Consciousness, Sapience and Sentience—A Metacybernetic View

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The non-expert reader might struggle at times with the density of information presented in a decentralized way in the manuscript. The relevant terms are sometimes defined in multiple places throughout the text or are used before they are defined. Overall, the manuscript could become clearer if the following points are addressed:

·      Metaphysics: Only somewhat defined on Page 33 but first mentioned on Page 1. A more detailed definition or explanation could help the reader, as this is a central notion. Moreover, why are sapience, sentience, feeling, and thinking metaphysical? Proponents of physicalism would strongly disagree. Should this critique be considered?

·      Page 1: Structural information is never clearly defined in the manuscript.

·      Page 8: It is unclear from reference [64] how psychic energy relates to emotional energy and cognitive liveliness.

·      The numbering of chapters and sections needs to be corrected. For instance, there are double occurrences of labels “1,” “2,” “2.1,” “2.2,” and “4.5.” Then, Section 3.1 jumps to 4.5. Other jumps are from “4” to “5.1.” Finally, the section label “5.4” is missing.

·      The term “qualia” is referenced by [47]. Perhaps a more comprehensive reference is https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/qualia/.

·      Page 9: What is the rationale for introducing the thermodynamic potential, and what is its relation to system motivation?

·      Page 10: Introduction of “spirit” as a function of consciousness. What is the motivation here? What is the relation to psyche and mentality?

·      Page 12: Introduces Schwarz’s 1980 publication without mentioning the corresponding reference number (i.e., [141]).

·      Page 12: System structures are stable if the structural information is intrinsic, i.e., if it is Fisher information. A reference for this important statement would serve the reader.

·      Page 12: A note or reference regarding how the physical and metaphysical structures are related via structural information would be welcome.

·      Intrinsic information is defined in Section 3.2 (note that this is the corrected number and not the one currently seen in the manuscript). However, the concept is mentioned many times before that. The same goes for Fisher information introduced on Page 18. Perhaps a more detailed account could be added where the different measures are first mentioned in the outline of Chapter 1.

·      Pages 12 and 20: The sentence “intrinsic information enables living systems to maintain their order through intrinsic information” appears tautologous.

·      Page 15: What is “autogenesetically intrinsic information?”

·      Page 18: Eqs. (2), (4), and (5) are motivated and derived in reference [30] for the interested reader. This reference, however, is not provided.

·      Page 18: “Minimum Fisher information” is only stated as its acronym “MFI,” obscuring clarity.

·      Page 19: Is a deliberate distinction being made between “free-energy” in the metaphysical sense and “free energy” in the physical sense?

·      Page 23: “Landauer’s principle applies to metaphysics enables psychoenergy and information to be mutually transmutable through the notion of intellect.” To the non-expert reader, this sentence may be confusing.

·      Page 23: More details on the metaphysical dimension of psyche would be helpful.

·      Page 41: “Agency has three ontologically distinct maps,” however, the following nine maps are discussed: Context, regulatory, homeostatic, affect, homeostatic affect, internal affect, cognitive, regulatory-affective, and affect regulatory. A clarification is welcome.

·      Page 42: “The brain, when seen as a hierarchical composition of quantum scale chaotic systems, has an interrelationship between the elementary units that compose it, and as a whole it is constituted as a macroscopic quantum chaos system that generates and maintains an entanglement of its electric field in the active areas of its network, this explaining consciousness.” Why does this explain consciousness? What role does entanglement play here?

·      Page 42: “Setting agency activity in terms of the quantum level enables the consideration of superstring theory, which purports that everything in our Universe is made up of tiny vibrating strings that can have both homeostatic and regulative functionality.” Relating superstrings to functionality is very unorthodox and requires elaboration and/or references, as they are ontological primitives, conventionally measurable via their mass, charge, spin, …

The following typos have been found:

·      Abstract: “cyeberintrinsic.”

·      Page 7: “Reflecting on Konderak...” parenthesis unbalanced.

·      Page 19: The sentence “It is the study of interrelationships between macroscopic properties is called thermodynamics.”

·      Page 29: The sentence “Bienertová-Vašků et al. ( [156]: [157]) explain” is confusing, especially as reference [157] refers to different authors.

·      Page 34: “To be fair, Entropy…” no capitalization.

·      Page 42: “quantum explanations that operate as the level of the neuron become useful.”

·      The texts in the figures do not always end with a period. There appears to be an inconsistency with highlining: bold, italic, and bold-italic.

·      References [33] and [36] are identical.

·      References [65] and [93] are identical.

The following topics seem relevant in the context of the proposed ideas, and perhaps the author would like to elaborate further should they not exceed the scope of the manuscript.

