Isn't that overly simplistic in that the point of intentional action just triggers a whole range of prearranged links in the machine and unknown and at times unknowable interfaces with the environment? — magritte

I would say it illustrates a general semiotic truth. Signs in fact have the aim of becoming binary switches. Their goal is to reduce the messy complexity of any physical situation to the simplest-possible yes/no, on/off, present/absent logical distinctions.

People talk about symbols as representing or referring - a kind of pointing. But semiosis is about actually controlling. And if your informational connection to the material world is reduced to an on/off button, some kind of binary switch to flick, then that is semiosis at its highest level of refinement. It is how reality can be controlled the most completely with the lightest conceivable touch.

So how much do I need to know about the mechanics of a car to drive it? One pedal to make it go and another pedal to make it stop is pleasantly minimalistic.

And even my body is seeking a similar simplicity in its metabolic regulation. Much of its homeostatic control boils down to the switch where insulin is the molecular message that is telling the body generally to act anabolically - store excess energy. And then glucagon is there to signal the opposite direction - act catabolically and release those energy stores.

Insulin is produced by the beta cells of the panceas. Glucagon by neighbouring alpha cells. A simple accelerator and brake set up to keep the body motoring long at the right pace.

So semiosis is not passive reference, but active regulation. And for a mere symbol to control reality, reality must be brought to its most sharply tippable state. It must be holistically responsive to a black and white command.

Stop/go. Grow/shrink. Store/burn. Etc.

So, maybe science has not clearly defined it? — Sir Philo Sophia

If the competition here is for the most concise definition, I would go with Howard Pattee's epistemic cut.

"Rate-independent symbols regulating rate-dependent dynamics"

I'll leave you to scratch your head on that with this as an aid - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12009802_The_physics_of_symbols_Bridging_the_epistemic_cut

Why ever not? We're talking about the power of social conventions here. Please explain the difficulty? — bongo fury

I'm saying there is no difficulty. But then to call it a "pretence" is thus unnecessarilly loaded.

But of course, it could be said that some codes do and some don't derive their power from being tied to physics. — bongo fury

The codes that could evolve to survive in the physical world would have to be tied to their own material means of existence.

For example, nature implements a DNA/protein correlation automatically. The rest is semantics, and requires a degree of social agreement as to what symbols are (to be pretended are) pointed at what objects. — bongo fury

You are just skipping from one level of semiosis - genes - to another - words - and pretending that says something meaningful here.

It doesn't.

I'm arguing that human reference is quite generally a matter of pretence, no less when asserting unpretended truths than otherwise. — bongo fury

So to the degree that you are only concerned with linguistic semiosis, you are not engaging with my biosemiosis. And this conversation will remain at cross-purposes.

Remember that I have already specified the four key evolutionary steps in the ascent of biosemiosis - genes, neurons, words, numbers.

These levels equate to biology, neuroscience, culture and technology. And each of them are like a new sphere of life.

The modern educated human mind partakes in all four at the same time, in a moderately well integrated way. But we are dealing with a complex story here.

If you are not able or willing to do that here then you are not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard, and most likely do not have/know of one. — Sir Philo Sophia

You are still being unconstructively hostile. I've given both ample references and corrected you on two crucial points.

I can point you on your path, but I can't walk if for you.

I don't think that a carburettor will function as a referring symbol merely by functioning as an actual carburettor, but only by performing a semantic, referential function, and being pointed at things. — bongo fury

I was just citing Searle's examples. A full semiotic argument would be more complex.

For car drivers, it is the accelerator pedal that is the mechanical switch which connects to their entropic desires. The symbol that is "in mind".

The carburettor is buried out of sight as just part of the necessary set of mechanical linkages that will actually turn an explosion of petrol vapour into me going 90 mph in 30 mph zone.

For a driver, there are all kinds of signs involved. The ones on my speedo dial that I'm relishing, the ones on the roadside that I ignore. Even just the sign of the landscape whizzing past my window at my command. Or the feeling of my foot flat to the floor as the annoying sign I can't make the damn thing go faster.

But if I'm doing all this within a car simulator, I can drive carefully or smash into the nearest lamppost without it being an actually meaningful difference. It is only when this semiotic umwelt is plugged into the physics of the world that there can be consequences that matter.

The point of talking about simulated carburettors or simulated rain storms is just to say that the syntax exists to actually do a semantic job. And that job is to regulate the material world. That is what defines semiosis - a modelling relation - so far as life and mind go.

Whereas living organisms have the option to do inefficient work — Sir Philo Sophia

If coal is buried in the ground, that is a huge store of potential energy that inorganic nature is unable to unlock. But even a primitive first human steam engine - about 80% inefficient in terms of extracting work - can create the missing entropic path.

The problem with this inefficiency was that you would only want to use such a steam engine for pumping the water out of your coal mine. So even if it is in fact creating a lot of entropy - waste heat and clouds of smoke - only a very few such devices would ever be built.

But technology is in Darwinian competition. Soon along come steam turbines that are 50% efficient at generating work. That is less entropy it might seem. But now industry wants to use steam turbines everywhere. Coal consumption rockets exponentially. Steam battleships start raining explosives on each other. Total entropy greatly exceeds work extracted. The Second Law sits back and smiles happily at this world.

So if you read the literature, this is the kind of paradox that needed to be thrashed out. Biology is characterised by this seemingly opposed imperative of being both entropically efficient and entropically wasteful. In fact, they are both aspects of the one larger game life has learnt to play.

So there is no choice - because of Darwinian competition - but for organisms to drive towards the energy efficiency that maximises work. Your "free" potential energy stores that apparently remove the constraints of a least action principle.

Yet this happens within the larger story of efficiency promoting exponential growth of the most efficient organisms. Their populations swell to serve the overall purpose of maximising the possibilities for entropy production.

Another way to put it, is that I'm saying natural inanimate processes must always do locally optimized work, Whereas living beings can hop over Potential gradient barriers Achieve globally optimized work. This has nothing to do with negentropy concepts. Get it now? — Sir Philo Sophia

Sure. Biology takes dissipative structure to another level. A local system, armed with a memory, can lay its entropic plans over a considerable span of space and time.

And so memory (acquirable habit and intent) becomes a large part of what is definitional of an organism.

Thus not Being constructive Towards moving forward in this regard. — Sir Philo Sophia

Terribly sorry not to be furthering your own entropy-creating enterprise here. :lol:

Is it really such a shock that science has already worked all this out for itself?

In particular, which path(s) out of all available paths will a system take to minimize potentials or maximize the entropy? The answer (the law of
maximum entropy production) is the path or assembly of paths that minimizes the
potential (maximizes the entropy) at the fastest rate given the constraints. — Swenson

So this says that the least action path does win. Biology puts a whole bunch of paths in active Darwinian competition. And an ecosytem then arises that finds the best average of all those working together.

A messy feeder leaves large crumbs but gobbles fast. A nimble feeder breaks everything very fine, but moves slow. An ecosystem thus combines both extremes of entropification. In a clear space, you first have the gobbling weeds and later the stately trees and their detritus recycling.

So the least action principle is an optimisation principle. Quantum theory employs it to explain how even particle events sample every possible route so as to establish the least action route - the Feynman path integral.

And Darwinian evolution is a way of exploring the space of possible paths. Stanley Salthe's canonical ecosystem life cycle - talking of the three stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence - is a good account of the balancing act involved.

Again I don't think you understand the path of least action in physics — Sir Philo Sophia

That's a bit rich. It is one of my particular subjects. :smile:

I don't think anyone is saying a tornado is alive? — Sir Philo Sophia

Stan Salthe does. Or at least he is willing to argue a dust devil is right on the cusp.

For example, a virus exist just fine without any coding machinery to stabilize its path or repair — Sir Philo Sophia

Huh? A virus just is a stray bit of code. It needs an organism to play host and run its routine, force a cell's metabolism to churn our little replicants.

The RNA code might be wrapped in sturdy sheathing. But that is also why biologists are dubious about calling a virus an actual organism. And from your point of view, when dormant, it is not entropifying. It is not actively organising the world so that there is some metabolic process accumulating potential energy and producing waste by-products.

So, apparently, you, Swenson, Schneider and Kay Would say a crystal Growing And replicating itself is alive? — Sir Philo Sophia

Read and find out.

