So the key difference is that I am arguing that all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative. — apokrisis

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?

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

There is an important place in traditional philosophy for what is beyond measure, although nowadays such ideas are probably regarded as antiquarian.

So the key difference is that I am arguing that all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative. — apokrisis

God.

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.

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

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

That's all you've been doing. Spinning a yarn about Thermodynamic Imperative, your God. No different than Whitehead's God. But you like pretending it is "scientific". It's a palor game you like playing.

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.

Continue with your little yarn about Thermodynamics Imperatives. Didn't mean to interrupt your storytelling hour. Definitely much more scientific than God or the Dao.

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. — apokrisis

That has nothing to do with the statement that 'all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative'. I'm not talking about devices that disprove the Second Law of thermodynamics, but what could disprove that particular statement.

I'd dispute that by pointing out all ideas are ultimately based on observation of the world. — apokrisis

But that is simply empiricist dogma. The point about the rationalist tradition, was to infer what the ultimate truth was, based on reasoning from observation - as you say, the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, and on innate ideas. Now of course that also could lead to absurdities - I recall my very first lecture in Philosophy of Science, an anecdote about a bunch of monks arguing about how many teeth a horse had, and scurrying off to find it in Aristotle. When it wasn't there, they basically gave up - until one of their number had the temerity to suggest going and looking at a horse, which was ridiculed. So, I get how old-school philosophical rationalism can become a caricature. But it's also possible that ancient philosophy really did discover something 'beyond the domain of name and form', and which is on that account beyond the purview of science. That would be in the general category of things you consider 'not even wrong'. And I'm OK with that - at least we understand where we differ.

I can just hear someone in the back of the forum yelling, “yours was an awesome post!”, and I agree with them.

Trying my best to figure out something to debate about, what would your take be on the hypothesis that meaning, of itself, is non-phenomenal information?* So, for instance, in the examples of the OP where the same meaning applies to different phenomenal information, the meaning itself is non-phenomenal information (and hypothetically the same) whereas the various means of obtaining it will all be phenomenal information and thereby uniquely different.

A different example in my attempts to keep this simple: “four”, “4”, and “IV” serve as three different bodies of visually phenomenal information yet they all convey the same non-phenomenal information (the same meaning being identical to itself in all three, phenomenally different cases).

So the meaning of “4” has a form different from the meaning of “5”, for instance, but its form as meaning is noumenal: and thereby ontically distinct from the phenomenal information it is conveyed by to those who can so interpret the meaning of the given phenomena. (Alternatively, from the phenomenal information of the imagination one uses to convey the meaning to oneself.)

*As I mentioned to you on a different thread: here phenomenal is defined by anything apprehendable through the physiological senses and anything of the imagination that takes the same forms, e.g. sights, sounds, smells, tactile feels, proprioceptions, etc. (the list is a bit longer, e.g. physiological pain, vestibular sense of balance and acceleration, etc.).

BTW, the aforementioned is a basic premise I hold; wanting to test out the waters with it, so to speak.

I happen to think that the term 'phenomena' applies to 'the manifest domain', i.e. approximately the area of study of the sciences. It's a very general term for whatever exists. But by this definition, numbers (and the like) are not phenomena, or among phenomena, as they're not in the phenomenal domain, but the intelligible domain, that being the domain of things that can only be grasped by a rational intelligence.

I happen to think that the term 'phenomena' applies to 'the manifest domain', i.e. approximately the area of study of the sciences. It's a very general term for whatever exists. But by this definition, numbers (and the like) are not phenomena, or among phenomena, as they're not in the phenomenal domain, but the intelligible domain, [...] — Wayfarer

Yes, and in today’s world, in large part due to the great modern influence of physicalism, “things that appear” (i.e., phenomena) is deemed fully identical with all possible experiences. Hence the common standard interpretation of “everything that exists is phenomenal” due to the modern intellect’s interpretation that the only experiences (and, thereby, information apprehendable to awareness) that exist are only obtainable via the physiological senses.

I’m intending to maintain otherwise … while I won’t argue a link to Humean empiricism (not quite physicalist empiricism) I do argue that it’s tied into the experiential.

Maths, while important, are to me not as important as meaning, however—since I figure that meaning is a priori to meaningful maths, i.e. maths that can be discerned as such.

