On Oct 15, 10:22 pm, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I think we are talking past each other. There is the behavior of > >> neurons at the single-neuron level. That is fairly well understood. > >> Nothing about the spontaneous activity you referenced really > >> challenges anything about our understanding of single-neuron function. > >> You may disagree, but you would be disagreeing with the mainstream. > > > No, I don't disagree. In the language of the extended metaphor I used > > earlier, an auto mechanic with the right tools and engineering > > diagrams can tell you exactly how a car works. I have no problem with > > that. I only argue that the mechanic cannot tell you where the car is > > going to be driven. You can't predict what is going to be on TV by > > looking at the electronics of the screen. This is the situation with > > the brain. Low level neurology does not always predict high level > > intentionality. That's all that I'm saying. > > Yes, but your account of "intentionality" is confusing. You're saying > "high level intentionality" here but elsewhere identifying it with > electromagnetism, which is the lowest level without getting into > quantum dynamics. I would agree with intentionality being "high > level", as in, emergent.
Emergent properties of electromagnetism are also electromagnetic, are they not? Electromagnetism is intentionality on every level, it's just that low level intentionality might be almost unrecognizably primitive to us (or not - maybe it's as familiar as the feeling of holding and releasing). Emergence is a bottom up concept that I think takes for granted high level pattern recognition. It's useful instrumentally but I think ultimately fails at explaining anything on a cosmological level. Emerges from where? Why? It ignores perceptual frame of reference entirely and models the universe as an object with spontaneous magical properties. > But I can't make sense of your account. How > can something be low level and high level at the same time? How can it not? Level is in the eye of the beholder. What does the universe care for our idea of 'level'? > The > different levels of reality that emerge at increasing orders of scale > are characterized by completely independent dynamics. Characterized independently to us. Only to our perceptual frame of reference, our observations as creatures of a specific size and velocity. Frame of reference is everything. A nuclear bomb treats human beings and granite buildings alike, as matter. It doesn't resolve subtle levels of emergence, it addresses the whole protocol stack at the physical level. Booom. > > >> Then there is the behavior of large ensembles of neurons. This is an > >> emergent phenomenon and is not well understood. > > > Exactly. I think that it can be better understood as a phenomenon > > which is not only an emergent property of ensembles of neurons, but > > granular properties in the moment of an individual entity's behavior > > over time. It has to go both ways otherwise there could be no reason > > or mechanism for us to care about anything. > > What do you mean by "going both ways"? Causality really does not > cross levels. All we can say is that higher levels emerge > from/supervene on lower levels. Say that I decide to paint a picture of a creature that I have imagined. Like Cthulhu's more evil twin or something. How are the lower levels of neurological activity which govern my fine muscle movements, holding the paint brush, dipping the paint, etc not supervening on my higher level preferences? I and my fictional vision are driving the bus. Causality routinely crosses levels. That's what this conversation is - a personal, voluntary, high level semantic enterprise which pushes low level fingertips, keystrokes, internet switches, computer screen pixels, retina cells and neurons on the remote end. You have to look at the big picture from a more objective perspective. Your view is blindered by conventional wisdom of the 20th century. >If that gives you problems in seeing > how we could have a phenomenological experience of will, then that is > a failure of imagination on your part. It's not my problem, it's everybody's problem. I'm being rhetorical. Why and how do you imagine that a phenomenological experience of will exists if it is utterly superfluous? >Unless, you can come up with a > principled argument as to why, for one, "there could be no reason or > mechanism for us to care about anything," There can be no reason because it would not be necessary if our actions were all actually (secretly) involuntary. Why would a wind up toy need to care about anything? How would it help the gears spin? I don't see that it needs much argument, the proposition of will is a direct ontological contradiction of determinism. There can be no mechanism for us to care about anything because care has no physical ingredients. How do patterns which are purely physical arithmetic logic come to care about their foregone conclusions? Equations don't care. >and for another, how > causality can "go both ways". Rhetoric won't do. I need detailed > arguments. (Explained above) You have to start by grounding yourself in the reality that causality does indeed go both ways, and that it is the ordinary condition and circumstance in which you find yourself in. It is only because you are part of this moment in the history of Western culture that you are willing to allow the theoretical logic of the microcosmic models we have established to contradict the living reality of your own experience. It is you who needs to supply me with detailed arguments. What is it that is right not reading