1) The document discusses a new kind of positivism founded on a model that meets Carnap's liberal physicalism and is supported by biophysical evidence. 2) It argues that experience is a primitive aspect of the world that plays a role in the formation of physical structures, in contrast to contemporary emergence theory which dismisses experience. 3) The author proposes developing a notion of sensory manifolds as the basic element of apprehension and motility, and reformulating our treatment of time, with the present having something special about it compared to the past and future.

1. A New Kind of Positivism
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
@ Stanford University, CogLunch. March 13th, 2008.
1

2. Explaining Experience in Nature : The
Foundations of Logic and Apprehension
The premises of my research program.
2

3. In the course of the discussion I shall defend
Rudolf Carnap, praise Charles Sanders Peirce and
challenge Alan Turing ...
3

4. ... arguing finally for a new kind of positivism; one
founded upon a model that meets the expectations of
Carnap's Liberal Physicalism and is supported by
biophysical evidence.
4

5. Logic is first in the business of establishing and studying
conventions and when the nature of that study is
extended to include matters of apprehension it is rightly
called Semeiotics.
5

6. Charles Sanders
Peirce
Polymath
Semeiotician
(1839 - 1914)
6

7. “Precisely how much of the business of
thinking a machine could possibly be made
to perform, and what part of it must be left
for the living mind, is a question not without
conceivable practical importance; the study of it can at
any rate not fail to throw needed light on the nature of
the reasoning process.
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8. Though the machines of Jevons and of Marquand were
designed chiefly to illustrate more elementary points,
their utility lies mainly ... in the evidence
they afford concerning this problem.”
Charles Sanders Peirce. Logical Machines.
The American Journal of Psychology.
November 1887.
8

9. “the immediate [experience]* is preeminently first
the external dead thing is preeminently second
the [experienced]** representation mediating
between these two is preeminently third”
Charles Sanders Peirce. A Guess at the Riddle. 1887/1888
* Peirce wrote “consciousness” where I have placed the term “experience.”
** I have added the term “experienced” to the “third.”
A third is a memory, relations are the product of semeiosis; the organic processing of
memories.
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10. For our purposes experience is the basis of
consciousness.
It is that which is most familiar.
It is the common property of all sense.
10

11. ... consciousness refers to the variety of
properties associated with sense and cognition.
11

12. Rudolf Carnap
Philosopher of Science
Semeiotician
(1891-1970)
12

13. I take positivism to refer to a rejection of supernatural
solutions and the pursuit of a constructive unified
science.
13

14. I take empiricism to be a focus upon what is observed
(experiment and observation).
14

15. While positivism requires empiricism,
empiricism has not required positivism.
15

16. Carnap’s Liberal physicalism argues that the laws
and principles of physics must of necessity be
extended as we discover more about perception.
It is a view that allows for new discovery.
16

17. Liberal physicalism is not materialism or identity
theory (sometime called type physicalism).
17

18. Materialism is the view that our physical models
are essentially complete.
Any explanation of experience in nature based upon this
premise is logically constrained to identity
and emergence.
18

19. The physicalism of Rudolf Carnap sought a naturalistic
basis and anticipated extensions to our
physical models as we make new discoveries.
19

20. He took the first thesis of physicalism to simply be that
claims about the world can be confirmed by
others.
He took the second thesis of physicalism to be that the
laws of nature are logical consequences of
natural physical laws.
20

21. “This thesis does not refer to the laws known to us at
present, but to those laws which hold in nature
and which our knowledge can only more or less
approximate.”
Rudolf Carnap. P.883, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap : The Library of Living
Philosophers. Paul Arthur Schlipp (Ed) (1963)
21

22. Carnap took experience seriously as existent, having an
ontological status capable of scientific explanation.
He simply did not know how to proceed.
22

