proceedings fom 2/ First cfp fom 3

http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/current

Yes, new age as well as hard science.......

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(c) 2015 Seán ó Nualláin
The Foundations of Mind III Conference:
Science as if Being Mattered
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FOM 3
Sproul Room, International House at UC Berkeley
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This conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!”

approach will not yield a better, more veridical science with the 

possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature.

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Deadlines:

Feb 14, 2016      3,000 word summary of papers

Feb 29, 2016        500 word abstract for posters

Mar 1                  notification of acceptance

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FOUNDATIONS OF MIND III 

Reparsing Nature:  Science as if Being Mattered

This conference explores the issue of whether a “Being first!” approach will not yield a better, more veridical science. It asks the attendees to consider whether there are not different types of causal explanation at each level of nature including occasionally none at the quantum level, teleology in biology, and that nexus we invoke to explain each other termed “folk psychology” at the intentional/intersubjective level. While we began our project with the insight that reduction of mind to current theories of psychology has always been what Frege dubbed “psychologism,” we now extend the argument.

 In particular, we argue that $ billions are being lost in inefficient, often unethical “science” research whose lack of attention to ontology makes it doomed to failure. The premature  application of this to human affairs, be it drugs that do not take account of the intricate interplay of genes and metabolism, meditation “techniques” that do not take account of 21^st century Being-in-the-word, or simplistic accounts of how politics are processed in the brain, are engineered for failure. Conversely, appropriate use of robust dynamical systems techniques have already proven insightful and low-cost in neuroscience and elsewhere; constraining the search space by using syntax is already being used in genomics; homoiconic programming languages model DNA well; and so on

While its mythic poverty IS necessarily an ultimate constraint on science,as distinct from the equally valid exploration of reality in the arts,  much can be done to improve science education and research. As things stand, physicists search for a theory of everything that

makes other sciences redundant, Cognitivists implore us to couch our theories in the cognitive schemata they see as fundamental; neuroscientists up the ante on greedy reductionism by asserting the primacy of their findings - be they genetic, algorithmic or chaotic - over all other Sciences.

Several alternatives are also gaining traction. One, that of non-dualism, refuses to budge from the Inalienable fact of the primacy of conscious experience. Another, that of class warfare, surely due a comeback as the 2016 Democratic race shows, argues for the bourgeois nature of such speculation. Finally, an eschatological attempt to roll science, society, and culture into One Magisterium/Caliphate  now brutally occupies vast swathes of the Middle East.

This Conference is a search for alternatives. The premise underpinning this conference, a premise with which participants should feel free to disagree, is that once one has moved beyond solipsism/non-dualism,there now exists the possibility of a dramatic reparse of nature. Papers are invited which address these and other themes;

1.         Theories of everything (TOEs); in what sense would a set of equations comprehensible only to an extreme minority comprise a TOE to be taught as Hawking recommends to schoolchildren?

2.         Information; is the quantum information described by Bousso the same thing/process as Susskind’s “entropy”, information in Shannon, the deus ex machina that generates the universe of Seth Lloyd and the correlates in the biological work of Deacon and Tononi?

3.         Computation; in the 1990’s, Brian Smith argued that it was impossible to isolate a computational system to allow it perform algorithms and simultaneously to align it with the real world on which it was operating. In order to achieve “Computation in the wild”, he argued, it was necessary to identify computational systems as pure intentionality in the Brentano sense, precisely the position that the Chinese room thought-experiment rejects.  Can we rescue the concept in a way that does justice to all its manifestations from the quantum and classical Fourier transforms to using a spreadsheet?

4.         The psychological/intentional realm; Advaita Vedanta was brought into the West partly, if not largely, by George Harrison’s invocation of a transcendent reality “within you, without you.” Contrariwise, Gurdjieff’s fragment of a system, as expounded by Ouspensky, is full of clunky mechanical metaphors for the human psyche, the amoeba and indeed the Absolute. Can we do better than this in the face of the spectacular and burgeoning success of 21st century AI and robotics, and the dismal failure of psychology?

5          Science’s dark period: ”Dark energy” and “dark matter” are too well-known to be rehearsed here, and  are suggestive of a stage of crisis in science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the fact that the “dark energy”/default network of the brain is currently suggested as absorbing metabolic process even when no cognition is taking place; linear models of the neuron are clearly too simple; the “dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas that actually code by any computing definition; and so on.

6.      Quantum mind;  Internal FOM private discussion has benefitted from the input of the great Henry Stapp. Publicly, Henry has recently stated that the Orch OR model would generate creatures that would become conscious with no memory and thus no cognition. Yet he considers the Gödel incompleteness argument sound, with the proviso that its is the unfolding of the cosmos that is implicated in humans’ ability to “see” the truth of the Gödel sentence. This is of course compatible with the pre-Hameroff Penrose, and may be the start of a fusion of computationalist cognitive science and physics in a suitably extended notion of observer status. That in turn through the frames of reference argument in SR would give us a route into a treatment of selfhood compatible with science. Can we follow the path blazed by this physicist and mathematician to a formal theory?