this? What are it's opinions made of? How do you account for those things as an emergent property of cells? > > >> Spontaneous activity > >> is described at this emergent level. In fact, there may be multiple > >> levels of emergence in the brain, each characterized by a unique set > >> of dynamics. It is hard to say, because the complexity involved is > >> mindblowing. But the fact that we have observed activity at this level > >> of the brain that confounds us is hardly news. It just reinforces the > >> brute fact that we really don't know how the brain works. And this > >> says almost nothing about the nature of will or consciousness. > > > We are on the exact same page. This is why I keep barking in Stathis > > direction - his view is that there are no emergent properties because > > everything that exists must be reducible to a molecular level or else > > it's magic. > > Well I'm going to stop guessing about what Stathis thinks and let him > chime in if he wants to. > > > I would have doubted it too, but no. His argument is straight up 19th > > century Billiard Ball Universe determinism. He says that all that can > > happen in the brain is a chain reaction from neuron to neuron (plus > > "Inputs" from the external environment). > > But that is a correct description from the level of single-neuron > dynamics. It is utterly deterministic. If you disagree, then you must > show how, without hand-wavy arguments about will and electromagnetism. A single neuron is like looking at a single pixel on a screen. I will go along with you that it is utterly deterministic - I don't know if that is an absolute distinction or a relative one; it's certainly more deterministic than we are, but sure, let's say they are deterministic. In order for them to produce any sort of emergent property, that means that they must have the potential for that property to emerge within them to begin with. You can't make a benzene ring out of six marbles, the atoms themselves have to be Carbon atoms. So right away the atom is not what it seems to be to us when taken out of context as an individual entity. What I am able to understand is that the atom, the pixel, and the neuron are not only a thing in themselves, but they are also the granular 'non-things' of a greater thing as well. That greater thing has greater properties, dynamics, and potentials than the sum of it's parts, and those properties make a completely different kind of sense in their own frame of reference - their world. It is the relation of the greater and the lesser, the high and the low that defines both entities and both worlds. The relation. The sense that is made between all of it. That is reality. No one set of microcosmic laws or cosmic divinities causes it all. It's an autopoietic ontology which can potentially support phenomena of any level of literal realism or spiritual-mysterious experience that we care to investigate. > If single-neuron dynamics are not deterministic, then there must be a > random or probabilistic dynamic at play. Roger Penrose thinks so, as > he says consciousness is rooted in quantum effects. So, are > single-neuron dynamics 100% deterministic? It depends what you mean. Are the dynamics of the 452x101 pixel of your monitor 100% deterministic? Doesn't it depend upon what image you choose to put on your screen to determine the behavior of that pixel? Are you talking only about determination as far as how each pixel is illuminated? >If not, why not? What is > the *specific* mechanism that makes them non-deterministic? You > cannot answer "will" as that would be level confusion once again. The specific mechanism is that they are part of a greater system which seems to us subjectively to be not completely deterministic. That mechanism is not manifested directly from the high-level experience to low-level biological behavior - the high level experience corresponds to the greater pattern of brain activity as a whole, the low-level behavior only corresponds to the subjective pixels of that experience. What we call 'charge', 'voltage', 'polarization', 'ionization', etc are all our inferences of what are in fact micro-subjective experiences. Those experiences are what we are made of, and we are what they are made of. It's really that simple. The one is the many. > > >> Again we must distinguish > >> between single neuron dynamics, which are fairly well understood (and > >> can be roughly modeled in terms of linear dynamics, but only if you > >> don't care about precision), and large scale dynamics of ensembles of > >> neurons, which are not all understood in terms of any kind of linear > >> analysis. I would be surprised if Stathis disagreed with this > >> description. > > > Ask him. You'll be surprised. From what he has said here, his position > > is that since we do understand single neuron dynamics, then there > > cannot be anything which cannot be understood using linear analysis. > > OK, I will await his answer on this if he cares to. You're right, I > would be surprised. > > >> That is just hand-waving. There is no way to refute it and there is no > >> explanatory power. Why did Bob kick that tree? "It was his > >> electromagnetic dynamics, i.e. his will." "It was God's will". They > >> both have the same explanatory power. > > > Then you are saying that electromagnetism has no explanatory power > > either. My idea is that electromagnetism and sensorimotive experience > > are essentially the same phenomena, and that phenomena is a universal > > primitive. Carrying and releasing are the sensorimotive experiences of > > negative and positive charge in electromagnetism, it's just the first > > person