1

The mind-body problem in light of E. Schrödinger's


"Mind and Matter" (1958)



In 1958, Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger published a small book
entitled "Mind and Matter", wherein he provides a solution to the age-
old dualism of body and mind, which can be discussed in this thread.

Before entering one might read what has already been written in the
preceding threads on "mental causation“, “artificial intelligence“ and
"the hard problem":

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6339202163360784388

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6340564349463117826

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660/4011660-6318195368953810945

A Discussion between Dan Hetherington and


Hans-Joachim Rudolph

Part I

Dan:   
Hans-Joachim, I am glad that you posted this. I recently read this
piece in response to our conversations about the role of quantum
physics in explanations of consciousness. I found no indication in
there that Schrödinger felt that quantum phenomena offered a means
of explaining consciousness, or understanding the supposed "Hard
Problem". He rejects dualism early on, and without dualism there is no
"hard problem".
This should be the full set. 
http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/religionandscience/mindandmatter.pdf
2

Chapter 2 was particularly interesting to me, and I thought of posting a

thread on it. Please take a look, Hans-Joachim. In it, Schrödinger
discusses biological evolution, highlighting the role of behavior as a
driving force. While he does not mention it, it is very similar to an
account of evolution given by a fellow by the name of Baldwin, who
was a professor of psychology at Harvard in the early 20th century,
who placed mental processes and consciousness as the driving force
of evolution, using Darwin's general idea. You can find references
under the search term "Baldwin Effect".



Hans-Joachim:  

We could start a textual work, paragraph-by-paragraph?



Hans-Joachim:   

It is interesting that he starts this essay with a psychological
statement, saying that "the world is a construct of our sensations,
perceptions and memories." Only in the second sentence he adds
what we would expect to hear from a physicist, i.e. that it can also be
regarded "as existing objectively on its own." 

You might remember that I also maintained this simple truth. But here,
Schrödinger makes a subtle distinction: He says that the world "does
not become manifest by its mere existence."

This difference might be a consequence of the "observer effect"

described in quantum physics: When it was first noticed by the early
pioneers of quantum theory, they were deeply troubled. It seemed to
undermine the basic assumption behind all science, that there is an
objective world out there, irrespective of us. If the way the world
behaves depends on how – or if – we look at it, what then will "reality"
really mean?
3



Dan:  

He goes on to say later that it makes no sense to speak of a world
that is not a world for a subject, and that goes back to his questioning
of the subject/object distinction. I'll be up to maintaining that there is
nothing "spooky" about the "observer effect". It just amounts to there
being no such thing as pure observation without any effect, at any
level of analysis, be it quantum, biological, sociological or cultural. We
are participants, not observers.



Hans-Joachim:   

The same idea was caught by Heidegger without referring to quantum
physics: He spoke about the inexhaustibility of reality and the
astonishment over the fact that there are “open places”, where "nature
opens its eyes and notices that it is there". Without such testimony the
world would be a place of mere presence, closed in itself. So, we
might say that witnessing elevates simple presence to manifested
existence.



Dan:  

"The nervous system is the place where our species is still engaged in
phyogenetic transformation: metaphorically speaking it is the
'vegetation top' of our stem. I would summarize my general
hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the 'learning' of the
living substance: its 'knowing how' is unconscious."

For 'vegetation top' there is the German "Vegetationsspitze'. I assume

that is what is called in Biology the "apical meristem', the growing tip
which is composed of undifferentiated and partly differentiated cells
unfolding into the structure of the plant. Its a beautiful, dynamic image,
and it resonates with his later discussion of behavior and learning
being at the cutting edge of Biological Evolution, the "Baldwin effect".
4



Hans-Joachim:   

"consciousness is associated with the 'learning' of the living
substance"

In Integrated Information Theory (IIT), the system becomes conscious

as soon as it develops sufficient self-reference. I think this can be
seen and understood with the help of a simplified model provided
at  http://integratedinformationtheory.org/animats.html: S stands for
sensory input, M for motor output, A, B, C and D represent those parts
of the central nervous system, which are not directly engaged in the
processing of sensory input and motor output respectively. 

So, the appearance of 'self-loops' (= activated neuronal assemblies of

the CNS) indicates mental activity, which can be associated with the
learning of the living substance (= formation of additional circuitries)

Regarding your comment that there is nothing "spooky" about the

"observer effect", I must say that this can be condoned to a
psychologist. But in classical physics, observer effects were and had
to be excluded always! It was a shock for the pioneers of quantum
physics, when they found that these "spooky" things couldn't be ruled
out, rather they were intrinsic to the system under investigation, which
caused A. Einstein to reject the whole of quantum physics. Later, of
course, Einstein was proven to be wrong.


Dan: 
Hans-Joachim, those loops you speak of, which "lead to", "support"
consciousness: those are the structures Edleman emphasizes - the
cortico/thalamic networks of reenty. I might be off here, but I think
Damasio cites similar loopy structures critically involving the insular
cortex. Wherever you find that "loopiness" of reciprocal connections
and potential iterative processing of information, you find a potential
5

"support" of consciousness. What I question about approaches to

understanding consciousness and mental functioning based on
quantum phenomena is whether, on the one hand, that type of
"loopiness" occurs at the quantum level, and whether it is necessary
to invoke it, seeing as there is ample support for self-reference in the
neurological structures themselves.  

The way I read Schrödinger here is that he doesn't so much posit
consciousness as a functional characteristic of a sufficiently self-
referential system, as much as he says consciousness is a function of
that system in the situation of novelty. He talks about the difficulty of
defining 'consciousness' according to neural structures, pointing out
that there are many neural structures and functions which occur
without consciousness. It is the organism in the process of dealing
with novel situations, which is the condition of the appearance of
consciousness as a process, rather than as a fixed characteristic of a
system apart from it's context. 

As to the "spookiness" of the "observer effect": what you're describing
in the transition from classical to quantum physics is a breakdown of
the idealization of a completely disengaged observer. I'm with you,
there. The sorts of notions I'm highly suspicious of, and that I've seen
suggested in the popular literature, are things like one's attitude
changes the structure of matter, or the notion of simply wishing makes
it so. The "effect" in the "observer effect" is not through mental
„waves" (for lack of a better word), but through physical processes, in
the extended sense of physical processes involving quantum
interactions. What we are dealing with here are the limits of our ability
to predict outcomes, because our attempts at measurement change
the system whose future behavior we are trying to predict.



Dan:  

I've been thinking about a question that you posed to me earlier in
regard to the "observer effect", the Zeno effect, and neural systems.
6

You granted that we have something equivalent to the "observer

effect" in sociology, or better, anthropology, in that the introduction of a
researcher into the field introduces effects on that field. You asked me
how that would apply in neural systems in the context of the Zeno
effect. That depends on what you take to be the "observer". In the
example of sociology or anthropology, the observer is in fact an intact
human agent, a whole person. If you're talking about how that type of
observer "interacts" with his or her own neural structures in such a
way as to stabilize their own neural state, then I think you are in the
realm of the basic question of how an agency occurs in a physical
system. That, to me is an open question, and it's been kicked around
for a long time. I don't see how the Zeno effect elucidates that
situation.



Hans-Joachim:   

Dan, you ask "whether, on the one hand, that type of "loopiness"
occurs at the quantum level, and whether it is necessary to invoke it
(the quantum level), as there is ample support for self-reference in the
neurological structures themselves."

Of course, self-reference occurs on the level of neuronal circuitry, and
the connectome will provide not only a list, but even a map of it in the
near future.

The thing is that this "loopiness" doesn't provide any conscious
experience by itself. It's just an indicator of conscious activity
(depending on the Φ-value of IIT). Experiences occur exclusively on
the imaginary level; as we agreed earlier, all experiences (whatever
can be described phenomenologically) are imaginary. And it is only
the interaction between these two levels, where quantum theory
comes in.

Without such an openness, the loops would be places of mere
presence, closed in themselves. But remember, this is not a dualist
position.

7

The connection between the two is considered to be as old as the

universe. It is also contrary to Emergentism, because consciousness
is not considered to develop out of the complexity of organic matter. 

For getting an overview on quantum theory and the human mind, you
might have a look at  http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-
strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics



Dan:  

(depending on the Φ-value of IIT) 



You loss me, Hans-Joachim, with expressions like this. Also, I do not
think all experiences are imaginary, but I think it may be possible to
model experience with the notion of imaginary and real number
spaces, as you have done. That is very different from saying that
experiences are imaginary in a mathematical sense. That would be to
confuse the model with what is modeled.



Hans-Joachim:   

... to confuse the model with what is modeled.

You're right. That has been my problem since long. Excuse me for
having fallen into this trap again.

But IIT and the Φ-value: We'd discussed it earlier ( http://
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588),
and I'd referred to Tononi et al's Center for Sleep and Consciousness
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in this thread.

