The physical constraints that might in retrospect be recognised as the "primeval ecosystem" can be "crisply informational" for purely accidental reasons. — apokrisis

I don't see how information can be accidental. The word implies a necessity, the necessity which is required for knowledge. Without some form of necessity there can be no knowledge and no information.

So - remembering that we are talking about the development of the coding side of the biosemiotic relation - the syntax might seem physically definite in the primeval condition, but the semantics is still maximally contingent. And being uncertain or indeterminate, that makes it spontaneous or vague. — apokrisis

You continue to represent this in you inverted, mixed up fashion. What you call "the syntax" is the pre-existing "language", and this is the context in which the messages come into existence. It is not the syntax, it is the context and therefore semantic. As the context, this pre-existing 'language" provides the semantics, the meaning, and as the necessary condition for the existence of the messages, it is not contingent. Syntax is produced posteriorly, as what you call "the regularity of a habit". When the messaging proves to be sufficient for fulfilling the needs of the "language" there is reliability, stability, and this produces syntax. Simply stated, the rule follows after we notice what works, while the first messages might come off in a trial and error way.

What comes first is a vague state of semiotic relations. So chimps grunting in contextually meaningful, yet ungrammatical fashion, is at least some kind of messaging system. — apokrisis

Did you read the article by Pattee? He argues that it is necessary to assume that prior to any semiotic relations there exists a "language" itself. The semiotic relations are a function of the parts, the switching, the messaging, but prior to this is the "language" itself, the whole, and this "language" provides the context within which the semiotic relations will emerge. He argues that the language is prior to the symbols. So even if chimps grunting is considered to be a meaningful messaging system, he claims that these meaningful messages can only come into existence within the pre-existing "language". The "language" provides context, which is necessary in order that the grunts may have meaning. What Pattee does, is take this right back to the most primitive form of messaging, molecular switching, and claims that this switching must have come into existence within the context of a pre-existing "language".

What Pattee does, is take this right back to the most primitive form of messaging, molecular switching, and claims that this switching must have come into existence within the context of a pre-existing "language" — Metaphysician Undercover

You have it back to front. The primitive condition would have to be some kind of self activating network of connections - like an autocatalytic network.

So the point is that it would start with an accidental physical situation - like an ocean floor geothermal vent reducing sulphur in a biochemical series of steps. And then the physics would happen also to represent a simplest form of computational network - one that naturally generates cycling patterns that connect end states back to inputs.

In this pansemiotic fashion, the separate realms of Platonic form and material dynamics would be accidentally connected, the blue touch paper on biological development would be lit, and the rest becomes history.

So a language - in the sense Pattee employs - is about this happy conjunction of symbol and matter. The precondition is that computation is a form always in waiting. And that likewise, materiality could be patterned enough to accept yet further restrictions on its degrees of freedom.

So material dynamics is already organised by nature to run down biochemical gradients. But it then takes the addition of negentropic information - computational mechanism - to keep returning a cycle to its initial conditions, ready to repeat.

You have it back to front. — apokrisis

And I said the same thing about you. We might have to agree to disagree.

At least I know who Pattee agrees with.

Even a trivial version of the argument says you have to add the further thing of "the organisation". Summing the parts ain't enough. — apokrisis

I thought you were trying to say that the organization-of-the-parts was itself a part. So to help me better understand, I must ask : What do you think is meant by the "sum of the parts"? Is it the collection of parts without any organization - perhaps in separate containers? But such a collection is in fact an organization of the parts! (Such a collection is what I termed a listing.) And it will have properties just like any other organization. Thus a particular whole will have different properties from the sum of its parts, but a particular whole is not greater than the sum of its parts - unless we decide to rank the organizations by their properties.

Please let me know what you think constitutes the parts and their sum - it will help me to argue my position clearer.

So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? And from those vague parts comes a whole which constrains the parts?

If the parts are pre-existing the whole, in this unconstrained, vague fashion, where does the whole derive the power to constrain the parts, when the whole doesn't even exist yet? Do you not think that it's logically impossible for something which does not yet exist, to act as a constraint on existing parts, in order to bring itself into existence? The point to understand is the verb "to act". It is contradictory to say that something non-existent may "act" as a constraint, to bring itself into existence. And if the claim is that something can constrain without acting, or having any actual existence, this needs to be justified.

However, I think that this downward causation is still reducible to the properties of parts. I may try to demonstrate this on any example you will choose. — miosim

Great. Start with consciousness. — apokrisis

I expected you will offer an example where emergence shows advantage compare to reductionism. I don't think this is a case. The holistic approach, as I understand, contributed nothing in understanding consciousness, but just flooded discussion with new fancy terminology.

