Sorry, I did not understand that paragraph. Could you perhaps rephrase it? — Samuel Lacrampe

Put even more simply : the identity established between the information of the spoken sentence "Montréal is in Québec" and the written sentence "Montréal is in Québec" is an additional piece of information which is only born out of the processing of those two different item of data by an efficient processor.

This does not inform us on essential properties of the information medium, but on properties of the data post processing.

There's a certain "objectivity" in a great art. It resonates for a culture. It concretizes that culture's ideals. ... We can see measure the proportions of a culture's ideal woman. But I don't see why we would measure our understanding of cultural ideals only in a quantifying manner. We don't just want to manipulate and predict. — t0m

Yeah. I'm not arguing that art should be doing science's job somehow. My position here is about how art is employed in the social construction of what it means to be a modern Western mind. A painting is exactly like a bicycle in making it obvious how you are meant to view your world. It is another part of the technology that Heidegger was talking about.

If something is hung in a gallery as if its contains sacred meaning, then we know the hushed tone and clever reverence with which we must approach it to be "part of the club" - even if it shit in a can.

I'm not defending the holy individual here, though I do think there are limits to this dissolution of the individual into the social. I'm really just trying to be accurate about the world. For me, however, this very notion of "world" is in question. I don't assume the world of natural science. To me that is a useful abstraction that exists within a more "primordial" notion of the world. We are in the world with others. But I don't think the spatial notion of objects next to other objects captures this "in-ness" or "with-others-ness." — t0m

I do presume naturalism. And I think that gets at what you mean because it says everything is connected in that everything emerges from the same primordial ooze. Humans weren't inserted into the world by divine intention. And none of us are truly individual as we are all creatures formed by a context.

So naturalism is the organic view, the developmental view. I agree science is often Scientism - the mechanical or reductionist view.

A painting is exactly like a bicycle in making it obvious how you are meant to view your world. It is another part of the technology that Heidegger was talking about.

If something is hung in a gallery as if its contains sacred meaning, then we know the hushed tone and clever reverence with which we must approach it to be "part of the club" - even if it shit in a can. — apokrisis

This is too cynical, IMV. No doubt that's part of it, but "hushed tone and clever reverence" as the highest aspect of experiencing art ? Also reducing paintings to bicycles seems a little extreme. I'm no Heidegger scholar, but it's my understanding that he gave art a high place (especially poetry) as one of the ways that the world is revealed.

Heidegger aside, I contend that we use art to make sense of the world as much as we use physical science. Isn't what you individually experience as a whole a function to some degree of the art you've been exposed to? I can understand deciding to ignore that and do metaphysics in a way that ignores the subjective aspect. But from my point of view it's a reduction of the field, justified by an attachment to a more reliable if narrower method.

I can relate to that. One could even say that the forms are outside of space and time in the sense that they make space and time possible. I suppose Kant put them outside of space and time. For me there are basic forms (like the intuition of unity) that are truly outside of the time. They are always already there. That intuitively grasped "unit" is why (some) math is eternal truth, for instance, IMV. Other concepts like "justice," however, are arguably subject to the "dialectic" or historical evolution. So they would be "in" time. For Kojeve man "is" time as an embodied concept system increasing in complexity and self-knowledge. The "forms" are the intelligible-speakable form of self-describing reality itself.

But that's a digression. I sense a flame too. Or really I'm on the bonfire. Meaning is the least deniable thing, one might say. To deny meaning is to employ meaning. To insist that meaning is physical is to employ the meaning of 'physical.' The "physical" is already an abstract entity. As Hegel noted, we can't point at an particular unless it's already conceptualized and included in a universal, even if it's just the universal of the thing devoid of other determinations. There's already the projection of unity, that most basic and eternal of meanings as I see it.

One could even say that the forms are outside of space and time in the sense that they make space and time possible. — t0m

You got it. Not so much ‘outside’ as ‘prior to’. But, right on the money.

I should maybe say that they make space and time possible as concepts. They make talking about space and time possible? Putting event A before event B in an intelligible way, saying that X is to the right of Y.

