How about this, information is what is. A geologist can read the earth's history in the rocks. Information is everything in the universe, and our ability to perceive and understand it is growing, but thinking information is what we possess instead of what there is to learn, is a mistake — Athena
You mean the means by which information is transferred and in which it is stored, right? I am referring though to the content of the information.I believe information always has a physical basis, either as frequency or vibration, or the patterning of something. — Pop
Hence, dualism, and Descartes' statement "I think therefore I am (exist)". — Alkis Piskas
The change in a system — Daniel
energy is applied — Daniel
emitted energy — Daniel
amount of change — Daniel
system acts on itself — Daniel
the change it causes on itself through such interaction "is" information — Daniel
What do you mean by "mental content"? Are you identifying the brain with mind or saying that part of the brain is mind? If this is so, it is in conflict with dualism, according to which body (brain) and mind are separate things. So, do you reject dualism?The equivalent expansion of BRAIN(Mental content) is still entirely physical but brings into view the elements of dualism. — Mark Nyquist
I used an equals sign to mean 'is the same as'. It's my take on monism and dualism and might not be consistent with traditional meanings. But it's a better model.Are you identifying the brain with mind or saying that part of the brain is mind? — Alkis Piskas
"Enactivism" is a new term (to me) for an old concept : interaction, communion. And it seems to be relevant to Information Theory, in that it implies inter-relationship, which is the invisible pattern of links between things. It's that pattern of relationships (metaphysical structure) that constitutes Meaning in a mind. Ironically, our mental image of reality is built mainly from those invisible, immaterial connections between physical things. It's as-if, Reason can "see" intangible energy (information) exchanges between nodes (neurons) in a physical pattern (brain). So yes, I'll explore this further.. :nerd:I think the concept of information is relevant to enactivism, and I can not see that anybody has explored it from this perspective specifically? Does enactivism have a definition of information? — Pop
"Enactivism" is a new term (to me) for an old concept : interaction, communion. And it seems to be relevant to Information Theory, in that it implies inter-relationship, which is the invisible pattern of links between things. It's that pattern of relationships (metaphysical structure) that constitutes Meaning in a mind. Ironically, our mental image of reality is built mainly from those invisible, immaterial connections between physical things. It's as-if, Reason can "see" intangible energy (information) exchanges between nodes (neurons) in a physical pattern (brain). So yes, I'll explore this further.. :nerd: — Gnomon
The rough impression is that new form has to fit old form in order to be meaningful, If it does not then it is meaningless, and lost - this is similar to Shannon entropy. I think the concept of information is relevant to enactivism, and I can not see that anybody has explored it from this perspective specifically? Does enactivism have a definition of information? — Pop
To be honest I do not understand quite well what you mean by form. I also don't understand when you say that information is causal. To me, information is not a requirement for anything; instead, the term describes a change in the configuration of a system, a change that results from an interaction. — Daniel
You are opposing the stored information of the cognitivist with the lived dynamics of the enactivist. But then there is the third option - the one supported by the neuroscience - where the coding is predictive.
Whatever is happening out there right now can only make sense because it is judged against a running state of expectation. We anticipated some future, and now something has surprised us. — apokrisis
This is why Pattee makes the careful distinction of the epistemic cut - the division between rate independent information and rate-dependent dynamics - in living organisms.
The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. — apokrisis
In cognitive science,
this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and
that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.” — Joshs
If patterns act as controls , constraints, to effect changes in other entities or patterns such that they deserve the label ‘information’, then a sign and referent , subject and object , representer and represented are implied. — Joshs
- this statement implies a lack of understanding of what information is. Understandably so as it currently is a variable mental construct.In cognitive science,
this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and
that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.” — Joshs
You mean the means by which information is transferred and in which it is stored, right? I am referring though to the content of the information. — Alkis Piskas
I don't want to promote Wittengenstein, but didn't he make a valid "beetle in a box" argument about such private languages? — apokrisis
I am forced to talk in these kinds of cartoon accounts to the extent you wouldn't be able to follow a neurocognitive account in terms of dopaminergic influences on working memory, or the critical role played by the nucleus accumbens in the switching of the brain from a smooth endogenous focus to an abrupt state of alert or surprisal - the classic reorientation response. The aha! that is either then further interpreted as a nasty shock or as a pleasant surprise. — apokrisis
It is not your fault that we aren't speaking at that level. It is simply a fact here. — apokrisis
My argument would be that pleasure and pain are already socially-constructed concepts. They place the discussion squarely in a space of phenomenological accounts, and so bypass my more nuanced efforts to separate the neurobiology from the social constructs.
Are pleasure and pain just "feelings" - qualia? Or are they brains responding in a generalised and coherent fashion to the bare fact of having a state of prediction - a state of ignoring - interrupted by some form of unexpected surprise.
So there are not going to be pain and pleasure producing modules in the brain - centres for the production of Cartesian qualia. That expectation is the patent product of a culture soaked in the representational dualism of Cartesian metaphysics. — apokrisis
Instead, an embodied approach to neurocognitive architecture talks in terms of the basic rationality of coherent pragmatic action. We must start with some system of dialectically-framed definite choices - like the dichotomy of approach~avoid, or ignore~attend. And that general dichotomy we would expect to find distributed in a relevant way over the entirety of the brain's structure. It would be a dialectic that was hard-wired. — apokrisis
The point here is not the detail, but the fact that neuroscience does in fact have stories about what is going on that is now incredibly detailed. These are what make talk about pleasure and pain - Cartesian qualia talk - so quaint and socially-situated. — apokrisis
Who is this "us" when it comes to the embodied brain? All there really is is some collection of interpretive habits with sufficient plasticity to keep learning from its errors of prediction. — apokrisis
You've convinced me that people are right when they say phenomenology is Cartesian in spirit even when it starts dressing up in the clothing of physical embodiment. — apokrisis
It seems obvious that speech involves representations, although maybe not as primitive — frank
That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? — Joshs
One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery. — Joshs
Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa). — Joshs
As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model. — Joshs
Have you ever gotten into it with the Wittgensteinians on here about his critique of the idea of language as representation? If you look up some of the threads, especially those begun by Antony Nickles , you’ll get a good taste of the issue. — Joshs
Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science? — Joshs
You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. — Joshs
Let’s dig into Barrett’s text: — Joshs
Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. — Joshs
Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other. — Joshs
Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning. — Joshs
You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. — Joshs
You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.
How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.
I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around — apokrisis
It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. — Joshs
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