Semiotics Killed the Cat
Semiotics (describing things in terms of function rather than design) has been getting a great rap lately – maybe too great. It may be the reason so many scientists and even lay-people attack the idea of a god. What do you think?
Semiotics is great for local explanations of occurrences. By local I mean explanations at the level of examination- So, if we are talking about cells, then semiotics would be talking in terms of plasma membranes, cell walls and transport molecules. If we’re talking about atoms then we would be talking about electrons and protons. Any level beneath the local level could be considered a global level. We don’t talk about cell function in terms of up and down quarks as this more global semiotic language doesn’t fit.
Using Semiotics, science seeks to understand at the local level. The more successful the local explanation is, the less the global level is referenced.
Semiotics though, ‘objectifies’ the continuous world by assigning discreet properties (such as cell wall) to much more complex phenomenon. Rather than understanding a continuous flow of energy densities into atoms into molecules and seeing the wall as the arrangement of these energy densities, semiotics creates discreet worlds separated from the ones below and above it. By using semiotics to continually reduce emergent phenomenon to our own experiences we cease to marvel at the level of complexity upon which the local layer stands.
Semiotics is needed though for the volume of information is staggering when we enter complex arrangements, and semiotics lets us hold the important information in mind. Semiotics is a necessary cognitive shorthand. Imagine trying to explain neuronal signalling by explaining the energy state changes in atoms – and yet it could be done.
What is often overlooked is that semiotics represents information loss. To say that a planet orbits a sun or that a heart beats represents information loss and creates discreetness where there should be continuity. This is probably the reason there is difficulty in uniting theories of the universe with Quantum Mechanics.
When one layer of discreet semiotics is overlaid upon another semiotic layer, like a mask upon a mask, biology upon chemistry there a sense that the lower level of semiotic understanding does not apply or is irrelevant. After all, how do subatomic energy configurations contribute to an understanding of the circulatory system? We become blind to the continuous nature of reality, we no longer need nor seek global truth when local explanations are closed. The ‘but why’ questions are answered with local explanations of 'how'.
There are always exceptions to the rules though, because fundamentally semiotics is only a representation of the truth of a system at a certain hierarchical level. As an undergraduate I once suggested to a graduate student that finding a new property of an atom does not change our understanding of hydrostatic pressure. He was horrified, and suggested it did.
Due to the local understanding we derive through semiotics, we might marvel at the sentient nature of energy fields as atoms bind with other atoms, and at the sentient nature of ourselves, but we can’t link them and can’t tie them to a greater concept. We don’t see ourselves as nothing more than those same atomic energy configurations. Therein, of course, lies the true wonder of the nature of being. The energy states that coalesce to form us.
Science, so fixated on understanding at the local level – so specialised in their attempt – scorns the search for a deeper global truth as a failure to understand local truth sufficiently, or as an irrelevancy. It is a type of giving up - not trying hard enough, an unnecessary superfluousness that doesn’t contribute locally. Why invoke a God when our semiotic understanding is almost closed?
Or do you disagree?
Semiotics is great for local explanations of occurrences. By local I mean explanations at the level of examination- So, if we are talking about cells, then semiotics would be talking in terms of plasma membranes, cell walls and transport molecules. If we’re talking about atoms then we would be talking about electrons and protons. Any level beneath the local level could be considered a global level. We don’t talk about cell function in terms of up and down quarks as this more global semiotic language doesn’t fit.
Using Semiotics, science seeks to understand at the local level. The more successful the local explanation is, the less the global level is referenced.
Semiotics though, ‘objectifies’ the continuous world by assigning discreet properties (such as cell wall) to much more complex phenomenon. Rather than understanding a continuous flow of energy densities into atoms into molecules and seeing the wall as the arrangement of these energy densities, semiotics creates discreet worlds separated from the ones below and above it. By using semiotics to continually reduce emergent phenomenon to our own experiences we cease to marvel at the level of complexity upon which the local layer stands.
Semiotics is needed though for the volume of information is staggering when we enter complex arrangements, and semiotics lets us hold the important information in mind. Semiotics is a necessary cognitive shorthand. Imagine trying to explain neuronal signalling by explaining the energy state changes in atoms – and yet it could be done.
What is often overlooked is that semiotics represents information loss. To say that a planet orbits a sun or that a heart beats represents information loss and creates discreetness where there should be continuity. This is probably the reason there is difficulty in uniting theories of the universe with Quantum Mechanics.
When one layer of discreet semiotics is overlaid upon another semiotic layer, like a mask upon a mask, biology upon chemistry there a sense that the lower level of semiotic understanding does not apply or is irrelevant. After all, how do subatomic energy configurations contribute to an understanding of the circulatory system? We become blind to the continuous nature of reality, we no longer need nor seek global truth when local explanations are closed. The ‘but why’ questions are answered with local explanations of 'how'.
There are always exceptions to the rules though, because fundamentally semiotics is only a representation of the truth of a system at a certain hierarchical level. As an undergraduate I once suggested to a graduate student that finding a new property of an atom does not change our understanding of hydrostatic pressure. He was horrified, and suggested it did.
Due to the local understanding we derive through semiotics, we might marvel at the sentient nature of energy fields as atoms bind with other atoms, and at the sentient nature of ourselves, but we can’t link them and can’t tie them to a greater concept. We don’t see ourselves as nothing more than those same atomic energy configurations. Therein, of course, lies the true wonder of the nature of being. The energy states that coalesce to form us.
Science, so fixated on understanding at the local level – so specialised in their attempt – scorns the search for a deeper global truth as a failure to understand local truth sufficiently, or as an irrelevancy. It is a type of giving up - not trying hard enough, an unnecessary superfluousness that doesn’t contribute locally. Why invoke a God when our semiotic understanding is almost closed?
Or do you disagree?
Comments (75)
If you look at the "design" of living things through embryology, the blueprints are rather digital. There are genes that effectively represent numbers such as two and five and concepts such as symmetry, and recursion. There are strongly defined "types" as well. The "continuous world" is a doubtful concept, I suggest.
I'm not sure of your argument here Jake. Are you saying that because we are able to understand a lot of embryology locally through semiotics there is no need to invoke global references? - Because that falls into line with my argument that it doesn't happen.
Or are you suggesting that because we can understand a lot of embryology through semiotics, there is no continuous world? That the level of embryo is the lowest level from which an explanation be derived?
What about if we re-wrote embryology as a chemist, in terms of atomic interactions and chemical gradients. Is it possible to derive a deeper understanding or appreciation of what is happening? For example I know that gravity has been implicated in the process of embryogenesis. Can such an effect be described equally in terms of semiotics at the cellular level as well as semiotics at the molecular or even atomic level?
Atoms and their chemical properties are the medium through which a discrete digital embryological design is implemented. I don't think that smaller means deeper however. The properties of atoms are simply being harnessed in the round ... there will be a "random" fuzziness to the outcome because atoms have peculiarities of behavior that lie outside the scope of control of DNA etc. Such fuzziness is not part of the "design" but neither could it be said to add anything specific other than noise.
By what?
Quoting Jake Tarragon
So how is it that the result is a screaming baby pops out? Fuzzy noise seems to create a whole bunch of interesting stuff and the more we run from a 'design' element the more elaborate the explanations for something that should be quite simple to explain, become.
Que pasa?
The sky?
Anyhoot, I fear you know very little on the subject of semiotics as your post makes no sense. For instance:
Quoting MikeL
And then:
Quoting MikeL
Perhaps some clarity of what you are attempting to question?
There is no conflict here that I can see.
Semiotics allows us to understand local phenomenon. Because we have a local understanding the phenomenon become discreet. It is a world of cell membranes and ion channels, not glycoproteins and phospholipid bilayers. There is a different semiotic language.