23. “The question is this: provided that to all or some types of psychological processes
there correspond simultaneous processes in the central nervous system, what
connects the processes in question with one another? Very little has been done
toward a solution to the correlation problem of the psychophysical relation, but,
even if this problem were solved (i.e., if we could infer the characteristics of a brain
process from the characteristics of a psychological process, and vice versa), nothing
would have been achieved to further the solution of the essence problem (i.e., the
psychophysical problem). For this problem is not concerned with the correlation,
but with the essential relation; that is, with that which essentially or fundamentally
leads from one process to the other or which brings forth both from a common
root.
23

24. ...there still remain, in the main, three hypotheses: mutual influence, parallelism, and
identity in the sense of the two aspect theory ... Three contradicting and
unsatisfactory answers and no possibility of finding or even imagining an empirical
fact that could here make the difference: a more hopeless situation can hardly be
imagined...”
Rudolf Carnap. P. 37-38, The Logical Structure of the World. (1928)
24

25. Carnap’s account of the state of affairs remains valid
today.
25

26. My purpose here is to observe an historical narrative:
one that discloses a sharp distinction between
early and later twentieth century scientific
thinking.
There are a number of additional examples of science taking experience seriously during
the early twentieth century including the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics, the work of Poincaré and Einstein.
26

27. Broadly speaking experience was taken seriously in
science between 1850 and 1950.
But after 1950 the field was abandoned and
scientific investigation effectively ceased.
The period that runs approximately from the availability of the work of George Boole
through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernst Mach, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf
Carnap. Including Henri Poincare, Gottlob Frege, Neils Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner
Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and of course, the entire Vienna Circle. All of whom were
stimulated by the European Enlightenment (esp. Locke and Kant).
27

28. Alan Turing
Computer Scientist
Semeiotician
(1912-1954)
28

29. “I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no
mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something
of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I
do not think these mysteries necessarily need to
be solved before we can answer the question with which
we are concerned in this paper.
Alan Turing. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. (1950)
29

30. This neglect or mystification of manifest qualities is taken
further by contemporary authors Stephen Wolfram and
Gregory Chaitin.
I refer here to the manifest qualities associated with the lack of locality that Turing
observes and is presumably readily observed by each of us. It is most obvious in any
visual scene of some complexity. It should be readily apparent that the variety of visual
stimuli do not reduce to a point.
30

31. Wolfram states a Principle of Computational
Equivalence, that essentially states that everything is
functionally reducible to Turing computation and that
nothing is lost in such a reduction.
31

32. Chaitin has suggested mystifying breaks in the chain of
functional dependence.
“When you go to a higher level, the lower level
may be irrelevant.”
Gregory Chaitin. P.151, Sensual Mathematics, Conversations with a Mathematician.
(2002)
32

33. Certain contemporary philosophers have rejected
manifest qualities entirely, leaving us to face the
necessary suspicion that there may indeed be
Zombies among us.
33

34. In contradiction, we are confronted by the expectations
of populist computer science that machines will
awaken, and that in doing so there will be born an
intelligence more capable and more profound
than our own.
34

35. It is a surprising and remarkable fact that we can indeed
imbue computing machinery with aspects of our
intelligent behavior, but this is not sufficient to
explain the presence of manifest qualities.
Turing never asserted that it was.
35

36. Chaitin's response to my position is to dismiss
positivism and observe that physicists and cosmologists
have taken up metaphysics.
He claims that only the space of all mathematically
possible physical laws are of interest.
I take him to mean that all and only that which is mathematically conceivable is
worth taking seriously.
36

37. Chaitin’s Subject: A New Kind of Metaphysics
“Philosophers are still positivists, but physicists and cosmologists are doing
metaphysics again. Have you heard of the string theory landscape or the inflationary
universe multiverse or Max Tegmark's ideas on parallel (all mathematically possible)
universes? The general idea is that only the space of all possible physical laws is of
interest, and the particular laws of this universe are not of great interest, since it is
only, so to speak, our address in the multiverse of all possibilities.
Gregory Chaitin. Personal communication. Quoted with permission.
(March 10th, 2008)
37

