What is Information?
Consciousness integrates information. Nothing else!
In a moment of consciousness All of one’s historical information ( biological and social ), bodily sensation, and environmental information is integrated to a point, and life is no more than a procession of such points. So, what is this information, that we are entirely enmeshed in?
What is it’s source? Can we define it?
Some definitions:
Information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality. "Information" is a reifying of all the observed causal interactions between a given set of existents, and lacks independence from matter. The information a gene, quantum process etc. contains is not ontologically distinguishable from the structure of its components, so any realist account of biological occurrences must involve a substance, not a probability.— @Enrique
Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty; it answers the question of "What an entity is" and thus defines both its essence and the nature of its characteristics.[2][3] The concept of information has different meanings in different contexts.[4] Thus the concept becomes synonymous to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, education, knowledge, meaning, understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, proposition, representation, and entropy. - Wikipedia.
“ Information is distinctions” – @Frank
“The difference that makes a difference”, - Bateson
Some thoughts:
An information philosopher studies the origin and evolution of information structures, the foundations for all our ideas. - Information Philosopher
If we could paint all the information in the world grey, the earth would be a homogenous greyness all the way to the upper atmosphere, and nothing would be distinct. Everything would be the same greyness melding into everything else, and we could derive no information from it. The world would be a nothing, and there could be no consciousness.
If we could paint all the information in the universe grey, then the Universe would disappear into an informationless nothing. In a sense, the big bang is a story of information emergence and evolution. The perturbations of energy that @Gnomon calls Enformation ( energy + information ), is the basis of everything. These perturbations are information about a substance, and the way substances can interact depends upon the perturbations they posses. So, in a sense, when substances integrate, it is their information that integrates.
Everything that exists, exists as a body of evolving information, integrating more and more information into itself, and it all has its source in the distinction of one pattern against another, and through a process of placing every pattern into its rightful place to create an integrated whole pattern, a big picture consciousness emerges.
What are your thoughts, queries, arguments, definitions, and insights? It would be great to have a general understanding of information on this forum.
In a moment of consciousness All of one’s historical information ( biological and social ), bodily sensation, and environmental information is integrated to a point, and life is no more than a procession of such points. So, what is this information, that we are entirely enmeshed in?
What is it’s source? Can we define it?
Some definitions:
Information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality. "Information" is a reifying of all the observed causal interactions between a given set of existents, and lacks independence from matter. The information a gene, quantum process etc. contains is not ontologically distinguishable from the structure of its components, so any realist account of biological occurrences must involve a substance, not a probability.— @Enrique
Information can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty; it answers the question of "What an entity is" and thus defines both its essence and the nature of its characteristics.[2][3] The concept of information has different meanings in different contexts.[4] Thus the concept becomes synonymous to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, education, knowledge, meaning, understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, proposition, representation, and entropy. - Wikipedia.
“ Information is distinctions” – @Frank
“The difference that makes a difference”, - Bateson
Some thoughts:
An information philosopher studies the origin and evolution of information structures, the foundations for all our ideas. - Information Philosopher
If we could paint all the information in the world grey, the earth would be a homogenous greyness all the way to the upper atmosphere, and nothing would be distinct. Everything would be the same greyness melding into everything else, and we could derive no information from it. The world would be a nothing, and there could be no consciousness.
If we could paint all the information in the universe grey, then the Universe would disappear into an informationless nothing. In a sense, the big bang is a story of information emergence and evolution. The perturbations of energy that @Gnomon calls Enformation ( energy + information ), is the basis of everything. These perturbations are information about a substance, and the way substances can interact depends upon the perturbations they posses. So, in a sense, when substances integrate, it is their information that integrates.
Everything that exists, exists as a body of evolving information, integrating more and more information into itself, and it all has its source in the distinction of one pattern against another, and through a process of placing every pattern into its rightful place to create an integrated whole pattern, a big picture consciousness emerges.
What are your thoughts, queries, arguments, definitions, and insights? It would be great to have a general understanding of information on this forum.
Comments (973)
I wanna say information is not a quality of an object but depends on an interaction; so, the way a satellite orbiting the Earth "experiences" Earth is different from the way the moon experiences Earth. A particular interaction reveals only a particular amount of the total information that could be given by an object (which would be contained in the totality of its interactions - information is a quality of an interaction and not a quality of a single object).
Edit: an object does not have information; an interaction does have information.
This sounds like it says something useful, but consider:
How is this question - entierly sans information - different? What is "information" doing in that paragraph?
there is reality, which is a pattern and the mind makes a map of that pattern, which is a reduced version of the pattern used to avoid pain and attain pleasure.
it uses association to connect things.
language is nothing but association.
math is nothing but a map of the territory.
Check this. Imagine two objects, object A and object B. In the absence of object B, object A behaves in a particular way; let's call it the a state of object A - A(a). In the presence of object B (and assuming A and B interact), object A behaves in a distinct way; the a' state of object A - A(a'). The same goes for object B in the absence and presence of object A. However, object A in its a state will affect object B differently to its effect on B when in the a' state; that is,
A(a) -------> B != A(a') -------> B [the effect of A(a) on B is not the same as the effect of A(a') on B - and the system evolves due to the feedback loop that arises from the interaction between A and B].
Information is stored in this feedback loop.
I think what you are talking about is transmitted information? The only way for us to know a substance is through the information the substance possesses. The perturbations a substance possesses, its shape and size, texture, colour , smell, etc is information, and this gets transmitted to us via frequencies of light as sight, or discreet molecules as smell, etc.
Quoting Daniel
Unfortunately I don't understand the notation. I would say the qualities a substance possesses ( information ) interact with the qualities another substance possesses. A sponge interacting with water would soak up the water, whilst a rock interacting with water would sink to the bottom. So it's the qualities that interact and integrate.
If you are saying that in the absence of an interaction, information is irrelevant, then I would agree.
I feel similarly. It is the primal stuff, as a co-element of any stuff. But it is so hard to pin down. If you have a simple definition I would be interested to hear it?
I would have said everything is information, rather then nothing.
Information makes it all possible. Your version provides no reason. As a singular substance, nothing would be possible. But as distinct quantities with their own qualities interacting and integrating and evolving, something is possible.
The perturbations of a substance is "information" about it. It is these perturbations of various substances that are interacting, imo, and causing things to be. This extends to neurobiology where, I believe, every thought has its neural correlate, which I take to be some physical pattern.
It should be recognized that consciousness is not merely a product of complexity but also the kind of substance. A huge ball of yarn will never produce consciousness no matter how complex it is, and it is my opinion that action potentials/synapses alone won't either, and neither will inorganically organized atoms. It is only very specific molecular assemblages existing within a particularly concentrated electromagnetic field and welded together by electric charge that give rise to consciousness in matter as we presently know it.
This does not necessarily preclude universal consciousness, but it must be made of a different substance than those we have thus far classified. Hylomorphism: matter and form are codependent while constituting information. Form as the relationship between particulars is not exclusively responsible for function.
Reality contains patterns and connections and cause & effect. You can interpret that as "information" if you want but it's not.
"Information" is just a word that stands for parts of reality the mind uses to create a map then used to avoid pain and attain pleasure.
The simplest is what we call data. The origin of data is information. It's what differentiates something from empty space upon experience. I think people are a type of animal that have the capacity to reflect this "thing" and it takes the form of a metaphysical object that itself can be manipulated. We can record or imagine data.
The shape that things take.
On further consideration, you are correct, strictly speaking, the message ( transmission ) contains the information that we receive, and it is likely to be lossy ( Shannon entropy ). But the transmission contains data not of the message, but of an object. We are conscious of the object described in the message, but the message itself is normally subconscious.
Information is a very broad concept. What I'm focusing on is how the form of an object ( in it's widest sense ) informs the message, which in turn informs neurobiology. Thus a pattern of data is physically transformed from object, to wavelengths of light, to be sensed, and ultimately causes a particular form in mind, in accordance with neuroplasticity.
I mostly agree with your statement, but what is the evolutionary path, and underlying mechanism that causes this to be so?
Patterns are eternal
Form, in its broadest sense, is what interacts. Function follows form.
When one Wavicle interacts with another, their information ( frequency and amplitude ) integrates to create a resultant Wavicle. The resultant Wavicle in its form ( frequency and amplitude ) memorizes the interaction. This being a fundamental interaction is present in everything subsequent to it, as the basis of everything subsequent to it.
Quoting hope
What are patterns?
Is a black hole a paradox?
In Hawking's original formulation of his radiation process, that radiation carried no information away with it. But as the black hole emits radiation, it evaporates, eventually disappearing altogether — hence the so-called black hole information paradox. - Google.
What are your thougts?
I'm not sure I follow. Can you elaborate please?
Eh just a longtime fan of the old adage that is "when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth"
See. Take you. Why are you not sure you follow as opposed to simply dismissing my post as incoherent nonsense, which if so I appreciate your courtesy in not mentioning so. I've given you not information, but a request for information, that actually makes you seek the information you were already seeking, just in different places. Tricky, eh?
Unique arrangements of substance.
Shannon's information theory raises a similar, perhaps the same, issue. Roughly, the information that is understood, that gets through, is already established information. The information that does not get through, is the entropy of the message. This is the new information that has not been understood but is potentially the most valuable part of the message ** as it provides new information.
Sounds like "form" to me.
The only thing that exists is patterns of substance.
Humans don't exist.
I think so, but I'm not at all certain, so am looking for counterarguments.
What exists is the evolution of informational structure, and humanity is the ultimate example of this.
There is no information, only various amounts of complexity.
I don't want to derail your thread, but exploring that would be a good way to get a grasp of what physicists mean by information. Do you want to go in that direction?
If we can capture that complexity in a singular concept such as information, then we can deal with the enormous complexity quite simply.
Sure. But I am only vaguely familiar with it, so will be relying on you to explain it.
Since Claude Shannon formulated his definition of "Information" as an empty mathematical vessel for carrying meaning from one point to another -- specifically over telephone wires -- its practical utility has been exploited in a thousand ways. It has even transformed the discipline of Physics, from manipulating matter (mechanics, Chemistry, atoms) to manipulating abstract Ideas (relativity, statistics, fields). And IT (information technology) has revolutionized both Science and Philosophy.
Formerly, "Information" was simply loosely defined as "mind stuff", and associated with metaphysical Consciousness, Minds, and Souls. It was the intangible (and passive) stuff that life-risking spies could carry in their minds, or on bits of paper, or on magnetic tape. But now it is known to be an active agent in the real physical world. That's why I coined the neologism "EnFormAction" (EFA) to combine its activity (Energy) with its products (Matter & Mind). Plato's "Forms" were merely abstract Ideas (theoretical designs) that could be trans-formed into the en-formed stuff that our physical senses detect. Forms are merely Potential, but en-formed things are Actual (acted upon). As Pop summarized, "every Thing is information". Yet, every Idea about things, or possible things, is also information.
According to Einstein's definition of Energy (E=MC^2), that immaterial power-to-en-form is what gives physical form to the real stuff (matter) that we interact with in the world. In its dynamic/active form, Energy (EFA) is merely invisible & intangible Potential (a possible but not actual thing). But in its stable/passive form, EFA is the tangible massive matter that we know as Reality. With Einstein's equation in mind -- where C is the speed-limit of light -- I like to think of Matter as slowed-down light vibrations, compressed into the sedate wave-forms we know as physical substance. In other words, as mass-less Light decelerates from its max-velocity in a vacuum, it condenses into various forms of massive Matter. This is an oversimplification of course, but useful as a way to understand the relationship between Light (the essence of Energy) and Matter (the substance of Energy).
But, what about Information as the essence of Mind? If it's true, as Pop says, that "information is everything", as a corollary, we could also say that everything is Mind. For some people that notion makes sense. But for others, it violates the basic premise of secular Materialism. That's because it seems to support the ancient worldview of Panpsychism, and even Pantheism. The latter has been explained in the concept that our Real World is actually an idea in the Mind of God (Idealism). So, I think Shannon, as a pragmatic engineer, would be surprised at the novel forms that have evolved from his revival of a old worn-out word -- for the metaphysical contents of human minds -- applied to the mundane physical problem of traffic jams on phone wires. That technical term has subsequently ramified into an all-encompassing concept of both Reality and Ideality. :nerd:
Everything is Information :
Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfQ2r0zvyoA
Information is Everything :
We are now living in the information age and physicists are now wondering whether the universe must be seen as a kind of super computer or large information system.
https://hagedoorn.org/en/everything-is-information/
Information :
The English word "Information" apparently derives from the Latin stem (information-) of the nominative (informatio): this noun derives from the verb ?nf?rm?re (to inform) in the sense of "to give form to the mind",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Pantheism :
At its most general, pantheism may be understood positively as the view that God is identical with the cosmos, the view that there exists nothing which is outside of God, or else negatively as the rejection of any view that considers God as distinct from the universe.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” ? Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Note : To enform via direct acts is to create or to organize. To enform via natural laws is self-organization or evolution
"Information" is anything that helps the mind make its map of the territory.
It's relative to what the mind needs. It has no actual existence.
Ok. It will be this coming week. It's the same thing we've been talking about: why a thing is this, and not that. :nerd:
Awesome!
I would assume that all thoughts have their neural correlates. So the map of the territory is a physical pattern that exists in a brain. The source of this patterning is an external world. So, the form of an external world causes neural patterning, which becomes our consciousness.
Correlation is not causation.
There's a bottle that is, by all widely accepted views green, that happens to sit in a room you've yet to enter. One man informs you the bottle in the room is green. Another tells you it is blue. And still another tells you there is no bottle whatsoever. Are these not all bits of information? When you enter the room and confirm whether said bottle is green, blue, or even existent for that matter, does that change? Why?
If function follows form, there is a causality at play.
You don't elaborate much so I have to guess what you mean precisely but I think we are roughly on the same page.
Neither mind nor brain follow each other. They happen at the same time.
Experience. We trust in experience above all other information?
Notice the similarity between information and god?
Are you are inventing a new theology?
Arguably correcting one.
Ha, Ha. It does seem a little like that. But I am describing something physical.
Some of it's information about the other room and some is imagined. One or more is inaccurate. When I enter the room I make my own assessment and compare notes. The part that doesn't change probably isn't imaginary.
Yes, Information is something irreducible, and ultimate. Rather godlike, but entirely physical, for a monist at least.
I don't think so . I think there is a causal process that makes information integrate that is external to brains, that ultimately crates brains, that is itself a mind. I'm thinking of the anthropic principle - the integrated laws of the universe causing information to integrate.
Without getting into QM, etc. I think you are agreeing that the integrated laws of nature do that.
Quoting Pop
That makes me nervous. I'm not sure you are.
Quoting Pop
That is more theology than physics.
Complexity is eternal, and eternally changing.
That is a quote from Wikipedia. Your argument is with them!
But not prior to the big bang. Complexity starts after the big bang.
Complexity cannot 'start'.
That is magical thinking, a fantasy. illogical.
But you chose the quote, so presumably you think it has some merit. What I am pointing to is the capacity for this thread to be nonsense disguised as physics.
You're making a fool of yourself. Please continue.
But does it have to be imagined? Perhaps the person who describes the bottle in the room as blue did in fact see a blue bottle in the room that was subsequently replaced with the green bottle the first man saw? Perhaps he has some odd eye condition or whatever that made him simply see it as blue. Perhaps when the third man came in a fairy showed up and rendered the bottle invisible leaving him no other choice but to say "there was no bottle in the room"?
Right. So it seems information is not information unless it conforms to an observable and generally accepted consensus, which relies on our own senses or rather trust in them. But it was, everything, even assuming they were complete lies, were equally information until investigated. So does that mean information not personally confirmed are but clues? Lies? Possibilities? Relative?
Meanwhile, you remain a prince and a scholar. By putting down someone who by your own assertion is unintelligent. You poor bastard.
You better cling to your atheism and suckle at its bosom. It's all you'll have left, and even that will be gone when you need it most.
For the record I'm not a fan of Banno either. My point has receded. Is this the short story page?
Quoting Outlander Then, an explanation of an eye condition was needed to account for the difference.Quoting Outlander Yes, information is subject to error when it is human knowledge. Quoting Outlander I don't see how the confusion persists. I'm not trying to evade any example but they seem consistent with my account. Did I miss a chance to be confused?
That is your opinion, which you are entitled to. But If you are going to meaningfully engage with the thread then please point out the arguments and logic that are flawed, and specify in detail why. That sort of engagement would be valuable. I kind of have an intuition about this. It is far from being a fixed, and established ideology in my mind, but is on its way there. So I would value some substantive counterarguments.
Are you denying the big bang?
This reminds me of the Chinese whisper? But I'm still not sure what your point is?
For the laypersons reading which does not exclude myself, let's see if we can simplify things. This is your "account"
Quoting Cheshire
Your assertion that the definition of information seems to be that which "probably isn't imaginary" that's great. Who knows, maybe Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny "probably isn't imaginary". I mean, we see them every holiday. And that's when the legends say they show up. So, you see what I'm insinuating logically.
1.The opening paragraph is at best dubious, perhaps nonsense.
2. The posited definitions are ambiguous
3. Much of the discussion that follows is unverifiable, metaphysical meandering.
Here, have a look at Stanford. It might help you keep the thread on the path of reason.
Specific reasons?
Quoting Banno
Specific reasons?
Quoting Banno
Specific reasons. pick an example state your reasons, and we can take it from there.
It doesn't tell us anything.
Quoting Pop
What does that mean?
Ok, so, can we agree that information is "an idea that can be conveyed that may or may not be subject to error"? aka flat out wrong?
basically a flat out lie is information, though wrong, remains equal with an absolute accurate account? alongside a deeply held belief of something that just so happens to be wrong?
Informational structure goes all the way down. Assuming electromagnetism is the fundamental substance, then a Wavicle is the finest grain of reality. When two Wavicles integrate, it is their information ( frequency and amplitude ) that is combined. This Wavicular combination continues until the energy density becomes an elementary particle. The elementary particles combine to form atoms, atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form proteins, proteins combine to form cellular structure, on, and on. What is combining is the form of one substance with another - so it is information that is combining. We evolve as an informational structure. This is also true for all our social history, where experience creates informational structure as per neuroplasticity. Environmental data has its neural correlates. So, a moment of consciousness is created when all of this information comes to a point.
In the end Consciousness = integrated information
Quoting Outlander Equal in the sense of a subjective experience. Absolute accurate account should correspond to some state of affairs if it's indeed absolutely accurate. We don't place the same value on both types for obvious reasons. But, if information is an unknown error, then it is experienced like information that is accurate by definition.
I think there may be a speculative sense of information that directs space and matter apart from our observations of it. But, generally people talk about information as in the sense of human knowledge.
:up:
I'm not buying into that. It's a mess. It's not physics, and it's not philosophy. It's nearest parallel is theology.
This is what happens when engineers try to do metaphysics.
I'd be careful with this whole information-centric approach. It's often not clear what is meant as it is used in a technical manner in engineering then borrowed to biology and physics.
The problem is that it can lead one to think that the world is literally "informed". But to be informed and to have information is something people do, not objects. Unless you are of the persuasion that objects have some kind of mind that processes information.
And if objects literally process information, then we have a bunch of intelligence all around us.
I think a more neutral term would be helpful.
I think you've got a pretty good understanding of generic information. I did a thread once on semantic information. To compare:
"Semantic information may or may not be linguistic. A picture in a manual is information if it has well-formed, meaningful data.
Well-formed means the data follows the rules of a certain domain. This is syntax. An example of syntax is the rules of movie making. An old Hollywood movie conveys information according to a well known set of rules, such as that the camera is supposed to be perpendicular to the plane of action.
A director may break this syntactic rule, but she risks diminishing the meaningfulness of the movie.
So meaning comes last. The well-formed data has to adhere to meanings associated with the structures created by the presentation. So the good guy in a Hollywood movie is supposed to win in the end. If a director breaks this rule, the audience may be left uncertain, befuddled, and possibly violent."
"So the general definition of information (GDI) is:
information is data plus meaning
Semantic information is made of data, and diaphoric definition of data (DDD) is:
A datum is a putative fact regarding some difference or lack of uniformity within some context.
This definition can be further analyzed. The first component is data de re. This entity is a product of inference. We see ourselves as information systems. This implies an external source for the ground of experience. So we're talking about proto-epistemic data which we think of as a lack of uniformity. We can't give an example of this kind of data because it's uninterpreted."
There is a way to understand things that leads to this conclusion, namely Panpsychism.
The evolution of informational structure might be a way to understand how inanimate matter could become animated.
Initially, before neurons, information was memorized in the form of things. DNA is an example of this. It is data / code as physical structure.
I'm quite familiar with panpsychism. It's a natural alternative that may be intuitive depending on how it's articulated.
You don't even need information to articulate pansychism, all you need is experience.
But that's just the thing, do things like "code" and "data" accurately capture what is actually happening in the world? A person can crack a code, build a code or get lost in code. As for data, that might be less problematic as it seems more neutral to me.
Still you need to say for something to be data it needs to be data for someone.
I know. This road can lead people into saying things like "atoms" or "particles" don't exist because we named them this way, but I don't suscribe to linguistic idealism per se. I don't think the names we give to things in nature brings things into existence.
But approaches that are laden with extremely human centric concepts like "information", "code", "processing" are problematic in a way that "particles" or "DNA" are not.
At least that's my feel of the topic.
Is this the product of determining the standards for utterance? The posters account is in English and follows a consistent theme. Faking bewilderment to prove a point and creating it to sell one seems dubious.
Quoting Manuel
Yep.
There's too much room here for equivocation, for jumping to grand solutions from far too little evidence. The need is to tighten the discussion.
Yep.
But it's become a big industry in pop-science books, like Davies'The Demon in the Machine, Gleick's The Information or Loewenstein Physics in Mind and many others.
It seems to me to be very dubious, taking concepts from less well formed sciences and incorporating them into fundamental physics to then explain mental processes.
Quoting frank
What is meaning in this context? If it is understood, it is meaningful? And understood would imply it fits already established informational structure. Like in constructivism, If it does not fit established informational structure ( knowledge ), it can not be understood, and so is meaningless.
That's in the previous post. :up:
So it holds up pretty well. No substantive counterarguments thus far.
That would be how information integrates in mind. What makes information integrate generally is the big question?
And it is difficult, and counterintuitive. Consider this, from the previously cited SEP article:
Information is mercuric. Reaching conclusions too soon is fraught with potential for error.
But this thread is for acts of faith, it seems.
Hey, Pop and I are talking about semantic information with a plan to discuss the black hole information paradox next week.
Could you two either contribute to the discussion or take your moaning somewhere else?
Quoting Pop
Yes again. But, I could be wrong.
I'll let others contribute to what may be valuable information...
Where in this statement is there an invite for unreasoned derision?
Reasoned argument is always welcome. Much has been stated, there is plenty of meat to work on.
Semantic information? Or just the information associated with an organism's environment? @Isaac is familiar with some of the theories about how that happens. One is that attention creates a grand central station where integration takes place.
I found an article online by a biological theorist, Marcello Barbieri,What is information?
It starts off with:
The advantage of this approach is that it specifies the definition of 'information' with respect to a definite subject matter, namely, biology. It is well worth reading this article. This author is a pioneer of what he has called 'code biology' which develops from that understanding of DNA as a code. The sense in which DNA encodes and transmits information is fundamental in this article.
Otherwise, saying 'everything is information' means very little in my opinion. Something which explains everything, explains nothing, because it's too general to be meaningful. And 'everything is information' fails for that reason.
I suspect that a lot of this talk goes back to the celebrated exclamation of pioneering information technology theorist Norbert Weiner, who said in his seminal book Cybernetics, that 'information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day'. Great! said some. 'Let's not talk about matter~energy any more! Let's talk about "information"! Then we'll survive in the present day!' But as said above, the problem is that it's too general to be meaningul. At least matter or matter-energy can be defined within a range by physics. The term 'information' is polysemic, meaning it has many different definitions in different contexts. So saying that 'everything is information' is not a meaningful statement, in my view.
Information isn't an explanation. It's an observation. The universe is not uniform.
That would be news to the OP:
Quoting Pop
Yeah, everything is a self organizing system. And the thing being organized is information.
Or is it that a universe characterized by disuniformity gives us stars and planets and the potential for consciousness?
I did comment on this earlier.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yet everything is information, from an idealistic perspective. Consciousness has an ability to grey out certain information, to focus on specific information. As stated earlier, If we could grey out all information, nothing would be distinct, there would be no consciousness.
I am mindful of what you are saying, and admit there are pros and cons to this approach, but given the information on hand, this is a way towards an understanding.
I am also mindful that this might present a threat to those whos epistemic stance is one of no understanding.
I think what you're referring to here is the faculty of judgement. That is the faculty that synthesises sensory data into judgements, including elementary judgements - 'is' 'is not' 'is the same as' 'is different to' and so on. The mind is doing this all of the time - the brain with its billions of neural connections is like a vast Virtual Reality synthesizer that works to create the unified sense of self. But the question arises, what is the faculty that is performing that? There seems to be an ordering principle at work. And I don't know if that faculty can be understood in terms of 'information' or whether it exists on another level altogether. Analogously, it might be compared to the operating system of a computer, which sorts and indexes all the data in the disk storage. So there's the data, the binary code that contains the information, but the contains the instructions how to process and present that data. That seems analogous to how the mind operates (although I'm mindful of the limitations of comparing minds and computers).
Wiener and those other pioneers in information technology, were dealing specifically with information systems, and encoding and transmitting information across various forms of media. And that's all great work, and one of the reasons why we have access to such incredible technology nowadays. They were brilliant scientists. So naturally in those disciplines they're dealing with the means by which information can be stored, transmitted, and so on, which can be used for any kind of subject matter, and which also suggests many metaphors for the way reasoning, thinking and biology is organised. But it's still a leap from there to the claim that 'everything is information' in a metaphysical sense, as if in itself this idea comprises a grand philosophical synthesis. It's part of the picture, but not the whole picture.
Also note this source that was linked a few years back by @Galuchat Philosophy of Information Handbook.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15249-0.pdf
Is a good primer for any interested.
What integrates the information In mind and everywhere else, is the big question? I think it is the anthropic principle. In certain ordered pockets of the universe the combined laws of nature are already integrated, forcing everything to self organize, forcing all the distinctive matter to integrate as best it can.
It is a way to understand how a ribosome and RNA integrate in the cellular environment. If they are informational bodies that can only integrate with each other in a certain way and with nothing else, would explain the mind element that is missing from cellular biology.
Quoting Wayfarer
Philosophy of Information ( P.I ) is not well received in philosophical circles, reading between the lines ( SEP ), for this very reason, that it can in its own right narrate a grand synthesis.
As to whether you believe it or not, is up to you. :smile:
No problem. Hope you enjoy it.
Could you simplify that some? Aren't there multiple theories about how the brain integrates data?
Sure.
The headline is that the brain is hierarchical (in both structure and network relations) such that each cortex or cluster has, as it's data input, the ouput from those areas below it in the network. In this model integration is achieved hierarchically (the Markov Decision Process described), information is integrated in local models which produce discrete states to form part of a new level of information to be integrated by the model above. There's then a cascade of prediction flowing back down the hierarchy which filters and limits the outputs to give a less noisy feed. The working memory is the collection of regions responsible for both averaging output signals as they change over time (again, to reduce noise) and for developing policies which filter signals on the basis or prior predictions as to the cause of the signal.
So for eyes - you might get a load of light and dark receptors fire, they're modelled as being the result of some shape (light space, dark space not randomly distributed) so receptor signals not conforming to this prediction are suppressed, to reduce noise and these might then be sufficient to fire models for 'edges' - more feedback suppression, signal sent forward (skip a few dozen steps, you get the picture). We might eventually have 'car' being suggested from the Visuo-spatial sketchpad, and also 'car' from the Phonological loop (audio data).
Trouble is, these won't arrive at the same time, but that's OK because within milliseconds the working memory is suppressing the early signals using it's prediction of 'car' giving a uniform signal to feedback. The part of the WM that does this is called the episodic buffer, but it's not one brain region, it's several. Once the working memory has got 'car' it'll send that signal back through the whole cascade to inform the priors what to expect. Eventually motor movements (in this case saccades) are initiated on the basis of that expectation to focus attention on the areas of sensory input most likely to confirm the 'car' hypothesis.
Some models include a central executive (again, a cluster of regions, not one brain area), but Friston's model doesn't need one (one advantage of it) because the hierarchical structure doesn't require any further integration. There's never, as far as I know, been a hold account of how a central executive might work, and in fact it fell out of favour round about the time computational neuroscience matured Enoch to model hierarchical networks.
There are, as you say, other theories, but I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with them to give a good account.
Tononi has written a good summary in https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/comments/S1364-6613(98)01259-5, but it's payalled (I don't know if you'd have access).
Tononi's abstract:
"The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts."
Glad you found it interesting.
Our physical Senses are able to detect Information (meaning) only in its "entangled" or embodied physical form. But human Reason is able to detect Information in metaphysical (disembodied) form (ideas; meanings). Like Energy, Information is always on the move, transforming from one form to another. Likewise, Energy is only detectable by our senses when it is in the form of Matter. For example, Light (photons; EM field) is invisible until it is transformed into some physical substance, such as the visual purple in the eye.
However, since Information/Energy can exist in both forms, physical (actual) and metaphysical (potential), it transcends those dualistic (either-or) categories into the monistic (both-and) class of Universality. :nerd:
No. It's Epistemology, and Ontology -- hence, appropriate for a Philosophy Forum. Your comments might be more appropriate on a Physics Forum.:smile:
I'm trying to understand your meaning of the word 'integrate'.
Quoting Pop
Do you mean processes? Or combines/mixes? Some dynamic process?Quoting Pop
This didn't help. Do you mean information can be focused?
Is it mathematical like a calculation, dynamic process, or changing state?
I've read through most of the comments into the fourth page and I'm not getting it by the context. It just reduces to techno jargon to me.
And why does every 'thing' need to irreducibly contain information? So would you say something elementary like a hydrogen atom has some information pixies hanging about. How does that work. Why not make it easy on yourself and identify it as a hydrogen atom, period.
The confusion arises because metaphysics, and hence the natural sciences, must work their way to an answer by the logical structure of a dichotomy. The world must be broken into its complementary aspects.
The popular notion of information is that it is all about messages that convey meanings. Symbols that can be read. So Shannon's big step to a foundational model of information was to make the basic dichotomous distinction between signal and noise. Given some collection of material events - like crackles on a telephone line - what would we characterise as noise just because it was perfectly random as a pattern, and what would we characterise as signal because it was so clearly deliberate and intentional in its structure?
It was a short step from that to a view of information that was simply about the measurement of an environment's total capacity to be marked by discrete or atomistic events. The question was how many definite symbols could some physical system contain - how many binary 1s vs 0s - regardless of whether any meaning (or act of interpretation) was actually attached to such a mark. All marks just became treated as countable noise.
And that turned out to be its own deep question. Quantum theory showed that the classical physical realm had strict "holographic" limits to its carrying capacity. A volume of spacetime contained a finite number of countable degrees of freedom because every physical event or putative mark became a fuzzy uncertainty at the Planck scale. The logical question - "are you a 1 or a 0?" - became impossible to answer past a quantum limit.
So that is all very exciting from the natural science point of view. The whole of physics could be rebuilt on a metaphysics of marks - the smallest scale of definite events or countable degrees of freedom. It was a way to both recognise the underlying quantum nature of existence, and yet also apply the constraints of an emergent classical picture where reality is formed by a material capacity to ask the critical question of a spatiotemporal location - "are you a 1 or a 0?"
You will note how this rather turns the metaphysics of physics on its head, treating the existence of reality as a matter of inquiry. Can even the Universe be certain a binary question has a concrete answer? Well the Planck scale tells us where the countability of nature starts.
And of course, thermodynamics and entropy theory had arrived at the same equations for the same essential reason. The quantum limit of certainty was also the quantum limit of uncertainty, or disorder. So information and entropy were two ways of describing the same general thing.
Physics thus steered talk about information in the direction of talk about marks that were meaningless - or at least meaningful only in the simplest possible way. It developed the information theoretic framework which could measure the Cosmos's raw capacity for definite events - the pure dichotomy of particle and void, a happening or its absence.
And that both avoids the usual popular notion of information as physical marks that have some meaningful message - to an organism or mind - and also paves the way to a scientific account of meaning-making or higher level semiosis. If you have a clear and measurable definition of noise, then you can start to build a matching theory about signals and their interpretation - or organisms and their use of codes.
That is where cybernetics started to make its contribution - Gregory Bateson definition of information as "a difference that makes a difference". And biology generally is showing how organisms are semiotic - Peircean systems of interpretance.
So physics is being revolutionised by just asking the simple question of how does a reality based on quantum uncertainty even start to be organised enough to be considered a play of distinct marks.
This is a view of information that leaves out any receiver of the information. It is moot whether an event or degree of freedom is considered to be random noise or orderly signal as there is no higher meaning or symbolism being attached to the mark. The first step is just to discover the foundational thing of a counterfactual - the starting point of it being even meaningful to ask of anything: "are you a 1 or a 0? A presence or an absence? A something or a nothing?"
And then we can start to build towards a science of semiotics, a science of organismic meaning. This brings us to new basic principles like the epistemic cut, modelling relation, and other elements of biosemiotic theory.
We can recover the other sense of information as not just about countable physical differences, but differences that make a difference to someone as they are symbols being read as part of an exchange of messages.
So the natural sciences might seem to be confused about "information" as a physicalist notion. But in fact, they are breaking things down to be both far more simple, and far more complex, than the general folk notions of what "information" might mean.
Quoting Pop
... and what the natural sciences can carefully tease apart, folk metaphysics will gleefully smush back into ugly confusion.
Noise was a known problem before Shannon because their technology was analog. It was basically a mass of transmitters and receivers sprawled across the continent. There were all sorts of ways to suppress noise but in the real world there were too many variables to approach the problem purely logically. Enter Shannon.
I myself wasn't saying that natural science was confused about this notion, but that the effort to understand everything in terms of information, as given in the original post, is too general to be meaningful. (But I'm hoping that my attempt to analyse it might be useful from the perspective of constructive criticism, I'm not just trying to throw stones.)
I think the two paragraphs under 'Some definitions' are confused.
Quoting Pop
What i think this is saying is that the mind generates a 'modeling perspective' which interprets the relations between physical entities, and that the ability to do this is something distinct to humans.
But then:
Quoting Pop
So here I think the attempt is to avoid a dualism of mind and matter by saying that this modeling perspective doesn't exist separately from the material domain - ' The information a gene, quantum process etc. contains is not ontologically distinguishable from the structure of its components.'
But I think underlying this attempt is the assumption that material substance, or the domain of objects presented in everyday experience, is fundamentally real. So it's wanting to preserve a realist metaphysics, which can't help but be question-begging, because it's the very nature of the objective domain for which an explanation is being sought.
(The Wikipedia article on 'information' to which this passage links is not all that clear. If you look at the discussion on the 'talk' page of the article, you'll see that there has been some argument about the content of that article, which turns into a kind of index of different meanings of 'information' in various contexts.)
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but there's that well-known quote from John Wheeler:
He doesn't seem to want to go full idealist, but it's hard to avoid. Article goes on:
Sounds an awful lot like 'mind' to me.
Quoting frank
Right. And Claude Shannon was an electronics engineer, dealing with a specific form of information, namely, information being transmitted across media. i don't know if he was at all concerned with 'information' as an abstract concept was he? I found this amusing anecdote somewhere on the Web:
There is a purported analysis of this here http://www.eoht.info/page/Neumann-Shannon%20anecdote
This whole subject is so ripe with metaphor and suggestion that you can get almost anything out of it.
It is logical. If we are to know about it, it will be via information of it. This is the simple reality.
Everything is information. You can negate ( Popper ) this statement by providing something that is not information! Don't do this at home, it is not logically possible. :smile:
It follows information is a co-element of any substance.
Quantum Information and Randomness
Once we start to describe a substance, we start describing its form , whether it be chemical, electrical, physical, etc. The way the form of a substance connects with its surroundings, is information of how substances are connected. So there is a lateral informational flow, of substance and it's surroundings, contained within our personal perspective of the object / substance. In the end everything is connected via information.
The information he was dealing with was a mixture of voice and carrier frequency. From his angle it was pretty abstract. He was a mathematician. Back then if you had a bachelor's degree in electronics, you knew everything there was to know about it. It was common for people to have multiple degrees with electronics engineering being one of them.
But he wasn’t a philosopher. He was concerned with abstraction for practical reasons.
As I understand it, initially Shannon called it a theory of communication.
Sure. This topic is on the border of science and philosophy of science.
And metaphysics.
I guess.
"In this regard, in 1999, one of us (A.Z.) has put forward an idea which connects the concept of information with the notion of elementary systems. For the subsequent line of thought, we first have to make ourselves awareof the fact that our description of the physical world is represented by propositions, i.e. by logical statements about it. These propositions concern classical measurement results. Therefore, the measurement results must be irreducible primitives of any interpretation. And second, that we have knowledge or information about an object only through observations, i.e. by interrogating nature through yes-no questions.It does not make any sense to talk about reality without the INFORMATION about it." - Zeilinger
Sure. But analog signal filtering or analog computation are not revolutionary in the sense of achieving the kind of strict dichotomous separation I'm talking about.
A digital understanding of information turned both noise and signal into definite countable bits - binary degrees of freedom. And then having reduced everything to this same common ground - a mark could be a symbol for a noise, or a symbol for a signal - you could start to build your system back up from an absolutist stance.
Quoting Pop
So - what is the 'substance'? The passage you quote says 'It does not make any sense to talk about reality without the INFORMATION about it' - but this doesn't say anything about there being 'a substance'. Indeed it's the existence of an objectively existent substance which is called into question by quantum mechanics!
Quoting Pop
But I said that in that article, the precise meaning of 'information' is specified with reference to genetic inheritance and the transmission of hereditable traits. It's not a vague claim about 'everything being information'.
I have provided you with a negatable statement. Very simple to negate!
In the OP I quoted some definitions. Not my definitions. The purpose of the thread is to answer what is Information? I have my ideas, but I am willing to listen. Do you have a definition? When all things are considered a definition is a difficult thing to deduce.
Telecommunications transmission didn't become digital until the 1960s, so I assume you're using "digital" in a different way.
For a binary variable, there's a low amount of information. For a point in an analog waveform, there's a much more information because of the number of possibilities.
I'm agreeing that some kind of dualism is needed. And I'm saying science has gone down that road - on its way to the triadic systems view that makes sense of it all.
And I also agree @Pop is doing the opposite of conflating everything that ought to be kept separate. He is using the folk confusions over both quantum theory and information theory to make a simple-minded monist claim where information states = conscious states ... because "information integration", or "information parallelism", or whatever monist hand-waving confusion seems to serve the purpose.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again I agree. Materiality sans information dissolves into radical uncertainty, as quantum theory illustrates. We need to return to the original Aristotelean definition of substance as in-formed being - or fluctuation constrained.
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem with full idealism is that it is normally just an alternative form of monist substantialism. It is treating the mind as something physically real rather than our term for a systematic, and therefore irreducibly triadic, process.
So idealism is as bad as materialism to the degree it incorporates the idea that one kind of stuff explains things because that stuff happens to have, for some reason or other, substantial properties. Like either material reality, or mental reality.
In challenging hard materialism, quantum theory doesn't then force you to adopt hard idealism. Rather, it shows that reality emerges as an epistemic habit. And modern quantum interpretations - such as ones applying information theory - reflect that directly.
Reality is composed of the definite answers it can give to counterfactual questions. And two dichotomously opposed questions can't logically be asked of the one moment, or one event.
You can ask a particle about its location with infinite precision, but then that rules out asking about the other thing of its momentum.
You can ask a particle if it is still there or has decayed. But then the more frequently you check in to see, the less chance it has to in fact evaporate.
So good old fashioned substantial reality is formed by having this overlay of informational constraint on material uncertainty. And that means the ultimate Planckian grain of Being is based on this logical counterfactuality - the ability to ask the two contrasting questions that are needed to pin the truth of something elemental, like a particle, to some pair of definite measurements.
That's what I'm talking about.
Quoting Wayfarer
And it sounds an awful lot like semiotics, cybernetics, hierarchy theory, etc, to me.
Where you are saying it sounds like a justification for another kind of monist realism, I am saying, yep, that is exactly the kind of irreducibly complex triadic metaphysics that anyone actually wrestling with the problem of "the mind" has already arrived at.
Yep. The basic distinction goes back a few thousand years to when H.sap stopped counting in terms of "one, a few, a great many".
Are you familiar with IIT Theory? It seems not.
"According to the theory, just as the quantity of consciousness associated with a complex is determined by the amount of information that can be integrated among its elements, the quality of its consciousness is determined by the informational relationships that causally link its elements" - An information integration theory of consciousness
Very familiar.
Then what is this all about?
Quoting apokrisis
The statement “everything is information” is also applicable to you. If you cannot provide something that is not information, It follows, everything is information, including consciousness. Note the information in consciousness is integrated.
All you are demonstrating is that you don't understand your own sources.
Consciousness as a neural process is as much about differentiation as integration. So any simple claim about "quantities of information" is entirely missing the point.
That is why I prefer architectural approaches like Friston, Grossberg and Freeman (to name a few) that positively emphasise the brain's ability to ignore the world - to limit its "information". They get into what is going on at a deeper conceptual level.
Tononi isn't wrong. He just offers the shallow end of the pool story. ITT builds in the faulty psychology of Cartesian representationalism. And that is the bit you have picked up on and presented here.
So (Matter-Information)? That seems like a new kind of dualism. Are brains even required?
This is better:
Matter--->Brain(Information; the perception of matter).
What on earth are you talking about?
IIT is panpsychist. Mass - energy - information is the new way forward. :smile: The mass-energy-information equivalence principle
The familiar distinction between the old cogsci approach of the brain as a data display vs the embodied cognition approach where the brain is engaged in a pragmatic modelling relation with the world.
One is dualism rehashed. The other is a triadic systems paradigm.
Edit: Karl Popper.
Neither is IIT.
It is an integration of information. "What is information" is what this thread is supposed to be about.
Quoting Pop
That particular equivalence applies at the Planck scale. So it has nothing to do with the equivalence scale that actually matters for life and mind.
Biology begins at the nano-scale where there is a convergence of all the critical forms of energy that thus creates a "frictionless" mechanical switching of physical actions from one form to another.
Biology (and neurology) is about applying mechanical constraints on physical outcomes. This is why encoded information can have some effect on the world. And - fortuitously it seems - the world just happens to provide a second level where the equivalence principle can apply.
The Planck scale explains the existence of the Cosmos. The convergence of all classical forces at the nanoscale in tepid water is then a further remarkable foundation that accounts for how life and mind could arise as semiotic processes able to control material dynamics.
Phillips, R., & Quake, S. (2006). The Biological Frontier of Physics Physics Today 59
Quoting Pop
:lol:
I think we'll just have to put up with being bombarded by weird opinions and little curiosity.
Anyway, next week:. the holographic principle for dummies. :cool:
Are you saying that the Planck scale is irrelevant to life and mind? Did they just pop into existence separated from the foundations supporting them?
:up: Looking forward to it.
Straw man argument.
All of this is an expression of your consciousness. Note, it is vaguely integrated.
It is integrated information! :lol:
Straw man followed by plain silliness. Yet you seem to want to be taken seriously.
You provide me with expressions of your consciousness, that contain integrated information about it, whilst rubbishing me and IIT, all the while your expressions prove you wrong. You have got to laugh?
Then when you stop laughing, you have got to come on board. Information is the way to link things. Think about it.
There is a tendency to assume a particular qualitative structure of embodiment in any approach without specifying it - ie. acknowledging its limitations. The main difference between classical and quantum physics is this recognition that we’re approaching ‘information’ from the perspective of an observer-event, with which anyone must qualitatively align in order to make sense of the results.
This is most important when we talk about ‘information’, with its multiple ‘simplest’ forms, the most stable of which consists of three interrelated ‘events’, the least useful consisting of a paradoxical ‘relation’ of six-dimensional ‘meaningfulness’, and the most dynamic - and potentially confusing - a combination of ‘object’, ‘event’ and ‘potential’ (a differentiated triadic structure of 3-4-5).
The most difficult part about understanding ‘information’ I think is how we incorporate an awareness of our approach into this understanding. Even the question “what is information?” assumes a process of differentiating what it is from what it’s not, even though no answer can be given for “what is not information?”
Quoting Pop
Hold your horses - IIT is an interesting theoretical approach, but is firmly grounded in Cartesian dualism, and based on an assumption that it’s even possible to qualify consciousness as a consolidated event and then isolate it as a stable evaluation applicable to any interaction. But in reality, consciousness must be qualified differently for interactions between different systems. So there’s still a lot of work to do before one can even meaningfully ask ‘are you a 1 or a 0?’ of an event in relation to consciousness, even though IIT downplays this and carries on as if this value structure is real. It’s a placeholder that proponents of IIT have named and put their faith in, without evidence. As exciting as it may seem to throw your lot behind this idea (and you know I’ve explored this theory with enthusiasm), it’s still an empty promise...
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Because to identify it as “a hydrogen atom, period” would be inaccurate to a certain extent, if we’re being honest. A hydrogen atom doesn’t so much ‘contain’ as consist of information that is variable in a way that transcends its definition as such. This variability contributes to any interaction in a way that is not accounted for in its consolidation as a hydrogen atom. This indeterminate ‘difference that makes a difference’ to any interaction is what we’re referring to when we talk about ‘information’ in a ubiquitous sense. Most definitions of ‘information’ are qualified structures of this variability, such as Shannon information. Because unqualified information is random, meaningless ‘noise’.
:grimace: I don't understand this.
Quoting Possibility
"our model challenges prominent theories on philosophy of mind, which assume that consciousness is a continuous stream." - Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?
What do you think causes the information to integrate. You have described a process that might recognize a pattern and shunt it to an area that might symbolize it. But what do you think causes this to occur? What I'm wondering is if a pattern needs to be shunted to a particular area of the brain, it would seem to suggest it is recognized early in the process, and so escorted to where it should go, but is not actually cognized until the end of the process. - Just a query, any thoughts would be appreciated.
FYI - Neuroplasticity in action:
I gave you the obvious criticisms of ITT that were made even when Tononi first started going down that route. I remember the rubbishing and even some laughter during the coffee breaks at neuroscience conferences in the mid-1990s.
Quoting Pop
The thing to think about is that information theory is merely another model of reality. And it is not merely a model, but one - like the materialism it parallels - that explicitly rules out the formal and final causes that Aristotle attributed to substantial being. So it is a continuation of the reductionist project that gives rise to the standard existential crisis that gives rise to the various responses of dualism, Panpsychism and systems thinking or holism.
This is important here especially as you want to conflate consciousness as a phenomenon that is primarily concerned with formal and final cause, with information theory as a modelling paradigm deliberately set up not to talk about formal and final cause.
The reason information theory is useful to humans is that it allows us to atomise the notion of form just as classical mechanics allowed us to atomise the notion of masses and forces - or material and efficient causes. So just as we can mechanically construct systems that are composed of material atoms, so we can construct machines - like computers and communication devices - that are composed of informational atoms. That is, machines that implement logical structures or iteratively generate rule-based patterns.
And just like Newtonian material reductionism, the modelling leaves out final cause completely. Nature is reduced to being arbitrary and random … because that then gives us human maximum freedom to insert ourselves into the equation as the ones who make machines or computers to serve some purpose we might dream up ourselves.
Formal cause is included in the reductionist paradigm simply as unavoidable laws that constrain the space of constructive possibility. They do limit the action - either as physical law or logical law. But they are also somehow placed outside the reality the model is concerned about - a kind of necessary embarrassment of uncertain metaphysical status.
So information theory works really well as a way for us humans to model our physical reality. It imagines nature in terms of the opportunities for technological invention. We can build devices with any form we can conceive, for any purpose we might desire.
But as a model of nature’s causes, it doesn’t even pretend to be complete. It is deliberately a way of telling the story that maximises the creative possibilities for human engineering and thus gets the natural principles of organismic causality quite wrong much of the time.
And yet here you want to conflate a metaphysically truncated model of reality with the primary phenomenon it is so ill-designed to explain.
You can see why I will continue to laugh at the muddled thinking involved.
Why does it have to pertain to interactions? There's information associated with a particular photon whether it interacts with anything else or not, right?
I'm just not impressed by your knowledge of the topic so far. You've already presented misinformation about Shannon, so I think I'll rely on other sources than yourself.
For the record, I don’t assume that consciousness is a continuous stream, nor do I assume the alternative must be discrete packets or ‘moments’ of consciousness. What I’ve read of the article you linked supports Feldman Barrett’s constructionist theory, in which consciousness is constructed as an ongoing predictive event from incomplete, potential and affected ‘information’.
Quoting frank
You can predict information, sure - but until that photon interacts, you’re talking about potential information. It’s a calculation based on potential interaction. This is the problem with talking about ‘information’ as if it has one qualitative definition. I could be referring to the object, event or potential when I use the term ‘information’ - how would you know?
Because it's in superposition? The potential information is unique to that photon?
Quoting Possibility
So you would advise that we specify what kind of information we're talking about? What modifiers should we use?
I'm not sure that the integration of information is the correct teleology for the systems Friston describes. The objective is to minimise free energy (to maintain the integrity of one's form). To put it as best I can in terms of information, as that's the thread topic, free energy would be the 'information' contained in the co-occurrence of the sensory input and it's causes. If they are expected to co-occur, then information gain is lower.
So, this relies on the function distribution of the hidden causes being matched to the probability distribution of the model of them. The closer the match the less free energy. A creature which can minimise it's free energy obviously has a competitive advantage over one which is not so able. So that's what I think causes it to occur, the selective advantage gained by the lowering of free energy inherent in matching a model's probability function to the distribution of external causal states.
But, to be clear, integration is a means to an end here, that end being free energy reduction. Information is integrated only to better remove it. Models whose priors better match the posterior distributions gain less information (in terms of surprise). The goal is the reduction, the integration just a necessary tool among others.
Great video, by the way. Good find.
Quoting Possibility
Hey. I am interested in knowing why you think no answer can be given to such question; it's just curiosity.
I can relate to what you are saying in some respects. I also have my quibbles about IIT. But I find Integrated information ( a concept preceding IIT ) to be the best possible definition of consciousness. My interest is consciousness, I don't stray vey far into other topics, so I have a pretty good fix on it. I'm surprised how poorly understood the concept of integrated information is, given some of the queries, perhaps this needs a thread on it's own?
Quoting apokrisis
Yes precisely, Information needs to be broken down to into small chunks, its finest grains, to be understood, as everything is information. I have an intuitive affinity to an informational understanding of systems, that just doesn't occur with thermodynamics ( for me ). I am not interested in the intricate details, so much as a broad philosophical understanding, such that a singular concept can narrate the big picture in simply understandable and human scale terms. Information is excellent for this, but I don't yet fully understand it. There is a lot to understand. I feel there is quite a lot of "new" philosophical meat on offer, but perhaps this is just new to me.
The entire biomass of the planet occurs due to copying - so it is necessarily information processing. And because all systems evolve, they have to evolve by integrating the disintegrative information effecting them - such as we see in global warming.
@Wayfarer put me on to some excellent stuff from the Royal Society, which even I found surprising:
"We conclude that organic information does not have the status of a derived physical quantity because it cannot be expressed by anything simpler than itself. This means that organic information has the same scientific status as the fundamental quantities of physics."
This conclusion aligns with the Zeilinger paper posted earlier. And I think this is the broad direction understanding is headed towards.
As you say "information theory works really well as a way for us humans to model our physical reality."
Call me stubborn, but I keep thinking of information as being subjective; with that I mean that it is not a quality of an object, but it is instead (in its basic form) the effect caused by a given object onto another (the amount of change depends on the "strength" of the effect and on the amount of change the affected object is able to support). Thus, information is a quality of an object if and only if it is caused by something else [and information is not a quality of the object that causes the change but of the object(s) on which the change occurs]; this way, I think information is not a fundamental quality, for in a universe in which there is only one object, information would not exist (although the object does?).
Edit:
We could say information is potentially a quality of an object if such object has the capacity to interact with other objects. But information can only actually be a quality when it has been caused by another object (it is the result of an interaction). I dunno, what do you think?
You should know that Apokrisis is a published author in this field, although that particular author, Marcello Barbieri, has a different approach to the subject in question (code biology as distinct from Peircian biosemiosis.)
Quoting Pop
Another way of asking that question is, what is the source of the order we see in living organisms? Which amounts to the question 'what is life'? It seems a deceptively simple question, but really it's not at all.
Think about this: science obviously relies on there being predictable regularities and ratios, a.k.a. scientific laws. Through mathematical analysis and prediction, scientists can exploit these laws to marvellous effect, as we see every day in our technocentric culture.
But science doesn't necessarily explain the nature of those laws - like, whether they really are 'laws', or what the concept of 'laws' mean, and so on - none of those are scientific questions. They're prompted by science, but they're not themselves scientific in nature, because they're not subject to experimental verification.
Likewise in quantum physics, all of the discussion about the interpretations - none of that is necessary to understand and apply quantum physics to technology. It works, even if no-one really understands it, as a famous physicist said.
So I think in your analysis, some things that you are taking for granted, or which seem obvious to you, are not actually given. You're reaching for a kind of silver bullet explanation for 'everything' in your definitions - hey, it's ALL information! - but you're obfuscating some fundamental points.
In the third person we don't receive the information, in theory, in paradigm. We conceive our self as a passive onlooker watching information link others. Of course, whilst this is conceptually invaluable, in reality it is not the case, we are also informationally linked.
It is to do with the notion of a mind independent reality which some people believe is the case.
So, in the hypothetical scenario in which there exists only one thing, this lonely thing would be in its entirety pure information; is this correct?
More then that - What is the source of order in the universe? That which integrates the Universe integrates us!
I value Apo's input, and hope to continue the enquiry with him.
No, there is a primary substance, and then information about it. Those are the two logical necessities that we can never change. That is the metaphysical base .
What's the difference between the primary substance and the information about it?
So you would agree with the view that we are a body of information integrating more information in our path? :up:
If you say, every object has the capacity to interact (and thus cause a change in other object), I would agree with you (not that it matters). What I understand, however, is that you believe all is information, and that even in the absence of interaction information prevails (although irrelevant). What kind of information is there in the case of a universe with a single object? As you said, in a universe where everything is grey (there is only one thing), what kind of information could we extract? If information would no exist in a universe covered by greyness, I do not understand how everything is information and how information can be considered a fundamental quality (you said quantity, but I believe you meant quality). If a universe where there is only greyness has no information, then information would not be a quality of this particular object (the greyness). If greyness and some other thing is required for there to be information then I would be inclined to thing that information is not a fundamental quality of an object but a quality produced in an object as a consequence of its interaction with another object. Causes are not information.
At a certain level, integrated information is just a truism. It is obvious - once you accept the brain employs some kind of neural code to construct "consciousness" - that a big problem is how all this local information, this individually triggered firing, then gets integrated into a large structured state of meaningful experiencing.
So that sets folk off down a path towards an emphasis on information processing and global self-organisation - a path which leads them towards the age-old habits of Cartesian representationalism and even the faux-monism of panpsychism.
The easy case against ITT is that if people like Tononi and Koch are happy to arrive at a destination like panpsychism, you know that you don't even want to waste time starting going down that particular road.
One can make a more technical case. But like quantum consciousness theories, why even waste your day?
I contrast this with Friston's Bayesian Brain model. Friston worked with Tononi in Edelman's lab as it happens. But Friston's approach struck me as immediately right even before he really got going.
Like most neuroscientists who are serious, he wouldn't even use a dualist and representational term like "consciousness" - except with those scare quotes around them. He understood that we are talking about the brain's embodied and functional modelling of reality - or rather its model of it being a self in a world. So that takes us into a different intellectual space - one where cognition is enactive and semiotic. It is just a fundamentally different orientation that leads to a very different understanding of nature.
Quoting Pop
It is good you say you don't fully understand it. The scientific story is still being written. And my point is that the concepts of both information and entropy are themselves useful modelling constructs - extreme simplifications of the world they thus also make usefully measurable by those extreme simplifications.
So - as Friston keenly understood - information theory creates a cleared ground, one stripped of the quality of meaning, so that science could then start constructing the right kind of metric for measuring systems with meaning. Information theory gave you a basis for more complex metrics like mutual information, surprisal, ascendency, or one of the many other formalisations people have been attempting.
ITT could be considered an effort in that direction. But it is too disembodied. Friston flipped things around to talk about free energy minimisation. That was a clever trick along the same lines that biologists used a generation earlier to understand the phenomenon of life as an evolving dissipative structure. The immaterial information was connected to the material dynamics - the self to the world - via an explicit epistemic cut, or modelling relation.
Quoting Pop
I've returned to biology because so much has been happening there on this issue over the past decade.
And yes, Barbieri is going down this same semiotic track. I would draw attention to this bit...
This is where the new science is arriving to change the game.
Life can be divided into genetic information and chemistry. But the missing part of the story is how those two realms are mechanically connected.
And exactly the same intellectual journey is under way in neuroscience - as its tackles its good old dualism of mind and body.
"The free energy principle has been criticized for being very difficult to understand, even for experts.[3] Discussions of the principle have also been criticized as invoking metaphysical assumptions far removed from a testable scientific prediction, making the principle unfalsifiable.[4] In a 2018 interview, Friston acknowledged that the free energy principle is not properly falsifiable: "the free energy principle is what it is — a principle. Like Hamilton's principle of stationary action, it cannot be falsified. It cannot be disproven. In fact, there’s not much you can do with it, unless you ask whether measurable systems conform to the principle."[5] - Wikipedia.
It bears resemblance to the idea of the Logos, the Tao, Dharma - a principle of organisation which can only be discerned in its effects, never in its essence.
Wired article on Karl Friston. Bearing in mind, he is a neuroscientist, although philosophers find his ideas very interesting.
That rings a bell. Ah, I know: "nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage" - Von Neumann advising Claude Shannon.
Information describes the form of a substance - the edge, shape, perturbations, texture, volume, distinctive features, etc.
Without this information the substance would be grey. As you can imagine, If a primary substance had no edge and was completely featureless, such that wherever you look is the same, totally homogenous, the substance would be a "nothing".
Quality, quantity, interaction. I will bear that in mind and try to arrive at a definition that has wide agreement and input.
See my reply to Issac above.
I am searching for a philosophical understanding, and would be quite comfortable with a general principle of what is going on. And in general, Information processing is what is going on, even in Friston's principle.
Are you familiar with Neural networks?
Quoting apokrisis
If you start with a bias then you can not get anywhere. What is so wrong with panpsychism? Buddhism is panpsychist. Bhutan is the only carbon negative country, what is so wrong with that?
Quoting apokrisis
It is based on a Markov blanket, so neural network straight off. And neural networks have proven to be very successful in AI, such as GPT3.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree with this statement, but "semiotic" implies an epistemic cut. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that two informational bodies interact? And develop interrelationally?
Quoting apokrisis
Great, we agree on some things!
Quoting apokrisis
I don't understand the intricacies of Friston's theory, but I understand basic neural network principles such that an input is shunted to an output ( symbol ), via non logical gradients which can be arbitrarily adjusted. It seems right, since initially there could not have been any reasoning involved.
Quoting apokrisis
There you go again. If we cannot make the cut, why talk about it? This is the difficulty of understanding this, you have to try and understand it whilst being enmeshed in it, there is no cut. Its an interrelational situation. If the cut is arbitrary, then it is simply a cut you choose to make. Don't make the cut, then it it is two systems evolving interrelationally.
Respectfully, I suspect your bias is getting in the way of logic here.
Quoting apokrisis
I think logically, chemistry will also be understood as information processing.
I started with microbiology and chemistry a few years ago - its a different planet! :lol:
I would argue that it's not that it doesn't exist, but rather that it doesn't necessarily have a defined form. Instead, it can be encoded and understood in multiple ways, with its basis being reality.
People like the information philosopher have gone down that route. I trust in Shannon's understanding that information always exists embedded in a substance, as the co-element of the substance. As a monist, I see no evidence anywhere of an immaterial substance.
But I respect people who choose to think that way, I believe they have good personal reasons for choosing to think so.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
If everything is information, doesn't that solve it?
So you are saying information is NOT a non-physical, IS a co-element of a substance but is physically unmeasurable and doesn't alter in any way the substance. Without more detail given, that is no more than imaginary thinking.
Yep.
Quoting Pop
As critics of IIT like Searle note, Panpsychism is the kind of theory that is in the class of not even being wrong. It evades counterfactuality by claiming absolute generality. Panpsychists claim particles are conscious - but that consciousness is so dilute or unstructured that you couldn’t hope to tell the difference. You just have to take the panpsychist’s word for it.
That is a non-theory. It is standard substance dualism dressed up in a science-resistant cloak of invisibility.
See Horgan’s article - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/
Quoting Pop
I date back to the first era of neural nets and have always believed they were the right biologically realistic approach. The key difference is that neural networks are a stab at embodied cognition and so were immediately taking the step towards semiotics and away from cogsci representationalism.
Neural nets learn by establishing habits of doing. There is no mystery why they are integrated hierarchies of action routines. That is just basic to their architecture.
But note how IIT turns the structure of the “integrated” conscious picture into an immense mystery. It can’t even hazard a concrete guess at how the brain is architected to produce an output state that has this informationally nested semantic characteristic. It only offers some cod metric of the degree to which a hierarchically complex state of organisation exists.
Quoting Pop
The epistemic cut is crucial because the brain can’t model the world - or even construct a self - unless it first cuts itself off from that world.
This then leads on to all the things that folk find counter intuitive about neurocognition - such as the brain wants to predict its inputs so it can then ignore them as things it was already expecting and so doesn’t even have to especially note.
So representationalism is based on the idea that consciousness arises from the positive display of some structure of data. The brain is instead doing its best not to even have to react in the first place.
You can record from neurons in the retina and see their firing being quashed because the brain had already predicted that they were about to be poked by a stimulus and - sorry guys - that news is already old hat. Leave me alone.
So - as is basic to Friston’s approach and the general field of generative neural networks - the brain is striving to be unconscious. It wants to predict reality so well that there is nothing left that could disturb it by being surprising.
That of course then sets it up to be surprised and immediately focused on making the best sense of that surprise.
A surprise can be regarded as free energy. A poke in the eye of the system that forces it to make some new adjustment. The brain then does its best to avoid being poked in the eye by minimising the free energy via Bayesian prediction - its best guess on how to make something not happen.
Quoting Pop
OK. That is very basic neural networks that use after the fact back propagation to reset the internal weights. So it learns to do better at pattern recognition the next time around.
But even in the 1960s there were neural networkers like Stephen Grossberg working on generative neural nets that were biologically realistic in predicting their inputs, rather than merely belatedly reactions to them.
Quoting Pop
I don’t understand your issue here. The cut is completely essential if there is to be a difference between the neural model and the world that model encodes.
Quoting Pop
Or you haven’t understood the logic of what is being discussed. Have you read Pattee on symbol grounding or biosemiosis?
Quoting Pop
Any symbol or mark is of course a physical thing. A logical bit needs to be stored as a switched gate state or whatever.
But the meaning of that physical mark or thrown switch is entirely another story - a habit of interpretation.
Furthermore, the physics of the informational mark is of a special and rather artificial kind. It has as little actual physics attached as possible. It is basic to a code that it is zero dimensional - little more than a located point. It cost the same effort to make every mark, so effectively there is a zeroed cost for making marks. And thus the whole cost of mark-making ceases to be a constraint on any computational process on the other side of the epistemic cut.
