. If you create an EEPROM Device, it has a format. It can form an index. And, even if you fill it with unknown characters of an unknown language, — Rocco Rosano

This is wrong once you understand the physics of a USB flash drive. That is why I have specifically referred to the cells and the charge they hold by setting up a binary language that the computer can read. But the problem is not the signs that the USB flash drive may or may not have (the cells and the charge) you have to distinguish between the language and the information. A binary language by itself does not mean anything until it is transcribed into a computer that can work with it and make us see something totally different than some 1's and 0's. That is, if you use a USB flash drive to get a Paper you have written when you understand the Paper you are reading something totally different from 1's and 0's. This implies that the information as a process jumps from language to language. But it does not jump as a preferred language, which makes it impossible to confuse our language with another language such as binary. In this sense, information is not deposited in the memory, signs are deposited that will be available for the human practice of information creation.

When information is stored, it is indexed in a memory device that has a structure to facilitate an interrogation and reply sequence. The device is generally a 'read-write' structure designed for retrieval. — Rocco Rosano

I claim that nothing is stored. Actually what happens is that it is physically configured in loaded and unloaded cells. We can associate between charge and discharge as a 0 and 1 (thus forming binary language). But a binary language by itself does not mean anything (except if we understand it, just like a pc processes it) and this is my point, it needs a translation or transcription into our language so that something like what we call information appears. Information appears and is created in the relationship, but it is never stored. Because what there is, literally are cells loaded and unloaded, then there are 0 and 1, and then there is the language that we understand. All this is a process of information, of in-forming, con-forming, trans-forming. The fiction is to believe that our language, the information that is created at an end point, is at a beginning. In reality it is a process where information is constantly created. But never stored.

In my opinion, we need to understand other aspect of consciousness. One must understand how consciousness is constituted at the most fundamental level. And consciousness is constituted at the most fundamental level as present and immediate time. Thanks to Husserl's analysis we understand that consciousness is constituted at this level by protentions and retentions. This implies that there is always a non-present side with which consciousness is continually in contact. This non-present is precisely the form of the world, as a thing not given in consciousness. In that sense one can maintain the existence of the world as a distinct other with which consciousness is related. But even more, it is consciousness itself that is constituted by non-presents, with which it can be said that consciousness is constituted by what is proper to the world as non-present. Consciousness is part of the world and the world is part of consciousness. To deny the world we must deny the existence of the non-present. But this non-present is fundamental for consciousness and for its functioning.

The beauty of the object, however, is only given as an external property in relation to a subject that interprets the sculpture. In this case the information, "the beauty" of the sculpture is given in the relationship. This is easy to prove in art, art is beautiful only in relation to us who interpret it.

But if the shape of the sculpture is beautiful, was it beautiful before anyone looked at it?

In what sense?

Either the USB has information or it doesn't. If the USB never gets information written to it then there was never any possibility that it would contain information in the first place. — Harry Hindu

Information is never in the first place. In the first place there are always signs arranged in one way or another. The difference is that there is an arrangement of signs that may enter into a meaningful (in-formative) relation or there may be no such arrangement such that the interpreter understands nothing or no relation is possible. I claim that what you call information processing is not processing of anything except signs and their arrangement. Whereby I cannot say that there is information being processed in the first place.

You are confusing information with acts on, or with, information. Being informed is being fed information. Information processing is integrating different types of information (inputs, or what you were fed) to produce new information (output). When the output becomes the input to subsequent processing, you have a sensory information feedback loop. — Harry Hindu

I cannot be confused because I do not believe that there is information about which there are acts, since the information if it is possible to substantiate it is in the result of a process of interpretation or in-formation. So there are no types of information in the first place. What there is is signs arranged in one way or another introduced as inputs as you say. But that input is not information. Because it's always the result of the processing of the signs that we confuse as being at the beginning of the process. For example, if you had a Paper (the information) in a USB memory, when you see and read the Paper in your PC you say "this was (passed) in the USB memory" when in fact it was not.

and there is a relationship between the sign and what it refers to - information. — Harry Hindu

The sign refers. But not to the information but to its process in which it will be included.

Interpretation is the act of integrating sensory information (the current number of rings in the tree) with information in memory (how the tree grows throughout the year). — Harry Hindu

I cannot call that information. Because in reality these rings are signs that refer precisely to the age of the tree. But this, the age of the tree, is given a posteriori. Then we can call it the result of the information process. Remember that I avoid substantivizing the word information, and I speak rather of in-formation as the act of giving form, as interpretation. In this case the signs give form to our cognitive apparatus and the idea of an age of the tree appears in us. That, that idea, is perhaps information as a sustantive, as a result of in-formation. But I prefer to avoid calling it this way so that there is no confusion. But what is clear to me is that the rings are neither information (the result of the process of interpretation) nor in-formation, they are signs.

