Hi Joseph, fascinating stuff, but I have a few gripes.
Firstly, a river is not intelligent, because it is not trying to solve a problem. It is no more intelligent than a raindrop trying to “find the best path” to the ground.
Secondly, regarding life as a dissipative structure, is the argument that - given the right physical conditions (such as on Earth) - life is thermodynamically likely? Because life does not seem to be as common as might be expected if it was thermodynamically favoured.
Lastly, regarding evolution tending towards intelligence and beyond, there have been vast expanses in the history of life on earth where intelligence appears to have stalled. Why would this be the case?
>Firstly, a river is not intelligent, because it is not trying to solve a problem. It is no more intelligent than a raindrop trying to “find the best path” to the ground.
Would you admit that if we view it *as if* it were trying to solve the problem of finding the best route for the water to descend, it would appear to be doing a pretty good job at finding/creating that route? It's perhaps one of those points where it really comes down to how we define "trying" and "problem", but I think we can meaningfully use these terms in a broad enough way that it is true. The water has an innate drive (its mass/gravity) to descend, and it is exploring different potential paths to fulfil that drive. I think it's fair to call that "intelligence", or perhaps "proto-intelligence", if we want to be more conservative.
>Secondly, regarding life as a dissipative structure, is the argument that - given the right physical conditions (such as on Earth) - life is thermodynamically likely? Because life does not seem to be as common as might be expected if it was thermodynamically favoured.
Yes, essentially. One of the arguments it makes for this (or there's a chance I'm thinking of 'The Demon in the Machine' by Paul Davies), is that our best scientific theories say that life appeared almost immediately, as soon as it had what we consider "life permitting conditions". It may be that it could be a dissipative structure without being thermodynamically likely, but in any case the book argues for both.
What do you mean about life not being as common as might be expected?
>Lastly, regarding evolution tending towards intelligence and beyond, there have been vast expanses in the history of life on earth where intelligence appears to have stalled. Why would this be the case?
It is not clear to me that intelligence has stalled, but supposing it has, it may just be that the biosphere was advancing in complexity and adaptability in other ways, and also there's no requirement for progress to be smooth.
I haven't read the book, but here's something I think you'll like better, given that mechanistic reductionism is not your thing (nor mine). I don't know if I've shared this paper with you already, but in case I haven't, it would seem to be right up your alley.:
Is evolution progressive? Does it have a direction or tendency?
Are we evolving towards the noösphere?
Still not sure how I feel about the idea of evolution as progress. Something inside me says, really? Progress? It's not that I have a problem with directed-ness. It's that something whispers to me that everything's turning to shit, and if we're lucky this turning to shit might be followed by circling back to the beginning when things were better. No progress except in the short term...in the long term, just circles, cycles, as in nature. But who the hell knows, right.
That video is very cool. I'd read about the worms and the bio-electric field in 'The Demon in the Machine' by Paul Davies (which is awesome btw). I don't think that that really contradicts the role of DNA though. I think DNA is definitely not the full picture, as the neo-darwinists had believed, but it's still pretty crucial for understanding life. Although it may be less life the "instruction manual" for life, and more like a "family recipe book", complete with annotations, that you draw from and add to as needed.
I looked at the abstract for that paper and saw this:
>(A) Evolution favors living forms that exploit powerful truths of mathematics and computation as affordances, which contribute as causes of morphological and behavioral features. (B) Cognitive patterns are an evolutionary pivot of the collective intelligence of cells; given this symmetry between neuroscience and developmental biology, I propose that the relationship between mind and brain is the same as the relationship between mathematical patterns and the morphogenetic outcomes they guide. (C) Many mathematicians, and a non-mysterian approach to science in general, suggest that these patterns are not random facts to be merely cataloged as “emergence” when found, but rather can be systematically discovered within a structured, ordered (non-physical) space. Therefore, I hypothesize that: (1) instances of embodied cognition likewise ingress from a Platonic space, which contains not only low-agency patterns like facts about triangles and prime numbers, but also higher agency ones such as kinds of minds; (2) we take seriously for developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics; (3) what evolution (and bioengineering, and possibly AI) produces are pointers into that Platonic space – physical interfaces that enable the ingression of specific patterns of body and mind.