In computation, once you have paid for the hardware and it’s power supply, then you can run any software for the same basic price. The software still relies on a Turing machine - a tape and gate hardware device. But the software possibilities are unlimited and universal.
Biology does the same trick as genes can code for any protein structure, or neurons can code for any stimulus-response loop.
Question 1. Is A among the firsr 2 letters of the alphabet?
Answer 1. Yes [possibilities now reduced to A, B]
Question 2. Is A the first letter of the alphabet?
Answer 2. Yes [A it is]
Questions here are aimed at reducing the number of possibilities.
2 yes/no questions = 2 bits of information. A contains 2 bits of information.
The general formula is, given N equiprobable alternatives, the information content of a message (in bits) that zeros in on one of these alternatives = Log(base 2) N.
Thus 1 card from a 52 deck card has log (base 2) 52 = 5.7 bits of information.
Also, information, as per Claude Shannon, is a measure of surprise/shock a message contains. The more surprising/shocking the message, the more information it contains. I guess, things that are probable/likely are uninteresting while those that are improbable/unlikely are very interesting, worth knowing. In terms of yes/no questions, the more improbable something is, the more yes/no questions that need to be asked which translates into more bits of information.
Suppose there are three possibilities A, B, C. The probability of A is 0.001%, that of B and C are equal at 49.9995%. The probability of A is so small that for practical purposes it can be ignored i.e. we can assume A won't occur.
Question 1: Is it B?
Answer 1: Yes, B OR No, C [ B and C carry only 1 bit of information]
On the off-chance that A is the message,
Question 2: Is it C?
Answer 2: No, A [A carries 2 bits of information]
A is improbable and if A is the message, it carries 2 bits of information while the other two B, C contain only 1 bit of information. Shock value = Information!
I've cited one of the Howard Pattee papers you mentioned a few times, specifically this passage:
[quote=Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemios; https://www.academia.edu/234713/The_Physics_and_Metaphysics_of_Biosemiotics]All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws.[/quote]
Pattee mentions Descartes' dualism, but says (rightly) that Descartes' proposal consigns the solution to the mind-body problem to 'metaphysical obscurity' because of the well-known problem of how the 'thinking being' interacts with extended substance.
So I had an idea - if you ask the question, how does the intentional domain (let's call it) react with the physical domain, the answer is, through living beings. That is what life is. That is why as soon as life appears, it is already ontologically distinct from inorganic matter. (It's also, incidentally, why I can lift my arm, which is sometimes mentioned as somehow remarkable in this context.) Living beings are therefore more than simply an arrangement of matter; they signal appearance of the subjective dimension, or perhaps we could say the intentional domain, even if it's in the simplest forms of single-celled organisms.
In a review of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, we read -
[quote=Richard Brody, Thoughts are Real; https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thomas-nagel-thoughts-are-real] Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what exists (or, what is real). People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists (i.e. is real) as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.
In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them.[/quote]
And why? Because the ingredient that was always lacking in objective descriptions is perspective. Accordingly, It's a mistake to believe that the mind (or the subject) can be understood as something objectively existent, when its presence is always implicit - it only manifests as perspective. This is why those who say you can't show that the mind objectively exists (i.e. philosophical materialists) are correct, because it always eludes objective description. And it is the awareness of that which has dropped out of a lot of analytical philosophy, which presumes that what is objectively existent defines the scope of what is philosophically real. Whereas here we are discussing something that is philosophically real but not objectively existent.
So - in any living organism, perspective has already begun to emerge, albeit in extremely simple forms. (Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general.) In the case of h. sapiens, due to rationality and language, new horizons of being - radically new perspectives - open up which are not available to other sentient creatures (and, obviously, not available in a Universe lacking in such beings.)
So, I solve the issue of what consciousness or the mind is, by showing that it never occurs or appears as an object of perception, although because nothing can be known in its absence, it is nevertheless fundamentally real. And the reality of mind is demonstrated by the ability to grasp meaning, which is, arguably, a refinement of the very same process which is operative at the level of cellular biology. So to that extent, I advocate a form of dualism.
I see. I don't think anything that anyone is doing at this level is falsifiable, they're frameworks through which we can view the data. That's not to say there aren't better frameworks than others, only that the choice is not falsifiable.
This shouldn't be confused with the notion that any of the evidence Friston uses is also speculative. As too often happens (Quantum Physics being the archetypal example) some frameworks are highlighted as being speculative or unfalsifiable and people think it's then a free-for-all where everyone and their dog can have an 'opinion' on how quantum physics works. That's not what is implied by using a theoretical framework for one's analysis of the data.
Such Bias with a capital B! I often think that a philosopher should start their enquiry possessing no knowledge at all, and then they would be free to follow the logic wherever it may go. But that is not possible, is it. They start their enquiry already possessing a body of knowledge, and a sense of self entrenched in it's midst, and so any enquiry first and foremost must preserve this sense of self, as after all that is the mechanism of the system. The system is not free to pursue conclusions that destroy one's sense of self, and so a large part of possibility is left unexplored, and dismissed of hand.
I think the epistemic cut is largely about this, the preservation of ones sense of self, and one's humanity.
To not make the cut changes the world into a panpsychic world, whilst to not make it preserves the status quo. Like Descartes I think therefore I am, rather then I am Consciousness. It is a self preserving response, as would be expected from a self organizing system.
I don't agree with all of IIT, but I'm really grateful to it for entrenching the notion that consciousness is integrated information. As you have intimated, otherwise consciousness is an ungrounded variable mental construct. A nonsense to speak about.
Ok, well how about we put our differences aside and concentrate on describing and defining information? Given our differences in paradigm, is it possible to agree on "what is information"?
The rest of what you mention I largely agree with:
Quoting apokrisis - Yes I agree
Quoting apokrisis - I agree, and agree that the input receptor is more a predictor.
Quoting apokrisis - fascinating
I was as much referring to the difficulty in understanding. :smile: Thanks for clarifying.
Ah, I see. It's not for the faint-hearted that's for sure.
Proof?
Note how people are only conscious of the things that matter to them. The spectrum of light is very broad, but we only see what matters to us. Capra says " cognition is a disturbance in a state". If we apply this to rocks, they cognize when their state is disturbed.
Two points from the Marcello Barbieri paper - one, that life is inherently different from non-life, because it contains or encodes or creates information that is transmitted by the processes of cell division and reproduction. Second, that according to Hubert Yockey, who was a pioneer in the application of information systems theory to biology, the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable.
‘The old is dying, while the new is struggling to be born.[sup] 1[/sup]’
The problem is how to best characterise this duality that is based on an actively manufactured epistemic cut. Is it really either subjective or a dimension? In some sense, it is definitely all about intentionality or finality. It is also a kind of domain. So there is a question about the best terminology here.
I’ve already highlighted one key point - the epistemic cut is manufactured, so it is something constructed within the larger world that it organises, The genes live protected in the nucleus for example. Their information is literally contained. Each cell has about 2m in length of DNA sequence, but because it is of such reduced dimensionality - a 1D thread ruling a 3D metabolic volume - it can be coiled up into a relatively tiny physical object.
And that relates to my point about symbols being what emerge via a constraint on regular physical dimensionality. The informational realm or intentional domain is so reduced in its physical being that it can exist almost invisibly within the world that it wants to regulate. It is almost immaterial as it demands so little in terms of material being.
All codes are the direct product of the reduction of physical presence to virtually nothing. A volume is reduced to a surface (membranes are key biological structures for defining cuts between inner and outer, self and world.) Then reduction to one dimensional molecular strands naturally leads on to the possibility of chains composed of zero d points. A polymer can be constructed from monomers. And each monomer can become a particular free choice - a particular amino acid or neucleotide base.
So the informational aspect of life is a kind of anti-physics. The existence of regular dimensional physics - the 4D spatiotemporal realm of rate dependent dynamics - already contains within it this other realm of rate independent information as its “other”. The possibility of coded intentionality was always latent and just needed suitable conditions to become manifest as an actual symbol system - a semiotic process paid for by its ability to accelerate environmental entropy flows.
This is a neat kind of metaphysics in that the challenge to regular physics is also directly a kind of physics in being the exact opposite of regular physics. They are the two halves of the one broken symmetry.
So that is a new kind of metaphysical distinction I would argue and deserves its own terminology.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again I would agree but then be concerned at slipping into the terminology of older ontologies.
Semiotics is embodied or enactive and so is all about the reality of organising points of view. And it is the manufacturing of some local point of view - along with its contrast to a story of physics that is anti-intentional in leaving out any special viewpoint - which is a big metaphysical step.
This is the argument for a science of semiotics as it was formulated by Peirce. He started with the psychological reality of the mind as a modelling relation and thus the most particular thing of some self-interested or embodied point of view.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, perspective is a good term. As is intentional.
Quoting Wayfarer
The duality for me is that there is modelling relation. This demands an epistemic cut so that a “self” can stand outside the reality it means to regulate. To actually stand outside and so form a personal point of view is impossible. But because physical dimensionality can be constrained to the point it produces code, an organism can stand outside its reality as a virtual machine.
Consciousness is then just what it is like to be such a virtual machine - a modelling relation in which a self or point of view is also part of the constructed umwelt.
So neither the self, nor the world, are really real. They are virtual in being constructs of the model. But then the modelling relation as a whole is real as this virtual realm of modelling has a real physical basis and is doing real physical work.
So where you say subjective, I say virtual. This is another example of trying to find the jargon with the right connotations where possible.
Alternatively I have actively pursued the full range of the schools of thought out there. Far more than most. And so that is why I feel secure in my views and not concerned that some would find the people I champion - like Peirce, Pattee and even Friston apparently - at the outer extreme of obscurity.
Quoting Pop
I’ve already cited Bateson’s pithy “a difference that makes a difference”. And I’ve made the point that Shannon information is simply a way of counting pure differences - whether they make a difference or not.
So Shannon starts us off where we can make a raw count of digitally distinct events - whether the physical events are meaningful signals or meaningless noise.
Then those of us interested in semiotics - a science of meaning - can use that useful foundation to construct metrics that get at meaningfulness, or the reduction of uncertainty. That is where the debate over mutual information, surprisal, ascendency and other information theoretic proposals of biological relevance can start.
Science is about measurement and so about agreeing the right units of measurement. Tononi proposes his phi. But as critics point out, it is ill-defined and overly complex in practice. It also fails to distinguish integration in a living organism from that in a iPhone or even a rock. And it is computationally intractable to boot.
So far I don’t see that you are even engaged in the conversation at this level. You keep talking about integrated information as if it is just Shannon information. That is what you think you understand so that is what you want to keep dragging the discussion back to.
It can’t hurt. At the very least we should acknowledge the ambiguity of the term, referring to an interaction, its evidence and potential. This is why I describe information as ‘variability in an interaction’. I think we need to be clear on our position in relation to the interaction in using the term ‘information’, and recognise that this determines the qualitative structure of that use.
Quoting Cheshire
This still implies that information is definitive, but as what? As an (unobservable) action or as evidence or potential of such? The reality is that we rely on piecing together or constructing evidence of or potential information far more than we observe an actual interaction first-hand. I think that what isn’t a speculative sense of information would be almost entirely constructed from it as a prediction.
Quoting Daniel
I could be wrong, but I’d like to see you try. I believe it’s the ‘what’ that stumps...
But that’s not to say that ‘everything is information’ - I think I get what Pop is trying to get at, but that statement is oversimplified and therefore fraught with miscommunication, in my view.
Quoting Daniel
It’s confusing, isn’t it? For me, information IS a fundamental quality, because ‘a universe in which there is only one object’ must also contain potential in relation to which an object might occur, at the very least. An object is the result of interacting potential and/or events, after all.
Quoting Pop
Again, I think you’re oversimplifying it. If you describe us in this way then you risk drawing inaccurate conclusions - especially with regard to intentionality and purpose. We have an aspect which can be described as ‘a body of information’, and an aspect which can be described as ‘integrating information’. But they are not the same aspect, and the qualitative structure of ‘information’ is not the same.
If you have time would you want to disambiguate the various kinds of information? It does seem like there's a common thread through them, so it's easy to just end up sliding them altogether.
There is the common sense of information and then there is a sense of information that is speculated about on the forum. Ergo, speculative sense of information in this context.
A solution might be to start from a monist/physicalist view and identify information as an emergent property of matter, specifically tied to brain function. In notation form, you have BRAIN(information) and you can deal with both physical content (a representation) and non-physical content (a representation), specifically:
BRAIN(information; content representing physical matter) and
BRAIN(information; content representing non-physicals).
This solves the logic problem and you can go on to develop your models of information.
I also think of active Information (EnFormAction)in terms of Logos and Tao. It's not a physical thing, but a process of organizing and integrating disparate things into novel holistic systems. It's like a physical Force that we know only from its effects, not from observation of a particular thing. In other words : "creativity".
I just came across a statement in SKEPTIC magazine -- on the topic of a trial & error process that leads to success (e.g. Evolution) -- which, though in a different context, illustrates the relationship between Information, Integration, Organization, and Holism :
"This is an example of a holistic group, integrating diverse knowledge to create more than the sum of individual contributions" --- Trial, Error, and Success ; Sima Dimitrijev ; SKEPTIC v2, no 2
A force is an act or cause, not an object. But Information can be both. As Einstein noted, causal Energy (the push or pull) and passive Mass (the pushee) are interchangeable. Likewise, Information (idea) in a human mind (sculptor) can be translated into a causal creative force (behavior) that results in something new (sculpture). By the same reasoning, Evolution is not a physical object, but a creative action which causes diverse things to integrate into what Darwin called : "endless forms most beautiful". :grin:
Logos :
In Enformationism, it is the driving force of Evolution, Logos is the cause of all organization, and of all meaningful patterns in the world. It’s not a physical force though, but a metaphysical cause that can only be perceived by Reason, not senses or instruments.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Logos :
Greek term meaning “word”, “reason”, “proportion”. It was used by philosophers in a technical sense to mean a cosmic principle of order and knowledge. In ancient Greek philosophy and theology, Logos was the divine Reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
We can see that information about the shuffling is stored in the object that is shuffled (and not in the object that shuffles - you) and the object that is shuffled does not contain information about the shuffling until it is shuffled (that a card deck can be potentially shuffled does not mean that the card deck contains information about shuffling - again, it must be shuffled for it to contain "shuffling" information - and even so it contains information about the shuffling only at certain levels of its existence (that level which is affected by the shuffling).
So, information about shuffling is not in this case a fundamental quality of the card deck, for card decks can exist without being shuffled.
Potentiality requires an entity that realizes such potentiation therefore anything that can exist potentially cannot be fundamental; something fundamental is something that exists only actually.
Information/entropy are a new system of measurement. So they are universal units rather than some universalised substance as @Pop suggests.
What make them exciting and fundamental is that they are securely founded on the three Planck scale constants that define the “grain” of substantial being. If you want to model the Cosmos in atomistic terms, then you can use a unit that counts local “degrees of freedom” - the smallest possible events in terms of a triangulation of quantum uncertainty, lightspeed interaction and gravitational curvature. You have a physical spacetime backdrop measured in h, c and G. And Boltzmann’s k is derived from that as a way to talk about the smallest possible substantial event or material action.
So the same equation - rooted in dimensionless Planck constants - can speak of the reduction of uncertainty at the most basic physical level in either the language of information concepts or energy concepts. It speaks of the scale of decoherence where quantum possibility becomes substantial classical being - some concrete and counterfactual difference.
What should be the metaphysical import of this new trick is that however we conceive reality, we can only construct measurable models that give us predictable outcomes. And so imagining that everything is made of information and imagining everything is made of material particles are both just epistemic tactics and not some direct and unmediated understanding of the thing in itself.
And then, while Shannon information sounds like it has something to say about the mind or meaning, it in fact is part of the same old physical reductionist epistemic project. IIT stands outside its subject as usual, talking about the physics of brains rather than the logic that comes from being a semiotic modelling relation that embodies a point of view. That is why only panpsychists could take it seriously and neuroscientists realise that the mind needs to be understood as a functional process of meaning construction.
So Shannon information is a liberating system of measurement for reductionist physics. It paves the way for a quantum holism where reality decoheres in a way that can be modelled using statistical mechanics and the holographic geometry of lightspeed constrained interactions.
But the unit of meaning that is needed by life and mind science is another matter. And I’ve already cited the very exciting realisation that there is a convergence of all forms of energy relevant to biology at the nanoscale at the thermal scale of chemistry taking place in water.
(@Possibility - sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing you here. I just like your comments and wanted to see if I could make my own position more clear.)
Wow, what excellent commentary, full of deep insights. I think by the end of this thread we may be able to describe some new information about information? :smile: I would very much like this thread to end in some kind of agreement, and If we can keep to attacking the concept rather then the person or paradigm, we might just be able to achieve this?
Quoting frank
This is a great idea, and a great difficulty. I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. This pattern or form can be physical, chemical, energetic, etc, But it is this information of a substances that enables a substance to interact with another substance - It is the information that interacts with the information of another substance. As described earlier, without the information, the substance would be a "NoThing", so could not interact with "anyThing". It would posses no attributes that are capable of interaction. The perturbations of a substance that give it it's distinctive features enable the substance to interact and thus integrate with all other informational substances, including ourselves.
This view of information assumes an underlying substance. As @Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. That a substances exists is assumed by the information we have of it. What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. This brings into question whether information is a quantity or a quality?
@Daniel has also suggested no information can exist absent of an interaction, and as has been pointed out it is interaction that information facilitates. "NoThing" cannot interact with "AnyThing".
Everything that exists, does so as an evolving self organizing system. Interaction is a constant. So it is clear that information enables the interactional organization of a system. What a system self organizes is information..
How am I going??
"The pragmatic information content is the information content received by a recipient; it is focused on the recipient and defined in contrast to Claude Shannon's information definition, which focuses on the message" - Wikipedia
Quoting Daniel
So a physical interaction is a necessity for information? Information only occurs during or after the fact?
As a monist I would say that is true. When a thought arises it has it's neural correlates, so a physical interaction occurs which is identical to the thought.
I would say the information you are referring to has its neural correlates, thus is identical to a physical interaction in the brain, as described by @Isaac
This would be the Aristotelean view of substance as in-formed material possibility - the doctrine of hylomorphism. And I agree that this is the correct way to look at it.
But that then leads on to the epistemic cut and other stuff you appear to object to. It says that any instance of substantial being is an intersection between global constraints and localised meaningless action - Peirce's metaphysics of synechism and tychism. And this is very quantum. It says anything could be physically the case, but then becomes limited towards being some concrete event eventually by a prevailing context - some global informational structure that dictates the shape and destiny of a quantum system as a probabilistic wavefunction.
So from Aristotle to Peirce to quantum physics - and on to the complexities of life and mind - there is a common thread here. Concrete existence is all about global constraints on local uncertainty. And you can then label one side as formal/final cause, the other as material/efficient cause, or synechism and tychism, or information and entropy, or holism and reductionism, or whatever else floats your intellectual boat.
But all this is about epistemological tactics - the best way to divide reality into intelligible categories so we can appreciate both the way things are parts of wholes, and the way wholes are composed of parts.
We are constructing a point of view which allows us to read structure into a Cosmos that is part all about global logical necessity and part all about local chaotic freedom.
What you are doing is now trying to locate form in substance rather than seeing form as the external context placing limits on localised random fluctuations.
That leads to the error of a panpsychic conflation. The global structure and the local potential never have to come together via an interaction that produces the third thing of the actualised substance. You are thinking that form inheres in the substance as an innate primal property. There is no contextuality to formed existence, there is only the brute fact of that existence with a form. And so consciousness can be another property of physical materials - just like materiality itself.
But then - because we know that degrees of consciousness must have something to do with the complexities of neural circuits - you graft on an enthusiasm for IIT with its emphasis on patterns of relations. Now complicated consciousness can reflect that measurable density of "integrated information".
The panpsychic position likes quantum theory, or electromagnetic theory, as much as information theory for the same reason. Wavefunctions and force fields can be treated as the deepest levels of substance - a view that seems to have greater scientific credibility since ideas about atomic matter and Newtonian forces became too obviously just the epistemic tactics they always were.
So now the form inhering in the substance appears visible. A wavefunction or force field can represent a spread of textured surface rather than some featureless spherical pellet of matter. One can see a property that actually looks complex and so matches the ontic intuition of how such a property ought to look at the fundamental scale of being.
But again, this is arguing from little pictures in the head. Substantial reality could be primal featureless spheres. Or it could be instead the complex texture of a collection of interactions that makes a network tracery that throbs with intrinsic meaningfulness and experience.
Either way, the mistake is collapsing the holism of a systems view - one which sees substantial being arising from the contrasting intersection of global necessity and local spontaneity - into the usual reductionist metaphysics where substantial actuality, with its entities and properties, is the only thing that really exists. And so the only thing that explains - in brute non-explanatory fashion - why there is material being and mental being. And why they have to be two aspects of the one essence.
Quoting Pop
And here you are recruiting even the systems science view to your conflationist cause.
So yes it is right that natural systems are dissipative structures that self organise via information (or negentropy) so as to further the entropification of the Cosmos. And indeed, systems science would stress this is information that is actually meaningful and at the start of the evolution of intelligent selfhood or autopoietic autonomy. It is not just information but semiosis or the construction of a pragmatic modelling relation between a self and a world.
But you are taking all that sophisticated metaphysics and saying that this self-organising infodynamics schtick sounds complex. Mind is complex too. So let's collapse the model into the phenomena. Let's pretend that a pattern of information is not a construct of our models but already a form of instantiated being that therefore emanates mind as an inherent property.
Let's take actual metaphysical and scientific holism and present it as if it is the next big thing in property-based reductionism.
Quoting Pop
I didn't say that. I said: the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. You don't receive information from substance; instead, substance "imprints" information onto you by acting on you - by causing you to change in a way that depends on the nature of the substance and on the degree of change you are able to support (and also on the medium on which the perturbation travels). The fact that the amount of change you undergo depends also on your physicochemical composition (and not only on the nature of the perturbation, or the physicochemical composition of the object, or the medium between you and the object, or the change you cause in the object) I think points toward the conclusion that information is not a property of individual objects, although I could be missing something.
Quoting Pop
I don't agree with this. The substance is what the substance is. Your perception of what the substance is will change as you interact with the substance in different ways.
I think you are assuming that because an object has properties (properties that allow us to differentiate between objects) then all there is are properties; I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties. So, not all is information because information is information about something (information about information?), and the information we gather about something is, to some extent, dependent on things different to the object the information is about.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Daniel
The philosophical term ‘substance’ is not the same as the ordinary language definition. In ordinary language, substance is ‘a material with uniform properties’. In philosophy, the term ‘substance’ was originally derived from the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the term at issue being ‘ouisia’, which is a participle of the Greek verb, ‘to be’ [sup] 1 [/sup].
The Latin translation was ‘substantia’, or ‘that which stands under’; or in other places, ‘essentia’, ‘that which truly is’. The idea of substance evolved , but I think that in modern philosophy, it is very easy to equivocate it with the ordinary English use of ‘substance’, when originally it meant something very different.
One instance: ‘In Metaphysics, Aristotle states that everything which is healthy is related to health (primary substance) as, in one sense, because it preserves health, and in the other, because it is capable of preserving health. Without the primary substance (health) we would not be able to have the secondary substances (anything related to health). While all the secondary substances are deemed "to be" it is in relation to the primary substance.’
So, the sense in which ‘health’ is ‘a substance’ seems very confusing if ‘substance’ is regarded as any type of thing - ‘substance’ in the customary sense. We would say, rightly, that there’s no ‘substance’ called ‘health’, but that only shows up the sense in which the meaning of the term has shifted.
A related point is that just as ‘substance’ is not really ‘stuff’, ‘form’ is not really ‘shape’. In other words, when we hear ‘form and substance’, it is natural to think that ‘substance’ is the matter something is made from, and ‘form’ is the shape it takes. But in its original sense, the ‘substance’ again was the kind of being, and the ‘form’ is nearer the Platonic ‘idea’ rather than just ‘the shape’. In some ways, it could be argued that ‘subject’ is nearer in meaning to ‘ouisia’ than our ‘substance’, because it preserves the notion of ‘being’.
So lurking in the background, is the presupposition that, whatever reality is, in the end, it must comprise some kind of ‘substance’ in the customary understanding of it - when that is what is actually at issue in discussions of this kind.
I don’t want to drag this thread further into that distinction, as many books have been written about it, and besides, I myself don’t understand the subject very well, so if I am mistaken, then apologies for that, but I think it is a real distinction.
So in your OP which did you intend? I would have stayed away from the Shannon version.
This is the assumption that I was talking about. "This view of information assumes an underlying substance". I think we agree on this, though we misunderstand each other.
What is the difference between our perception of an object and the object itself ? - the assumption that something more exists.
Quoting Daniel
This is correct, and it brings in Change, but I don't think the inference you have drawn is
"and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. "
Interaction is assumed, What enables the interaction to occur? What is it that is interacting?
Properties are equal to the form of a substance. Properties are information about a substance.
In the OP I gave a variety of examples of definitions of information. But I intended to answer the question of "What is information" collectively. I have a view, but so do others. What is your view? Be warned paradigms will clash here, it is for the thick skinned strictly. :lol:
:up:
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
This concatenation of information as meaningless mark and as subjectively meaningful signal system sounds compatible with Dan Zahavi’s depoction of metaphysical realism:
“If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve. How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.”
We can do whatever we want to so long as we do not violate any of the laws of physics, and then if some of what we do is supported by some, then all the better, and then If we can find ways to falsify what we do and say - we can create reality! :starstruck:
But seriously: Quoting apokrisis
Yes, there is no contextuality to form, other then consciousness. Information is distinctions. Everything has its distinctive shape and colour and place. There is only one thing that we cannot distinguish from anything else, and that is information itself, because in the first person point of view, it is all information.
So Information is a very difficult thing to grasp. What would your definition be? Can you see problems with what has been proposed thus far in terms of conflicting with the laws of physics?
Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.
Have you considered what information is? @Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this?
I agree with all you said. The subtlety of Aristotelean hylomorphism has become sucked into the general vortex of materialist confusion.
So there is the understanding of substance as the essential material - material cause being the primary form of existence that underpins all else. So substance already has its key property of brute existence and inherent properties (like a location, a motion, a mass, a charge). And the dichotomy becomes one of these causal atoms or causal materials and the acausal void in which they freely exist.
But then there is the process view of Peirce, systems science, and others. Now enduring substance with its inherent properties becomes instead just a generalise potential or state of radical uncertainty. A chaotic fluctuation with no special persistence or direction at all. The material aspect of substantial being becomes the least possible form of substantial being.
And then actual substantial being is what you get once there is some contextual limits in place to give shape to some mass of fluctuations. Something aligns them so that a persistent state with fixed character results.
In other words, quantum mechanics and particle physics.
An electron represents free fluctuation constrained by circumstance to have an eternally fixed identity. At the Big Bang temperature, there are no such definite particles. There is just a directionless sea of fluctuations in one high symmetry (ie: low content) grand unified forced. Then this thermal bath cools and quarks, then leptons, can condense out.
Electrons are fixed in their properties because they break the GUT symmetries down to the simplest possible shapes. U1 gauge symmetry is the last stop in the road. And that gives you the simplicity of an electrical field populated by massive electrons and their massless photons.
So it is a plain mathematical fact that the simplest geometry is U1. That is a law beyond any particular cosmology. It is a Platonic constraint on any possible world. The last form standing is going to be that which creates the properties discovered once all fluctuation has been reduced to the limit of material simplicity.
Of course we have to talk about how the Higgs field gets tangled in this U1 story to make electrons actually massive and so slower than light. And how the symmetry breaking must harbour the asymmetries that prevented even all electrons disappearing in a puff of bare radiation as they encountered all their opposite spin positron twins.
But the point is that physics sees substantial being as this hylomorphic dyad. You have quantum potential. You have mathematical strength constraints. Electrons and other fundamental particles then pop out of the hot brew as whatever becomes the crud that can’t be washed away even as the Cosmos becomes as empty and cold as is at its Heat Death.
It is a difficult intellectual dance of course. But it makes the usual dialectical sense - the unity of opposites.
Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existing entities or aspects?
Well it was fun trying to explain it anyway.
Merleau-Ponty founds consciousness in gestalt ensembles organized as figure against background. “The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.4) .
The background is the formal (we can call it informational, the irreducible relation of the parts to the whole and the whole to its parts ) aspect of perceptual experience in its most primordial sense. Change is presupposed here rather than being added onto awareness , in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background.
Your communication style is very difficult to understand. Particularly for somebody who does not have a physics background.
Your comments are an excellent example of 'Showboating' and I especially liked this paragraph. Do you have a room with technical terms tacked to the wall and a ball of yarn or do you use more modern methods? I'd like to know.
If you re-read all his posts carefully you may find as I do that he is pointing to a consistent and coherent set of ideas. It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. But I’m seeing more than that in apo’s argument. It’s legitimate and interesting to integrate Peirce’s metaphysics, quantum theory and neuroscientific models of consciousness. It may also be threatening or confusing to those who prefer a more classically reductionist approach to these matters.
Yes, the change would be from moment to moment of consciousness.
What I was thinking: If we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change.
From a panpsychist perspective.
The grand project would be pansemiosis. The Cosmos would in fact have to have its own organismic point of view.
A place without a point of view would be a vagueness or an Apeiron. A state of boundless fluctuation with neither character nor history. The universe is instead already born as a concrete system dissipating entropy - trading local heat for global expansion. So it is in some scientific sense already organised to constrain fluctuations into a flow of events, a steady accumulation of habits that increasingly reveal its global direction.
But then an organismic view of the universe is too simple when it comes to actual organisms. And the difference is reasonably simple. The information that organises or constrains the actions of the universe sits out at its holographic boundaries. It is literally the outer limit of the event horizon in de Sitter models of cosmology.
Life then discovered the trick of encoding those kinds of shape-giving constraints. It could internalise the constraints it employed as memories for action sequences. It had genes, then neurons, and eventually words and numbers as a machinery for first person semiosis or reality modelling.
So the Cosmos has no memory except in terms of its own actual structure. It is like a tornado in that it spins now because it spun a moment before. And it will spin until it begins to equilibrate whatever combo of source and sink made for an entropic gradient.
But biology evolved code as a means to internalise a point of view. That is both a semiotic ontology, but a very big difference in having this own little store of private information rather than being the helpless product of the collective information of the Cosmos as a whole.
So hopefully answering your question, the objective world becomes the pansemiotic story where there is perhaps a first person view in operation, but one that is so generalised that it is hardly a view at all as far as we are concerned. The universe just comes with a bunch of simple content obeying some simple laws. It is basically raw thermodynamics with no particular concerns, memories or feelings.
And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick.
I must take the blame for your lack of grounding in the position you want to argue? That’s saucy.
But I’m not complaining.
Nobody is to blame. But it would be appreciated if you could dumb it down for us non physicists.
I interact with the physics that I cannot avoid. I agree with your minimization of brain energy principle :smile:
What if we say that being an organic system means that the creature has a patterned way of interacting with its environment each moment , that essentially what a living thing is is this patterned interacting which, unlike a stone, maintains its overall integrity and consistency of functioning even as it is incessantly altering its behavior in response to novelties imposed by the outside(the ‘outside’ includes the consequences of the creature’s own functioning, the reciprocal impact on the life form of the changes it makes to its world in the process of functioning).
Information in this sense would be the normative goal-oriented directionality of a living system’s functional organization. It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling.
Hah. Part of it is that I spend so much time having to make very complicated things very simple for mass audiences. So it is something of a relief just to blow off steam and use the direct technical language that draws on - and thus alludes to - the vast fragmented intellectual landscape that is systems thinking. I am flaunting not just one person’s or one group’s technical jargon here but the great many ways a lot of people have said much the same thing throughout history.
Ah, but if the codes of the cognitive system are just tricks, that is, adaptive accidents , then first person points of view in the experiential sense are really just eliminative rmaterialist products of the wider causal cosmic model.
But if you start with a truly fresh model
of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos.
I get that. I traffic in a different kind of technical language originating in a segment of the Continental philosophic community , and I sample from a variety of these positions when I write.
The thread is quite deep now so you would have missed a lot. We have pretty much established that information goes all the way down to the most fundamental substance, and even the Royal Society is promoting views that life is a process of copying, so information processing. We really can find no limits to how information links things. And now we are at the stage of trying to describe how precisely information effects a state of "integrated information", which I take to be an irreducible conception of consciousness. It would seem a "change in the state of a system" would be a necessity for a system to register external information?
And then, is this universally applicable to all systems including rocks?
True. But I am happy just making physicalism work as a model of reality. I don’t see it as a failed project but instead as an already stunning metaphysical achievement.
Do you think what you suggests leads to good science or practical knowledge?
That assumes there is such a thing.
Quoting apokrisis
Perspective is what rational sentient beings bring to the picture. ‘A physicist is an atom’s way of looking at itself’, said Neils Bohr. So, ultimately, this actually provides place for humanity in the grand scheme, rather than just being 'an accidental collocation of atoms’ (Russell).
There are so many different ‘kinds’ of information. The common quality, in my view, is variability in an interaction. So the focus is a point of interaction, but the variability in question can be in time, energy, space, direction, intention, meaning, etc. It is how our own relation to this variability can be qualitatively structured in relation to the point of interaction that differentiates information.
This may be why apokrisis focuses mainly on the Planck scale - because it is at this point we have minimal qualitative variability in an interaction. This is where our predictions are most certain. From here, we need to account for variability in energy, space, time, etc. It’s where an understanding of information starts. And it starts with us, because the variability we can’t account for is the quality of our own interaction.
Quoting apokrisis
Thank you for adding this - it prompted me to re-read your reply a couple more times to see if I could better grasp what you’re saying (I must admit that I don’t often understand your posts fully). But in this case, I do agree with all of it.
Personally, I think the tendency to talk about ‘substance’ and ‘objects’ and ‘properties’ only sustains the confusion here - but I do recognise that this makes sense to most. Rovelli talks about understanding the world as consisting not of objects in time but of interrelated events, and I think this is an important paradigm shift that in my view gives ‘information’ a more predictable quality.
I will admit that I understand QM only intuitively (qualitatively), though, if at all. It makes more sense to me in how I think about the world than classical physics - even though I can’t do the math, and my interpretations are rarely understood. I’m not entirely sure why that is.
Quite close to Claude Shannon's - father of information theory - own thoughts but with one small difference: not just change but also the degree of change as in more extreme the change, the greater the information content in a message that relates that change. C'mon, mathematize information and this is bound to happen. We need to quantify something. Why not measure the extent of the change (from the baseline)? A rough marker that this is how ordinary people actually view information is the sales figures of so-called tabloid news. I believe they sell like hot cakes.
While reading the OP I was wondering how an animal would answer your question, because information is essential to all animals and insects. Information regarding food, mating, and survial in a hostitle world an awareness that is essential to life. However, what humans do with it is very interesting. :lol: A pack of dogs or troop of apes is not going to sit around and discuss what is information. That said, I think your question is fascinating.
Good point. Not all information is true. You have tapped on to the emotional/social reason for seeking information. That is really something to ponder.
I think you guys have won me back from another forum that is just beginning. I wanted to be in on the beginning of a forum, but it does not have near the depth of thinking that happens here. You all are awesome!
That is a totally fascinating post. I am amazed by how important words are. We can not discuss something without a word for it and you have used words in a most interesting way. I hope to return to your post later when I have time to ponder it. To me, you seem to be speaking of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. Is that close to what you are talking about?
Quoting Pop
If one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, creation, transformation and production. Awareness does not register and copy external information, it enacts a world.
“ “One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)
Life involves copying DNA and producing proteins based on "instructions."
In the interest of starting to specify different kinds of information, here's a Khan academy video. Can you access it? Do you have any good sources?
That’s the Dawkins reductionist view. The holistic alternative recognizes that dna and rna are not autonomous structures but components of a cellular and intercellular milieu in which much more than ‘copying’ is going on. Genes are switched on and off in cells in highly complex ways as a function of changes in this larger system.
https://youtu.be/QceGqKZMqIM
“Predictive processing models, and the allied theoretical machinery, bounce back and forth between thermodynamic and information-theoretic understandings of information and entropy. These understandings are not identical or even equivalent, even though they are theoretically related. But the differences are rarely acknowledged by predictive processing proponents. Here is an example from Clark himself, in a recent paper whose main ideas we otherwise endorse:
‘ This is where FEP [the free energy principle] gets invited onto the stage. FEP states that living organisms that persist must minimize free energy in their exchanges with the environment. The ‘free energy' in question here is an information-theoretic isomorph of thermodynamic free energy, which is a measure of the energy available to do useful work. Useful work, in the information-theoretic story, involves fitting a model to a domain, so reducing information-theoretic free energy is improving the model.’ (Clark 2017)
This is cringeworthy, because it runs roughshod over exactly the point where care is needed. As Deacon (2012) points out, there is no analogue of work in information theory. More important for now is that neither thermodynamic nor information-theoretic understandings of information involve semantics, whereas semantics is the key point of the ecological information in dynamic enactive models. Ecological information—the information available to a moving animal in the environment—is inherently semantic because it specifies the affordances of that environment, what the animal can do in that environment, and generates and supports expectations for what that moving animal will experience as it moves. Ecological information reveals the world as significant for a given creature.
In contrast, it rarely crosses anyone's mind that thermodynamic information might be semantic; and many people forget that information-theoretic (Shannon) information is meaningless in itself, because it is generally discussed in the context of a known decoder that transforms the encoded patterns in the transmitted signal into something meaningful. But this way of framing the relationship between an organism and its environment, and the nature of the signals it receives from that environment—in terms of a transition from thermodynamic free-energy to information-theoretic free-energy—is far from theoretically benign. It is this switch that makes free energy minimization seem to have representational implications, and appear to necessitate the various accoutrement of computational theory of mind.
Why is this? Because the most compelling case for a world-representing inner-model-building brain begins by ignoring the richness of ecological information. This leads to the claim that perception offers insufficient information to guide action, and we therefore need a model to do so (Hohwy 2013). The assumption that organisms work with thermodynamic and Shannon (i.e, non-semantic) information builds that poverty in from the start. This is problematic because some (in our view) fairly unpalatable philosophical conclusions can be drawn from this particular well: if our behavior is driven directly by a model, and only indirectly by the world, then the thought that we have only indirect epistemic access to that world can begin to seem compelling (Clark 2013; 2016b; Hohwy 2013; 2016). And if we only have indirect epistemic access to the world, then isn't perception a form of controlled hallucination, a sensory veil cutting us off from the very world we appear to inhabit?”
Sensationalism sells! I dunno!
I think what I suggest leads to good science and practical knowledge in the following areas:
the understanding of affectivity , including mood, emotion and feeling, and its relation to intentionality, perception and cognition( I’m sorry, but Lisa Barrett’s attempt here just doesn’t cut it).
elucidation of the behavioral processes involved in autism, schizophrenia , depression and ptsd
the understanding of empathy, language and interpersonal dynamics ( how first, second and third person dynamics relate to each other)
an alternative to the realism of cogntive behavioral therapy
a grounding for logic , math and empirical science
I don't want to be a reduction nazi because I think they end up unable to talk about anything but illusions. OTOH, if we can't look at what's going on with life from the angle of information because we're leaving something out if we do, that's maybe hammering home a point we all understand. Or do we?
Yes, the old dialectic of logos and flux is another version of the same essential position. The Cosmos is about how logical order becomes the shaping hand that reins in chaos. And yet you need that lack,of order as the basic thing to then have something to rein in. This makes the whole system, the larger relation, a unity of opposites,
Quoting Joshs
Why do you exclude modelling along with copying and representing? The biosemiotic approach of biologists like Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and many more stress the need for the epistemic cut that indeed produces the closure of autonomy.
And Pattee shows how this even goes back to von Neumann’s mathematical treatment of self-reproducing automata. Rosen likewise provides the strong mathematical arguments. So even just for genetic copying, the need for a model that is separated from what it replicates is an axiomatic basic.
The problem with autopoiesis is that it was fuzzy on this aspect of the story. But there is a good grounding in semiotics to understand how selfhood and autonomy must emerge in life and mind. It is because they are this new thing of a semiotic modelling relation. It is all founded on the logical necessity of making an epistemic cut between self and world so as to start acting as a self in a world.
The informational machinery of a code has its first job in securing a state of enactive organisation. It must have a model of the self in its world so as to organise its metabolic flows and repair its dissipating structures - Rosen’s MR model of anticipatory systems. Then after that enactive relationship is established, there might be some kind of machinery worth replicating by making transmissible copies of a set of genes. The ability to replicate is somewhat secondary - although a logical inevitably because it allows biological development to be joined by biological evolution. And that is a powerful extra.
Note how words and numbers are semiotic codes that first exist as a way of separating a self from its world. Children have minds that become logically organised as they learn language and become able to self-regulate - as was well understood by symbolic interactionism and Vygotskian psychology. Humans have a heightened sense of selfhood because they must socially construct themselves as actors in a cultural drama, and now in the modern era, actors in a techno-neoliberal drama (the world made by thinking in terms of numbers or pure quantification).
And then words and numbers become something that can be transmitted and copied - turned into information or inert symbols to be decoded - by being rendered as marks on a page or electronic fluctuations on a wire. Human culture developed the power to become copyable and thus fully evolvability - capable of explosive change and growth over time as history shows once the digitised habits of writing and counting got started.
Oral culture is weakly transmissible. You had to be there to hear how the story was told and the gestures were used to really get the message. The machinery of copying was still more enactive than representational. It was not symbolic so much as indexical.
But with alphabet systems and numerals, along with punctuation and the sequestering of these marks in inert substrates - in the same way DNA is zipped up and inert and so physically separated from the molecular storm it regulates - humans continued on to full strength symbolism. Or a proper epistemic cut where the transmissiblity of information is separated from the interpretation or enaction of that information.
So you can see why huge confusion results from not being clear that syntax and semantics are two different things when we want to talk about “information” in some generalised way. An informational system - like a biological organism with genes and neurons, perhaps even words and numbers - is both enactive and representational. It is involved in both development (of a self-world modelling relation) and evolution (of a self-world modelling relation).
As usual, there is always a dialectic. And academic camps spring up at either pole to defend their end as the right end.
Again, I stick with systems thinkers or hierarchy theorists who can frame things more coherently.
Enaction is about the first person particularity of being in some actual selfish state in regard to the world. Representation is about what can be objectively copied and replicated so as to pass on the underlying machinery that could form such a particular state of world adaptedness.
Genes represent a generalised growth schedule and a list of essential molecular recipes that are the basic machinery for a body having an enactive modelling relation with its world. And genes also are in some active state of enaction when they are part of a body doing and feeling things as it indeed lives and transacts its metabolic flows.
In any moment of active selfish living existence, the DNA is unzipped and coated with all kinds of regulatory feedback signals so that it is functioning as the anchor to a vast cell and body-wide epigenetic hierarchy of “information”. The code couldn’t be more enactive.
And then the DNA is zipped tight, reduced to the frozen dialectic of sperm and ovum, mechanically recombined as now part of a different kind of story - one that couldn’t be more representational in being an inert process of information copying and the seeding of a next generation with the syntactic variety upon which the process of evolution depends.
If we talk about neurology or neurosemiosis, the stress is of course more on the enaction than the representation. Nature relies on genes to encode neural structure. So experience is something that can both be enacted and represented if you are dealing with simple intelligence in the form or ants or jumping spiders. Genes can specify the shape of the wiring to the degree that habits of thought are pretty much hard wired.
But large brained animals become more or less dependent on personal development or enaction. Thoughts, feeling and memories - some package of life experience that shaped the mind of a tiger or elephant - is information gained and lost. Only very general parts of being a tiger or elephant, as a self in some particular ecological niche, can be captured and transmitted as evolvable and representational information passed on to the next generation.
Humans became even more enactive and developmental as a large brain species. Our babies are at a real extreme in being born with unformed circuitry awaiting the imprint of life experience and hence the accumulation of untransmissible states of attentional response and new thought habit forming.
So genetics was strained to its outer limit in this tilt towards the enactive pole.
But then - hey presto - that paved the way for linguistic culture as a new higher level of semiotic code or information enaction/information representation. We could restore the balance between making minds and being minds with oralism, and then oralism’s continued evolution towards literacy and numeracy.
So neurosemiosis is sort of a gap in the story. It is where the baton gets passed as the genes get stretched to the limit and suddenly - with Homo sapiens - something more abstract, something arising out of social level systemhood, arises to continue the semiotic journey to a higher level of organisation.
This is why the neural code is so hard to find, and why we have patent idiocies like integrated information theory or quantum consciousness theories trying to fill the explanatory gap.
Biology can point to genes as the dual basis of enaction and representation, development and evolution. Social psychology can point to words and numbers in the same way. Brain scientists have to talk in terms of neural network principles to feel they are getting at what makes it all tick in terms of a mind that can be both some particular enactive first person state, and then also the other thing of a genetically transmissible algorithm which a new generation of minds can implement.
Again, I return to the neuroscientists who are actually homing in on this understanding of the great hunt for the neural code - folk like Friston and Grossberg. It is easy to see why they are on the right track, scientifically speaking.
The neural code has to be understood not as a train of symbols but as a standard microcircuit design. A bit of computational machinery. An architectural motif. A transmissible algorithm that is the brain’s basic building block.
And the problem there is Turing machine based notions of neurology’s canonical microcircuit - the standard approach - are so far off the mark. The only people to pay attention to are the ones that talk the language of anticipatory systems.
Quoting apokrisis
An epistemic cut, the attempt to glue back together the objective and the subjective, which we decided to separate many centuries ago, is only necessary when we take the following as our ground.
“…the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. It is objective, and indeed utterly recalcitrant, in its existence.”
I mentioned in a previous post what I consider to be the practical and scientific implications of the model
of causality I support. You undoubtedly noticed that these have to do with psychological processes that are quite a distance from the physical, biological and psychophysical regions that you are interested in. Although I believe that eventually this approach will impact thinking in these domains , I don’t have any particular criticisms of your thinking as long as it confines itself to territory that doesn’t involve psychological phenomena such as affect, rationality , social and political interaction , and language.
In that light , your view of semiotics as structural coding and decoding strays into the territory of human language,
and clashes with recent thinking in psychology on the nature of language. As psychologist George Kelly wrote
“For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so courageously initiated.
Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system."
Those are motherhood claims rather than concrete examples. Is there a particular case where phenomenology or continental philosophy delivers an insight that my brand of semiotic holism or systems science couldn’t?
I agree that the general project of internalism is a valid reaction to the excesses of externalism, or objective third person, view from nowhere, metaphysics.
But my physicalism - following on from Peirce and Salthe - is internalist too. Or at least it starts and returns there to the degree that it is a pansemiotic understanding of reality - a view of the Cosmos as itself an organism undergoing a process of enactive development (rather than a Darwinian evolution, or blind play of chance).
So as I have said I don’t want to go too overboard on pansemiosis and an organismic Cosmos. Peirce and Salthe are way to the left of me on that. But I do accept weak pansemiosis rather than strong. And so a weak version of internalism rather than phenomenology’s over-emphasised one.
Again as I have argued, enaction is twinned with representation in semiosis. A code is something which is objectivised - in being syntax divorced from semantics, information divorced from its entropic consequences - and yet is also internal because an organism can curl all its symbols up into tiny DNA threads, or a pocket size book and act on a set of instructions at its leisure.
Selfhood thus becomes objective or mechanical at its anchoring source. The internalism of organismic being had the devil of the third person view at its functional heart. The whole metaphysics of organicism - the romantic naturphilosophie response to Enlightenment Reductionism - is subverted because the machine becomes the precious conceal trick.
Objectivists and subjectivists do their ritual battle. Realism vs idealism. Analytic philosophy against Continental. Externalists vs internalists. Always the response to discovering a foundational dichotomy is to set up camp at one or other end and look around for who wants a fight. Start policing the boundary - the epistemic cut! - that separates self from other.
On the internet, some random dude (me) sounds a little dismissive of phenomenology. Immediately your hackles are raised. You leap forth from your camp to make a challenge to discover whose side ai really stand on. This is the social drama we must engage in - the one written into very formula of the forum’s software. It is a game of taking sides and marking boundaries with our technical vocabularies.
But as I have tried to make clear, there is a third way that is (successfully) Hegelian in being Peircean.
The only problem is that it is rather complicated and so has remained marginalised ever since Anaximander tried to get the show rolling.
That’s not a deep understanding of what it is. It is instead the enactive production of the dialectical drama which is a self in its world. It is how the objective vs subjective distinction even rises to the level of intelligible categories of being.
Quoting Joshs
Oh I just love these examples of boundary policing. Watch out, here comes the bloody social psychologist knocking on the door of our cosy introspectionist Wednesday night group meet. What a nuisance. See him off with a quick quote from one of our cherished authorities.
Quoting Joshs
Happily I’ve covered that in an extensive post on the way codes have to support both copying and enaction. And why neurosemiosis presents a particular issue in the transition from genes to words. Brain circuitry is some kind of standard algorithm - but also not really an algorithm in the mainstream computer science sense. And so neuroscience has more work to do on elucidating the nature of what we would mean in talking about a neural code.
I see human consumers queuing up all night to be the first to purchase Apple's latest generation of iPhones. What is going on there - from a George Kelly point of view? What kind of diagnosis and remedy does your hero provide to what we both surely agree is some mad, or at least odd and fetishistic, societal behaviour?
This is a concrete example to test a contrast in our world views.
I claim my techno-dialectics gets down to the root of things in providing a naturalistic explanation - one that ties the construction of the modern self to the driving impulse of thermodynamic necessity.
But what say you?
I have an enormous amount of respect for both approaches here. I am reading along, taking notes and doing background research. I’ve let you know because I’m hoping you keep us spectators in mind with handy references and refrain from academic shorthand. And try and keep it respectful, gentlemen.
Carry on...
I am totally with you in an enactive understanding. I think you will find "Information" is what enables it.
Not feeling so well today, will reply more fully later.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/
https://www.academia.edu/234713/The_Physics_and_Metaphysics_of_Biosemiotics
https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html
Dan Zahavi (phenomenology)
Michel Bitbol (Philosophy of Science). He has some fascinating papers and online lectures.
These are all sources I've discovered or been shown through this Forum.
Quoting Joshs
Not 'utterly', according to John Wheeler. The following from his paper, Law without Law
(Also learned of that paper through this forum...)
Not feeling to well currently, will take a little break.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37969#Sec7
Might be suffering from information overload. :wink:
Wheeler is one of the greats. But this also reflects the era of Copenhagen quantum mechanics before quantum maths had decoherence, or the missing bit of statistical mechanics, bolted on to give us quantum field theory.
Now decoherent quantum physics is a problem as lesser minds than Wheeler carried on with a mechanical understanding of physics and so arrived at the popular metaphysics of the many worlds interpretation.
But Wheeler’s participatory universe just needs to adjust the position of its epistemic cut. It has to be moved from the default Copenhagen position - something do to with being the boundary defined by a conscious human observer reading a needle on a dial (how semiotic!) - to being a Cosmos that pansemiotically observes itself.
The decoherence mod to quantum maths - the addition of statistical mechanics to the wave mechanics - is a way of universalising the epistemic cut so it exists freely at every physical scale of being. You get a practical story where the quantum turns classical with an exponential speed as it encounters its thermal surrounds.
Sometimes - if interactions are sparse because the events are in an empty and cold vacuum - then decoherence, the collapse of the wavefunction, can take a long time. And that is how we trap quantumness in the lab. Chill it and let it swell larger in a vacuum.
But most of the time the collapse - in the hot and crowded thermal environment that makes our comfortable human home - happens almost immediately as far as we are concerned. It just isn’t a visible factor in a world we experience as concrete and classical.
And if we do look up at the twinkle of a star, that means we are trained to see it as a distant object and not a remarkable photonic interaction that is nonlocal in the way Wheeler’s quantum eraser emphasises.
So Wheeler was free thinking enough to give voice to a semiotic view that incorporates the necessity of placing the classical vs quantum epistemic cut somewhere. But Copenhagenism was just science being methodologically strict and saying we can’t yet place that cut out there as some physical mechanism. So hold on and just say all we can do so far is know we are reading a dial.
And then the maths was added that gives the whole universe a thermal structure. Quantum theory still can’t speak directly about the actual collapse of the wavefunction - hence why the many worlds interpretation has legs. But it has placed the epistemic cut out in the world as a grid of constraining structure - classical measurements we can agree on using a thermometer, stopwatch and ruler. Quantumness is confined in classical boxes of every size, just as we observe to be the case.
Chaos is controlled, order is regained, the scientist feels good.
And quantum biology is showing now how life itself has long mastered this semiotic trick of boxing up quantum uncertainty to extract useful work from its thermal environment. Every enzyme looks to use classical structure to harness quantum superposition so as to beat the odds when it comes to driving chemical reactions uphill against the prevailing entropic conditions,
Reactions that might only happen once in a thousand years can be forced to happen in a millisecond. Physics had become life’s plaything down at nanoscale. Life thrives on uncertainty because randomness is something it knows how to control. And quantum uncertainty is the most high powered form of randomness. Life can do jujitsu by using its opponent’s own helpless weight against it.
I think people make a lot of the marvels of the mind. Consciousness seems mysterious and fantastic. But biology - the trick of being alive - is revealing its own deep underpinnings at long last. Even biologists are stunned by how little they understood just 15 or 20 years ago.
This video isn’t about the harnessing of the quantum realm directly, but it is about the nano-machinery which colonises that physical boundary layer with its remarkable molecular motors…..
Yeah, but no room for epistemic cuts here! All is enactive, with a mind in the background, but also intrinsic to it ( every member and the whole ), causing the informational bodies to integrate. Thus creating meaning / life.
So the genes don’t measure the state of the body, the state of its metabolism, and turn the dials accordingly? There is no separation between the regulation and the action? An enzyme doesn’t have both its quantum pocket for doing its physical magic and also separately it’s regulatory receptor site for listening out for its instructions?
The body is a nested hierarchy of epistemic cuts. And that is only expanded by evolving an immune system and a nervous system.
It is ridiculous that you now just go boo, hiss in pantomime fashion when the epistemic cut is mentioned. Show that you understand what it even means as a technical term from theoretical biology.
You do not need to resolve all the details / cannot currently resolve all the details,. But you know that once you do discover the details, that what you will be describing is INFORMATION.
So, there is a logical way to describe it, if all information can fit a singular definition? This is the aim of the thread. You have agreed that the plot is feasible, grudgingly! Thus far @Daniel has been the prime mover. Can you capture all information in a singular definition?
My take is that decoherence explains why Schrödinger’s cat is never actually both dead and alive, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental role of observation in the formulation of quantum mechanics.
Or did you buy the last one? Please don’t disappoint me after raising my hope so, :cry:
In the sense that is is meaningful and not merely noise?
But the mechanics - the formal model - doesn’t grant observation a fundamental role. It isn’t even in the model. There is no mechanism that determines the actual outcome. QM only describes some constrained space of probabilities - a wavefunction. It shrugs it shoulders about the collapse of the wavefunction. That’s your problem, mate. Open the box and look at the cat yourself.
Decoherence at least now gives us boxes of many appropriate sizes. A cat sized box is so large, crowded and warm that our chances of observing anything weird are too negligible even to consider. But a nanoscale box can be full of fluctuating surprises. We can materialise sudden reversals of the second law that are like bank errors in our favour,
Message = A poodle dog entered the room xptlmz
Redundancy = dog
Noise = xptlmz
Information = A poodle entered the room
Meanings can’t just be composed. They must be subsumed to a holistic pattern, a top-down structure, a semiotic habit of interpretance.
Information theory is particularly silent on this.
Edit: But not even this! For as nature as it is understood here to be a non-sentient randomness of conformity can convey what time is best to plant, hunt, or harvest. So where does that leave us?
The way I see it, Claude Shannon treats information as answers to questions which from a certain perspective dissociates the grammar/syntax from semantics.
So, "a poodle entered the room"is rephrased as the answer to a question like so:
Q. What entered the room?
A. A poodle.
There's no discernible grammar/syntax in the answer (the message) as you will have already noticed.
I dunno!
A: A poodle.
A: The poodle.
A: Some poodle.
A: Poodle.
A: Poodle a.
A: Can you repeat the question in a way that takes up more of the grammatical load so I can pretend my reply has no grammatical structure?
I'm grateful that you thought my views were worth pursuing further but I'm not sure whether your objective was to make me realize that,
I wouldn't feel too grateful at 10k posts the argument is more self-enforced than otherwise. :razz:
:smile:
Quoting apokrisis
Hence the 'observer problem' - that the role of the observer is essential but unspecified. The problem which the many-worlds intepretation wishes to sidestep.
Quoting apokrisis
What's at the top? Isn't that just what Dennett dismissed as 'sky hooks'? Isn't everything supposed to evolve through the blind shuffling of genetic units of information, sieved through natural selection? Bottom-up all the way? If that's not right, then the acclaimed Neo-Darwinian Synthesis has some major problems.
Quoting Outlander
Well, what would you expect with a question like that as the OP? The only sensible response would have been 'what information?'
I’m sure an insult is buried in there somewhere. But you asked surely I could see there was no discernible grammar in your answer. And yet I seemed able to discern some grammar in your answer.
Was I mistaken or do you accept that and now withdraw your claim? Ball is in your court, sir.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If there's a point, I didn't get it.
No insults I assure you. I thought you were being snide. No point discussing this. Let's pick up where we left off.
I'm not even sure if what I say makes sense but Claude Shannon's information theory seems to treat messages (carriers of information) as the final answer to a series of yes/no questions aimed at narrowing down the possibiilites that the message could be from an arbitrary n to 1.
For instance, if there are 4 possibilities A, B, C, and D, the message A is the answer to 2 yes/no questions [1. Is it among the first two letters of the alphabet? 2. Is it the first letter of the alphabet?] and thus carries 2 bits of information.
Given this is the case, the message "a poodle entered the room" can be reframed as the following:
Question: What entered the room?
a) A poodle OR b) An elephant OR c) A cow
Answer: a) A poodle
As you can see the syntactical aspects of the answer are covered for by the question itself. In fact, it seems possible to remove the phrase "a poodle" completely and just say a).
A thousand apologies! I'll do my best to restrain myself.
:up: Take a break.
... non-sentient randomness of conformity implies a scientific (but not philosophical) objectivity in that within the scope of all observations that conformity is universal. Nature knows when it's time to plant. As for us, we copy and try to improve on nature's way by seeking to extract and make use of information useful for us.
What is information for the cosmologist is not information for the farmer.
A physical poodle enters the room--->Physical light travels from the poodle to your eyes--->A physical signal travels from your eyes to your brains vision processing region--->Physical signals from this brain region are transmitted to regions that have the ability to instantiate mental content as a specific brain state.
The final state takes the form BRAIN(mental content) as in BRAIN(a poodle has entered the room).
We test for mental content all the time (tests, quizes, exams) so in practice we ackowlegde mental content exist. I'm wondering if it's falsifiable or unfalsifiable... not sure. My default is that mental content does exist. That leads to the idea that information exists in the form of BRAIN(mental content).
If you missed it earlier in this thread it solves the logic problem of how the physical can interact with the "non-physical" (really neuron contained mental content) and vice versa. This would assume full input/output capabilities. Such as Physical input--->senses--->BRAIN(mental content)--->muscles--->Physical output.
Turing test? Mimicking consciousness to a T maybe possible. That's the nub of the Turing test. Of course, we may not be able to tell if the AI that passes the test is actually conscious (mental content +). P-zombies?
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I don't see any explanations on how the laws of science aren't violated.
Quoting TheMadFool
If you think they are you could point that out.
I'm thinking about the turning test. Biology and electronic computers each have unique parameters.
Thanks for this abstract. FEP and its pros and cons was touched upon earlier. In contrast to the energy / thermodynamic consideration, life is basically about copying. Life copied itself into existence as outlined in this royal society publication. A copy has to be made before any other consideration, and this seems to be the focus of contemporary understanding.
Abstract: "We conclude that organic information does not have the status of a derived physical quantity because it cannot be expressed by anything simpler than itself. This means that organic information has the same scientific status as the fundamental quantities of physics.
Again it has to be underlined that a similar idea has been proposed by Küppers [26] in respect to the concept of ‘pragmatic information".
Quoting Joshs
This is more along the lines of my understanding of how information embeds an organism in its environment in an enactive manner.
The world is enactive at all scales, and a generic platonic information seems to facilitate this. This Information seems to be the currency of an enactive world, but it is such a slippery concept to get a metaphysical fix on. Has anybody explored enactivism specificaly in terms of information such that they have arrived at a definition that befits an enactive world?
Thus far with the help of @Daniel We have :
Information describes the physical structure of entities, and enables them to interact with and change other entities, in a reciprocal manner.
But I hope to significantly improve on this. Anyone??
Quoting apokrisis
The claims I made included models of schizophrenia and
autism. These illnesses involve deficits in empathy whose elucidation requires a theory of empathy, how we recognize others as having minds, thoughts , feelings. The discovery of mirror neurons which fire not only when Chimps perform an action but when they see another chimp perform the same action has led to a new range of theories of empathy. The three leading candidates for theory theory simulation theory and interactionism. Theory theory relies on classical information processing models of in which an internal representation is generated of the other’s actions and compared against that action. According to this perspective, Autistics fail to pedicure a theory of other minds. Interaction theory, borrowing from phenomenology, argues against the idea that we generate a theory of other minds as the main way that we relate to others. They argue empathy is no mediated by representations but is immediate and directly in the world. They point out that autistics have difficulty in this immediate and direct relating and so fall back on a theory of mind as an inadequate substitute for direct interaction.
Quoting apokrisis
It is a common misunderstanding to consider phenomenology as an idealism, internalism, introspection, a philosophy of the ‘inside’.
But as Zahavi puts it :”…the very alternative between internalism and externalism – an alternative based on the division between inner and outer – is inapplicable when it comes to phenomenological conceptions of the mind-world relation.
As Husserl already pointed out in the Logische Untersuchungen, the entire facile divide between inside
and outside has its origin in a naive commonsensical metaphysics and is phenomenologically suspect and
inappropriate when it comes to understanding the nature of intentionality (Husserl 1984b, 673, 708). The
same criticism can also be found in Heidegger, who denies that the relation between Dasein and world can
be grasped with the help of the concepts “inner” and “outer”. As he writes in Sein und Zeit:
In directing itself toward...and in grasping something, Dasein does not first go outside of the inner
sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already
“outside” together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner
sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its
character. Rather, even in this “being outside” together with its object, Dasein is “inside” correctly
understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what
is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one
has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Dasein that knows
remains outside as Dasein (Heidegger 1986, 62).
The notions of internalism and externalism remain bound to the inner-outer division, but as the following,
final, quote from Merleau-Ponty illustrates, this is a division that phenomenology plays havoc with:
“Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (Merleau-Ponty
1945, 467 [1962, 407]).
Considering the way in which phenomenologists conceive of intentionality, of the mind-world
relationship, I think it is questionable whether it really makes much sense to classify their views as being
committed to either internalism or externalism. Avoiding the two terms obviously won’t solve all the problems,
but might at least permit us to avoid letting our investigation be guided by misleading metaphors. The mind is neither a container nor a special place. Hence it makes little sense to say that the world must be either inside or outside of the mind. Ultimately, we should appreciate that the phenomenological investigations of the structures and conditions of possibility for phenomena are antecedent to any divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since they are investigations of the dimension in which any object – be it external or internal – manifests itself (cf. Heidegger 1986, 419, Waldenfels 2000, 217). Rather than committing the mistake of interpreting the phenomena mentalistically, as being part of the mental inventory, we should see the phenomenological focus on the phenomena as an attempt to question the very subject-object split, as an attempt to stress the co-emergence of mind and world.”
