This implies either:

- The past is real and changeable (at a quantum level)
Or
- The particle knows the future; so the future is probably real (else just fully deterministic) — Devans99

A third alternative is that time is thermally emergent.

So the story there is that any localised thermal event - like a photon being emitted and absorbed - is timeless, or exists in its own present tense moment, in the sense that its future and past states are continuously connected.

So there is a change - how we define time passing. But the photon's story takes account of the whole of the path it must cross.

It is ruled by the least action principle and must take the most direct route - give and take the statistical fluctuations of its wavefunction. So the fact that spacetime expands and cools while it is moving - thus red-shifting it - and the fact that the environmental context might be changing in its future, as with quantum eraser experiments, all get factored into that overall wavefunction.

For the photon, there is no real past and future. Instead there is only the sum of some pathway which is like a single moment of action. There is a present that stretches like a strand to connect how things were before, and how things were after, because of an abrupt thermal change - the loss of energy at point A which became a matching gain of energy at point B. Or in fact an actual loss of energy at point B because the photon got red-shifted on the "journey".

Then orthogonal to that strand of action is the other thing of the global present which is the current average temperature of the expanding/cooling universe. Now we have a more concrete past and future in that the universe is loosing heat and red-shifting in a steady continuous fashion. It is not a punctate or quantum jump like a photon event. It is emergently a statistical and predictable curve of dissipation. The average energy density of yesterday was always higher. And tomorrow it will always be lower. So that creates a backdrop against which the temperature or energy level of any particle can be currently measured.

So time is a complex comparison of two opposing notions of "the present". You have the present of the individual quantum event. This is a jump from one energy level to another energy level. Quantum weirdness tells we have to take the non-locality of that seriously. The photon does get to see its whole journey all at once. It takes into account everything when responding to the constraints imposed by the least action principle. Its wavefunction is the retrospective account of everything that did in fact give the path some more complicated structure - like experimenters fiddling around with switchable paths.

Then out of a population of these basically statistical events, you get a universe that is expanding and cooling because they are happening. You get a global average that changes smoothly and predictably in a general direction. There is now no going backwards to the past because that would mean unscrambling the scrambled. It could happen theoretically, given absolute determinism - the ergodic hypothesis. But if you accept the reality of quantum collapse, as I'm doing, then the past does become irretrievable. It is real history. And also the future remains undefined because all things are still possible.

The future - from the global point of view that is the present tense for the universe as a whole - may be constrained by history. Yet it also contains all the further quantum fluctuations yet to happen. So the future may have "happened" for some photon winging its way toward some bit of experimental apparatus still lightyears in our collective future, but right now, for observers measuring things against the current thermal backdrop, the future remains full of surprises and unknowns. Time from the global perspective is split into the three emergent steps of past, present and future.

So you can imagine all this as global time - a present moment that is squashed flat like a cross-section view, sandwiched beween some wodge of past history and some wodge of future possibility. The present moment is defined by all the parts of the universe which share the same average energy density. Or more simply, has the same general background temperature.

Then particle or event time is a thin line that cuts across this temporal structure horizontally, at right angles to its "forward progressing present moment". The photon's journey looks to start in the past and end in the future. But from its point of view, there is only some quantum jump in terms of momentum and location. It didn't have to move through any kind of backdrop spacetime.

The photon simply connects two spacetime points in a thermally-constrained fashion. Its wavefunction took into account everything that existed "inbetween" and so affected its probabilities of being the way a thermal difference "eventually" got added to the bulk statistical structure of the expanding/cooling cosmos.

It is more specifically described as an action or opinion given through inadequate use of reason, or through emotional distress or cognitive deficiency. — Wikipedia

Ignore the first sentence and move on to the second.

Is it circular to say rationality is pragmatic reasoning that aspires to some high ideal - some sense of optimality and certainty - and that then the irrational is a very substandard adherence to that?

So being irrational is trying to be rational and failing for some reason.

One way to fail is a lack of information. The other way is a faulty habit of conception. So pragmatically, things can go wrong when we don’t have a good enough theory of a phenomenon. And they can go wrong if we don’t make the right evidential measurements. The ideas and the impressions have to be in synch in some optimal way.

Schizophrenics suffer mainly from faulty measurement. They are trying to construct rational beliefs about a world, but they are getting wrong information at a sensory and affective level.

Ordinary folk then suffer mainly from faulty conception - which leads on to working off the wrong kind of evidence. Their irrationality is down to habits of thought that might accept, for instance, coincidences as some kind of miracle.

So rationality is that tango between theory and measurement. Our ideas are clear and good when they have a crisp logical structure - one that imposes a definite counterfactuality on our impressions. We can know yes or no because a proper question is getting put.

But there is something else. The reasoning has to be serving some purpose. The theory must have an aim.

So irrationality also tends to be ascribed to purposes that seem idiosyncratic or subjective. To be rational is to go with the “objective” view of the collective social reality. You don’t get to invent your own private world - unless you are an artist or poet. In which case, it is that irrationality which is now socially approved.

And the big secret is that artists and poets need to be switched on, atuned to the cultural zeitgeist in cunningly rational fashion. Their irrationality is a disguise to a large extent (although, because this is “unbelievable”, folk will scour for evidence of all the creative minds that were “actually crazy dudes” in the culturally require sense).

The idea is that a belief is not an individual, not a thing, so much as a series of actions, spoken about in a certain way. — Banno

So before beliefs are spoken as propositions, do they not exist in any fashion? Do we just find ourselves suddenly blurting out words with no inkling we had meant to say something roughly of that kind?

And worse yet, do we always act without thought in general, then merely back-fill with a justificatory narrative?

What a curious understanding of human psychology. It is almost as if 1950s Behaviourism was still all the rage.

Thanks. Looks on the money. :grin:

In order to explain why this bundle is a unity and that bundle is not the event ontologist will inevitably have to invoke some additional principle, but this is just substance ontology all over again. — Theorem

So doesn’t your account lead to two versions of hylomorphism? One where form creates change in inert material and one where form constrains change in dynamical potential?

The first version doesnt really make sense as why would form have a need to change and where did the passive matter come from?

The second one is an intelligible metaphysics.

You're re-interpreting the whole question from a modernist perspective. ... But, you see, you regard it as a virtue to 'omit the eternal' — Wayfarer

Well sure. I'm not here to speak for the authentic 300BC Aristotle. In his day, there was far less reason to take a strong developmental approach to Cosmology - as science now requires us to do with the Big Bang. So he would have been more inclined to eternalism in his ontology.