But crystal growth is an inorganic dissipative structure. It lacks something that biology adds.

Biology is also dissipative structure in a fundamental sense. And that narrows the search for what is its definitional extra.

So my point is that biology as a whole had to rethink its foundations in the 1980s as the surprises of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics were established in the physical sciences.

And that is what the references I gave did.

This may make your own contribution rather redundant. It has all been worked out with clarity already.

But if you are interested enough to ask the question, it should be welcomed that there is this communal answer to explore.

What I am really saying is that it sometimes appears that the sciences are seen as superior. Are the arts just relegated to the domain of pleasure. I am querying the scientists claim to a monopoly upon truth. — Jack Cummins

And in the culture wars, the "poets" proclaim their own superiority over science.

So for a start, we would expect some kind of dichotomy to emerge as a hallmark of an organised system. It is natural for there to be a dialectical division that then becomes what defines a consequent space of free possibilities.

It is not intrinsically bad that the arts and sciences might seem antithetically opposed. Some kind of split has to be the case so that neither possible limiting extreme gets neglected. We need to explore the limits so as to then exist securely in the various points in-between.

The question then becomes of synthesis. In what way are science and art both contributing to some shared system cause. What is the world they mean to define and construct by their formally complementary approaches?

So the set-up means neither has to be the "winner". Instead, each have to be carefully aligned as exact opposites ... so that they can then work together in common cause with their complementary contributions.

Where things get sticky is defining the goal of that system. Why has human society now divided itself in this particular fashion.

Is it indeed all about targeting "truth"? Or really, about targeting something much more pragmatic - like maintaining a social organisation that delivers on the human hierarchy of basic needs? Something like Maslow's pyramid of needs - the ascending steps of physiological need, safety needs, love and belonging needs, then social esteem and self-actualization.

So when it comes to truth, isn't that a rather unworldly ambition? A dispassionate abstraction? We might talk about it a lot, but it ain't what either science or art is really about. The actual outputs - in terms of technology and culture - are much more to do with the pragmatics of constructing our own dear human existence.

If you switch the goal to the production of Maslow's hierarchy, you can see how science and art are two parts of that one equation.

And then also the fly in the ointment starts to become clear perhaps. Since the scientific revolution became the industrial revolution, we have transformed our human world so that it is a fast-paced, fossil fuel powered, information-mediated, super-organism.

That could be a good thing. It could be a bad thing. The question is whether it is our proper goal, or whether we've just stumbled into this direction?

So we have our current institutions of science and art well aligned for the production of the modern world. They each play their equal part in complementary fashion.

Yet if there is then a philosophical question - a meta-question - then it must be about the final purpose the current balance of power serves. Who chose it? Are we happy to just let it emerge? What is the right meta-answer on that?

But even if you accept that, it by no means implies that computing machines cannot understand language.

Therefore his conclusion that consciousness is bound to some kind of biological excretion is totally unwarrented. — hypericin

Searle did offer the argument that consciousness is a physically embodied process. And that makes the crucial difference.

Against the AI symbol processing story, Searle points out that a computer might simulate the weather, but simulated weather will never make you wet. Likewise, a simulated carburettor will never drive a car. Simulations have no real effects on the world.

And so it is with the brain and its neurons. It may look like a computational pattern at one level. But that pattern spinning can't be divorced from the environment that is being regulated in realtime. Like the weather or a carburettor, the neural collective is actually pushing and shoving against the real world.

That then is the semantics that breathes life into the syntax. And that is also the semantics that is missing if a brain, a carburettor or the weather is reduced to a mere syntactical simulation.

So it is not that there isn't computation or syntax in play when it comes to life and mind. Organisms do exist by being able to impose their syntactic structure on their physical environments. But there also has to be an actualised semantics. The physics of the world needs to be getting rearranged in accordance with a "point of view" for there to indeed be this "point of view", and not some abstracted and meaningless clank of blind syntax inside a Chinese Room.

Living organisms bear the unique hallmark ability of modifying themselves in a manner to redirect and/or create kinetic energy to systematically increase their potential energy greater than any kinetic energy expended in their metabolic process. — Sir Philo Sophia

Are you familiar with the biological literature that takes this general entropy production route?

Swenson, Schneider and Kay, Lineweaver, Salthe and many more have hammered out the basics of how life and mind arise as dissipative structures with the intelligence to exploit entropic gradients.

For example....
http://www.sonoran-institute-for-epistemic-studies.org/images/NYASoriginal.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717794901880
https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/chapter%2016v3.pdf

And they built on the earlier well-known work of Prigogine, Schrodinger and Bertalanffy.

Two points that might conflict with your definition as stated is that life is negentropic only because that, in the end, achieves more entropification.

So it is not that life veers off from least action paths. Instead, it exists because it constructs new ones. It burrows through barriers that were preventing the inorganic from doing a better job on releasing its potential energy.

Bare dirts bounces the sun's radiant energy back into space. Rain forests insert themselves in that path and radiation that would have still been 70 degrees C is degraded into lower potential, 20 degree radiance. Life can exist because it pays for itself by offering better least action paths. The ability for intelligent and personal choices is something subservient to that larger entropic goal.

Then second, replication does kind of matter in a definition of life. The entropy degrading story is the metabolism. But the ability to repair - and hence replicate - the stable body of an organism is a further exceptional feature when it comes to life as a dissipative structure.

A tornado is a dissipative structure doing the Second Law's will. But it is fragile - conjured up by chance circumstance.

Life, on the other hand, has coding mechanisms to ensure its structural stability. It has DNA and other semiotic machinery to regulate its own being and ensure it sticks around doing the Second Law's bidding.

So this is a definitional property. The ability to maintain a constant structure in the face of the environment's usual destabilising uncertainty. Life must be constantly under repair.

Then replication is this capability shifted up a level from the individual structures composing a cell to a remaking of whole cells. And that then allows life to evolve as a genetic lottery. Life is now able to stabilise its entropic design against the environment in general.

So if first life was some kind of proton gradient, autocatalytic, dissipative cycle that emerged in the very particular environment of a warm, acidic, ocean floor thermal vent - a likely hypothesis - then to be able to colonise the wider world, it had to be able to develop both the self-repair that would allow it to persist in that environment. And in so doing - constructing that degree of local independence - it would then have paved the way for a cellular replication that would see it able to adapt and colonise any kind of environment.

So two amendments.

Life remains still tied to the least action principle. Overall, its intelligence is employed to break down the barriers to entropification where inorganic nature had hit some kind of stop, leaving an unspent store of potential energy.

And then a coding machinery to stabilise this path - this dissipative structure - is also definitional. Life is organismic because it has a blueprint of its structure and so a means to repair and replicate that structure.

The world is only hot or cold relative to your own body temperature, large or small relative to your own size, etc. In other words, these sensations are relationships between the state of your body and the state of the environment. — Harry Hindu

I am saying that this dualism is always actually a dichotomy, and thus something intrinsically relational.

Hotter is only ever relative to colder. And vice versa. But then a world constructed within that contrast makes possible the new thing of having some particular position on that spectrum of possibilities. You can be a body in an environment where you have this Goldilocks three choices about the temperature you prefer.

But the boundary between life and non-life gets blurry. After all, life is just a more complex relationship than non-life, so it stands to reason that non-life would have very rudimentary, the most basic, the most fundamental relationships that life has, not that it doesn't have it at all. — Harry Hindu

The division - the epistemic cut - lies in the fact that life and mind are how we describe systems organised by symbols. They have a coding machinery like genes, neurons or word that can store memories and so impose a self-centred structure of habits on their environments.

It is pretty easy to recognise that difference between an organism and its backdrop inorganic environment surely?

You associate meaning with the constraints (form), I associate meaning with the thing which is constrained (content, or matter). — Metaphysician Undercover

Why can’t it be the Holism of the relation that is meaningful? The form represents the intent. The resulting materiality is the degree to which an intent is being manifested.

From my perspective, matter is inherently meaningful, because it cannot exist in a meaningless way. To exist as matter is to already have meaning. So even when matter appears to be free from constraints in an absolute way, it is still meaningful. This implies that we need to look beyond "constraints" to find the foundation of meaning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Matter is always found as part of a process and so is in-formed by some set of constraints. Even an electron is a product of cosmic cooling and the constraints of the electroweak symmetry breaking being able to kick in.