I may have missed the post where you get into the details of this. There are a number of fans of the later Wittgenstein on here, and they may be of help in clarifying whether your model of neurosemiosis, of language in general , is at all compatible with the radical contextuality of Philosophical Investigations. I mention this because phenomenology and Wittgenstein move in the same direction on semiology, and we could save a lot of time by being able to refer the topic of language back to some very helpful previous threads.
I'm assuming monism, where information has it's neural correlates. So information causes a physical change ( in brain structure ), and this physical change embeds and orients an entity to its environment.
So there is a physical thing going on, where environmental information acts upon an entity and changes them physically, thus creating an enactive situation.
This is entirely subconscious, similar to the way the skin tans in the sun.
@apokrisis RIP "epistemic cut"
I think your starting point is too over-determined and abstract. Individual sense and interpretation get lost when we begin from a monolithic ground of natural objects. It misses where those objects come from, that they arise as fictions of a sort , or better yet, idealizations.
We dont begin with the natural except as a naive presumption. We begin, every one of us, with a constantly changing flow of sense from which we carve out patterns of stability that integrate what we perceive with how we move our bodies to form what we eventually call empirical objects when we correlated our own perspectives with those of others in our communities. But each perspective remains one’s own , even when we convince ourselves that we can be conditioned, shaped, indoctrinated into larger social structures.
We are only indirectly beholden ton techno ,economic -and language structures, but we are , each one of us , directly beholden to our own personal construals of the sense of language , technology, economic structures.
An Apple phone means different things to different people, and its effect on the working of culture also break down to subgroups and those subgroups to even smaller groups and so on , as a function of what each of us brings to our interpretation of the sense and meaning and usefulness of the toys made available to us.
Oh I would agree with that. And it explains why a binary code is the ultimate notion of a code. It is the simplest and fastest means to constrain uncertainty.
Think of the game of 20 questions. I could be thinking of anything - here it happens to be a poodle. And you have to zero in on that answer in as few steps as possible. The most efficient algorithm is a series of yes/no questions that exactly bisects the space of all possible replies. So typically you would ask is it living or dead? Is it human or another living form? Is it domestic or wild? Does it live on a farm or in your house? You get the idea. Eventually you get down to the best questions for halving your uncertainty about the breed.
So a binary code offers the simplest way to constrain semantics. It doesn’t have to tick off alternatives in a linear fashion. It can home in on the only possibility at an exponential rate.
So at an abstract level we can define semantic meaning as about erasing information. Each yes/no counterfactual step can potentially eliminate as much as half of all the contextually valid alternatives.
The question then is can we ever arrive at some irreducible quantity which might constitute a semantic atom. Is any reply ever going to be completely sufficient.
This gets us into the essential difference between a pragmatic theory of meaning or truth and the more familiar atomising approaches to meaning and truth as just naked facts.
So all I meant to emphasise is that information - as meaning - is not atomic and therefore never easy to just turn into a counting exercise - a matter of naked quantity. Meanings are semantics that are the results of grammatical frames. Work has been done to constrain the space of possibilities and limit the uncertainties to a “reasonable” degree.
Turning that into a mathematics is difficult. But even so, biologists and neuroscientists are having a go, with Shannon information and Boltzmann entropy being some kind of atomistic foundation.
As I said, the Planck scale at least does provide a measurable limit on uncertainty, and thus also certainty. It tells us how confined quantumness in practice is, and where the boundary of classical atomism more or less begins. That is why information theory is such a big deal in new physics. It introduces the idea that reality is not constructed of actual atoms but, even so, it is fundamentally grainy and atomistic because holographic constraint or thermal decoherence acts everywhere to limit material uncertainty to a Planck constant defined scale.
Now that kind of physics says nothing about our ordinary linguistic notions of meaning or semantics. And yet it also is the same paradigm shift that would be reflected in a move from an analytic philosophy style logical atomism to a semiotic or pragmatic theory of meaning and truth.
These are neurological disorders that strike at brain organisation at a far more basic level than any “cognitive module” like the rather shaky TOM story. They are both about fine grain and pervasive disturbances to the microcircuitry that in general has to achieve a meaningful balance of integration and differentiation in terms of a modelled self-world relationship.
They show as disorders of social thought because social thinking is the most complex and challenging level of human thought. But the dysfunctions are at a deeper neurodevelopmental level.
Trying to fix the empathy circuit is not addressing the root issue. But reframing the social space of the person in a suitable fashion is of course a way to make their lives better.
Quoting Joshs
Great. We can identity a way that phenomenology is clearly wrong. Semiotics says the production of a self in a world is the opposite of a facile distinction. It is the distinction on which life and mind themselves are founded.
Quoting Joshs
This is starting the story after the fact. Every child has to go through the neurodevelopmental process of learning it owns its own hands and that a cat disappearing behind the chair will likely re-emerge the other side.
So for the rationalising adult self, the situation is all rather Kantian. We are beings trapped in our representations. But pragmatism then points out that we are “selves” to the degree we have managed to construct the separation that in fact allows us to be in this kind of modelling relation with “reality”.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. The usual love of confounding paradox that marks Continental philosophy and thus “others” it from AP’s love of reassuring certitude.
This is why a prefer the third way of pragmatic philosophy and its modelling relation ontology.
We start off in a state of vagueness - a blooming, buzzing confusion - and then sort that out into a dichotomously rational, hierarchically structured, state of being which is “us as selves in a world.”
The inner is a construction, and so is the outer. The two are rationally constructed to be mutual and complementary aspects of the one modelling relation. I am me to the extent I have othered the world. And vice versa. And what then makes this sane is that it delivers in terms of pragmatic optimality. Goals are defined and goals are achieved.
Intentionality isn’t a surprise or a mystery. A point of view is what will be developed - to the degree that a point of view is useful and meaningful.
The next bit of business is then to discover what defines “useful”. Natural science points us towards the perhaps shocking answer - entropy production. It hasn’t so far pointed us to anything in terms of some higher human purpose - something to do with ineffable spirit or feeling or Platonic goodness.
Quoting Joshs
And so we circle back to the view we share - that mind is an enactive relation. Another way of talking about semiotic modelling. But with a very different evaluation of the role of the epistemic cut.
Semiotics makes the point that it is how a co-construction of mind and world even gets going. It is the feature and not the bug.
The later Wittgenstein who had Ramsey softly whispering the Peircean corrections to his earlier logical atomistic realism in his ear?
I wonder if all the details of how information correlates to it's neural parts, and the embeddings of the physical changes taking place with the environment ...etc would be philosophically meaningful topics. Would it not be then neuroscience, cosmology or cognitive psychological topic, rather than a philosophical topic?
I believe that true philosophy has element of critiques, clarifying what is not clear in the thoughts, assertions and arguments in the topics, and defining what is the correct way of seeing and resolving the problems by using self reasoning and intuition.
No one would need all the information about everything under the sun in real life. Sure, there is vast amount of information stored on the internet, almost everything about the whole history of the universe. But then it is not information, it is data warehouse.
An individual or organisation would always need some specific data organised in the form they want for their task, project or usage. That is information.
If I want information on how to increase the chances of winning the lottery, then I don't need how the world works, or why the sun rises from the east, or billions and billions of other data etched into some physical organism and changing by its environmental surroundings. I want to know the particular instructions on how to select the 6 numbers and where and how to buy the tickets. That would be it. That is information (not encyclopaedic data), and is the information I want. :D
In my understanding, information plays a deeper role then is normally understood. By understanding information in it's deepest sense a certain picture of the world emerges.
For instance, everything is information from the perspective of everything.
Wouldn't you say that is interesting philosophy?
Sure it is. I am just saying from the other side point of view to get the dialectic discourse of the argument. :)
Whenever there is a new OP, if everyone all agrees to it, or says nothing, then that is not philosophy either. We must see, and discuss the points from all sides of angle.
Given I take a process philosophy point of view, that can’t be the case. Semiotics starts from the other end of the spectrum. It begins in the monolithic ground of structuralism if anywhere. And it others monism by being irreducibly triadic.
So on all scores, it stands apart from a metaphysics of "middle-sized dry goods". It is the opposite of an object oriented ontology.
Quoting Joshs
As said, I agree that experience is the construction of a point of view that yields a clear distinction between a self and the world this self is in.
Where we differ - or the flaw I read into phenomenology- is that my natural philosophy approach sees this modelling relation as so general that it is the trick that underlies all life and mind. And maybe even - pansemiotically/thermodynamically - the Cosmos itself. Whereas the Continental habit of thought is socially shaped by the ideology of Romanticism and so the “right answer” becomes the one that most celebrates individuation and personalised truths.
To make psychology something owned by an individual, both biology and culture must be rejected as legitimate sources of this selfhood. The constraints that form us in pragmatic fashion are turned into the chains that bind us. To be “true to ourselves” we must learn to hate hierarchy and “monolithic” structure.
But as I argue, that is an entirely false notion of personhood. The Romantic model of self ironically is employed against humanity by fossil-fuel driven modern economics. The entropic game is kept going by the mass production of individuals eager to accumulate some life store of personalising material objects and even socially-ranked bucket list experiences.
The dysfunction stares us in the face. So I asked whose model can better diagnose the human reality we have managed to co-construct as an interaction between information and entropy.
Well, I know whose model is based on that epistemic cut rather than bemoaning the fact of such an epistemic cut.
Quoting Joshs
It is not about being beholdened or enchained by our biological and social contexts. They are the information that informs our being in the first place.
Your phenomenology gets the causality the wrong way around.
And to forestall your next attempt to simplify my irreducibly triadic ontology to some too simple and plainly false monism, the systems view is all about the co-construction of the functional modelling relation.
A society or ecosystem has a natural interest in producing well fitted parts. And those parts have a natural interest in constructing a well functioning whole.
Rather than antagonism, what drives things is the search for pragmatic synergy. A balance of opposites such as competition and cooperation, or plasticity and stability. The kind of dichotomies that characterise a “system”.
As per the OP, without information, everything would be nothing.
But everything is nothing if it is just noise with no signal. So you are no better off until you take the next step of producing a theory that offers an epistemic cut that separates signal from noise - something like the algorithm of a Bayesian Brain engaged in minimising its surprisal or free energy.
If you have a TV screen and it is just a display of white noise static, isn’t that both everything and nothing? Every random flashing pixel is some part of the instantiation of both every great film ever made, and even every great film that could possibly either get made.
So you have the problem in saying “everything is information”. It is the kind of monism that is bounded by two self-ridiculing notions - the idea of absolute nothingness and of infinity. Two equally unrealistic notions of “a limit”.
If you can’t introduce an epistemic cut into your ontic model - the constraint that separates signal from noise - then that is how you wind up with metaphysical idiocies like the many worlds quantum interpretation or modal realism. You have the TV screen that is showing you every great movie that could ever be made in its featureless static. You have the panpsychic nonsense where even a stone is conscious because it implements an unbounded number of informational states in the random thermal jiggling of its constituent atoms.
So your approach to the big question of “what is information” is doomed to failure until you can offer a machinery or formalism that separates signal from noise.
When does a difference make a difference? When does it cease to be merely a difference, like the flash of a pixel or a crackle on a telephone line?
(A: When it has a context that could make that the case.)
Sure, but each individual will only need specific tailored information, and process with it. By definition, I think, information is tailored, abstracted and minimised in content for the purpose. The universe is filled with objects which can be seen as symbols carrying meanings, but they are randomly observed and perceived, and not classed as information. Data is produced by people, but it is not organised, and has no format, random in content. Data in general is not meaningful to most people.
Information is specific and always has seekers and providers for certain purposes.
If one is writing a database software for covid vaccinated population, then they will go through data analysis on the targeted entities (population) with the fields such as name, dob, sex, address, citizens no, date of 1st vaccination, do2ndvac, do2ndvac. The system is abstracted, organised and specified for certain purposes. Data gathered in the format from the real population and facts are gathered and is in presentable form to the seekers (gov, authorities, health officials and media) as information.
That is the way I think what information is, but maybe it is too narrow definition. I stand for correction.
As I explore this, and as has been previously mentioned. Information seems to be a fundamental quantity. The universe needs information fundamentally. It could not exist without it. Elucidating this information precisely though is pretty tricky.
And then what you mention is also valid, but comes much later. Ideally we would be able to define a singular information that covers all instances of informational transaction..
This thread has been unusually calm & rational & broadminded, perhaps because Pop himself is calm & rational & broadminded. However, the philosophical implications of modern Information Theory lie primarily in the general Ontological and Epistemological realms. But this thread has been mostly focused on narrow technical details. Just mention Realism versus Idealism, as in the Antirealism thread, and you'll see a more hotly contested, and interesting, philosophical debate break out. Remember the Chinese curse : "may you have an interesting life". :cool:
Did you see the video that @Daniel posted earlier. There are similar experiments with Killbots from Harvard.
At the heart of systems theory, it is just noise, then particles with noise begin to interact, and form a clump, and soon we are on our way to elementary particles.
Quoting apokrisis
That everything is information is an easily falsifiablestatement, as mentioned earlier. You really need to acknowledge this, to get a feel for reality, imo. A self is something that forms in the midst of a self organizing informational system. How can the system cut itself off from what it is interrelating with. Sorry, it makes no sense to me.
At the same time, I need to narrate a story in terms of the knowledge that I posses, just as you do. In the end no paradigm can be absolutely true. We mustn't lose sight of that fact.
You mentioned earlier you have explored different paradigms. Did you step over the fence, or did you push the fence further. Do you understand what I mean?
What if, like some suggest, there was a time when nobody was around who could perceive it? If a tree falls in the woods...
A time before DNA and plants even. Just, whatever you believe, I suppose prevailing theories would suggest empty void of various gases and dust that somehow were present, later coalescing to form stars and planets? Was there really information then? What was the "first" bit of information? The big bang? Perhaps, or perhaps prodding too far will render the mind unable to process information entirely. It's a real head-scratcher, or perhaps just a big knee-slapper. I am without information to discern which is most accurate!
I really like the analogy above about TV static being nothing and everything. It can be compared to atoms. We got satisfying enough answers in the OP already, discernment, patterns, etc. A hypothetical infinite and absolutely gray universe, but even a wall painted one color can show that.. if there is one who can perceive, they will. Naturally not only would there not be sentient life in such a universe there would be no knowledge. Is information reality? It becomes almost metaphysical. What is not available to a person, cannot be known. We allegedly live in a "world" where when your heart stops, you are dead. But do we really know this? I know some claim to, myself included, but I just feel there's some relevance somewhere here in this quest for more information about information.
Edit: I see the black hole information paradox has been brought up already, which to those not familiar is "[the suggestion] that physical information could permanently disappear in a black hole" clashing with some fancy talk about how it can't.
At metaphysical bottom, there is a stuff and information about it. And If we are to understand the stuff, that is the way it will always be.
What precisely information is, is the question? @Gnomon has some really good info on his website.
Quoting Outlander:up:
We live in a world where we most deeply identify with the feeling we posses at heart. As best I can unravel it, everything in this universe feels it's forces acting on them. If so, then we can never lose touch with that feeling in this universe.
If it didn't, it wouldn't be 'a self'. Even the very simplest life-forms, single celled organisms, are separated from their environment by a membrane. If they weren't separated, they would decompose, as would any organism. Being an organism means being separate. Death is precisely the end of that distinction because it results in decomposition.
When you get mail, it’s addressed to you, not ‘the universe’. The separation of self and world is a basic, or the basic, fact of existence.
A Cell is an individual organism inside a body. A human is a cell inside the biosphere.
Hope that helps.
This is bullshit. But you seem happy enough with it.
I didn't bother with the video as a glance at the thumbnail was already enough. The reply to these artificial notions of life and mind - self organisation with no epistemic cuts - is contained in this paper, Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology.
Quoting Pop
The question cuts both ways. How can a self cut itself off from the world with which it interacts? And how can a self interact with a world unless it is separated from that world in some pragmatic sense?
If things make no sense, it is because you don't get the logic of modelling relation theory, or biosemiotics, as the right kind of systems theory for systems that have life and mind and which aren't simply physical systems (or their informational simulations).
Quoting Pop
There is a race. But all must win prizes! I remember that from Alice in Wonderland.
Quoting Pop
When I first came across Peirce, I thought it was nuts. Everything I hold true is the product of engaging fruitfully with the opposition.
.
Of course, for something to 'exist' be it physical or even a thought it has to have some properties to it. Without turning this into a dreadful discussion of qualia and having to phone up Daniel Dennett, it would seem we equate information with literally anything that exists, form, perhaps. A pure blue sky is information, that it probably won't rain, along with numerous scientific details that can be extracted about weather, climate, atmosphere, etc.
Matter possesses properties aka information, is what you're saying? Sure, it's either small, large, hot, cold, light or dark, inobservable to the human eye (regardless if any alleged humans exist or not) or it is. Descriptions, etc. Dang it, more qualia talk. So this is your (pen?)ultimate definition of information: properties. Matter, even.
Eh. A bit like riding a roller coaster up a steep hill and having it instead turn to the side and gradually return to it's resting place at a speed that wouldn't spill a full glass but, if that's what it is.
Think of a cell inside a body, and then think of a human as a cell in the biosphere.
Quoting apokrisis
From what I know of Pierce, he seemed to be on the right track, but just lacked the concepts in his time. I bet today he would be a panpsychist.
You say you are catching up on biology, that is a real eye opener. Lets take this up again in a couple of months. It's been a pleasure.
You are thinking of a cancer.
A cell is constrained by a body. It gets the plug pulled by apotosis as soon as it starts to falter in dectable ways. A key step to branching out as a cancer is thus to knock out this self-regulating machinery.
So individuation or differentiation takes place against a backdrop of holism or integration. What is known technically as a nested hierarchy. You have a stable balance between top-down imposed constraints and bottom-up constructive action.
Quanta did a good article on the information theoretic approach to this biological issue - What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.
And surprise, surprise. It too ends up reacting against the Santa Fe brand of informational complexity to arrive at a semiotic or cognitive model based on Friston’s Bayesianism.
Quoting Pop
You wouldn’t win that bet.
Self-organization, also called (in the social sciences) spontaneous order, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability. Wikipedia.
Quoting apokrisis
Try Prion. Mitochondria, white blood cells. Think proteins inside a cell, if you are going to be so obstinate.
I'm assuming monism, where information has it's neural correlates. So information causes a physical change ( in brain structure ), and this physical change embeds and orients an entity to its environment.
So there is a physical thing going on, where environmental information acts upon an entity and changes them physically, thus creating an enactive situation.
This is entirely subconscious, similar to the way the skin tans in the sun.
@apokrisis RIP "epistemic cut"
I've been trying to do this collectively, but we cannot seem to even get to first base.
Ok, perhaps I have a problem. Perhaps I need guidance. You see I'm coherent. So, be as your name suggests. Guide me, please.
It isn’t obstinate to understand the distinction between dissipative structure that is physical and dissipative structure that comes with added biological information.
One is just rate dependent dynamics. The other is rate-independent information added to the mix.
A whirlwind can’t repair itself and so it falls apart. Life can not only repair itself, it can seek out the zones of instability which can propel its own existence. It expects to have to repair itself continuously because it handles hot stuff.
Quoting Pop
By assuming you mean conflating. A correlation isn’t a cause. And no one is delivering on the neural correlates anyway. That was only ever a panpsychic tactic mounted by Chalmers, Koch, and the like. I was there at the conference at which their manifesto was launched. I had lunch with them to discuss it.
A whirlwind, created by a larger biologic system that is distinct from itself, can however strengthen and prolong it, and in theory, allow it to exist indefinitely. See Jupiter's Great Red Spot that has been "repairing" itself for at least 400 years and for all we humans would know millennia if not much longer. What do you say to that.
Furthermore, what is life for that matter. That which is alive, moves or otherwise interacts with the environment in a matter that consumes that which allows it to continue to exist, breathes, etc? Bacteria is intelligent. We didn't know that let alone it even existed until recently. Ignorance does not define what is fact or fiction. Unless you let it.
If I catch your drift, you mean to say that a theory of information must include syntactical elements such as the one described above. Right?
Err, what biological system is maintaining the Great Red Spot.
Haha I was thinking of correcting that. Replace that with the most counter-productive word to your argument or just omit it entirely. Do not ignore the rest of my very logical post please!
Yes. The load of conveying meaning is shared by a machinery that places constraints on uncertainty. And so this devolves into the familiar things of words and rules. A word is a unit - some noise uttered in punctuate fashion. The sentence is the formal structure that imposes a sequential logic to build a statement - some chain of word units that tell a causal story of who did what to whom.
Language is narrative and builds in the way we are meant to think as socialised humans. The rules of grammar encode the very notion of subjects acting on objects. And this is why it is so hard to escape from this kind of linear causal analysis when we start to reason. It is already hardwired into our rhythms of speech. Any different notion of causality (such as the non-linear holism I so regularly employ) literally fails to compute.
So human language is already a code, a form of information, with a rather particular pragmatics built in. It is not designed for abstract philosophising. It is designed for turning our realities into social narratives where “we” are actors, an we live in a world of all kinds of actors, And then actors can be expected to desire their concrete effects. They are the forces that push and pull objects into place.
Thus grammar is our global general model for capturing a complex reality in a single linear statement. Words are like the free variables in an equation. Any x can go in the position of the subject, any y in the position of the verb, any z in the position of the object. The rules of grammar constrain the logic - they carry that part of the burden. And if the separation is clean and not fuzzy, then the x, y and z are unlimited in their variety, Any word could appear in those places. The certainty about the grammatical rules are matched by the uncertainty of the words that might appear in the speech act.
“Hey, I ate an elephant for breakfast.”
You can also see how words also then share the burden in that you might want to check you heard me right. Or believe that I might lie.
Quoting TheMadFool
You have to have a system of semantic elements and syntactical rules. So you have the uncertainty of the one matched by the certainty of the other. Together, you share a communication space where the general format is agreed and yet you can also formulate an infinity of particular statements.
Then there is the further business of actually interpreting those speech acts. Did we get the intended meaning of some message? Did we hear it right? Was it a lie? Was it too vague or overly pedantic?
You have the three things of sentence structure, word meaning, and social pragmatics.
You are basically saying your self concept is something separate from the environment you grew up in, different, and set apart, to the experiences that created it, all the while you are relating to me the historical basis of your attitudes and understanding. You seem to be a product of your history and times, as we all are.
In evolutionary psychology, it is thought that language developed before a self concept, and obviously an epistemic cut a considerable time after that.
It is difficult to understand, how it must have been to live absent of a self concept. But a number of ancient cultures still retain some roots in such attitudes by seeing themselves as part of the land, and in having an affinity to mother earth.
Take a look at different cultures to recognize how much people are a product of their environment. They see themselves as free agents, Whilst all the while they are a body of information, drawn from their environment, with its own momentum that only has slight freedom of movement.
An epistemic cut is a belief. I can respect your beliefs, so long as you respect mine.
It's worth noting here that the "sentence", John George kill sounds like something that a person just learning the English language would say - I've seen many such "sentences" being attributed to African tribes in old comics like Tarzan and Tintin. Is there anything worth investigating here?
Broken English
This is where we are at:
I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. This pattern or form can be physical, chemical, energetic, etc, But it is this information of a substances that enables a substance to interact with another substance - It is the information that interacts with the information of another substance. As described earlier, without the information, the substance would be a "NoThing", so could not interact with "anyThing". It would posses no attributes that are capable of interaction. The perturbations of a substance that give it it's distinctive features enable the substance to interact and thus integrate with all other informational substances, including ourselves.
This view of information assumes an underlying substance. As @Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. That a substances exists is assumed by the information we have of it. What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. This brings into question whether information is a quantity or a quality?
@Daniel has also suggested no information can exist absent of an interaction, and as has been pointed out it is interaction that information facilitates. "NoThing" cannot interact with "AnyThing".
Everything that exists, does so as an evolving self organizing system. Interaction is a constant. So it is clear that information enables the interactional organization of a system. What a system self organizes is information..
I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties.
— Daniel
This is the assumption that I was talking about. "This view of information assumes an underlying substance". I think we agree on this, though we misunderstand each other.
What is the difference between our perception of an object and the object itself ? - the assumption that something more exists.
everything is information from the perspective of everything.
Information describes the physical structure of entities, and enables them to interact with and change other entities, in a reciprocal manner.
Where did I say that?
If you mean that I can think in a grammar that is both linear and non-linear, then that is true. But I provide the social context in which I developed that skill. Peirce, Pattee and several hundred others in the long tradition of systems science and organicism.
Quoting Pop
Yep.
Out of interest, what is your source for saying that?
Quoting Pop
That isn’t how truth is decided. But I will respect any coherent argument and supporting evidence if it eventuates.
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~crsi/thesymbolicself.pdf
Balls. I say the opposite. Selfhood is enactive both neurally and culturally. Cognition is all about constructing the self in a world. The epistemic cut is how such a useful fiction can come about.
Thanks for the link. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it is ticking the boxes.
Linguistics devotes much of its energy to disproving Chomsky’s claims about universal grammar. The lack,of syntax in the Piraha Amazonian Indians is the celebrated challenge.
So I”m not saying the causal structure is hardwired. There is an arbitrariness to how much strong grammar some culture might find useful to its way of life. Chomsky made a big mistake in claiming a genetic template.
You also have pidgins and creoles as living examples of how much, or how little, grammar is needed for functional social order.
There are also arguments for why English is particularly good for rational thought as it is so easy to turn verbs into nouns - construct reified abatractions. But these days, such theorising would be forbidden as racist.
It is also obvious that formal education is all about getting us to speak proper like, eh? As we moved to writing, language really did become strict in form with manuals on how to write and speak the code.
So this is all hugely researched and disputed. I give my own distillation which at least has passed a decent level of peer review.
I'm at a loss as to how language can be syntax-less. What about ambiguity like the one I talked about? One way could be if Piraha world is a highly stable, highly-ordered system. For example if dogs never eat men only men eat, the "sentence" man dog eat = man eat dog = dog man eat = dog eat man = eat man dog = eat dog man. Syntax is no longer required for disambiguation for there's no ambiguity in the first place. I wonder if the Piraha language is the closest human language to Shannon's language of bits.
Quoting apokrisis
I was worried about that. No offense was intended, I hope none was taken.
The claim is that it lacks recursion. It does have a regularity of word order - a general subject-object-verb organisation.
So the basic narrative structure is there. But it is a simpler language that doesn’t make it easy to construct nested hierarchical statements - long sentences with multiple clumps of sub clauses - much like the way I write, to general bafflement and annoyance.
All this reflects bigger philosophical battles. Chomsky is some variety of a structuralist (like me) who has tipped over into frank Platonism about rational structure. He drew some silly lines in the sand over the genetic innateness and biological determinism of grammar as hardwired neurology. The Continental types hated this naturalism mixed with extreme structuralism and hyper rationalism. They want grammar to be utterly arbitrary and cultural - rainbow diversity with no one’s system better or worse, more evolved or more primitive.
Linguistics became its own little private shit show for many years. It also was entangled with the shit show debate between the cognitivists arguing thought precedes language and the constructionists who argued language precedes thought.
The subject of nested hierarchies is fundamental to how the brain functions and what information is. It's the first I've seen it come up.
Another subject to look at is back propagation as it plays a role in our brains input/output capabilities.
For example making decisions like 'no, don't do that' or 'yes, do that'.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Pop
The thought that comes to mind when reading those replies is chaos is essential to creativity, but total chaos would no form, and manifestation is dependent on functioning form. Evolution requires mutant genes, but all living things come with DNA and a mechanism for stability. Oh my goodness the ancients are looking incredibly aware to me, as they spoke of chaos and the need for order. The pharaoh's job was to keep things in order because too much water or not enough to lead to famine, and so on. Mayans were consumed by the importance of numbers and dates. Chinese I Ching too. Yet if there was no chaos there would be no change, no creativity, no evolution.
Does quantum physics come to the rescue? It gives us uncertainity.
I see. If one considers language as a mode of communication, it needs to be about reality and that invariably requires language to capture causality. Causality, as we all know, true or not, is permutationally sensitive (order matters). In fact, all human enterprises seem to be wholly cause-effect oriented.
Causality and other sides to reality in which order matters requires this order (sequence) to be adequately reflected in language. Is syntax just that? A way of representing those facets of reality wherein permutation plays a (major) role.
Take the sentence, dog ate dog (world :grin: ). Order doesn't matter in this case as swapping subject and object makes no difference. There's no need to create a syntax structure that's sensitive to order. However, the sentence, man ate dog is not the same as dog ate man because there's an order in which the event takes place, causally speaking as the subject is a cause that acts and produces an effect in the object.
Man ate dog.
Man dog, ate.
Dog, man ate.
Dog ate, man.
Ate dog, man.
Ate, man dog.
Poetic license! A comma is just another way of expressing order.
I did search for the origin of the world "information", and the standard dictionary definition of information.
(1) (Christianity) Divine inspiration. [from 15th c.].
(2) (IT industry jargon) Any ordered sequence of symbols (or signals) (that could contain a message). [from late 20th c.]. (computing) […]
(3) the meaning that a human assigns to data by means of the known conventions used in its representation..
(4) (legal) A statement of criminal activity brought before a judge or magistrate; in the UK, used to inform [...]
I think I was speaking under the definition of (3).
I think I know what the OP means with the information of the universe, and its workings. But should it not be then, the historical data of the universe rather than information. Just my 2 cents.
Sure. I think it is the best attitude in philosophical debates. I try to educate myself to be that level all the time.
I'll butt-in here to suggest that what Wayfarer meant by "cut itself off" was not a literal or physical operation, but merely metaphorical or metaphysical dissection. In my imagination, I place my "self" into a different logical category from "other" -- which is everything that is not-self. This figurative notion is what Buddhists sometimes dismiss as an illusion. But if we didn't make that distinction, we'd be unable to make sense of the world. Nevertheless, philosophers should be able to admit that the "line" between "us" and "other" is subjective, and somewhat arbitrary -- though necessary. Did I just confuse or clarify the question?
:chin:
For what it's worth, here's couple of my attempts to define the ancient & modern meanings of the term "information", and the act of "enforming". :smile:
Information :
[i]According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest historical meaning of the word information in English was the act of informing, or giving form or shape to the mind (i.e. meaning), as in education, instruction, or training. ___Wikipedia
The English word was apparently derived by adding the common "noun of action" ending "-ation"[/i] [Hence, En-Form-Action]
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
Note -- A "Form" is a meaningful pattern, as contrasted with random chaotic noise.
What is Information? :
The Latin root “informare” meant to give recognizable (meaningful, significant) shape to something. In that sense a sculptor “in-forms” a blank slab of marble with a physical shape to represent a pre-existing image in his mind. In other words, a mental image somehow “causes” physical raw material to take on a shape that, in turn, “causes” cognition in another mind. Another way to put it is to say that “Information Creates Meaning”. Hence it is an integral component of Sentience, Consciousness, and Cognition. It is the raw material of Reason, the essence of Knowledge, and the structure of Mind. The ancient Greeks referred to the whole spectrum of information as “Logos”—often translated as “Word”, but more specifically the conscious motive behind an act of speech: Intention.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
En-Form-Action :
A coined term referring to an ultimate principle in the universe, which functions as the “formal” cause of all physical and meta-physical things. The creative act of En-formation, causes something new to emerge from pre-existing, unformed Chaos.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page9.html
Ideal vs Real Forms :
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas is a philosophical theory, concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms", are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggests that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge.[6] The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Nonetheless, the theory is considered to be a classical solution to the problem of universals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
UNFORMED CHAOS
ENFORMING IMAGE
What would be difference between a wood carver carving away his mental image in his brain into a woodspirit carving, and something taking physical shape in the universe via / caused by "information"? Could they not be simply described as the same form of manifestations?
Are there reasons that one is a process or entity caused by information, and the others by sheer chance (heavy rainfall in Indonesia or avalanche in the Alps) or an artistic / economic labor of a guy carving the wood to produce a woodspirit that he intends to sell on eBay?
And more significantly would the information able to reveal how the earth was formed and when?
Just as a matter of argument, what is happening here? No matter what the reasoning for wearing masks, there are some who do not accept the scientific evidence and insist, mandating wearing a mask or getting vaccinated is not what science says it is, but is a government threatening our liberty because those at the top want the power to control us, and we must oppose that threat. Here information does not mean the same thing to everyone. What can be done about this? To me, it is completely mind-boggling! It is like telling someone not to drink from the well because it is polluted, and people throwing stones at you because they think you are trying to control them. Huh, for information to be useful we must trust each other and if don't trust each other information is just a lie, not truly information. :brow:
Yes, I read about that. Wittgenstein apparently did read Peirce , although only mentioned James as someone whose work he was enthusiastic about. And yet he submitted Pragmatism to a critique. I do think he left Pierce behind at a certain point , but I would have to take a closer look at it to say anything more.
Quoting Corvus
I would say there is a difference between a nature-made object or event and a man-made object of event. This is where I part with Plato and perfect forms. I think the universe just throws it out there and what happens to it depends on its interaction with other forces. Such as the shapes of snowflakes are influenced by the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. A snowflake is not a perfect form created by a mind such as human objects are created by a mind. There are universal laws, but not universal pre-determination. Whereas a man creating a statue begins with a rough idea of what the finished product will be.
In relation to what I asked early about some people rejecting explanations of why we should wear masks and get vaccinated. In the media, I hear some people have a totally different understanding of covid and over crowded hospitals when they experience fighting for air and when they can not get medical help because the system is overwhelmed. Words alone do not necessarily convey the information that needs to be understood. Much of our information comes from experience.
I don’t dispute that the disturbances are at a deeper neurodevdevelopmental level, I am trying to point out that shifting the account from the cognitive to the subpersonal ‘neural’ doesn’t clarify disputes about the understanding of human behavior any more than shifting from a neurological to a subatomic account. It can be that the supposedly more primordial empirical account
is not up to the task of effectively addressing the supposedly higher order, emergent phenomenon , and this can be not simply because the ‘harder’ scientific model is focused on different aspects of the world, or at a different level of focus , but because the model is an expression of an older philosophical worldview. That’s right , physical, neurological and cognitive theories are manifestations of broader philosophical perspectives, and as these perspective change, so does the ‘hard’ science.
The difference between TOM , simulation and interaction theory accounts of empathy and autism is at the same
time a dispute about how to understand the underlying neural processes, and this amounts to a philosophical disagreement between neo-Kantian realism and phenomenology. Varela developed a tentative model that he called neurophenomenology to point the way out of the older philosophical influences much of neuroscience is beholden to. That is, to offer a neurological account that is no -computational and non-representational.
It may be that such a rethinking of the organism-world interaction is consistent with recent movements rejecting disturbance’ models of schizophrenia and autism. The ‘hearing voices’ movement that destigmatizes hallucination , and the autism-spectrum community, (spearheaded by Temple Grandin , Donna Williams and others,), that refuses the label of pathology, are some examples.
“Trying to fix the empathy circuit is not addressing the root issue. But reframing the social space of the person in a suitable fashion is of course a way to make their lives better”.
Note that the fundamental issue is UNDERSTANDING the behavior one is witnessing. TOM and interaction theory lead to different predictions and anticipations when we are in the presence of real human beings who we care about who act in ways that may puzzle us , and our puzzlement is well noted by them and adds anxiety and depression to their other issues. So when you meet an autistic person( do you know any?) , what do you draw from when you attempt to form a bond with them?
My hunch is your philosophical
presuppositions. which ground your neurological model will give you no choice but to embrace TOM.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you are saying there is no Kantian self , which I agree with , that self is a construction emerging developmentally through social interaction, which I also agree with. Merleau-Ponty, who btw was a child developmental psychologist as well as being a philosopher, said that initially the child makes no distinction between self and other , that self only emerges over time.
But what about models, representations , algorithms, calculations neural machinery? I wouldn’t call this ‘self’ in a strictly Kantian sense , but is it not a temporary internal environment? Yes, it’s only adaptive function is to interact with and adjust itself to an outside , but isn’t the idea of internal machinery troublesome?
As Pattee says, it comes down the the Janus-faced notion of a mechanical switch. That is where information and physics intersect at a fundamental level so far as life and mind - systems that model the world and thus construct meanings - are concerned.
A switch is the simplest way to turn the lights on or off. Either the electricity flows or it doesn’t. The switch opens or shuts a gate. And any amount of physics can be regulated by the least actual physical effort. The switch could be the little red button that triggers a nuclear war. A puffy old hand could change its state with a careless dab.
So information theory is about 1s and 0s. The simplest logical counterfactuals. They are a definite choice represented in the baldest possible terms. You either have one thing or it’s other. The switch obeys the laws of logic - the law of the excluded model upon which rational meaning is based. A binary switch either tells of a presence or it’s absence, with nothing else as a possibility inbetweeen.
And what makes this switching state meaningful - for life and mind - is some power always flows through it. A switch is pragmatically employed. The body is set up as a hierarchy of informational switches that regulate physical flows.
An enzyme is a way to switch on or switch off some particular metabolic reaction at the nanoscale. The same metabolism is switched between anabolism and catabolism by the opposed signals of insulin and glucagon at the whole body scale.
Neurons are whole networks of switches switching switches that can thus encode learnt habits of physically appropriate reactions - reactions that are muscular and so again a hierarchy of dichotomous or counterfactual acts. Fibres are set up in lines to expand or contract. Arms are moved because muscles work against bones. A bicep pulls one way and relaxes to allow the tricep to pull in the other.
If Shannon reduced information to a binary code, it is because this just is the natural logic of semiosis and its epistemic cut. For it to be possible for information to regulate physics, the physics must become switchable with the least actual physical effort. Just as a signal must be differentiated from the noise with the least informational effort.
It all comes together - physics and information - at the hinge point which is the structure of a logic gate, a mark that can be made or erased at no effective cost for the system employing such marks.
Yes. This is one of the places Chomsky got it really wrong because he didn’t know his neuroscience. The brain Itself is a recursion-based structure. Chomsky tried to posit an innate grammar as the Homo sapiens evolutionary leap. But the brain already uses nested hierarchies to analyse any sensation or develop any motor plan.
The “grammar module” of Broca’s area is just a standard bit of premotor planning cortex given over to control of the vocal cords with better connectivity to a matching object representation area over in Wernicke’s area by the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe.
Biology is finding that enzymes rely on quantum uncertainty to amplify their ability to make desired reactions happen. Life and mind thrive on zones of instability because they can master that free energy to do work - give the randomness of big fluctuations a cohesive direction that then builds, and keeps rebuilding, the same material structures.
So the usual notion of stable entities is that they are composed of stable parts. A house is built out of bricks and not jelly.
But an organism is a machinery that thrives on zones of instability as it has the means - the information - to just keep rebuilding itself. That is why life thrives in hot sun, intertidal zones, volcanic underwater vents, and anywhere else that there is lots of unpredictability and so the basic raw material to feed a machinery that can turn that into the predictable.
Yes. Because the most important thing for the tribe to be talking about is the switching points where the application of a force will achieve its greatest desired effect.
If we are going hunting today, we could go off in 360 degrees of direction. But wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which direction lies the easy prey? The tribal language will be optimised to deliver a binary choice to coordinate the physical choice.
With civilisation, we even built our environments in terms of causal switches. We built roads, windows, doors, as ways to channel the flow of humanity into logically switched flow. We live inside a logical engine built of reductionist cause and effect principles,
But caution. The majority of languages do tend towards an SVO structure. However any order can work. What is key is the division of causal reality into the three parts into a subject, an object, an action.
The action can be named last in some languages. We are put in mind of the name of the subject and the name of the object first, then supplied with the name of the connecting action. So we get all the same information even if the convention of word order is different.
A language has to be linear, (being a verbal code) so some choice of order must be made. But the information about a causal interaction is holistic - irreducibly triadic. So what a linear sequence must rebuild in out minds is the wholeness of the causal situation being spoken about.
I totally love what you said. Just yesterday I was reading about wind evaporating water and releasing heat. I need to find that information again and add it to what you said. The transfer of energy is mind-boggling to me and here we are speaking of a transfer of information as well. In fact, I am feeling overwhelmed with information and need to take a break and digest all this. I want to pull out a book and see if I can improve my understanding. What if 70% of our population lived to learn and felt intense pleasure in the process, rather than bashing each other over stupid things, watching WrestleMania, and spreading gossip. It saddens me to know not everyone loves what we are doing here.
What defines a social context? I have two parents and two brothers. We all lived in the same household in the same city. My older brother is 18 months older than me and went to the same schools with the same teachers. We even had some of the same friends. And yet we all live in entirely different worlds, with different politics and different relations with technology. What was it that made the difference in how each of us was informed by the social world? My explanation is that there is a certain thread of consistency that runs through person’s experience, assimilating the new in a thematic manner to one’s precious history. The novelty of the world always redefines and reinvents from moment to moment the ongoing ‘self’ , which in fact has no strict identity. If we dont see this ongoing self-consistency bin ourselves or in others, we will attempt to understand them by reference to larger categories of social meaning in the way Marx does, or Foucault does in a different way. Individuals become nodes in a social formation. But from what vantage is this formation being glimpsed? One could say it is constantly being realigned as the nodes of the system interact. Most phenomenologically informed enactivists today adhere to a quasi-Foucaultian notion of the relation between self and world. For instance , Shaun Gallagher has written recently about socially distributed cognition:
“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.” Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own
and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities.”
I’ve only encountered 5 writers who endorse what I call a radically temporal model of experience.
Gene Gendlin is one of them.
“The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing
directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you.”
In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities.
Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's implying of behavior possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate . Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person. Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual
incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social.
The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society.”(What First and Third Person Processes Really Are (2009)
Of course it does. It matters hugely whether a psychological level problem is a manifestation of an organic problem or a situational problem. Is the fix medical or therapeutic?
And even if it is organic, we have to find out if it is developmental or genetic. That again radically changes the fix.
Autism and schizophrenia cross all three levels as even broken brains must live in a society, But we can’t offer a humane treatment until each of these three contributing factors have been clearly teased apart.
Kelly’s PCT - a very semiotic approach, by the way - only might help at one level.
Quoting Joshs
This kind of view is well meaning but unscientific. If we are to correct the excesses of organic medicine by supplying cultural medicine, then it some down to what we can be sure of from social psychology. And that story has to be told stripped of romantic fantasy to be sure of being an effective and predictable therapy.
So sure. It is commonsense to anyone with half a brain that the ordinary social world is a complex and terrifying place if you have some particular cognitive deficits. You want to turn down the demands in a matching fashion.
But to then pretend that the organic difference doesn’t exist and society is the sole problem is the romanticism that creates its own monsters. Lobotomies are matched by cults.
So yes to empathy as a necessary aspect of humans as social animals. But we have to accept the corollary that aggression is the other side of the same coin. The brain is wired to make this epistemic cut, this fundamental neuromodulated shift in state, from love of the group to hate of the outsider.
If your happy, clappy, metaphysics reduces itself to a monism of love and forgiveness, it just doesn’t fly as a model of the neural or social reality. Life and mind are organised by their dichotomies. Intelligent outcomes are based on the right balances between competition and cooperation - hating and loving, in-grouping and boundary policing.
If we couldnt switch modes in binary fashion, we wouldn’t have the basis for making smart choices.
The question then is how as increasingly civilised society - living in the luxury of endless energy to burn - treat those in difficult situations, such as autism and schizophrenia. It is hard to deliver a sound answer if your metaphysics contains a fundamental muddle. Although, pragmatically, we can start with our “commonsense” realism and park the Continental romanticism on the library shelf.
In that case, what follows is, nature made / caused events or entities are not meaningful in terms of human intelligence, perfect form or logic in its purpose or design.
Nature caused events or entities have been happening randomly without aim, purpose or plans. We can explain the physical cause of the snowfall using the other elements such as humidity, temperature and air pressure, but that is not snow itself. It is the condition for snowfall, and there is no way to explain why snow flakes looks the way it is without citing God's will.
In that case, I wonder if it could be related to information which is based on predesigned and thought out plans, practical purposes, human intelligence and meanings in abstract form or linguistic content.
I wouldn't quite say chaos is the creative element. We shouldn't forget that things are largely determined. But not entirely determined, there is also a slight element of randomness applicable to every transaction. So determined with a slight element of randomness.
This is one rare situation where Art can inform science. :lol: If you have ever created a painting, or made a sculpture, and I think this would hold for any form of art, and life in general. The product you make is largely what you set out to make, but not quite, elements of randomness creep in and change the final product slightly, and sometimes more then slightly.
As you intimated, this understanding can also be seen in the evolution of Covid, It is largely determined, with a slight element of randomness.
Sure. Our identities are a self narrative. And that is a socially-constructed habit which has developed from the generally group minded world of experience of small bands of hunter-gathers to the romantically exalted sense of self demanded by modern culture. We can no longer have our selfhood confined into any brackets - social or biological - as every bracketing is something we must take personal ownership of.
Frankly that is pathological. We can see that in the mental health statistics of modern society. Individuals striving to be individual are cosntructing their own nightmares and identity crises. Social media reduces social interaction to the binaries of trolling and gushing. It is dialectics, but no longer delivery productive outcomes.
Quoting Joshs
A view of reality viewed through a gauzy film of idealist and subjectivist monism is just as partial as the view through the gauzy film of a materialist and objectivist monism. It is not impressive to take the long way around to arrive back at what ought to be pragmatically obvious.
Quoting Joshs
Another example of fingering the dialectic - the one and the many - then picking the side that matches the general socially-approved frame of the speaker.
You can identify yourself as a “phenomenologically informed enactivist” - and direct the collective hate towards its evil “other” - by taking a stand with the correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion.
Academia offers a more complex dynamic of course. We love our enemies and fear our friends as dialectical opposition defines careers, while those treading the same path slightly better are dangerous rivals. :grin:
It’s all a game of pragmatics in the end. Reality will weed out the foolish extremes in the long run.
This I like. My interest is in brain only information and this is relevent.
Quoting apokrisis
This I don't like. If we are going to study information we need to have some order of analysis and studying brain only information should come first, because that's how we use information, that's how we can philosophize and it's the basis of how we do science. If we don't understand brain only information first, these cases of disembodied or assigned "information" start to show up.
Something to observe is this brain only type of information alway occurs in a dynamic state and never in a static state. An example of what this brain only information really is, is what we write as we write it. And what we write is a sampling and record of mental content. Once written it becomes static, basically just encoded matter, not information.
I'm really not complaining about anyones views or writing style, but this thread has been a lot to sort through. Maybe sometime I'll post on why Claude Shannon information theory is a bad idea as a universal theory of information.
I should explain that empathy as it is understood within phenomenological and cognitive research is not the common meaning of the term. It doesn’t refer to sympathy or positive feelings or caring for one another. It deals with how we learn that other persons are not inanimate objects. In order to be aggressive toward another we have to empathize with them first. That is, we can’t despise them if we don’t perceive them as having thoughts, attitudes and feelings of their own. Autistics often feel like they are observing beings from another planet. Affect in particular is very difficult for them to make sense of, not just in humans but in other mammals , like dogs.
There is some support for the theory that we are wired, via mirror neurons , to recognize the actors. of others as being akin to our own. Shaun Gallagher explains:
“Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is, we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding their behavior. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do. TT claims that we explain another person’s behavior by appealing to an either innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general; a theory that is framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or motivating behavior. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this, because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate the other person’s mental states. We model others’ beliefs and desires as if we were in their situation.
Claims that such theory or simulation processes are explicit (conscious) are dubious from a phenomenological point of view. That is, if in fact such processes are primary, pervasive, and explicit, they should show up in our experience – in the way that we experience others – and they rarely do.The phenomenological critique also rejects the idea, clearly found in TT, that our everyday dealings with others involve an observational, third-person stance toward them – observing them and trying to come up with explanations of their behavior. Rather, our everyday encounters with others tend to be second-person and interactive.
Long before the child reaches the age of four, the capacities for human interaction and intersubjective understanding are already accomplished in certain embodied practices -- practices that are emotional, sensory-motor, perceptual, and nonconceptual. These practices include proto-mimesis (Zlatev, this volume), imitation, the parsing of perceived intentions (Baldwin et al. 2001), emotional interchange (Hobson 2004), and generally the processes that fall under the heading of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979). These embodied practices constitute our primary access for understanding others, and they continue to do so even after we attain our more sophisticated abilities in this regard (Gallagher 2001).
In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s mind. What we might reflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is expressed directly in their actions and behaviors. This phenomenologially direct understanding is likely made possible by the above mentioned complex neuronal processes described as the mirror neuron system(s) and shared representations.”
When you say the brain is wired to make the shift from love of the insider to hate of the outsider, it sounds like you are presuming a fairly sophisticated sort of innate neural machinery. Can you elaborate a bit on this?
Thanks for that. Your opinion is as valuable as anybody's. It is not as if anybody understands this conundrum. :smile:
The still fuzzy and vague impression I have is that there is a connection between a platonic form ( the formal structure of a substance ) being able to integrate with another substance due only to possessing form - this creates a fundamental state of integrated information. And a state of integrated information is consciousness.- of course, consciousness as we know it is such an incredibly intricately complicated entanglement of form ( assuming thought has its neural correlates ).
So, there is something about the ability of things being able to mash together that is inherently meaningful. And at the extreme other end of this, we see understanding as the ability of new DATA being able to mesh with established data. Dot forget now- DATA is a pattern of information. So, a pattern fits an already existing framework of patterning ( brain ) to cause understanding.
“Quoting apokrisis
What if you are a social constructionist like Ken Gergen, who has certain affinities with phenomenology?
Does the following sound like ‘directing collective hate via a correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion’? And what’s all this about ‘reality’ weeding out anything?
“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)
Yes, I would be happier in using DATA rather than information to denote the universe workings and makings. :)
Strictly, DATA is still in the system as storage. It is when you go and do "SEARCH" and hit the button for the item you are searching, the system will process your request, and present to you as "INFORMATION" that you are after.
Once the information is fed into your brain, I would see it as "knowledge" rather than information. Information comes out from hardware and software of an information system, and the individual or organisations who already own the information, not from human brain, and definitely not from the universe.
The universe may feed you with the raw signals, and symbols which could be classed as data.
With the collected or observed data from the universe, you then compile them into the information you are after.
A mask or an injection are minor discomforts. But they have been made into binary symbols within a particular society already marked by its deep irrational divisions.
There is geopolitical reason why the US winds up so divided. It is unusual in being so evenly balanced between the urban and the rural. It is fractal in embodying this geographic divide over almost all possible scales. So the tension is wired in and can’t be escaped.
That is on top of its other generalised tensions that history has built into its cultural system.
The outcome of tension is positive when it is creative and leads to dynamic adaptation. But the US has reached the end of another chapter in history and the old accommodations are visibly strained. This plays out in the irrationality over little symbols that point towards different views of the best way forward.
In human affairs - ordered by binary symbols - nothing could be more meaningful than signalling your public allegiance to one or other side of a culture war.
The only problem is when this particular discourse bears no pragmatic relation to the dialectic it is meant to represent. A pandemic strikes society at a rather existential level. Liberal or conservative, woke or redneck, rural or urban - disease doesn’t care about your identity that much.
And so your political and economic philosophy has to focus on the immune system and its signalling regime. The self-nonself dialectic remains exactly the same kind of tension to be balanced. But now the social response has to be directed towards that level of semiotics - the game played between virus and immune cells.
You can see here how it all connects. Everything is in the end explained by semiotics - the epistemic cut that allows structural order. Chaos can be tamed and turned into intentional maintenance of some stable sense of identity or functional systemhood.
One metaphysics to rule them all!
It is by taking an information-only view that you arrive at idealism, representationalism, behaviouralism, disembodied cognition and other pathologies of scientific explanation. That is where mind science has been going wrong for decades.
Psychology started off enactive and pragmatic - the habits of reflexes and psychophysics of Wundt, Donders, Helmholtz, and others. But it got overtaken by the dialectics of romantics like Freud in battle with mechanists like Skinner,
Even when a Ulric Neisser or Steven Grossberg started off a new chapter, like cognitive science or neural networks, they got overtaken by the usual cultural wars. The pragmatic beginning becomes another battleground for spirit vs matter, information vs physics - all the ways of speaking of the same epistemic cut that is meant to connect by providing the useful divide.
Rest easy. I am well familiar with all this. :smile:
Quoting Joshs
The crude story is that it is a balance of oxytocin versus testosterone. Neuromodulating chemical signals that produce reciprocal states of response. One puts us in a cooperating state of mind - inclined to be sympathetic in terms of our empathic understanding of another’s state of mind. But high testosterone, low oxytocin, switches things. You employ your empathic skills to find the least sympathetic ways to undermine your competition.
This is of course the most reductionistically crude telling of the story. The whole brain is organised by dichotomies of affective response such as approach-avoid, react-relax, concentrate-alert. Our perceptions are likewise poised to make gestalt judgements of integration and differentiation. Sensation is judgement of boundaries that define selves from others.
So as I keep saying, the essential bit of machinery that builds the entirety of life and mind is the thing of an unbalanced switch. If you can turn things on and off, you have achieve material control over the randomness of entropic existence. You have created a grain of regulating information.
The switches in biology, neurology or sociology are all thus reciprocal or dialectic in nature. They have to implement not just the mindless simplicity of a 0 or a 1. They need to be something that carries rational meaning - a switching between intelligibly opposing directions of action.
And so bodies and brains are structured with a reciprocal logic. Insulin is a generalised signal to all parts of the body to do their part of the job in storing some transitory energy excess. It is anabolic. Then alongside the beta cells of the pancreas churning out this hormone are the alpha cells that send out the opposite general message. The alpha cells detect a lack of circulating glucose and tell the body to catabolise its energy stores. Each group of cells sit close enough together that they take the one point of view of the same reality of the body and hence blood glucose is maintained with a beautiful precision.
Every biological or neurological process embodies the same reciprocal logic. That is just how nature functions once it has established an epistemic cut to regulate its physics via a semiotic model.
Everything is a nested hierarchy of switches that delivers a self-balancing outcome - one that is both stable and yet dynamic, conservative and liberal, loving and hateful, habitual and attentional, or whatever other dichotomy has come to your notice as a nasty dualism that must be hammered flat by your brand of philosophical monism.
I previously linked to a Royal Society paper provided by Wayfarer. In researching it further I found it was one of twenty one papers submitted to the Royal Society on the topic of "Information and DNA."
Initially I felt red faced and disappointed, as the paper was consistent with my understanding and considerably more advanced. I have since skimmed a selection of the the other 21 papers and much to my joy, the thinking is broadly consistent. The new paradigm amongst these, I assume younger, researchers is that Life is no longer just chemistry, BUT Chemistry + Information + Coding.
As a broad impression of the understanding at play amongst the papers I skimmed, I think it would be fair to say that at this level of life, the form of a substance is equal to its meaning - which is right on track with where this thread was supposed to be heading. :grimace:
All the papers can be found here. I find this to be an extremely valuable source of information, as it provides a glimpse into contemporary and future thinking. These are the guys who will create the paradigm of the future, and it seems palpable how they are struggling with a Cartesian framework, and advocating for an understanding that is closer to panpsychism, at least as it relates to life. A number of papers advocate for a reconsideration of what information means in biology, that it is something intrinsic to and irreducible to life.
This validates the view, that @gnomon and myself have been advocating in our own way. That information is in the fundamental mix.
And a change in understanding of how biology fundamentally works @Isaac, should make life easier for neurobiology, because if we come to understand that form is fundamentally meaningful, the search for the immaterial substance will lose all its meaning!** This fits very nicely with the trajectory of integrated information as an understanding of consciousness.
That is a hard one as the causal model is so different from the one normally supplied by normal culture that you have to relearn your deepest habits of thought. You have to rebuild the boat while still sailing it. It had to be learnt by doing - and failing - as much as reading the instruction manual.
Another problem is that it is an outsider exercise - in being opposed to the mainstream of causal monism - and so you don’t have a single authority. Hundreds of thinkers arrive from different directions with their own jargons and priorities. You have to live with many different camps to discover they are struggling to express the same general holism.
But Peirce is a foundational resource. And then in science, the heavy hitters for me were the systems scientists, cyberneticians, hierarchy theorists, and eventually the biosemioticians these guys have become since Peirce’s deep work got properly discussed in published from about the 1990s.
But I don’t mean the biosemioticians that follow the dyadic semiotics of Saussure rather than the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Bloody Continental philosophy sneaks its hooks into everything. :grin:
So pick anything by Peirce, or the now abundant commentary on Peirce. And read anything by Pattee tagged biosemiosis.
But as I say, it is not merely a view to be learned alongside every other. It is a reboot of how we are all trained to construct our worlds. We need to live it and see the world as very different from what we were told it was.
How do you understand Barbieri's distinction between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm'? Why do you think he mentions Ernst Mayr's contention that living things are fundamentally different from inanimate matter? Do you agree with that proposition?
Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999)
At the moment I have skimmed a lot of the papers, and I think you should also, to get a broad impression of the thinking. The point you are getting at, and what everybody will have to contend with ultimately is:
Once you recognize that form is meaningful in biology, how will you defend the assumption that it is meaningless outside of biology?
This is the conclusion gained, reading between the lines, when he says that this way of thinking might lead to an understanding of how life arose from matter.
Maxwell's demon
We are talking about open systems. Natural systems are dissipative. I'm not sure what you are getting at?
If you can't recognise the distinction that Barbieri is making between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm', then you haven't understood the paper, and whatever conclusions you draw are likely to be false.
I wasn't getting at anything, although I do think we're getting semantic information mixed up with the kind of information scientists use, including biologists. Do you think?
As I said, you should read them yourself. I am not talking about any particular paper, rather the general thrust of the thinking. I don't specifically recall the "distinction" you cite.
That's the point! Go back and look at it again, and consider the distinction that Barbieri is making between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm', It is central to the entire paper, and what he means by 'code biology' so if you're not seeing that distinction then you're not understanding the point of the paper.
This is the thing Frank, a lot of people are advocating for a reconsideration of "what information is".
There are two papers in the link titled "What is information". The focus is DNA and information, but it is still relevant to general consideration.
Just so we're clear that copying DNA is not a case of semantic information. No cognition involved.
There's a reason that Marcello Barbieri launched in 2012 what he considers a new scientific discipline which he calls 'code biology'. It is specifically about the way in which DNA encodes and transmits information. It is not a general theory about information, nor a theory that maintains that everything is information or is reducible to information, it's a study of codes. So, again, unless you understand why he is using the term 'code biology' and how he differentiates that from 'the chemical paradigm', you're not seeing the point of his paper.
Good lord. Maxwell’s demon is how classical mechanics introduces the epistemic cut that underpins thermodynamics and hence dissipative structure theory.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists-20210422/
And that led to Feynman’s ratchet to show the quantum limit of any such informational demon.
Semantic - relating to meaning in language or logic. - Google.
We need therefore a paradigm that goes beyond the two present paradigms of biology. A paradigm that fully accepts the implications of the existence of the genetic code. The implication that life is based on copying and coding, that both biological sequences (organic information) and biological coding rules (organic meaning) are fundamental observables that are as essential to life as the fundamental quantities of physics. This is the code paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information plus codes’. - Barberi.
Please read the paper. It is very interesting.
We have been through this before - How is it relevant for irreversible systems?
Ok, but DNA replication still isn't semantic information. Should we discuss the difference?
To provide more context for that statement:
[quote=Marcello Barbieri]What is not clear...is the ontological status of information, and the result is that today we have two conflicting paradigms in biology.
One is the ‘chemical paradigm’, the idea that ‘life is chemistry’, or, more precisely, that ‘life is an extremely complex form of chemistry’.
The other is the ‘information paradigm’, the view that chemistry is not enough, that ‘life is chemistry plus information’.
This implies that there is an ontological difference between information and chemistry, a difference which is often expressed by saying that information-based processes like heredity and natural selection simply do not exist in the world of chemistry.
Against this conclusion, the supporters of the chemical paradigm have argued that the concept of information is only a linguistic metaphor, a word that summarizes the result of countless underlying chemical reactions. [This is exactly the contention of reductionist physicalism - wayfarer]
The supporters of the information paradigm insist that information is a real and fundamental component of the living world, but have not been able to prove this point. As a result, the chemical view has not been abandoned and the two paradigms both coexist today.
Here [e.g. in this paper - wayfarer] it is shown that a solution to the ontological problem of information does exist. It comes from the idea that life is artefact-making, that genes and proteins are molecular artefacts manufactured by molecular machines and that artefacts necessarily require sequences and coding rules in addition to the quantities of physics and chemistry. More precisely, it is shown that the production of artefacts requires new observables that are referred to as nominable entities because they can be described only by naming their components in their natural order. From an ontological point of view, in conclusion, information is a nominable entity, a fundamental but not-computable observable.[/quote]
So, what is crucial here, is that Barbieri is claiming there's an ontological distinction between living organisms and non-organic matter. That is what is resisted by 'the chemical paradigm', because if it's true, then materialism proper - the contention that matter-energy is all that exists - can't be maintained.
Information is a property.
I think what @Wayfarer has brought up is good. We shouldn't rely on only one source however. we have an excellent 21 sources, all vying to be the next Darwin, so we get a great insight into what the thinking is.
This has the makings of a super massive thread, though.
I have always thought of it as a quality. Barbari goes into this in the paper. Traditionally quantities are measurable, but in biology they are not.
So whether it is a quality or quantity is up in the air, to some extent.
Barbari suggest it should be a non measurable quantity.
What Barbieri is showing, is the sense in which the storing and transmission of information differentiates life from non-life. So it's properly defined - to define something is to say what it isn't, which enables you to say what it is.
Quoting frank
I think you need to consider what 'biosemiosis' means (and I'm not an expert by any stretch, I've only learned about the concept on this forum and readings from it. The Wikipedia definition is 'Biosemiotics (from the Greek ???? bios, "life" and ??????????? s?mei?tikos, "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm.[1]
Biosemiotics integrates the findings of biology and semiotics and proposes a paradigmatic shift in the scientific view of life, in which semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic features.'
So, my take is that 'semiosis', which is interpretation of signs, is also something that happens on a cellular level - the whole of biology is a form of interpretation, in the broader sense - not just the conscious act of reading a sign, but the interactions between cells on a micro level. And what I think it is replacing is the metaphor of mechanism - that living things are like machines. They're much nearer to language, than to mechanism. That's my take.
What you do not understand is - when you look at a rock it changes your brain patterning. So what exactly changed your brain patterning?
This is what enactive means - a reciprocal causation.
How is it not?
You might be suffering from a faulty understanding of irreversibility though. Thermodynamic equilbriums are simply states were reversion has become homogenised and so all fluctuations are confined to a Gaussian bell curve distribution.
In an ideal gas, the particles exchange position and momentum with wild thermal abandon. They bash about gaining and losing in Brownian motion fashion. But at a macro scale view of this microscopic fluctuation - the epistemic cut where the global view is made separate from the local view - all the information you need to describe the system is largely told as a general temperature and pressure reading. A statistical mean.
The irreversibility comes from heat being lost to the environment. The flask of particles can’t head back towards higher pressures and temperatures all by itself (give or take ergodic scale fluctuations).
But heat can be supplied. And work could even be extracted up to a point, as Maxwell’s demon illustrates.
As Pattee put it, the central problem for biology is to explain how a molecule can be a message (and not just a material). :up:
We are discussing Barberi's paper. Did you read it?
What? The paper on biosemiosis? Is that the toipic we are meant to be discussing now?
Have you read the Barbieri team mission statement?….
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
At least this is relevant to what is being discussed.
There are 21 papers we are focusing on, and the broad thrust is a reconsideration of what is meant by "information" at the cellular level.
**These papers an excellent source for getting a feel for the cutting edge in contemporary understanding.
Meaning may be meaningful in its own right. Integrated information may be meaningful at all scales.