So yes, we could have a more historical conversation about what was actually believed in terms of what was empirically known at some stage of the development of these contrasting traditions. But it is silly to say that I omit the eternal as "a virtue". I am responding to what we have learnt.

The "virtue" here - the scholarly one that I do value - is giving full credit to the history of interesting ideas. If Aristotelian tradition was by now a completely dead one - as Enlightenment science tried to proclaim - then I wouldn't even bother to mention it. But I stress it precisely because it is still relevant and influential ... for systems scientists and natural philosophy.

This means that in the knowledge of forms, ideas, geometric proofs and the like, the truth is apparent to 'the mind's eye' in a manner that is not possible with the knowledge of sensible objects. — Wayfarer

But that is my point. Once you realise that the world has accidental particulars, that is how you start to discover its necessary universals.

So it is categorising reality in terms of the one that also reveals the reality of the other. It is because we can conceptualise an aspect of every actual substantial thing as being the result of a material accident that we are also justified in dialectical fashion to conceptualise everything that is not a material accident to be a formal necessity.

You make your own jump from that hylomorphic view of substantial actuality to a Platonic story about the mind having some mystic access to another kind of reality. One gains access to a transcendent realm of pure forms by leaving behind the dirty, dusty, imperfect world of the actual.

But my position is the Aristotelian one. Matter and form are the two aspects of substantial being - one standing for constructive causation, the other for the causality of constraints. And both are immanent of this actual world.

So the way we "see" the realm of form is via the shedding of the accidental particulars. We keep rubbing away every unnecessary rough corner. And eventually we find the symmetry, the limit, where only the necessary formal structure remains.

You are claiming this is an exercise in transcendent perception. But it is just a pragmatic exercise of getting rid of the "obscuring" details. It is an empirical story as much as a rational story as we have to work out what material facts can be ignored.

Now, of course, I don't for a minute expect that will accept that, as in your ontology, there is no provision for anything immaterial and because of the obvious implied dualism. — Wayfarer

It is not that I don't make a provision for anything immaterial. Mine is not a sin of omission.

What I am arguing is that it is as plain as the nose on your face that abstraction or generalisation proceeds by discovering what empirical facts you can afford to ignore. You will arrive at the bare forms of things, the necessary structures, apophatically. It is what is left once everything that can be left out has been left out.

So it is the feature of my ontology that it is hylomorphic and not Platonic. It is immanent and not transcendent. It is a process view and not an eternalist one. It sees flux and development as basic, not stasis and existence.

And that's because you're viewing it from your modern/system science/biosemiotic perspective, rather than from the 'traditionalist' perspective. — Wayfarer

Well it should be clear enough that I am view it from a natural philosophy angle that goes back to Aristotle and Anaximander as opposed to some theistic framework like yours.

But you are doing your thing - trying to pigeon hole everything I say as Scientism at work. :roll:

I was speaking about the Greek conception of mathematics — InternetStranger

It is not exactly clear what you think that conception actually was.

Are you saying it relied on the concept of the unit more than of deductive proof?

Things, e.g., monads, can never be equal, how could they be considering equal means not different, but, rather, perfectly the same. A performative contradiction. — InternetStranger

Things are the same to the degree there are no differences that count. What's the problem there?

I don't think one form has anything mathematical to do with one unit in the Greek sense. As idea it is the genus of "one". But what does one mean, a whole. A form is a whole, one man, cut an arm off, no longer whole. There is no mathematical equality between men. They are the same as they are under the same form or genus. They are both one is the everyday sense. That's not mathematical in the Greek sense. It's practical everyday vague, not exact, counting. — InternetStranger

Not so. We can talk about the unit triangle just like the unit one. The most individuated possible things are precisely those that are the most symmetrical versions imaginable.

But now you are talking about a world of hierarchical complexity - where both top-down constraint and bottom-up construction are in play. So there is something it is like - a genus-level constraint - that it is to be a human. And there are then the particular historical accidents that also compose that human.

A man might have lost an arm - but he was meant to have one. The genetic intent existed. That constraint on growth was there. It was simply a historical contingency that it ran into a chainsaw.

And a man might be bald, shaven or hirsute. That again is some kind of accident in regards to what we consider as a necessary constraint flowing from the genus. It's optional because it is a difference that doesn't make a difference. And so the genus "human" has the kind of generalised symmetry I'm talking about.

Maths just takes that way of thinking and imagines it with all "material accidents" or "historical contingencies" shorn away to leave a bare formal necessity. That certainly works as act of imagining what a perfect limit would look like. But we can see the trick of the imagination that is involved in turning an immanent development towards an ultimate limit into some transcendent claim that the limit exists in some Platonically dualistic realm.

In ordinary life we can't jump to five million. In maths we don't have to wait to count 1,2,,4, etc., we go right where we want. That's wholly unlike life. Infinity is intelligible, I count, 1,2,3, well, it goes on I say to myself tacitly, as it were, infinity. No such thing in the world as what one can point to. — InternetStranger

Yeah. Construction allows that kind of freedom, as I say. It is the very opposite of constraint, even if it is ultimately the product of that constraint.

Not sure how any natural things, if that means stuff one can point to, can be equal in the perfect sense things are equal in the mind. e.g., an angle of 90 degrees. never occurs for the senses by the Greek way of thinking. I don't think form is like number, in fact, number in the mathematical sense of unit is a form. I.e., it is something peculiar, unlike anything else. — InternetStranger

Your objection here is not clear so I can't answer.

When neurons fire, the ions blend. Firing neurons helps entropy increase. It is a second law affect. Consciousness makes the brain fire at will, since consciousness is an entropy generator. It is needed to help neurons reverse. — wellwisher

I like your focus on entropy, but we would need to make a distinction between physical entropy and informational entropy here.

The point of neurons is in fact to zero the hardware costs of being "conscious" and so create a basic freedom when it comes to the informational or "software" entropy of the system.

So like the circuits of a computer, neurons are designed so that it "costs nothing" to switch their states. And so all physical constraints on freewill - the making of informed choices - are thus removed.

It does of course cost quite a lot to keep neurons running. They burn glucose like hard-working muscle - even when we sleep. Humans could only support their big brains because it was matched with a shift to a cooked and calorie dense diet.

But neurons themselves fire all the time. They are set up so they just keep charging up and discharging as their basic steady-state level of operation. What "consciousness" - or global attentive focus - does is modulate those firing rates. It speeds them up or slows them down. It creates larger states of synchrony and asynchrony so as to weave meaningful information patterns.

