Ayn Rand and dualism

[tadmjones]

Is there an underlying schema that determines the function(s) of the processing, is there a fundamental level ‘below’ which the processing rests or is process the thing ?

 

[DavidOdden]

As a starting point, data and information do not exist in a universe without a consciousnesses. Data is created by a consciousness. Data is a representation of a fact, a fact grasped (for example as a proposition) becomes data. Data is valid or invalid, depending no whether it was created correctly. For example, if I say “lag”, you may erroneously state that I said “lack” because you didn’t hear me correctly, then “lack” would be invalid as data (regarding what I said). What I actually said is the underlying fact (it is an aspect of reality, and can be conceptually grasped). An artifact which has been buried for 5,000 years is not a datum until it is uncovered and put in relation to some proposition.

I was wondering whether the underlying issue here is a reification of epistemology, in conflating “fact” with “data” or “information”. Everything has the potential to be grasped by a consciousness so might become data, but mental processing is necessary for there to be data.

[EC]

No, the concept of data doesn't exist without consciousness but quantum gravitational qubit processing is what the universe *is*. That's what the laws of physics are and what results from it. True, it may not be data yet without consciousness but it is processing of qubits "randomly" at first but according to well defined physical laws that must be discovered by any volition conscious beings capable of conceptualizing that may eventually emerge-- us in this exact case. In other words, spins are still flipping, etc. pre-consciousness emergence to the forming of the concept as "randomized" data processing. Reality is still primary and does what it does independent of any potential future concept formers of what is occuring. No Objectivist principles are violated in this process but I do understand your confusion here and why you possibly thought that.

[Boydstun]

On 12/5/2023 at 2:16 PM, QuidProQuo said:

I know that Ayn Rand does not reduce the consciousness to the brain, but what is the metaphysical status of it in her view? Not reducible to the brain but an emergent property of the brain? Where can I read more on this topic specifically in Objectivism? 

In Rand's Galt's Speech (GS, 1957), she broaches the topic of sensory illusions, which she takes to be only illusions insofar as one has made an error in judgement-identifications about what is there. And this was because the sensory systems are purely physical, therefore purely deterministic, and being without free will, unlike conscious thinking, the senses have no power to "deceive" one. It's an old philosophic picture—held most famously by Kant: the inerrancy of the senses. Own up to it or not, that picture put forth in GS implies there are no perceptual illusions that one cannot expunge from experience by intellectual understanding of how they are caused. That picture of Rand (and others) is false, beginning to end. There is no such physical determinism even in the classical regular regime of physical law when one gets down to real physical processes taken in their intersecting independent causal streams as in nature. (I don't care how many thousands of times that phony picture of physical determinism in the classical regime has been repeated by way of introducing the "problem of free will", it is still baloney, as ever it was down from LaPlace.)

As Peter noted above, Rand held to the modern view which, most reasonably, takes all occasions of consciousness to be features of living animal brain. She writes in GS that mind is not possible without physical life: "Your mind is your life" and "neither is possible without the other." Also, in an oral exchange a dozen years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: "It's a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That's what the concept means." (ITOE App., 252; cf. Binswanger 2014, 30–41; and the article by Robert Efron in The Objectivist which Peter mentioned earlier.) 

Any free will and any volitional, fallible consciousness are undergirded by living brain processes. Just as when we drift on habit, engage in evasion, or get things right.

None of my retuning of Rand on classical physical process (including living sensory process), which I published in Objectivity in the 1990's and was likewise put forth later by Alan Gotthelf in his little book On Ayn Rand (only with my talk of independent causal 'streams' replaced with independent causal 'chains' and without remarking that he was departing from Rand) affects at all the fundamental principle permeating good epistemology that consciousness is identification (focally, of existence). 

Edited December 12, 2023 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

As for the title of the thread is it fair to say that Rand was a dualist, eg there are entities of either physical , material stuff(s) and those of mental stuff(s) and they are ultimately reducible to incommensurate kinds?

