The claims I made included models of schizophrenia and
autism. These illnesses involve deficits in empathy — Joshs

These are neurological disorders that strike at brain organisation at a far more basic level than any “cognitive module” like the rather shaky TOM story. They are both about fine grain and pervasive disturbances to the microcircuitry that in general has to achieve a meaningful balance of integration and differentiation in terms of a modelled self-world relationship.

They show as disorders of social thought because social thinking is the most complex and challenging level of human thought. But the dysfunctions are at a deeper neurodevelopmental level.

Trying to fix the empathy circuit is not addressing the root issue. But reframing the social space of the person in a suitable fashion is of course a way to make their lives better.

As Husserl already pointed out in the Logische Untersuchungen, the entire facile divide between inside and outside has its origin in a naive commonsensical metaphysics and is phenomenologically suspect and inappropriate when it comes to understanding the nature of intentionality — Joshs

Great. We can identity a way that phenomenology is clearly wrong. Semiotics says the production of a self in a world is the opposite of a facile distinction. It is the distinction on which life and mind themselves are founded.

Rather, even in this “being outside” together with its object, Dasein is “inside” correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. — Joshs

This is starting the story after the fact. Every child has to go through the neurodevelopmental process of learning it owns its own hands and that a cat disappearing behind the chair will likely re-emerge the other side.

So for the rationalising adult self, the situation is all rather Kantian. We are beings trapped in our representations. But pragmatism then points out that we are “selves” to the degree we have managed to construct the separation that in fact allows us to be in this kind of modelling relation with “reality”.

The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (Merleau-Ponty — Joshs

Yes. The usual love of confounding paradox that marks Continental philosophy and thus “others” it from AP’s love of reassuring certitude.

This is why a prefer the third way of pragmatic philosophy and its modelling relation ontology.

We start off in a state of vagueness - a blooming, buzzing confusion - and then sort that out into a dichotomously rational, hierarchically structured, state of being which is “us as selves in a world.”

The inner is a construction, and so is the outer. The two are rationally constructed to be mutual and complementary aspects of the one modelling relation. I am me to the extent I have othered the world. And vice versa. And what then makes this sane is that it delivers in terms of pragmatic optimality. Goals are defined and goals are achieved.

Intentionality isn’t a surprise or a mystery. A point of view is what will be developed - to the degree that a point of view is useful and meaningful.

The next bit of business is then to discover what defines “useful”. Natural science points us towards the perhaps shocking answer - entropy production. It hasn’t so far pointed us to anything in terms of some higher human purpose - something to do with ineffable spirit or feeling or Platonic goodness.

Rather than committing the mistake of interpreting the phenomena mentalistically, as being part of the mental inventory, we should see the phenomenological focus on the phenomena as an attempt to question the very subject­-object split, as an attempt to stress the co-emergence of mind and world.” — Joshs

And so we circle back to the view we share - that mind is an enactive relation. Another way of talking about semiotic modelling. But with a very different evaluation of the role of the epistemic cut.

Semiotics makes the point that it is how a co-construction of mind and world even gets going. It is the feature and not the bug.

Claude Shannon's information theory seems to treat messages (carriers of information) as the final answer to a series of yes/no questions aimed at narrowing down the possibiilites that the message could be from an arbitrary n to 1. — TheMadFool

Oh I would agree with that. And it explains why a binary code is the ultimate notion of a code. It is the simplest and fastest means to constrain uncertainty.

Think of the game of 20 questions. I could be thinking of anything - here it happens to be a poodle. And you have to zero in on that answer in as few steps as possible. The most efficient algorithm is a series of yes/no questions that exactly bisects the space of all possible replies. So typically you would ask is it living or dead? Is it human or another living form? Is it domestic or wild? Does it live on a farm or in your house? You get the idea. Eventually you get down to the best questions for halving your uncertainty about the breed.

So a binary code offers the simplest way to constrain semantics. It doesn’t have to tick off alternatives in a linear fashion. It can home in on the only possibility at an exponential rate.

So at an abstract level we can define semantic meaning as about erasing information. Each yes/no counterfactual step can potentially eliminate as much as half of all the contextually valid alternatives.

The question then is can we ever arrive at some irreducible quantity which might constitute a semantic atom. Is any reply ever going to be completely sufficient.

This gets us into the essential difference between a pragmatic theory of meaning or truth and the more familiar atomising approaches to meaning and truth as just naked facts.

So all I meant to emphasise is that information - as meaning - is not atomic and therefore never easy to just turn into a counting exercise - a matter of naked quantity. Meanings are semantics that are the results of grammatical frames. Work has been done to constrain the space of possibilities and limit the uncertainties to a “reasonable” degree.

Turning that into a mathematics is difficult. But even so, biologists and neuroscientists are having a go, with Shannon information and Boltzmann entropy being some kind of atomistic foundation.

As I said, the Planck scale at least does provide a measurable limit on uncertainty, and thus also certainty. It tells us how confined quantumness in practice is, and where the boundary of classical atomism more or less begins. That is why information theory is such a big deal in new physics. It introduces the idea that reality is not constructed of actual atoms but, even so, it is fundamentally grainy and atomistic because holographic constraint or thermal decoherence acts everywhere to limit material uncertainty to a Planck constant defined scale.

Now that kind of physics says nothing about our ordinary linguistic notions of meaning or semantics. And yet it also is the same paradigm shift that would be reflected in a move from an analytic philosophy style logical atomism to a semiotic or pragmatic theory of meaning and truth.

I'm grateful that you thought my views were worth pursuing further but I'm not sure whether your objective was to make me realize that, — TheMadFool

I’m sure an insult is buried in there somewhere. But you asked surely I could see there was no discernible grammar in your answer. And yet I seemed able to discern some grammar in your answer.

Was I mistaken or do you accept that and now withdraw your claim? Ball is in your court, sir.

Q: What entered the room?

A: A poodle.
A: The poodle.
A: Some poodle.
A: Poodle.
A: Poodle a.
A: Can you repeat the question in a way that takes up more of the grammatical load so I can pretend my reply has no grammatical structure?

What about the grammatical structure? Subject-verb-object was lurking as the generating constraint on your collection of informational units.

Meanings can’t just be composed. They must be subsumed to a holistic pattern, a top-down structure, a semiotic habit of interpretance.

Information theory is particularly silent on this.

Your every comment manages to be more hurtful than the last. I am at rock bottom now.

but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental role of observation in the formulation of quantum mechanics. — Wayfarer

But the mechanics - the formal model - doesn’t grant observation a fundamental role. It isn’t even in the model. There is no mechanism that determines the actual outcome. QM only describes some constrained space of probabilities - a wavefunction. It shrugs it shoulders about the collapse of the wavefunction. That’s your problem, mate. Open the box and look at the cat yourself.

