Another thought is that the monism/dualism question and the what is information question should be considered and solved together.

At a certain level, integrated information is just a truism. It is obvious - once you accept the brain employs some kind of neural code to construct "consciousness" - that a big problem is how all this local information, this individually triggered firing, then gets integrated into a large structured state of meaningful experiencing — apokrisis

Are you familiar with Neural networks?

The easy case against ITT is that if people like Tononi and Koch are happy to arrive at a destination like panpsychism, you know that you don't even want to waste time starting going down that particular road — apokrisis

If you start with a bias then you can not get anywhere. What is so wrong with panpsychism? Buddhism is panpsychist. Bhutan is the only carbon negative country, what is so wrong with that?

I contrast this with Friston's Bayesian Brain model. Friston worked with Tononi in Edelman's lab as it happens. But Friston's approach struck me as immediately right even before he really got going. — apokrisis

It is based on a Markov blanket, so neural network straight off. And neural networks have proven to be very successful in AI, such as GPT3.

its model of it being a self in a world. So that takes us into a different intellectual space - one where cognition is enactive and semiotic. — apokrisis

I agree with this statement, but "semiotic" implies an epistemic cut. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that two informational bodies interact? And develop interrelationally?

It is good you say you don't fully understand it. The scientific story is still being written. And my point is that the concepts of both information and entropy are themselves useful modelling constructs - extreme simplifications of the world they thus also make usefully measurable by those extreme simplifications. — apokrisis

Great, we agree on some things!

So - as Friston keenly understood - information theory creates a cleared ground, one stripped of the quality of meaning, so that science could then start constructing the right kind of metric for measuring systems with meaning. — apokrisis

I don't understand the intricacies of Friston's theory, but I understand basic neural network principles such that an input is shunted to an output ( symbol ), via non logical gradients which can be arbitrarily adjusted. It seems right, since initially there could not have been any reasoning involved.

The immaterial information was connected to the material dynamics - the self to the world - via an explicit epistemic cut, or modelling relation. — apokrisis

There you go again. If we cannot make the cut, why talk about it? This is the difficulty of understanding this, you have to try and understand it whilst being enmeshed in it, there is no cut. Its an interrelational situation. If the cut is arbitrary, then it is simply a cut you choose to make. Don't make the cut, then it it is two systems evolving interrelationally.

Respectfully, I suspect your bias is getting in the way of logic here.

Life can be divided into genetic information and chemistry. But the missing part of the story is how those two realms are mechanically connected. — apokrisis

I think logically, chemistry will also be understood as information processing.

I started with microbiology and chemistry a few years ago - its a different planet! :lol:

I would argue that it's not that it doesn't exist, but rather that it doesn't necessarily have a defined form. Instead, it can be encoded and understood in multiple ways, with its basis being reality.

A first thought was, matter is physical and information is non-physical, so isn't that dualism? — Mark Nyquist

People like the information philosopher have gone down that route. I trust in Shannon's understanding that information always exists embedded in a substance, as the co-element of the substance. As a monist, I see no evidence anywhere of an immaterial substance.

But I respect people who choose to think that way, I believe they have good personal reasons for choosing to think so.

↪Pop Another thought is that the monism/dualism question and the what is information question should be considered and solved together — Mark Nyquist

If everything is information, doesn't that solve it?

I fear Claude Shannon's work has entered pop culture as it never was intended.
So you are saying information is NOT a non-physical, IS a co-element of a substance but is physically unmeasurable and doesn't alter in any way the substance. Without more detail given, that is no more than imaginary thinking.

Are you familiar with Neural networks? — Pop

Yep.

What is so wrong with panpsychism? Buddhism is panpsychist. Bhutan is the only carbon negative country, what is so wrong with that? — Pop

As critics of IIT like Searle note, Panpsychism is the kind of theory that is in the class of not even being wrong. It evades counterfactuality by claiming absolute generality. Panpsychists claim particles are conscious - but that consciousness is so dilute or unstructured that you couldn’t hope to tell the difference. You just have to take the panpsychist’s word for it.

That is a non-theory. It is standard substance dualism dressed up in a science-resistant cloak of invisibility.

See Horgan’s article - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/

It is based on a Markov blanket, so neural network straight off. And neural networks have proven to be very successful in AI, such as GPT3. — Pop

I date back to the first era of neural nets and have always believed they were the right biologically realistic approach. The key difference is that neural networks are a stab at embodied cognition and so were immediately taking the step towards semiotics and away from cogsci representationalism.

Neural nets learn by establishing habits of doing. There is no mystery why they are integrated hierarchies of action routines. That is just basic to their architecture.

But note how IIT turns the structure of the “integrated” conscious picture into an immense mystery. It can’t even hazard a concrete guess at how the brain is architected to produce an output state that has this informationally nested semantic characteristic. It only offers some cod metric of the degree to which a hierarchically complex state of organisation exists.

