....continuation of first comment below which was truncated when it was edited... unexpected glitch, I think...
...one must turn to the phenomenological philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas--but, while deeply important, that is far too large a tangent--although fundamentally important. This is covered some of those who are writing about 'semio-ethics'. Raghuveer & Endres criticize 'Bayesian Mechanics' and the FEP on the basis of what is implied in terms of metaphysics if it were to be true and accepted. What is implied, as is the case with most of the models that are brought forward by modern neuroscientists who see the 'hard problem' as eventually solvable, is a SUBSTANCE METAPHYSICS, which is basically anathema to anyone who believes that process is primary. Why? Because, as Raghuveer and Endres state:
'the theory... (ie. substance metaphysics offers) ...no resource to model novelty, growth, and development observed in human psychology.' And I would hasten to add--not only novelty, growth, and development in 'human psychology', but as features that are deep, foundational aspects of Nature. And then the authors go on to offer an alternative based on process metaphysics. Which is similar, I would argue, to the kind of evolutionary process metaphysics that Charles Sanders Peirce offered in a series of papers in 'The Monist' in the last decade of the 19th century, well over 100 years ago. Which raises the question: what is it going to take to get beyond the mechanistic formalism and its associated ontological implications--like the implications that result when one adopts a metaphysics based on 'stuff' rather than 'process'? I would humbly suggest a thorough reading and study of these two papers, both of which quote the fundamentally significant work of relational biologist, Robert Rosen, and some of the more recent extensions of this work that realize the true autopoietic nature of living organisms, as open systems that are closed to efficient causation. And which are necessarily self-referential and manifest the capacity to anticipate and act autonomously with purpose related to the biologically granted capacity to persist in their physical embodiment in the context of their species-specific ecological conditions, not as passive creatures, but as intentional agents who may even have the capacity to modify their ecological niche to some degree...https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21534 ....which is something that our species has taken to the point where it all appears to be backfiring on us.
Just a brief addition... yes, purposeful niche construction and the process of learning how to do it demonstrates how the learning of individual members of a species can influence the direction of evolution... and this adds to the argument that any model that does not adequately account for learning, growth, development, and adaptive agency of living organisms, doesn't really tell the full story... does it?
One of the problems is the assumption of computability as a foundation for the operation of living organisms. It does not and cannot work, as was shown some time ago by relational biologist, Robert Rosen. Mechanisms compute; Organisms exceed computation. Mechanisms are strictly deterministic in their obedience to the 'ontology of states'--ie. the fact that they admit to the mechanistic formalism means that their operation can be very neatly partitioned into 'states'
and the 'laws' that control them. It really is SO nice! And enticing. But it is entirely inadequate as a model for a living creature. Fundamentally. Rosen calls the assumption of computability the 'Church-Pythagoras Theorem' in an essay in his book, 'Essays on Life Itself' (it is chapter 4 in the book), blatantly and misleadingly false. Living organisms are not reducible to mechanisms... they are context-dependent creatures that adapt through a process of agency and cognition, which are, as Jaeger et al maintain, 'fundamentally not computational'. What quantum physics is telling us is that the mechanistic formalism needs to be transcended--it does not work as a model for 'complex' living organisms. Mechanisms, as Rosen shows, in conforming to the mechanistic formalism, have limited entailment capacity, and are 'simple' relational systems. Period. Adaptive agency cannot be accommodated by the mechanistic formalism. It can only be weakly approximated. One wishes that more people would read the work of Robert Rosen--relational biologist extraordinaire! The other important piece are the metaphysical implications and the ethical and moral inferences and fall-out, for which one must turn to the phenomenological philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas--but, while deeply important, that is far too large a tangent--although fundamentally important. This is covered some of those who are writing about 'semio-ethics'. Raghuveer & Endres criticize 'Bayesian Mechanics' and the FEP on the basis of what is implied in terms of metaphysics if it were to be true and accepted. What is implied, as is the case with most of the models that are brought forward by modern neuroscientists who see the 'hard problem' as eventually solvable, is a SUBSTANCE METAPHYSICS, which is basically anathema to anyone who believes that process is primary. Why? Because, as Raghuveer and Endres state:
'the theory... (ie. substance metaphysics offers) ...no resource to model novelty, growth, and development observed in human psychology.' And I would hasten to add--not only novelty, growth, and development in 'human psychology', but as features that are deep, foundational aspects of Nature. And then the authors go on to offer an alternative based on process metaphysics. Which is similar, I would argue, to the kind of evolutionary process metaphysics that Charles Sanders Peirce offered in a series of papers in 'The Monist' in the last decade of the 19th century, well over 100 years ago. Which raises the question: what is it going to take to get beyond the mechanistic formalism and its associated ontological implications--like the implications that result when one adopts a metaphysics based on 'stuff' rather than 'process'? I would humbly suggest a thorough reading and study of these two papers, both of which quote the fundamentally significant work of relational biologist, Robert Rosen, and some of the more recent extensions of this work that realize the true autopoietic nature of living organisms, as open systems that are closed to efficient causation. And which are necessarily self-referential and manifest the capacity to anticipate and act autonomously with purpose related to the biologically granted capacity to persist in their physical embodiment in the context of their species-specific ecological conditions, not as passive creatures, but as intentional agents who may even have the capacity to modify their ecological niche to some degree...https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21534 ....which is something that our species has taken to the point where it all appears to be backfiring on us.
Thank you, Matt. I totally agree. That is a really brilliant paper in my opinion and I see that you have done some dialoguing with it--which I will definitely check out. I am interested in following up on what they mean by the 'trialectic' co-constructive dynamic. The key issue is 'Thirdness' in the 'new list of categories' of CS Peirce. What is that? It is the necessary process of mediation. In Peirce's Evolutionary Process Metaphysics, that mediating element is what he called 'Evolutionary Love'--which is a concept that is explained in some detail in a little book by Adam Crabtree. The fundamental issue, in my mind, is the recognition that organisms are categorically distinct from machines and do not admit to the mechanistic formalism. In fact, as living beings living in the context of relational time that mediates their 'transactions' with other subjects, living beings cannot possibly be mechanisms and cannot admit to a Substance Metaphysics. Why? Because they contain closed causal loops that operate on a temporal continuum. Besides the fact that they are closed to efficient causation--which mechanisms are NOT!--living organisms have a semantic description that exceeds their syntactic description, as Rosen shows. Which means that living organisms operate in the domain of context-dependence and you cannot predict their functionality in any complete way from a knowledge of their structure, the way you can with a mechanism--which, in admitting to the mechanistic formalism, is strictly deterministic. If you know the structure of a mechanism, you can predict exactly how it is going to behave. It is operating in an idealized context-independent realm. It is like the difference between a computer language which functions without any ambiguity--it cannot because if it did, then the compiler would not know what to do! Versus a natural language which operates in the realm of context-dependence. Tim Eastman addresses some of this in his Logoi framework. Mechanisms operate 'by the numbers' in Tim's 'first realm' of context-independence. Organisms do not and cannot. If they did, they would never manage to survive. They are fundamentally context-dependent living creatures. That is Tim's 'second realm' of context-dependence. And then there is the 'third realm' of context-transcendence. Which is a realm in which time-dependent systems cannot exist. Though it is quite possible that we may gain some intermittent access to it in the context of what has been called 'unexplained experiences'. We are finite creatures who have had the infinite 'implanted within us.' See: Ecclesiastes 3:11 Which is really quite extraordinary. There is a transcendent relational reality that we cannot fully inhabit. However, we may be able to gain some insight into how it operates by way of quantum science and the workings of the 'quantum substratum', which is the realm of possibility, of Heisenberg's 'potentiae'. And, I do think, that this may well be consistent with the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, which is what Ruth Kastner has been exploring. That is, that everything operates out of a hidden relational realm of possibility, which would also correspond with what David Bohm called the 'Implicate Order'. And 'trans-action' requires three elements, as is evident in Ruth's work: 1. An 'emitter' that has something to 'give', to 'confer', 2. An 'absorber' which has the possibility of receiving what the 'emitter' is offering up. and 3. A 'MEDIUM' through which messages (ie. 'waves') can be transmitted between potential 'emitter' and potential 'absorber', an 'Offer Wave' from the potential emitter, and a 'Confirmation Wave' from the potential absorber--which John G Cramer likened to a hidden 'handshake' which determines how things will actualize out of the hidden relational realm of the quantum substratum and into the manifest realm of the physical world. And McLuhan knew what he was talking about when he generated the aphorism:
'The Medium is the Message' Without a medium, without permeable boundaries through which the medium penetrates, there can be no trans-action, no exchange. And we have what Leibniz called a world of 'windowless monads'... a 'silent' mechanistic world devoid of transaction.
