If they weren't separated, they would decompose, as would any organism. Being an organism means being separate — Wayfarer

A Cell is an individual organism inside a body. A human is a cell inside the biosphere.

Hope that helps.

A self is a transient body of information over a lifetime. In the absolute sense, changes with every moment of consciousness. The materials are regenerated constantly. The constant is the feeling deep inside.

What if, like some suggest, there was a time when nobody was around who could perceive it? If a tree falls in the woods... — Outlander

At metaphysical bottom, there is a stuff and information about it. And If we are to understand the stuff, that is the way it will always be.

What precisely information is, is the question? @Gnomon has some really good info on his website.

Naturally not only would there not be sentient life in such a universe there would be no knowledge. Is information reality? It becomes almost metaphysical. What is not available to a person, cannot be known. We allegedly live in a "world" where when your heart stops, you are dead. But do we really know this? I know some claim to, myself included, but I just feel there's some relevance somewhere here in this quest for more information about information. — Outlander

:up:

We live in a world where we most deeply identify with the feeling we posses at heart. As best I can unravel it, everything in this universe feels it's forces acting on them. If so, then we can never lose touch with that feeling in this universe.

But everything is nothing if it is just noise with no signal. So you are no better off until you take the next step of producing a theory that offers an epistemic cut that separates signal from noise - something like the algorithm of a Bayesian Brain engaged in minimising its surprisal or free energy. — apokrisis

Did you see the video that @Daniel posted earlier. There are similar experiments with Killbots from Harvard.

At the heart of systems theory, it is just noise, then particles with noise begin to interact, and form a clump, and soon we are on our way to elementary particles.

So you have the problem in saying “everything is information”. It is the kind of monism that is bounded by two self-ridiculing notions - the idea of absolute nothingness and of infinity. Two equally unrealistic notions of “a limit”. — apokrisis

That everything is information is an easily falsifiablestatement, as mentioned earlier. You really need to acknowledge this, to get a feel for reality, imo. A self is something that forms in the midst of a self organizing informational system. How can the system cut itself off from what it is interrelating with. Sorry, it makes no sense to me.

At the same time, I need to narrate a story in terms of the knowledge that I posses, just as you do. In the end no paradigm can be absolutely true. We mustn't lose sight of that fact.

You mentioned earlier you have explored different paradigms. Did you step over the fence, or did you push the fence further. Do you understand what I mean?

Sure, but each individual will only need specific tailored information — Corvus

As I explore this, and as has been previously mentioned. Information seems to be a fundamental quantity. The universe needs information fundamentally. It could not exist without it. Elucidating this information precisely though is pretty tricky.

And then what you mention is also valid, but comes much later. Ideally we would be able to define a singular information that covers all instances of informational transaction..

No one would need all the information about anything in real life — Corvus

As per the OP, without information, everything would be nothing.

:up:

I wonder if the details of how information correlates to it's neural parts, and all the embeddings of the physical changes taking place with the environment ...etc would be philosophically meaningful topics. Would it not be then neuroscience, cosmology or cognitive psychological topic, rather than a philosophical topic? — Corvus

In my understanding, information plays a deeper role then is normally understood. By understanding information in it's deepest sense a certain picture of the world emerges.

For instance, everything is information from the perspective of everything.

Wouldn't you say that is interesting philosophy?

↪Pop I think it is organised data for certain purpose or use. — Corvus

I'm assuming monism, where information has it's neural correlates. So information causes a physical change ( in brain structure ), and this physical change embeds and orients an entity to its environment.

So there is a physical thing going on, where environmental information acts upon an entity and changes them physically, thus creating an enactive situation.

This is entirely subconscious, similar to the way the skin tans in the sun.

