Without experience, human beings would not be as they are and they would not be able to function in the man-made reality we have created. Higher-level animals learn from each other and this is essential to their survival. Humans have created huge vocabularies that make it possible to think about many things, such as what is the difference between reason and empirical thinking, and a great ape can not, and would not, get involved in such a discussion. — Athena

Logic, maths, deductive knowledge don't need experience. 1+1 = 2. You know it instantly without having to experience anything.

All humans are mortal
Socrates is a human
===============
Therefore Socrates is mortal

You don't need any experience to come to the conclusion in that syllogism.
Try to get that across to apes or cats.

I am really curious about how well the Taliban will do when they have control of Afghanistan because I don't think they know much about the modern world and things like managing the utilities of a nation so that everyone has clean water and electricity. Organizing a nation requires more than fighting for power and the Taliban have a lot to learn about the modern world. Humans are born only with the capability of learning, not with the ability to reason that must be learned and their ability to learn has a window of time. Referal children will never be as normal people if their windows of learning close before they are found. — Athena

I don't watch TV, or read the news at all lately, so am not aware of the current affairs of the world. I just read the old books whenever have some free time these days. Just wish and hope all goes well, and am sure it will.

Where do you get your information about the original meaning of logos? I am looking for a reason to believe you know what you are talking about, versus you just heard something and came up with an idea you believe is true. The reason it rains is not because a god says rain, fall from the sky. The reason for rain is more complex than that, and that is logos. — Athena

Just looked up my Dictionary of Philosophy for "Logos". It says - Greek, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion.

It derived from the verb "lego" which denotes "I say".
Therefore, I say and confirm that Logos comes from language.

Or encode the same information in completely different material forms. I had a monster thread on that some time back. — Wayfarer

Are we encoding information or are we encoding matter?
If I start with a brain state(information) and wish to communicate that brain state to person(2) the process looks like this:
Person(1) INFORMATION--->Encode matter,send-->PHYSICAL MATTER--->Person(2)Receive, Decode matter--->INFORMATION transfered to Person(2).

So if we encode matter, send matter, and decode matter we have communication of information.
Different matter works. Different information content works.

.

What you mean is, to put it in terms you can picture — Wayfarer

Yes, that is right. The process is Form > interaction > change > form > interaction > change..........on and on. I am assuming neural correlates to all information. Form would be a state of integrated information of mind, and the information content would be represented by the amount of change in the neural state.

This is similar to the Shannon model, where information content is measured as the difference of the normal state, as compared to the state containing information. We can also say information is the amount of change to the normal state. The white of this page is the normal state, punctuated by lettered disturbances to it that are information. But then, the patterning of the letters and grammar and concepts contained within also contains a normality punctuated by conceptual disturbances, as experienced in the recipient of the message.

and the information content would be represented by the amount of change in the neural state. — Pop

I like this. Good point. I think you are saying input or a message sent may not be fully received.

That seems agreeable with the notion of logos and when you study the information that is in the form, you can be conscious of it, right? — Athena

Yes. without that form, there would be no information. It is the fact that something has form, that allows us to interact with it. The form changes the patterning of our brain somehow. This change that the form imposes on our brain patterning, at a subconscious level, embeds us in a meaningful exchange with the object. If mind is a state of integrated information, then a disturbance to that state is more information.

If we accept that information is fundamental, then this process of mutual change between systems ( objects, people ) is what happens in every transaction that can possibly happen in the universe at any scale. Information enables the interaction of form - says to me: because something has form it is able to interact with another something that has form. A change in that form is information.

If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning.

and the information content would be represented by the amount of change in the neural state.
— Pop

I like this. Good point. I think you are saying input or a message sent may not be fully received. — Mark Nyquist

Yeah. Maybe so. In some sense a mind kind of sits behind a sensing / receiver unit, noting differences in its state. The differences are information. Normally the differences noticed or focused on are the unexpected differences.