7.      Consciousness; there is a remarkable consensus that this has not yet been solved. Yet, in the rush to “solve’ the “hard problem’ with gazebos like Terahertx oscillations and a word salad of half-understood biology, many useful concepts have been lost and we welcome papers on them.  Examples are; the Locke/Leibniz debate on the relation between subjective state and neural event; Levine’s explanatory gap; Block’s a- and  p -;  Marxist class consciousness and its relation to emanationist systems; neural synchrony; Pribram’s Gabor transform; Global workspace theories; Crick’s comment that he came into the area 20 years too early for the neuroscience and his resulting idée fixee about a neural correlate in a specific location.

8.      Neuroscience; as predicted in FOM, the Markram/EC project has become a debacle. What are the technical and organizational desiderata to prevent a recurrence in the USA?

9.      Activism; In what increasingly looks like a fragile pause in hostilities, the neoconservative “shock doctrine” has given way to a neoliberalism that exploits distracters like gender or an African-American president. How long can this last in an era which has seen major terrorist attacks in the EU?

10.      The academy; we tend to forget that the academy is meant to produce truths to be acted on. Instead, just as the state rescued an extreme version of financialized capitalism post-2008, neglecting to pursue thousands of criminals, so the academy sees its role as providing drones for an ever more economized life. At the elite level, may post-docs find themselves 30, $100k + in debt, and with career prospects the same as if they had never gone to elementary school, let alone college. How long can this last in an are where all necessary research and educational resources are free on the web, and it is clear to the lab drones that most PI’s are hopelessly out of date?

11.       Science set free; famously, Rupert Sheldrake has invoked “morphic fields” to explain everything from crystallization to biological morphology. Can this be extended to  the human level to explain simultaneous discovery like non-Euclidean geometry in Lobachevski, Bolyai and  Gauss as well as the more famous Newton/Leibniz bother? What entities might carry these “Nuons” and what are the implications for ESP and indeed all conversation?

Poster presentation; 500 word abstract by Feb 29

Spoken presentation; 3,000 word summary by Feb 14. Notification of acceptance; Mar 1 2016

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ABOUT FOUNDATIONS OF MIND

We study Science as if Being mattered. Speakers at the “Mind” conferences in the past, initially run in Ireland and England  in the 1990’s,  have included two of America’s greatest neuroscientists, Walter Freeman and  the late Karl Pribram, who reject simplistic neural models for a dynamical systems approach to the brain. Incidentally, we produced the only software implementation of Pribram’s work. Quantum mechanics was graced by Henry Stapp, an ex-colleague both of Heisenberg and Pauli, who has proposed not only an intellectually defensible dualism, but a view in which individual mental acts can be viewed as instances of the self-expression of universal mind.

At this point, we have verged on the spiritual; and fortunately we have not only had the honor of hosting Fr. Robert Spitzer of EWTN, but the philosopher and author Jacob Needleman. Our scientific bar has been raised by the presence of several associates of the late, great Pat Suppes of Stanford. In 2014-15 we verged into biology, and were assisted by Terry Deacon, Fritjof Capra  and Stuart Kauffman in this endeavour. Our next conference will be our 7^th and we will continue our emphases on human freedom, the notion that mind must be viewed in the context of a transcendent reality, and the necessity of attending to ontological divisions in nature even to do computation. In short, we promote a salutary reparse of nature, one that does not make any assumptions outside best practice in science.

http://www.FoundationsOfMind.org

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The bionoetics manifesto

Aside from massive student debt and risible employment prospects for Ph D’s, the early 21^st Century University has other profound problems. The disciplinary structure is a mess of different geological strata, excluding the 21^st century and its urgent need for focused departments dealing with hitherto “interdisciplinary” subjects like Cognitive Science. 

In the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, students are asked to perform an acting job in pretending that their professors are more competent than those available through a single click on a browser. In the age of readily available neatly archived knowledge , a mafioso level scam is implemented with “anonymous” review , cartels of professors introducing their students to the fleshpots of the conference circuit , and interlocking boards of capi – sorry, journal editors. Of course, this feeds into the “tenure “ scam, where a historical deal between the state and scholar to secure academic freedom for the latter is now a dead letter.

The solutions are blindingly simple. All basic courses are now available for minimum charge of the web. Academic articles can transparently be posted for equally transparent peer review and appropriately edited by the original writer. , who might alternatively agree to disagree or ignore. Cui bono the present system? The corporation-dominated university and immensely profitable journals to start with. 

Yet there is a darker agenda at work. The demonic social forces unleashed by the attempted neoconservative coup of 2000-2008 have been transmuted into a paralysis of political will. It suits purveyors of neoliberalism that students of political science can be indoctrinated to look away from the Wiki leaks revelations of how diplomacy actually works. It suits them also that psychology students are not taught the elements of objective math models of reality and the real political order. 

All this can easily be changed, and this is but a short foray into the area .Apart from the crisis in replicability of results and consequent retraction of papers that characterizes 21^st century science, there are vast swathes of potential  knowledge  that remain unexplored as a result of the idiot savant microfocus of current science. “Dark energy” and “dark matter” are too well-known to be rehearsed here, are suggestive of a stage of crisis in science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the fact that the “dark energy”/default network of the brain is currently suggested as absorbing metabolic process even when no cognition is taking place; linear models of the neuron are clearly too simple; the “dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas that actually code by any computing definition; and so on.