So the neurons are just a constant cost. They are going to fire anyway. So there is no effective cost for using them for one thing rather than another. And this thus opens up the infinite possibilities that allow us to think about anything at all at any time ... to the degree it is then ecologically and pragmatically useful, of course.

Now we get to the informational entropy. The brain exists to model the world in a useful predictive fashion. And so it is set up to minimise the possibility of the world being surprising. It wants to minimise the Shannon information uncertainty that exists "out there".

So consciousness - as our running attentional model of the world - in fact is organised by the goal of decreasing its information entropy. It is pointed intelligently at the task of constructing a mental state of order - where the world unfolds in a smoothly-predicted and intention-fulfilling fashion.

And this is the freewill ideal. Anything that we could wish, we can make be the case. By learning and planning, we can limit the possibility of being surprised by the world telling us, well no, you can't do anything you want in fact.

So it is all about this separation from physical entropy which allows this new game based on informational entropy. We have to pay for that freedom by burning a heck of a lot of glucose all the time. We do have to meet the greater cost imposed by the second law. But then that gives us our freedoms as reality modellers, seeking to minimise our informational entropy.

We are free to pursue our own organismic goals because we have made a bargain with nature where we burn much more than we could ever extract as useful work. But hey, that capacity for work can then be freely applied to any intention or plan we could possibly conceive. Freewill exists because we can afford the underlying fuel bill, eventually reaching the point as civilised technological humans where the cost of any choice becomes too "cheap" to be a concern.

It is like they said about atomic energy. It would be too cheap to bother monitoring. It might as well be given away on a help yourself basis.

That wasn't actually true of course. But for a while now, it has seemed effectively true enough of fossil fuels and other natural resources like clean air and clean water. A consumer culture enshrines exactly that kind of "freewill" dynamic - where you can just afford to help yourself to the negentropy that sits around on the planet, simply begging to be entropified.

The next probable chapter of the freewill story will be the one that shows that, in the end, it does come back to paying for that right to burn. It only feels like we can make any choice we want. In fact, it is meant to be about modelling the world in a way that doesn't store up a bunch of nasty surprises.

Units are only in the mind. — InternetStranger

But that is the mistake that leads to strong Platonism. So it would be the other deplorable fault that pervades this forum. :)

The interesting thing about the world is that aspect that maths captures - the fact that forms constrain material being. Individuation is contextual. The identities of things are the result of differences being suppressed to the point they cease to make a difference.

So counting is based on that trick. A mathematical unit, like 1 or 0, is defined by an identity operation - the transformations which don't actually change it. Multiplying by 1 changes nothing. Adding 0 again changes nothing. A unit speaks to a state of perfect symmetry. And having constrained change so as to arrive at an unchangeable symmetry - the unit - then something new can happen. Construction can begin employing that now stable bit of identity. Constraint produces the very thing which is its antithesis. The freedom to start building up from definite parts.

So units are really out there in the world. The Platonic forms are descriptions of constrained symmetries. And to the degree material instability is thus regulated, atomistic construction can begin. We have individuated individuals - like electrons or other identical quantum particles that lack any essential differences ... and so now only have the antithetical thing of particular contextual properties, like how they break the global symmetries of space, time and energy.

To talk of units being only in the mind is to yield to substance dualism. Instead, the possibility of units is already inherent in the world because formal constraints have limits.

The rough and irregular edges can be rubbed off any object. But eventually that in turn means one is going to arrive at the smooth and the regular - the most symmetrical individual possible. And so the further possibility of unit-based, atomistic, construction is already anticipated in that smoothing process. It is immanent in reality that arithmetical operations like adding and multiplying will be present to the degree that individuation has been most fully realised.

So no need to invoke Platonic realms or the power of human minds. Units will emerge naturally where constraint is allowed to act to suppress difference. In trying to erase something - individuation - reality must in fact end up creating it in the guise of something new, the atomistic ability to construct.

If some gizmo were able to identify the model of Ant Man in my brain and wrote that as 'kdhfh' in a language called Braineze, the definition of 'kdhfh' would be ‘The model of Ant Man on a desk inside Read Partit’s brain.' — Read Parfit

But aren't you just deferring the essential issue by creating another reader of another pattern of marks? You keep refocusing on a set of observables and therefore never account for how they get understood in a meaningful way.

So sure, it is true that every thought, concept or image does get instantiated as a material pattern in the brain. Neurons fire. Something physical happens.

But the problem then is say how this results in feelings of meaningful experience. You can't just keep pointing to the marks and offering a "definition" of what they mean, as in itself, that is just pointing to more marks.

To explain "Ant Man" as a "Marvel comic book character" is to introduce four more words in want of a definition. You are offering up marks for interpretation without ever explaining how interpretation gets done.

So there is something horribly one dimensional about claiming a concept exists simply because some pattern of marks is physically instantiated. A concept is canonically an act of interpretation, an act of making sense, an acting of appreciating meaning. To point to its physical footprint is not to point to the bit that matters.

Quickly, the way out of this bind is semiotics. Signs are the way that habits of conception or interpretance relate to a dynamical world. So marks mediate a regulatory relation. A picture of Ant Man or a verbal description of Ant Man are symbols or tokens that stand between a "me" and an "it". I will act in certain ways given an understanding of the world in terms of these signs being present.

So this is the whole story rather than the one dimensional story. The marks do a job of connecting. And it is the whole relationship that is semantic or meaningful.

The mistake would be to take the dualistic representational view where the simple display of some set of symbols, some array of data, is enough to create a modelling relation with the world. It needs to be a triadic relation where the symbols are embedded in a context of interpretation, and that is then secured by the pragmatic effects that has in terms of achieving some embodied purpose. There has to be feedback from the world which says a sign interpreted in that fashion is really working to get things done as wanted.

Think of genes. They code for proteins. So a gene being active is a sign of the organism wanting something materially useful getting done.

The missing part of your story is the purpose, the Aristotelian finality, that gives a pattern of signs their meaning. So clearly brains have a developmental structure that encodes some set of purposes, some habits of intentionality. And that purpose then gets expressed as a set of material effects out in the world. Things get done because that purpose exists. Then in the middle - doing the mediating - are a set of marks that connect a purpose to a world.

The marks are important. But they are only one aspect of the whole story. So talk about concepts existing just because a set of symbols exist is inadequate. The marks have to be interpreted. And that takes a context of intentionality which itself then exists within the third thing of a world of possibilities.

