:up: Excellent.

This is the infodynamical story, as a theoretical biologist might call it.

Infodynamics (information dynamics) is a perspective that animates information theory by way of thermodynamics (Ulanowicz 1986, 1997, Brooks and Wiley 1988, Weber et al. 1989, Salthe 1993, 2000). Insofar as infodynamics is based on repeatable, knowable aspects of systems, I consider it basically a developmental perspective rather than an evolutionary one (see Salthe 1993). An alternative perspective on infodynamics that is oriented around evolution can be found in Brooks (1997). A fundamental postulate of infodynamics is that the formal isomorphism between Boltzmann's (1974) statistical interpretation of physical entropy as disorder and Shannon's formulation of variety as informational entropy (Shannon and Weaver 1949) signals a deep connection between information and entropy production. Because it is so general, the infodynamical perspective, which offers a nonequilibrial, process type of framework, can be applied to virtually any dynamic material system whatsoever.

https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art3/

So we begin with a static ‘is’ and add an ‘and’. The ‘and’ is necessary to give us change and movement because the ‘is’ doesnt in itself manifest change. — Joshs

But it is this search for a static ground that must be rejected, simply because that is already a ground divided by the PNC. What answers better to the challenge of modelling vagueness is a "ground" of utter uncertainty - an infinity of unbound fluctuation or impulse. Or Peircean tychism.

So this is an apophatic description that can't in the end evade claiming something concrete and PNC - the idea of a "spontaneous and unbounded fluctuation". But it is also a familiar and mathematically tractable idea in physics. It is already where physics starts in its talk of a quantum realm or the structure-creating act of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

Is it odd that Peircean logic and 20th Century physics wound up in the same place? Or is this all the confirmation we need of what is the right approach?

By change I don’t mean the displacement in space and time of an object, but qualitative change, the transit from one qualitative to another. — Joshs

And here we are already off the road by returning to Cartesianism.

To expand on my reasons for seeing phenomenology as immediately defective, the focus of an inquiry into nature - with the scope to account for both the objective and subjective - must be to find the structure that connects the two points of view.

Cartesian phenomenology just takes the unity of the subject for granted. The self or experiencing "I" is a structureless centre. And percepts and affects rain in on this witnessing soul. The "I" may be embedded in a body that adds particular and personalised structure to the percepts and affects. But there is no theory about the little dot in the centre of it all having a structure.

Peircean phenomenology instead dissects the structure of the subject, it does this in mathematical strength terms, and it shows how this is even the structure of the object to boot. Semiotics is the structure on either side of the Cartesian divide - and thus dissolves this divide at root, turning us towards the very different project of understanding how objective physics could support the "other" thing needed by life and mind - the informational realm created via the additional machinery of an epistemic cut.

That is why I stress the need to start with a structured understanding of consciousness as a dialectic of habit and attention. If you don't start with this essential division within any conception of "I-ness", then you are still entangled with the central mistake of Cartesianism.

The failure to see "consciousness" as a rational semiotic structure from the "ground up" is why Cartesian phenomenology then winds up in a PoMo celebration of pluralism and the arbitrariness of unconstrained difference - that particular politicised cultural project. As I say, Cartesianism leads to Romanticism.

Peirce of course steers in the other direction. He claims a unity of the subjective and objective description of nature in terms of semiotic structure - the modelling relation. And PoMo types will find that monolithic and scientistic (while AP types will find it mystical and metaphysical).

This means seeing the figure/ground relation not as two objects or states or inherences that exist in themselves first and then produce a distinction, dialectic, relation. Rather , the figure is a modification of the ensemble. There was never an ensemble before
the figure. The ensemble only appears as the transition takes place , the coming to the fore of a new figure against a transformed ground. — Joshs

Aren't you just talking yourself around to what Peirce said? Here is how he wrestled with it in his ink blot argument...

On one of the pages of the logic notebook in which he defined his three-valued connectives, Peirce gave an example involving an ink-blot. He seems to have intended that example as an illustration of an object-singular, non-modal proposition that takes "L" as its value:

Thus, a blot is made on the sheet. Then every point of the sheet is unblackened or is blackened. But there are points on the boundary line, and those points are insusceptible of being unblackened or of being blackened, since these predicates refer to the area about S and a line has no area about any point of it. (MS 339, February 23, 1909)

The question Peirce found interesting was whether the boundary between the ink blot and the rest of the paper is black or non-black. His answer, it seems, was "neither." Again, Peirce described an L-proposition "S is P" as follows:

S has a lower mode of being such that it can neither be determinately P, nor determinately not-P, but is at the limit between P and not P. (MS 339, February 23, 1909)

The boundary between the black ink blot and the non-black paper is neither black nor non-black, and the (object-singular, non-modal) propositions "The boundary is black" and "The boundary is non-black" are neither true nor false. Each is the sort of proposition that Peirce thought should take the value "L". The boundary between the black and the non-black areas of the paper is a continuity-breach; it is a line in an otherwise uninterrupted surface. Peirce intended "L" to value propositions that predicate of a mathematical or temporal continuity-breach one of the properties that is a boundary-property relative to that breach. Such propositions are boundary-propositions.

This might seem strange at first. Why, after all, would Peirce take boundary-propositions to be interesting or important enough to motivate him to introduce three-valued connectives? The answer lies in the fact that the notion of continuity was itself of supreme philosophical importance for Peirce. That the question of continuity-breaches and their boundary-properties was for him not simply an afterthought or a relatively unimportant aspect of the broader issue of the nature of continuity, is indicated by the fact that each time he revised his definition of continuity in a significant way, his position regarding continuity-breaches and their boundary-properties changed as well. (Lane 1999)

http://www.digitalpeirce.fee.unicamp.br/lane/trilan.htm

This alternative likely won’t sound appealing , but I think it captures a trend encompassing a host of philosophical disciplines privileging difference , transit and displacement as primary over inhering state. — Joshs

I've explained why my own position is founded on the natural philosophy triadic theme - the view that the fundamental structure of any system is the hierarchical story of global constraints in-forming local fluctuations or degrees of freedom.

So yes, the "ground" is a bare ground of differencing. The naked pluralism that PoMo seeks. It all starts from ceaseless change - an Apeiron or chaos.

But then, the Peircean/Systems Science analysis goes further and so avoids this lapse into a monism of flux that merely opposes a monism of stasis.

There is the larger triadic structure of the global constraints that act on the local fluctuations to give them their evolving counterfactual definiteness - a Gestaltian context in which the edges of inkblots can be transformed from non-coloured boundaries to psychological structures vividly edged in Mach bands.

I’m confused about Firstness. I thought that Peirce describes it as without relation , as a pure in-itself , inherence, identity. Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. — Joshs

Peirce had many goes at describing what is a pretty ineffable concept. His incomplete project of creating a logic of vagueness I find the most useful as it is mathematical, Vagueness is defined as that to which the principle on non-contradiction fails to apply (as generality is that to which the laws of the excluded middle fails to apply).

Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. — Joshs

For there to be the definite things of a definite figure AND its definite ground - a state of developed thirdness - there must have been the vagueness out of which such a coupled or dialectical distinction arose. A concrete void awaiting its events can’t be taken for granted. That is atomism.

Either you are misreading phenomenology( especially Merleau-Ponty) or you have an unusual definition of ineffable qualia. — Joshs

The accusation of being rooted in Cartesianism is simply standard. To speak of consciousness as a thing is already reifying a process.

