http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/current
Yes, new age as well as hard science.......
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(c) 2015 Seán ó Nualláin
The Foundations of Mind III Conference:
Science as if Being Mattered
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FOM 3
Sproul Room, International House at UC Berkeley
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This conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!”
approach will not yield a better, more veridical science with the
possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature.
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Deadlines:
Feb 14, 2016 3,000 word summary of papers
Feb 29, 2016 500 word abstract for posters
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Deadlines:
Feb 14, 2016 3,000 word summary of papers
Feb 29, 2016 500 word abstract for posters
Mar 1 notification of acceptance
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FOUNDATIONS OF MIND III
Reparsing Nature: Science as if Being Mattered
This
conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!” approach will
not yield a better, more veridical science. It asks the attendees to
consider whether there are not different types of causal explanation at
each level of nature including occasionally none at the quantum level,
teleology in biology, and that nexus we invoke to explain each other
termed “folk psychology” at the intentional/intersubjective level. While
we began our project with the insight that reduction of mind to current
theories of psychology has always been what Frege dubbed
“psychologism,” we now extend the argument.
In
particular, we argue that $ billions are being lost in inefficient,
often unethical “science” research whose lack of attention to ontology
makes it doomed to failure. The premature application of this to human
affairs, be it drugs that do not take account of the intricate interplay
of genes and metabolism, meditation “techniques” that do not take
account of 21st century Being-in-the-word, or simplistic
accounts of how politics are processed in the brain, are engineered for
failure. Conversely, appropriate use of robust dynamical systems
techniques have already proven insightful and low-cost in neuroscience
and elsewhere; constraining the search space by using syntax is already
being used in genomics; homoiconic programming languages model DNA well;
and so on
While its
mythic poverty IS necessarily an ultimate constraint on science,as
distinct from the equally valid exploration of reality in the arts,
much can be done to improve science education and research. As things
stand, physicists search for a theory of everything that
makes
other sciences redundant, Cognitivists implore us to couch our theories
in the cognitive schemata they see as fundamental; neuroscientists up
the ante on greedy reductionism by asserting the primacy of their
findings - be they genetic, algorithmic or chaotic - over all other
Sciences.
Several
alternatives are also gaining traction. One, that of non-dualism,
refuses to budge from the Inalienable fact of the primacy of conscious
experience. Another, that of class warfare, surely due a comeback as the
2016 Democratic race shows, argues for the bourgeois nature of such
speculation. Finally, an eschatological attempt to roll science,
society, and culture into One Magisterium/Caliphate now brutally
occupies vast swathes of the Middle East.
This
Conference is a search for alternatives. The premise underpinning this
conference, a premise with which participants should feel free to
disagree, is that once one has moved beyond solipsism/non-dualism,there
now exists the possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature. Papers are
invited which address these and other themes;
1.
Theories of everything (TOEs); in what sense would a set of equations
comprehensible only to an extreme minority comprise a TOE to be taught
as Hawking recommends to schoolchildren?
2.
Information; is the quantum information described by Bousso the same
thing/process as Susskind’s “entropy”, information in Shannon, the deus
ex machina that generates the universe of Seth Lloyd and the correlates
in the biological work of Deacon and Tononi?
3.
Computation; in the 1990’s, Brian Smith argued that it was impossible
to isolate a computational system to allow it perform algorithms and
simultaneously to align it with the real world on which it was
operating. In order to achieve “Computation in the wild”, he argued, it
was necessary to identify computational systems as pure intentionality
in the Brentano sense, precisely the position that the Chinese room
thought-experiment rejects. Can we rescue the concept in a way that
does justice to all its manifestations from the quantum and classical
Fourier transforms to using a spreadsheet?
4.
The psychological/intentional realm; Advaita Vedanta was brought into
the West partly, if not largely, by George Harrison’s invocation of a
transcendent reality “within you, without you.” Contrariwise,
Gurdjieff’s fragment of a system, as expounded by Ouspensky, is full of
clunky mechanical metaphors for the human psyche, the amoeba and indeed
the Absolute. Can we do better than this in the face of the spectacular
and burgeoning success of 21st century AI and robotics, and the dismal
failure of psychology?