Sorry to say it ain’t the cutting edge of biosemiosis. I can tell that just from the authors and the titles. I just read Ball’s journalistic summary and skimmed Barbieri - whose position remains a second rate summary of more incisive thinking.
But if you are eager to read and learn, that is great. If you can tag Barbieri and his mates as closet panpsychists, even better. :clap:
Peirce stresses that it is not about an interpreter - as some kind of ego or subject. It is about systems of interpretance. And that is entirely different …. In ways I’ve now exhaustively describes, starting with Friston’s Bayesian Brain.
A semiotic relation exists when some sort of habit of interpretance reads the world in terms of its “signs” and responds with the certainty of automatic reflex.
The light goes green, I go. That is what a green light means. It tells me that the road is clear of crossing cars.
But then I shoot off on green and I am immediately t-boned. Oh dear, the epistemic cut meant to plug me enactively into the physics of the world suddenly seems to have left me separated from that actual world. It seems there can be surprises in this well regulated life - entropic exceptions to the informational rules.
"supporters of the chemical paradigm have argued that the concept of information is only a linguistic metaphor, a word that summarizes the result of countless underlying chemical reactions."
I agree with it so maybe I'm a chemical paradigm supporter. If you reject this view you are saying matter and energy are not sufficient to support life. And it's not anything close to the information we experiece with our brains (refering to both views).
In the early universe there could not have been an interpreter, but form arose and developed.
In one sense everything is a development of form.
In constructivism, understanding develops as a result of more information.
Meaning arises as a result of integrated information?
Form is meaning, because without it , only nothing could exist.
"The parts" of the universe could not be integrated without form.
Just some thinking that badly needs integration. :sad:
Why are you telling me this when I’ve just told you how my position does not involve an interpreter but habits of interpretance?
Quoting Pop
One can lead the horse to integration, but one can’t make it integrate.
Habits belong to entities. Who / what is the entity with such habits?
That is a very crude way of phrasing a basic question of philosophy.
Quoting Pop
Meaning is always imputed or interpreted. It doesn't exist in its own right.
That's the problem - there's an unavoidably idealistic or possibly even theistic :groan: implication. See the argument from biological information.
Quoting apokrisis
It's certainly a problem for physicalism, not so much for dualism or idealism. I mean, 'if the stuff of the world is mind-stuff....'
Quoting apokrisis
'You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think' (Dorothy Parker, when asked to use 'horticulture' in a sentence.)
This is the prevalent thinking that Barbieri and co are up against.
You tell me what you might mean by an entity. That’s a mighty vague term. I will watch with interest as you try to justify some epistemic cut to separate the living and mindful from the physics of dissipative structure.
Oh I forgot. You will just claim panpsychic dualism as the reason not to have to provide an intelligible mechanism for such a differentiation.
It was a problem that got solved though. So physicalism prevailed.
Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-009-9064-2
Hah. Barbieri has been changing sides. As a good careerist, he has snuggled up more closely with the acceptable mainstream. This is a nice commentary…
Am I understanding you correctly ? - YOU are the one arguing epistemic cut. Not me - hence I have a panpsychic understanding. The anthropic principle is the interpreter ( the integrated laws of the universe ) - it causes the information to integrate. At all scales, as far as I can see.
So - the cosmological principle that theories of the universe are constrained by the necessity to allow human existence?
All you need to provide now then is an explanation of how Panpsychism is indeed “a theory” in the scientific sense. (And not pseudo-metaphysical hand waving.)
A clue. To be a formal model, it needs to be testable. And that involves an epistemic cut between model and measurement.
"Everything is information"
There you go. A falsifiable, thus scientific , theory in three words. Beat that! :lol:
And to refine it a little:
Everything is information from every perspective.
But to keep @Wayfarer happy:
We will never know the truth, we will only ever know information about it.
What is your unit of measurement? You forgot something.
If it involves an atomistic notion of consciousness, well best of luck.
(Remember, you are claiming everything is panpsychist information.)
You can falsify it, by providing something that is not information.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm claiming everything exists as a body of information. This "body of information" is what is evolving from every perspective. Our consciousness is the ultimate body of information that we are aware of.
That the quantum foam is information is doubtful. You can rest assured however that once we discover its secrets, these too will be information. Such is the nature of fundamental information.
Sure. I’ll get right on to it just as soon as you provide the units of measurement.
Does it involve something like a stopwatch and ruler? Or is it more like waving your hands over an entity and going “woooo-oo”?
And yet:
You do not have to believe this, cannot believe this, in one big gulp. But you can stop for a moment and admire its theoretical beauty, its simplicity and logic. I think Occum would be impressed. It is logically coherent and can be used to understand and predict situations.
The consequences of panpsychism is a belief system similar to Buddhism
Bhutan is the world’s only Buddhist country. They measure national happiness. They preserve 75% of the country to nature. They are carbon negative. Theirs is a sustainable lifestyle. Compare that to our western way of life, and when you do compare the happiness of a typical Bhutanese to a typical westerner. You have to do the legwork and make this call yourself. Then you can judge the theory of panpschism in a holistic way. It is the most provable of theories, and its social results are known - it has a good outcome in general. It is not a theory for the west of today, but for a future west that is suffering the effects of hot house earth, who knows?
The major prediction of this theory is that the combined laws of nature is what we feel to give us integrity. The feelings and emotions that we most deeply identify with are those laws affecting the body of information that we are - towards integrity. All bodies of information in this universe are affected by those same laws. So, it is not possible to lose touch with feeling in this universe ever.
Yep. You need to move past Barbieri and also Hoffmeyer to reach Pattee’s resolution.
Imhotep: The language of the [s]slaves[/s] machines. I may have use for you. And the rewards...will be great!
The difference is specific Intention versus general progression. Evolution is a process of enforming, by which general laws "select" the fittest forms from among those produced randomly. You could say that Nature "sculpts" new species from the raw material of old "stuff". Human intention (design) creates novelties much faster by eliminating most of the randomness. We "select" the best elements for our creations by applying personal values, rather than by rolling dice. Come to think of it, you might say that Natural Laws are the cosmic values that fashion turbulent amorphous matter into the stable natural forms that we know and love. :smile:
PS__If that sounds teleological, I'll just say that's one way to interpret the evidence. :joke:
Information is not only fundamental to the universe, it is ubiquitous. In my view, it is the essence of both Energy and Matter . . . . and Mind. Some would interpret that datum as proof of a Universal Consciousness. But I prefer to remain agnostic about any "mind" that I can't converse with. Instead, I tend to use the less grandiose term : "Universal Enformation". That keeps me more grounded in empirical observations instead of unfettered speculation. Although, I can't help but conjecture from "what is" to "what if?" :smile:
Universal Consciousness (redirected, here, as Universal Mind) is a concept that tries to address the underlying essence of all being and becoming in the universe. It includes the being and becoming that occurred in the universe prior to the arising of the concept of “Mind,” a term that more appropriately refers to the organic, human, aspect of Universal Consciousness. It addresses inorganic being and becoming and the interactions that occur in that process without specific reference to the physical and chemical laws that try to describe those interactions. Those interactions have occurred, do occur, and continue to occur. Universal Consciousness is the source, ground, basis, that underlies those interactions and the awareness and knowledge they imply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_mind
Why do you think that?
The unit of measurement is the human mind, as in "Man is the measure of all things". :smile:
To Measure : from Latin "mensura"; mens- (mind)
Don't get me started. I have a webpage and a blog devoted to exploring that equation. Shannon defined his concept of Information in terms of the absence of energy (entropy). But the math works both ways. Here's a link, not written by me, that might point you in the direction I'm looking. :cool:
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
I don't think so.
"In information theory, the entropy of a random variable is the average level of "information", "surprise", or "uncertainty" inherent in the variable's possible outcomes."
It's not about absence of energy.
0 = nothing or no discernible “content” however -1 +1 is a contrast of equal opposites - a spectrum which can be appreciated from within itself and yet still equals zero.
You cannot have black without white or space without matter to occupy it. Information is difference.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
What I’m wondering here is how much of a role a sociobiological component plays in your model. Are these just general capacities for affectivity and motivation you’re ascribing to the nwueohormonal machinery , or do they specify content? If a series of mutations were to occur , could they wreak havoc with the motivational-affective system in such a s way as to reverse the poles of the dichotomy cooperation-competition , fight-flight, approach-avoid, love the insider-hate the outsider?
Piaget once debated Chomsky and Fodor , who were both innatists when it came to semantic content of language. Piaget’s positions was that the instincts play essentially no role i. human behavior , other than the Babinski reflex. The general organizing principles of cognition and affect ( assimilation , accommodation , progressive equilibrarion) belong to the general organizing principles of life( and he wanted to extend this back to physics ). Dan Dennett also disagreed with evolutionary psychologists who , along with Dawkins and Pinker, ascribed specific innate grounds for many behaviors. Dennett believes that human behavior is almost entirely explainable without reference to innate modules or other kinds of machinery , other than the general capacities required for goal-oriented cognition. Where do you stand on this?
Do we suspect the outside and embrace the insider because of arbitrarily tuned machinery or because we attempt to make sense of our world with the neural machinery we have and the alien is intrinsically unassimilable? That is , can’t a general notion of predictive sense-making encompass what you are delineating in terms of fine-grained switches, hormones , dichotomies? What is it this hardware detail is adding to our understanding of human behavior? Do we have to uncover a flow chart of arbitrarily patterned sequences of instructions in the individual , and coordinate the this with a large arbitrary social patterning , in order to understand human behavior?
When I interact with someone , like with you right now , I read every word that you write as belonging to a system of meaning that guides the sense of each word. I try to discern what that larger system is, what your overarching philosophical
presuppositions are , and I experiment with different versions to ‘try on for size’. I know I’m getting closer if I know that I can compose a response that you will find remarkably consonant with your thinking ( obviously that’s not what I’ve been aiming to do up
till now ). Thus, my goal is to better abs better anticipate the trajectory of your thinking , where your passion lies in the conversation. Again, how successfully I construe your larger worldview is not up to me to decide, it’s up to you to let me know by your assent or objections , by the fruitfulness of our interchange.
My subsuming of your construct system , or your subsuming of mine, is not the capturing of a dead thing. In every word exchanged between the two of us , your entire worldview is aight alight altered by exposure to my thinking, and so is my thinking changed by the interaction. When each of us go back to read each other’s posts, we find that the sens of each word has changed as a result of the effect of the previous interaction on both of our perspectives.
There is a reciprocal dialogic altering of thinking going on, but that doesn’t guarantee that our two approaches become more aligned with each other. That can only happen if either one or both of us manage to transform and expand our own thinking enough to accommodate what initially appears as the alienness of the other.
Norice that the only motive I presume here is sense-making , the need on the part of each of us to anticipate the events the others words express. There may be switches going off like nobody’s business and neurohormones up the wazoo, but the balance of integration and differentiation that is being sought via all this machinery is in the direction of replication of events, construing the most novel and strange future in terms of an aspect of the familiar past.
Tell me how you attempt to make sense of an interchange such as this. Let me put my subsuming skill to the test. Certainly you would construe my personalistic, individualistic bent (construct system ) as itself a narrative product of a social scheme. I convince myself there is something called a personal construct system because socially induced motivational mechanisms select for such a thinking.
At the organismic level, my notion of a functionally unified motivational telos would appear incoherent at best , or a relic of Romanticism. There would likely be a range of loosely correlated , motivational systems which
are the expression of evolutionary mechanisms, and thus could be other than what they are. In sum, a complex of contextually embedded semiotic codes ( my syntax, semantics and affectivity) denotes
the epistemic cut between the material and the informational.
Kant and Hegel, in different ways, recognized the absolute inseparability of form and content in understanding the real. Biosemiotics in all its varieties brings this insight into the realms of physics and biology.
I hadnt realized the influence writers like Partee and Peirce have had on people whose work I am familiar with (Bateson, Deacon). So this brings biosemiotics right up against the cognitive work on language I am familiar with. It seems to me that a cognitive semiotic can play the role of challenging remnants of traditional views still hiding within the various versions of biosemiotics. Certainly ,hermeneutical ( influenced by Gadamer and Heidegger) and Wittgensteinian pragmatical semiotics can help in this direction. I also think dialogical models inspired by Bakhtin and social constructionism ( John Shotter in particular) can help us leave behind computationalism on the plane of human language.
Does that include madmen, fools and dreamers?
Seems legit, :ok:
My position on emotions is social constructionist and biological. One must build on the other.
So yes, we already know people have genetic variability in their basic biological affectivity. There is a natural economy of physiological preparedness that produces a pallet of feelings - the contrasts of the parasympathetic vs the sympathetic nervous system for a start. And some are more anxious or reactive than others. Some more dominating than submissive. Some are almost excessively agreeable and others psychopaths.
Quoting Joshs
Whenever academics argue for an extreme position on the nature/nurture divide, you know they are still mired in the culture wars of yesteryear. It is a sad sight to see so much time and effort being wasted on a false dichotomy.
Quoting Joshs
No. That is just the general rationality of the Cosmos expressing itself. Seriously, Everything in Nature is the product of symmetry breakings, from particle physics up.
The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself. But then also inserts a self interested point of view into the map of this terrain. Hence Gestalt psychology. We experience an Umwelt which is symmetry broken into the figure and ground that has now a personal meaning. We highlight what matters to us as a point of view, and ignore everything else as peripheral detail.
And so we lump and split the world in terms of self and other, so as to construct ourselves as both an individual biological organism and a part of a larger social organism. That means reading self and other into any social situation,
This dichotomisation or symmetry breaking isn’t an arbitrary epistemic tactic. It always was the driving logic of a nature making itself intelligible - developing a rational structure. That’s Peircean pansemiosis 101.
Quoting Joshs
Yep.
Quoting Joshs
Perhaps it is also hard for folk to paradigm shift if they haven’t first established a paradigm to shift away from? Often people don’t understand their own socially constructed belief systems, just like fish don’t know water.
To break out of a reductionist causal mindset, it is not enough to listen to a long lecture on organicism.
:up: You are on the right track, and I need help to define it @Daniel has disappeared. I'm looking for a definition of information befitting an enactive world .
So far I have: In the enactive world : Information is the interaction of form.. In the case of organic form, the interaction causes an internal physical change that entangles an organism into its environment.
( neural correlates )
Still a bit unwieldly, hoping to do better then this. Can you work with this to reduce it? Anyone?
For a communications engineer (Shannon), it wasn't about the energy. But for more recent information theorists, their topic has much broader applications & implications than just 1s & 0s. For physicists, it's all about the energy. :smile:
What is the relationship between forms of energy?
So when energy is exchanged between two systems, information is also exchanged (see Figure 1), but the dynamics of energy exchange does not uniquely determine the information exchanged. For the same amount of energy, different amounts of information can flow in or out of a system.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0501/0501014.pdf
Yes. They see the world as they are. :smile:
That’s true, but they do know when their paradigm is crumbling , because this is for Kelly the meaning of what are conventionally called negative emotions. Kelly did away with the dichotomy cognition-feeling-conation and instead made what we think of a a feeling the expression of the organizational status of our attempts at anticipating events . Anxiety , threat , guilt and hostility all have to do with a ‘paradigm’ , what he calls our superordinate system , running into trouble in its attempts to make sense of things. One can think of such feelings as anxiety as the experience of impending chaos , the near meaningless of a world that one cannot construe on the basis of similarities with what one already knows. One cannot move forward.
One can attempt to stave off such chaos for a while , constricting one’s world to simple routines and situations that are familiar( the ultimate constriction is suicide) and avoiding the situations one no longer cope with, but only a reorganization of one’s system ( a new paradigm) offers the possibility of moving forward again. In this regard, Kelly makes a distinction between aggression and hostility. Aggression is simply confident exploration of new situations, with no intent to harm or destroy.
Hostility is the attempt to force a round peg into a square hole, the recognition that one’s social
predication has failed ( one discovers one’s lover has cheated , violating one’s sense of trust in them). Rather than reconstruing the situation so as to determine how the other came to their behavior , one attempts to force the other back to the way we expected
them to act in the first place. Hostility and anger are thus impetuses of conformity. We blame the world for our failure to understand it, to keep up with the changing flow of events such as to discern replicating patterns.
Notably missing from Kelly’s treatment of affect is recourse to bodily sensation. He contradicts the classic view of feeling as instinctive , raw, primitive , bodilly, non-intentional , a force , surge, glow , energy.
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps the ‘rationality’ of Kelly’s approach can be linked to this ‘rationality’ of the Cosmos.
Quoting apokrisis
Is the brain’s inserting a self interested point of view necessary? Could it be imagined differently? Enactivists like Thompson argue that all living things have a point of view, a functional unity that makes them norm generating goal-oriented systems. As Piaget defined it, for an organism , ‘interest’ is simply the system’s actively pursuing a continuing pattern of interaction with its world, and need is the interruption of this cycle.
So it’s not simply that we ignore what doesn’t matter to us , we would disintegrate as organisms if we attempted to ‘assimilate’ what was not compatible with our current functioning and interests. I suppose one could put this in dialectical terms and say with Piaget that the interest-based equlibrarion of cognitive structures is progressive ,
the direction is from weaker to stronger structures. Put differently, self-interest, point of view and normativity produce new structure from older ones. Without relevance, mattering , interest there is no dialectical
progression of structural integration, only a mechanical reproduction or re-shuffling of pre-existing pattern.
I suppose that , rather than taking the individual
organism as focal point , one could take a broader ecological stance and put in question the coherence of biological ‘selves’. I don’t think that such an approach would alter the general features of the dialectic. It would merely identify the self as the totality , the world coming to know itself.
Happy clappy bullshit. You wouldn’t believe the delusions of a schizophrenic. You wouldn’t think they had achieved some praiseworthy level of reality modelling.
Peirce got it right in defining truth as the limit of a community of rational inquiry. The units of measurement might arise from the point of view taken, but it is clearly situated in the pragmatics of being part of a collective social level of organismic existence. If units of measurement can’t be shared across the community of inquiry, there ain’t anything worth talking about.
Note how you want to cloak the prosaic in the dramatic. You are romanticising anxiety as a cosmic existentialist drama - passionate man against uncaring nature.
And yet anxiety is part of the stress response - physiological readiness for fight or flight (or even the third strange choice of freezing). Noradrenaline in the brain goes up to change the signal-noise balance. We become less able to focus on endogenous/dopamimergic planning and more open to the exogenous/readiness response where we have no clear prediction of where the signals we seek might come from. So the brain as a whole is made readier to react to anything that might just normally be treated as peripheral noise.
Thus we shift the discourse from heightened Romanticism back towards the mundanity of information processing. Anxiety is just a machinery for paying better attention to the uncertain environment when that is the processing mode that makes better sense than remaining head down and focused on some narrow task or activity.
Quoting Joshs
The general dichotomy that a learning and living system implements is that of plasticity-stability. An organism must be able to resist change to its structure of habits so as to persist as that functional set of habits. But the same organism must also have the plasticity to adapt as the world changes in ways it hasn’t encountered. It must have the attentional level of processing to complement the habitual. Paradigms need to be tweakable.
So any systems minded biologist or neuroscientist gets this. Existence for an organism is a dialectical balancing act in terms of staying the same and yet constantly adapting.
It is not a psychic drama. It is the intelligible basis of organismic being.
Quoting Joshs
Or another way of putting it is that selfhood is pervasive and scalefree.
Life is Gaian in scale in that it eventually came to control the Earth’s chemistry. It produced a stable atmosphere and carbon cycle that favours life as an ongoing entropic project.
So we have bacteria that form communal biofilms. Even the smallest organisms make social collectives as higher level identities. Rainforests make their own rain - seeding the clouds with bacteria lifted into the sky by their own evapotranspiration. Life as a whole took control of the planet when it evolved the dialectic of oxygen-based respiration and CO2-based photosynthesis some 2.2 billion years ago (although it took a couple of snowball earth extinction events to secure the mature state marked by the Cambrian explosion of complexity some 600 million years ago).
So selfhood exists at every level of biology and neurology. It is anti-reductionist in that a point of view - an epistemic cut - is ubiquitous to every scale of organisation.
Mind and consciousness are rather vague terms with variable meaning in each end user. To overcome this I have accepted that integrated information is equal to a moment of consciousness. A state of integrated information embeds and orients us in our personally construed reality. This way consciousness becomes a logical quantity, as per IIT, and then we can work with it logically and get somewhere.
Since last we discussed this at length, I have been considering the status of information metaphysically. If we say that fundamentally we have energy and its information, how are these different things? To cut a long story short, the only difference between a fundamental substance and its information is the assumption that something more exists. This is similar to Shannon's entropy, so I prefer the simplicity of Pragmatic information theory, for the purpose of describing an enactive world.
Here only the information that is transmitted is relevant and enactive. So in this view, the assumed underlying substance gets dropped, and all that remains is information of it The information becomes identical to the substance. This works for describing a universe that arises due to particles possessing form. Without the form there would be no basis for interaction, so nothing could exist. But because of form, particles can interact, and eventually clump together, and away we go towards elementary particles, and so on. This way everything arises bottom up as a result of the interaction of form. Everything is an intricate vertical build up of form, and then once built up how can a formed substance interact laterally? With form of course. So everything can be captured through an interaction of form. Here Information is a fundamental substance that informs the universe. I am assuming monism, such that anyThing perceived has its neural correlates, and this is how we become informed and embedded in the world through an interaction of form.
This way everything is information from every perspective. And I think this touches on what we sense consciousness to be? An integration of form in all its dimensions. The trick is to define this information if possible. Any ideas?
Thus far I have; "Information is the interaction of form..... In the case of organic form, the interaction causes an internal physical change that entangles an organism with its environment."
( neural correlates )
Is anxiety part of the stress response or is the stress response simply an accompaniment to anxiety? If someone loses sensation, such that the physiological accompaniment is no longer kinesthetically and tactile perceived, do you think the anxiety goes away? All that goes away is the body’s stepping in to help optimize the movements that the anxious or fearful person is contemplating in rapid fashion. The situation as we construe it is what dictates the movements we want to make, not the feedback from our body. This feedback
follows, but does not lead. And when the feedback is absent , we still perform all the typical
actions and thoughts that we think of as
flight or fight, although we may do them more clumsily.
If I see a bear coming toward me, I can process very quickly the potential dangers , options and outcomes. I will do this quickly not because of physiological help , but because I already know that this is a situation that requires split second decision. Fearful situations also imply a rapid oscillation between anticipation of loss or hurt, and hope of escape. This is precisely because the feared event hasn’t happened yet. If what we fear happens, we will no longer be afraid but shift to a different attitude. So fear is a rapidly oscillating attitude between doom and hope. This is its meaning. We can dump all kinds of adrenaline into someone. .Sometimes they may initially confuse it for fear, but when they don’t find a situational cause they will shift attitude.
We can’t concentrate in fear not because of the hormones but because then worry over the situation is a greater priority to us than other interests PTSD isnt a disorder of chemicals , it is a problem of failure to effectively understand events the past that have relevance for ones present and future.
of Quoting apokrisis
This is redundant. We don’t need the explanation of the machinery stepping in to tell us to focus when the situation as we construe it is already telling us in capital letters to focus on nothing else. Try injecting yourself
with adrenaline and see how it ‘makes’ you focus. It actually has the opposite effect unless you are already gearing yourself up for action, action which ebbs and flows in it’s urgently in precise orchestration to the now imminent, now not so imminent danger. Hormones are dumb, but one’s assessment knows exactly what it is afraid of, why and what it wants to do about it, and it can think all this ina split second.
nQuoting apokrisis
I would only add that an organism ‘persists’ as a set of habits only in a relative sense. It is crucial
to bring temporality into the equation and remind that , as Piaget said, each assimilation to ‘habits’ is at the same time an accommodation to the novelties of the environment. The world is always, minute by minute, changing in ways the organism hasn’t precisely encountered. Look at perception. Each moment , the world presents our senses with a slight new set of data. We effortless accommodate our perceptual system to this unless a more significant anomaly occurs and causes us to stop and take notice.
In this way , our perceptions and our languaging are immediately in the world, never merely ‘persisting’. Awareness would be impossible if it didn’t present an always slightly novel world.
This may be an interesting difference between us. What is novelty to you? Do organisms and humans just rearrange previous bits and codes most of the time?
So where did "information is a lack of energy" come from?
Sorry I'm quoting myself here. There is a question of if mental content exists, what it is and is it falsifiable.
I sometimes write BRAIN(mental content) as the form of information we experience, and since the tool of an epistemic cut is being brought up I am looking at making a cut like this: Brain | (mental content).
I don't think you can because the way I was explaining it, the notation was an expansion on something that is singular...brain state.
Brain state (1) is BRAIN(Mental content (1))
Brain state (2) is BRAIN(Mental content (2))
This expansion is useful because you can include mental content such as:
POPS BRAIN( the content of pops last post)
I don't mean this text is information. It's not. It's just coded physical matter. The information would have been active as pop wrote it. Like this:
POPS BRAIN(paragraph 1) , time duration t0 to t1
POPS BRAIN(paragraph 2) , t1 to t2
POPS BRAIN(paragraph 3) , t2 to t3
The time duration shows information as dynamic.
So back to the question of is this model falsifiable. Theoretically it is but in practice it isn't.
It would involve taking an entire dynamic brain state and extracting mental content.
If you really wanted to use an epistemic cut you would need to acknowledge mental content can't exist in a physically divided state.
I've found my own understanding creeps along and changes as new information becomes available. Currently I'm recalibrating idealism in light of enactivism, largely due to @Joshs narrative. It makes better sense.
If you consider information takes the form BRAIN(mental content) then time as we perceive it as information can take multiple forms, such as:
BRAIN (present clock time)
BRAIN (the past, present or future)
BRAIN(time duration, such as in physics or engineering math problems)
BRAIN(time and location as a meeting point)
BRAIN(time as non-existant-it is always the physical present)
BRAIN(time dictating a series of physical events, task 1, task 2, task 3...)
BRAIN(recurring events, like your dental appointment)
BRAIN(deadlines)
BRAIN(evaluating feasibility based on time constraints)
BRAIN(time based billing)
The point being time perception is inseparably linked to information.
You are pretending my position is monistic so that you can counter it with your own monism. But I’ve already said that “feelings” are an interaction of two varieties of information - biological and cultural.
Biology accounts for states of arousal that are functional in that they prepare us for actions that meet the demands of our world. Sociology accounts for how we must give reasons for our responses in a language that is socially accepted.
Shoot someone up with adrenaline, and no particular situation to frame the feelings, and they will be confused as to whether they are excited, anxious, or in some unspecific way, rushed and unsettled.
Push your kids on to a roller coaster, and if they complain “Daddy, I’m scared”, tell them they are wusses. There is no real danger. What they really need to feel - to justify the money you are spending on them - is thrilled.
All you are talking about is the socially constructed aspect of emotion. I’ve already said that is part of the story. And how there is also the neurology of affect, and how that reflects the evolutionary need to have the whole body reorientate its readiness state in the time it takes to spot that tiger lurking in the shadows.
I offered the cartoon version of oxytocin. But one of the interesting things is how it is neuromodulator that looks designed to override the usual natural fear and anxiety of “being too close” to others. It allows intimacy to override keeping even your social conspecifics at a certain safe distance.
Chimps have mutual grooming sessions as moments of intimacy. Cats prefer a brief sniff of noses. Humans evolved to tolerate the new behaviours of long term pair bonding and prolonged child rearing. That needed more of an off button for the kind of anxiety that being “overly close for too long” is otherwise liable to evoke.
Oxytocin is not, in that light, an on button for intimacy, but an off button on anxiety. Even that is a simplification. But it makes more evolutionary sense and shows how we shouldn’t presume intimacy as some kind of universal good. Biology sets us up to be physiologically intimate as was functional in the typical pre-modern social setting.
So the neurology is remarkably plastic and specific, even if it is an evolutionary adaptation. Our affect system system is precisely calibrated to our million years of hunter-gatherer living.
If folk need lots of psychotherapy these days, that is not so surprising. Society has become its own historical project with its own socially-constructed framing of how to think and what to feel. Biology hasn’t had a million years to catch up with some of the ways we are now meant to live.
Quoting Joshs
Utter bollocks. You will react physiologically even before you can form a clear conscious picture. Your reptile brain - the amygdala in particular - sits poised to react to any sudden rushing object in a fifth of a second. It will then take half a second at least for the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex to come to some sort of agreement about whatever the hell is actually rushing us.
And a few days after the fact, you will have reframed the whole thing as a heroic episode where you instinctively kicked the bear in the nose, or an amusing reason for why your bowels let go and you shat your pants and froze rather than ran - or whatever socially accepted narrative helps explain your feelings at the time in a reasonable light.
You have the temporality back to front.
Quoting Joshs
Generalised anxiety is a pathological state. Nervous expectation is functional as a way of rising to the expectation of some temporary challenge. It is dysfunctional to get stuck in any particular physiological state for longer than the immediate situation demands.
But of course, culture can frame your reality as a state of constant threat, or a dread of a moment’s boredom. It can play all sorts of manipulative tricks. An animal lives in the moment. Humans learn to inhabit a world where love and hate, strength and weakness, friends and foe, etc, are permanent signifiers of the psychic landscape. You are suppose to maintain the boundaries of this emotional economy at all times - because that is who you are! LOL.
Quoting Joshs
You say this as if stating facts. And yet you too have an amygdala as well as a prefrontal cortex. The neurology tells you what part of your responses are preverbal - or at least limited to the kinds of shrieks, screams and swear words the amygdala, in cahoots with the anterior cingulate, might cause you to emit even as you are trying to make sense of something scary that is in the middle of happening.
Can we retrain the hyper-sensitivity of an abused amygdala by reliving and desensitising - talk therapy? Sure. To an extent.
Quoting Joshs
The body injects itself with noradrenaline in the brain, adrenaline in the body, in a habitual fashion that hopefully matches your mental state to the situational requirements.
Try stepping out on to a stage or the finals of a tennis tournament and not feel butterflies. It is essential to react physiologically and neurologically in a way that gets you up for the occasion. If you are ready to face any threat, then you can get into the flow of the actual challenge and not stumble and stutter. Well prepared habit can let you deal smoothly with whatever gets thrown your way.
So shooting a relaxed subject up with adrenaline is of course a nonsensical and inappropriate thing to be doing. Anyway, just hold an evil rusty syringe up in your shaky hand, mutter unconvincingly there is no chance it could hurt or harm.. You won’t even have to inject your juice, Dr Joshs. The social framing of the act will have created the adrenaline rush before the needle descends.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. But the flip side of the cognitive coin is that habits are the automaticisms which deal with the first 200 milliseconds after something has started to happen. Conscious attention can only follow between 300 to 1000ms - depending on the actual amount of novelty and need for a radical reframing of expectations.
So habits take long to form and a split second to emit. Attention takes longer to develop, but offers more immediate fruits.
The temporality is important. So it is important to actually get it right.
Quoting Joshs
…he says hopefully, seeking to “other” me as already in the camp of shameless mechanical discourse.
Sorry. Did you miss the start of this thread where I pinned my colours to the Bayesian Brain answer on just this?
Precisely. :up: you are a dark horse! :smile:
The way I understand it. The "contrast" of one moment of consciousness ( state of integrated information ) and the next moment of consciousness is how we experience time.
Life is a procession of moments of consciousness.
Moments of consciousness can last 1-400ms according to a number of studies. This fact is also important to IIT. So about 20 to 30 odd frames a minute.
Not sure precisely how this is measured, but that it is justifies the "integrated information" view, amongst other reasons.
I see it as a problem were the end points are known but the intermediate processes need to be solved. For the people who know maybe a lot has been solved. The end points would be the physical brain and mental content.
Mental content, as a concept, is something some people would like to back engineer into computers as in the Artificial Intellegence field.
The first sentence made sense to me. The second sentence makes sense to me. The third sentence makes sense to me. The first half of the fourth sentence makes sense to me. Concluding that it is a god's will that a snowflake takes the shape it takes, does not make sense to me.
Why throw in a god's will or a question of intelligent design?
Where there seem no reasonable answers to the questions, it is our tendency to rely on God for the answers. If you are a theist, you would accept it. If not, then it is unlikely you would accept it.
It is a question that has two possible answers. One is that it is unknown. The other is God wanted it to be. Saying unknown sounds there is no answer. Saying God wanted it sounds like it is at least an answer. But in essence, they are the same answer.
You kind of lost me in the explanation of why humans don't agree on the correct information, but I love your use of the concept of fractals. Hum, when the main character of the movie "Inside Out" enters the door of abstract thinking, the 3 characters who entered, started to take different and changing forms. They risked no longer being themselves. Might we say that abstract thinking is chaos that takes form and that form changes? As someone said in this thread, new information changes the thought/ concept of reality.
Because the notion of logos is so strong in my head, my thoughts keep coming back to it. For me, that would be the one metaphysics rule, but it would be a shapeshifter too like the abstract room in the movie. I think we want truth to be one thing and only one thing, but that is not the way it is.
Robin Williams, "reality, an interesting concept."
Religion is an attempt to make reality consistent and unchanging. Science is constantly changing our notion of truth and reality. We have to love Aristotle for giving us the concept of metaphysics, that which is beyond physical limits. :lol: My head is like the abstract room. I attempt to reply to posts and come to realize I don't know what I think because my thinking is a constantly changing process.
But really, the science of how to stop the spread of disease is not new. Somehow turning that information into a religious/political issue, is nuts! I know our environments and limited exposure to others, shapes our thinking, but (strong pagan words) shouldn't it be pretty easy to agree on scientific truth? It is logos, information on the physical level. We need to keep the abstracts of religion and politics out of it.
:lol: That would not be so bad if that god were an unknown god instead of a god-like Zeus who has human qualities. Doesn't the bible say God is beyond our comprehension, and then along comes Jesus and we get a god we can know because He is like us. Our relationship with the Jesus god is very different from our relationship with a god that is beyond our comprehension. Interpreting the bible abstractly is completely different from interpreting it concretely.
Oh no, there is another complication! Is our understanding of information concrete or abstract?
Heck, let us really complicate things, Daniel Kahneman explains different mental functions as fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking isn't actually thinking. Fast thinking is a knee-jerk reaction to stimulus. Fast thinking is a reflex. Education for technology favors fast thinking, and that is a disaster for democracy.
Slow thinking consumes a lot of energy and we would not have enough energy to make it through the day if we were in slow thinking mode for most of the day. Saying God wanted it, is to avoid thinking. Serious thinking can be as a walk through Hades, a place we must all go to search for the meaning of life events, but we should never go there without the help of the gods, because it is so easy to get lost in Hades. Lost in Hades means to suffer mental dis ease. Christians avoid that by turning everything over to God and trust in the will of God and the power of prayer.
I won't quote everything you said because we can refer back to it. I just want to say those thoughts are totally awesome! Now my brain is so overstimulated I have to take a break. There are not words for expressing how much I appreciate your explanation for the Greek words and reasoning, so I will just say thank you plus 100 times thank you.
I think everything is up to interpretation. And if we agree God is out of the boundary of human reason, then it is comforting for some people to base all the mysteries and unknowns to him.
But still, information is something that people seek, provide, supply and use. If something is information, then it cannot be unknown. If something is not unknown, then it must be able to be demonstrated and verified when required. If it cannot, then it is a myth and speculation.
What I said was : "Shannon defined his concept of Information in terms of the absence of energy (entropy)". I didn't mean to put words in his mouth, but was merely using my own terminology. As I tried to explain before, Shannon was not thinking in terms of Energy when he borrowed the concept of Entropy from Physics to define the distinction between meaningful information and meaningless noise. For him, Entropy was simply a mathematical statistical measurement of potential to carry content (an empty vessel). And since he was mostly concerned with impediments to communication, his measurement focused on the negative.
So I'm the one who interpreted his definition in terms of Energy -- the opposite of Entropy (Negentropy). For me, "information value" can be defined in terms of positive-potential-for-meaning versus discharged potential -- as in your phone's battery (energy storage). Your cell phone presents that value in terms of percentage of full charge. And it shows the potential for information storage in terms of percentage of memory capacity. Do you see the inverse relationship?
Anyway, the positive association of Energy & Information came later. In my understanding of the broader Information theory, Energy (order, potential, certainty, life) and Entropy (disorder, impotence, uncertainty, death) are two sides of the same coin : Thermodynamics, Causation, Action. Energy can be defined in terms of the mathematical ratio between Potential and Impotence. The best illustrations of that reciprocal relationship, that I'm aware of, is Sagan & Schneider's Into The Cool. :smile:
Entropy :
a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=entropy+is
Communication Entropy :
The basic idea of information theory is that the "informational value" of a communicated message depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Negentropy is a construct drawn from physics that can be conceptualized as the opposite of energy losses associated with normal organizational life.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-019-00448-5
Entropy :
[i]A quality of the universe modeled as a thermodynamic system. Energy always flows from Hot (high energy density) to Cold (low density) -- except when it doesn't. On rare occasions, energy lingers in a moderate state that we know as Matter, and sometimes even reveals new qualities and states of material stuff .
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, in a closed system, Entropy always increases until it reaches equilibrium at a temperature of absolute zero. But some glitch in that system allows stable forms to emerge that can recycle energy in the form of qualities we call Life & Mind. That glitch is what I call Enformy.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Into The Cool :
Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all sought to answer the questions of why we are here and where we are going. Finding this natural basis of life has proved elusive, but in the eloquent and creative Into the Cool, Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan look for answers in a surprising place: the second law of thermodynamics. This second law refers to energy's inevitable tendency to change from being concentrated in one place to becoming spread out over time. In this scientific tour de force, Schneider and Sagan show how the second law is behind evolution, ecology,economics, and even life's origin.
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Cool-Energy-Flow-Thermodynamics/dp/0226739376
:up: Yep. Entropy and information aren’t metaphysical substances. They are inverse descriptions we apply to a natural world we are now coming to view as essentially probabilistic rather than deterministic. They are the right kind of maths for capturing reality as an evolutionary process - a story rooted in statistical mechanics or thermodynamics. A story of probability patterns.
So it reflects a shift from stories of mechanical certainty - the material atomism and abstract universal law of Newton - to a post-quantum understanding of reality where the Planckscale defines a fundamental grain of uncertainty that must be now incorporated into any universalising description of nature, And both Boltzmann’s entropy and Shannon’s information do that,
But then it is easy to get confused because we humans also still want to understand the world in terms of familiar substances like energy and meaningfulness. And we can even extract useful measures of these two things as inverses of their “others”.
If Shannon information is just a measure of bare difference - a counting of physical states of possibility, or definite marks found in the world - then we can talk about when they are differences that make a difference … to some organisms point of view. We can talk about the difference between surprises and predictions, between signal and noise.
And if entropy is a measure of physical disorder or a stable equilibrium state - where there is a maximum quantity of difference, and it doesn’t make a difference - then again we can create an inverse metric that speaks to Gibbs free energy or the ability to extract work. Negentropy is minimal entropy - high order - and so a quantity of potential work available to someone who knows how to channel it from its source to a sink.
So science is shifting paradigms by accepting reality is based on developmental patterns that organise fundamental possibilities. Probability theory becomes the deep framework.
Then having redefined reality that way - as low information and high entropy - that sets up the maths to talk about the inverse pattern. States of high information and low entropy.
Our scientific descriptions of nature have thus left behind the substantial notions of Newtonian physics - little lumps of matter, pushed and pulled about by the magic of void filling force fields - to employ the bare language of patterns of possibility. The self-organising tendencies of statistical distributions.
Quoting Gnomon
You might have missed the anecdote I mentioned earlier in this thread:
I think you are referring to what occurs within a moment of consciousness. Yes, there is still controversy about what exactly occurs within the process . At some point the process completes and out of it arises a moment of clarity about current reality, is how I understand it.
That is the point where all information is integrated. The "moment of clarity" though, is not only about brain information. All bodily information, all historical understanding, and all environmental / situational information is integrated to create that moment of consciousness ( you can test this by sticking a pin into your distal toe, to check to see whether it effects your consciousness :smile: )
Within my understanding, all of this can be conceptually represented by a "body of integrated information", which has its physical correlates, as neural patterning and bodily patterning. So it is all a physical patterning. And a continual build up of physical patterning. Understood this way, there is no logical reason to not extend this reasoning beyond the body to all matter ( as does IIT ).
So, I seek to capture all this with a definition of information - "Information is the interaction of form"......... information causes a physical change that entangles an organism into it's environment................Information is causal !!
What do you think?
Time would also have to exist within a moment of consciousness, but as you say, I don't think we can be conscious of that. Cannot be conscious of time within a moment of consciousness, because it is not an integrated state of information. It is still a fuzzy state ( in a process of resolution ) of information, lacking clarity. So we can only be conscious of integrated states of information. Of course, we don't always manage to put it together, and the conscious state then recognizes that - that there are some things we can not be certain about - this too is an integration.
Sorry bout the rant, just thought I'd clarify it in case anybody is interested but still uncertain about how it works.
Describing the natural world as probabilistic is a category error. Probability is about prediction.
The concept of determined events is baked into information theory.
They have a life of their own. :smile:
Quoting frank
Yeah. I would say deterministic with a slight element of randomness - is the determinism we are seeing?
Or maybe you just have a limited grounding in the philosophy of probability?
Quoting frank
Either that. Or events yet to be determined and hence fundamentally indeterministic and awaiting their constraint by systems of interpretance, or even their physical quantum collapse?
Yes, Of course, those abstract terms can be used to describe the statistical energy state of material substances. But, in that symbolic sense, they are mathematical "objects". And what physical stuff is mathematics made of?
Philosophically, I tend to think of Information, because of its ubiquity and universality, in terms of Aristotle's essential "Substance" -- which is not physical, but meta-physical. Moreover, the core concept of the term "information" recalls Plato's Forms, which were abstract definitions of real things. In modern terms we might call Platonic Forms "Programs" for the production of physical products. But those programs contain nothing but the metaphysical Information necessary to create a final physical product.
Spinoza also came close to describing the modern (all-encompassing) notion of Information in his assertion that "Substance" is the only thing that exists. And some cutting-edge physicists have concluded that even physical Matter is made of metaphysical (abstract) Information. That's why I think of Generic Information as a shape-shifter, constantly forming new things, and transforming old things. :cool:
In what sense do mathematical objects exist? :
Whereas the natural sciences investigate entities that are located in space and time, it is not at all obvious that this also the case of the objects that are studied in mathematics.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
Mathematical Objects :
Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) is the metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objects whose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, and practices.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
Substance :
Every being in any category other than substance is a property or a modification of substance. For this reason, Aristotle says that the study of substance is the way to understand the nature of being.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle/Physics-and-metaphysics
Substance Monism :
The most distinctive aspect of Spinoza's system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substance—God or Nature—is the only substance that exists.
https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
Information Realism :
Indeed, according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation. But in such a case, what exactly is meant by the word “information,” since there is no physical or mental substrate to ground it?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/
Everything is information :
Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfQ2r0zvyoA
Everything is Information, and Information is Everything :
Note -- not really about the philosophical implications of universal information, but the title says it all.
https://www.kmworld.com/Articles/White-Paper/Article/Everything-is-Information-and-Information-is-Everything-123561.aspx
Generic Information :
5. Information is the Promethean power of transformation. Information is Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility : the Platonic Forms.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
Information is causal!!
Rocks have their neural correlates, because information is causal ! I think we are getting somewhere?
An event that has only one possible outcome has no associated information.
This is the trend in biology also. Particularly cellular biology. To understand life information has to become an observable non measurable quantity - according to barbieri , and this is also the gist of these 21 papers submitted to the Royal Society, on the topic of DNA as Information.
This is Shannon. In Pragmatic information theory only the information that gets cognized is information.
I think this will be more useful for describing an enactive world.
The pragmatic information measures the information received, not the information contained in the message. Pragmatic information theory requires not only a model of the sender and how it encodes information, but also a model of the receiver and how it acts on the information received.
The very idea of "physical stuff" is what the idea of "physical patterns" is meant to replace.
A metaphysics of stuff can't account for its own origin. It leads to the irresolvable paradox of getting something out of nothing.
A metaphysics of statistically emergent regularity can replace that by starting with the "everythingness" of a vagueness or uncertainty. Anything at all might be the case. Then the mathematics of patterns tells us the kind of determination in terms of self-consistent form that must then constrain that everythingness to a more organised somethingness.
And statistical mechanics or thermodynamics is all about that. Even chaos or randomness becomes subject to our new deterministic mathematical models of such phenomena.
Even chaos ain't just chaotic but a specific kind of natural pattern - one described by fractals, criticality, powerlaws, Levy flights, 1/f noise ... that kind of "mathematical stuff".
Quoting Gnomon
Yep. But the shift is from thinking that form in-forms stable matter to thinking of how form acts to regulate material instability, or pure potentiality.
What Aristotle likely meant by prime matter before the Catholics subsumed his metaphysics into their theology, or what Plato tried to get at in talking about his forms needing a chora or receptacle.
Quoting Gnomon
They are finding it necessary to go beyond a metaphysics of physical matter as atomistic lumps of informed substance bumping about in the nothingness of a spatiotemporal void.
So the need - as cutting edge physics moves on to a unified quantum gravity theory - is to find a suitable metaphysics which can measure both lumps of formed matter and the backdrop spatiotemporal void in the same fundamental units.
The language of information/entropy does that trick. It gives hope of uniting measurement in units based on the Planck scale - the three constants needed to construct a quantum gravity theory, or h-scaled uncertainty, G-scaled curvature, and c-scaled connectivity between these two.
So it is not what the world is "made of", as that presumes it all begins with some eternal stable stuff.
It is how the radically uncertain becomes stabilised by the constraining necessity of achieving a generalised self-consistency.
The fundamental question is what are the laws that chance itself cannot escape?
And that is what modern views of probability - ones that have been expanded in a major way by adding powerlaw distributions to Gaussian ones - have been busy with.
Some noise is white, some is pink. Some motions are Brownian, some are Levy flights. Some systems are bell curve, some systems are fractal. Some equilibriums are dead and closed, others are active and open.
Probability theory is itself gaining a richer dialectical structure as it starts to come into its own at the centre of scientific metaphysics.
Ok, but that isn't related to IIT, or the way physicists think about information.
The way information works in the Enactive world
To some extent the "self" readingtheseFUNNYwordsbecomes identical to them, in the moment of reading them.
There are neural correlates of substances and they arise due to information. Make sense?
Information is mutually causal, when there is a change in a system? Capra -" cognition is a disturbance in a state". Information disturbs a state !!!
Pragmatic information theory is far simplar and intuitive, I think. We can always trackback and see if we violate Shannon theory later?
It's just not related to ITT or physics. As long as you recognize that, you're good.
It simplifies things enormously. It does not violate either, as far as I can see?
:smile: Ok.
I have been processing some of the references offered here, and the article ‘What is information?’ from Christophe Adami caught my attention - in particular a Venn diagram showing information as ‘what you don’t know (entropy) minus what remains to be known given what you know’.
If we consider that the ‘observer’ is one of these variables, and the ‘observed’ the other, then ‘information’ depends on how we structure them in this interaction.
There is a tendency to perceive information as something separate from the two interacting systems. The quote @Wayfarer gave from Barbieri, for instance, talks about life manufacturing observable information as molecular artefacts, as if from nothing. But I’m thinking it isn’t from nothing - rather it’s constructed from what we don’t know, in this way.
Earlier in this thread I made idle (and confusing) reference to dimensional structures of interaction, suggesting that an uninformative ‘interaction’ consists of two six-dimensional systems, the most stable consists of two interrelating four-dimensional events producing a third 4D structure as an ongoing process, and the most dynamic consisting of an interchangeable 3-4-5 structural relation. This is based on a speculative, heuristic structure of all possible relation consisting of six dimensions (in which anything at all might be the case) and every interaction, with an epistemic aggregate of twelve aspects, is ‘cut’ into a triadic relation. I don’t expect this to make a whole lot of sense in reality - it’s just a different (qualitative) way of approaching relational structure to incorporate the infinite uncertainty of entropy, information and meaning. But the above Venn diagram offers a visual that might help illustrate what I mean.
As an example, interaction between an intentional, potential observer mind (5D) and a fixed, material object (3D) generates information as an ongoing, changing event (4D) - eg. consciousness. For that same intentional observer to recognise actual information as a fixed (3D) object (eg. material evidence), they must recognise the observed as a changing (4D) event.
But most epistemology ignores ‘what we don’t know that we don’t know’ as part of a six-dimensional system (unformed possibility), and focuses instead on the single epistemic cut, arbitrarily made (eg the internal curve on the left hand circle), by which we distinguish ‘self’ and ‘other’. So an interaction is cut into two 3D objects, or an observer event (4D) and a wavefunction (2D), or affect (2D) and action (4D), or a mind (5D) and a linear (1D) value. The ‘epistemic cut’ in each explanation of these interactions refers to an indefinable, unformed idea being ignored: what we don’t know that we don’t know.
For me, this diagram solves or (at least keeps straight in my mind) the problem of identifying the nature of ‘information’ in any discussion, in relation to any assumptions made regarding the observer and the observed.
Information literally changes our form ( neural correlates ) . But we have to understand this in terms of constructivism, so it is a build up of form............... The change in form is memorized.
I'm just not seeing the relationship. I think ”information” is being used in two different ways here. The physics usage is closer to the idea of data. Pierce was focused on behavior arising from messaging.
The diagram is excellent, thank you. The intersection is the relationship of two systems exchanging information. The systems are mutually changed in his exchange.
Please see my post above regarding enactive world. I would love a comment?
Yes. We don't think of consciousness as being of uninterpreted data, but rather of data plus meaning in some context.
Data plus meaning equals information.
[quote=Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?;https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060] In a long series of articles and books, Hubert Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.
Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’.
Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital worldof life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.
At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. This amounts to saying that we do not know how linear and digital entities came into being; all we can say is that they were not the result of spontaneous chemical reactions. [/quote]
Meaning in this sense occurs when the information fits already existing information?
** Sorry, I think you have already answered this.
This construction could be used universally - it describes the human process, I believe. But could also describe all processes that are a build up of form, which they all are!
This sounds like a theory of meaning.
The average theory of meaning is a labyrinth. Atomic meaning can't work. Holistic meaning doesn't work. Meaning as behavior doesn't work. Meaning as entirely abstract doesn't work.
Meanwhile I know what meaning and meaningless are. I see the potential for progress in the development of a testable theory of consciousness.
How do you see the issue?
Information and meaning are kind of similar. Meaning occurs when information fits already established ( informational) structure. And all structures are informational in this view.
Quoting frank
I don't think this is entirely new thinking. It is largely constructivism, and enactivism mixed in with a few bits of my thinking here and there. I'm hoping to reduce it to a heuristic.
Meaning requires a context, true. Say a siren is blaring. We can't know the meaning without knowing the context
But is context necessarily in the form of meaningful data? I don't know. I'm not sure how to approach the question.
Do I get a tax break for adopting it?
I'm sure you could find a way :lol:
Information creates meaning, through a construction of form - Lego brick by Lego brick.
The only context "information" and "meaning" have is consciousness! imo. Integrated Information
I think meaning is supposed to be a constituent of semantic information. So how can it create meaning?
Quoting Pop
In physics it's more like the history of an entity. Quantum theories don't allow two distinct entities to become indistinguishable. That would be a loss of information.
I guess consciousness is in the background of this line of thought because we're talking stuff that's knowable in principle, but the information discussed there isn't associated with any conscious being.
Semantic information is already a constructed meaningful informational structure. Further information has to fit this established structure in order to be meaningful. If it cannot fit, then it is meaningless - Shannon entropy describes something like this, I believe.
I doubt QM contains information. Think double slit experiment. It only becomes meaningful at the point of measurement / observation. prior to that it is probabilistic. I'm thinking Feynman and his proposal that the bucky ball goes everywhere in the universe. Most of what we know of QM is top down theory.
I am hardly an authority in this area - just a punter.
From the perspective of the Standard Model and CERN, and Quantum Field Theory I cannot see any problems. Wave theory is where this understanding started.
Quoting frank
That information has to be in the mix is well recognized in Zeilingers quantum randomness and information
This is due to the mind dependent nature of the world. At metaphysical base - no matter how deep we may dig, what we will find is a "substance" and its "information". But the question is - How are these things different?
This is your starting point? Why?
Quoting Pop
I mentioned before that metaphysics isnt my bag. I don't really have a lot of philosophical baggage. :razz: No metaphysics, no theory of meaning.
But I do think that even Yockey is copping out here - excluding what we don’t know that we don’t know for the sake of certainty. Everyone then has their own version of ontological duality, with a dividing barrier that absolutely cannot be crossed, even as it can be shifted with an alternative interpretation.
The reactions of chemistry, understood as three-dimensional, cannot generate linear and digital sequences from interactions. We have to recognise the part that we play as observer in understanding the interaction.
The variability (information) in a chemical reaction process is four-dimensional at least - it varies over a duration. When this interacts with another four-dimensional structure, an informative event (4D) occurs - regardless of whether or not anyone notices. The possible information in an interaction between two ongoing chemical reactions is equal to what remains when you subtract from entropy what information one reaction cannot obtain about the other in that interaction.
If we recognise our part in this as mind, then we restructure the interaction as:
- our intentional evaluation (5D) of a meaningful (3D+3D) interaction generates a linear or digital information sequence (1D); OR
- our intentional evaluation (5D) of life as an ongoing event (4D) generates a biochemical (3D) information structure;
Or frankly any way you care to divvy it up, so long as the aggregate is twelve.
If we recognise our part in this as irrelevant or unintentional, then we can restructure the interaction as:
- any temporal observation of an ongoing event generates an informative event.
But we can’t just write ourselves (or what we don’t know) out of the equation.
Enactive in this context simply means that we are part of any interaction, and cannot objectively talk about ‘information’ without including ourselves and what we don’t know that we don’t know.
Any change you’re referring to in the diagram, then, is only a possibility. H refers to entropy. You need to identify yourself in the diagram. Are you the entity that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know - the outer box? If so, how certain are you regarding how you define each system? Or are you one of the two systems, and if so, is your consolidation as such at the level of meaning, intentionality, consciousness, life or object? And how would you define the other system? This determines to what extent a system can change, and therefore what kind of information is available in the interaction.
That information has to be in the mix is well recognized in Zeilingers quantum randomness and information: abstract: ,
"in 1999, one of us (A.Z.) has put forward an idea which connects the concept of information with the notion of elementary systems. For the subsequent line of thought, we first have to make ourselves awareof the fact that our description of the physical world is represented by propositions, i.e. by logical statements about it. These propositions concern classical measurement results. Therefore, the measurement results must be irreducible primitives of any interpretation. And second, that we have knowledge or information about an objectonly through observations, i.e. by interrogating nature through yes-no questions.[b]It does not make any sense to
talk about reality without the INFORMATION about it[/b"] - - my bold and Caps.
This is quite similar to
"We need therefore a paradigm that goes beyond the two present paradigms of biology. A paradigm that fully accepts the implications of the existence of the genetic code. The implication that life is based on copying and coding, that both biological sequences (organic information) and biological coding rules (organic meaning) are fundamental observables that are as essential to life as the fundamental quantities of physics. This is the code paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information plus codes’." - Barbieri 2016.
In short, they are both roughly proposing, as do the other 20 papers, that information is a fundamental quantity in its own right. The Empirical world assumes a fundamental substance ( matter ) and information about it. The enactive world says the substance and observer are enacted in their interaction.
Enactivism
"Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. ... "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations."
Sorry bout the bold, editor has gone haywire.
:up: We cannot extract ourselves. The exchange and ourselves, to some extent, become one.
Information is that which gives us form, and our most recent form is consciousness?
Not in a reductionist sense, though. We are not one with the exchange, but only with a part of it. The question is, which part?
No, consciousness is whole. It is integrated whole information. We cannot slice that in half. Note, the external world is represented by neural patterning somehow. Information of the external world acts upon us to cause a patterning of brain matter - this patterning is identical to the external world. It is a nonsense to think we can extricate ourselves from our neurological state.
This is the issue - Information becomes you - in a physical way. Which also means you inform the world just as it informs you.
I think that you assign to ‘information’ the role that is assigned to ‘citta’ in Indian religions. It’s like you’ve had an ‘aha!’ experience - not saying it’s not real - and that you’re translating that into the jargon of information science, or trying to. That’s what I think is going on here.
Yes. But this isn't metaphysics exactly. It's that conservation of information has turned out to be the crux of a problem with the way we understand black holes.
As what's his name said: reality is the stuff we can't do without. I think a lot of the preoccupation with trying to sort that out in terms of substances comes from emotional problems with religion and a desire to thwart it on all fronts no matter the cost in terms of making sense. On the other hand there are those eager to push metaphysics into the forefront because they want to license some sort of spirituality.
I'm not too interested in that stuff anymore.
Quoting Pop
I think he's referencing the fact that biology is thought of as a subset of classical physics and this conflicts with the way biologists think and talk about causality and patterning.
So this is philosophy of science, not science per se. Biology mostly gets its money from the powerful pharmaceutical industry. Biologists are free to use whatever paradigms work for them. They don't answer to anyone but industry executives who couldn't care less about philosophy. Biologists are in charge of the conversation, not physicists, and certainly not philosophers.
Quoting Pop
Right. I think Isaac was confirming that this is the prevailing view among neuro scientists.
Do you mean that there's no non-physical information? What about abstract elements, like numbers, concepts, etc. They cannot be used as information?
Quoting frank
The prevailing view among neuroscientists is that the cognizing organism actively attempts a useful fit between incoming stimuli and internally generated representations, so they do still endorse the idea of computationalist internal representations. Enactivists on the other hand reject computationalism and representationalism.
If you start with brain state that is entirely physical it can be expanded by ackowledging that it contains mental content such as:
Brain state = BRAIN(mental content), still entirely physical.
A further expansion will give:
BRAIN(content dealing with the physical) and
BRAIN(content dealing with the non-physical)
Still entirely physical.
I think this addresses the issue.
Let’s say that we define pattern as a particular way in which elements of a plurality or multiplicity are related to each other to form the whole. At a given moment this ensemble can be defined in terms of this internal structuralality. We could further define the elements of the pattern as one and zeros, and their relations with other elements of the pattern in terms of relative spatial location. Or we could describe the elements in qualitative terms , as having a qualitative sense that arises out of its role in the pattern. There are computational descriptions of informational patterns as ones and zeros, and non-computational accounts of the components as qualitative aspects of a gestalt.
Beyond this static , or synchronic account of pattern, there is the diachronic, or temporal aspect. Does it makes sense to talk about a pattern that we can move from place to place or from time to time, intact and unchanged in itself? We certainly are tempted to describe patterns such as dna codes in such mechanically reproductive terms. But what about human language and conceptualization? If we view perception , for instance , as the internal representation of a stimulus , or as a direct fitting between internal pattern and external stimulus,?are we assuming that the internal pattern is stored and waiting to be used? In this case , we are assuming the idea that an internal cognitive or pereceptual pattern is something that remains self-identical at least temporarily, to be drawn upon when needed. That’s why we call it ‘internal’.
The alternative does not accept the idea that in the realm of human perception, cognition and languaging it makes sense to talk about patterns as having self-identicality from one moment of time to the next. Thus these patterns cannot be spoken of as codes in any traditional sense. There are only relative temporary stabilities overlaying a ceaselessly changing neural patterning.
Their dynamical properties determine psychological processes as non-representational and non-decoupleable “...variables changing continuously, concurrently and interdependently over quantitative time...”(Van Gelder,1999)
Varela(1996b) says “...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act”(p.291)
Furthermore , if it doesn’t make sense to talk about an ‘internal’ milieu of stored, temporarily self-identical mental patterns , what do we make of the ‘external’ patterns that we like to in nature , such as dna codes , that appear to manifest temporal self-identicaility, such that they are transmissible and moveable in algorithmic purity? Do we ground our ‘messy’ mental processes in reproducible external pattern and materiality (Reducing human behavior and cognition to the computational , representational dynamics of neurons)? Or do we derive representationalism, computationalism , moveable and reproducible codes and patterns , algorithmic information, from a messy pattern making that is only any of these things in a derived and secondary sense.
What do you think?
As Frank said (I think it was Frank) this discussion is getting out of control. I see you have several times tried to provide a definition of information taking into account all that's been said in this thread, I think that's wonderful moderation. I have seen that many comments allude to biological information and that many comments agree on the notion that information is a quality of an interaction (information depends on an interaction).
I would recommend you first try to give a general definition of information before you move to discuss other more specific types [as it was said before somewhere, there must be a common quality(ies) shared by all types of information; and I think we should define these qualities as best as we can before we move on to discuss things like genetic information, or sensorial information, or things like these] - it would be very interesting to see all participants give in their own words a general AND CONCISE definition of information. Again, the idea would be to describe information on its most basic terms, nothing complex. The idea would be to arrive to a basic definition of information on which more complex or detailed definitions can be built.
So, for example, if information depends on interaction, it would be interesting to discuss what in the interaction leads to the emergence of information so that we can say that information is the result of this type of change or that type of change. Discussing the dynamics of change (rates of change) that produce information would certainly help us find general characteristic of information.
Finally, I think we should try to find this basic, generally applicable definition of information not from the human point of view, or the organismal/cellular point of view, but from a more objective/general one, if possible - so, instead of thinking about what information is for a human being, or a cell, we should think what information would be for a star, or for a water molecule in an ocean, or for the elements of a multiplicity, as Joshs said. If information is a quality of an interaction, then it plausible that information is not a quality of only human interactions but also a quality of any other type of interactions.
Again, concise, basic, original definitions... that would be fun.
I see this as an artificial limit were you are enforcing both a dualist form (information is extra-physical) and also brain restricted.
Since the entirety of information of original post and comments on this thread are brain originated how could that be concidered and wouldn't you encourage the opposite (brain based dominance) or tolerate the status quo that is a vetting of all views.
But, yes, I agree with you and frank that some days seem out of control. Maybe weekends...alcohol?
Yes, Isaac explained this. I thought Pop was saying enactivists agree with that. Thanks for the heads-up.
You are opposing the stored information of the cognitivist with the lived dynamics of the enactivist. But then there is the third option - the one supported by the neuroscience - where the coding is predictive.
Whatever is happening out there right now can only make sense because it is judged against a running state of expectation. We anticipated some future, and now something has surprised us.
And that is then how we manage to live in the “now” … most of the time. We construct the now ahead of time, and so when it happens - which takes at least 120ms to learn about because neural signalling is not instantaneous - we remember ourselves as having been already there in the moment, synchronised with that reality.
To be enactive or embodied as a cognitive process in fact requires some pretty fancy footwork. It is inaccurate to brush over the processing view and speak as if what the brain does is simply some dynamical dance.
This is why Pattee makes the careful distinction of the epistemic cut - the division between rate independent information and rate-dependent dynamics - in living organisms.
The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. The proper view is the one that can speak of the two as complementary aspects of the one whole - the one biosemiotic modelling relation.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but what kind of interaction? I’ve been presenting a model of affectivty that is only supported by five authors
that I know of, and they are drawing from a radicalized version of philosophical phenomenology , which is too far afield from your background to allow for a useful interchange, I’m afraid. So I’m going to dial it back to notch and attempt to contrast your model of affectivity with writes like Matthew Ratcliffe , who is well ensconced within the enactivist community. I think the differences between his theory of affect and those of the predictive processing group ( in particular Lisa Barrett) are pertinent to your approach to the interaction of the biological and the cultural.
Quoting apokrisis
Are we never capable of giving reasons for our responses in a language that is not socially accepted?
Was the predictive processing account of affect , as a significant departure from the then conventionally accepted idea of emotion , socially accepted when it was first developed? Even with the predictive processing community , was there a progenitor who didn’t even have the luxury of an intellectual community to accept their ideas initially?
