The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as (...) a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories. (shrink)

Riassunto: Il presente contributo esamina il concetto di esperienza cosciente da una prospettiva epistemologica evoluzionista, ispirata ad un approccio naturalistico non riduzionista. Il lavoro si inserisce nel quadro concettuale delle ricerche nel campo della filosofia della mente, avanzando delle ipotesi circa i possibili processi che hanno determinato la comparsa e lo sviluppo nella nostra biosfera di una mente specificatamente umana sia dal punto di vista filogenetico che da quello ontogenetico. In quest’ottica, vengono rivisitati in chiave epigenetica alcuni tratti salienti della (...) teoria della coscienza di Edelman alla luce delle più recenti ricerche sulla misurazione dell’esperienza cosciente, condotte da Tononi e da altri studiosi nell’ambito della Integrated Information Theory. In un quadro siffatto, l’articolo analizza alcune criticità dell’approccio algoritmico della IIT, evidenziando la necessità di individuare nuove misure della complessità per quanto riguarda lo studio dei processi semantici di trasmissione dell’informazione biologica. Parole chiave: Coscienza; Evoluzione naturale; Neuroplasticità; Informazione intenzionale; Seconda natura Reflections on conscious experience. The perspectives of the integrated information theory: This paper examines the concept of conscious experience from an evolutionary epistemological perspective, inspired by a non-reductionist naturalistic approach. Situated in the conceptual framework of philosophy of mind, it considers what processes could have led to the appearance and development of a specifically human mind in our biosphere, both from a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic point of view. Salient features of Edelman’s theory of consciousness are revisited from an epigenetic perspective, in light of some of the most recent measurements of conscious experience proposed by Tononi and other scholars in the field of Integrated Information Theory. The paper analyzes some criticalities in the algorithmic approach of the IIT, highlighting the need to identify new measures of complexity for the study of semantic processes of transmission of biological information. Keywords: Consciousness; Natural Evolution; Neuroplasticity; Intentional Information; Second Nature. (shrink)

Defending Robert Rosen’s claim that in every confrontation between physics and biology it is physics that has always had to give ground, it is shown that many of the most important advances in mathematics and physics over the last two centuries have followed from Schelling’s demand for a new physics that could make the emergence of life intelligible. Consequently, while reductionism prevails in biology, many biophysicists are resolutely anti-reductionist. This history is used to identify and defend a fragmented but progressive (...) tradition of anti-reductionist biomathematics. It is shown that the mathematicoephysico echemical morphology research program, the biosemiotics movement, and the relational biology of Rosen, although they have developed independently of each other, are built on and advance this antireductionist tradition of thought. It is suggested that understanding this history and its relationship to the broader history of post-Newtonian science could provide guidance for and justify both the integration of these strands and radically new work in post-reductionist biomathematics. (shrink)

To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex communities of knowers as its subject matter, then its third party character is essentially stigmergic. In its most generic formulation, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Extending this notion one might (...) conceive of social stigmergy as the extra-cranial analog of an artifcial neural network providing epistemic structure. This paper recommends a stigmergic framework for social epistemology to account for the supposed tension between individual action, wants and beliefs and the social corpora. We also propose that the so-called "extended mind" thesis offers the requisite stigmergic cognitive analog to stigmergic knowledge. Stigmergy as a theory of interaction within complex systems theory is illustrated through an example that runs on a particle swarm optimization algorithm. (shrink)

The evolutionary emergence of biological processes in organisms with inner, qualitative aspects has not been explained in any sufficient way by neurobiology, nor by the traditional neo-Darwinian paradigm — natural selection would appear to work just as well on insentient zombies (with the right behavioral input-output relations) as on real sentient animals. In consciousness studies one talks about the ‘hard problem’ of qualia. In this paper I sketch a set of principles about sign action, causality and emergent evolution. On the (...) basis of these principles, I characterize a concept of cause that would allow for a naturalistic explanation of the origin of consciousness. The suggested account of causation also turns the ‘hard problem’ of qualia into the easier problem of relating experimental biology to experiential biology. (shrink)

The problem of emergence in physical theories makes necessary to build a general theory of the relationships between the observed system and the observing system. It can be shown that there exists a correspondence between classical systems and computational dynamics according to the Shannon-Turing model. A classical system is an informational closed system with respect to the observer; this characterizes the emergent processes in classical physics as phenomenological emergence. In quantum systems, the analysis based on the computation theory fails. It (...) is here shown that a quantum system is an informational open system with respect to the observer and able to exhibit processes of observational, radical emergence. Finally, we take into consideration the role of computation in describing the physical world. (shrink)

It is here proposed an analysis of symbolic and sub-symbolic models for studying cognitive processes, centered on emergence and logical openness notions. The Theory of logical openness connects the Physics of system/environment relationships to the system informational structure. In this theory, cognitive models can be ordered according to a hierarchy of complexity depending on their logical openness degree, and their descriptive limits are correlated to Gödel-Turing Theorems on formal systems. The symbolic models with low logical openness describe cognition by means (...) of semantics which fix the system/environment relationship, while the sub-symbolic ones with high logical openness tends to seize its evolutive dynamics. An observer is defined as a system with high logical openness. In conclusion, the characteristic processes of intrinsic emergence typical of “bio-logic” - emerging of new codes-require an alternative model to Turing- computation, the natural or bio-morphic computation, whose essential features we are going here to outline. (shrink)