@apokrisis RIP "epistemic cut"

And if we only have indirect epistemic access to the world, then isn't perception a form of controlled hallucination, a sensory veil cutting us off from the very world we appear to inhabit?” — Joshs

Thanks for this abstract. FEP and its pros and cons was touched upon earlier. In contrast to the energy / thermodynamic consideration, life is basically about copying. Life copied itself into existence as outlined in this royal society publication. A copy has to be made before any other consideration, and this seems to be the focus of contemporary understanding.

Abstract: "We conclude that organic information does not have the status of a derived physical quantity because it cannot be expressed by anything simpler than itself. This means that organic information has the same scientific status as the fundamental quantities of physics.
Again it has to be underlined that a similar idea has been proposed by Küppers [26] in respect to the concept of ‘pragmatic information".

Ecological information—the information available to a moving animal in the environment—is inherently semantic because it specifies the affordances of that environment, what the animal can do in that environment, and generates and supports expectations for what that moving animal will experience as it moves. Ecological information reveals the world as significant for a given creature. — Joshs

This is more along the lines of my understanding of how information embeds an organism in its environment in an enactive manner.

The world is enactive at all scales, and a generic platonic information seems to facilitate this. This Information seems to be the currency of an enactive world, but it is such a slippery concept to get a metaphysical fix on. Has anybody explored enactivism specificaly in terms of information such that they have arrived at a definition that befits an enactive world?

Thus far with the help of @Daniel We have :
Information describes the physical structure of entities, and enables them to interact with and change other entities, in a reciprocal manner.

But I hope to significantly improve on this. Anyone??

So the genes don’t measure the state of the body, the state of its metabolism, and turn the dials accordingly? There is no separation between the regulation and the action? An enzyme doesn’t have both its quantum pocket for doing its physical magic and also separately it’s regulatory receptor site for listening out for its instructions? — apokrisis

You do not need to resolve all the details / cannot currently resolve all the details,. But you know that once you do discover the details, that what you will be describing is INFORMATION.
So, there is a logical way to describe it, if all information can fit a singular definition? This is the aim of the thread. You have agreed that the plot is feasible, grudgingly! Thus far @Daniel has been the prime mover. Can you capture all information in a singular definition?

I think people make a lot of the marvels of the mind. Consciousness seems mysterious and fantastic. But biology - the trick of being alive - is revealing its own deep underpinnings at long last. Even biologists are stunned by how little they understood just 15 or 20 years ago. — apokrisis

Yeah, but no room for epistemic cuts here! All is enactive, with a mind in the background, but also intrinsic to it ( every member and the whole ), causing the informational bodies to integrate. Thus creating meaning / life.

I think I've seen that video. Its mostly Shannon communication theory? It is relevant but does not lend itself to a simple philosophical understanding, such that we can speak of information as something that enables the full cosmos really.

Not feeling to well currently, will take a little break.

I think as we explore the full meaning of information we will find it is the currency that enables the whole cosmos.

If one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, creation, transformation and production. Awareness does not register and copy external information, it enacts a world. — Joshs

I am totally with you in an enactive understanding. I think you will find "Information" is what enables it.

Not feeling so well today, will reply more fully later.

It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling. — Joshs

The thread is quite deep now so you would have missed a lot. We have pretty much established that information goes all the way down to the most fundamental substance, and even the Royal Society is promoting views that life is a process of copying, so information processing. We really can find no limits to how information links things. And now we are at the stage of trying to describe how precisely information effects a state of "integrated information", which I take to be an irreducible conception of consciousness. It would seem a "change in the state of a system" would be a necessity for a system to register external information?
And then, is this universally applicable to all systems including rocks?

I must take the blame for your lack of grounding in the position you want to argue? That’s saucy. — apokrisis

Nobody is to blame. But it would be appreciated if you could dumb it down for us non physicists.
I interact with the physics that I cannot avoid. I agree with your minimization of brain energy principle :smile:

Change is presupposes here in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background. — Joshs

Yes, the change would be from moment to moment of consciousness.

What I was thinking: If we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change.

From a panpsychist perspective.