view of it. How is that not explanatory? I am putting > > consciousness into the physical universe, not sequestering it into a > > metaphysical never-never land. My view even explains how the idea of > > God works and why it, and other super-signifiers are such powerful > > motivators for human beings. > > Electromagnetism obviously has explanatory power - at the level at > which electromagnetism operates, which is the atomic. I am not > unsympathetic to the idea that things like atoms and molecules might > have a subjective aspect or flip side to their objective realities. Isn't chemistry just electromagnetism scaled up to the next frame of reference? You may be very close to understanding my ideas if you want to: Think of how different and how much richer chemistry and biology are compared to physics. My understanding is that qualitative scaling up which we see on the 'outside' of cells, molecules, and atoms, correlates to a scaling up on the 'inside' which is completely different topologically. Instead of just getting larger and slower, the flip side is utterly flipped ontologically. It is not some other dimension of stuff in space, it is experience through time. It has no substance at all. It scales up through experience, aggregating significance amongst atoms to make molecules, molecules to make cells, cells to make organisms. Cells are an experience of molecules. There is nothing that makes a group of molecules part of a cell except that they participate in the cellular function. You will know if you are getting this when you realize that it's right in front of your face. I'm not talking about any weird non-physical thing, this is all ordinary. It just seems unfamiliar because our whole perceptual frame of reference is designed to insulate the psyche from these other levels of experience - as it should. We are a specific thing, and our view of the universe is specific to that thing. > But for one, now you are committing to a metaphysics of your own > (something you seem to be averse to for whatever reason), and for > another the burden is on you to explain how the phenomenological > realities we experience as humans are somehow made up of the 10^40 > (just a guess) subjective experiences of the atoms in our bodies. What > mechanism have you identified that integrates all these > micro-experiences? And again we run into the boundary problems, see > below. Tell me if this is separate from what I've already answered. The mechanism is General Relativity. Just as the flip side of electromagnetism is sensorimotive charge, the flip side of Relativity is Perception. They are the same thing - the tendency of stuff to clump together and fall apart as matter across space, and the tendency of feelings to combine and separate as experience through time. It's stupid simple really, it's just hard to explain. The obstacle is the simplicity - it's just too absurd to consider that (experience * time) is just (matter รท space) turned around, and that makes all the difference. I think it's true though. > > >> Also, why is will, in your account, confined to regions of the brain? > > > Will isn't confined to regions of the brain. It's just our will that > > is, because we happen to be this huge, trillion cell organism that has > > a specialized organism-within-an-organism nervous system to manage the > > whole monstrosity as a single coherent entity. You can't really even > > say our will is confined to the brain, since we impose our will on the > > outside world and on others all the time. The motor areas of the > > brain, collectively, are the inflection point from which an individual > > person's will is translated from the subjective 'experience through > > time' topology into the material changes in 'objects across space'. > > But if will isn't confined to regions of the brain then you have no > story for why some behaviors are voluntary and some are involuntary. It's not that some behaviors are voluntary from an objective point of view, it's that what we consciously are only includes some regions of the brain. What we consider voluntary is what 'we' have direct access to in our role as curator-caretaker of this human organism's life. If we meditate for a long time, it appears that we can expand that scope of voluntary control to a surprising extent if we want to. Maybe 'we' have to earn the trust of the rest of the psyche? > > >> If will and electomagnetism are the same thing, where are the > >> boundaries? > > > The boundaries are a matter of perspective only. It's solipsistic, but > > it isn't an illusion. Change that you feel that you cause or infer is > > being caused by something which resembles yourself is will. > > If I'm superstitious, I might believe I caused the Red Sox to choke > because I lost my hat. Is that will? That gets into a whole different area. When you are looking at a frame of reference greater than yourself and what you can control directly with your body - you are like the neuron in your brain was when you tell it to dip the paint brush in Cerulean blue. Your will is not relevant to whether you caused the Red Sox to choke, but rather it is relative to whether you choose to believe that is the case. If you do, it won't have consequences for the Red Sox, but it may have consequences for your own life - not just the mundane ones of stapling your hat to your head next time, but the induction of superstition into your psyche can open up sensitivities to larger patterns which can be interesting and can also compromise your sanity. The 'rabbit hole' isn't a real place, but that doesn't mean you can't go down it. It's your will that determines how