Thanks for the partial answer to one of my questions, but I received much more semantic information from the answers you didn't provide.

Information entropy is exactly about semantic content, isn't it? It's how many bits can be lost before the information contained in the string loses its meaning? Yes or no? — Wayfarer

Note the "message" is a random set of data. Quite deliberately a meaningless pattern. So you can't cheat by posting A, B, C,.. The test is a transmission of symbols of maximum uncertainty. One shouldn't give you any information about the next for free.

However one question that occurs to me about the purported equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy is that there is no concept of temperature or energy in the discipline of information entropy. — Wayfarer

Oh that occurred to you? It's also mentioned in the criticisms section on the page. ;)

As a really crude example, you could encode the same information in a string of granite boulders, each of which weighed 1 tonne, and also in bits on a hard drive. — Wayfarer

The physics comes into it as enough granite boulders would form a gravitational field so strong they would collapse to create a black hole. More bits could thus be stored in a volume of space if they were scratched on grains of sand. And even more if they could be dents in microscopic flakes of silica.

So you see where this is going. Eventually there is a plankscale limit on the possible information content of a volume of space. See this good SciAm article -
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

I should maybe say that they make space and time possible as concepts. They make talking about space and time possible? — t0m

Indeed. Aren't they Kant's 'primary intuitions'? But I'm so glad you see the point. Really this is the single issue that has been my main interest, ever since joining forums, which must be getting near to 10 years. It has to do with the fact that rationality, rational relations, can be understood to be true with reference to nothing other than thought itself, and yet (miraculously) they are also predictive with respect to phenomena. It really is an astonishing thing, which most people simply take for granted - like, they use it all the time, without actually noticing what an amazing faculty it is. That is actually the primary sentiment behind the essay of Wigner's, 'The Unreasonable Efficiency of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'. Why should it be that the 'laws of thought' can unlock all of these undiscovered facets of reality? That, I think, is near to the heart of the entire Pythagorean-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition.

The physics comes into it as enough granite boulders would form a gravitational field so strong they would collapse to create a black hole — apokrisis

My question was about the equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy - the 'equation' which you referred to. So I looked it up, and that is a question about it. I strongly suspect that Claude Shannon created his equation on the model of Bolzmann's equation, but that it is basically an analogy. But I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong.

My question was about the equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy - the 'equation' which you referred to. — Wayfarer

From that article I cited, this might help....

Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one
would need to implement any particular arrangement.

The two entropies have two salient differences, though. First, the thermodynamic entropy used by a chemist or a refrigeration engineer is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, whereas the Shannon entropy used by a communications engineer is in bits, essentially dimensionless. That difference is merely a matter of convention.

Note also that Boltzmann's entropy is based on probability theory foundations - statistical mechanics. The point about energy/temperature relate to the earlier classical entropy equations of Clausius - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(classical_thermodynamics)

You would have spotted that wrinkle in the criticism section that occurred to you.

In classical thermodynamics, which is the study of thermodynamics from a purely empirical, or measurement point of view, thermodynamic entropy can only be measured by considering energy and temperature. Clausius' statement dS= δQ/T, or, equivalently, when all other effective displacements are zero, dS=dU/T, is the only way to actually measure thermodynamic entropy.

It is only with the introduction of statistical mechanics, the viewpoint that a thermodynamic system consists of a collection of particles and which explains classical thermodynamics in terms of probability distributions, that the entropy can be considered separately from temperature and energy.

So it is why the conclusion is....

Ultimately, the criticism of the link between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy is a matter of terminology, rather than substance.

Zing!

The public\private dichotomy does not help us here, and it is not toward it that my use of the term "public" was aimed, but rather to the fact that the initial act of assignment, the first time someone establish that & means "and", that must be at least at some point be shared to the processors — Akanthinos

This is what I claim to be mistaken though. It's very likely that the first time someone wrote down that symbol, it had meaning only for that person, until that person explained to someone else what it means. We find this in mathematics quite frequently. A physicist producing a theory will introduce a new symbol. That symbol has meaning only for that physicist, within that theory, until other physicists are exposed to the theory.