And regarding the imaginary: I had Kauffman's article on my screen:
"Self-reference and recursive forms", which we had also discussed
earlier. Therein he concludes: Only the imaginary is real.



Hans-Joachim:

But I should return to Schrödinger's article, and particularly to the
second topic in chapter 1 - "a tentative answer". In the beginning he
8

says that whenever we ask ourselves whether consciousness might

also be associated with other than nervous processes, we run into
unprovable speculations. Therefore he suggests to start in the
opposite direction. Accordingly, he finds examples of processes in the
nervous system that remain unconscious or become conscious only
under certain conditions. His conclusion is that any succession of
events in which we take part with sensations, perceptions and
possibly with actions gradually drops out of the domain of
consciousness, if the same string of events repeats itself in the same
way very often. 

In a metaphorical sense he concludes that consciousness is like a
tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves
his pupil, i.e. the living substance, alone to deal with all those tasks for
which he is already sufficiently trained.

In the next step, he extends this approach to the autonomic nervous
system. He says that the heart beat, the peristaltic movements of the
bowels etc. are faced with nearly constant or regularly changing
situations; they are very well and regularly practiced and have,
therefore, long ago, dropped from the sphere of consciousness.

Next he extends these notions to other than nervous processes, and
summarizes that what has been said to be a property of nervous
processes is actually a property of organic processes in general,
namely that they are associated with consciousness only if they are
new, which means that consciousness is associated with learning of
the living substance; its 'knowing how' is unconscious.  

What I take from these deliberations is that consciousness must have
aided living beings from their very beginning. When I wonder about
the complexity of bacteria and archaea, I can get along with it only by
assuming some cognitive principle helping in its evolution. For me,
coincidence is not a choice.

Consequently, there are only two possibilities: Either that cognitive
principle emerged from the complexity of these archaea/bacteria, or it
9

existed even before their advent. The first option is called

Emergentism, the second Panpsychism.

In the first section of his first chapter (headlined "The Problem"),
Schrödinger repeatedly mocks about rationalists, and then he says:
The urge to find a way out of this impasse ought not to be damped by
the fear of incurring the wise rationalists' mockery.

But in the next sentence he praises Spinoza, then refers to the Greek
Holozoists and to Theodor Fechner, who did not shy at attributing
souls to plants, to the earth and to the planetary system! His last
sentence in this section is: I do not fall in with these fantasies, yet I
should not like to have to pass judgement as to who has come nearer
to the deepest truth, Fechner or the bankrupts of rationalism.



Hans-Joachim:   

Paramaprakrti and Paramapurush, the two aspects of Brahma, are
translated as the operative (doing or actional) and the cognitive
(knowing) principle.

That active principle - Mother Nature - is acting anyhow.


But let me add one more thought, to which you might disagree: In my
view, the principles of mathematics are not man-made, rather they are
given to us - you can also say, they are found, not made by humans.
One of these is the relation between real and imaginary numbers,
whose beauty it is that there is no way to arrive at the imaginary unit
number i - the square root of minus one - if you think in terms of real
numbers only. On the other hand, it is very easy to arrive at the real
unit number one, if you think in terms of imaginary numbers (you just
have to multiply i with itself three times). If you generalize this truth,
you will find that it is easy to start with the cognitive (Paramapurusha),
then arriving at the physical, and subsequently proceeding to the
cognitive again, rather than starting with the physical and then trying
to arrive at some cognition from there.

10



Dan:  

I'm partial to Emergentism. The problem with Panpsychism is that the
type of consciousness that is required to complete the system, as
something that is intertwined with matter at the deepest quantum level
and has existed through all eternity (or since the first Big Bang,
whichever came first) is so far removed from the notion of
consciousness that we usually employ in daily life that it is difficult, at
least for me, to see the two uses as referring to the same "thing".
What I like about Emergentism is not only it's naturalism, but - and this
is the part rabid spiritualists overlook - it's appeal to miracles, or
"singularities". Christian De Duve, in his account of the evolutionary
process, highlights "singularities". The development of Sex is a
"singularity". The development of the organelles, mitochondria and
chloroplasts, are "singularities" as was the emergence of the
Eukaryota from the Archea and Bacteria. Life is a line of very singular
events. 

There is something suspicious in using the idea of "emergence" as an
explanation of origin. It just happened. In retrospect we could identify
the preconditions of the phenomena that "Emerged", but by definition,
we could not have predicted it. It is akin to the formation of a Gestalt.



I much prefer this idea of the unpredictable formation of pattern to the
notion of entelechy, in which the form is always already there, and
simply needs to be realized. That seems too static of a picture, and
doesn't square with the inherent unpredictability and spontaneity of life
and consciousness.



Hans-Joachim:   

I agree that our problem of understanding cannot be captured by the
dichotomy of Emergentism versus Panpsychism. 

In an earlier thread, we already dealt with Aristotelian versus
11

Nagarjuna's logic, where the former sticks to the principle of "tertium

non datur", whereas the latter dismisses the same. This Law of the
Excluded Middle could be applied, if we would still see it from the
perspective of Presocratics, who thought that the mind is either an
elemental feature of the world, or that the mind can somehow be
reduced to more fundamental elements. If one opts for reductionism, it
is incumbent upon one to explain how the promotion happens. On the
other hand, if one opts for the panpsychist view that mind is an
elemental feature of the world, then one must account for the
apparent lack of mental features at the fundamental level. But after
roughly 2500 year, philosophers have paved the way for solutions. A
third and possibly a fourth and a fifth have evolved, one of them is
Emergentist Panpsychism, another one is Constitutive Panpsychism
and then there is also Panprotopsychism. They are summarized at 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#ConsVersEmerPanp

and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#PanpVersPanp 

respectively.



Dan:  

Interesting articles, Hans-Joachim. I only had a chance to glance
through them, but I'll take a closer look when I can. This caught my
eye:

Thomas Nagel (1979) influentially argued that adopting a view like
Panpsychism is the only way to avoid what he called “emergence”.
Crucially, close examination of the text reveals that Nagel is using the
word “emergence” slightly differently to how it has come to be used in
contemporary discussions of Panpsychism (discussed above). For
Nagel, “emergent” properties of a complex system are ones that
cannot be intelligibly derived from the properties of its parts. In
contrast, for the “emergentist panpsychists” discussed above,
“emergent” properties of a complex system are simply fundamental
macro-level properties, which may or may not be intelligibly derived
12

from the properties of its parts. Following Galen Strawson (2006) we

can use the word “radical emergence” to express Nagel’s notion of
emergence.

I favor the "radical emergence" that Nagel apparently rejects.
13

Mind and Matter, chapter 2




Hans-Joachim:   

The sections of Schrödinger´s second chapter. are headlined as
follows: A biological blind alley? The apparent gloom of Darwinism.
Behaviour influences selection. Feigned Lamarckism. Genetic fixation
of habits and skills. Dangers to intellectual evolution. 

In the fifties nobody talked about epigenetics, which has become a
focus of contemporary research meanwhile. I'm sure Schrödinger
would have cheered and supported it. 



In my view, vacuum fluctuations are the common ground of both,
matter and thoughts. Quantum mechanics uses 'creation' and
'annihilation operators' to model particle production and dissolution in
the zero point field. Here it is important to note, that the annihilation
operator doesn't extinguish the particles, but transmutes them from
actuality to potentiality, i.e. from real to imaginary space-time. If this
constantly ongoing process leans more to the side of actuality, we get
particles (matter), if it leans more to the side of potentiality, we get
thoughts (ideas). On the fundamental level, as it was mentioned
above, we might, however, better speak of proto-thoughts, constituting
what we might call Quantum Protopsychism.

How could matter get organized if it would not observe itself?



Dan:  

"Quantum measuring is a built-in function of all matter."

That's pure speculation. Remember also that "Schrödinger's cat" was
a thought experiment set up by Schrödinger precisely in order to
highlight the shortcomings of the Copenhagen Interpretation,
particularly its lack of clarity in the notions of "measurement" and
"observer". So, in the eyes of Schrödinger, you've simply elevated a
lack of conceptual clarity into a fundamental principle of the universe.
14

Penrose does the same.




_______________________________________________________



Hans-Joachim:   

Today I found in our most renowned, national newspaper - the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) - a long article entitled "Wie
kommt der Geist in die Natur?" It's a translation from English, written
by the Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch, who is currently
at the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness as well as the
Center for Sleep and Consciousness of the University of Wisconsin-
Madison (which had been mentioned during our discussions
repeatedly). The original article was published April 6, 2017 in
Nautilus (=> http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious).

All the questions & queries we were dealing with during our combined
efforts in this forum are specified therein. This means more or less
that Panpsychism and dual-aspect monism have reached mainstream
media.