In the case of the tree each ring is nothing more than a property of the tree. But in no case is it information because what you get from those rings you only get a posteriori as knowledge. That is, when we see the rings in general we ask "What information is here?" But in reality there are only signs that refer to other things, in this case the age of the tree. But those signs by themselves mean nothing. Necessarily there must be a process of interpretation to access knowledge like that, since it is never evident from looking at the rings that we are talking about age. That only goes a posteriori after a process of in-formation. The age itself is not contained in the tree, it is a ghost in the wood.

But if you are given a cleanly-formatted USB stick it is still correct to say that it contains no information — Wayfarer

I would say: you have no possible information. There is no possible in-formation/interpretation process due to the absence of signs. Or the absence of that of a specific configuration that can relate to an interpreter.

Every object contains information about its causes bottled up in its form and structure. — Harry Hindu

The thing is that what you call information is only given in the result of a process of interpretation. That is why I cannot call memory information. Memory are signs that are inscribed in a stable and perdurable way. But these are objects of any possible interpretation. Here interpretation is synonymous with in-formation. The signs of memory form something in the interpreter, they shape his language and his consciousness. they have an active role.

The type of Qualia that the subject conceives is due to the form of the object. To me, Qualia is not information so to me, the information is the form of the object. — MoK

For me qualia is a configuration given an information process. For I understand information not as a substance but as the relationship. Information for me is in-forming, con-forming trans-forming. So you have to distinguish the process with respect to the result. The qualia is the result. But I cannot agree that information is in the form of the object. You can call it information if you want but I can't call that in-formation.

If a l wrote a letter to my friend providing information on directions to my house. I can say I have transmitted this information by means of a letter. What was transmitted to him if he arrived at my house? — Richard B

From my point of view the signs contained in the letter did not contain information about your home address. What actually happened is that some signs, the signs in the letter have caused an effect on your friend. They have configured his language in such a way that he understands your home address. And this is evidently because you both share a language, a idiom, a context. But nothing has been transmitted since it is only ink on paper, or pixels on a screen.

Perhaps this is the right way of looking at it, but I would qualify this appraisal by affirming that the substance in itself is not doing any informing, and instead aver that the interpreter must first interpret, translate, transcribe the substance into a "form" that is understood by it as information. This I will call, tentatively, the communicative act. Interested in JuanZu's thoughts on this. — NotAristotle

I agree with the active role of the interpreter in communication. But I would also add an active role of the interpreted. Here it can be said that the substance also has an active role, as when we read a note on the refrigerator: the note informs and causes effects on us.

When we actually communicate what we do is to cause informational effects on the other person, without anything being transmitted. There is no ghost in the sound. We cause effects on their learned language, we shape it with our words. In communication the active and passive role varies from moment to moment, there is mutual transformation.

While information may be an act, not a substance, it would seem to rely on substance for its instantiation because there is something that is acted upon. In other words, for there to be an act of interpretation, what is there must be translated into what is meant. Does that sound right? — NotAristotle

Yes, You are right.

I agree only if we take into account that the shape of the object is distinguished from the information that will be created later. Since nothing is transmitted. We simply have signs as causes in a work of art that provoke different things in us. Just as a USB stick provokes things in a computer. But there must be a relationship between interpreter and interpreted, between the human and the work of art.

Information is the form in a substance. Take a bulk of clay that does not have any specific form. An artist can give a shape to the bulk of clay to convey something meaningful to his/her audience. — MoK

In that case, as I understand it, the bulk of clay is informed, but no longer in the sense of the result but in the sense of the act. The result is a system of signs with a form but it is not the act of informing, that is, the act of giving form. The audience is informed by the work of art in this case, that sign that is the work of art acts on people and then a new act of information appears. But before there was no information in the work of art. There were forms perhaps, but no information; information appears and is created in the relationship of the audience with the work of art. And appears as distinct effects on the audiencie, as interpretation.

The information exists in a form in a substance and the form is the result of the substance having specific properties. — MoK

I cannot say that information is the form in a substance. Information as I conceive it is the act of informing. That is, to cause significant effects on an interpreter.

1. I cannot speak of information as something that is interpreted because that makes us speak of it as a substance. But there is interpretation as the act of an interpreter who exerts a series of effects on a system of signs. For example a person who exerts his language and his context of interpretation on a book, what another person says, etc.

2. Can You give me more context to that question?

3. Since I conceive information as a relation always in act and not as a substance, I cannot say that information resides as an addition to anything. What appears is a system of signs that must be interpreted; and these have the quality of informing, in the sense of con-forming and trans-forming an interpreter.