You are right that my use of the term semiotics is based on the idea that complex molecules etc can be represented simply by describing function. If someone else wants to define it another way, that's okay.
Semiotics as I define it here describes function over design. A biomechanic or exercise physiologist doesn't need to understand chemistry to do their job. On their level, the heart is a pump to circulate blood by creating a pressure system. That is all they need to know about it.
Of course there is a lot of form and function that goes on to create this circulatory system. A physician might look at the body one way and a chemist another.
Each layer is discreet. When we focus strongly on one layer we try to understand that layer completely, in terms of the semiotic variables in that system. To not be able to explain it fully this way seems wrong. This creates a tunnel vision that isolates ones thinking. We easily overlook the massive complexity beneath our simple understanding. We forget we are standing on an emergent layer of a much more complex playground. We don't really understand what we are looking at in its truest form.
Wakarimasu ka?
If I am understanding correctly, the closer something is examined, the more global the level is? Quarks are the local level for the physicists gaze and talk, whereas it's experience for the phenomenologist, but what's the reasoning behind placing these at the ends of a 'scale of examination' (where the closer one examines the world the more 'global' the talk is)?
Why is it not the reverse, where the closer we get to phenomenology the more global the explanation?
Why do disparate types of explanations and modes of examination sit upon a sort of objective scale? Don't you only think this way because you assume a sort of metaphysics of emergence from the smallest quarks to the largest objects (where does consciousness fit - being that which examines both the quarks and the widest scales in the first place, including itself when doing phenomenology)? Isn't this assumption about the nature of the world in-itself a local examination (it's you, examining and explaining the world in a particular way or mode) - just another way of talking about the world?
Not necessarily. Global implies not local. It is what we see when we back out of our local knowledge and reconsider everything that is happening beyond our semiotic understanding. It could just as easily be top down as bottom up.
I like the idea that things are bottom up. As life grows more complex emergent phenomenon are assigned symbols. Soon we have an array of such symbols that interact with each other, seemingly independent of what is happening in the symbols on the level below them.
I see emergent patterns due to an excess of something in the system that is breaking constraint. When an isolated system suddenly begins to interact with another system to form a more complex system, the interaction happened because there was a capacity or tolerance in the system that allowed this indulgence. I haven't given it a great deal of thought, but I would probably define consciousness as an emergent phenomenon from an excess in the nervous system. As a crude example, we are able to process sight without actually seeing. Seeing is an emergent phenomenon.
Quoting antinatalautist
Yes. I'm not saying semiotic explanations are not good, only restrictive in the way we see the world. Our language uses nouns to define objects. Semiotics is hard to escape.
So is this just a development over time in the way we speak? Or rather, is this language over time better corresponding itself to a world? Is language itself the system, or is language itself couched within a wider (material?) system? Is semiotics itself an emergent phenomenon? If so, what did it emerge from? Can this question coherently be answered?
(I have no idea).
When we describe something, anything, there are different ways we may choose to describe it. I may say there is a cup in front of me. I have isolated the object 'cup' with my language.
I could also say there is a yellow patterned fired clay cylinder closed on one end and open on the other, with a curved hollow protuberance (the handle).
In the first instance I summed up that information with one word cup, because that was all that was needed to communicate the idea. There was also information loss. I did not say the cup was yellow, that it had a handle, that it was fired nor that it was patterned.
Local Level 1: Cup - a function
Local Level 2: The description of the cup
I could also look at the arrangement of the atoms. What type of atoms they are, how they are bonded, what conformation they take inside the cup. I could become very specific with my description of the atoms and the angles the bond configurations take as the cup takes form. Lots and lots of information.
At the level of the cup there are other objects about, such as myself and the desk. These also can be described at different local levels. When we say the man picked up the cup off the desk and we describe this in terms of atomic configurations and relative movements through the atoms in the air, the electrostatic bonds with my hand etc it is extremely complicated. It is best to use semiotics (the man lifted the cup off the desk).
It seems almost absurd to describe the action in terms of atoms, and yet, there is nothing else there. It is all atoms. Everything else is semiotic description. (OK even atoms are and we can keep regressing).
When we realise this, a Holy Cow moment comes over us - or me at least. What guided that? How did the atoms coalesce to create this complex phenomenon. In this example I have used things made by man rather than life or natural inanimate object interactions, and so it may seem a bit mundane, but the point I hope is clear:
When we back out of our local level and look at what is truly going on we find the security of semiotic understanding is removed. We begin to search for the fundamental driver of the action.
Where is apokrisis when we need him?
In apo's absence...we look like sign-making creatures to me. How do we get to 'what is truly going on'? Isn't that, like, with signs? I certainly don't find semiotic understanding that secure, but maybe I missed the reassuring memo. Understanding looks like semiotics all the way down to me. How did you glimpse the noumenon?
I'm sorry but I think this is totally off the mark.
The 'science vs religion conflict' is a fascinating topic and one of the themes I am always interested in, but I don't think semiotics in particular has anything much to do with it. The Science V Religion conflict, such as it is, is rooted in certain currents of thought arising from the European Enlightenment, such as historical positivism (see The Conflict Thesis for a handy summary.)
I haven't studied semiotics in depth, but I do know is the discipline of signs and representation. That is where Peirce is significant, but from what I have read, a couple of later theorists, particularly Ferdinand Sauserre, greatly expanded the scope and applicability of semiotics beyond Peirce's original work. It has subsequently been found to be highly applicable in biology. My reading is, this because of the 'language-like' nature of living organisms. The metaphor of signs and languages is much more effective at depicting the processes of living organisms, than the metaphor of machines and mechanical processes. That is the background to 'bio-semiotics'.
There is now an additional move - towards 'pan-semiosis', which is to understand the entire universe in semiotic terms. I think that is highly speculative, not that I understand it very well. But I think bio-semiosis works perfectly well regardless of whether pansemiosis holds water or not.
But in any case, in this post, you're basically accusing semiotics of the very thing that it supposed to remedy, namely, scientific reductionism. That, I don't think, is characteristic of semiotics, as such, which is consciously anti-reductionist.
It's good you've developed an interest in these ideas and themes from Philosophy Forum, but I think you would benefit some further background reading on history of ideas, philosophy, semiotics and the 'culture wars' surrounding evolutionary theory. They're all very big, and controversial, topics, that take a lot of reading to get a handle on, but well worth the effort of study.
Also - have a look at this particular website - http://www.biosemiosis.org. It seems, in my inexpert opinion, to summarise the subject very well, but from a conscientiously non-materialist point of view.
That seems to be an eliminativist standpoint. The question is 'who is manipulating the signs in order to do the understanding, and where does the semiotics come from '?
I think you need to distinguish between semiotics as being the notion that describes all processes of human (and perhaps animal) understanding via signs and manipulation of signs, and the self-conscious valorization of semiotics (as systems or information science) as potentially being 'the answer'. The latter may certainly reflect an anti-theistic and totally anti-mystical, anti-transcendental, stance.
You're right, my reading on so many topics is behind, and I would benefit from further background reading, but I also like to try and rely on what is logical- not just what other people think. When you look at a coiled protein and say that is a channel, then surely you have reduced the configuration of the protein to a symbol.
Scientific reductionism is by definition: Scientific reductionism is the idea of reducing complex interactions and entities to the sum of their constituent parts, in order to make them easier to study.
Whether the definition exactly fits the definition as defined by someone else though is not to the point. When using symbols to describe our landscape, when those symbols form a closed loop - all is explained, there is no need for further invokation of forces. It is only when we back out of the symbology- providing a local level understanding, that we see we really know very little at all.