This is the FAZ-article: 

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/eine-loesung-fuer-das-
harte-problem-des-bewusstseins-15397757-p2.html?
printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_1

Regarding dual-aspect monism see 

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Milan/papers/Dual-
aspect-Atmanspacher.pdf

  

Some weeks ago we discussed about Kant and the thing in itself. Now
this topic returns in the form of Arthur Schopenhauer’s succinct
response to Kant saying "We can know the thing-in-itself because we
are it" (you find it just after the headline "In order to give both
phenomena their proper due, a radical change of thinking is
15

required").



Actually, in Dual-Aspect Monism, the subject/object distinction is
elevated to a conception about intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of
matter. It reminds me of our discussion on Emergentism and
Panpsychism, finally finding Emergentist Panpsychism in the
literature. Similarly, we discussed Dualism and Monism, just to come
across Dual-Aspect Monism in the end.

 

It's about consciousness in a very general and basic sense, not in the
sense we use the word when we speak about humans. Regarding
that difference, she argues that it should be easier to see how to get
one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from
another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious
particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious
matter: The 'combination problem' should be less hard than the
original 'hard problem'. 



Regarding dual-aspect monism, I referred to an article of H.
Atmanspacher. The title is "Dual-Aspect Monism à la Pauli and Jung".
W. Pauli was one of the founders of quantum physics. He became a
close friend of C.G. Jung in 1931/32, and their cooperation lasted for
decades. 

Interestingly, Schrödinger quotes C.G. Jung in his third chapter (The
Principle of Objectivation, p 119): "All science, however, is a function
of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest
of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as
an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart
from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this
being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the
subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to
apparent non-existence." And then Schrödinger adds saying "Of
16

course Jung is quite right." (p120)




Actually, Hedda Hassel Mørch doesn't say that "consciousness is the
real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that
implements the software of our physical theories." What she says is:
"The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of
reality, ... , is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture
of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp." So she knows
that the idea is refutable. Since hundreds of years Western scientists
and philosophers used another concept of substances. Now, she says
that substance has extrinsic properties, which we can experience and
measure with our senses as well as with their technological
extensions. But it has also intrinsic properties, which we can
experience only within ourselves, including what has been called
qualia, i.e. pain, sorrow, pleasure, happiness, etc.

17

Mind and Matter, chapter 3




Hans-Joachim:   

I think most of us once thought for a while that the antagonism of
matter and energy might be related to the body-mind problem.
Schrödinger relates to this possibility; in chapter 3, page 123, he
writes:

“Let us, with all the knowledge we have about it, follow such a 'tender
look' inside the body. We do hit there on a supremely interesting
bustle or, if you like, machinery. We find millions of cells of very
specialized build in an arrangement that is unsurveyably intricate but
quite obviously serves a very far-reaching and highly consummate
mutual communication and collaboration; a ceaseless hammering of
regular electro-chemical pulses which, however, change rapidly in
their configuration, being conducted from nerve cell to nerve cell, tens
of thousands of contacts being opened and blocked within every split
second, chemical transformations being induced and maybe other
changes as yet undiscovered. All this we meet and, as the science of
physiology advances, we may trust that we shall come to know more
and more about it. But now let us assume that in a particular case you
eventually observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents,
which issue from the brain and through long cellular protrusions, are
conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence,
tends a hesitating, trembling hand to bid you farewell - for a long,
heart-rending separation; at the same time you may find that some
other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to
veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears. But nowhere along this
way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and
the tear glands - nowhere you may be sure, however far physiology
advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever  meet the
dire pain, the bewildered worry within this soul, though their reality is
to you so certain as though you suffered them yourself - as in actual
18

fact you do!“




Basically the same argument was brought forward some 300 years
before by G.F. Leibniz, who suggested a thought experiment that
involves walking into a mill, showing that material things such as
machines or brains cannot possibly have mental states. Only
immaterial things, that is, soul-like entities, are able to think or
perceive.

All this shows not only that our minds must be immaterial or that we
must have souls, but also that we will never be able to construct a
computer that can truly think or perceive.



Dan:  

Notice, though, Hans-Joachim, that while Schrödinger's description
supports the impossibility of reducing awareness to physical
processes, thus maintaining them as separate domains, he also
speaks of there being no place for a subject/object distinction in
philosophy.

 

I agree, Hans-Joachim. It appears as if the subject/object distinction is
context dependent, and is needed "for practical reference", so when
we ask "is the subject separate from the object?", we can't say that
ultimately it is, in a philosophical sense, but we can say that it is in a
relative sense, for practical purposes. It sounds like a violation of the
Law of the Excluded Middle. 



Hans-Joachim:   

Dan - yes, he speaks of there being no place for a subject/object
distinction in philosophy. But he maintains that this is valid only for
philosophy! First he says that this distinction is deeply rooted in our
cultural heritage. Then he emphasizes that we have to accept it in
everyday life 'for practical reference'. And thirdly he maintains that this
19

"antinomy cannot be solved on the level of present-day science, which

is still entirely engulfed in the 'exclusion principle' - without knowing it -
hence the antinomy. To realize this is valuable, but it does not solve
the problem. You cannot remove the 'exclusion principle' by an act of
parliament as it were. Scientific attitude would have to be rebuilt,
science must be made anew. Care is needed."

The whole situation reminds me of a sentence Wolfgang Pauli noted
down in a letter to Abraham Pais:

"It is my personal opinion that 'reality' in future science will mean
neither 'psychic' nor 'physical', but both as well as neither.“



It's again a matter of Aristotelian vs. Nagarjuna's logic, isn't it?

It is a position that has been called Panentheism. It maintains a

difference between God and the world, insofar as He is also
transcendent; but being immanent as well, Panentheism represents a
form of Panpsychism, which is explicitly referred to in Hedda Hassel
Mørch's article.

The difference between Pantheism and Panentheism is that

Panentheism is considered to allow for the resolution of the
philosophical difficulties inherent in the closely related doctrine of
pantheism. For example, some claim that pantheism's conception of a
completely immanent God mitigates the sense of power attributed to a
God conceived as more transcendent. In Panentheism, although God
is, of course, always present in the immanent world, he also
possesses all the transcendence of the traditional theist conceptions
of God (=> http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Panentheism).



Panpsychism and Emergentism are, on the other hand, currently
discussed, for example, in Mikael Leidenhag's article From
Emergence Theory to Panpsychism - A Philosophical Evaluation of
Nancey Murphy's Non-reductive Physicalism (2016): 

20

http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?
pid=diva2%3A1046024&dswid=-6586



Panpsychism has been confronted with the mockery, that it would
imply even rocks to experience an interior psychic life with all the
conscious richness of human desires, fears, evaluations, thoughts,
emotions, choices, and dreams. To counter such (unjustified) attacks
the term Panexperientialism has been coined, which means that
individual cells, individual molecules, individual atoms, and even
individual subatomic particles, such as photons or electrons,
incorporate nothing but a capacity for ‘feeling’, i.e. a degree of
subjective interiority.



It is exactly this general interiority, which I had in mind, when I
conceptualized imaginary space(s) to coexist with physical space
everywhere. The basic idea is presented in my article "Sadhana and
Interiority“: http://www.crimsondawn.net/crimson7/node/315

(also contained in  http://anandamargabooks.com/portfolio/crimson-dawn-
microvitum/ as well as in https://www.amazon.de/Microvita-Exploring-New-
Science-Reality/dp/1524691135).



I agree that particles can't experience anything except forces, which is
not self-evident, as we can imagine situations where an exposure to
forces doesn't mean necessarily to experience them. Suppose you
are lying in an operation theatre and the surgeon opens your belly.
The force that is applied on your tissues is the same, whether you are
conscious or not, i.e. whether you experience the pain or not.
Nevertheless, Panexperientialism maintains, that even subatomic
particles are able to experience the forces which they are exposed to.



21

Mind and Matter, chapter 4




Hans-Joachim:   

But let me come back to Schrödinger's "Mind and Matter", where he
describes in chapter 4 what he calls the arithmetical paradox. He says
"there appears to be a great multitude of (these) conscious egos, the
world however is only one." Further down he concludes. "There are
two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic
from the point of view of present scientific thought (...). One way out is
the multiplication of the world in Leibniz's fearful doctrine of monads:
every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them;
the monad 'has no windows', it is 'incommunicado'. That none the less
they all agree with each other is called 'pre-established harmony'. I
think there are few to whom this suggestion appeals, nay who would
consider it as a mitigation at all of the numerical antinomy.

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of
minds or consciousness. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth
there is only one mind."



Now, if I take these two propositions together, (1) that the multiplicity
of minds is only apparent, and in truths they are just one mind, and (2)
that energy and the experience of energy is one and cannot be
differentiated into its aspects - if I accept these propositions, I can
agree with Dan's position, which he has brought forward repeatedly.
But, before going into the details, I would like to ask you, Dan,
whether you agree that these two are essential for your philosophical
stance?