5
Science’s dark period: ”Dark energy” and “dark matter” are too
well-known to be rehearsed here, and are suggestive of a stage of
crisis in science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the
fact that the “dark energy”/default network of the brain is currently
suggested as absorbing metabolic process even when no cognition is
taking place; linear models of the neuron are clearly too simple; the
“dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas that actually code by any
computing definition; and so on.
6.
Quantum mind; Internal FOM private discussion has benefitted from
the input of the great Henry Stapp. Publicly, Henry has recently stated
that the Orch OR model would generate creatures that would become
conscious with no memory and thus no cognition. Yet he considers the
Gödel incompleteness argument sound, with the proviso that its is the
unfolding of the cosmos that is implicated in humans’ ability to “see”
the truth of the Gödel sentence. This is of course compatible with the
pre-Hameroff Penrose, and may be the start of a fusion of
computationalist cognitive science and physics in a suitably extended
notion of observer status. That in turn through the frames of reference
argument in SR would give us a route into a treatment of selfhood
compatible with science. Can we follow the path blazed by this physicist
and mathematician to a formal theory?
7. Consciousness; there is a remarkable consensus that this has not yet been solved. Yet, in the rush to “solve’ the “hard problem’ with gazebos like Terahertx oscillations and a word salad of half-understood biology, many useful concepts have been lost and we welcome papers on them. Examples are; the Locke/Leibniz debate on the relation between subjective state and neural event; Levine’s explanatory gap; Block’s a- and p -; Marxist class consciousness and its relation to emanationist systems; neural synchrony; Pribram’s Gabor transform; Global workspace theories; Crick’s comment that he came into the area 20 years too early for the neuroscience and his resulting idée fixee about a neural correlate in a specific location.
8.
Neuroscience; as predicted in FOM, the Markram/EC project has
become a debacle. What are the technical and organizational desiderata
to prevent a recurrence in the USA?
9. Activism; In what increasingly looks like a fragile pause in hostilities, the neoconservative “shock doctrine” has given way to a neoliberalism that exploits distracters like gender or an African-American president. How long can this last in an era which has seen major terrorist attacks in the EU?
10. The academy; we tend to forget that the academy is meant to produce truths to be acted on. Instead, just as the state rescued an extreme version of financialized capitalism post-2008, neglecting to pursue thousands of criminals, so the academy sees its role as providing drones for an ever more economized life. At the elite level, may post-docs find themselves 30, $100k + in debt, and with career prospects the same as if they had never gone to elementary school, let alone college. How long can this last in an are where all necessary research and educational resources are free on the web, and it is clear to the lab drones that most PI’s are hopelessly out of date?
11.
Science set free; famously, Rupert Sheldrake has invoked “morphic
fields” to explain everything from crystallization to biological
morphology. Can this be extended to the human level to explain
simultaneous discovery like non-Euclidean geometry in Lobachevski,
Bolyai and Gauss as well as the more famous Newton/Leibniz bother? What
entities might carry these “Nuons” and what are the implications for
ESP and indeed all conversation?
Poster presentation; 500 word abstract by Feb 29
Spoken presentation; 3,000 word summary by Feb 14. Notification of acceptance; Mar 1 2016
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ABOUT FOUNDATIONS OF MIND
We
study Science as if Being mattered. Speakers at the “Mind” conferences
in the past, initially run in Ireland and England in the 1990’s, have
included two of America’s greatest neuroscientists, Walter Freeman and
the late Karl Pribram, who reject simplistic neural models for a
dynamical systems approach to the brain. Incidentally, we produced the
only software implementation of Pribram’s work. Quantum mechanics was
graced by Henry Stapp, an ex-colleague both of Heisenberg and Pauli, who
has proposed not only an intellectually defensible dualism, but a view
in which individual mental acts can be viewed as instances of the
self-expression of universal mind.
At
this point, we have verged on the spiritual; and fortunately we have
not only had the honor of hosting Fr. Robert Spitzer of EWTN, but the
philosopher and author Jacob Needleman. Our scientific bar has been
raised by the presence of several associates of the late, great Pat
Suppes of Stanford. In 2014-15 we verged into biology, and were assisted
by Terry Deacon, Fritjof Capra and Stuart Kauffman in this endeavour.
Our next conference will be our 7th and we will continue our
emphases on human freedom, the notion that mind must be viewed in the
context of a transcendent reality, and the necessity of attending to
ontological divisions in nature even to do computation. In short, we
promote a salutary reparse of nature, one that does not make any
assumptions outside best practice in science.
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