38. In principle, I have no disagreement with the position
that only mathematically possible physical laws are
ultimately of interest ...
... I disagree to the extent that it is closed minded and
disallows new foundational discoveries as
Carnap anticipated.
38

39. “Mathematical possibility is only valid within the constraints of
empirical science if it is founded upon sound premises and if in that
possibility nothing is lost or excluded.
If the space of all possible physical laws as currently conceived
leaves complexity unaccounted for then it is the premises of that
construction that must be challenged; it cannot lead (as you have
suggested) to supernatural conclusions. That suggestion is, IMHO, a
desperate and dangerous act. It is desperate in that it is born of frustration and
intellectually lazy, it is dangerous because it opens the door for irrational thought.
Steven Ericsson-Zenith. In response to Chaitin. (March 10th, 2008)
39

40. This is a subject upon which even those that understand
these issues well are shy.
Lee Smolin (Trouble with Physics) would not provide
me with permission to quote an earlier exchange and
says that the subject is not one he wishes to make
public statements about.
In response to my invitation to speak on the matter of Explaining Experience in
Nature he expressed to me the opinion that science is not yet ready to address
these questions.
40

41. Roger Penrose
Physicist
Semeiotician
41

42. “... it seems to me that a fundamental physical
theory that lays claim to any kind of completeness
at the deepest levels of physical phenomena must also
have the potential to accommodate conscious
mentality. ...
42

43. My arguments demand that this missing theory
must be a non-computational theory ...
Roger Penrose. 34.7, The Road to Reality. (2004)
43

44. We take Penrose to simply mean that the solution is
like nothing we currently understand.
44

45. This brings us back to a new kind of positivism,
one that meets the expectations of Carnap and those of
Penrose.
Discovery of something new in the foundations
of science.
(Premise: there remain things to discover in the foundations of the world.)
45

46. Newtonian analogy
Diverse observations may be unified by the
introduction of a universal primitive.
All complexity can be explained by such a primitive.
(An hypothesis of my research program - the domain of observation obviously
includes biophysics and the product of the investigation should be a calculus.)
46

47. The Challenge
What would be the nature of such a primitive and how
may it be characterized?
47

48. A solution can be derived simply by asking what would be
required to enable a formal explanation of such a
primitive.
With the requirement that the model is strictly
constructive and without supernatural appeal.
48

49. The mechanics and engineering of sentience in the physical
world is the product of a natural assembly against a
previously unconsidered inert primitive aspect of the world.
Hypothesis. We use the term “against” in the same manner as one might say a shelter is
built against a cliff, or that planets are the construction of mass “against” the gravitational
field.
49

50. Gravitational field analogy
Precisely we mean a formulation that is mutually
affective general covariance.
50

51. PREMISE :
Emergent properties are of necessity functionally
dependent upon primitive nature.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, these
emergent properties translate into other forms and
these forms continue to play a role in the
development and operation of the physical systems in
which they appear.
51

52. Yet, according to contemporary emergence theory,
experience has none of these features.
It is simply along for the ride. It has no role.
52

53. If dualism is to be rejected and experience is not to be
dismissed, then there is some necessity that in this new
construction an element of that which we liberally label
“consciousness” is a primitive aspect of the world
and that it play a role in the formation of physical
structures.
53

54. This new primitive must adhere to the laws of
thermodynamics: it must be conserved and its
character must be transformed by entropy*.
(*That is, it must change as the value of entropy changes.)
54

55. Like the gravitational field, the effects of this new primitive
appears much later in the evolving cosmology and
can thus be considered a much weaker force than the
gravitational field.
55

56. The answer:
Gµν = 8π Tµν
(nearly)
56

57. Unfortunately this field equation explains nothing
is physically vacuous
describes only the principles of gravitation.
(Einstein probably understood this)
John D. Norton, General covariance and the foundations of general
relativity: eight decades of dispute. Rep. Prog. Phys. 56. 1993
57