This sounds exactly up my street! I will have to give it a proper read, but it already sounds like exactly the kind of lines I've been moving towards.
Re everything turning to shit, do you mean recently or in the long term? I think there are a lot of troubling trends at the moment (particularly the rise of authoritarianism), but I also think these are in all likelihood the "birth pangs of creation" (borrowing from the bible). I think we're undergoing a phase transition, and it's going to be messy and bumpy for a while, but I believe it will resolve itself to the good in the end.
I thought you might like his work. He has a bazillion videos on YouTube as well. I'm trying to get an interview with him, though he's a busy guy so we'll see! Anyway, ignore that comment about everything turning to shit. I'm just moving air with my mouth. :)
I have a feeling that when we venture out into the universe, we are going to be directing our own evolution by changing ourselves, for example for interstellar journeys and existence on other worlds. Those people and societies spreading outwards aren't going to care that we stay the way we were on Earth. We belong to the universe anyway.
As for the other ideas, I would have to read the book to judge if the author makes good arguments. But this idea of our role as a species stands out.
Also, the use of the horror face emoji is fitting for that particular worldview.
I think you're right about us directing our own evolution. We're already beginning to in a number of ways, including things like social engineering, and even just as individuals deciding to reflect and take control of our own lives.
Personally, I feel its important that whatever we are, we remain organic rather than artificial. Or that the changes are organic rather than artificial. Not necessarily that there should be no tech integration, but that the integration needs a kind of holism and dynamism and continuity to it... Similar for any genetic adjustments.
Yeah, Marxism as a historical ideology been absolutely horrific. But I do wonder if there's some slither of truth in its theories around history. It's rare for anyone to be wrong about everything all the time.
"Is evolution progressive? Does it have a direction or tendency?"
I think it's a mistake to view it this way. It seems like there are many alternate paths to being adaptive, not all of which we'd regard as progressive. For example, sometimes animals become less intelligent because the cost/benefit with their ecological niche changes. Of course, we could just define "progress" as whatever evolves, but that seem pyrrhic.
A lot might depend on what someone means by "mechanistic", but to me it doesn't seem incompatible with reality being evolutionary, dynamic, and in process (unless we're loading those terms with hidden meaning). Natural selection is usually hailed as the thing that makes evolution mechanistic. (It's why the pre-Darwin takes on evolution didn't convince the scientific community. They lacked a mechanism.) But to me "mechanistic" just means fully deterministic, causal, or more fundamentally, structural.
I'm not sure if I understand what the noosphere is, but if it means a groupmind, it seems like we could regard any social animal as having some form of that.
I'm not sure about poetic meta-naturalism. The fact that he keeps it mechanistic is actually a plus for me. I'm just leery of dubious concepts being smuggled in. And without those concepts, my question would be what we gain from adopting it.
Fair point about animals sometimes evolving to become less intelligent. Although it seems to me this is probably always only a short term advantage. Being intelligent, I think, almost *just is* being more adaptable, and in the long run evolving to be more adaptable is bound to be the winning move. But it's clearly not the case that every organism will inevitably evolve in the "right direction". Still, I think if we're looking across the whole biosphere, the trend emerges pretty strongly, and logically it makes sense.
I think in one sense, mechanistic philosophy isn't incompatible with reality being evolutionary, dynamic, and in process. I just think it doesn't fit very well, when you're writing a whole book about how everything is evolving and adapting and learning, to assume that at the fundamental level, reality is made of something completely inert and lifeless. In another sense, mechanistic philosophy is kind of already dead thanks to Darwin, since we now know life isn't a well-designed machine, but something essentially organic. The machine metaphor that underlies mechanism really just doesn't make sense any more. And then there's the fact that quantum physics is completely different to any machines we've ever conceived of.
>But to me "mechanistic" just means fully deterministic, causal, or more fundamentally, structural.
Do you fully subscribe to determinism? Personally, I don't have an issue with saying everything is causal and structural, but I'm fairly opposed to determinism these days.
The noosphere is a higher degree of unity that just a society, I think, but it's definitely on it's way there.
I think the big gains he argues PMN brings would be an idea of cosmic purpose for life and for minds and for ourselves, rather than seeing ourselves as a cosmic accident, as well as the understanding of the reality of emergence in his account (which I don't remember all that well and so didn't include in the post). I do think it's very cool to see our science, and really the whole human project, as an extension of evolution and the project of life as a whole.