The cosmos is then generally indifferent to the particular position and momentum of those electrons. The distribution is essentially free or random. Unconstrained as material properties. And you might also call that randomness meaningful from the whole system viewpoint.

But actually it would seem to count as part of the back-grounding meaninglessness that could now give particle momentum some meaning if you - as a sub-system of the cosmos - now found some reason to track the whereabouts of some selected electron.

You might want to have the kind of relationship where it is constrained to some flow in a mechanical circuit or something.

Reality is a hierarchical web of constraints given localised form to materiality. This is the opposite of the merological metaphysics you are trying to argue.

This is very much a Wittgensteinian approach. We apply boundaries (define words) for specific purposes. This creates the appearance that the meaning of the word is associated with the boundary. However, such a boundary (definition) is not necessary for the word to have meaning. And, the word inherently has meaning simply by the fact of being used. We can use a word, and therefore it has meaning, without employing any boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

I’m not sure quite what you are thinking. But it is obvious that we don’t construct the entirety of reality through words. A lump of rock has already formed by some natural process before I decide to call it a stone, a boulder or pebble.

Yet if I ask you to bring me a stone and you bring me a pebble, then something has gone wrong. My attempt to constrain your material behaviour in some meaningful way does not yet fit the bill.

You in turn could reply a small rock is as good as a large rock surely? Your belief is that the size difference is pretty immaterial - a matter of vagueness or indifference.

So your argument simply confuses levels of semiosis.

To begin with, we cannot ever have this perfection in sameness which you propose as "the global condition". "Similar" can never obtain the absolute perfection of same. "Same" is merely an ideal, produced as a modeling condition, like an artificial scale. In reality there is no such thing as perfect continuity with a lack of differentiation. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that was my point. So you are confirming my position again.

A constraint imposes conditions. It defines the differences that make a difference. In that, it is imposing a generalised sameness.

Yet by the same token, that act of constraint is also ruling on what are the differences that don’t make a difference. It is also defining what can be left free as material accidents.

You might come along and declare those differences are differences that count for you and thus mar the “absolute perfection” in your eyes. if a black dog has a single white hair, it fails your test.

But that is not the same as showing reality ought to have that same Platonic-strength concern. My position is all about avoiding the mistakes of that kind of formal cause idealism.

The Peircean view is founded on tychism or chance. Nature becomes organised by developing continuity or a hierarchy of limitations on its spontaneity. Forms rule because they have evolved to the degree needed to produce a lawful and regulated cosmos.

Therefore "different" is an absolute sense of "not the same", while "similar" is a relative sense of "not the same". — Metaphysician Undercover

I see what you mean. But that is part and parcel of the constraints-based approach here.

Sameness (or synechism in Peircean parlance) is the global condition. All are within one. A continuity. A lack of differentation.

So sameness is about wholeness and the single general large scale state. It maps to the bounding constraints in other words. A constraint is an ultimate measure of sameness. It constitutes "the same".

And then difference is the local exception to the general rule. In hierarchical terms, it is down there at the ground level as the grain of atomistic action. It is the many within the one. It is something plural rather than singular simply because that is how our hierarchical model of any system works.

So the point you make only confirms the position I argue. It picks out that even you are working with the same systems perspective without realising how it informs the very grammar of this discussion.

You can't help but think of sameness as singular and difference as plural. Or sameness as exception-less because difference is about exceptions. Or sameness as continuity because difference is discrete.

But differences still then divide into differences that make a difference and differences that don't. A state of constraint is disturbed by the one and indifferent to the other.

So difference can never be eliminated - all part of the story that absolutes are only approached in limiting or asymptotic fashion. But large differences are likely to matter - in being large and so challenging the prevailing singular state of sameness. And small differences are likely not to. They all just blur into each other and so look like a continuity of sameness.

Yeah I'm afraid 'dissipative structures' will never provide a philosophical rationale as far as I'm concerned. It's engineering speak. — Wayfarer

In fact, it is anti-engineering speak. It is natural process speak.

A tornado is a classic dissipative structure. The interest of engineers is piqued more by the fact that the fluid mechanics involved represents the outer limits of computability.

It doesn't get more metaphysical than to deal with the formally non-computable.

But whatever. :roll:

BTW, how do you rate Stuart Kaufman in the overall spectrum? — Wayfarer

Big fan. The whole Santa Fe complex adaptive systems bandwagon was an important stepping stone.

So I was mostly involved with the backroom guys labouring in obscurity. There was bugger all funding for the systems science tradition.

But then this was this new mathematical physics that was gaudy and caught the public eye, while also being hugely important in terms of the techological payback. You had the computer-based breakthroughs of chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, complexity theory, network theory, fractal mathematics - anything where you could start with a seed algorithm and run it through enough cycles to produce a self-organising pattern.

So that was a case of valuable new science hitting the public immediately between the eyes. It did produce a popular paradigm shift.

However it also seems to say that "more is different". Complexity is a matter of emergence. Create enough interactions and even randomness becomes organised.

And that is still a reductionist sounding take-home. It doesn't actually make contact with the biosemiotic story with its epistemic cut between symbols and matter. It is just matter being busy on its own in essentially meaningless ways.

So it was the rapid rise of the new complexity maths that was this other camp in neuroscience - the dynamicists opposed to the computationalists. It was very important to learn how self-organisation is an inherent part of nature, not some unexpected add-on.

And talking of dissipative structure, that was part of this bottom-up, mindless, self-organisation story too.

However, seen from a semiotic perspective, the fact that inorganic physics could produce so much "order from chaos" for free also then meant that any semiotic regulation of the material realm had in fact far less it needs to do.

The material world already wants to fall into its dissipative structure patterns - vortices, tributaries, etc. And so information - DNA, neurons, words - only has to provide some well directed nudges to tip the balance.

That was the point where biosemiosis could click into place as an unmysterious story - once you understood the triadic nature of the relation.

I think it cautiously supports dualism in recognizing the distinction between the 'inexorable laws of physics', and 'the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA... — Wayfarer

But does Pattee think that?

What is relevant to this thread is the point I have already tied to make. Yes, there is a dualism at the heart of everything in some strong sense.

But then there are the two completely different paradigms trying to "resolve" that. And panpsychism/idealism/eliminativism/etc represent the mainstream mechanistic response - an attempt to reduce a dualism to a monism.

Meanwhile triadic systems thinkers see a dualism as a dichotomy. It is in fact the very thing nature must produce as a fact of historic development. Reality itself is an evolutionary process.

So sure. Science hasn't done its job until it can account for the emergence of critical dualisms - in particular, this general semiotic one of matter and symbol. The job isn't done until there is an account of abiogenesis.

And what Pattee provides is robust basis for having this particular discussion. He ain't no closet panpsychist. I can tell you that for a fact.

I'm not asking you to 'solve' this problem - who could? - but when I see the claim that life 'holds no metaphysical mystery', I'm going to object. — Wayfarer

It is more that there is an odd contrast where public opinion no longer finds the problem of life to be sufficiently mysterious, while it also clings on to an exaggerated mystery in regard to the problem of mind.

Even on PF, who still thinks biology needs vitalism to explain anything - close an explanatory gap?

Yet talk about mind and the explanatory gap is the only thing that needs explaining. Who would pick up a neuroscience or psychology textbook to find the answer on that?

Biosemiotics takes the position that life and mind are pretty much synonymous as phenomena. They share the same basic systems explanation.

That is another reason for being dismissive of the Hard Problem. It logically either applies to both or neither. They are not two kinds of things but different semiotic levels of the same thing.

This is indeed the reason I gravitated towards Pattee and his circle in the first place.

Within neuroscience and the science of mind during the 1980s/1990s, there was a very strong division between the computationalists and the dynamicists. Another paradigmatic duality. And both sides were very persuasive that theirs was the proper lens to view the brain through.

Neuroscience - as a branch of medicine - was actually very backward and untutored in its metaphysics so was failing to figure it out. It wasn't seeing how these were the two aspects of the one semiotic whole.

That led me to complexity theory and hierarchy theory as a more abstract level of discussion. And then I stumbled into the Theoretical Biology crew who had a 20 year head start because they had been forced to explore exactly the same issue as a reaction to the mechanistic triumphs of the Crick-Watson 1960s.

Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and others had hammered out the answers that resolved the neuroscientific dilemma.

As it happens, neuroscience did eventually rediscover much the same answers. You had Friston's Bayesian Brain, the enactive turn in cogsci, etc.

And as another wrinkle to the tale, the Theoretical Biology crew was undergoing its own next step transition. The sudden wealth of Peirce scholarship was revealing the guts of the answer had already been laid down with greater metaphysical generality by 1910.

Salthe was the one pushing a semiotic rewrite of hierarchy theory. I was an eager student. Pattee was sternly resistant.

We all went our own ways after a few years. And suddenly Pattee came out with his own blizzard of papers about biosemiosis. He has seemed unpersuaded. Then he was leading the charge. The paradigm shift had clicked for him too. And he has the razor intellect to make the best case.

So there is a really intricate social history here. I was in fact in contact with another dozen such camps at least, all roughly pursuing the same quarry. Second order cybernetics was its other whole thing. I was close with Friston and his Bayesian Brain. There was Walter Freeman and his chaos approach. Scott Kelso and his complementary nature approach.

The point is that this is science in action - multiple camps of overlapping activity, often rediscovering the same truths in different jargon and believing it is wholly original.

And then there is public opinion in action - hooked on ancient science debates recycled in dumbed-down format. The audience of the Chalmers, Krausses and other carnival buskers. :smile:

If you really do take into account Aristotle's four causes, then the question of 'how' only addresses two of them. — Wayfarer

And?

The Theoretical Biology crew - especially Salthe - push the fact that the systems science approach requires science to take teleology seriously. And indeed, in the laws of thermodynamics, that is just what has happened. Life and mind are now to be grounded in the science of dissipative structure.

Nevertheless, Pattee acknowledges that he has been unable to solve the question of the origin of life — Wayfarer

We've had this discussion before. In my view - and I spent many years talking with him – he took this angle to sell his wares.

He was making his name in the era of Crick-Watson where science had discovered the double helix of DNA, the cellular machinery of protein manufacture and respiration. The reductionists where dusting their hands on a job well done.

But Pattee was making the point that a system of code and metabolism raises an obvious chicken and egg problem for biology. We know they evolved to be the two aspects of the one whole, but it seems one ought to have evolved first. And that has become the new great problem.

In my view, this is another advantage of a Peircean metaphysics. The origins of things are not about some first thing and then the next other thing - a simple chain of cause and effect, a tale of material/efficient causality.

Instead, the origin of things is about symmetry-breaking, co-dependent arising, or however you want to put a fully organicist position - one large enough to embrace the holism of all four Aristotelean causes.

So the bug becomes a feature. It would be my argument that the degree to which symbol and matter are formally the "other" of each other - the product of a symmetry breaking or dichotomising development - then it is inevitable that you should have both arising in tandem.

Actually this applies to the origin of human speech and any other origin problem. The language origin problem is which came first - words or rules, semantics or syntax? My answer is that words (as atoms of meaning) and rules (as the structuring habits of a grammar) would be the matching halves of the one division. Each would arise within the context of the other.

The more you have something like a word atom, the more you are going to get something like rules for combining those atoms. And the same goes the other way. The more you have a habit of using rules, the more words you are going to require as components to manipulate.

It is a virtuous feedback spiral. The faintest starting difference becomes magnified until you get a very clear difference between vocabulary and grammar. It is only together that they work. But at the beginning, you only need a slight difference with a slight edge and then a positive feedback that amplifies things and gives the divide its fullest expression.

Anyway, I've also pointed you in the direction of Nick Lane's The Vital Question as a good contemporary view on abiogenesis. The picture of how life could have got started in the way I describe is explored there.

Maybe some very simple or even elementary fact about the nature of existence is beyond science, due to the specific ways that science has to go about analysis of an issue. — Wayfarer

Of course I agree that our epistemologies frame the facts we are able to discover. Everything is just a paradigm.

But that is also why I put so much effort into exploring all the different paradigms people use and defend the few key people – Peirce and Pattee for instance - who do it best.

I think that's Chalmer's point, and I think it's a valid point. — Wayfarer

I think you give Chalmers way too much credit as a critical intellect. He's a nice chap. But a showman.

Is Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics a good place to start? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is worth knowing that semiotics is divided into the dyadic tradition of Saussure and the triadic tradition of Peirce. And until the rediscovery of Peirce's corpus in the 1990s, it was Saussure who dominated the landscape.

On Eco's own position here....

Peirce and Eco approach this abstract/concrete duality of signs, and the theory of signs more generally, in quite different ways. The most obvious difference is that while Peirce's theory is triadic (revolving around sign, object and interpretant, with this latter bringing the sign-user into the formula), Eco’s is a modification of the dyadic theory of Saussure (which is built up entirely from the relation of sign and signified – no sign-user is considered14), but Eco’s dyad is operational, in my sense, and it is a difference that reaches to the core.

For Eco, the fact of lying is more important than telling the truth, or attempting to tell the truth. As he says, “semiotics is in principle the discipline of studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for general semiotics.” (Eco 1975: 6-7; 0.1.3).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1112

Also, Saussure was focused on semiotics - the science of meaning-construction - as it relates to human linguistic culture. That was broadened somewhat to the degree it influenced psychological structuralism and continental philosophy.

Whereas Peirce was mounting a fundamental assault on meaning in the Cosmic context. He was concerned with grounding logical and mathematical thought in some general metaphysics. So his ambitions were vastly greater.

Need to read more carefully, but at first glance there's no explicit dissolution or even mention of the hard problem, which is odd as it was written in the last few years. — bert1

Maybe the Hard Problem is only a problem for those still stuck in the maw of Cartesian dualism?

Pattee is a biologist. And biology had its own version of the "hard problem". It was called vitalism. It was just obvious that some spirit must animate a flesh and blood body. But who now believes the body is anything other than a complex machine? Life - as a phenomenon - holds no metaphysical mystery anymore.

Well in fact, the machine metaphor was also inadequate as far as any curious biologist was concerned. And so people like Pattee in particular have gone beyond that in defining life as a semiotic phenomenon. The organismic view of physics parasitised by codes.

A holistic or triadic paradigm now explains life. And it is easy to see that it also explains mind, as semiosis already grants life an intentionality and "awareness" at the cellular level ... the subject of the cited paper here.

I came up through both sides of the debate as the Hard Problem was raging in Philosophy of Mind at the same time that neuroscience was finally getting to grips with the enactive and semiotic basis of the brain's relation to the world.

So on one side, there was this constant chanting of the "Hard Problem". On the other, there were the neuroscientists not interested in the time-wasting diversions. It was a very 1990s moment.

I was sitting next to a philosopher when Chalmers gave his first big public presentation of the Hard Problem. I asked him why all the fuss? He said Chalmers was making dualism respectable again as a philosophical position. And ain't it great just to have something new to stir things up, give philosophers something of their own to argue about rather than just tag along behind the science bandwagon?

In a nutshell, that should tell you the social dynamics at work.

I hadn’t read that one myself. But it’s a handy paper in connection with this Panpsychism thread.

Semantics is a social game of pretend. — bongo fury

But there just is no fact of the matter whether a word or picture is pointed at one thing or another. No physical bolt of energy flows from pointer to pointee(s). So the whole social game is one of pretence. Albeit of course a hugely powerful one.

Can it both be a pretence (in physical terms) and yet also a hugely powerful one? I would say that undercuts your own argument.

My claim is that the human language game is all about organising the material environment that gives physical reality to human society as an organismic state of being. So language is all about regulating entropy for self-interested reasons. It could evolve as a communal habit because it physically plugs in a cultural mind into a material world.

But of course, as I said, the power of any code is that it is not tied to the physics of its world. It is powerful because it could refer to anything. That means when it is not used that way, but instead pointed rather precisely, that is what makes it meaningful - signal rather than noise.

So a community of speakers can spin any fictions or fantasies they want. They can talk nonsense if they choose. The faculty of language has that absolute freedom built in as the necessary other to what language is actually evolved for - organising social behaviour in ways that physically sustains that community of speakers.

One can’t be definitely pretending anything unless that is a clear contrast to the “other” of now making clear and meaningful reference to something understood to have a genuine social reality. Something that is of material consequence.

