Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a cosmic form of natural selection...

The structure of cognition reflects the syntactical structure the universe. The structure of a waterfall reflects nothing except what allows a waterfall to be.

This is ridiculous Advaita crap covered in pseudoscientific language that rivals the continental faggotry.

(OP)
My main criticism is he is correct in finding what is "NECESSARY" for intelligence, that is incremental adaptation, but he makes the assumption this is "SUFFICIENT". Just because the incremental adaptation of ant colonies, evolution, and so forth show parallels with dynamic brain processes associated with learning or whatnot, this does not necessarily mean the former are intelligent.

It is true that the brain has incremental adaptation in order to exhibit intelligent behavior (e.g., it is highly plastic and can change its functional connectivity to compensate for structural damage), but to make the jump and say all systems that have incremental adaptation are intelligent is not backed by evidence. This is a metaphysical statement and doesn't need evidence, BUT it is unfalsifiable and, without evidence, is specious. It is pseudoscience to propose it as a scientific theory. It is true, panpsychism is becoming popular among a lot of philosophers, but to tout it as a scientific theory is retarded.

I am not going to give the same ethical consideration to an ant colony as I am to a human because the former does not have what is sufficient for intelligence (which is a functioning brain -- specific functional connectivity). In this sense, I am more of a pragmatist and dislike unfalsifiable metaphysical speculation. It is a waste of time.

Finally, here is what I have to say about this guy: Christopher Langan is very arrogant and demeaning. He is not as intelligent as you think. Just because one has a high IQ does not necessarily mean they will apply it well. This idea he proposes is nothing new, and it does not constitute science (it is more like a repeat of Advaita like philosophy which is numerous). I actually skimmed a journal article which said a lot of high IQ people tend to develop obsessions or autism, and as a consequence, they do not make any productive change to a field of research. One needs to be trained in order to apply his intelligence well.

If you don't grant your mind can reliably describe anything about the world then you're argument's dead too.

This thread is dumb and people don't seem to realize consciousness is not the same as intelligence.

In order to be intelligent, one needs some degree of experiential content, otherwise it's just a blind self-correcting mechanism. Also, I am taking his entire theory into account, which is panpyschist. He is a panpsychist.

Do you consider the swarm behavior of ants "intelligent"? To me, it's just a blind self-correcting mechanism -- it is not intelligent in the way we think.

I give a more nuanced opinion here: I read his theory to a large extent, so I am takin in the overall context.

Honestly, his view is not that different from David Bohm's implicate/explicate order. I read some of his paper, which is overly dense and littered with pseudoscientific language. He's worse than Deleuze even.

Can you prove it's blind? did you think intelligence at the level of ants would be contemplating the mysteries of the universe? what reason don't we have to attribute a dynamical intelligence to these systems?

>what reason don't we have to attribute a dynamical intelligence to these systems?

Check here:
Look at my necessary and sufficient distinction.

I would ask what needs to attributed to autopoietic systems for sufficient intelligence to be demonstrated

>Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a cosmic form of natural selection.
>But BY THE NATURE OF THIS SELECTION PROCESS, it also bears description as intelligent self-design (the universe is “intelligent” because this is precisely what it must be in order to solve the problem of self-selection

But one of the virtues of natural selection as a theory of evolution is that it doesn't, despite the metaphors often employed to explain it, depend upon any "agency" "selecting for" or "selecting against". So even if it were appropriate to say that the universe exhibited a "cosmic form of natural selection", it would not follow that, because of this, the universe exhibits "intelligence" as a latent property, as "intelligence" is not latent in natural selection.

> otherwise it's just a blind self-correcting mechanism
Which can be considered intelligence.

>self-selection
What did he mean by this?

Yeah, I think the more we find out about the mesoscopic neural requirements for intelligence, then we can probably test whether the evolution's autopoiesis is sufficient for intelligence. I am saying we have a lack of evidence at the moment and we need to realize the limitations of such claims.

I will say that I dislike dogmatic reductive physicalists / eliminative materialists too though, but I am not entirely fond of jumping on the panpsychists, type-f monism, bandwagon yet.

Recent evidence shows that evolution has incremental adaptation and can improve its ability to evolve over time. Check here:

>in·tel·li·gence
>inˈteləjəns/
>noun
>1. the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

'No'.