Decoherence at least now gives us boxes of many appropriate sizes. A cat sized box is so large, crowded and warm that our chances of observing anything weird are too negligible even to consider. But a nanoscale box can be full of fluctuating surprises. We can materialise sudden reversals of the second law that are like bank errors in our favour,

But you know that once you do discover the details, that what you will be describing is INFORMATION. — Pop

In the sense that is is meaningful and not merely noise?

I checked. They are out of stock.

Or did you buy the last one? Please don’t disappoint me after raising my hope so, :cry:

Yeah, but no room for epistemic cuts here! — Pop

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

The body is a nested hierarchy of epistemic cuts. And that is only expanded by evolving an immune system and a nervous system.

It is ridiculous that you now just go boo, hiss in pantomime fashion when the epistemic cut is mentioned. Show that you understand what it even means as a technical term from theoretical biology.

Not 'utterly', according to John Wheeler. — Wayfarer

Wheeler is one of the greats. But this also reflects the era of Copenhagen quantum mechanics before quantum maths had decoherence, or the missing bit of statistical mechanics, bolted on to give us quantum field theory.

Now decoherent quantum physics is a problem as lesser minds than Wheeler carried on with a mechanical understanding of physics and so arrived at the popular metaphysics of the many worlds interpretation.

But Wheeler’s participatory universe just needs to adjust the position of its epistemic cut. It has to be moved from the default Copenhagen position - something do to with being the boundary defined by a conscious human observer reading a needle on a dial (how semiotic!) - to being a Cosmos that pansemiotically observes itself.

The decoherence mod to quantum maths - the addition of statistical mechanics to the wave mechanics - is a way of universalising the epistemic cut so it exists freely at every physical scale of being. You get a practical story where the quantum turns classical with an exponential speed as it encounters its thermal surrounds.

Sometimes - if interactions are sparse because the events are in an empty and cold vacuum - then decoherence, the collapse of the wavefunction, can take a long time. And that is how we trap quantumness in the lab. Chill it and let it swell larger in a vacuum.

But most of the time the collapse - in the hot and crowded thermal environment that makes our comfortable human home - happens almost immediately as far as we are concerned. It just isn’t a visible factor in a world we experience as concrete and classical.

And if we do look up at the twinkle of a star, that means we are trained to see it as a distant object and not a remarkable photonic interaction that is nonlocal in the way Wheeler’s quantum eraser emphasises.

So Wheeler was free thinking enough to give voice to a semiotic view that incorporates the necessity of placing the classical vs quantum epistemic cut somewhere. But Copenhagenism was just science being methodologically strict and saying we can’t yet place that cut out there as some physical mechanism. So hold on and just say all we can do so far is know we are reading a dial.

And then the maths was added that gives the whole universe a thermal structure. Quantum theory still can’t speak directly about the actual collapse of the wavefunction - hence why the many worlds interpretation has legs. But it has placed the epistemic cut out in the world as a grid of constraining structure - classical measurements we can agree on using a thermometer, stopwatch and ruler. Quantumness is confined in classical boxes of every size, just as we observe to be the case.

Chaos is controlled, order is regained, the scientist feels good.

And quantum biology is showing now how life itself has long mastered this semiotic trick of boxing up quantum uncertainty to extract useful work from its thermal environment. Every enzyme looks to use classical structure to harness quantum superposition so as to beat the odds when it comes to driving chemical reactions uphill against the prevailing entropic conditions,

Reactions that might only happen once in a thousand years can be forced to happen in a millisecond. Physics had become life’s plaything down at nanoscale. Life thrives on uncertainty because randomness is something it knows how to control. And quantum uncertainty is the most high powered form of randomness. Life can do jujitsu by using its opponent’s own helpless weight against it.

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

This video isn’t about the harnessing of the quantum realm directly, but it is about the nano-machinery which colonises that physical boundary layer with its remarkable molecular motors…..

You'd have seven or so people in a small city committed to the project and just generalized chaos everywhere else. — thewonder

I’m not talking about reviving anything but starting the construction of a politics appropriate to the situation as it is likely to be - to the degree that is predictable.

This is the transition town approach. Start today in very small places and rebuild local community. Create the local money, the time banks, the community gardens, the town wind farm, the local militia, or whatever else seem like the necessary institutions of life in a few years. Cities can start planning on their own scales by reconnecting with their surrounding countryside in terms of food security, energy harvesting and transport solutions.

It’s not rocket science. Just an enormous shift in mindset. People will actually have to learn new habits. And who doesn’t hate that?

I have previously given a rather expository post as to what I prefer to Liberal democracy. — thewonder

Do you mean?....

Anarchism is a political philosophy and it can more or less be simply defined as "libertarian socialism".

I could see why you then might reject my description of liberal democracy as a collective of institutions.

But have you read Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Goverment: A Study of Social Pressures, 1908?

His story is that society is composed of interest groups that formulate pressures which result in government level accomodations.

This could be groups organised around moral or social issues - liberty and equality groups - as much as around economic issues. States and cities are locality-based groups. The justice system is composed of its law groups. And because people could belong to many groups, it becomes a complex web. No simple divides like left vs right, or religious vs atheist. But instead a hierarchy - a nested hierarchy - and so not a rigid hierarchy but a hierarchy equipped to evolve over multiple temporal and spatial horizons (see Salthe again for the textbooks on that).

So what Bentley was focused on was the pluralism which is a variety of institutionalised habit - the organs of the organism - that still need to have some scope to learn and adapt. It was a pragmatic view of a working whole that had proved itself over time.

That is about allowing vigorous and messy interest promoting - strong competition - but within a plastic set of global social constraints so a holistic balance can be arrived at. This pluralism contrasts with the socialist/communist notion of social engineering where disinterested technocrats impose order on a passive crowd (after the angry mob has done with stringing up the bourgeoisie and has been sent off to their collectivised farms and collectivised factories).

So where I speak of successful modern technocratic societies, they are more "anarchic" in being an active and dynamical jostle of institutions. The state is merely a framework for delivering some kind of structured accomodation to the mass of often conflicting desires.

It is a very organic understanding of society. Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man is a good recent book giving an overview.

Here's yet another way of looking at it. You accurately tagged my thesis as techo-dialectics. And so I say, look around and see what seems to be evolving in the modern world. Is it the human spirit or is it technology - the world of informational machines?

I see human consumers queuing up all night to be the first to purchase Apple's latest generation of iPhones. What is going on there - from a George Kelly point of view? What kind of diagnosis and remedy does your hero provide to what we both surely agree is some mad, or at least odd and fetishistic, societal behaviour?

This is a concrete example to test a contrast in our world views.

I claim my techno-dialectics gets down to the root of things in providing a naturalistic explanation - one that ties the construction of the modern self to the driving impulse of thermodynamic necessity.

But what say you?

An epistemic cut, the attempt to glue back together the objective and the subjective, which we decided to separate many centuries ago, — Joshs

That’s not a deep understanding of what it is. It is instead the enactive production of the dialectical drama which is a self in its world. It is how the objective vs subjective distinction even rises to the level of intelligible categories of being.