I would add that we should consider what happened once human societies added numbers on top of words as ways of regulating their material conditions.

Maths considers itself a truly transcendent exercise in abstraction. A Platonic realm of form. It has no necessary connection to physics or material reality.

And yet then this very separation turns out to make maths a next level tool of entropification. It went hand in hand with the scientific and industrial revolutions. Human entropification went exponential as we became technological and economic creatures speaking the language of numbers.

Evolutionary history shows that symbols systems are always about a separation - an epistemic cut - that then enables an organism to take over control of the "laws of nature" for personal gain.

That is what unifies the biological, neurological and social sciences. The humanities even.

And biosemiosis is a general model of this story. It shows how symbols and physics are bound in this mindful causal loop.

As such, it stands apart from the regular mechanical description of nature given by the physical sciences. It says organismic causality is also its own part of nature.

So when it comes to panpsychism, we can rule it out just by its failure to speak to this organismic causality. If panpsychism wants to argue that awareness is a property of particles just like gravity, then already it is sunk by its attempt to ape the metaphysics of monistic material reductionism.

Once you allow that similarity is not the same as difference, it becomes evident that it is impossible that the two are created by the same process. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you not see vagueness as inherent within meaning, and it is what we might try to exclude through the application of constraint? — Metaphysician Undercover

Your logic is all over the shop in your eagerness to foster a dispute. I make the obvious point that similarity and difference are terms relative to each other. So things in the world can be vaguely different or similar, or they could be extremely different or similar. Difference and similarity then become the dichotomous concepts we employ to try to define some absolute notion of sameness and difference.

So while we may talk of them as two categories of being, we shouldn’t make the mistake of demanding that only one or other is the case. We don’t have to reduce this dualism to a monism.

Indeed, following Hegel and Peirce, we can recognise the triadic metaphysics in play. Similarity and difference are opposing limits that define a connecting spectrum of possibility.

And that is where a logic of vagueness becomes valuable. It defines the third thing that is the state where neither similarity, nor difference, is the case. The principle of non contradiction has yet to apply. Things have yet to go either way on that score.

Mechanical thought routinely demands counterfactual definiteness. It can’t tolerate ambiguity in its claims about reality. That is why it ends up insisting - as you are doing - that things just either are similar or different, with no scope for relativity.

But an organic understanding of reality sees that all universals are pairs of relatives. A unity of opposites. And so a triadic logic, a systems logic, needs to be used.

So I approach every argument with that triadic logic. And you have your own habit of always trying to reduce every dichotomy to an either/or monism. You can never see the big picture like that.

In fact the concrete reality is obvious in biology. DNA codes for proteins. Neurons code for sensorimotor habits of response. The theoretical issue is about coming up with a general background theory of semiosis.

Saussure and structuralism were indeed also an early part of my adventures.

If you are interested, it would be worth checking out Howard Pattee’s papers on biosemiosis, the epistemic cut and the physics of symbols. His is the most incisive presentation of the crucial ideas.

Then two other theoretical biologists, Stan Salthe and Robert Rosen, are part of the same circle.

This means that the first time that the word "baby" was used (we can assume that there was a first time can we not?), it was not a communal habit of interpretation which gave it its meaning, because there was no communal habit of interpretation of that word at that time. — Metaphysician Undercover

And so you are claiming instead that the first person to utter this particular noise had exactly that clear intent of it being understood in that fashion ... by some linguistic community used to noises meaning something ...

I don't think your "Just So" approach is going to get you far here.

And, yes I find it very useful, having my own private reason for choosing the words that I do. This makes the words that I use very well suited to my own private intentions. Why would you think that it's not useful? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is pretty clear that the more private your meanings, the less useful they would be in a communal setting.

I mean, if I say "MU is talking utter bollocks as usual", but in private that means to me: "What another splendidly insightful remark from MU", then where would we be in terms of communicative effectiveness?

So less of this time-wasting bollocks please.

Are you familiar with what is called "the division of labour"? There you will find clear evidence that difference between the actions of individuals is the essential property of meaning, not similarity. — Metaphysician Undercover

A major feature of a constraints-based causality is that it gives a solid answer on why nature repeats with variety. Similarity and difference are generated by the same process.

That is why when I say "baby" to you, I expect that to constrain your thoughts in a certain direction. But I don't make the mistake of expecting you to have some complete exact replica of whatever I have in my mind. There is always an element of variety or unconstrained spontaneity in the response you will have. Or even a surprisingly large degree of that uncertainty in your case?

So what actually is the story in terms of a constraints-based causality is that both similarity and difference can be produced. Difference will always exist in some degree. But we can regulate that to limit it to differences that don't make a pragmatic difference. Or we can also work to ensure that a difference that does make a difference gets maintained.

Do I need a knife to cut my meat. I could use a fork edge if its soft enough. Or if its particularly tough, I might have to scrabble in the cutlery drawer for a serrated steak knife.

A fork is sometimes similar enough to do the job of a knife. A blade sometimes needs to be more specialist than the typical knife.

And the use of words is just the same. We find it quite natural to broaden our definitions, or to narrow them, depending on the pragmatics of what we hope to achieve.

I never would say similarity was primary, nor that difference was primary. That is a false dichotomy you want to pursue.

As usual, my position is that it is the contrast offered by similarity and difference as the complementary extremes on possibility that is what then makes the third thing of some actual choice on the spectrum a meaningful action.

A thought can be described in a similar way. As the current result of a process. — Pop

Again I will point out that there are two different notions of causality in play here.

The mechanical notion of cause and effect would say that A gives you B. One thing leads to another in the direct deterministic fashion of one billiard ball bumping the next. In that view, a thought is computed.

An organic notion of cause instead speaks of constraints being placed on possibility. And so there is a holism in play in which a context places limits on the actions observed at a locale. A result is not determined as such. It is just that enough other choices have been removed to be sure of an action breaking in a selected direction.

In this view, a thought pops out as a kind of general neural competition - an optimisation function. The brain needs to globally suppress a near infinite number of thoughts that might have been the case and that sets the scene for a best fit answer to emerge.

This constraints-based causality is modelled by simulated annealing and other such network approaches.

It would seem there is a process of self organization at play at the fundamental level, and this would suggest panpsychism. — Pop

But physics has become fairly successful at modelling self organisation in terms of collective, constraints-based, causality.

You don't need conscious elements making clever individual choices. You need the formation of global states of constraint that are then the context which forces blind spontaneous action to break in a collectively optimal direction.

In this regard, you didn't address my main query, that matter is a symbol of an ongoing process of self organization. It is not the end point, as all is in motion / evolution, but at any given time matter symbolizes the state of a process. — Pop

I don't understand your point. What definition of matter are you using?

Matter can be seen as a material process or flow. So it is a succession of events organised within a context. Something is material for us as it can be recorded as an event happening and history being rewritten by a possibility being eliminated.

So in a process philosophy view, a material act is a sign that something "eventful" has happened. There was some difference that makes a difference. That in turn speaks to the context, the developing general history of the world, for which the difference is mattering. Pansemiotically, the event is a symbol playing its part in a system of interpretance in that sense.

But that is the pansemiotic view. What are you claiming from a panpsychic point of view?

I still don't see how Peirce avoids some form of panpsychism. — Wayfarer

If it is a form of panpsychism, then it is one shorn of panpsychism's subjectivist and idealist tendencies.

That doesn't really square with panpsychism wanting to claim experience as a dualistically primitive aspect of matter, does it?

And if anything, Peirce is placing the "mental" at the level of global habit. So all reality is being organised by some suitably impersonal and objective integrative force.

To the degree that sounds like a variety of idealism, the point again was that it wasn't about any first person experiencing but a universal "rational" tendency that any objective physical reality would have to develop to be able to exist.

So Peirce doesn't ground anything on a Cartesian notion of subjective experience as a spooky soul stuff. Instead, he expanded the explanatory resources of science to the point that they could both objectively include the causality we like to assign to "the mind", while also introducing useful critical doubt to our matching presumptions about the hard, atomistic, material reality of the world.

That is a bit of a double whammy that turned out pretty prescient just before the revolution of relativity and quantum mechanics.

The mind aspect of systems causality - the Universals issue - was taken as more concretely real. And the matter aspect was revealed to be less concretely real. And out of this, you get a picture where mind and matter arrive at the same degree of (mutually derived and emergent) reality.