Well it was fun trying to explain it anyway. — apokrisis

Your communication style is very difficult to understand. Particularly for somebody who does not have a physics background.

An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. — Joshs

Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.

Have you considered what information is? @Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this?

Let's pretend that a pattern of information is not a construct of our models but already a form of instantiated being that therefore emanates mind as an inherent property.
Let's take actual metaphysical and scientific holism and present it as if it is the next big thing in property-based reductionism. — apokrisis

We can do whatever we want to so long as we do not violate any of the laws of physics, and then if some of what we do is supported by some, then all the better, and then If we can find ways to falsify what we do and say - we can create reality! :starstruck:

But seriously:

That leads to the error of a panpsychic conflation. The global structure and the local potential never have to come together via an interaction that produces the third thing of the actualised substance. You are thinking that form inheres in the substance as an innate primal property. There is no contextuality to formed existence, there is only the brute fact of that existence with a form. And so consciousness can be another property of physical materials - just like materiality itself. — apokrisis

Yes, there is no contextuality to form, other then consciousness. Information is distinctions. Everything has its distinctive shape and colour and place. There is only one thing that we cannot distinguish from anything else, and that is information itself, because in the first person point of view, it is all information.

So Information is a very difficult thing to grasp. What would your definition be? Can you see problems with what has been proposed thus far in terms of conflicting with the laws of physics?

Pop We fight like pirates but go home in one peice. — Mark Nyquist

:up:

Pragmatic theory of information
— Pop
So in your OP which did you intend? I would have stayed away from the Shannon version. — Mark Nyquist

In the OP I gave a variety of examples of definitions of information. But I intended to answer the question of "What is information" collectively. I have a view, but so do others. What is your view? Be warned paradigms will clash here, it is for the thick skinned strictly. :lol:

I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties. — Daniel

This is the assumption that I was talking about. "This view of information assumes an underlying substance". I think we agree on this, though we misunderstand each other.

What is the difference between our perception of an object and the object itself ? - the assumption that something more exists.

the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, — Daniel

This is correct, and it brings in Change, but I don't think the inference you have drawn is

"and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. "

Interaction is assumed, What enables the interaction to occur? What is it that is interacting?

Properties are equal to the form of a substance. Properties are information about a substance.

It's not a physical thing, but a process of organizing and integrating disparate things into novel holistic systems. — Gnomon

I would say the information you are referring to has its neural correlates, thus is identical to a physical interaction in the brain, as described by @Isaac

something fundamental is something that exists only actually. — Daniel

So, information about shuffling is not in this case a fundamental quality of the card deck, for card decks can exist without being shuffled.

Potentiality requires an entity that realizes such potentiation therefore anything that can exist potentially cannot be fundamental; something fundamental is something that exists only actually. — Daniel

So a physical interaction is a necessity for information? Information only occurs during or after the fact?
As a monist I would say that is true. When a thought arises it has it's neural correlates, so a physical interaction occurs which is identical to the thought.

Pragmatic theory of information

"The pragmatic information content is the information content received by a recipient; it is focused on the recipient and defined in contrast to Claude Shannon's information definition, which focuses on the message" - Wikipedia

Wow, what excellent commentary, full of deep insights. I think by the end of this thread we may be able to describe some new information about information? :smile: I would very much like this thread to end in some kind of agreement, and If we can keep to attacking the concept rather then the person or paradigm, we might just be able to achieve this?

If you have time would you want to disambiguate the various kinds of information? It does seem like there's a common thread through them, so it's easy to just end up sliding them altogether. — frank

This is a great idea, and a great difficulty. I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. This pattern or form can be physical, chemical, energetic, etc, But it is this information of a substances that enables a substance to interact with another substance - It is the information that interacts with the information of another substance. As described earlier, without the information, the substance would be a "NoThing", so could not interact with "anyThing". It would posses no attributes that are capable of interaction. The perturbations of a substance that give it it's distinctive features enable the substance to interact and thus integrate with all other informational substances, including ourselves.