In that light , your view of semiotics as structural coding and decoding strays into the territory of human language,
and clashes with recent thinking in psychology on the nature of language. As psychologist George Kelly wrote — Joshs

Oh I just love these examples of boundary policing. Watch out, here comes the bloody social psychologist knocking on the door of our cosy introspectionist Wednesday night group meet. What a nuisance. See him off with a quick quote from one of our cherished authorities.

Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. — Joshs

Happily I’ve covered that in an extensive post on the way codes have to support both copying and enaction. And why neurosemiosis presents a particular issue in the transition from genes to words. Brain circuitry is some kind of standard algorithm - but also not really an algorithm in the mainstream computer science sense. And so neuroscience has more work to do on elucidating the nature of what we would mean in talking about a neural code.

I think what I suggest leads to good science and practical knowledge in the following areas: — Joshs

Those are motherhood claims rather than concrete examples. Is there a particular case where phenomenology or continental philosophy delivers an insight that my brand of semiotic holism or systems science couldn’t?

I agree that the general project of internalism is a valid reaction to the excesses of externalism, or objective third person, view from nowhere, metaphysics.

But my physicalism - following on from Peirce and Salthe - is internalist too. Or at least it starts and returns there to the degree that it is a pansemiotic understanding of reality - a view of the Cosmos as itself an organism undergoing a process of enactive development (rather than a Darwinian evolution, or blind play of chance).

So as I have said I don’t want to go too overboard on pansemiosis and an organismic Cosmos. Peirce and Salthe are way to the left of me on that. But I do accept weak pansemiosis rather than strong. And so a weak version of internalism rather than phenomenology’s over-emphasised one.

Again as I have argued, enaction is twinned with representation in semiosis. A code is something which is objectivised - in being syntax divorced from semantics, information divorced from its entropic consequences - and yet is also internal because an organism can curl all its symbols up into tiny DNA threads, or a pocket size book and act on a set of instructions at its leisure.

Selfhood thus becomes objective or mechanical at its anchoring source. The internalism of organismic being had the devil of the third person view at its functional heart. The whole metaphysics of organicism - the romantic naturphilosophie response to Enlightenment Reductionism - is subverted because the machine becomes the precious conceal trick.

Objectivists and subjectivists do their ritual battle. Realism vs idealism. Analytic philosophy against Continental. Externalists vs internalists. Always the response to discovering a foundational dichotomy is to set up camp at one or other end and look around for who wants a fight. Start policing the boundary - the epistemic cut! - that separates self from other.

On the internet, some random dude (me) sounds a little dismissive of phenomenology. Immediately your hackles are raised. You leap forth from your camp to make a challenge to discover whose side ai really stand on. This is the social drama we must engage in - the one written into very formula of the forum’s software. It is a game of taking sides and marking boundaries with our technical vocabularies.

But as I have tried to make clear, there is a third way that is (successfully) Hegelian in being Peircean.

The only problem is that it is rather complicated and so has remained marginalised ever since Anaximander tried to get the show rolling.

On a second review of your post, it seems like you're just arguing for an effective Liberal democracy. That's just how Liberal democracy is supposed to function. — thewonder

What do you prefer to liberal democracy then? What do you think works better - and so what you would like to see restored as much as possible in a climate change collapse scenario?

That seems like some kind of post-apocalyptic vaguely right-wing regionalism, which is neither not extreme nor beyond charting on the Political Compass. I'm also fairly unsure as to how not looking into the future or considering ecological responsibility is supposed to resolve the ecological crisis. — thewonder

Why is re-localisation right or left wing? It is about living within the scale we will be reduced to once the basis of global just-in-time material flows has vanished. We can get ready for that inevitably by imagining it now.

And I wasn’t advocating short termism. I was fingering that as the obvious current problem.

then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, — Joshs

As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson) — Joshs

Why do you exclude modelling along with copying and representing? The biosemiotic approach of biologists like Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and many more stress the need for the epistemic cut that indeed produces the closure of autonomy.

And Pattee shows how this even goes back to von Neumann’s mathematical treatment of self-reproducing automata. Rosen likewise provides the strong mathematical arguments. So even just for genetic copying, the need for a model that is separated from what it replicates is an axiomatic basic.

The problem with autopoiesis is that it was fuzzy on this aspect of the story. But there is a good grounding in semiotics to understand how selfhood and autonomy must emerge in life and mind. It is because they are this new thing of a semiotic modelling relation. It is all founded on the logical necessity of making an epistemic cut between self and world so as to start acting as a self in a world.

The informational machinery of a code has its first job in securing a state of enactive organisation. It must have a model of the self in its world so as to organise its metabolic flows and repair its dissipating structures - Rosen’s MR model of anticipatory systems. Then after that enactive relationship is established, there might be some kind of machinery worth replicating by making transmissible copies of a set of genes. The ability to replicate is somewhat secondary - although a logical inevitably because it allows biological development to be joined by biological evolution. And that is a powerful extra.

Note how words and numbers are semiotic codes that first exist as a way of separating a self from its world. Children have minds that become logically organised as they learn language and become able to self-regulate - as was well understood by symbolic interactionism and Vygotskian psychology. Humans have a heightened sense of selfhood because they must socially construct themselves as actors in a cultural drama, and now in the modern era, actors in a techno-neoliberal drama (the world made by thinking in terms of numbers or pure quantification).

And then words and numbers become something that can be transmitted and copied - turned into information or inert symbols to be decoded - by being rendered as marks on a page or electronic fluctuations on a wire. Human culture developed the power to become copyable and thus fully evolvability - capable of explosive change and growth over time as history shows once the digitised habits of writing and counting got started.

Oral culture is weakly transmissible. You had to be there to hear how the story was told and the gestures were used to really get the message. The machinery of copying was still more enactive than representational. It was not symbolic so much as indexical.

But with alphabet systems and numerals, along with punctuation and the sequestering of these marks in inert substrates - in the same way DNA is zipped up and inert and so physically separated from the molecular storm it regulates - humans continued on to full strength symbolism. Or a proper epistemic cut where the transmissiblity of information is separated from the interpretation or enaction of that information.

So you can see why huge confusion results from not being clear that syntax and semantics are two different things when we want to talk about “information” in some generalised way. An informational system - like a biological organism with genes and neurons, perhaps even words and numbers - is both enactive and representational. It is involved in both development (of a self-world modelling relation) and evolution (of a self-world modelling relation).

As usual, there is always a dialectic. And academic camps spring up at either pole to defend their end as the right end.

Again, I stick with systems thinkers or hierarchy theorists who can frame things more coherently.

Enaction is about the first person particularity of being in some actual selfish state in regard to the world. Representation is about what can be objectively copied and replicated so as to pass on the underlying machinery that could form such a particular state of world adaptedness.

Genes represent a generalised growth schedule and a list of essential molecular recipes that are the basic machinery for a body having an enactive modelling relation with its world. And genes also are in some active state of enaction when they are part of a body doing and feeling things as it indeed lives and transacts its metabolic flows.

