Re: Conscious Layer Speculations

Dear Colleagues:

Season's greetings to ALL!

This is a belated response to the October posts of Wiliam S. Dockens and
Ted Goranson. Becaause of the tardiness of this response, I am copying
the original messages below.

First, Prof. Dockens describes:

> The interfaces between psychology, anthropology, endocrinology, and
> pharmacology are crucial to a behavioral science approach to the problem of
> consiousness. Here, consciousness manifests itself from three perspectives:
>
> 1) Inside, looking out,
> 2) Outside, looking in and
> 3) Inside, looking in.
>
Prof. Dockens perspective is close to my own views, but, not restricted
to the nature of consciousness, but to causality in living systems.
Thus, one can classify causality as:
: bottom-up
: top-down
: inside-outward
: outside-inward.

Such a classification allows for much more than layering; it allows for
a hierarchical logic of organization which includes scalar
relationships. I think the bottom-up term is necessary to account for
energy flows and for biochemical processes. Such biochemical processes
must underlie both pharmacolgy and endocrinology which are included in
the "problems of consciousness."

Ted Goranson wrote:
> >You'll recall that we supposed that there are two kinds of information,
> >Info (1) which is the ordinary kind, but which I wish in the present
> >context to limit to kinds of abstractions and messages that support (the
> >mechanics of) a science and Info(2) the impetus to organize. I submit that
> >they are different and the challenge is to have them merge, which is more
> >likely possible in the social layer.

The separation of info(1) and info(2) into these two descriptions is a
bit uncomfortable to a chemist. Chemists believe that a fundamental
nature of atoms is that they attract to one-another in very specific
ways (manners, accomodations, associations, co-ordinations, ...).
Molecules are organizations of atoms. Biomacromolecules are
organizations of specific biomolecules.
Within chemical thermodynamics, the "impetus to organize" is described
in terms of energy relationships; these phenomena underly the need for
nutritional sustainance of living systems. Of course, more than
"imputus" is needed to form new biological organizaions; the specific
structures must be obtained from the ecoment (surroundings) or from
storage sources and reformed under the actions of the existing
organization. Thus, it would be most interesting to learn how the
notions of "info(1)" and "info(2)" can be made inclusive with the
perspectives of chemistry and with the notions of causality as expressed
above.

Ted Goranson further writes:
> >3. The laws which codify these new abstraction spaces (and ideally the
> >mechanism which defines them) will be the most basic discoverable laws.
> >This is to say that the mapping between info(1) and (2) will be not in
> >terms of information per se, but the definition of the abstraction spaces
> >which define information. Since Category Theory is the mathematics of
> >abstraction, it may provide some useful formal techniques.
> >

I agree with the premise that abstraction spaces are necessary to
represent complex systems. A basic question is: Are two abstraction
spaces sufficient?
Can we consider the term "abstraction spaces" to mean simply "info(1)
and info(2)" or analogously, microscopically and macroscopically (as in
Boltzmann)?
Rosen argues, from a categorical perspective, that Newtonianism is
insufficient.
(Boltzmann's equation is closely related to a Newtionian perspective.)
>From my perspective, I have argued that category theory can be used to
construct a hierarchy of "abstraction spaces," but that these "degrees
of organization" (in my terminology) are linked in a manner different
from (info(1) and info(2). Rather, it is argued that degrees of
organization are composed as a sequence of metalanguages within the
"imputus to organize" generated by chemical thermodynamics. Thus, the
number of "degrees of organization" is open-ended; the logic of the
grammers must be defined in terms of observations of natural systems.
It is asserted that within a cell (or any living organism), the
"imputus" to organize can be classified into the set of directional
causes given above; proof of this assertion will not be easy.
Obviously, genetics play a role in the "inside-outward" causal
processes.

I am reluctant to comment on further aspects of Ted's post because the
meanings of the wider assertions are unclear to me. Perhaps Ted would
find the time to ground his assertions within an explicit context space?

And perhaps Prof. Dockens would find time to relate his hypothesis to
biochemical phenomena?

Happy New Year to ALL!

Jerry LR Chandler

William S. Dockens III wrote:
>
> Fisers
>
> As a behavioral ecologist with a general systems approach, I have been
> watching this conference with increasing interest. I enter here in response
> to Ted Goranson's move to "jump-start" the conference. Focus is on the
> perspectives from which we view the problem of consciousness, and the
> interdisciplinary interfaces where we formulate both the problems and the
> approaches to their solutions.
> The interfaces between psychology, anthropology, endocrinology, and
> pharmacology are crucial to a behavioral science approach to the problem of
> consiousness. Here, consciousness manifests itself from three perspectives:
>
> 1) Inside, looking out,
> 2) Outside, looking in and
> 3) Inside, looking in.
>
> Inside looking out is basic because this is the first, and most immediate,
> way that individuals view the world. Effects of hormones and the inadequacy
> of language to describe these effects are two exceedingly difficult
> problems from the "inside, looking out perspective".
>
> Outside, looking in, is the dominant approach of science and technology.
> Mathematics and game theory, add power tools to scientific language.
> Nevertheless, consciousness has characteristics that frustrate most
> conventional mechanistic approaches. Mutual causality, non hierarchical
> levels, opponent processes organization and extremely complex positive and
> negative feedback systems, all combine to produce a labyrinth of obstacles
> to a universally acceptable definition of "information". Add to this the
> territorial imperatives that are the excess baggage of specialties, and the
> sociology of science emerges as a significant factor.
>
> Inside, looking in is by far the most difficult perspective of the three.
> Self-reference plays havoc with conventional logical analysis. Identity and
> identity functions lead to fuzzy boundaries that create nightmares for
> classification systems.
>
> Despite the obvious complexity that arises as a consequence of viewing the
> problem from all three perspectives simultaneously, we can make progress.
> First, a division of labor, similar to the gnome project is necessary. We
> should be careful not to confuse divisions of labor with divisions of
> nature. I suggest we formulate our approaches in terms of functional units.
> So that we can meet at the interfaces between disciplines and discuss the
> variables that describe, predict and control information.
>
> William S. Dockens III
> Department of Psychology
> Uppsala University
Received on Thu Jan 07 10:27:57 1999