As I keep pointing out to you the arts are not measurable, and they are of the greatest intellectual value to human life in my view. — Janus

Sure. And that's no mystery. Anthropology explains it. Art is semiotics. It is all about the necessary thing of the social construction of the self.

But you were promoting Whitehead's pan-experientialism as a reasonable metaphysical theory. And I countered with reasons why Peirce's semiotics does count as a theory - it imposes counterfactual possibility on our experience - and Whitehead ain't, because it doesn't.

If you want to just accept Whitehead as a cultural poet, putting forward an image of what it is to be human, then fine. But the anthropological lens would apply to that position too. I would be asking what social purpose does Whitehead pragmatically serve? Why would there be folk who consider it so important that his "not even wrong" pseudo-theory count for something in cultural discourse?

Do you have an argument that demonstrates unequivocally that feeling, as opposed to "feelings", which have obviously already been identified and conceptualized and could hence be counted as "cognitive') is cognitive? I have already said I think it is reasonable to think of experience or feeling as interpretative "all the way down"; but "cognitive" in my view, is a step too far. — Janus

I set out that argument. Name me a feeling that isn't dichotomous in structure, and hence cognitive in the structural sense I'm using.

It's just like the after images seen by the eye. The nervous system is set up on the principle of constructing sharp counterfactual contrasts. It applies to feelings like all other forms of perception.

Feelings are measurements - evidence. And so it is a dialectical counterfactuality all the way down.

I'm looking for a knock-down argument that any unbiased thinking person must accept, — Janus

So you are claiming to be unbiased? And if this forum proves anything, no one needs to accept anything if they don't feel inclined. I mean if you reject the constraints of empirical evidence, then you are free to believe whatever you like. Who could stop you? That is just how it works. So let's not waste time with this strawman.

You haven't addressed that statement and argument at all, so I don't know what you are after here. — Janus

You claimed Whitehead to be a theory. Then it became a poem. So I did lay down an argument for what constitutes a theory. You retreated into saying that metaphysics is just meant to be fun speculation.

And yet if you are honest, you would have to admit that this at least divides metaphysics into different kinds of activity - one of which thinks it important that theories pass the test on both their internal logical coherence and their external empirical correspondence.

So even if yours is a form of metaphysics, you didn't show that Whitehead met my criteria for a metaphysical theory. Which was the thing you were hoping to convince me off, after all.

Poetry is not usually logical argumentation at all. Do you see the difference? — Janus

Of course I see that difference. But I said if you want to stretch your definition of metaphysics to include Whitehead as an example of poetic licence, well I can't stop you. What I said was that you can't stretch the definition of a theory so that it is only about internal coherence as we all know about the perils of tautological argument.

If the theory doesn't make counterfactually structured claims, it is never in a position to challenge any of the premises from which it is constructed. It is simply "true" in being able to assume its conclusions.

And that is how Whitehead works. Experience is always just there. It never develops. It exists even when there is no evidence to suggest that. It is the typical theistic story of the invisible hand moving with complete freedom. Anything you claim about why something happened or didn't happen couldn't be disproved. The hand is invisible. It is free to do anything. So if you say it is always there, who can deny it?

Look closely and you can see that it is not that your kind of "theory" doesn't need evidence. Instead it carefully constructs itself so that evidence against it becomes impossible. So empiricism is very relevant to its interests. It must at all costs put itself beyond the reach of the counterfactual. If the theory meets a factual challenge, the game is to refine the theory in a way that puts it again beyond such counterfactuality.

So it is a whole pathological mode of thought. And it is very attractive to many people. Just respond to any call for evidence by moving your "theory" another step away from the risk of having to answer with a clear counterfactuality.

Whitehead's system is internally consistent and coherent; you just don't like it because it rests on premises you don't agree with. — Janus

I don't expect you to make the effort to study Whitehead in order to really understand him; why would you make such a considerable effort if you don't accept his starting premises? — Janus

My position is that Whitehead is transparently failing the test of offering a theory. It ain't got no counterfactual test of those starting premises. And so it is merely a tautology at best. It says that if everything is experiential, then everything will have experience - even when you can't see any evidence for that.

Um. OK.

You tell me how much Whitehead you've read. So fine. Either convince me his theory is properly falsifiable. Or convince me that theories don't need to be capable of being wrong. Tautologies are the way to go.

All metaphysical systems rest on premises which cannot be demonstrated within the system, in fact cannot be demonstrated at all, because all unimpeachable demonstration is strictly deductive, and all deductions rest on premises.... — Janus

How do you arrive at the premises? It ain't deduction. It's abductive inference.

How do you test the premises? It ain't deduction. It's inductive confirmation..

So if metaphysics is about being reasonable rather than poetic, I think we all know the whole story of how it is meant to work.

As I said before metaphysical systems are just invitations to look at the world in creative speculative ways; — Janus

You keep waving this "get out of jail free" card. It cuts no ice.

The brain is obviously capable of storing, retrieving and crunching these patterns in ways that are meaningful to us. Isn't that where to find the semantics and interpretance — Read Parfit

You are doing what I described - telling me all about the computational syntax and nothing about the semantics that are the only reason a system of marks means anything to anyone.

I guess if you can’t see the problem here, you just don’t see it.

But it is a core issue in the life sciences and philosophy of mind - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem

These concepts may or may not or may not describe something that is compatible with the laws of nature, but the concepts still exist in a physical way. — Read Parfit

The key question you might need to ask is whether the meaning of a mark is physical, even if the mark itself is surely physical, and furthermore, marks are essential to there being instantiated states of meaning.

So sure, every concept exists as a pattern of neural activity. It is a set of physical marks. But where in your physicalist conception of this situation is the meaning of the marks? I see only syntactical operations - the mechanics. I don’t see physicalism accounting for any semantics, any interpretance.

Concepts have to exist as a set of marks, but also as a set of marks understood to mean something, and so likely to result in actions that speak to the sense of what was meant.

To incorporate the semantics of symbols, you need a larger version of physicalism than materialist mechanics can provide.

Biology of course is all about that larger story.

Stick to the subject - Whitehead. I gave you a specific argument why I say it is the wrong sort of metaphysics. The clinching evidence is that feelings are cognitive. Their organisation is dichotomous and hence counterfactually structured.

So rather than going on about the solitary splendours of poetry, just tell me how Whitehead counts as a proper metaphysical theory.

You don’t want to say Whitehead is just poetry do you? Or if you do, then I’d probably agree that that is all that it is. We need never mention him again when talking about actual metaphysical theories which make observable claims about the structures to expect when investigating reality.