In any moment of active selfish living existence, the DNA is unzipped and coated with all kinds of regulatory feedback signals so that it is functioning as the anchor to a vast cell and body-wide epigenetic hierarchy of “information”. The code couldn’t be more enactive.

And then the DNA is zipped tight, reduced to the frozen dialectic of sperm and ovum, mechanically recombined as now part of a different kind of story - one that couldn’t be more representational in being an inert process of information copying and the seeding of a next generation with the syntactic variety upon which the process of evolution depends.

If we talk about neurology or neurosemiosis, the stress is of course more on the enaction than the representation. Nature relies on genes to encode neural structure. So experience is something that can both be enacted and represented if you are dealing with simple intelligence in the form or ants or jumping spiders. Genes can specify the shape of the wiring to the degree that habits of thought are pretty much hard wired.

But large brained animals become more or less dependent on personal development or enaction. Thoughts, feeling and memories - some package of life experience that shaped the mind of a tiger or elephant - is information gained and lost. Only very general parts of being a tiger or elephant, as a self in some particular ecological niche, can be captured and transmitted as evolvable and representational information passed on to the next generation.

Humans became even more enactive and developmental as a large brain species. Our babies are at a real extreme in being born with unformed circuitry awaiting the imprint of life experience and hence the accumulation of untransmissible states of attentional response and new thought habit forming.

So genetics was strained to its outer limit in this tilt towards the enactive pole.

But then - hey presto - that paved the way for linguistic culture as a new higher level of semiotic code or information enaction/information representation. We could restore the balance between making minds and being minds with oralism, and then oralism’s continued evolution towards literacy and numeracy.

So neurosemiosis is sort of a gap in the story. It is where the baton gets passed as the genes get stretched to the limit and suddenly - with Homo sapiens - something more abstract, something arising out of social level systemhood, arises to continue the semiotic journey to a higher level of organisation.

This is why the neural code is so hard to find, and why we have patent idiocies like integrated information theory or quantum consciousness theories trying to fill the explanatory gap.

Biology can point to genes as the dual basis of enaction and representation, development and evolution. Social psychology can point to words and numbers in the same way. Brain scientists have to talk in terms of neural network principles to feel they are getting at what makes it all tick in terms of a mind that can be both some particular enactive first person state, and then also the other thing of a genetically transmissible algorithm which a new generation of minds can implement.

Again, I return to the neuroscientists who are actually homing in on this understanding of the great hunt for the neural code - folk like Friston and Grossberg. It is easy to see why they are on the right track, scientifically speaking.

The neural code has to be understood not as a train of symbols but as a standard microcircuit design. A bit of computational machinery. An architectural motif. A transmissible algorithm that is the brain’s basic building block.

And the problem there is Turing machine based notions of neurology’s canonical microcircuit - the standard approach - are so far off the mark. The only people to pay attention to are the ones that talk the language of anticipatory systems.

To me, you seem to be speaking of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. Is that close to what you are talking about? — Athena

Yes, the old dialectic of logos and flux is another version of the same essential position. The Cosmos is about how logical order becomes the shaping hand that reins in chaos. And yet you need that lack,of order as the basic thing to then have something to rein in. This makes the whole system, the larger relation, a unity of opposites,

C.S. Peirce had the ambition of refounding logic on a graphical basis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph

And Spencer Brown had a similar leaning with his laws of form - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

Louis Kauffman has written a number of fine papers that give a historical overview of this more visual tradition in logic - https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/chk/2011/00000018/F0020001/art00004

Is that the kind of thing you are looking for?

But if you start with a truly fresh model of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos. — Joshs

True. But I am happy just making physicalism work as a model of reality. I don’t see it as a failed project but instead as an already stunning metaphysical achievement.

Do you think what you suggests leads to good science or practical knowledge?

It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. — Joshs

Hah. Part of it is that I spend so much time having to make very complicated things very simple for mass audiences. So it is something of a relief just to blow off steam and use the direct technical language that draws on - and thus alludes to - the vast fragmented intellectual landscape that is systems thinking. I am flaunting not just one person’s or one group’s technical jargon here but the great many ways a lot of people have said much the same thing throughout history.

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

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

But I’m not complaining.

Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existence entities or aspects? — Joshs

The grand project would be pansemiosis. The Cosmos would in fact have to have its own organismic point of view.

A place without a point of view would be a vagueness or an Apeiron. A state of boundless fluctuation with neither character nor history. The universe is instead already born as a concrete system dissipating entropy - trading local heat for global expansion. So it is in some scientific sense already organised to constrain fluctuations into a flow of events, a steady accumulation of habits that increasingly reveal its global direction.

But then an organismic view of the universe is too simple when it comes to actual organisms. And the difference is reasonably simple. The information that organises or constrains the actions of the universe sits out at its holographic boundaries. It is literally the outer limit of the event horizon in de Sitter models of cosmology.

Life then discovered the trick of encoding those kinds of shape-giving constraints. It could internalise the constraints it employed as memories for action sequences. It had genes, then neurons, and eventually words and numbers as a machinery for first person semiosis or reality modelling.

So the Cosmos has no memory except in terms of its own actual structure. It is like a tornado in that it spins now because it spun a moment before. And it will spin until it begins to equilibrate whatever combo of source and sink made for an entropic gradient.

But biology evolved code as a means to internalise a point of view. That is both a semiotic ontology, but a very big difference in having this own little store of private information rather than being the helpless product of the collective information of the Cosmos as a whole.

So hopefully answering your question, the objective world becomes the pansemiotic story where there is perhaps a first person view in operation, but one that is so generalised that it is hardly a view at all as far as we are concerned. The universe just comes with a bunch of simple content obeying some simple laws. It is basically raw thermodynamics with no particular concerns, memories or feelings.

And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick.

So Information is a very difficult thing to grasp. — Pop

Well it was fun trying to explain it anyway.

I don’t think that’s it. The Peircean approach is not to rid our view of reality of any subjectivism, it is instead to match such a science of the third person view from nowhere with its “other” of a general science of first person points of view. So a science of semiotics and habits of interpretance, in other words.

It is a difficult intellectual dance of course. But it makes the usual dialectical sense - the unity of opposites.

So lurking in the background, is the presupposition that, whatever reality is, in the end, it must comprise some kind of ‘substance’ in the customary understanding of it - when that is what is actually at issue in discussions of this kind. — Wayfarer

I agree with all you said. The subtlety of Aristotelean hylomorphism has become sucked into the general vortex of materialist confusion.

So there is the understanding of substance as the essential material - material cause being the primary form of existence that underpins all else. So substance already has its key property of brute existence and inherent properties (like a location, a motion, a mass, a charge). And the dichotomy becomes one of these causal atoms or causal materials and the acausal void in which they freely exist.