1.     The ongoing metaphysical debate in the philosophy of mind identifies four major commitments: eliminativism/illusionism, dualism, panpsychism (micropsychism or cosmopsychism), and idealism.

a.     The metacybernetic framework allows for a generic definition of living system, implying (micro) panpsychism. How is its main critique addressed, namely the combination problem?

b.     Extrapolating from the degrees of consciousness, is not idealism (or cosmopsychism) implied? In other words, is there room for a sapient and sentient universe in the metacybernetic framework?

c.     Can the metacybernetic framework help with the “hard problem of consciousness,” namely, why and how brain processes give rise to subjective experiences? In essence, can it bridge the gap between the first-person and third-person perspectives?

2.     The idea that at the quantum level, microtubules give rise to consciousness goes back to Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff and is contested by many scholars.

3.     Emergence, self-organization, and structure-formation appear magical, particularly when observed from a physicalist and reductionist metaphysical position. Could there be a yet undiscovered teleological force be guiding the generation of complexity in the universe, which metacybernetics can help unveil?

4.     The notion of free will is heavily debated. Can a metacybernetic perspective help clarify?

5.     What should we make of non-ordinary states of consciousness? Especially the emerging field of the philosophy of psychedelics asks about the epistemic and ontological relevance of such enhanced states. Is this relevant to the metacybernetic understanding of consciousness?

Author Response

I thank you for your clear observations of this paper, and the indicative lacks, which have been very well put. Since submitting this paper I made some improvements and some restructuring to improve the flow.

All of these changes are in yellow.
Particular responses to your excellent points have been highlighted in blue.
The green colour highlights the responses made with respect to the other reviewer.

I have been unable to respond to you clear considerations like free-will, or psychodelics. It would be of interest to respond to thiese issues, but I suspect that they are slight out of the flow of the paper to include them.

I am very grateful to this reviewer for the obvious time given to the paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for sending me this very interesting and important article for review. My recommendation is that the article should be published. It is very high quality and truly transdisciplinary.

The points I make below are meant to help turn it from truly very good, to outstanding. Thus, my comments follow a three-tier structure: A. Simple comments. B. Somewhat advanced comments. C. Meta-theoretical comments. D. Very good points.

A. Simple comments.

1. Main weakness is in the area of philosophy, which cannot be taken lightly in the area of consciousness. For instance, F. Peters [reference 2; P. F., “Theories of Consciousness as Reflexivity,” The Philosophical Forum, vol. 44, pp. 341-372. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260210038, 2013] presents definition 3 in relation to Tomas Nagel, but our author even does not go one step in this direction, despite trying to discuss this Peters’ classification.

2. Dominant tilt of the author’s approach is broadly sociological [or, externalist], in conjunction with cybernetics. Interestingly, the author rightly and clearly presents weaknesses of such externalist approaches but this does not really influence his own take.

2.b. To put it differently, the Author sometimes arguments as a recommender engine, asking not the question what the case is, but rather what an expert would say (e.g. the whole classification by Lane as a basis of Author’s argument). This was also a problem with British philosophy of common language, but they made additional veridical presumptions about the role of language as the necessary and sufficient carrier of wisdom /sort of/.

3. The graph “Figure 1: Venn Diagram indicating Epistemic Values of Lane’s (2019) Ontological Classes” [p.5] follows Lane’s dictionary review of the terms related to consciousness, which methodology the author seems to take with a grain of salt but then follows this graph, kind of embedding it in the structure of his argument.

B. Somewhat advanced comments

4. This tendency to take the arguments from various sources (and mixed quality at that!) at their face value, seems to prevent the Author from toying with the outcomes, which is often very interesting. For instance, I cannot but notice --  in the abovementioned Figure 1 – that the category ‘awareness’ figures in central location of the graph, unifying, consciousness and sapience (table adds emotion and intelligence).

4.1 By my take the table is flawed (though interesting) since it separates awareness and sentience; by many standards (Eccles, Metzinger) minimal awareness is the sine qua non position on sentience (see also Chalmers, Nagel in philosophy). 

4.2 The question is whether qualia (always first-person) can be instantiated without the background of awareness, potentially present Dunn and Jahn [48] explain functionality not epistemic structure of subjectivity. This is proper to their task, which is functional explanation of a mechanism; but the Author’s project seems broader, so requires broader take on it. (p.6) By the way, defining qualia based on [47] M. Shepard, which is a work in aesthetics, is fringe, and unfortunate. T. Nagel has relevant explanations, F. Jackson, D. Chalmers – this is first of all a definition including philosophical inputs.

Also, two senses of subjectivity used: as first-person conscious awareness (Metzinger, Eccless, Chalmers) and subjectivity as changes in output from similarinputs (Author; O’Regan).

