absential

From the Glossary

Absential: The paradoxical intrinsic property of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent. Although this property is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind; elsewhere (Deacon 2005) described as a constitutive absence

Constitutive absence: A particular and precise missing something that is a critical defining attribute of 'ententional' phenomena, such as functions, thoughts, adaptations, purposes, and subjective experiences.

Absential - p3

• a state of things not yet realized
  
• a specific separate object of a representation,
  
• a general type of property that may or may not exist,
  
• an abstract quality,
  
• an experience, and so forth-just not that which is actually present.
  
• something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent
  
• irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but a defining property of life and mind
  
• what is absent matters.
  
• a purpose not yet actualized,
  
• a quality of feeling, a functional value just discovered
  
• not just superimposed probable physical relationships
• each an intrinsically absent aspect of something present
  

Absential - p544

• The universe is larger than just that which we can see, and touch, or manipulate with our hands or our cyclotrons.
  
• There is more here than stuff.
  
• There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff.
  
• And there is more than what is actual.
  
•  There is what could be, what should be, what can't be, what is possible, and what is impossible.
  

Absential ~ Causality

• a form of causality dependent on specifically absent features and unrealized potentials can be compatible with our best science - p16
  
• How can something not there be the cause of anything? Making sense of this - efficacy of absence - will be the central challenge of this book - p45
  

Absential ~ Consciousness / self

• Like meanings and purposes, consciousness may not be something there in any typical sense of being materially or energetically embodied, and yet may still be materially causally relevant - p7
  
• an additional issue with consciousness that makes it particularly insistent, in a way that these other absential relations aren't: that which is explicitly absent is me - p8
  
• this approach can help to illuminate to what extent the phenomenon of self is not a simple physical property of bodies or brains, but rather a critical absential character, which is ultimately the locus of the reflexive individuation that creates the distinction from non-self - p467
  
• The intentional properties that we attribute to conscious experience are generated by the emergence of these constraints-constraints that emerge from constraints, absences that arise from, and create, new absences. You are in this quite literal sense something coming out of nothing, and thus newly embodied at each instant p535
  

Absential ~ Constraints

• This concept of constraint can provide a negative approach to realism, though it might also be paradoxically described as a nominalism of absences, since it is determined by discrete interaction effects that don't occur - p191
  
• In each case, there are reduced degrees of freedom that could potentially be realized in the absence of these constraints - p192
  
• This requires that we show how what is absent is responsible for the causal power of organization and the asymmetric dynamics of a physical or living process. Beginning to explain how this might be possible is the major task of this chapter - p195
  
• Constraints are the present signature of what is absent - p484
  

Absential ~ Ententional

• Currently, we lack a single term in the English language (or others that I know of) that captures this more generic sense of existing with-respect-to, for-the-sake-of, or in-order-to-generate something that is absent that also includes function at one extreme and value at the other. The recognition that there is a common core property characterizing how each of these involves a necessary linkage with, and inclination toward, something absent argues for finding a term to refer to it - p26
  
• Ententional phenomena include functions that have satisfaction conditions, adaptations that have environmental correlates, thoughts that have contents, purposes that have goals, subjective experiences that have a self/other perspective, and values that have a self that benefits or is harmed. Although functions, adaptations, thoughts, purposes, subjective experiences, and values each have distinct attributes that distinguish them, they all also have an orientation to a specific constitutive absence, a particular and precise missing something that is their critical defining attribute - p 26
  
• Ententional processes and relationships can best be classed as expressions of final causality in Aristotle's terms. Their absential character is determined by the end toward which they tend, or the represented concept for the sake of which they were created. But with this erosion of the plurality of causal concepts, a place for a form of causal influence derived from something absent was no longer acceptable - p35-42 << much discussion on the absential follows.
  
• By examining this model system more closely, we will be able to demonstrate how ententional processes acquire this seemingly paradoxical character of efficacious absence - p311
  

Absential ~ Evolution

• Because organisms are constituted by specially organized, persistent, far-from-equilibrium processes, they are intrinsically incomplete. In this regard, they are processes organized around absence - p416
  
• The ability to produce highly diverse and yet precise constraints-absences-thus makes possible a nearly unlimited capacity for selves to intervene in the goings-on of the natural world - p480
  

Absential ~ figure / background

• A counterintuitive figure/background reversal, focusing on what is absent rather than present, offers a means to repair some of the serious inadequacies in our conceptions of matter, order, life, work, information, representation, and even consciousness and conceptions of value - p44
  

Absential ~ Information

• Information is the archetypical absential concept - p373
  
• The importance of physical regularity to the analysis of information is that it is ultimately what enables absence to matter - p376
  
• As we have repeatedly argued, regularity is the expression of constraint, and it is with respect to some constraint on variety that something absent or deviant can stand out. This absence or deviance is ultimately what is conveyed - p377
  