>Which can be considered intelligence.
No. I think there are more complex mechanisms underlying intelligence. Incremental adaptation is needed/necessary for intelligence, but I do not think it is sufficient for it. There is probably a more complex circuit of activation going on. For example, even GABAergic inhibition of hippocampal cells is important for learning, and has made many scientists reevaluate the weight they place on the LTP paradigm.

Thanks for the actually stimulating discussion. Do you have any sites or blogs or whatever that let's you keep up on dank current metaphysical shit like this?

If this kind of stuff interests you, I highly recommend you check out John O'Keefe's research on theta phase precession and Buzsaki's book Rhythms of the Brain. This is very complex stuff, and I recommend avoiding premature metaphysical claims and propounding it as science.

Yes. Where does it say it has to experience anything? A computer can do those things.

Now you're just making up additions to intelligence. No, it doesn't have human intelligence because it's not human.

AI is still intelligent, even if it's not human intelligence.

Yeah, that's reasonable

Why does this asshole look like a professional wrestler?

No one is even implying that it has intelligence like a human. Also you're part of the universe.

I don't understand why you draw a distinction between intelligence and a mechanistic reaction; they would be one and the same, but the mechanistic aspect is blurred in more sophisticated levels of intelligence

>AI is still intelligent,
Yeah, I mean, we're debating semantics. I've actually read Christopher Langan's stuff a bit, and I believe he's arguing the entire universe is sentient. He is arguing for a stronger more overt intelligence.

I mean, sure, given your definition, I agree with you the universe is intelligent. However, in the case of your definition, I do not agree that is satisfactory evidence for sentience*.

AI isn't "blind"; it takes in information from either an artificial environment or from user interfaces or both.

I disagree with the other user about what qualifies as intelligence, but I also think describing intelligence as a "blind self-correcting mechanism" is reductionist and basically wrong.

>that article
>In an opinion paper, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Professors Watson and Eörs Szathmáry, from the Parmenides Foundation in Munich, explain how formal analogies can be used to transfer specific models and results between the two theories to solve several important evolutionary puzzles.
>formal analogies can be used

This guy is definitely not making the kind of metaphysical claims you are misrepresenting him as making.

In what ways does the "feedback" caused by intellect differ from the "feedback" caused by waterfalls (erosion etc) from the perspective of reality? Why grant primacy to one but not the other?

>>Furthermore, because the universe is natural, its self-selection amounts to a cosmic form of natural selection.

The term 'self-selection" is obfuscatory. Also, saying that the universe is natural and therefore any behavior of the universe amounts to natural selection is a empty tautology.

Natural selection describes the phylogenesis of species. It isn't some skeleton key analogy that can be applied to any phenomenon while maintaining scientific validity.

Without knowing what he means by self-selection this entire paragraph is void of any meaningful interpretation.

>This is unsurprising, for intelligence itself is a natural phenomenon that could never have emerged in humans and animals were it not already a latent property of the medium of emergence.

Okay, besides using the completely uninformative and flashy phrase "medium of emergence" I have another problem with this statement. It essentially declares that there is a necessary relation between intelligence latent in the structure of the universe and the emergence of intelligence in humans.

This is an entirely unsupported statement. In fact, natural selection itself is touted as a way of explaining how intelligent life could appear by means of a wholly mechanistic and mindless algorithm.

If he believes selection processes must indicate the operation of intelligence, he appears to totally misunderstand the concept.

Okay, I'm skeptical if the universe is sentient. It's a fun idea, but all I'm saying is that it could be considered intelligent in a non-human way. Intelligence doesn't mean think like a human. By that definition, if you're a solipsist, you question if anyone else is "intelligent"

From the quote, it appears he's simply saying that there's no surprise that a universe that has a "memory" (the altered physical state), computational power (input output with laws of physics) and self-selection and propagation, created human intelligence which has these same features on a different scale. It's not a miracle. A universe that works on those principles on a cosmic scale that self-selects patterns that can replicate themselves will naturally evolve more sophisticated patterns that can replicate themselves, such as human intelligence.

Because one feedback is experiential and thus, self-configuring and the other is as deterministic as it gets.

And the universe takes it's own state as the input. I guess it's blind to anything outside the universe?

What does that make a brain in a vat? Is a brain in a vat not intelligent?