I agree with this statement, but "semiotic" implies an epistemic cut. Wouldn't it be simpler to say that two informational bodies interact? And develop interrelationally? — Pop

The epistemic cut is crucial because the brain can’t model the world - or even construct a self - unless it first cuts itself off from that world.

This then leads on to all the things that folk find counter intuitive about neurocognition - such as the brain wants to predict its inputs so it can then ignore them as things it was already expecting and so doesn’t even have to especially note.

So representationalism is based on the idea that consciousness arises from the positive display of some structure of data. The brain is instead doing its best not to even have to react in the first place.

You can record from neurons in the retina and see their firing being quashed because the brain had already predicted that they were about to be poked by a stimulus and - sorry guys - that news is already old hat. Leave me alone.

So - as is basic to Friston’s approach and the general field of generative neural networks - the brain is striving to be unconscious. It wants to predict reality so well that there is nothing left that could disturb it by being surprising.

That of course then sets it up to be surprised and immediately focused on making the best sense of that surprise.

A surprise can be regarded as free energy. A poke in the eye of the system that forces it to make some new adjustment. The brain then does its best to avoid being poked in the eye by minimising the free energy via Bayesian prediction - its best guess on how to make something not happen.

understand basic neural network principles such that an input is shunted to an output ( symbol ), via non logical gradients which can be arbitrarily adjusted. — Pop

OK. That is very basic neural networks that use after the fact back propagation to reset the internal weights. So it learns to do better at pattern recognition the next time around.

But even in the 1960s there were neural networkers like Stephen Grossberg working on generative neural nets that were biologically realistic in predicting their inputs, rather than merely belatedly reactions to them.

There you go again. If we cannot make the cut, why talk about it? This is the difficulty of understanding this, you have to try and understand it whilst being enmeshed in it, there is no cut. Its an interrelational situation. If the cut is arbitrary, then it is simply a cut you choose to make. Don't make the cut, then it it is two systems evolving interrelationally. — Pop

I don’t understand your issue here. The cut is completely essential if there is to be a difference between the neural model and the world that model encodes.

Respectfully, I suspect your bias is getting in the way of logic here. — Pop

Or you haven’t understood the logic of what is being discussed. Have you read Pattee on symbol grounding or biosemiosis?

I trust in Shannon's understanding that information always exists embedded in a substance, as the co-element of the substance. — Pop

Any symbol or mark is of course a physical thing. A logical bit needs to be stored as a switched gate state or whatever.

But the meaning of that physical mark or thrown switch is entirely another story - a habit of interpretation.

Furthermore, the physics of the informational mark is of a special and rather artificial kind. It has as little actual physics attached as possible. It is basic to a code that it is zero dimensional - little more than a located point. It cost the same effort to make every mark, so effectively there is a zeroed cost for making marks. And thus the whole cost of mark-making ceases to be a constraint on any computational process on the other side of the epistemic cut.

In computation, once you have paid for the hardware and it’s power supply, then you can run any software for the same basic price. The software still relies on a Turing machine - a tape and gate hardware device. But the software possibilities are unlimited and universal.

Biology does the same trick as genes can code for any protein structure, or neurons can code for any stimulus-response loop.

Information, according to Richard Dawkins à la Claude Shannon, is that which helps narrow down possibilities to one in the most economical way possible. If the possibilities were A, B, C, D and someone tells you A, how much information does A carry? Arguably that question can be rephrased as how many yes/no questions need to be asked to get to A from A, B, C, D.

Question 1. Is A among the firsr 2 letters of the alphabet?
Answer 1. Yes [possibilities now reduced to A, B]
Question 2. Is A the first letter of the alphabet?
Answer 2. Yes [A it is]

Questions here are aimed at reducing the number of possibilities.

2 yes/no questions = 2 bits of information. A contains 2 bits of information.

The general formula is, given N equiprobable alternatives, the information content of a message (in bits) that zeros in on one of these alternatives = Log(base 2) N.

Thus 1 card from a 52 deck card has log (base 2) 52 = 5.7 bits of information.

Also, information, as per Claude Shannon, is a measure of surprise/shock a message contains. The more surprising/shocking the message, the more information it contains. I guess, things that are probable/likely are uninteresting while those that are improbable/unlikely are very interesting, worth knowing. In terms of yes/no questions, the more improbable something is, the more yes/no questions that need to be asked which translates into more bits of information.

Suppose there are three possibilities A, B, C. The probability of A is 0.001%, that of B and C are equal at 49.9995%. The probability of A is so small that for practical purposes it can be ignored i.e. we can assume A won't occur.

Question 1: Is it B?
Answer 1: Yes, B OR No, C [ B and C carry only 1 bit of information]

On the off-chance that A is the message,

Question 2: Is it C?
Answer 2: No, A [A carries 2 bits of information]

A is improbable and if A is the message, it carries 2 bits of information while the other two B, C contain only 1 bit of information. Shock value = Information!