Thanks! Still reading up on it. But the thing I don't get, is that, as I said, you could represent a particular item of information, using any kind of media, and the information entropy that was associated with a change in the representation of that proposition would be the same regardless of the medium. But thermodynamic entropy is tied to physical specifics i.e. it is measurable for particular kinds of matter. So I can't see how that difference is 'a matter of convention'. It's taking thermodynamic entropy as an analogy for how information entropy works, but there are no fixed units of measure in the information entropy instance. So it seems much more a matter of substance than mere terminology as far as I can see.

One could even say that the forms are outside of space and time in the sense that they make space and time possible. — t0m

Not so much ‘outside’ as ‘prior to’. — Wayfarer

One point which I've been trying to make in this thread, is that it came to Plato's attention that these Forms which are outside of, or prior to material existence, are not the human conceptions of universals as is commonly attributed to Platonism in the modern representation, they are, as described in "The Timaeus", the forms of individual, particular objects.

The conclusion that there is an immaterial Form, which is prior to the material existence of each and every particular object is derived from two principal premises. One of the premises is concerned with the nature of intention, will, "the good". The other premise is concerned with the nature of material existence in relation to the passing of time.

Aristotle uses a slightly different method to prove that the form is prior to the material existence of the object. He produces his law of identity, which is an inductive principle derived from the uniqueness of every particular material thing. Every material thing is unique, so a prior form is necessary to ensure this uniqueness. This also can be derived from the principle of sufficient reason. There must be a reason why every thing is unique.

You are still thinking that Shannon was talking about the meaning of a message. He was instead talking about its quantity.

As I said, he derived a fundamental measure by assuming the message to be maximally meaningless - just some random binary sequence. So that means no matter how meaningful (or otherwise) your message, Shannon information defines the logical space it takes up in the world.

Meaningful messages can be pretty compact as a fragment could be used to deduce the whole. Contextual knowledge could be applied. But what Shannon was tackling was the problem of being sure your incoming message hasn’t been corrupted by noise.

So the strictest test of that is the accurate reception of a message where each symbol is random and completely unpredictable from the others before and after. The risk of uncertainty is the greatest. Therefore solve the noise issue there and you have your limiting case. You can quantify the worst your uncertainty would be. You know the limit to which a message may have been disordered.

On your other point, the tight connection between information and matter is something more recent. It is with the holographic principle that now spacetime can be viewed as imposing informational limits on material being. That is what the SciAm article is about.

You are still thinking that Shannon was talking about the meaning of a message. He was instead talking about its quantity. — apokrisis

I know! Shannon is of course concerned with quantitative representation of information - about the maximally efficient ways to compress and transmit information via electronic media. That is the problem the paper addresses, and we're all relying on Shannon's work every day. I am starting to see, now, why this is felt to be a kind of 'copernican revolution', because it greatly amplifies and generalises the scope of quantization. But it's not especially relevant for the metaphysics of meaning as I understand it.

But it's not especially relevant for the metaphysics of meaning as I understand it. — Wayfarer

Well I explained why in fact it is. If you can quantify, you can do science. So Shannon clears the decks for the assault on semantics.

At the start of the thread I cited the way that information theory, and indeed its "ugly twin", entropy theory, are being employed to make sense of life and mind - material systems that are clearly "all about the meanings". So you have Shannon information-based metrics, like mutual information, self-information, ascendency and dozens of other ways of now measuring the semantic content of material systems.

My favourite model of the way the brain works - Friston's Bayesian brain - jumps right over to the entropy view. It talks about brains being systems to minimise free energy. So what that does is convert neuroscience into thermodynamics.

We already know that thermodynamics explains biology in a general way. And biology explains psychology. So this is making that relationship mathematically precise. Something we can now go out and measure in those terms.

One point which I've been trying to make in this thread, is that it came to Plato's attention that these Forms which are outside of, or prior to material existence, are not the human conceptions of universals as is commonly attributed to Platonism in the modern representation, they are, as described in "The Timaeus", the forms of individual, particular objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

That sounds plausible. I read parts of Plato closely but have utterly neglected other parts. For me that's secondary, I suppose, because something like conceptualism is more plausible to me.

