So true, so true. We are all just Grasshopper to your David Carradine, oh wise one. Tell us again how we are all just spinning stories. Tell us again how you sat in disgust as others so much more foolish than you were misrepresenting the holy Dao.

My socks still aren't dry from laughing so hard the last time.

Bless you my child. Take a pew and I'll tell you a story.

Do you think that is something that would be subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by any possible empirical discovery? If so, what kind of discovery might that be? — Wayfarer

Of course. A perpetual motion machine for a start. Plenty of inventors have applied for patents. There have been big controversies like cold fusion.

There is an important place in traditional philosophy for what is beyond measure, — Wayfarer

I'd dispute that by pointing out all ideas are ultimately based on observation of the world. And then Western philosophy in particular got going due to the inspiration provided by mathematics.

So maths showed a deep rationality at work in nature. A necessity and inevitability about ontic structure. But that arose out of the habit of measurement.

First came the rulers, sundials and tally sticks. The Babylonians and Eqyptians were pretty competent in that regard.

Then came the Pythagorean reverence for the pure and absolute order that this habit of measurement eventually revealed.

So yes, Plato talked about the Good that was beyond measure. A lot of theistic talk resulted from the realisation that counting also implied the infinite or uncountable. A sharp definition of what is natural is always going to produce as its own reaction - the folk now saying the highest rung of the ladder is the next one just beyond reach. The supernatural.

The "important place" is about finding some place to ground claims of authority that transcend ordinary human affairs. If I want to tell you what to do - constrain your behaviour for my benefit - then I have to situate the ultimate power on the other side of the finite, put it beyond your reach.

So what is important about the beyond measure? It can't be challenged. It is not testable. It takes away your ability to argue alternatives.

If you want another perspective, you might consider Robert Ulanowicz "ascendency" as a information measure of higher purpose - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency

Ulanowicz was part of the same biosemiotic crowd - Pattee, Rosen, Salthe. But also a convinced Catholic and so motivated to find a theistic spin where he could.

Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.

One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as “organized power”, because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated willy-nilly.

So he was defining a way of measuring the actual negentropic purpose that an organic system could evolve. A measure of action or information in terms of what was meaningful to an organism, as opposed to the simply entropic waste heat that also has to accompany that.

In mathematical terms, ascendency is the product of the aggregate amount of material or energy being transferred in an ecosystem times the coherency with which the outputs from the members of the system relate to the set of inputs to the same components (Ulanowicz 1986). Coherence is gauged by the average mutual information shared between inputs and outputs (Rutledge et al. 1976).

The key as ever is he did derive an equation so that real systems could actually be measured.

And he claimed results....

Originally, it was thought that ecosystems increase uniformly in ascendency as they developed, but subsequent empirical observation has suggested that all sustainable ecosystems are confined to a narrow “window of vitality” (Ulanowicz 2002). Systems with relative values of ascendency plotting below the window tend to fall apart due to lack of significant internal constraints, whereas systems above the window tend to be so “brittle” that they become vulnerable to external perturbations.

This shows scientists do take systems causality seriously and can advance our understanding in terms of actual equations, actual experiments.

Physics provides the base with its foundational work on the equivalence of entropy and information. Biology and neuroscience are now exploiting that by using more complex measures like mutual information or free energy in their new theories.

Because integration in every other phenomena that consciousness apprehends (i.e. the physical events) is radically different in its non-qualitativeness. — schopenhauer1

But that is back to the circularity of how you choose define mind in opposition to matter. You can only arrive at your dualistic conclusion because it is the distinction you have already assumed. Mind and matter are separate, therefore mind and matter are separate, amounts to a tautology, not an argument.

I agree that this dualistic framing is socially acceptable. It is standard cultural practice. But you have to come up with something better than demonstrating that the customary definition of "the world" leaves no room for "experience".

Probably worse that that, your actual claim here winds up being contradictory of your now professed pan-experientialism. Somehow you know that material integration/emergence is non-qualitative. And yet even Whitehead seems to accept that the claims about differentiation and integration reflect what are usually considered material descriptions of the world. He is talking about the physical structure of rocks vs the physical structure of bodies with brains. Otherwise how could we tell a rock isn't integrating information, binding together occasions of experience? Are we to believe its apparent material structure might say its not, but its mental aspects are somehow doing just that despite the materiality not going along on that correlational ride?

This is what is so ghastly about panpsychism. It falls apart under the slightest prod like a mouldering corpse. But ah well.

You use the word, integration, how is this not magical fiat where you are getting quality from quantity? — schopenhauer1

Jeez. You asked me to comment on Whitehead. I just agreed that he at least did argue for standard systems causality - emergent organisation or the birth of autonomy as the result of a symmetry-breaking process of differentiation and integration.

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity

But I did say how it can't explain it: — schopenhauer1

I'm not following your logic. Didn't you cite Whitehead employing a systems-type emergence argument to explain why rocks aren't conscious and yet brains are? One has something extra the other lacks - global constraint to organise and create generalised integration.

So given a basic acceptance of this approach to causation, why can't experience be a materially emergent property?

Yes, I hear you claim a categorical dualistic difference. But I am waiting for your argument that supports that as the necessary conclusion.

Ah, smug snootyism, one of the most satisfying and least valuable philosophies. — T Clark

Zing! (Y)

Panexperientialism. — schopenhauer1

Right then. So how do you deal with the criticism that claiming agency at the level of particles is causal overdeterminism? What use is there in granting choice to particles unless there is evidence of them making choices?