The implications of this realization are massive, and they relate to understanding the importance of what Bergson referred to as the 'open source' of morality and religion ( actually what John Vervaeke called 'Religio' that I take to be the process of binding together ). And the ideas resonate deeply, in my opinion, with the phenomenological approach to ethics and morality of Emmanuel Lévinas, recognizing the priority of the diachronic over the synchronic, the relational over the material, the infinite realm of organismic possibility over the finite realm of mechanical totalization. Which is what Lévinas, in effect, tackles in his first major book, 'Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority.'
This is also why we are in the process of bringing to fruition an issue of Pari Perspectives that I mentioned in another post here on the general theme of 'Life Beyond Mechanism. Undoing the Legacy of the Machine Metaphor' Arran Gare and Judith Rosen have agreed to contribute and I am hoping there will be others. In order to advance beyond our current mechanistically oriented 'perspectival' Mental/Rational Structure of Consciousness, and arrive at a new 'mutation' in the structure of consciousness that opens up into the 'aperspectival' Integral structure, we are going to need to realize that what quantum physics is telling us is that ALL natural relational systems are 'organismic', and that biology and the comprehension of the life of organisms is the real foundational science of existence, not physics. Because what is truly originary is the relationality of mind, not physicality of substance.
....continuation of first comment below which was truncated when it was edited... unexpected glitch, I think...
...one must turn to the phenomenological philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas--but, while deeply important, that is far too large a tangent--although fundamentally important. This is covered some of those who are writing about 'semio-ethics'. Raghuveer & Endres criticize 'Bayesian Mechanics' and the FEP on the basis of what is implied in terms of metaphysics if it were to be true and accepted. What is implied, as is the case with most of the models that are brought forward by modern neuroscientists who see the 'hard problem' as eventually solvable, is a SUBSTANCE METAPHYSICS, which is basically anathema to anyone who believes that process is primary. Why? Because, as Raghuveer and Endres state:
'the theory... (ie. substance metaphysics offers) ...no resource to model novelty, growth, and development observed in human psychology.' And I would hasten to add--not only novelty, growth, and development in 'human psychology', but as features that are deep, foundational aspects of Nature. And then the authors go on to offer an alternative based on process metaphysics. Which is similar, I would argue, to the kind of evolutionary process metaphysics that Charles Sanders Peirce offered in a series of papers in 'The Monist' in the last decade of the 19th century, well over 100 years ago. Which raises the question: what is it going to take to get beyond the mechanistic formalism and its associated ontological implications--like the implications that result when one adopts a metaphysics based on 'stuff' rather than 'process'? I would humbly suggest a thorough reading and study of these two papers, both of which quote the fundamentally significant work of relational biologist, Robert Rosen, and some of the more recent extensions of this work that realize the true autopoietic nature of living organisms, as open systems that are closed to efficient causation. And which are necessarily self-referential and manifest the capacity to anticipate and act autonomously with purpose related to the biologically granted capacity to persist in their physical embodiment in the context of their species-specific ecological conditions, not as passive creatures, but as intentional agents who may even have the capacity to modify their ecological niche to some degree...https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21534 ....which is something that our species has taken to the point where it all appears to be backfiring on us.
Just a brief addition... yes, purposeful niche construction and the process of learning how to do it demonstrates how the learning of individual members of a species can influence the direction of evolution... and this adds to the argument that any model that does not adequately account for learning, growth, development, and adaptive agency of living organisms, doesn't really tell the full story... does it?
For example, see: https://nicheconstruction.com/#:~:text=Niche%20construction%20is%20the%20process,natural%20selection%20in%20their%20environments.