[Boydstun]

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

As for the title of the thread is it fair to say that Rand was a dualist, eg there are entities of either physical , material stuff(s) and those of mental stuff(s) and they are ultimately reducible to incommensurate kinds?

No. Although Rand may have had a view here or there that suggested dualism, her general metaphysics and biocentric ethics and psychology would not be consistent with dualism. At least not in the sense of dualism as usually meant: of some sort of fundamental dichotomy of the physical and the mental.

Rand did not have a fundamental dichotomy between the inanimate and the animate, even though the latter has a profoundly different character than the former. Living systems can have even the feature of non-intentional, non-conscious teleological causes of individual life cycles, ways of life, and reproduction to continue the species, which is entirely absent in the inanimate components whose activities make possible that overall ends-pursuits of the living system. It would be untrue to all that reality to deny the existence of either the living things or the non-living things and their very deep differences in character (or the relationships in which they stand to each other). One does not have to choose between eliminative reduction of life to the inanimate on the one hand or dualism of the living things and the non-living things on the other.

Similarly, conscious mind is not a biological feature that one must think of as either really just non-conscious living activities on the one hand or dualism on the other. Those alternatives are not the only ones under which one might comprehend the relation between conscious mind and the physical. Indeed they leave out the alternative relation that is the truth (for which one needs neuroscience and not only the philosopher's armchair).

Edited December 12, 2023 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

I always vote for both !

 

[Grames]

21 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

As a starting point, data and information do not exist in a universe without a consciousnesses.

Data and information are two very different things.  Data has some semantic context to determine what it means, but the concept of information omits semantic context.  Data depends upon consciousness but information is mind independent.  Focus upon communication as an engineering problem has shed light on this previously unappreciated aspect of existence, its information content.  But what is being measured and how to measure it?  From the first pages of Claude Shannon's paper 

A Mathematical Theory of Communication by C. E. SHANNON from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948.

Quote

 

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

If the number of messages in the set is finite then this number or any monotonic function of this number can be regarded as a measure of the information produced when one message is chosen from the set, all choices being equally likely. As was pointed out by Hartley the most natural choice is the logarithmic function. Although this definition must be generalized considerably when we consider the influence of the statistics of the message and when we have a continuous range of messages, we will in all cases use an essentially logarithmic measure.

The logarithmic measure is more convenient for various reasons:

1. It is practically more useful. Parameters of engineering importance such as time, bandwidth, number of relays, etc., tend to vary linearly with the logarithm of the number of possibilities. For example, adding one relay to a group doubles the number of possible states of the relays. It adds 1 to the base 2 logarithm of this number. Doubling the time roughly squares the number of possible messages, or doubles the logarithm, etc.

2. It is nearer to our intuitive feeling as to the proper measure. This is closely related to (1) since we intuitively measures entities by linear comparison with common standards. One feels, for example, that two punched cards should have twice the capacity of one for information storage, and two identical channels twice the capacity of one for transmitting information.

3. It is mathematically more suitable. Many of the limiting operations are simple in terms of the logarithm but would require clumsy restatement in terms of the number of possibilities.

The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey. A device with two stable positions, such as a relay or a flip-flop circuit, can store one bit of information. N such devices can store N bits, since the total number of possible states is 2^N and log2 2^N = N.

 

But is it physical? From

The Physical Nature of Information by Rolf Landauer from Physics Letters A 217 (1996) 188-193 (a link to a copy)

Quote

 

1. Information is physical

Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of our real physical word, its laws of physics and its storehouse of available parts.

This view was implicit in Szilard's discussion of Maxwell's demon [1]. Szilard's discussion, while a major milestone in the elucidation of the demon, was by no means an unambiguous resolution. The history of that can be found in Refs. [ 2,3 ]. The acceptance of the view, however, that information is a physical entity, has been slow. Penrose [4], for example, argues for the Platonic reality of mathematics, independent of any manipulation. He tells us "... devices can yield only approximations to a structure that has a deep and 'computer-independent' existence of its own." Indeed, our assertion that information is physical amounts to an assertion that mathematics and computer science are a part of physics. We cannot expect our colleagues in mathematics and in computer science to be cheerful about surrendering their independence. Mathematicians, in particular, have long assumed that mathematics was there first, and that physics needed that to describe the universe. We will, instead, ask for a more self-consistent framework in Sec. V.