However the reduction approach to conscience also have a problem. The problem is not in the reductionism original formulation as 'The complex things are always reducible to the nature of the sum of underlying constituents and their causes, where the sum is any mathematical or logical procedure that evaluates a resultant of multiple causes', but in its stripped-down interpretation that 'the system behavior could be described in terms of parts' properties studying in isolation'.
This striped down interpretation is profoundly wrong, because it fails to recognize that isolated parts, in absent of interaction, will not exhibit any properties at all. For example, an electron possesses an electrical charge, but we cannot observe this property unless electron interacts with another charged particle. We do not declare that the charge of an electron emerges during interaction. Instead we agree that the electron always posses the charge (whether we observe it or not) and reveals this property only during interactions. While electron interacts with external magnetic field it reveals its spin properties, while accelerating an electron in the force field it reveals its mass, while interacting with atomic nuclear an electron reveals so many other of its properties not observable and not expected while we just stare at electron in isolation. These 'hidden' properties that are revealed only during interactions in the system causes the perception of emergence that is 'a holy grail' and fertile ground of emergentism.
When parts in the system are subjected to the new interactions that may reveal their 'hidden' properties. A system acts as a ‘magnifying glass’ and a ‘litmus test’ that reveal properties of the parts not observable otherwise.

To investigate life and mind phenomena I used this approach in the paper published more than a year ago. This is the badly written paper published in the online journal that you probably would avoid. However this paper has my answer to question about conscience. The paper is accessible using link below

http://www.hrpub.org/download/20151231/UJP3-19405044.pdf

So now you recognise that to "have a collection" one must add the further thing of "a container for the parts"?

Cool. You have conceded my point in regards to taking a set theoretic approach.

Hey, that paper is in fact a pretty decent defence of Panpsychism. But you are right. Being a pansemiotician myself, I would fundamentally disagree with it. :)

So the guts of my objection would be that nothing can be solved by positing a dualism of substance. In metaphysics, progress is always achieved by discovering the formal complementarity at the heart of every phenomenon. And arguing for two kinds of substance is making a brute claim about there being two types of the same general thing (a substance) that have no particular reason to be locked into a mutually formative interaction.

So positing a microphysics of matter plus mind cannot work. It has no internal logic. There is nothing to show how the existence of one requires the existence of the other. There is no holism or unity that binds these two ontic catergories. This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking.

With pansemiosis on the other hand, we are talking about the symmetry breaking that is matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And now the two categories are related as a symmetry breaking dichotomy. The two-ness is a fact of logical necessity rather than merely a brute and arbitrary claim.

Materiality is all about material degrees of freedom - the entropy to be dissipated. It is physical dimensionality.

But then the very fact of materiality makes room for its complementary opposite - information or the immateriality of symbolised meaning and sign relations. As I have argued in another thread, the universal expressiveness of a language is due to an extreme constraint on dimensionality. When materiality is reduced towards the ideal of a zero-D point - as it is with any serial code - then this active lack of materiality becomes the birth of the something different, the something opposite, that is the "immaterial" realm of symbols. Or negentropy.

Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity.

So the pansemiotic view can argue it's merit on first principles. Matter and symbol are formally complementary in that the existence of one makes the existence of the other a necessity. You couldn't have a material world and not then have "immaterial" sign relations with that world as a logical possibility.

So in general you start by arguing that reductionism is a failure - its reliance on a rather mystical notion of emergence being a symptom of that. I of course agree. Emergence is always itching to be reduced back to supervenience in the mouths of reductionists. A reductionist only wants to believe in an emergence that is sanitised by quote marks.

And then you argue that if monistic reductionism fails, then maybe mind - that horribly ill defined notion - is the second substantial ingredient that must be discovered in the microphysics. And yes, if all else fails, perhaps we have to accept such a brute fact posit.

But all else hasn't failed. Science already has a science of sign. It is perfectly normal in neuroscience or biology to treat the phenomena of life and mind as sign relations with the material world.

And the matter~symbol dichotomy has the required Metaphysical validity. Sign - living in its zero dimensional realm of digital bits - can be shown to be the outcome of material constraint taken to its physical limits. Negentropy is defined as the inverse of entropy.

The rapid emergence of an information theoretic approach to "everything" - microphysics and cosmology too - shows that this is the universal Metaphysical duality that is working. Information encodes the Janus face relation between sign and matter. Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognised as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit. ;)

But Panpsychism has not fared so well. There is still no metaphysics, let alone physics, connecting the brute and disparate categories of matter and mind. As a possibility, it was raised a century ago and has proved a complete dud.

Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences.

So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality.

But it is also true that part and whole have their most definite state of existence on quite different spatiotemporal scales. So what you are seeing is what you would expect to see as an observer existing inside what is happening.

To you - looking at the story from the middle ground scale - the parts coalesce first. The whole is present largely as a desire to be achieved in the long run future. So the parts shed any vagueness fast and the whole remains vague for the longest possible time.

But as I say, this is an optical effect. It is what you see when you regard creation from some scale intermediate between its local and global limits. Of course the parts look small and definite "by now", while the whole looks large and mysterious, still to make itself absolutely clear to us.