Dan:  

Hans-Joachim - I hope that you don't expect a straightforward answer
to your question : ). I think it gets complex, and ties back to your
discussion about reconciling the Immanent and the Transcendent. I
22

read this chapter many years ago, and what I remembered of it, prior
to rereading it, was the notion of there being only one consciousness,
ultimately. When I reread it, what struck me was that Schrödinger
ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. He does not resolve the
antimony between the One and the many, and seems to suggest that
it is not resolvable: 



"To me this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role
of mind. On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the
whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant
accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total
effect."

"Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here

faced with one of those typical antinomies caused by the fact that we
have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook
on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world
picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it
into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities." 



So, if there is one Mind, one Consciousness, it is a peculiar thing,
because it has a double role, and the other role it has is as our
particular, personal consciousness, or selves. The simile that
Schrödinger was referring to in the beginning was the artistic device of
painting oneself into a picture, typically in a very small and
insignificant way.

I look at it in terms of the distinction that both Kant and Husserl drew
between the Transcendental and Empirical ego. The Transcendental
Ego is the artist, that which does the painting, and the empirical ego is
the character that is painted into the painting. There is some debate,
at least in regard to Husserl, whether when we speak of the
Transcendental Ego we are speaking of One thing, or of many. 

23



"(2) that energy and the experience of energy is one and cannot be
differentiated into its aspects"

I'm not sure. I think our understanding of the concept of energy is
based on our experience of energy, in the same way that our
understanding of the concept of "life" is based on our experience of
being alive. To think conceptually is to differentiate, but the basis of
our conceiving is our own experience.



Hans-Joachim:   

Indeed, chapter 4 doesn't provide a positive outlook. Rather it's an
account of paradoxes, antinomies and absurdities. Most of all he
complains that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly
understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind,
the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in
it. 

Nevertheless, I have two remarks:

Firstly, I think that Schrödinger’s „arithmetic paradox“ is actually
exactly the same as what Hedda Hassel Mørch calls „the combination
problem“. But while Schrödinger seems to be quite desperate, Hassel
Mørch has more hope to find a yet undiscovered solution.



Secondly, Schrödinger sees only two ways out of the described
dilemma, that is either Spinoza‘s or Leibniz‘s approach. While he
favors the former, he ridicules the latter from the very beginning. This
is understandable in light of the limited literature available at his time.
As we know meanwhile, however, Leibniz elaborated his thoughts in
letters, which he wrote to about 1.300 partners. Comprising 20.000,
they are all stored at the Leibnitz Archives in Hannover; only a fraction
of this material has been edited and published up to now. It is
expected that a complete edition will be available by the year 2050.

However, letters made available in the last 60 years already shed new
24

light on his "Monadology". Therefore, mockeries about it are

apparently out of place. It is also to be noted that this treatise was (1)
published post mortem under a new title, and (2) was never meant for
publication. Rather he wanted to propose a conundrum to Nicolas
Francois Rémond and his scholarly circle.



Dan:  

I don't see Schrödinger as desperate or hopeless, Hans-Joachim. I
may be reading more into what he said than is warranted, but the very
last paragraph describes both the necessary atheism of natural
science and the personal validity of an experience of the Divine. That
is a rich mixture. To me, it offers promise. The double roles of mind
and consciousness suggest that sense of Transcendence in
Immanence. I think the lack of reconciliation of the antinomies is a
fruitful paradox. 



Hans-Joachim:   

Dan - what you say is true, and there is hardly anything to add. Only
one thing: Leibniz's Monadology has been extended, and there is a
Quantum Monadology developed by Teruaki Nakagomi. His papers
can be found, next to other useful articles, in a periodical called
Neuroquantology (=>  https://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/
journal/index).



Also, even, if you would like to read these 20.000 letters, you would
not be able to do so, as most of them are still unpublished. They have
been kept for 300 years in various archives, withstanding wars,
famines, firestorms etc.; so it needs a lot of care to prepare them for
publication.

In 2016, Leibniz's 300th obit was celebrated in Hannover, and I went
there to get a glimpse of it (=>  https://www.flickr.com/photos/
25

30954202@N05/31039335711/in/album-72157675343260882/).

In the 17th century, science and philosophy were not run in the way
as it is done nowadays. What I know about misconceptions and later
corrections on his Monadology is from Hubertus Busche's "Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibnitz: Monadology", Akademie Verlag, 2009 (https://
www.amazon.de/Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Monadologie-Klassiker/dp/
3050043369).

I don't think that you can be more knowledgable about Leibniz's
philosophy than Busche, particularly as he didn't write the book alone,
rather it's a compilation of various authors...

 

Speaking disrespectful about him might reveal some lack of
understanding. Please consider that Leibniz may have been the first
computer scientist and information theorist. Early in life, he
documented the binary numeral system (base 2), then revisited that
system throughout his career. He anticipated Lagrangian interpolation
and algorithmic information theory. His calculus ratiocinator
anticipated aspects of the universal Turing machine. In 1961, Norbert
Wiener suggested that Leibniz should be considered the patron saint
of cybernetics.

In 1671, Leibniz began to invent a machine that could execute all four
arithmetic operations, gradually improving it over a number of years.
This "stepped reckoner" attracted fair attention and was the basis of
his election to the Royal Society in 1673. 



Leibniz was groping towards hardware and software concepts worked
out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. In 1679, while
mulling over his binary arithmetic, Leibniz imagined a machine in
which binary numbers were represented by marbles, governed by a
rudimentary sort of punched cards. Modern electronic digital
computers replace Leibniz's marbles moving by gravity with shift
registers, voltage gradients, and pulses of electrons, but otherwise
26

they run roughly as Leibniz envisioned in 1679.




Dan:  

Hans-Joachim - Did Leibniz correspond with Bach?



Hans-Joachim:   

Dan - your intuition brought me to an interesting article, which 

starts with the inscription: 

"How Bach’s musical intervention into the thought-process of the
young King Frederick II continued Leibniz’s epistemological battle
against the oligarchical outlook of the Venetian-directed
‘Enlightenment’", and culminates in the following sentences:

"The American Revolution of 1776-1789, was made possible by the
growing political influence of a cultural revolution spreading
throughout Europe. This was the so-called Classical revolution, led by
the vowed defenders of the legacies of Gottfried Leibniz and Johann
Sebastian Bach, the leading cultural opposition to the French and
British Enlightenment of that time."

It presents lots of details, but also relates to the "Criss-Crossing Paths
of Leibniz and Bach", as well as the "Leibniz-Newton Conflict". You
can find it at

https://de.scribd.com/document/261568206/Bach-s-Musical-Offering



Dan:  

Thanks, I'll take a look at the article.



Dan:  

Have you had a chance to read the second chapter, Hans-Joachim?
That's the one I found particularly interesting as it includes an
argument for the role of consciousness in biological evolution.
Schrödinger describes what has come to be known as the Baldwin
Effect, but he never makes mention of Baldwin, and instead he
27

mentions Julian Huxley. The Baldwin Effect was dismissed for many
years in evolutionary theory because it was viewed as trivial or too
metaphysical, or both. The first time I came across a description of it
was in a book by Richard Dawkins, "The Ancestors Tale". That shows
just how close to mainstream the idea has come, because Dawkins
represents something close to the epitome of a materialist, non-
metaphysical position.



Schrödinger, Mind and Matter p.101: “But is it not absurd to suggest
that this process of evolution should directly and significantly fall into
consciousness, considering its (evolution's) inordinate slowness not
only compared with the short span of an individual life, but even with
historical epochs? Does it not just run along unnoticed?

No. In the light of our previous considerations this is not so. They
culminated in regarding consciousness as associated with such
physiological goings-on as are still being transformed by mutual
interaction with a changing environment. Moreover, we concluded that
only those modifications become conscious which are still in the stage
of being trained, until, in a much later time, they become hereditarily
fixed, well-trained and unconscious possession of the species."



I want to separate this portion off from the rest because it is beautiful,
and it is a continuation of the above:

"In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution.
This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it
develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from
consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of
evolution." 



In placing consciousness at the cutting edge of evolution, Schrödinger
shifts the concept of evolution from blind determinism to exploration
and freedom, and in our case, moral responsibility:

28

"I feel as unable as anybody else to explain the "shall" of Kant's

imperative. The ethical law in its simplest form (be unselfish!) is plainly
a fact, it is there, it is agreed upon even by the vast majority of those
who do not very often keep it. I regard its puzzling existence as an
indication of our being in the beginning of a biological transformation
from an egoistic to an altruistic general attitude, of man being about to
become an animal sociale"

 

Its a different view of biological evolution than what has come to
dominate modern biology, and it seems to reflect the times when
Schrödinger wrote. I'm reading the sociologist G. H. Mead who wrote
just a bit earlier, who also spoke of evolution in these more hopeful,
less mechanistic ways. There is a growing movement in modern
biology toward a more "systems" view of biological evolution, which
shares the flavor of this earlier time: more organic, more holistic.
There is a touch of German Idealism back there.