Quoting apokrisis
This sounds like a glorified version of S-R theory. Do reinforcements from discrete centers of ‘pleasure’ have the capability to shape our complex attributions this way? I know conventional
models of addiction rely on a reductive idea of the reinforcing effect of chemicals.
Ratcliffe doesn’t deny that primitive sensory events of pleasure and pain are an important part of the organization of behavior , but what makes his account differ from the predictive processing one is that he integrates the contribution of the biological with the perceptual and intentional in a more complex and holistic way.
Ratcliffe's causal reinforcement-based model of affect assigns it the role of biasing appraisal via selectively guiding attention toward a heightening or lowering of perceived significance of various world events. The role of affective attunement is to produce “changes in the types of significant possibility to which one is receptive'. (Ratcliffe 2016) “...existential feelings determine the kinds of noetic and noematic feelings that one is open to. “...the existential feeling sets the parameters for the kinds of more localized experience one is capable of having.”(2016). “Emotions “tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. “(Ratcliffe 2002)
Bodily dispositions can actively direct one toward salient objects in one's world, but are “equally implicated in feeling unable to act upon something. Passivity in the face of threat may involve inclinations to withdraw, to retreat, along with the absence of any other salient possibilities.” (Ratcliffe 2015). For instance, in depression one cannot find the motivation to act to change one's situation ( a confident ‘I can' becomes ‘I can't'). Solipsistic self-perpetuating narratives, reinforced and organized by feelings of avoidance and reduced salience, tell one why they shouldn't or can't connect with others.
In order to situate Ratcliffe's orientation relative to the phenomenologists whose ideas he incorporates, it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention.
“...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus “mark” those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)
You can see that this account is closer to your own than the one I described in an earlier post. But I think there are still important differences.
Quoting apokrisis
Here I think Ratcliffe might object that neurohormones mechanisms are too closely and inseparably implicated in the encompassing higher order goal-orientedness of embodied cognition to be able to exert such an important effect on their own like forcing intimacy.
Oxytocin is not, in that light, an on button for intimacy, but an off button on anxiety. Even that is a simplification. But it makes more evolutionary sense and shows how we shouldn’t presume intimacy as some kind of universal good. Biology sets us up to be physiologically intimate as was functional in the typical pre-modern social setting.
Quoting apokrisis
But if the discrete contribution of neuro-reinforcers get swallowed up by and subsumed within the integrated goals of the system , then no genetically programmed reinforcement variant can have any more than a superficial effect on behavior. There has been study of ‘rage modules’ and other presumed inborn reinforcement predispositions and their effect on personality. We all know people who have hair -trigger tempers, or are prone to sentimentality. And of course we can cite the breeding of dogs for specific affective dispositions.
But thre question becomes how we are to situate the shaping effect of the biological component on the total personality. If we were able to genetically engineer a powerfully reinforcing olfactory response to human smell, would this amount to a superficial or significant influence on our social lives and propensity to intimacy?
Quoting apokrisis
And if it did ‘catch up’ , no amount of monkeying around with reinforcement contingencies, no amount of dialing down of anxiety juice, would make a significant impact on ptsd or other anxiety syndrome. But then, I shouldn’t present my argument as if you are favoring one side of the equation over the other, the biological over the social.
Your model is consistent. Both the biological and the cultural in your presentation have a quasi s-r character to them. There is a dynamic of overall integration missing in your brain-body-world interaction such as to over emphasisize the arbitrariness and polarization of the pushes and pulls cutler and biology exert on the brain-body-world system.
You will react physiologically even before you can form a clear conscious picture. Your reptile brain - the amygdala in particular - sits poised to react to any sudden rushing object in a fifth of a second.
Quoting apokrisis
In a way it doesn’t matter whether you talk about fear and anxiety in terms of unconscious reflexivity or consciousness processes of attribution, because both depictions are dealing with response to situations as various kinds of unconsciousness and reflexivity. What I know consciously is what is reinforced via the social
milieu. It by s a kind of polarized causal cobbling with only the most peripheral feature of intricacy , intimacy, consistency and autonomy to it’s moment to moment unfolding. In a way it is a more sophisticated version of the mechanism thinking you reject, one that put probability, uncertainty and algorithm. at its heart.
Quoting apokrisis
Only if we are treating psychological phenomena reductively and missing all today the intricate complexity that makes such phenomena as anxiety much more than reinforced patterns.
Quoting apokrisis
Who says? Because others define what the immediate situation should entail ? Does the label of pathology imply the forcing of a third person perspective on a situation that doesn’t fit it? Do you think that prolonged nervous expectation is divorced from what the situation demands? What is a ‘immediate situation ‘ and what defines its temporal boundaries? There is no strict sense to immediacy for a human being because our present is always defined by and infused with its grounding past and an expectant future. One could argue that an experiential focus on the most narrowly defined notion of immediacy is itself pathological , or at least a great way to lose all sense of coherence in one’s world. By the same token, the most expansive and dilated awareness can often be associated with a strong sense of belonging, clarity and confidence. The issue with prolonged anxiety isn’t the temporal expanse it involves , but the fact that the issues that obsessively pop up over and over as unresolved and threatening have relevance right now, in ones immediate present. One is not being inappropriately directed to a certain set of ‘immdeiate’ concerns in prolonged anxiety . It is not the concerns that are inappropriate. It is the world as it is being construed that is being uncooperative. To pathologize this situation is to blame the messenger for the message .
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. but it is your personal culture, as it connects with your past. It is you who are experiencing the crisis, not the entire culture you interact with.
Quoting apokrisis
Pointing to the role of the amygdala in fear. is not the same as assigning it the role of a reinforcement.
There is plenty of research attributing to the amygdala a contribution to the processing of the event. If you can’t recognize and process the rapid changes i.n a situation , you will not be able to fear it. Brain injuries slow down processing of events.
Quoting apokrisis
Try performing the same speech in the privacy of your living room and with one audience member. No butterflies and arguably a better performance. Or play that tennis match without the huge crowd and see how your nervousness is reduced and how your focus may improve. You’ll notice that the benefits of the hormonal circuit only make sense in the context of additional assessment pertaining to risks to self-esteem ,worries of potential embarrassment and failure. The hormonal ‘ boost’ is only half of the anxiety equation . The other half is what defines it as a negative feeling. it is the experience of potential loss, the feeling of interruption of cognitive activity , a gap in awareness. This is the pain component of fear and anxiety. There are plenty of stimulants on the market, but only intentional attribution can produce the pain of potential loss. The persistent suffering of potential loss inherent in chronic anxiety and ptsd is what makes them emotional crises. The hormones are not producing the pain, and they do not have the power to trigger memory of loss. Only a relevantly meaningful thought of threat can do that. The hormone , in fact, is the only positive contribution to this cycle of anxiety, by encouraging rapid action.
Quoting apokrisis
I would agree if you substituted for ‘automatism’ , the contribution my system of anticipations makes to
the recognition and construal of the event.
If it is truly unthinking, unconscious and automatic it will play no relevant role in my subsequent thinking This is why subliminal advertising never worked.
Yes. Quantum Theory has made the old Atomic theory obsolete, except in the sense that it is much more intuitive for non-scientists. A Quantum Field is not made of a swarm of atoms, but of a mathematical pattern of relationships.
Quoting apokrisis
What you refer to as "statistically emergent regularity" sounds similar to my own metaphysical notion of "Order from Chaos", to explain how Something (objects) could emerge from Nothing (potential). Plato's myth (likely story) of CHAOS (uncertainty) described how the Real World could magically appear as-if from nowhere, by organizing the disorderly randomness of Chaos. Aristotle seemed to think of "Potential" simply as an abstract Principle, but ultimately, the word "principle" refers back to Princeps (ruler, lawmaker).
That hypothetical speculation still sounds reasonable to me, since the Big Bang theory implied that the world (Where) had a sudden beginning, along with its inherent Space & Time, from Nowhere or "who knows where?". Although the theory doesn't speculate on what came "before" the Bang, it seems to assume that at least Energy (creative power) and Laws (orderly patterns) were eternal.
Creative Chaos :
For Plato the primeval chaotic stuff of the universe has no inherent preexisting form that governs some course of natural development toward the achievement of some goal, and so the explanatory cause of its orderliness must be external to any features that such stuff may possess.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus/
Note -- His implicit "explanatory cause" was an intentional being, but not a typical Greek god.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. Colloquially, the term "chaos" now implies a complete absence of pattern. But for Plato, Chaos was empty of actual (physical) things, but it was full of creative "Potential".
Chaos :
In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the eternal/infinite state from which the Big Bang created space/time. In that sense of infinite Potential, it is an attribute of G*D, whose power of EnFormAction converts possibilities (Platonic Forms) into actualities (physical things).
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Chaos theory [i]states that, under certain conditions, ordered, regular patterns can be seen to arise out of seemingly random, erratic and turbulent processes. . . .
"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order"[/i] -- Douglas Hostadter
http://www.patternsinnature.org/Book/Chaos.html
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, The Catholic theologians gave “metaphysics” a bad name, as far as Enlightenment science is concerned. But Quantum Theory and Information Theory are making the idea of something “beyond” (meta) physics (atoms, matter) more plausible.
Quoting apokrisis
Quantum Theory has forced us to think in terms of cloudlike “fields” instead of hard little “atoms". And Information Theory has given us a new vocabulary (e.g. bits & bytes ) for “mind stuff”. I call my personal metaphysics : “Enformationism”, as an update to Atomism and Materialism.
Quoting apokrisis
I envision that “radially uncertain” state in terms of Plato's Chaos. And the “stabilizing” “necessity” is what he implied was Divine Intention. Some kind of Intentional Lawmaker is necessary, unless as some physicists imagine, the Laws of Nature were just floating out there in Eternity before an accidental quantum fluctuation lit the fuse of the Big Bang. Plato was somewhat ambivalent about the Lawmaker, in some cases referring only to an abstract principle of LOGOS, and otherwise to a Demiurge. To account for the necessary "intention", I ambiguously label the Lawmaker as "G*D", which is not the Jehovah of the Bible. In place of the workman, following orders, I simply call it "Nature" or "Evolution" or "The Program" :nerd:
People interpret metaphysics differently. For me, it is the underlying logic that enables subsequent construction. Wave theory, QM, etc are metaphysical to me. And yes, as you suggest, there is talk of a substance, normally matter, as being fundamental in the Empirical view, but what we are seeing broadly is a kickback against that view, as being an impediment to understanding, particuarly in biology, but also in physics ( zeilinger ).
Quoting frank
Yeah, there are all sorts of political, social, economic, etc vested interests at play. In recent years technology has provided insights into what is occurring at the deep cellular level , and as that knowledge spreads it is hard to ignore the sophistication of the "mind" at work at that level. The chemical mechanical paradigm just can not cut it, so there is a push to extricate from it - which would have far reaching consequences, imo, for the better. The originators of enactivism are almost all biologists come philosophers. They started the embodied movement in the late 70s early 80s , and now their view is being largely validated through the latest findings, which are being distributed widely through Youtube, etc. So there is some momentum for a change in paradigm. Of course it is not something we will see any time soon.
Materialism will sink slowly from view with a few fringe elements holding out until it appears again some decades or centuries from now, born fresh from the waves in a new guise. That's how this stuff goes.
Quoting Pop
It's pretty handy in many ways.
Thanks for that. I'll look into it. This is the view of enactivism, which I appropriate in my understanding.
There are parallels between yogic understanding and enactivism. The way Enactivism understands the self is particularly beautiful in regard to the concept of enlightenment. In Eastern religion / philosophy as you would know, the self is destroyed and rebuilt, in a process that takes years. Enactivism can do this in five minutes, and hand you back your self fully intact, but with far greater possibility.
It is a Red Pill moment for those who buy into enactivism.
That was one of a variety of definitions presented in the OP. I believe you are quoting @Enrique there.
I believe information always has a physical basis, either as frequency or vibration, or the patterning of something.
I had to Google this. It's a reference to the 1999 film "the Matrix".
What were their names again?
And this sounds much like me with biosemiosis. There is what I regard as the inner circle versus the many levels of fellow travellers. :razz:
Quoting Joshs
I don't want to promote Wittengenstein, but didn't he make a valid "beetle in a box" argument about such private languages?
Quoting Joshs
I am forced to talk in these kinds of cartoon accounts to the extent you wouldn't be able to follow a neurocognitive account in terms of dopaminergic influences on working memory, or the critical role played by the nucleus accumbens in the switching of the brain from a smooth endogenous focus to an abrupt state of alert or surprisal - the classic reorientation response. The aha! that is either then further interpreted as a nasty shock or as a pleasant surprise.
It is not your fault that we aren't speaking at that level. It is simply a fact here.
Quoting Joshs
You see, there is the problem. My argument would be that pleasure and pain are already socially-constructed concepts. They place the discussion squarely in a space of phenomenological accounts, and so bypass my more nuanced efforts to separate the neurobiology from the social constructs.
Are pleasure and pain just "feelings" - qualia? Or are they brains responding in a generalised and coherent fashion to the bare fact of having a state of prediction - a state of ignoring - interrupted by some form of unexpected surprise.
The surprise could be good - a matching in the form of finally discovering something long sought. You wanted it, but just didn't know exactly when or where it would show up. Now your whole physiological economy can readjust to support a positive state of approach. Having found it, you want to grasp it, hold it, even get more of it.
Then the surprise could be the opposite thing. Something nasty, dangerous, repulsive, damaging. Your embodied response must be coherently organised around the idea of getting as far away as possible, right here and now!
So there are not going to be pain and pleasure producing modules in the brain - centres for the production of Cartesian qualia. That expectation is the patent product of a culture soaked in the representational dualism of Cartesian metaphysics.
Instead, an embodied approach to neurocognitive architecture talks in terms of the basic rationality of coherent pragmatic action. We must start with some system of dialectically-framed definite choices - like the dichotomy of approach~avoid, or ignore~attend. And that general dichotomy we would expect to find distributed in a relevant way over the entirety of the brain's structure. It would be a dialectic that was hard-wired.
This is why the tiny nucleus accumbens pops up as a critical organ - a neural intersection in the striatal mid-brain that throws the switch in terms of ignore~attend. Or why the anterior cingulate is its match at the level of the cortex - adding extra regulation in terms of a working memory capacity to ignore pain so as to pursue longer-term pleasures (like thrusting your hand into brambles to pluck blackberries). Or why your amygdala makes rapid and crude approach~avoid choices, while it also is being regulated by the more thoughtful working memory attentive processes of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
The point here is not the detail, but the fact that neuroscience does in fact have stories about what is going on that is now incredibly detailed. These are what make talk about pleasure and pain - Cartesian qualia talk - so quaint and socially-situated.
Quoting Joshs
Sure. This is making the point about dialectical structuralism when it comes to neurosemiosis. But now invoking the Cartesian division of some "us" that "feels" and "deliberates".
Both languages may aim to describe the same thing. I'm sure Ratcliffe feels informed by an understanding of the current neuroscience. But that way of speaking still builds in its own folk metaphysics.
Who is this "us" when it comes to the embodied brain? All there really is is some collection of interpretive habits with sufficient plasticity to keep learning from its errors of prediction.
If this system feels itself to be a self, that is because a large part of what it must do is construct that epistemic cut that separates the model from its world (its umwelt, to use the jargon).
I am the limit defined by what I can reach and affect. Normally that might mean my finger tips. But we have all seen those experiments with mechanical hands, or know how the skin of cars become something we feel as we nearly scrape the curb.
Quoting Joshs
Oh God. Damasio. Not wrong, just a light-weight still weeded to cognivitist tropes.
Quoting Joshs
As is clear from my response, it is a very watered down and middle of the road account. Rather blah.
Not wrong as such. Just rather half-baked and still trailing its Cartesian framing.
It is only with a code-based semiotic framing does it become sharply clear that the whole account must be rooted in the generality of the embodied modelling relation perspective, and also do justice to the separate levels of semiosis that get united in the psychology of individuals.
The human mind, even as a neural economy, must be reduced both to neuroscience and social science, as neurons and words are the two semiotic spheres of information shaping its actual functional architecture.
An enactive cognitivist is no better than a representational cognitivist to the extent they don't respect that fact.
Quoting Joshs
Huh? Have you got such a clear understanding of neurodevelopment that you can explain why there is this problem?
Sure, it is a problem for a cartoon S-R view perhaps. But not for the post-Pavlovian "orientation response" neuroscience of the likes of Evgeny Sokolov and Jeffrey Gray.
Quoting Joshs
Or perhaps you should be asking the other evolutionary question of why pheromones signalling became down-regulated in hominids?
Was that another genetic trick to promote social behaviour that came to revolve around the overly-intimate lives of hunter-gatherer tribes? Small bands united by language and thinking now with group minds.
Quoting Joshs
More cartoon-level framing of the story. So not wrong as such. But certainly too light weight to carry the conversation far.
Quoting Joshs
I've done both. That's why I used the examples as phenomenological evidence. My real experience contradicts your disembodied assertions.
Quoting Joshs
I've put that into more precise neurology for you now. The amygdala is plugged into the ventromedial cortex. The nucleus accumbens is plugged into the anterior cingulate. The lower brain itches to do its thing of reacting in fast, learnt, and even genetically instinctive, habit - the bottom-up response. And then the higher brain sits over that as the attentive, interpreting, novelty-handling, plan prioritising, top-down intelligence.
The two halves were already part of my architectural whole. My positions are always fully resolved as dialectic.
Quoting Joshs
You are walking into another minefield there. You have further wrinkles like iconic memory and the attentional blink that bear on the temporal story of how the brain integrates~differentiates its world.
The fact that subliminal advertising doesn't mean anticipatory priming ain't a thing or that plastering your energy drink logo all over an extreme sport isn't a sly why to legitimate a certain habit of consumption.
...
So a lot of words have been expended now. You've convinced me that people are right when they say phenomenology is Cartesian in spirit even when it starts dressing up in the clothing of physical embodiment.
And that is just a general problem for any version of psychological science which isn't rooted in semiotics, and so equipped to understand the human mind as the intersection of cultural semiosis and biological semiosis.
That is why Vygotsky and Luria made a great team who really got it back in the 1920s. The social scientist and the neuroscientist who could unite the two halves of the story.
Well, he rather messed things up by reversing the order so that being begets becoming. A substance has its potential or properties, rather than arriving at such properties as a matter of in-formed constraint on infinite variety.
So there are two notions of potential in play here. There is the unboundedness of chaos vs the boundedness of countable alternatives, or well-formed properties.
Quoting Gnomon
But to insert some disagreement here, you also cited the fact that chaos can self-organise. Chaos that is too chaotic will find some way to be patterned.
So we don't need some outside hand. The drive to order lies within the chaos of "everything trying to happen all at once" itself.
As Feynman models in his path integral or sum-over-histories approach to quantum theory, everything does try to happen in terms of a quantum event. But much of this then turns out to be self-cancelling. A leap to the left is cancelled by a leap to the right. And so everything boils down to something. The only outcome which hasn't cancelled away its own possibility of definite existence.
This is another way of understanding the least action principle - about the deepest principle of all physics. Only one path emerges to connect the world in its simplest possible way.
Quoting Gnomon
Now add the least action principle to the list. :smile:
I'm glad your back. Yes, I have tried to encourage something of the sort, but these threads are "self organizing" it seems. :lol:
I would like to define information in general, but now I'm particularly interested in information in the Enactive world. I don't believe the Enactive world has been explored from the perspective of information? So it might be fun, and also we might discover something new - who knows?
Quoting Daniel
Sounds good to me. Would you mind kicking it off and I'll follow up and try to encourage others to.
You have my views from previous posts. Roughly speaking.......information - the forming of a substance is what is going on from metaphysical base all the way to the top. Information forms us vertically up, and then also laterally. Interaction and information are inseparable. We are describing Platonic form interacting and giving form to the world through infomation.
Your thoughts?
ps. I will try to summarize the "informational" aspect of the thread once its momentum fizzles out, so don't think its all a waste of time. I'm determined to get somewhere though it may take some time.
:up:
Everything might be up to our ability to precieve and our interpretation of what we perceive, but to think that covers everything that can be known, is a bit presumptuous. Because our consciousness is limited to our perceptions and vocabulary there is far more that we do not know, than what we know. To think we know God's truth, and God's will is pretty presumptuous because we do not experience that. That puts God outside of our comprehension and it is a huge mistake to not be aware of that. This is an edited insert. I am not saying there is a god, only that if there is a god we can not know that god because we can not experience god.
How about this, information is what is. A geologist can read the earth's history in the rocks. Information is everything in the universe, and our ability to perceive and understand it is growing, but thinking information is what we possess instead of what there is to learn, is a mistake.
Ouch, I am not understanding what you said. Can you reword that?
From my perspective, the information is in the rock if we are conscious of it or not.
I think you have been very tactful and kind. Thank you. On reading back on my comments I can see I led @Possibility astray a little in not emphasizing that the interaction is two way, and that a self is an artifact of this interaction, rather then something standing outside looking on. I am foaming at the bit to explain the self, and the third and first person point of view in enactivism. This is the most brilliant piece of theory that I have every come across. It gave me such joy to understand it.
I think constructivism is firmly embedded in enactivism, but it is not really a brick like knowledge building, so much as an organic informational body that interacts with incoming information to construct a world view from which emerges a self concept and direction. All the while there exists an informational physical forming as neuroplasticity - that is never static, but a building onto of already established form, whilst at the same time we can introspect on our expandng understanding - it doesn't make sense not to equate the two.
What this forming is precisely, how it becomes meaningful - we can never reach it's essence, just like we can never reach the essence of anything - we can only ever be informed about it! This needs to be considered?
Because we can not reach anything's essence we have to conceptualize what is going on at some level.
I think the approach by IIT is good in many ways. Of course here we are talking about an internal language. An internal interaction. Integrated information is an artefact of the system, but it is all we have to work with. :smile: I'm still trying to understand the finer details of enactivism. A lot of it I like, but some of it does not fit established understanding. :lol:
The thread is making some progress in equating formed structure and meaning generally. We have found form and information are fundamental, so this might be relevant to the picture of why neuroplasticity is meaningful?
The rough impression is that new form has to fit old form in order to be meaningful, If it does not then it is meaningless, and lost - this is similar to Shannon entropy. I think the concept of information is relevant to enactivism, and I can not see that anybody has explored it from this perspective specifically? Does enactivism have a definition of information?
Sorry that must have been confusing. I'm trying to define information, and you said something that made me realize that information is causal. In monism, rocks have their neural correlates - the usual counter is that correlates are not causal, BUT information is!
So I realized from your comment that information causes neural correlates.....Thank you. :up:
Information in the third person point of view is an internal representation - which you are talking about.
Information in the first person point of view is a causal process - the qualities the rock possesses travel via light waves to effect a change in our neural state. Thus informing us physically.
Ok, I'll try hopefully with some success (which might not be the case).
I wanna say information describes a change in some physical quantity of each system in a set of interacting systems (or elements); that is, for there to be information in a set of interacting systems the change that takes place in the set as a whole or in its individual systems must, directly or indirectly, affect the amount of change the interacting systems will experience in some future time (a feedback loop).
The change in a system (which could be represented by a change in the velocity, position, or mass of its constituents, or by a change in the distance between its constituents, etc) which occurs when energy is applied into such system (as the result of an interaction) is information only if when the system decays or loses energy (that is, when the system emits some kind of signal) such emitted energy changes the configuration of its interacting partners in such a way that a future change in the configuration, or state, of the system will depend on the amount of change it experiences presently* (keep in mind that the system is not acting on itself directly but indirectly - you could say the system acts on itself through an interaction, and the change it causes on itself through such interaction "is" information; and the same is true for each element of the set).
* I understand that a system in a given configuration, or state, requires energy to change such configuration and that with time, and given that no energy is being transferred into the system, the configuration of the system will decay to some ground state. It is also in my understanding that it is possible that a system may have different configurations that satisfy a given energy level such that the input or loss of a certain amount of energy into or from the system may lead to different changes in configuration (relative to a given one) which are all equivalent in the amount of energy they contain. The fact a system possesses energy-equivalent states I think implies that in "cycles" of energy transfer an interacting set will evolve in contrast to maintain a constant state since the probability of a system reaching a given energy-equivalent state is the same for all energy-equivalent states.
So, a concise definition would be, roughly, information is change in a system which amount (the amount of change) is bounded (dependent) to some extent by the effect of the system on its interacting partners.
Edit: Information is a limit to the amount of change a system can undergo which arises due to the system being part of an interaction; and because it is an interaction, such limit depends to some extent on the system itself.
This is good. :up:
So, for information to occur, these are the requirements:
1. Form
2. Interaction
3. Change
4.
Can anybody add to this?
I think you are really talking form here. The form a system possesses interacts with the form of another system to effect a mutual change in form? But it needn't be mutual, as only when change is effected does information occur?
The requirements for interaction are form. That is what we recognize in something that we can interact with- HEY- from the first person point of view, that we recognize form means we can interact with it. When we do it causes a change in us ( neural correlates ).
So. Information enables the interaction of form.??
Quoting Daniel
When we add the view that "everything is information", we can conclude that all that can happen in this universe is the interaction of form. Form is endlessly variable. What do you think?
"Everything is information because information enables the interaction of form".
I think we have captured all information?
Is it a quality or a quantity?
It depends on how you interpret the term "existence". In fact, it is mostly used for physical things. And this because science is totally materialistic as most people also are. However, this is only a bias, and a stupid one. Because Ideas exist, numbers exist, and all sort of abtract, non-physical things. If I say "I exist" this doesn't mean that only my body exists. I also exist on a mental, spriritual plane. Hence, dualism, and Descartes' statement "I think therefore I am (exist)".
Your "brain state" approach is quite interesting. However, my remark was just about the existence (as the word is explained above) of non-physical information. Which, it seems that you still deny! But it's OK with me. :smile:
As I have said before, I will say again. The rock for the geologist to study is just some physical substance with molecules and particles. The geologist will break it and look inside of the rock, and look into the patterns and shapes of the interior of the rock to come to some conclusion on how old the rock is, and what type of rock it is. OK. I don't think that is information in the rock at all. It is just a physical entity with the observable property for the geologist. And the geologist has observed it, and constructed the intelligent data about the rock.
When the observed data had been established with the analysis and expertise of the geologist into some sort of useful and intelligent and organised data, we could call it, then information. But what is just in the rock itself prior to that process is not information. I would like to draw the line in that.
It doesn't matter what all the other scientists or writers are saying in their books and websites about these things. We philosophers shouldn't be blindly accepting their definitions on these concepts without the critical philosophical analysis based on our reasoning. I don't think the physical processes and how they do these things are even in the slightest interest of philosophy. The detailed knowledge on the physical process and structure of the instructions are the topics of science, not philosophy. Philosophy does not go to the fields, observe, investigate and analyse the physical processes of the objects in the universe. Its operations are performed on the abstract concepts on the objects by reasoning.
Philosophy must be able to point out these irresponsible uses of blurred concepts by the scientists who are borrowing and mixing the abstract concepts by their instincts. IOW Philosophy shouldn't be brushed under the same carpet as those sciences, because Philosophy is a different subject in nature and its operations from all other subjects. It's duty is to criticise and clarify all the abstract objects and concepts in the universe.
You mean the means by which information is transferred and in which it is stored, right? I am referring though to the content of the information.
Brain state, if entirely physical, is monism.
The equivalent expansion of BRAIN(Mental content) is still entirely physical but brings into view the elements of dualism.
The examples of non-physicals you give will always share the same location and time of your physical brain so this expansion method gives some useful insights.
To be honest I do not understand quite well what you mean by form. I also don't understand when you say that information is causal. To me, information is not a requirement for anything; instead, the term describes a change in the configuration of a system, a change that results from an interaction.
Descartes thought process:
Brain state(1) = BRAIN(mental content(1)) = Descartes BRAIN(Do I exist?)
Brain state(2) = BRAIN(mental content(2)) = Descartes BRAIN(I think therefore I am)
Quoting Daniel
Quoting Daniel
Quoting Daniel
Quoting Daniel
Quoting Daniel
Quoting Daniel
Why not just admit we can observe physical matter?
What do you mean by "mental content"? Are you identifying the brain with mind or saying that part of the brain is mind? If this is so, it is in conflict with dualism, according to which body (brain) and mind are separate things. So, do you reject dualism?
Quoting Mark Nyquist
See my above reply.
I used an equals sign to mean 'is the same as'. It's my take on monism and dualism and might not be consistent with traditional meanings. But it's a better model.
"Enactivism" is a new term (to me) for an old concept : interaction, communion. And it seems to be relevant to Information Theory, in that it implies inter-relationship, which is the invisible pattern of links between things. It's that pattern of relationships (metaphysical structure) that constitutes Meaning in a mind. Ironically, our mental image of reality is built mainly from those invisible, immaterial connections between physical things. It's as-if, Reason can "see" intangible energy (information) exchanges between nodes (neurons) in a physical pattern (brain). So yes, I'll explore this further.. :nerd:
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism
I'm glad to hear it. :up: It is intuitive to think of mind as something immaterial, but it can also be described as something electrical. This way we can think of it in a monistic manner. Then everything has regular properties which can be used to infer about processes that we cannot observe. This is roughly what those papers , previously linked, are calling for. We are inhibited by a Cartesian way of thinking, and to expand our thinking we need a slight shift in paradigm....... In Yogic Logic, a shift in paradigm is enlightenment :starstruck:
What do you think of the Definition? Information enables the interaction of form
Quoting Pop
The idea of ‘fitting’ is problematic for enactivism.
Let me introduce here what is considered one of the original texts of enacticism, The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch). In this book, information is linked to internal and external domains which connect with each other in terms of a fitting, matching or mapping relationship. If patterns act as controls, constraints, to effect changes in other entities or patterns such that they deserve the label ‘information’, then a sign and referent , subject and object, representer and represented are implied. But the terms of this relationship are what enactivism is critiquing. Specifically, the above thinking presupposes a gap or cut between the two sides, with each external to and independent of the other, so that their relation is arbitrary.
“At first sight, contemporary cognitive science seems to offer a way out of the traditional philosophical
impasse [between solipsistic idealism and naive metaphysical realism]. Largely because of cognitive science, philosophical discussion has shifted from concern with a priori representations (representations that might provide some noncontingent foundation for our knowledge of the world) to concern with a posteriori representations (representations whose contents are ultimately derived from causal interactions with the environment). This naturalized conception of
representation does not invite the skeptical questions that motivate traditional epistemology. In fact, to shift one's concern to organism-environment relations in this way is largely to abandon the task of traditional a priori epistemology in favor of the naturalized projects of psychology and cognitive science. By taking up such a naturalized stance, cognitive science avoids the antinomies that lurk in transcendental or metaphysical realism, without embracing the solipsism or subjectivism that constantly threatens idealism. The cognitive scientist is thus able to remain a staunch realist about the empirical world while making the details of mind and cognition the subject of his investigations.
Cognitive science thus seems to provide a way of talking about representation without being burdened by
the traditional philosophical image of the mind as a mirror of nature. But this appearance is misleading.”
“… a crucial feature of this image [of naive realism] remains alive in contemporary cognitive science-the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation.”
“ Thus although everyone agrees that representation is a complex process, it is nonetheless conceived to be one of recovering or reconstructing extrinsic, independent environmental features. Thus in vision research, for example, one speaks of "recovering shape from shading" or "color from brightness." Here the latter features are considered to be extrinsic properties of the environment that provide the information needed to recover ''higher-order" properties of the visual scene, such as shape and color. The basic idea of a world with pregiven features remains.”
“…we have slowly drifted away from the idea of mind as an input-output device that processes information.
The role of the environment has quietly moved from being the preeminent reference point to receding more and more into the background, while the idea of mind as an emergent and autonomous network of relationships has gained a central place. It is time, then, to raise the question, What is it about such networks, if anything, that is representational?
“The answer that is usually given to this question is, of course, that these relationships must be seen as embodying or supporting representations of the environment. Notice, however, that if we claim that the function of these processes is to represent an independent environment, then we are committed to
construing these processes as belonging to the class of systems that are driven from the outside, that are defined in terms of external mechanisms of control (a heteronomous system). Thus we will consider information to be a prespecified quantity, one that exists
independently in the world and can act as the input to a cognitive system. This input provides the initial premises upon which the system computes a behavior-the output. But how are we to specify inputs and outputs for highly cooperative, self-organizing systems such as brains? There is, of course, a back-and-forth flow of energy, but where does information end and behavior begin?Marvin Minsky puts his finger on the problem, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:
“Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars. The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves-and this means we cannot separate such
processes from the products they produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we
cannot yet trust our commonsense judgement about such matters.”
What is remarkable about this passage is the absence of any notion of representation. Minsky does not say
that the principal activity of brains is to represent the external world; he says that it is to make continuous
self-modifications. What has happened to the notion of representation?
In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification. This change in stance does not express a mere philosophical preference; it reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The notion of operational closure is thus a way of specifying classes of processes that, in their very operation, turn back upon themselves to form autonomous networks. Such networks do not fall into the class of systems defined by external mechanisms of control (heteronomy) but rather into the class of systems defined by internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy). The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.
We wish to evoke the point that when we begin to take such a conception of mind seriously, we must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.”
A system has its properties, perturbations, characteristics without which it couldn't be recognized and distinguished from other systems. These properties are the things that interact, when interacting with another system
These properties can all be reduced to the concept of form. So form is a precondition of interaction. Without form there could be no interaction. From there we have an interaction, and this interaction causes a change in form ( change in the properties of the system ).
This is all that can happen in this universe, and it is a precondition for the universe. The definition : "Information enables the interaction of form", describes the role of information in the universe. It is a fundamental quality / quantity - connecting a formed universe that is interacting and evolving.
We did it Dude!! :up: :strong: I think the definition is irreducible and universally applicable. It captures all information in every possible situation?? This is what we have to test now. Can form change without information? It makes no sense.... Would you mind probing and poking it for cracks?
Quoting apokrisis
Doesn’t the notion of a Markov blanket require a strict delineation between the entity doing the fitting and that which it is attempting to predict? That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? From this vantage it would be incoherent , would it not, to suggest that the fitter co-produces the very substrate that it is alleged to be matching itself to? One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery.
Quoting apokrisis
Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa).
As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model.
It seems obvious that speech involves representations, although maybe not as primitive?
Some portion of human cognition is speech that never makes it to the motor cortex for external expression. So it seems we have to accept that we do represent. What's the object of representation?
Information, such as a siren or blinking light is part of it. Some of it is psychic harmonics and improvisations in cultural keys. Some of it is who we are through others' eyes, and so on. IOW, we represent representations, right?
The first thing we need is a definition of information, so we can all be certain we are talking about the same thing. I think we might just have one now - it requires lots of probing and poking to see if it can prevail: "Information enables the interaction of form"
Quoting Joshs
No, the subject object relationship is not necessarily implied, provided meaning is understood as a construction / connection of form. Which I am attempting to do. Please see my post to Daniel above.
It is not an arbitrary relation. Form and the relationships of form are a logical precondition for the existence of the universe. No form, no universe, but then the form has to relate and interact with all other form - it has to evolve. Information enables this. Form is infinitely variable, but the underlying metaphysics is constant. Every post in this forum only varies in form!
Quoting Joshs - this statement implies a lack of understanding of what information is. Understandably so as it currently is a variable mental construct.
All of this changes once we have a definition of information, and we understand that what is going on is an evolution of form. Once one accepts that form is inherently meaningful, then much of what you have brought up is solved.
"Information enables the interaction of form"
Information always exists embedded in a substance, as the perturbations of a substance. Thoughts have their neural correlates.
There is no evidence of an immaterial information anywhere?
Quoting apokrisis
I’m curious. Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science?
Quoting apokrisis
I may surprise you . I have a background in biology and neuroscience. But I have a request. I’ve been reading Pattee and am prepared to go through his texts closely before I render any off the cuff judgements about him. I ask the same of you. You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. I can be prone to some of the same liberties but I don’t like arguing that way. My Continental philosophy background draws me to close and careful readings of original texts.
Quoting apokrisis
You should speak at that level. That’s the whole point here. That’s the world as you see it , and I need the full
flavor of it.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes and no.
Let’s dig into Barrett’s text:
“ Your affect is always some combination of valence and arousal, represented by one point on the affective circumplex. When you sit quietly, your affect is at a central point of “neutral valence, neutral arousal” on the circumplex. If you’re having fun at a lively party, your affect might be in the “pleasant, high arousal” quadrant. If the party turns boring, your affect might be
“unpleasant, low arousal.”
In sum , our interoceptive sensations which regulate our body budget lead to predictions as to the cause of those sensations. The simplistic S-R model is replaced by an internally mediating one in which interpretation and prediction stand between sensation and behavior. Has the reinforcement component been removed? Not at all, it has simply been complexified. The arbitrary link between valence-arousal and behavior remains , but with a lot of intermediate variables added between the two polles of input and output. For instance:
“Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime. The judges experienced their interoceptive sensations not as hunger but as evidence for their parole decision. Immediately after lunch, the judges began granting paroles with their customary frequency.
When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world. The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades
performing clever experiments to better understand how people make decisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called a!ffective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are
created in part by our feelings. For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.”
Ratcliffe’s model also maintains the link between valence and behavior, but the difference with Barrett is that her predictive subsections of the brain are only loosely linked to eaxh other in reciprocal dependency , and only indirectly linked to the outside environment.
Quoting apokrisis
I thought that for Barrett approach-avoid was a function of predictions , not the interoceptive senses of the body budget.
Quoting apokrisis
Barrett uses the same language , and just like Ratcliffe , she is able to break this language down to physiological, interpretive and social aspects. Don’t preemptively holler Cartesian before you’ve seen how the common emotional terms are broken down.
Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. But as we know now , far from ignoring the elucidations of process contributed by S-R, cognitivism dug deeper, complicating Skinner’s model , and made it possible for you to complain about my using the terms ‘pleasure and pain reinforcement’.
Quoting apokrisis
What is this ‘habit’ that somehow resists
time, context and an outside , to maintain its structure? What are these rate-independent codes’ that transmit or reproduce without producing novelty and changing themselves in the process? What are these natural laws, these natural causal dynamics that martian their externality? Believe it or not , the ‘us’ is more complexly and deductively delineated in enactive accounts than in your own. Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other.
Quoting apokrisis
What is Cartesianism? Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning.
You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. From the postmodern pole , your keeping as irreducible a vocabulary of dynamical natural law alongside a semiotics of sign-referent is a latter day form of Cartesianism.
Have you ever gotten into it with the Wittgensteinians on here about his critique of the idea of language as representation? If you look up some of the threads, especially those begun by Antony Nickles , you’ll get a good taste of the issue.
I don’t get this criticism. You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.
How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.
I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around.
So it is in our imposing constant motion or a changing point of view on the world that we form a vivid sense of being the very thing of an enactive point of view. Note how eyes must shift in microsacades even as we fixate on a stimulus. If a stimulus is actually stabilised on the retina, it fades almost immediately as the neurons are set up to detect informational difference. They must be predicting to even respond.
So if the world ain’t in fact on the move, the retina has to impose a motion that keeps refreshing the necessary possibility of their being an error in prediction. The eyes dance to prevent the world fading into a habituated state of zero possible surprise. A state of plain representation is avoided by the necessity of always being in the middle of making a best guess.
It seems simple enough. We know we are ourself to the degree we know we are not he world. And that is a constantly lived boundary making. We micro-predict by imposing motion on our point of view and then demonstrating we can ignore that motion, thus confirming ourselves to be separated from the world in a pragmatic and action-based processing fashion.
Quoting Joshs
Sounds like you are pointing out the flaws of a PoMo/Saussurean dyadic view of semiosis rather than talking about the Peircean triadic model - the modelling relation version.
We divide ourselves from the world by the construction of an Umwelt or system of signs. Our experience of the world is not a representation of that world, but an experience of the degree we have reduced our interactions to some habit of interpretance, some panorama of affordances that invites our actions. We experience the world beckoning us in terms of all we could be doing, or wanting to avoid doing. So we experience the world as a model of the world as it is from the point of view of having this “us” in it. The actor who is its “still” centre in being the one that can ignore all its forms of self-motion. And that includes this self’s thoughts, imaginings, ambitions, and even affects (as in the ability to suppress pain signals when you know thrusting your hand into a bush is going to scratch a bit).
So words are the same. They speak to a relation between a self and its world. And in so doing, they construct both this self and it’s world. If “I” can point to something using a word, then the pragmatic success of such an action creates both the pointed at and also its pointer.
It is a co-creation. But one rooted in the reality of the physics. All this pointing has to be tied to its pragmatic success. It has to actually control the material dynamics of the world, not just be some arbitrary system of noise-making.
The actions have to fit the reality. And finding that they do continually - as in microsaccades - is also how we recapture a sense of being a self in a continuous flowing manner. We become stable selves to the degree we can freely change our point of view and predict how that will produce differences that don’t make a meaningful difference.
Quoting Joshs
Pattee was never enthused by pansemiosis. That was Salthe’s thing. So no. He was only making the biosemiotic case.
Quoting Joshs
Everyone wants to assimilate anything new to the world they already thought they knew.
As I have said already, monism abounds, And so every dichotomy must be reduced towards one of its two available poles. Folk are swept helplessly towards either PoMo or AP when entering philosophy, for instance. They are forced to construct their identity along those divided lines.
Or I guess they can cluster around the life raft of Wittgenstein as the guy who made a dramatic flip-flop from the one to the other without ever resolving the dichotomy of paradigms.
I instead follow the systems science tradition that is Aristotelean in origin. Or in fact dates to Anaximander. This understands the dialectic to be a triadic paradigm. So both sides of any well formed view are “secondarily derived” from each other … in being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
That mutual derivation is the feature and not the bug. It is how anything definite exists, having managed to emerge from its swamp of vagueness via the rational mechanism of semiosis or an epistemic cut.
Did Wittgenstein actually critique language in general? Or just suggest that much of language use is game-like?
I'm just playing the game of talking sides - the social acts that construct a self identity. It is more about taking a dig at those who follow him as if the PI is the fount all philosophical truth and an excuse not to engage with either metaphysics or science.
Quoting Joshs
You will find I have sampled most things. And that is how I know what is ignorable on the whole.
Quoting Joshs
I'd rather not. It seems like another dumbed down version of affect - a story I've already deconstructed into its biological and cultural spheres with the aid of better sources.
Quoting Joshs
I think Skinner in fact liked the idea that inner speech served as an externally-imposed constraint on behavioural responses. It was the cogsci notion of mentalese - thought before language - that was a problem.
Quoting Joshs
Your bug is my feature. The point of semiosis as a science of meaning lies in its generality. Semiosis has to be defined as something completely abstract so it can then be applied as a model across all levels of organismic systemhood.
It is not just for talking about cognition but also metabolism, and maybe even dissipative structure, as well as also epistemology and the habits of logic.
Quoting Joshs
I use it to point to the dualism that inevitably ensnares the monist. The triadic systems thinker can recognise the dichotomy or dialectical relation that is the source of the monist's dualised confusion and so sidestep that trap.
Quoting Joshs
Are you giving me fair warning of being cancelled? I need to fear your mounting of a woke witch-hunt? :rofl:
Just look at how passive aggressive your little sally there was. All the things I have done to myself by my own poor choices. I cannot blame anyone else for the beating I am about to be doled out.
Pathetic.
Have you ready any Husserl? There is a lot of him in here.
Husserl told us that to get to the ‘things themselves’ we have to bracket what we already know about the world, by performing a ‘reduction’ to the most primordial
sphere. So that includes bracketing off the awareness of ourselves as a human self in distinction to other humans. It includes the recognition of objects in our surround as intersubjectively determined empirical objects. It even includes eliminating any notion of object as an enduring spatial identity with properties. Att first there are only phenomena , not yet a ‘world’ in any sense, and certainly not an ‘external’ world. So what is left after all of these levels of constitution have been stripped off? There is no ‘I’, there is only a zero point of activity. This zero point is the intersection of retention , presencing and protention. It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. I suppose this could be called a pre-self self or a proto -self , in that there is awareness of continuity and familiarity of a sort.
Next, one can imagine how an unpatterned flow of phenomena first begins to show regularities and correlations in the sense data that unfold. Even before there is any construction of ‘my body’ as a psychophysical unity of organs of sensing and kineshtesia, of controlled movement, there is the constituting of spatial objects as identities out of reguglaties in the unfolding of sensations. But without correlating one’s own deliberate movements in a regular and predictive fashion with the changes in sensation and perspective of the ‘object’ that occur in synch with it, there still will not be an ‘object’ as an identity. But is this developing process of constituting an experiencing of the ‘real’ natural objects of the world? We can’t say that, because these are ongoing, tentiave hypothesies of what will happen next , and things can always happen to disappoint. So the ‘real’ world is always contingent and relative, a changing product of our constitutive acts. As far as a separation of subject and object , the aim of experiencing isnt to create separatism , but to ascertain harmonious unities and similarities in a constantly changing stream of sensations.
Primordially, there is no subject-object split, only a past-present-future differentiation. Subject and external
world as separate sides of a divide are higher order constituted products.
So if there is a dialectical grounding in phenomenology , the subjective protending , anticipative striving and the objective ‘now’ which occurs into this protending would be it. But notice we’re still along way away from natural empirical objects , much less natural laws , or formal symbol systems.
If you're a strong externalist, which I think you must be if you're thinking Wittgenstein ruled out any sort of representation, then there is no semantic information from your point of view. Which just means you and I can't agree in the common sense of that word. You can't be surprised by anything I say, because you never really understand anything I say, again per the common meanings of those terms.
So your main interest in this thread is a discussion about how cognition works? Without information?
For what it's worth - speaking from my oh so conservative position in the science wars, that I seem to share with some of the least conservative theoretical biologists and semioticians like Stan Salthe - this is yet again a collapse into monism. And Salthe, shows this with his concept of the "cogent moment" and the semiotics of hierarchical order.
Peirce starts by flipping things the other way around. Continuity is the global scale of being - synechism. And fluctuation is the local scale of being - tychism. And neither is the ground as both are each others ground as complementary or dialectial limits on being. Neither owns priority as both requires its "other".
Peirce was implicitly a hierarchy theorist, but not explicitly one. Salthe provides the explicit model of what is going on semiotically.
The cogent moment is the spatiotemporal scale over which entification - the integration~differentiation that produces "objects on a void" – occurs. So it is the "now" that is both synchronic and diachronic in being both extended in spacetime, but also a coherent one-ness in terms of being a fully integrated process as defined over some size of moment - some characteristic duration and extent.
This is a maximally general model of any hierarchical order. We could be talking about "now-ness" of any size. A mountain exists for a long time in the same place as essentially the same thing. It is only over much larger - or smaller - spatiotemporal scales that we can see the mountain either flows as a fleeting fluctuation of plate tectonics, or crumbles as tiny weathering events down at the scale of chemistry and dust.
So the cogent moment of Mt Everest might be a few hundred millions years. The cogent moment of some other dissipative structure might be a morning for something like a thunderstorm.
The point then is that human cognition is tuned to its cogent moment. And in fact, it is itself - so as to build in prediction - an interaction between two levels of cogency. The attentional and the habitual. But generally speaking, the brain is striving to make sense of the world as experienced from the body's own particular characteristic scale. We live in a realm where mountains are permanent distinct features and clouds are shape-shifting flows. That is "reality" from a certain cogent scale.
We have some natural scale of cogency that is tuned to the realm which itself is dissipatively cogent in a way that makes it the familiar world of middle-sized dry goods. So that certainly works pragmatically.
But if we want to speak of grounds or foundations, Salthe's hierarchy theory makes it explicit how this can be achieved via a metaphysics of entification over all possible scales of being.
Looking up from our own middle position, we start to see the world as a process that unfolds so largely and slowly that it entirely fills our field of view. From one perspective it is a mountain - just another local fluctuation on the continuous flow of plate tectonics. And that is the view of third person physics. It is the view where the cogent moment is defining the Universe as itself a single fluctuation or solitary entity.
And likewise we can also look down to see all the weathered crumbs of rock dissolving away our Everest. Now Everest is just a pile of atoms, or even some decohered pattern of quantum probabilities. The lower limit of a reality is also entified - made definite as some theory about integration~differentiation as the way an entity arises from vagueness. However now it is not a solitary event but a sea of events. It is not a one-ness that completely fills our view with its sameness, but a many-ness that becomes a continuous blur of distinctions in which any distinctiveness is lost.
So sitting at a middle scale of entification is how you can become semiotic bounded by dialectical limits. The largest "now" or cogent moment fills our view to create a boundary on information ... a holographic horizon as exists with the visible universe. And the smallest now does the same thing in complementary fashion by becoming an irresolvable blur of differences that don't make a difference ... the other holographic bound that enclosed information falling into a black hole.
I mention the visible universe and black holes just to show that this is a metaphysics which directly grounds actual real-life science. It is not just some metaphysical fluff but a general mathematical way to understand hierarchical organisation in terms of cogency and entification.
So when it comes to the beginnings of phenomenal experience, we can safely say it doesn't begin in an already given temporality, let alone a given spatiotemporality. Any kind of particular cogent scale that might establish some situated point of view is precisely what has to evolve. And that is a dialectical symmetry-breaking story. A fit between model and world has to develop by producing its suitable contrasts in Gestalt fashion.
And again, any talk about experiential nows has to reflect the reality of the neurological hierarchy - a brain set up to operate with two cogent scales, the attentional and the habitual.
Then on top of that, we layer the human social constructions of a cultural cogent moment in relation with a psychological or personal cogent moment. That is, there are now social truths so large that they are how things always have been done (traditional society), or indeed how they should universally be done (post Enlightenment society). And then these super-habits or new laws of human existence are meant to interact with the second by second freewill choices of effectively self-regulating individual human actors. The familiar Romantic psycho-drama.
Maybe Husserl meant to mumble something intelligible along these lines?
I mean I would hate for you to have to take the word of notorious scientific conservatives like Salthe and Peirce. :groan:
Meanings require some context. It doesn't have to be an ideal context kept frozen in a vault in Paris.
Husserl didn't get into rationalizing about the mystical like Peirce, to his credit
But what was missing, until Peirce finally hoved into my view, was the mechanism of semiosis as something universal in the definition of an organism.
That moves the conversation from a critique to a solution.
Now be nice. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded. I’m not sure why I mentioned it , except that I’m
curious as to what impact the ‘science critics’ of the postmodern left have had on you professionally or personally , if any. Are they a source of amusement, annoyance or worse? I wonder, because I don’t see them going away any time soon. In fact, they seem to be becoming more entrenched in academia. I may identify with certain overarching arguments that are made from their perspective, but I don’t approve of cancel
culture or the general bullying , condemnatory attitude associated with the more strident factions of wokism.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie.
Yes. I recall Richard Rorty calling them the old reformist left versus the cultural left.
Would you be able to suggest a link to your favorite source for a thoroughgoing account of affect? I really want to zoom in on a text you can endorse, so I can get a stable textual basis for discussion.
Quoting apokrisis
If the informational view and the dynamical view
are complementary aspects of a whole, how does Peirce’s triad relate to this dialectic? How does the three become two?
Best quit while you are ahead. The whole left vs right nonsense is a sorry level of analysis.
As a systems scientist, my position already starts in the irreducible organismic complexity of the need to balance the dialectical constraints of long-run stability and short-term plasticity in any politico-economic system.
Quoting Joshs
Nope. I am summarising a vast range of sources I studied about 30 years ago. That spanned the gamut from - to name highlights - Rom Harre's circle of social constructionists to the Evgeny Sokolov/Jeffrey Gray school of Pavlovian orienting responses.
The problem starts with treating "affect" as something separate from the holism of the brain's architecture. My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia.
Now you might rightly say that phenomenologists are also trying hard to crawl out of that pit. But my reply is why ever even start off from down that hole. Let's just avert our eyes from their struggles and get on with those who began in the right place - where "emotions", or "affect", or "valorisation", are part of the general process that is neurosemiosis, and so they are actions more than reactions.
So I can't give you one simple source as my sources would be praiseworthy to the degree they didn't take that wrong turning on affect as something that needs to be dissociated from other stuff, like rationality, or automaticism, in getting to grips with the holism of the neurosemiotic relation.
What it is critical to dissociate - at the psychological level - is the separate forces of biological and social semiosis. So don't even try to make theories about affect until you demonstrate a clear understanding of how all four levels of semiosis stack up in the shaping of something as located and particular as some individual consciousness.
This is the easy rule I apply when winnowing the academic wheat from the chaff. Show you get the difference that matters before you start reifying an aspect of neurology that doesn't.
Desimone, for instance, failed on this score. A skim of Barrett suggests she too fails this reliable sniff test.
Quoting Joshs
Two things (in the form of matched limits) plus the one thing of their interaction.
Well, that is the cartoon version anyway. Have you read Peirce on firstness, secondness and thirdness and understood how it is an irreducibly complex nested hierarchy?
Firstness doesn't even exist - or defines the limit of existence in being naked fluctuation or vagueness. But unbounded fluctuation produces the secondness of two things having some relation. Then the generality of such a connection develops into a regular habit as soon there is a context, an environment, that is formed simply by virtue of having a flurry of things all relating, and that making up the world.
Because there is a context like that, the connecting becomes constrained by its global statistics and falls into inveterate habit - a state of thirdness. And that state of thirdness is a nested hierarchy in containing both secondness and firstness as aspects of itself. Tychic fluctations and the particularity of individual reactions are not washed away by the blanding smoothness of a synectic accomodation of the collective action. Thirdness may be the stability that is the persisting whole, but it still needs the plasticity of localised fluctuations to keep the whole show alive.
So again, note the reasons why I hold Peirce above others. Or Salthe, Pattee and Friston (within his narrower sphere of interest) as well.
Their approaches to natural philosophy are mathematical strength arguments. They root metaphysics in probability theory, hierarchy theory and statistical mechanics.
And also, you keep finding how well they parallel actual physics in its long journey away from classical Newtonianism to a pansemiotic Cosmos that is turning quantum firstness into the thirdness of a Big Bang dissipative structure ... while also sweeping up the problems of life and mind along the way.
What problem did Peirce have with Hegel, or what did Peirce say that was different from Hegel and not just stated differently?
It may be a sorry level of analysis , but it is a reality of today’s academic culture, for better or worse . I’m sure you remember Alan Sokal. Like Salthe , he was a proud supporter of socialist causes , but sensed that the academic environment was dividing itself into two incompatible camps. His ‘hoax’ was an attempt to discredit one of those two camps. All he accomplished in the end was to deepen the divide.
Quoting apokrisis
I’ve begun to read about the three levels. Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it? That is , rather than the whole preceding and determining the parts , here the part, in the guise of firstness, is the origin of what comes after , by contributing an irreducible content ( vagueness , fluctuation) which then defines the nature of the relation that secondness manifests. And finally , the regular habit of an environment is generated from these interrelationalities as thirdness. Do I have this right ?
These are murky waters and I’ve forgotten the details. But they are easy to look up.
Internally there is nothing transcending our nature that does not require our activity to create. Externally there is matter which we are. The sole definition of matter is "that which we are". The world is one material entity with many entities inside. I understand Hegel as saying that the world emerges from it's totality as materiality. I understand Husserl as understanding the transcending of the material world by act as intention, as beyond the totality of it's parts because of it's nature as a acting (verb). Hegel would agree with this. I wish I knew more about Peirce's philosophy but it's style is near impossible to read and I read Hegel!
Salthe a socialist? I don’t know as we never discussed politics in that reductive light. And he didn’t shy from making left field identifications with causes such as ecology, natural philosophy and internalism.
But here is Gare who is a good commentator on such things - https://philarchive.org/archive/GARERO
Quoting Joshs
As I say, it’s never been my reality. But then also my understanding of politics has more of a base in the real world of politicians and direct experience. Theory and practice are two different things.
Quoting Joshs
Why are you already trying to invert some judgement of which pole is right, which wrong? It would be evidence of progress if you instead became sensitive to every instance when you want to launch out like that.
Even reductionist monism isn’t wrong from a triadic and holistic perspective. It is what we recover in the limit from a thorough-going organicism. The mechanical - in the form of symbols and codes - is how life and mind can be semiotically organised.
So it is the physics that is “organic” in being self organising dissipative structure. And then life and mind are a system of informational switches that inserts a top-down hierarchy of regulation into the mix.
This does invert the usual metaphysics of physicalism and idealism, but in a way where the one now incorporates the other as its reciprocal limit.
Most holism fails to get this wrinkle. That again is why I champion semiotics as the brand that finally gets it right.
Quoting Joshs
It is a co-production from first to last. The global whole has to constrain local possiblity so that it is the “right kind of stuff” for then re-constructing that whole. Each has to evolve together in a mutualism that results in the synergy of a good fit.
In the first moment of a system’s existence - its Big Bang - the small and the large are still the same size and so not clearly divided. That is the PNC doesn’t apply and the condition is vague.
But then exponentially, the division grows in scale so that the local and global have their clearly different cogent moments. On the local scale, you have the material fabric of rate dependent interactions - secondness. Then on the global scale you have the generalised laws or constraints - the rate independent information - that regulates these material degrees of freedom.
So Firstness is where it starts. But Firstness is already promising its own sharply divided future. To be the kind of tychic fluctuation which could develop, it must already have proposed the essential epistemic cut between figure and ground as a Gestalist would rightly say, or local and global as a hierarchy theorist would want to put it.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I see. OK.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
"In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical – or mind and body or mind and brain – are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/)
As you can see from the image below, there's only one form of dualism. Monism, on the other hand, can take different forms. Maybe one of them is what you are talking about?
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dualism-vs-Monism.png)
I assume you mean physical evidence. Yes, there is. Emotions are responses in the form of wavelengths (physical) produced by non-material information (e.g. thought).
Cartesian dualism is only one form of dualism. It’s quite different to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. And there are others.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I know, but they insignificant, not worthy mentioning and much less considering.
Anyway, we have lost focus (since quite a while ago!) and deviated from the topic, which is about "information", not "dualism"!
Matter &Energy. All that's needed OR All there is?
[quote=Pierre-Simon Laplace]I had no need for that hypothesis.[/quote]
when being asked by Napoleon, no less, where, in his scientific theory, God fit in.
Since this post is about information, I would identify information as physical brain state and use the useful tool of expansion to give information = BRAIN(mental content). And you can't just say information is mental content because mental content is inseparable from brain state.
Wow, this is a challenge. I still don't think I am getting your meaning. I looked for the meaning of "casual" and got this "not regular or permanent". Is that the correct meaning for the way you use that word? Information is not regular or permanent?
That does not make sense to me, because some information is eternal but a rock mountain may wear away. I am thinking we can learn something about the rock by using ultraviolet light or grinding it into a powder, or by applying chemicals to it. :lol: If we use oil shale rock to build a fireplace, we can watch it burn like coal. That had to be amazing to the first people who found burning rocks. My point is we can read nature and learn about the earth's elements and apply what to learn to study the universe. The information of everything is in it, what we can learn depends on our ability to perceive. Does that work with what you are meaning or is there a gap between our understandings? I am feeling like my tie to the spaceship got broken and I am drifting with no connection to your thought.
You speak of information we can see, but we can also smell information, and if we can't smell the milk is sour, and drink it, we will taste if it has gone sour or not. I am probably strange, but it absolutely fascinates me how an odor becomes information. It is easier to understand how what we see becomes information we can use. And perceiving things through touch is a totally different experience. That is really experiencing information. Am I lost in space or do my words make sense?
The various models of monism and dualism are inconsitstant in what they model. Some model physical matter and others model mind. I think it gets brought up because the fundamentals are intertwined with the fundamentals of information.
Oh, oh I am afraid we have an argument of conflicting ideas. Every creature on earth must perceive and use information for survival. I also think the planet and sun can share information but that is going too far for "normal people". Our concepts of god are very different when we believe information is in the rock or believe it is only information if a person thinks it. Logos is reason, the controlling force of the universe. For me, that does not mean there is reasoning being, but that things are as they are for a reason, and it is up to us to learn that reason. Which also leads to a notion of predetermination versus quantum uncertainty.
I so disagree with your reasoning and it is weird how people can have totally different understandings of the same thing. Geologists read the earth and get the earth's story. That is the ability to understand the information that is there. To think it isn't information until we put words to it, is incomprehensible to me. Like oh my gosh, your preception eliminates the reality of animals also perceiving and using information for their survival. I can not think like that because my way of understanding reality is so different from yours.
Wow, science is not blindly accepting their definitions on these concepts. :gasp: Are you one of those people who refuses to wear a mask and get a vaccine? You sure do seem to present their thinking, and this is fascinating to me. How many times do you have to prove to yourself the truth of what science says or do you disregard it all? I think we would be stuck with a very primitive reality if we could not trust what others think. But do you trust the Bible is God's truth? Excuse me, but your line of reasoning reveals a lot about people's completely different senses of reality and what is believable. That makes this thread extremely interesting.
A scientist is not thinking with instincts. Everything is tested and reviewed by peers and then the facts become an agreement on the best reasoning. But it does not stop there. New information will lead to a review of old facts, and that stated fact will be changed if there is better reasoning. Understanding this is very important to understanding democracy. I wait with excited anticipation for your explanation of the way you see reality and if you are a religious person or not.
OK
It may be so
Reason is unique to human beings. It is also a priori. You don’t learn the reason a posteriori. That is empirical learning. So you seem to be confused between reasoning and empirical learning from the start.
I don't believe other species of animals use information for their perception and survival. They use their instincts, not information.
If you think the controlling force of the universe is reason, then I feel that you are stretching the concept of reason too wide. The universe works the way it does, because that is what they do, you cannot ask why. Because they will keep silence to your questions. It is humans, who have been observing the workings of the universe, and found the universal laws out of the workings of the universe with the application of human reason, and have been explicating how and why the universe work the way they do. IOW the universe does not have reason like humans do.
I repeat (yet again), the universe does not observe, investigate, analyse and work as humans do. It sounds to me as if you are some shaman or the pegan religious people who believe and propagate vociferously that nature has spirits and souls, and do all the weird funny things, when you say the universe has reason, and works by reason.
I always try to tighten the philosophical concepts wherever possible, but you (just like those scientists) seem trying your best widening it, so no wonder we disagree.
I have been fully vaccinated against covid19, and been wearing masks all the time outside. So I am afraid that your inference is wrong and groundless.
I could write here how scientists work on their research, projects and find new principles and laws, but it would take up much space, and also it would be off topic for this forum, so leave you to find it out yourself.
I think you’ve got it backwards. It’s the material
world that transcends our intending acts. Material nature for Husserl is an abstraction, an idealization that we never actually fulfill completely in our experiences of it. We never see complete spatial objects , but only a flowing continuum of partial perspectives. We hypothesize that self-identical objects exist. That is, with every néw perspectival view , we intend the ‘object’ as a self-identical unity. But we never actually see this perfect identity, so the object ‘transcends’ what we actually experience.
Quoting apokrisis
Let’s not worry about which is right and which is wrong. I’m simply trying to determine how Peirce’s model
of the relation between whole and part differs from
that of the Gestaltists. They certainly are not identical.
Quoting apokrisis
Does this mean that the ‘parts’ of the whole ( local
possibility ) can be understood or defined outside of their role within the whole, or would such a separation count as an artificial abstraction?
Quoting apokrisis
I’m confused about Firstness. I thought that Peirce describes it as without relation , as a pure in-itself , inherence, identity. Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty based his model on the gestalt For him the irreducible basis of the world is the figure/ground ensemble , and the figure has no identity, sense or essence apart from its role with respect to the ground.