5.            Very broad extrapolation “cognition crossfire constitutes an inherent manifestation of consciousness, and this can be expressed in terms of personality information processes and traits…always develop in sufficiently complex generic living systems”. There are very different cognitive systems and this sentence puts into question what we know of Octopus brains etc. Luckily, in the next section it is extended to intelligent artificial systems, but the idea that they would have to follow cognitive architecture designed by the Author is preposterous, since dominant view pertains to multiplicity of designs, biological, in possible cosmic civilizations and artificial. (P.8 is very restrictive in this respect. It follows Itay Shani’s cosmopsychism, which is interesting but should perhaps be discussed in the context of more some main stream approaches. E.g. Shani argues “feeling and knowing are among the most general and fundamental features of consciousness.” – what about deeply autistic people, are they unconscious? Sounds like a nonsense implication).

C. Meta-theoretical comments. Those are a bit idiosyncratic comments – the fact that I put them forth here shows my deep respect for the Author and his important article.

7. There is a strong feeling that the author has a tendency to search from ‘normal science’ and to ‘sort out’ the outcomes of the ongoing scientific revolution (not necessarily in Kuhn’s exact sense, more of David Auerbach]. The paper refers primarily to authors with similar tendencies from Rao Mikkilineni, to David Kelley and Giulio Tononi, which is a group of great thinker, most of whom seem to shape or sculpt preexisting knowledge , whereas the Author treats them more as a quilt, collage or a puzzle to be put together.

7.1 An example of such puzzle-like approach is visible in section 2.2. with a list of known and opaque authors and quoting them in a somewhat randomly organized flow of the argument. At the same time third-hand use of Ned Block’s distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. The second-had reference results in somewhat narrow interpretation of such terms.

7.2 This is visible in strong conclusions drawn at the bottom of page 6 from table 1. Their status seems stronger than that of the table, which would be a methodological mistake.

8. Methodological tendency to oscillate towards ‘normal science’ quite manageable by the simple explains the Author’s tendency to follow Occam’s Razor viewed as the gist of inductive method.

8.1 This avoids the problem of ‘simplicity being a complicated idea” (with various criteria: syntactic /notation dependent?/, syntactic, pragmatic , or informational /by which definition/. The author endorses the informational definition in its cybernetical and thermodynamic (entropy) meanings – which is a good move.

8.2 Still Occam’s Razor is a heuristic tool, related to relative computational strength of one’s computational machinery. In big data analysis simplicity is not always a good methodology at all. Also in veridical epistemologies it may or may not be a good fit with inference to the best explanation.

9. Sometimes I tended to feel that the article’s argument needs more ‘perturbance’ (less order) to follow Stephen Thaler’s methodology for ‘discovery engines’. This also runs counter to the ‘Edge of Chaos’ approach to innovation in intellectual work both in humans, animals and AI [e.g. Goertzel 2006]. The term is used, but narrowly, to characterized ‘living organisms’ – it should be also applied to methodology of transdisciplinary research in the conditions outside of Kuhn’s ‘normal science’.

D. Points o special applause.

11. Nice building on the structure of intelligence in the context of sapience and sentience by David Kelley.

12. Nice presentation of the Author’s prior publications; easier to follow than preceding compressed reports of the works of others.

13. Very interesting on metacybernetics and related kinds of information.

14. Good incorporation thermodynamics of agency.

15 Conclusion: the article avoids all of the problems of part 1 since those are general problems where the author sometimes pick fringe solutions or leaves gaps in explanation (as noted above).

However, the second part of the article seems sound and well informed. The author being more of an expert on those topics that the current reviewer, they would be in need of an expert on metacybernetics and psychological thermodynamics.

Author Response

I thank you for your clear observations of this paper, and your enthusuiams. Your comments are well considered and well put.

Since submitting this paper I made some improvements and some restructuring to improve the flow. This includes creating a model to explain how consciousness emerges from the interaction between sapience and sentience.

All of these changes are in yellow.
Particular responses to your excellent points have been highlighted in green.
The blue colour highlights the responses made with respect to the other reviewer.

With respect to one of your comments, it is clear that I did make an error in not including "awareness" in sentience, which is now corrected in Table 1. This was a fundamental error, and I thank you for pointing it out.

I have been unable to respond to some of your considerations, for instance concerning your sectin C point 7, since while the point is well appreciated, it would require sufficient space which would shift the trajectory of the paper. Having said this, I have moderated my position of Table 1, since I think you are correct in what you see. Nor have I responded to your point 9, since once again discussing methodology (which would be needed in a book) diverts the trajectory of the paper.

I am very grateful to this reviewer for the obvious time given to the paper, and the significanceof the comments.