Hans-Joachim:   

Yes, and I think that this position has reached mainstream thinking in
the form of epigenetics. Wikipedia says: The "Baldwin effect" is better
understood in evolutionary developmental biology literature as a
scenario in which a character or trait change occurring in an organism
as a result of its interaction with its environment becomes gradually
assimilated into its developmental genetic or epigenetic repertoire
(Simpson, 1953; Newman, 2002). And it add the words of D. Dennett:
Thanks to the Baldwin effect, species can be said to pretest the
efficacy of particular different designs by phenotypic (individual)
exploration of the space of nearby possibilities. If a particularly
winning setting is thereby discovered, this discovery will create a new
selection pressure: organisms that are closer in the adaptive
landscape to that discovery will have a clear advantage over those
more distant.

29



Dan:  

I was going to mention Dennett's thought on the Baldwin Effect, but if I
had done that, I would have mentioned two of the "Four Horsemen" in
the same post, and that might have made some individuals nervous.
Just for fun, I want to suggest this rather academic and cognitive
description by Dennett: 

"Thanks to the Baldwin effect, species can be said to pretest the
efficacy of particular different designs by phenotypic (individual)
exploration in the space of nearby possibilities,“ which means that can
“play“ in that space. Schrödinger might describe it as an encounter
with novelty, and use the metaphor of the growing top of a plant,
which, in some cases, when viewed with time-lapse photography,
appears to be actively exploring its environment. 

Also, as in the schoolyard, "play" runs a continuum from "competitive"
to "cooperative".



Hans-Joachim:   

Dan, I agree with that notion, but the question is whether such "plays"
need awareness, interiority, subjectivity - or whether they can run
simply externally, without witnessing their own standing?

At least that's what humans are doing: Before acting externally, we
can consider some consequences, playing with an action in our
mental space, checking for more possibilities with the help of our
imagination. 

I don't mean that plants have a comparable richness of interiority, but
they should have something similar, in a rudimentary sense. And
that's where intelligence and the divine enter into the "play" of mere
chances.



Dan:  

I think that you can equate that "play" with awareness, Hans-Joachim.
30

That is essentially what Schrödinger does with learning and dealing

with novelty. Consciousness is what handles novelty. Consciousness
occurs with novelty as a means of dealing with novelty, then fades
with habituation and habit. At least that's how I read him.

"What in the preceding we have said and shown to be a property of
nervous processes is a property of organic processes in general,
namely, to be associated with consciousness inasmuch as they are
new."

"I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is
associated with the "learning" of the living substance; its "knowing
how" (Können) is unconscious."



Hans-Joachim:   

Here, we both agree. 

Remarkably, this understanding also implies that what is unconscious
nowadays, must have been conscious once before.



Dan:  

Hans-Joachim, It only occurred to me after I responded that you were
probably, at least in part, referring to Dennett's description of the
Baldwin Effect, which involved no "interiority" or "subjectivity". The
original idea advanced by Baldwin no doubt involved the ideas of
subjectivity and interiority. It was an explicit effort to highlight
consciousness as a driving force in biological evolution. Dennett's
description was the materialistic, "tamed" version.



31

Mind and Matter, chapter 5




Hans-Joachim:  

But, let us return to Schrödinger's book. We already spoke about
chapters 1-4. Now chapter 5, which ends with the following words:

“To my view the 'statistical theory of time' has an even stronger
bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The
latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the un(i)directional
flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory
constructs it from the order of events. This means a liberation from the
tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves
cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our minds, neither the
power of bringing it to the fore, nor the power of annihilating it. But
some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So, with all due
acknowledgement to the fact that physical theory is at all times
relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or
so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly
suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.“



So, if Mind is to be considered more powerful than Time, how then
should it emerge from a completely time-bounded process, i.e. the
higher complexity of biological metabolism? How can it be that
changes on a physical level can produce something completely new,
a new category, i.e. the mental level? There is, of course, a
parallelism between physical and mental processes; and once the
mental level has been established, numerous modifications can
"emerge" from the physical. But at the beginning, that novum has to
be created, and I think it's quite unpleasant to delegate such an event
to a black box.



Dan: 

"What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have
32

dictatorial power over our minds, neither the power of bringing it to the
fore, nor the power of annihilating it."



It involves the difference between "lived time" and "objective time", or
the difference between Kairos and Chronos. When Schrödinger
speaks of the unidirectionality of time in the context of entropy, he
incorporates time into mind or subjectivity.



"The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and
kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the
latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action."



Chronos is time as a quasi-objective frame in which events are given
determined places, while kairos places the emphasis on the events
themselves, as making time. The conception of time in physics,
including Einstein’s (minus the 'statistical theory of time'), is akin to
Chronos. Time as a quasi-objective frame can be run backward or
forward mathematically. There is nothing inherently directional about
physical objective time until you consider entropy, or the 'statistical
theory of time'. And with entropy, you have dynamic systems, which
are productive and do not simply repeat ad infinitum. You move from a
closed system of time to an open system of time, and time becomes
intimately bound up with process, rather than standing apart from
process and restricting it. 



A time without direction and entropy is a time which makes no
difference. The Newtonian and Einsteinian equations can be run
forward or backward in time. The system is determinate. Nothing new
emerges. The system is closed, like Laplace's clockwork universe.
That all changes with entropy. I get the sense, and it may be wishful
thinking, that Schrödinger had some intuition of what was to come out
of Chaos and Complex Systems Theory when he talked about
33

entropy. His view of the role of consciousness and behavior in

evolution, and his view of the future of humanity were both forward-
looking and open-ended, and there is a sense of kairos, or "opportune
time" in the way he says that he sees humanity as in the process of
moving from an egoistic to a social species.



Chronos is always retrospective, if only from an imagined future time.
Kairos is future-oriented and productive. It’s hopeful.



Hans-Joachim:  

Very interesting! 

I understand that kairos means the perfect moments, the epiphanies,

the times one never forgets. They produce a different time scale, with
highlights, followed by meaningless periods of time.

And kairos is hopeful, because everybody thinks that the perfect
moment is going to come again, at least with the last breath …



Hans-Joachim:

On the other hand, the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould, said: "When presented as guidelines for a philosophy of
change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws
of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction
among components of complete systems, and sees the components
themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products of and inputs
to the system. Thus the law of ‘interpenetrating opposites’ records the
inextricably interdependence of components; ‘the transformation of
quantity to quality’ defends a systems-based view of change that
translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the
‘negation of negation’ describes the direction given to history because
complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states.” [An Urchin
in the Storm,1987, W. W. Norton, New York, pp. 153-154].

34



Dan: 

That transformation of quantity to quality is not located between the
level of biochemistry and mental content. There are several
successive and interpenetrating levels of organization between those
two, and it's in that complex that the transformation occurs. You've got
the basic level of autopoiesis which defines the living system as such
in the environment, which defines it through its structure and function.
Right there, you have a transformation of quantity to quality through
the determination of what is relevant in the environment to the
organism, that is, the portioning of relevant "chunks" from the
quantitative continuum, which is the environment, carved out by the
organism as „meaningful", to the organism. You find that at the level of
the simplest unicellular organisms. 

Each successive level of organization, from multi-cellularity on up
through social and cultural structures in us are but further refinements
of that basic partitioning of "self" and world, which is the
transformation of quantity to quality.

If you place the point of transformation from quantity to quality
between biochemistry and mental content, you put much more
explanatory weight on biochemistry than belongs there. It might in
theory be possible to conceive of biochemical structures that are
sufficiently complex to account for mental content or meaning, but that
complexity will be "borrowed" from the successive levels of
organization, the biological, organismic, neurological and ultimately
cultural. One could say that a sufficiently complicated biochemical
process occurring in a sufficiently complicated biological structure, set
within a sufficiently complex social and cultural context would
correlate with some mental content,  but the organization of that
biochemical process would be better described in the terms of those
higher levels of organization.

The same issue comes up in descriptions of mind being the product of
35

the brain, or "skull-bound" theories of mind. There can't be a full

account of mental content given strictly in terms of neurological
functioning. There is always a reference to a meaningful world, which
that neurological process is correlated with, and which functionally
defines that neurological process as 'the correlate" of a mental
content. I think the dialectic is interesting, because it comes out of
Hegel, who saw Mind as a distributed process, not localized in heads
and brains. Chalmers and Clark's Extended Mind Hypothesis is a
modern variation on the theme of a distributed mind, and I recently
saw a similar idea in G. H. Mead about 100 years ago. He viewed
mind as a function distributed within social systems, rather than
located within particular subjects heads. 