Particular objects are perceived, as it were, already infused with conceptuality stemming the spontaneity of the rational subject herself. — Wiki

Because I know that (in some sense) I'm "in" a brain, it makes sense that a semi-automatic conceptual processing of sensory information is going on. Concept seems central to this processing. But this theory itself is part of the less automatic part of that processing, so we have a strange mobius strip. Concept is. Intelligibility is. Hypotheses about its nature or origin occur within this 'is.'

Indeed. Aren't they Kant's 'primary intuitions'? — Wayfarer

Right. That's how I understand it. Then entities are revealed as 'unities' in relation within these intuitions.

But I'm so glad you see the point. Really this is the single issue that has been my main interest, ever since joining forums, which must be getting near to 10 years. It has to do with the fact that rationality, rational relations, can be understood to be true with reference to nothing other than thought itself, and yet (miraculously) they are also predictive with respect to phenomena. It really is an astonishing thing, which most people simply take for granted - like, they use it all the time, without actually noticing what an amazing faculty it is. That is actually the primary sentiment behind the essay of Wigner's, 'The Unreasonable Efficiency of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'. Why should it be that the 'laws of thought' can unlock all of these undiscovered facets of reality? That, I think, is near to the heart of the entire Pythagorean-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. — Wayfarer

I agree. It's amazing. I think we tend to get "sucked in" to taking care of business that distracts us from wonder. As far as why thought can unlock reality, you probably remember that's one of my big issues. As I see it, introspection and mediation on what we tend to mean by "why" reveals that any 'explanation' has 'brute fact at its apex. For me this is fine. Wonder becomes a logical necessity, a conceptual result. It's not (only) how but that the world is that is the mystical or wonderful.

Was Parmenides struck with wonder? We know that Plato was influenced by Parmenides.

One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is.

Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thinking apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered. (B 8.34–36)

For to be aware and to be are the same. (B 3)

It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not. (B 6.1–2)

You will know the aether’s nature, and in the aether all the/ signs, and the unseen works of the pure torch/ of the brilliant sun, and from whence they came to be,/ and you will learn the wandering works of the round-eyed moon/ and its nature, and you will know too the surrounding heaven,/ both whence it grew and how Necessity directing it bound it/ to furnish the limits of the stars. (Fr. 10)

…how the earth and sun and moon/ and the shared aether and the heavenly milk and Olympos/ outermost and the hot might of the stars began/ to come to be. (Fr. 11) — Parmenides

The idea that thinking and being are one seem proto-Kantian to me. Language-concept makes entities possible as entities. "It is" reveals or suggests pure intelligible presence.

If you can quantify, you can do science. So Shannon clears the decks for the assault on semantics. — apokrisis

Shannon's work is about 'the quantification of information', and science is also centred around quantification. Well and good, but it's a different matter to the metaphysics of meaning. What interests me, is the idea that rational and mathematical truths are real but not physical. Nor can they be derived from physical premises. In fact in order to arrive at any premisses, we have to employ them first.

I have to say something about ‘emerging from ooze’, also. I am not creationist, but I do think think that man embodies, or is, a ‘spark’ of the divine (which is a frequent expression in the mystical side of Greek philosophy.) So, ooze + spark. Much philosophical discipline is based on dis-identifying with the ooze so as to realise one’s tru nature as spark.

We know that Plato was influenced by Parmenides. — t0m

The Parmenides is one of the principal dialogues. It's deeply mystical. The difficulty is with these materials, such words as 'thought' and 'knowledge' - and even 'is'! - are laden with unstated meanings that have to be drawn out by scholars expert in the tradition (which I'm certainly not).

One key point of the Parmenides the introductory section wherein he meets various goddesses and then travels to 'the meeting place of day and night'. That is often interpreted as a reference to a similar kind of non-dualism that is found in other cultures of that time, notably Indian. "What is', is rather like the Indian 'sat' , or truth. Perhaps it denotes an awareness, typical of mysticism, that is in some sense beyond or outside time and space. It would have to be something like that, otherwise what he says makes no sense.