Yeah, I suppose I can agree with that, but in general, I do not think that necessarily means the universe is sentient, as you agreed. Furthermore, it also does not refute the commonly held scientific conception that the evolution is blind.

It's also reductionist to identify intelligence as a feedback loop, though intelligence does exhibit this property.

Category errors all over everywhere all the time and I don't know why.

>This is an entirely unsupported statement. In fact, natural selection itself is touted as a way of explaining how intelligent life could appear by means of a wholly mechanistic and mindless algorithm.

Don't be silly.

>he doesn't know about the evolutionary argument against naturalism

If the your mind is an arbitrary product of an arbitrary principle your argument collapses, too.

But your thought processes are deterministic.

In what ways do the electrical cascades of a neural network differ from the cascades of water in a system? Remember, the water cycle exists such that it can be self correcting (an abundance of flow causes erosion which causes sedimentation which causes a reduction in flow, whereas a lack of it causes an area of low deposition which will be preferrentially filled in the future, etc) across geologic time, similar to the way neurons self-correct and self-reinforce across a shorter timescale. Of course, this means duration causes them to be different, but why would duration imply how fundamental something is to the fabric of reality?

i dunno lol

news.stanford.edu/2015/06/08/computer-water-drops-060815/

lol yeah what a silly dummy XD

There is nothing "determining" my behaviors outside of obvious biological factors, if consciousness is determined I am equivalent with its determiner; only I can choose to raise my hand at this moment, there is nothing "behind" me making this action, whatever arcane causality is operating behind this action I am one with it.

That consciousness is a part of the universe and that it nonetheless exhibits a capacity for self-regulatory feedback is exactly what Langan is saying: the universe's structure and development is a product of the mutual interaction between observer (experiantial, yin) and observed (mechanistic, yang)

>If the your mind is an arbitrary product of an arbitrary principle your argument collapses, too.

Do explain, please.

>outside of obvious biological factors
So you have no argument, okay.

>consciousness
You double have no argument.

>There is nothing "determining" my behaviors outside of obvious biological factors
Of course there are. All the un-obvious biological factors, which are much more significant than your casual dismissal would suggest. For example:

nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html
Desicions are actually made before the "I" decides them. There is quite a bit occurring biologically "behind" you making an action, despite the I's illusion of total control.

The question then again becomes why the mind should be elevated over other items in existence when talking about the nature of the universe.

What biological factors are at play when I choose to raise my hand right this minute? At the level of human intelligence we're talking about a "blurred determinism" where the distinction between free will and determinism is functionally indistinguishable.

You're appealing to some magical deterministic blind man behind my actions. You're missing the point that Langan is saying we are deterministically embedded in the universe only insofar as that means we are part and parcel of its makeup. The universe is self-perceiving; the experiential cannot be reduced to the mechanistic, they are opposed by definition

>He found that the regions responsible for movement reacted a few hundred milliseconds before a conscious decision was made.

So? You receive the urge to press the button, then you make the conscious decision to press the button.

>The universe is self-perceiving; the experiential cannot be reduced to the mechanistic, they are opposed by definition

But perception is mechanistic, ergo "universal self-perception" (lol we are the universe getting to know itself :-DDDDD) is mechanistic.

>all this projection

This philosopher wrote an entire book basically backing up what I said, and so I'm not going to respond to your trivial reply but rather just link you to it so you can find out yourself.

amazon.com/DARWINS-DANGEROUS-IDEA-EVOLUTION-MEANINGS/dp/068482471X

The regions responsible for movement. In other words, the signal to be sent to the limbs was generated before the "concious desicion" to move was generated.

...

By the very fact you wouldn't call your thinking mechanistic proves that "mechanism" becomes increasingly obscure at higher levels of intelligence, and you must concede that to truly understand the mechanistic dimension of consciousness you would have to construct a causal ruleset that corresponds exactly to the internal experience of any given consciousness for it to be reliable. Calling consciousness mechanistic at this stage is practically meaningless.

>Dennett

lol

You know, bringing up evolution isn't automatically going to win you the prize.

If your mind is a random product of blind mechanism there is absolutely no reason to believe it can hold any reliable idea of reality and therefore all discourse is rendered meaningless.

You must grant the mind can rationally understand existence to the extent we are even engaging in a philosophical debate in the first place. Get outta here with this babby's first reductionism BS.

>By the very fact you wouldn't call your thinking mechanistic

But I would.

