The other consciousness is self-awareness. Which is hard to detect from the outside. Some animals may have it. Do they understand when they look silly? Do they recognize themselves in a mirror? These may be diagnostic.
It's important to know which one is intended since they are so very different, at least in their distribution among living creatures.
I claim that this is not true as stated. The main bulk of the habit-forming nearly everyone needs to do when learning to lucid dream is to recognise when you're dreaming, because almost nobody natively knows when they're dreaming. You have to learn to spot it by paying attention to the things which the dream machinery is very bad at (like text, clocks, and your own breathing).
Anyway good point.
I discovered this book in my early teens and it helped me in structuring my thinking about this sort of thing.
I see what you did there...
I can recommend the books of David Hawkins for a modern, scientifically-informed view on the subjective experience of Reality.
https://veritaspub.com/dr-hawkins/
> Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. was a nationally renowned psychiatrist, physician, researcher, spiritual teacher and lecturer. The uniqueness of his contribution to humanity comes from the advanced state of spiritual awareness known as ” Enlightenment,” “Self–Realization,” and “Unio Mystica.” Rarely, if ever, has this spiritual state occurred in the life of an accomplished scientist and physician. Therefore, Dr. Hawkins was uniquely qualified to present a spiritual path that is scientifically compelling to modern society.
You might find the book Modern Samkhya: Ancient Spirituality for the Contemporary Atheist a good starting point.
- individualism treats individuals as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful based on their outcomes without regard for the structural incentives around that person.
- we still categorically divide between "life" and "not-life", treating life (and especially consciousness) as a conundrum and "not-life" as dead matter. We try our best not to look at the fuzzy edges between life and not-life. I would argue that this is a hang-over from Abrahamic dualism (the spiritual inhabiting the material), and that there is no distinction but instead a continuum from less-organised to more-organised. We do the same as the above with many other issues of category.
- Identity isn't concrete in bottom-up organisation. The Ship of Theseus, for example, is not a paradox when you take a bottom-up metaphysical approach. The illusion of identity is only propagation of a pattern.
TL;DR - yes, we do have some ideas around bottom-up organisation, but they're not applied consistently or across the board.
If you think all this sounds like woo, then you are at least in agreement that these ideas are not Western modernist canon.
The general biological view of viruses certainly demonstrate the absence of a categorical divide between "life" and "not life" as does the philosophy of the Turing Test. I'd argue that level of organization is less useful than the level of feedback loops in something, particularly if those loops are internal rather than external.
We daily operate with the idea of the Ship of Theseus as non-paradox in any number of ways. The City of Philadelphia retains its identity not because it is composed of the same people, geography, and structures established in its founding but rather because of the role it plays as an organizational concept, the Mississippi River retains its identity despite course changes over the centuries (let alone the constant replenishment of the individual water atoms within it).
I'd agree that we do not consistently apply bottom-up organization across the board, but that also necessarily means that we apply no consistent philosophy across the board. That leads to the question of how you're defining "Western modernist canon" given such an absence of a unified system.
I mean the tendency to see someone who is for example a burglar and contrast them with a business owner and say that one is bad and the other is good. Which could be true if you removed all context, but usually when you add in context these kinds of absolutes dissolve. But my broader point is that we make value judgements based on the agent, minus the environment, which is IMO erroneous.
> The general biological view of viruses certainly demonstrate the absence of a categorical divide between "life" and "not life" as does the philosophy of the Turing Test. I'd argue that level of organization is less useful than the level of feedback loops in something, particularly if those loops are internal rather than external.
Feedback loops are the exact kind of organisational structure I was referring to, but I didn't know if you were cybernetically-oriented so left it vague. Loops are the mechanism of self-organisation.
> We daily operate with the idea of the Ship of Theseus as non-paradox in any number of ways. The City of Philadelphia retains its identity not because it is composed of the same people, geography, and structures established in its founding but rather because of the role it plays as an organizational concept, the Mississippi River retains its identity despite course changes over the centuries (let alone the constant replenishment of the individual water atoms within it).
I agree - we certainly act this way, but we culturally value reductionistic thinking; system-2-thinking is typically not oriented in this same way, and is more culturally valued. It's not necessarily how we act that I think is bad - it's how we think.
> I'd agree that we do not consistently apply bottom-up organization across the board, but that also necessarily means that we apply no consistent philosophy across the board. That leads to the question of how you're defining "Western modernist canon" given such an absence of a unified system.
It's our cultural institutions of thinking and understanding that are flawed, IMO. We generally act relatively well when we act on instinct, refusing to draw rigid boundaries and treating our environments teleologically. But in terms of the "right way" to solve problems, we go away from this and towards reductionism and mechanistic thinking (essentially ignoring the small or inconvenient relationships in the systems we examine, in classic "spherical chicken in a vacuum" style). We try to fix malignant systems by looking for the bad people who made it that way (the simplest, and usually most incorrect, approach possible), or by fixing proximal symptoms rather than following longer causality chains for root causes (think medicine - problems are addressed locally rather than systemically).
Also I say that it's a Western thing, not because it's exclusive to the West, but because reductionism is part of our philosophical foundations since the Enlightenment. Compare to, say, SE Asian philosophical foundations - SEA religions are typically non-dual and metaphysically idealist.
What do you mean by, “bottom-up metaphysical approach.”
The problem is saying "everything is X" makes X useless as an adjective.