far down you want to go ordinarily, but neurological conditions, substances introduced, etc, can override our will as well (because it's bi-directional). > > > Change > > that you observe in something other than yourself which you cannot > > infer as having intention boils down to electromagnetism. > > Isn't this statement as guilty of reductionism as you chastise Stathis for? No, I'm just trying to clarify how I think electromagnetism and sensorimotive experience are related. I think they are the same thing, but experienced from opposite perspectives. I'm not saying that feelings must all be understandable in terms of electromagnetism. Just the opposite, they can never be understood in each other's terms, only correlated and synchronized spatio-temporally. > > >> Why not the entire brain (even the parts we know to > >> control involuntary behaviors)? Why not the entire body? Why not the > >> air I breathe in and out, and my shit and piss, pardon the language? > >> All of that can be modeled in terms of its electromagnetic dynamics if > >> you go micro enough. > > > Yes, all of those things have micro wills too - just nowhere near as > > qualitatively developed as ours (just because we are this crazy > > overgrown animal nervous system). The blood cells in the coronary > > traffic jams may not be playing XM radio while they get pumped through > > the interchange, but that doesn't mean that these tissues aren't > > expressing a will to live in what they are doing every day, just as we > > do in our own (1,000,000,000,000 times more elaborate) way. > > >> >> If you want my explanation, will is a psychological epiphenomenon. > > >> > Which means you are relying on metaphysics. I don't. > > >> You wanted an alternative explanation. I was not offering it to argue > >> it. Only to show that there are alternative explanations in which > >> "will" is something that is not contradicted by the laws of physics. > >> Perhaps it is wrong. Who cares. > > > If you are fine with metaphysical explanations of what the universe > > is, then that's ok with me. I want the uni in universe though. I don't > > buy some voyeuristic dimension that is separated from physical > > phenomena by an impenetrable wall. I think that although our > > perception is determined by who and what we are, that does not mean > > that we aren't also literally part of the physical universe - that we > > don't directly participate in our own lives rather than some > > epiphenomenal simulation. My ideas offer a way of putting us back into > > the cosmos without sacrificing anything from science. > > OK, I'll bite. What are my metaphysics? The idea of consciousness as an epiphenomenon adds an unexplained layer of coherence on top of the physical layer. Where is potential for consciousness located? What is it made of? > All I'm proposing is that > will and consciousness emerge from a particular organization that we > refer to as brains Emerge from where though? If they physically exist why do they need to 'emerge'? It's hard not to take perception for granted but to understand my idea you would have to do that. You have to treat the universe like a computer program - nothing can exist unless the possibility for it's existence is specifically proscribed. The universe needs to have some property of emerge-ness built into it which is conjured by some organizations and not others. How can that be justified physically when we can put things together in the same organizations without having the same effect (a pyramid of donuts does not behave the same way as a pyramid of smoke rings.) Organization is important, but what it is that is being organized determines the range of possibilities for emergent properties as well. > (and, btw, possibly from other kinds of > organizations with certain properties that brains happen to embody). > What am I sacrificing from science? I'm not saying will and > consciousness aren't real. I am saying they aren't magic. I think that by saying they are epiphenomena, you are saying they must be magic. It's just 'God did it' with different words. By saying they are the same phenomena as electromagnetism but experienced subjectively, we recover subjectivity without sacrificing science. Your way does not recover subjectivity, it just explains it away so that it can only be addressed in a separate universe. The assumption of such an epiphenomenal universe sacrifices the ability for science to achieve closure and unity in it's cosmology. Meaning and feeling are sequestered in a never-never land, with no meaningful connection to the unfeeling, meaningless universe that really 'matters'. > > >> So you don't believe in egos? > > > I'm saying that in the case you describe, where are bodies and minds > > simply behave according to various predeterminations and > > probabilities, that it would make no sense for egos to exist. I don't > > think that egos 'exist', but they can be said to 'insist'. > > OK, I like that, 'insist' instead of 'exist'. But of course it makes > sense for them to 'insist'. How would we relate to other people > otherwise? Just because there is a deterministic root on which egos > supervene, does not mean that we have no agency. Totally agree. I just don't like the term ego because it's too discrete. I think the reality is more ephemeral and relativistic (as subjects are). If you think of the senses and motives associated with the mid-range of our perceptual inertial frame, which for us as human beings our mundane mid-range is social and political; i.e. our peer level phenomenology, that is the world which applies to an ego concept. It has no concrete existence on other