There is this basic problem of claiming a mental aspect to materiality as a brute fact. We can certainly track material being a long way down. But mental being seems to disappear as soon as the complexity of a neural modelling relation with the world disappears. You haven't yet said why emergence can't explain this, only that you "can't see it yourself".

What I said - what I spelled out, in plain view, and plain English, was this: — Wayfarer

I agree with much of that. But you prefaced it with:

That is true, as far as it goes, but it is not the final say. I am working towards the idea that the 'domain of meaning' really is independent of the physical world. It's not dependent on it for its reality, and it doesn't arise on account of anything that happens on the physical level; it's not the product of evolution (which everything is supposed to be). — Wayfarer

So the key difference is that I am arguing that all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative. Thou shalt entropify. Life and mind cannot escape that general constraint (even though there is plenty of freedom to invent within that restriction).

So what bothers me ... is that the universe remains basically dumb stuff. — Wayfarer

It bothers you. You find "dumbness" to be personally distasteful. An imperative to disorder seems a literal waste of time.

I'm in the spirit of facing facts. Let the answers play out as they may. What is it that nature is telling us when we listen closely with an open mind?

Think about your example in terms of Chinese Whispers. What are we to make of the information loss that results from the message - "three-masted Greek boat this PM" - being transmitted down a chain of speakers?

yet you retain the overall materialist view of there being nothing intentional, there being no kind of 'telos'. — Wayfarer

Saying the telos of existence is dissipatory is not saying there is no telos. It is just mentioning a telos which you have some personal distaste for.

I could say this a billion more times and you will still pretend that's the first time you've even heard me say it.

Why is that exactly?

No need to get huffy. — Wayfarer

Just trying to rouse you from your dogmatic slumbers.

What I observed was that, the same information can be represented in a limitless variety of forms and media. So given a meaningful sentence or proposition, if the meaning stays the same, and the representation changes, then the meaning and the representation are separate things. — Wayfarer

Yes of course. Translation is possible. But information theory is about boiling down to the limits of that possibility. At some ultimate level, information gets grainy. You have to worry about whether "all the information" is being converted. And so you have to be able to count information in some physically rooted fashion.

It was a major discovery of the last century that this can be done in a definite fashion. Information and physics can be two sides of the same coin. They can be defined by the same equation, or system of measurement.

You want to talk about the meaning of information and not its mechanics. Its semantics rather than its syntax.

That's fine. There is that conversation to be had. But you can't then employ that to side-swipe the physics of information in passing. You can't pretend to be talking about Landauer and proving his kind wrong by simply making the argument "hey guys, there is also this".

As I argued, you are just wanting to talk about the issue of semantics or interpretance in unplaced fashion. If you can get away with that, you hope no one will notice you pushing meaning away into Platonia. You can make subjectivity safe from reductionist attack.

But science is laying a necessary foundation for a semiotic approach to the fundamental questions about reality. Ignore that if you choose. However that is what is going on.

That's really a form of dualist argument - that the 'information layer' and the 'physical layer' are different things. — Wayfarer

Computers are literal dualism. They are machines. A dualism of hardware and software is the feature that is designed into them. The divorce between the physics and the information is made as perfect as we can humanly imagine.

Then Landauer comes along to remind where this mechanised dualism encounters its material limits. Hey guys, we can create information at no entropic cost (as entropy itself produces some negentropy "accidentally"). But then to erase that information - reverse an accident with deliberate intent - requires us to pay back on this loan with interest. The whole deal has to wind up producing more frictional heat than useful work.

I also don't see how you can have the 'epistemic cut' without an implied duality between the semantic and the physical level. Is what you're trying to establish, a bridge from the physical to the semantic? — Wayfarer

Hell's bells. What do you think the epistemic cut is other than the means to then build a bridge?

To describe something, you have to step off that something. And the epistemic cut is how a division between "self" and "world" is actually established so that "acts of description" become even a thing.

Out of curiosity: How do you generally feel about holistic systems like Hegel's, Schelling's, or Goethe's? Mostly organicism, naturaphiloshopie - the world as a macroanthropos. — Marty

For me, it is a move towards the correct organic causal logic, but then still mired in the ultimate goal of making religion and romanticism come out right. There is a desire to argue for an ultimately transcendental or supernatural response in answer to the apparent brute materialism and personal meaninglessness of Enlightenment physics.

So a tick for the analysis of general causal structure. But then a problem with an unwillingness to just go with the immanence, the naturalism, the self-contained organisational principle, that that causal structure is pointing directly at.

Yes. Mechanical reductionism deserves a good bashing. That is a big motivation for any holist or organicist.

But I trust to science to be clever enough to get to where it needs to go. If science is the one that has the biggest problem with reductionism, it is also in the best position to fix that.

And that isn't an anti-philosophical stance. It simply reflects the reality that science drives any progress in metaphysics these days.

No, I think a switch is different to a mark. A switch does something; a mark means something. — Wayfarer

You are hoping to get away with ordinary language use definitions in the discussion of information theory. Nice.

Feel free to walk right past the careful argument I just made ... the one you claimed your OP was about in citing Landauer on the very issue of the difference between creating information, and creating and erasing information.

Really. The hypocrisy.