58. However, we would like to identify something like the
Einstein field equation for its utility.
58

59. We develop formally the topological notion of a
sensory manifold that is an element of the physical
structure that characterizes sense.
59

60. A set of such manifolds may be considered to represent
the cellular membranes of an organism but the physical
basis of these sensory manifolds is not yet identified.
60

61. Difficult to formalize?
Is it this simple? Manifolds of sense as the basic
element of apprehension and motility.
(note that Mach also used the phrase “manifold of sense”)
61

62. General covariance must be mutually affective;
otherwise we simply have identity theory.
62

63. Space-time is eliminated in favor of mass-energy alone.
Current formalisms are misleading.
(Einstein [and Mach] understood this too)
Boy, the curvature of space-time is so very convenient!
63

64. It is necessary to reformulate our treatment of
time.
There may be a close association between a
formal conception of time and “memory.”
64

65. In the way we currently model time, the present is
indistinguishable from the past and the future.
It seems likely that this is invalid, rather ...
... there is something special about the
present.
65

66. The notion of an Eternal Moment provides a
potential basis for resolving numerous standing
problems and ...
66

67. ... potential explanation of the continuum and the
discrete that may apply to classical vs quantum.
67

68. There is no before
And no after
There is only now
The rules that get us from here to there
The how
.
There is the experience of it all
And the stuff that sticks
The memories of moments
The hits
.
And in there somewhere
Is you
And is I
The fleeting
The being
The sign
And the sigh ...
(by SEZ)
68

69. These foundational physical hypotheses are necessary
so that we may resolve the formalization problems.
They are central questions of apprehension, not merely
mathematical explorations.
69

70. Identity theory and supernatural notions of
emergence are the product of a failed reduction.
They are the logical consequence of an adherence
to a strict materialist construction; of limiting our
physical models to our current understanding.
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71. When reductions fail it is necessary to challenge
the basis of our construction, it is never the basis of a
supernatural solution.
(Premise)
71

72. Experience is the first thing and the last thing for each
of us.
Though strictly, in the model we will present, the first thing
and the last thing for each of us is a SENSE:
the primitive aspect of the world that we propose
characterized by physiology.
72

73. Looking to Biophysics we see evidence that is suggestive
of our new model :
Bacterial receptor conformance spread.
Chemotaxis and all other forms of motility.
73

74. Sensory receptor patterns in mammals.
Neuroplasticity, neurogenesis and the synchronous
behavior of neurons.
74

75. The basis of experience is an inert primitive aspect
of the world.
It affects physical assembly by its presence alone.
It plays a role in the assembly of physical forms.
It is the root of all complexity.
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76. This is a negative result for computer science,
identifying fundamental limits.
76

77. The hypothesis identifies the limits of Turing
computation and classical mechanics – essentially by
observing that symbolic systems, and the mathematical
logic upon which they are based, do not reflect the
substantive engineering of sentience in nature.
77

78. The essential differences here lie in both the
temporal nature and the nature of locality in the
respective models of computation.
78

79. This broader locality of evaluations, enabled by the
engineering of sentience against the primitive we
propose, overcomes the challenge of integrating
non-local results found in the Turing model of
computation.
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80. These factors make a difference in the results of computations
that relate principally to the ability to efficiently connect
apprehension and response. Importantly, there is a substantive
difference; in cases where temporal constraints
prevail, in the same material implementation, the
results of each computational approach differ.
80

81. Carnap was right about the nature of logical evaluation.
It is logical differentiation from the entirety of
sense.
81

82. ... not logical integration of the parts with strong
locality.
Turing was wrong.
82

83. A New Kind Of Positivism
In which the mechanics of sense are known and the
ontological basis of epistemology is established.
83

84. senses.info
iase.info
Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering
84