Edmund Husserl, who along with Franz Brentano is usually acknowledged as the founder of the phenomenological movement, described Descartes as “the genuine patriarch of phenomenology”; he dubbed his own transcendental phenomenology as “a new, twentieth century Cartesianism”, and insisted that “the only fruitful renaissance is the one which reawakens .

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278321582_Descartes_and_the_Phenomenological_Tradition

Like Salthe , he was a proud supporter of socialist causes — Joshs

Salthe a socialist? I don’t know as we never discussed politics in that reductive light. And he didn’t shy from making left field identifications with causes such as ecology, natural philosophy and internalism.

But here is Gare who is a good commentator on such things - https://philarchive.org/archive/GARERO

but it is a reality of today’s academic culture — Joshs

As I say, it’s never been my reality. But then also my understanding of politics has more of a base in the real world of politicians and direct experience. Theory and practice are two different things.

Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it? — Joshs

Why are you already trying to invert some judgement of which pole is right, which wrong? It would be evidence of progress if you instead became sensitive to every instance when you want to launch out like that.

Even reductionist monism isn’t wrong from a triadic and holistic perspective. It is what we recover in the limit from a thorough-going organicism. The mechanical - in the form of symbols and codes - is how life and mind can be semiotically organised.

So it is the physics that is “organic” in being self organising dissipative structure. And then life and mind are a system of informational switches that inserts a top-down hierarchy of regulation into the mix.

This does invert the usual metaphysics of physicalism and idealism, but in a way where the one now incorporates the other as its reciprocal limit.

Most holism fails to get this wrinkle. That again is why I champion semiotics as the brand that finally gets it right.

That is , rather than the whole preceding and determining the parts , here the part, in the guise of firstness, is the origin of what comes after , by contributing an irreducible content ( vagueness , fluctuation) which then defines the nature of the relation that secondness manifests. And finally , the regular habit of an environment is generated from these interrelationalities as thirdness. Do I have this right ? — Joshs

It is a co-production from first to last. The global whole has to constrain local possiblity so that it is the “right kind of stuff” for then re-constructing that whole. Each has to evolve together in a mutualism that results in the synergy of a good fit.

In the first moment of a system’s existence - its Big Bang - the small and the large are still the same size and so not clearly divided. That is the PNC doesn’t apply and the condition is vague.

But then exponentially, the division grows in scale so that the local and global have their clearly different cogent moments. On the local scale, you have the material fabric of rate dependent interactions - secondness. Then on the global scale you have the generalised laws or constraints - the rate independent information - that regulates these material degrees of freedom.

So Firstness is where it starts. But Firstness is already promising its own sharply divided future. To be the kind of tychic fluctuation which could develop, it must already have proposed the essential epistemic cut between figure and ground as a Gestalist would rightly say, or local and global as a hierarchy theorist would want to put it.

Whose Hegel and whose Peirce? Fichte’s Hegel? The Peirce that liked Schelling? The early Peirce that attacked Hegel or the late Peirce who was reconciled to him?

These are murky waters and I’ve forgotten the details. But they are easy to look up.

Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie. — Joshs

Best quit while you are ahead. The whole left vs right nonsense is a sorry level of analysis.

As a systems scientist, my position already starts in the irreducible organismic complexity of the need to balance the dialectical constraints of long-run stability and short-term plasticity in any politico-economic system.

Would you be able to suggest a link to your favorite source for a thoroughgoing account of affect? I really want to zoom in on a text you can endorse, so I can get a stable textual basis for discussion. — Joshs

Nope. I am summarising a vast range of sources I studied about 30 years ago. That spanned the gamut from - to name highlights - Rom Harre's circle of social constructionists to the Evgeny Sokolov/Jeffrey Gray school of Pavlovian orienting responses.

The problem starts with treating "affect" as something separate from the holism of the brain's architecture. My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia.

Now you might rightly say that phenomenologists are also trying hard to crawl out of that pit. But my reply is why ever even start off from down that hole. Let's just avert our eyes from their struggles and get on with those who began in the right place - where "emotions", or "affect", or "valorisation", are part of the general process that is neurosemiosis, and so they are actions more than reactions.

So I can't give you one simple source as my sources would be praiseworthy to the degree they didn't take that wrong turning on affect as something that needs to be dissociated from other stuff, like rationality, or automaticism, in getting to grips with the holism of the neurosemiotic relation.

What it is critical to dissociate - at the psychological level - is the separate forces of biological and social semiosis. So don't even try to make theories about affect until you demonstrate a clear understanding of how all four levels of semiosis stack up in the shaping of something as located and particular as some individual consciousness.

This is the easy rule I apply when winnowing the academic wheat from the chaff. Show you get the difference that matters before you start reifying an aspect of neurology that doesn't.

Desimone, for instance, failed on this score. A skim of Barrett suggests she too fails this reliable sniff test.

If the informational view and the dynamical view
are complementary aspects of a whole, how does Peirce’s triad relate to this dialectic? How does the three become two? — Joshs

Two things (in the form of matched limits) plus the one thing of their interaction.

Well, that is the cartoon version anyway. Have you read Peirce on firstness, secondness and thirdness and understood how it is an irreducibly complex nested hierarchy?

Firstness doesn't even exist - or defines the limit of existence in being naked fluctuation or vagueness. But unbounded fluctuation produces the secondness of two things having some relation. Then the generality of such a connection develops into a regular habit as soon there is a context, an environment, that is formed simply by virtue of having a flurry of things all relating, and that making up the world.

Because there is a context like that, the connecting becomes constrained by its global statistics and falls into inveterate habit - a state of thirdness. And that state of thirdness is a nested hierarchy in containing both secondness and firstness as aspects of itself. Tychic fluctations and the particularity of individual reactions are not washed away by the blanding smoothness of a synectic accomodation of the collective action. Thirdness may be the stability that is the persisting whole, but it still needs the plasticity of localised fluctuations to keep the whole show alive.

So again, note the reasons why I hold Peirce above others. Or Salthe, Pattee and Friston (within his narrower sphere of interest) as well.

Their approaches to natural philosophy are mathematical strength arguments. They root metaphysics in probability theory, hierarchy theory and statistical mechanics.

And also, you keep finding how well they parallel actual physics in its long journey away from classical Newtonianism to a pansemiotic Cosmos that is turning quantum firstness into the thirdness of a Big Bang dissipative structure ... while also sweeping up the problems of life and mind along the way.

I've nothing against Husserl at the general level as a corrective Kantian approach to psychological theory. I agree and say the same things.

But what was missing, until Peirce finally hoved into my view, was the mechanism of semiosis as something universal in the definition of an organism.

That moves the conversation from a critique to a solution.

It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. — Joshs

For what it's worth - speaking from my oh so conservative position in the science wars, that I seem to share with some of the least conservative theoretical biologists and semioticians like Stan Salthe - this is yet again a collapse into monism. And Salthe, shows this with his concept of the "cogent moment" and the semiotics of hierarchical order.

Peirce starts by flipping things the other way around. Continuity is the global scale of being - synechism. And fluctuation is the local scale of being - tychism. And neither is the ground as both are each others ground as complementary or dialectial limits on being. Neither owns priority as both requires its "other".

Peirce was implicitly a hierarchy theorist, but not explicitly one. Salthe provides the explicit model of what is going on semiotically.

The cogent moment is the spatiotemporal scale over which entification - the integration~differentiation that produces "objects on a void" – occurs. So it is the "now" that is both synchronic and diachronic in being both extended in spacetime, but also a coherent one-ness in terms of being a fully integrated process as defined over some size of moment - some characteristic duration and extent.