While I agree that this must be true of empirical theories; I don't think it is necessarily true of metaphysical theories. That would be like saying that poetry must have a crisp counterfactual structure — Janus

And that is my claim. The definition of a theory is that it is empirical in some meaningful fashion.

Theories are generalisations capable of having particular consequences. So they have to be “good” in two complementary senses. They need internal rational coherence (to be generalisations). And they need to relate to whatever they are a model of via the particularity of their consequence. So they need to correspond to thing in question via a clear counterfactual act of measurement.

Poetry doesn’t need a crisp counterfactual structure because it is not attempting to be a theory of metaphysical reality.

It is not rationality being aimed at the world in an attempt to make sense of it. It is instead - at best - an attempt to socially construct a culturally structured self. Art sketches out the kind of world, the kind of umwelt, that we are then meant to “find ourselves in”. It we learn to see the meaning in the cultural artefact, then that is teaching us to be the kind of self who sees that kind of world.

So poetry is semiotic. It is about modelling a “world”. But while metaphysics was about the attempt to model the real world, reality as it actually is, poetry is about the invention of socially useful worlds. So one form of semiosis targets the metaphysically objective, the other targets the socially subjective. It is a mistake to conflate the two as you hope to do.

I will need for you to go back and edit your non-complying posts — Hanover

Really?

You might be disappointed if you expect a "precise theoretical description" from Whitehead. — Janus

That is why I don’t take him seriously. A theory of anything must have crisp counterfactual structure. It must impose a measurable definiteness on the world. So a theory that claims to cash itself out in anything vague, like undefined feeling, lacks explanatory force. The PNC fails to apply to the predictions it makes.

What kind of theory is it that says x is always there, just sometimes it is really definite and obvious, at other times it is so faint and vague that it becomes undifferentiated and unmeasurable. The theory just can’t be found wrong as it doesn’t in fact pose a counterfactual account of the world.

Just because a theory puts itself beyond been proved wrong does not mean it is then true. It means it is not even actually a theory. It is a claim that is not even wrong - the most damning of possibilities.

The basis of experience is emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given. — Whitehead

So the Peircean pansemiotic story would be about the claim that the Cosmos has a universal logical structure - the sign relation. It is a basically cognitive story. Reality exists because a counterfactual structure could be imposed on material vagueness or indeterminism.

Thus the highest form of mind - the rational scientist - is expressing the very thing of a world-making causal relation. We form our rational umwelts. The Cosmos likewise is forming itself into concrete being by imposing a counterfactual definiteness on its general being.

This pansemiotic metaphysics has turned out to be correct. Quantum mechanics shows that. The most recent turn in quantum interpretations supports the idea that wavefunction collapse represents the imposition of a counterfactual structure on material possibility. The world asks yes/no questions of itself. If an event happens, history gets made and that now constrains the future.

So the thing to note is that pansemiosis is all about rational cognitive structure. It is where the evolution of the human mind has ended up. And it is all about the logical exactness of counterfactual structure imposed on material indeterminacy.

But Whitehead is taking some ill defined notion of conscious experience as his starting point. And then he is treating cognition as an imposed logical structure that can be thrown off to leave some barer affective potential. Feeling is treated as a concrete materiality. A subjective substance. And right there we have the misstep.

We have a located stuff that is inside some thing. But then that claim lacks counterfactuality as the experience of an electron is something that makes no measurable difference to its behaviour. At least we can credit organisms with a mind as they do act with counterfactual autonomy. We can see they make purposeful choices in terms of their behaviour. As Peirce would say, organisms always have reasons because they have a personal point of view. But electrons give us no reason to think they have experience.

So stick to logic and cognition. To claim that reality is founded on feeling or affect is always going to be Cartesian substance thinking. It is treating experience as a material potential stripped of its logical structure.

But even human affect is completely rational in its structure. Neuroscience tells us that. The whole structure of emotional response is the same old story of a semiotic imposition of dichotomies on an umwelt. Things are either good or bad, arousing or boring, attractive or repulsive, etc, etc.

Feelings aren’t actually vague at all. Our brains are set up to feel either the one thing, or its logical opposite, so that we have a clear counterfactual direction to guide all our reactions. The panpsychic move Whitehead is trying to make - strip away cognition to leave something more fundamentally simple - falls at the first hurdle. Feeling is just as cognitively organised as thinking in the neuroscientific view.

Of course feelings can be vague. But that just means there are times when we are uncertain. A counterfactual response to the world has not yet clicked into place.

To treat the uncertain as the primal sort of works. But it takes the Peircean semiotic story to actually make it work. Mindfulness is all about resolving uncertainty by managing to impose a counterfactual umwelt on it. Cognition makes things definite. So cognition is also primal in complementary fashion. And that is why the Peircean story is properly structuralist. It is irreducibly hierarchical or triadic.

Whitehead want some kind of reductionist monism - pan experience. All is the vagueness of a feeling. But that is closet dualism. It is substance thinking.

Peirce gets it right by refusing to try to reduce from dualism to monism. He steps up to the larger metaphysical model which understands being in terms of a three part sign relation.

So what is a first person point of view in your metaphysical scheme?

I think you are too dismissive of Whitehead and mischaracterize him as a 'panpsychist' as I've already explained. — Janus

I don't see how he gets beyond being a panpsychist. If experiencing is a process, then what is its structure exactly? Where is the precise theoretical description of that? If you understand Whitehead, help by explaining how it works in some causal sense.

...would you say that interpretance is operating at the quantum scale? If you would say that then would there not also be in your own terms an 'internalness", which could be characterized as a kind of proto-experience compared with our idea of human experience, just as the interpretance would be classed as a proto-interpretance compared to our notions of human interpretance? — Janus

Quantum scale interpretance would have all that interpreting happening externally. Or better yet, contextually.

Organisms are defined by having internal models of their worlds. That is why they need some kind of coding mechanism - an informational way to construct material constraints. Genes, neurons, words, numbers - a way to remember the forms of order that will perpetuate the organism's own existence.

But the physical world is clearly not organismic in that sense. The Universe has no internal model of its world. Why would it need such an umwelt of sign? It already is the world.

However - contra the usual mechanical view of material nature - there is something pretty semiotic going on in terms of how physical contexts shape up local fluctuations or excitations. So the Universe can be considered as a kind of running model of the sorts of local events that ought to take place. The Universe represents a memory of its own development in the structure of habit or natural law it imposes on all material possibilities. It says there can electron like particles as local degrees of freedom because a history of development - a generalised cooling and expanding - has now crisply backed that possibility in.