But then there is the process view of Peirce, systems science, and others. Now enduring substance with its inherent properties becomes instead just a generalise potential or state of radical uncertainty. A chaotic fluctuation with no special persistence or direction at all. The material aspect of substantial being becomes the least possible form of substantial being.

And then actual substantial being is what you get once there is some contextual limits in place to give shape to some mass of fluctuations. Something aligns them so that a persistent state with fixed character results.

In other words, quantum mechanics and particle physics.

An electron represents free fluctuation constrained by circumstance to have an eternally fixed identity. At the Big Bang temperature, there are no such definite particles. There is just a directionless sea of fluctuations in one high symmetry (ie: low content) grand unified forced. Then this thermal bath cools and quarks, then leptons, can condense out.

Electrons are fixed in their properties because they break the GUT symmetries down to the simplest possible shapes. U1 gauge symmetry is the last stop in the road. And that gives you the simplicity of an electrical field populated by massive electrons and their massless photons.

So it is a plain mathematical fact that the simplest geometry is U1. That is a law beyond any particular cosmology. It is a Platonic constraint on any possible world. The last form standing is going to be that which creates the properties discovered once all fluctuation has been reduced to the limit of material simplicity.

Of course we have to talk about how the Higgs field gets tangled in this U1 story to make electrons actually massive and so slower than light. And how the symmetry breaking must harbour the asymmetries that prevented even all electrons disappearing in a puff of bare radiation as they encountered all their opposite spin positron twins.

But the point is that physics sees substantial being as this hylomorphic dyad. You have quantum potential. You have mathematical strength constraints. Electrons and other fundamental particles then pop out of the hot brew as whatever becomes the crud that can’t be washed away even as the Cosmos becomes as empty and cold as is at its Heat Death.

Would it be fair to characterize your thesis as a kind of techno-dialectics? There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it , with technology moved to front and center. — Joshs

It is absolutely Hegelian. And also Peircean - as Peirce also saw the Cosmos in terms of a universal growth of reasonableness.

The challenge here is to understand why the world is so mad when humans have become so wise. We must be missing something and we can no longer blame original sin or the dark Darwinian ape that lurks within.

In particular - with climate change, peak oil, consumerism and neoliberalism - we must explain why that is a system with now a mind of its own that continually keeps reasserting itself.

I started off in ecology at the time of the Club of Rome and the first stirring of the Green movement. And so I've always had one eye on our attempts to take the long-term future seriously. I've have seen how rational precautions are always trumped by ... well, some Trump figure or other. And yet - as with the neo-liberal reforms of the the 1980s - the short-termism can also be absolutely rational. Irrationalty doesn't have to show its face until disaster is right there waiting at touching distance and not a problem for your great-great grandkids.

So my argument is that things went to another level with the industrial revolution and its unlocking of the fossil fuel bonanza. Society shifted from an organisation based on words as a semiotic code to one based on numbers. Science and technology could unlock fossil fuels by thinking in the pure abstraction of logical form. And so what had been a realm of social discourse - a world organised by words - became a realm of mechanism, a world designed for the benefit of mechanised entropy production.

People used to run society as all they had was the spoken language that had evolved to do that particular more restricted job. But when maths and logic came along - as the final Platonic-strength incarnation of semiosis - the whole system reorganised itself to have a higher level of being. A Noosphere some thought. A virtual reality cyber realm, others still fantasise. But I'm sorry. I only have to offer a far more prosaic form of Gaianism. There was this shit-load of burnable plankton gunk and carbonised tree that someone had to figure out how to burn. Homo sapiens was the natural candidate to step up to the plate.

There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it... — Joshs

I'm not big on Marx. He was correct about economic basics but a muddled romantic on human nature.

That's all well and good and all, but how does technocracy effectively resolve anything? — thewonder

I'm thinking of top rated societies like Scandinavia, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan. Or south east Asia in general. Or how the UK and US used to be.

City planners, national utilities, an effective civil service. It is not a secret how to govern rationally.

A strong society has strong institutions that look to the long view ... coupled to strong democracy that allows constant short-term challenge to those institutions. And you can engineer that balance. It is not about a conflict between left and right, good and evil. It is about plumbing and food security. Boring stuff that keeps the lights on and things headed in desirable directions.

Obviously, in fields that require expertise, there is a need for specialists, but, structuring the whole of civil society as if it were an engineering department doesn't seem to make too much sense to me. — thewonder

Technocratic just means there is a fundamental acceptance that society is a rational project and not some eternal power struggle. And being rational means engineering the checks and balances of there being both enough competitive tension and enough cohesive cooperation.

The best understandings of societies is based on them being coalitions of institutions. So you can have both artists and engineers, or galleries and laboratories. You form institutions for everything that seems to matter. And at every scale of the social system from state to street. Then they freely contest for resources and status.

This doesn't need extreme political theories - either about communism or capitalism, left or right. Instead it needs general acceptance that the job of a political system is to encourage the right kind of institutional structure. Everything becomes a shade of some form of social democracy - until fossil fuel looks up and sees its accelerating rate of entropification being threatened. Then you get a bout of creative institution destruction like a world war or Thatcher's Britain. Society can be steered away from the long-termism that was beginning to creep into human affairs - ecological responsibility, anti-consumerism, social equality, etc - and rebuild itself with the shortest institutional timeframes in mind.

So see "technocratic" as a code word for countries like Singapore, Taiwan, New Zealand and others that have no choice but to have excellent governance. Big bloated countries - ex-empires like the UK and US - have the geopolitical capital to run with a lot of avoidable friction. They don't need to be excellent across the board. They only have to maintain an acceptable level of adequacy in their key institutions. If the US needs expertise, there are any number of top PHds it can import.

I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. — Pop

This would be the Aristotelean view of substance as in-formed material possibility - the doctrine of hylomorphism. And I agree that this is the correct way to look at it.

But that then leads on to the epistemic cut and other stuff you appear to object to. It says that any instance of substantial being is an intersection between global constraints and localised meaningless action - Peirce's metaphysics of synechism and tychism. And this is very quantum. It says anything could be physically the case, but then becomes limited towards being some concrete event eventually by a prevailing context - some global informational structure that dictates the shape and destiny of a quantum system as a probabilistic wavefunction.

So from Aristotle to Peirce to quantum physics - and on to the complexities of life and mind - there is a common thread here. Concrete existence is all about global constraints on local uncertainty. And you can then label one side as formal/final cause, the other as material/efficient cause, or synechism and tychism, or information and entropy, or holism and reductionism, or whatever else floats your intellectual boat.

But all this is about epistemological tactics - the best way to divide reality into intelligible categories so we can appreciate both the way things are parts of wholes, and the way wholes are composed of parts.

We are constructing a point of view which allows us to read structure into a Cosmos that is part all about global logical necessity and part all about local chaotic freedom.

What you are doing is now trying to locate form in substance rather than seeing form as the external context placing limits on localised random fluctuations.