Personally, I think semiotics is reductive. All symbolic understanding is reductive, and I think that is the OP's point. I would say there is scientific reduction, (in order to know we reduce) "reductionism" is another, properly philosophical, matter. It says that there is "nothing but" what our reductive explanations tell us, and that reality is thus comprehensively explicable in those terms, with no mysterious 'leftovers'. Semiotics, if treated in such a way, can be equally as reductionist as materialism, idealism or any other "ism".
By semiotics as a human understanding via signs and manipulation of signs, I assume you mean communication? In this case a distinction could be made between communication and using symbols to understand the world around us.
Quoting Janus
Yes. In a nutshell.
It is only by backing out of the local layer we see how limited our knowledge really is - how every conclusion we reached about our system was predicated on much deeper assumptions/semiotics. It is at this point we begin to look for a driver of it all.
But it has nearly always been understood in terms of those 'constituent parts' being physical entities. For centuries, that was 'materialism' or 'atomism'; now the PC term is 'physicalism', because (unfortunately for materialists) physics itself seems to have dissolved atoms.
The point about reductionism is to say that something - like human experience, or the world - is 'nothing but' - 'nothing but' atoms in motion, humans are 'nothing but' another species, the intellect is 'nothing but' the aggregation of neurons. There is recent canonical statement by Francis Crick, who, after all, was one of the discoverers of DNA, and surely germane to this debate, to whit:
So there's your classical reductionist statement (which incidentally several thousand philosophers have comprehensively shredded.)
But to say that something is 'a symbol or a sign' is NOT 'reductionist' in the sense that physical reductionism is. That is why it is said that semiotics allows for 'top-down causation' - the notion that meaning itself can have causal powers. No materialist could ever allow for that. So, I don't agree that semiotics is reductionist in that sense, you will find in any textbook on the subject, plenty of criticisms of reductionism.
I think the problem you're sensing, is of a different nature - it is basically about the scope of science, rather than semiotics, in particular.
For semiotics, there is no meaning 'beyond' the signs; no meaning 'out there' or 'in here' in some transcendent sense. So, it is reductionist, just as surely as materialism or physicalism is. Reality is reducible to a system of signs instead of to a system of energetic interactions; or rather the two are the two faces of one coin, beyond which there is simply nothing else.
I take your point that semiotics is not boiling down the facts to support some conclusion, but I also agree with Janus that the symbol is a reduction of information - a loss of information about the property of an object. I may have a complex set of wires, transistors and capacitors and then put them all in a box and call it a radio. To my mind, identifying the radio without having to understand the wires is an example of semiotics.
At the level we use the radio it is fine not to understand the workings of it. We can make assumptions and conclusions about the radio. We can say it 'picks up' radio waves that we can 'tune into' by turning this knob. We can claim to understand at this local level all there is to know about the functioning of the radio, but we do not understand the wiring and components.
By assuming a complete knowledge, based on our semiotic understanding, we no longer look for deeper truths.
Yes, I think a distinction can be made between communication and understanding. There is probably much that we, along with other animals, understand via signs, that we cannot effectively communicate. I would say that visual arts and music are also semiotic, but they embody the more indeterminable dimension of signs. This in-finity of signs is just what points beyond them. The horizon shrinks when the focus is fixated by the determinable.
I was reading (watching on YouTube) about a philosopher the other day who said the appeal of art to people is the fact that it captures a truth about ourselves or the world and therefore we can relate to the experience. And so it would by reason be semiotic.
Quoting Janus
Yes, the search for answers comes to a stop and trying to introduce other ideas such as a creative force become superfluous nonsense. It is only by backing out of the semiotic layer we are using that we find a place for such a thing.
Yes, indeed, the deliverances of the human imagination must be eliminated at all costs, or we may, woe betide us, be duped into some illusory understanding of ourselves and of reality itself! What dire results could be the consequence of such a cosmic mistake?
I'll throw in Paul Grice too as someone with a theory of meaning that connects "natural meaning"-- what Eco calls "symptoms" in your quote, clouds meaning rain, that sort of thing-- and "non-natural meaning", that is, what we do when me mean something by a sound we make, etc., etc.
If you could support that with a citation or example, it would be useful. I would say there are some who appeal to semiotics who would say that, but others who would not. I don't see it as being particularly associated with semiotics.
Quoting MikeL
What we're actually discussing here is not semiotics but scientism, that being:
'to describe the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methodology and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measured or confirmatory' (wikipedia).
Scientism is a pejorative term - it implies a deficient or prejudiced understanding, so it is generally rejected by those who are accused of it, but I agree it is very widespread in contemporary culture.
Interesting. Yes we are discussing scientism by this definition - a scientism whose fallacious belief arises from semiotics.
It is my contention that this fallacy is what has procluded Creative Forces from scientific discussion and rendered it homeless. It is only by backing out of the current semiotic model that we see there are really no substantial answer at all to the 'but why' question.
Totally with you Mike. But it's not simply confined to semiotics.
I think what's happened is that the debates on the forum about the 'origin of life' have really crystallised some feelings for you, which are basically religious or spiritual in origin. They concern big questions and they generate a lot of passion.
There's a really interesting and worthwhile current US academic philosopher, by the name of Thomas Nagel. If you were to read any of the current philosophers as a consequence of your time on the Forum, I would hope he would be among them. Nagel himself professes to be an atheist, but he is also extremely sceptical of what he calls 'neo-Darwinian materialism', which is the mainstream philosophical attitude in the 'Secular west'. It is what most purportedly intelligent and educated people take for granted nowadays.
Nagel says in one of his essays that what he thinks drives a lot of the debate, is actually a deep-seated and unacknowledged fear of religion.
from Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, in The Last Word
In my view, many people have made up their minds about the whole God business - they've closed the door, nailed it shut, and don't want it to be opened again. That drives a lot of debate around this point.
You are right in your observation that some ideas have been crystalised here in this forum. It is very interesting for me to observe myself at this point arguing for a god.
Seeing that you've expressed an interest, I can tell you that during my university days I was a steadfast atheist. There were these two 7th day Adventists that would keep coming to my place with pamphlets containing scientific evidence for God and I would debate them for sometimes an hour at a time. It was great fun, but I was in no way swayed. I was trying to sway them. I wish I could remember their arguments fully - One was the L-isomer, which I might try and find a way to post on at another time.
At one point I had even arranged to meet a group of them in the park to debate the issue at great length, but when I got there a sweet girl pulled out a picture of Jesus and sat it upright on the rug and asked if I knew who it was. It was one thing to debate for fun, but I didn't want to attack her beliefs so I just held my tongue.
Anyway, like I said, I'm as surprised as anyone at the position I've taken in the forum. I've long wrestled with the ideas, and I may yet argue back the other way.
Thanks for your input Wayfarer.
I am not an atheist, but I don't really believe in a God. It's a lot more vague than that - 'higher intelligence' might do. This includes but transcends what a lot of people mean by the name (I hope!)
But, in today's world, if you express reservations about the scientific consensus, then you are usually categorised as being somehow fundamentalist. And there is a reason for that. The 'naturalist project' is monistic - there is one fundamental category of 'substance', and that is matter~energy (it used to be just 'matter' until the discovery of E=MC[sup]2[/sup]). It methodically denies there could be any other dimension to existence.
To illustrate: Thomas Nagel, whom I mentioned, published a book in 2012, called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False; notice that the title doesn't pull any punches. But, long story short, this book was excoriated by the secular intelligentsia; it was promptly dubbed 'the most despised book of 2012', and other scholars lined up to rubbish it. And why? Because it questions the materialist consensus.
The Jealous God of the OT dies hard.
That about sums me up at this point too. A part of me still feels very atheistic, but I am also aware of an awakening within me - a connection to some spiritual current running through things.
