition - an opposition that is necessary to
produce good results - I think and hope that this "recognizable
caricature of conscious awareness" can be found within the rest of our
lifetime.
Dan:
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