Hans-Joachim:  

I think that Emergentism is incompatible with the idea of an immortal
mind/soul. Emergentists argue that mental qualities emerge from
sufficiently complex brain activities. In the absence of brain activity,
however, mind cannot exist, therefore it must cease to exist when the
brain dies.

On the other hand, works of art can, indeed, survive thousands of
years, but they are certainly not immortal. 

And mathematics? I don't think that it is produced by humans, rather it
is found by the human mind due to subtle similarities in our basic
conditions.

On page 142 of his book, E. Schrödinger writes: “A mathematical truth
is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its
discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift
from a fairy.“

Obviously, a higher degree of complexity is a necessary condition for
the emergence of mental qualities. The question is, however, whether
it is also a sufficient condition. In the context of dialectical materialism,
the answer would be a clear yes. 

36

In contrast, Hegel's philosophy is written in the tradition of German

Idealism. His "Phenomenology of Spirit" ends with the famous
sentence:



...; both together, conceptually grasped history, form the recollection
and the Calvary of absolute spirit, the reality, truth, and certainty of its
throne, without which it would be lifeless solitude; 

only — from the chalice of this realm of spirits 

foams out to Him, His infinity.



So, it should be clear that Hegel presupposes a Universal Spirit,
whose existence is a conditio sine qua non for the mental in human
beings.



Dan: 

I wonder what Schrödinger would say. He certainly seems
sympathetic to the notion of one consciousness, yet he doesn't
present any discussion of anything like a Universal Spirit in this work.
He suggests a kind of loose teleology, but it is open ended.



Hans-Joachim:   

We already agreed that the belief in an Immortality of the Soul is not
identical with the belief in a Resurrection of Man. In that regard I'd
quoted the following passage: 

"In the third century, the Platonic belief in immortality infiltrated the
Catholic Church, merged with the Christian faith in resurrection and
was raised to an ecclesial dogma not before the 5th Lateran Council
in 1515. ... Also the institution of requiems as well as the doctrine of
the purgatory can be understood only from this perspective",

which implies that in early Christianity this belief was not prevalent,
rather the followers thought that they will be reawakened at the time of
His second coming.

37

To me, this idea resembles the reawakening of vegetation after a long

and enduring winter. So, in the interim period, our existence could be
imagined to be reduced to something like a metaphysical seed...



Dan:  

Plato himself borrows the notion of an immortal soul from Orphism. I
find the idea a bit more appealing when I think of it as arising from
trance states induced by Orphic mystery rites. Plato gave rational
form to the insights of past shamans, in a way analogous to Descartes
giving rational justification to Church teachings about the soul.



38

Gotthard Günther



Hans-Joachim:   

Before, I read about Gotthard Günther only once - in Peter Sloterdijk's
"Die Sonne und der Tod". Now, I can find more in a number of
interviews. It's very interesting - and it's directly related to our previous
topic, robots and AI.



In summary, Günther's polycontexturality theory represents a formal
theory that makes it possible to model complex, self-referential
processes, which are characteristic for all vital processes, non-
reductionistically and without logical contradictions. In his works, he
designs a parallel-network calculus, which he introduces into the
sciences as polycontextural logic (PCL).

The basic idea of this calculus is to mediate individual logic systems
by means of new operators introduced in his previous works. PCL is
characterized by distribution and mediation of various logical
contextures, whereby intra-contextual all rules of the classical
propositional logic strictly apply, whereas inter-contextual new
"transjunctional" operations that do not exist classically are to be
introduced. This makes it possible not only to model self-referential
processes logically without contradictions, but also to bring them, in
principle, to implementation.



Now I understand what was meant with "black box"! Rudolf Kehr
opened that thing, and it looks much "worse" than what I had
presented to my audience in 2012 (From imaginary Oxymora to Real
Polarities and Return). Here's Kehr's paper:

http://www.vordenker.de/rk/rk_Catching-Transjunctions_2010.pdf

It was written in order to present Günther's idea of transjunctional
operators! 



39

Hans-Joachim:  

I understand that the whole becomes more than its parts only by
virtue of "transjunctional" operators, which allow correspondence
between otherwise inkompatible systems. In Google, I find
applications of such operators only on logics and sociology. Do you
have other references at hand? 

I'm thinking of transjunctional operators to allow for multiple
correspondences between Nicolai Hartmann's four levels of reality, i.e.
the inorganic, the organic/biological, the psychical/emotional and the
intellectual/cultural level.



Wikipedia defines an integrative level as a set of phenomena
emerging from pre-existing phenomena of a lower level. The concept
arranges all material entities and all processes in the universe into a
hierarchy based on how complex the entity's organization is. When
arranged this way, each entity is three things at the same time: It is
made up of parts from the previous level below. It is a whole in its own
right. And it is a part of the whole that is on the next level above.
Typical examples include life emerging from non-living substances,
and consciousness emerging from nervous systems.



Interestingly, ideas connected to integrative levels can be found in the
works of both materialist and anti-materialist philosophers.



Dan:

One facile critique of Emergentism is that it is in fact materialism. Your
comment addresses that oversimplification. 



Hans-Joachim: 

In summary, Günther's polycontexturality theory represents a formal
theory that makes it possible to model complex, self-referential
processes, which are characteristic for all vital processes, non-
40

reductionistically and without logical contradictions. In his works, he

designs a parallel-network calculus, which he introduces into the
sciences as polycontextural logic (PCL).

The basic idea of this calculus is to mediate individual logic systems
by means of new operators introduced in his previous works. PCL is
characterized by distribution and mediation of various logical
contextures, whereby intra-contextual all rules of the classical
propositional logic strictly apply, whereas inter-contextual new
"transjunctional" operations that do not exist classically are to be
introduced. This makes it possible not only to model self-referential
processes logically without contradictions, but also to bring them, in
principle, to implementation.



Hans-Joachim:

Now I understand what you meant with "black box"! Rudolf Kehr
opened that thing, and it looks much "worse" than what I had
presented to my audience in 2012 (From imaginary Oxymora to Real
Polarities and Return). Here's Kehr's paper:

http://www.vordenker.de/rk/rk_Catching-Transjunctions_2010.pdf

It has been written in order to understand Günther's idea of
transjunctional operators!



Hans-Joachim:

Gotthard Günther himself writes in "The consciousness of
machines" (1963):

After all, Wiener and his school questions, in an unprecedented way,
the millennial and time-honored distinction between spirituality and
materiality, as it has been handed down to us in its special classical
form. However, this must not be understood as if a new variant of
vulgar materialism has developed in the theory of "mechanical
brains", or as if the intention was to abolish the dichotomy of mind and
matter by means of new technical tools. Such an idea would be a fatal
41

mistake.



Norbert Wiener said "information is information, not matter or energy.
No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present
day." And Günther added: "information is information, not spirit or
subjectivity." No idealism which does not admit this can survive at the
present day.

By the way, Heinz von Foerster and Gotthard Günther were
collaborators at the State University of Illinois.



Dan:  

Hans-Joachim - What type of information is Günther talking about
here? Information as defined by Shannon? If it is not Information from
"information theory", how is it different from meaning? Information as
meaning ties information to subjectivity.



This "polycontextural logic" is fascinating stuff. I only took a brief look
at it. It answers a weakness in"fuzzy logic" that has bothered me, that
the truth value between 0 and 1 is relative to a particular dimension,
or „context", in which case it is again either 1 or 0. There is a theory of
logic in Buddhism called "Apoha" which was developed to address the
Buddhist rejection of a theory of concepts based on universals ("no-
self", no context-free essences). One of the explanations of Apoha is
that it involves a use of violations of the law of the excluded middle. 



The classic example of how meaning is handled in Apoha is: "a cow is
not a non-cow", and this is taken to be more than trivially true. It
involves double negation in a productive way. Somebody save me a
bit of work and reading by describing "transjunctional operators" and
the way they handle negation. It sounds very similar.



42

Hans-Joachim:  

Dan, this field is completely new to me; before, I never knew anything
about polycontexturality theory, Gotthard Günther, Heinz von Foerster
or Rudolf Kaehr!



Dan:  

I have just a tiny bit of familiarity with von Foerster. I put down what I
had been reading of his because it seemed to relativistic, but I
probably jumped the gun in my judgement. The other two I have never
heard of. "Fuzzy logic" as a topic has gotten some airplay in this
group, as some major advancement. I never bought it. The space
between 0 and 1 is not some vague grey area between truth and
falsity. It seemed a gross oversimplification to say that a proposition
was .7628....true. That position on the continuum between 0 and 1 is
defined by a context. A proposition judged to be relatively true is true
in a particular sense, again, in a context. It sounds like Günther nailed
that down.



Hans-Joachim:  

I didn't see fuzzy logic to play an important role in these papers. Yes, it
deals with the three-valued logic (with truth values 0, 1/2, 1),
developed by Jan Łukasiewicz in 1920. And it rejects the tertium non
datur of classical logic.