[numbers] being the domain of things that can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. — Wayfarer

You should know a bit about me by now, so here it goes: it has been demonstrated that some animals can count--and hence function via recognition of numbers (the first article that popped up in a google search: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121128-animals-that-can-count). And I don’t think you’d feel comfortable categorizing lesser animals as holding any rational intelligence. Other than the greater apes and a few other of the more intelligent lesser animals, neither would I. A different, and very convoluted, topic though. But again, to me it boils down to information and awareness of information, and I'd agree that lesser animals don't have awareness of maths. Numbers is a different issue.

The author of a piece of information puts meaning into that piece. And this act of creating is completely different from the act of interpreting. So it is not true that "meaningful" implies that the thing has been interpreted. — Metaphysician Undercover

I disagree.
An author encodes the semantic information in their mind into a physical form (e.g., a book) suitable for transmission to others. When that transmission (physical information) is received (read) and decoded (interpreted) it becomes semantic (meaningful) information in another person's mind.

In other words, physical information becomes semantic information through interpretation (semiotic cogitation).

This is the same problem I have with Floridi's GeN (i.e., data can have a semantics independently of any informee). He asserts that Egyptian hieroglyphics had meaning prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (and its subsequent translation) in spite of the fact that nobody on Earth at that time knew what the hieroglyphs meant.

Whereas, I contend that: because nobody knew what they meant, they had no meaning for anyone alive at that time.

If we conflate these two distinct senses of "meaningful", one might insist that naturally occurring structures, must have been created by an author to be meaningful, or, that something created by an author must be interpreted to be meaningful. — Metaphysician Undercover

Meaning is located in a person's mind, nowhere else.

I would define "information" in such a way as to separate these two distinct senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

That would be a useful exercise (i.e., defining information) in that it might help further this discussion.

But this is where the difficulty arises. Like any other property, we can abstract the property from the object, and start talking directly about the property without necessarily attributing it to any object, as if the property is an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that your concept of "meaning" presents this difficulty. However, information is not a property, it is an object which can be physical and/or psychophysical.

This is the problem, with associating information with data. If we take a look at some collection of data, we have no way of knowing whether it's information, or misinformation. — Metaphysician Undercover

In addition to providing a definition of "information", it would be helpful if you could provide a definition of "data", otherwise I have no idea what you mean when using these terms (though I suspect it is substantially different from what I mean).

I contend that: because nobody knew what they meant, they had no meaning for anyone alive at that time. — Galuchat

True, but they were still written in a script, written by people to record meaning. So they are different to the scratches left in a rock by glacial action. Their meaning couldn't be discerned, but it potentially, and eventually, was.

Meaning is located in a person's mind, nowhere else. — Galuchat

I don't know about that. Certainly meaning can only be discerned by a mind, but I think there are elements of thought and language that are common to all who think. So I wouldn't like to say that they are peculiar to a specific subject.

Certainly meaning can only be discerned by a mind, but I think there are elements of thought and language that are common to all who think. So I wouldn't like to say that they are peculiar to a specific subject. — Wayfarer

Can you elaborate? Thanks.

You ought not to anthropomorphise natural selection, to make of it an agent that 'does' something. Neither natural selection nor evolution 'does' anything. It is simply a description of how species evolve, but by saying that it 'arranges' something, you are attributing to it something that it doesn't have. — Wayfarer

I wasn't. Mindless, natural processes do something. Natural selection is a mindless process, which means that it has no agency. The theory of evolution by natural selection is a description of the process itself. The process of natural selection is environmental feedback where the environment as a whole interacts with it's constituents and vice versa. An example is coat color where one's coat matches the the color of the environment and makes it more difficult to see as compared to other colors, which allows that animal a greater chance of not being eaten. Jerry Coyne calls natural selection the "engine of evolution" in his book, "Why Evolution is True".

Tree rings mean something to an arborist, but nothing to the tree. — Wayfarer

What you're saying here is that the tree rings can't be part of a causal relationship with some visual sensory system of the tree, because the tree doesn't have one. An arborist has a visual sensory system to see the tree rings and then follow the causal sequence backwards to know what the tree rings mean, or what information they carry. How is it that all arborists agree what the tree rings mean and they all point to how the tree rings were caused? Are tree rings the result of how the tree grows throughout the year? Isn't that what the tree rings mean? Would that be the case if there were no visual sensory systems to interact with the tree rings to continue a causal sequence?