This is a maximally general model of any hierarchical order. We could be talking about "now-ness" of any size. A mountain exists for a long time in the same place as essentially the same thing. It is only over much larger - or smaller - spatiotemporal scales that we can see the mountain either flows as a fleeting fluctuation of plate tectonics, or crumbles as tiny weathering events down at the scale of chemistry and dust.

So the cogent moment of Mt Everest might be a few hundred millions years. The cogent moment of some other dissipative structure might be a morning for something like a thunderstorm.

The point then is that human cognition is tuned to its cogent moment. And in fact, it is itself - so as to build in prediction - an interaction between two levels of cogency. The attentional and the habitual. But generally speaking, the brain is striving to make sense of the world as experienced from the body's own particular characteristic scale. We live in a realm where mountains are permanent distinct features and clouds are shape-shifting flows. That is "reality" from a certain cogent scale.

We have some natural scale of cogency that is tuned to the realm which itself is dissipatively cogent in a way that makes it the familiar world of middle-sized dry goods. So that certainly works pragmatically.

But if we want to speak of grounds or foundations, Salthe's hierarchy theory makes it explicit how this can be achieved via a metaphysics of entification over all possible scales of being.

Looking up from our own middle position, we start to see the world as a process that unfolds so largely and slowly that it entirely fills our field of view. From one perspective it is a mountain - just another local fluctuation on the continuous flow of plate tectonics. And that is the view of third person physics. It is the view where the cogent moment is defining the Universe as itself a single fluctuation or solitary entity.

And likewise we can also look down to see all the weathered crumbs of rock dissolving away our Everest. Now Everest is just a pile of atoms, or even some decohered pattern of quantum probabilities. The lower limit of a reality is also entified - made definite as some theory about integration~differentiation as the way an entity arises from vagueness. However now it is not a solitary event but a sea of events. It is not a one-ness that completely fills our view with its sameness, but a many-ness that becomes a continuous blur of distinctions in which any distinctiveness is lost.

So sitting at a middle scale of entification is how you can become semiotic bounded by dialectical limits. The largest "now" or cogent moment fills our view to create a boundary on information ... a holographic horizon as exists with the visible universe. And the smallest now does the same thing in complementary fashion by becoming an irresolvable blur of differences that don't make a difference ... the other holographic bound that enclosed information falling into a black hole.

I mention the visible universe and black holes just to show that this is a metaphysics which directly grounds actual real-life science. It is not just some metaphysical fluff but a general mathematical way to understand hierarchical organisation in terms of cogency and entification.

So when it comes to the beginnings of phenomenal experience, we can safely say it doesn't begin in an already given temporality, let alone a given spatiotemporality. Any kind of particular cogent scale that might establish some situated point of view is precisely what has to evolve. And that is a dialectical symmetry-breaking story. A fit between model and world has to develop by producing its suitable contrasts in Gestalt fashion.

And again, any talk about experiential nows has to reflect the reality of the neurological hierarchy - a brain set up to operate with two cogent scales, the attentional and the habitual.

Then on top of that, we layer the human social constructions of a cultural cogent moment in relation with a psychological or personal cogent moment. That is, there are now social truths so large that they are how things always have been done (traditional society), or indeed how they should universally be done (post Enlightenment society). And then these super-habits or new laws of human existence are meant to interact with the second by second freewill choices of effectively self-regulating individual human actors. The familiar Romantic psycho-drama.

Maybe Husserl meant to mumble something intelligible along these lines?

I mean I would hate for you to have to take the word of notorious scientific conservatives like Salthe and Peirce. :groan:

Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science? — Joshs

I'm just playing the game of talking sides - the social acts that construct a self identity. It is more about taking a dig at those who follow him as if the PI is the fount all philosophical truth and an excuse not to engage with either metaphysics or science.

You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. — Joshs

You will find I have sampled most things. And that is how I know what is ignorable on the whole.

Let’s dig into Barrett’s text: — Joshs

I'd rather not. It seems like another dumbed down version of affect - a story I've already deconstructed into its biological and cultural spheres with the aid of better sources.

Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. — Joshs

I think Skinner in fact liked the idea that inner speech served as an externally-imposed constraint on behavioural responses. It was the cogsci notion of mentalese - thought before language - that was a problem.

Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other. — Joshs

Your bug is my feature. The point of semiosis as a science of meaning lies in its generality. Semiosis has to be defined as something completely abstract so it can then be applied as a model across all levels of organismic systemhood.

It is not just for talking about cognition but also metabolism, and maybe even dissipative structure, as well as also epistemology and the habits of logic.

Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning. — Joshs

I use it to point to the dualism that inevitably ensnares the monist. The triadic systems thinker can recognise the dichotomy or dialectical relation that is the source of the monist's dualised confusion and so sidestep that trap.

You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. — Joshs

Are you giving me fair warning of being cancelled? I need to fear your mounting of a woke witch-hunt? :rofl:

Just look at how passive aggressive your little sally there was. All the things I have done to myself by my own poor choices. I cannot blame anyone else for the beating I am about to be doled out.

Pathetic.

That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? — Joshs

I don’t get this criticism. You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.

How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.

I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around.

So it is in our imposing constant motion or a changing point of view on the world that we form a vivid sense of being the very thing of an enactive point of view. Note how eyes must shift in microsacades even as we fixate on a stimulus. If a stimulus is actually stabilised on the retina, it fades almost immediately as the neurons are set up to detect informational difference. They must be predicting to even respond.

So if the world ain’t in fact on the move, the retina has to impose a motion that keeps refreshing the necessary possibility of their being an error in prediction. The eyes dance to prevent the world fading into a habituated state of zero possible surprise. A state of plain representation is avoided by the necessity of always being in the middle of making a best guess.

It seems simple enough. We know we are ourself to the degree we know we are not he world. And that is a constantly lived boundary making. We micro-predict by imposing motion on our point of view and then demonstrating we can ignore that motion, thus confirming ourselves to be separated from the world in a pragmatic and action-based processing fashion.

One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery. — Joshs

Sounds like you are pointing out the flaws of a PoMo/Saussurean dyadic view of semiosis rather than talking about the Peircean triadic model - the modelling relation version.

We divide ourselves from the world by the construction of an Umwelt or system of signs. Our experience of the world is not a representation of that world, but an experience of the degree we have reduced our interactions to some habit of interpretance, some panorama of affordances that invites our actions. We experience the world beckoning us in terms of all we could be doing, or wanting to avoid doing. So we experience the world as a model of the world as it is from the point of view of having this “us” in it. The actor who is its “still” centre in being the one that can ignore all its forms of self-motion. And that includes this self’s thoughts, imaginings, ambitions, and even affects (as in the ability to suppress pain signals when you know thrusting your hand into a bush is going to scratch a bit).

So words are the same. They speak to a relation between a self and its world. And in so doing, they construct both this self and it’s world. If “I” can point to something using a word, then the pragmatic success of such an action creates both the pointed at and also its pointer.

It is a co-creation. But one rooted in the reality of the physics. All this pointing has to be tied to its pragmatic success. It has to actually control the material dynamics of the world, not just be some arbitrary system of noise-making.

The actions have to fit the reality. And finding that they do continually - as in microsaccades - is also how we recapture a sense of being a self in a continuous flowing manner. We become stable selves to the degree we can freely change our point of view and predict how that will produce differences that don’t make a meaningful difference.

Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa). — Joshs

Pattee was never enthused by pansemiosis. That was Salthe’s thing. So no. He was only making the biosemiotic case.

As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model. — Joshs

Everyone wants to assimilate anything new to the world they already thought they knew.

As I have said already, monism abounds, And so every dichotomy must be reduced towards one of its two available poles. Folk are swept helplessly towards either PoMo or AP when entering philosophy, for instance. They are forced to construct their identity along those divided lines.

Or I guess they can cluster around the life raft of Wittgenstein as the guy who made a dramatic flip-flop from the one to the other without ever resolving the dichotomy of paradigms.

I instead follow the systems science tradition that is Aristotelean in origin. Or in fact dates to Anaximander. This understands the dialectic to be a triadic paradigm. So both sides of any well formed view are “secondarily derived” from each other … in being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

That mutual derivation is the feature and not the bug. It is how anything definite exists, having managed to emerge from its swamp of vagueness via the rational mechanism of semiosis or an epistemic cut.

Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. — Constance

Well my camp is natural philosophy. So we explain where language comes from as well as how it organises human thought in socially constructed fashion. :lol:

Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered. — Constance

Peirce formulated both pragmatism as epistemic method - a theory of truth as the limit of inquiry in a community of rational thinkers using abductive reasoning - and also semiotics as an ontology that, among other things, grounds such an epistemology.

So semiotics operates within epistemic limits while also being an ontology large enough to encompass anything sensible and evidence-backed that PoMo might have to say or raise as a concern.

Aristotle seemed to think of "Potential" simply as an abstract Principle, — Gnomon

Well, he rather messed things up by reversing the order so that being begets becoming. A substance has its potential or properties, rather than arriving at such properties as a matter of in-formed constraint on infinite variety.

So there are two notions of potential in play here. There is the unboundedness of chaos vs the boundedness of countable alternatives, or well-formed properties.

Some kind of Intentional Lawmaker is necessary, unless as some physicists imagine, the Laws of Nature were just floating out there in Eternity before an accidental quantum fluctuation lit the fuse of the Big Bang. — Gnomon

But to insert some disagreement here, you also cited the fact that chaos can self-organise. Chaos that is too chaotic will find some way to be patterned.

So we don't need some outside hand. The drive to order lies within the chaos of "everything trying to happen all at once" itself.

As Feynman models in his path integral or sum-over-histories approach to quantum theory, everything does try to happen in terms of a quantum event. But much of this then turns out to be self-cancelling. A leap to the left is cancelled by a leap to the right. And so everything boils down to something. The only outcome which hasn't cancelled away its own possibility of definite existence.

This is another way of understanding the least action principle - about the deepest principle of all physics. Only one path emerges to connect the world in its simplest possible way.

I ambiguously label the Lawmaker as "G*D", which is not the Jehovah of the Bible. In place of the workman, following orders, I simply call it "Nature" or "Evolution" or "The Program" — Gnomon

Now add the least action principle to the list. :smile:

I’ve been presenting a model of affectivty that is only supported by five authors
that I know of, and they are drawing from a radicalized version of philosophical phenomenology — Joshs

What were their names again?

And this sounds much like me with biosemiosis. There is what I regard as the inner circle versus the many levels of fellow travellers. :razz:

Are we never capable of giving reasons for our responses in a language that is not socially accepted? — Joshs

I don't want to promote Wittengenstein, but didn't he make a valid "beetle in a box" argument about such private languages?

This sounds like a glorified version of S-R theory. Do reinforcements from discrete centers of ‘pleasure’ have the capability to shape our complex attributions this way? I know conventional models of addiction rely on a reductive idea of the reinforcing effect of chemicals. — Joshs

I am forced to talk in these kinds of cartoon accounts to the extent you wouldn't be able to follow a neurocognitive account in terms of dopaminergic influences on working memory, or the critical role played by the nucleus accumbens in the switching of the brain from a smooth endogenous focus to an abrupt state of alert or surprisal - the classic reorientation response. The aha! that is either then further interpreted as a nasty shock or as a pleasant surprise.

It is not your fault that we aren't speaking at that level. It is simply a fact here.

Ratcliffe doesn’t deny that primitive sensory events of pleasure and pain are an important part of the organization of behavior.... — Joshs

You see, there is the problem. My argument would be that pleasure and pain are already socially-constructed concepts. They place the discussion squarely in a space of phenomenological accounts, and so bypass my more nuanced efforts to separate the neurobiology from the social constructs.

Are pleasure and pain just "feelings" - qualia? Or are they brains responding in a generalised and coherent fashion to the bare fact of having a state of prediction - a state of ignoring - interrupted by some form of unexpected surprise.

The surprise could be good - a matching in the form of finally discovering something long sought. You wanted it, but just didn't know exactly when or where it would show up. Now your whole physiological economy can readjust to support a positive state of approach. Having found it, you want to grasp it, hold it, even get more of it.

Then the surprise could be the opposite thing. Something nasty, dangerous, repulsive, damaging. Your embodied response must be coherently organised around the idea of getting as far away as possible, right here and now!

So there are not going to be pain and pleasure producing modules in the brain - centres for the production of Cartesian qualia. That expectation is the patent product of a culture soaked in the representational dualism of Cartesian metaphysics.

Instead, an embodied approach to neurocognitive architecture talks in terms of the basic rationality of coherent pragmatic action. We must start with some system of dialectically-framed definite choices - like the dichotomy of approach~avoid, or ignore~attend. And that general dichotomy we would expect to find distributed in a relevant way over the entirety of the brain's structure. It would be a dialectic that was hard-wired.

This is why the tiny nucleus accumbens pops up as a critical organ - a neural intersection in the striatal mid-brain that throws the switch in terms of ignore~attend. Or why the anterior cingulate is its match at the level of the cortex - adding extra regulation in terms of a working memory capacity to ignore pain so as to pursue longer-term pleasures (like thrusting your hand into brambles to pluck blackberries). Or why your amygdala makes rapid and crude approach~avoid choices, while it also is being regulated by the more thoughtful working memory attentive processes of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The point here is not the detail, but the fact that neuroscience does in fact have stories about what is going on that is now incredibly detailed. These are what make talk about pleasure and pain - Cartesian qualia talk - so quaint and socially-situated.

“Emotions “tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. “(Ratcliffe 2002) — Joshs

Sure. This is making the point about dialectical structuralism when it comes to neurosemiosis. But now invoking the Cartesian division of some "us" that "feels" and "deliberates".

Both languages may aim to describe the same thing. I'm sure Ratcliffe feels informed by an understanding of the current neuroscience. But that way of speaking still builds in its own folk metaphysics.

Who is this "us" when it comes to the embodied brain? All there really is is some collection of interpretive habits with sufficient plasticity to keep learning from its errors of prediction.

If this system feels itself to be a self, that is because a large part of what it must do is construct that epistemic cut that separates the model from its world (its umwelt, to use the jargon).

I am the limit defined by what I can reach and affect. Normally that might mean my finger tips. But we have all seen those experiments with mechanical hands, or know how the skin of cars become something we feel as we nearly scrape the curb.

it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention. — Joshs

Oh God. Damasio. Not wrong, just a light-weight still weeded to cognivitist tropes.

You can see that this account is closer to your own than the one I described in an earlier post. But I think there are still important differences. — Joshs

As is clear from my response, it is a very watered down and middle of the road account. Rather blah.

Not wrong as such. Just rather half-baked and still trailing its Cartesian framing.