It seems to me you can't avoid the element of intentionality or the requirement for a 'meaning maker', if you like. — Wayfarer

I made a careful argument for how a meaning maker is implied by the possibility of there being that next level of meaning. So the physics itself creates the potential for the physics-free in the very fact that dynamism has its limit.

The fact that entropy flows downhill in the Cosmos means that any movement uphill - no matter how accidental it might seem - is negentropic. To the degree that physics is one thing, its "other" is also made counterfactually possible. And if the possible turns out to be the useful - as it is in the case of dissipative structure - then it becomes "Platonically" necessary that it develop as a further habit of nature. Negentropic order must arise if it increases the downhill flow.

Sure, you can just ignore the fact that I made this argument. That is normal human behaviour. I've explained the semiotics of that. But still. Philosophy is about dealing with arguments in systematic fashion. That is suppose to be the special thing about it.

So get back to me when you have something less vague to say than "seems to me that you can't avoid....".

I think you are trying to avoid answering hard questions. How can something be functional in the reality "out there" if there isn't some degree of truth associated with it? — Harry Hindu

I don't like the term "truth". I would use the pragmatic term, justified belief.

Truth is about an absolute claim of certainty. Pragmatism accepts that knowledge can only make claims about a minimisation of uncertainty.

So sure, you can talk about "some degree of truth" as your way of acknowledging the pragmatic approach to knowledge. Truth is the absolute limit. In practice, we can only approach that state of perfect certainty with arbitrary closeness. In the end, you are saying the same thing.

But I prefer to say that upfront and directly. I don't say a truth is (almost) certain. I say the uncertainty of a belief has been measurably minimised.

I am hardly avoiding any hard question. I am stressing the pragmatically provisional nature of any claims to truth or absolute certainty.

And there is no denial of a "world out there" to be read into this epistemic position. It is pragmatism, not idealism.

Look at your post. It is an explanation of reality itself, not the virtual reality in your head, but the one out there, and it's relationship with the virtual reality in your head, right? — Harry Hindu

You are complaining that I am concealing the very point I have attempted to make. I am talking about the triadic sign relation of pragmatism/semiotics. So yes, it is taken as basic that there are three players in the equation.

But the wrinkle is that this is a more generic level of analysis than just the usual me/sign/world relation of indirect realism or standard issue psychology. Sure, for us humans and other creatures with complex nervous systems, it is all about the "subjective self" and the "objective world". We are just talking about useful reality models mediated by a sign relation. Nothing to scare any realists. The world is actually out there ... just as the self is actually in here. >:O

LOL. That should give the naive realist game away surely? It is always just concealed dualism when it comes to its own theory of truth.

Anyway, the triadic sign relation is more generic than just our functional psychological relationship with an actual, real, material, completely physical, world. It doesn't even need to care about there being a real world as it is paying attention to the prior thing which is the very manufacturing of a state of information division. It is talking about how "selves" and "worlds" arise as the two complementary aspects of a sign relation.

Which is why Peircean epistemology can become a model of ontological being itself. It drills down to the very causality by which self~world could arise as a self-organising symmetry breaking.

Let's say that I associate red apples as being delicious and green apples as disgusting. In this instance, I'm relating a color to one of my subjective experiences. — Harry Hindu

Look at how you are having to treat the "self" as real here. You are having to reify this little person in your head doing the looking at the representations, experiencing the qualia. Already an inadequate ontology is going badly wrong, headed off down the path labelled infinite homuncular regress.

It is tough to give up the habit of talking about a reified self at the back of it all. But that is what you need to be able to do.

What is actually going is a process of interpretance where it is the world that is being reified in sign. The world is being rendered as "qualia". And then the "self" doing that is also interpretive reification. The system is taking its own actions as a sign that there must be a homuncular observer sitting in back of it, doing its job.

Of course, "we" never see this "self" who is doing the real experiencing. But we hear people invoking it by name the whole time. People are always talking in terms of I, me, you, we, them, us. People even give each other actual names. So we encounter the signifiers of selfhood constantly. No wonder the self really comes to seem to exist .... like a faux real object. Rocks and selves just become part of reality's collection of objects. If we doubt the existence of "a self", we only have to look in a mirror.

The apples aren't really different colors, except in my head, and they are delicious and disgusting only in my head. But the apples do have different properties that cause a different interaction with the same wavelength of light that gets reflected into my eye and processed by the eye-brain system, which results in me seeing different colors, or interacts with my taste buds and nervous system that results in a taste of deliciousness or distaste for me. — Harry Hindu

Isn't that what I plainly said? The world is what it is. Then we represent it in a way that is useful. What we want to see is reality as it looks through the eyes of our purposes.

Colour sensation arose as a fast route to object discrimination. As with all other sensory processing, it is about hardwiring for pop-out recognition. If you see the world in black and white - simple luminance contrast - then there is quite an information load in sifting out the million shades of grey. Of course you can do it - there is a lot of black and white hardwired pop-out mechanism, like Mach bands, to draw quick and sharp contrast lines around every boundary, group features in coherently guessed fashion.

And yet still, adding sharp hue contrasts takes object perception to another level of quickfire automatic discrimination. You just look at fruit in a bowl and each different object just leaps out as the colour processing removes a vast amount of borderline ambiguity. No one could confuse green for red, or yellow for blue. I mean it is literally impossible to see greenish red or yellowish blue due to the opponent channel processing principles of our primate visual pathways.