I think the important thing to understand is that we are not describing, nor can we describe the actual details of neurobiology, but we are conceptualizing what might be the case. IIT uses this approach. By contrasting differences in mental state, we can isolate the new information content. Hey - you did this in an earlier post. :smile:

There is no evidence of an immaterial information anywhere?
— Pop
I assume you mean physical evidence. Yes, there is. Emotions are responses in the form of wavelengths (physical) produced by non-material information (e.g. thought). — Alkis Piskas

Sorry, I missed this. There is no agreement as to what emotions are. There are many theories. One thing that is generally agreed upon is that emotions are different to information in that they cannot be stored like information can.

In my understanding emotions are the force we feel that causes a system to integrate. The effect of forces can be described, but the forces themselves are invisible. So you got me there, forces may indeed be immaterial. :up: :smile: In QM they are mediated by Bosons, so maybe you haven't got me entirely?

If I start with a brain state(information) and wish to communicate that brain state to person(2) the process looks like this: — Mark Nyquist

I don't accept that ideas or sentences or the like are 'brain states' or can be understood in those terms. I think pain, and suchlike, might be usefully thought of as 'brain states', but not ideas. I think that materialist way of understanding it is based on a fallacious understanding of what representation amounts to. It can't be said that some particular disposition of bodily states 'represents' an idea, it is mistaking the meaning of 'representation'. Accordingly I think that this:

I am assuming neural correlates to all information — Pop

is also mistaken.

The fallacy behind all of this, or the point that is not being seen, is that it relies on a mental image of being a subject in a world, and 'the world' being 'represented' in the brain/mind of the subject in terms of impressions. That comes straight from John Locke, whose representative realism is so deeply part of our day-to-day culture that we don't recognise its source.

I don't accept that ideas or sentences or the like are 'brain states' or can be understood in those terms — Wayfarer

So what's the starting point for encoding and are you using the correct grammar when you write 'encoded information'. I read encoded as a modifier.

this question was the subject of a previous thread.

infinity is one limit on unbounded counting, and the infinitesimal is its “other”. And it is a reciprocal or dichotomous definition, 1/ infinity = infinitesimal/1. And vice versa.

So counting seems to make sense just as it seems to make sense that a line is a infinite series of points, and every one of those points can still be infinitely divided as just very small intervals. — apokrisis

infinity and the infinitesimal are two poles of the same concept, and that concept depends on a mathematicized view of the natural. The geometric concept of the line is an abstraction that makes possible the notion of measurement and calculability. It is an arbitrary , but useful , abstraction based on actual experience in which there are no lines , no self-identical qualities whose instances can be enumerated infinitely or subdivided infintessimally.

Shouldn’t the answer be ‘both’? It seems to me Peirce is presupposing two states ……(
— Joshs

One more time you want to abandon the internalism that you claim as your thing. Everything must have some monistic ground rather than co-arise as a dialectical process. — apokrisis

lIm not sure what is monistic about ‘interbleeding’ in relation to dialectic. Firstness is a unity. It’s designed that way. It is a monism: this and only this, before, outside of relation and plurality. You can’t have a dialectic without unities ( monisms) that compose it’s poles.

The difference between the poles of your dialectic ( or the in-itself of firstness) and the poles of my interbled unity is that your starting point is inert, dead, static, and only is brought to life by adding a relation to it in a secondary move. Saying it’s vague, fuzzy, dances around or fluctuates doesn’t avoid the problem that it is still treated as an intrinsic thing.


And it’s too late by the time one has added secondness. You’ve already missed a whole universe of intimately changing sense. This intimate sense doesn’t exist to you. It is misread as Romantic qualia , as some abstraction that needs to be reduced to its physical-semiotic basis in a relation between signs and matter. You read my terms as a naive gloss on the real underlying explanation.



For my part, I find your account to be absolutely true in terms of what it is trying to do and the way it improves on older models. I don’t want to refute or disprove it. Nothing of the kind. I just think that what your model is taking as the rock bottom irreducible basis of the physical, biological and cultural world (and yes, of the extant empirical accounts , I do think panbiosemisis is the most satisfying effort to synthesize these three realms ) is hiding within its terms a rich process of meaningful change that is invisible to you. As long as you stay within the bounds of the physical and biological, you’re not going to find any tightly articulated alternative models to seriously challenge your account.