When the thing we are talking about continues to interact with things and create new effects (like how it appears to a mind), then we can say that the information about the cause continues to flow through time. If no one ever looked at a tree stump, or ever wondered how those rings got there, would the tree rings still have information? Of course because they were caused. Information is all around us that we simply ignore or filter out. Information isn't made simply by looking at something and interpreting it. The information is already there. It just continues to flow forward in time as it interacts with other things to create new effects where the effects carry information about all the causes that led up to the effect we are talking about.

How does the information in your head get in to mine without causation? When you have an idea, you then need to think about how to say it, and then you need to type it, and then you need to proofread it submit it. I then need to read it and interpret it. If you can agree with this then I don't see why you can't agree that information resides in all causal relationships, including the ones out there that we never notice, or bother looking at. It's just the information doesn't continue to flow, or establish new causal relationships with our visual sensory system, but it does continue to interact with other things when we aren't looking. When we decide to notice it, then it is a particular effect in the chain of causation that we notice, not the original cause. We have to follow the causal sequence backwards to find the particular cause/information we are looking for. We could follow the causal sequence of tree ring formation all the way back to the Big Bang if we wanted to - if that was the bit of information we were after.

I don't see why you can't agree that information resides in all causal relationships, including the ones out there that we never notice, or bother looking at. — Harry Hindu

It makes sense to me that causality should be linked to notions of data and/or information origin and/or history. How would you include it in a definition?

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. — apokrisis

I never said you denied the "world out there". Idealists don't deny a "world out there" either. It is what keeps them from falling off the cliff into solipsism. They just say that everything, including the "world out there", is mental. What you seem to be saying is that there are two distinct realities. The one out there and the VR in your head. Isn't the VR in your head part of the world out there? If not, then how does information flow between your VR and the world out there?

When some causal sequence occurs, can we not say that the effect carries some truth about the cause? The effect doesn't interpret the cause. The effect is a direct result of the cause. Causal relationships are mindless relationships. There is no interpreting happening until it gets into a visual sensory information processor that has a goal. Once it gets into a visual sensory information processing system that has goals, then we can start talking about the truth getting muddled. But is it really getting muddled? If we are then mixing the information with our goals and then pointing to the resulting effect as if it were the original information, or cause, that is where the problem lies. If we were to prevent the information from mingling with our goal, then the information would still be pure, no? We could point to the information before mingling with our goal as the "truth". If we point to the information after it mingles with our goal and talk about the cause as if it never mingled with our goal, that is where we would be making the mistake. I hope that makes sense.

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. — apokrisis

No. I was complaining that you were being inconsistent. If you say that we can never reach the truth, but only a semblance of it, then your explanation of reality is as irrelevant as anyone else's. How can you go about testing your theory when the outcome of any test will have your purpose imposed on it? It's no different than saying, "We can never know anything.", which is a contradiction. If we can never know anything, then how did you come to know that we can never know anything?

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 — apokrisis

Isn't the self out there as well? How else can my self interact with your self? How else can we transfer information between each other if we aren't connected in some way causally?

When you type your post, your idea changes into a physical form of words on a screen. The words on the screen are not your idea, but a representation of it. If no one ever read your post, would it still contain "truth" in that it accurately represents your idea without any mind coming along and muddling it with their own purpose? If so, then how is it that it doesn't contain "truth" when it continues to flow into another mind, like mine when I read it? I'm not trying to impose MY purpose on it. If I did, I'd never get at what YOU were saying. When communicating, we attempt to get at what the speaker, or writer, is saying. We are attempting to get at the speaker, or writer's purpose, not our own.

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. — apokrisis

This went over my head. I have no idea what you are saying here. "How selves and worlds arise" seems to me talk about causation and time existing independently of minds. How do selves and worlds arise? Arise from what? How long does it take? What is the causal sequence of events?

How can you make any objective statements about the world when you say that we impose our subjective purposes onto what it is we see and hear all the time?

It seems to me that natural selection would favor organisms that tend to impose their subjectivity on the world less and see the world more as it really is. If what you say is true then that makes makes problems for the theory of natural selection. If what you say is true, then the process of natural selection isn't an objective process out there, but rather a subjective process in here.

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. — apokrisis

But you used the term "self" yourself in saying that "the self is actually in here". You seem to be the one committing the crime of assuming an infinite homuncular regrees. I'm not because I'm saying that the self isn't in here. The self is out there with everything else. There is no out there and in here. That is the fault of dualism.

If the self isn't real, then how can you give it a location which is relative to the location of the world? If the self isn't real, then how do you explain communication at all? Who, or what, is communicating? How do you explain a difference in opinion in how we interpret the world if it isn't a difference in selves? You are not me, and I am not you. If you're saying I am part of you, or vice versa, then you are talking about solipsism.

