The double look on complex dimension
Abstract: Artificial neural networks construct a hierarchy of information. That digital circuits can experience their own complexity seems beyond the reach of our current paradigms. However, I show that above all they are programmed to avoid such autonomy and that the depth of information reached is minuscule compared to the brain. The example of the … Read more
Abstract: The complex dimension has two axes: horizontal complexion —our classic systems of interacting elements and their models— and vertical complexion —overlapping systems, an elementary constituting a superior. A ‘platist’ trend sees this vertical axis as an illusion. I show that it is in fact a dualistic dead end excluding our mind. The metaphor of … Read more
Abstract: What assumptions should be kept to solve the mind-body problem? We need a reality unified by its relationships —a term to be preferred to ‘monistic’— but which leaves its relational levels owners of their frameworks. Indeed their characteristics differ: definition of ‘elements’, elementary time, energy, causal and temporal arrows. Connecting the levels implies the … Read more
Abstract: The difficulty of the mind-body problem does not come from the brain itself, which is conscious before our eyes, but from the apparent incompatibility between the two ways of looking at it, the physicalist/ontological and the spiritualist/phenomenological. After clarifying the notion of level of explanation, a level that varies according to the authors, I … Read more
Abstract: Nicholas Humphrey’s solution to the brain-mind problem, discussed in the previous article, is to see sensations as directly experienced activities and not objects of experience. He vigorously separates sensation and perception, the former as a sensible experience and seat of the phenomenon of consciousness, the latter as an interpretation of the external world. What … Read more
Abstract: By supporting the idea of a sharp separation between sensation and perception to solve the mind-body problem, Nicholas Humphrey solves some difficult questions but creates others that are insoluble. It thus opens the door to a more complete solution, which retains the need for a dual view of the problem, without making a summary … Read more
How would resilience be possible without forgetting? Without forgetting how something presents itself, how could it be overcome? It would present itself to me continuously, daily, the way it has always presented. I would be mired in this eternal present, which has become a past. I would be the ancestor of myself, not my perpetual … Read more
Vlatko Vedral, a physicist at Oxford, argues that reality is made only of waves and that the obsolete wave-particle dualism must be completely abandoned. This position is eliminatory reductionism. It denigrates the existence of the complex dimension of reality. I will show how it reintroduces a dualism, that of reality and spirit. The reductionist discourse … Read more
In the face of the unacceptable, the mind flees into a better world through a series of “if…”. The longer the sequence, the more unreal the new universe. Some people take refuge there and are completely absent from the collective reality. Unsurpassable mourning, mythomania. Why do some find comfort in the imagination, which facilitates reintegration … Read more
What is real? What are our representations about it worth? Philosophy carefully scrutinizes these representations by its various metaphysical branches, but it knows nothing about their overall authenticity. These models could be congratulating each other and seriously mistaken on the reality itself. Is the powerlessness to explain a riddle such as consciousness an indication of … Read more