However, at the level of the psychological and the cultural , your account has a lot of competition from enactivist, poststructuralist , hermeneutic, social constructionist , phenomenological and deconstructive alternatives which all view language as self-referential rather than pointed toward an ‘out there’.


The brand of realism that you and Peirce subscribe to would not be possible without nailing down an inert( inert not because it isn’t vague or fluctuating , but because it is intrinsic before it is relational ) if temporary, ground. It is what makes it possible to talk about a real world thar exists independently of any individual’s account of it. Once you begin questioning the basis of this ‘ independence’, intrinsic entities like firstness lose their stability of sense , and the whole enterprise of third person science becomes a social game of pragmatic preferences divorced from any connection to what ‘really exists out there’. Because now it appears that what ‘really exists’ only exists as a node in a language game, and the ‘really out there’, is just one more game.

Coming to such a realization is why the Wittgensteinian notion of language game affected philosophers of science like Kuhn , Rorty and Feyerabend the way it did, why putting language front and center became their obsession, and why this treatment of language is incompatible with that of Peirce and Popper, for whom falliblism and falsifiability presuppose that the criteria of a method of approach to scientific truth , if not a guaranteed arrival at an ultimate endpoint,
are secured by the fact that there is indeed something intrinsic to nature beyond our local, contingent conversation about it.

At this point in our conversations , I’m thinking we are echoing the Putnam-Rorty, Popper-Kuhn debate.
Tell me how Pierce and Popper defend their realism from Kuhn.

Your enformy is fine for your purpose. I need something simpler. Something in a few words. — Pop

How about : "Enformy is Energy with a purpose"?
Or, “Enformy : the motivating and guiding force behind the self-organizing process of Natural Evolution".

Most scientists and experts in technical fields assume that Energy is random, until humans take control of it and direct it for their own purposes. But, it is definitely steered by natural laws, such as Thermodynamics. Also, a more philosophical and cosmological view finds that, on the whole, causal Energy is following a long-term trajectory toward some teleological destination (Time's arrow ; Heat Death?). But all we know about that "Omega Point" is that it lies "out there" in the future somewhere. But we can speculate, as Teilhard de Chardin did, by interpreting the progression of evolution in vaguely Christian terms.

Personally, I don't buy the Judeo-Christian story of our world, as a way to produce faithful sycophantic slaves to serve the needs of the mercurial king-of-the-world. But, the philosophical notion of an intentional First Cause seems to be unavoidable. So, I interpret the "purpose" of our world in terms of PanDeism. Which doesn't claim to know "the mind of God". And. in which intelligent creatures are localized intentional causes. I'm not sure what the overall purpose is, but the Anthropic Cosmological Principle seems to be a good guess. Perhaps, it's the process, running the program of ongoing creation, not The End that really matters. :nerd:


Teleology :
Philosophical term derived from Greek: telos (end, goal, purpose, design, finality) and logos (reason, explanation). Philosophers, from Aristotle onward, assumed that everything in the world has a purpose and a place in the scheme of history. As a religious concept, it means that the world was designed by God for a specific reason, such as producing sentient beings to stroke His ego with worship & sacrifices.
1. In Enformationism theory, Evolution seems to be progressing from past to future in increments of Enformation. From the upward trend of increasing organization over time, we must conclude that the randomness of reality (Entropy) is offset by a constructive force (Enformy). This directional trajectory implies an ultimate goal or final state. What that end might be is unknown, but speculation abounds.
2. Teilhard de Chardin postulated that God created the world to evolve toward perfection, eventually to become god-like. He called that end-state the Omega Point.
3. In Chris Langan's CTMU theory, the term "unbounded Telesis" refers to the infinite creative power of God for "planned progress".
4. <<By "spirit" Montesquieu meant "causes" from which one could derive "laws" that govern [physics & societies] . . . The "necessary relations" derived from the nature of things.>> Shermer, The Moral Arc
[ see EnFormAction, Energy; see Vector diagram at left; see "Teleonomy" below: see Post 31 ]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page20.html

Anthropic Cosmological Principle :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropic-Cosmological-Principle-Oxford-Paperbacks/dp/0192821474

I am assuming neural correlates to all information
— Pop

is also mistaken.