I never said that the self resides in my head. The self is my entire body, not just my mind. So there is no little self inside my head looking at the qualia. My body is simply taking in information and reacting to it based on my genetic disposition and previous experiences. Simple cause and effect (information flow). This is why you can look at how I am behaving and not only determine how I interpret my sensory information, but what it is that I'm seeing that is causing me to behave this way. My behavior carries information about not just what is in my mind, but what is out there that I'm reacting to. You may react differently but that isn't to say that the thing out there has different properties for both of us. It is saying that we both produce different effects because we ourselves are part of the causal sequence that mingles with the thing out there. We are different causes ourselves, which is why we produce different outcomes (effects) when interacting with the same thing. It's no different than talking about mixing two different ingredients in water. You get different outcomes even though water was an ingredient in both.

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. — apokrisis

And we are part of the world, so we can say that our representations are part of the world as well. They are the outcome of our selves interacting with the world - no different than any other mix of causes leading to other outcomes. To separate our selves from the world as if our selves aren't part of the causal sequence, or information flow, is to make a serious mistake and causes many problems (dualism)

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". — apokrisis

But swirling lights and coloured dots isn't a world. It is just the firing of "bored" synapses. If we created a world when we close our eyes, then why is there a clear distinction between the world I imagine and the world I experience when I open my eyes. I can imagine any world I want in my head, but that world is less vivid than the world I experience when I open my eyes. As a matter of fact, when I open my eyes, the sensory information is imposing compared to the world I create in my head. It imposes itself on me. It's signals are very strong compared to the world in my head.

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. — apokrisis

Then there would be no direct reason why a world might cause our way of modeling it. It is pointless to wonder about why a particular effect is the result of a particular cause as if it could be any different.

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. — apokrisis

I could see this being the case for non-social organisms, but human beings are highly social. We seek others out for companionship and to share ideas, so I don't see us wanting to ignore each other. That would mean that we aren't a social species. Bees and ants are no different. If ignoring each other is our default disposition, it would falsify that we are a social species.

Our posts are getting long. I'm sorry if I missed something you said. If so, then please point it out.

It makes sense to me that causality should be linked to notions of data and/or information origin and/or history. How would you include it in a definition? — Galuchat

I'm not sure what it is you are asking for - a definition of causality, or a definition of information. It seems to me that when you define one, you are defining the other. It seems to me that you would also be defining "meaning".

A definition of information would be useful.

Information is the relationship between cause and effect.

Cheers!

Another thought about how to approach the connection between information and semantic content ...

When a U-boat sends a coded message, there is an in-band signal and an out-of-band signal (I may be abusing these terms, but whatever): the in-band signal is the coded message they are intentionally sending which can only be understood by folks that know the code, preferably only the intended recipient(s); the out-of-band signal they send unintentionally simply by using their radio transmitter. This latter signal tells whoever can detect (and triangulate) the signal where the U-boat is.

When a plant grows phototropically, it's using out-of-band signals from the sun and whatever nearby plants block our hero's access to sunlight. In general, senses make sense as out-of-band signal receivers. Things around you, animate and inanimate, radiate some of the sunlight that strikes them, unintentionally, and your eyes pick up that signal.

This is just a way of framing the issue. The question is: how does the in-band signal arise? Senses readily receive both kinds of signals, but then they have to be sorted into the two types and processed differently, etc.

ADDED:
If you look at something like the chemical trail-marking ants do, the distinction would seem to be not that the ants do this "intentionally", in some full-blooded sense, but that there is an "intended" audience, only members of which can decode the signal.

(Austin is looking over my shoulder. Do the ants leave pheromones "accidentally"? "Inadvertently"? "Unthinkingly"?)

This is just a way of framing the issue. — Srap Tasmaner

It's a good point. But doesn't the distinction give rise to a four way division as we now have two different dimensions to consider?

One is the intentional vs accidental distinction. The other is the sender vs receiver distinction.

So we can have the sender accidentally sending, but the receiver reading intentional meaning into the signs - as with the U-boat leaking news of its position or the plant seeking the light.

Then we have the three other cases. Intentional sender/intentional receiver. Intentional sender/accidental receiver. Accidental sender/accidental receiver.

A rock heated by the sun lacks the intention (the reason, the purpose, the functional benefit, the semantic meaningfulness) just as much as the sun lacks the intention of transmitting that heat to the rock.

