
Mind as an emergent self-organizing process - Osiris30
http://qz.com/866352/scientists-say-your-mind-isnt-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body/
======
cocktailpeanuts
It's kind of weird how this comes from a "scientist" instead of a philosopher.
I read the article and it's basically saying this scientist guy came up with
the definitive "definition" of the mind so other scientists can have a common
ground to build upon.

While I understand where this is coming from, I still don't understand why a
"scientist" is advertising this concept as something novel. Also I can't
believe a scientist--who should know better--is trying to define this.

This debate has existed throughout human history and you could even arguably
say the entire history of philosophy is to figure out the answer to this
problem.

I also visited the author's book page on Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Mind-
Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039...](https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-
Heart-Being-Human/dp/039371053X?tag=quartz07-20) (of which this article is an
advertorial), and just look at that cover art. This is not a "scientist"
material. Really reminds me of some Eckhart Tolle stuff.

~~~
infpetal
Hi cocktailpeanuts,

Can I share with you some of the things I learned through reading his books?

You say he did this for scientists to share a common ground, but there is a
more practical reason too. He's a practicing psychiatrist who has written
books to help the general population with their mental health and
relationships.

That is how I found him - through exploring attachment theory, of which he
discusses a great deal.

What does this have to do with the idea of the mind as a self-emerging
process, or a healthy mind as integrated?

It's this idea that is leveraged in his books to help teach people how to
develop their mental health. It gives them a clear and concrete path to
follow. The idea of integration is not just for intellectual beauty - it is a
teaching tool.

He used an analogy of a choir to teach attachment theory. Anxious attachment:
multiple people singing the same, prolonged, single note - connected, not
differentiated. Avoidant attachment: everyone singing a different song -
differentiated, not connected. A choir of people singing the same song,
connected, and in harmony with a variety of pitches, differentiated,
represents secure attachment and integration.

There is a visceral experience of something wonderful emerging when you hear
the secure choir vs insecure, and likewise the well-being and health that
comes from a secure attachment relationship (or an integrated mind) is
viscerally wonderful too.

If you are happy to look at his ideas for their teaching applications, I
encourage further investigation of his books and talks. They have been an
anchor for my healing from trauma and I am deeply thankful.

~~~
mcguire
If you have read his books, is this a suitable description of his definition
of mind:

" _After much discussion, they decided that a key component of the mind is:
“the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that
regulates energy and information flow within and among us.”_ "

Just between you and me, I don't think that is very spectacular. But it's been
years since I kept up with readings in the theory of mind.

~~~
inpetal
Yes, in a similar way to saying 'I am a human being' is a description of me.
:)

What I mean is that a brief, minimal description can be accurate but missing
the joy, wonder and nuanced intimacy that comes from a deeper relationship.

For example, there is a wheel of awareness practice where you develop your
ability to 'regulate energy and information flow'. You practice directing your
consciousness to different points of awareness, one by one, and linking them
together. Awareness of awareness itself is part of this practice too.

An exercise like this is when the definition above can come to life in your
personal, subjective experience, and you get to observe how it looks and feels
to you. You feel whether these ideas resonate with you, not just from
assessing its logic, but from your felt experience. This is the spectacular
part for me, the movement from abstract ideas to taking actions in the world
that help improve my ability to thrive.

The emergent self-organizing part... think of a flock of birds in the sky and
the shape it creates. No-one told the birds to make that specific shape.
Likewise, no-one is telling me to speak these exact words to you. They have
emerged from a combination of many processes coming together, culminating in
an orchestra that somehow is coordinated well enough to let these ideas flow
coherently from me to you. I can find this meaningful in many ways, some of
them are: a sense of wonder, gratitude, trust, understanding how rigidity and
chaos affects the shapes I make, looking at relationships and observing the
emerging flow we make together and how it changes over time and what
influences us.

This is my current understanding, but I am no expert. I can say that exploring
a personal relationship with these ideas, developing my own hypotheses and
observations and comparing them, and looking to observe these concepts in the
world around me, has been deeply fulfilling.

------
johndoe4589
No need to throw the baby with the bathwater...

I thought the point to take away, is that mind is not separate from
environment. And futher questioning the inner / outer distinction which causes
a sense of separation and disconnectedness.

edit: for me it echoes a recent post from Riccardo Manzotti's "spread mind"
theory:

 _" Are subjective qualities really more private than objective properties? Or
are they the conceptual byproduct of two different ways to address the same
stuff?"_

[http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-
subjec...](http://thespreadmind.tumblr.com/post/154801861307/are-subjective-
qualities-really-more-private-than)

As Alan Watts beautifully put it:

 _" Every way in which you define your self, can be described in terms of
other"_

ie. just find a single part of "personal" experience that can not be defined
as non-personal. arms, legs, face ? those are the body. memories / thoughts?
Are obviously made of some kind of echo of sense experience. Content of recent
thougghts? Obviously in response to recent experiences or concerns, which
themselves again are not self, and never originated as "self".

------
wyager
"the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that
regulates energy and information flow within and among us"

This definition is worthless. It has an incredibly high false-positive rate.
For example, according to this, any animal would qualify as "a mind", any
self-sustaining chemical reaction would qualify as "a mind", and in fact
anything that sort of looks like life (key concept is "self-organizing") would
qualify as "a mind".

Breaking it down:

> emergent self-organizing process

Any life, and a lot of things that probably wouldn't be counted as life. For
example, gravitationally bound spherical bodies in space.

> both embodied and relational

Mumbo-jumbo, presumably meaning "both physical and abstract".

> that regulates energy and information flow

Vague bordering on meaningless. This sounds more like it's describing a
transistor than a mind.

> within and among us

Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where
"us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless.

It's cool if people want to spin yarn about how to define various difficult-
to-quantify abstract concepts, but it's frustrating when they act as if
they're talking about some sort of factual discovery they've made.