Even our own minds don't have properties of color independent of looking at the world. Even closing your eyes, you end up looking at the inside of your eyelids, which is the dark side of your eyelids, which is why it appears black. — Harry Hindu

But I don't see black. I see the photic rustle of retinal neurons seeking missing input. I get the vague impression of swirling lights and coloured dots that are my own endogenous baseline brain activity. So actual phenomenology confirms the constructedness of visual experience. Our brains are so hungry to make a visual world that they will restlessly imagine colours and patterns even in the complete dark. That is, unless we stare into the dark and interpret it as black, ignoring this photic rustle that wants to get in the way of our "reality experiencing".

In this sense, light is a cause of color as much as the existence of an eye-brain system is. — Harry Hindu

The real world might be the cause of our having a way of modelling it. But there is no direct reason why the phenomenology of colour experience should reflect the reality of wavelength energy the way it does.

The only physical requirement or constraint is that the system works. That the signs we form do an effective job of achieving the basic goal - which is quick and sure acts of discrimination. The cause of colour is that colours are "completely obvious". They do the best job of removing visual scene ambiguity. The information we need is just going to pop out.

How is it that your mind has a certain quality, structure, attribute, or property that is persistent and follows certain logical rules that allows it to be functional, but everything else doesn't? If everything else is just a function of the mind, then that would include other people, therefore solipsism would be the case. — Harry Hindu

You keep wheeling out an argument built to attack idealism against my argument based on pragmatism.

I'm not seeking to deny there is a world.

I'm pointing out the degree to which both self and world are an imaginative co-construction - a semotic interpretive relation. The actual world - the Kantian thing in itself - in fact drops out of the picture for us. We end up having as little do with it as we can .... as that then means we are completely plugged into it only in a way that matters most to "us".

Hence why signs are about the usefulness of information loss. Mastery over the world is demonstrated by the growth of our capacity to ignore it. Signs are how we deal with the world only to the extent "we" need to care.

What I'm saying is that there is a two-way street where information flows from the outside to the inside and information flows from the inside (projected by intent) to the outside. — Harry Hindu

I thought I was saying that. You only think I can't have being saying that because you have labelled me as an idealist, even a closet solipsist. Your personal system of sign has been imposed on the reality that is the pragmatist me.

Another good illustration of how this works. :)

The information crosses the boundary between your VR and the real world, back into my VR. If I make your post into what is functional to my purposes, how can you ever expect express yourself at all. How is it that language works at all? — Harry Hindu

Yeah. Minds need to be connected by physical symbols. And a lot of energy gets expended in transferring information. Especially because another mind really only wants to see the world in the way to which it has become accustomed. The other mind always wants an easy life where it can pretty much ignore other minds and deal with anything they might say as a labelled, pre-packaged position that can be given a quick tick. Yes for true, no for false. Trip the memory switch flag and move along.

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. Conflating 'meaning' with 'physical dispositions of parts' seems very question-begging to me. — Wayfarer

Sign or symbol starts where physics leaves off. A physical mark can "mean anything" only because that mark has zero dynamics. There is, in short, an epistemic cut. The normal physics of dissipative decay are suspended. And so the semiotics of information can then arise. A mark can be used to mean anything you like. The mark becomes the coin of this newly emergent realm.

And when I say mark, in practice we are talking about a switch. A binary mark.

I can scratch a mark on a rock - something tough like granite. It meets the requirement of having zero physics (for all practical purposes). I could go away a million years and come back and find it again (given some weathering). So the effective lack of dissipative physics creates the possibility of memory. The mark is timeless, changeless. It is not even located if I can make that exact same mark anywhere I go.

But also we want to be able to erase marks. And just as easily and physics-free as we can create them. That is really getting into a realm of pure information.

Thus the ideal of a binary switch. We have a reversible mark. Just flip the switch. That takes a little bit of effort each time you do it. But otherwise, it is physics-free. The mark (or marks - 0 or 1) are effectively eternal and placeless. Well, there is a material cost in manufacturing the switch itself. But then it is as outside normal physics as a chisel mark on a lump of granite.

So we can see that information relates fundamentally to a zeroing of physical dynamics. Information exists to the degree we can eliminate the ordinary material dissipation that reality seeks to impose. And yet, by the same token, there is some fundamental scale of connection. A switch has to be made. The switch has to be flipped. Some minimum and constant energetic price must be paid to create this parallel abstract or physics-free world (constant as we can't have the cost of switching switches become a final physical fact impinging on the freedom to create and erase states of memory or sign).

And now note how the fact of going physics free is the cause of a crisp digitality, a binary logic. To be able to create and erase a mark freely, at zero cost, gives rise to on and off, yes and no, either or. Definite counterfactuality is the unphysical possibility that arises. The state of a switch virtually demands an explanation. An intelligible choice is implied.

So you don't need to start with a "meaning-maker". The fact that the mark, and then the erasable mark, stand as the limit on ordinary dissipative physics means that an interpreter is implied by the switch's very existence. It is ready-made for interpretation. It is only going to be an accident or two before interpretance actually gets going ... if that closes a feedback loop with the physical world where the interpretance is functional.

If the use of the switch is something that increases the physical dynamics of the world - such that there is spare physics to build switches and flip their states - then interpretative states of switching are going to evolve.

This is of course the story at the level of biological, neurological and linguistic information. But your question has shifted to that of personal or autonomous meaning. And so I'm challenging your use of "abstract".