A few more papers to check out that are fundamentally critical of the FEP with, I think, sound justification... Jaeger et al... https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1362658/full
...and a paper by Raghuveer & Endres... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373107823_Active_Inference_and_Psychology_of_Goals_A_study_in_Substance_and_Process_Metaphysics
One of the problems is the assumption of computability as a foundation for the operation of living organisms. It does not and cannot work, as was shown some time ago by relational biologist, Robert Rosen. Mechanisms compute; Organisms exceed computation. Mechanisms are strictly deterministic in their obedience to the 'ontology of states'--ie. the fact that they admit to the mechanistic formalism means that their operation can be very neatly partitioned into 'states'
and the 'laws' that control them. It really is SO nice! And enticing. But it is entirely inadequate as a model for a living creature. Fundamentally. Rosen calls the assumption of computability the 'Church-Pythagoras Theorem' in an essay in his book, 'Essays on Life Itself' (it is chapter 4 in the book), blatantly and misleadingly false. Living organisms are not reducible to mechanisms... they are context-dependent creatures that adapt through a process of agency and cognition, which are, as Jaeger et al maintain, 'fundamentally not computational'. What quantum physics is telling us is that the mechanistic formalism needs to be transcended--it does not work as a model for 'complex' living organisms. Mechanisms, as Rosen shows, in conforming to the mechanistic formalism, have limited entailment capacity, and are 'simple' relational systems. Period. Adaptive agency cannot be accommodated by the mechanistic formalism. It can only be weakly approximated. One wishes that more people would read the work of Robert Rosen--relational biologist extraordinaire! The other important piece are the metaphysical implications and the ethical and moral inferences and fall-out, for which one must turn to the phenomenological philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas--but, while deeply important, that is far too large a tangent--although fundamentally important. This is covered some of those who are writing about 'semio-ethics'. Raghuveer & Endres criticize 'Bayesian Mechanics' and the FEP on the basis of what is implied in terms of metaphysics if it were to be true and accepted. What is implied, as is the case with most of the models that are brought forward by modern neuroscientists who see the 'hard problem' as eventually solvable, is a SUBSTANCE METAPHYSICS, which is basically anathema to anyone who believes that process is primary. Why? Because, as Raghuveer and Endres state:
'the theory... (ie. substance metaphysics offers) ...no resource to model novelty, growth, and development observed in human psychology.' And I would hasten to add--not only novelty, growth, and development in 'human psychology', but as features that are deep, foundational aspects of Nature. And then the authors go on to offer an alternative based on process metaphysics. Which is similar, I would argue, to the kind of evolutionary process metaphysics that Charles Sanders Peirce offered in a series of papers in 'The Monist' in the last decade of the 19th century, well over 100 years ago. Which raises the question: what is it going to take to get beyond the mechanistic formalism and its associated ontological implications--like the implications that result when one adopts a metaphysics based on 'stuff' rather than 'process'? I would humbly suggest a thorough reading and study of these two papers, both of which quote the fundamentally significant work of relational biologist, Robert Rosen, and some of the more recent extensions of this work that realize the true autopoietic nature of living organisms, as open systems that are closed to efficient causation. And which are necessarily self-referential and manifest the capacity to anticipate and act autonomously with purpose related to the biologically granted capacity to persist in their physical embodiment in the context of their species-specific ecological conditions, not as passive creatures, but as intentional agents who may even have the capacity to modify their ecological niche to some degree...https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21534 ....which is something that our species has taken to the point where it all appears to be backfiring on us.
