Sunday, January 30, 2011

Emergence and organization towards a taxonomy of organizing relations

I have argued for a physical basis for all ontological forms of emergence and consequently appear to be denying the possibility of a great wonder of the universe: its meaningfulness. But I want to suggest here that in fact I am arguing for an even greater wonder and that is that the physical, material universe itself is capable of conscious existence through its interdependent accumulation of complexity. In other words what we normally think of as "mental" is in fact a characteristic of complexly organised forms of ordinary matter and requires no miracles for its development.
- Jones, S.
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Find that explanation hard to digest? This is the state of the art as far as ontological reason applied to the subject of consciousness expressed by physical beings. It renders the flatland of reductionism with and added dimension of cascading or ordered magnitudes as an essential MEANS by which a possible explanation for consciousness as emergent from the physical stuff of our physical being's constitutent parts. In other words where ordinary reductionism satisfies the necessary links and connections which exist among an organized set of constituent parts forming the basis for the emergent coherence and object being expressed at one step higher but due directly to the interrelations among parts. What Jones is attempting to ram down our throats is that consciousenss is just a meta level spanning the entire system and emergent from both all levels, all objects of coherent function and all constitutent functioning. From that perspective he suggests what emerges is the experience of being conscious. While it extends the reason along already emerging lines of meta logic on the integrating one's VALUE across and/or spanning separate paradigms, it to do any justice to the nature of coherence which consciousness must express as emergent from the physical.
What is the snag here preventing us from languaging the reality of consciousness, of which Jones' attempt was a gallant attempt but nonetheless worthless in identifying the emergence of consciousness ontologically. He does this knowingly it would seem as I recall early in his paper him speaking about the Irreducible quality of consciousness which is non-physical, but in the conclusion he forgets to address how function emerges in a non-physical operation to create meaning and value abstractly vs among the array of methods properly defininig a neuro net and feed back system.
His attempt to rebuke I think comes in talkin about the ontology of language and how nothing in our language exists without some phyical corresponding reference. This kind of specious reasoning is a bit disappointing. On the one hand ontologically one defines language by physical measures or info perceieved and inventoried into sets which then are given linguistic names. However, that doesn't prevent the evolution of memes taking place on purely randomized non physical days of foamy chaos. We live for these days or at least our best humorists do and the reason for that is because it is precisely this ontological blind spot of Jones' which completes us as human beings.

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