The Parmenides is said to be the origin of systematic metaphysics, i.e. the first attempt to infer the nature of reality on the basis of logic alone. When stated baldly, it sounds completely implausible - that what is, cannot not be, and what is not, cannot come to be. But I think where the Parmenides is significant is as a pole in a dialectic (the other being Heraclitus). He sharpens the question, what do we really mean when we say what something is? Recall, this is generations before Aristotle with his ‘substance and accident’.

For to be aware and to be are the same. (B 3) — Parmenides

Obviously enigmatic, but I would say this is a reference to the apodictic reality of being - the same idea, basically, as the Cogito.

The Parmenides is one of the principal dialogues. It's deeply mystical. The difficulty is with these materials, such words as 'thought' and 'knowledge' - and even 'is'! - are laden with unstated meanings that have to be drawn out by scholars expert in the tradition (which I'm certainly not). — Wayfarer

Ah yes, Hegel used that dialogue as an example of "the labor of the concept." Is it mystical? I've only skimmed it, and I wasn't the frame of mind to get absorbed by it. I'm not saying it's not.

"What is', is rather like the Indian 'sat' , or truth. Perhaps it denotes an awareness, typical of mysticism, that is in some sense beyond or outside time and space. It would have to be something like that, otherwise what he says makes no sense. — Wayfarer

Interesting. That's plausible. As you may know and seem to hint at, Popper had a go at this. He understood it as "pure logical reasoning" as opposed to sense experience. The way of illusion is all the useful pragmatic "knowledge" that is metaphysically-logically false. IMV, that is a reasonable if limited interpretation. It's hard working with only fragments. The poetic form indicates a high feeling. Is that elation wonder or a sense of the power in the logic that pierces the rich illusion? Or both? Something else entirely? Something esoteric or mystical?

He sharpens the question, what do we really mean when we say what something is? Recall, this is generation before Aristotle with his ‘substance and accident’.

For to be aware and to be are the same. (B 3)
— Parmenides

Obviously enigmatic, but I would say this is a reference to the apodictic reality of being - the same idea, basically, as the Cogito. — Wayfarer

I'm a broken record, but sharpening the question of what we mean by 'is' is the 'one thought' of Heidegger's life and work. That quote does remind me of the apodictic reality of being, and perhaps also of "only as phenomenology is ontology possible." But (following Heidegger) the tradition is 'wrong' to think of the phenomenon as a mask worn by the noumenon. The phenomenon is the thing itself from a different perspective that sidesteps the ultimately scientistic Cartesian framework that understands the human as a disinterested knower or isolated subject of the (mediated) extended matter in physics-space.

I like Parmenides' idea that all awareness is being. For practical reasons we divide this awareness between only-private and private-but-public-also. In our usual mode of talking, we start with agreed-upon alreadyclarified-or-revealed or 'thematized' phenomona. But our most human mode employs a "productive logic" or poesis that "opens" a field for science (or just 'business') by disclosing-inventing the entities and basic framework involved.

What appeals to me especially is getting behind or around all the pre-interpretedness that we don't think to question (since it's almost invisible as we use it) that traps our thinking in certain loops.

That sounds plausible. I read parts of Plato closely but have utterly neglected other parts. For me that's secondary, I suppose, because something like conceptualism is more plausible to me. — t0m

That was probably the first sense of "inform", where Plato referred to the creation of particular things as matter being informed. Matter is passive, and receives a form. Aristotle produced a similar description of the mind, it receives intelligible objects, as forms. This produced the need for the "passive intellect" to account for the reception of forms. The Neo-Platonists and Christians went even further to say that matter is created in the act of informing.

"Information" properly refers to the act of informing, though we commonly use it as a noun referring to a thing called "information". If "information" refers to the activity of informing, then it really doesn't make sense to speak of information as not being physical, because the passive thing receiving the form will be physical. There are two parts to the act of informing, the immaterial form, and the material thing receiving the form. If "information" is used as a noun, referring to the thing doing the informing, then we are speaking of nothing other than th e forms themselves. And if the forms are assumed to be non-physical, i.e. exist independently from matter, such independent existence needs to be demonstrated logically.