 The recent accidental (sorry, “serendipitous”) discovery of CRISPR mechanisms now means that gene-editing is at the stage that Monsanto assured us a generation ago they had achieved. This opens a Pandora’s box of speculation about corporate influence on science, already accepted in medicine to the extreme that corporations have gotten so concerned about academics whoring themselves that they have started to do their own replication studies.

. Contemptible as such influence is, the problem is deeper still. It is clear, after the bail-outs post-2008, that the  number one value in our society is the right of quants to fiddle with numbers and, by financializing the economy, introduce what has become a neo-feudal system. The state pays for this economized status quo  - using taxpayers’ money against them – and then requires that the universities produce graduates to work in this Procrustean Uber/taskrabbit dystopia in the name of “competitiveness” in a market that has been carefully jury-rigged.

The result is that talented  artists are being removed from the gene line as it becomes too expensive for them  even to afford the white picket fence, let alone the house. It should be the duty of universities to ensure that humanities and arts graduates assert the transcendence of the realities to which great art points, be that transcendence achieved through language (like Mallarme) or conceived of as contact with an objective reality (like Beethoven). Nothing of the sort happens; indeed.  this writer has sat at seminars with classical music students forced to endure disquisitions about Beyonce videos. If it is all about feelings – as distinct, say, from exploring the stack depth in Beethoven’s recursive motif in the fifth -  why bother with reality and value judgement?

Similarly, the social sciences feature instruction in Atheism 101 (using the Dover trial as a straw man) and – more subtly – an injunction to the students to regard political facts only insofar as they are relative to psychology. Famously, the Kerry 2004 campaign was ill-advised along these lines. Of course, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, and such  weak epistemological fences  are easily breached later in life.

So what can be done? It is clear that we cannot proceed further without looking at the goals of the larger society, which should include human beings living healthily in safe communities and free to explore their relation with a reality conceived of as wonderful. Tertiary education is a critical part of this, and has become subverted. So we can insist on total transparency in all research and pedagogy as a first step. We do not have to resort to new age woo-woo whose only virtue is a radical assertion of the reality of subjectivity; the current structure of the academy leaves unexplored  many fertile areas of research on things meaningful to people. We can in fact build a structure of research and teaching built on a set of ineluctable  propositions about humanity’s relation to reality that cannot, even in principle, ever contradict best practice in science

One is to insist – the central Bionoetics propositions -  that we humans are a process in which the universe has come to know itself, and that math exemplifies this. Before the acceleration of mathematical knowledge in the renaissance, we built sophisticated societies based on co-operation through language; since then there has been a vast acceleration Mathematics is neither more nor less than the most elliptical and precise expression of the cosmos knowing itself through us. This is irrefutable (as distinct from true, a slippier concept); the index of access to an objective reality through all the travails of constructivism, psychologism etc is the litmus test of math models working in areas like QM.   Math  contains access to entities historically conceived of as Platonic (cosine, pi, e,….etc) as well as reflections of our cognitive  and social systems.  Indeed, math may be illogical as anyone who struggled with infinities knows; it may work in contexts it shouldn’t with “bad” methods like non-converging infinities and QFT; underlying its success is surely something deeper than “cognitive” operations. 

In the social sciences, students should indeed be taught the techniques of graph traversal that constitute modern literacy. Yet it should be done in a context in which it is made clear to them that in the political sphere they are objects more than subjects, not to believe everything they think as our century has witnessed development of expertise in implanting narratives. In the arts it should be insisted that artists are often consumed by a vision of a reality transcendent to them, and the formal techniques they use (like Beethoven’s stack, and his innovation  of the diminished chord)  should be explicated in properly respectful fashion.

Medicine should indeed focus on health rather than illness and preventive rather than cure or (the other extreme) “prospective medicine, with Prozac being introduced to countries newly told they’re depressed. Biology is in such crisis that it is the poster child for new explanatory schemas in science. Psychology does not yet exist, 150 + years after its initial replicabilty crisis. For the moment, we might  insist on “psychological’ concepts like simultaneity copying their correlates in physics…..

Now, of course, we have to make money. Or do we?  For it is clear that the current model involves burdening students with debt so they will later  be dutiful consumers. If there is a revenue stream, it will be in interdisciplinary degrees with max $1k a year fees and astutely chosen research topics like those mentioned above.  That may never make much money, but presenting it as an alternative is a radical and salutary acy.

However, there is another possibility; introducing the scheme to students of science and the arts  as an entrée into a vast, numinous, transcendent reality unavailable to them in the other colleges they are contemplating. For social scientist aspirants, we might point out that the activism that most of them are drawn to requires intimate knowledge of the forces in our complex society, and being told it is all relative to their minds is useless. For performing artists, we can stress that sophisticated performance is likewise a profoundly  revolutionary political  act and one for which they should demand respect