Ironically it was watching Richard Dawkins attacking the church in his debates on god with his knowledge of science that so disgusted me I wanted to defend faith in god and that started me slowly down the path some years ago.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're right, but I am struck by how many people on this forum share our views. I was expecting a huge defense of science, but it's not materialised. Critically thinking people on the main seem to agree with us.
And the more I probe science with the idea of god force, the more I see how weak science's position on insisting that there is none really is. I want to see some solid ideas from the science community to rule out the idea of a god. I want them to fight back on intelligent design with their life from the soup arguments, but their gun is empty.
In the absence of any evidence that a god does not exist, one must assume that the message the scientific community is putting out is unscientific pontification without even applied reasoning.
It would be great to advertise this forum in the universities and get them on here so we can all stir up a storm of debate.
I don't think ruling on the reality or otherwise of God, is 'science's position' at all. Strictly speaking, science ought to be methodologically naturalist - that is, scientists assume for the purpose of their work, that there are not non-natural factors to contend with. But you can do that, while remaining circumspect about the larger question of whether there are metaphysical truths beyond the scope of science. Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable attitude in my view.
I think the idea that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion is pernicious, and is usually peddled by either religious fundamentalists, or scientific materialists (like Dawkins). There are however plenty of religious scientists - I just discovered, for example, that the recently-deceased Vera Rubin, who basically discovered the concept of dark matter (and whom a lot of people believe ought to have won the Nobel for so doing), was a practicing Jew. George Ellis, who is a noted cosmologist, is a Quaker. For that matter, the physicist who came up with the 'big bang' theory, was a Jesuit, although he took great pains to keep his scientific work and his religious beliefs separate.
But the 'intelligent design' movement is a different matter - they're trying to prove God, by scientific means, which I think does a disservice to both sides. I can't help but find some of the design arguments persuasive, but at the end of the day, they don't amount to scientific proofs, because they point to something that is by definition beyond empirical knowledge.
In my view, philosophy's unique role is to delineate the border between the different domains of knowledge; it can't necessarily tell you what is over the cognitive horizon, but it can at least suggest where the horizon is, in a way that the natural sciences generally can't, or won't.
I think that scientists are a lot like philosophers, philosophers whose ideas are grounded in the natural, which is why they get into trouble when they cross the boundary. It would be great to debate them.
We have letters: a, b, c,...,x, y, z. These letters represent sound and are the fundamental stuff of language. Consider this level 1
Then these letters come together to form words: apple, ball, cat, dog, etc. This new combinations of letters have meaning distinct from the letters. There are rules on how to combine letters to form words and these are distinct from rules that govern level 1. Call this level 2
Letters come together to form sentences: "This cat is brown", "The apple is ripe", etc. These sentences have their own set of rules, distinct from levels 1 and 2. This is level 3
Sentences come together to form expositions, passages, essays, books, etc. Level 4 which has its own set of rules, distinct from the previous 3 levels.
As you can see, each level acquires an extra property, requiring its own interpretation and analysis. I think this works for all complex systems.
So, yes, we can reduce all 4 levels to level 1 but that would be a mistake because all 4 levels have their own state of existence, distinct from each other and thus, requiring a distinct interpretation.
I don't think there's any information lost in viewing the world this way - biology overlaying itself on chemistry, for example - because, in fact, we're on the right path by giving due importance to the complexities of complexity.
I like the way you built this argument.
You are right, there is no information lost in viewing this world this way. When I look at the word cat in a book, what I see are the letters c, a, t but when I look at an ion channel I don't see the protein sequence. It is masked behind the colorful blue diagram of a pipe.
I am still trying to understand whether your question is related to the philosophical analysis of conceptual, epistemic, maybe even the methodological basis of metascientific inquiry using Pierce' system or even structuralism. I don't see you mentioning him, which makes me doubt you even understand how semiotics could be applied to scientific analysis. Accessibility to scientific literature has indeed enabled a more broader reach by simplifying the exchange of knowledge through signs.
For instance, Pierce' theory is modelled on a tripartite sign system of symbolic (meaning is given to a symbol through an associative process of signification between sign and object), iconic (shared quality defined by a sensory feature) and an indexical (representative of causally identifiable facts). A deduction is an observable fact and thus would feature as an indexical, while an induction is symbolic etc. This is particularly interesting with qualitative analysis in biology among other sciences.
You just seem to be praising it with random statements but there is no substance in what you are saying.
The idea I'm using is very straight forward. We ascribe attributes to emergent phenomenon. This is like a sign or a mask for the reality of the object - it says this is an ion channel. It doesn't describe the underlying complexity of the ion channel. Therefore there is information loss.
When we study a system at a certain level we become conversant in that system using the symbols we created to represent each part of it. When we understand how that layer works in relation to the symbols we say 'case closed, I understand'.
Of course it is not a total understanding as information has been lost in providing you with the semiotics you need to understand your emergent layer. It is only by dropping back out of this layer and considering the other layers beneath it that the full complexity of the system comes to bear.
When we are faced with such enormity of information we can no longer hold tenable the assertion that we truly understand the system we are investigating. Outside of our local understanding, when asked why a system works a certain way we enter into infinite regress or egress depending on if you are a top down or bottom up kind of thinker. Ultimately there is no answer to the why question. There is no full understanding that can be derived.
Semiotics is useful for understanding local phenomenon, but blinds us to the bigger picture. It creates a false sense of confidence in our understanding of the nature of things.
That's what I'm saying TimeLine. Make sense?
The enormity of information is the very reason why we have symbolic representations as part of our associative process to metascientific enquiry; take cosmology, that attempts to build a narrative to articulate the universe both past and present to establish symbolic meaning to our investigations within astrophysics viz., the indexical and iconic. It does not 'blind us to the bigger picture' on the contrary it is our attempt to cognise something that cannot be seen otherwise. That is the point of semiotics, which is why you still are not making sense to me. If you want to give some specificity to your point by providing an example, perhaps we could work from there.
Quoting TimeLine
Yes, because it cuts down on the information load.
Quoting TimeLine
Yes, to understand something at the local level.
Quoting TimeLine
In order to understand our local layer we make assumptions about the nature of the objects in it. It is a planet would be an assumption. From a cosmological perspective we see a Planet - this is a semiotic term. It sums up a whole bunch of information into one discreet package.
A planetologist may describe it in terms of their semiotics
It is a gas giant 2 billion miles in diameter with an iron core and sulphur-dioxide atmosphere, a rotational period of 2.3 days, a surface pressure of 10 million KPa and a core pressure of 40 billion kPa, a surface temperature of 600Kelvin and a core temperature of 6000 kelvin.
Between the two there has been information loss.
The cosmologist cannot claim to fully understand the cosmos without fully understanding the planets in it. They can only claim to understand their part of it - the local level.
Similarly a planetologist cannot claim to fully understand the planet unless he can explain why the electrons in the magnetosphere undergo bonding when passing through the most solar part of the magnetosphere or why there is a counter current circulation of lithium hydroxide ions in the storm below the equator.
And so we enter into a regress that contains so much information it is impossible to understand in its entirety. A cosmologists understand the cosmos, a planetologist understands the planet, a chemist understands the chemical reactions and so on, but none of them understands everything as they are using semiotic models to explain their systems and the models are not universal like 'c, a, t'.
Science specialises into fields. Specialists in each field are specialists in understanding the semiotics of that field. They seek complete understanding of that field and believe that the system can be understood in terms of the semiotics. They will not invoke a higher power to explain their system as that is like cheating.
It is not until we remove ourselves from the local level and look at all the information in all the fields and realise that these in turn are only semiotic representations of processes that it begins to dawn on us that the big question is not answered.
What? Why would "its a planet" be an assumption?