But the meaning of that physical mark or thrown switch is entirely another story - a habit of interpretation. — apokrisis

I've cited one of the Howard Pattee papers you mentioned a few times, specifically this passage:

All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemios

Pattee mentions Descartes' dualism, but says (rightly) that Descartes' proposal consigns the solution to the mind-body problem to 'metaphysical obscurity' because of the well-known problem of how the 'thinking being' interacts with extended substance.

So I had an idea - if you ask the question, how does the intentional domain (let's call it) react with the physical domain, the answer is, through living beings. That is what life is. That is why as soon as life appears, it is already ontologically distinct from inorganic matter. (It's also, incidentally, why I can lift my arm, which is sometimes mentioned as somehow remarkable in this context.) Living beings are therefore more than simply an arrangement of matter; they signal appearance of the subjective dimension, or perhaps we could say the intentional domain, even if it's in the simplest forms of single-celled organisms.

In a review of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, we read -

Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what exists (or, what is real). People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists (i.e. is real) as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. — Richard Brody, Thoughts are Real

And why? Because the ingredient that was always lacking in objective descriptions is perspective. Accordingly, It's a mistake to believe that the mind (or the subject) can be understood as something objectively existent, when its presence is always implicit - it only manifests as perspective. This is why those who say you can't show that the mind objectively exists (i.e. philosophical materialists) are correct, because it always eludes objective description. And it is the awareness of that which has dropped out of a lot of analytical philosophy, which presumes that what is objectively existent defines the scope of what is philosophically real. Whereas here we are discussing something that is philosophically real but not objectively existent.

So - in any living organism, perspective has already begun to emerge, albeit in extremely simple forms. (Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general.) In the case of h. sapiens, due to rationality and language, new horizons of being - radically new perspectives - open up which are not available to other sentient creatures (and, obviously, not available in a Universe lacking in such beings.)

So, I solve the issue of what consciousness or the mind is, by showing that it never occurs or appears as an object of perception, although because nothing can be known in its absence, it is nevertheless fundamentally real. And the reality of mind is demonstrated by the ability to grasp meaning, which is, arguably, a refinement of the very same process which is operative at the level of cellular biology. So to that extent, I advocate a form of dualism.

I see. I don't think anything that anyone is doing at this level is falsifiable, they're frameworks through which we can view the data. That's not to say there aren't better frameworks than others, only that the choice is not falsifiable.

This shouldn't be confused with the notion that any of the evidence Friston uses is also speculative. As too often happens (Quantum Physics being the archetypal example) some frameworks are highlighted as being speculative or unfalsifiable and people think it's then a free-for-all where everyone and their dog can have an 'opinion' on how quantum physics works. That's not what is implied by using a theoretical framework for one's analysis of the data.

Panpsychism is the kind of theory that is in the class of not even being wrong. — apokrisis

Such Bias with a capital B! I often think that a philosopher should start their enquiry possessing no knowledge at all, and then they would be free to follow the logic wherever it may go. But that is not possible, is it. They start their enquiry already possessing a body of knowledge, and a sense of self entrenched in it's midst, and so any enquiry first and foremost must preserve this sense of self, as after all that is the mechanism of the system. The system is not free to pursue conclusions that destroy one's sense of self, and so a large part of possibility is left unexplored, and dismissed of hand.

I think the epistemic cut is largely about this, the preservation of ones sense of self, and one's humanity.
To not make the cut changes the world into a panpsychic world, whilst to not make it preserves the status quo. Like Descartes I think therefore I am, rather then I am Consciousness. It is a self preserving response, as would be expected from a self organizing system.

I don't agree with all of IIT, but I'm really grateful to it for entrenching the notion that consciousness is integrated information. As you have intimated, otherwise consciousness is an ungrounded variable mental construct. A nonsense to speak about.

Ok, well how about we put our differences aside and concentrate on describing and defining information? Given our differences in paradigm, is it possible to agree on "what is information"?


The rest of what you mention I largely agree with:

the brain wants to predict its inputs so it can then ignore them as things it was already expecting — apokrisis

- Yes I agree

the brain is striving to be unconscious. It wants to predict reality so well that there is nothing left that could disturb it by being surprising. — apokrisis

- I agree, and agree that the input receptor is more a predictor.

thus the whole cost of mark-making ceases to be a constraint on any computational process . — apokrisis

- fascinating

I don't think anything that anyone is doing at this level is falsifiable, they're frameworks through which we can view the data. — Isaac

I was as much referring to the difficulty in understanding. :smile: Thanks for clarifying.

I was as much referring to the difficulty in understanding. — Pop

Ah, I see. It's not for the faint-hearted that's for sure.

(Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general. — Wayfarer

Proof?

Note how people are only conscious of the things that matter to them. The spectrum of light is very broad, but we only see what matters to us. Capra says " cognition is a disturbance in a state". If we apply this to rocks, they cognize when their state is disturbed.

Well, I think declaring that rocks cognise anything is the height of folly, myself. See again, your ‘definitions’ are so broad that all meaningful distinctions are lost.