Yes, you can twist that to sound a bit like panpsychism. But only if you miss the fundamental differences in ontological thought that are in play.

According to Fritjof Capra, the basic unit of cognition is a reaction to a disturbance of a state – I cant remember the exact words. — Pop

Yep. He was talking about autopoiesis there most probably - one of the various incarnations of a systems science approach through the 80s and 90s. Or that is also the basic insight of 1960s cybernetics - particular Bateson's definition of information as a difference that makes a difference.

So that is a very general truth. And Capra is a good populariser of systems science thinking.

So basic cause and effect at the most fundamental level is cognition. Hence panpsychism. No? — Pop

It isn't really basic cause and effect, but holism. So nope.

Cause and effect is an input/output model. And so it would suggest that the mind is like a final act of display - in the computational view. Or a soul stuff, an experiential field, or some other kind of emergent substantial property, if you are thinking consciousness is the "effect" of a suitably complex material process.

But autopoiesis tries to start turning things around the other way. The "output" of a biological system is a prediction of the state it needs to be in. And it then reacts to learning it hasn't quite achieved that state.

Reversing input/output thinking so that the output is the prediction of the input is the first key step that cybernetics, gestalt psychologists, neural networks, autopoeisis and other systems thinkers were making a while back.

In terms of the mind, it means the brain has a homeostatic goal of not wanting to be disturbed. It wants to predict the world so well that all its reactions are at the level of well drilled habit or automaticism. It is seeking not to experience as such, just act constantly in ways that maintain a smooth flow.

But of course the world is full of actual unpredictability. So that is when it needs to focus and pay attention. There is some disturbance - the difference that makes a difference. Then attentional processing assimilates that to the running world model and the organism can return to being absorbed in its running homeostatic balance.

So the brain is set up as a consciousness minimising machine. Which what makes it such a super-effective "shit going wrong" detector device.

Which is cause and effect given this mutually dependent story of manufacturing states of contrast? The ground of unconcern is what creates the possibility of foci of high concern. The assimilation of these foci of high concern then build up that ground of unconcern.

Each is the other's cause. Each is the other's effect.

Or just move on and see the holism at work here where the very idea of the production of effects as the end points of linear processes is the wrong mode of analysis.

He (it must be a he) regularly gets asked to put his stuff in more laymen's terms, but he never does. — bert1

I've made a good living putting complex stuff into the simplest lay explanations. I've even been commissioned to do such for the likes of Reader's Digest, Dorling Kindersley and New Scientist. So I certainly don't lack the skills.

And if you say I have tried frequently enough, and you have failed to understand just as often, well where is the issue likely to be?

I realise the difficulty though. We are all trained to think in simple cause and effect terms. And Peirce - as a process philosopher and systems thinker - demands a conception of causality that is complex in that it must construct its own ground of being.

It is not monistic, linear and one-dimensional. It is tri-dimensional and recursively holist - a complex entanglement never at rest but always developing. A squirming beast of causal interaction.

So to understand anything about a semiotic ontology, you have to establish a second brand of logic - of causal analysis - inside your own head.

The standard issue "cause and effect logic" you got taught is not wrong, just a corner of the larger story - the right way to think if the problem is the engineering one of regulating the world as if it were a machinery.

A holistic causal logic is then something you can only learn about directly in specialised education - an interdisciplinary "field" like systems science or hierarchy theory. Or of course, Peircean philosophy.

I learnt about it over many years progressing from biology to neuroscience to systems science and then Peircean semiotics. And at least I always knew roughly what I was looking for, so could recognise it when I found it.

But as I say, it is its own contrasting system of thought. You can't make sense of it from the standard cause and effect paradigm. And you only truly understand it in its own terms once it is obvious how mechanistic cause and effect thinking is in fact the formal "other" of it holism.

It is funny that way. Life and mind are seen as paradigmatically organic and holistic phenomena. Yet it is they that most perfectly employ machinery to regulate their worlds and bring order to chaotic physics.

Anyway, I'm not trying to baffle you. But it is a whole system of thought I am saying you would need to learn rather than some particular theory that ought to make more sense from a simple cause and effect perspective.

If you can explain in a few words, it’d be appreciated. — Olivier5

That's a challenge and a half. But the central claim of a biosemiotic approach to the science of life and mind is that the mind~matter divide can be bridged by understanding that mind and world exist in a modelling relation.

Mind is not something passive and separate - an awareness - but a state of interpretance that arises through active engagement with the material potentials of the world. Mind and life exist as informational structure regulating the entropic physical goings-on of the world.

This means life and mind interact to impose constraints by way of mechanism.

Genes code for proteins. Proteins make enzymes, channels, membranes and all sorts of cellular machinery that control and stabilise chemical and energetic gradients.

Neurons likewise encode sensory and behavioural habits that impose a regulating machinery on an organism's general environment.

Words do the same again in encoding the sociocultural habits that are the regulating machinery of a complex human society. Words are the syntactic mechanism that underpins a collective social life and collective social mentality.

So the semiotic bit is about recognising that the science of life and mind boils down to the critical question of how there can be this "physics of symbols". How does a protein become a message rather than just a molecule? How does a neuron represent information rather simply some electrochemical chatter of noise?

To talk about biosemiosis is to say - as a scientist - that it is being recognised that symbols aren't explained by material physics. Symbols require their own branch of science - semiotics!

And semiotics is also then more than just "information processing" or "computation", as a modelling relation is all about a regulatory interaction with the real physical world.

A computer doesn't need the world. It lives in its own Platonic realm of mathematical pattern spinning.

But semiotics is information plugged into entropy. It is the science of life and mind plugged into the physics of thermodynamics and dissipative structure. So it is an approach to life and mind that never fractures the two halves of the equation while also never confusing the two halves either.

You can then go beyond biosemiosis to pansemiosis - which would be Peircean semiotics applied to the Cosmos in general. Even physics would have this informational aspect, and so count as a complex system of interpretance.

Peirce had that ambition. And modern physics has arrived there too with its information theoretic turn.

But in general, semiotics is the science of meaning, or meaning making. And that leads to seeing symbols as their own "unphysical" thing. Another basis of causality in nature.

But then the proviso. A symbol system or modelling relation can only exist in the context of there being material flows to regulate and organise in an organismic fashion.

So as a science, semiotics speaks to this duality of symbols and matter, and also to their mutual ontological dependence on each other - as each is the "other" of the other.

All the sciences had to somewhat smuggle in this complex arrangement. The life sciences talked of bodies as machines, and brains as computers. The physical sciences had to have universal laws and other abstract regulative principles.

But as ontologies, abstract laws and information processing are both pretty crude concepts.

Semiotics goes to the heart of the matter by being clear both about the general nature of the separation - symbols vs matter - and about the means of the interaction, the connection that is a modelling relation.

As said, that applies very straightforwardly to actual organisms - life and mind. It is more of a speculative stretch to apply it to inorganic systems like the Universe.

Yet still, physics itself is winding up having to make some such paradigm shift. And semiotics provides a well-worked out explanatory structure for doing that - for combining information and entropy, formal cause and material cause, in the one over-arching reality scheme.

Yes, or a signal standing out from the noise. — Olivier5

I nearly added that too. :grin:

We are on the same page. I was also going to remind of the formal duality that has been established between information and entropy. As signal vs noise, order vs chaos, message vs meaninglessness, we can see why information and entropy stand in relationship as the two faces of the same coin, the two dichotomous extremes of the one opposition.

My own definition of awareness’s primacy: The tenet that everything which can and does exist (i.e., everything that can and does stand-out in any way) is either directly or indirectly contingent on the presence of awareness - with some existents (like the objectivity of space, time, and matter) being contingent on all cooccurring instantiations of awareness — javra

So how does this work?

It seems that awareness is being defined by its freedom to be about anything. A mind can imagine what it wishes. Yet also minds then all interact to co-create a shared spacetime material world. They are somehow constrained to agree due to the demands of being able participate as actors in the same place.

Now this holism is a systems way of looking at things. It says some kind of synergistic duality of parts and wholes is need to have "a world". Even a materialist needs to claim a reality that involves matter and laws - locally differentiated parts being organised according to global integrating rules.