Yes, to go from a physics-determined world to a physics-free world involves abstraction. It is physics that must be abstracted away. Yet still, we can see the impossibility of a complete disconnection. There is a minimal energy dissipation requirement to create and run a set of erasable marks or switches. And then more crucially, the evolution of interpretive systems - systems with meanings - can only happen if those systems are increasing the entropy of the worlds they arise in. There is this basic requirement that shapes the interpretive system from the get-go ... if it is to get going.

So while one can marvel at the freedom of the human mind to spin any kind of fiction, or entertain apparently unlimited personalised meanings and abstracted notions, the whole show remains rooted in the real world physics. In the long run or on the microscale, it comes back to paying for this unphysical freedom. You won't get far scientifically or philosophically in pretending it isn't.

So have you decided what you are defending? Is it correlationalism or panexperientialism?

You are missing the point. Yes, the mind needs to relate to the world functionally and so its beliefs need to be "true". But that correctness is in relation to the mindful organism's purposes, not the truth of the thing in itself. So what we perceive are the signs of reality. We want to make "our" reality - our umwelt - easy to see.

So you talk about the information contained in cause and effect. If wavelength energy is cause, why should it look like hue as its effect? Or why should a fragment of an organic molecule smell like a rose? Why should vibrating air sound like tinkling or grating noise?

The way we read information into the world seems pretty arbitrary if we are to take your simple cause and effect view that demands perception is somehow veridical of how the physics really is, rather than as the useful way we interpret it - the way we make the world easy to see in terms of our evolved sets of interest.

Oh that's right, you are going to follow the Daniel Dennett routine of denying that mental states exist, but then never explaining the illusion itself. — schopenhauer1

As usual, when you are under pressure to defend your claims, you divert to ad homs like eliminative materialism. Telling.

I don't see how "reality is information" necessarily entails idealism. — Harry Hindu

It doesn't. That is my point. And so it is ironic that some scientist are going overboard with the idealism.

Minds process information, which has to exist prior to being processed. — Harry Hindu

That is where I would disagree. Sure it is the usefully simplistic view of what goes on. But my semiotic approach says mind shapes the signs its treats as "information". Out there in the real material world, there is only radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies. The "mind" or brain then does its processing and understands that in terms of colours. It produces its own meaningful symbol that then stands in a mediating relation with the physics.

The primate mind in particular can see the red fruit that is ripe vividly against the backdrop of the green foliage that is of less interest. Well, there has to be some kind of evolutionary explanation for why our primate ancestors dropped a retinal pigment while living their nocturnal existence and then hastily regrew one once they started wandering about the landscape during the day.

So the mind is a virtual reality - reality as it is meaningful in terms of our interests. We don't just mindlessly process the physical information that is "out there". From the get go, we are symbolising the possibilities of that world in terms that are functional for us.

This means that when physicists talk about information and biologists talk about information, it isn't exactly the same.

But then, if we know how it is not the same, that is how we can know the way it is then the same. A mindless theory of information can be the basis for grounding the higher order mindful one.

Ah religion. Aren't you always popping up every 10 seconds to tell us it's a "just so" story like science?

Yep. The story has to be told in a way that slips God and soul-stuff in through the back door even when talking about causality from a systems perspective. The Church was hardly going to take the set-back of the Enlightenment lying down.

Before I answer your questions, can you first read the quote I had earlier to T Clark about Whitehead's process philosophy. I'd like to know your take. — schopenhauer1

Sure. In strangulated language, Whitehead is making the essential systems argument. The whole shapes its parts, the parts (re)construct that whole. You have a causal interaction in which the material system forms a functional relation. A tree turns photons (as free energy) into some material structure that is meaningful to "it" as an autonomous lifeform. And you can situate that tree within the physical world where that also makes sense. A tree is like a more sophisticated tornado in that it is a form that survives as entropy "blows through it".

So Whitehead is trying to employ a systems ontology. We even get a nod towards triadicism.

The tree is the global entity that embodies a purpose - it is the general habit that "prehends". The photon energy is then the "datum" - the external material flow it seeks to regulate. And that photon energy gets turned into the material structure needed to compose the tree, maintain that regulatory structure.

So you have the basic causal logic that describes a hierarchically-organised system - the kind of structure that emerges dissipatively in nature as a material process.

But then Whitehead just pastes "mental" over everything in unwarranted fashion. Everything gets labelled as "experiential".

As I've said, you take it obvious that the "mental" exists. You know that because you believe you know that there is also this other thing called the "material". The material only explains half of reality - by definition. The mental is the half that it does not explain - again by definition.

So there is this baked-in ontology to be blindly applied. The existence of a dualism is taken at face value. The game therefore becomes to shoehorn that division back into nature at some fundamental level. And Whitehead plays that game. No need to justify that photons have experience. They must do once ontic dualism is presumed.

The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; — schopenhauer1

Here is the essence of the systems view. The fundamental dichotomy it is talking about is differentiation~integration. So local degrees of freedom in interaction with global states of constraint.

As a causal logic, it might be hard to get your head around. But it is basic to neuroscience understanding. It was what Gestalt psychology demonstrated. As a process, awareness is about doing both together. Integrating and differentiating. Awareness is the high contrast "representational" state that forms by lumping and splitting at the same time. The sharper the supporting detail, the more vivid the coherent whole.