A religious crank with a placard might intone his message to the crowd, but for the crowd it is just background noise. A case of intentional sender/accidental receiver.

Then we have the actual case of transmitted meanings which require the co-ordination of intentional sender/intentional receiver. The two sides of the equation have to become co-ordinated in their mental state. They must have understandings that are similarly constrained.

And of course this is where we get to the "beetle in a box" difficulty of private meanings and have to conclude something about how, in practice, this level of semantic meaningfulness can only be demonstrated by the similarity of behaviour that results. Semantics does boil down to effective limits on material spontaneity or behavioural degrees of freedom.

This is in fact an important point, given Wayfarer wants to defend the mental reality of meaning. He wants to grant understanding some kind of res cogitans status separate from the material signs themselves. But maybe the psychological reality just is established habits of behaviour. The mental does reduce to the actions that make sense of signs, or pragmatic interpretance.

Anyway, the OP does focus on the transmission of information. And it is in itself telling that it was just assumed the transmission was between minds with matchable states of intentionality when it should be obvious that the boundary between the deliberate and the accidental is porous here. Any reader can read too much or too little into any signal. The perfect transmission of semantics in fact looks an impossible dream. The sending and receiving of messages is always fraught with uncertainty.

Which should really make one think about what is going on when one talks things through with oneself. :)

Certainly meaning can only be discerned by a mind, but I think there are elements of thought and language that are common to all who think. So I wouldn't like to say that they are peculiar to a specific subject.
— Wayfarer

Can you elaborate? Thanks. — Galuchat

When h. sapiens evolve to the point of being able to recognise logic and number, I believe they are discovering something, not creating or inventing something. In other words, on the contested question of whether number is 'discovered or invented', I am advocating the former (which is generally Platonist). I'm arguing that the 'furniture of reason' - such things as grammatical structure, the laws of logic and so on - are not the product of mental activity, but can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. So certainly they're intellectual or mental, but no less real than the phenomenal objects of perception.

I think it was Srap Tasmaner who mentioned Frege's 'Third Realm' - I have a lot of sympathy for that view. 'Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he said "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." Tyler Burge, Frege and the Third Realm

This is close to the point I was getting at in the OP - that 'intelligible objects' including ideas are real, but intelligible. So, real but not physical - which is why I wanted to qualify the suggestion that meaning being 'in the mind' might imply that it is therefore 'merely subjective'.

Mindless, natural processes do something. Natural selection is a mindless process, which means that it has no agency. The theory of evolution by natural selection is a description of the process itself. The process of natural selection is environmental feedback where the environment as a whole interacts with it's constituents and vice versa. An example is coat color where one's coat matches the the color of the environment and makes it more difficult to see as compared to other colors, which allows that animal a greater chance of not being eaten. Jerry Coyne calls natural selection the "engine of evolution" in his book, "Why Evolution is True". — Harry Hindu

I don't want to get into this argument in this thread, but in my view, Jerry Coyne is - let's see - the materialist equivalent of a young-earth creationist. He is a 'darwinian fundamentalist'. His POV reduces everything to Darwinian biology.

It's a good point. But doesn't the distinction give rise to a four way division as we now have two different dimensions to consider? — apokrisis

Yeah exactly. And once you're aware of the out-of-band signal, you can avoid sending one (for instance, if sinking a ship would indicate you've been reading the enemy's mail) or deliberately send a false one, etc.

I was thinking about Grice's just-so story about how an animal might make what was heretofore an involuntary signal voluntarily, as a step toward language, etc. But this is already an in-band signal.

Ants, for instance, might develop a mechanism for recognizing each other, develop a unique chemical to do the job, like a team jersey, and then once that's in place the next step is marking something else with that chemical. What's the semantic content there? It looks a lot like an out-of-band signal, like a footprint, except it's done with something team-specific. The message is no more than a footprint would carry-- somebody on my team was here-- but it's a footprint only your team members can see. Hopefully.

(And then Ed Wilson comes along with a q-tip dipped in your team pheromone and can write "hello, world" in ants.)

there is an in-band signal and an out-of-band signal — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks, but kind of oblique to the point I'm laboring. My original point is simply that it is incorrect to say that information is necessarily physical, as the physical representation can be entirely changed, but the information remain the same. So they're separable. To elaborate on that, this is because the mind is able to represent ideas by symbolic means, but the ideas themselves are distinct from the symbols. Of course the mind is continually imputing or inferring meaning as per the example in the OP. But that is just the illustration of a particular faculty, namely, intelligence, which is derived from a compound word meaning 'to read between', to 'pick out' or 'discern' 1.

