roachboy

nice post, zen-tom.
i have been reading alot of fransesco varela lately, who is one of the folk to lay out a theory of biological autonomy--it is more general than the work on coupled oscillators, which is a fascination of a close comrade, who passes me information when it strikes him as interesting. but i am not terribly comfortable with running out positions on these matters as the discourse is, fundamentally, alien to me.

that said, i wonder if, from a viewpoint not far from your own in the previous post, if the category of intelligence is necessary on other aesthetic grounds.

i wonder still, after reading through this thread a couple of time, chasing links, etc. (many of which have been quite helpful) what exactly it is being adduced to describe: the appearance of order in the world?
from this two problems:

first, how is this approach other a kind of updated neoplatonism? it seems dangerously close from the outset. just wondering. in any event, most of what one might say on the matter would be subject to the kantian critique, which i think i saw someone outline earlier--categories like order----and the various ways in which one can amplify them----are not about the world as such, but rather about particular modes of ordering that world, of evaluating that world, and as such are aesthetic categories, descriptive insofar as they outline a particular relation to features attributed to the world, but not descriptive insofar as the world goes.

let's say, on the other hand, that there can be a description of processes in the world that do not wobble too much under the kantian trick. what i am interested in is implicit in zen-tom's post: thinking biological systems from framework of biological autonomy in general, the matter of coupled oscillators in particular would correspond to a biologically oriented mode of ontological argument, while claims for intelligence as explanation for the appearance of order would be more epistemological.

the difference between the two registers can come down to: the epistemological relation takes what is given as the point of departure, while the ontological relation takes phenomena in the world as functions, and looks more to conditions of possibility. what i wonder about is the extent to which the move to thinking biological systems tends to render questions of intelligence moot (why am i using that word? i dont even like it). another way of asking: to what extent are these approaches opposed trajectories? each looks to push from the observable to conditions of possibility for the observable: it seems that the bio-autonomy approach involves a harder break with the observable than does the imputing of intelligence to patterns that operate in the world. because it is not obvious that the register of conditions of possibility operates within that which is thereby made possible, i wonder about the move to intelligence as category in itself.


interesting thread...

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