The independent existence of forms is necessitated by Aristotle's cosmological argument, that is the necessary logical demonstration. The consequence of this principle is that not only is matter a passive receiver of forms, but matter is created in the act of information. This accounts for the fact that the living soul creates its own material body.

Well and good, but it's a different matter to the metaphysics of meaning. What interests me, is the idea that rational and mathematical truths are real but not physical. — Wayfarer

So you want a definition of meaning. And you don’t think it useful to first have a definition of the meaningless?

Mathematical truths seem fundamental in some crucial way, yet you don’t seem impressed when two such opposed things - information and entropy - are shown to be mathematically the same?

You’re a tough crowd. :)

Do you have any kind of definition of the semantic as yet? My impression is that anytime meaning is mentioned, your mind skips immediately to the necessity of a self experiencing that meaning. That is where all he mystification begins. Meanings can’t be just acted upon. They must be felt. They are not just states of interpretation or information that constrains, they are understood, appreciated, perceived, known to be.

So a meaning encodes a point of view. Yet points of view are then by definition particular, personal, individual. That is why sharing meanings is a fraught business. Likewise any claims to be able to measure meaning in any objective or scientific fashion. Your way of thinking about meaning - as rooted in the subjectivity of the singular point of view - already defeats any possibility of all attempted objective descriptions.

You’ve set up a nice fortress of presumptions to protect your view of semantics. So you don’t need to take the generalisations of the philosophy of semiotics, or the science of information, seriously.

Even though that generalisation project is arriving at its mathematical terminus. Somehow you can hold mathematics in the highest regard, yet ignore it completely when it comes to the generalisation of semantics.

What appeals to me especially is getting behind or around all the pre-interpretedness that we don't think to question (since it's almost invisible as we use it) that traps our thinking in certain loops. — t0m

I really like the way you’ve been expressing this. But I think the weakness is that it depends heavily on the metaphysical truth of some communal or shared state of being, when the phenomenal mind is so completely private and unshared.

So it is both an appealing notion - expressed in many philosophies - but also fails unless we can define the “ground state” in something other than the usual mentalistic terms.

Alluding to the divine kind of works for me if it again has nothing to do with anthropomorphic creators, or creating forces.

There is a mathematical magic at the heart of Peircean metaphysics, a self-making relation that can call forth being from its pure inescapable logic. And then that meaning-forming, structure-creating device points deeper to its own ground, its own precondition, in the “not-being” of Apeiron, of Firstness or vagueness.

So reality swims into existence. And it condenses out of neither some ur-substance, nor some rarified divine mind - ur-phenomenology. The ur-potential of the Apeiron has to be a still more subtle concept.

Yet I can see that that approach to metaphysics is by-passing phenomenal being, which is actually the basis of our particular being as humans. So to match the ur-objectivity of the pansemiotic metaphysics I just described, there is then the ur-subjective description that would formally complement that.

There is here the possibility of two complementary metaphysical projects.

I really like the way you’ve been expressing this. But I think the weakness is that it depends heavily on the metaphysical truth of some communal or shared state of being, when the phenomenal mind is so completely private and unshared.

So it is both an appealing notion - expressed in many philosophies - but also fails unless we can define the “ground state” in something other than the usual mentalistic terms. — apokrisis

To my mind this brings up the grounds of phenomenology --or actually its groundlessness. "To the things themselves." But what normalizes this discourse? How do we know that Heidegger is "correct" about being-in and being-with-others as the phenomenon? It just "sounds right." It convinces. Since the phenomenon is the "thing-in-itself" for Heidegger, this is still "metaphysical" in some sense. But strives for some analogue of presuppositionlessness. Yet the method itself reveals that things are always already preinterpreted. This is the "guilt" of being Dasein, of having a past, of not being able to get behind the past. I believe this is what is meant by "finitude." The "perfect" phenomenology is impossible. Or rather an attempt to go to the things themselves reveals the impossibility of taking an eternal-atemporal or before-the-past view of them. Being is so entangled with time as history (preinterpretedness) that we can't have it pure.