The interesting question now becomes, if Joe and Jane are both "in-formed" in the same way, or with the same result, what fact about the interpreted (document, e.g.) allows this to be so? — J

In this case it is not so much the properties of the document if is the same for both, as the conditions imposed by the interpreters. Both have the same language for example, and the same context of interpretation.

Information is everywhere you care to look and which information is relevant is dependent upon the goal in the mind of the informed. — Harry Hindu

I would not reduce the interpreter to a mind for all cases. A computer can in-form itself by acting as an interpreter as soon as there is a process leading to a transcription effect. That is to say, as soon as the sign system "USB memory" enters into a causal relationship with the computer and its language.

Give me the information!" i.e., Hand over that document! vs. "What information does that document contain?" — J

In both cases the information is presupposed on the side of the interpreted. A correct expression according to my theory would be, "In-form me!" In the sense of causing something in the interpreter. To in-form him is to give form to the language of the one who says "In-form me!". In no case is something transmitted (like a ghost in sound, in ink, or in electric flow). In this case we are only talking about causes and effects, about how signs affect us and create things on the side of the interpreters.

This is quite counter-intuitive. But imagine it is but it is true theory. This prevents us from substantivizing information and treating it as an entity that passes from one side to the other. Which has many consequences for information theory like the ilusion of transmission.

I have no idea of what This possible means.

The information does exist in the USB stick, in the form of variations in electrical charge in different regions of a flash memory chip. This is why the device works as a memory. — wonderer1

Imagine that you use that USB flash drive to access a Paper you have composed. Now think about the memory itself, do you really see the Paper (the supposed information) inside the USB stick? No. You see exactly what you said, variations in electrical charge. But you don't see the Paper. The Paper is created at the moment of contact and transcription with the interpretant. But before, it did not exist.

Can you give it a name? — Wayfarer

The principle of reason.

Overall, I think that receptivity or hostility to the principle of sufficient reason might be closely tied to theist or non-theist views of the Universe. — Wayfarer

There is a text by Heidegger in which he speaks of the principle of reason and criticizes it in a certain sense. In the text he speaks of something more fundamental of the being of things than their casual reason. There appear phenomenological notions about light in which something is given and appears. Something more proper to the thing (its being) that is differentiated from the reference to something else (a cause or a reason). That is to say the criticism is made that when we speak of reason or cause we speak of something else other than what we should speak of. I recommend reading it. Especially because it is indirectly a critique of the notion of causality and the ontotheology of a causal God.

If we accept the scissors argument, we accept the idea of a universe that is out of the hands of a supposed creator and designer. In other words, God has not foreseen the evolution of the universe. And if this is so then why maintain the idea of a Great Designer? It is like saying that the designer is not such a designer and God who foresees everything does not foresee too much. Do you understand my point?

But as far as that being an analogy or argument for a 'divine creator', that was not the point. — Wayfarer

I claim that it is an argument against intelligent design. We can talk about the creator of the scissors or the creator of the universe. In both cases the becoming outweighs the intention or purpose. And the example of the scissors is important because it refers to the only case where purpose and intention seem to be present and can function as evidence for understanding intelligent design. That is, human action. And I say "seems" because in reality intention and purpose are not really able to saturate the being and existence of things created by man. Or created by God, as its first analogy. We can speak of scissors as of laws of nature, there is no distinction.

So you are not talking about scissors determined by the external agent, the great creator of scissors. You are talking about self-organizing systems. Is the universe a self-organizing system? But that excludes God, as the external cause of the organized being of the universe. So what is your point?

intrinsic reason — Wayfarer

Well, that's a concept. But I'm afraid experience contradicts it. We can give many uses to a scissors, why discriminate between one and another more than by an anthropomorphism?

Anyway I claim that scissors are more than scissors. And this "more" has to be explained, but it cannot be explained by the purpose.

Ok lets talk about scissors.

What I'm saying is actually quite simple. Think of other uses we can put those scissors to - which indeed it has. Those different uses are part of its existence and being. So linking a specific intention to its being is arbitrary. In this case, existence surpasses intention. It does not matter if when you created the scissors you were thinking of a purpose, what matters is also the becoming of the scissors that you were not thinking of, that is, not a purpose. In this sense the existence and being of the scissors surpasses the final cause that supposedly gave rise to it.

If you give an alien a pair of scissors, he might not know what to do with them. Or it could be that it would give them an extraordinary and different use than the great creator of the scissors. That is something that cannot be denied. The being and existence of the scissors surpasses purposes and final causes. So, literally, when we create scissors, we do not know what we create and the supposed main reason for the great creation of the scissors does not saturate the becoming of the scissors.

