Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in an attempt to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here). — Galuchat

I agree. 'information' is given as a fundamental explanatory category, in the same sense as 'matter' or 'energy'. But 'information' has many meanings, it is not as if there is a unitary thing, force or power called 'information' which serves a role analogous to (say) 'the atom'.

Peirce himself clearly felt his semiosis applied at the physically and cosmologically general level. — apokrisis

but wasn't this because he regarded mind as fundamental? He wasn't dualist - didn't regard mind and matter as fundamental - but whatever it is that underlies phenomena is nearer what we understand as 'mind'. Otherwise, how could there be signs?

You aren't going to be able to follow this as you are insisting on a mentalistic reading of anything I say. — apokrisis

I see this as the obvious problem. We are talking semiotics, which implies semantics and meaning. You appear to be assuming a type of semiotics which doesn't require mental activity. I want you to explain the basis of this assumption to me, otherwise how can I interpret what you say in any way other than mentalistic?

The current flow of water doesn't interact with that past directly, in some material fashion, but it does interact with that past indirectly in seeing the current state of the channel as an informational constraint on its possibilities. — apokrisis

So, this is a good example. How does the water "see" the channel as informational constraint on its possibilities? I can understand how you, as a human being with a mind, can understand the channel as informational constraint on the water's possibilities. But to project this understanding onto the water, to say that the water understands the informational constraints on its possibilities appears like a mistaken attribution of the interpreting, and understanding, of information. You don't really believe that water "sees" or understands the informational constraints on its possibilities do you?

If you don't follow modern physics, you likely have no idea how important this new approach is. But it is why fundamental physics is attempting to rebuild itself on thermodynamic principles like entropy, dissipation and emergence.

One doesn't have to label this pan-semiotics. Physics calls it information theory, holography, thermal, etc. — apokrisis

There is a very big difference between the principles of physics, and what you are claiming. Physicists recognize that they are the ones seeing the world as information, they do not claim as you do that the inanimate matter of the world, such as water, sees the world as information.

My view is that Peircean pan-semiosis offers the best metaphysical framework for interpreting what this new physics is actually struggling to say about reality.

So you can scoff at the triviality of the river in its channel example. But instead, why not think about it carefully. All those little bouncing H2O molecules knocking off one another. And then the mysterious invisible hand that is their collective past. The events of the moment are being shaped by the information which represents the context of a history. But also each molecule has the chance to rewrite the history of the river bed. — apokrisis

This is not a good metaphysics to pursue because it misses the essence of intentionality, "telos", which involves a view toward the future, anticipation. You claim the possibilities involved in the activity of H2O molecules are constrained by history, and this is probably a true way of looking at things. But it is a mistake to claim that this is a semiotic activity because the description lacks the essence of semiotic activity, which is carried out for the sake of bringing something into existence in the future. Semiotic activity involves anticipation of the future. Being constrained by history, and having anticipation for the future are two completely distinct things. Water is constrained by history, the living being anticipates the future. This is the difference between formal and final cause which you will not cease to conflate. Unless you can demonstrate how being constrained by the past, and anticipating the future, are one and the same thing, the conflation is completely unjustified. But I think that by not recognizing this difference your metaphysics entirely misses the mark.

.

But 'information' has many meanings, it is not as if there is a unitary thing, force or power called 'information' which serves a role analogous to (say) 'the atom'. — Wayfarer

You miss the point. Information was given rigorous mathematical meaning by Shannon. It was defined in terms of message uncertainty or information entropy. So a physical result was derived from psychological argument.

And yes, it is obvious that Shannon information in fact stripped out the semantics so as to wind up talking only about its physical signs. He created a universal way to count bits. What any bit meant became absolute general - or rather, it just stood for a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no, a presence or an absence. It stood for a bare metaphysical strength dichotomy - a difference that makes a difference in the most absolute possible fashion.

Thus having stripped out semantics from a theory of information - or reduced that semantics to its ultimate abstract form - information then allows science to build semantics back into its descriptions of nature in controlled and explicit fashion. Useful models are possible.

You have to understand how science builds its tools to understand the metaphysical implications of the new scientific results that then follow.

To protest that "information has many meanings, some of them very colloquial or mentalistic" is missing the point.

It was defined in terms of message uncertainty or information entropy. So a physical result was derived from psychological argument. — apokrisis

it was defined in the context of there being information - a signal - to be sent and received. What is an example of that in a world where there are no senders and receivers, where there is nothing to signal? What are examples of information being encoded and transmitted in a lifeless world?

If an atom decays, that is an event that changes the history of the world in definite, digital, fashion. Existence will never be the same again having received that message. It will be that bit - or bit - colder feeling. ;)

If an atom decays, that is an event that changes the history of the world in definite, digital, fashion — apokrisis

but if nobody knows it, it ain't information. or more precisely, it doesn't encode anything.

You won't abandon your mentalism. Fine. Science isn't for you. And thus the metaphysics that follows in the wake of scientific advance is also not for you. Again fine. It's your choice.