Two points from the Marcello Barbieri paper - one, that life is inherently different from non-life, because it contains or encodes or creates information that is transmitted by the processes of cell division and reproduction. Second, that according to Hubert Yockey, who was a pioneer in the application of information systems theory to biology, the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable.

This amounts to saying that we do not know how linear and digital entities (that is, DNA) came into being; all we can say is that they were not the result of spontaneous chemical reactions. The information paradigm, in other words, has not been able to prove its ontological claim, and that is why the chemical paradigm has not been abandoned.

‘The old is dying, while the new is struggling to be born. ¹’

Living beings are therefore more than simply an arrangement of matter; they signal appearance of the subjective dimension, or perhaps we could say the intentional domain, even if it's in the simplest forms of single-celled organisms. — Wayfarer

The problem is how to best characterise this duality that is based on an actively manufactured epistemic cut. Is it really either subjective or a dimension? In some sense, it is definitely all about intentionality or finality. It is also a kind of domain. So there is a question about the best terminology here.

I’ve already highlighted one key point - the epistemic cut is manufactured, so it is something constructed within the larger world that it organises, The genes live protected in the nucleus for example. Their information is literally contained. Each cell has about 2m in length of DNA sequence, but because it is of such reduced dimensionality - a 1D thread ruling a 3D metabolic volume - it can be coiled up into a relatively tiny physical object.

And that relates to my point about symbols being what emerge via a constraint on regular physical dimensionality. The informational realm or intentional domain is so reduced in its physical being that it can exist almost invisibly within the world that it wants to regulate. It is almost immaterial as it demands so little in terms of material being.

All codes are the direct product of the reduction of physical presence to virtually nothing. A volume is reduced to a surface (membranes are key biological structures for defining cuts between inner and outer, self and world.) Then reduction to one dimensional molecular strands naturally leads on to the possibility of chains composed of zero d points. A polymer can be constructed from monomers. And each monomer can become a particular free choice - a particular amino acid or neucleotide base.

So the informational aspect of life is a kind of anti-physics. The existence of regular dimensional physics - the 4D spatiotemporal realm of rate dependent dynamics - already contains within it this other realm of rate independent information as its “other”. The possibility of coded intentionality was always latent and just needed suitable conditions to become manifest as an actual symbol system - a semiotic process paid for by its ability to accelerate environmental entropy flows.

This is a neat kind of metaphysics in that the challenge to regular physics is also directly a kind of physics in being the exact opposite of regular physics. They are the two halves of the one broken symmetry.

So that is a new kind of metaphysical distinction I would argue and deserves its own terminology.

Because the ingredient that was always lacking in objective descriptions is perspective. — Wayfarer

Again I would agree but then be concerned at slipping into the terminology of older ontologies.

Semiotics is embodied or enactive and so is all about the reality of organising points of view. And it is the manufacturing of some local point of view - along with its contrast to a story of physics that is anti-intentional in leaving out any special viewpoint - which is a big metaphysical step.

This is the argument for a science of semiotics as it was formulated by Peirce. He started with the psychological reality of the mind as a modelling relation and thus the most particular thing of some self-interested or embodied point of view.

So - in any living organism, perspective has already begun to emerge, albeit in extremely simple forms. (Note this is not panpsychism, because perspective is only associated with sentient creatures, not with matter in general.) In the case of h. sapiens, due to rationality and language, new horizons of being - radically new perspectives - open up which are not available to other sentient creatures (and, obviously, not available in a Universe lacking in such beings.) — Wayfarer

Yes, perspective is a good term. As is intentional.

So, I solve the issue of what consciousness or the mind is, by showing that it never occurs or appears as an object of perception, although because nothing can be known in its absence, it is nevertheless fundamentally real. And the reality of mind is demonstrated by the ability to grasp meaning, which is, arguably, a refinement of the very same process which is operative at the level of cellular biology. So to that extent, I advocate a form of dualism. — Wayfarer

The duality for me is that there is modelling relation. This demands an epistemic cut so that a “self” can stand outside the reality it means to regulate. To actually stand outside and so form a personal point of view is impossible. But because physical dimensionality can be constrained to the point it produces code, an organism can stand outside its reality as a virtual machine.

Consciousness is then just what it is like to be such a virtual machine - a modelling relation in which a self or point of view is also part of the constructed umwelt.

So neither the self, nor the world, are really real. They are virtual in being constructs of the model. But then the modelling relation as a whole is real as this virtual realm of modelling has a real physical basis and is doing real physical work.

So where you say subjective, I say virtual. This is another example of trying to find the jargon with the right connotations where possible.

Such Bias with a capital B! I often think that a philosopher should start their enquiry possessing no knowledge at all, and then they would be free to follow the logic wherever it may go. But that is not possible, is it. They start their enquiry already possessing a body of knowledge, and a sense of self entrenched in it's midst, and so any enquiry first and foremost must preserve this sense of self, as after all that is the mechanism of the system. The system is not free to pursue conclusions that destroy one's sense of self, and so a large part of possibility is left unexplored, and dismissed of hand. — Pop

Alternatively I have actively pursued the full range of the schools of thought out there. Far more than most. And so that is why I feel secure in my views and not concerned that some would find the people I champion - like Peirce, Pattee and even Friston apparently - at the outer extreme of obscurity.