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

But then - because we know that degrees of consciousness must have something to do with the complexities of neural circuits - you graft on an enthusiasm for IIT with its emphasis on patterns of relations. Now complicated consciousness can reflect that measurable density of "integrated information".

The panpsychic position likes quantum theory, or electromagnetic theory, as much as information theory for the same reason. Wavefunctions and force fields can be treated as the deepest levels of substance - a view that seems to have greater scientific credibility since ideas about atomic matter and Newtonian forces became too obviously just the epistemic tactics they always were.

So now the form inhering in the substance appears visible. A wavefunction or force field can represent a spread of textured surface rather than some featureless spherical pellet of matter. One can see a property that actually looks complex and so matches the ontic intuition of how such a property ought to look at the fundamental scale of being.

But again, this is arguing from little pictures in the head. Substantial reality could be primal featureless spheres. Or it could be instead the complex texture of a collection of interactions that makes a network tracery that throbs with intrinsic meaningfulness and experience.

Either way, the mistake is collapsing the holism of a systems view - one which sees substantial being arising from the contrasting intersection of global necessity and local spontaneity - into the usual reductionist metaphysics where substantial actuality, with its entities and properties, is the only thing that really exists. And so the only thing that explains - in brute non-explanatory fashion - why there is material being and mental being. And why they have to be two aspects of the one essence.

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.. — Pop

And here you are recruiting even the systems science view to your conflationist cause.

So yes it is right that natural systems are dissipative structures that self organise via information (or negentropy) so as to further the entropification of the Cosmos. And indeed, systems science would stress this is information that is actually meaningful and at the start of the evolution of intelligent selfhood or autopoietic autonomy. It is not just information but semiosis or the construction of a pragmatic modelling relation between a self and a world.

But you are taking all that sophisticated metaphysics and saying that this self-organising infodynamics schtick sounds complex. Mind is complex too. So let's collapse the model into the phenomena. Let's pretend that a pattern of information is not a construct of our models but already a form of instantiated being that therefore emanates mind as an inherent property.

Let's take actual metaphysical and scientific holism and present it as if it is the next big thing in property-based reductionism.

I think that that's kind of a false dichotomy. You contrast technocracy, which, as it is advanced by whom you call "greenies", cyber-utopianism, I think, it is called, with a fringe set of political philosophies as if we ought to take the former at its word without any form of critique whatsoever. — thewonder

You don't need solutions until the problems bite. No one needs a seat belt to drive around a car. A seat belt is an entirely fringe concept that only starts to make obvious sense after the crash.

And the greenie response is hugely varied because the right answers depend on the actual degree of civilisational collapse - which itself won't be distributed evenly.

I've been involved in the controversies and politics of environmentalism for decades now. And it is heavily critiqued. Critique is not the problem. The problem is defining the exact speed and degree of the changes that will demand our best thought-out responses.

Isnt there a distinction to be made between growth defined in classical economic terms ( GDP, etc) and growth of knowledge( scientific, technological, philosophical , literary)? — Joshs

My position on this is based on my view of biological systems in general. So no. The two are clearly coupled. It is rooted in physical law - the second law of thermodynamics as applied to dissipative structure.

Dissipative structure is - to cite Stan Salthe again - a story of infodynamics. So the growth of information is the growth of the structure that creates the entropic gradient that dissipates the available free energy. And the availability of some source of free energy (along with a convenient sink to take the resulting waste) are then the reason that some informational structure would inevitably evolve to do the job.

Life and mind - biology and society - are accidents waiting to happen. If some store of free energy has accumulated - like half a billion years worth of heat distilled planktonic hydrocarbon trapped in deep sediment (petroleum), or ancient buried forests of carbon (coal) - then that is a glut of free energy in clear want of a technologically-minded social and economic system. And eventually such a system evolved to do the job - a system reaching its monetised apogee of unbounded growth under neo-liberal financialisation and globalisation.

So sure, the popular understanding of modern life is based on the mythology of the sciences versus the humanities, technology versus literature, base physics vs higher spiritual values, etc. The good old heaven and earth metaphysics that wants a clear separation of realms and responsibilities.

And that false dichotomy is the reason for so much angst - as expressed in the OP. Reality doesn't make sense if you try to live it by being both a romantic and a rationalist in some way that is authentic to both those cultural memes. But nor does reality give you a chance to live by just one of those two ways of life as the reality is they are two halves of the one whole system. Popular culture has just failed to recognise that fact.

My point is that information and entropy are wedded together in the form of a dissipative structure - the infodynamic thesis. And biology is all about the paired growth of negentropy and entropy. So if you see through the obscuring veil of the culture wars - the rational Enlightenment and its irrationalist Romantic reaction - you will see how the burning of fossil fuels demands iPhones in colours that best match your rainbow personality.

Fossil fuel puts pressure on the human race to finish the job it started as quickly as it can. In the early days of the industrial era, the burning was constrained by production capacity. There was inefficiency in terms of society delivering the knowledge and capital to maximise the burn rate. But we sorted that out by educating the globe in terms of STEM subjects and things like property rights and intellectual patents that made the informational flows as liquid as possible.

The bottleneck then became the human capacity to sensibly consume everything that boundless fossil fuel and resource mining could produce. And so we responded at a global social level to fix that as well. We invented a consumption-led economic model. We sold it to the mug public as the ultimate expression of self-actualisation. We pushed people into Macmansions with garages full of plastic crap and gaudy status symbols that spent a brief time being an impulse buy before making a lingering journey towards some public tip.

We then moved into selling experiences and personas as well. What is a bucketlist or an influencer except some new high in terms of essentially heedless entropy production? But fossil fuel really needs bucketlists and influencers to meet its embodied desires. The second law of thermodynamics is the hidden hand behind all forms of modern accelerating growth.

If there were a catastrophic disruption of access to sources of energy for technological use, do you really think this would prevent individuals from continuing to transform their ways of understanding the world? — Joshs

Individuals have always done fuck all except be expressions of their social systems, which are in turn predicated on some prevailing dissipative ecosystem organisation. If you are a society living in a rainforest, you learn how to come up with "new ideas" within the adaptive limits of that framework. If you live in a ghetto, or a gated community, or a rural service town, or a cosmopolitan elite, likewise.

The hidden hand behind social organisation is not the free and noble human spirit - the tiny part of the brain that has been touched by the divinity that lies beyond the realm of the brute and earthly.

One thing the growth of information does give us is some actual understanding about the truths of human existence. Although I would agree - it is part of my own thesis - that science as a whole is a diligently technological enterprise. And so you have to be able to filter the mechanistic excesses of its reductionism to see the wholeness of life and mind as the natural by-product of the Cosmos's generalised trajectory from a hot Big Bang to an eternalised cold and empty Heat Death.

There'd have to be some model to work with. Anarchism seems rather apt for such generalized chaos. — thewonder

The transition town movement makes sense. We don’t have to repeat the medieval era because we head into the next stage with a technocratic governance mindset that is highly effective. Small rational communities will function very differently from small irrational ones.

