Evan Thompson

Précis of my book with @adamfrank4.bsky.social and Marcelo Gleiser. Soon to be followed with a response to commentators. The Blind Spot rdcu.be/eQkzc

@amandagefter.bsky.social writing in Nautilus about a meeting on intelligence in which I participated last year in Tuscany.

Spontaneous activity of astrocytes is a stochastic functional signal for memory consolidation | PNAS In the absence of explicit neuronal inputs, the glial cell astrocytes exhibit recurring intracellular Ca2+ fluctuations, primarily localized at thi...

Go glial cells! More and more evidence keeps pouring in that the cognitive brain is not just a neuronal network. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New preprint of a theoretical paper with @evanthompson.bsky.social. We discuss using information theoretic approaches to test the role of emergent interaction dynamics hypothesized by #ParticipatorySensemaking on attention and agency — using dance improv as a laboratory: osf.io/preprints/ps...

The Third Entity: Participatory Sense-Making, Agency, and Attentional Dynamics osf.io/preprints/ps... New paper by @beckety.bsky.social and yours truly.

Excited to learn about the Blind Spot podcast with @evanthompson.bsky.social @adamfrank4.bsky.social and Marcelo Gleiser.

Why quantum mechanics needs phenomenology | Aeon Essays The role of the conscious observer has posed a stubborn problem for quantum measurement. Phenomenology offers a solution

aeon.co/essays/why-q...

Death, Grief, and Radical Hope Crepe myrtle’s confetti of flowers.

Death, Grief, and Radical Hope by @beckety.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/becketto...

Grappling w my identity as a reluctant enactivist...
My favorite formulation of the approach so far is @xabibaran.bsky.social's "Autonomy and enactivism: Towards a theory of sensorimotor autonomous agency" (2017)

link.springer.com/content/pdf/...

IMO, it does three great things:

Transforming agency: On the mode of existence of large language models - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This paper investigates the ontological characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Between inflationary and deflationary accounts, we...

How ChatGPT is transforming agency:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you are interested on the ontological status of LLMs or want to get a better technical grasp on their internal functioning (without a maths or engineering background) this might be a good starting point.

So, even in the case of the ecosphere, where oceans, atmosphere, rocks, biota, etc., self-produce each other under closure (according to Earth Systems Science/Gaia Theory), it would still happen via molecular synthesis (not mechanical replacement)

We need to distinguish organization and structure. Chemical processes are nomologically necessary to instantiate structurally the autopoietic organization in the physical world, because without them there's no material transformation. But the organization as such is defined without reference to them

No, they didn't have different views on this matter. Mechanical replacement is neither necessary nor sufficient for autopoiesis. They agreed completely on this.

Oh, and here's a primer in relation to the free energy principle (also not sufficient to characterize autopoiesis) philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Sensorimotor Life: An enactive proposal Abstract. This book elaborates a series of contributions to a non–representational theory of action and perception. It is based on current theoretical deve

academic.oup.com/book/5967

Mind in Life — Harvard University Press How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan Thompson exp...

Chapters 5 & 6 www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Principles of Biological Autonomy Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy was a groundbreaking text when it was first published in 1979, putting forth a novel theory of how...

For further details, see these three books (in chronological order) + mitpress.mit.edu/978026255140...

What you need is structural transformation+destruction (synthesis). The chemical domain is paradigmatic. Could it happen at a higher level? That's an open question but your system wouldn't qualify (but organs, multicellular organisms and maybe the whole ecosophere might). +

The simplest process that's minimally autopoietic would be an autocatalytic chemical reaction network that produces its own topological boundary (membrane).

That's not synthesis (chemical production/transformation + destruction). Synthesis = breaking + forming chemical bonds to create new molecular structures. (This could conceivably happen with different molecules than we know on Earth, so it is compositionally plastic.)

*or do they come from outside?*

Does the system generate its own replacement elements (as a cell does) or are they do come from outside? If the latter, then the system is allopoietic, not autopoietic. Some elements can be replaced from outside but only into a system that is already autopoietic in the case of cellular life.

No. Foreign elements can/must enter/exit (the system must be thermodynamically open) but it's definining organization (internal self-production network + self-produced topological boundary) must have closure.

See M&V, 78-9: "production" = "transformation & destruction" (instantiated in/by molecular synthesis) within the system's topological unity (instantiated in/by the membrane), which itself results from (auto-)transformation & destruction. Your example doesn't meet any of these requirements.

That's not the issue. A network/system is any definable set of processes but for them to be autopoietic they must be processes of production (molecular synthesis) - yours are not -that exhibit operational closure (every element is synthesized by another element in the system) - yours do not.

Yes.

Sorry, *Eric's*

Here's the definition (as restated in a recent paper I did with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Randall Beer). Erik's robot is not a network of processes of production, let alone one that meets (i) and (ii).

Eric, your system is not anywhere near to being minimally autopoietic, according to the criteria set forth by Maturana and Varela and developed in the subsequent literature.

Rabbits with strange horn-like growths spotted in Colorado | CBC News Photos of rabbits in Colorado with grotesque, horn-like growths have been circulating on social media. Scientists say the photos are literally viral.

So much for the Indian philosophical trope "horns of a rabbit" (used to signify nonexistence). www.cbc.ca/news/science...