It is only with a code-based semiotic framing does it become sharply clear that the whole account must be rooted in the generality of the embodied modelling relation perspective, and also do justice to the separate levels of semiosis that get united in the psychology of individuals.

The human mind, even as a neural economy, must be reduced both to neuroscience and social science, as neurons and words are the two semiotic spheres of information shaping its actual functional architecture.

An enactive cognitivist is no better than a representational cognitivist to the extent they don't respect that fact.

But if the discrete contribution of neuro-reinforcers get swallowed up by and subsumed within the integrated goals of the system , then no genetically programmed reinforcement variant can have any more than a superficial effect on behavior. — Joshs

Huh? Have you got such a clear understanding of neurodevelopment that you can explain why there is this problem?

Sure, it is a problem for a cartoon S-R view perhaps. But not for the post-Pavlovian "orientation response" neuroscience of the likes of Evgeny Sokolov and Jeffrey Gray.

If we were able to genetically engineer a powerfully reinforcing olfactory response to human smell, would this amount to a superficial or significant influence on our social lives and propensity to intimacy? — Joshs

Or perhaps you should be asking the other evolutionary question of why pheromones signalling became down-regulated in hominids?

Was that another genetic trick to promote social behaviour that came to revolve around the overly-intimate lives of hunter-gatherer tribes? Small bands united by language and thinking now with group minds.

And if it did ‘catch up’ , no amount of monkeying around with reinforcement contingencies, no amount of dialing down of anxiety juice, would make a significant impact on ptsd or other anxiety syndrome. — Joshs

More cartoon-level framing of the story. So not wrong as such. But certainly too light weight to carry the conversation far.

Try performing the same speech in the privacy of your living room and with one audience member. No butterflies and arguably a better performance. Or play that tennis match without the huge crowd and see how your nervousness is reduced and how your focus may improve. — Joshs

I've done both. That's why I used the examples as phenomenological evidence. My real experience contradicts your disembodied assertions.

The hormonal ‘ boost’ is only half of the anxiety equation . The other half is what defines it as a negative feeling. it is the experience of potential loss, the feeling of interruption of cognitive activity , a gap in awareness. This is the pain component of fear and anxiety. There are plenty of stimulants on the market, but only intentional attribution can produce the pain of potential loss. — Joshs

I've put that into more precise neurology for you now. The amygdala is plugged into the ventromedial cortex. The nucleus accumbens is plugged into the anterior cingulate. The lower brain itches to do its thing of reacting in fast, learnt, and even genetically instinctive, habit - the bottom-up response. And then the higher brain sits over that as the attentive, interpreting, novelty-handling, plan prioritising, top-down intelligence.

The two halves were already part of my architectural whole. My positions are always fully resolved as dialectic.

If it is truly unthinking, unconscious and automatic it will play no relevant role in my subsequent thinking This is why subliminal advertising never worked. — Joshs

You are walking into another minefield there. You have further wrinkles like iconic memory and the attentional blink that bear on the temporal story of how the brain integrates~differentiates its world.

The fact that subliminal advertising doesn't mean anticipatory priming ain't a thing or that plastering your energy drink logo all over an extreme sport isn't a sly why to legitimate a certain habit of consumption.

...

So a lot of words have been expended now. You've convinced me that people are right when they say phenomenology is Cartesian in spirit even when it starts dressing up in the clothing of physical embodiment.

And that is just a general problem for any version of psychological science which isn't rooted in semiotics, and so equipped to understand the human mind as the intersection of cultural semiosis and biological semiosis.

That is why Vygotsky and Luria made a great team who really got it back in the 1920s. The social scientist and the neuroscientist who could unite the two halves of the story.

Vagueness vagueing is pretty vague if that's your answer, but it's just as oddly metaphysical as any other metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

It is a logical claim about counterfactuality. When no difference can be found, you have reached the limit in terms of differences. Some statement is neither true nor false, just completely vague.

And then most normal stories about the world - regular reality - focus on the vast amount of counterfactuality. The world is a state of affairs, the realist exclaims. It is a world populated by an apparently infinite supply of middle-sized dry goods bumping about in some cosmic scale void.

But if we want to imagine ultimate reality - the ground to this counterfactual mixture of atomic substances acting mechanically within an a-causal spatiotemporal expanse - then we can start inquiring into the point at which this sharp counterfactuality first arose. That is, we can head back to where we encounter the Planckian limit on any form of definite material being.

That there was this limit was the quantum surprise. We found scientifically that the past ain't infinite - turtles as far as any eye could see. It was instead bounded by a horizon - a limit on substantial "thingness", or even physical law, or spatiotemporal voids - itself.

So it ain't oddly metaphysical. It is the cashing out of a dialectical and process based metaphysics in robust science.

You keep wanting to argue the view from Newtonian materialism - the metaphysics of middle-sized dry goods. And that still feels supported by a matching version of logic - the one in which the three laws of thought, the principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, are taken for granted as eternalised verities rather than as their own emergent limit states on Being.

In the imagined limit - the limit on uncertainty as the inverse to Vagueness's limit on certainty - these laws of thought might apply. But in practice, we exist in the world that is suspended between these dialectical limitations on Being.

Circling back to Aristotle, substance is informed potential - self-consistent constraint on generalised uncertainty. And the "ground" of Being is thus this dialectics of establishing a world that is strongly dichotomised ... in dialectical opposition with the "world" that was once, by contrast, merely a vagueness or Apeiron. A pre-Planckian condition unmarked by distinctions, as our measuring instruments now tell us.

I csn’t make sense of your additions.

Thus these patterns cannot be spoken of as codes in any traditional sense. There are only relative temporary stabilities overlaying a ceaselessly changing neural patterning. — Joshs

You are opposing the stored information of the cognitivist with the lived dynamics of the enactivist. But then there is the third option - the one supported by the neuroscience - where the coding is predictive.

Whatever is happening out there right now can only make sense because it is judged against a running state of expectation. We anticipated some future, and now something has surprised us.

And that is then how we manage to live in the “now” … most of the time. We construct the now ahead of time, and so when it happens - which takes at least 120ms to learn about because neural signalling is not instantaneous - we remember ourselves as having been already there in the moment, synchronised with that reality.

To be enactive or embodied as a cognitive process in fact requires some pretty fancy footwork. It is inaccurate to brush over the processing view and speak as if what the brain does is simply some dynamical dance.

This is why Pattee makes the careful distinction of the epistemic cut - the division between rate independent information and rate-dependent dynamics - in living organisms.

The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. The proper view is the one that can speak of the two as complementary aspects of the one whole - the one biosemiotic modelling relation.

And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back itself. — schopenhauer1

Haven’t we been through that loop many times already? But I note you correctly put “ground” in quotes.

Any notion of the Apeiron is one of a limit. A limit on distinctions themselves. Vagueness is defined by the principle of contradiction finally giving out and failing to apply.

So if you are a materialist, you must think in terms of grounds. And then moan forever about the paradox of a world standing on an infinite number of turtles.

But process thinking already makes natural the idea of limits. An equilbrium is a mess that can keep messing about yet not get any messier.

It ain’t my problem if you feel you must employ an inferior brand of metaphysics when better ones are available.

The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. — Constance

We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world.

Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic. — Constance

I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,

So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense?

as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this). — Constance

Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers.

Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language. — Constance

Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does a fair job of valorising this.

Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, — Constance

Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling.

But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. — Constance

Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions.

The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable.

The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc.