The fallacy behind all of this, or the point that is not being seen, is that it relies on a mental image of being a subject in a world, and 'the world' being 'represented' in the brain/mind of the subject in terms of impressions. That comes straight from John Locke, whose representative realism is so deeply part of our day-to-day culture that we don't recognise its source. — Wayfarer

Well I would love to hear how it could work without neural correlates. And at the same time what is the purpose of all this energy zapping baggage between our ears?

Yes, monster thread. 48 pages. I was wondering about that so thanks for the link. I'll take a look. Thanks.
Your grammer is fine. I think you wrote what you meant.

The difference between the poles of your dialectic ( or the in-itself of firstness) and the poles of my interbled unity is that your starting point is inert, dead, static, and only is brought to life by adding a relation to it in a secondary move. Saying it’s vague, fuzzy, dances around or fluctuates doesn’t avoid the problem that it is still treated as an intrinsic thing. — Joshs

You are not getting it, just continuing to impose your own frame of reference on a discussion of Peirce and a triadic systems logic.

However, at the level of the psychological and the cultural , your account has a lot of competition from enactivist, poststructuralist , hermeneutic, social constructionist , phenomenological and deconstructive alternatives which all view language as self-referential rather than pointed toward an ‘out there’. — Joshs

You continue to fail to get it. I've repeatedly said self and world are co-constructed through the semiotic relation that is a code mechanism like language. The use of language brings out those two things as opposed poles of "being".

The danger of that is the social construction of self and world as each other's Hegelian "other" can then so easily be collapsed into the doubled monism of Cartesian dualism. World and self become two varieties of substance - the error panpsychics then compound by making them two properties of one ultimate material.

So yes, there may be "competition". But it is muddle-headed to the degree it mires itself in dualism and monism.

Pluralism is no problem for the triadic view, just as unity is also not a problem. The dialectic provides the unity that reduces one-ness and many-ness to being two complementary limits on the possibilities of existence. You can approach either pole asymptotically, but never - in ying-yang fashion - arrive at one or other limit, and thus exceed the world of the boundedly possible.

So you are arguing PoMo's case for the plural, the arbitrary, the individual - the case it must make to distinguish itself from its natural "other". That other is identified as a metaphysics which instead gravitates to the other pole that is univocal or in other ways prescriptive, constraining, hierarchical, etc, etc.

I get it. This is a cultural war that became entrenched after the unifying forces of the scientific enlightenment triggered their own natural dialectical response in a Romanticism that sought its identity in being rationality's "other".

So PoMo is a historical inevitability. As Scientism grows as one politicised pole of cultural being, its opposite pole must also become a camp of thought to right the balance - right the balance in terms of being able to measure a distance from each other, or preferably a chasm, that leaves two sides which are "poles apart". :lol:

It is amusing to see this playing out even in the debate over how language is used to socially construct the semiotic sense of being a self in its world - Vygotsky batting for Hegelian/Enlightenment unity and Bakhtin for PoMo pluralism....

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254081081_Contrasting_Vygotsky%27s_and_Bakhtin%27s_approaches_to_consciousness

The brand of realism that you and Peirce subscribe to would not be possible without nailing down an inert( inert not because it isn’t vague or fluctuating , but because it is intrinsic before it is relational ) if temporary, ground. — Joshs

You still don't get it. Or rather, you must pretend that every dialectical claim is a dualism yearning to become a monism in disguise.

Your hope is to lift the veil of opaque triadic texts and find the same old reductionist machinery that places you back in familiar territory. You can take a firm stand with your comrades by standing squarely on PoMo ground and start throwing the conventionalised insults at your traditional "other".

Again, if you understand logic, you should get what it might mean that vagueness is logically defined as that to which the PNC fails to apply. It is a construct that can ground the resulting dialectical division that is the first intelligible moment of when the PNC might begin to apply.

But "grounds" are themselves crisp and not vague. So vagueness is also "other" to the notion of grounding. And that means we can only even talk about it from the vantage point of some dialectic framing - like vague~crisp indeed, or the PNC's failure vs the PNC's success - that provides a measurable degree of othering.

It gets tricky in terms of the mental gymnastics. But it is what it is. It sorts folk out pretty fast.