"Being intelligent, I think, almost *just is* being more adaptable"
I think whether any trait is adaptive will depend on the balance between its benefits and costs. Brains and nervous systems are reported to be pretty costly in terms of energy usage. If an organism is in an environment or a niche where the benefit isn't needed in every generation, the cost might become a bigger factor in its selection.
"to assume that at the fundamental level, reality is made of something completely inert and lifeless."
It doesn't seem like being inert is a trait of mechanism, which seems to imply something active and changing. I would agree that the limited number of states in old school machinery probably isn't a good guide, but that's not what I mean by mechanism, and if Azarian is calling his view "mechanistic" I wouldn't think he does either.
"Do you fully subscribe to determinism?"
I'd say, based on centuries of success, it's my assumption until there's evidence to falsify it. For instance, if one of the fundamentally indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics should turn out to be true, I'd ditch it. But the mathematical structure of QM by itself seems adequate to fit the data, and sticking to just that seems to leave things deterministic, even if it's not a determinism any individual observer can cash out.
"The noosphere is a higher degree of unity that just a society, I think, but it's definitely on it's way there."
An interesting question here is how much further things can go without compromising individual freedom. I think of the eusociality of ants, where the colony seems much more like an integrated organism. That doesn't mean evolution may not go that direction, but I wonder how much we'd see it as progress if we could see the future result.
On cosmic purpose, right. Short of a simulation scenario, I'm leery. I'd have to be convinced that seeing things that way gave us a better understanding of things. Part of my reluctance is we seem wired to want that, and given the history of science, it seems like we should be cautious in concluding the truth of anything we're predisposed to want.
>I think whether any trait is adaptive will depend on the balance between its benefits and costs. Brains and nervous systems are reported to be pretty costly in terms of energy usage. If an organism is in an environment or a niche where the benefit isn't needed in every generation, the cost might become a bigger factor in its selection.
That's absolutely true, but I think intelligence is *adaptability* rather than *adaptiveness*, if you get what I mean? A well adapted creature is well adapted to a particular situation, but an adaptable creature is capable of more efficiently adapting itself to a new situation. In the long run, a creature which is capable of adapting more quickly will win out, especially because they will create environments that require faster adaptation (as with human caused changes to habitats, ecosystems, and climate).
But you're right that intelligence won't always be adaptive because of its trade-offs. I imagine that human-level intelligence would have been pretty useless in the Ediacaran as an extreme example.
>It doesn't seem like being inert is a trait of mechanism, which seems to imply something active and changing. I would agree that the limited number of states in old school machinery probably isn't a good guide, but that's not what I mean by mechanism, and if Azarian is calling his view "mechanistic" I wouldn't think he does either.
I'd say mechanism implicitly suggests a system where there is only change at the higher level, but at the lower level everything is made of inert matter. It's roughly saying that life is an unreal epiphenomenon of micro scale physics (would you agree with a statement like that?). You're probably right that Azarian wouldn't hold to that understanding of mechanism though...
>I'd say, based on centuries of success, it's my assumption until there's evidence to falsify it.
What would you consider success for determinism? It seems to me that if every successful prediction might count as its success, everything we can't predict should count as its failure.
>An interesting question here is how much further things can go without compromising individual freedom. I think of the eusociality of ants, where the colony seems much more like an integrated organism. That doesn't mean evolution may not go that direction, but I wonder how much we'd see it as progress if we could see the future result.
Yes, it is very interesting... There's a chance we might see it as an increase in freedom and diversity at the individual level. There's a point in the book where he's saying how as a system becomes more complex, there is more and more need for diverse parts taking on diverse roles, and how there are a large number of specialized cells in the brain for example. If we look at human economies as an example, we also see more diversity as they become more integrated. And even ants are perhaps more diverse among themselves than we would say for comparable insect species.
>On cosmic purpose, right. Short of a simulation scenario, I'm leery. I'd have to be convinced that seeing things that way gave us a better understanding of things. Part of my reluctance is we seem wired to want that, and given the history of science, it seems like we should be cautious in concluding the truth of anything we're predisposed to want.