You don't seem to have any idea what the concept of free will encompasses. Ever look it up? — Metaphysician Undercover

:yawn:

I see how you slid from freewill to other things without even noticing. Sloppy.

And what physical stuff is mathematics made of? — Gnomon

The very idea of "physical stuff" is what the idea of "physical patterns" is meant to replace.

A metaphysics of stuff can't account for its own origin. It leads to the irresolvable paradox of getting something out of nothing.

A metaphysics of statistically emergent regularity can replace that by starting with the "everythingness" of a vagueness or uncertainty. Anything at all might be the case. Then the mathematics of patterns tells us the kind of determination in terms of self-consistent form that must then constrain that everythingness to a more organised somethingness.

And statistical mechanics or thermodynamics is all about that. Even chaos or randomness becomes subject to our new deterministic mathematical models of such phenomena.

Even chaos ain't just chaotic but a specific kind of natural pattern - one described by fractals, criticality, powerlaws, Levy flights, 1/f noise ... that kind of "mathematical stuff".

Philosophically, I tend to think of Information, because of its ubiquity and universality, in terms of Aristotle's essential "Substance" -- which is not physical, but meta-physical. Moreover, the core concept of the term "information" recalls Plato's Forms, which were abstract definitions of real things. — Gnomon

Yep. But the shift is from thinking that form in-forms stable matter to thinking of how form acts to regulate material instability, or pure potentiality.

What Aristotle likely meant by prime matter before the Catholics subsumed his metaphysics into their theology, or what Plato tried to get at in talking about his forms needing a chora or receptacle.

And some cutting-edge physicists have concluded that even physical Matter is made of metaphysical (abstract) Information. — Gnomon

They are finding it necessary to go beyond a metaphysics of physical matter as atomistic lumps of informed substance bumping about in the nothingness of a spatiotemporal void.

So the need - as cutting edge physics moves on to a unified quantum gravity theory - is to find a suitable metaphysics which can measure both lumps of formed matter and the backdrop spatiotemporal void in the same fundamental units.

The language of information/entropy does that trick. It gives hope of uniting measurement in units based on the Planck scale - the three constants needed to construct a quantum gravity theory, or h-scaled uncertainty, G-scaled curvature, and c-scaled connectivity between these two.

So it is not what the world is "made of", as that presumes it all begins with some eternal stable stuff.

It is how the radically uncertain becomes stabilised by the constraining necessity of achieving a generalised self-consistency.

The fundamental question is what are the laws that chance itself cannot escape?

And that is what modern views of probability - ones that have been expanded in a major way by adding powerlaw distributions to Gaussian ones - have been busy with.

Some noise is white, some is pink. Some motions are Brownian, some are Levy flights. Some systems are bell curve, some systems are fractal. Some equilibriums are dead and closed, others are active and open.

Probability theory is itself gaining a richer dialectical structure as it starts to come into its own at the centre of scientific metaphysics.

Describing the natural world as probabilistic is a category error. Probability is about prediction. — frank

Or maybe you just have a limited grounding in the philosophy of probability?

Propensities are not relative frequencies, but purported causes of the observed stable relative frequencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propensity_probability

The concept of determined events is baked into information theory. — frank

Either that. Or events yet to be determined and hence fundamentally indeterministic and awaiting their constraint by systems of interpretance, or even their physical quantum collapse?

What about the 'limit' of there seemingly being a zero-sum balance of opposites, or no absolutes, or as no intrinsic properties such as with relationism? — PoeticUniverse

I am talking about a system of pure self-defining relation in talking about dialectics and semiotics. But that is a positive rather than a negative story. Two complementary limits add up to produce the wholeness of a spectrum of mediating possibiities. It is a division that creates something.

The other way of looking at it is negative in that two opposites must cancel to nothing. That is a division that destroys possibility.

Which one were you thinking of?

So you can see there is no way out of this impossibility of affirming in language something that is not language. Language, its signifiers, can only be self referencing. UNLESS: Reason really IS grounded in some impossible ultimate language reality, like Hegel's. If this were true, and it is not impossible that it is, then what we say and think could be significant in the Hegelian way. But how to go about this, that is, at least giving this idea the minimal presumption of "truth"? — Constance

But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement.

So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities.

Peirce then came along - as a scientist, metaphysician, epistemologist and logician - to sort things out.

But anyway, my key point is that ordinary language is concerned with constructing our social reality. That is what constrains its practice pragmatically.

And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom.

There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism.

Only one way I see: Take the Kierkegaardian motion of the eternal present (Witt approved), and consider that even here, standing, if you will, in the light of a phenomenological reduction, and all schools in abeyance (as Walt Whitman put it): this present, I submit, is undeniable, notwithstanding post modern, post hermeneutical objections, yet there we stand, eidetically aware! Question: Is this actually happening? Is it a finite event? Or is it infinite. — Constance

The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view.

The Peircean advance was to move towards the view which shows the larger semiotic relation that makes these two views the complementary limits of Being.

The core of this thread is an attempt to say the unsayable. — Banno

Or the attempt to explore its limit, don’tcha think? :roll:

Do you see the inverse relationship? — Gnomon

:up: Yep. Entropy and information aren’t metaphysical substances. They are inverse descriptions we apply to a natural world we are now coming to view as essentially probabilistic rather than deterministic. They are the right kind of maths for capturing reality as an evolutionary process - a story rooted in statistical mechanics or thermodynamics. A story of probability patterns.

So it reflects a shift from stories of mechanical certainty - the material atomism and abstract universal law of Newton - to a post-quantum understanding of reality where the Planckscale defines a fundamental grain of uncertainty that must be now incorporated into any universalising description of nature, And both Boltzmann’s entropy and Shannon’s information do that,

But then it is easy to get confused because we humans also still want to understand the world in terms of familiar substances like energy and meaningfulness. And we can even extract useful measures of these two things as inverses of their “others”.

If Shannon information is just a measure of bare difference - a counting of physical states of possibility, or definite marks found in the world - then we can talk about when they are differences that make a difference … to some organisms point of view. We can talk about the difference between surprises and predictions, between signal and noise.

And if entropy is a measure of physical disorder or a stable equilibrium state - where there is a maximum quantity of difference, and it doesn’t make a difference - then again we can create an inverse metric that speaks to Gibbs free energy or the ability to extract work. Negentropy is minimal entropy - high order - and so a quantity of potential work available to someone who knows how to channel it from its source to a sink.

So science is shifting paradigms by accepting reality is based on developmental patterns that organise fundamental possibilities. Probability theory becomes the deep framework.

Then having redefined reality that way - as low information and high entropy - that sets up the maths to talk about the inverse pattern. States of high information and low entropy.

Our scientific descriptions of nature have thus left behind the substantial notions of Newtonian physics - little lumps of matter, pushed and pulled about by the magic of void filling force fields - to employ the bare language of patterns of possibility. The self-organising tendencies of statistical distributions.

This incompatibility between free will, and Newton's first law, has no affect on the marvel of the internet, but it means that physics, in it's acceptance of this law, is incapable of understanding that part of reality which provides us with free will. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or maybe freewill is just a cultural meme - a faulty characterisation of a human social construct as something metaphysically fundamental?

(Spoiler: That is indeed all it is.)

And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. — Science hopes to change events that have already occured

Just replace good old fashioned Copenhagen mysticism with new model thermal decoherence and you can tell a story that is safe for physicalism.