So both idealism and materialism actually must invoke some form of triadic systems ontology, even if both want to claim to reduce the wholeness of reality to some kind of monistic primacy - a world that is actually mind, or a world that is actually matter.

Thus what I point out is that panpsychism tries to make sense by smuggling in a triadic relational perspective while still sounding like a monistic idealism standing in paradigmatic contrast to a monistic materialism.

Given that, it is better just to keep on going and openly embrace a triadic relational ontology - which is what Peircean semiotics is.

The categories of both matter and mind then drop away as we focus on the bare structure of networks of differentiated relations (secondness) and the generalised world of integration (thirdness) that results.

To talk about ontology in either the language of matter or mind already freights the conversation with all sorts of ontic commitments that create all the friction. Every thread becomes a rerun of idealism vs realism - the effort to reduce a dualism to a monism.

But the way out of the bottle is to see a triadic systems logic as the maximally general ontology. It is much more abstract - a mathematical representation in moving past questions of concrete quality. We don't have to worry about the mind as a quality (a quality of experiencing, whatever that is), or matter as a quality (the quality of substantial being, whatever that is). We are now dealing with a notion of pure relations - a system of signs and interpretance.

So again, both materialists and idealists can work their way towards some kind of triadic ontology. They can see what needs to be said to inject some necessary holism back into their general reductionism.

But this just winds up being inefficient as ontology. The step forward - as Peirce demonstrated - is to arrive at a proper ontology of a system of relations itself. You want the triadic or hierarchical order in which the local parts are the clear product of differentiating relationships (or local symmetry breakings), and the global whole is the clear product of a collective integration over all those possible relationships (or the unity of the production of a generalised universal symmetry state ... the one that can be locally broken in ways that prove it in fact exists ... ).

So as philosophy, the problem is that monism is much simpler to think about than the holism of a triadic system of relations. One produces an ultimately simple stuff - call it mind, call it matter. The other produces only the "simplicity" of an irreducible relational complexity. The image in mind is of a hierarchical feedback loop of interactions - a simultaneity of local differentiations amid a global integration.

But in the end, if we want to understand nature, learning to visualise holism in this fashion is necessary. The only viable "monism" is the one that is the traditional Greek unity of opposites, the Hegelian synthesis, the Peircean semiotic, the modern systems science or hierarchy theory story of reality as a self-organising process.

Comes from latin informare: give form to, and also educate — Olivier5

That’s right. To in-form is to constrain or give shape. And information is a constraint on uncertainty. It produces concrete definiteness from a sea of possibilities.

So your attempt here, to remove the essence of "sign" from the sign, and say that "a sign intrinsically refers to nothing" is self-contradicting — Metaphysician Undercover

A word like “baby” doesn’t have intrinsic meaning just as a collection of four letters. It gains meaning as a communal habit of interpretation.

The intent of the author then becomes the most important factor in meaning, validating "what is meant by", so that the premise of infinite possibility, and your assumption that it is "completely up to a community of speakers to agree as to the semantics of any utterance", is falsified. — Metaphysician Undercover

So how do you use “baby” in a sentence? Do you always have your own completely private meaning in mind? Is that a useful habit do you find?

Similar to what you're arguing, I think. — Wayfarer

Yep. Enactivism is another recent incarnation of the general idea.

To say that 'everything is composed of matter and information' is a kind of modern update of hylomorphic dualism, but 'information' is a very different conception to 'form'. — Wayfarer

This is tricky as information is both a primitive, and also stands against the notion that a primitive is something concretely material.

Information could be considered the atoms of form. A bit of information is a countable degree of freedom. So it is elemental in the sense of existing as some constraint on material possibility. It is thus a top-down way of defining a concrete primitive - one that denies primitives have the brute material existence that a materialist wants to presume.

Atomism presumes that matter has some divisible limit, otherwise matter would crumble to nothingness. Nothing could be composed unless matter is grounded in uncuttable atoms.

Information in physics also speaks to such an ultimate limit. But now in terms of form rather than matter. There is some smallest Planckscale notion of an event or action. And so that is what grounds a composable reality. There is a smallest signal or definite countable possibility. An atom of form.

Other than via mischaracterization or willful strawmaning, panpsychism does not deny the (somewhat) clear line between the inorganic realm and the organic realm — javra

That is where panpsychism becomes even more intellectually dishonest. People do argue that neural complexity somehow amplifies the dilute awareness that is already a property of the material realm.

This is called having your cake and eating it. You can agree with the material emergentist while also disagreeing.

But that is a failure to engage with the actual position that a biosemiotician would be advancing on the how and why of this "clear line".

Recall that, of itself, panpsychism "is a difference that makes no difference". — javra

Yes. That was my criticism. It is not an advantage to argue a theory that "isn't even wrong" in this fashion.

I'd don't believe that I misinterpreted the notion of effete mind. Peirce, after all, was an objective idealist, not a materialist. — javra

As to Peirce's point, agapeism was a part of it. Something your system appears to conveniently overlook. — javra

Peirce offers any number of hostages to fortune. It is the totality of his life and work that must be weighed here.

And even if modern biosemiotics only picked and choosed what best fits a science framework, that would be OK too.

My approach is that of a pragmatic scientist, not a theist who must defend a holy text. It just so happens that Peirce turns out to be such a rich resource for any systems thinker seeking to go beyond scientific reductionism.

I disagree with the semiotic distinction between syntax and semantics when it comes to meaning, but other than that.. — creativesoul

I'm not sure what you mean. You may be making a point from linguistics that is not that relevant to semiosis in a more general triadic sense.

But syntax and semantics would be an example of a dichotomistic opposition here. A sign intrinsically refers to nothing. And so it can be take to mean anything.

In causal terms, the apparent impotence of a symbol - its lack of meaning - is likewise the source of its omnipotence. It is now completely up to a community of speakers to agree as to the semantics of any utterance.

And in that, an epistemic cut becomes a physical possibility. A Cartesian-style division between worlds and minds can arise with the syntax - the naked symbol - as the universal fulcrum to lever the situation.

So as a general story, semiosis is about how a system of reference can arise in a materially constrained world. The possibility of a relation emerges on the back of some state of physical meaninglessness that thus enables a matching degree of informational meaningfulness to be injected into the equation.

That is what the evolution of semiotic codes - like genes, neurons, words, numbers - is all about. Each level has less to do with concrete physics and thus more to do with abstract information.

A gene can speak about any possible protein structure, but also, only about possible proteins. A neuron can encode any physical stimulus in terms of a behavioural response. Words and numbers encode for material social relations and logically abstract ideas. (Eventually, Platonia is achieved. :grin: )

So there is a constant thread. Syntax is how the material and informational aspects of being get divided into their two distinct halves by the time you get to that Western philosophical ideal of the abstract mind in opposition to a brute meaningless world. The mathematical understanding of nature.

But Peircean semiotics brings us back to the fact that a code - a syntax - is simply a mediating device. There is nothing at all unless the two sides being divided are also then in a pragmatic modelling relation. The full triadic relationship has to be "meaningful" in that it represents now "a point of view acting on the world with intent".

Conscious experience is meaningful to the creature having it. — creativesoul

Or to generalise that, semiosis is all about the possibility of a point of view. And that possibility hinges on the machinery of a triadic modelling relation.

We can thus see an amoeba is as semiotic as any human at the level of general natural mechanism, even if we might not have reason to think of the amoeba as "conscious".

In some sense, every organism has a first person perspective. And so the proper target of a theory of mind and life is just that.

The explanation for consciousness is then focused on animals with a running neural model of their worlds.

And for human introspective self-awareness, that is a story all about the difference a linguistic code makes to the running relation humans have with their sociocultural worlds.

Numbers in turn are constructing an even higher and more abstracted semiotic reality beyond that. A noosphere or singularity some might speculate. An AI Platonia or Borg colony possibly. Heh, heh.

How does that follow from the premise that the universe has been partly negentropic from the Big Bang get go? This being something you’ve previously stipulated in other threads. — javra

What I've emphasised in the past is that entropy and negentropy are two sides of the one coin. You have to have structure to dissipate, and dissipation to have structure.

So yes, the Big Bang can be talked of as just dissipation - a great cooling. But that in itself requires structure - the expansion of spacetime which creates the "sink" in which the material contents of the Big Bang can cool.

In cosmology, that makes entropy counting a tricky business. In the end, the amount of entropy and the amount of negentropy have to come out the same. The two add together to sum to nothing.