That is fair. You can definitely tell from the book how much Azarian wants there to be a "cosmic purpose", and to be honest I'm not convinced his picture of things is sufficient to get us there.
"What would you consider success for determinism?"
It seems like the history of natural philosophy and science is finding ways to understand the principles by which things work. Those principles appear to always turn out deterministic. Naturally that doesn't mean everything is predictable. Many systems, like the weather or economy, are just too complex. But that doesn't mean they're not deterministic, just that there are just too many variables to track, and any lack of precision multiplies over time.
So the question for me isn't what is a success for it. It seems like we have a long track record. The question is what would falsify it? It seems like an objective quantum collapse would. Or any other scenario with fundamental randomness.
Of course, we can never know whether we've hit bedrock fundamentality. It seems like something we could only establish retroactively over a long stretch of failed reductions. And it would always be subject to revision on future data, or even a more streamlined model of existing data.
"... influential British idealist, J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), defended a theory in which reality is a community of individual spirits connected by the relation of love.[189] McTaggart defends ontological idealism through a meretological argument which argues only spirits can be substances, as well as through an argument for the unreality of time (a position he also defends in The Unreality of Time).[189]
In The Nature of Existence (1927), McTaggart's argument relies on the premise that substances are infinitely divisible and cannot have simple parts. Furthermore, each of their infinite parts determines every other part. He then analyzes various characteristics of reality such as time, matter, sensation, and cogitation and attempts to show they cannot be real elements of real substances, but must be mere appearances.[190] For example, the existence of matter cannot be inferred based on sensations, since they cannot be divided to infinity (and thus cannot be substances). Spirits on the other hand are true infinitely divisible substances. They have "the quality of having content, all of which is the content of one or more selves", and know themselves through direct perception as substances persisting through time.[191] For McTaggart, there is a multiplicity of spirits, which are nevertheless related to each other harmoniously through their love for each other.[170] " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
When I was first getting interested in idealism, McTaggart was generally regarded as the last thorough-going metaphysical idealist.
In a similar vein, I think you might find the books by Paul LaViolette interesting as well. He approached physical sciences (geology, theoretical physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and such) from the discipline of general systems theory rather than from disciplines of physical sciences. Forgive me if I have mentioned these previously. -- https://starburstfound.org/astrophysicist-paul-alex-laviolette-phd-has-passed-away/
"Genesis of the Cosmos" the ancient science of continuous creation, based on his systems approach.
"Subquantum Kinetics" advances in our understanding of how nonequilibrium reaction systems spawn self-organizing wave patterns. The basis for his Genesis of the Cosmos theories.
"The Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion" using his systems approach to theoretical physics to explain Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology. ... such as used on the now popular B2.
"The Talk of the Galaxy" what he takes as proof of the existence of interstellar radio signals of intelligent origin. Based on the characteristics of signals from a few very peculiar pulsars, one quite near earth and another quite near the galactic center.
-- -- --
Just for fun:
Norman Bergrun: "Ringmakers of Saturn" Norm was one of the lead image analysts for early flybys of Saturn. He discovered in the photographs very large "devices" that appeared to be actively engaged in manipulating Saturn's rings by systematically transporting the icy material outward from the planet. Such devices were on the order of 22,500 miles long, 1750 miles wide/thick. Norm was still working at NASA when he asked permission to publish his findings. Nasa approved, and he got a publisher to print something like 30k copies (not sure the actual number). He took 50 copies for himself and the rest were sold. Fewer than a hundred ever got to the public. An unknown government agency bought out the run and the publisher refused to print more. The devices seemed to be mining huge quantities of water and then ... sending it somewhere? A little off topic, but it puts ideas about evolution etc. into a new perspective. For example, where is all that water going? Why did NASA space shuttle astronauts mention large "house-size" balls of liquid water falling downward into our atmosphere? -- https://archive.org/details/texts?tab=collection&query=ringmakers+of+saturn
I really enjoy the debate and thoughts that pop up in your comments section :)
Hi Joseph, fascinating stuff, but I have a few gripes.
Firstly, a river is not intelligent, because it is not trying to solve a problem. It is no more intelligent than a raindrop trying to “find the best path” to the ground.