The door to your cage or conceptions has been opened. But you don't have to walk through it if you prefer the comfort of the familiar.

ad hom. Weak, considering.

If you keep just asking me "who knows", why should I show respect for your lack of imagination here?

You believe consciousness to be itself a universal property of nature, well fine. Stick to that. Don't for an instant explore the alternative of deflating consciousness by understanding it in terms of a universal semiotic process.

you're evading the point, which is crucial to the entire thread. Sure Shannon defined 'information' but as I said that was in the context of signal transmission. What about 'atomic decay' is analogous to that? No information is being transmitted in that. This is where I suspect 'pansemiosis' - it defines information too broadly (which i think @Galuchat is also saying.)

NASA has funded SETI for decades, and nothing has been found. And what are they looking for? Structured information, something that indicates life and mind has arisen somewhere else in the cosmos. it only occurs where there is life; the cosmos, to our knowledge, lacks that. What is the secret sauce? Something only known to Peirce?

you're evading the point, — Wayfarer

The point is eluding you. That is something different. I've explained myself endlessly. Time for you to do some work in understanding better.

again, what about atomic decay amounts to information?

Christ almighty. It rewrites the state of the Universe. Another bit of history has accumulated and so points all possibility toward a more constrained future.

Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. And don't even start thinking about it computationally as the reading and writing of memory states.

Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. A bit has physicalist meaning as a sign of things to come. :)

No external interpreter is required. Reality arises as interpretance. The historical context points possibility towards its free future. Then history is created by that possibility making up its mind.

Why does an atom decay? Do you think you can answer that in causal terms using regular materialism? Do you think mad woo like Rich's or whoever's idealism can do the job?

And yet you belly-ache like buggery just because I dare to apply Peirce's careful generalisation of a psychologically-derived tale of causality. And point out that it is science as the duality of matter and information is now a formally exact, formally measurable, deal.

Mate, either catch up with the 21st century or leave me alone.

Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. — apokrisis

Better yet, stop thinking, period. That is the only way the trick works.

Apparently, the answer to the OP is to give up on the idea that there is life. Problem solved.

21st century dehumanization.

Being constrained by history, and having anticipation for the future are two completely distinct things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? They are the two faces of the same thing. Surely that is obvious? To be constrained is what results in being left with a more focused point of view.

If we throw the thin sheet of semiotics over the universe, so that rather than being full of disparate items with interactive properties they all become objects of a common sign language, such that an atom now becomes a 'potential bond partner' and a molecule becomes a 'willing cycle participant', how would we describe entropy and negentropy?

It is the desire for negentropy that needs to be explained now. Life should wind down after the initial concentration gradients are exhausted. Instead life actively seeks new reactants to sustain its reactions.

There is a prompt that arises when internal reactants drop below a certain point, much like the coming on of a fuel light. It makes me get out of the chair and go to the fridge. A lion will go out onto the plain to run down the gazelle. A tree will turn its leaves toward the sun and grope with its roots through the soil.

Aside: I could not care less if this is not discussed by Pierce or is not the focus of semiotics at all. It is my question.

That's your great mistake, how you conflate final cause with formal cause, as if they are two facets of the same thing. Past actualities, which are the constraints on present existence, are fundamentally different from future possibilities, which are the freedoms of present existence. We relate the two to each other through the assumption of present existence, but that they may be related to each other does not make them two faces of the same thing.

And, the fact that present existence is just an assumption, though it is one which is necessary to make in order to have this relationship, indicates that the constructed, or artificial, relationship between these two, is itself unsound. Therefore the assumption that past actualities and future possibilities are two faces of the same thing, is equally unsound.

The assumption is of a "being", or "existence", at the present. It is made sound by designating us, human beings, oneself, as this "being" at the present. When the assumption of a being at the present is made sound in this way, then past actualities, and future possibilities are assigned the name "reality" by this being. However, they are understood to be independent from the being, and not two faces of the being. To model reality as two parts of one being, at the present, is a mistake, because it disallows the possibility of an independent reality.

Christ almighty. It rewrites the state of the Universe. Another bit of history has accumulated and so points all possibility toward a more constrained future. — apokrisis

That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission.

Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. — apokrisis

What 'difference' does it make when a star explodes, exactly? When a landslide occurs? None of that conveys any information; none of it signifies or represents anything. Sure you can gather information about such events, but the events themselves are not information.

The whole point of Shannon's work was about transmitting actual information, something that has meaning. If it was just about transmitting white noise, then what would have been the point of the analysis?

The notion that anything whatever that happens is information, is too broad a definition.

you belly-ache like buggery... — apokrisis

You meet argument with insults, again.

We relate the two to each other through the assumption of present existence, but that they may be related to each other does not make them two faces of the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Constraints remove degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom not removed are then those that must be expressable. It's not rocket science.

Maybe, if the material objects in the world are the signs moving about, entropy and negentropy are the slope of the road. We can use levers to push things up the road by coupling them with the movement of heavier things coming down the road (like a passive transporter does), but again, once the initial reactants (heavy things moving down the road) are exhausted, the lever stops working. This is death.

