Prompts for Is the Monastery Minded?

The question and its scope

We probably need to address https://www.apronus.com/philosophy/dialogues/monastery-conscious and the Schwitzgebel paper, does it make more sense stand-alone or as part of a mindedness centered essay that we thought would follow the two AI deep dives? Three options in total: (1) a dedicated essay that jumps the queue, (2) part of mindedness essay and it waits its turn, (3) pull mindedness forward. Note: the USA and the monastery are distinct examples due to scales involved. For the monastery, it’s easy to see that any phenomenal experiences that are for it are precisely the phenomenal experiences that are for the monks; and the question then is what’s the phenomenal and metaphysical status of any additional phenomenal field.

However, note that mindedness is important, since for the monastery it’s the bigger jump than from mindedness to phenomenality.

For the USA, there’s an argument from residual integration: on the organizational ladder, all relevant integrations are discharged before reaching the level of USA, so we can conclude about USA even when group-human-mind is not resolved.

Length: 6000 with room to grow to 8000 words. Important: consider if the simulation criterion / condition for mindedness is the harder one for groups to meet.

Attribution

Incorrect: “Michał also supplied the distinction that organizes it. A monastery and a nation differ in scale, and the difference matters in a specific way. Whatever experiences a monastery has, he observed, are precisely the experiences of its monks.” Michal supplied examples, I drove the distinction (unless I picked it up unconsciously). The claim “experiences a monastery has are precisely the experiences of its monks” is mine and follows from the sharing experiences essay.

Nowness, truth-tracking, and channels

Having read up to the table so far, nice examples! Arguing around (P2) needs care, I’m guessing/conjecturing the temporal grain of constituting a phenomenal now is decisive: the monastery has nowness (temporal span of regulatory loops) that’s too wide to regulate truth-tracking of monks’ experiences. To distinguish cognition from experience it’s worth contrasting truth-bearing (of judgements) from truth-tracking. Also worth noting that truth-tracking is conditional on inputs, e.g. in dreams or imagery is not about an occurrent world.

My point is that P2’s “No additional field” is begging the question (?) I mean Michal will object. Same point from a different angle: neural bridge is underspecified, speech or any communication is bridging neurons.

Persistence and unfolding

M3 is weak. We can, or should, make the case for persistence at the phenomenal level (since we relied on its lack as one wedge between mindedness and phenomenality), but at the cognitive level it’s an implementation detail, no? Michal will bring up translations between stateful and functional programs.

I think the unfolding argument is weak, but I would let it stand in our public record, as getting constructive pushback can only help us.

For the unfolding idea, we can distinguish weak unfolding from strong unfolding. Weak unfolding is simply the stateful-to-functional conversion that otherwise preserves the network computation. Strong unfolding is retraining of the network so that each layer’s output representations are different representational spaces.

“The unfolding argument against causal theories of consciousness needs something stronger.” Did you mean “The unfolding argument against coarse-grain functionalist theories of consciousness needs something stronger.”?

Ah I must admit I’m not aware of Adrien Doerig et al.’s argument, sorry. The way we originally invoked unfolding was around the argument against phenomenal consciousness in feed-forward networks, but used the latter as a premise to undermine coarse-grain functionalism. Is Doerig’s argument going in the other direction?

I think we need to foreground this. Could be a sub-sub-section or a box (we use Markdown quotation for boxes).

Cognition, mindedness, and simulation

Do we also discuss that mindedness is a further achievement relative to cognition? We don’t need to bring it up if not needed, since it would be redundant with what we wrote previously.

One way to drive the difference between cognition and mentality is that biology accomplishes cognition even without nervous systems.

Aren’t there stronger cognition examples in plants?

Maybe we should withdraw this: “Of the five conditions, simulation is the one a group finds hardest.” Your simulation illustrations are quite convincing! WDYT?

Group understanding and participation

It’s probably a stretch for this essay, but we anticipated group-mindedness in “The Restless Form of Meaning”.

Like I said it stretches the article, so I’m not saying it’s worth adding, but hear me out. “A person’s life can be carried by a structure that exceeds it” in a meaning sense, which puts not just intentionality but understanding at the group level. Spiritually, it’s called participating in the mind of God.

“concerns a mind that isn’t built from its participants” under traditional ontology, but not under a potential naturalized ontology.

You are right that this is in tension and even contradicts my current leanings, but it, via the top-down view, would fit at home with my 2025 leanings.

Yes, but layer 0 is emphatically not mental.

The local variant and the field

Just got to this: “The argument depends on a distinction that Experience, Selfhood drew with its broadcast case.” We distinguished three variants of the regulation view: local, hybrid, and global. This is relevant for field formation, in other words, binding into the phenomenal now. We could disown the local view by pointing out that it leaves field formation outside of phenomenality on the account’s terms.

Interesting. You provide a positive argument via binding, while I had only a negative argument in mind. My weaker argument was that binding / field is phenomenal pre-theoretically, so leaving it out would shift the explanatory target.

(Right, I meant weaker in what it proves, so stronger in what it an withstand.)

“The monastery’s share in its monks’ experiences adds no experience to the world.” collapses a nuance that both the preceding and the following text underscores. Which means maybe it’s fine? Nuance is in our mereological metaphysics.

No, I had a simpler point in mind, the point being whether a field is an experience.

No, there is no contradiction between a field being an experience and being composed out of experiences. We made no commitment to a field not being a further experience, if that is understood very carefully as, to use a physical/material metaphor, “experiencing the joints”

Ah why is no additional field presumed at this point?

Minor stylistic shortcoming: “and that speech is a neural bridge too” is the first time “neural bridge” appears after it got dropped from the table.

Prices and an alien mind

Cool point about prices, but it may be worthwhile to try to delineate the economy that makes prices into a system, and that it’s not a nation. It would be a particularly alien mind, more along the lines of what Stephen Wolfram imagines.

“the minds Stephen Wolfram imagines far from ours in”rulial space,” ” – No, I don’t mean this. I mean, when he talks of the weather as having a mind, it’s unclear to what degree he is being metaphorical because he is used to think of observers as in physics.

Fields and selves

Have you noticed that this essay answers a question we asked but I’m not sure if we answered before via a different route? A phenomenal field is not a self. I think if a phenomenal field was a self, it would become a distinct metaphysical category.

“A field that doesn’t line up with one subject.” This point is not established by the examples alone. Two subjects and two corresponding fields are not a dissociation.

“fields and subjects line up by construction” is plausible but isn’t analytically true, there is still a possibility for dissociation in the direction of two or more fields within a single subject. I guess we could get traction by researching disunity.

I wanted to push for including this discussion in the essay because I am excited about the essay, but you’re right it’s not very reasonable. Can you briefly signpost it?

Final pass

“A monastery is minded to the degree that its common life meets the conditions, simulation above all.” I would remove the callout to simulation. A simulation Olympics is not a mindedness Olympics. WDYT?

I hear Michał raising another objection that we’ll also need to land outside of this essay. We disowned the local variant, but doesn’t the argument that the monastery has experiences reestablish it?

Ready for the final editorial pass. Thank you!

I don’t think we need to trim further. The essay earns the length, and it’s below the hard cutoff.