Secondly, regarding life as a dissipative structure, is the argument that - given the right physical conditions (such as on Earth) - life is thermodynamically likely? Because life does not seem to be as common as might be expected if it was thermodynamically favoured.
Lastly, regarding evolution tending towards intelligence and beyond, there have been vast expanses in the history of life on earth where intelligence appears to have stalled. Why would this be the case?
Hi Saj, thanks for commenting :)
>Firstly, a river is not intelligent, because it is not trying to solve a problem. It is no more intelligent than a raindrop trying to “find the best path” to the ground.
Would you admit that if we view it *as if* it were trying to solve the problem of finding the best route for the water to descend, it would appear to be doing a pretty good job at finding/creating that route? It's perhaps one of those points where it really comes down to how we define "trying" and "problem", but I think we can meaningfully use these terms in a broad enough way that it is true. The water has an innate drive (its mass/gravity) to descend, and it is exploring different potential paths to fulfil that drive. I think it's fair to call that "intelligence", or perhaps "proto-intelligence", if we want to be more conservative.
>Secondly, regarding life as a dissipative structure, is the argument that - given the right physical conditions (such as on Earth) - life is thermodynamically likely? Because life does not seem to be as common as might be expected if it was thermodynamically favoured.
Yes, essentially. One of the arguments it makes for this (or there's a chance I'm thinking of 'The Demon in the Machine' by Paul Davies), is that our best scientific theories say that life appeared almost immediately, as soon as it had what we consider "life permitting conditions". It may be that it could be a dissipative structure without being thermodynamically likely, but in any case the book argues for both.
What do you mean about life not being as common as might be expected?
>Lastly, regarding evolution tending towards intelligence and beyond, there have been vast expanses in the history of life on earth where intelligence appears to have stalled. Why would this be the case?
It is not clear to me that intelligence has stalled, but supposing it has, it may just be that the biosphere was advancing in complexity and adaptability in other ways, and also there's no requirement for progress to be smooth.
"A creature's DNA, then, plays the role of the accumulated body of ideas/beliefs/knowledge that have yet to be experimentally falsified."
I dunno, man. Check this out: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?si=cMNS-udSYKx9_ttv
I haven't read the book, but here's something I think you'll like better, given that mechanistic reductionism is not your thing (nor mine). I don't know if I've shared this paper with you already, but in case I haven't, it would seem to be right up your alley.:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v3
To answer your questions:
Is evolution progressive? Does it have a direction or tendency?
Are we evolving towards the noösphere?
Still not sure how I feel about the idea of evolution as progress. Something inside me says, really? Progress? It's not that I have a problem with directed-ness. It's that something whispers to me that everything's turning to shit, and if we're lucky this turning to shit might be followed by circling back to the beginning when things were better. No progress except in the short term...in the long term, just circles, cycles, as in nature. But who the hell knows, right.
That video is very cool. I'd read about the worms and the bio-electric field in 'The Demon in the Machine' by Paul Davies (which is awesome btw). I don't think that that really contradicts the role of DNA though. I think DNA is definitely not the full picture, as the neo-darwinists had believed, but it's still pretty crucial for understanding life. Although it may be less life the "instruction manual" for life, and more like a "family recipe book", complete with annotations, that you draw from and add to as needed.
I looked at the abstract for that paper and saw this:
>(A) Evolution favors living forms that exploit powerful truths of mathematics and computation as affordances, which contribute as causes of morphological and behavioral features. (B) Cognitive patterns are an evolutionary pivot of the collective intelligence of cells; given this symmetry between neuroscience and developmental biology, I propose that the relationship between mind and brain is the same as the relationship between mathematical patterns and the morphogenetic outcomes they guide. (C) Many mathematicians, and a non-mysterian approach to science in general, suggest that these patterns are not random facts to be merely cataloged as “emergence” when found, but rather can be systematically discovered within a structured, ordered (non-physical) space. Therefore, I hypothesize that: (1) instances of embodied cognition likewise ingress from a Platonic space, which contains not only low-agency patterns like facts about triangles and prime numbers, but also higher agency ones such as kinds of minds; (2) we take seriously for developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics; (3) what evolution (and bioengineering, and possibly AI) produces are pointers into that Platonic space – physical interfaces that enable the ingression of specific patterns of body and mind.