Either you are misreading phenomenology( especially Merleau-Ponty) or you have an unusual definition of ineffable qualia. A direct quote from him to buttress your claim , along with a clear definition of ineffable qualia , might help me to decide which of the two it is. If you’re going to tell me you don’t need to bother with a quote because you already know all you need to about phenomenology, I’ll take that as a failure to provide any evidence.
As far as the meaning of ineffable qualia, I take the target of Dennett’s critique in Quining qualia’ to be a good exemplification of the sense of the term for proponents of qualia like Strawson. I don’t think Dennett would have the slightest problem with Merlea-Ponty’s approach in this regard. The last thing his model of perception is doing is glorifying qualia.
Peirce had many goes at describing what is a pretty ineffable concept. His incomplete project of creating a logic of vagueness I find the most useful as it is mathematical, Vagueness is defined as that to which the principle on non-contradiction fails to apply (as generality is that to which the laws of the excluded middle fails to apply).
Quoting Joshs
For there to be the definite things of a definite figure AND its definite ground - a state of developed thirdness - there must have been the vagueness out of which such a coupled or dialectical distinction arose. A concrete void awaiting its events can’t be taken for granted. That is atomism.
Quoting Joshs
The accusation of being rooted in Cartesianism is simply standard. To speak of consciousness as a thing is already reifying a process.
I must take blame. It is a challenge to follow the story given all of the irrelevant posts. Perhaps I'll start another thread. :lol:
A lot of evidence has been provided that information is a fundamental quantity. That it is much more then what we normally understand information to be. That information is everything! The below tries to illustrate how information works as a fundamental quantity.
A system ( or any object / being ) has its properties, perturbations, characteristics, persona, etc without which it couldn't be recognized and distinguished from other systems. These properties are the things that interact, when interacting with another system ( or person or object or anything ).
These properties can all be reduced to the concept of form. So form is a precondition of interaction. Without form there could be no interaction. Without form a substance can not be! From there we have an interaction, and this interaction causes a change in form ( change in the properties of the system ) - when we look at a rock, we experience a change in our neural patterning.
This is all that ever happens in this universe ( that information causes change to form ), and it is a precondition for the universe. The Universe, to exist, needs to have form, and needs to be interrelated and connected, acting upon itself and giving form to itself. Hence all of its component parts are in the same act, including ourselves. The definition : "Information enables the interaction of form", describes the role of information in the universe. It is a fundamental quality / quantity - connecting a formed universe that is interacting and evolving.
I'm trying to get at the fact that information is present in every transaction in the universe ( this being a result of it being fundamental ) but we are normally blind to it, and this thread largely remains blind to it :angry:
"Form" here can be any characteristic whatsoever - form is endlessly variable and open ended. Our consciousness is the form of our mind - it is often referred to as a state of "integrated information". Form is "integrated information", and information effects a change to it.
Any philosophy that is out of touch with this, is out of touch with fundamental reality, and sadly due to this being a fairly recent observation most are.
Quoting apokrisis
I’ve been reading Salthe and enjoyed seeing his use of the concept of vagueness in the context of bypassing the law of non-contradiction. I also. prices he is comfortable embracing the label postmodernist , finds phenomenology and the enactivist work of Maturana and Varela valuable.
Quoting apokrisis
I think the key word here is AND. One way we can begin a world is with states that are what they are in themselves , and then build from these inherences via relations with other states or inherences. So we begin with a static ‘is’ and add an ‘and’. The ‘and’ is necessary to give us change and movement because the ‘is’ doesnt in itself manifest change.
Another way to begin a world is by putting change and transition before self-inhering state. But this doesn’t simply mean moving the ‘and’ to the primary position.
By change I don’t mean the displacement in space and time of an object, but qualitative change, the transit from one qualitative to another. It might seem to be the case that one would need to stipulate the states
that this transit puts itself between, but the idea here is that there is no such thing as a state. If I draw a line, you can say that it marks a boundary between two
states. But you could instead say that states are derived and secondary, that the change from a before to an after is not added on but primary. Transit IS what the ‘is’ ’ refers to. If we look at it this way, then we don’t need to add an ‘and’ , a relation, dialectic , distinction to an ‘is’ because the ‘is’ is already this transit.
This means seeing the figure/ground relation not as two objects or states or inherences that exist in themselves first and then produce a distinction, dialectic, relation. Rather , the figure is a modification of the ensemble. There was never an ensemble before
the figure. The ensemble only appears as the transition takes place , the coming to the fore of a new figure against a transformed ground.
This alternative likely won’t sound appealing , but I think it captures a trend encompassing a host of philosophical disciplines privileging difference , transit and displacement as primary over inhering state. Of course, this can be traced back to the interest of Hegel and Peirce in articulating a philosophy of becoming.
But it is this search for a static ground that must be rejected, simply because that is already a ground divided by the PNC. What answers better to the challenge of modelling vagueness is a "ground" of utter uncertainty - an infinity of unbound fluctuation or impulse. Or Peircean tychism.
So this is an apophatic description that can't in the end evade claiming something concrete and PNC - the idea of a "spontaneous and unbounded fluctuation". But it is also a familiar and mathematically tractable idea in physics. It is already where physics starts in its talk of a quantum realm or the structure-creating act of spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Is it odd that Peircean logic and 20th Century physics wound up in the same place? Or is this all the confirmation we need of what is the right approach?
Quoting Joshs
And here we are already off the road by returning to Cartesianism.
To expand on my reasons for seeing phenomenology as immediately defective, the focus of an inquiry into nature - with the scope to account for both the objective and subjective - must be to find the structure that connects the two points of view.
Cartesian phenomenology just takes the unity of the subject for granted. The self or experiencing "I" is a structureless centre. And percepts and affects rain in on this witnessing soul. The "I" may be embedded in a body that adds particular and personalised structure to the percepts and affects. But there is no theory about the little dot in the centre of it all having a structure.
Peircean phenomenology instead dissects the structure of the subject, it does this in mathematical strength terms, and it shows how this is even the structure of the object to boot. Semiotics is the structure on either side of the Cartesian divide - and thus dissolves this divide at root, turning us towards the very different project of understanding how objective physics could support the "other" thing needed by life and mind - the informational realm created via the additional machinery of an epistemic cut.
That is why I stress the need to start with a structured understanding of consciousness as a dialectic of habit and attention. If you don't start with this essential division within any conception of "I-ness", then you are still entangled with the central mistake of Cartesianism.
The failure to see "consciousness" as a rational semiotic structure from the "ground up" is why Cartesian phenomenology then winds up in a PoMo celebration of pluralism and the arbitrariness of unconstrained difference - that particular politicised cultural project. As I say, Cartesianism leads to Romanticism.
Peirce of course steers in the other direction. He claims a unity of the subjective and objective description of nature in terms of semiotic structure - the modelling relation. And PoMo types will find that monolithic and scientistic (while AP types will find it mystical and metaphysical).
Quoting Joshs
Aren't you just talking yourself around to what Peirce said? Here is how he wrestled with it in his ink blot argument...
Quoting Joshs
I've explained why my own position is founded on the natural philosophy triadic theme - the view that the fundamental structure of any system is the hierarchical story of global constraints in-forming local fluctuations or degrees of freedom.
So yes, the "ground" is a bare ground of differencing. The naked pluralism that PoMo seeks. It all starts from ceaseless change - an Apeiron or chaos.
But then, the Peircean/Systems Science analysis goes further and so avoids this lapse into a monism of flux that merely opposes a monism of stasis.
There is the larger triadic structure of the global constraints that act on the local fluctuations to give them their evolving counterfactual definiteness - a Gestaltian context in which the edges of inkblots can be transformed from non-coloured boundaries to psychological structures vividly edged in Mach bands.
Hmmm! I'd first have to define the terms of the definition. . . . . .
As I understand it, Information comes in many forms. Yet the basic distinction is between static-passive-but-useful Information (ideas, data), and active-dynamic-causal Enformation (intention, energy) -- or as I like to spell it : EnFormAction. Shannon focused mainly on the first kind of information (packets of data) that can be passively moved around like inert cargo. But, physicists & philosophers seem to be more interested in the self-moving, dare I say "self-organizing", forms of Information.
Next, I'd like to distinguish between "enabling" and "causing". "To enable" means to remove any constraints to change. But, "to cause" means to have an impact on a thing or form that is already "able" to change. For example, the "immovable object" cannot be affected by external causation. So, in order for change to occur, an "unmoved mover" must have the power to "enable" its objects to react to its action. Simple "causation" is strictly mechanical, and assumes that objects are already "able" to change. However, the notion of "enabling" seems to imply that the causal force has the power & authority to overcome resistance. Therefore, the notion of "enabling" may assume, not just a random causal force, but a directional intentional force. Is this what you intended?
Then, "interaction" sounds like it works both ways. And implies communion between equal partners. In that case, the ultimate effect is not strictly determined top-down, but allows for individual contributions to the end result. But what is the contribution of "form" to the process? Is it an abstract Platonic Form in a remote Ideal world, or a general principle (law) of Nature that both causes and limits the varieties of enformed objects and systems?
Altogether, your definition seems to describe, not just inert entropic Shannon Information, but what I call “Enformy” : the motivating and guiding force behind the self-organizing process of Natural Evolution. Of course, some deny that Evolution is progressive. But by ignoring the local ups & downs, and one-step-forward-two-steps-back reductive details, on the whole the process is not just randomly changing like static on a screen, but is growing in the complexity and organization of the natural "forms" that Darwin rhapsodized about.. . . . Sorry, I'm just riffing here. :cool:
Does the less general definition below sound anything like what you were getting at?
Enformy :
[i]In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce Complexity & Progress. [ see post 63 for graph ]
1. I'm not aware of any "supernatural force" in the world. But my Enformationism theory postulates that there is a meta-physical force behind Time's Arrow and the positive progress of evolution. Just as Entropy is sometimes referred to as a "force" causing energy to dissipate (negative effect), Enformy is the antithesis, which causes energy to agglomerate (additive effect).
2. Of course, neither of those phenomena is a physical Force, or a direct Cause, in the usual sense. But the term "force" is applied to such holistic causes as a metaphor drawn from our experience with physics.
3. "Entropy" and "Enformy" are scientific/technical terms that have religious/moralistic analogues in "Evil" and "Good". So, while those forces are completely natural, the ultimate source of the power behind them may be super- or meta-natural, in the sense that the "First Cause" or "Prime Mover", postulated by Aristotle, logically existed before the Big Bang.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
This is the infodynamical story, as a theoretical biologist might call it.
This sounds like Sartre who said we are nothingness inside of being. It seems to me that we are matter and know what matter is in a very real sense but yet there is something about it and us we don't know. Husserl isn't an idealist is he? Information seems to me to just be the brain conceptualizations we get from matter. Information isn't out there. It's just the aspects of matter we can grasp and this can map the external world very well
This is an assumption, that a system is already recognised and distinguished prior to interaction (by whom?). It’s the interaction that exists prior, and these properties that interact consist of unattributed quality, taking on form only with interaction, by structuring different quality according to pre-existing logic.
It might seem tangential to your own aim in this thread, but I’ve found it’s worth reading the discussion between apokrisis and Joshs here, and trying to make sense of where they’re going with this in relation to an understanding of information at a level beyond (or prior to) an assumption of existing systems.
Quoting Pop
Yet form is also a consolidation of ineffable quality, logic and energy relating in potentiality - at least that’s my understanding. So without this relation there could be no form, and without form there could be no systems. Reducing properties (in relation to a system) to the concept of form doesn’t help in understanding what information is - only what it does in relation to existing systems. If everything is information, then how does any system form in the first place? What are these ‘properties’ prior to distinguishable systems as such? How do we go from vagueness to form without an assumption of differentiated systems? This is what Joshs and apokrisis seem to be exploring.
Quoting Pop
Neural patterning is not static. Change for neural patterning is the norm, and therefore not informative in itself. When we look at a rock, any change in neural patterning that amounts to information is limited to variability in relation to what we expect from the experience.
It seems there’s a lot going on between looking at a rock and any change in neural patterning (of which the rock is unaware). To say that an interaction we describe as ‘looking at a rock’ causes a change in neural patterning ignores the variability in our intentional ‘looking’ as well as our concept of ‘rock’, which are the real sources of any informative change in neural patterning. So we can look at a rock without experiencing any change in neural patterning that would amount to information at that level.
[quote=Norbert Wiener]The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.[/quote]
That is from his book, Cybernetics, and is often quoted.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The duality of signs and substance is basic to this question. The OP wanted to say that 'everything is information', but I'm arguing that is so broad a definition as to be meaningless. I introduced the paper 'What is information?' because it discusses the role of information in the formation and propogation of organic life. So it does not propose that 'everything is information', although this keeps getting lost in the debate. It says that there's a fundamental distinction between 'the chemical paradigm' (which is reductionist materialism) and 'the information paradigm' (which says that there's an ontological distinction between mineral and organic.)
I want to focus on the language you are using here. I know it is tentative, but let me start with infinite. Infinity pertains to an already established category of meaning, the counting of instances of a theme. What ever it is that has infinite instances of it maintains its sense throughout the counting. It is an infinitely counting of a ‘this’ thing or this phenomenon or this vagueness or this fluctuation. So what is the category here that is infinite? What about the term ‘fluctuation’ . In order to fluctuate , mustn’t something change over time? So this wouldn’t be a singular thing we are talking about but already a complexity , a changing process. Would a fluctuating then not presuppose a multiplicity of some sort , now behaving this way, now that way? So far we have something that seems to be defined categorically and is multiple, doing a variety of things , but determined as the ground of all else. Could there not be a more fundamental
ground within this ground, which does not yet have the categorical sameness to be infinite, and is not yet a complex activity , a changing multiplicity of shapes or patterns or conformations?
Quoting apokrisis
An infinite entity is a Cartesian entity in that it presupposes a category that remains unreduced, and a firstness treated as a ground of all else , but already a complex activity also seems Cartesian to me.
Shouldn’t the answer be ‘both’? It seems to me Peirce is presupposing two states ( white space and black space) and a boundary between them, and then questioning how to characterize this boundary. But the position I’ve been arguing jettisons the notion of in-itself entity . The black of the ink blot isn’t its own state all to itself, not just it’s own shade of black. It is a more particular kind of black. Specifically, it is the black that emerges from the background of the particular white that borders it. The white doesn’t simply surround it. The very essense and defintion of this particular black is the white that it emerges from. This particular white surround inhabits the interior of the black and thus co-defines its sense. One could call this the blending or interbleeding of the background and figure as sense. As you know, a color only appears as what it is relative to the background we see it against. Red on blue is a different appearing red than the ‘same’ red on a yellow background. Is there a ‘true’ red to be protected from this contextualization? That is what advocates of qualia believe, but not enactivists. The interbleeding of perceptual background and figure can be likened to Wittgenstein’s language games , where the dictionary definition of a word concept has no actual existence. What does exist are an endless variety of senses of meaning of a word as it is used in actual social contexts, where one’s background sense of a word and the contextual usage interbleed to form the pragmatic sense.And this dependence of meaning on sense isn’t restricted to the social sphere. When I think or read alone I am always creating slightly néw and different sense from old words as I use them. A radicalized account of phenomenology would insist that there are no entities or processes in the world that we can point to as independent of our contextually formed and interbled pragmatic construal of them. Just as word concepts and perceptual data don’t exist outside of particular blended sense contexts , firstness is already interbled as contextual sense.
This notion of interbleeding is not one that is part of the language of physical science , nor is it part of biosemiotics as far as I can tell. It also is not present in Descartes. Kant , Hegel or the other Romantics.
This is related to the subverting of the fact-value distinction that Quine , Sellars and Putnam championed but goes further , thanks to figures like Nietzsche , Rorty and the phenomenologists.
I’m not sure where Peirce stand in relation to the notion of fact-value interpenetration. Maybe you can help me with this. Also, is the philosophy of scientific method you and Peirce share more in tune with Popper or figures like Kuhn and Feyerabend?
You are asking me to repeat whole tracts of Peirce or Rosen who cover these issues of mathematical conception. It is a well traversed terrain.
But I will just point out that infinity is one limit on unbounded counting, and the infinitesimal is its “other”. And it is a reciprocal or dichotomous definition, 1/ infinity = infinitesimal/1. And vice versa.
So counting seems to make sense just as it seems to make sense that a line is a infinite series of points, and every one of those points can still be infinitely divided as just very small intervals.
In other words, it doesn’t bloody make sense as Peirce and Rosen will tell you. And it directly leads to the need for our models of reality to presume their epistemic cuts.
Quoting Joshs
Again you are simply applying a reductionist habit of thought and finding paradox in a triadic dialectics. Why should I have to go through the same conceptual loop every time?
If you didn’t follow the Salthean explanation in terms of cogent moments, what more can I say?
Quoting Joshs
One more time you want to abandon the internalism that you claim as your thing. Everything must have some monistic ground rather than co-arise as a dialectical process.
Quoting Joshs
As I know, hues are experienced via opponent channel processing. So red is a lack of greenness, blue is a lack of yellowness - to give the crude starting story.
Quoting Joshs
I see that the mention of Mach Bands went whoosh right over your head then. Gestalt psychology says interbleeding is the opposite of what brains do in imposing intelligible structure on experience. Psychophysics cashes out von Uexküll’s story on phenomenology as a semiotic Umwelt.
Resonates with me, this idea of mind being information and that information is neither matter nor energy.
A very simple proof, in my humble opinion, that information isn't physical is that we can use the same matter-energy pattern to encode different information. For example, in on instance I could stipulate that a tap means yes and tap-tap means no and in another instance, tap could mean good and tap-tap could mean bad. The information has changed but the matter-energy carrying that information hasn't - impossible if information were physical. Does my argument make sense?
Cloude Shannon
Information theory
Or encode the same information in completely different material forms. I had a monster thread on that some time back.
I was talking about dualism as a philosophical system!
Quoting Gnomon
Exactly, everything is information ( something singular ) that has many forms.
You cited the mass-energy-information principle paper previously. Another way to state this principle is to say - everything is energy. I am saying everything is information, and then I'm trying to describe how it works. In the first person point of view, everything is information - there is no getting away from this!
I guess you missed this, it answers a lot of your questions, and where my thinking is at:
A lot of evidence has been provided that information is a fundamental quantity. That it is much more then what we normally understand information to be. That information is everything! The below tries to illustrate how information works as a fundamental quantity.
A system ( or any object / being ) has its properties, perturbations, characteristics, persona, etc without which it couldn't be recognized and distinguished from other systems. These properties are the things that interact, when interacting with another system ( or person or object or anything ).
These properties can all be reduced to the concept of form. So form is a precondition of interaction. Without form there could be no interaction. Without form a substance can not be! From there we have an interaction, and this interaction causes a change in form ( change in the properties of the system ) - when we look at a rock, we experience a change in our neural patterning.
This is all that ever happens in this universe ( that information causes change to form ), and it is a precondition for the universe. The Universe, to exist, needs to have form, and needs to be interrelated and connected, acting upon itself and giving form to itself. Hence all of its component parts are in the same act, including ourselves. The definition : "Information enables the interaction of form", describes the role of information in the universe. It is a fundamental quality / quantity - connecting a formed universe that is interacting and evolving.
I'm trying to get at the fact that information is present in every transaction in the universe ( this being a result of it being fundamental ) but we are normally blind to it.
"Form" here can be any characteristic whatsoever - form is endlessly variable and open ended. Our consciousness is the form of our mind - it is often referred to as a state of "integrated information". Form is "integrated information", and information effects a change to it.
Any philosophy that is out of touch with this, is out of touch with fundamental reality, and sadly due to this being a fairly recent observation most philosophies are.
Your enformy is fine for your purpose. I need something simpler. Something in a few words.
I guess the easiest thing would be to find an instance where the definition doesn't work? I just work it out metaphysically and make a broad sweep on the basis of that.
If you could be bothered, I would be grateful, anybody? Information enables the interaction of form
This is true, but we have to describe it somehow. There are certain attributes necessary before information can take place, such as form, interaction, and change. Of course we don't find ourselves at the beginning of any process, but in the midst of it.
Quoting Possibility
The quantum foam has to develop to form. Without form there is no information, so no interaction is possible. Daniel posted a good video earlier in the thread.
Quoting Possibility
At it's simplest you can discern a difference, of neural patterning. Sure you have seen plenty of rocks so wont look too closely, but you need enough information ( neural change ) to predict a rock. It is very much a predictive process.
Quoting Possibility
No, I don't think so. Try shutting your eyes and opening them. Or turn your head to the side. Its quite different. Of course the environment is probably memorized and so you will not see anything new that can draw your focus.
As was I.
What you mean is, to put it in terms you can picture.
That seems agreeable with the notion of logos and when you study the information that is in the form, you can be conscious of it, right?
I am not sure of that statement. It is possible for something to be in our sight without seeing it and :lol: lately, any change in my head is very temporary. Part of the complexity here is understanding logos involves how our brains work :lol: or don't. It is just as important for us to filter out unnecessary information as it is important to perceive necessary information and when we learn something new, we have to forget the old. :grimace: that can make adjusting to change very challengingly. But that is also a different subject from the information is in the form.
Hum, how is reasoning different from empirical learning? I get that not all reasoning is empirical, but I would not say empirical learning is not reasoning.
Sure. This is a huge topic, and I am sure there is plenty of online information for it. But what I normally take their meanings for are,
Reason is unique to humans, and is a faculty of mind, that when presented with problems, it (reason) produces knowledge or conclusions without having to rely on experience. (foundations for logic, mathematics knowledge, deduction)
Empirical knowledge is knowledge or conclusions coming from experiences. With learning, observations and tests, empirical knowledge increases. (all scientific knowledge, induction)
Information is generated via the above 2x faculties of the human mind working together towards producing tailored, organised and arranged knowledge system about objects and events in the universe which are useful for human life, or meaningful for human intelligence.
Asking why is fundamental to reasoning on a human level. Studies of Bonobo indicate they can think abstractly and reason but they do not have the richness of language that we have. Language has made human reasoning much more than the reasoning of animals. The degree of how much more complex our thinking is, depends on our vocabulary. People who have very limited vocabularies can not argue as we are doing.
The reason of all things is in the universe as @Pop explained. The communication of that reason is in the form, not words. Animals perceive the reasons essential to their survival and react accordingly, Higher-level animals must learn and the social ones learn from each other. Lions by their social nature have a higher IQ than solitary cats that do not learn from each other, and democracy makes the highest IQ possible because it is inclusive of everyone's thinking.
Reason for all things is in the universe, because humans explained them via observation, analysis and theorising.
I think what animals do for their survival is their instincts, not reasoning. The logos original meaning is for language.
It is not just language, but also maths, logic and all deductive knowledge and thinkings, which are the main aspects reason is in charge of.
Without experience, human beings would not be as they are and they would not be able to function in the man-made reality we have created. Higher-level animals learn from each other and this is essential to their survival. Humans have created huge vocabularies that make it possible to think about many things, such as what is the difference between reason and empirical thinking, and a great ape can not, and would not, get involved in such a discussion.
I am really curious about how well the Taliban will do when they have control of Afghanistan because I don't think they know much about the modern world and things like managing the utilities of a nation so that everyone has clean water and electricity. Organizing a nation requires more than fighting for power and the Taliban have a lot to learn about the modern world. Humans are born only with the capability of learning, not with the ability to reason that must be learned and their ability to learn has a window of time. Referal children will never be as normal people if their windows of learning close before they are found.
No, the reason of all things in the thing. Humans may or may not come to understand the reasons. We do not have global warming because humans reason this is so. We have global warming because the conditions are right for that, and it is our task to discover the reason. Science is discovering the reasons, not creating them.
You may think that but how much have you studied the subject of animal thinking and communication?
Where do you get your information about the original meaning of logos? I am looking for a reason to believe you know what you are talking about, versus you just heard something and came up with an idea you believe is true. The reason it rains is not because a god says rain, fall from the sky. The reason for rain is more complex than that, and that is logos.
I don't deny animals posses some degree of intelligence based on instinct, but wouldn't call it reasoning. Reasoning is ability to operate logics, maths and deductive thought processes.
I am sure Logos came from the ancient Greeks, originally to denote language. I must confirm that, not 100% sure off hand.
I don't understand this text, but will try to decipher what it is trying to imply. To me, reason is a human faculty of mind, not something existing out there in the objects. Science cannot discover reasons. Reason is not some physical entity. It is a priori ability of mind, an abstract concept. Some might say it is meaningless because it is an empty concept - but it is not empty. They just think it is empty, because they cannot see it. Reason is already in human mind, nowhere out there.
Science tries to discover laws of the nature via empirical observations. At the end of the day, Science also need, and rely on reason to come to some senses on what they are trying to do.
Logic, maths, deductive knowledge don't need experience. 1+1 = 2. You know it instantly without having to experience anything.
All humans are mortal
Socrates is a human
===============
Therefore Socrates is mortal
You don't need any experience to come to the conclusion in that syllogism.
Try to get that across to apes or cats.
I don't watch TV, or read the news at all lately, so am not aware of the current affairs of the world. I just read the old books whenever have some free time these days. Just wish and hope all goes well, and am sure it will.
Just looked up my Dictionary of Philosophy for "Logos". It says - Greek, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion.
It derived from the verb "lego" which denotes "I say".
Therefore, I say and confirm that Logos comes from language.
Are we encoding information or are we encoding matter?
If I start with a brain state(information) and wish to communicate that brain state to person(2) the process looks like this:
Person(1) INFORMATION--->Encode matter,send-->PHYSICAL MATTER--->Person(2)Receive, Decode matter--->INFORMATION transfered to Person(2).
So if we encode matter, send matter, and decode matter we have communication of information.
Different matter works. Different information content works.
.
Yes, that is right. The process is Form > interaction > change > form > interaction > change..........on and on. I am assuming neural correlates to all information. Form would be a state of integrated information of mind, and the information content would be represented by the amount of change in the neural state.
This is similar to the Shannon model, where information content is measured as the difference of the normal state, as compared to the state containing information. We can also say information is the amount of change to the normal state. The white of this page is the normal state, punctuated by lettered disturbances to it that are information. But then, the patterning of the letters and grammar and concepts contained within also contains a normality punctuated by conceptual disturbances, as experienced in the recipient of the message.
I like this. Good point. I think you are saying input or a message sent may not be fully received.
Yes. without that form, there would be no information. It is the fact that something has form, that allows us to interact with it. The form changes the patterning of our brain somehow. This change that the form imposes on our brain patterning, at a subconscious level, embeds us in a meaningful exchange with the object. If mind is a state of integrated information, then a disturbance to that state is more information.
If we accept that information is fundamental, then this process of mutual change between systems ( objects, people ) is what happens in every transaction that can possibly happen in the universe at any scale. Information enables the interaction of form - says to me: because something has form it is able to interact with another something that has form. A change in that form is information.
If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning.
Yeah. Maybe so. In some sense a mind kind of sits behind a sensing / receiver unit, noting differences in its state. The differences are information. Normally the differences noticed or focused on are the unexpected differences.
I think the important thing to understand is that we are not describing, nor can we describe the actual details of neurobiology, but we are conceptualizing what might be the case. IIT uses this approach. By contrasting differences in mental state, we can isolate the new information content. Hey - you did this in an earlier post. :smile:
Sorry, I missed this. There is no agreement as to what emotions are. There are many theories. One thing that is generally agreed upon is that emotions are different to information in that they cannot be stored like information can.
In my understanding emotions are the force we feel that causes a system to integrate. The effect of forces can be described, but the forces themselves are invisible. So you got me there, forces may indeed be immaterial. :up: :smile: In QM they are mediated by Bosons, so maybe you haven't got me entirely?
I don't accept that ideas or sentences or the like are 'brain states' or can be understood in those terms. I think pain, and suchlike, might be usefully thought of as 'brain states', but not ideas. I think that materialist way of understanding it is based on a fallacious understanding of what representation amounts to. It can't be said that some particular disposition of bodily states 'represents' an idea, it is mistaking the meaning of 'representation'. Accordingly I think that this:
Quoting Pop
is also mistaken.
The fallacy behind all of this, or the point that is not being seen, is that it relies on a mental image of being a subject in a world, and 'the world' being 'represented' in the brain/mind of the subject in terms of impressions. That comes straight from John Locke, whose representative realism is so deeply part of our day-to-day culture that we don't recognise its source.
So what's the starting point for encoding and are you using the correct grammar when you write 'encoded information'. I read encoded as a modifier.
Quoting apokrisis
infinity and the infinitesimal are two poles of the same concept, and that concept depends on a mathematicized view of the natural. The geometric concept of the line is an abstraction that makes possible the notion of measurement and calculability. It is an arbitrary , but useful , abstraction based on actual experience in which there are no lines , no self-identical qualities whose instances can be enumerated infinitely or subdivided infintessimally.
Quoting apokrisis
lIm not sure what is monistic about ‘interbleeding’ in relation to dialectic. Firstness is a unity. It’s designed that way. It is a monism: this and only this, before, outside of relation and plurality. You can’t have a dialectic without unities ( monisms) that compose it’s poles.
The difference between the poles of your dialectic ( or the in-itself of firstness) and the poles of my interbled unity is that your starting point is inert, dead, static, and only is brought to life by adding a relation to it in a secondary move. Saying it’s vague, fuzzy, dances around or fluctuates doesn’t avoid the problem that it is still treated as an intrinsic thing.
And it’s too late by the time one has added secondness. You’ve already missed a whole universe of intimately changing sense. This intimate sense doesn’t exist to you. It is misread as Romantic qualia , as some abstraction that needs to be reduced to its physical-semiotic basis in a relation between signs and matter. You read my terms as a naive gloss on the real underlying explanation.
For my part, I find your account to be absolutely true in terms of what it is trying to do and the way it improves on older models. I don’t want to refute or disprove it. Nothing of the kind. I just think that what your model is taking as the rock bottom irreducible basis of the physical, biological and cultural world (and yes, of the extant empirical accounts , I do think panbiosemisis is the most satisfying effort to synthesize these three realms ) is hiding within its terms a rich process of meaningful change that is invisible to you. As long as you stay within the bounds of the physical and biological, you’re not going to find any tightly articulated alternative models to seriously challenge your account.
However, at the level of the psychological and the cultural , your account has a lot of competition from enactivist, poststructuralist , hermeneutic, social constructionist , phenomenological and deconstructive alternatives which all view language as self-referential rather than pointed toward an ‘out there’.
The brand of realism that you and Peirce subscribe to would not be possible without nailing down an inert( inert not because it isn’t vague or fluctuating , but because it is intrinsic before it is relational ) if temporary, ground. It is what makes it possible to talk about a real world thar exists independently of any individual’s account of it. Once you begin questioning the basis of this ‘ independence’, intrinsic entities like firstness lose their stability of sense , and the whole enterprise of third person science becomes a social game of pragmatic preferences divorced from any connection to what ‘really exists out there’. Because now it appears that what ‘really exists’ only exists as a node in a language game, and the ‘really out there’, is just one more game.
Coming to such a realization is why the Wittgensteinian notion of language game affected philosophers of science like Kuhn , Rorty and Feyerabend the way it did, why putting language front and center became their obsession, and why this treatment of language is incompatible with that of Peirce and Popper, for whom falliblism and falsifiability presuppose that the criteria of a method of approach to scientific truth , if not a guaranteed arrival at an ultimate endpoint,
are secured by the fact that there is indeed something intrinsic to nature beyond our local, contingent conversation about it.
At this point in our conversations , I’m thinking we are echoing the Putnam-Rorty, Popper-Kuhn debate.
Tell me how Pierce and Popper defend their realism from Kuhn.
How about : "Enformy is Energy with a purpose"?
Or, “Enformy : the motivating and guiding force behind the self-organizing process of Natural Evolution".
Most scientists and experts in technical fields assume that Energy is random, until humans take control of it and direct it for their own purposes. But, it is definitely steered by natural laws, such as Thermodynamics. Also, a more philosophical and cosmological view finds that, on the whole, causal Energy is following a long-term trajectory toward some teleological destination (Time's arrow ; Heat Death?). But all we know about that "Omega Point" is that it lies "out there" in the future somewhere. But we can speculate, as Teilhard de Chardin did, by interpreting the progression of evolution in vaguely Christian terms.
Personally, I don't buy the Judeo-Christian story of our world, as a way to produce faithful sycophantic slaves to serve the needs of the mercurial king-of-the-world. But, the philosophical notion of an intentional First Cause seems to be unavoidable. So, I interpret the "purpose" of our world in terms of PanDeism. Which doesn't claim to know "the mind of God". And. in which intelligent creatures are localized intentional causes. I'm not sure what the overall purpose is, but the Anthropic Cosmological Principle seems to be a good guess. Perhaps, it's the process, running the program of ongoing creation, not The End that really matters. :nerd:
Teleology :
[i]Philosophical term derived from Greek: telos (end, goal, purpose, design, finality) and logos (reason, explanation). Philosophers, from Aristotle onward, assumed that everything in the world has a purpose and a place in the scheme of history. As a religious concept, it means that the world was designed by God for a specific reason, such as producing sentient beings to stroke His ego with worship & sacrifices.
1. In Enformationism theory, Evolution seems to be progressing from past to future in increments of Enformation. From the upward trend of increasing organization over time, we must conclude that the randomness of reality (Entropy) is offset by a constructive force (Enformy). This directional trajectory implies an ultimate goal or final state. What that end might be is unknown, but speculation abounds.
2. Teilhard de Chardin postulated that God created the world to evolve toward perfection, eventually to become god-like. He called that end-state the Omega Point.
3. In Chris Langan's CTMU theory, the term "unbounded Telesis" refers to the infinite creative power of God for "planned progress".
4. <
[ see EnFormAction, Energy; see Vector diagram at left; see "Teleonomy" below: see Post 31 ][/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page20.html
Anthropic Cosmological Principle :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropic-Cosmological-Principle-Oxford-Paperbacks/dp/0192821474
Well I would love to hear how it could work without neural correlates. And at the same time what is the purpose of all this energy zapping baggage between our ears?
Your grammer is fine. I think you wrote what you meant.
You are not getting it, just continuing to impose your own frame of reference on a discussion of Peirce and a triadic systems logic.
Quoting Joshs
You continue to fail to get it. I've repeatedly said self and world are co-constructed through the semiotic relation that is a code mechanism like language. The use of language brings out those two things as opposed poles of "being".
The danger of that is the social construction of self and world as each other's Hegelian "other" can then so easily be collapsed into the doubled monism of Cartesian dualism. World and self become two varieties of substance - the error panpsychics then compound by making them two properties of one ultimate material.
So yes, there may be "competition". But it is muddle-headed to the degree it mires itself in dualism and monism.
Pluralism is no problem for the triadic view, just as unity is also not a problem. The dialectic provides the unity that reduces one-ness and many-ness to being two complementary limits on the possibilities of existence. You can approach either pole asymptotically, but never - in ying-yang fashion - arrive at one or other limit, and thus exceed the world of the boundedly possible.
So you are arguing PoMo's case for the plural, the arbitrary, the individual - the case it must make to distinguish itself from its natural "other". That other is identified as a metaphysics which instead gravitates to the other pole that is univocal or in other ways prescriptive, constraining, hierarchical, etc, etc.
I get it. This is a cultural war that became entrenched after the unifying forces of the scientific enlightenment triggered their own natural dialectical response in a Romanticism that sought its identity in being rationality's "other".
So PoMo is a historical inevitability. As Scientism grows as one politicised pole of cultural being, its opposite pole must also become a camp of thought to right the balance - right the balance in terms of being able to measure a distance from each other, or preferably a chasm, that leaves two sides which are "poles apart". :lol:
It is amusing to see this playing out even in the debate over how language is used to socially construct the semiotic sense of being a self in its world - Vygotsky batting for Hegelian/Enlightenment unity and Bakhtin for PoMo pluralism....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254081081_Contrasting_Vygotsky%27s_and_Bakhtin%27s_approaches_to_consciousness
Quoting Joshs
You still don't get it. Or rather, you must pretend that every dialectical claim is a dualism yearning to become a monism in disguise.
Your hope is to lift the veil of opaque triadic texts and find the same old reductionist machinery that places you back in familiar territory. You can take a firm stand with your comrades by standing squarely on PoMo ground and start throwing the conventionalised insults at your traditional "other".
Again, if you understand logic, you should get what it might mean that vagueness is logically defined as that to which the PNC fails to apply. It is a construct that can ground the resulting dialectical division that is the first intelligible moment of when the PNC might begin to apply.
But "grounds" are themselves crisp and not vague. So vagueness is also "other" to the notion of grounding. And that means we can only even talk about it from the vantage point of some dialectic framing - like vague~crisp indeed, or the PNC's failure vs the PNC's success - that provides a measurable degree of othering.
It gets tricky in terms of the mental gymnastics. But it is what it is. It sorts folk out pretty fast.
:up: Yes that would do it.
Quoting Gnomon Yes I agree. I also see the Anthropic principle as doing much the same thing. As you say it is a guess, but it fits so logically into the bigger picture I see.
I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation, that describes reality as a progression of form. Rather abstract from a human perspective, but perhaps meaningful in terms of what the universe needs to exist. To exist it needs form. And then everything within it is an informing.
You are describing an order from disorder - correctly, however it is a "forming" that represents order. Increasingly more complex form is what is occurring, imo.
In this view matter is an informational body that grows and grows in complexity. And in this process emerges new function, rather than new properties as it is normally understood. It is a bit of a shake up of how it is normally understood, but this way it fits. A forming is going on, where formless quantum foam moves to form and develops in complexity through an increasingly more complex forming process.
Put this way information has a “definition” Information enables the interaction of form.
To me, this definition describes the need for form to interact with form. Form interacting with form captures everything, except the forces of the universe. They act to cause this. The integrated laws of the universe act to cause the interrelational self organization of form.
Ordinarily information lacks a definition, and has various definitions in different situations, but understood as something that enables forming, has a single definition that fits all those instances where it is variously defined. Shannon's information, as well as Pierces, is captured by information enables the interaction of form. Shannon information talks about a sender unit and a receiver unit. In the process of information, the sender unit changes the receiver unit, information enables the interaction of the two forms.
This is the singular thing information does. Enables the interaction of forms. This is the overriding process - rather dehumanizing :sad: . But how we relate to this, within the process, is how it is normally understood. Enactivism, as I understand it, paints a picture of a mind sitting behind a Shannon receiver unit. Receiving it's information from it's neurobiology. The mind is rather solipsistic in this setup, but is totally free to be what it understands itself to be. Whilst physically it is very much constrained and embedded in the informing process of a physical world, it is free to relate to its neurobiology as it sees fit! :lol: I love it, as this explains the freedom and variety and malleability of sanity that we see.
This is another digression, but the idea of 'neural correlates' is a misunderstanding of the nature of representation. Representation and meaning is the subject of semiotics and linguistics which are already being discussed, but here I want to make a more general point. Words and sentences represent meaning, and refer to objects, states of affairs and so on. All of those mental acts require judgement, memory and the other rational faculties. It might sound trite, but you won't find any such things in neurobiological data. Neurobiological states don't represent anything in the sense that language does, and to say that they do misunderstands the meaning of representation. It is an attempt to find a physical or material ground, something perceptible by sense and reasoning, in the objective domain. But the brain does more than represent, it generates the entire world-picture within which representation is one aspect.
Consider the phenomenon of representational drift, which shows that the areas of the brain which can be correlated with stimuli are in constant flux, even in mice. Some faculty organises their responses, but that 'something' is not to be found in the neural data itself, it's more like an organising principle that operates at a different level. Hence the interest in language, representation, and signs as metaphors for understanding how organisms self-organise.
I'm of the view that the most realistic model is (ironically) idealism and its cognates. It was represented in philosophy by the German idealist tradition - Kant and those following - but it's also represented in C S Peirce, whom Apokrisis is referring to (although not necessarily his idealist leanings). It's always a thorny topic because it's so easily misunderstood, but I sometimes refer to the opening paragraph of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea to provide a way in to understanding it. (I've noticed a current title by idealist philosopher Bernado Kastrup called Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics.)
Anyway - another digression, another set of rabbit-holes to fall down, I've really got to bow out for a little while, have some pressing real-world stuff to deal with. Sayonara.
Unless you are a dualist, the question seems moot. Only a dualist would classify things as physical/not-physical.
To an anti-realist, information is not physical because NOTHING IS.
To a physicalist, information is physical because EVERYTHING IS.
Is the implication then that we are all actually dualists? Or is something else meant by "physical" in this context?
And then there is the question of the meaning of the term "information". I would argue that a poor choice has been made by physicists in adopting the word "information" to describe quantum states. Like using "real" and "imaginary" to describe numbers in math, the term "information" has too strong of a colloquial usage (i.e., tied to the mental activity of interpreting symbols - or of a mind choosing to assign a meaning to an observed thing). Back at the beginning of the discussion, Bitter Crank asked if DNA is information. Well, DNA is a complex physical arrangement of genes that a particular system can react to, but calling it "information" might imply that the system is conscious and assigns meaning to the DNA. So the question of whether information is physical or not might hinge on whether you believe consciousness is physical or not.
4 years ago By Lucifer Sam
This is copy and paste from four years ago...Wayfarer thread
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
Part of what’s throwing me here is that , while I do make use a notion of dialectic , it is closer to George Kelly’s concept of the construct as dichotomous. By this he means it is a way in which two events are alike and different from a third. Your use of dialectic seems closer to that of Hegel. The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification. this is not only the general way I see changes in individual experience over time , but the way I view historical change in social, political, scientific and philosophical ideas. So what from a certain broad perspective could appear as a harsh or abject opposition between two ideologies , when looked at more closely, can be characterized as less revolutionary that evolutionary. One can always see pomo in opposition to what came before it, but a closer look should reveal an intricate development within pomo that bridges what came before such that the appearance of dialectical conflict and othering is replaced by something more on the order of a continuum of historical change.
I see this (brain states) as the frontrunner of what information could be. Pattern and form just don't cut it. If you need to deal with the complexity that manifests, go right to the brain itself.
And back to your puzzling on the non-physicalness of 'encoded information'. The thing you are referring to is (encoded) physical matter and the process and our choice of encoding methods should leave no doubt that physical matter only is sufficient to communicate.
Physical matter is not information; instead, I was trying to argue that the term "information" describes the present state* of a system which belongs to an interaction**. In other words, information is stored in the configuration that the physical matter of a system adopts when it interacts with something else.
I do not agree with @Pop on the statement that "everything is information" because what about things like matter, or space? As I mentioned before, I believe information is a quality of something, and as such it cannot be a fundamental thing, for it needs the existence of something else (that which it is information of/about) to exist.
* ALL properties of an object at the present time (i.e., properties such as density, frequency, velocity, acceleration, packing, absorption, amplitude, etc).
** An interaction being an event on which the properties of an object (something that exists) are influenced by the presence of its interacting partners, and vice versa; that is, if something's existence affects the properties of another existing thing, and vice versa, then those things are interacting.
:smile: :up:
Quoting Daniel
:sad:
This is what the Mass-energy-information equivalence principle tells us.
The question is. How is "anything" different to information?
:rofl: :rofl: That is the truth of it!! most of our thinking is determined, it maintains its determined momentum, except for random variation!!! That is what you are referring to, correct?
You have come a long way in those three months. :up: A sign of high intelligence.
See my reply to Gnomon above your post.
Yep. Kelly starts off being quite Peircean, but then drags things off in the direction of pluralism.
So we see his good start in grounding his psychology in habits of prediction - a modelling epistemology that roots "mind" or "self" in a pragmatic and embodied metaphysics and so begins in the right place, as opposed to the wrong place of Cartesian representationalism.
And Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructing constructs - the generalities that ground the ability to then particularise in terms of individuated balances on some spectrum that lies between "two poles of being".
But then he starts to veer off into the dogma of pluralism....
Yet if we are talking about the mind and its model of physical reality, then the dichotomies are objectively real in that reality self-organises via its fundamental symmetry breakings. The Universe is not pluralistic but unified as a system.
So it is only at the socially constructed end of our reality modelling - the end where the opposition of the personal and the public is being manufactured, the romanticised dichotomy of individuated self and collectivising society – that these kinds of personal constructs, or localised prejudices, start to become a thing.
And indeed, it is only as we take a universalised view of the human condition - one that sees rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, black and white, toned or lard-arse, as all members of the same tribe – that the differencing also makes sense.
Our chore becomes the one of placing ourselves as free individuals within some vast space of seven billion people all meant to live by the same social code. Any local diversity or plurality is a freedom gained by accepting some even more trans-communal and pan-species moral system and Platonic-strength abstraction.
We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct - which of course breaks into its dichotomies as its must. If there is a coherent leftish position, it is automatic that there is a rightish position that is just as loud and proud in its cultural demands.
Anyway, getting back to Kelly...
So good. Both the personal and the public are being recognised. But bad. It isn't being framed as a dichotomy of localised construction and globalised constraint.
It is only about the bottom-up construction which thus roots things in the individual and leaves the communal as some kind of collection of accidental choices rather than a larger universalising view that has evolved to provide a generalised constraining hand over local acts of individuation.
We are veering off the good old structuralist road and heading into the familiar post structuralist ditch.
This ain't too bad a start to the degree it treats affect as a particular class of embodied action - the action of reorienting the mind and body as surprise produces the necessity of revising your expectations.
That is what I was saying about the orienting reflex literature. No one ever realises how much of the brain is devoted to the complexities of knowing how to be looking in the right place most of the time. A large chunk of motor cortex is devoted to getting our senses and physiological state aligned in a forward looking fashion.
Embodied action ain't just about motor plans that might manipulate the physical world in some self-interested way. It is just as much about shifting this "experiencing and deciding self" to a new and better placed set of receptive and affective co-ordinates.
Here we see the problem of failing to distinguish between the biological and cultural sources of semiosis that shape the individual person. It is bad enough to reduce social constructs to personal acts of construction. It is really bad to omit the biological basis of a person's world modelling.
Of course, as pragmatics, PCT can do some good as a therapeutic practice. But I would prefer therapy that is more squarely based on good psychological theory - that is one that is rooted in a social psychology model.
Modern positive psychology is broadly such an approach. It helps people realise the degree which they have habitualised family, community or general cultural imperatives. They have learnt to make automatic at an uncritical age various ways of thinking that might not be terribly useful in terms of their own lives, especially as humanity becomes increasingly mobile and increasingly rapid in its collective changes.
Quoting Joshs
Well yeah. Have you seen the actual mathematical definition of a dichotomy - the one I have cited so many times? Two poles of being that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive?
But one indeed might have to triangulate to start to divide reality into a pair of complementary poles. The certainty of the dialectic might well have to start with the tentativeness of exploring a relation in which the similarity of two things can now start to oppose a mutual differencing from some third.
Or as Peirce said, make that move from the Secondness of bare reaction to the Thirdness of holistic relation.
Quoting Joshs
Oh quick. Before our start gets us to the "wrong" destination, let's jump our escape hatch and return to the comfort of PoMo pluralism.
There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line. There is just all us little chirping personalised differences - small, accidental, and localised reactions that constitute a Secondness that doesn't want to venture any further into the thickets of grand univocal metaphysics.
Quoting Joshs
I'm sure the post-structuralists had no violent intentions when it came to smashing structuralism. It was just a helpful conversation to help the old guard come to see the error of its ways.
But anyway, as usual, as always, as a habit you can't avoid, you talk right past my dialectical framing of my dialectical position.
A dichotomy is about the conflict that produces the complementary. Society is about the local competition or individuated freedom made possible by the co-operation or global constraint that could give this freedom is meaningful shape and constructive role.
So for me, unity and pluralism go together as the obvious two sides of the one triadic coin. Hierarchy theory exists to spell that out as a lesson in structuralism making good on its promise.
You are creating excuses for PoMo. But they don't wash.
Of course - as getting into the detail of Kelly illustrates - any individual writer of any note always grasps the systems perspective to some degree. They have to, as that is simply the way reality is.
What I am complaining about is the pervasive tendencies that result as social camps spring up around opposing poles of the dichotomies that thus arise from any critical analysis. The mindless pluralism that seeks out the best available examples to find the mindless universalising that makes its own mindless polarity the "definitely right one".
The various forms of sanity that we see, is the highest form of reality that there is! :halo: It is a reality that we create ourselves. In Yogic Logic, we always create our own reality from the concepts we take to be true. So the saying goes - choose your concepts wisely such that you create for yourself a joyous reality.
This is where dictionaries come in handy! :smile:
"Emotion" from Merriam-Webster (First definition): "A conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body"
(Stresses are mine. But disctionaries are not faultless: the phrase "in the body" at the end is not only redundant (since it is implied by "physiological") but also wrongly connected to the word "behavioral" (since behaviour is normally related to the mind and the human being iself).)
Classic example: it is a common fact that fear/stress increases heart rate and adrenaline, that hormones are released by anger, etc.
No, a child does not automatically know 1+1 = 2. It takes a lot of work to get a child to understand the concepts of math. There are primitive tribes today that do not have the ability to count above the number 3 and it took us centuries to understand the importance of the zero.
And human, when broken down to its root meaning, means moist soil, That means contained in our word human is the belief that a god made us from mud, but few of us are aware of that. And to stop at the root of logos being connected to the spoken word and dropping its meanings of being a principle, law, and reason is a failure to understand the meaning of logos. That law meant universal law, not man-made law, and a democracy is supposed to build it isn't laws on an understanding of best reasoning and universal laws, but in our ignorance, we don't know that.
I am good with what you said up to the last line. Why did you have to add the term "neural system?" Does the universe have a neural system?
There are some child prodigies who can do high level calculus.
Sure the tribe people must have had very simple life style, for which they only needed 3 fishes to catch, and enough to feed the whole family at a time. That is not necessarily to their disadvantages or shortcomings in their abilities. Because it is all they need for survival and life of happiness.
I am confident that when they caught 1 fish, they would know instantly they must catch another 2 to make up total 3 fishes without having to recourse to observations or experience, making full use of their reasoning.
Principle was listed far behind in connection to logos in the dictionary suggesting that it is not usual usage or connection. I have not come across principle to denote reason. That would be very unusual, if anyone used that meaning.
The most popular meaning of logos is with language in philosophy. If you read some Heidegger, it will be evident.
The universal laws are laws established by the scientists and imposed into the universe. It is all from the workings of human mind and reason. There is absolutely nothing out there in the universe apart from matter and space.
It looks as though they are working according to some clever principles or laws, because you are imagining so.
Except that, done with flair, it can apparently add tons of energy, and the illusion of clarity.
Do you never look at a sentence you've written and think, what on earth (rather than heaven) am I "quantifying over"? What are the odds my reader will correctly infer what things I'm referring to, and at which I'm pointing some of these other words? Wouldn't those odds improve if those things were relatively concrete, and graspable?
The notion of "neural correlates of consciousness" is an attempt to draw a simple one-to-one map of the inter-relationships between empirical brain functions and rational mental functions. But, as a typical reductive scientific approach, it may place undue stress on the neurons themselves. They are just relay stations (nodes) in a complex web of functional relationships for processing information. Even the relatively-inert glial cells have been found to play a supporting role in the system. So, I prefer a more holistic model of the physical network that mysteriously produces spooky Consciousness as its metaphysical output. Even a silicon analogue (computer) is just a "brick" unless its output includes meaningful information for the human mind.
That's why I think the overall Monism of Information Theory is built upon a dualistic substrate consisting of both physical and meta-physical elements -- equivalent to Descartes's body/mind split. Most scientists try to avoid mentioning "Metaphysics" in their theories. That's mainly because Catholic theologians interpreted Aristotle's metaphysics in terms of the ancient Hebrew notion of "Spirit" (ruach; breath ; life), and the Greek notion of "Psyche" (soul ; mind). Although those concepts were appropriate for their pre-scienfific era, they can be misleading in light of current understanding of how the world works. For example, I prefer to substitute the mind's model of "Self" (a pattern of information mapped directly to the subjective observer) in place of the obsolete concept of a "Ghost", that can act independently from the body. Isolating neurons as the producers of Conscious Minds leaves us with a simple, but incomplete, map or model of the body/mind system. :smile:
Meta-physics :
4. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind. Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is. Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made. Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the “formal” cause of the thing designed.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
Self/Soul :
[i]The brain can create the image of a fictional person (the Self) to represent its own perspective in dealings with other things and persons.
1. This imaginary Me is a low-resolution construct abstracted from the complex web of inter-relationships that actually form the human body, brain, mind, DNA, and social networks in the context of a vast universe.
2. In the Enformationism worldview, only G*D could know yourself objectively in complete detail as the mathematical definition of You. That formula is equivalent to your Self/Soul.
3. Because of the fanciful & magical connotations of the traditional definition for "Soul" (e.g. ghosts), Enformationism prefers the more practical term "Self".[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page18.html
The point they are making is that Energy = mass = information. That paper was found in a rush. This paper is a better source. "John Archibald Wheeler proposed rethinking of basic physical notions and laws within the informational paradigm, aphoristically summarized as “it from bit”. Read the conclusion of this paper to get a sense of the rush to reinterpret everything in terms of information. Compare this to the 21 Royal society papers, to get a feel for where understanding is heading.
You would understand that E=mc2, and that this justifies seeing the world as made of energy? The trend now is to understand everything in terms of information, as @Gnomon and I have been spruiking to deaf ears for the last year. @Gnomon understands it from a realistic paradigm, so describes it as Enformation ( energy + information ). I used to also, but I like to take things to their logical conclusion and now say everything is information. This is falsifiable. It is not a party trick. It is what it is.
This is something that has been known to idealism since 5000 BC odd. As an idealist, and monist I see energy, matter, and information bundled into one material package. It is not very different to realism. As an idealist, I have slightly more explanatory power.
Do the legwork yourself, see if you can find well sourced counter arguments?
I'm trying to point out that in the process of exchanging information two interacting systems get changed. Change is the necessary thing that needs to occur for information to take effect between any two or more substances. When we look at something it is not immediately clear, that this changes us physically by changing our neural patterning. ...........No the universe does not have a neural system, it incurs a physical change otherwise.
Thanks for reading and citing Kelly. It gives us a shared focus.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you understand this correctly , but just to make sure, whereas a concept understood via traditional
metaphysics is a context -independent, universal logical definition, a construct is idiosyncratic to one’s own system. As a therapist, Kelly would notice that what a client meant by a word like honestly could only ascertained, with the client’s help ,by teasing out the contrast pole, which oftentimes the client was not explicitly aware of. So whereas for one person , the contrast pole for honest could be ‘prone to telling untruths’, for another person the contrast pole could be ‘disloyal’. And what is true for common worlds is also true for the most important orienting values of our lives.
Quoting apokrisis
And even then , the prejudices of the people around him don’t automatically become his prejudices , because the differentiations he forms will be idiosyncratic to his own system of dichotomies. ( I think you gathered that already).
Quoting apokrisis
I don’t remember if you said that you said Hegel’s dialectical metaphysics was monistic or pluralist. It does provide us a ‘key’ to logic of the dialectic, doesnt it? This gave the phases of historical development a logical necessity. Eventually this gave speculative dialectics a bad name, because one could ignore empirical contingency and just use the ‘key’ to unlock the logic of historical development without paying attention to real material circumstances. Peirce , coming in the wake of Darwin and Marx, wanted facts on the ground rather than a metaphysical key to decide the twists and turns of the dialectic , if I have it right. So when you talk about a unified system , I assume you are not making recourse to a metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you lost me a little. Who is it who is claiming there is a trans-communal and trans-species moral
system? Certainly Kant endorsed a trans-human moral universality, and Hegel’s metaphysical ‘key’ points to a different sort of moral universality. If you and Peirce are making the claim for a trans-species normativity how are you differentiating such a moral system from these idealist moralisms?
Quoting apokrisis
So is the above what you mean by trans-species moral system, that which is universally correct? Perhaps, then, this is a sort of metaphysical key , albeit not identical to Hegel’s.
Quoting apokrisis
You are right about it being bottom up. You left out Kelly’s favorite corrolary, the complement to the commonality corollary. Kelly's Sociality Corollary say that “to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of
another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person”
Kelly explains the difference between the commonality and the sociality corollaries:
“...for people to be able to understand each other it takes more than a similarity or commonality in their thinking. In order for people to get along harmoniously with each other, each must have some understanding of the other. This is different from saying that each must understand things in the same way as the other.” “In order to play a constructive role in relation to another person one must not only, in some measure, see eye to eye with him but must, in some measure, have an acceptance of him and of his way of seeing things. We say it in another way: the person who is to play a constructive role in a social process with another person need not so much construe things as the other person does as he must effectively construe the other person's outlook...social psychology must be a psychology of interpersonal understandings, not merely a psychology of common understandings.”
I’m probably digging a deeper pluralist hole for Kelly from
you vantage , but let’s see how for Kelly an individual is influenced by their society if not in a top down fashion.
In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”
One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.
Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”
for
Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.
“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”
Quoting apokrisis
Kelly initially wanted to be a physiological psychologist. He always said that personal construct theory had a limited range of applicability. It was designed as a psychological theory. He offered that one could just as well use a physiological construct system. One would
get different results of course , but that could be useful depending on how one wanted to look at a phenomenon ( I know , pluralistic ).
“Certain widely shared or public construction systems are designed primarily to fit special fields or realms of facts. When one limits the realm of facts, it is possible to develop a detailed system without worrying about the inconsistencies in the system which certain peripheral facts would reveal. We limit the realm and try to ignore, for the time being, the intransigent facts just outside the borders of that realm. For example, it has long been customary and convenient to distinguish between ‘mental' and ‘physical' facts. These are two artificially distinguished realms, to which two types of construction systems are respectively fitted: the psychological construction system and the natural-science group of construction systems. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we have on our hands two alternative construction systems, which can both be applied profitably to an ever increasing body of the same facts. The realms overlap. Consider more specifically the realms of psychology and physiology.
These realms have been given tentative boundaries based upon the presumed ranges of convenience of the psychological and the physiological construction systems, respectively. But many of the same facts can be construed within either system. Are those facts ‘psychological facts' or are they ‘physiological facts'? Where do they really belong? Who gets possession of them, the psychologist or the physiologist? While this may seem like a silly question, one has only to sit in certain interdisciplinary staff conferences to see it arise in the discussions between people of different professional guilds. Some individuals can get badly worked up over the protection of their exclusive rights to construe particular facts. The answer is, of course, that the events upon which facts are based hold no institutional loyalties. They are in the public domain. The same event may be construed simultaneously and profitably within various disciplinary systems— physics, physiology, political science, or psychology.
No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event', we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. A further idea that we must keep straight is that the physiologically constructed facts about that event are the offspring of the physiological system within which they emerge and have meaning, and that a psychological system is not obliged to account for them. It is also important that we continue to recognize the limited ranges of convenience of our miniature systems.
It is always tempting, once a miniature system has proved itself useful within a limited range of convenience, to try to extend its range of convenience. For example, in the field of psychology we have seen Hull's mathematico-deductive theory of rote learning extended to the realm of problem solving or even to the realm of personality. Freud's psychoanalysis started out as a psychotherapeutic technique but was progressively enlarged into a personality system and, by some, into a religio-philosophical system. This kind of inflation of miniature systems is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does cause trouble when one fails to recognize that what is reasonably true within a limited range is not necessarily quite so true outside that range.”
Maybe pansemiotics is what Kelly was waiting for.
Quoting apokrisis
How do you reconcile “There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line” with “ We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct.”
Quoting apokrisis
But don’t you think one could lay out a spectrum of positions within ‘structuralism’ and pomo such that it becomes difficult to discern the actual
boundary between them? Isnt this why no one can nail down exactly what these terms refer to , except by pointing to very general families of resemblance, and why even those commonly labeled as within one camp or the other can’t agree on a category?
Yes, this kind of thinking about the parasitic dependence of oppositions on each other is very pomo. It is also very deconstuctive.
Quoting apokrisis
That wasn’t true of Hegel was it, unless we consider his metaphysical ‘key’ as the ‘definitely right one’ to unlock the logic of dialectical becoming.
What about Kelly’s constructive alternativism? How would you state the mindless universalism and polarity he settles on? Elevating the personally psychological and its dichotomous processes to pre-eminent status?
In this passage, Kelly confuses us by waffling on the question of an ordered universe.
“ Do I not believe the universe is organized? My answer to that is that I would not claim to know that it is. Whether it is organized or not is still one of those things that are unknown. I don't even know whether it is a good question or not.But while I don't know the answer to the question, I need not be immobilized. There is a psychology for getting along with the unknown. It is a psychology that says in effect, "Why not go ahead and construe it to be organized-or disorganized, if you prefer-and do something about it.” (Kelly 1963)
Earlier in the same paper, he clarifies what I think was always his real aim.
“Let us say that the whole of truth lies ahead of us, rather than that some parts of it ahead and some behind. What we possess, or what we have achieved so far, are approximations of the truth, not fragments of it. Hopefully we are getting closer, in some sort of asymptotic progression, and, at some infinite point in time, science and reality may indeed converge.“
This is a description of the effects of emotions. Not a description of what emotions are. Emotions are what we feel deep down. We never take side against our emotions. Emotions are something that can only be felt. If it was not for emotions all experiences would be the same. There would be no feeling good or bad or happy or sad, there would just exist an indifference to everything, including life and death. Whilst information can be conceptualized, emotions absolutely cannot be, so you will not find them described in a dictionary any time soon.
Instead read this Wiki source, and focus on all the different theories of emotion.
For me, monism means everything is made of the same substance, and we can describe that substance as energy + matter + information, or any other configuration of these that we choose. We can choose to see the world as all matter, or as all energy, or as all information.
When I speak of metaphysics, I'm speaking of the underlying logic that gives rise to something. I analyze things like information at their metaphysical base, the deepest depth that I can reach.
In the absence of information only nothing can exist is a metaphysical fact. I play with these logical constructs until I understand their limitations and potential, through this I gain a sense of how they work as the underlying patterning that underpins higher level complexity.
Perhaps I should drop the term metaphysics if it is so variously construed.
Neural correlates is a commonly used expression, of course I'm referring to the neuroplasticity of the brain, and as I said I am assuming that a change in brain matter occurs at the same time as perception.
The best we can ever achieve is to conceptualize mind at some level, and I think IIT has done a good job in this regard. Integrated information, and the difference of one state of integrated information to the next is much like Shannon's difference of a blank sheet of paper and the writing on it. The writing being information.
Do you believe in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? That kind of thing. [Oh, and I meant to write pan-species of course.]
Quoting Joshs
My constraints-based systems approach also stresses the personal creativity that is inherent here - especially to the degree the culture has developed a rhetoric of self-actualisation … because it means to shape up that kind of personal creativity.
Again, we are biological selves - that kind of social creature - before we are modern cultural selves - that other kind of creature. So there is alway going to be a deeper evolved level of self-social group action that a culturally-constructed system of self-group interaction is going to have to contend with.
Quoting Joshs
Seems odd there can both be a cultural milieu and yet deny its existence in the same sentence.
But maybe that’s only a paradox for a view of social systems that doesn’t get the notion of how global constraints are also the source of local freedoms.
If we are all limited to using the same language, then we are also all freed to be definitely (and not vaguely or tentatively) saying different things. Unity and plurality go together if you have the right understanding of systematic organisation - an organismic one rather than a mechanical one.
This sounds fine. But why doesn’t Kelly talk about the duality of physiological and cultural events?
Psychology is where these two sources of self-world construction intersect. But let’s carve the problem at its actual naturalistic joints.
Quoting Joshs
The systems view - as Salthe makes clear - is based on the structuralism of nested hierarchies. So a local-global balance is something struck in fractal fashion over all possible scales of organisation.
So there is no iron law than floats abstractly above the system. That is an externalist and mechanical trope. Instead, an organism is a unity of its habits. It is aligned to achieve its end over all scales of its being.