levels, other than the consequences of it's influences on behavior, personality, etc. The ego isn't a thing, it's more like a turbulence pattern which manifests in the social interference between motive agendas. Cells maybe have the same thing. Maybe cancer feels like narcissism to other cells? > You should check out > Conway's Game of Life. Understanding how higher-order objects appear > and interact with one another can be very instructive given that at > base it is a cellular automata with just three rules. In fact, some > smarty pants even implemented a Turing Machine on it. Thanks, yeah I know all about it. Not to be condescending, but just to help explain why I'm not interested in these kinds of suggestions to 'look into this or that' is that I've been down that road already. I'm 43 years old. I played LIFE on an Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P in 1978. I've spent most of my life believing exactly as you do now. I don't claim to have even novice level facility with higher math, computer science, or physics, but I am quite familiar with the general principles. This discussion we are having here is only one of a long line of such conversations I have had over the last several years. My purpose here is only to share my ideas and explain them to anyone who might be interested. I am output only. The only input I even care to consider is anything that would be a direct counterfactual to my ideas. I know all about self-similarity and autopoiesis, abiogenesis, cellular automata, etc. It is compelling, I know. I used to think that too. I used to think that the cosmos was all "pattern", but that doesn't explain enough. Sense is more than pattern and patterns which are physical or computational both supervene upon sense. Sense separates the abstract from the concrete and joins the subject and object while separating them at the same time. It's all about sense. Sense in every sense. Cosmos means order and order is what sense provides. No order can exist without it, no pattern can insist without a capacity for pattern recognition. > > >> That is for you to answer, unless you are asserting that you don't > >> participate in such a narrative yourself. > > > Are you saying you want me to answer why it exists (again, I think > > that it 'insists', and the reason is because it reflects the evolution > > of significance in the face of entropy) or that the nature of the > > narrative is such that it also includes a mysterious quality that > > invites interpretation by each person? Of course I participate in such > > a narrative myself, sure. > > The point is that you think such a narrative is unnecessary, but this > is surely due to your squeamishness about everything supervening on a > completely deterministic level. I'm just being rhetorical. I already know that narrative is part of the cosmos. I'm challenging your view to justify it as physically necessary because I know that it can't be done. > > btw, what does "reflects the evolution of significance in the face of > entropy" mean? That's my theory of significance as the countervailing 'force' to entropy. Just as sensorimotive is the opposite of electromagnetic, and perception is the opposite of relativity, significance is the negentropic quality which concentrates statistical rarities. I call it cumulative entanglement too. Sheldrake is close with 'Morphic resonance' and Bohm with Implicate Order. Significance gives uncommon patterns a lasting impression (temporally), which makes them more influential, which encourages their reproduction until they are either no longer uncommon (and become generic) or until they evolve by connecting with other significant pattens. It's subtractive rather than additive. This might be hard for you because you are grounded in bottom up, additive topology, but think of how the visible spectrum cannot be understood from white, and white cannot be guessed at by mathematically superimposing or mixing the colors of the spectrum. The sense is in the relation. The spectrum and the white and black make each other make sense. They are one thing. Each hue brings out a different aspect - yellow reaches for white naively, indigo-violet withdraws from it. Significance is like that - it pulls us closer to a conclusion, like breadcrumbs on the trail. Whether it's art or science, philosophy, business, etc. whatever subject we consider is striving toward significance (or retreating from it). It's not that life is significant, it's that the accumulation of significance which we can relate to is what we call life. You know how liquid crystal displays change by twisting the polarity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TN-LCD-schematic-MS-208kB.png)? Think of that relation underlying all of the opposites that I keep bringing up. Existence is created through the twisting and untwisting of the singularity. The twisting makes a pseudo-dualism which helps define the monism in the first place. The monism is nothing but 'that which pretends it's not the monism'. The Big Diffraction is as much of a beginning as an ending, and it pulls the significance out of entropy, collects it like a strange attractor from 'the future' as well as the past. Like the spectrum being diffracted from white light, it already knows where it's going and what is has to do to get there, but in the Twisted Nematic phase which we participate in (existence) we don't see that broad pull, and indeed our own participation can perhaps defy and redefine it. Can we go against 'nature' or is that part of nature too? > > >> That is an argument from ignorance. Just because you can't conceive of > >> a reason, doesn't