~~~
visarga
> Completely ill-defined. Who is "us"? Is this definition impredicative, where
> "us" is defined over the set of minds? If so, it's useless.

If you think in terms of behavior, there is the agent, the environment and
some kind of reward signal to be optimized. The article "is saying" (liberally
adapted by me) that behavior depends on both the agent and dynamics of the
environment. Of course it does, the mind learns its values from interaction
and rewards.

Why are people still trying to solve the mind-body problem when we have
Reinforcement Learning? It's a much better conceptualization - without
definitional problems, concrete, implementable in both biology and AI, and
most of all, it's simple. It does away with most words used in psychology and
philosophy, which is a good thing, because they have really imprecise
meanings. Just try to define "consciousness" or "mind" \- it's a 2000 year old
mess.

------
kryptokommunist
I think there is a much cleaner, more logical approach to the topic without
any magical voodoo. I always find that this topic somehow lures people into
esoteric explanations that wouldn't be acceptable in other areas, but when
dealing with the mind it somehow is okay. In my opinion there is an example
for a more productive paradigm when we want to discuss what the mind is. Just
take a look: [http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-
MicroP...](http://www.cognitive-ai.com/publications/assets/Draft-MicroPsi-
JBach-07-03-30.pdf)

~~~
jhedwards
This article looks interesting. I was going to make a similar comment with a
much more dated source so I'll piggyback off of yours. Piaget, in his book
"Biology and Knowledge", applies biological concepts to the study of mind and
comes to the conclusion that consciousness is similar to embryogenesis: both
are processes that actively construct a set of interwoven systems that effect
biological homeostasis. Many of the basic principles in embryogenesis and
learning are the same. For example, isolated subsystems are developed in
parallel, with input both from the genetic system and from the environment,
and are later integrated to form higher-order functional systems. This idea is
more interesting when you consider that the development of mind could be just
the final stages of embryogenesis insofar as it is an aspect of the physical
development of a child and their integration into society.

Piaget's ideas were a little sketchy because of the paucity of information
about the brain at the time so I'm excited to look more at the article in the
parent comment which appears to be an attempt at a more detailed analysis.

~~~
kryptokommunist
Well in a way the articles approach is similar to Piaget's in the sense that
the approach is also functional. The hypothesis here is that the mind is just
a information processing system and the research approach therefore is
developing functional models. It will either work or not, you can actually
test your models. This approach doesn't just model biological structures but
independently tries to find functional explanations/mechanisms that could
result in a mind like system. I think the articles model is one of the most
sophisticated of the highly integrated ones out there. It really is worth
reading, especially the explanation for emotion and motivation i found to be
quite interesting.

If you need a teaser to get you going, there is also a talk by the author
which is a good summary of the article:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok)

------
lngnmn
What the f __* am I reading?