So the question becomes do you live in a society that votes for modern technocratic best practice? If your country collapsed, there is a better chance that some actually civilised form of community order will result if you do. Otherwise, expect good old barbarian politics.

If I was framing this as a political discussion, then that might be the useful contrast. What does each pole of this response look like - the greenie dream of technocratic rule and permaculture, or the new barbarism of folk now equipped with assault rifles and recent memory of individualistic ideologies.

I wouldn’t say it’s the number of experiences you cope with that produces growth but the manner in which you organize those experiences. — Joshs

I’m counting the number of adaptations. But of course that amounts to the same thing as the number of opportunities for reorganisation.

And if I single out experience, that is because the psychological model involves attentional processes creating some novel response, and that then bedding down into an accumulation of habit level - subconscious - response.

Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character. — Joshs

That view is very much a product of living in a world of accelerating social and technological change - the one driven by fossil fuel exploitation. In a world living off the solar flux, adaptation would be asymptotic. Growth can approach its best fit in a stable world.

So personal growth is fun. And also stressful. I have nothing against it. A balance of the positives and negatives can always be the target.

But I want to be clear about how unnatural it might be to live “forever” in accelerative mode. That would require an exponential supply of energy and materials to match - along with a sink for the entropic waste the social system must transport across its physical boundaries.

If we can crack fusion in the next decade, it could be game on again. But if it is a civilisational future to be built on wind and solar, then that is a very different growth regime.

But that’s not to say that ‘everything is information’ - I think I get what Pop is trying to get at, but that statement is oversimplified and therefore fraught with miscommunication, in my view. — Possibility

Information/entropy are a new system of measurement. So they are universal units rather than some universalised substance as @Pop suggests.

What make them exciting and fundamental is that they are securely founded on the three Planck scale constants that define the “grain” of substantial being. If you want to model the Cosmos in atomistic terms, then you can use a unit that counts local “degrees of freedom” - the smallest possible events in terms of a triangulation of quantum uncertainty, lightspeed interaction and gravitational curvature. You have a physical spacetime backdrop measured in h, c and G. And Boltzmann’s k is derived from that as a way to talk about the smallest possible substantial event or material action.

So the same equation - rooted in dimensionless Planck constants - can speak of the reduction of uncertainty at the most basic physical level in either the language of information concepts or energy concepts. It speaks of the scale of decoherence where quantum possibility becomes substantial classical being - some concrete and counterfactual difference.

What should be the metaphysical import of this new trick is that however we conceive reality, we can only construct measurable models that give us predictable outcomes. And so imagining that everything is made of information and imagining everything is made of material particles are both just epistemic tactics and not some direct and unmediated understanding of the thing in itself.

And then, while Shannon information sounds like it has something to say about the mind or meaning, it in fact is part of the same old physical reductionist epistemic project. IIT stands outside its subject as usual, talking about the physics of brains rather than the logic that comes from being a semiotic modelling relation that embodies a point of view. That is why only panpsychists could take it seriously and neuroscientists realise that the mind needs to be understood as a functional process of meaning construction.

So Shannon information is a liberating system of measurement for reductionist physics. It paves the way for a quantum holism where reality decoheres in a way that can be modelled using statistical mechanics and the holographic geometry of lightspeed constrained interactions.

But the unit of meaning that is needed by life and mind science is another matter. And I’ve already cited the very exciting realisation that there is a convergence of all forms of energy relevant to biology at the nanoscale at the thermal scale of chemistry taking place in water.

(@Possibility - sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing you here. I just like your comments and wanted to see if I could make my own position more clear.)

The Forest People, which is about the Mbuti, — thewonder

One of my favourite books - even given the usual academic backlash.

What seems to be more reasonable, ethical, and viable is to actively disengage from society as such, salvaging what is good of it that we can, and to just kind of let it all fall apart. — thewonder

Isn’t that relocalisation of economies and transition engineering. I don’t even consider it a battle of left-right - globalising political theories. The best outcome after the collapse of state level order would be communities able to sustain local order - however that looks.

, I am extraordinarily doubtful of that a supermajority of the population is going to agree to participate within a socialist society in the coming eras, I do think that a pluralistic syncretic society is not only requisite, but also preferable, as the incorporation of political ideas outside of what I would prefer to tell you flat out is, but will say that I understand as Anarchism will have the effect of providing a certain balance to what would necessarily be an experiment in governance. — thewonder

But aren’t any political systems the kind of theory led approach that will have little relevance in a collapse back to small communities scratching a living?

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. — Pop

Alternatively I have actively pursued the full range of the schools of thought out there. Far more than most. And so that is why I feel secure in my views and not concerned that some would find the people I champion - like Peirce, Pattee and even Friston apparently - at the outer extreme of obscurity.

Given our differences in paradigm, is it possible to agree on "what is information"? — Pop

I’ve already cited Bateson’s pithy “a difference that makes a difference”. And I’ve made the point that Shannon information is simply a way of counting pure differences - whether they make a difference or not.

So Shannon starts us off where we can make a raw count of digitally distinct events - whether the physical events are meaningful signals or meaningless noise.

Then those of us interested in semiotics - a science of meaning - can use that useful foundation to construct metrics that get at meaningfulness, or the reduction of uncertainty. That is where the debate over mutual information, surprisal, ascendency and other information theoretic proposals of biological relevance can start.

Science is about measurement and so about agreeing the right units of measurement. Tononi proposes his phi. But as critics point out, it is ill-defined and overly complex in practice. It also fails to distinguish integration in a living organism from that in a iPhone or even a rock. And it is computationally intractable to boot.

So far I don’t see that you are even engaged in the conversation at this level. You keep talking about integrated information as if it is just Shannon information. That is what you think you understand so that is what you want to keep dragging the discussion back to.

Living beings are therefore more than simply an arrangement of matter; they signal appearance of the subjective dimension, or perhaps we could say the intentional domain, even if it's in the simplest forms of single-celled organisms. — Wayfarer

The problem is how to best characterise this duality that is based on an actively manufactured epistemic cut. Is it really either subjective or a dimension? In some sense, it is definitely all about intentionality or finality. It is also a kind of domain. So there is a question about the best terminology here.

I’ve already highlighted one key point - the epistemic cut is manufactured, so it is something constructed within the larger world that it organises, The genes live protected in the nucleus for example. Their information is literally contained. Each cell has about 2m in length of DNA sequence, but because it is of such reduced dimensionality - a 1D thread ruling a 3D metabolic volume - it can be coiled up into a relatively tiny physical object.

And that relates to my point about symbols being what emerge via a constraint on regular physical dimensionality. The informational realm or intentional domain is so reduced in its physical being that it can exist almost invisibly within the world that it wants to regulate. It is almost immaterial as it demands so little in terms of material being.