Given our differences in paradigm, is it possible to agree on "what is information"? — Pop

I’ve already cited Bateson’s pithy “a difference that makes a difference”. And I’ve made the point that Shannon information is simply a way of counting pure differences - whether they make a difference or not.

So Shannon starts us off where we can make a raw count of digitally distinct events - whether the physical events are meaningful signals or meaningless noise.

Then those of us interested in semiotics - a science of meaning - can use that useful foundation to construct metrics that get at meaningfulness, or the reduction of uncertainty. That is where the debate over mutual information, surprisal, ascendency and other information theoretic proposals of biological relevance can start.

Science is about measurement and so about agreeing the right units of measurement. Tononi proposes his phi. But as critics point out, it is ill-defined and overly complex in practice. It also fails to distinguish integration in a living organism from that in a iPhone or even a rock. And it is computationally intractable to boot.

So far I don’t see that you are even engaged in the conversation at this level. You keep talking about integrated information as if it is just Shannon information. That is what you think you understand so that is what you want to keep dragging the discussion back to.

So you would advise that we specify what kind of information we're talking about? What modifiers should we use? — frank

It can’t hurt. At the very least we should acknowledge the ambiguity of the term, referring to an interaction, its evidence and potential. This is why I describe information as ‘variability in an interaction’. I think we need to be clear on our position in relation to the interaction in using the term ‘information’, and recognise that this determines the qualitative structure of that use.

Information and the speculative sense of information. — Cheshire

This still implies that information is definitive, but as what? As an (unobservable) action or as evidence or potential of such? The reality is that we rely on piecing together or constructing evidence of or potential information far more than we observe an actual interaction first-hand. I think that what isn’t a speculative sense of information would be almost entirely constructed from it as a prediction.

even though no answer can be given for “what is not information?”
— Possibility

Hey. I am interested in knowing why you think no answer can be given to such question; it's just curiosity. — Daniel

I could be wrong, but I’d like to see you try. I believe it’s the ‘what’ that stumps...

But that’s not to say that ‘everything is information’ - I think I get what Pop is trying to get at, but that statement is oversimplified and therefore fraught with miscommunication, in my view.

Call me stubborn, but I keep thinking of information as being subjective; with that I mean that it is not a quality of an object, but it is instead (in its basic form) the effect caused by a given object onto another (the amount of change depends on the "strength" of the effect and on the amount of change the affected object is able to support). Thus, information is a quality of an object if and only if it is caused by something else [and information is not a quality of the object that causes the change but of the object(s) on which the change occurs]; this way, I think information is not a fundamental quality, for in a universe in which there is only one object, information would not exist (although the object does?).

Edit:

We could say information is potentially a quality of an object if such object has the capacity to interact with other objects. But information can only actually be a quality when it has been caused by another object (it is the result of an interaction). I dunno, what do you think? — Daniel

It’s confusing, isn’t it? For me, information IS a fundamental quality, because ‘a universe in which there is only one object’ must also contain potential in relation to which an object might occur, at the very least. An object is the result of interacting potential and/or events, after all.

Feldman Barrett’s constructionist theory, in which consciousness is constructed as an ongoing predictive event from incomplete, potential and affected ‘information’.
— Possibility

So you would agree with the view that we are a body of information integrating more information in our path? :up: — Pop

Again, I think you’re oversimplifying it. If you describe us in this way then you risk drawing inaccurate conclusions - especially with regard to intentionality and purpose. We have an aspect which can be described as ‘a body of information’, and an aspect which can be described as ‘integrating information’. But they are not the same aspect, and the qualitative structure of ‘information’ is not the same.

It can’t hurt. At the very least we should acknowledge the ambiguity of the term, referring to an interaction, its evidence and potential. This is why I describe information as ‘variability in an interaction’. I think we need to be clear on our position in relation to the interaction in using the term ‘information’, and recognise that this determines the qualitative structure of that use. — Possibility

If you have time would you want to disambiguate the various kinds of information? It does seem like there's a common thread through them, so it's easy to just end up sliding them altogether.

This still implies that information is definitive, but as what? As an (unobservable) action or as evidence or potential of such? The reality is that we rely on piecing together or constructing evidence of or potential information far more than we observe an actual interaction first-hand. I think that what isn’t a speculative sense of information would be almost entirely constructed from it as a prediction. — Possibility

There is the common sense of information and then there is a sense of information that is speculated about on the forum. Ergo, speculative sense of information in this context.