That Jaeger et al article on Vervaeke’s relevance realization is great. I had a dialogue focused on it here last week: https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-naturalization?r=2at642
Thank you, Matt. I totally agree. That is a really brilliant paper in my opinion and I see that you have done some dialoguing with it--which I will definitely check out. I am interested in following up on what they mean by the 'trialectic' co-constructive dynamic. The key issue is 'Thirdness' in the 'new list of categories' of CS Peirce. What is that? It is the necessary process of mediation. In Peirce's Evolutionary Process Metaphysics, that mediating element is what he called 'Evolutionary Love'--which is a concept that is explained in some detail in a little book by Adam Crabtree. The fundamental issue, in my mind, is the recognition that organisms are categorically distinct from machines and do not admit to the mechanistic formalism. In fact, as living beings living in the context of relational time that mediates their 'transactions' with other subjects, living beings cannot possibly be mechanisms and cannot admit to a Substance Metaphysics. Why? Because they contain closed causal loops that operate on a temporal continuum. Besides the fact that they are closed to efficient causation--which mechanisms are NOT!--living organisms have a semantic description that exceeds their syntactic description, as Rosen shows. Which means that living organisms operate in the domain of context-dependence and you cannot predict their functionality in any complete way from a knowledge of their structure, the way you can with a mechanism--which, in admitting to the mechanistic formalism, is strictly deterministic. If you know the structure of a mechanism, you can predict exactly how it is going to behave. It is operating in an idealized context-independent realm. It is like the difference between a computer language which functions without any ambiguity--it cannot because if it did, then the compiler would not know what to do! Versus a natural language which operates in the realm of context-dependence. Tim Eastman addresses some of this in his Logoi framework. Mechanisms operate 'by the numbers' in Tim's 'first realm' of context-independence. Organisms do not and cannot. If they did, they would never manage to survive. They are fundamentally context-dependent living creatures. That is Tim's 'second realm' of context-dependence. And then there is the 'third realm' of context-transcendence. Which is a realm in which time-dependent systems cannot exist. Though it is quite possible that we may gain some intermittent access to it in the context of what has been called 'unexplained experiences'. We are finite creatures who have had the infinite 'implanted within us.' See: Ecclesiastes 3:11 Which is really quite extraordinary. There is a transcendent relational reality that we cannot fully inhabit. However, we may be able to gain some insight into how it operates by way of quantum science and the workings of the 'quantum substratum', which is the realm of possibility, of Heisenberg's 'potentiae'. And, I do think, that this may well be consistent with the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, which is what Ruth Kastner has been exploring. That is, that everything operates out of a hidden relational realm of possibility, which would also correspond with what David Bohm called the 'Implicate Order'. And 'trans-action' requires three elements, as is evident in Ruth's work: 1. An 'emitter' that has something to 'give', to 'confer', 2. An 'absorber' which has the possibility of receiving what the 'emitter' is offering up. and 3. A 'MEDIUM' through which messages (ie. 'waves') can be transmitted between potential 'emitter' and potential 'absorber', an 'Offer Wave' from the potential emitter, and a 'Confirmation Wave' from the potential absorber--which John G Cramer likened to a hidden 'handshake' which determines how things will actualize out of the hidden relational realm of the quantum substratum and into the manifest realm of the physical world. And McLuhan knew what he was talking about when he generated the aphorism:
'The Medium is the Message' Without a medium, without permeable boundaries through which the medium penetrates, there can be no trans-action, no exchange. And we have what Leibniz called a world of 'windowless monads'... a 'silent' mechanistic world devoid of transaction.
The implications of this realization are massive, and they relate to understanding the importance of what Bergson referred to as the 'open source' of morality and religion ( actually what John Vervaeke called 'Religio' that I take to be the process of binding together ). And the ideas resonate deeply, in my opinion, with the phenomenological approach to ethics and morality of Emmanuel Lévinas, recognizing the priority of the diachronic over the synchronic, the relational over the material, the infinite realm of organismic possibility over the finite realm of mechanical totalization. Which is what Lévinas, in effect, tackles in his first major book, 'Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority.'
This is also why we are in the process of bringing to fruition an issue of Pari Perspectives that I mentioned in another post here on the general theme of 'Life Beyond Mechanism. Undoing the Legacy of the Machine Metaphor' Arran Gare and Judith Rosen have agreed to contribute and I am hoping there will be others. In order to advance beyond our current mechanistically oriented 'perspectival' Mental/Rational Structure of Consciousness, and arrive at a new 'mutation' in the structure of consciousness that opens up into the 'aperspectival' Integral structure, we are going to need to realize that what quantum physics is telling us is that ALL natural relational systems are 'organismic', and that biology and the comprehension of the life of organisms is the real foundational science of existence, not physics. Because what is truly originary is the relationality of mind, not physicality of substance.