All codes are the direct product of the reduction of physical presence to virtually nothing. A volume is reduced to a surface (membranes are key biological structures for defining cuts between inner and outer, self and world.) Then reduction to one dimensional molecular strands naturally leads on to the possibility of chains composed of zero d points. A polymer can be constructed from monomers. And each monomer can become a particular free choice - a particular amino acid or neucleotide base.

So the informational aspect of life is a kind of anti-physics. The existence of regular dimensional physics - the 4D spatiotemporal realm of rate dependent dynamics - already contains within it this other realm of rate independent information as its “other”. The possibility of coded intentionality was always latent and just needed suitable conditions to become manifest as an actual symbol system - a semiotic process paid for by its ability to accelerate environmental entropy flows.

This is a neat kind of metaphysics in that the challenge to regular physics is also directly a kind of physics in being the exact opposite of regular physics. They are the two halves of the one broken symmetry.

So that is a new kind of metaphysical distinction I would argue and deserves its own terminology.

Because the ingredient that was always lacking in objective descriptions is perspective. — Wayfarer

Again I would agree but then be concerned at slipping into the terminology of older ontologies.

Semiotics is embodied or enactive and so is all about the reality of organising points of view. And it is the manufacturing of some local point of view - along with its contrast to a story of physics that is anti-intentional in leaving out any special viewpoint - which is a big metaphysical step.

This is the argument for a science of semiotics as it was formulated by Peirce. He started with the psychological reality of the mind as a modelling relation and thus the most particular thing of some self-interested or embodied point of view.

So - in any living organism, perspective has already begun to emerge, albeit in extremely simple forms. (Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general.) In the case of h. sapiens, due to rationality and language, new horizons of being - radically new perspectives - open up which are not available to other sentient creatures (and, obviously, not available in a Universe lacking in such beings.) — Wayfarer

Yes, perspective is a good term. As is intentional.

So, I solve the issue of what consciousness or the mind is, by showing that it never occurs or appears as an object of perception, although because nothing can be known in its absence, it is nevertheless fundamentally real. And the reality of mind is demonstrated by the ability to grasp meaning, which is, arguably, a refinement of the very same process which is operative at the level of cellular biology. So to that extent, I advocate a form of dualism. — Wayfarer

The duality for me is that there is modelling relation. This demands an epistemic cut so that a “self” can stand outside the reality it means to regulate. To actually stand outside and so form a personal point of view is impossible. But because physical dimensionality can be constrained to the point it produces code, an organism can stand outside its reality as a virtual machine.

Consciousness is then just what it is like to be such a virtual machine - a modelling relation in which a self or point of view is also part of the constructed umwelt.

So neither the self, nor the world, are really real. They are virtual in being constructs of the model. But then the modelling relation as a whole is real as this virtual realm of modelling has a real physical basis and is doing real physical work.

So where you say subjective, I say virtual. This is another example of trying to find the jargon with the right connotations where possible.

This got me wondering where cryogenics had got to - have they tested the concept on rats yet.

This report says they have managed to perfectly preserve a rabbit’s brain now. But using a preservative that is also perfectly toxic. So one step forward and two steps back. :razz:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2077140-mammal-brain-frozen-and-thawed-out-perfectly-for-first-time/

Are you familiar with Neural networks? — Pop

Yep.

What is so wrong with panpsychism? Buddhism is panpsychist. Bhutan is the only carbon negative country, what is so wrong with that? — Pop

As critics of IIT like Searle note, Panpsychism is the kind of theory that is in the class of not even being wrong. It evades counterfactuality by claiming absolute generality. Panpsychists claim particles are conscious - but that consciousness is so dilute or unstructured that you couldn’t hope to tell the difference. You just have to take the panpsychist’s word for it.

That is a non-theory. It is standard substance dualism dressed up in a science-resistant cloak of invisibility.

See Horgan’s article - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/

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. — Pop

I date back to the first era of neural nets and have always believed they were the right biologically realistic approach. The key difference is that neural networks are a stab at embodied cognition and so were immediately taking the step towards semiotics and away from cogsci representationalism.

Neural nets learn by establishing habits of doing. There is no mystery why they are integrated hierarchies of action routines. That is just basic to their architecture.

But note how IIT turns the structure of the “integrated” conscious picture into an immense mystery. It can’t even hazard a concrete guess at how the brain is architected to produce an output state that has this informationally nested semantic characteristic. It only offers some cod metric of the degree to which a hierarchically complex state of organisation exists.

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? — Pop

The epistemic cut is crucial because the brain can’t model the world - or even construct a self - unless it first cuts itself off from that world.

This then leads on to all the things that folk find counter intuitive about neurocognition - such as the brain wants to predict its inputs so it can then ignore them as things it was already expecting and so doesn’t even have to especially note.

So representationalism is based on the idea that consciousness arises from the positive display of some structure of data. The brain is instead doing its best not to even have to react in the first place.

You can record from neurons in the retina and see their firing being quashed because the brain had already predicted that they were about to be poked by a stimulus and - sorry guys - that news is already old hat. Leave me alone.

So - as is basic to Friston’s approach and the general field of generative neural networks - the brain is striving to be unconscious. It wants to predict reality so well that there is nothing left that could disturb it by being surprising.

That of course then sets it up to be surprised and immediately focused on making the best sense of that surprise.

A surprise can be regarded as free energy. A poke in the eye of the system that forces it to make some new adjustment. The brain then does its best to avoid being poked in the eye by minimising the free energy via Bayesian prediction - its best guess on how to make something not happen.

understand basic neural network principles such that an input is shunted to an output ( symbol ), via non logical gradients which can be arbitrarily adjusted. — Pop

OK. That is very basic neural networks that use after the fact back propagation to reset the internal weights. So it learns to do better at pattern recognition the next time around.

But even in the 1960s there were neural networkers like Stephen Grossberg working on generative neural nets that were biologically realistic in predicting their inputs, rather than merely belatedly reactions to them.

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. — Pop

I don’t understand your issue here. The cut is completely essential if there is to be a difference between the neural model and the world that model encodes.

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

Or you haven’t understood the logic of what is being discussed. Have you read Pattee on symbol grounding or biosemiosis?

I trust in Shannon's understanding that information always exists embedded in a substance, as the co-element of the substance. — Pop

Any symbol or mark is of course a physical thing. A logical bit needs to be stored as a switched gate state or whatever.

But the meaning of that physical mark or thrown switch is entirely another story - a habit of interpretation.

Furthermore, the physics of the informational mark is of a special and rather artificial kind. It has as little actual physics attached as possible. It is basic to a code that it is zero dimensional - little more than a located point. It cost the same effort to make every mark, so effectively there is a zeroed cost for making marks. And thus the whole cost of mark-making ceases to be a constraint on any computational process on the other side of the epistemic cut.

In computation, once you have paid for the hardware and it’s power supply, then you can run any software for the same basic price. The software still relies on a Turing machine - a tape and gate hardware device. But the software possibilities are unlimited and universal.

Biology does the same trick as genes can code for any protein structure, or neurons can code for any stimulus-response loop.