Something for monists to consider is the class of non-physical information, for example philosophy itself, beliefs, ideas, political views and generally things that are physically intangible. This poses a problem in logic. How can a non-physical exist. By definition a non-physical has no physical form and a monist only has physical matter to work with. Dualism is a response to this problem but fails in the details.
A solution might be to start from a monist/physicalist view and identify information as an emergent property of matter, specifically tied to brain function. In notation form, you have BRAIN(information) and you can deal with both physical content (a representation) and non-physical content (a representation), specifically:
BRAIN(information; content representing physical matter) and
BRAIN(information; content representing non-physicals).
This solves the logic problem and you can go on to develop your models of information.

What is the source of order in the universe? That which integrates the Universe integrates us! — Pop
It bears resemblance to the idea of the Logos, the Tao, Dharma - a principle of organisation which can only be discerned in its effects, never in its essence. — Wayfarer

I also think of active Information (EnFormAction)in terms of Logos and Tao. It's not a physical thing, but a process of organizing and integrating disparate things into novel holistic systems. It's like a physical Force that we know only from its effects, not from observation of a particular thing. In other words : "creativity".

I just came across a statement in SKEPTIC magazine -- on the topic of a trial & error process that leads to success (e.g. Evolution) -- which, though in a different context, illustrates the relationship between Information, Integration, Organization, and Holism :
"This is an example of a holistic group, integrating diverse knowledge to create more than the sum of individual contributions" --- Trial, Error, and Success ; Sima Dimitrijev ; SKEPTIC v2, no 2

A force is an act or cause, not an object. But Information can be both. As Einstein noted, causal Energy (the push or pull) and passive Mass (the pushee) are interchangeable. Likewise, Information (idea) in a human mind (sculptor) can be translated into a causal creative force (behavior) that results in something new (sculpture). By the same reasoning, Evolution is not a physical object, but a creative action which causes diverse things to integrate into what Darwin called : "endless forms most beautiful". :grin:


Logos :
In Enformationism, it is the driving force of Evolution, Logos is the cause of all organization, and of all meaningful patterns in the world. It’s not a physical force though, but a metaphysical cause that can only be perceived by Reason, not senses or instruments.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

Logos :
Greek term meaning “word”, “reason”, “proportion”. It was used by philosophers in a technical sense to mean a cosmic principle of order and knowledge. In ancient Greek philosophy and theology, Logos was the divine Reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Imagine a card deck. If you shuffle the cards and place them side by side in a flat rectangular shape (i.e., a 4 x 13 rectangle) - and do this several times - from the plane of the whole deck there is absolutely no change between shuffles as long as you keep laying the cards in the same rectangular shape (4 x 13) and keep using the same number of cards. However, from the plane of the individual cards, each time you shuffle them their neighbours in the rectangle change. So, in this scenario, it is the change in neighbouring cards which stores information about the shuffling, and the plane of the whole deck has no information about the shuffling. In the hypothetic case that the shuffling has no effect on the neighbours for each card (i.e., each time you shuffle the cards, they appear in the same order), information about the shuffling would not be stored neither in the plane of the whole deck nor in the plane of the individual cards.

We can see that information about the shuffling is stored in the object that is shuffled (and not in the object that shuffles - you) and the object that is shuffled does not contain information about the shuffling until it is shuffled (that a card deck can be potentially shuffled does not mean that the card deck contains information about shuffling - again, it must be shuffled for it to contain "shuffling" information - and even so it contains information about the shuffling only at certain levels of its existence (that level which is affected by the shuffling).

So, information about shuffling is not in this case a fundamental quality of the card deck, for card decks can exist without being shuffled.

Potentiality requires an entity that realizes such potentiation therefore anything that can exist potentially cannot be fundamental; something fundamental is something that exists only actually.

But that’s not to say that ‘everything is information’ - I think I get what Pop is trying to get at, but that statement is oversimplified and therefore fraught with miscommunication, in my view. — Possibility

Information/entropy are a new system of measurement. So they are universal units rather than some universalised substance as @Pop suggests.

What make them exciting and fundamental is that they are securely founded on the three Planck scale constants that define the “grain” of substantial being. If you want to model the Cosmos in atomistic terms, then you can use a unit that counts local “degrees of freedom” - the smallest possible events in terms of a triangulation of quantum uncertainty, lightspeed interaction and gravitational curvature. You have a physical spacetime backdrop measured in h, c and G. And Boltzmann’s k is derived from that as a way to talk about the smallest possible substantial event or material action.

So the same equation - rooted in dimensionless Planck constants - can speak of the reduction of uncertainty at the most basic physical level in either the language of information concepts or energy concepts. It speaks of the scale of decoherence where quantum possibility becomes substantial classical being - some concrete and counterfactual difference.

What should be the metaphysical import of this new trick is that however we conceive reality, we can only construct measurable models that give us predictable outcomes. And so imagining that everything is made of information and imagining everything is made of material particles are both just epistemic tactics and not some direct and unmediated understanding of the thing in itself.