So quantum scale events become the kinds of thing that are likely to happen because the world has accumulated some generally constraining history. And electron is not a little roaming jot of experience making simple choices. It is a constraint of energetic possibilities to the point we are left with a localised excitation with very little distinctive character.

It is an electron identical to all other electrons and must follow the same dynamical laws. It might be different in terms of its speed or location, but those are not exactly a matter of experience-based choice or any kind of individuated point of view on the electron's part.

So in an organism, interpretance is an internalised model of the world - the informational ability to construct states of material constraint.

But in physics, intepretance just is a material state of constraint. And to model that interpretance then demands an informational brand of physics as the materiality is now that which emerges from constraints. Materiality becomes an output rather than an input from the pan-semiotic or infodynamic point of view.

Unless there is some already-there interpreter (first person point of view) this concrescence of behavior has to cohere and “do” its internal thing. — schopenhauer1

So what is a first person point of view in your metaphysical scheme? Give us a useful definition that excludes interpretance as something models do. Let's see you shake that dualism one more time, tell us how the mind is some kind of unphysical thing rather than some kind of natural process.

No, I don't mean "physical space" in this case. What I meant is more abstract.. If all this physical stuff is happening.. "where" is this modelling happening? — schopenhauer1

Why do you think "where" is a meaningful question if we are no longer talking about a materialist notion of space or time?

As I've already said, the embodied or enactive view of neurocognition is the one that tries so hard to get away from notions like "consciousness happens in the brain as the result of neuron firings".

It is the holism of the modelling relation - an organism in interaction with a world - that is the place where all this mindfulness action is occuring.

This is why Whitehead's philosophy is spoken of as a 'pan-experientialism', rather than as a 'pan-psychism'. Experience can be understood as en embodied physical process if you don't have an eliminative or mechanically reductive notion of the physical, thus obviating the need to posit a separate mental substance. — Janus

This is fine but my reason for preferring Peirce is because he starts with some actual bit of mechanism or structural relation that we can all understand - language and the way it mediates as a system of sign to result in a "reasonable" experiencing of reality.

And from there, we can see that neurology and biology generally have the same central structuring relation. Beyond that, pan-semiosis can track that "experiential relation" all the way down to the quantum level.

So the Peircean approach makes a concrete proposal that starts in an uncontroversial way with how language and logic work to structure human awareness of reality. And then that can take us down all the way to where quantum physics is again throwing up the same essential question about how physical reality itself could have intelligible form. That's quite an achievement.

Whitehead moved on from the failed project of logical atomism to create some pretty incomprehensible melange of pan-psychism, quantum physics and theism. Yes, he said the right kind of holistic stuff about a process approach to metaphysics. But that is nothing new in itself. And then his actual claims about quantum scale physical action just don't bear serious scrutiny. The "experience" of electrons or photons becomes a hollow term which explains nothing and instead diverts attention from the actual holism and contextuality which is the metaphysical issue for fundamental physics.

We know there is internalness, but it is not obvious from the substrates themselves.. and modelling is a process.. — schopenhauer1

So stop going on and on about material substrates. Start talking about the process ... of modelling ...

but where is this process space occurring? — schopenhauer1

What has physical space got to do with it? The model is about an organism in a world. So it is an abstraction as far as that physical space is concerned.

Then I should hardly need to point out that your talk about "physical space" is itself a modelling interpretation. So you are simply doubling down on the epistemological missteps.

I don't see your way out of the bind. — schopenhauer1

I don't see you doing anything but ducking the question you were asked. Your problem is that you are happy with the bind you are in. You think being stuck in an irresolvable paradox is some kind of good thing. You just keep on shaking that dualism in my face while you avoid answering why modelling wouldn't feel like something, when we both know that the brain actually models and that it indeed does feel like something when it does that.

No, it just doesn't make sense how behavior can have an internalness. — schopenhauer1

Aren't you going to even make a single solitary attempt to justify your position against the claims of modelling?

Why wouldn't an umwelt-style modelling of the world feel like something?

The point of this exercise is to show yourself that you can't in fact come up with convincing reasons why all that activity wouldn't be "experiential" in a basic "animal experience of the world" way. You having nothing concrete to support the prejudices you are expressing.

It is not the behaviour that has "internalness" here. It is the modelling. So again, stop deflecting and focus on the question as it was asked of you. Discover for yourself that you really don't have any concrete reason to deny an "internalness" to a modelling relation between the brain and the world. You might in fact realise that the semiotic story is all about the organismic construction of an "internal and meaningful point-of-view".

So stop treating my position as merely good old materialism.

Semiotics is a metaphysics designed to get beyond both materialism and mentalism - the standard issue Cartesian substance duality. Start respecting that by answering the question it poses for you - why wouldn't modelling a world feel like modelling a world?

I think the point is that when it comes to the question " what is the feeling-like-something ontologically speaking" that the sign relation is where it "bottoms out". What more could we hope to say without positing some additional mental substance; which would be to return to substance dualism? — Janus

You got it.

It is just the same as the equivalent cosmological question of "why anything?" or "what is being?". We can only answer any such question semiotically - via a modelling relation. And modelling in turn relies on measurable counterfactuals. A theory has to impose a falsifiable claim on the reality. And once we get down to asking "why experience?" or "why existence?", what can count for the kind of counterfactuals that would truly make sense of some proper theory?

So I accept a limit to rational explanation in terms of the measurement of counterfactuals. If the question is why is green so greenish, we have pretty much run out of road as we can't even think what other possible alternative could be the case. The question ultimately becomes a hollow one because the modelling relation itself has no counterfactuals it can get a purchase on.

But despite that kind of ultimate barrier, we can then model the world pretty effectively. Neuroscience can give us answers on how experience is constructed as an umwelt to a degree of detail that is well past most people's actual level of interest.

I've been through all this with Schop a number of times, but still there is this plantiff bleat - solve the Hard Problem to my satisfaction. I believe in this stuff called mind. Explain how it gets there - in a world that I also believe is just a bunch of stuff called matter.

He won't be walked back an inch from his Cartesian dualism. He just stands there with his nose pressed against a brick wall complaining.

So stepping back from the business of theorising about both the human mind and the origin of existence itself, we can all marvel that there is anything there to be discussed at all. But then we ought to get back to theory-building if we are actually engaged with these things in a metaphysically interesting way.

Sure we can wade through literature on all sorts of neurobiological concepts.. doesn't get me closer to what experiential process is. — schopenhauer1

Defeatist.