Quoting MikeL
Need I remind you that semiotics is the study of signs? Hence why I mentioned Pierce; something that is symbolic is one part of a tripartite system, whereby a planet is iconic according to Pierce, not symbolic. It thus changes the structure of the argument and how we articulate this to form meaning.
Quoting MikeL
?
I can see how the use of semiotics would be possible in metascientific enquiry and the significance our interpretations have to the structure of our representations, but our thoughts of reference that may contain predisposed mental constructs becomes much more complex in the field of science as it is dominated by a sophisticated interpretative structure based on factual evidence. From a Saussurian perspective, language is this tool and at fundamental level requires a signifier (object) and the signified (representation) that are both arbitrary but nevertheless unequivocally inseparable and how much you know about planets are further defined by a structure or flow in syntagmatic meaning or paradigmatic where meaning is formed through a themes between groups. This enables us to articulate, to communicate, to organise our vocabulary.
Quoting MikeL
A cosmologist is not a planetologist. They share information, work together in a complex network of interconnected contrasts and negative differentiation, which is why language is arbitrary to afford this flexibility. That is how we progress and learn. A philosopher of mind is not a cognitive scientist neither a psychologist, but by contrasting and sharing they advance their narrative in their respective fields. There is no sudden predefined structural categories.
You are laboring points that I don't disagree with. I want you to understand what the OP is saying. To do this you must abandon what Pierce or anybody else says about semiotics. Let me try and walk you through the concepts so we know where our opinions diverge.
1. If I showed you a picture of a transport protein in a cell membrane would you agree that the protein channel looks like a colored pipe sitting in a membrane represented by yellow headed lipids with squiggly tails?
Image
Image 2
A doctor may need to understand the protein channel at this level.
2. Do you see any difference to this picture of a protein channel?
Image 3
A molecular biologists may need to understand the protein channel at this level.
3. Do you agree that between the first two images and the third there has been information loss?
What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. We exchange ideas in language, which is signs. Our maths is signs.
Like Wayfarer I am no great advocate of scientising. But one needs a firm grasp of the philosophy of science to criticise it reasonably. Any working scientist must heighten the local detail that matters as much as they can, simplify the rest and hold certain things to be not involved with their locality - ceteris paribus - then do their thing. Scientists at different 'levels' will regard the 'detail' they are interested in in a different way. So we have pluralist understandings, from sub-atomic particle to chemical to cell to protein to organism to social facts. I presume we start from this basis.
It's what comes next in metaphysics, or at least in seeking to explain how the pluralities inter-connect, where the trouble starts.
But I think of the opponents in that argument as equally semioticians. Indeed, sometimes the semioticians are the good guys, refusing the reduction, insiting on the necessity of complexity and of pluralism.
Actually, I think this point came from a discussion in the thread on life arising from non-life.
I took issue with the idea that 'everything is information' - how, I asked, could an instance of 'radioactive decay' constitute 'information'? The answer was something along the lines of, it narrows the possibilities for what will happen next.
The particular exchange is here. The salient passage is this one:
I still think this is mistaken - if everything is information, then 'information' has no meaning.
The point about biosemiosis, is that organisms 'encode' or contain information in the form of DNA. But that information has morphological consequences i.e. it is able to transmit itself, grow, reproduce, mutate, and so on, whilst maintaining itself.
I think MikeL has taken it a different way altogether, but this is the passage that I think is behind this thread.
Any example could only be refuted by a counter-example. Can you give an example of a statement by any semiotician that shows that the notion of transcendent meaning is incorporated in their system?
I would have thought innumerable exchanges you have had with apo where he unfailingly rejects the transcendent would have been enough to convince you of reductionist nature of semiotics.
It's the logic of the discipline itself, which (inevitably) reflects the limitations of the discursive intellect. To say that all the answers that matter will be given by semiotics is a form of scientism par excellence. I'm surprised you cannot see that so-called "top-down" causation is understood to be the result of countless complex interactions, just as the mind is understood to be the result of unimaginably complex neuronal processes in physicalist thinking. Nothing transcendental is going on according to semiotics any more than it is according to materialism or physicalism.
I don't think that, and I'm not saying that mcdoodle.
Quoting mcdoodle
I have stated that this happens and have not suggested they should not understand their local layer.
Quoting mcdoodle
This is my contention, yes.
Quoting mcdoodle
This is the critical part. There is no place to start. All is semiotic.
Yes, that about sums it up. It has meaning, but only in context. It is not a universal meaning. It is only when we pop out of our local level we see that everything we have predicated our understanding on is much more complex then we can possible grasp, but even that complexity is just a semiotic respresentation of an infinitely regressing or egressing system. So we go from have a high degree of certainty in our local semiotic system to having hardly any at all.
What is 'transcendent' anyway? Might be worth having a go at trying to define it. Perhaps - a feature or attribute of experience, which can't be explained on the basis of anything in experience. That is close to the Kantian meaning. Take (for instance) mathematical reasoning and inference - both those are essential attributes of rational thought, but I don't know if they can be explained by rational thought; we all know how to count, but 'theory of number' is a notoriously difficult. In other words, we use numbers easily, but it is not at all clear what number is.
But the point about my debates about naturalism and semiotics, is that there are naturalistic interpretations of the subject which are not necessarily essential to semiotics as such. In other words, one could study semiotics apart from a commitment to a naturalist worldview. I still say, they're separate topics. It's like I said to MikeL - you can be 'methodologically naturalist' without being 'metaphysically naturalist'. So you might argue for a 'naturalist' philosophy on the basis of semiotics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that semiotics must assume a naturalist philosophy.
So it's not a case of not being to truly know everything, its a case of not being able to truly know anything.
Kant deliberately distinguished 'transcendent' from 'transcendental'. He rejected the coherence of the idea of the transcendent. The transcendental he thought as being the conditions for possible experience, which do not themselves appear in experience. In other words, the 'in itself', the 'noumenon'. So, I don't think it is so much " a feature or attribute of experience". I agree that it is not clear what number is; but that may be as much because of the way the question is framed. We think of what things are in terms of constitution, like water is H2O, and so on. What are we asking when we want to know what number "is"? On the phenomenological side, I think it is perfectly clear to us what number is. Most of us get it.
I certainly agree that one could study semiotics without being committed to a naturalistic worldview. There was a very bright Christian Peirce enthusiast on here for a while, for example. Everything we do is semiotics whether we study it as a conscious discipline or not. The side of it that gets forgotten by the 'systems' and 'information' people is the domain of arts and music; they are semiotic too.
That's all I was trying to say.
Semiotics isn't saying everything is information. It is saying "everything" is the sign relation that has the three parts of an interpretation, a world, and a mediating sign.
So information is the physical mark that stands in-between the "self" and its "world". The information bit is a Janus-faced element that points in both directions. It can be freely read as meaningful precisely because it is so actually lacking in the usual "physical meaningfulness".
An ideal bit of information is a mark or a symbol. It has the special quality of being permanent and unchanging. That makes it really unlike "normal physics" which is all about dynamism and entropy and wear and tear.
If I scratch a rock with my name, the mark is likely to still be there in 10,000 years. So that endurance puts the mark at the limit of normal physics. It is an exceptional thing. And it is also just as exceptional (well, a lot more so) that a rock face might have my name scratched on it. Physics left to itself would be highly unlikely to produce such a striking pattern. What could have done it naturally - a succession of micro-meteorite strikes catching the face of the rock just so?
The point is to recognise that a "realm of information" or semiotic interpretance becomes possible at the limit of physics. It is itself a natural or immanent fact. The world is on the whole entropic and dynamic - always in motion and running down an energy hill. But immanent in that is then inherently the "other" which is the possibility of a "non-physical" mark. Well, of course every symbol has to be some actual physical mark - a negentropic constraint on dissipation. The circuits of a computer don't want to be organised like that. But we can make them behave that way ... by plugging the computer into some wall socket and paying the electricity bill.