I'm into your monster thread. Really interesting. Four years ago and a bunch of the commenters are around now. Understanding your view better from the OP.

:up:

How about : "Enformy is Energy with a purpose"?
Or, “Enformy : the motivating and guiding force behind the self-organizing process of Natural Evolution". — Gnomon

:up: Yes that would do it.

But, the philosophical notion of an intentional First Cause seems to be unavoidable. — Gnomon

Yes I agree. I also see the Anthropic principle as doing much the same thing. As you say it is a guess, but it fits so logically into the bigger picture I see.


I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation, that describes reality as a progression of form. Rather abstract from a human perspective, but perhaps meaningful in terms of what the universe needs to exist. To exist it needs form. And then everything within it is an informing.

You are describing an order from disorder - correctly, however it is a "forming" that represents order. Increasingly more complex form is what is occurring, imo.

In this view matter is an informational body that grows and grows in complexity. And in this process emerges new function, rather than new properties as it is normally understood. It is a bit of a shake up of how it is normally understood, but this way it fits. A forming is going on, where formless quantum foam moves to form and develops in complexity through an increasingly more complex forming process.

Put this way information has a “definition” Information enables the interaction of form.
To me, this definition describes the need for form to interact with form. Form interacting with form captures everything, except the forces of the universe. They act to cause this. The integrated laws of the universe act to cause the interrelational self organization of form.

Ordinarily information lacks a definition, and has various definitions in different situations, but understood as something that enables forming, has a single definition that fits all those instances where it is variously defined. Shannon's information, as well as Pierces, is captured by information enables the interaction of form. Shannon information talks about a sender unit and a receiver unit. In the process of information, the sender unit changes the receiver unit, information enables the interaction of the two forms.

This is the singular thing information does. Enables the interaction of forms. This is the overriding process - rather dehumanizing :sad: . But how we relate to this, within the process, is how it is normally understood. Enactivism, as I understand it, paints a picture of a mind sitting behind a Shannon receiver unit. Receiving it's information from it's neurobiology. The mind is rather solipsistic in this setup, but is totally free to be what it understands itself to be. Whilst physically it is very much constrained and embedded in the informing process of a physical world, it is free to relate to its neurobiology as it sees fit! :lol: I love it, as this explains the freedom and variety and malleability of sanity that we see.

Well I would love to hear how it could work without neural correlates. And at the same time what is the purpose of all this energy zapping baggage between our ears? — Pop

This is another digression, but the idea of 'neural correlates' is a misunderstanding of the nature of representation. Representation and meaning is the subject of semiotics and linguistics which are already being discussed, but here I want to make a more general point. Words and sentences represent meaning, and refer to objects, states of affairs and so on. All of those mental acts require judgement, memory and the other rational faculties. It might sound trite, but you won't find any such things in neurobiological data. Neurobiological states don't represent anything in the sense that language does, and to say that they do misunderstands the meaning of representation. It is an attempt to find a physical or material ground, something perceptible by sense and reasoning, in the objective domain. But the brain does more than represent, it generates the entire world-picture within which representation is one aspect.

Consider the phenomenon of representational drift, which shows that the areas of the brain which can be correlated with stimuli are in constant flux, even in mice. Some faculty organises their responses, but that 'something' is not to be found in the neural data itself, it's more like an organising principle that operates at a different level. Hence the interest in language, representation, and signs as metaphors for understanding how organisms self-organise.

I'm of the view that the most realistic model is (ironically) idealism and its cognates. It was represented in philosophy by the German idealist tradition - Kant and those following - but it's also represented in C S Peirce, whom Apokrisis is referring to (although not necessarily his idealist leanings). It's always a thorny topic because it's so easily misunderstood, but I sometimes refer to the opening paragraph of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea to provide a way in to understanding it. (I've noticed a current title by idealist philosopher Bernado Kastrup called Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics.)

Anyway - another digression, another set of rabbit-holes to fall down, I've really got to bow out for a little while, have some pressing real-world stuff to deal with. Sayonara.

Is 'information' physical?
Unless you are a dualist, the question seems moot. Only a dualist would classify things as physical/not-physical.

To an anti-realist, information is not physical because NOTHING IS.