What is deemed local acceptable custom will be so deemed to the degree that it institutionalises what is globally acceptable custom. And being constraints based, this doesn’t demand absolute homogeneity. Indeed, creative variety is necessary. Every organism must have variety to keep evolving and adapting to a world that is also forever changing.
An organism must also have its aligned structure of habits as well so as to even be a persistent, because adequately adapted, organism.
Again, an organism is a balance of plasticity and stability. And that means also that it is a fruitful balance of unity and plurality, sameness and difference, integration and differentiation - and all the other ways of saying the same thing.
So the organic view starts from that as its dichotomous ground. Which is helpful as it is then already equipped to ask more useful questions about what some particular balancing of the dynamic ought to look like. You could have a political discussion, for example, where both poles of the spectrum are taken for granted and the debate turns to how much liberty there should usefully be in your conservatism, and how much conservativism there should usefully be in your liberalism.
That is, the kind of debate that exists in countries happy to label themselves social democracies.
Quoting Joshs
Sure. But what if structuralism is the position that is built on the dichotomous trick that produces such connecting spectrums and PoMo treats dichotomies as monistic and politicised choices?
Why do so many folk gravitate to Wittgenstein? Is it not because he represents the “clarity” of the division between the univocal and the pluralist factions? First he was all about rationalist certainty, then he was all about language games. His career path embodies the schism. And his fans applaud him for landing eventually on the “right side of history”.
This is Peirce’s pragmatic definition of truth as the limit of rational inquiry by a community of thinkers, by the way. Just saying. :grin:
Quoting Joshs
Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructs. His repertory grid technique is designed to find - and even construct - robust dialectical structure in some Kansas farmer’s habits of social reaction.
And how should we then read his efforts to impose a therapy that indeed imposes a universalising rational structure on the perhaps idiosyncratic and fairly contingent social learning of that farmer?
Is it the farmer that does all his or her own self-actualising? Are the constructs truly personal creations that are merely being excavated and brought finally to light?
Or are they vaguely organised thoughts being constrained within a cultural context - such as the US circa 1950 - that prized both rationality and individuality, and so made it natural to frame its therapeutic interventions in that fashion?
And then you come along with your phenomenology, affect, and PoMo pluralism, and somehow shoehorn your reading of Kelly into that.
I wonder why the circa 2020 Kansas farmer might seem such a different creature if Kelly were still around? Did something happen to the dream of universalising rationally-structured individuality in the decades of mindless culture wars inbetween?
But is it a universalizing structure? The asymptotic approach to truth that Kelly envisioned doesn’t originate at the intersubjectively normative but at the personal level.
Kelly says:
“The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.”
Kelly says all events in the universe are interlocked via temporal succession. What does he mean by interlocked? He says “all its imaginable parts have an exact relationship to each other”, but by ‘exact' he doesn't appear to mean an objectively causal exactitude, even though he describes it as all working “together like clockwork”. The order of material causality is dictated by the empirical content, which is inherently arbitrary. A car engine's parts have an exact causal relationship with each other, but not an inferential one. If one part were removed, the others would retain their identity, even if the engine no longer worked. By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is different than saying they are just causally connected.
Certainly Kelly never gave up a realist-sounding language that spoke of a universe seemingly ‘out there' and which we are mirroring more and more accurately through successive approximations, but If one follows the implications of the theory itself, it seems to me what one ends up with is not a correspondence theory of truth, but rather a developmental teleology of intentionality itself directed toward endlessly increasing internal integration. This subordinates what would be external' in reality to relational activity between subject and world. I think that's what Kelly(1955) was aiming at with the following awkward rendering:
“The truths the theories attempt to fix are successive approximations to the larger scheme of things which slowly they help to unfold.”
Notice that Kelly does not say our approximations UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality. I interpret this to mean that our approximations co-create the ‘larger scheme of things’ in contingent fashion.
This sounds like a constructivist rather than a realist idea. The asymptotic convergence of ‘outer reality' and human formulations, then, far from being a progressively more exact inner mirroring of an outer causal process, has the character of Kelly's Organization corollary, the events of the universe functioning as sequential variations on a moving superordinate theme. The content of the theme seems to be beside the point. In fact content doesn't seem to play a significant role either on the side of the subject or the world. A psychology in which the in-itself content of events plays second fiddle to the relationship between events and the psychological system is not much of a realism. By the same token, a construct system guided by no ‘internal gyroscope' other than the abstracting of events along dimensions of similarity and difference doesn't seem to accord with the kind of inner content- based rationalism that his critics attribute to him.
Quoting apokrisis
Does the cultural context constrain the theory like a frame that limits the range of variations that can occur within it, or does each individual participant redefine the boundaries of the frame in some measure?
Of course, no theory is born of immaculate conception, but isnt the frame just an abstraction generated from individual variations?
What was the cultural context of Kansas in the 1950’s? It depends on who you asked. There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians, So there was a range of ideologies, and certainly they all interacted with and were defined in relation to each other and with Kelly’s thinking. But is any major thinker just a product of their time or does a Descartes, Kant , Hegel extend the frame and move slightly beyond their ‘time’? Of all the ideas circulating around the American Midwest in the middle 20th century, postmodern constructivism was nowhere to be seen except in the work of George Kelly. Even today , 70 years later , one can hardly claim that Kelly’s perspective characterizes the mainstream intellectual climate there yet. Phenomenology was the closest thinking to his approach, but he had never read any of the original authors.
Quoting apokrisis
The vocabulary Kelly used showed the influences of the experimental psychology of the time, but the content of the ideas are much more at home in 2021 American psychology.
So there is no ‘before’ - but I get that language structure doesn’t help us here. If information is the variable interrelation of form, interaction and change, then the question becomes ‘how would one describe/define these attributes?’
To describe interaction, for instance, we embody the relation between form and change.
interaction = x - (form, change)
form = x - (interaction, change)
change = x - (form, interaction)
Where x is information.
But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know? How do we determine what remains to be known? What is the ground on which we can understand what information is? I don’t think any of these three will suffice. You need to look deeper. What does interaction consist of, for instance?
Quoting Pop
But how does quantum foam develop form without interaction? As I said, you need to look deeper. If quantum foam has no form, then what does form consist of? Let me try: quality, logic and energy...
Quoting Pop
Sure - as long as you recognise that you’ve relinquished any intentionality in this model. There is no mind or cognition here, just interrelated events. You’re mindlessly going with the flow, not intentionally turning your head to the side.
We CAN look at a rock without gaining information, if we recognise that the change is in turning our head to the side, not in looking at the rock. But if we’re looking FOR changes in the rock, then of course we’ll find them. This determination occurs at a level deeper than your interaction-form-change model can explain. It’s a slippery slope of panpsychism not to acknowledge the intentional shift in embodiment when deriving information from interaction, form or change.
Of course. The dichotomy is the basis of rational analysis itself. There would be no philosophy without the dialectic.
Quoting Joshs
Not making much sense here.
If there ain’t also differentiation then any claim of integration becomes meaningless. Things must be separated to also stand in some relation. As they say, time had to exist so not every happens all at once.
Quoting Joshs
You seem to be reading a lot into Kelly.
Quoting Joshs
Or maybe he was thinking like an organicist who also sees the natural world as an unfolding development rather than a grounded construction. Maybe it was that he was trying to articulate? Reality as a series of ever more definite symmetry breakings.
Quoting Joshs
As usual, you are advancing a false dichotomy because you haven’t got how this goes. The global social constraints are meant to shape the individual’s psychological development in some time-proven useful way. But as I’ve said, the same system wants to be able to learn and adapt, and so a tolerance for local variety is also part of the deal. If every individual interprets cultural norms according to their own local contingencies, then that feeds back cybernetically to ensure the collective social order can change its own global settings. The whole system can adjust.
So culture makes frames and individuals can promote change. Sounds like the usual way evolution gets done to me.
Quoting Joshs
But perhaps not one communist for every one fundamentalist. Care to guess at a realistic ratio?
Quoting Joshs
Again, why would I be arguing that folk are prescriptively products of their upbringings when I was quite explicit that global constraints are meant to shape the local productive freedoms of a system?
Quoting Joshs
So much for the diversity you claimed for Kansas folk just a sentence or so earlier.
I don't think it is about us Possibility ( nonanthropocentric ). I think it is about the creation of form. In the creation of more and more complex form, new function arises. In the case of our interaction, random elements will click, but we will maintain the momentum of our personal knowledge Juggernaut. Its direction and momentum cannot shift drastically, but will shift in some small respect in the process of interaction, even if only in understanding each other.
I am trying to describe information as something far deeper then what we normally conceive it to be. Information links all entities in the universe. It is a necessary component for the universe's existence, that it's components are linked, and interacting. Information understood as an enabler of the interaction of form achieves this. In the process of being informed we become embedded to the object / person informing us. There is no choice, If we accept neural correlation. We are transformed slightly in this process, and in the process become embedded in our personally construed reality, but due to an external informing. ( it is such a labyrinth to untangle :angry: )
This informational linkage of form creates all physical structure bottom up, and then laterally also everything is informationally linked. We can reduce everything to information, but we cannot reduce anything beyond information. We cannot interact with anything beyond information. So it is fundamental, and because of this we know logically that it is present in everything as the basis of everything. It is more then just a receiving of a message, it is fundamental reality.
To exist things have to have form, and they have to exist through an interrelation of other things. So information enables the interaction of form. This occurs in an ongoing evolutionary manner.
Quoting Possibility
The theory is that through random interaction form develops. Daniel posted a video earlier of one way it might happen.
Form is endlessly variable. Form varies, but the underlying informational process is constant.
.
Except that you also said:
Quoting Pop
I did watch Daniel’s video, hence my question.
You’ve said that:
1. Information enables interaction of form.
2. Form develops through interaction.
3. Interaction is not possible without information.
4. Information is not possible without form.
But that’s not really saying anything much at all.
I’ve said before that the most stable description of reality consists of three interrelated (4D) events, which is what you’ve described here. That’s all well and good - it’s satisfyingly symmetrical, if anything.
The truth is that form can appear to develop either through interaction OR through spontaneous change; and that information can be perceived as either a cause OR an effect of interaction, form and change - depending on your intentional embodiment as observer, on what you think/feel/believe you’re interacting with, and what kind of information you’re looking for.
Information is this variable interrelation of interaction, form and change. But you still don’t have a useful definition. You have a description of variability at the level of interrelated events.
It isn’t until the dimensionality shifts that information becomes useful to any aspect of reality, including us.
Quoting Pop
Why only form? It could just as easily be about the creation of an interaction, or of change. It’s really about intentionality creating an object by subtracting information from entropy - a momentary dimensional shift from (4,4,4) to (3,4,5). In the case of our interaction, it’s possible to shift as far as (5,2,5), recognising a two-dimensional difference (direction and momentum) between two minds.
But the point I was making was that your model appears to assume zero entropy, which we need to keep in mind when we apply it to real interactions. This is where the twelve aspect values (dimensions) come in handy for me. If I embody a 5D intentional mind in relation to a 3D object I assume exists, then the information that remains to be known will be x = 12 - (5+3) = four-dimensional: that is, an ongoing informational event that varies over time. If I understand that my interaction is with another intentional mind, then the information that remains to be known need only be two-dimensional: x = 12 - (5+5). Put simply, if the structure doesn’t add up to twelve, then I’m missing information, denying an aspect of form or capacity for interaction or change somewhere.
More importantly, if information appears as an ongoing event (consciousness), and I assume that the universe exists as an ongoing event (physics), then the stable part I play in this interaction as observer is that of an unintentional, ongoing event (organism). It is the variability in this dimensional arrangement that informs, enabling an awareness of intentionality: the capacity to shift and rebalance a relational structure of form, interaction and change by rearranging energy, quality and logic.
Quoting Pop
Form is not endlessly variable in reality - its possibilities are limited by a relation of energy, quality and logic.
How does "feel deep down" differ from "experienced as strong feeling" in the definition I brought up? And why "deep down"? Emotions can be very light and subtle and easily felt. But maybe by "deep down" you mean the elements that exist in our subconscious that produce emotions as reactions. Because emotions are reactions. And as such they are always felt (sensed) at the surface, not somewhere deep.
Quoting Pop
Experiences do not necessarily produce emotions. "Experience" from Merriam-Webster: "Practical contact with and observation of facts or events.". But as I can see, you don't like dictionnaries much. You prefer creating your own concepts about terms, risking to use baseless descriptions like "deep down" ...
Quoting Pop
You can find anything in a dictionary. Not that dictionaries are faultless or desrcibe something in the best way. But if you cannot find something in a dictionary or you cannot define it yourself better, then you cannot talk about it!
Quoting Pop
I did. (I also use Wikipedia very often -- sometimes, it's the first reference I use, depending on the subject.) Emotions are biologically-based psychological states brought on by neurophysiological changes, .... It's also a good description. In fact, it is a little better, because the term "state" is more appropriate than "reaction" as far as emotions are concerned.
But what was the initial argument? Ah, yes. "There is no agreement as to what emotions are"! :smile:
There's a certain pathos in someone who can't understand what it is they don't understand.
Quoting apokrisis
‘We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.’
Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
I'd be hugely grateful to learn from @Kenosha Kid or other physicists precisely if and where it is, within modern science, that one is compelled to interpret the probability of a thermal microstate as the probability of a message?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory?wprov=sfla1
I'm not getting this. Change would be form(1)--->form(2), or f(2) - f(1), right? Is this supposed to be tied to something in the physical world? Can it be multi-dimentional? Does it handle the 'non-physical'? Can you give physical and non-physical examples to show that it works. Maybe something like process notation would work better. Does interaction imply brain presence or not?
Pardon me for butting-in here. But, I think the point of that article, and others like it, is not that Mass, Energy, and Information are the same thing. But that they are different forms of the same universal "Substance" (essence), each with properties and qualities of its own. For scientists, the take-away is that each of these Forms can be transformed into the other.
A century ago, Einstein showed that causal Energy could be transformed into tangible Matter (Mass) and vice-versa. But later physicists have performed experiments that transform Energy and Mass into abstract-but-useful Information, and vice-versa. Of course, they are referring primarily to Shannon Information, which emphasized the meaningless entropic (empty) forms of Information, that have off-loaded their human-style meaning & values, leaving only mathematical meaning or values. Even the uncertainty of Entropy is a form of Information.
Like Photons, Bits of Information have no intrinsic mass. But like light-speed energy, that information is able to "condense" into massive particles as its "propagation" slows down. This is a relatively new idea to physicists, but they are preparing to take advantage of the knowledge that physical information and mental information are interchangeable. But, it still requires a conscious Mind to make sense of that information.
My favorite fictional illustration of the interchangeability of Energy-Mass-Information is the Star Trek Transporter. Hypothetically, the Transporter could "scan" the atomic structure of a human body & mind with some unspecified kind of radar rays. A computer then translated that reflected abstract data into a digital code, which could be beamed to the planet below over a carrier wave of Energy. And, that coded energy would then be translated back into a flesh & blood living thinking human, complete with memories. It was a neat trick, that may-or-may-not be hypothetically possible in a far-fetched future technology. But the question remains : is that transformed & reconstituted person really me -- or just a facsimile??? :joke:
In the end information is a list of stuff with “stuff” having a very, very, very large, broad definition.
___Thomas Williams, physicist, Quora quote
https://www.quora.com/If-matter-is-energy-and-energy-is-information-then-what-is-information
Yes. I know that abstractions, such as mental Information, can only be discussed in terms of physical metaphors. We just have to be careful not to reify the metaphors. :cool:
My reply to you was clumsy. I wanted to make the point that emotions are the lynchpin of one's philosophy. Emotions, enable experience, and without experience there could be no consciousness. This is the hard problem. Life is a procession of moments of experience.
You too, will have to take a punt on what you understand emotions to be, either from your own understanding, or from the understanding of others. and it will effect how you come to understand yourself, and what you understand life to be. Good luck with it. :smile:
You are looking for inconsistencies in my argument, and I appreciate it. Testing for inconsistencies and cracks is so difficult to do on ones own. However, insisting I should know how QM works is a little unreasonable. Who knows how QM works? But clearly form arises from it. No?
Quoting Possibility
How can it occur through spontaneous change?
Everything is articulated, interrelated, and situated within the progressive forming of the universe. as illustrated in this graph. We are situated somewhere in there evolving interrelationally with everything else. The variety of form is open ended. The variety of forms of life is open ended, and the variety of forms of consciousness is open ended. If you accept consciousness is integrated information, you can appreciate the form of the integrated information is progressively evolving and can have no end.
Everything exists as a self organizing system formed bottom up, where the underlying layer creates the layer on top. It is all vertically and then also laterally informationally connected. All the complexity of this can be simply represented by the form of one system interacting with the form of another system ( this captures everything - all the articulations). Information describes the process of form enabling the interaction of form. That something has form, enables it to interact with something else that has form. It does not enable it to interact with something else that does not have form, for our purposes at least since we can never know about it. The Definition information enables the interaction of form captures most of the facts: that things have to have form to interact, and that what is interacting is the form of the things.
Quoting Possibility
Form represents the underlying self organization that creates order in the universe. No form, no order, no universe.Quoting Possibility
You may as well be talking Swahili. Sorry. :sad:
Quoting Possibility
I would say you do not play a stable part. You evolve interrelationally with everything else. In the variability of this dimensional arrangement, the multiplicity of causal factors converge to allow the emergence of random novel form. Because of the role the novel form plays in future integrations novelty of form is assured......... But for the most part I would agree with this paragraph. Intentionality is variously construed, particularly in phenomenology - can you be more specific?
:up: That is a better explanation, thanks. We should also say it is not absolutely a done deal, but seems like it might be. :smile: **The actual conversion is supported by theory, but has not actually been done, yet!
Quoting apokrisis
But there are different ways of looking at universality. One could say , for instance , that there can be no existent , no experience, no world without time, and time
presupposes both similarity and difference. So absence and presence , sameness and difference , form and content are irreducible , universal requirements for any kind of world. Notice that there is nothing in this assertion to differentiate Kant’s notion of universality from Hegel’s or Nietzsche’s or Kelly’s . But when we start inquiring as to whether there are universal contents constraining the dynamics of dialectics, such as Kant’s transcendental categories subtending time, space, causation and morality, we can distinguish different kinds of universality. Like Kant , Hegel fills in the dialectic with a universal content. For Hegel, however, this content doesn’t subsist in static categorical schemes , but in the ordering logic guiding the movement of the dialectic.
With Nietzsche and the postmodernists there is no longer any universal content determining either schematic form or dialectical movement. Both schematic form ( value systems ) and dialectic movement are utterly contingent and relative.
One could say that such a notion of universality is, as Derrida put it , a quasi-transcendental , or quasi-universal, idea. It is always a new ,contingent, relative sense ( content) of absence, presence, sameness and difference that appears to make up a world.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, differentiation and integration together form the irreducible basis of any world.
But look at the difference between the ‘flow’ experience of the intuitive , organic unfolding of a dance duet, and the hostile , conflictual exchange of a political disagreement. Both situations are built upon a ‘separation of things’ , but yet they differ vastly in the relation between separation and integration. There are a number of dialectically based philosophies that make a certain irreducible violence, or at least conflict, a necessary precondition of social change. Kelly’s isn’t one of them. Where does Peirce stand on the necessity of conflict in cultural development?
Quoting apokrisis
A global system implies that each of its components be co-determined by reference to the functioning of the whole.
If an Islamic fundamentalist and a pan semioticist engage in a debate about metaphysics , every word that each uses in the conversation will be interpreted by the other according to their own construct system. Does this mean the contribution of each to the exchange has no effect on the other’s thinking? No, my perspective and that of another are not to be understood as independent, private regions. The interpersonal relation directly remakes my sense of what my `own' perspective is, as well as what I assume to be the other's integral position. It is always a new sense of `me' and `other' that emerge in conversation. And yet , this mutual affecting between us is not to be conceived in the same way as our personal
construct systems. My own system , my own world , is
a global system in which each of its components is co-
determined by reference to the functioning
of the whole, and so is my debating opponent’s in relation to his global system. But there is no such global system BETWEEN. us , or encompassing us and a much larger culture within a superordinate global system. Each word I use gets its sense from its categorical inclusion within a superordinate hierarchy of personal meaning. The trivial day to day events of my life get their relevance from the broader themes of my life, and the most superordinate of these involve my sense of myself as a social being.
I can’t perform the same hierarchical move in drawing up a global , between person system. There simply is no neutral vantage point from which such a system can be determined. My personal meanings aren’t determined by a global cultural system the way that my superordinate system determines the sense of my day to day trivial experiences.
Anything one might attempt to say about it would apply differently to each of its participants. There are as many global systems as there are participants in a culture. Try getting agreement on the nature of this global system. You might respond, sure, each of us are accessing and contributing to this system from own vantage within it. But I’m saying there is no ‘it’, no same system and no same world.
While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields.
In a ‘community’ of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.
In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.
Quoting apokrisis
But what’s your point , that one can articulate a global system here using evidence of a majority worldview? If indeed the fundamentalist perspective was much more prevalent than the communist view in Kelly’s social environment , this certainly didn’t constrain Kelly’s model. You could claim that his approach was in dialectical opposition to it , but the central critique in his work was directed against positivism, Feduaniam and Marxism, not fundamentalism.
I asked the question because I found it a very difficult technical article, with a lot of terminology and equations I couldn't understand, and I suspected that Pop didn't really understand it either, but simply linked to it because of the title.
(It appears to be trying to validate Rolf Landauer's claim that 'information is physical' by proposing that a hard drive full of information should have a different mass (i.e. be heavier?) than when it is empty of information, thereby proving that information has mass. But the mass proposed seems to be of minute dimensions and is extremely hard to measure, and so this paper is just a proposal awaiting validation at some future time. Which seems to me pretty poor support for Rolf Landauer's initial claim.)
You would be correct that I don't understand the math. :sad: My understanding comes from a different perspective, and I cited that paper, as well as all the others in support of my views - in the delight that different perspectives are converging to this same conclusion. :smile:
Banno, I'm sure you could find us something that is not information?
And whilst your at it, what is your theory of everything?
To say that Information is "physical" could mean two different things. Either that it has mass like all other physical objects, or that it has the ability to transform into mass, similar to the E=MC^2 equation. In it's meaningful mental form, Information is weightless. But in its physical forms, information may have a variety of masses, depending on its structure.
Landauer's notion of weighing a hard drive to see how much information is has gained or lost, reminds me of the doctor who carefully weighed a terminal patient, before and after death, to see how much the Soul weighs. Apparently, he thought the human soul was a physical object, with a mass of its own. But that's like asking how much the number 4 weighs. How much does Energy weigh -- before and after transforming into Mass?
Souls and mathematical objects are abstractions. They may have Meaning without Mass. :joke:
Actually that story comes from the early Buddhist texts, where the experiment was conducted by a character called Prince Payasi, who was a charvaka, materialist philosopher, although it might also have appeared in other cultures.
It is my view that ideas are real but not physical. That includes real numbers, logical syllogisms, theories, principles, much else besides. Of course that is unacceptable to materialism, hence all the blather about information having to be 'encoded' before it is real. And that in turn is based in a deficient idea of the nature of reality. But that's a whole other can'o'worms and I'm not going to re-open it again now.
That is a good point. I would like to hear Kenosha's opinion also.
The way I would reason it is: I would ask what is a thermal microstate to you, If not a message? And on the basis of my monist model, I would say it is the same thing to everything else that it interacts with.
Quoting Gnomon
I just a moment ago read an article by science writer John Horgan : What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common. But, it's actually about the reason why he is an Agnostic about notions that require belief without plausible evidence. And, he makes a statement that resonates with me, as a fellow skeptic and agnostic, who nevertheless finds reasons, not to believe, but to take seriously, some ideas that are on the fringes of Empirical Reality.
"Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a theory about information. For positive perspectives on information-based interpretations, check out Beyond Weird by journalist Philip Ball and The Ascent of Information by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf. But to my mind, information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes. The concept of information makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the information." ___Horgan
That is a pertinent point in Information Theory, that many hypotheses, including IIT, tend to ignore : Information is ultimately mind-stuff. The necessity of an observer, or knower, of Information (meaning) makes the early universe, prior to the emergence of humans, seem to be devoid of the First Form of Information : meaning in a mind. Energy and Matter are the second and third Forms of Information. Unfortunately, Shannon made it seem plausible to think of Information without spooky souls, or minds, or consciousness. But the term originally referred to meaning in a mind.
That's why, although I remain agnostic about anything outside the universe, or prior to the Big Bang, I have been forced by Logic to assume, as an axiom, the existence of a universal Mind of some kind. A First Cause, who is the Prime Enformer. :cool:
What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common :
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-god-quantum-mechanics-and-consciousness-have-in-common/
Information :
* [i]Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
* When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
G*D :
* [i]An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to LOGOS. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
* I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. That’s because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
I don't think so. If you consider it in terms of evolutionary psychology, where language evolved before self awareness, and then a subsequent self concept, in terms of self awareness. You see a progression of form. Language > self awareness > self concept > then and only then do our interpretations of universe, god, the plot, etc come into being. As the progressive evolution of form?
Yes. Where is Information before it is "encoded" in material form? An idea can be "encoded" in a thousand languages and a variety of mathematical equations, or even in dots & dashes of ink, or flashes of light. But where does the Meaning go, in between those transformations? Is it stored in a physical Brain, or a hard disk, or a floppy disk, or a metaphysical Mind? Materialism views matter as fundamental, but Enformationism postulates that ideas & meanings & intentions are primary and primal. Not Real though, but Ideal. :smile:
Nowhere. It is a noThing before it becomes form.
If you were to say mind was integrated information, and integrated information is equal to form, then I would agree with you. IIT is on the right track, imo.
Cribbed from various sources:
Biosemiosis studies 'pre-linguistic meaning making' - that is, production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm, on several levels. One level is the cellular level, 'vegetative semiosis occurs in all organisms at their cellular and tissue level'; zoosemiotics or animal semiotics, or the study of animal forms of knowing. Then you have semiotics in its original sense, meaning interpretation of signs by humans. Code biology builds on that by the analysis of the sense in which living processes encode and transmit biological information e.g. by dna. That is the subject of the paper from Marcello Barbeiri that I linked earlier. (Note that code biology distinguishes itself from 'Peircian biosemiotics' which is Apokrisis' speciality, even though they're both in the same general field.)
But you're correct in saying that it seems very suggestive of a mind, or of being the product of a mind. There is actually an Internet theist meme based on the 'argument from biological information'. This argument says that as DNA is a code, then it must have been produced by a mind, as codes are invariably associated with minds - in the case of living organisms, then the mind in question is God, of course. This is very much associated with the intelligent design movement and has very little presence on this forum (and I certainly wouldn't want to be involved in introducing it to this forum, but it should at least be acknowledged. See this summary.)
You will notice that it is precisely the question of where biological codes originate that is left unanswered in Barbieri's paper. He refers to Hubert Yockey, also a favourite with some ID proponents, who says that the origin of DNA is formally unknowable, in the same sense that some propositions of logic are formally undecideable. That attitude is satisfactorily apophatic from my point of view.
Quoting Gnomon
Where is 'the domain of natural numbers'? Silly question, of course. But it's instinctive for us to ask it, because we've become so conditioned by naturalism as to conceive that everything real exists on the objective plane. This is really the crucial point. We nowadays tend to conceive of what is real in terms of it being 'out there somewhere', existing in time and space.
Check out this excerpt from what is math?, Smithsonian magazine:
See? That expresses the entire problem in a nutshell.
Quoting Gnomon
Shannon was dealing with a very specific problem i.e. transmission of encoded information across electronic media. But that has then been re-interpreted in all of these metaphorical ways to say things about life and mind that maybe it actually doesn't say at all.
Information enables the interaction of form. It doesn't go anywhere ( does not become immaterial ) since everything is situated and interrelated, evolving as a great mass of order. Articulated by information. As far as I can see. **Everything has to be integrated as a whole, by the form systems posses.
Semiotics implies a dualism. One has to drop the idea of a mind ( interpretor ) in cellular biology to make any sense of it - that is what Barbeiri was on about. Instead one has to see form as identical to code, and their interaction as information, in the sense that I am using it.
**Information enables the interaction of coded form :100:
It is a matter for argument whether those are the right fundamental constructs (they may or may not be). But what is truly fundamental is that dialectics is the universal logic, the universal rational process, which produces any well-formed construct.
Quoting Joshs
Kant fell down with his antimonies. Hegel got things a little wrong because he lacked a concept of vagueness. That is why I say Peirce worked it out best with his triadic systems perspective.
To achieve the goal of arriving at a dialectical unity of opposites, you have to find a reasonable way in which both sides of any such metaphysical symmetry breaking can actually be real - present in the one world while apparently also representing some essential contradiction.
That is why we end up understanding dichotomistic constructs as complementary limits on Being itself. The two poles of a spectrum can be part of the same reality by marking the two bounding extremes of what is possible.
Hierarchy theory then arises as the most general way of representing such a structure of Being. The simplest way to have two opposites in the same world is if they are placed as far apart as possible - as in the divide between the local and the global scales of Being. Local~global is the ur-dichotomy.
But then because synchronic structure is itself opposed to diachronic process, we also have the other ur-dichotomy of the vague~crisp - the extension to dialectical reasoning made explicit in the triadic logic of Peirce.
Peirce was always trying to connect these two dichotomies in the one world description, which is why you wind up with his super-dichotomy of tychism~synechism. The local is pure chance or pure spontaneity, so also as vague and unformed as it gets. The global is continuity and universalised habit or law, so as crisp and definite as its gets.
Thus the content that results from dialectical inquiry is that which in the end can't be done away with. Peirce makes sense to me in his reduction of existence to these two complementary ur-dichotomies - the local~global and the vague~crisp, or the dichotomies of structure and of development.
Quoting Joshs
Social organisation boils down to the dialectical balancing of competition and co-operation. It needs both in balance for a society to persist as a system.
That in turn reduces to the general systems story of local~global hierarchical structure.
Competition is local differentiation and creative contest. Hostile disagreement, if you want to get rhetorical about it. Or useful individual variety, if you want to get evolutionary about it.
Co-operation is its "other" of global integration or stabilising habit. The organic unfolding of a dance duet if you want to get PoMo rhetorical about it. Or useful collective uniformity, if you want to get evolutionary about it.
So of course you will seek to frame things in a way that befits the cultural agenda of PoMo. But that is itself a highly particular viewpoint when it comes to metaphysics. My interest is in arriving instead at the most general possible one.
And as you can see, that opposes your habit of forever seeking plurality at every level of Being with the other habit of spotting the two ur-dichotomies that underlie every form of existence.
Quoting Joshs
To defend PoMo as a political set of beliefs, you must argue against the structuralism of hierarchical order. I get it.
The world must be an egalitarian network where no node carries any more weight than any other. Every interaction has the one scale - an informational symmetry rather than an informational asymmetry. You must resist any notion of the natural world as a system of nested order where some folk might actually have a more successfully generalised metaphysics than others.
Quoting Joshs
And this is something you learnt ... from reading some book?
Quoting Joshs
Have you read up on symbolic interactionism - George Herbert Mead's take that stems from the same Peircean sources? That gives a balanced account of the semiotic interaction between personal possibility and its environmental constraints.
Perhaps because Peirce himself was so notoriously awkward, he didn't cash his semiotics out at the level of social theory. :smile:
Quoting Joshs
Again, you are describing the necessity of dialectics rather than the fundamentality of the plural.
A successful network - the one with the best balance of stability and plasticity - is going to be neither over-connected nor underconnected. So neither too bound by groupthink, nor too unbound by excessive individualism.
We have formal models of these things, like tensegrity. Emergent balances that minimise the collective tensions of individuals arriving at commonality.
Quoting Joshs
My point was that Kelly's approach was constrained by the certitudes of 1950's US intelligentsia - the tropes of rationality and self-actualisation. He saw his impoverished Kansas farmers as needing training in how to become rational and self-actualising in a way that was a society's generally stated goal.
Now for an Islamic fundamentalist, that is a cultural goal that still might not compute. But for a systems scientist, one would say of course! If you want the right kind of self-organising whole, you must shape up the right kind of self-fitting parts.
Biosemiosis is saying that interpretation takes place on the level of cellular biology, i.e. that cellular biology can be understood in terms of interpretation and signalling. That is called 'vegetative semiosis' and no conscious mind is implied or required.
Besides, you're still not seeing the distinction that Barbieri makes between the chemical and information paradigms. That is a dualism - the dualism of information and matter. Information operates in a different way to chemical causation by encoding and transmitting information. That doesn't happen in non-organic matter. It's a clear distinction, and arguably also a dualism of form (morphe) and matter (hyle).
Quoting Gnomon
See this post
Politics of paradigm? He makes a case for information as a fundamental observable, non measurable quantity. Every cellular structure then is code and their interaction is an exchange of information - in the sense that I am using it. It becomes just a matter of time, before this approach is extended to chemistry.
** This approach is then extended to mind, and outside the body, to transform monist materialism to monist panpsychism. :fire:
(There's also a really neat feature I only learned of recently- if you quote from some source, enter a semi-colon after the quoted source and then paste in the URL of the source. Sometimes if the URL is very long you need to enclose the whole string in double-quotes as well. That way, the quoted source becomes a clickable link.)
Most of these models can't explain how we remember our own birthdays.
Quoting Gnomon
Gnomon calls it First Form of Information so I'm not the only one thinking about it.
Process notation includes a directional flow of energy, so no, it wouldn’t work better. The equations refer back to a Venn diagram on entropy from earlier, and the notion that ‘everything is information’. There is no distinction between physical and non-physical here - this is a logical relation only - no directional flow of energy, and no particular quality attributed to any of the elements. I thought we could use the Venn diagram to explore the logical relation between information, interaction, form and change. When all four terms refer to purely logical events (no energy, no quality), then each element in the Venn diagram is interchangeable. You can literally put the terms in any of the four spaces, and the relationship makes sense.
An interaction consists of ongoing form, change and information. Form in this sense is not a static measurement, but a process. It refers to the Aristotlean notion of arrangement or organisation (of matter). So we’re not talking about the static form of a rock, for instance, but the process of looking at a rock. An observer is always involved in the event somehow - here’s your brain presence. If you’re going to relate any two of these events, it implies a living system. Any three, and it implies a brain.
All the elements here are four-dimensional on purpose - a five-dimensional perspective of reality as consisting of interrelated events takes the human experience of ‘time’ out of the equation. Time necessarily involves a directional flow of energy, as a distribution of attention and effort. Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ suggests this as a way to incorporate quantum theory into a more accurate understanding of reality that dissolves the physical/mental divide. I find it’s particularly useful in discussions about information.
I hope this helps a little.
Quoting Pop
As a monist, panpsychist, I would argue the first form of information is form itself. This is what seems to be evolving, creating everything in it's path.
We have to exist in some form!
The form of our existence is meaningful to us!
But I am happy to go wherever you like. :smile:
Yes! Yes! you got it. I love it!
I've never been a monist or a dualist because I think they are both wrong. What I do like is starting with physical monism and doing an expansion to a dualist form and a further expansion to specific mental content. Such as:
Brain state = BRAIN(mental content) = BRAIN(my birthday is XX-XX-XXXX)
Not bragging, just showing how I do it.
You might find neuro-anthropology interesting.
But your body also contributes to the state of this, doesn't it?
I think our total form, all of the information that our body possesses contributes to our consciousness.
I'm assuming a fully intact organism to support the brain. And it's bad manners to edit or embellish a quote.
I think you are describing a shift in self here? Yes the self can shift slightly in how it relates to all this. And, I think, this occurs in tiny increments in every moment of consciousness, such that over long periods of time ( years ) can be quite different. There is the biological grounding, and I think things like life long memories, and relationships and groups we identify with would ground us in a sense of self that endures to a large extent. I wouldn't agree with Metzinger and co who say it only exists at the time it is considered, but there is an element of that, imo.
No offence intended.
Yes that works for me. I would also include the information from the body as part of the brain state.
I'd like your opinion on an idea that I have about the connection between skepticism and information theory. You're well-versed in both these topics so I'll get right down to business.
Skepticism, doubt, is, in the final analysis, about uncertainty - given a proposition p, the skeptic holds that it's uncertain whether p or ~p. To then assert p or to assert ~p is to claim certain knowledge.
Shannon's information theory defines information as any message that reduces uncertainty from a given set of possibilities to ONE.
Information is basically the digital avatar of what in philosophy is termed as knowledge and skepticism is the state of lacking information. In other words skepticism = 0 bits (of information).
Will/should skeptics be offended/pleased that all of them together amount to 0 bits?
:up: Are you familiar with Integrated Information Theory?
You pretty much understand the gist of it! :up:
It also would say brain states exist in a sequence of moments. And it attempts to measure them, but to what extent it can presently is debated.
The logic of IIT is very similar to the way I understand things. It also extends it's logic to outside the body, and thus becomes panpsychist.
Harry Nyquist (1889 - 1976) Information Theory
Your namesake was one of the pioneers of information theory.
[quote=Wikipedia]Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of digital information. The field was fundamentally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s.[/quote]
Well, technically everything arises from quantum foam, so...
Simply stating that ‘quantum foam somehow develops form’ is a leap of faith you’re expecting us to take with regards to your theory. You do need to understand how your model works with QM if you’re going to reference it to plug the gaps. Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ is a good starting point, because it explains why it makes sense to describe reality as consisting of interrelated events, not objects.
Quoting Pop
I said that form can appear to develop through spontaneous change, depending on your intentional embodiment as observer. You need to be careful here, because all of these terms (form, interaction, change and information) can be defined as objects (3D), events (4D) OR potential (5D). If they’re all events, then all elements remain interchangeable. If even one of them is perceived as either fixed object or potential, then the observer is embodied, and there is a direction of intentionality/causation in play (5-4-3).
Quoting Pop
The graph is based on an assumption that the universe is infinitely expanding, which is why the variety of form appears open-ended. But it’s not that simple. Rovelli describes two postulates of QM in relation to information theory, which I think is relevant here:
Postulate 1: there is a maximum amount of relevant information that may be obtained from a quantum system.
Postulate 2: it is always possible to obtain new information from a system.
At first glance, they appear to contradict each other. Is it ‘open-ended’ or not?
Quoting Pop
This moves away from the process model even further - plus you’re using ‘form’ to describe both a process and a property here, which compounds the confusion. You’ve completely lost sight of the observer now. It is not that something has form (ie. as a property) which enables it to interact, but the process of form in relation to change and information that amounts to interaction. Things do not have to ‘have form’ to interact, but form as a process is present in any interaction.
Quoting Pop
This notion of self-organisation is your personal focus. You could just as easily say no interaction, no universe. Or no change, no universe.
Quoting Pop
Stable is not the same as static. I am a relatively stable living organism in an ongoing interaction (of a particular duration). This stability or dynamic balance is related to the notion of wu-wei in the Tao Te Ching: acting without attributing intentionality, or going with the natural flow of energy (chi).
Of course, I can also attribute intentionality (awareness of potential) to interaction, form, change or information, which directs the flow of energy in a particular direction and momentarily positions me somewhere in an intentional process (5-4-3). But there are many different ways to describe this shift.
Quoting Pop
What???
Quoting Pop
Do you mean that if I don't feel anything, I am emotionless, I can't experience anything and/or be conscious (aware) of anything? Do you really believe this?
But, anyway, let's see ... What is this topic about? Ah, yes. "What is Information?" :grin:
I am done. Not even a child prodigy would do simple math without a teacher. Mathematical concepts do not automatically come with being human. Only the potential to learn comes with being human.
That was just to say, that your example of child cannot do math is not relevant and not sensible in the arguments by giving you the contradictory case. It is just a logic.
Awe, the word "effect" makes all the difference. We are all trying to exchange information and only rarely do we have the pleasure of success. The information can be all around us but that does not mean it affects us.
That was not logic, it was a stupid argument. We are not born with knowledge of math or anything else. We only have the potential to learn. When we are knowledgeable we gain the ability to create math and comfortable beds and high-rise apartments, etc.. The more knowledge we have the more we can learn. It took mankind millions of years to get to where we are today. Our capability to fill our heads with knowledge is not different but because we know more we can understand more. However, now we have unrealistic expectations of children and locking them up in classrooms and expecting them to learn what they have no interest in learning is not healthy.
It is the most fundamental method of proving in Logic that the example was irrelevant and senseless for the argument. It shows the example proposed is not a universally true case by simply showing the contradictory case. I definitely read about the child genius cases with their IQ 200 doing calculus.
In terms of quantum mechanics, entropy is the number of degenerate (equal energy) or near-degenerate microstates a system with a given energy may occupy and explore. Things that increase energy tend to increase entropy: heat it up, stir it, shake it shake it shake it baby... (Sorry, been listening to Tom Waits.) Doing these things changes the configuration of particles such that there are more permutations of each configuration available.
I'm not sure what either have to do with the OP; perhaps you can expand?
Where is "nowhere"? Do "forms" pop into existence like Venus, who emerged from the sea "fully formed", with no history behind her? What if "nowhere" is Plato's Ideal realm of Potential? His ideal Forms were basically the immaterial idea of a thing, before it is transformed into material forms or things. That's what I call "Enformation" : the potential for creating forms.
But where does Potential reside? If it's not actual, maybe it's the intangible metaphysical power of causation similar to human Will, that exists only in Minds, or Hearts if you prefer. When I act consciously, the action is preceded by the idea of a future effect. But that idea exists nowhere except in my Mind, which has no "where" in terms of Cartesian coordinates. So whose Mind is the imaginer or designer of Platonic Forms? :smile:
Platonic Forms :
[i]The Platonic Forms, according to Plato, are just ideas of things that actually exist. They represent what each individual thing is supposed to be like in order for it to be that specific thing. . . .
According to Plato’s Theory of Forms, matter is considered particular in itself. For Plato, Forms are more real than any objects that imitate them.[/i]
https://owlcation.com/humanities/An-Introduction-to-Platos-Theory-of-Forms
Potential :
According to Aristotle, when we refer to the nature of a thing, we are referring to the form, shape or look of a thing, which was already present as a potential, an innate tendency to change,in that material before it achieved that form, . . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality
Note : Clay possesses the Passive Potential for being molded into many forms. But the Active Potential was in the mind of the sculptor, who imagined the future form, and then modeled the clay.
Yes. That's why I try not to present my notion of "G*D", without some preliminary throat-clearing, to dispel the Judeo-Christian notion of a humanoid heavenly tyrant and magical Intelligent Design (ID). Unfortunately, my alternative of Intelligent Evolution (IE) is not easy to distinguish from ID, for those who have a limited preconception of how a deity "must" create. Oh well, the creator cat is out of the bag now. :joke:
So, when the material form decays and dissipates, the conceptual Form vanishes? That would make our concept of categories of things-with-something-in-common, meaningless. Does a real Cat participate in the Ideal Form of cats-in-general? What is the material "thing" cats have in common? What kind of information is it made of? :cool:
Yes. The ancient beat of Realism versus Idealism goes on, and on, and on . . . . . :wink:
Yes. Materialists liked Shannon's statistical definition of "Information", because it allowed us to think in terms of Mechanical Machines instead of Conscious Minds. Machines are real, but Minds are just the abstract notion of an immaterial information processor. To attempt to answer "what is information?" without reference to the pre-Shannon implication of the term is short-sighted. As some recent contrarians have insisted : meaning is in minds, but not in computers. :nerd:
Original meaning of Information was Meaning :
Meaning "knowledge communicated concerning a particular topic" is from mid-15c.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/information
Information :
[i]* Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Now nice forms of information, INformation, that is, are the ones that correspind to intermediate numbers. Which means not complete, or total order (all particles at one point for example, like in the center of a black hole), nor completd, or total disorder (like on the event horizon of a hole). It corresponds to ordered structures of matter or particles. The black hole is a complementary unit jn that it contains bith forms at once. Matter inside a volume (not having the configuration of a black hole state yet, can be nicely ordered and whirl around in formation. Not too much information and not too little being there.
Quoting apokrisis
What Kant, Hegel and Peirce had in common was their grounding of Being in divinity. Peirce posited God as the source and creator of the dialectic , a God he said could
produce miracles( he and James had a fondness for spiritualist mediums) . He articulated his divine teleology as the developmentally assured triumph of love over hate.
Peirce infers from the Gospel and Epistles of John that ‘God is love’, and that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of love and loveliness.
Quoting apokrisis
I know you’ve said you don’t go along with Peirce’s theological interpretation of his metaphysics, but don’t you think he would defend the dialectic and the divine as inseparable? Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent? More specifically , doesn’t the developmental
model you have been laying out presuppose a hidden hand guiding universal rational process? A number of your colleagues in pan semiotics are quite sympathetic to theological writers like Charles Taylor, Kierkegaard and Martin Buber( Bergson comes to mind also ).
Quoting apokrisis
I’m curious. Is what you wrote above consistent with the fact-value interpenetration argument?
Varela writes:
“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.
‘A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:
If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.’
Is the above consistent with Peirce’s definition of the real?
“ I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched.”
Quoting apokrisis
Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology.
Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism.
Self-actualization as a buzzword made its way into American psychology in the 1950’s due to the indirect influence of European trends such as existentialism, American pragmatism, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. These tropes were not embraced by mainstream intellectual culture until many years later.
In the 1950’s only a handful of American psychologists and philosophers adopted them. The mainstream endorsed S-R positivism and the new discipline of cognitive science, a rationalist offshoot of 19th century idealism.
Yippee, a physicist is going to help me dispell the woo...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Oh jeez.
Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk?
"Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk?"
Yes. The (in)formation of the brain in terms of information contained in patterns of particles. Entropy is of no use here.
Exactly. The brain is a physical system.
I would say this brings out the need to be able to distinguish two varieties of uncertainty.
We can be uncertain where we agree that the principle of non-contradiction, and we are simply counting the missing information. The skeptic agrees your proposition must be either true or false, 1 or 0. But they await the evidence. They see an informational gap waiting to be filled. There are known unknowns that can be quantified.
Is the cat in Schrodinger's box - the familiar quantum thought experiment - dead or alive? In the classical view, it must be one or the other. The PNC applies. The information may not be received until the lid is lifted, but there is already a fact of the matter. There is a known unknown. If you proposed the cat is by now surely dead from the poison having been released by the radioactive decay event, then the skeptic can say your claim of having reduced your uncertainty to 1 is a little premature. You could still be flat wrong in that assertion.
But then there is the uncertainty that results from the PNC not applying to some description of reality. The quantum view. It is simply logically vague as the two possibilities are in superposition until the wavefunction has been collapsed. The binary choice of 1 or 0 doesn't yet answer to any classical conception of an actual fact - a definite or crisp state of logical counterfactuality.
So you can be skeptical because the information hasn't yet been properly provided. It is person making the doubtful bivalent claim that is missing the information.
Or you can be skeptical about whether the real world is ever truly counterfactual in any situation. Behind the certainties of the bivalently encoded message - a message generated using a model of atomistic or digital information - there is always inherently a vagueness or uncertainty in regards to world as the thing in itself beyond our imposed modelling. Meaning may elude our grasp to the degree we shoehorn a proposition into a blunt binary logical frame of true or false.
Beyond the known unknowns, there are the unknowns unknowns. Beyond the quantified uncertainties, there are the unquantified uncertainties.
Even great thinkers reflect their social era. Doesn't that prove my point about the social construction of even the most independently minded individuals?
Quoting Joshs
Yep. Logic is logic.
You haven't been able to pick holes in account of that logic and so now you chose to play the man rather than the ball.
Quoting Joshs
As I keep saying, the hard turn towards material reductionism by Newtonian science was matched by a soft-headed turn towards Romanticism and idealism in Western society. There is a generalised ache to preserve a spiritual and personal dimension in modern folk metaphysics.
So yes. It is the norm in modern society to feel there must be more to existence than just the blind and souless determinism of the "scientific world view". That is why we have cultural responses like PoMo, phenomenology, humanism, and the watered down, pantheistic, notions of the divine that are so common.
As usual, you are quoting stuff that supports my argument. Goodman is asking for a ground in monistic facticity. And I am arguing that what grounds counterfactual definiteness is the "epistemic" process of dichotomisation. Point and line are the complementary limits of the one dialectical conception.
A point stands for the absolutely discrete, the line for the absolutely continuous. And between these two bounds on concrete possibility, we can expect to find our own reality cashed out as a measurable ground. We are always some infinitesimal degree away from arriving at the limit represented by the notion of a 0D point, and always some infinite degree away from reaching the end of the 1D line.
Quoting Joshs
Err. OK. So he was constructing himself as an anti-rational renegade ... yet now is recognised as just a rationalist positive psychology type responding early to the spirit of his age?
Quoting Joshs
You forgot to mention the dominance of Freudian Romanticism that was in fact the official mainstream in US psychotherapy of that era. Wasn't Kelly reacting against that?
Self-actualisation and humanist approaches took off in the US because there was already the deeply engrained notion of the US being the land of the self-made man. But by the 1950s, corporations and unions dominated the society. People were suddenly rich, secure and leisured, yet still constrained by class and traditional values. So very ready to discover themselves and construct their own personal realities.
Behaviourism was popular among those who liked the idea of mind control. It was hardly central to popular culture. Cognivitism started out naturalistic and ecological - as with Neisser - but became over-run by computer science and the metaphysics of information processing.
I'm not really buying your social history here. If you are determined to make Kelly the base of your argument against pragmatic positivism or social constructionism, that seems a poor choice.
No not faith. Just take a look around yourself and understand all this was once quantum foam.
Quoting Possibility
Please reread my previous post to you, and point out where I am not describing this. "Information describes the process of form enabling the interaction of form."
Quoting Possibility
This was Apo's defence with the epistemic cut. Please yourself, but understand that your subjectivity is not ungrounded, but grounded entirely in information, in the sense I am describing it.
Quoting Possibility
I think we have covered the QM angle of this argument.
Quoting Possibility
Right! So something without form - without any characteristics or perturbation or properties can interact?
No doubt due to your subjectivity again?
Quoting Possibility
You totally misunderstand. It is all evolution, not arbitrary change. A primer in systems theory would fix this.
Quoting Possibility
Self organization is what makes systems organize. Everything is a self organizing system in systems theory. Please catch up on it and we can speak again.
At some stage I will write my thoughts up coherently and in detail. At present, the ideas are just emerging, so nobody could blame you for misunderstanding, given they are presented as disintegrated bits of information here and there.
**In the end our philosophy is only as good as the reality it creates. I have given my views on this previously - why I argue what I do, and where it leads.
It is the belief of phenomenology, and the philosophical zombie argument.
:up: Aint that the truth! :sad:
They are formally complementary modes of description now. Two ways of saying the same thing.
Entropy might be composed of an ensemble of microstates, and so a system at equilibrium might appear to contain a hell of a lot of information ... all those individually distinct possible states. But then the only actual information we need about the system is the value of its macroproperties, like its temperature and pressure. In the same way that we only need values for the mean and standard deviation of a Gaussian probability distribution, we can afford to discard all the information represented in the individual microstates as they all smear into the one macro probability distribution encoded in Boltzmann's entropy equation.
Entropy is thus a model of complete randomness or disorder. And then the same equation can be inverted to arrive at the other view - the Shannon information view - where every microstate is treated conversely as a negentropic signal to be separated from the surrounding noise. The world is being modelled not as a self-organising average, a meaningless collection of accidents, but as a place where now every aspect of some particular microstate has been chosen with meaningful care.
So in entropy world, the particular gets absorbed into the general. Differences no longer make a difference worth counting. And in negentropy world, the metaphysics is inverted. Every difference now makes a difference.
Confusion then arises in threads like these because conventional notions of "information" relate to finding meaning in the world. We are semiotically seeking to distinguish signal from noise in any situation. We are discovering where we want to impose the epistemic cut in terms of everything that particularly matters (to "us") and everything that generally doesn't.
But physics is our model of reality that wants to talk about things beyond the point where they are embedded in self-centred points of view. The need to divide the world into signal and noise, meaningful and meaningless, drops out of physics' picture as it is only interested in the naked statistical mechanics - the view that can marry the metaphysical absolutes of blind chance and deterministic necessity.
So that is why physics is making this move to model the world in infodynamical terms - making use of the fact that entropy and information are inverted versions of the one fundamental statistical equation.
Used in one direction, the description of nature can treat everything as just generalised difference. Used in the other direction, the description of nature will treat everything as some matchingly particular state of affairs. Every difference now counts as a difference rather than counting as something that is a matter of indifference.
This is a neat dialectical trick that means physics has reality tied up from both directions in a framework for counting and measuring its bits or microstates.
You just need to establish the Planckscale limit on the counterfactual definiteness this infodynamic view of physics presumes. And also understand how it builds in the Gaussian bell curve version of a probability space - the world of closed systems that can equilibrate as they are statically bounded.
That assumption of a normal distribution becomes a little fraught once you realise that a scalefree or fractal distribution - the log/log distribution that is open and growing and has no actual mean - is likely the more generic story in dissipative systems. The familiar Shannon information gives way to a more general model such as Rényi entropy.
But that is a bleeding edge conversation.
The things of importance is that physicists aren't interested in the issue of meaning. They are seeking the depersonalised view of reality and so their metaphysics deliberate excludes that part of Aristotelean causality which relates to purpose and finalities. So when they speak of information - or when neuroscientists employ that physicalised version of "information" – they don't mean what most of the folk here think they ought to mean.
And then the reason why entropy and information have become fused as a new information theoretic turn in physics is that they are two ways of reading the same formula. And the formula is a step forward in moving physics from the old atomistic Newtonian paradigm to a view of reality that does a better job of rooting the descriptions in the holism of probability spaces and statistical mechanics.
Newton spoke of forces - little pushes and pulls delivered by corpuscular objects. That became generalised to quantities of energy - forceful interactions were turned into some notion of actual conserved substance that flowed. Then the pendulum swung the other way to make energy just patterns in fields. After that, we get to the entropic view of force - patterns in a probability space. And now that has been joined by the informational response that reads global pattern as individuated marks.
The analysis gets ever more remote from the original folk belief that the world is a collision of substantial entities. It becomes eventually some rationalist account of order vs disorder. A tale that is all about the abstractions of the form and purpose of Being - even though that is not something the culture of physics would want to admit.
And again, people pick up on this discomfort. Entropy and information are treated in discussions like these as the "new concrete stuff of reality", because that is what "real" has to mean to maintain a purely materialist discourse.
Panpsychism and other pathologies of reason can then set up camp on the paradoxes that result from not understanding why what is working for physics in fact works for physics.
Quoting apokrisis
No, their theologies were well ahead of their time. To the great bulk of the nonacademic culture that surrounded them , their ideas were generations ahead.
Quoting apokrisis
I thought logic was a cultural creation like the rest of philosophy. Isnt that the view of writers like Lakoff and Johnson, who view logic as embodied activity? I’ve read 5 or 6 different interpretations of Peirce’s triadic model and they all differ. You don’t think the variability in how people interpret ‘firstness’ has any bearing on the use od the logic? I think how much the application of his logic will differ from user to user depends on what they want to do with it. The more abstract and complex the aspect of the world one looks at , the greater difference interpretation will make. If you don’t see God in Peirce’a triad, you’re not looking closely enough.
Quoting apokrisis
That’s one reading of Kelly, one he was bemusedly familiar with.
“Cognitive, behavioural, emotional, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and even dialectical materialist and Zen Buddhist: these are some of the ways in which George A. Kelly's (1955) theory has been labelled, as he himself tells with pleased irony (Kelly, 1969/1965, pp. 216-217). Such obstinacy in trying to insert personal construct theory (PCT) within already formalized psychological perspectives, and the odd variety of proposals so distant each from other on the epistemological and theoretical level, in our opinion testify as better would not be possi-ble the originality of Kelly's thought.”( Gabrielle Chiari)
As with any thinker , ther are different Kelly camps. I happen to agree with those who align Kelly with pragmatism , phenomenology and constructivism.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you kidding me? The 1950’s and early 1960’s were among the most conformist periods in American history. The last thing the average person was ready for during that time was self-transformation.
The counterculture didn’t emerge as a substantial force until after Kelly’s death in 1967.
Quoting apokrisis
Behaviorism ( and psychoanalysis) had such a stifling hold over academic psychology during this period that Jerome Bruner had to establish his own group at Harvard in the 1960’s to wrest control away from information processing and bring psychology back to its roots in pragmatism. That took more than 30 years to accomplish. Neisser’s groundbreaking text in 1967 made little impact until the 1970’s, and even then second generation cognitive science still had a struggle on its hands.
In Britain things weren’t much better. Only a few malcontents attempted to break way from the stranglehold of S-R and rationalistic cognitivism. These included Don Bannister, Rom Harre, Fay Fransella and John Shotter. Bannister had become close friends with Kelly and began to establish an academic community in Britain around Kelly’s approach, which spawned social constructionist , radical constructivist and hermeneutic readings of Kelly.
Quoting apokrisis
The choice of individual shouldn’t be the issue. The issue should be how to divvy up and characterize an entire culture of an era. Claiming that America of the mid 1950’s was ready for what Kelly offered stands in direct contrast to the reality of a profoundly hidebound academic and mainstream culture. Yes, Kelly reacted against S-R, cognitivism and Freud , but I think he went farther than that , challenging even some enactivist notions.
Even if that’s not the case, I can think of any number of original thinkers( Heidegger , Nietzsche, Leibnitz) who were so far ahead of their ‘time’ ( the bulk of the populace) that they could count only a tiny handful of writers to directly contrast their ideas with. Nietzsche had Schopenhauer , Kierkegaard , Darwin and Marx, and more distantly , Hegel. The rest of the culture that surrounded him was living in a much more traditional world. In fact , 120 years later , only a small segment of today’s world has assimilated his thinking.
I think the typical situation for original thinkers is that their closet competition is a tiny handful of writers. Beyond that immediate sphere of influence lies a larger circle of maybe a few thousand thinkers who are regurgitating the previous generation’s cutting edge thinking. Beyond that is a much larger circle of non-academic educated culture which represents the best of an even older generation. And beyond that is an uneducated pluraity that still identify with even more ancient ways of thinking. So as far as the wider culture influencing the work of an original thinker, I think as we move out from the small inner circle in every wider approaches , the numbers of individuals grows, and the influence becomes more and more indirect.
"Newton spoke of forces - little pushes and pulls delivered by corpuscular objects. "
That was LeSage. Newton couldn't explain gravity and disagreed stringly with corpuscules. You can compare them somehow with gravitons in modern views on gravity though the corpuscules werd calculated to be non-existent. Gravitons are quantum particles and behave very differently from their classical counterparts.
In other words - who does the thinking? - the thing that integrates the information - my best guess is the anthropic principle. What is your best guess? The anthropic principle integrates the information, but acts on different information ( unique consciousness ) ?? :smile:
I've been thinking about the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, and the notion of an immaterial mind. I would normally think about them as bundled into the one unit, hence monism, but it occurred to me, due to comments you made, that no laws are broken in thinking of mind as either all matter, or all energy, or all information. So this might require a rethinking of monism to some sort of compatibilism?......Informational mind??
What I love about Information Philosophy is that there is so much unexplored philosophical meat!
At least as far as I am aware. :lol:
DNA.
Quoting Gnomon
Code. 100 odd volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica worth . :smile:
:up: ....Very nice. thank you for your comment. Are there limits on the minimum amount of information?.... According to my model that would be impossible, since in the end, everything reduces to information, if we are to have knowledge of it.
First you lump and then you split, as suits your rhetorical convenience. Ho hum.
Quoting Joshs
I’ve yet to see evidence you understand how it works. So not much to say here.
Quoting Joshs
I’m surprised there is any kind of Kelly industry at all. He seems far too minor a figure.
Quoting Joshs
True. But I was there and so in retrospect, it seems strikingly non-linear in the speed of the social transition. One minute, only the beats wore Levi’s. The next, jeans were the uniform. So a tension builds over time and then a phase transition results. One state of social conformity is replaced by the next.
Quoting Joshs
Plainly the US wasn’t ready, and even the UK found him a minority interest. My comment was that he reflected ideas that were in the air - if you were part of the intelligentsia - but he did not feature as a thought leader in the way that “revolt” eventually played out. That is, in the hedonism and other irrational/romanticised responses that masked the US’s economic turn from a production to a consumption based system. People ended up in EST classes and multilevel marketing as the mainstream self-actualisation therapy of the yuppie 90s. :wink:
As I have said, if I am lukewarm on Kelly it is because the cognitive part of his story is already familiar and taken for granted from pragmatist philosophy, social constructionist psychology and anticipation-habit based models of neuroscience.
Then the aspect I say is being overplayed by you is how the individual point of view becomes a justification for the reheated romanticism that animates PoMo pluralism and anti-structuralism.
So you celebrate Kelly as a self-proclaimed renegade. Others might find him not particularly startling, just more of a missed opportunity in the Anglo psychological tradition that never really focused on the social construction of the individual mind.
Quoting Joshs
Of course.
And yet also, no thinker begins outside the social circumstances that shaped them as their arena in which to begin to react as an individual.
That’s not understanding, it’s accepting without understanding. The reason I challenge you to back up these statements is because you have a tendency to make sweeping claims such as ‘everything is information’ and ‘form is fundamental’ without much qualification. The rampant misunderstanding that results from taking these kinds of statements at face value is why posters such as Banno won’t take it seriously.
Quoting Pop
I haven’t said that you’re not. What I’ve said is that you don’t seem to really understand why it makes sense to do so. It feels true, so you run with it. I’m not convinced by that, even though I agree with it. I’d like to see your working out.
Quoting Pop
What you need to understand is that your interaction model does not include you, but is relative to you: a potential idea in relation to an intentional mind manifesting two-dimensional information as an observable property of both. Relation is the ground, not information. Look deeper.
“Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something” (Carlo Rovelli, ‘Helgoland’)
Quoting Pop
See above. You’re interacting with an idea that has no form, and manifesting form in a written description.
Quoting Pop
Yes, you could say that the eternal universe is self-organising. But you have to keep in mind: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” The universe you describe in a system is not absolute, because you exist outside the system you use to describe it. So we can’t really avoid subjectivity here, only recognise it as such. This is why I keep going back to the Venn diagram. We can agree on this logical relation, at least, as a grounding to our discussion/interaction.
So when you attribute self-organisation as a potential of the system itself, you’re attributing your intentionality (ie. form) to the system you have formed. But you can’t presume that self-organisation is the intentionality of the universe, just because it’s how you understand it. The intentionality behind systems theory is form - I get that. The intentionality behind the universe could just as well be information.
This may also be why there are so many interpretations of the Tao Te Ching, and of QM....:chin:
No, I take a** third person perspective and first person perspective into account and I can see the abyss at its end. Hence my guess with the anthropic principle doing the thinking.
This is a forum. I try to simplify and reduce things to a minimum of wordage. I cannot do what Joshs and Apo do, it would take me all day. Misunderstanding results from this, but I cannot see a way around it.
What you don't know- that's a strange way to define a set. Ok, it's an unknown set.
What remains to be known given what you know- that's even worse! How did this get published? It's junk.
All I can say is look deeper. The anthropic principle deals with possibility, not perceived potential or intentionality. Many a poor argument starts with this misunderstanding. There’s a deeper level of discussion regarding information that both you and Gnomon are avoiding. It’s what leads to conclusions such as the anthropic principle (or G*D) doing the thinking. But we can’t force the paradigm shift, and you seem pretty comfortable where you are. Oh well.
Information can be simply defined as the opposite of a blank sheet of paper minus the writing on it[/b]
So: ( paper - writing )opposite = information. or Paper + writing = information
But I am interested in a deeper understanding. I want to understand why information changes us.
This was explained to you previously, but in an edit, so you may have missed it.