So the first point is to establish what we are actually talking about when talking about "information". We are talking about physics in a special way. We are talking about the material world's own limits on its dynamism and erosion. That is why information theory has become so central to modern physics. We can model reality itself in terms of "marks" or countable degrees of freedom. We can measure the negentropic constraints that form existence in a direct fashion.
Physics was once classically atomist - reductionist in presuming reality was just composed of definite lumps of matter. We learnt better. So now we use the notion of information to describe reality in terms of its formal limits. The "ultimate stuff" becomes the "outputs" that regulate being - the emergent constraints - rather than the "inputs" that supposedly compose it.
So at the level of physics (or pansemiosis), we are finding a different way to describe nature. The true material world is being understood in terms of its indeterminacy and dynamism. Materiality wants to be going off in all directions with no regularity. There just ain't any stable atoms to count.
But then we can start to count that mess of action in terms of its own limitations. We can imagine it converted into some giant collection of scratches or marks, each one symbolising a conserved "degree of freedom", or bit of "negentropy". And pragmatically, that new way of doing physics - of conceiving of material reality - really works.
So physics has found a way to distance its descriptions of nature. The Universe is mediated by its own system of sign. The unholy mess that is the continuity of physical interactions can be understood as being organised via its own emergent limitations. The meaningfulness that is incomprehensible at the one level - as the confused blur of material motions - is rendered comprehensible by viewing it now as an arrangement of information, each bit standing as the token of a primal event or interaction. Or rather, a physical and spatiotemporally localised act of constraint.
OK. That is what "reduction" amounts to in talking about information and semiotics as applied ontically in the physical modelling of reality. Instead of being Scientism - the claim that material reality is essentially meaningless (and observerless) - this is now a formal way of building those things into the scientific picture.
The material world is now flooded with meaning - more things going off in more directions than could ever be counted. You might as well be living in a multiverse where everything happens.
But if we can now build a constraining observer into that world - one that reduces the blur to its critical individual events, its countable degrees of freedom (exactly the bits which escapes constraint) - then we can construct the kind of meaningful relation with the world we are interested in. Or pansemiotically, see existence as the state that emerges out its own meaningful self-interest via this basic "epistemic cut".
So to return to my initial point, the key to "information" is that it is becomes meaningful to a system of intepretance as it is also the arrival at the limits of material meaning.
A mark like a name scratched on a rock is just a nothing to the ordinary material world. It is having just no effect - unlike the wind, the rain, the volcanic eruptions, and all the other hot shit going on. If materiality is defined by its hot mess dynamism, the physical mark is the most immaterial aspect of that world.
And then in being so apart from regular dynamics and flux, the physical mark becomes the start of something else. It can become the rock-solid sign that anchors an interpreter. It can be the basis for meaning at a different formal level.
But what prevents this then being unnatural is that systems of interpretance or sign relations must always be pragmatic. They actually have to live and survive in the worlds they arise from. They may regulate material flows, but they can't transcend those flows. In the end, any local system of interpretance has to be entrained to the generic purpose or meaning of the most global or cosmic level system of interpretance.
So again, that throws us back into the arms of physics. Although a physics itself now hopefully understood pansemiotically and so not "bereft of meaning" in any simplistic sense,
OK. but the salient point is that semiotics cannot take you beyond naturalism. Just as you can nonetheless think beyond naturalism despite being a semiotician, many scientists are religious. Even some materialists are religious, so being a materialist doesn't necessarily commit you to naturalism. It doesn't follow from that that materialism can take you beyond naturalism.
I don't understand what 'a countable degree of freedom' is.
Furthermore - and without wishing to sound trite - who is counting?
Quoting apokrisis
Does 'physics' really think that? Where are some examples of that kind of thinking in the literature? Where does it come into the thinking about 'the standard model' and the alternatives to it? I do know that this is likely to be a difficult question, but just an indication of where this kind of thinking is showing up in physics itself would be helpful.
Quoting apokrisis
But the point is, that scratch mark conveys something - it is made by an agent, and interpreted by another agent - 'aha, Apokrisis was here'. How is that like atomic decay, or some other non-directed process?
There is (as you know) a school of argument for intelligent design, based on the observation that living organisms - DNA, actually - encodes information, in a way that non-living matter does not (see http://www.iep.utm.edu/design/#SH2a.)
The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, by Pattee, seems to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living matter:
In respect of 'the epistemic cut', Pattee says:
Whereas, you seem to be saying that there is no such 'topological discontinuity' at all? Am I understanding you right?
Quoting Wayfarer
Well obviously physicists in the first instance. But in an information theoretic model, reality itself is "counting". Or rather, a countable number of degrees of freedom are just the totality that emerges dynamically. It is what counts when things have gone to their limit.
Right now, we can say there is an electron here and moving in direction x. The universe knows that too. Our realities have thus converged. We are both saying the same thing about what is happening in terms of the countable, or physically orthogonal, ways they could otherwise be happening. Description has been reduced to fundamental bits of information, or formal signs.
Quoting Wayfarer
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course. There is a vast difference to information (constraints) being internalised. This is what creates an autonomous point of view. Life and mind are discontinuous from physics (dissipative dynamics) because they can construct an epistemic cut.
But pansemiosis then also allows us to talk of a fundamental continuity with nature.
Your complaint about Scientism is that it negates Spiritualism. It pretends nature - even life and mind - are fundamentally meaningless.
My pansemiotic reply is always that the trick is then to see nature, the Cosmos, as also meaningful ... in some properly justified sense, not merely a transcendental, supernatural, mystical hand-waving fashion.
So the new information theoretic physics is about doing that. In measurable fashion, it anchors metaphysics in the basic notion of "a sign".
Quoting Wayfarer
You are doing your usual best to misunderstand I would say.
Pattee is hardly sympathetic to the metaphysics you want to promote here. He is just honest that abiogenesis remains a tough nut for science to crack.
And yet even as we speak, huge inroads are being made due to new experimental possibilities. Pattee was writing before one of the most critical discoveries I have mentioned to you many times now - the realisation that life arises at the quasi-classical nanoscale where a variety of different forms of energy all converge in scale (in the chemistry of water) and so become eminently "switchable" when you stir in "information" (or molecular machines).
See - http://lifesratchet.com/
Quoting apokrisis
"Counting" without anyone who counts, "knowing" without anyone who knows. That's the problem I have with 'pansemiosis'.
"" Yet powered by energy, microscopic molecular machines—the ratchets of the title—work autonomously to create order out of the chaos. Life, Hoffmann argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. ""
-- I haven't read the book but that's seems like a no brainer. I find it hard to see how it is an argument rather than an observation. The only problem is it doesn't explain the origin of life at all. It only explains the propagation of life from life. It seems that everyone is converging on the same points. For more of my ideas read the OP on "The First Few Steps Required to Believe in Primordial Soup Theory"
As for switching, I've considered switching as a possible cause for starting life - namely the circadian rhythm all things seem to have - day night, hot cold all function as on-off. The idea seemed pretty revelational to me until I realized I couldn't make molecules do too much with it other than dance around a bit and change conformation. I don't see how switching can begin life.
I heard of a research group in Japan who denied a tree of any sleep by keeping the lights on, and it grew sick and died. I briefly read up on the circadian rhythm in plants and it said it uses the day night break to conduct different functions in the leaf (redistribute resources for other activities).
So I don't consider any of these to be huge inroads at all into explaining abiogenesis. Perhaps I am failing to see the broader implication of the findings or there are other details I don't know of to strengthen the position?