Will the Universe still be rocketing towards is Heat Death long after our Sun has died, and well after the blip that was humanity fiddling around with reading dials and capturing dots on light sensitive film to impute some story about material existence?

What we already know - from the science - is the “lawful” description of the Universe is destined to keep on evolving until the classicality that developed is then washed away again. The Heat Death will be a state of blackbody photons with a temperature of 0 degrees k being radiated by the Universe’s own holographic horizons. An anti-de Sitter state bereft of all non-quantum action and so wiped clean of any need for our classical baggage of mid-period laws.

Well, there are some hashes to settle first. What is dark energy? Do black holes really radiate all their information in the long run?

But what is for certain is that the existence of the Universe has zero to do with human consciousness, or any kind of idealist schtick. Quantum theory is now wave mechanics glued to statistical mechanics. That is the next level shit that now constrains your metaphysical flights of fancy.

Although retrocausality and many world scenarios are far more challenging in terms of deciding which horse you actually want to back.

All that goes away is the body’s stepping in to help optimize the movements that the anxious or fearful person is contemplating in rapid fashion. — Joshs

You are pretending my position is monistic so that you can counter it with your own monism. But I’ve already said that “feelings” are an interaction of two varieties of information - biological and cultural.

Biology accounts for states of arousal that are functional in that they prepare us for actions that meet the demands of our world. Sociology accounts for how we must give reasons for our responses in a language that is socially accepted.

Shoot someone up with adrenaline, and no particular situation to frame the feelings, and they will be confused as to whether they are excited, anxious, or in some unspecific way, rushed and unsettled.

Push your kids on to a roller coaster, and if they complain “Daddy, I’m scared”, tell them they are wusses. There is no real danger. What they really need to feel - to justify the money you are spending on them - is thrilled.

All you are talking about is the socially constructed aspect of emotion. I’ve already said that is part of the story. And how there is also the neurology of affect, and how that reflects the evolutionary need to have the whole body reorientate its readiness state in the time it takes to spot that tiger lurking in the shadows.

I offered the cartoon version of oxytocin. But one of the interesting things is how it is neuromodulator that looks designed to override the usual natural fear and anxiety of “being too close” to others. It allows intimacy to override keeping even your social conspecifics at a certain safe distance.

Chimps have mutual grooming sessions as moments of intimacy. Cats prefer a brief sniff of noses. Humans evolved to tolerate the new behaviours of long term pair bonding and prolonged child rearing. That needed more of an off button for the kind of anxiety that being “overly close for too long” is otherwise liable to evoke.

Oxytocin is not, in that light, an on button for intimacy, but an off button on anxiety. Even that is a simplification. But it makes more evolutionary sense and shows how we shouldn’t presume intimacy as some kind of universal good. Biology sets us up to be physiologically intimate as was functional in the typical pre-modern social setting.

So the neurology is remarkably plastic and specific, even if it is an evolutionary adaptation. Our affect system system is precisely calibrated to our million years of hunter-gatherer living.

If folk need lots of psychotherapy these days, that is not so surprising. Society has become its own historical project with its own socially-constructed framing of how to think and what to feel. Biology hasn’t had a million years to catch up with some of the ways we are now meant to live.

I will do this quickly not because of physiological help , but because I already know that this is a situation that requires split second decision. — Joshs

Utter bollocks. You will react physiologically even before you can form a clear conscious picture. Your reptile brain - the amygdala in particular - sits poised to react to any sudden rushing object in a fifth of a second. It will then take half a second at least for the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex to come to some sort of agreement about whatever the hell is actually rushing us.

And a few days after the fact, you will have reframed the whole thing as a heroic episode where you instinctively kicked the bear in the nose, or an amusing reason for why your bowels let go and you shat your pants and froze rather than ran - or whatever socially accepted narrative helps explain your feelings at the time in a reasonable light.

You have the temporality back to front.

This is precisely because the feared event hasn’t happened yet. If what we fear happens, we will no longer be afraid but shift to a different attitude. — Joshs

Generalised anxiety is a pathological state. Nervous expectation is functional as a way of rising to the expectation of some temporary challenge. It is dysfunctional to get stuck in any particular physiological state for longer than the immediate situation demands.

But of course, culture can frame your reality as a state of constant threat, or a dread of a moment’s boredom. It can play all sorts of manipulative tricks. An animal lives in the moment. Humans learn to inhabit a world where love and hate, strength and weakness, friends and foe, etc, are permanent signifiers of the psychic landscape. You are suppose to maintain the boundaries of this emotional economy at all times - because that is who you are! LOL.

We can’t concentrate in fear not because of the hormones but because then worry over the situation is a greater priority to us than other interests PTSD isnt a disorder of chemicals , it is a problem of failure to effectively understand events the past that have relevance for ones present and future. — Joshs

You say this as if stating facts. And yet you too have an amygdala as well as a prefrontal cortex. The neurology tells you what part of your responses are preverbal - or at least limited to the kinds of shrieks, screams and swear words the amygdala, in cahoots with the anterior cingulate, might cause you to emit even as you are trying to make sense of something scary that is in the middle of happening.

Can we retrain the hyper-sensitivity of an abused amygdala by reliving and desensitising - talk therapy? Sure. To an extent.

Try injecting yourself with adrenaline and see how it ‘makes’ you focus. It actually has the opposite effect unless you are already gearing yourself up for action, — Joshs

The body injects itself with noradrenaline in the brain, adrenaline in the body, in a habitual fashion that hopefully matches your mental state to the situational requirements.

Try stepping out on to a stage or the finals of a tennis tournament and not feel butterflies. It is essential to react physiologically and neurologically in a way that gets you up for the occasion. If you are ready to face any threat, then you can get into the flow of the actual challenge and not stumble and stutter. Well prepared habit can let you deal smoothly with whatever gets thrown your way.

So shooting a relaxed subject up with adrenaline is of course a nonsensical and inappropriate thing to be doing. Anyway, just hold an evil rusty syringe up in your shaky hand, mutter unconvincingly there is no chance it could hurt or harm.. You won’t even have to inject your juice, Dr Joshs. The social framing of the act will have created the adrenaline rush before the needle descends.

It is crucial
to bring temporality into the equation and remind that , as Piaget said, each assimilation to ‘habits’ is at the same time an accommodation to the novelties of the environment. The world is always, minute by minute, changing in ways the organism hasn’t precisely encountered. — Joshs

Yes. But the flip side of the cognitive coin is that habits are the automaticisms which deal with the first 200 milliseconds after something has started to happen. Conscious attention can only follow between 300 to 1000ms - depending on the actual amount of novelty and need for a radical reframing of expectations.

So habits take long to form and a split second to emit. Attention takes longer to develop, but offers more immediate fruits.

The temporality is important. So it is important to actually get it right.

This may be an interesting difference between us. What is novelty to you? Do organisms and humans just rearrange previous bits and codes most of the time? — Joshs

…he says hopefully, seeking to “other” me as already in the camp of shameless mechanical discourse.

Sorry. Did you miss the start of this thread where I pinned my colours to the Bayesian Brain answer on just this?

if the theories are faulty then you wouldn’t be receiving these distant disturbing ideas over the technological marvel of the internet.

To reverse the temporal order of cause and effect is simple contradiction, unless you are no longer talking about causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

The evidence from quantum mechanics tells us already that the nonlocality which is illogical to your way of thought is the reality of how the Cosmos is.

Now you can choose other interpretations - like Many Worlds. But they ought to be even more offensive.