Dan:  

But, what does Günther mean by "information"? Is this information as
defined by Shannon, or is it a more general use of the term?



"Norbert Wiener said "information is information, not matter or energy.
No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present
day." And Günther added: "information is information, not spirit or
43

subjectivity. No idealism which does not admit this can survive at the
present day."

I would like your thoughts about what Günther means by information. I
think that the first wave of cyberneticists kept faithful to Shannon's
definition, while the second wave played more loosely with the idea. I
think Wiener used the term ‘information' in the looser sense. 



Hans-Joachim:  

Günther wrote a few articles in English:



Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations. University of
Illinois, Engineering Experiment Station. Technical Report no. 4.
Urbana: Electrical Engineering Research Laboratory, University of
Illinois (1962), and

Cybernetics and the Transition from Classical to Trans-Classical
Logic. Illinois University Biological Computer Laboratory BCL Report
3.0. Urbana: Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois
(1965).



But I didn't find a translation of his 200 pages book "The
Consciousness of Machines".



The topic is quite challenging, and we might open a new discussion
on these things as well.

Regarding information, Günther writes that it is principally impossible
to reduce the cybernetic concept of information to purely material-
energetic categories. This is exemplified by the fact that information
can be conveyed by any means, which shows its independence from
specific carriers. 

Also, he writes that in fundamental discussions about information, one
should conceive not only the immediate factum of information, but the
entire process of communication by which information is conveyed.

44



Dan, you already managed to find a link to a translation of "Geist und
Materie". Couldn't you try to also find a translation of "Das
Bewusstsein der Maschinen" (the consciousness of machines)? 



Dan:  

"Also, he writes that in fundamental discussions about information,
one should conceive not only the immediate factum of information, but
the entire process of communication by which information is
conveyed."



That makes "information" co-extensive with pretty much everything if
you have a process view of reality. It wouldn't be "Shannon"
information, which by definition is not "meaning". I could do a search
for "the consciousness of machines" in English, but I don't want to
commit to reading it.



Hans-Joachim:  

Don't worry, Günther doesn't conclude that machines do have
consciousness. The title is more a kind of provocation, as people are
afraid of machines dominating mankind.

Let me quote from its last page, where he says:

“So nothing mythical happens in the robot brain, and actually it doesn't
have any consciousness of its own. If the ideas described in this book
can really be carried out, this would mean nothing but that man has
managed to detach some of his consciousness processes from his
organism and transferred them to another medium. A mechanism
doesn't generate consciousness, even if its working rhythm is trans-
classical.“



Dan:  

45

I'm not too concerned about machines having consciousness. My

concern is over the term "information" being so broad that it simply
takes the place of the term "spirit" or "consciousness". It is a concern
with mythologizing, though, a mythologizing of the concept of
"information".



Perhaps "information" is the same type of shell-game as "spirit", and
is as informative a concept.



Hans-Joachim:  

I'm still reading "the consciousness of machines", and it's really
stunning... I would very much like to share it with you - Günther has
been called the "Einstein of philosophy", because he revolutionized
the logic foundation of philosophy, just like Einstein did in respect to
space and time.



On page 39, he writes:

“But cybernetics is interested in classical laws of nature only as far as
it matters to find a deeper layer of being in physical existence, from
where natural laws build up as secondary forms of reality. That this
layer of being exists, and that its legality is trans-classic - not
Aristotelian - that is no longer a question today. In that deeper layer,
causality is replaced by statistical probability and the rigid, irreflexive
identity of the classical body is replaced by still very dark functions,
which seemingly have reflexive, i.e. self-centered character. One can
not deny the conjecture that in this subatomic region the classical
difference of the law of being and the law of thought becomes
obsolete and thus the one of non-me and me. At first this has probably
been seen by W. Heisenberg, who expressed it in the lapidary
sentence: "The completely isolated object ... [has] ... in principle no
more describable properties."



46

And on page 38 he envisions:


“If the forms of existence, offered by nature for this purpose, are
inappropriate - it does not need to be proven first, that it is impossible
to teach the differential calculus to the violet - then you produce the
appropriate forms of being yourself. You go back to the last conditions
of material existence and then seek to determine, whether there is a
second way out of the basic forms of objective existence to create
reflexive being. We already know the first one. It is the one "nature"
itself went in order to produce organisms.“



On page 48 he says:

“Thus, the classical dichotomy between mind and matter, between
thinking and thought, resp. consciousness and thing should finally be
refuted. In a self-forgotten devotion to the object, classical philosophy
produced the theory of an irreflexive, self-sufficient and exclusively
with itself identical being. In this period, the problem of reflection was
hardly taken care of. It was tacitly accepted that reflection must be the
exact counterpart of being, and can therefore also be represented
self-sufficient, completely self-determined and fully identical with its
own inwardness.“



And on page 49:

“Cybernetics is the science that fulfills the idealistic demand that the
absolute must be rounded into a circle. It is that eternal circle that
contains the three elements "I", "You" and "It". But the figure of the
circle implies that the three moments constituting the Absolute are
equal to each other. That is, there is no relationship like above and
below, like between divine and human consciousness. But this
equality is not yet given, as long as "I" and "You" appear as reflections
in-themselves, but the "It" remains excluded from this form of
existence.



47

Dan:  

It looks very interesting, Hans-Joachim. That triad, "I" "You" and "It",
has been coming up a lot in things I've been reading by he
Pragmatists, and it is also a central idea in the question of the
constitution of "objectivity" among some of the Phenomenologists.



Hans-Joachim:  

These citations are basically about the fact that cybernetics is based
on semiconductor technology, which is again based on solid-state and
quantum physics. With the advent of such technologies, a new type of
machines has evolved, which cannot be compared to Leibniz's wind
mill. In his book, Günther doesn't say that such machines could
develop a consciousness as it is known to us; he says that they might
develop another type of self-reference, which will be new and
complementary to our consciousness.



Dan:  

I haven't had any luck finding an English translation of "the
consciousness of machines". If you keep going, perhaps you will
produce one! What are you working from, a hard copy in German? I
did find a few articles by Günther in English which I've bookmarked.



Hans-Joachim:  

I found the book at  http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/
gg_bewusstsein-der-maschinen.pdf

There you can also find a complete bibliography:

http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_bibliographie.htm



I think, the questions we were dealing with in these threads are
preconfigured and partially answered in these articles.



Dan - the question of information vs. communication is dealt with at 

48

http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_inf-comm-many-val-logic.pdf



There he writes:

“In fact, the success of the theory, which Shannon and his
collaborators developed, depends on a careful separation of the two
(information and meaning) and on the exclusion of the concept of
meaning from the formulas describing the laws that govern the
transmission of information from its sources to its recipient. It is
obvious that this approach is inadequate both for philosophic
anthropology and for the theory of culture which the Humanities try to
develop.“



Dan:  

So do you have any access to German/English translation software?



Hans-Joachim:  

I was using the Google translator, but it needs lots of amendments.



Page 60:

“Hegel's boldness entails in conceiving the materiality of being as
reflection itself - a materiality which precedes thinking and manifests
itself as such. According to him, substance and form are perfectly
equal to each other (at least as far as the foundation of dialectics is
concerned). They are logically the same. Reflection and irreflexivity
constitute a pure exchange ratio. This means that it makes no
difference whether we say: "matter has the property of
reflection" (dialectical Materialism) or whether we formulate "the mind
has the property of materiality" (objective Idealism). We deeply
believe that there is a very essential and fundamental difference
between the two statements. But this difference just imposes us on,
because when we reflect, that reflection is entrapped into an individual
consciousness, an Ego. To be an Ego means having taken sides
49

against the world, which is repelled from our own subjectivity as the
Other, as the embodiment of the object-domain. The fact that we can't
help otherwise is undoubtedly certain; because that would mean, to
give up one's own Ego, which can't be expected meaningfully. But if,
as Hegel says, the whole world and its history is, from the very
beginning, self-reflection, then we obviously are not entitled to take
our unilateral and biased state of reflection as the logical yardstick for
a worldview that wants to do justice to the nature of reality.“



On page 64 he quotes from Oskar Lange's "Totality, Development,
and Dialectics" (1960): 

"Both these concepts are at variance with experimental knowledge
and scientific method. The mechanistic view negates the experimental
fact of the existence of totalities having unique properties and
patterns. On the other hand, finalism introduces 'beings', which are
experimentally unverified and unverifiable. A strict and
methodologically correct approach to the problem of totality and
dialectic development was, nevertheless, made difficult by the
absence of a thought apparatus – concepts and principles of their
operation adequate to the task. At present, such apparatus is
beginning to be formed as a concomitant of the new science of
cybernetics."