As far as "mentalistic" goes, I think trying to get beyond this framework is a big part of radical phenomenology. I guess this is already in Hume. Look for the subject and you can't find it. It exists in a certain sense only in the way we use the word "I." The distinction mind-matter is also a tool that works in daily situations that philosophers have tended to absolutize. We try to reify a mark-noise that exists for the most part as a ready-to-hand tool. We look for a present-at-hand "non-physical
" entity just because we have the word 'mind' misleadingly ripped out of context/use. It's the same with the word 'real.' Perhaps (later) Wittgenstein is usefully thought of as a phenomenologist of language use. But philosophers don't want to understand his critique, since it threatens the project of building a crystal castle from these reifications.

Alluding to the divine kind of works for me if it again has nothing to do with anthropomorphic creators, or creating forces. — apokrisis

I'm with Feuerbach on the divine. It's "just" the highest human feeling-thinking. Of course this "just" is also the most unjust adjective possible here. For me the usual alien creators or forces are dead machines. They have life only to the degree that we project what is most highly human on them. The "philosopher's god" often strikes me as a scratching of the systematizing itch. I'm not saying such an itch as bad. I'm suggesting a continuum of notions of the divine. On one side there is love, for instance, and on the other side a "mechanical" apex employed the knowledge-hero.

There is a mathematical magic at the heart of Peircean metaphysics, a self-making relation that can call forth being from its pure inescapable logic. And then that meaning-forming, structure-creating device points deeper to its own ground, its own precondition, in the “not-being” of Apeiron, of Firstness or vagueness.

So reality swims into existence. And it condenses out of neither some ur-substance, nor some rarified divine mind - ur-phenomenology. The ur-potential of the Apeiron has to be a still more subtle concept. — apokrisis

I can somewhat relate to this. There is a "productive logic" that calls beings from being which is nothing (Heidegger's idea) or from the apeiron. There is emergence from a postulated background or source. Being is not itself a being. Or our image of the source is not the source itself. Our image of the source emerges from the source as its self-representation. I think we agree that distinctions emerge, that no distinction is fundamental. There is a kind of logic that is ontology. Reality is a self-thinking "thought," but of course "thought" is the wrong word here. The "thought" cannot be mental, since thought or difference or distinction is prior to the mental-physical dichotomy as its condition of possibility.

Yet I can see that that approach to metaphysics is by-passing phenomenal being, which is actually the basis of our particular being as humans. So to match the ur-objectivity of the pansemiotic metaphysics I just described, there is then the ur-subjective description that would formally complement that.

There is here the possibility of two complementary metaphysical projects. — apokrisis

I agree, to the degree that I understand. For me there is a "Hegelian" project (or Peircian) and a "Heideggerian" project. I can imagine complementarity and I can also just see both projects as fascinating and worthwhile in themselves. We can such try to see clearly what it is like to be human in the non-theoretical mode (by seeing around this theoretical mode) and we can push the theoretical mode to extremes.

That was probably the first sense of "inform", where Plato referred to the creation of particular things as matter being informed. Matter is passive, and receives a form. Aristotle produced a similar description of the mind, it receives intelligible objects, as forms. This produced the need for the "passive intellect" to account for the reception of forms. The Neo-Platonists and Christians went even further to say that matter is created in the act of informing. — Metaphysician Undercover

So maybe Plato was proto-Kantian? I'm understanding Heidegger at the moment as an "improved" Kant. It seems that Kant was most interested in understanding the possibility of Newtonian nature. He was interested in the possibility of objectivity. It was a "scandal" that there was still no proof of the objective world. For Heidegger it was a scandal that such a proof was thought necessary. A less biased look sees how purpose-driven our informing of the substratum or matter is. The disinterested staring at present-at-hand entities is not at all our primary mode of experience of what is. "Matter" is revealed to us for the most part as resource or tool-to-be-used. Language use involves a deep sense of being-in and being-with. True statements conform not to some dead external "matter" but to being-with and being-in.