And then, while Shannon information sounds like it has something to say about the mind or meaning, it in fact is part of the same old physical reductionist epistemic project. IIT stands outside its subject as usual, talking about the physics of brains rather than the logic that comes from being a semiotic modelling relation that embodies a point of view. That is why only panpsychists could take it seriously and neuroscientists realise that the mind needs to be understood as a functional process of meaning construction.

So Shannon information is a liberating system of measurement for reductionist physics. It paves the way for a quantum holism where reality decoheres in a way that can be modelled using statistical mechanics and the holographic geometry of lightspeed constrained interactions.

But the unit of meaning that is needed by life and mind science is another matter. And I’ve already cited the very exciting realisation that there is a convergence of all forms of energy relevant to biology at the nanoscale at the thermal scale of chemistry taking place in water.

(@Possibility - sorry if I sound like I’m lecturing you here. I just like your comments and wanted to see if I could make my own position more clear.)

Wow, what excellent commentary, full of deep insights. I think by the end of this thread we may be able to describe some new information about information? :smile: I would very much like this thread to end in some kind of agreement, and If we can keep to attacking the concept rather then the person or paradigm, we might just be able to achieve this?

If you have time would you want to disambiguate the various kinds of information? It does seem like there's a common thread through them, so it's easy to just end up sliding them altogether. — frank

This is a great idea, and a great difficulty. I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. This pattern or form can be physical, chemical, energetic, etc, But it is this information of a substances that enables a substance to interact with another substance - It is the information that interacts with the information of another substance. As described earlier, without the information, the substance would be a "NoThing", so could not interact with "anyThing". It would posses no attributes that are capable of interaction. The perturbations of a substance that give it it's distinctive features enable the substance to interact and thus integrate with all other informational substances, including ourselves.

This view of information assumes an underlying substance. As @Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. That a substances exists is assumed by the information we have of it. What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. This brings into question whether information is a quantity or a quality?

@Daniel has also suggested no information can exist absent of an interaction, and as has been pointed out it is interaction that information facilitates. "NoThing" cannot interact with "AnyThing".
Everything that exists, does so as an evolving self organizing system. Interaction is a constant. So it is clear that information enables the interactional organization of a system. What a system self organizes is information..

How am I going??

Pragmatic theory of information

"The pragmatic information content is the information content received by a recipient; it is focused on the recipient and defined in contrast to Claude Shannon's information definition, which focuses on the message" - Wikipedia

something fundamental is something that exists only actually. — Daniel

So, information about shuffling is not in this case a fundamental quality of the card deck, for card decks can exist without being shuffled.

Potentiality requires an entity that realizes such potentiation therefore anything that can exist potentially cannot be fundamental; something fundamental is something that exists only actually. — Daniel

So a physical interaction is a necessity for information? Information only occurs during or after the fact?
As a monist I would say that is true. When a thought arises it has it's neural correlates, so a physical interaction occurs which is identical to the thought.

It's not a physical thing, but a process of organizing and integrating disparate things into novel holistic systems. — Gnomon

I would say the information you are referring to has its neural correlates, thus is identical to a physical interaction in the brain, as described by @Isaac

I think of information as a singular co-element of a substance. As the pattern or form describing a substance. — Pop

This would be the Aristotelean view of substance as in-formed material possibility - the doctrine of hylomorphism. And I agree that this is the correct way to look at it.

But that then leads on to the epistemic cut and other stuff you appear to object to. It says that any instance of substantial being is an intersection between global constraints and localised meaningless action - Peirce's metaphysics of synechism and tychism. And this is very quantum. It says anything could be physically the case, but then becomes limited towards being some concrete event eventually by a prevailing context - some global informational structure that dictates the shape and destiny of a quantum system as a probabilistic wavefunction.

So from Aristotle to Peirce to quantum physics - and on to the complexities of life and mind - there is a common thread here. Concrete existence is all about global constraints on local uncertainty. And you can then label one side as formal/final cause, the other as material/efficient cause, or synechism and tychism, or information and entropy, or holism and reductionism, or whatever else floats your intellectual boat.

But all this is about epistemological tactics - the best way to divide reality into intelligible categories so we can appreciate both the way things are parts of wholes, and the way wholes are composed of parts.

We are constructing a point of view which allows us to read structure into a Cosmos that is part all about global logical necessity and part all about local chaotic freedom.

What you are doing is now trying to locate form in substance rather than seeing form as the external context placing limits on localised random fluctuations.

That leads to the error of a panpsychic conflation. The global structure and the local potential never have to come together via an interaction that produces the third thing of the actualised substance. You are thinking that form inheres in the substance as an innate primal property. There is no contextuality to formed existence, there is only the brute fact of that existence with a form. And so consciousness can be another property of physical materials - just like materiality itself.

But then - because we know that degrees of consciousness must have something to do with the complexities of neural circuits - you graft on an enthusiasm for IIT with its emphasis on patterns of relations. Now complicated consciousness can reflect that measurable density of "integrated information".