The notion of mind is a delusion, caused by confused verbalized introspection
in the first place. An observer (the awareness) misapprehends working of a set
of semi-independent parts as a whole, like an observer of a large city from
the top of a skyscraper could readily mistake it for a living organism.

Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called
[my] self is just an illusion of the same kind. (The Robert Wright's course on
Coursera is a good starting point).

Consciousness (but not necessarily self-consciousness, which is the notion
available only to an abstract-thinking capable entity) or awareness is the
property of all animals with a complex-enough brain. It definitely exist as
one of many processes in a brain.

The notion of an individual mind being a part of the universal mind (in which
each individual mind is a drop in a waterfall on the river of Brahman) goes
back a few millennia and nowadays is considered to be nothing but a beautiful
abstraction.

As a person who got The Society Of Mind and The Emotion Machine (among other
titles) on my bookshelf I am very concerned about such lousy "science" being
promoted on HN.

~~~
red75prime
> Some rather theoretical scientists are arguing that the notion of so-called
> [my] self is just an illusion of the same kind.

Illusion of mind, which is represented as activity of neural patterns in a
brain, and therefore causes observable effects, stretches definition of
illusion to the point of losing any sense.

~~~
pessimizer
> [mind...] is represented as activity of neural patterns in a brain

This is the stretch; accepting electrical activity (EEGs in particular) as a
proof of mind. If electrical activity is a proof of mind, my radio has a mind.

~~~
red75prime
When radio mediates sounds of "I think, therefore I am", there's nothing more
than sound and electrical currents correlated with waveform of that sound in
it. Source: I can build simple radio.

Why brain is probably not like that? Because there's no single experimental
result pointing in this direction, while there's nothing contradicting the
idea of brain producing mind.

I know, philosophers are arguing both pro and contra, but they unlikely to
come to agreement in nearest 100 years. Thus I need experimental results that
brain is somehow communicates to something, to take this seriously.

------
SubiculumCode
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition)

The article's ideas are related to the extended mind, situated cognition,and
embodied cognition hypotheses. They are interesting, and really challenge us
to let go of our scientific tendency to separate the world into discrete
objects.

------
zdean
Defining "mind" or "consciousness" seems like a backwards effort. I would
think that the natural progression would be that there is an observed concept
which then needs a label (ie, I observe a bunch of tallish greenish things
that share a large number of similarities and I label them "tree"). In this
case, I would think that there was some observed phenomenon with
observable/definable traits that we would then label as "mind" or
"consciousness". However, in these cases, it feels as though we came up with
the label and are now in search of a concept to fit them.

~~~
pessimizer
You're missing the point. We know that angels are real because we observe
their effects on the world around us. The important thing for us to do as
scientists is to figure out how angels operate on everything, simultaneously,
without leaving any evidence. A thought experiment that will give us
unprecedented insight into their function would be to imagine how small an
angel could physically get while maintaining all of the properties they are
known to have. It would be very, very small, so the best unit to calculate it
with might be the maximum density of angels of theorized types, qualities, and
distributions within some arbitrarily small area. It'll be the greatest
discovery since aether, and has the potential to yield methods for us to wield
the power of angels, which would completely disrupt health care, immersive
gaming, social multimedia and national defense.

Just kidding. Theory-theory is all about discovering the definition of words.
It rests entirely on the axiom that when people talk about their motivations
and the motivations of other people, they're talking about real objects and
real processes. After we assume we're already right and have always been
right, all that's left is to locate and quantify "jealousy," and invent ways
to create, destroy, and control it. "Jealousy," whatever we may determine that
is, is axiomatic before being defined.

I ambiguously like the article, just in that it reminds the reader that
there's no clear way to detach any physical mind from anything else in the
world without making it into a soul. The important thing about you is not that
there's introspective rationalizations running on a verbalized loop in your
head (and in any reaction requiring speed, slightly later than the action they
pretend to explain), but why you can hear the ones running in your head so
much louder than you can hear the ones running in someone else's head. It's a
proximity problem, not a problem of "consciousness" or "mind." Why am I so
much closer to me than I am to you? I have to rely on sounds and visual
indications to act upon, and to get feedback from, your nervous system. Why am
I in my head and not yours? If I am not this introspective loop; if I were in
your head, wouldn't I be in your introspection? If I have no agency, and my
behavior and the content of my introspection are an epiphenomenon of the
relationship of my nervous system and environment, rather then something that
I initiate from wherever I connect with the physical world - am I unitary?
Could there be countless me's in my own head observing (living without acting)
my life from my perspective?