So yes, the functional logic is all about this interaction between two complementary directions of action - integration and differentiation, or the emergence of constraints and degrees of freedom. Normal causal analysis gets hung up on wanting to argue "either/or". But systems causality is irreducibly "both".

However it is a functional logic that is agnostic about whether it is applied either to the "mental" or the "physical". It is prior to the kinds of dualistic pronouncements that reductionist thought is wont to make.

You have already decided reality is ontically divided into two disconnected categories. But I say wind that back. Start again and show your working out. Consider that the problem here is a product of your analytic tool kit. There could be a holistic understanding of causality - one that is triadic, and indeed semiotic - which avoids the strife that dualism creates.

So Whitehead is annoying just for his strangulated language. But he is grasping after a systems causality - just like many others were in his day. However he then just slapped dualism all over this half-articulated picture.

Which of course is why he is remembered. Giving into dualism like that suits many folk's agendas, especially the theistic and anti-science ones.

But in so doing, it also risks losing any relationship with reality. That is why Jim Baggott's book, referenced in the above blog post, is sub-titled 'Farewell to Reality' — Wayfarer

Of course I agree that an idealistic understanding is just as bad as a materialistic one. I'm just pointing out how many physicists are indeed "going over to the other side" and taking information as the literal basis of being. You have scientists actually saying they believe the Universe actually is a hologram, rather than merely like a hologram.

It is the new Platonism.

But I'm still pushing the middle road metaphysics of semiotics. So it is important to that project that we are seeing matter and information being formally granted equal causal weight. Or even more importantly, that we can actually measure both sides of the epistemic cut in the same coin. We can establish the symmetry relation which connects them ... and thus the symmetry relation which pan-semiosis can break.

Actually my point is really rather prosaic. It is simply this: that ideas are not material, but real in their own terms. They are not composed of material units of any kind, and can't be derived from physics, but exist in their own right, and on their own terms. — Wayfarer

Yes. You are concerned with semantics. And from there, with minds, observers, interpretance, spirit, values, etc.

This is hardly a prosaic concern. I agree that even semiotics is not much cop unless in the end it really has something to say about complex lived experience.

But biological life certainly looks well explained by biosemiosis. That is killing the accidentalism of Darwininan reductionism as surely as it is killing the vitalism of spiritualism or theism. Both the brute materialist and the brute idealist has lost out as we come to understand life as a semiotic process.

So now we are seeing physics and cosmology also turning semiotic - or at least building up an information theoretic position to balance the materialistic one. And mind science is also turning semiotic in overt fashion (it always was, but now it has better "physical models" as a result of advances in information theory/thermodynamic theory).

But this wrapped up could be the very experientialness of matter itself, perhaps. I don't see how it can be wrapped up in any other way other than being a strict dualist- the mystical kind you don't like. — schopenhauer1

So explain to me how this story of correlation actually works then. If the material becomes convolutedly organised in a way that produces emergent organisation and global properties, why does the mental follow suit? Is it being caused to do so by the material changes. Or does it just like going along for the ride for some reason?

Classic correlationism is monadology. So what is this new version that you appear to be suggesting exactly?

And if instead you are claiming panexperientialism or some kind of dual aspect monism, then maybe you can now claim a free ride. But you get into other kinds of idiocy. If experience is a property of matter, then in what sense does it do anything (as properties are normally about the capacity for doing things). Panpsychism becomes just epiphenomenalism by another name unless it is causing matter to behave. So your correlationism looks right out of the window if you want to grant actual occasions the power of agency.

It's not up to me to make sense of the many positions you want to dance between. Although I would agree that none of the ones you have indicated so far in fact bear much critical examination.

Actually that is the opposite- if panpsychism has it, they are a neutral monism of sorts. — schopenhauer1

Yes. Of course. :-}

And I think that panpsychism is immanent. — schopenhauer1

Making the dualism immanent is not a good solution. Naturalism is about nature as a coherent unity.

Um, since when did correlation mean emergence? — schopenhauer1

You did it again. As soon as you feel pinned down to a specific position, you switch the story.

You just about grudgingly tied the correlational story of this mind stuff that tracks the fortunes of the matter stuff - as it becomes complexly organised and shows new "emergent" features - then immediately pull back from the causal implications.

You almost admitted to the causal link - in saying the mental is somehow "wrapped up" in the physical, and therefore more than merely just some "correlation". Now you have to rescue your ghost in the machine by a hasty retreat.

Mind and matter can travel in the same bus, eat in the same restaurants, but never actually be found in the same section of those places. There must be no actual mixing of the races.

Though you do not account for mental events, just how their physical correlate interacts in its realm. Or you jump over the gap and presume the very thing to be explained, thus conveniently skipping that hard part. — schopenhauer1

So you will repeat to your last dying breath. I get that.

But here I am asking you to show the firm ground to your own questioning. Not having much luck so far.

What do you mean by deflationary? Reductionist? — schopenhauer1

Naturally immanent and not transcendently supernatural.

I just gave Marty some references on the kind of emergence that goes beyond reductionist modelling still. But if you mean just references to the reductionist modelling of emergence, then there are tons of really good popularisations.

James Gleick's Chaos and Roger Lewin's Complexity are still great.

Isn't the critical fact of emergence that the emergent properties cannot be predicted from or traced back to, the properties of the constituents? The properties of water can be, at least in this case. — T Clark

That was the original holist proposal really, back around the 1920s level of understanding with guys like Broad, Smuts, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan. Back before there were mathematical models that could predict - at least by simulation - emergent properties as the result of collective behaviour.