• Shannon's analysis of information capacity provides another example of the critical role of absence - p379
  
• Because of this explicit physical constraint, even the absence of any change of signal entropy can provide referential information p 387 << Much discussion on the absential follows
  
• The informative power of absence is one of the clearest indications that Shannon information and referential information are not equivalent - p 387
  
• This combination of absence and necessary relevance to an asymmetric process, incessantly interacting with and modifying the world, is what projects the property of information into otherwise merely physical states and events - p417
  
• These absences embody, in the negative, the constraints imposed on the physical substrates of signals, thoughts, and communications which can be transferred from one substrate to another, and which thereby play efficacious roles in the world as inherited constraints on what tends to occur, rather than acting as pushes or pulls forcing events in one direction or another - p419
  

Absential ~ Non-absential

• Many scholars now believe that developing a science capable of accurately characterizing complex self-organizing phenomena will be sufficient to finally describe organic and mental relationships in entirely non-absential terms - p5
  
• absential features must, by definition, be treated as epiphenomenal glosses that need to be reduced to specific physical substrates or else excluded from the analysis - p5.
  
• Simply asserting this necessary unity-that an observing subject must be a physical system with a self-referential character-avoids the implicit absurdity of denying absential phenomena, and yet it defines them out of existence. We seem to still be living in the shadow of Descartes - p6
  

Absential ~ Purpose

• The most characteristic and developed exemplar of an absential relationship is purpose - p24
  
• purpose is more complex than other absential relationships because other forms of absential relationship are implicit in the concept of purpose - p24
  

Absential ~ Reduction

• Absence has no components, and so it can't be reduced or eliminated - p204
  

Absential ~ Teleodynamics

• So, in effect, each is the expression of a form of higher-order absence generated by relationships between lower-order absences. This doubly negative, doubly absential character of teleodynamic processes is almost certainly one reason that we find them so mechanistically counterintuitive - p323
  

Absential ~ Value

• It's time to recognize that there is room for meaning, purpose, and value in the fabric of physical explanations, because these phenomena effectively occupy the absences that differentiate and interrelate the world that is physically present - p541
  
• If quantum physicists can learn to become comfortable with the material causal consequences of the superposition of alternate, as-yet-unrealized states of matter, it shouldn't be too great a leap to begin to get comfortable with the superposition of the present and the absent in our functions, meanings, experiences, and values - p 544
  

Quotes

There is something not-there there.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 2). Norton. Kindle Edition.

I will refer to this as an absential feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth-just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 3). Norton. Kindle Edition.

A purpose not yet actualized, a quality of feeling, a functional value just discovered-these are not just superimposed probable physical relationships. They are each an intrinsically absent aspect of something present.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 3). Norton. Kindle Edition.

zero, I believe that I can demonstrate how a form of causality dependent on specifically absent features and unrealized potentials can be compatible with our best science.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 16). Norton. Kindle Edition.

The most characteristic and developed exemplar of an absential relationship is purpose.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 24). Norton. Kindle Edition.

In an important sense, purpose is more complex than other absential relationships because we find all other forms of absential relationship implicit in the concept of purpose. It is most commonly associated with a psychological state of acting or intending to act so as to potentially bring about the realization of a mentally represented goal. This not only involves an orientation toward a currently non-existing state of affairs, it assumes an explicit representation of that end, with respect to which actions may be organized. Also, the various actions and processes typically employed to achieve that goal function for the sake of it. Finally, the success or failure to achieve that goal has value because it is in some way relevant to the agency for the sake of which it is pursued. And all these features are contributors to the sentience of simple organisms and the conscious experience of thinking beings like ourselves.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (pp. 24-25). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Information is the archetypical absential concept.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 373). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Thus autonomy and agency, and their implicit teleology, and even the locus of subjectivity, can be given a concrete account. Paradoxically, however, by filling in the physical dynamics of this account, we end up with a non-material conception of organism and neurological self, and by extension, of subjective self as well: a self that is embodied by dynamical constraints. But constraints are the present signature of what is absent. So, surprisingly, this view of self shows it to be as non-material as Descartes might have imagined, and yet as physical, extended, and relevant to the causal scheme of things as is the hole at the hub of a wheel.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 484). Norton. Kindle Edition.

The universe is larger than just that which we can see, and touch, or manipulate with our hands or our cyclotrons. There is more here than stuff. There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff. And there is more than what is actual. There is what could be, what should be, what can't be, what is possible, and what is impossible.

Deacon, Terrence W. (2011-11-14). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (p. 544). Norton. Kindle Edition.

My thoughts

missing from inanimate/ inorganic

missing from organic /'selves'

missing from man-made

missing from man

discovered versus invented

absence makes the heart grow fonder

abence makes the mind go ponder