So a very important thing to conceptualize I think is the drive of the entire system, road and all, to find more reactants. That in itself seems anti entropic without a coupling to entropic movement.

That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission. — Wayfarer

Silly me.

The whole point of Shannon's work was about transmitting actual information, something that has meaning. If it was just about transmitting white noise, then what would have been the point of the analysis? — Wayfarer

That comment sums up how little you understand about the subject.

Well, enlighten me. The point was to understand how degraded a signal could become, and still convey information, wasn't it? And related to that, was the means by which information could be condensed, and still retain information, which is why they are especially important for data compression. Is that correct?

You could argue that the removal of the reactant creates a concentration gradient for further reactant to move into that space- until the heat death of the ocean.

As life developed though the reactants became more constrained - inside a piece of fruit or another fish - enter the age of predation. But how do we explain it?

No, I've given myself an out. The initial heat death of the ocean, or local environment at least, is what I am arguing should have caused life to wind down and die. What happened? If we're using vents as our driver, did it float to other vents on the current? Was there a smorgasboard of vents? Even if so, we are still looking at an eventual heat death (used loosely as a semiotic word), then predation must have started while vent feeders were in full swing.

The driver could have been the gradual winding down of vents or the population explosion of variant molecular cycles. The necessary constraint of reactants could have triggered the cycles to form into cells.... but from where and how does the membrane materialise? It is not a cycle.

The point about any living system is that information is encoded in the cells, along with the means ('program') by which the information is transmitted and biological matter organised in the processes of growth and reproduction, which is what DNA does. The fact that it is encoded is significant, because non-living or inorganic matter doesn't carry any encoded information in that sense. (That's why I mentioned NASA's SETI search, because it has been searching for any sign of intelligence and/or life throughout the Universe - so far without success. That's because life embodies a certain kind or level of process which makes it distinguishable from inorganic matter - the matter which is central to this thread.)

As I understand it, 'semiosis' is taken to be central to this, because the processes which are central to living organisms are more 'language-like', or sign-like, than they are like either mechanical, physical or chemical processes in nature. In that sense, proteins and so on encode, represent or signify the features of an organism. There is a fundamental differentiation between the code and matter in which it is embedded. There's nothing like that in inorganic nature, save for in situations of high instability and complexity and the like, which are the purported point of origin of complex molecules.

Living things embody an order, and that order is also able to reproduce, maintain itself, and even evolve into new forms. It has been said that DNA is basically 'LifeOS'.

At issue in all of this is the origin or source of that order. Some argue that the presence of that order is an indication of a designer - this then becomes a species of design argument. Naturalism wishes to show (as I understand it) that this order is a consequence or expression of the same order which underlies everything else in nature, i.e. there is no fundamental discontinuity between the order you see in living organisms, and the order in atoms or solar systems. In naturalism's eyes, any kind of 'ID' argument is something close to Nazism, voodoo, or black magic.

Constraints remove degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom not removed are then those that must be expressable. It's not rocket science. — apokrisis

No, freedom and constraint only actual exist in relation to something else, a thing which is either free or constrained. Otherwise you are just referring to a concept. Degrees of heat or cold only have reality in relation to something which is either hot or cold. You are trying to assign reality to the abstracted concept "degrees of freedom", with disrespect for the fact that this only has meaning in relation to a thing, a being, which is having these degrees of freedom taken from it.

Once you give reality to this thing, the being, then freedom and constraint can no longer be considered as two faces of the same thing. They are completely different aspects of the world. Freedom comes from a different source than constraint does. They are only two faces of the same thing within the concept which opposes them as the negation of each other.

Hi Wayfarer, I think that like all languages, semiotics in terms of a biological language evolved from the patterns created, and not the other way around. Semiotics is not the driver, merely the reporter that allows our perception to understand what is occurring and thereby make more logical leaps of understanding.

I brought up earlier about the ribosome. I think it is key. Nowadays the whole affair of DNA transcription, translation and replication is tightly controlled. The ribosome is key to changing the code of the DNA into the protein by marrying up nucleotide sequences with amino acids and sewing the amino acids together.

But if we impose bi-directionality on this effect, we could also have amino acids encoding 3 nucleotides and then another amino acid coming along and the ribosome sewing three more onto the chain. Bidirectionality means that at these 6 nucleotides that encode 2 amino acids are also being transcribed, and we get the emergence of a record on one end and a protein at the other, but emanating from a position central to both.

Where we have code, we have the start of language, we have semiotics.

As to the origin of the ribosome, it's one more lower doll in the stack of Russian dolls.

No, freedom and constraint only actual exist in relation to something else, a thing which is either free or constrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

So the story is .... triadic?

Degrees of heat or cold only have reality in relation to something which is either hot or cold. — Metaphysician Undercover

Except a backwards triadism that relies on brute fact monism rather than emergence...

Sounds legit.