>If your mind is a random product of blind mechanism there is absolutely no reason to believe it can hold any reliable idea of reality and therefore all discourse is rendered meaningless.

How so? I can make two computers, that I built, "talk" to each other in Portuguese. Is there discourse "meaningless"? Maybe if you don't speak Portuguese, but otherwise no, it's quite sensible. Is their discourse mechanistic? Yes, absolutely.

Your automatic, habitual thinking, maybe, but you're thinking ABOUT your thinking is operating on a higher order and is more deterministically fuzzy, and as such, the recourse to le deterministic bogeyman completely loses any credence

lol intelligent design
whatever

>If your mind is a random product of blind mechanism there is absolutely no reason to believe it can hold any reliable idea of reality
Why? The very concepts of "blind" and "mechanism" are human constructs. The universe simply is. And the mind is incredibly easily fooled, but why would that imply knowledge is impossible?

>there/their

What the fuck brain-auto-correct.

So Langan is a Platonist?

Metacognition is by no means any less mechanistic than regular cognitions in brains that can support it.

But now if these computers want to talk about what it's like to be a computer, or speculate about the programmer, they're fucked because their literal wiring does not permit them any access to the origins of their "thoughts".

Thought is by and large deterministic, awareness of thought as deterministic is less so.

>blind
I don't understand how this word is being used. Patterns that can created patterns that displace other patterns are survive. It's not like there's no logic behind why these patterns are formed.

>Your automatic, habitual thinking, maybe, but you're thinking ABOUT your thinking is operating on a higher order

Reflexivity isn't a "higher order" of intelligence any more than my reaction to your reaction to my reaction to your reaction to my reaction to Lagrange's bullshit is an elevated form of intercourse.

>But now if these computers want to talk about what it's like to be a computer, or speculate about the programmer, they're fucked because their literal wiring does not permit them any access to the origins of their "thoughts".

Bitch, don't talk about what my computers can and cannot do. I tell them where their thoughts come from.

Are you god?

No. Awareness of habitual, automatic, psycho-physically determined thoughts is on a higher order, because if one say, successfully gains control of their emotions, their self has essentially become self-determining, and that is considerably less mechanistic than a purely conditioned response to the environment.

As far as these two dumb-dumbs are aware, yeah.

>and that is considerably less mechanistic than a purely conditioned response to the environment.

Explain why. You just keep repeating this same point without explaining anything, like it's a brute fact. It isn't. Justify it.

A blind, arbitrary system can of course create self-repeating patterns that successfully interact with one another in their own pre-determined mode of interaction but there's no reason to expect it would create intelligences that can create internal models of reality that correspond to the real thing, so either you must grant some isomorphism to cognition or your argument's dead right from the jump

>Hit traffic
>Awareness of my innter state allows me to nip the automatic anger response in the bud soon as it starts building

This decision was not on the same order of determination as the anger. The anger (especially if I've always had a problem with my anger) was the product of some biological cascade as the response to some conditioned psychological complex, and so is more akin to a psychological kneejerk reflex than an actual, deliberated action. It's not REALLY me, it's not "myself", insofar as I choose not to identify with it according to a self-concept that is dystonic with such a complex.

The awareness of said anger, however, proceeds from a more active and lucid consciousness. The felt experience of this consciousness is not on the order of random emotional outbursts. I believe life experience will suffice to demonstrate for this.

> This is unsurprising, for intelligence itself is a natural phenomenon that could never have emerged in humans and animals were it not already a latent property of the medium of emergence.
>[...] could never have emerged [...] were it not a latent property
Is this guy saying that you can't make original comments? Oh boy, /r9k/ is fucked.

Wow, none of this makes any sense.

>but there's no reason to expect it would create intelligences that can create internal models of reality that correspond to the real thing

They actually managed to cooperate in the construction of a game software, an FPS actually, kinda like Doom, which they play for hours at a time. I watch them on my monitor. They swear at each other a lot. In Portuguese.

>Is this guy saying that you can't make original comments? Oh boy, /r9k/ is fucked.
The universe constantly generates new patterns over time.

I hate how he is clearly flaunting his cool vocabulary to hide how mumbo jumbo it all sounds

You are just stating the same thing, as brute fact, with more words.

Beyond how it all "feels" to you, how does any of what you said necessarily entail non-determinism?