So back when modelling was stuck with simple linear equations, then that kind of emergence might as well be magic. Properties may as well pop out as there was no maths that could predict them.

But then with computers and non-linear maths becoming a practical thing, we have had an explosion in the modelling of such emergence. In a sense, the reductionists have claimed back that part of what holism was trying to steal away. :)

It is hard to recommend non-technical books. But there are plenty of systems science or hierarchy theory texts. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory is one. Stanley Salthe's Development and Evolution is another.

There are plenty of popularisations, like Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics and its follow-ups, Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Yet they tend to miss the mark for me.

The trick here is that reductionists are right about their version of emergence. That has to be given credit. But then there is still the larger picture which is the kind of emergence that hierarchy thinkers or semiotic theorists would be talking about - where top-down constraints shape the parts.

The entire world would instead operate instead as a totum, to where it determines it's parts as a relationship with itself. — Marty

This is the more sophisticated view.

Unfortunately reductionists can point to the liquidity of water or the magnetic field of an iron bar as simple reductionist models of emergence, or collective behaviour.

H2O molecules already have weak electrostatic forces due to their asymmetrical form - a faint polarity. And so when a gaseous collection of molecules cools enough to let this faint attraction become the dominant organising force, you get the new property of a liquid state. But that faint attraction was "always there". So no mystery as to why the liquid state emerges as a global property.

So reductionism has a good theory of emergence in terms of pre-existing, but very faint, material properties. This then allows reductionism to ignore a bigger story involving top-down causes that actually shape those lower level properties.

So "emergence" turns out to be more than just one kind of thing. A thread about emergence has to make it clear which variety it might have in mind.

this is similar enough to somebody’s comment about “that which breath’s life into the maths”. — javra

Worth mentioning that was Mr Blackholes, Stephen Hawking: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.”

One relevant issue that I find interest in is the ontic possibility of novel information creation and information erasure. As it happens, there are some physicists who uphold the possibility that information itself might be both created and erased within Black Hole gravitational singularities (to be clear, non-allegorically). — javra

Landauer was the one who made the information erasure point. Computation is physical because it doesn't have to cost energy to create information. But an entropic price has to be paid to erase it. That is a fundamental constraint which shows information and matter are connected in a deep fashion. Even a Matrix simulation can't be a perpetual motion machine as the laws of thermodynamics apply.

Then black holes are about information loss - so only erasure in being lost over an event horizon. With black holes, we seemed to have a violation of conservation principles. But then the solution was found in the holographic principle. The information can be considered as physically encoded on a surface ... the event horizon. And so it can be recovered ... re-radiated in scrambled fashion, but nevertheless, returned.

Some really crazy ideas turned out to have deeply meaningful consequences. They made predictions which we can observe.

So - so far - conservation of information is proving a powerful principle, just as conservation of matter was.

But then where does that leave spontaneity, creativity, novelty? Is this ontic structural realism the new determinism? Or is material cause - the ineffable thingness that is missing from the formal account - now the pure indeterminacy, the pure uncertainty, the pure notion of "an action", that lurks just out of sight of the phenomenology?

Is material cause now the ghost in physics's formal machinery?

Yes, the relation of things in logical space gives rise to facts, — Posty McPostface

The shift is from things to relations. The things drop out of the picture to leave only the relations.

So it is a shift from material cause thinking to formal cause thinking, which reflects the reality that Reality boils down to its organisation, its structure.

Hence ontic structural realism as the new metaphysical bandwagon - the response to the information theoretical turn in physics.

Of course that then makes "things" or "materiality" rather mysterious. The materialists will cry in reply, the existence of relations surely implies the existence of things to be related? The same old, same old.

But really, what we can be sure of is the existence of patterns or structures. The nature of "the material" in fact is ineffable, beyond our reach.

The ironies keep compounding here. Physics is moving towards a more rigorous epistemology and that flushes out the lingering materialism in most folk's thinking. The old habit that can't be broke.

So, in essence, we seem to be talking about epiphenomena. — Posty McPostface

No. The point is that phenomena are the only thing we can talk about. We have to start from experience itself (which is prior even to a mind~world distinction - the debate between the idealists and realists).

Materialism - as reductionist atomism - made all reality a composite of individuated "thingness". Substantial being was made basic. Relations then became accidental. Form and purpose were not real as causes.

As the basis of physics theories. that was great up until quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then it started to get very sticky as the basic holistic contextuality of nature became grimly apparent.

Now physics has switched over to a more idealist mode of description - information. It no longer makes any real presumptions about the nature of matter. Instead it freely speculates about the "fundamental constituents" in terms of pure forms. Particles could be vibrating strings, or excitations in the geometry of a network, or knots in spacetime dimensionality.

In other words, physics now seeks the pure calculus of relata. A particle isn't a material string. It is instead the symmetries that a string can encode which are now the basis of the modelling of reality.

So for a long time, pattern, form, purpose, universals - all these things were treated as epiphenomenal. But now we are explaining reality in terms of these phenomena - patterns we perceive and can understand "directly".

If reality is about knot theory, or string theory, or braid theory, we can see directly the reasons for the patterns we experience. It is the generic form involved that explains things. We no longer have to invoke some mysterious "uncuttable material constituent particle".