This sounds exactly up my street! I will have to give it a proper read, but it already sounds like exactly the kind of lines I've been moving towards.
Re everything turning to shit, do you mean recently or in the long term? I think there are a lot of troubling trends at the moment (particularly the rise of authoritarianism), but I also think these are in all likelihood the "birth pangs of creation" (borrowing from the bible). I think we're undergoing a phase transition, and it's going to be messy and bumpy for a while, but I believe it will resolve itself to the good in the end.
I thought you might like his work. He has a bazillion videos on YouTube as well. I'm trying to get an interview with him, though he's a busy guy so we'll see! Anyway, ignore that comment about everything turning to shit. I'm just moving air with my mouth. :)
I have a feeling that when we venture out into the universe, we are going to be directing our own evolution by changing ourselves, for example for interstellar journeys and existence on other worlds. Those people and societies spreading outwards aren't going to care that we stay the way we were on Earth. We belong to the universe anyway.
As for the other ideas, I would have to read the book to judge if the author makes good arguments. But this idea of our role as a species stands out.
Also, the use of the horror face emoji is fitting for that particular worldview.
I think you're right about us directing our own evolution. We're already beginning to in a number of ways, including things like social engineering, and even just as individuals deciding to reflect and take control of our own lives.
Personally, I feel its important that whatever we are, we remain organic rather than artificial. Or that the changes are organic rather than artificial. Not necessarily that there should be no tech integration, but that the integration needs a kind of holism and dynamism and continuity to it... Similar for any genetic adjustments.
Yeah, Marxism as a historical ideology been absolutely horrific. But I do wonder if there's some slither of truth in its theories around history. It's rare for anyone to be wrong about everything all the time.
"Is evolution progressive? Does it have a direction or tendency?"
I think it's a mistake to view it this way. It seems like there are many alternate paths to being adaptive, not all of which we'd regard as progressive. For example, sometimes animals become less intelligent because the cost/benefit with their ecological niche changes. Of course, we could just define "progress" as whatever evolves, but that seem pyrrhic.
A lot might depend on what someone means by "mechanistic", but to me it doesn't seem incompatible with reality being evolutionary, dynamic, and in process (unless we're loading those terms with hidden meaning). Natural selection is usually hailed as the thing that makes evolution mechanistic. (It's why the pre-Darwin takes on evolution didn't convince the scientific community. They lacked a mechanism.) But to me "mechanistic" just means fully deterministic, causal, or more fundamentally, structural.
I'm not sure if I understand what the noosphere is, but if it means a groupmind, it seems like we could regard any social animal as having some form of that.
I'm not sure about poetic meta-naturalism. The fact that he keeps it mechanistic is actually a plus for me. I'm just leery of dubious concepts being smuggled in. And without those concepts, my question would be what we gain from adopting it.
Thanks for reviewing the book.
Fair point about animals sometimes evolving to become less intelligent. Although it seems to me this is probably always only a short term advantage. Being intelligent, I think, almost *just is* being more adaptable, and in the long run evolving to be more adaptable is bound to be the winning move. But it's clearly not the case that every organism will inevitably evolve in the "right direction". Still, I think if we're looking across the whole biosphere, the trend emerges pretty strongly, and logically it makes sense.
I think in one sense, mechanistic philosophy isn't incompatible with reality being evolutionary, dynamic, and in process. I just think it doesn't fit very well, when you're writing a whole book about how everything is evolving and adapting and learning, to assume that at the fundamental level, reality is made of something completely inert and lifeless. In another sense, mechanistic philosophy is kind of already dead thanks to Darwin, since we now know life isn't a well-designed machine, but something essentially organic. The machine metaphor that underlies mechanism really just doesn't make sense any more. And then there's the fact that quantum physics is completely different to any machines we've ever conceived of.
>But to me "mechanistic" just means fully deterministic, causal, or more fundamentally, structural.
Do you fully subscribe to determinism? Personally, I don't have an issue with saying everything is causal and structural, but I'm fairly opposed to determinism these days.
The noosphere is a higher degree of unity that just a society, I think, but it's definitely on it's way there.