make that a valid argument. > > > No, it's just a contrafactual example. What would be the pojnt of > > having two different areas of the brain that do the exact same thing > > but one is accompanied by some magical feeling that it 'wants' to be > > breathing? I'm asking you why that would make sense. Why have any high > > level processes in the brain at all if it's all automatic and > > awareness of it is epiphenomenal? > > Highly evolved primates surely evolved this mechanism of "voluntary" > control because singing and otherwise vocalizing required it. Why would vocalizing, or any other behavior require it? We can talk in our sleep. Birds sing. Why would primates grunts require any more consciousness to generate than the sounds of crickets? > > > I used to believe in consciousness as an epiphenomenon myself, not > > very log ago, and for most of my life, so I do understand the appeal > > of it very well. It's almost right, but in this case I think that > > means that is exactly wrong. The point of this conversation for > > instance, is to consider our opinions. We care about our opinions for > > one reason only, because we might need to use them. With an > > ephipehenomal intellect, why would we have opinions much less care > > about them or identify with them. They would mean no more to us than > > the wallpaper in the hotel room we are visiting. It just doesn't make > > sense to feel anything if we aren't going to be able to do anything, > > and it doesn't make sense that doing anything should or could feel > > like anything if it is going to get done no matter what. Determinism, > > emergent properties, bottom up processing are all just the left hand > > of the story; the stage and props. The actors and agents add something > > else. I don't know why everyone is so afraid of recognizing that > > simple, ordinary reality that they treat it like some exotic > > witchcraft but I'm not afraid. > > > Craig > > Far from it, it's an incredible and stimulating challenge to > understand how agency arises from deterministic origins. Nobody here > is running from that. In fact, I could easily turn the tables and say > that those who deny determinism out of fear it denies agency are the > ones who are afraid to consider the empirical facts. Both of those things are true. I call those philosophical extremes ACME and OMMM. "Anything Can Mean Everything" denies objective realism and "Only Material Matter Matters" denies subjective realism - both out of mutually exclusive and opposing fears. Fear of empirical facts and fear of agency. What they both share is the fear of synthesis. That both empirical facts and subjective agency can seamlessly coexist. I don't have that fear. I understand that it is the ordinary way that the universe works and must be accepted as *the* fundamental underlying unity of the cosmos. Once you do that, everything else falls into place and makes sense. > > As far as I can tell, the two biggest problems with your account are: > > 1. You conflate vastly different ontological levels by identifying > will, a psychological phenomenon, with electromagnetism, a low-level > physical one. Electromagnetism is only low level if we use low level instruments to detect them. Our ordinary experience, as we can see from MRIs and TMS, is nothing other than electromagnetism in the brain. There is nobody here but us neurons. I require no metaphysics to explain this, it is just the case that we can't see the private side of electromagnetism unless we are the thing that is having the experience. If will is not electromagnetic, how it getting into my fingers to type this? >The problem is not the duality between the objective and > the subjective, but the scale at which these things manifest. That's not my problem because I am clear that sensorimotive perception scales up from low level to high level in the opposite way as electromagnetism (feeling through time not substance across space). We know what our high level experience looks like (flavors, images, memories, etc), and we know what the high level electromagnetism looks like (whole brain MRI), and we even know what the low level electromagnetism looks like (action potentials in cell membranes, etc.) but we don't know what the sensormotive experience of the low levels look like. This is what nobody is seeing. The high level perception is composed of low level perceptuons, not of low level electromagnetism. The back end of perception is totally opposite. They scale up and down differently. It's all meaning and association, sequence and proportion. There are no absolute gears within gears like atoms are to molecules are to cells. It's not literal. It's not objects nested within each other - it's blended meanings, enriched qualities, unified purposes. > > 2. You still haven't rejected determinism at the lowest levels, which > means you actually believe comp is true. Low levels seem to tend to be more deterministic than some high levels. That could be just because they seem that way to us, since subjectivity is going to define anything outside of itself as the opposite of itself, and/or there could be an empirical sense of determinism inherent in the microcosm owing to relative lack of complexity. This seems weaker though since the quantum world has turned out to be so crazy and probabilistic. That suggests to me that either determinism and indeterminism have periodic oscillations in their influence of different scales of the cosmos, or that quantum phenomena are beyond the point where we begin tapping into our own subjectivity 'behind our backs' so to speak. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