What you seem to be saying is that there are two distinct realities. The one out there and the VR in your head. Isn't the VR in your head part of the world out there? If not, then how does information flow between your VR and the world out there? — Harry Hindu

I am saying the "reality" is the wholeness of the modelling relation. So it is the co-ordination between the two - the modeller and the world. And then the point that the mechanism of the co-ordination is not some naive realist "veridical representation", but in fact a useful "irreality" in terms of experiential sign.

For a semiotic relation to arise, first the mental side of the equation must be freed from having to be literal.

Imagine we just felt the radiant energy in some more literal fashion. Standing in the field, the tree would heat the surface of your body slightly differently depending on whether it was reflecting light more in the "green" frequency or more in the "red". In fact the difference would be so slight and so diffuse as to be pretty well useless at telling you anything. A vast amount of signal processing would have to be employed to tell you anything about the world.

But because biology is free to form its signs of the world in more logical fashion - as crisp binary signals of what is vs what is not - the irreality of colour discrimination can arise. Two frequencies of radiation that have a vanishingly slight difference from each other can be treated by the brain as the very opposite of each other - as with red and green.

So this is the crucial thing your argument looks to be missing. You want the world to be the cause, the perception the effect. But the mind wants to be disconnected from that kind of directness so it can invent its own more useful system of sign. It wants to already have converted the physical information available in the world into some logically-processed sensory quality.

Thus I'm not talking about a virtual reality, if you are going to take that as just talk about an attempt at a veridical re-presentation of the world within some Cartesean theatre. I'm talking about the virtuality of a semiotic umwelt. The world as we find it most useful to experience it. The signs that best anchor our habits of interpretance.

No. I was complaining that you were being inconsistent. If you say that we can never reach the truth, but only a semblance of it, then your explanation of reality is as irrelevant as anyone else's — Harry Hindu

That is silly. An epistemology that includes the fact that our view of reality is a purpose-soaked model, a semiotic umwelt, is truer than naive idealism or naive realism.

Explaining why and how the goal of "reaching truth" is naive realism is rather the point here.

It seems to me that natural selection would favor organisms that tend to impose their subjectivity on the world less and see the world more as it really is. — Harry Hindu

That is contradicted by the facts of psychology and neuroscience.

Just one example that always struck me. Compared to chimps, humans have a proportionately larger foveal representation in their primary visual cortex, a proportionately smaller peripheral vision one.

So we have evolved less need to process the edges of our visual field as we are more certain about where we need to focus our attention. A larger brain makes us better at predicting the part of the world which is going to be interesting to us.

Think also of colour vision. Why do birds and bees have more cone pigments than we do? We make do with just three. They get four or five. And it would seem trivial for evolution to generate any number. Why is less also more in hue discrimination?

If we created a world when we close our eyes, then why is there a clear distinction between the world I imagine and the world I experience when I open my eyes. — Harry Hindu

But sensory deprivation experiments (and hypnagogic imagery/REM dreams) show that starved of real world input for long enough, the brain does just completely invent a world of impressions. And we can't distinguish the fictional nature of the experience while that is our state of experience. Even afterwards, hallucinations may never be categorised as unreal.

I was thinking about Grice's just-so story about how an animal might make what was heretofore an involuntary signal voluntarily, as a step toward language, etc. But this is already an in-band signal. — Srap Tasmaner

Peirce covers the intermediate cases by talking about three classes of sign - iconic, indexical and symbolic. One just accidentally indicates, one habitually points, the last is fully intentional as it demands interpretation.

My original point is simply that it is incorrect to say that information is necessarily physical, as the physical representation can be entirely changed, but the information remain the same. So they're separable. — Wayfarer

Yeah I get that. The problem people have with Frege's third realm is that it's platonism, which kinda blows.

I'm looking to work my way up from the bottom. There's a phenomenon of two utterances "saying the same thing", yes, but are we forced to say there's a thing, an immaterial, eternal thing, that they both say? No we are not. (Quine attacked synonymy precisely because he wanted to reject "the proposition".) But that leaves us with the burden of explaining what propositions (and all the rest) are posited to explain.*

That's what I'm trying to do. If you're okay with platonism, then yeah what I have to say will be irrelevant.

*ADDED: "explain" is way too strong; "describe" is more like it.