Page 66:

“Western literature is full of petty fears that the machine will ultimately
enslave man.“ In contrast, the Russian scholar Novik explains:

"A kingdom of machines, even self-reproducing, cannot become
independent, self-contained, without depending on man as the prime
mover of cybernetic machines ... The automaton is no more than a
link in a close chain: man - nature. This link can become progressively
longer and more complicated, but it does not become the entire chain.
The automaton cannot occupy any other space in the universe except
50

between man and nature. The space of automata can become

progressively wider but it cannot cease to be only an intermediate
space.... Always nature will be below the automaton and man above it
..."



Page 71:

“It is perfectly possible to translate idealistic terminology into that of
intelligent dialectical materialism and vice versa. Unfortunately, our
eastern colleagues have not yet understood this fact! However, no
arrangement is possible between transcendental idealism and the
"stupid" materialism, which has not yet realized that the "material"
must have reflective properties as well.“



Page 72:

“Even the deadest, most "mindless" stuff is endowed with reflexivity. It
would be - remaining in the usual physical perspective - e.g. quite
impossible that on planet Earth self-organizing living beings emerge,
which call themselves in self-reflection "humans", and claim to have a
"mind", if not all reflection components of what we call consciousness
and mind are already in that hypothetical gas cloud and its
surrounding space-time dimension, from which our solar system was
supposed to have originated. Whether one calls that metaphysical X
God, soul, spirit or self-reflective matter, is totally irrelevant. Only
children are allowed to quarrel over words.“



Dan:  

I'm still thinking about that quote, and what it might mean to broaden
the concept of information to include the processes of communication,
and not just the "message" or signal.



Hans-Joachim:  

Regarding information, Günther says at the beginning of his article
51

"Information, Communication and Many-valued Logic" that additional

work is required by logicians and semanticists to permit its full
application in the Humanities as well as in Philosophy. What follows is
an explanation of this statement. If you read it, you will easily
understand why we have no chance to come to terms with the word
information in a philosophical context. 

Conversely, I like these two sentences:

Whether one calls that metaphysical X God, soul, spirit or self-
reflective matter, is totally irrelevant. Only children are allowed to
quarrel over words.



Dan:  

Is that article available in English, Hans-Joachim?



Hans-Joachim:  

It's this one:  http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_inf-comm-
many-val-logic.pdf



Page 83:

“What promises the peoples of the world a common future today is the
fortunate circumstance that this provocation will now be experienced
everywhere. It challenges Asians, as well as Europeans or Americans,
and does so in the same way in every sphere of civilization, in that it
exposes the mechanism of human existence everywhere and
releases no other choice but to deliver oneself to the mechanism and
then go bankrupt, even in the most blatant economic (let alone in a
deeper) sense - because the person ready only for mechanical
services will have no market value at all - or to develop a new creative
image of himself in which he conceives himself as so free that he can
fearlessly affirm the historical necessity of the machine, because he is
never in danger of being enslaved by it. Sonnemann rightly says:
‘Automation as the first process in the history of technology promises
52

the de-mechanization of man.’"




Page 93:

“It is essential - and may serve as comforting powder to those who
need it - that the consciousness that cybernetic endeavors will one
day bestow on a machine, will historically always be at least one
epoch behind that of the constructor of the mechanism. This distance
of around one or more world-historical stages of reflection on
subjectivity is the decisive criterion of the difference between man and
machine. The difference is therefore a historio-metaphysical one.“










53









Mind and Matter, chapter 6



Hans-Joachim:  

Coming back to Schrödinger's "Mind & Matter", I would like to
highlight his conclusion in chapter 6, where he says:

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations
and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to
remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some
primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is
therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors
of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent
theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have
found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the
terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very
useful for our remembering the fact in a well-ordered pattern, tends to
obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the
theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some
sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual
qualities; which, of course, they never do.



For further investigations, it might be useful to study P.T. Morgan's
"The Experience of Consciousness" (=>  https://books.google.de/books?
id=oFGNCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA623&dq=conn%27s+translational+neuroscience+
%22Morgan%22&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvtZSq96zZAhWHKOwKHS_aAtI
Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=conn's%20translational%20neuroscience%20%22
Morgan%22&f=false)



In Box 28.1, Morgan directly refers to Schrödinger's Mind and Matter,
54

chapter 6, with the specific paragraph characterizing the problem of

qualia.



Next he addresses the problem of how to judge whether a person is
conscious or not (in this regard we had already learnt from Giulio
Tononi's IIT that there is a possibility by measuring the self-
referentiality of neuronal networks (Phi)).

Then he arrives at the problem of artificial intelligence, where Günther
had clarified that a machine will never experience a kind of
consciousness as we ourselves can have it (I-consciousness). All
machines could eventually experience is the type of consciousness
others are supposed to have (you-consciousness).



In his second paragraph, Morgan writes: 

"Explanations in this category tend to rely on what Chalmers calls the
"extra ingredient". The extra ingredient is something that seems as
mysterious as consciousness itself, except that fortunately whoever is
explaining it seems to understand it better than, or in a different way
from others. Quantum mechanics is a typical candidate, as the
uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanical predictions seems well
suited to match the “difficulty” around explaining the conscious
experience (eg, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction model
championed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff). A fallacy of all
such explanations is that they ascribe to the quantum mechanical
model of nature itself, rather than accept that quantum mechanics or
any other scientific model of nature is just a predictive model."



In the next step he arrives at Schrödinger's lectures at Trinity College
with the quote given above (Scientific theories serve to facilitate the
survey ...). He interprets Schrödinger as saying that "no scientific
models explain why there is electric force, or how it arises. Any such
argument would necessarily be circular, ... Similarly, with regard to
55

explaining how consciousness arises, any explanation that summons

a scientific model (like quantum mechanics) to explain how the
phenomenon arises without the benefit of measurement is
scientifically meaningless, as the model is not nature, and has no
scientific function outside the measurable predictions it makes."



Dan:  

In the way in which Günther states that we humans, and therefore the
type of consciousnesses we are, will always be a "generation or more
ahead" of what we take to be consciousness in machines,
consciousness is always ahead of whatever it takes as an object,
including any models, we as conscious beings make of it (or of
ourselves). It is what Schrödinger's talk of paintings with small
representations of the painter tucked away within them was about.



Some Quantum Mechanics scientists are not averse to the suggestion
of an immaterial base of the micro particles of matter that could
approximate to consciousness itself. For Max Planck, mind is the
matrix of matter.



Hans-Joachim:  

Indeed, we can't have consciousness, rather we are either conscious
or unconscious (Günther’s I-consciousness). Regarding others,
however, we can only assume that they are conscious; so we add
something to their existence, which we cannot experience, hence we
might loosely say that they have consciousness (Günther’s you-
consciousness). This is of special interest in cases of Coma vigile.
And regarding robots, we will never know - some might assume,
others won't - they might behave just like being conscious. The Turing
imitation game replaces the immeasurable by a measure how well
humans can distinguish the robot from a real human. Turing's
question was: How many of us how often and with what consistency
56

cannot tell the human from the computer? In other words, rather than
measure whether a computer becomes sentient, or experiences
thoughts or consciousness, the test would measure whether others
believe that it does. 



On page 72, Günther wrote that "it would be ... quite impossible that
on planet Earth self-organizing living beings emerge, which call
themselves in self-reflection "humans", and claim to have a "mind", if
not all reflection components of what we call consciousness and mind
are already in that hypothetical gas cloud and its surrounding space-
time dimension, from which our solar system was supposed to have
originated." Interestingly he doesn't speak only about the gas cloud,
rather he adds the surrounding space-time dimension. And this is, in
my view, the crucial point: Space-time has the potential to develop
sentience, provided that we accept it to have a complex structure.



Once, sentience is established, an "observer" can be established, of
whom Frank Wilczek said: "The relevant literature [on the meaning of
quantum theory] is famously contentious and obscure. I believe it will
remain so until someone constructs, within the formalism of quantum
mechanics, an ‘observer’, that is, a model entity whose states
correspond to a recognizable caricature of conscious awareness. That
is a formidable project, extending well beyond what is conventionally
considered physics."

After all, this project is well on its way - and it has even reached
mainstream thinking, as could be seen in Hassel Mørch's article.
Although there is tough opposition - an opposition that is necessary to
produce good results - I think and hope that this "recognizable
caricature of conscious awareness" can be found within the rest of our
lifetime.



Dan:  

57

"The appearance of mind is only the culmination of that sociality which

is found throughout the universe, its culmination lying in the act that
the organism, by occupying the attitudes of others, can occupy its own
attitude in the role of the other.“ (G. H. Mead)



Hans-Joachim:  

Dan - that's beautifully said. And it corresponds to the basic reflectivity
(reflection components) mentioned above.


All From: LinkedIn.com, 


Group: Philosophy of Mind

(https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4011660) =>

h t t p s : / / w w w . l i n k e d i n . c o m / g r o u p s /
4011660/4011660-6360502370413223940