[Fis] Information, Natural Values & Subjectivity (Oh my!)

[Katherine Peil Kauffman]

Dear friends,

While my official session may be over, I offer follow-up comments given your many thoughtful responses:

Francesco: Thank you for sharing your hexagonal theory of value. I agree in that all six dimensions - The Good, The Beautiful, The Useful, The True, The Right & The Legal - unite in our embodied emotional sentience. I would also add “The Healthy” with its universal Yes~No logic that living systems experience as Pleasure~Pain. This addition underscores an important caveat to “The Legal”: That our diversity of socio-cultural constructions designed to regulate one another - the “Rule of Law” (from tribal mores, to local codes, to national and international laws) - cannot be legitimate or attain long-term success unless they remain tethered the universal self-regulatory logic of the body. Most religions do this by aligning virtue with the divine “fruits of spirit”, all of which flow naturally from cultivating thoughts and actions consonant with the complex positive emotions (Joy, Love, Faith, Peace, Gratitude, Patience, Self-control, etc). Where they go awry is in degrading of defiling “the self”, when mediating one’s functional identity is fundamental to how life works. (And of course, inventing false dichotomies such as Us~Them and Good~Evil.) 

Pedro: My addition above of The Healthy, gets at the pure pragmatics of biological function upon which we agree. But you extend this further still into my Tao Metaphor with your “distinction on the adjacent” – a lovely Kauffmanian twist that blends well with Bateson’s “difference that makes a difference”. To add the emotion science is to emphasize that “the difference” always concerns “me” – the self. Damasio shows this with the emotion mediating the “proto-self” awareness “via the feeling of what is happening” – to which I add “…to me”. This also honors Joesph LeDoux’s distinction between cognitive computations (thoughts) and affective computations (emotions - always about the self and leading to action). But it also takes us into the realm of Whitehead, and the transactions between Domains 0 and 1 that emerge as “actual occasions”. I mentioned earlier my graduate student that recently reworked Whitehead as an emotion theory. When your life evens out I hope to continue our conversations along these lines.  I’ve also been meaning to ask, in terms of complex and/or foundational algorithms, what do we think about Stephen Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence?

Karl: You are definitely one of those Scarecrows that I will miss the most. (Although legitimate Wizard might be better still). Although each of your communications have been crisp, complete and precise, I’m still swirling confused in your foreign yet resonant Koans.  For example, you say “deviations of the properties of cycles 3,6 of the reorder ab - ba of Cohort 16”. In my over-simplicity, I hear the bit in bold to reflect the dual-identity state transitions between parts~wholes (we~me; me~we identity informational swaps) central to cyclic transformations between domains 0 and 1 in my Tao story. The rest sounds like very specific and important aspects of the maths (and complex algorithms) involved in pattern formation in one or both realms that I’d like to learn, albeit unrealistic in this lifetime. But when you say a “formal deictic definition of the concept” I hear a definition of information that spans “time, space, and self” and we’re back in my territory. So please help me understand “deviations of properties of cycles”.  Might we find common language in complex networks and phase transitions? https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/phase-transition-phenomenon__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VC9-xBaqhuNPdS7q41hhWR2xLwPt9Xsr1Zc1nnkeDeV7bH-e23zB4NjalhRAOt15uK7qHzuCohC7Ofz5DA$  <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/phase-transition-phenomenon__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!VC9-xBaqhuNPdS7q41hhWR2xLwPt9Xsr1Zc1nnkeDeV7bH-e23zB4NjalhRAOt15uK7qHzuCohC7Ofz5DA$ >. 


ERIC: You are reflecting some of my own ennui over the roadblock of formalizing subjectivity, as well as its saddling of economics and even moral psychology with an impoverished view of human value systems. But we can get there even when starting with the objective observables: The common physio-chemical mechanisms of sensory-motor control in simple living systems, the overtly appetitive or hedonic approach~avoidant behavior that results, the role of that same chemistry in cell signaling and all functional regulatory networks, and building learning, decision-making and prediction models based on neural networks. (This is the project of AI engineers hoping to build general intelligence, but now struggling with framing, contextuality and relevance problems.) But adding the subjective – evaluative - informational component within our emotional biology, with all that it implies (identity, agency, compatible free will, creativity, purpose) changes the game, opening conceptual doors for more further and deeper empirical investigations. I’ve offered my Tao story to address some of the deeper questions, but the missing self-regulatory  function  also bridges cleanly to huge swaths of literature in the social sciences. Indeed, there is a suite of universal human needs (mediated by both positive and negative emotions) that can better inform the notion of utility, usher progress in behavioral economics, and even offer a form of Purple Populism that can help transcend tribal political divisiveness. I have heard echoes of these directions in both yours and Joe’s approaches and would be happy to continue our discussions.  As for souls? I’ve described this work as the “new vitalism” because our emotional biology  serves as the mechanism the old vitalists suggested was missing – providing both the animation and guidance captured in terms like spirit or soul. But the take-home here is that any such additional identity construct is fully embodied. This is why I find it essential to put subjective experience back at the center of empirical science. Our embodiment allows us to experience events that remain unexplained but should never be denied. Thanks so much for all your inspiration and that fabulous cartoon. I will treasure it always.

With fond affections all around,

Kate Kauffman (Kung Fu Kate)
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