To a physicalist, information is physical because EVERYTHING IS.

Is the implication then that we are all actually dualists? Or is something else meant by "physical" in this context?

And then there is the question of the meaning of the term "information". I would argue that a poor choice has been made by physicists in adopting the word "information" to describe quantum states. Like using "real" and "imaginary" to describe numbers in math, the term "information" has too strong of a colloquial usage (i.e., tied to the mental activity of interpreting symbols - or of a mind choosing to assign a meaning to an observed thing). Back at the beginning of the discussion, Bitter Crank asked if DNA is information. Well, DNA is a complex physical arrangement of genes that a particular system can react to, but calling it "information" might imply that the system is conscious and assigns meaning to the DNA. So the question of whether information is physical or not might hinge on whether you believe consciousness is physical or not.
4 years ago By Lucifer Sam

This is copy and paste from four years ago...Wayfarer thread

you are arguing PoMo's case for the plural, the arbitrary, the individual - the case it must make to distinguish itself from its natural "other". That other is identified as a metaphysics which instead gravitates to the other pole that is univocal or in other ways prescriptive, constraining, hierarchical, etc, etc. — apokrisis

This is a cultural war that became entrenched after the unifying forces of the scientific enlightenment triggered their own natural dialectical response in a Romanticism that sought its identity in being rationality's "other". — apokrisis

we can only even talk about it from the vantage point of some dialectic framing - like vague~crisp indeed, or the PNC's failure vs the PNC's success - that provides a measurable degree of othering. — apokrisis

Part of what’s throwing me here is that , while I do make use a notion of dialectic , it is closer to George Kelly’s concept of the construct as dichotomous. By this he means it is a way in which two events are alike and different from a third. Your use of dialectic seems closer to that of Hegel. The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification. this is not only the general way I see changes in individual experience over time , but the way I view historical change in social, political, scientific and philosophical ideas. So what from a certain broad perspective could appear as a harsh or abject opposition between two ideologies , when looked at more closely, can be characterized as less revolutionary that evolutionary. One can always see pomo in opposition to what came before it, but a closer look should reveal an intricate development within pomo that bridges what came before such that the appearance of dialectical conflict and othering is replaced by something more on the order of a continuum of historical change.

Neurobiological states don't represent anything — Wayfarer

I see this (brain states) as the frontrunner of what information could be. Pattern and form just don't cut it. If you need to deal with the complexity that manifests, go right to the brain itself.
And back to your puzzling on the non-physicalness of 'encoded information'. The thing you are referring to is (encoded) physical matter and the process and our choice of encoding methods should leave no doubt that physical matter only is sufficient to communicate.

Physical matter is not information; instead, I was trying to argue that the term "information" describes the present state* of a system which belongs to an interaction**. In other words, information is stored in the configuration that the physical matter of a system adopts when it interacts with something else.
I do not agree with @Pop on the statement that "everything is information" because what about things like matter, or space? As I mentioned before, I believe information is a quality of something, and as such it cannot be a fundamental thing, for it needs the existence of something else (that which it is information of/about) to exist.

* ALL properties of an object at the present time (i.e., properties such as density, frequency, velocity, acceleration, packing, absorption, amplitude, etc).
** An interaction being an event on which the properties of an object (something that exists) are influenced by the presence of its interacting partners, and vice versa; that is, if something's existence affects the properties of another existing thing, and vice versa, then those things are interacting.

"information" describes the present state* of a system which belongs to an interaction**. In other words, information is stored in the configuration that the physical matter of a system adopts when it interacts with something else. — Daniel

:smile: :up:

I do not agree with Pop on the statement that "everything is information" — Daniel

:sad:

This is what the Mass-energy-information equivalence principle tells us.

The question is. How is "anything" different to information?

I don't always agree with Pop except by randon chance.

↪Daniel I don't always agree with pop except by randon chance. — Mark Nyquist

:rofl: :rofl: That is the truth of it!! most of our thinking is determined, it maintains its determined momentum, except for random variation!!! That is what you are referring to, correct?

Pop and I go way back...like three months of fighting.

Pop and I go way back...like three months of fighting. — Mark Nyquist

You have come a long way in those three months. :up: A sign of high intelligence.