Quoting Pop
How information shapes and changes us might be another thread. Am a bit pooped at the moment. :smile:
Yes. As I said above, entropy is the _number_ of microstates available to explore. The actual microstate occupied by a system would be the totality of its information, and is not specified by the system's entropy.
Impressed forces? What do you mean? That forces are fotced?
If you have a problem with the phrasing, best take it up with the dude that wrote the law. Tell him what a dope he is. :lol:
Does anyone speak about dope...? :lol:
Quoting Pop
Thanks, but I would prefer your opinion, what do you think/believe and why.
Translated in Dutch:
Wet 2. Verandering in beweging is evenredig met de opgedrukte aandrijfkracht;
En wordt in lijn gemaakt wanneer de kracht wordt ingedrukt.
"De kracht wordt ingedrukt". The force is impressed. I would I could contact the guy who wrote that. You either impress or force. The meaning is clear, but hearing that phrase over and over makes the force look as an object. Using these words over and over poisons the mind, like small doses given each time. :)
I can see you are certainly mucho impressed by your own arguments. But Newton likely had his reasons for distinguishing between vis impressa and vis insita, don’tcha think?
"I can see you are certainly mucho impressed by your own arguments. But Newton likely had his reasons for distinguishing between vis impressa and vis insita, don’tcha think?"
Why do you see I am certainly impressed? My arguments impress but i'm not not impressed by them. Certainly not. Maybe Newton had his reasons but that only shows he didn't understand vis. Vis impressa and vis insita just can't be causing one another as he implies. He just didn't understand force. He knew how to use it. And that's where his mistake originated.
Another view is:
Paper is physical matter.
Ink is physical matter.
So paper and ink (the combination) is physical matter.
Information (brain states) is encoded to paper and ink (because it's cheap and relatively stable) and decoded by yourself or others (by convention) - an attempt to transfer brain states.
I have a short theory of consciousness. It is badly in need of renovation, but it might give you some clues. Ultimately you have to do something like this on your own, unless you are to take somebody else's word for it .
:up: Yes, and it causes a change in the sender and recipients brain state, thus changing them. And through an ongoing process of such informing, we evolve.
That is a great point! The distinction between order and entropy is the information in the system. That is very much the same as the distinction of the blank page and the scribble on it is information, or the grey nothingness and an object within it is information. The object has form, as distinct to the nothingness.
At the same time as I describe this I am aware what I describe is identical to my neural patterning creating it. So I am interacting with this idea, which is entirely internal, and when you interact with it, it is internal to you. This creates the process of information, where the form of an idea interacts with a larger form that is our consciousness, thus creating it’s moments, and distinctions of moments and thus sense of time, and this way we evolve..
Without these distinctions of order against entropy, there would be total order, or total entropy, and this way the system would be a nothing, so could not interact and evolve.
So, information enables the interaction and evolution of a system.
The definition of information in this sense is: information enables the interaction of form. or Information = evolutionary interaction
On a more human scale this definition reduces to: Information changes us, in a continuous evolutionary process.
This is well illustrated in fictional "form":
[i]I was bewildered by all the information given to me all at once.
Information of her brothers death caused her to sink to the floor in tears.
Information about the party ruined the surprise.
The information in the rock changed the paleontologist's mind about its origins.[/i]
As I understand it anyhow. :smile:
". That is very much the same as the distinction of the blank page and the scribble on it is information, or the grey nothingness and an object within it is information. The object has form, as distinct to the nothingness."
Illuminating! :100:
Cool, where those states are assumed equiprobable, and in which case the analogy according to the linked Wikipedia page is that information is the _number_of messages available to... send? ... store? ... explore? ... whatever, but the cardinality of the message space. The number of alternatives.
So, is we is or is we ain't... compelled to interpret the one as the other? The maths of alternative states/events/outcomes/anythings as the maths of alternative messages more specifically? If so, where, exactly?
I thought this would be a physics question, and I should be prepared to accept an interesting justification for the specific interpretation, even while not fully understanding it. But I have to admit,
Quoting Kenosha Kid
sounds like any old woo. Please explain.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Is it like, the actual message sent along a channel would have its own surprise value, its Shannon 'self-information', analogously not specified by the source's entropy, i.e. the Shannon information of the whole message space? That would make 'totality of its information' the (log of the) probability of that particular state? That doesn't seem to be what you mean.
Or are you appealing to some non-technical (at least non-Shannon) intuition of information as stream-of-fact?
'the totality of its information'... how physics, please? Else, what, exactly?
What is information? - Physics Stack Exchangehttps://physics.stackexchange.com › questions › what-is...
Jan 23, 2016 — information contained in a physical system = the number of yes/no questions you need to get answered to fully specify the system. https://physics.stackexchange.
I don't think this means information resides in the physical system but is used by the observer to measure the physical system.
Other definitions came up but this is the one I agree with.
This quantifies the information in the system, but does not tell us what information is.
I've been searching for a definition of information, expecting to see somebody has beaten me to it, but I can not find anything better. I saw a lecture last night by some information professor, but he had no definition. So still searching hoping not to find it. :razz:
Quoting apokrisis
Speaking of Romanticism, let’s get back to Peirce.
First, let’s review a definition of philosophical Romanticism from The Basics of Philosophy. You’ll notice that postmodernism is not mentioned as a form of Romanticism. On the contrary, it is generally thought that Nietzsche, the first postmodernist thinker, signaled the end of Romanticism.
‘The roots of Philosophical Romanticism can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau, (who is credited with the idea of the "noble savage", uncorrupted by artifice and society), thought that civilization fills Man with unnatural wants and seduces him away from his true nature and original freedom. Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism (see the section on Idealism) posited that we do not directly see "things-in-themselves"; we only understand the world through our human point of view, an idea developed by the American Transcendentalism of the mid-19th Century.
The German Idealists who followed on from Kant and adapted and expanded his work with their own interpretations of Idealism, can all be considered Romanticists in their outlook. Among these the most important were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and (arguably) Arthur Schopenhauer. Hegel was perhaps the most influential of the German Idealist philosophers, and his idea that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (Absolute Idealism) had far-reaching effects.’
Now let’s look at a discussion by Andrew Stables of Peirce’s relation to those ol’ Romantics Kant and Hegel.
Both Kant and Hegel were progressivists. Kant's moral absolutism can be contrasted with Hegel's universal progressivism. While Kant saw progression through assimilation (via duty), Hegel posits progression through agonism.
‘Kant explains the empirical as making sense only within the context of the rational: cognitively in terms of the fundamental Categories, and ethically in terms of the Categorical Imperative and the moral law that flows from it (Kant, 1909, p. 281).Thus mind dictates material/bodily experience. Peirce does not need to separate mind and body, at least in his later semiotic thinking, but he still offers a rational schema which accounts for experience: his various reformulations of the triadic models built on Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. As with Kant, the pure ‘categories' here are implicit and remain hidden: one cannot isolate Firstness any more than one could isolate pure Relation or Modality. Any attempt to explain Firstness in terms of Qualities begs the response that Qualities may be features of a noumenal world that remains ultimately inaccessible at the phenomenal level, though Peirce does not raise the distinction and committed Peirceans take him as denying it. However, as neither Kantian Category nor Peircean Firstness is either empirically or logically testable other than indirectly, through the creation and working out of alternative models, there are no grounds for resolving this.
Also, Peirce remains as committed as any idealist or rationalist philosopher to the logical possibility of infinite non-existent worlds and entities. Given the role that pure chance plays in the increasingly pansemiotic approach that Peirce takes towards the end of his life, the possibilities for change are potentially infinite.Why actual change should be progressive or rational is entirely unclear, unless some higher power has invested certain beings (specifically humans) with rational power and free will, such that arbitrary change at the level of Firstness (of there be such a level) is transformed into rational change at the level of Thirdness; however, for Peirce explicitly to take this position would be an admission that he had scarcely moved on from Kant at all. While Kant's argument for rationalism is circular, Peirce, like Hegel, effectively collapses mind and experience. Like Hegel, the rationalist idealist, Peirce seems increasingly to see the universe as spirit unfolding or revealing.
Kant, Hegel and Peirce are all Enlightenment progressivists insofar as progress is regarded as universal and rational. None would be sympathetic to a social constructivist, nihilist, poststructuralist or any strongly relativistic take on progress. Kant has progress flow from the actions of autonomous rational agents motivated by that which guides ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within' (Kant, 1909, p. 260): that is, universal rational laws which are expressed in nature and which guide experience but can be clear only to the mind. While for Kant progress comes through assimilation (freedom as duty), to Hegel it comes via the agonistic dialectic of inevitable opposition and resolution, as reason works itself out in and as the world (Hegel, 1977). Peirce’s concerns are always less social than Hegel's, but in the juxtaposition of Firstness and Secondness and in the resolution that Thirdness offers as the Interpretant Sign, there is a kind of implicit dialectical movement that resonates with Hegel. Also note that Hegel, while commonly construed as an idealist, is arguably not a dualist insofar as the body of the world cannot be divorced from mind itself. Peirce's progressivism can therefore be regarded as broadly Hegelian, though not expressed in terms of alienation, struggle and negation.
However, just as Hegelian progress can seem to some merely to be inevitable change, since there are no criteria for assessing it as progress (other than the accrual of power, perhaps), Peirce can be held to a similar charge. Peirce assumes change to be progressive because he attempts to explain it as rational process. Of the three, only Kant's Categorical Imperatives offer grounds for judging whether change has been progressive, and even the criteria for judgment thus derived would be open to evaluative interpretation. Universal unfolding is not necessarily progressive. As Peirce assumes it to be, then he must tacitly be working on a basis not dissimilar to Kant's: the logic of the rational outcome.
Peirce, therefore, owes many debts to rationalism and can be seen as its heir rather than its successor.
There are many who remain unconvinced that Peirce's work can offer the final word, even in terms of philosophical underpinning, but rather see it, for all its inspiring qualities, as a not entirely happy marriage of competing traditions rather than a final resolution of the tensions between them. Merrell, for example, cites Peirce's ‘collusion . . . of evolutionary cosmology coupled with his no-nonsense “realism” tinged with “idealist' metaphysics' (Merrell, 1997, p. 95). The present argument is that he does not move as far from an Enlightenment rationalism as his more committed followers claim.’
(Andrew Stables)
Sounds awfully Romantic to me.
You are hoping *not* to find? The I think your hopes will come true!
Are you below the right question?
Just pretend we’re talking about information.
Information is the equalisation of different forms by assigning a number to them.
Would you equalize them necessarily?
What do you think of the mass - energy - information equivalence principle?
Im not sure I follow you. You mean the information in the information paradox concerning black holes? Or how much information is contaied in a mass?
the mass - energy - information equivalence principle?
?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844021004382
A mass, say that of an electron-positron pair, can be changed in two massless photons. What can you do with that? You can give more motion, and thus more possible states, to other matter particles. You can ionize an atom, you can warm up a gas.
Are you Damir Ivancevic? :smile:
Anyway, I will read it, because consciousness is always a hot subject! And I'll come back to you ...
Quoting Joshs
The original issue here was phenomenology’s roots in Cartesian dualism and representationalism.
Romanticism is then the more general dualistic response to Enlightenment materialism - an effort to appeal to the reality of the ideal and sublime.
Peirce’s is an anti-Cartesian view. He called it vicious individualism, among other things. He opposed both monism and dualism with his triadic systems epistemology and ontology - his pragmatism and his semiotics.
Peirce might follow in Kant and Hegel’s footsteps in developing their antimonies and dialectics into a full blooded story of hierarchical development. But he went way beyond in pin-pointing the mediating role of a sign relation that forges a self along with its world. As I say, he showed epistemology and ontology to be two versions on the one rational structure of relations.
Quoting Joshs
So the conclusion is that Peirce is essentially still a rationalist - ie; argued a structuralist case. And you want to say that sounds like idealism-tinged metaphysics to you?
Cool.
I'm currently reading The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by Astronomer Barrow & Physicist Tipler. I was superficially aware that AP was a religious and philosophical position on the human-friendly universe. But I didn't know that it was also a serious scientific hypothesis. This book is 700 pages of dense philosophical reasoning, and scientific analysis, but no overtly religious assertions at all. The early chapters give an exhaustive history of the concept from Ancient Greece to Quantum Cosmology. And the middle sections are full of complex mathematical expressions (equations), and technical analysis. So, I have been impressed with the serious thought that has been put into a notion that has been marginalized by post-Enlightenment Science.
This 1986 book (2009 reprint) has a lot to say about Information, and Information Processing. But, so far, nothing about actively Integrating Information. Anyway, a "principle" in science or religion is essentially an article of faith, or at least an axiom, that is taken to be a "brute fact", as opposed to a Ruler's regulation, with a Reason behind the Rule. Like the universe, it just is, and we don't know for sure why it is what it is. So, the Anthropic Principle is accepted by some as almost a Law of Physics. But it is not accepted by those who deny a human-favoring agency, such as a God, who might mandate such a specific reason for being. Consequently AP, the numerous technical coincidences that point to a world designed to produce living and thinking beings, is controversial primarily due to the implication of an intentional cosmic Agency, as contrasted with Random Chance hitting a jackpot, that is only incidentally favorable to egotistical beings.
So, the question remains : is this Principle like the Law of Gravity, which tends to aggregate and integrate stars & planet, but without any planning, or is it more like a Program that is intentionally designed to work toward a pre-defined Objective? I happen to prefer the notion of a Cosmic Program, with built-in directions, but no pre-determined Final Answer. Which is why I have been forced to assume, as an axiom, that there must be a Programmer or Enformer or Rule-maker to decide which direction this experiment in self-organization will go. In other words, to give the program the Means toward a specified End. Your answer to "who does the thinking?" is a human-oriented Principle. But how does an abstract Principle think and act, unless it is also a free agency with goals and intentions? Does Reason overrule Chance? :smile:
Principle :
[i]1. a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.
2. a general scientific theorem or law that has numerous special applications across a wide field.[/i]
___Oxford
Brute Fact :
In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation.
Laws are general rules and ideas that adhere to the nature of the universe while principles describe specific phenomena that require clarity and explanation.
https://sciencing.com/difference-between-law-and-principle-in-physics-12760897.html
Objective :
A fundamental objective is an end that you are trying to achieve · A means objective is a way of achieving an end or fundamental objective ·
https://www.structureddecisionmaking.org/steps/objectives/objectives2b/
I'm not sure what your reference is to. So wavefunction is total information about a system. Is information then a mathematical construct or a physical reality?
Yes. Every book contains the same AMOUNT of information. Considering equal books with an equal amount of symbols. The Shannon entropy as well as the thermodynamic entropy are equal. But the books are very different, if they are a book on non-perturbative quantum gravity and a book on the philosophy of science by Paul Feyerabend.
1) BRAIN(mental content) or BRAIN(information as a mathematical construct) or
BRAIN(wavefunction as a mathematical construct)
2) Information is physical matter.
3) something else.
Entropy is a function of the number of possible messages. Information is still afaik the content of those messages, i.e. the values of the degrees of freedom (011000100111100) rather than the number of degrees of freedom (15).
Quoting bongo fury
E.g. the state space vector, wavefunction, binary readout, whatever. The thing that physically encodes the information.
Quoting bongo fury
The message space isn't the message afaik (assuming a parallel with state space -- I'm not sure I've ever used the phrase "message space" in a sentence before). The message space is a map of all the degrees of freedom of any such message. The particular message is a coordinate in that space.
Shannon information is the particular things we'd need to know about something to e.g. build a copy or predict its future behaviour. Shannon entropy is essentially the number of things we'd need to know (or rather a function of that number).
Can I choose "BRAIN: Wavefunction as a physical construct"?
Quoting apokrisis
As Thompson’s recent reappraisal of Husserl indicates, it was never phenomenology that trafficked in Cartesianism and representationalism, it was the early Anglo-American interpreters of Husserl who imposed their own bias on phenomenology. That is why phenomenology is only now having its day in the sun for those in anglo-american philosophy and psychology who are looking for support for their anti-foundationalist, anti-rationalist models.
Quoting apokrisis
But Hegel , a romantic , was not a dualist.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, he repackaged Hegel’s synthesis of mind and matter, and swapped out the former’s dialectical rationalist logic with his triadic rationalist logic.
Quoting apokrisis
Hegel’s Rationalism is a form of German idealism.
No. Entropy is a function of the possible permutations (S=ln(N)). Not every permutation contains a message.
Again no. The information contained is not the content. Its just a number.
No and yes. You use 2 different definitions of Shannon entropy here.
Quoting Gnomon
Evolution is a brilliant mind, imo. It takes everything into account, and then has all the time in the universe to see what survives and what doesn't. In the end the best possible solution, under the circumstances, is presented every time. I normally think perfection is impossible, but evolution has got to be pretty close! Similarly AP, ensures that in Gnomon's pockets of the universe, a phase state of order occurs, due to the underlying self organization in such states. That ordering occurs is determined, but with a slight element of randomness such that we cannot foresee exactly what the ordering result will be, but obviously, the right elements found themselves in the right circumstances at the right time, is how I see it. So I tend to think life is determined, but exactly where and what time, is random. But we have spoken at length about this before. :smile:
The book sounds fascinating, but there is always so much to learn on my list. If you find anything of import, please let me know.
What do you think about the definition? https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/583523
"The wavefunction is the total information about a system,"
Almost correct. The wavefunction contains only information about the chances where to find a particle. Or the chances of finding a momentum in a certain range. The total information about a system is dependent on the configuration of the particles wrt to each other. But if there is no interaction with the systems surroundings, this wavefunction wavers out in phasespace (well, the position part wavers out while the momentum part collapses). After a while all useful information will be lost. The chances are conserved though (unitarity). Information about these chances, or better, the particles with their chances are conserved whenn falling into a black hole.
Information is interaction. Ideally it is evolutionary interaction. But within that interaction, something external has to be translated to an internal structure of knowledge ( constructivism style ). At minimum, that knowledge structure gets changed............Bear in mind, I am conceptualizing this to something that makes sense to me. I haven't heard it explained quite like this before. And frankly Information seems to be one of those concepts like consciousness, that we have been largely blind to.
I think the definitions presented earlier are reliable, and I can not find alternative better ones. Have you had any luck?
Why is that? Ten equal pieces of paper with different numbers on them (1 digit) contain the same information (when expressed as a number). The form of the different numbers is different though. The entropic definition of information does not take that into account though. Does interaction?
Hey guys, something cool.
In trying to validate this definition of information. I thought about the double slit experiment and wave function collapse, and much to my delight the definition is consistent. Bear in mind I used no physics at all to arrive at it . I used information theory ( personal understanding ) reductionism, and systems theory, @Daniel was a great help.
Information enables the interaction of form, But it doesn't enable the interaction of something that has no form. You cannot provide me something that has no information - ever! Since in order for information to occur, interaction has to cause a change to a system. So this would explain why the wave function collapses, but get this - it also predicts entanglement cannot contain information, can only contain information at the point of collapse. It also explains Wigner's friend scenario.
The interaction element of information is missing in most understanding of information. What do you think?
** interaction creates information.
That's probably a bigger ask than I assumed, and less to be expected of physicists than I assumed.
Thanks anyway.
Not until you interact with them.
A state of matter at zero Kelvin contains zero information. There is only one state. Since S=lnN the information is zero.
Also when you interact.
That observation is an interaction.
Quoting Prishon
Yes.
** Realists / materialists assume a mind independent world.
I dont make an observation of the state. I imagine it. It can exist without me interacting with it. The state came to be because of interaction, thats true. In fact interactions are necessary for systems to develop. Isolation does no good for a system. It gets more and more diffuse. If all the systems mass is converted to photons (by introducing antimatter) the photons posses energy but still the information is zero. Of course their the associated quantum field configuration contains energy. But that's pure energy. Pure energy (photons but also gluons, hypergluons, or gravitons) does not necessarily contain information. The same holds for mass. Its the *form* that contains information. Be it entropic (the number of states) or the different forms containing the same entropic information (the different figures on a oiece of paper). These different forms owe their existence indeed to interactions. A number 8 form is different from the other numbers because of different interactions ( but they contain the same number of information). An 8 written up by us has the information content of being a number. So have the other digits written uo. They need interaction with brain content to get their useful meaning. For a person loving ballgames, the 8 resembles two piled up balls. The 6 can be a head with a hair on one side. Evolution of lifeforms took place because the Earth finds itself rotating between the hot sun on one side and the freezing space on the other. Heat flowed on the surface of the Earth giving rise to different forms in matter like the diiferent digits on the paper. Every living system contains about the same number of information but not maximal nor minimal. Different animals are as it were the different digits on paper. But with eyes and nice different bodies and different internal and external worlds.
I'm not going to reply to each of your daft comments, but as a physicist I guess I'm obliged to treat this. What you've just said is equivalent to "Only the position operator can be used to find expectation values of the wavefunction." Which is, of course, total rubbish.
Good point. I'll correct myself. The wavefunction is our best representation of the information about a system. A crowbar separation there between representation of a thing and a thing itself. The actual information properly belongs to the physical system itself imo, where each of its constituent parts are, not where we represent them to be, how each are moving, not how we represent their motions, what their charges, spins, masses, etc. are. How we represent it is irrelevant to what it is. Always good to demand clarity on that point.
It is true you don't make an observation , but imagine one, and the same situation arises, and this still needs to be understood.
Form seems to be the thing the universe is evolving. This impression converges from several angles, and you are suggesting something of the sort.
Form is endlessly variable and open ended. But it enables a substance to mesh into the larger system, such that it can interact.** form is something the universe needs itself. :smile:
Where did I state that? The momentum operator can too. I do QM in phasespace.
Rubbish!
Quoting Prishon
Then the wavefunction doesn't merely encode position, but also momentum. In fact, the wavefunction encodes any property for which you can construct a complete basis set of eigenstates, which is why the statement:
Quoting Prishon
is bullshit.
Quoting Prishon
Do you really mean phase space rather than reciprocal space? Then you're doing it wrong. Or, more likely, lying about doing it at all.
I guess we would have to say your imagination is a physical interaction neurally?
I mean phasespace. The combined view. Luckily I had a good teacher. The Wigner function rules suppreme there. Position wavers and momentum converges.When the system doesnt interact.
Why are you not the one lying?For a physicist, as yiu claim to be, you make a lot of fundamental mistakes...
Good observation! Yes, the forms whirling around (forms are indeed the thing) in my inner world couldnt exist without interaction. Like the forms in the ohysical world. In my neural network virtual ALL forms cen whirl around. Interactions shape bith forms (in bothe the outside and insude world(. Both forms are interdependent.
Quoting Prishon
Because I'm the one who knows that you can get more than positions out of a wavefunction maybe? Which suggests I've at least seen the time-independent Schrödinger equation.
Again you jump to unexamied conclusions. Where did I state you cant get more than position from the wavefunction? Calling the Wigner function a fiekd I find very strange. QFT is not what we discuss now. We discuss the wavefunction which is derivable from fields. Who is the liar? You.
Im way past that equation. Sorry...
As I noted at the start, Husserl seemed surprisingly keen to contribute to this misunderstanding then.
Then I agree.
You should have paused to understand it en route. At least you'd have been exposed to more than the position operator.
Quoting Prishon
Quoting Prishon
Unless you're suggesting you can get information out of the system that isn't in it to begin with...
Quoting Prishon
Oh god. A field is a mathematical object that takes different values at different coordinates and that supports addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Quantum fields of QFT are fields, yes. Not all fields are quantum fields. Like how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, yes?
At fundamental energy, two wavicles modulate their information ( frequency, amplitude, etc ) to a resultant wavicle that "integrates that information".
This is all that ever happens, can happen.
This continues to amass until it gets to a density of elementary particles, then atoms, then molecules, etc
These are all symbolized forms. Forms are the things that represent order, in pockets of the universe experiencing a phase state of self organization. forms are the thing evolving.
Is there some bosonic force creating this order?
This would be the thing doing the thinking? - Integrating the information to various forms.
We must complete the quote:
“Accordingly one might almost call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism, even though It Is obliged and precisely by its radical development of Cartesian motifs to reject nearly all the well-known doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.”
Descartes used the method of radical doubting to uncover the essential indubitable ground of the cogito. It is this drilling down beneath unexamined preconceptions guiding our everyday acceptance of the world that Husserl took from Descartes, not the conclusion that the indubitable essence of being is the cogito. This grounding Husserl rejected. I think all philosophy since Descartes takes from him this spirit of thoroughgoing doubting, with the aim of arriving at a point where skepticism can be dispelled.
“And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically: that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences. Let the idea guiding our meditations be at first the Cartesian idea of a science that shall be established as radically genuine, ultimately an all-embracing science.
But, now that we know longer have at our disposal any already given science ( after all we are not accepting any given science) as an example of radically genuine science , what about the indubitability of that idea itself, the idea mainly of a science that shall be grounded absolutely?
Is it a legitimate final idea, the possible aim of some possible practice? Obviously that is something too we must not presuppose , to say nothing of taking any norms as already established for testing such possibilities-or perchance a whole system of norms in which the style proper to genuine science is allegedly prescribed.
That would mean presupposing a whole logic as a theory of science , whereas logic must be included among the sciences overthrown in overthrowing all science. Descartes himself presupposed an ideal of science, the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural science. As a fateful prejudice this ideal determines philosophies for centuries and hiddenly determines the Mediations themselves.
Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the start that the all-embracing science must have the form of a deductive system, in which the whole structure rests, ordine geometrico, on an axiomatic foundation that grounds the deduction absolutely. For him a role similar to that of geometrical axioms in geometry is played in the all-embracing science by the axiom of the ego's absolute certainty of himself, along with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego only this axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of geometry and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding even of geometrical knowledge. None of that shall determine our thinking. As beginning philosophers we do not as yet accept any normative ideal of science; and only so far as we produce one newly for ourselves can we ever have such an ideal.
In a quasi-Cartesian fashion we intend, as radically beginning philosophers, to carry out meditations with the utmost critical precaution and a readiness for any-even the most far-reaching transformation of the old-Cartesian meditations. Seductive aberrations, into which Descartes and later thinkers strayed, will have to be clarified and avoided as we pursue our course.
I don't see much rejection of the key thing that interests me here - a rejection of the primacy being given to a homuncular self, the first person point of view, the ego that grounds the rationalising after all preconceptions have been stripped away.
This is the fatal flaw - the one Peircean semiotics fixes. By focusing on the primacy of the modelling relation, both the self and its world become a co-construction. The two emergent poles of the one dialectical process.
This deals with Kant's epistemic strictures without then lapsing into the homuncular regress of a conscious observing ego sat behind the curtain. The "self" becomes just the fact that a set of habits are integrated from "a point of view".
Once psychology is understood as a semiotic modelling relation - one based on a mediating system of signs, and thus a code - then psychological science can get on with the interesting job of seeing the degree that two quite different levels of semiosis, biosemiosis and anthrosemiosis, play their part in shaping some individual psyche.
But if you don't question the central motif that is the dualism of world and ego, then you wind up down the same cul-de-sac as Descartes.
Maybe phenomenology is rescuing itself by a new stress on enactivism or embodiment. But that seems to be just the incorporation of biosemiosis so far. It doesn't appear to involve the socially constructed aspect of mind and selfhood - our enactive embodiment in a shaping cultural environment.
That is the PoMo-Romanticism having its effect. The driving idea there is to reject global constraints on local freedoms. To be shaped is read as being anti-self, rather than the source of selfhood in the first place.
So you are not yet convincing me that phenomenology is anything more than a passing curiosity in the history of ideas.
Enactivism itself is of course a crucial corrective to Cartesian representationalism. But Peirce already founds everything in that kind of pragmatic embodiment. And there are plenty of psychologists, from Helmholtz to Brunner, who got it as well.
That would be you.
Or, at heart, you and me are the same, just different in formation :smile:
The physics stuff is beyond me (and most of us because of the math) so sometimes I just try to follow the discussion. Not sure of the Mass = Energy = Information model though. I think you could do a model of everything with just energy - except where does the energy come from?
Yeah, me too. So it is great to have @Kenosha Kid, and @Prishon to fill in the blanks.
The mass - energy - information equivalence principle, suggests these are all the same thing. We know since E=mc2 that matter = energy. So really we have energy and information left to consider. Do we see energy, or do we see information about energy? Energy must exist, but can not without information, so it is a tricky question. Largely physics has been blind to this, and only lately has it become a consideration.
I think it is largely an issue of paradigm politics. A definition of information, in this day and age, should be out there, but the one we found, which is explanatory, changes its normal meaning, and understanding as a result. Information is almost the same as interaction, in fact. But interaction already has that spot.
I will make another thread soon to explore this, as I think it is important to understand that information changes us. And how this works today is an important consideration.
Yuuuup!!! And thats ALL ( objective) to be found. Its us assigning a variation of that wavefunction. Thats no inherent property.. There is no such thing as an objective wavefunction traveling through momentum space.Sorry...
Quoting apokrisis
After having now read a number of papers discussing Peircean semiotics in the context of a range of approaches within philosophy and psychology here are my tentative thoughts:
In the wake of Hegel, Darwin and Marx, three distinct schools of thought arose to correct for the inadequacies of Kantianism. Peircean pragmaticist semiotics is a rationalist, progressivist model centering around his triadic logic. It finds general expression in Popper’s falsificationist philosophy science, in which ‘crisp’ truth is progressively attained as an asymptotic limit. One is allowed to talk about progress in attaining scientific truth through falsification only because the methods of scientific validation are presumed to sit still , to be resistant to cultural differences.
The second school is the pragmatism of Dewey, James and Mead, which , while sympathetic to Peirce’s approach , avoids the strict logic of his code-based semiotics in favor of an intersubjectively mediated empiricism. Some of the more conservative versions of enactivism , along with Putnam , endorse this perspective. The third school includes the later Wittgenstein , phenomenology, postmodern and postatructuralisms, radical enactivism
and hermeneutics. This diverse group
rejects representationalism, computationalism and rationality-based progressivism. Their notion of semiotics is not code or logic based but instead compatible with Wittgenstein’s language games as forms of
life. They reject the concept of language as ‘meaning’ , of truth as propositional belief, and critique empiricism and the myth of the given. They prefer the non-rational philosophy of science of Kuhn rather than Popper. Kuhn rejects the idea that methods of coming to agreement on what constitutes validating or invalidating evidence scientific remains fixed, and since it does not remain stable, the determination of empirical truth is more akin to a political than a rational process.
In my understanding, none of these schools begins from a homuncular self or ego. They are all at least as non-Cartesian in this respect as Peirce is. They would instead point out that there is more to Cartesianism that a Kantian self, that a dialectic or triadic rationalist logic perpetuates a different form of Cartesian dualism than that of the Kantian autonomous self. In this case the split is between the forming logic and contingent empirical content.
I suspect that the fatal flaw that Peircean semiotics fixes
is to be found in older cognitive models that are less prevalent these days in the wake of the affective , embodiment and ecological crazes in psychology.
Quoting apokrisis
The issue for all three schools is what grounds the ordering that precedes any notion of the subjective and the objective, a self and a world. If the shaping is organized by a rationalist logic , whether dialectic or triadic, no matter how much effort you put into distancing your approach from the old Kantian and Cartesian ideas of subject and object, you end up re-introducing a dualism. This rationalizing , logicizing tendency is what every philosophical figure since Hegel has been obsessed with avoiding , starting with Schopenhauer and on through Kierkegaard , Nietzsche , Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida. Peirce was not able to avoid it.
Enactivism is generally thought as shorthand for 4E: enactive, embodied, embedded , extended and affective. The system is not simply embodied in its biology, it is equally embedded in its physical-social environment and extended into that ecology via tools outside the strictly determined end of the body
that are nonetheless part of its functioning.
As I mentioned before, there is almost no debate these days within phenomenological-pomo-enactivist circles as to whether being shaped is the source of selfhood. The only debate is over whether to jettison the notion of the subject entirely in favor of a social system with no independently identifiable parts, or keep some minimal remnant of the old idea of subject. I don’t think you appreciate how much more radically interpersonally based some of these approaches are compared with Peirce’s quaint-by-comparison code-based model of the social. Have you read any Derrida, Foucault, Gergen or Deleuze? Do you think that the later Wittgenstein held onto a homuncular notion of self?
Quoting apokrisis
Keep in mind that those involved with phenomenology see it as inextricably linked to Wittgensteinian pragmatics, post structuralism, deconstruction, Gibsonian ecological psychology and a host of related ideas. So if it is merely a curiosity , the same would have to be said of the larger tapestry of thinking in the social sciences that it is merely one element of. One would have to include the social activism on campuses which is feeding off of pomo currents. Of course, in one sense, all ideas are just passing curiosities. The question is whether the path of change today is leading the vanguard of psychological and philosophical thinking closer to Peirce or further away from him. They do seem to be moving further away from Schelling , Hegel and Marx, and closer to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault , Heidegger , Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.
Quoting apokrisis
Those in many branches of the social sciences choosing to bypass Peirce’s semiotic form of pragmatism feel that a pragmatics is severely constrained when it is grounded in rationalistist logic and a notion of truth as a ‘real’ which is progressively attainable.
I think you are getting close! Energy, at least forms of it, needs interaction to have a form. A circle form will "evaporate" if no interactions are considered. Its a pitty you havent studied quantum fields. A free field (without a gauge field to INTERACT with,is a weird thing... To say the least... :smile:
Nice writing. Its indeed all semiotic. The initial state of the universe, causally disconnected to the one proceeding it (though I still have to work out how one big bangs can leave the 5d torus substrate unchanged) contained the seed structures, the seed forms, for all living structures to appear and their connections of a representative internal world to the external one (interdependent) to be formed. The emerged beings are a mere shell, but a living one. The body is the true identity and is the interface between an evoling inner world and an evolving outer one. There are no such things as homuculi. Only the dream part of the inner world (showing itself during nightlh or daily dreamtimes) can show other creatures being appearances letting you know things.
And where do you feel I diverged?
Please remember this is the internet. For all you know, I'm just frantically Googling my way through my own bullshit. And Prishon certainly is, don't elevate the guy to an authority.
Quoting Pop
Both Shannon's classical information theory and modern quantum information theory have their roots in computation, wherein the purpose of information storage is future retrieval. However, both begin with storage. Classically this could be writing something down on paper, saving something to a hard disk, memorising something, etc. In each case, one is speaking of configurations of physical things (locations of ink, polarity of little magnets, network of neurons), so classical information theory does treat information stored in a system well, it's just within a context of transmission.
Quantum information theory on the one hand is more elementary, and any review article will likely start with notion of performing a quantum mechanical measurement of a system, which is just straight QM. The information stored in that system is nothing less than the physical state of that system itself, not just the bits that were intentionally stored
On the other hand, QM is somewhat more transmission-focussed insofar as everything is geared toward an intended measurement by an experimenter (who, in quantum information theory, takes the place of the message recipient) after preparation of that system (which takes the place of sending). The observer plays a more important role in QM than in classical mechanics.
But to an extent this is linguistic. If you save a file to disk, then move that disk an inch, we have transmission of a message. Is this remotely important in talking about the information content? Not at all. Ultimately, information storage is physical configuration of state, therefore the physical configuration of a system has information irrespective of whether it was intended or transmitted. That physical state is (theoretically) completely encoded in the wavefunction (all of the information about that system), hence one can have a purely informational basis for physics.
This is proof you are a fantast. Who says YOU are not working your way through the internet. I tend to think you do as you show no true understanding of the matter spoken of here. Well, a bit. At starters level.
It’s a good post. You set out the positions clearly. :up:
Quoting Joshs
Yes. But my reason for championing Peirce here is his tight focus on the semiotic modelling relation and the mechanics of codes. This is key because what is generally missing from causal metaphysics is an account of how the two realms of mind and matter interact. Semiosis plugs that explanatory gap.
Peirce himself is pretty weak on how semiosis in fact applies to biology, neurology, psychology and sociology. His own phenomenology, or phaneron, just tries to shoehorn things into a trite trichotomy of faculties - feeling, volition and cognition.
Similarly, his agapism is toe-curling. He was mired in the theism and transcendentalism that was the norm for his cultural milieu.
But on the central issue - the generality of semiosis as a mechanism to connect the two divided aspects of nature - he is sound.
Quoting Joshs
That’s fine. But my reply is that this is the view from just the level of semiosis that is language use, and so just the aspect of human psychology that is socially constructed,
My interest is in countering scientific reductionism and its idealistic counter-response, romanticism, with a systems or natural philosophy metaphysics - the tradition that traces itself back to the four causes of Aristotle.
This view is well developed especially in theoretical biology. As I have described, I was focused first on the socially constructed nature of the human mind (so Vygotsky was my man there), then on neuroscience and philosophy of mind, then on complexity theory, then eventually - as the best unifying perspective I found - the circle of theoretical biologists led by Pattee, Salthe and Rosen. And these guys in turn were moving from a general hierarchy theory and modelling relations perspective to one that acknowledged Peirce as offering a unifying logical story.
But also, biosemiotics now goes far past Peirce in grounding itself not just on a process and probabilistic ontology, but the more specific one of the thermodynamics of dissipative structures. So there is a general theory where the material aspect of being is all about entropy dissipation (with the Big Bang being the most general example). And then semiosis and code explains how informational mechanism can evolve to accelerate entropy production. So the argument becomes that everything - from the Cosmos to Mind - is just a thermodynamic drive. And complexity arises out of that as grades of organismic semiosis.
This is a scientific claim more than a metaphysical one now. It stands or falls on the evidence.
Quoting Joshs
Sure. When enactivism came along as a vogue new term, it was already what I had always argued. But it lacks the emphasis on code as the hinge of everything. It is just a corrective to the general disembodied rationalism of Cartesian inspired psychology. It doesn’t count as an actual new paradigm. It only alerts us to fact that minds are part of the structure of the world - further steps up the hierarchy of infodynamics or Second Law constrained being.
Quoting Joshs
Sure. This is what makes it unscientific and headed off into its own familiar culture game based on “othering” univocal discourse. If you can’t win the big game, you pick up the ball and go make your own games.
Quoting Joshs
I’m more interested in how this plays out for science - metaphysical speculation that is grounded in maths and evidence.
Does psychology even exist as a single scientific field anymore? I found it a mess of a discipline until I realised you needed to listen to those who focused on either mind at the level of the neural code, or mind at the level of the linguistic code. So neural cognition and social construction.
Quoting Joshs
So I should follow the crowd rather than follow the evidence? Hmm.
I used wave theory for illustrative simplicity. The interesting thing to me is that there is an underlying structure that is consistent to all these conceptions.: A wave and its frequency, a field and it's excitation, a string and its vibration, a piece of paper and its scribble, a thing against a nothingness, are all different forms of fundamental conception, that create relational distinction, such that we can understand. These are the limits of relational understanding.
:up: It needs to interact to have a form, and we need to relate it to create a distinction. So a form against a greater form that is our understanding, is a conception of consciousness at its most basic.
That definition is getting close to what I call EnFormAction, which is the causal & organizing agent of Evolution. That creative force is what was called "the Will of God" in the Bible, or "Logos", by Plato, or "First Cause" & "Prime Mover" by Aristotle, or "Natural Law" by Deists. Like the "Energy" of modern Science, it is known, inferred, only by its effects in the real world. And yes. EFA both causes all interactions, and directs them toward some ultimate destination.
Of course, since motivating & organizing "Cosmic Destiny" is randomized by Entropy (disorganization), each information processing (or integrating) agent in the world has some degree of Free Will (Choice within Chance). Unfortunately, that freedom from Destiny also allows for the physical & emotional suffering of those agents. Why? Maybe it's a test, similar to that argued by Jewish & Christian & Islamic theologians. But, I doubt that it's a test of long-suffering loyalty to the inferred-but-unseen deity, as assumed by those apologists for the Problem of Evil. That would be plain perverse. :smile:
EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force (aka : Divine Will) of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_of_God
EnFormAction :
[i]* Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", so EFA is the general cause of everything in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application.
* All are also forms of Information, the "difference that makes a difference". It works by directing causation from negative to positive, cold to hot, ignorance to knowledge. That's the basis of mathematical ratios (Greek "Logos", Latin "Ratio" = reason). A : B :: C : D. By interpreting those ratios we get meaning and reasons.
* The concept of a river of causation running through the world in various streams has been interpreted in materialistic terms as Momentum, Impetus, Force, Energy, etc, and in spiritualistic idioms as Will, Love, Conatus, and so forth. EnFormAction is all of those.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
I think I underdtand this. All present forms have their origin at the big bang (about which I have some pretty non convential thoughts as well as about the stuff thats in it; the reason for many bans on physics forums). So the initial state had to be slightly nonrandom. The hand of God(s)?
I can tell you that I am constantly Googling, checking, and rechecking, and referring to a wide range of opinion from reputable sources. We are all cyborgs these days. We absolutely need to be because of the pace of change. My background is art and IT, but decorative art makes me puke, whereas art that is symbolic of understanding I can really get into. I have a broad range of understanding, but in my fields of special interest, my understanding, I believe, is equal to anyone's. I'm sure you and Prishon feel something similar. Interpretation is a fact, and differences of interpretation exist in any field due to the nature of consciousness - it creates uniqueness- so your interpretation is slightly different to Prishon's, it is to be expected, and it arises at all levels of life.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, I agree. It quantifies the information such that you can get a value out of it. A number.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:up: Thanks for that. To simplify: The word I am currently typing is a form of the larger form of my thinking. So my form interacts with the form of the keyboard, which interacts with the form of the computer, which interacts with the form of the internet ( this way the information is stored and transmitted, but can be stored indefinitely ) which interacts with the form of your device which interacts with you to change your brain state ( form ) such that you have understanding of my thoughts.
In this view, Information is the interaction of form, Although we say the information is stored, it doesn't become information until it is interacted with - this is true for the device that stores it, as well as the end user.
To put it another way: Information has to have form - that is what we derive from the distinction of the blank sheet of paper and the scribble on it. The scribble makes its way to the end user mind through intermediary interactions - it is those interactions that determine what information is ultimately stored, not the storage of them?? ( Chinese whisper )
This way of understanding information explains the double slit experiment. The interaction of the measurement device collapses the wave, so the information stored is a point particle?
The hand of God. The Anthropic principle. The basis of self organization. Natural Law. The forces we feel at our center all seem to be linked? Different words for the same stuff maybe?
Different interaction, too; and form...
Different to some extent in quality and energy for any interaction we might have. Same logical relation, though.
Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something - I think we need to at least entertain this possibility by Rovelli that the substrate of existence is simply relational. But is this just a case of quantum-mechanical self-awareness? Prior to anything even possibly existing, one might imagine that energy, quality and logic were at least eternally possible in relation, if nothing else.
To understand these three terms, we need to get to the ineffably absolute, infinite ideals they represent.
Logic is commonly defined as ‘a proper or reasonable way of thinking about something’. But what is logic when no one is thinking? Strip away all the assumptions, and logic is the idea of absolute interconnectedness: inspiring the possibility of perfectly true relation, free of inaccuracy. Technically, it’s a mere possibility - impossible in itself, because any potentiality exists only as relation ...to something else. Yet logic - The Way - is clearly fundamental.
QM determines that energy is fundamental, and exists as an assumed potentiality. Energy originally meant ‘an internal source of work’. It refers to the idea of infinite flux: inspiring the possibility of this ultimate source of work, free of limitation. This is also a mere possibility/impossibility in itself - it is describable as potentiality in a true (logical) relation, while also constraining the accuracy of that logic to some extent. And energy’s potentiality is limited, in turn, by QM as an imperfect logic.
QM also assumes that - for all intents and purposes - potential energy has the same value across the board. But most acknowledge that this is incomplete as a description of reality. It works because we, as observers, exist to interpret the calculations as action - to distribute energy as attention and effort. Something is still fundamentally missing when we replace humans with computerised action, even when they surpass us in terms of technical accuracy.
What’s missing from this described relation is quality: from the original Latin qualis meaning ‘of what kind’. To clearly define it, though, we need to embody what is other than quality: this undifferentiated interconnectedness and flux. From this perspective, quality refers to the idea of value in diversity: inspiring the possibility of excellence by differentiation. When we assume reality as merely a relation of logic and energy, then we presume an observer of either infinite goodness or absolute indifference.
In my view, this triadic relation strives to explain the irreducibility beyond assumptions of potentiality/form/intentionality/mind/G*D evident in this thread. It can be found underlying the truth of most (if not all) spiritual, creative and scientific genius, from the Tao Te Ching to QM.
So how does this answer the question: what is information?
When we define information as ‘enabling the interaction of form’, we are assuming that potentiality/form/intentionality/mind/G*D already exists. This is the same gap that Peirce’s metaphysics had: that somehow this “completely undetermined and dimensionless potentiality” transitioned to a “determined potentiality” consisting of qualities that spontaneously self-actualise and then mutually interact to produce factual events. Why? Because of “the power of the human mind to originate ideas that are true”? or:
Quoting Pop
The aim of this alternative triadic relation has been to incorporate the ‘why’. Why does information change us? Because interconnectedness (logic), flux (energy) and diversity (quality) are fundamentally eternal and absolute possibilities. To ignore/isolate/exclude an aspect of these in our description of reality is to unavoidably embody this incompleteness in how we then relate or interact with reality, and how it interacts with us.
I think you mention different things here. Natural law (Law) takes care of evolution. Not of initial conditions. The Anthropic Pribciple comes closer but doesnt explain the Natural law. The Hand of God takes care of both.Im not sure what you mean by the force we feel at our center. Is it sexual? Then yes. ;)
:up: In the distinction of one thing and another arises two distinct forms. Hence energy and information.
Quoting Possibility
Logic is the only way to understand something, via a structure of knowledge. The thing understood, is understood in terms of the already established understanding.
Quoting Possibility
How does it do this? would it be via information.
This is an intro to a free course:
:up: :rofl: :rofl: I was referring to emotions / feelings. I would understand evolution as the evolution of self organization.
I think so.
I used published reading, speaking and typing rates as a basis but really my guess was 20000 to 80000 items per day. Maybe 20000 would be a slow day and 80000 would be a high stress day. I think these are in the ballpark numbers, you may have other ideas, but they seem to be large enough to accompish most tasks we may want to do. Of course this would be 20000 to 80000 items with specific information content so it's not analogous to bits or computer code. Any comments, suggestions or corrections?
:up: I have no idea of your methods, but it sounds interesting. I wonder if you can convert it to MB?
Human DNA has about 875mb of data, or 100 odd volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanicas worth. It would be interesting to compare.
We covered earlier how moments of consciousness can be 1- 400ms long, according to a couple of studies, and this equates to 25 - 35 moments of consciousness per second. This sounds about right, as in the old days movie movie reels used to run at about 25 frames per second, and we couldn't tell the difference between that and normal perception.
Quoting Possibility
QM determines the evolution of mass. To include energy quantum field theory has to be involved, the 7 gauge fields (they INTERACTIONmediating fields) representing energy, like the photon field. Dont be awed by qft. Its very easy conceptually. The math is merely used to impress.
Energy is Quoting Prishon
In fact a bee equals a people...
Quoting Pop
This is what I thought was significant - data is ones and zeros but mental content is fully formed ideas that are interconnected with the environment and dynamic.
What we take in visually if converted to pixels would be an enormous amount of data but that's not what I'm focusing on. I'm just trying to get some number range of information (as distinct items) in our brains as we use it. So I'm trying to get you to see the difference between data and brain information.
?? That’s nothing like what I wrote. Can you explain how you think this is saying the same thing?
Quoting Pop
You’re presuming that someone exists with knowledge and a capacity for understanding - ie. thinking. I’m not. I’m talking about what logic is before anything exists. What is this ‘structure’ without knowledge?
I guess that was a poor choice of word on my part. As I basically understand it (and I could be wrong), most QM assumes that potential energy exists fundamentally. QFT attempts to explain how.
Quoting Prishon
You lost me...
Equal in what sense?
I answer in a moment. We are eating and our puppy dog is barking... Puppy love...
Data and brain information differ in quality - that is, in the value of the relation as a potential difference. Not how much it is valued. You can’t fully quantify brain information.
It depends. If you mean simply entropic information then it can. The value will lay somewhere between that of a gas of free or interacting particles at high temperature, and the same particles at zero temperature. Of course this gas has to interact with the medium it's in (the body) to exist at all as a separate entity. The same holds for the body. In fact all interacting field shape one another.
There is a different form of information. I think you know which reading your stuff.
I saw a bee on top of an empty bottle Amarischia. She was looking in attracted by the sweet smell. Damned, I thought. That could be me. But without knowing.
I agree, in practice we cannot.
We can define brain information as physical brain state. It's completely different than Claude Shannon information theory but is information as we know it.
Sure - hence the qualifier.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Agreed. The difference as I see it is in dimensional quality. Shannon information is one-dimensional. Brain information is four-dimensional.
We simultaneously posted the same answer. What does that say about initial conditions?
I was agreeing that thigs are relational, and I was trying to point out how this is related to the limits of thinking. Logic at its most fundamental is the relation of one thing to another. Like a field and its excitation, or the substance energy and its information.
Quoting Possibility
Everything exists as an evolving body of information, such that subsequent informing fits onto existing informing, necessarily, in order to create an evolving body. All systems are enmeshed in this way, and interrelationally evolve together. Information, as the interaction of form, enables this.
Evolving bodies of information exist internal to us and external to us. Evolving bodies of information are all that exists. As stated earlier, it starts with two wavicles integrating, and then evolves from there.
Systems theory is essential knowledge for any philosopher. You don't need to understand it all. Just enough to grasp the butterfly effect, which would take an intelligent person like you, about half an hour I would guess.
:up: I see now. Yes, Information is the catalyst of evolution. But if we are to arrive at a definition of information, we need to capture all information, in every circumstance. Whilst there are some differences, I think what is significant is that one system causes the other to change - this is information.
We tend to miss the catalysing effect of the process of information, and instead just focus on the result, that data has been transferred. But if we change the focus to how information causes change, then we are closer to getting a fix on it, imo.
Ultimately, we are exchanging information, and being changed in the process incrementally. This is an important consideration in this information age, imo.
If brain content represents the non-physical, is the brain content just physical matter than? What is the non-physical?
I start with physical brain state that I identify as entirely physical matter. Any expansion on that state is equivalent, just with more details.
Im not sure I understand this:
"mental content of things that are physically non-existent can exist"
What are physically non-existent things? Patterns in matter?
I get that a lot.
I use non-physical as a noun but it's more commonly used as an adjective. Does that help at all?
You are abstracting information from it's physical ground. If energy = matter = information, and we have had no serious rebuttal of this. You are free to do that. The world can be seen as all matter, or all energy, or all information.........instead of saying immaterial, why not say informational?
Yes, I get that. I use the term magic stuff that is the content of matter.
I was asking about physically non-existing things. Is that form, information, in matter, on our neural network and physical matter out there?
Ok. My definition of information is that it's the same as brain state. This isn't a common view so I'm starting from scratch to explain it. A physically non-existing thing is a general catagory of information (or brain state). Holding non-physicals is a capability of our brains and unique to our brains.
So your non-physicals are either energy or information, or both? All held together in matter?
:100:
Cant the physical world contain non-entropic information too? Imagine 100 different words or geometrical figures writen on a piece of paper. Or ten different Naturally occuring forms are present on stone. The entropic information (S=lnN) are the same. But the variety of forms is huge. Like there is a huge variety of animals all containing the same entropic infofmation. They are tbe result of the rotating Earth between the hot Sun and the cold universe. Heatflow can make different forms evolve. Likewise, the whole neural network can accomodate all forms present in the universe.
I dunno, but our brains are at the top as far as we know.
Why do you think that? The brain can be the universe in small.
And what I was saying is that Logic at its most fundamental is just relation as an unformed ideal. No ‘one thing’ distinct from ‘another’, no field as distinct from its excitation; no difference, no action.
Quoting Pop
You seem to be assuming that I don’t understand it yet. I follow what you’re saying here - I’m pointing out your assumptions at the most fundamental level. You assume that something exists to be aware of information as form - this is why you keep ending up at the anthropic principle, or G*D. You need to answer the question: what is logic before anything exists? Before it can even be ‘the relation of one thing to another’?
Quoting Pop
Information refers to the significance of one system causing another to change. Significance, potential, value - this underlies causation.
At the most fundamental level. Your most fundamental thought, is a mirror image of fundamental reality. Nothing exists before this, as far as we are concerned. This is where mind arises, as the distinction of one thing to another. Before that, everything was **timeless and indistinct. No mind – but a grey nothingness.
I don't think this is in keeping with neuroscience, is it?
Maybe it's a logic problem. Fundamental thought is the only tool we have to explore fundamental reality. But the tool itself seems to emerge from fundamental reality.
I don't think so. There is no fundamental thought That assumption assumes the existence of a fundamental. What is considered as derived from the fundamental in this view can in fact be equal to all forms. It could be that there is no hierachy. With fundamental slaveforms at the bottom and and a tirant form at the top.
I think it is. I think neuroscience would say without the physical neural change, no externalities could register. But what I was referring to, in that particular statement is something entirely conceptual.
Logically there is a minimum requirement to register a distinction, which is the relation of one thing to another. And at the same time we see fundamental theory must start with: a nothingness and a big bang, order and entropy, a wave and its frequency, a field and its excitation, a string and it's vibration, a blank sheet of paper and it's scribble, 1+1. So it makes me wonder?
I would think our evolution as an informational body, would be equal to what happens to all informational bodies in the universe, including the ordered universe itself. So the limits of logic would have their parallels in the universe, as it relates to structured bodies. So the limits of thought would be equal to the limits of structure in the universe. Hence a fundamental thought is a mirror image of fundamental reality.
I wish somebody would comment in the definition of information thread so this story can continue?
I agree with what you mean. It is something that must arise in tiny increments. But how we conceive it is limited to the relation of one thing to another. So how I imagine the situation you are referring to evolves, is as a state of consciousness existing in a form, being disturbed by information changing its state, in an ongoing process, at all levels of an evolving system. See my reply to Frank. Consciousness in this case is a state of integrated information. This is the primary form that is evolving, in parts, and as a whole, in a sequence of one card being laid upon the integrated form of the preceding others imo.
Yeah. Fundamental reality, is something we have to conceive, given we have no access to it's cornerstone. I would agree with you that informational structure would take the same fundamental form wherever it occurs, so it seems a reliable thing to say that fundamental thought is equal to fundamental reality, at least the structured elements of that reality. Outside of the structure, would be chaos, and according to the definition form cannot interact with something that is formless.
I cannot believe there is not one comment in the definition thread. :sad:
Via footnote 4:
Quoting Sabine Hossenfelder
As well as being a term that strictly speaking says all sorts of interesting things that can and should be stated perfectly well in terms of entropy. Whether or not the equivocation between loose and strict has been helpful to physicists, it seems to have been disastrous for philosophical discussion of 'information'.
Totally agreed! I forgot to mention Forms of Nature developing indeed! (after I mentioned somewhat similar to this on philosophy stack exchange my answer was deleted and downvoted a number of times... God forbid!). Wel totally almost. Or almost totally. I dont think this addresses the hard problem of consciousness. However complicated the inner and outer Forms are (with the bodily mixed Form in between), it cant account for actually FEELING stuff.
These forms are forming for some reason. Forces acting on them? Surely they would feel forces acting on them?
One of the things I like about the format here is that popular opinion has to engage with you before it can knock you down. But sadly not many people do engage with me. So I imagine popular opinion would not think much of my thinking also.
One already suffices. :wink:
Its great to find another that understands :up:
I dunno... For example, when a dog of us died, this was a strange experience. She had a hard time. The vet couldnt come because of lady Corona. And it was maybe for the best. She laid sick on her favorite spot. I was singing for her a bit (Im that a lunatic!). Then it looked the pain she had subsided a bit.. I laid my hand on her, together with my wife. We felt her heart beating. And then it stopped. I almost get tears now! But why telling you this? Because the very experience I had just cant be explained by Forms. I think. It was a feeling that she was showing her love. Waiting for us and her to be one befors leaving to who knows where. It was a kind of religious experience. Only god knows the true Nature or something like that. :cry:
There you go!!! ?
I just realized. Maybe the force is the feeling! In physics gauge fields ( taking care of interactions) are strange fields. So maybe you're right! :up:
I'm sorry to hear that. Pets are family in our house. They are as entitled as any member, so I can relate to your loss. That our feelings are related to bosonic forces does not diminish their significance, but amplifies them and unifies us to the larger picture evolving, imo. In my view, we can never loose touch with those feelings in this universe, no matter our form. :halo: Yogic logic suggests a similar story, and ultimately my philosophy is one of universal togetherness. Please don't puke when reading this. :smile:
Quoting Prishon
I'm not familiar with gauge fields, so will look in to it. Thanks
WOW! ?
This short 10min video is a great primer in systems thinking, and it answers why entropy is not enough.
I agree that there’s more going on, but brain information (ie. the physical information formed in the brain) is nevertheless four-dimensional. How that manifests, forms and changes depends on the structures of the interacting systems.
Brain information doesn’t actually differentiate between physical and non-physical representations. The ‘code’ it’s written in, as far as I understand it, is a wavefunction of affect: reduced to a relation between qualitative attention and quantitative effort as a distribution of energy over spacetime. This is in much the same way as DNA code is written as energy distribution in three dimensions, with a chemical structure that is irreducibly both quantitative and qualitative. So I would argue that it’s possible to dispense with the physical/non-physical distinction, which complicates so many structural explanations for the universe, as a mere heuristic device - an epistemic cut - specific only to one dimensional level of awareness at a time.
Interestingly, the Tao Te Ching uses the qualitative/quantitative distinction of traditional Chinese ideographic language to create a similar ‘code’ by separating ‘desire’ or affect, the directional flow of energy (chi), from a five-dimensional description of human experience. The TTC says it isn’t about ‘control’, which is only ever temporary, but about wu-wei, or minimising quantitative effort by maximising qualitative attention.
I think we keep dancing around the same disagreement. As an idealist, you’re assuming that ‘mind’ arises from this ‘grey nothingness’. I’m saying that a vague, qualitative difference of potentiality/significance/value arises from the most fundamental level of reality, and that mind or thought isn’t even in the picture yet. You call it ‘mind’ because that’s the only quantifiable ‘thing’ you feel certain exists in five dimensions. But this involves prematurely positioning yourself in the description. Humans are not fundamental, and mind is inseparable from a living organism. It is your feelings about the existence of mind that are complicating the discussion.
I agree. I tried to write it that way.
As for 'non-physical' representations, it would be hard for us to function without them and we all use them all the time...try never doing math. It's just better to understand than not.
This mental ability is also unique to us(humans) on planet earth and we don't know of it anywhere else in the universe. That is a stark contrast to the everything is information definition of information.
Pop and I have had lengthy discussions before.
My approach to logic is probably a little unusual. I think where Pop and I run into disagreement is where he sees logic as mental only, rather than a fundamental aspect of reality. Modern thought has a tendency to focus on quantifiable logic, and we forget about qualitative logic such as geometric structures and dimensionality, because we take it for granted in three-dimensional descriptions of the world.
Did you miss that mental content (as contained) is unaffected by physical matter?
No doubt :up:
Quoting Pop
Not at all. Possibly it argues why physics is not enough, and we need a science of complex systems. Fine.
But that science won't thank you for spreading information woo, based on confusions about physics.
If I was too succinct:
Quoting bongo fury
I don't understand what you mean by woo? Whatever I have stated, I have backed up with references, and argument. You are free to make a counter argument with counter references.
I am referencing science, but I don't see that you are referencing anything.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.2515.pdf
Quoting bongo fury
This is what I meant. Not that systems theory replaces entropy and physics, but that it compliments it.
Did you observe this, or was it something you thought up? :smile:
What I meant is that fundamental reality is a conception. It used to be that God made fundamental reality in seven days, and this has had many different permutations since. I am pointing out that we need to conceive fundamental reality, and perhaps we still have a way to go in this regard?
Ask a fundamentalist, from any religion, what fundamental reality is, and feast on the variety of fundamental reality.
It would be great to explore how information creates fundamental reality in the definition of information thread? How information changes us?? This thread is getting too long. :sad:
Surely you have some objection to what I wrote, or you have some observations to add?
Maybe an analogy can illuminate the issue. The entropy of you and me is about the same (entropy as defined by S=lnOMEGA (where is that Greek symbol button??). Nevertheless, we are completely different forms. Like the huge variation of animals. Biodiversity. All living thinga have developed between the sweet heat of the Sun and the ultracold darkness on the other sjde of the rotating Earth.
I think it’s even better to understand that all representations are only partial structures of reality: they represent the difference between inner and outer systems. So maths is eventually applied by an inner system to an outer system according to qualitative-quantitative distribution of energy.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Must have. In expanding ‘brain state’ to ‘BRAIN(mental content)’, what would you say is the process? By ‘mental content’, are you referring to a four or five-dimensional structure?
Huh? Mental content unaffected by physical matters? Dont think so.
Quoting Prishon
:up: Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about . 1 percent. This means that about one base pair out of every 1,000 will be different between any two individuals. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/
Not much difference genetically, but experience then plays its part in furthering the divide due to the information we encounter ( information changes us in the act of experiencing ). Still not much difference, but enough to heat up discussion in a philosophy forum, and, of course, the wider world. :lol:
** In terms of being a self organizing system, shaped by information, there is no difference between us, and all other systems.
I see determinism as the momentum of informational structure, at all scales - but there is a slight element of randomness at the intersection of every transaction, such that it makes it a determinism with a slight element of randomness. This would seem to be the case in the natural world. This would seem to be entropy playing its part - the domino must fall, but can fall with a slight twist to the left or right thus changing its path slightly in the process, such that you ultimately can only probabilistically predict it's final location. This creates emergent novel form. Would you agree?
Hi Pop! I read this contribution with delight. My answer is almost certainly yes. I want to say something more but I got a sudden ache in mt stomach. Damned! "Pain no like!" says Prishon... I must rest a while... I will certainly elaborate later!
"Still not much difference, but enough to heat up discussion in a philosophy forum, and, of course, the wider world"
:lol:
Quoting Pop
Are they compulsory now?
There's a line of thought that holds that having a theory of everything is better than admitting to ignorance. I don't agree with it.
I distrust theories of everything. They are too easy to construct.
We all posses a theory of everything. Everybody takes an epistemic stance. It is just that for some people that stance is that there can be no understanding. Their understanding is that there can be no understanding, so when they come across an understanding, the immediate response is to dismiss it based on an assumption of no understanding.
You have a theory of everything - nobody gets to sit this one out. You understand yourself within your theory of everything. What is its form?
If you are interested in my view, you are welcome to read my posts.
Yes, I'm familiar with your posts. You subscribe to the prevailing popular dogma, where most people gather and concur. It is not a bad strategy. Good luck with it, but it seems to me an odd place for a philosopher and enquiring mind.
That got a laugh. I doubt many here would agree with you.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Flash into existence? Or come to your attention?
The way I understand it, five-dimensional conceptual structure isn’t organised according to time, but according to value/potential/significance in a ‘block universe’ type structure. So, as a deer jumps in front of your headlights, your most affected value structures determine what you pay the most attention to, and time can seem to have moved slower than normal when you recall the event and realise just how much you ‘noticed’. Most of that detail would come from existing conceptual structures, though, and after the event. In that moment, the new information is only what’s unpredictably changing in the areas you predict will count in how to act - all coded as affect. Pretty much everything else is filled in later and consolidated as you would expect. This is how the brain makes the most effective and efficient use of attention, effort and time. It’s also compatible with on-the-spot expressions regarding moments like these, such as “I didn’t have time to think”, or “instinct just took over”. Later, you will have formed a clearer, more rational explanation, including why you acted the way you did.
I wish you would do a thread on dimensionality so that slow pokes like myself could understand it?