The "rot" started with quantum mechanics. Is reality about particles or waves, or even wavicles, or wave packets? Physics says all we can really know is what we see. Sometimes reality has the pattern that we would derive from the idea of a particle, sometimes that derived from the idea of a wave.

So science is treated by Wayfarer especially as guilty of arch-materialism. He is always searching for examples of scientists who can best confirm that opinion.

And yet here with the turn to information theoretic physics, we have science that is actually now more phenomenological, more idealistic. Thermodynamics even endorses teleology now that it has advanced to talk about the Cosmos as a dissipative structure (see Layzer).

Namely, that information is the description of the arrangements of particles or 'things'. Meaning is derived from the sum total of the arrangement of 'things' in space, which are facts. — Posty McPostface

So it is an ontology of relata rather than things. That is why the talk is of counting degrees of freedom instead of particles or things.

Yeah sorry. The comment was directed at the OP. Your Matrix remark highlighted for me that the literal view is the modern version of idealism.

As to death and the Matrix, a problem literal informatics would seem to have is that it undermines conservation principles. Physicists would want an it from bit Universe in which the information is a conserved quantity. So the death of a character would have to be a disassembly of bits which could always be rearranged - resurrected in theory.

In the end, informational bits or material bits, the bigger ontological issues remain the same. More evidence of why there is an essential equivalence. Idealism always ends up having to "work" just like physicalism. We see that with panpsychism for instance.

Another irony here.

I can't see how 'information' can be understood as something which is metaphysically simple. — Wayfarer

Probabaly the best foundational definition of information - from Bateson and cybernetics - is that it is a difference that makes a difference. So meaningfulness in a nutshell.

Then to quantify such a quality, you need to be able to measure that in terms of what it is not. You need a way of also counting the differences that don't make a difference. You need a metric of the meaningless.

Hence the close connection with physical entropy modelling. You need to be able to count the total number of possible material bits - all the differences that could have been signal rather than noise - so as then to be able to give a value to what turns out to be signal, and not noise.

This is what science is so good at. Taking a basic metaphysical intuition and deriving a system of measurement that then makes the ontological commitments exact and testable. A way of thinking becomes fully worked out.

You are very focused on the issue of "where has meaning gone?". You eavesdrop on the scientists - a librarian's account! - and say clearly they are talking about meaningless bits. They are measuring physical noise and not conceptual knowlege or semantic facts.

But what science is doing is defining difference itself as the baseline for then measuring differences that make a difference.

Once you have Boltzmann entropy, then you have a secure basis for more meaningful thermodynamic models - like dissipative structures which are negentropic and serving a purpose.

Once you have Shannon information, you can then build theories of meaning based on more sophisticated metrics like mutual information or free energy reduction.

Science ain't dumb. It knows that information theory isn't a theory of meaning. It is about establishing a secure foundation for that by being able to measure what is instead the meaningless. Once you have cleared the ground, the real work can begin.

I confess I am helpless against this level of rhetorical idiocy. Reason has completely departed the scene.

This is somehow amusing to me. In terms I think even preadolescent kids might understand, it all amount to: who has the metaphysical rights to the ontology portrayed in the movie “The Matrix” (sans the part of being unplugged from the Matrix)? The physicalists or the non-physicalists? — javra

Hmm. It is ironic that a lot of you guys are reacting in horror at physicists who might take it literally that reality is just a pattern of information. It is after all just a modern version of idealism. You have physicists who are denying materialism and saying things are pure information. Reality is even observer created if you go to the quantum extreme.

So here we have science prepared to talk openly about a concrete idealist ontology. And everyone gasps in shock. No they must be wrong. Matter is obviously real. The Matrix could only be a simulation hanging off an electrical plug.

So in one breath, you seem to accept physical to mental causality, but say emergence as a mechanism feels too mysterious. Well that's a good place to start I would say as I agree that "emergence" of the reductionist "pop out global property" kind is rather too simplistic and magical. That is exactly why I then take a systems science or semiotic approach to accounting for the causality involved.

But then in the next breath you are quite taken by panexperientialism, an utterly different ontology. That jumping about from one explanatory basis to another is what makes it hard to have a discussion. It allows you always to deny any attempt to provide a deflationary account of "the mind" as you reserve the right to invoke mystical being at any point.

. Despite an enormous evolutionary selection that must exist for the property of prediction, I think that imagination has great difficulty arising through cause and effect coupling or any other mechanical definition. — MikeL

Not really as the way the brain "computes" is based on generating a forward model of the world. It attempts to predict its inputs, imagine the world as it is just about to be in the next instant.

Google Bayesian brain theory to get the up to date neuro picture.

So imagination is the basis for awareness, not a difficult to explain bolt-on. We are always expecting something, and so that is how we are capable of being surprised. There is a forward projection to be contradicted.

Semiotics also has the problem of resolving dual conflicts. Lets give our bacterium some more flagella. What happens when the left and right chemoreceptor light up at the same time? The only reasonable argument I can see would be the claim that there is never simultaneity in effector-response nor ever an exact equal weighting of two things, as simultaneous as they may appear. A see-saw with a 100kg weight placed on both sides at the same time will not move. — MikeL

Why would you invent difficulties just to make the argument difficult? It seems an odd habit of thought you have here. Would evolution favour a set up that doesnt work?

But anyway, your left and right chemoreceptors would seem to be on the front end, not the back end, so there would still be a hardwired asymmetry. You haven't yet managed to imagine Buridan's Ass.