This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking. — apokrisis

I would like to make clear that the panpsychism I advocated is not about 'mater' and 'mind'. It is about 'some entities' which behavior could be described in terms of physical matter or mind. The difference is that description in terms of physical matter is simplified and incomplete (because it can't describe mind related phenomena) and only the description in terms of mind could describe all phenomena, including what we call physical.

Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognized as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit — apokrisis

According to some source, when von Neumann asked Shannon how he was getting on with his information theory, Shannon replied: "The theory was in excellent shape, except that he needed a good name for "missing information". "Why don’t you call it entropy", von Neumann suggested. "In the first place, a mathematical development very much like yours already exists in Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, and in the second place, no one understands entropy very well, so in any discussion you will be in a position of advantage.

I wonder if Shannon theory of information has a wrong name. It is not about information, but about data (storage, transmission, etc.). Shannon freely admitted that his definition of information was limited in scope and was never envisioned as being universal. Shannon deliberately avoided the "murkier" aspects of human communication in framing his definitions; problematic themes such as knowledge, semantics, motivations and intentions of the sender and/or receiver, etc., were avoided altogether.

Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity. — apokrisis

On entropy I agree with von Neumann that no one understands it.

Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences — apokrisis

I am not up to speed with this new dominant paradigm, but Wiki also not aware about it. However I found a short clip about Pansemiosis on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5tLBa-Q-SY

I like it too. ;)

I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality. — apokrisis

Perhaps this makes sense to you, but it is unintelligible, and therefore nonsense to me. All you are saying here is that when you look toward the beginnings of things, you cannot determine which comes first, the part or the whole, because the beginning is lost in vagueness. But as I've explained to you many times now, by logic, the whole is necessarily prior to the parts. You recognize this fundamental principle when you say that the whole constrains the parts. Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning.

Since your perspective, for looking at beginnings, renders the relationship between parts and wholes "maximally vague", when logic tells us that wholes are necessarily prior to the parts, then we may conclude that your perspective is inadequate for understanding beginnings, and therefore unacceptable.

Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation.

So the triadic part~whole relation goes from being something dormant as a pure possibility to something which actually starts to happen - a division that becomes crisply developed as it is self-sustaining due to feedback.

So yes, this still leaves metaphysical questions. But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. There is a concrete limit on any "beginning" which the "perfect symmetry" of vagueness marks.

As soon as you have the slightest bit of the one (wholes, constraints, global "formal" organisation), you also must have already the same degree of its other (parts, degrees of freedom, local "material" action).

Dialectical logic gives you no choice about this. Every action has its reciprocal reaction. Every thesis is intelligible only in the light of there being its antithesis.

Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation. — apokrisis

Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. There must be something which is separated. If it's the whole, then the whole is prior to the parts. If it's a whole consisting of parts, which is what you seem to be saying, then prior to that whole, is another, and prior to that another, ad infinitum. Infinite regress is unavoidable when you describe a beginning as the end of something else.

But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. — apokrisis

I don't see how the separation you speak of could kill the regress, unless the thing which separates, the symmetry itself, is something completely different from a whole and parts. In this case, the whole and parts would come into existence simultaneously at the symmetry-breaking. But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? Then the whole is prior to the parts. The way I see it, either the whole is prior to the parts, or there is an infinite regress of co-dependence.

Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being the beginning of (space)time, it is also the beginning of the dichotomy that we call old vs new, past vs future, change vs stasis.

To talk about things as they were "before" the time there was a "before" is nonsensical. Or at least, only a logic of vagueness - which talks about things "before" the principle of non-contradiction applies - can make sense of such a statement. :)

But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? — Metaphysician Undercover

What's the problem if the whole with no parts is formally equivalent to the parts with no whole? That's what vagueness - as standing prior to the PNC - says.

There are 3 possible cases ( interpretations) of " other than the sum of the parts":
1. less than
2. more than
3. equal to
We can discount the 3rd for obvious reasons. The 2nd is easily seen around us, which might account for the common 'reduction ' of Aristotle's and Koffka's statement(s). How about number 1?
Can we identify a case where the " The whole is LESS than the sum of the parts?" and it is yet relevant to the concepts where this axiom is used, specifically Holism, Gestaltism, Systems Theory... useful in understanding the universe around us?

Can we identify a case where the " The whole is LESS than the sum of the parts?" — malcolm

What about chaos? All those parts flying about in determinate and lawful fashion, yet amounting to nothing strongly orderly on the whole.

If "the sum is greater" is about the power of global coherence, then chaos is about the other thing of increasing the global incoherence.

This is similar to Kurt Koffka's (correctly translated) phrase "the whole is other than the sum of the parts" which itself is sometimes mistranslated as "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", a translation that Koffka disagrees with.

So it seems the particular term "greater" is a misquote. — Michael

This is good! And true to its meaning. Another philosopher had posed the question, at which point do we see the heap instead of the millet.

Can we identify a case where the " The whole is LESS than the sum of the parts?" — malcolm

The United States Congress.

Edit: possibly also the Los Angeles Dodgers.