Fair enough. And I have the same problem with imagining some big daddy super-mind in the sky who counts or knows.
Given that you too want to avoid that kind of transcendental/supernatural entity, then what is your alternative option - reality as just some kind of generalised, disembodied, counting and knowing stuff? Where does your "mind" exist in physical reality?
Do you want to argue for panpsychism?
If so, why isn't pansemiosis better, in that it doesn't seek to found itself either on meaningless physics, nor mystical disembodied "mind-stuff". It starts from good old obvious semiotics - the fact that counting and knowing are a particular kind of useful epistemic habit based on "a sign relation".
So there is a science of meaning-making. Semiotics. And it begins right at the intersection of physics and symbols. It is embodied or rooted in an pragmatic interaction between "a mind" and "a world".
It seems just obviously the best place to begin the larger metaphysical project of recovering nature from the mangling jaws of the reductionist scientists and the reductionist theists.
Hmm. I'm sensing a connection here between the "not reading" and the "failing to see".
Trust me. This stuff is fundamentally surprising to the biologist. It makes you go wow! :)
Quoting MikeL
It explains how life even makes sense thermodynamically. It explains how it is quite wrong to think in terms of a "chemical soup". And so it is critical to the general abiogenic explanation.
If you want to talk about specific abiogeneic scenarios - like alkaline hydrothermal vents - I pointed you already in the direction of Nick Lane's books.
Quoting MikeL
Err, OK.
There's your problem in a nutshell - an inherited image which conditions your thinking (and not only yours). It's this kind of subterranean mountain, which we are duty bound to avoid.
It's more that in the Western philosophical tradition, there is the seminal idea of 'nous', which goes back at least to Plato (and is, I think, essential to the Western philosophical tradition). But I don't think you recognise anything that corresponds with that, whilst still seeking to retain some of its products. You will acknowledge that 'mind has been there all along' but if anyone suggests that this might amount to a notion of 'spirit' then you vociferously object (because of the 'subterranean mountain'). But quite what is the nature of 'nous' or 'mind' in that naturalistic sense, is obviously a very hard thing to conceive of.
I think I understand why, but to explain that requires a re-framing of the problem. In my philosophy, 'mind' is never an object of perception, but is nevertheless an ubiquitous reality. But it's not a 'that' to us, it is not something we can objectively know.
Whereas in your science-based approach, you're seeking to elucidate an essentially objective process, so when I make those kinds of remarks, you say 'aaargh, mysticism, hand-waving'. From your P.O.V., that is a valid criticism.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually, no. A few months back I started a thread on that, on the basis of an essay by Phillip Goff, who actually turned up and posted a question about my response.
Quoting apokrisis
It's all very good, except for when it tries to become a 'theory of everything'. That's where I think you're extending the model too far. But, I'm learning a lot of stuff thinking about it, which is after all why we post here.
Definitely there must be a connection between not having read the book and failing to see. That's true, I am an awful reader of late. I always feel I'm getting cheated out of my ideas to read other peoples ideas. That's why I like the forum where we can discuss and formalise our own ideas- sure we can use other people's concepts but I would prefer them only as a springboard into the imagination.
And I can't run out and read every book you recommend, Apokrisis, that's why it would be helpful if you could boil down the points so we can discuss them in some detail. As it stands there is no substance to the points being made in favour of abiogenesis- as you saw I used the same points of molecular machines to argue against abiogenesis..
Yeah. I just find it so hard to imagine reality in any but the most stereotyped and hackneyed old ways. You got me. Forever guilty of the unthinking Scientism you find in anything that doesn't immediately sound like it is agreeing with you.
Quoting Wayfarer
Gosh darn. How did I never hear about that?
Quoting Wayfarer
Gee whiz. Well maybe nous could be understood as a claim about "soul stuff", or maybe it could be understood as a claim about reason - semiotics - as a metaphysically general reasoning process?
I mean did we ever decide what Aristotle might have been arguing for in saying nous was the form that shaped the rational in the animal? Seems kind of an embodied approach. And so not so much your disembodied mind stuff.
So from your cite.....
...well that sure seems reasonable. Pretty straight semiotics.
Then...
...Oh there you go. Now we are into the soul stuff business. Unless you take a detour into pansemiosis where the Cosmos is a "mind" in that strict deflationary sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. Your position is that what you say is true and cannot be falsified ... as if being above factual disproof is a good thing.
So the Cosmic mind is everywhere and nowhere, baby, It is immaterial, imperceptible and disembodied, knowable only via faith and deep meditation. That's your "philosophy" and it is impregnable to anything science might have to say.
Quoting Wayfarer
Me too. :)
You've got to bend these things, over-extend these things, to find whether they break. That's why I hope you can bring up stronger arguments in regards to your universal mind. I need more push-back.
In the end - as I've said - the sheer fact of existence seems the most remarkable thing of all. Whether we are talking experience or world, the "why anything?" question is basically mind-boggling.
In that light, God-causes and soul-stuffs just strike me as mundane. It is obvious they don't even get started at illuminating the big question.
Remind me how molecular machines argue against abiogensis?
If it is demonstrated that a tiny fragment of biological machinery can harness a vast amount of entropy, then that makes abiogensis vastly more probable. It goes from being a freak of nature to an inevitability of nature.
And you are saying....?
Firstly atoms forming biological machines is an absurd notion, but one that does occur, suggesting that even at this level some weird shit is happening that breaks the bounds of a dumb physical world.
Secondly, that the specificity of the machines found in the nucleus must be encoded in the DNA. I list a whole bunch of enzymes in my OP and their specific function, and Wayfarer has a good link above too about irreducible design: http://www.iep.utm.edu/design/#SH2a
In terms of encoding a massive paradox opens up. I know its a bit long and dry, but see try and read my OP.
Ultimately I guess its an engineering problem. Randomness cannot account for it in any sensible way. It may lay the materials all over the ground, but they will not assemble randomly into a racecar. And the degree of regulation inside the nucleus is staggering.
It's not absurd if the thermodynamics enormously favours it.
That is the point. Folk have this notion that life is extraordinary because the Universe can only promote disorder. Well here is the evidence of how wrong that view is. Mechanical order can be hugely favoured. Hoffman gives you the actual numbers.
Quoting MikeL
Yep. It's all about semiosis. You need to keep a blue print somewhere to build your molecular machines.
But again - if you read up on the biophysics - you will see how little DNA control is in fact required. We might call it molecular machinery, but it is also in fact the most unstable kind of machinery you have ever seen. The molecules want to fall apart and only hang together by going in the "right" thermal direction.
So the machinery doesn't require the kind of genetic control we used to think it did - the kind of "distant hand exerted by blind code" that left life still a mystery. The machinery only needs nudges to encourage it to keep it generally hanging together and continuing with its job.
So again - as a biologist - wow! We never knew. This is a revolutionary change in view. Life is a much more a natural and inevitable set-up then we ever could imagine. It is not a problem that complex organic molecules struggle to hang together for more than a few seconds or minutes. That is why they are "unreasonably effective". If they weren't always on the cusp of thermal dissolution, they couldn't be so easily nudged to keep doing their thing. That is the physical trick which makes informational control possible.
Quoting MikeL
You are missing that the conversation in biology has gone way beyond this stage now. The organism is neither a random assemblage nor a deterministic machine. It already starts its story with the irreducible complexity of a semiotic relation.
The critical instability of the molecular machinery of life is the point. It both wants to fall apart and put itself back together. And so it comes to exist with any stability only then as an expression of the larger desires of the whole. Yes, you need DNA to encode that wish. But now that DNA only has to deliver gentle nudges, not tell every molecule what it must do the whole time. The simple fact that entropy flows through the circuits keeps the show hanging together and pointed in the right general direction.