This view of information assumes an underlying substance. As @Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. That a substances exists is assumed by the information we have of it. What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. This brings into question whether information is a quantity or a quality?

@Daniel has also suggested no information can exist absent of an interaction, and as has been pointed out it is interaction that information facilitates. "NoThing" cannot interact with "AnyThing".
Everything that exists, does so as an evolving self organizing system. Interaction is a constant. So it is clear that information enables the interactional organization of a system. What a system self organizes is information..

How am I going??

(Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general. — Wayfarer

Proof?

Note how people are only conscious of the things that matter to them. The spectrum of light is very broad, but we only see what matters to us. Capra says " cognition is a disturbance in a state". If we apply this to rocks, they cognize when their state is disturbed.

I don't think anything that anyone is doing at this level is falsifiable, they're frameworks through which we can view the data. — Isaac

I was as much referring to the difficulty in understanding. :smile: Thanks for clarifying.

Panpsychism is the kind of theory that is in the class of not even being wrong. — apokrisis

Such Bias with a capital B! I often think that a philosopher should start their enquiry possessing no knowledge at all, and then they would be free to follow the logic wherever it may go. But that is not possible, is it. They start their enquiry already possessing a body of knowledge, and a sense of self entrenched in it's midst, and so any enquiry first and foremost must preserve this sense of self, as after all that is the mechanism of the system. The system is not free to pursue conclusions that destroy one's sense of self, and so a large part of possibility is left unexplored, and dismissed of hand.

I think the epistemic cut is largely about this, the preservation of ones sense of self, and one's humanity.
To not make the cut changes the world into a panpsychic world, whilst to not make it preserves the status quo. Like Descartes I think therefore I am, rather then I am Consciousness. It is a self preserving response, as would be expected from a self organizing system.

I don't agree with all of IIT, but I'm really grateful to it for entrenching the notion that consciousness is integrated information. As you have intimated, otherwise consciousness is an ungrounded variable mental construct. A nonsense to speak about.

Ok, well how about we put our differences aside and concentrate on describing and defining information? Given our differences in paradigm, is it possible to agree on "what is information"?


The rest of what you mention I largely agree with:

the brain wants to predict its inputs so it can then ignore them as things it was already expecting — apokrisis

- Yes I agree

the brain is striving to be unconscious. It wants to predict reality so well that there is nothing left that could disturb it by being surprising. — apokrisis

- I agree, and agree that the input receptor is more a predictor.

thus the whole cost of mark-making ceases to be a constraint on any computational process . — apokrisis

- fascinating

A first thought was, matter is physical and information is non-physical, so isn't that dualism? — Mark Nyquist

People like the information philosopher have gone down that route. I trust in Shannon's understanding that information always exists embedded in a substance, as the co-element of the substance. As a monist, I see no evidence anywhere of an immaterial substance.

But I respect people who choose to think that way, I believe they have good personal reasons for choosing to think so.

↪Pop Another thought is that the monism/dualism question and the what is information question should be considered and solved together — Mark Nyquist

If everything is information, doesn't that solve it?

At a certain level, integrated information is just a truism. It is obvious - once you accept the brain employs some kind of neural code to construct "consciousness" - that a big problem is how all this local information, this individually triggered firing, then gets integrated into a large structured state of meaningful experiencing — apokrisis

Are you familiar with Neural networks?

The easy case against ITT is that if people like Tononi and Koch are happy to arrive at a destination like panpsychism, you know that you don't even want to waste time starting going down that particular road — apokrisis

If you start with a bias then you can not get anywhere. What is so wrong with panpsychism? Buddhism is panpsychist. Bhutan is the only carbon negative country, what is so wrong with that?