It's far safer to define consciousness or mind as the thing that separates
humans from meat, then spend a lot of time studying humans and meat and
comparing the two. It's also useful in that you can declare any behavior that
you don't like in humans a problem with their meat, or declare some people
more meat than human. You'll never be wrong.

------
dominotw
I read the article twice, I still have no idea what he is talking about.

------
vinceguidry
I wonder if the mind can be distinguished philosophically from identity. It's
an important concept in many spiritual practices, to understand and realize
that the mind is not the self.

------
andraganescu
hey folks, if this is not ok i'll remove my reply. I just want to post this
article I wrote on the subject a few months ago:

[https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-
cause...](https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/life-causes-
uncertainty-and-other-problems-7e2e6ee721ef#.sdkrok1iv)

If anyone finds the time and mood to go over it I'd appreciate a discussion :)

~~~
lisper
You lost me at "Life causes the Heisenberg uncertainty". Actually, you lost me
at least a paragraph before that, but this statement is just so flat-out wrong
that I stopped reading at that point. Life has nothing to do with Heisenberg
uncertainty.

Your essay in general is poorly informed and borderline incoherent. But asking
for feedback on HN is perfectly OK and you should be downvoted for that. I
think it is reasonable to expect people to either give you constructive
feedback or STFU.

~~~
andraganescu
hey, thanks for replying. Yep, this is what I find hardest these days, asking
for feedback. If you happen to be in a life setting where you don't have
direct access to informed opinion you must risk the usual down vote of coming
out of the blue asking for opinion on internet forums.

regarding the article itself I think you should try to understand I did my
best stay away from the horror of the shitty "new age" quantum bullshit
interpretation of the measurement problem. it is NOT my intention or idea.

my central idea is that maybe life is a property of the universe not a
phenomenon, and try to construct something out of it.

I wish you'd give the perspective a chance :), beyond the annoying paragraphs,
and put up with my lack of coherence as a gentle gesture towards an amateur
wrestling with an extremely complicated subject.

Thanks again!

~~~
otalp
>life is a property of the universe not a phenomenon

That is a bizarre, quasi-religious assumption. What evidence do have in
support of it? I understand that you're making an assumption and proceeding
from there, but it seems to revolve around a misunderstanding of what
"property" means. If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else
also is, and the word ceases to have any meaning.

~~~
andraganescu
> If life is a 'property' of the universe, everything else also is, and the
> word ceases to have any meaning.

Why would life be all encompassing? It is just a thing on its own, and quite
small in its manifestation. The way I framed the assumption is that life (I
know it's hard to dismantle the meaning inside the word and see it separate
from us) is just as time woven in, working in the opposite direction of time.

I have developed this here:

[https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-
meanin...](https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meaning-of-
life-afeac3662bae#.2q1fcdt4g)

As for the idea, it is exactly NOT religious I want it to be seen. A property
is a characteristic and I don't know if life would be an essential or
accidental property of our (this) universe.

Awareness, our subjective existence, subjects of religion and philosophy are
completely separate subjects from life and the phenomenon of evolution it
produces.

As for evidence, I would dare quote evolution and the spawning of it. But I
can solely produce thought experiment type of evidence :) from my current
settings.

~~~
jhanschoo
For one, you need to better define life. Are you referring to life in the
biological sense? You say that it is distinct from consciousness. Will
bacteria qualify? What about viruses?

~~~
andraganescu
yes bacteria and viruses qualify. I propose biology is a process made possible
by life and evolution a phenomenon inside this process.

for entertainment purposes i have an attempt to define life here:

[https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-
meanin...](https://medium.com/for-for-thought-for-rainy-days/the-meaning-of-
life-afeac3662bae?source=linkShare-8e7d1e45df9-1482844617)

~~~
jhanschoo
Back to your original article, I think several scientific notions of yours are
misguided. I presume that by entropy you refer to information entropy, not
thermodynamic entropy, and I think you have conflated these two different
notions that are called entropy. Thermodynamic entropy is concerned with how
easily energy can be transferred from one thermodynamic system to another,
while information entropy is concerned with how many bits we require to select
a string from a group of possible strings.

> The void has in theory the highest level of entropy. Matter randomly spawns
> into existence, then back into non existence. Can’t get any more chaotic
> than that.

On the contrary, a vacuum has very little information density; to describe a
region of space to that is a vacuum to any degree of precision requires fewer
words than to describe any space on earth to the same degree of precision,
since the vacuum is very uniform. Your impression that the void is more
chaotic than our everyday environments is a misreading of pop-sci physics
books; the same chaos happens throughout, even in matter-dense regions of
space.

I think that your article illustrates why many critical thinkers refrain from
creating cosmologies; our present scientific understanding and tools are still
so immature that we cannot accurately describe our own minds and bodies, let
alone with any certainty the human societies; and that let alone the cosmos,
let alone one person's attempt.

Though it seems to me that physics has a tradition of producing outspoken
physicists with enough hubris to think otherwise.

------
Cybiote
I see that there is much disagreement with this article but I could not find
anything with which I seriously disagreed. I suspect most readers are pattern
matching in that the arguments sound very dualist but they need not be; most
of the piece's problems are more in phrasing and emphasis. While the core
ideas offered within might not be known to the broader population, they are in
line with current research. There are two aspects to the piece. One that
appeals to math and another that is really arguing for a notion of distributed
cognition.

The math portion is not well written but I don't know whether the fault lies
in the article or the original book. Whatever the case, I can summarize more
concretely: the idea is that life (and minds) are organizations of matter that
more effectively leverage free energy in open systems out of equilibrium. This
4 min video narrated by Sean Carroll gives an accessible description.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxTnqKuNygE).

Much of the work in this area was jump started by Jarzynski, who notes _non-
equilibrium free energy plays a central role in the thermodynamics of
processes involving the manipulation of information_.

In
[http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047...](http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475)
Friston argues that life " _—is an inevitable and emergent property of any
(ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket_ ". And in
the work of Susanne Still, we see that all manner of systems, not just brains,
are capable of some kind of predictive inference in order to operate at high
energy efficiency.

 _the stall torque for the F1-ATPase [26] and the stall force for Myosin V
[27] are near the maximal values possible given the free energy liberated by
ATP hydrolysis and the sizes of their respective rotations and steps. These
and many other biological functions require some correspondence between the
environment and the systems that implement them. Therefore the memory of their
instantiating systems must be nonzero

We have shown that any such system with nonzero memory must conduct predictive
inference, at least implicitly, to approach maximal energetic efficiency_

* * *

The other aspect to the essay essentially was an argument for the Distributed
Mind Hypothesis, which is certainly more philosophy than it is science. I
nonetheless find the viewpoint most compelling.

 _Examples of Distributed and or Extended Minds_

\- Mutually Auto-completing Old married couples where recall of events is most
accurate together.

\- Experts at some task where the knowledge is distributed amongst workers
because it is too subconscious to be reliably recorded as text.

\- Proto cyborgs via mobile phones and laptops. As computers get more
personal, the notion of the mind extending outside the brain will get less and
less outlandish sounding.

\- What makes up a person? After you remove the influence of genetics and
interactions with books written by others and people met, what is left? Now
this part is controversial but someday, we might find that the mind as a
single self is a useful illusion but actually a highly correlated subcomponent
of a more distributed concept _in both space and time_.

What to look for: Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind, Intelligence
Augmentation

------
flybass
Possibly the worst article I've read about mind-body dilemma.

------
openfuture
This definition is basically a translation of anaxogoras's original
definition.

It's good to have a more modern way of phrasing it but the idea is older than
Christianity.

------
edblarney
This is really a little misleading.

The 'mind' is an abstraction, it does not exist in physical space, ergo, it
never did exist in your 'brain' or 'anywhere else'. It does not have a
'location'. And this is without getting into tangential metaphysical issues
...

~~~
woodruffw
I'm not sure why you were downvoted here -- the mind-body problem isn't nearly
as trivial as this article makes it sound.

~~~
dang
I don't think the article makes the problem sound trivial. The title does,
because it's the usual baitiness. We replaced it with a primary phrase from
the text itself.

~~~
inlikelitude
You lost the essence of the article by changing the title to a trite
observation. The point the author is (presumably) making _is_ a bit
outrageous: that you not live just in your own brain but in the brain of the
others you're related to.

I say _presumably_ because I haven't read Siegel's book, but am extrapolating
from the same thread which was woven by Hofstadter in "I am a Strange Loop". A
more popular yet similar exposition of this idea is the word _Ubuntu_ , which
you can roughly grasp using the aphorism "A person is a person through other
people".