 

A discussion of Maxwell's demon (not to be confused with Descartes' demon) in popular science literature is available here: (Quanta Magazine: How Maxwell's Demon Continues to Startle Scientists)  Maxwell's demon has been reduced to experimental forms and demonstrates the physical nature of information.

A philosophical implication is that the Pythagorean/Platonic notion of mathematics being an independent or a priori realm apart from physical reality is refuted.  This satisfies my confirmation bias as an Objectivist that Existence exists is the broadest possible axiom and that mathematics must be about and within a prior Existence.

[tadmjones]

Information is identity? A way to view or conceptualize identity with a bent toward epistemology as opposed to a consciousness independent frame of reference ?

[DavidOdden]

Is "information" different from "fact" (esp. as Objectivism uses it)?

[Boydstun]

11 hours ago, DavidOdden said:

Is "information" different from "fact" (esp. as Objectivism uses it)?

Yes. Strictly speaking, Yes.

Information is to fact as truth is to fact. Information and truth are registrations of fact by a purposive system.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Information as a Topic in Philosophy

Biological Information

Information and the Origin of Life

Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information

[Grames]

On 12/14/2023 at 7:32 AM, tadmjones said:

Information is identity? A way to view or conceptualize identity with a bent toward epistemology as opposed to a consciousness independent frame of reference ?

Existence is identity.  Information is an aspect of identity, and so it is an aspect of existing.  It is valid to ask how much of an aspect, is this a detail that can be neglected?

Before Einstein one could extract a certain amount energy from burning a log in a fireplace or a boiler.  After Einstein it is possible to calculate how much energy exists simply by virtue of the mass of the log and by the mass-energy equivalence of E = m * c^2 that is an amount of energy many orders of magnitude greater than is possible to release by combustion.  A similar ratio obtains when comparing the amount information we handle on a daily basis to the amount of information that is embodied in what exists.  The information encoded in a letter or word carved on a log is dwarfed by the information of the matter of the wood.

[tadmjones]

On 12/15/2023 at 6:44 PM, Grames said:

Existence is identity.  Information is an aspect of identity, and so it is an aspect of existing.  It is valid to ask how much of an aspect, is this a detail that can be neglected?

Before Einstein one could extract a certain amount energy from burning a log in a fireplace or a boiler.  After Einstein it is possible to calculate how much energy exists simply by virtue of the mass of the log and by the mass-energy equivalence of E = m * c^2 that is an amount of energy many orders of magnitude greater than is possible to release by combustion.  A similar ratio obtains when comparing the amount information we handle on a daily basis to the amount of information that is embodied in what exists.  The information encoded in a letter or word carved on a log is dwarfed by the information of the matter of the wood.

But isn’t it the case, that post-Einstein the amount of extracted energy from wood by combustion, the same as pre-Einstein? By that I mean the ability to perform a computation describing the energy-mass conservation principle to a specific piece of wood is similar to converting between units of Fahrenheit and Celsius. The average kinetic energy in a specific location can be measured and described , but the naming of the units of measure has no effect on the ‘absolute quantity’ of the thing eg the temperature when converting units.

The post-Einstein(I have had that the e=mc2 is a thing prior to him but most associated with him ) wood’s energy doesn’t exist a part from it being wood, changing the description to a different unit frame doesn’t confer a different reality to the wood or the ‘energy’ therein.

Similarly when you equate the ratios between energy/information availability to actual states is hard for me to follow.

What I was asking , obviously poorly, by ‘information’ do you mean just a different way to describe the apprehension of identity as metaphysical category into an epistemological frame? 

Edited March 30 by tadmjones