Usually, when you talk about this stuff, you look just a couple layers of reality. For example, if your lower level is water molecules and the upper level is observation, then "waves" "whirlpool" and so-forth are emergent objects/characteristics and water is a primitive object/characteristics - never mind that water molecules emerge from still lower level processes.
"...a thing is defined by... systematizations of coincidental aggregates of the properties of lower things [and] the emergence of the systematic from the non-systematic"
There's nothing beyond fundamental physics that's required, in principle, to explain these emergent properties, so in this sense I'm a philosophical reductionist. Emergence is just an illusion created by our brain's inability to deal with the true nature of fundamental reality.
The sum is more capable than each of it’s constituents. You could argue that a hyper-intelligent entity can explain everything due to temperature by the simple movements of atoms but that is not true, since with temperature, we can reason about a system we know only one property about, while the said entity would have to know every detail about every atom. In other words, we created a new thing that could not have existed alone. (Perhaps it is not the best example, but there are countless others :) )
Our mind was designed to work this way. The most advantageous way to perceive a rock is as a single object with properties pertaining to utility (hardness, potential weapon, etc). This takes the least cognitive load and is the most beneficial way to perceive the world from a fitness perspective.
There's nothing epiphenomenal above and beyond the individual components (and the laws governing their interactions) except in our minds. In that specific sense, emergent properties are an invention.
Nevertheless yes, this is the basic idea. Systems theory speaks about how you have substances flowing between different buffers or containers, as well as feedback loops that look at the buffers and adjust new flows based on those buffers. Or at least that is one of the most universal models. A nice general set of theorems about this are the fixed point theorems, which say that in a very large set of circumstances such systems find themselves in a “fixed point,” a set of buffer quantities and flows that is self-sustaining and usually healing from small perturbation. This is why when you stop dieting you gain back the weight; the same causes lead to the same effects.
The complexity of systems theory in particular comes from a few different properties worth thinking about:
(a) not being able to predict the whole from the parts and thus not knowing how to change the system to facilitate the overall behavior change [in other words “if dieting doesn't work, what does?]
(b) metastability transitions where there is enough random variation to allow for spontaneous reorganization between multiple fixed points [in other words if I get skinny in the Netherlands and fat in the US, then maybe American pandemic-me is skinny but Dutch pandemic-me is fat—as a corollary there is no such thing as “best practices” really, the same “causes” do not produce the same effects: what is the difference with the above?]
(c) when you do manage to create change, it is typically by thinking wishfully about what the system should do and then driving it to produce that “at whatever cost” and initially some “bottlenecks” emerge which appear to be resistant to the desired change, which you want to think is bad, but what actually starts to happen is that everything else about the system re-architects to reinforce that “bad” thing and that makes it okay. [In other words the journey from fat to skinny may seem to be limited at first by my love of food and joyous hedonistic eating... if that's the main bottleneck then unlike a diet’s plan to make me deny myself, my healthy relationship with food will actually feature more of that, indeed the reason that I was fat was that I did not love food enough and with delectatio morosa consumed whole boxes of cookies not for my truest enjoyment of them but because the pleasure of even a few cookies was always denied to me. If you read Marie Kondo's book you may be struck that her diagnosis of mess is that you have too much stuff and her prescription for having too much stuff is perversely not to love your stuff less and be more stoic but to actually love your stuff more. Ecclesiastes seems to come to a similar conclusion.]
Yeah, I think those are the most outrageous parts of dealing with systems which makes me astonished by their “complexity.” I often find that if I ask “why can't we do that,” I get some response “because of such-and-so” and then I surprise my interlocutor by saying “but what if I accept the such-and-so?” and, we eventually arrive at a whole different self-consistent system.
One example of this in a tech context since I feel I have overmilked the health context: “What if we don't have merge conflicts?” “psh, yeah right, you're never gonna get rid of merge conflicts.” “ok but pretend I am dumb, tell me why?” “because people modify the same code in different ways and you have a conflict!” “so if I could make them take turns then there would be no conflict?” “well you can't make us all take turns on the codebase! That would mean only one person is allowed to work at any given time!” “Ah I see your point, but what if it's more like a Google Doc where everyone sees other peoples' changes in realtime, that sequences the edits so that they never have merge conflicts.” “but then we couldn't do code reviews properly!” “why does that matter?” “because when I am setting out to rewrite the auth logic, I put the thing into a half-finished state! The code review protects those failing states from getting to prod.” “Ok, so is there a way to develop without failing states?” “Well, kind of. Like I can write `if (false)` and then write breaking code. But if our codebase were littered with those I would never be sure what I needed to re-enable.” “So there's no way to define your own version of true and false for this thing you're working on?” “I mean, I guess a boolean variable. But that won't work either.” “why not?” “if you have 10 of those then you have 1,024 different states that the system can be in, it becomes a nightmare.” “and you can't remove them when a developer is done?” “not without proper code review! That's what I am saying!!” “okay but what if you then have both mini review and proper review, mini reviews just check to make sure that everything is behind a feature toggle, very quick approval-at-a-glance of work in progress: then bigger reviews happen when you instate the new code path and delete the old one. We could detect those mass deletions, yeah?” “I mean, yeah, but, I mean, this is just not how it's done. Nobody develops code like this.” “Well, can we try it as an experiment for a month and see if we like never having merge failures more than we hate doing things a new way?”