Commenting on Tim Reeves' article on Heideggerian Intelligence, and exploring the nature of mind and cosmological potential, I had the following thoughts:
Regarding Heideggerian Intelligence et al - I have reads papers on these subjects in the past. I am currently working through some papers on physics and some on neuroscience - looking for similarities and patterns that will give extra support to ideas about mind giving the appearance of a small cosmos (or if you prefer, cosmos giving the appearance of one vast mind).
Commenting on the quote Tim extrapolated....
“Acting is experienced as a steady flow of skilful activity in response to one's sense of the situation. Part of that experience is a sense that when one's situation deviates from some optimal body-environment gestalt, one's activity takes one closer to that optimum and thereby relieves the "tension" of the deviation. One does not need to know what that optimum is in order to move towards it. One's body is simply solicited by the situation [the gradient of the situation’s reward] to lower the tension. Minimum tension is correlated with achieving an optimal grip.”
Yes, any envisaging done within the mind is it seems sublimely implicit in ‘mind’ - in fact, terms such as ‘goals’ and ‘aims’ are, I would say, accretive; that is, mind exploring some of the greater potential of its own artefacts. However, if Dreyfus’ ideas are to be realised in cosmological models - hardware and software - analogues with ‘mind’ phenomenology are only sparse idioms found in ‘software’ itself. That is to say, if the totality of created ‘mind’ is the extent of the Simulacrum (the created simulation of the Divine realm) then yes, the “Cartesian problem surrounding the ontological distinction (if any) of noumena and cognita” is non-existent. If conscious cognition is the primacy of the Divine simulation, and we have only God and creation, anything in the latter must itself qualify as conscious cognition.And yes I agree with you that regarding the systemic whole, the objects among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the conscious cognition itself - it’s all mind!!.
Now of course, from my own position, attempting to conflate mind and cosmos, it is very difficult to do justice to the infinitely complex as there is no scientific equivalent beyond abstract reasoning, which seems to tie in with your next comments.The Simulacrum does seem to be our model, and our sparse sampling of the systemic whole does not require that we internalise a model of how it interrelates with each first person selfhood - it is already internalised in selfhood. I suppose it is a bit like ‘personality; in that one cannot ever sample the whole (not even one’s own) and yet the ramifying effects on other parts of reality seem to be internalised within personality itself. In other words, it is aspectual, yet it contains its own interrelational mechanism that automatically reconfigures itself irrespective of which aspects of outer reality it interrelates with.
Just as a comprehensive aspectual model of reality includes the cognitive mechanism required to model these effects, personality includes all the aspectual models of reality that cater for its own essence.I like your term ‘absorbed coping’. The mathematical ‘absorbed coping’ is clearly found in intelligent organisms like ourselves - even at the most basic level, geometrical and numerical knowledge would have helped with survival; and because of the stable contour lines that run through morphospace, evolutionary diversity has given us a ‘framework’ view that organisms are dynamic systems coupled to their environment via stimuli which are not processed using representations and models. That these stimuli succeed in soliciting the right responses without the use of representations and models does not mean that there is no wider model framework into which degrees of intentionality operate; for in fact, human minds have a degree of computational and informational content that suggest a representative modeling framework somewhere, particularly bearing in mind that the cosmos itself is amenable to computational and informational explanations.
Is this the biggest clue yet that matter IS mind - that the whole cosmos is one vast mind? The fact that when it comes to noumenal things we can predict and logically infer suggests that with mind we have the potential to explore the aspectual nature of mind while knowing that ‘mind’ as a whole is beyond us. Not only is this what separates us from the animals, but this probably explains why we can anticipate X, Y or Z without coming into contact with X, Y or Z. Could this be what separates modern man from his proto-human progenitors - the point at which God really did put something into man - the first Adam? Because one thing seems certain, regarding proto-humans, we know of various ‘external contrivances’ that help prompt thinking, but it seems pretty clear that if the proto-human mind did any symbolic modelling it wasn’t very good at it, not as an intrinsic aspectual system. In other words, the only creatures that could apprehend the mathematical whole and, perhaps more importantly, enough of the concept of ‘mind’ to apprehend ‘mind’ are the creatures into which God put the requisite parts of Himself, namely Adam and his descendents (which, of course, includes us).
If natural selection shows that organisms are dynamic systems coupled to their environment via stimuli which are not processed using representations and models, there must be something else to explain why it seems to human minds that ‘mind’ IS the frame. This would be remarkable, it would mean that the cosmic blueprint contained within it an algorithmic program that took care of every eventuality that was to be part of the Creator’s plan, and that ‘mind’ itself already contains all the potentiality for everything within the Simulacrum because the Simulacrum IS mind. Every bit of relevant information necessary for the simulated realm must be already present - in mathematical terms, all possibilities are embedded somewhere in the mathematical accretions contained within the Simulacrum. So when the mind registers something ‘new’ we are only speaking of ‘new’ in the sense of being ‘new’ to the senses, not new to the Simulacrum. And given the qualitative difference between ‘minds within mind’ and ‘mind’ itself, it seems that acquisition of knowledge and intellectual supplementation are truly open ended, at least as far as our limitations are concerned within the vastness of the Simulacrum.
This means, of course, that there is (by definition of ‘open ended’) always more effort yet needed in order to crystallise this work, but the similarities between mind and cosmos seem emphatic, particularly as the Simulacrum, if my model is correct, gives the appearance of its own up and running intelligence. You touch on something very important when you say that ‘intelligence’ is isotropic (it has properties with the same values in all directions). Because it is all embedded in the algorithmic whole, it does not attempt to impose any a priori limitations on which knowledge resources belong to which aspects of the whole because it is all part of the systemic whole. If it is true that whenever we talk of something within the Simulacrum we are talking about ‘mind’ then naturally human intelligence need not interrelate resources to other aspectual situations because the nature of ‘mind’ already takes care of that problem.
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