So from both sides - the random emergence of order, and the deterministic control of that emergence - the new biophysics has immensely reduced the credibility gap. It used to be hard to see how life could evolve on Earth. Now it is hard to imagine how it could not.
In the meantime you say: Quoting apokrisis
What level are you talking about here?
The flipside of a molecular structure that has critical instability is that it is matchingly open to small nudges.
So it is perfectly poised. It faces two-ways in terms of its causality - both back towards the self-organising complexity of dissipative chemical structure and and also towards the newly available possibility of informational regulation.
The irreducible complexity is about a triadic semiotic relation. You can't have semiosis - a modelling relation - with less than three elements. A world, a sign, an interpretation.
And so abiogenesis would be about the first time this arises. And as a possibility to be exploited, we can see that it is already there - as a potential - as soon as you have critical instability in the form of a dissipatively structured material process.
I really wasn't trying to be unfriendly. I'm just pointing out that whenever a concept comes up that might be associated with 'theism', then look out.
Quoting apokrisis
But, as we said, you have a system wherein there is 'counting' - but no-one who counts; and 'knowing' - but no-one who knows! So at issue is, how does a 'metaphysically general reasoning process' exist - in what does it inhere - independently of a reasoning intelligence? You can say that nature 'counts' or 'knows', but isn't there an implicit dualism, not to say anthropomorphism, in these expressions?
In what sense does reason exist, independently of any mind? You appear to be saying that 'semiotic processes' are intrinsic to, or can be derived from, physics itself. But the point of the Pattee quote I provided was *not* that 'abiogenesis is a tough nut to crack', but that there is in some important sense an incommensurability between the physical and the semiotic. It is precisely this incommensurability which you then claim to have overcome by 'pansemiosis' - when this is actually the point at issue!
So what I'm arguing is that semiotics was originally derived from a philosophical tradition in which there was indeed a concept of 'mind-stuff' or 'soul-stuff' - horrible terminology, I agree - but which was nevertheless intrinsic to the conception of 'reason' in that tradition. But then to remove the ostensible ground of reason, and relocate it in the domain of physics - I think there's a metaphysical sleight-of-hand going on here. It's like the Cheshire Cat's grin. And appealing to theories of 'the holographic universe' isn't much of an out; that's just one of a number of current cosmological speculations.
Quoting apokrisis
And I still say, that's because of how you think about it, how it occurs to you, what it means to you - and to a lot of people for that matter. 'God' has become a cliché, but what was it before it became that? (And also, 'mundane' means 'of the world'.)
Quoting apokrisis
What is the goal in the kind of philosophical understanding I'm seeking? It's not understanding the technicalities of how molecules come together, or what drives the processes of life in a biological sense - even if they're perfectly worthy goals in their own right. But the goal of 'classical' philosophies is 'sapiential' rather than 'scientific'.
That is like reiterating over and again about the categorical imperative by asking one to abandon Kant. I don't need you to walk me through the concepts, I need you to understand that semiotics is not 'everything' but a process of articulating and interpreting signs based on a signified and the signifier, an object and you that enables meaning to an interpretation. Without solidifying your point rooted in this specific interaction, you are no longer talking about semiotics and sure, you can abandon Pierce since his theories have since progressed, but you are not presenting a strong enough case.
What I am saying is that I can understand the meta-scientific inquiry of semiotics based on finding this interpretative meaning in physical reality - that is the signifier and signified based on the information between you and the scientific material world - but your attempts at ameliorating this has since been unsuccessful, to me anyway. The actual science of meaning-making in semiotics is multidisciplinary, as mentioned already such as cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, even epistemology, but without an adequate focal point using pre-existing literature on the subject makes it hard for me to ascertain what your point actually is.
Quoting MikeL
No. Semiotics is not about the loss of information based on what we know in science as a whole, but the meaning that we obtain from the information to articulate and interpret its signification to the individual. The first image is all that is necessary for the doctor to develop meaning that will enable him/her to understand cell membranes, but a molecular biologist would understand from the first two that there is not enough information. That, however, does not mean that there is an error occurring.
Quoting apokrisis
There is the same sophistication in language, hence why language is arbitrary to ensure that it adapts to the dynamism and why we progress through negative differentiation. Really well said, though.
Information not defined in terms of meaning is physical. Information defined in terms of meaning (i.e., semantic information) is psychophysical.
Everything is semiotic (adjectival form of semiosis) only for psychophysical organisms in that semiosis is how they model their world (at every level of investigation).
Everything is information (in a nominal sense) in that everything is composed of relational data (i.e., physical or psychophysical variables).
Information must be interpreted to have meaning. Because interpretation is a psychological process, information only has meaning for psychophysical organisms.
Once more, you can leave pansemiosis out of it if you like. Biosemiosis alone makes the crucial point when it comes to how life/mind can be both a physical process, and then more than physical in being informational.
Then pansemiosis is the larger view which shows how an informational view can be applied to the purely physical.
Now the epistemic cut is not due to some internal coding machinery - a memory that provides the constraints that shape the organism - but is a physical feature of material interactions themselves. All interactions are limited by lightspeed. And so this creates an event horizon when it comes to the history that is the shaping context of any material events.
It is this fact that creates a sharp topological discontinuity. You can't be affected by what hasn't yet had time to affect you. So in a real sense, every physical event is being shaped by a "personal" history. It is seeing the Cosmos from a particular point of view.
This is what the holographic principle is about. Event horizons aren't real in the sense of being material. They are just the fact that it takes time for distant events to impinge upon you as now part of your history.
But then this situation is best described as informational. Whether you know or not makes an actual difference. It is meaningful to you. Or if you are a particle, it is the context that determines your state.
So physics does have a need to make a distinction - draw a line, make an epistemic cut - to mark the event horizon which is not a physical thing itself but is an definite informational effect.
Well at least that is where the information theoretic approach begins. As you get properly quantum, and materiality gets totally slippery, the event horizons start to look like they are creating our reality as a holographic projection.
That is getting crackpot of course. But that is another reason for liking pansemiosis. It stops the metaphysics going that far and becoming nonsense.
Macrostates of nature have to be multirealisable. Indifferent to their particulars. An ideal gas has a temperature and pressure despite the fact that there are any number of ways the particles composing that gas could have distributed their motions, their kinetic energies.
So the actual arrangement of the particles is information that needs to be shed for more macro levels of reality to emerge. The dynamics of the micro scale are averaged over.
Newtonian concepts of causality are locked into determinism. Quantum indeterminacy does undermine that fundamentally. But also our models of nature need this idea of hierarchical information loss to explain how higher organisation - habits or laws - could even emerge from "fixed motions".
At the microscale, particles seem fixed in their relations. They have no means to be indifferent to a world of impressed forces. So a capacity to be indifferent is the physically new macro property that emerges. Global states, like temperature and pressure, become real to the extent they don't have to sweat the detail. A capacity to shed information is the key to the macro scale having causal meaningfulness.
So this can be treated as metaphorical. And yet semiotics is the actual metaphysical model which makes sense of this "paradox". It explains why systematic information loss is key to the hierarchical self organisation of nature. It provides a way out of traditional reductionist causal thinking based on efficient/material causality.
Mention? It's the entire OP minus some implications, although you did do a good job at rewording it. Personally I've tried to present my writing to be simple and easy to understand rather than technical and hard to access, however perhaps I should ramp it up a bit. It seems sometimes like rather than pitting idea against ideas, some people prefer to pit their words against your words - using the most highly sophisticated words they can find, regardless of whether their sentences actually makes sense anymore. Anyway, to each their own.
I'm reading Hoffman and should have some comments for you in the not to distant future.