The panpsychic position likes quantum theory, or electromagnetic theory, as much as information theory for the same reason. Wavefunctions and force fields can be treated as the deepest levels of substance - a view that seems to have greater scientific credibility since ideas about atomic matter and Newtonian forces became too obviously just the epistemic tactics they always were.

So now the form inhering in the substance appears visible. A wavefunction or force field can represent a spread of textured surface rather than some featureless spherical pellet of matter. One can see a property that actually looks complex and so matches the ontic intuition of how such a property ought to look at the fundamental scale of being.

But again, this is arguing from little pictures in the head. Substantial reality could be primal featureless spheres. Or it could be instead the complex texture of a collection of interactions that makes a network tracery that throbs with intrinsic meaningfulness and experience.

Either way, the mistake is collapsing the holism of a systems view - one which sees substantial being arising from the contrasting intersection of global necessity and local spontaneity - into the usual reductionist metaphysics where substantial actuality, with its entities and properties, is the only thing that really exists. And so the only thing that explains - in brute non-explanatory fashion - why there is material being and mental being. And why they have to be two aspects of the one essence.

Everything that exists, does so as an evolving self organizing system. Interaction is a constant. So it is clear that information enables the interactional organization of a system. What a system self organizes is information.. — Pop

And here you are recruiting even the systems science view to your conflationist cause.

So yes it is right that natural systems are dissipative structures that self organise via information (or negentropy) so as to further the entropification of the Cosmos. And indeed, systems science would stress this is information that is actually meaningful and at the start of the evolution of intelligent selfhood or autopoietic autonomy. It is not just information but semiosis or the construction of a pragmatic modelling relation between a self and a world.

But you are taking all that sophisticated metaphysics and saying that this self-organising infodynamics schtick sounds complex. Mind is complex too. So let's collapse the model into the phenomena. Let's pretend that a pattern of information is not a construct of our models but already a form of instantiated being that therefore emanates mind as an inherent property.

Let's take actual metaphysical and scientific holism and present it as if it is the next big thing in property-based reductionism.

As Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. — Pop

I didn't say that. I said: the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. You don't receive information from substance; instead, substance "imprints" information onto you by acting on you - by causing you to change in a way that depends on the nature of the substance and on the degree of change you are able to support (and also on the medium on which the perturbation travels). The fact that the amount of change you undergo depends also on your physicochemical composition (and not only on the nature of the perturbation, or the physicochemical composition of the object, or the medium between you and the object, or the change you cause in the object) I think points toward the conclusion that information is not a property of individual objects, although I could be missing something.

What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. — Pop

I don't agree with this. The substance is what the substance is. Your perception of what the substance is will change as you interact with the substance in different ways.

I think you are assuming that because an object has properties (properties that allow us to differentiate between objects) then all there is are properties; I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties. So, not all is information because information is information about something (information about information?), and the information we gather about something is, to some extent, dependent on things different to the object the information is about.

substantial being — apokrisis

substantial classical being — apokrisis

The substance is what the substance is. — Daniel

The philosophical term ‘substance’ is not the same as the ordinary language definition. In ordinary language, substance is ‘a material with uniform properties’. In philosophy, the term ‘substance’ was originally derived from the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the term at issue being ‘ouisia’, which is a participle of the Greek verb, ‘to be’ ¹ .

The Latin translation was ‘substantia’, or ‘that which stands under’; or in other places, ‘essentia’, ‘that which truly is’. The idea of substance evolved , but I think that in modern philosophy, it is very easy to equivocate it with the ordinary English use of ‘substance’, when originally it meant something very different.

One instance: ‘In Metaphysics, Aristotle states that everything which is healthy is related to health (primary substance) as, in one sense, because it preserves health, and in the other, because it is capable of preserving health. Without the primary substance (health) we would not be able to have the secondary substances (anything related to health). While all the secondary substances are deemed "to be" it is in relation to the primary substance.’

So, the sense in which ‘health’ is ‘a substance’ seems very confusing if ‘substance’ is regarded as any type of thing - ‘substance’ in the customary sense. We would say, rightly, that there’s no ‘substance’ called ‘health’, but that only shows up the sense in which the meaning of the term has shifted.

A related point is that just as ‘substance’ is not really ‘stuff’, ‘form’ is not really ‘shape’. In other words, when we hear ‘form and substance’, it is natural to think that ‘substance’ is the matter something is made from, and ‘form’ is the shape it takes. But in its original sense, the ‘substance’ again was the kind of being, and the ‘form’ is nearer the Platonic ‘idea’ rather than just ‘the shape’. In some ways, it could be argued that ‘subject’ is nearer in meaning to ‘ouisia’ than our ‘substance’, because it preserves the notion of ‘being’.

So lurking in the background, is the presupposition that, whatever reality is, in the end, it must comprise some kind of ‘substance’ in the customary understanding of it - when that is what is actually at issue in discussions of this kind.

I don’t want to drag this thread further into that distinction, as many books have been written about it, and besides, I myself don’t understand the subject very well, so if I am mistaken, then apologies for that, but I think it is a real distinction.