I think the big gains he argues PMN brings would be an idea of cosmic purpose for life and for minds and for ourselves, rather than seeing ourselves as a cosmic accident, as well as the understanding of the reality of emergence in his account (which I don't remember all that well and so didn't include in the post). I do think it's very cool to see our science, and really the whole human project, as an extension of evolution and the project of life as a whole.
"Being intelligent, I think, almost *just is* being more adaptable"
I think whether any trait is adaptive will depend on the balance between its benefits and costs. Brains and nervous systems are reported to be pretty costly in terms of energy usage. If an organism is in an environment or a niche where the benefit isn't needed in every generation, the cost might become a bigger factor in its selection.
"to assume that at the fundamental level, reality is made of something completely inert and lifeless."
It doesn't seem like being inert is a trait of mechanism, which seems to imply something active and changing. I would agree that the limited number of states in old school machinery probably isn't a good guide, but that's not what I mean by mechanism, and if Azarian is calling his view "mechanistic" I wouldn't think he does either.
"Do you fully subscribe to determinism?"
I'd say, based on centuries of success, it's my assumption until there's evidence to falsify it. For instance, if one of the fundamentally indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics should turn out to be true, I'd ditch it. But the mathematical structure of QM by itself seems adequate to fit the data, and sticking to just that seems to leave things deterministic, even if it's not a determinism any individual observer can cash out.
"The noosphere is a higher degree of unity that just a society, I think, but it's definitely on it's way there."
An interesting question here is how much further things can go without compromising individual freedom. I think of the eusociality of ants, where the colony seems much more like an integrated organism. That doesn't mean evolution may not go that direction, but I wonder how much we'd see it as progress if we could see the future result.
On cosmic purpose, right. Short of a simulation scenario, I'm leery. I'd have to be convinced that seeing things that way gave us a better understanding of things. Part of my reluctance is we seem wired to want that, and given the history of science, it seems like we should be cautious in concluding the truth of anything we're predisposed to want.
>I think whether any trait is adaptive will depend on the balance between its benefits and costs. Brains and nervous systems are reported to be pretty costly in terms of energy usage. If an organism is in an environment or a niche where the benefit isn't needed in every generation, the cost might become a bigger factor in its selection.
That's absolutely true, but I think intelligence is *adaptability* rather than *adaptiveness*, if you get what I mean? A well adapted creature is well adapted to a particular situation, but an adaptable creature is capable of more efficiently adapting itself to a new situation. In the long run, a creature which is capable of adapting more quickly will win out, especially because they will create environments that require faster adaptation (as with human caused changes to habitats, ecosystems, and climate).
But you're right that intelligence won't always be adaptive because of its trade-offs. I imagine that human-level intelligence would have been pretty useless in the Ediacaran as an extreme example.
>It doesn't seem like being inert is a trait of mechanism, which seems to imply something active and changing. I would agree that the limited number of states in old school machinery probably isn't a good guide, but that's not what I mean by mechanism, and if Azarian is calling his view "mechanistic" I wouldn't think he does either.
I'd say mechanism implicitly suggests a system where there is only change at the higher level, but at the lower level everything is made of inert matter. It's roughly saying that life is an unreal epiphenomenon of micro scale physics (would you agree with a statement like that?). You're probably right that Azarian wouldn't hold to that understanding of mechanism though...
>I'd say, based on centuries of success, it's my assumption until there's evidence to falsify it.
What would you consider success for determinism? It seems to me that if every successful prediction might count as its success, everything we can't predict should count as its failure.
>An interesting question here is how much further things can go without compromising individual freedom. I think of the eusociality of ants, where the colony seems much more like an integrated organism. That doesn't mean evolution may not go that direction, but I wonder how much we'd see it as progress if we could see the future result.
Yes, it is very interesting... There's a chance we might see it as an increase in freedom and diversity at the individual level. There's a point in the book where he's saying how as a system becomes more complex, there is more and more need for diverse parts taking on diverse roles, and how there are a large number of specialized cells in the brain for example. If we look at human economies as an example, we also see more diversity as they become more integrated. And even ants are perhaps more diverse among themselves than we would say for comparable insect species.
>On cosmic purpose, right. Short of a simulation scenario, I'm leery. I'd have to be convinced that seeing things that way gave us a better understanding of things. Part of my reluctance is we seem wired to want that, and given the history of science, it seems like we should be cautious in concluding the truth of anything we're predisposed to want.