But nothing can emerge if it wasn't already there??????????
Does this guy even 1+1?

Your amygdala triggering "anger" was a biological cascade triggered by external stimuli. Your ACC triggering a mediation of the anger response was a biological cascade triggered by activation in the amygdala. It is all biological cascades.

What causes one to be aware of his thought? An emergent property (consciousness), or a set of brain states in a given instant? Its structure could give rise to the experience of being aware, maybe awareness is some configuration of the brain, not the experience itself, which is corelated with awareness.
Do you think the mental causes changes on the physical or is it an epiphenomena? Determinism could be compatible with the former I think.

Please actually read my posts. I'm not arguing non-determinism, I'm arguing whatever determinism there is in our atoms, our molecules, our cells, organs, and bodily systems, scales up into consciousness (which possesses its own gradient, mind you) all the way up to the consciousness-of-consciousness, which I have been describing. Your determinism gets harder and harder to call determinism. I am not denying I am operating on some principle when the self becomes "self-determining" in this way, but that the principle is considerably less mechanistic than the analogous "intelligence" in cells or molecules, and attempting to reduce the former to the latter is dumb and autistic.

Any deterministic model of person X's consciousness would be equivalent to that person X's consciousness itself. Person X can very well be making decisions based solely on qualia that cannot be reduced to mechanistic cascades; say, choosing to pursue a girl of a look because it reminds him of his ex. This was a decision made primarily in his consciousness, through his consciousness.

The mediation itself is a biological cascade, no doubt the dying down of anger is just as physiological as its arising. The decision to not engage with your anger was made by you and only you, only your experiential self, a decision not made by any biological directives but because of the subsequent qualitative effect on one's own consciousness (the sensation of actually being free of anger)

>but that the principle is considerably less mechanistic

You are not explaining HOW. I keep asking you explain HOW it is less mechanistic, and you just list off a whole bunch of OTHER MECHANISTIC PROCESSES that you think prove your point.

>Any deterministic model of person X's consciousness would be equivalent to that person X's consciousness itself. Person X can very well be making decisions based solely on qualia that cannot be reduced to mechanistic cascades; say, choosing to pursue a girl of a look because it reminds him of his ex. This was a decision made primarily in his consciousness, through his consciousness.

Round and round a fucking circle with you, my dude. It's like we're on the surface of a cyclically rotating object or something.

Except that, as per , desicions would seem to be made before the "you" makes them. The "experimental self" is under the illusion that it is under control, but it is not in actuality.

Consciousness isn't the same as intelligence.

He's just saying that the universe can calculate self-selecting patterns, not that it consciously experiences anything.

Because it is experiential. Subject is opposed to object, consciousness is opposed to the lifelessness of matter. That's it. There's no secret causal formula, consciousness is self-determining by virtue of what it is. Whatever determinism at play in consciousness is expressed only through consciousness.

We are the total awareness of a deterministic system we call our bodies. Total awareness of ourselves AS the awareness of a deterministic system deconditions us, gradually. We become self-regulating in a true sense instead of passive receivers of stimuli data like plants and some animals. Evolution is a progressive, multi-branched development of greater and more expansive meta-awarenesses that culminate in the human awareness of self

But the mental interfering on the physical would be deterministic too.

I'm only arguing for how this process appears in the human realm, where it IS accompanied by experience and shit

>Because it is experiential. Subject is opposed to object, consciousness is opposed to the lifelessness of matter. That's it.

THESE ARE NOT BRUTE FACTS, YOU NEED TO PROVE THEM.

Even assuming that he is actually as innocent as you say, he's still wrong. Extremely isolated pockets of the universe are capable of what he is calling "self-selection" but that does not mean the universe as a coherent whole is capable of it. (Specific cells in your body are able to change their charge with a few molecules of ATP, but "you" are not capable of changing "your" charge with just a few molecules of ATP.)

I need to prove consciousness is different than inert, dead matter? lol. Sure m8.

I really don't think it's as an open-and-shut case as the article is making it out to be but in the interests of not spending the next hour doing research for a Veeky Forums argument I'll let you have this one

>Subject is opposed to object, consciousness is opposed to the lifelessness of matter
Those arequirements very nice metaphysical assumptions but you have yet to provide any evidence for them. And "the lifelessness of matter" is completely meaningless. Life is a term for specific systems of interactions, and matter itself is a very outdated term.