One can think of such feelings as anxiety as the experience of impending chaos , the near meaningless of a world that one cannot construe on the basis of similarities with what one already knows. One cannot move forward. — Joshs

Note how you want to cloak the prosaic in the dramatic. You are romanticising anxiety as a cosmic existentialist drama - passionate man against uncaring nature.

And yet anxiety is part of the stress response - physiological readiness for fight or flight (or even the third strange choice of freezing). Noradrenaline in the brain goes up to change the signal-noise balance. We become less able to focus on endogenous/dopamimergic planning and more open to the exogenous/readiness response where we have no clear prediction of where the signals we seek might come from. So the brain as a whole is made readier to react to anything that might just normally be treated as peripheral noise.

Thus we shift the discourse from heightened Romanticism back towards the mundanity of information processing. Anxiety is just a machinery for paying better attention to the uncertain environment when that is the processing mode that makes better sense than remaining head down and focused on some narrow task or activity.

So it’s not simply that we ignore what doesn’t matter to us , we would disintegrate as organisms if we attempted to ‘assimilate’ what was not compatible with our current functioning and interests. I suppose one could put this in dialectical terms and say with Piaget that the interest-based equlibrarion of cognitive structures is progressive ,
the direction is from weaker to stronger structures. — Joshs

The general dichotomy that a learning and living system implements is that of plasticity-stability. An organism must be able to resist change to its structure of habits so as to persist as that functional set of habits. But the same organism must also have the plasticity to adapt as the world changes in ways it hasn’t encountered. It must have the attentional level of processing to complement the habitual. Paradigms need to be tweakable.

So any systems minded biologist or neuroscientist gets this. Existence for an organism is a dialectical balancing act in terms of staying the same and yet constantly adapting.

It is not a psychic drama. It is the intelligible basis of organismic being.

I suppose that , rather than taking the individual
organism as focal point , one could take a broader ecological stance and put in question the coherence of biological ‘selves’. I don’t think that such an approach would alter the general features of the dialectic. It would merely identify the self as the totality , the world coming to know itself. — Joshs

Or another way of putting it is that selfhood is pervasive and scalefree.

Life is Gaian in scale in that it eventually came to control the Earth’s chemistry. It produced a stable atmosphere and carbon cycle that favours life as an ongoing entropic project.

So we have bacteria that form communal biofilms. Even the smallest organisms make social collectives as higher level identities. Rainforests make their own rain - seeding the clouds with bacteria lifted into the sky by their own evapotranspiration. Life as a whole took control of the planet when it evolved the dialectic of oxygen-based respiration and CO2-based photosynthesis some 2.2 billion years ago (although it took a couple of snowball earth extinction events to secure the mature state marked by the Cambrian explosion of complexity some 600 million years ago).

So selfhood exists at every level of biology and neurology. It is anti-reductionist in that a point of view - an epistemic cut - is ubiquitous to every scale of organisation.

Yes. They see the world as they are. — Gnomon

Happy clappy bullshit. You wouldn’t believe the delusions of a schizophrenic. You wouldn’t think they had achieved some praiseworthy level of reality modelling.

Peirce got it right in defining truth as the limit of a community of rational inquiry. The units of measurement might arise from the point of view taken, but it is clearly situated in the pragmatics of being part of a collective social level of organismic existence. If units of measurement can’t be shared across the community of inquiry, there ain’t anything worth talking about.

If a series of mutations were to occur , could they wreak havoc with the motivational-affective system in such a s way as to reverse the poles of the dichotomy cooperation-competition , fight-flight, approach-avoid, love the insider-hate the outsider? — Joshs

My position on emotions is social constructionist and biological. One must build on the other.

So yes, we already know people have genetic variability in their basic biological affectivity. There is a natural economy of physiological preparedness that produces a pallet of feelings - the contrasts of the parasympathetic vs the sympathetic nervous system for a start. And some are more anxious or reactive than others. Some more dominating than submissive. Some are almost excessively agreeable and others psychopaths.

Where do you stand on this? — Joshs

Whenever academics argue for an extreme position on the nature/nurture divide, you know they are still mired in the culture wars of yesteryear. It is a sad sight to see so much time and effort being wasted on a false dichotomy.

Do we suspect the outside and embrace the insider because of arbitrarily tuned machinery or because we attempt to make sense of our world with the neural machinery we have and the alien is intrinsically unassimilable? — Joshs

No. That is just the general rationality of the Cosmos expressing itself. Seriously, Everything in Nature is the product of symmetry breakings, from particle physics up.

The brain recapitulates what is ontologically the way that reality organises itself. But then also inserts a self interested point of view into the map of this terrain. Hence Gestalt psychology. We experience an Umwelt which is symmetry broken into the figure and ground that has now a personal meaning. We highlight what matters to us as a point of view, and ignore everything else as peripheral detail.

And so we lump and split the world in terms of self and other, so as to construct ourselves as both an individual biological organism and a part of a larger social organism. That means reading self and other into any social situation,

This dichotomisation or symmetry breaking isn’t an arbitrary epistemic tactic. It always was the driving logic of a nature making itself intelligible - developing a rational structure. That’s Peircean pansemiosis 101.

Thus, my goal is to better abs better anticipate the trajectory of your thinking , where your passion lies in the conversation. Again, how successfully I construe your larger worldview now. it up to me to decide, it’s up to you to let me know by your assent or objections , by the fruitfulness of our interchange. — Joshs

Yep.

There is a reciprocal dialogic altering of thinking going on, but that doesn’t guarantee that our two approaches become more aligned with each other. That can only happen if either one or both of us manage to transform and expand our own thinking enough to accommodate what initially appears as the alienness of the other. — Joshs

Perhaps it is also hard for folk to paradigm shift if they haven’t first established a paradigm to shift away from? Often people don’t understand their own socially constructed belief systems, just like fish don’t know water.

To break out of a reductionist causal mindset, it is not enough to listen to a long lecture on organicism.

The unit of measurement is the human mind, as in "Man is the measure of all things". :smile: — Gnomon

Does that include madmen, fools and dreamers?

Seems legit, :ok:

Since this organizing agent, the whole, the being, cannot exist prior in time to itself (that would be contradictory), it cannot be assigned the role of the cause of itself, nor can it be responsible for the "Becoming" of itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean it would operate non-locally? Like quantum physics? And thus operate retrocausally?

Yes, that is essential to my view. Finality lies in the future and acts as an organising constraint on its own past. It sifts pure possibility as the ultimate destiny.

which distinguishes life from dead machinery

Yep. You need to move past Barbieri and also Hoffmeyer to reach Pattee’s resolution.

You can falsify it, by providing something that is not information. — Pop

Sure. I’ll get right on to it just as soon as you provide the units of measurement.

Does it involve something like a stopwatch and ruler? Or is it more like waving your hands over an entity and going “woooo-oo”?

There you go. A falsifiable, thus scientific , theory in three words. Beat that! — Pop

What is your unit of measurement? You forgot something.

If it involves an atomistic notion of consciousness, well best of luck.

(Remember, you are claiming everything is panpsychist information.)

The anthropic principle is the interpreter ( the integrated laws of the universe ) - it causes the information to integrate. — Pop

So - the cosmological principle that theories of the universe are constrained by the necessity to allow human existence?

All you need to provide now then is an explanation of how Panpsychism is indeed “a theory” in the scientific sense. (And not pseudo-metaphysical hand waving.)

A clue. To be a formal model, it needs to be testable. And that involves an epistemic cut between model and measurement.