That is fair. You can definitely tell from the book how much Azarian wants there to be a "cosmic purpose", and to be honest I'm not convinced his picture of things is sufficient to get us there.
"What would you consider success for determinism?"
It seems like the history of natural philosophy and science is finding ways to understand the principles by which things work. Those principles appear to always turn out deterministic. Naturally that doesn't mean everything is predictable. Many systems, like the weather or economy, are just too complex. But that doesn't mean they're not deterministic, just that there are just too many variables to track, and any lack of precision multiplies over time.
So the question for me isn't what is a success for it. It seems like we have a long track record. The question is what would falsify it? It seems like an objective quantum collapse would. Or any other scenario with fundamental randomness.
Of course, we can never know whether we've hit bedrock fundamentality. It seems like something we could only establish retroactively over a long stretch of failed reductions. And it would always be subject to revision on future data, or even a more streamlined model of existing data.
I suspect that you might find this interesting:
"... influential British idealist, J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), defended a theory in which reality is a community of individual spirits connected by the relation of love.[189] McTaggart defends ontological idealism through a meretological argument which argues only spirits can be substances, as well as through an argument for the unreality of time (a position he also defends in The Unreality of Time).[189]
In The Nature of Existence (1927), McTaggart's argument relies on the premise that substances are infinitely divisible and cannot have simple parts. Furthermore, each of their infinite parts determines every other part. He then analyzes various characteristics of reality such as time, matter, sensation, and cogitation and attempts to show they cannot be real elements of real substances, but must be mere appearances.[190] For example, the existence of matter cannot be inferred based on sensations, since they cannot be divided to infinity (and thus cannot be substances). Spirits on the other hand are true infinitely divisible substances. They have "the quality of having content, all of which is the content of one or more selves", and know themselves through direct perception as substances persisting through time.[191] For McTaggart, there is a multiplicity of spirits, which are nevertheless related to each other harmoniously through their love for each other.[170] " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
When I was first getting interested in idealism, McTaggart was generally regarded as the last thorough-going metaphysical idealist.
Vol. 1: https://archive.org/details/natureofexistenc01mctauoft
Vol. 2: https://archive.org/details/natureofexistenc02mctauoft
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In a similar vein, I think you might find the books by Paul LaViolette interesting as well. He approached physical sciences (geology, theoretical physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and such) from the discipline of general systems theory rather than from disciplines of physical sciences. Forgive me if I have mentioned these previously. -- https://starburstfound.org/astrophysicist-paul-alex-laviolette-phd-has-passed-away/
"Genesis of the Cosmos" the ancient science of continuous creation, based on his systems approach.
"Subquantum Kinetics" advances in our understanding of how nonequilibrium reaction systems spawn self-organizing wave patterns. The basis for his Genesis of the Cosmos theories.
"The Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion" using his systems approach to theoretical physics to explain Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology. ... such as used on the now popular B2.
"The Talk of the Galaxy" what he takes as proof of the existence of interstellar radio signals of intelligent origin. Based on the characteristics of signals from a few very peculiar pulsars, one quite near earth and another quite near the galactic center.
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Just for fun:
Norman Bergrun: "Ringmakers of Saturn" Norm was one of the lead image analysts for early flybys of Saturn. He discovered in the photographs very large "devices" that appeared to be actively engaged in manipulating Saturn's rings by systematically transporting the icy material outward from the planet. Such devices were on the order of 22,500 miles long, 1750 miles wide/thick. Norm was still working at NASA when he asked permission to publish his findings. Nasa approved, and he got a publisher to print something like 30k copies (not sure the actual number). He took 50 copies for himself and the rest were sold. Fewer than a hundred ever got to the public. An unknown government agency bought out the run and the publisher refused to print more. The devices seemed to be mining huge quantities of water and then ... sending it somewhere? A little off topic, but it puts ideas about evolution etc. into a new perspective. For example, where is all that water going? Why did NASA space shuttle astronauts mention large "house-size" balls of liquid water falling downward into our atmosphere? -- https://archive.org/details/texts?tab=collection&query=ringmakers+of+saturn
Thanks! That is all very interesting. I especially feel I ought to look more properly into the different flavours of idealism.