Upholding a partly negentropic universe that is, and has always been, governed by teleological and formal principles is nothing short of a proposal for an Anima Mundi, i.e. for an animated cosmos with teleological strivings, this being a form of panpsychism. — javra

A pansemiotic approach is Aristotelean in accepting that there are all four causes in nature. And that maps to a physics of thermodynamics and cosmogenesis that gives equal dues to negentropy (or informational structure) and entropy (or dissipation).

But it doesn't support panpsychism for the reason I gave. There is still a clear line to be drawn between the inorganic realm and the organic realm. Science also talks about that.

On the other hand, if there indeed is upheld a sharp division between the entropic and the negentropic, as you’ve here asserted, then how can a fully entropic system logically give rise to negentropy? — javra

Again, the thesis is that they are two sides of the one coin. A case of dependent co-arising if you take the Buddhist view. A dichotomy if you take the Greek one.

So it is a division that arises and grows sharp. And it can do so because those are the two contrasts embedded in the very beginnings.

With one example being that of the objective world being effete mind; another being the difference in where the cosmos is headed: a difference that is exceedingly substantial. — javra

The "effete mind" quote is easy to misinterpret as one sentence picked out from a large corpus.

Peirce was clearly trying to move beyond Cartesian dualism in toto, not merely declare against materialism and for divine soul. His focus was on the semiotic relation between impersonal information and informed material being.

Either you critique that machinery - the thirdness of a modelling relation - or you are avoiding the point of his metaphysics.

But I gather the primacy of awareness is a bit too theistic reeking for the materialistically minded. So, to avoid that slippery slope into monotheism or some such, it must be denied tout court. — javra

Primacy itself is the problem here.

Whether you are an idealist or realist, theist or materialist, the problem with your scheme is the drive to declare one metaphysics right and its opposing metaphysics wrong. That is the faulty mindset that defines the Cartesian bind.

As I have reminded here, my pansemiotic approach is all about dependent co-arising and dichotomistic symmetry breaking. You have nothing at all unless there is already a division in nature towards its two logically opposed limits. There is no yin without yang.

Furthermore, any successful dichotomy has to show the relation that makes its two halves logically connected. They must be thesis and antithesis - each obviously the other of the other.

With spirit and body, these aren't a dichotomy as we have no such explanatory connection. It is just a simple dualism aching to be resolved into a monism.

It is only if you can follow Peirce and other triadic system thinkers that you can go in the other direction of arriving at a duality that in fact is the trinity of a self-organising and synergistic relation.

Peirce nutted that out as a formal logic - his semiotic. And it happened to map to the way science has now gone as it gets to proper grips with nature.

Either you are talking about the car as one unified entity, or you are not talking about a car, but a bunch of separate things, existing independently which could be used to make a car. — Metaphysician Undercover

A car is in fact the worst kind of example as a car is a machine and not an organism.

The whole point of a car is that it exists as the expression of some engineer's wishes and designs. So it is an example of nature that is as much an arrangement of dumb components as is materially possible. It is an example of the maximally unnatural, in other words. It is built to be as little subject to holistic physical processes - like rusting or change - as possible.

It is thus a Cartesian object - the sophisticated expression of a human capacity to separate top-down informational constraints from bottom-up material processes. It is dualism made real.

The engineer becomes a god ruling nature - an intellectual willing soul. The world becomes a realm of passive material action.

But that is the reality of artifice, not the reality of nature.

There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top. — Gnomon

Yes and no. :grin:

Panpsychism is a non-starter for a science-informed metaphysics because "consciousness all the way down" explains nothing and just defers explanation.

But clearly, even physics has changed its materialist paradigm to now think of physical reality as somehow a product of "information". So science is also proving it is not adverse to a radical paradigm shift here. A metaphysics of material/efficient cause has been making way for a metaphysics of formal/final cause in some guise.

So something like a pan-informational view of the Universe, or better yet, a pan-semiotic view, has emerged. And via that, a science-based understanding of "consciousness" can be suitably naturalised. We can see how what humans do is explained within some totally generalised "physical theory of everything".

Yet even if we accept a physics which says "everything is an informational process all the way down, rather than a material process all the way up," this same ToE must make a hard distinction between "mindless physical systems" and "mindful living systems".

So there is a generalised informational/semiotic process that applies to the inorganic and non-organismic world. This is covered pretty well in unmysterious fashion by thermodynamics and quantum holism. We can understand reality and the emergence of its dissipative structures in terms of its generalised drive to entropify.

The shift from the old materialist paradigm to a new informational paradigm is about how a material world would self-organise in emergent fashion from the demands of entropy-maximising flow.

That is just untroubled science these days.

And then, likewise, we can also see how life and mind are both embedded in this generalised entropic flow, and have some extra trick - an epistemic cut - that lifts them to a different level in regards to that flow. Life and mind have the trick of memory, the trick of a modelling relationship with their material environments, the trick of being able to harness entropic gradients and direct them towards their own organismic ends.

So that makes a hierarchy with a sharp division. The foundation is a brute material world of entropy flows and the structures and patterns that must produce. Then the further thing is the evolution of semiotic mechanisms - truly informational substrates like membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers - to support a world of self-interestedly entropifying organisms.

Again, panpsychism is a theory that is "not even wrong" as whether it is the case or not, makes no difference. Panpsychists still explain atoms vs amoeba vs chimps vs humans in terms of genetic information, neural information and cultural information.

And that still leaves "consciousness" as completely unexplained as it is by material reductionism.

The only difference is that physical materialists have to say that consciousness somehow pops out at the end. And panpsychists have to claim it was always there - in some invisible and maximally attentuated fashion - from the beginning. It is just a different choice about which carpet the essential explanandum gets swept under.

But biology, neuroscience and social psychology have already long shifted to a worldview that accepts reality is a combo of matter and information. Or to be more precise, a semiotic interaction between the two.

Consciousness - in that view - is simply what it is like to be in a meaningful and intentional semiotic modelling relation with the world. It feels like something to be an organism engaged in the world via a complex interpretive relation because ... well, why wouldn't that feel like something. It must feel like exactly what it is. An enactive or embodied psychological relation.

And then happily, the physical sciences have shifted from an uber-materialist metaphysics towards a information-based one.

The Universe isn't gaining a "mind" in the process as to have a mind is to have the kind of private point of view that a semiotic interpretive relationship is all about. But it does then allow the Universe to be modelled overtly in terms of its formal and final causes - as for instance, the laws of thermodynamics. So the metaphysics becomes "mindful" in that important respect.

So panpsychism is bunk because it is a simple inversion of the failures of materialism.

Materialism shrugs and says consciousness must pop out due to "sufficient complexity". And that emergence thesis is meaningless to the degree materialism offers no proper model of "complexity". Meanwhile panpsychism shrugs its shoulders and says consciousness is always there in matter, even when it is ultimately simple. And panpsychism then offers no proper model of this simplicity. It just claims property dualism as a logically necessary fact.

But physics was in need of metaphysical reform. That is happening with an information theoretic perspective that shows how a generalised material simplicity can arise from "complex" chaos. The Comos could arise as a self-organised dissipative structure - the Big Bang universe.

And the biological sciences also had to finish the job on modelling actual complexity - systems that are organismic in that they can embody their own formal/final causes. That too is a project that has moved at great speed these past 50 years.

It’s my sense that the creationists perspective, and any subsequent perspective derived from that tenet, is flexible enough to adapt to the scientific discoveries and incorporate them our postulations. So, is it possible there is a creator? — Julz

It is always "possible" to posit some kind of hidden machinery in this fashion. And so science doesn't try to prove something is not the case. Instead it works to constrain the likelihood that it could be the case.

Science gives us reasonable and measurable doubt when it comes to creationism. And that is itself the rational position. Theories don't get proven wrong. It is just demonstrated that they lack support.

Or of course, if science wants to pass the really damning judgement, the theory can be shown to be "not even wrong".

And this is where creationism eventually leaves itself if it is a claim that also makes the claim that its truth would make no observable difference to how things turned out (according to the accepted science).

So is there a creator? Well, are you saying it would have made a difference? You need to be able to give an account of that difference to even make it an interesting question. Otherwise you are just pushing a "theory" that is not even wrong.