0 ABSENCE1
THE MISSING CIPHER (Page 13)
Science has advanced to the point where we can precisely arrange individual atoms on a metal surface or identify people’s continents of ancestry by analyzing the DNA contained in their hair. And yet ironically we lack a scientific understanding of how sentences in a book refer to atoms, DNA, or anything at all. This is a serious problem. Basically, it means that our best science—that collection of theories that presumably come closest to explaining everything—does not include this one most fundamental defining characteristic of being you and me. In effect, our current “Theory of Everything” implies that we don’t exist, except as collections of atoms. (Page 13)
In other words, the content of this or any sentence—a something-that-is-not-a-thing—has physical consequences. But how? (Page 14)
Each of these sorts of phenomena—a function, reference, purpose, or value—is in some way incomplete. There is something not-there there. Without this “something” missing, they would just be plain and simple physical objects or events, lacking these otherwise curious attributes. Longing, desire, passion, appetite, mourning, loss, aspiration—all are based on an analogous intrinsic incompleteness, an integral without-ness. As I reflect on this odd state of things, I am struck by the fact that there is no single term that seems to refer to this elusive character of such things. So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential2 feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth—just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind. A complete theory of the world that includes us, and our experience of the world, must make sense of the way that we are shaped by and emerge from such specific absences. What is absent matters, and yet our current understanding of the physical universe suggests that it should not. A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences.
WHAT MATTERS? (Page 15)
For the most part, the mental half of any explanation is discounted as merely heuristic, and likely illusory, in the natural sciences. And even the most sophisticated efforts to integrate physical theories able to account for spontaneous order with theories of mental causality end up positing a sort of methodological dualism. Simply asserting this necessary unity—that an observing subject must be a physical system with a self-referential character—avoids the implicit absurdity of denying absential phenomena, and yet it defines them out of existence. We seem to still be living in the shadow of Descartes. (Page 19)
Chalmers argues that we just need to face up to the fact that consciousness is non-physical and yet also not transcendent, in the sense of an ephemeral eternal soul. As one option, Chalmers champions the view that consciousness may be a property of the world that is as fundamental to the universe as electric charge or gravitational mass. He is willing to entertain this possibility because he believes that there is no way to reduce experiential qualities to physical processes. (Page 20)
In this book I advocate a less dramatic, though perhaps more counterintuitive approach. It’s not that the difficulty of locating consciousness among the neural signaling forces us to look for it in something else—that is, in some other sort of special substrate or ineffable ether or extra-physical realm. The anti-materialist claim is compatible with another, quite materially grounded approach. Like meanings and purposes, consciousness may not be something there in any typical sense of being materially or energetically embodied, and yet may still be materially causally relevant.
Conscious experience confronts us with a variant of the same problem that we face with respect to function, meaning, or value. None of these phenomena are materially present either and yet they matter, so to speak. (Page 21)
there is an additional issue with consciousness that makes it particularly insistent, in a way that these other absential relations aren’t: that which is explicitly absent is me. (Page 21)
CALCULATING WITH ABSENCE (Page 21)
the scientific account of concepts like function and meaning essentially lags centuries behind the sciences of these more tangible phenomena. (Page 23)
We take meanings and purposes for granted in our everyday lives, and yet we have been unable to incorporate these into the framework of the natural sciences. We seem only willing to admit that which is materially present into the sciences of things living and mental. (Page 24)
For medieval mathematicians, zero was the devil’s number. The unnatural way it behaved with respect to other numbers when incorporated into calculations suggested that it could be dangerous. Even today schoolchildren are warned of the dangers of dividing by zero. Do this and you can show that 1 = 2 or that all numbers are equal. 5 In contemporary neuroscience, molecular biology, and dynamical systems theory approaches to life and mind, there is an analogous assumption about concepts like representation and purposiveness. Many of the most respected researchers in these fields have decided that these concepts are not even helpful heuristics. It is not uncommon to hear quite explicit injunctions against their use to describe organism properties or cognitive operations. The almost universal assumption is that modern computational and dynamical approaches to these subjects have made these concepts as anachronistic as phlogiston. (Page 24)
A ZENO’S PARADOX OF THE MIND
The inability to integrate these many species of absence-based causality into our scientific methodologies has not just seriously handicapped us, it has effectively left a vast fraction of the world orphaned from theories that are presumed to apply to everything. The very care that has been necessary to systematically exclude these sorts of explanations from undermining our causal analyses of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena has also stymied our efforts to penetrate beyond the descriptive surface of the phenomena of life and mind. Indeed, what might be described as the two most challenging scientific mysteries of the age—explaining the origin of life and explaining the nature of conscious experience—both are held hostage by this presumed incompatibility. Recognizing this contemporary parallel to the unwitting self-imposed handicap that limited the mathematics of the Middle Ages is, I believe, a first step toward removing this impasse. It is time that we learned how to integrate the phenomena that define our very existence into the realm of the physical and biological sciences. (Page 27)
“AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT TOO SIMPLE”
The present exclusion of these absence-based relationships from playing any legitimate role in our theories of how the world works has implicitly denied our very existence. (Page 29)
I operate on the principle that if I can’t explain an idea to any well-educated reader, with a minimum of technical paraphernalia, then I probably don’t thoroughly understand it myself. (Page 30)
enseñanza aprendizaje favorite cita
1 (W) HOLES
A STONE’S THROW (Page 34)
What about the role of the child’s mental conception of what this stone might look like skipped over the waves, his knowledge of how one should hold and throw it to achieve this intriguing result, or his fascination with the sight of a stone resisting its natural tendency to sink in water—if only for a few seconds? These certainly involve the physical-chemical mechanisms of the child’s brain; but mental experience and agency are not exactly neural firing patterns, nor brain states. Neither are they phenomena occurring outside the child’s brain, and clearly not other physical objects or events in any obvious sense. These neural activities are in some way about stone-skipping, and are crucial to the initiation of this activity. But they are not in themselves either past or future stones dancing across the water; they are more like the words on this page. Both these words and the mental images in the boy’s mind provide access to something these things are not. They are both representations of something not-quite-realized and not-quite-actual. And yet these bits of virtual reality—the contents of these representations—surely are as critical to events that will likely follow as the energy that will be expended. Something critical will be missing from the explanation of the skipped stone’s subsequent improbable trajectory if this absential feature is ignored. (Page 35)
The thought is about a possibility, and a possibility is something that doesn’t yet exist and may never exist. It is as though a possible future is somehow influencing the present.
The discontinuity of causality implicit in human action parallels a related discontinuity between living and non-living processes. Ultimately, both involve what amounts to a reversal of causal logic: order developing from disorder, the lack of a state of affairs bringing itself into existence, and a potential tending to realize itself. We describe this in general terms as “ends determining means.” But compared to the way things work in the non-living, non-thinking world, it is as though a fundamental phase change has occurred in the dynamical fabric of the world. Crossing the border from machines to minds, or from chemical reactions to life, is leaving one universe of possibilities to enter another. (Page 38)
Our brains evolved as one product of a 3-billion-year incremental elaboration of an explicitly end-directed process called life. (Page 38)
WHAT’S MISSING? (Page 38)
applying our most sophisticated scientific tools to the analysis of human life and mind has apparently demoted rather than ennobled the human spirit. (Page 39)
Our scientific theories have failed to explain what matters most to us: the place of meaning, purpose, and value in the physical world. (Page 39)
Our scientific theories haven’t exactly failed. Rather, they have carefully excluded these phenomena from consideration, and treated them as irrelevant. This is because the content of a thought, the goal of an action, or the conscious appreciation of an experience all share a troublesome feature that appears to make them unsuited for scientific study. They aren’t exactly anything physical, even though they depend on the material processes going on in brains. (Page 39)
ciencia crítica subjetividad fenomenología cita
A Laplacian demon2 might know the origins of these atoms in ancient, burned-out stars and the individual trajectories that eventually caused them to end up as you see them, but this complete physical knowledge wouldn’t provide any clue to their meaning. (Page 40)
Such concepts as information, function, purpose, meaning, intention, significance, consciousness, and value are intrinsically defined by their fundamental incompleteness. They exist only in relation to something that they are not. (Page 40)
We recognize teleological phenomena by their development toward something they are not, but which they are implicitly determined with respect to. Without this intrinsic incompleteness, they would merely be objects or events. It is the end for the sake of which they exist—the possible state of things that they bring closer to existing—that characterizes them. Teleology also involves such relationships as representation, meaning, and relevance. (Page 41)
The most characteristic and developed exemplar of an absential relationship is purpose. Historically, the concept of purpose has been a persistent source of controversy for both philosophers and scientists. The philosophical term for the study of purposive phenomena is teleology, literally, the logic of end-directedness. The term has its roots in ancient Greek. … In an important sense, purpose is more complex than other absential relationships because we find all other forms of absential relationship implicit in the concept of purpose. It is most commonly associated with a psychological state of acting or intending to act so as to potentially bring about the realization of a mentally represented goal. This not only involves an orientation toward a currently non-existing state of affairs, it assumes an explicit representation of that end, with respect to which actions may be organized. Also, the various actions and processes typically employed to achieve that goal function for the sake of it. Finally, the success or failure to achieve that goal has value because it is in some way relevant to the agency for the sake of which it is pursued. And all these features are contributors to the sentience of simple organisms and the conscious experience of thinking beings like ourselves. (Page 41)
A tool derives its end-directed features parasitically, from the teleology of the designer or user. (Page 43)