I contrast this with Friston's Bayesian Brain model. Friston worked with Tononi in Edelman's lab as it happens. But Friston's approach struck me as immediately right even before he really got going. — apokrisis

It is based on a Markov blanket, so neural network straight off. And neural networks have proven to be very successful in AI, such as GPT3.

its model of it being a self in a world. So that takes us into a different intellectual space - one where cognition is enactive and semiotic. — apokrisis

I agree with this statement, but "semiotic" implies an epistemic cut. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that two informational bodies interact? And develop interrelationally?

It is good you say you don't fully understand it. The scientific story is still being written. And my point is that the concepts of both information and entropy are themselves useful modelling constructs - extreme simplifications of the world they thus also make usefully measurable by those extreme simplifications. — apokrisis

Great, we agree on some things!

So - as Friston keenly understood - information theory creates a cleared ground, one stripped of the quality of meaning, so that science could then start constructing the right kind of metric for measuring systems with meaning. — apokrisis

I don't understand the intricacies of Friston's theory, but I understand basic neural network principles such that an input is shunted to an output ( symbol ), via non logical gradients which can be arbitrarily adjusted. It seems right, since initially there could not have been any reasoning involved.

The immaterial information was connected to the material dynamics - the self to the world - via an explicit epistemic cut, or modelling relation. — apokrisis

There you go again. If we cannot make the cut, why talk about it? This is the difficulty of understanding this, you have to try and understand it whilst being enmeshed in it, there is no cut. Its an interrelational situation. If the cut is arbitrary, then it is simply a cut you choose to make. Don't make the cut, then it it is two systems evolving interrelationally.

Respectfully, I suspect your bias is getting in the way of logic here.

Life can be divided into genetic information and chemistry. But the missing part of the story is how those two realms are mechanically connected. — apokrisis

I think logically, chemistry will also be understood as information processing.

I started with microbiology and chemistry a few years ago - its a different planet! :lol:

It bears resemblance to the idea of the Logos, the Tao, Dharma - a principle of organisation which can only be discerned in its effects, never in its essence. — Wayfarer

See my reply to Issac above.

I am searching for a philosophical understanding, and would be quite comfortable with a general principle of what is going on. And in general, Information processing is what is going on, even in Friston's principle.

↪Pop In other words, I agree that information is a quality of objects if and only if it is a quality that results from an interaction. — Daniel

Quality, quantity, interaction. I will bear that in mind and try to arrive at a definition that has wide agreement and input.

what is required for information to be able to describe. — Daniel

Information describes the form of a substance - the edge, shape, perturbations, texture, volume, distinctive features, etc.

Without this information the substance would be grey. As you can imagine, If a primary substance had no edge and was completely featureless, such that wherever you look is the same, totally homogenous, the substance would be a "nothing".

Thanks for the reply. That Channel has a few similar such videos, that I found extremely interesting. I will look into Friston's principle some more. I was originally dissuaded due to this comment :

"The free energy principle has been criticized for being very difficult to understand, even for experts.[3] Discussions of the principle have also been criticized as invoking metaphysical assumptions far removed from a testable scientific prediction, making the principle unfalsifiable.[4] In a 2018 interview, Friston acknowledged that the free energy principle is not properly falsifiable: "the free energy principle is what it is — a principle. Like Hamilton's principle of stationary action, it cannot be falsified. It cannot be disproven. In fact, there’s not much you can do with it, unless you ask whether measurable systems conform to the principle."[5] - Wikipedia.

Feldman Barrett’s constructionist theory, in which consciousness is constructed as an ongoing predictive event from incomplete, potential and affected ‘information’. — Possibility

So you would agree with the view that we are a body of information integrating more information in our path? :up:

The information describes a primary substance, but not completely. Potentially there is always a deeper ingredient that creates a primary substance, as I understand it.

So, in the hypothetical scenario in which there exists only one thing, this lonely thing would be in its entirety pure information, is this correct.? — Daniel

No, there is a primary substance, and then information about it. Those are the two logical necessities that we can never change. That is the metaphysical base .