The problem is, you don't even know the problem. — schopenhauer1

Sure I do. You keep running from the question of why all that umwelt-style modelling wouldn't feel like something.

What does that mean? "Self in it"? That makes no sense outside of already experiencing selfhood. — schopenhauer1

I've explained these things 1000 times. Look up umwelt. Look up proprioception. Look up enactive perception. If you want to discuss these issues, you need to educate yourself on them.

Because of precisely what I am inquiring above.. — schopenhauer1

You are just deflecting. If you were serious about wanting to know, you would have learnt enough about how the brain works not to be wasting my time with your Cartesianism.

I didn't mind discussing something new with you - like abiogenesis. But now you are back on your old hobby horse. Boring.

What are you defining as self-modelling then — schopenhauer1

An umwelt is a model of the world with a self in it. It is a world modelled from a point of view that expresses a personal set of interests. So it is a way to understand why experience appears to be imbued with selfhood and thus avoid the usual dualistic and homuncular regress of a self that witnesses its own perceptions in some Cartesian theatre. Selfhood is built into the "picture" from the beginning.

Again that wouldn't be an explanation, just a synonym, an infinite regress)? — schopenhauer1

Again, can you now answer my question instead of continuously deflecting. Why wouldn’t the kind of unwelt modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?

Saying, "Wouldn't processes feel like something" — schopenhauer1

And why wouldn’t the kind of world and self modelling that brains do, not feel like something rather than nothing?

You’ve never said despite being asked many times now.

I suppose we need to define "spontaneously" then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. I did. The spontaneous part of "spontaneous symmetry-breaking" refers to the fact that any old material nudge is going to tip everything in some collective symmetry-breaking direction. So it says, yes, you need some kind of material/efficient cause to get things going. But the very least imaginable fluctuation is going to do that.

It doesn't have to be a fluctuation of any particular formed kind. It doesn't have to be a fluctuation with any degree of intention. It is the very opposite of any kind of voluntary act. It is a pure accident. Whatever happened, it would have resulted in the same effect.

A classic example of this is a ball balanced on top of a dome. It is going to roll off one way or another of its own accord. Well, it will need a nudge to get going. But there is always going to be some vibration or other that tips the balance.

So in the physics of symmetry-breaking and self-organisation, the notion of "spontaneous" in regards to material/efficient cause is very well defined.

And likewise, the final/formal cause is well understood. If there is a state of organisation that can lower a system's entropy - like a ball rolling of a dome - then finality will drive that to happen. It so wants to happen, that is the reason any old nudge is going to get you started.

It is the usual reciprocal or dichotomous story. The more powerful the entropic urge, the less material push it takes to get things going. Hence you have this sharp contrast between tiny pushes and outlandish effects.

Ok, then replace state with experience or process. — schopenhauer1

Right. So now you are asking what was the first internal experience? :lol:

But perhaps if you understand your question to be, "what was the first internal process?", you can see that life - being organismic - is already the internalisation of some process. Being an organism is already to have crossed a clear line in becoming a subject.

So you can either make the happy dualistic leap from material state to mental experience, which simply jumps to either side of the process view, or you can stop and consider what is actually being said in process terms.

And semiotics is the science of meaning. It is about the process of semantics. That Pattee paper should have grounded you in how that cashes out. It is all about a sign relation that allows modelling to regulate environmental or material instability in a way that produces local autonomy.

That is then the "analogy" (its actually much stronger than that) which allows you to talk about semiotics as a general process. Life and mind are levels of the same trick. One level involves the machinery of genes. The other, neurons and even words.

So your "mentalism" becomes as redundant as vitalism. There just is no mystical substance in need of a proper explanation. To ask for an explanation of "mind" or "experience" is to be already making a category error.

How is this story analogous to the first internal state (i.e mental state)? — schopenhauer1

You are presupposing that mental states are a thing. And so you presuppose their dualism to physical states. The whole state-based conception of reality is where you have already gone wrong.

You are trapped by your own habits of thought. So I can't talk you out of that. You have to talk yourself out of it. You would have to learn to think in a different fashion.

Once we grant thoughts themselves an ontological status, the next question becomes, can we apply objective criteria to the claims expressed by these thoughts? — Read Parfit

I'd point out how this all stems from analytic philosophy taking a Newtonian view of ontology. And that sets things up for an odd dualism that is at the heart of your OP.

So the assumption is that everything ontic can be reduced to states of affairs - some collection of particular individuated things. And then all these things have simple Newtonian relations. Each is an element of reality with some inherent property. You have then a calculus of relations where each element affects any other element in a fixed, determined and mechanical way. It is a world of straight lines of action with no deviations possible.

And so it is a world of logical operations too. Happily for AP ontology, physics is computational. One state of affairs maps onto the next state of affairs in utterly predictable and deterministic fashion because all causality is merely syntax. There are laws that set the rules. There are elements with properties that have to obey those rules. And that's it. Get computing.

Thus AP ontology is dualistic. Physics and logic are mirror images of each other in that both are about syntax determining what is possible in terms of reality. If you have A, it is going to give you B - so long as you know the rule that applies to your world of elements.

This is why AP winds up in modal realism. Unicorns might not exist in our world, but they could have evolved in some other world with the same natural laws. So they are a definite possibility. On the other hand, solid gold planets are impossible objects in worlds with our laws. Their gravity would collapse them into black holes.

It all does sort of makes sense.

But also it doesn't. And @Wayfarer is right to highlight how it is all about syntax, and semantics gets left out.

AP just really struggles with semantics - just as classical Newtonian physics really ended up struggling with its story of a world of concrete observables that left out any physical account of the observers making sense of their observations. Not to mention how Newtonianism created a mystery in regard to how the laws could exist in a fashion where they did determine every state transition of a collection of material elements. And the leaving out of the observers who discover the laws, and the manner in which laws might be properly real, were of course a connected problem.

So AP ontology leaves you with this weird thing where all that seems to be going on when a brain is having thoughts is some collection of physical events. You have a bunch of neurons "firing". Something energetic is happening at synapses. If it is energetic, it must obey physical law - the standard universal syntax of Newtonian physics.

But also - dualistically - the physical pattern of activity is being caused by a second logical syntax. There is some kind of computational program being run. The brain is doing information processing. The physics now just instantiates the pattern. It gives the software some hardware.

However - from the AP point of view - the story is still safely Newtonian. There is some system of rules in play which determine each step of any transition from one state to the next. The ontology is mechanical in exactly the way classical physics imagines ontology. So the logical level of reality seems to safely parallel the material level of reality in this fashion. And then AP tries to get on with business without mentioning the gap.