In reality what happens is that we introduce intentions into the events. But what we introduce (an intention) is never proven, not even a posteriori. When a technological apparatus works, it does so to the extent that we have expectations, but the technological apparatus can always fail. The question is: Where is the intention and the final cause in the technological apparatus that works differently from our expectations? If everything has a reason it should also have a reason for failure too, and we would have to say that we also intended it to fail. This implies that you can introduce any final cause to objects or events as you see fit. Which makes the final cause arbitrary. Actually Ontologically there is a gap between the supposed final cause (our intention) and the caused object. No object or events possess a final cause that passes mysteriously from cause to effect.

And yet we can build a whole body of knowledge, neurology, from the conscious study of what we call the brain. This implies, by right, an epistemological primacy of consciousness over neurology. From neurology we cannot know the consciousness, but from the consciousness we can know the brain.

Thus it is difficult to think of consciousness as simply something enclosed in an interiority (the brain). Consciousness seems to be thrown into the world and in a more direct connection with the world than the physical sciences themselves. For me this is the reason why the question of the external world seems implicated in consciousness, and even a dualism between consciousness and the world is problematic.

But the properties of particles are, in conjunction with other factors, the reason groups off particles have the states they do under various conditions.

Where am I leaping — Patterner

In your example of iron, a path of decomposition, reduction and reconstruction is still possible. In these paths you find the parts that constitute the whole and with which you can reconstruct it. That does not happen with experience. You can have a whole neural complex and establish relationships between each neuron up to a very complex level, and yet you do not know whether you have constructed the experience. You can't even decompose an experience into neural processes. So the idea of composition and decomposition is not useful for understanding this matter of experience and physical matter.

For me it is simply necessary to accept that irreducibility is a fact. The contents of consciousness are not reducible to the contents of physics, but just as the contents of sociology are irreducible to psychology. I think that we have the faculty that many things we perceive are given to us in irreducible ways. But in such a way that the genesis of these things is a closed path for us, but not absolutely closed, since there are connections such as the associations of the brain to thought (but associations), or of the brain to society.

Given the irreducibility, the image that we must have cannot be hierarchical between the different dimensions of reality. But more horizontal, in such a way that it does not necessarily imply the construction thinking from the smallest to the largest. There are times when we can make reductions of the type: we know the building bricks and their relationships and with this we can reconstruct the whole; but there are times when we can go to the building bricks but we cannot reconstruct the whole. The need for a conception of the dimensions of reality cannot be in the form of a pyramid, but in another form, like a rhizome a la Deleuze.

When you speak of principle it reminds me a little of Hegel for whom the spirit is an active principle or process of reality as opposed to the concept of substance as something immobile and static, codified and subsistent by itself.

The movement with respect to the scholastic philosophic is precisely the introduction of notions such as event, process, active principle, etc. From the static to the dynamic, from the cosified to the processual.

But I don't think it changes much about the hard problem of consciousness either. Because we want to be physicalists about something that seems to escape this kind of descriptions. The question is: if it is no longer dualism of subtances what is the ontology that best suits this difference between the mental and the physical?

The question is whether the banana event repeats itself we always have a causal explanation. Hume would say yes. Another thing is to try to know the details in order to have a more detailed explanation that explains the banana event.

The question is in the details.

We must also keep in mind that we already have prior knowledge that explains to us in turn why an event like the banana is not possible or not explainable.

Magic is defined by the inexplicable. So yes there can be magic if an event is not explainable in any possible way. Or maybe there is just unknowing, but we can never rule out magic a priori.

Is our belief that every event is explainable absolutely true? Or is just an induction never proven false?

I am not arguing that coherence is given from the mind. The mind just perceives coherence in the experience. — MoK

Then you are contradicting yourself. Since before you had said that the brain, the subject, the experience made of what the senses give us something coherent. And you did so by denying that you were talking about a tabula rasa.

Don't bother. You really believe that thoughts, feelings, intentions and purposes travel through the air when two people talk to each other. Imagine a tape recording where something you say is recorded. You have the tape and you literally believe that there are thoughts, emotions and so on on the tape. That is a type of mentalism and magical thinking that I do not share and is patently false.

By one agent interpreting the ink and sounds' forms in addition to discerning whence they originated and thereby understanding the intentions of the agent(s) from which these inks and sounds were resultant. — javra

If you look closely at what you have said, in no case is there a transmission of something. You speak of indirect relations as that of an agent presupposing what another agent means. But as it happens you are simply inferring from the ink and sound, but you never get inside the mind of the other agent, so to speak. Since there is no such thing as passing from one head to another, you have to infer from the ink and sound (and also from its context), which implies an active role for both. Here inferring is nothing other than creating meaning for itself which we indirectly link to another agent. But there is nothing that is transmitted.