"Information" properly refers to the act of informing, though we commonly use it as a noun referring to a thing called "information". If "information" refers to the activity of informing, then it really doesn't make sense to speak of information as not being physical, because the passive thing receiving the form will be physical. There are two parts to the act of informing, the immaterial form, and the material thing receiving the form. If "information" is used as a noun, referring to the thing doing the informing, then we are speaking of nothing other than th e forms themselves. And if the forms are assumed to be non-physical, i.e. exist independently from matter, such independent existence needs to be demonstrated logically.

The independent existence of forms is necessitated by Aristotle's cosmological argument, that is the necessary logical demonstration. The consequence of this principle is that not only is matter a passive receiver of forms, but matter is created in the act of information. This accounts for the fact that the living soul creates its own material body. — Metaphysician Undercover

For me "information" doesn't have a fixed meaning. There is the modern scientific meaning properly used within that context and then the vague everyday meaning successfully vaguely employed non-scientifically. I do like the background you provided. To in-form as the imposition of form is nice. I also see matter as created in a distinction that is not material. We use a sign to refer to what is not sign.

So you want a definition of meaning. And you don’t think it useful to first have a definition of the meaningless?

Mathematical truths seem fundamental in some crucial way, yet you don’t seem impressed when two such opposed things - information and entropy - are shown to be mathematically the same? — apokrisis

I'm not after a definition of meaning, really. It's too fundamental a term to admit of definition - 'what's the meaning of meaning' :-} . I'm simply saying that the ability to quantize information, important as that indubitably is, doesn't necessarily tell us that much about the original point of the thread, namely, the nature of reason and the ontological status of abstract 'objects'. I'm very interested in that original meaning of the idea of 'intelligibility', and I think it's something that has been lost or forgotten, rather than superseded; just because something is archaic, doesn't mean it is obsolete.

The other point, as I mentioned to tOm, is that there can't be any way to quantify meaning, really. The example I gave was: imagine a short string of text, like, for instance, a ground-breaking or seminal scientific discovery, like the Laws of Motion. In terms of an amount of information, you can calculate what it would take to digitise it, store it and transmit it -actually it would be a trivial amount of information it today's world - but the meaning of those ideas, and the consequences of discovering them, are impossible to quantify.

My impression is that anytime meaning is mentioned, your mind skips immediately to the necessity of a self experiencing that meaning. That is where all he mystification begins. Meanings can’t be just acted upon. They must be felt. They are not just states of interpretation or information that constrains, they are understood, appreciated, perceived, known to be. — apokrisis

Very good observation, and thanks for it. Yes, I do think that, in fact, I can't see how it can be any other way. That's why I don't get the idea of 'states of interpretance' without a mind that interprets - as discussed here in some of the other posts.

I do like the background you provided. To in-form as the imposition of form is nice. — t0m

if we take this as a principle, we can refer to two distinct ways that forms are imposed in the act of informing. In the one case, we accept intelligible forms into our mind in understanding, and in the other case, we impose intelligible forms onto the material world, in the act of creating.

How do we relate "information" to this? I like to think of information as the act which is either the passive mind receiving the form in understanding, or the matter of the material world receiving the form in creating. This act of informing can be called information. But what is this thing which is called "information", which is supposed to be somehow independent from the act of informing? is it just the form itself, or is it something other than the form?

But what is this thing which is called "information", which is supposed to be somehow independent from the act of informing? is it just the form itself, or is it something other than the form? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think the everyday understanding is that information is "meaning." But what is meaning? And what is the "is" here? I suggest that we approach the irreducible with these questions.

Not only intermingled but (until the expression terminates) deferred are the meanings that gel to constitute this sentence. I'm suggesting that plucking individual forms out of this intermingling, deferred flow is already a reduction-for-convenience of what it is to think. I suppose "forms" are the "atoms" of thinking, yet these forms don't "snap together" in a simple way. The whole is greater than the parts. Can we get behind this meaning-making? I think we can make it more conspicuous. We can peel off our unwitting projections of what it "should" be.