Syntax is syntax after all. And physics is treating the material world as a logical pattern - rule-bound computation acting on elements with predicates. So why not believe the reverse? All possible logical patterns could be materially real. And so - in some sense - all logical patterns are real. If a brain imagines a unicorn or Pegasus, then that gives these individuals an ontological-strength claim to existing. They exist as a logical pattern in some set of circuits. The idea has happened materially.

Again, it sort of makes sense. Yet clearly, it is all rather out of whack. There is a dualism that is getting fudged. You have a realm of matter and a realm of form, with nothing properly connecting them.

In the Newtonian view, the laws provided the rules, and so the form of any material change. But where do these laws live? How do they act on the material?

In the computational view, the algorithms provide the rules, and so the form of any informational change. But why does it take such an atypical state of materiality to allow that to be the case? You just won't find computer circuitry appearing naturally in nature. A set of digital circuits wouldn't appear in any world just left on its own without the intervention of some human-scale imagination and a machine constructing culture.

A brain of course evolved. But brains are not machines or computers.

So we have this AP ontology that reduces existence to the syntactical. Everything is a logical pattern. Even physics - because, hey, Newton told us that back about 400 years ago. Thus to exist is this thing of being a material state of affairs - a collection of elements arranged in a pattern and deterministically controlled by a syntax. And then even a logical state of affairs exists as something real because it too is a collection of syntactically-controlled elements - that is thus always implementable as some material state of affairs. And so - the fudge arriving - the gap between the informational version of reality and the physical version of reality can be ignored.

Any blueprint for a machine could be turned into some actual machine. And thus the gap between the logical or informational, and the material or physical, is a fairly theoretical one that ontology can afford to ignore.

It sort of works as a rough approximation of reality. Both Newtonian physics and Turing computation are really great ... for building a world of machinery.

But science of course has moved on, both in physics, but especially in biology. And this is returning us towards a more sophisticated Aristotlelian "four causes" ontology. AP feels so last century now. You are dealing with a historical curiosity is all.

But lipids don't form spontaneously — Metaphysician Undercover

They form membranes spontaneously. You forgot, or never understood, what was said.

By removing that non-physical aspect, intent, from finality, you are left with nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

Godless nonsense I’m sure. :grin:

I agree with most of what you say, by the way.

But it's strikingly at odds with your metaphysics. — csalisbury

It probably isn't given it is a view that comes directly from Stan Salthe, the one person to have had the greatest personal influence on any metaphysical position I might have. Actually, a wise old bird is the best description I can imagine for Salthe.

Of course one's metaphysics can be separated from one's practice. If your passion is [non-metaphysical-x] all the more power to you - but your passion seems to be metaphysics, no? — csalisbury

Hey, I live a life too. I raise a family, play a role in a community, etc. Metaphysics is a hobby. Well, having a sound understanding of how the world actually works - socially and physically - has also been a paying gig. But I'm not some kind of theory nerd who reads dense textbooks all day. Pretty much the opposite all my life in fact. I have to start an argument to get interested enough to check if my facts might be right. :)

As I explained to Read Parfit, both the evidence and the logic indicate that the correct direction for speculation is into the nature of the non-physical, and how the non-physical "soul" brings about the existence of living physical bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

So do lipids have eternal souls that bring about their existence in nature? Tell us more.

You don't seem to understand the scientific version of hylomorphism - the kind where global organisation can form "spontaneously" to meet some finality. The word spontaneous is used here to denote that there is no particular local material/efficient cause that produces the global organisation. Instead there is some generalised finality being served which does the trick.

In the case of lipids forming micelles, the finality is the usual one of entropy minimisation. The lipid molecules have no choice but to find the configuration which is the least energy-demanding possible. And any kind of nudge or fluctuation at all is going to be enough of a local material push to set that chain of dominoes falling to its inevitable conclusion - a micelle arrangement with all the hydrophobic tails tuck up inside, safely far from any surrounding water.

So for a modern biological Aristotelian, we have our notions of final/formal cause that make measurable sense. We have a second law of thermodynamics. We can apply it universally in a way that explains micelles and vesicles as spontaneous necessities. They are forms of material organisation that can't not happen as even the most "non-physical" nudge - the faintest possible accidental fluctuation - is going to tumble everything in that direction. The outcome is almost Platonically pre-destined.

But what is the story for your scholastic Aristotelianism? What about nature does it manage to explain in a way that has any pragmatic use these days?

What does the Bible say about the origin of lipids, and hence micelles and vesicles? Point us to the relevant chapter and verse.

Only thing I would change is the language - not 'accumulating' practical 'wisdom' - but just finding a way to live practically. — csalisbury

Not that it matters, but there were the usual technical reasons for the choice of words. We accumulate wise habits like sedimented states of thought. And a lifecycle view of that kind of habit-taking recognises that it almost inevitably winds up in senescence. We become so fixed in our wise ways that our capacity to learn new particular things dwindles. Every novelty gets assimilated to the existing totality.

So wisdom becomes itself another stage rather than an endpoint. To be completely adapted to the world as you could know it creates its own new vulnerability of being completely surprised by some real environmental shift.

So the best we can do is grow to be pragmatically wise. And that will be such a sediment of habits that we are exposed if circumstances are changed radically. Like happens all the time in nature.

So what was the interpretive context the protein was already situated in? — schopenhauer1

It would have to be some dissipative process that the protein could regulate. So for example, a really primal step would be the appearance of protein that could act as a hydrogenase enzyme switch - convert protons into H2 molecules and vice versa.

So the basic reaction - which happens when acid water meets an iron rich substrate - is there already. All you need is iron atoms bound up in the right protein conformation to begin to have a knob that controls the reaction in a meaningful direction. There is a little bit of something - which can be used in directed fashion to harness energy and begin building complex carbohydrate structures - for evolution to get its teeth sunk into.

It is like a switch floating around in an already active soup. A network of these switches can assemble to create a complexly structured flow - with switch building becoming itself an increasingly complex part of the construction process.

So the first steps are not very "informational" perhaps. They are not the leap to completely symbolic semiosis as we see with RNA. But Peircean semiosis itself recognises grades of semiosis - the three steps from iconic to indexical to fully symbolic.

So the earliest biological structure would have been merely a switch pointing a way in indexical fashion. The interpretive context would be of the most minimal possible kind.

But then what else would you expect right at the beginning?