Pragmatic theory of information — Pop

So in your OP which did you intend? I would have stayed away from the Shannon version.

I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties. — Daniel

This is the assumption that I was talking about. "This view of information assumes an underlying substance". I think we agree on this, though we misunderstand each other.

What is the difference between our perception of an object and the object itself ? - the assumption that something more exists.

the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, — Daniel

This is correct, and it brings in Change, but I don't think the inference you have drawn is

"and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. "

Interaction is assumed, What enables the interaction to occur? What is it that is interacting?

Properties are equal to the form of a substance. Properties are information about a substance.

Pragmatic theory of information
— Pop
So in your OP which did you intend? I would have stayed away from the Shannon version. — Mark Nyquist

In the OP I gave a variety of examples of definitions of information. But I intended to answer the question of "What is information" collectively. I have a view, but so do others. What is your view? Be warned paradigms will clash here, it is for the thick skinned strictly. :lol:

We fight like pirates but go home in one peice.

Pop We fight like pirates but go home in one peice. — Mark Nyquist

:up:

This is a view of information that leaves out any receiver of the information. It is moot whether an event or degree of freedom is considered to be random noise or orderly signal as there is no higher meaning or symbolism being attached to the mark. The first step is just to discover the foundational thing of a counterfactual - the starting point of it being even meaningful to ask of anything: "are you a 1 or a 0? A presence or an absence? A something or a nothing?" — apokrisis

We can recover the other sense of information as not just about countable physical differences, but differences that make a difference to someone as they are symbols being read as part of an exchange of messages. — apokrisis

This concatenation of information as meaningless mark and as subjectively meaningful signal system sounds compatible with Dan Zahavi’s depoction of metaphysical realism:

“If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve. How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.”

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. — apokrisis

We can do whatever we want to so long as we do not violate any of the laws of physics, and then if some of what we do is supported by some, then all the better, and then If we can find ways to falsify what we do and say - we can create reality! :starstruck:

But seriously:

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. — apokrisis

Yes, there is no contextuality to form, other then consciousness. Information is distinctions. Everything has its distinctive shape and colour and place. There is only one thing that we cannot distinguish from anything else, and that is information itself, because in the first person point of view, it is all information.

So Information is a very difficult thing to grasp. What would your definition be? Can you see problems with what has been proposed thus far in terms of conflicting with the laws of physics?

An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. — Joshs

Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.

Have you considered what information is? @Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this?

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. — Wayfarer

I agree with all you said. The subtlety of Aristotelean hylomorphism has become sucked into the general vortex of materialist confusion.

So there is the understanding of substance as the essential material - material cause being the primary form of existence that underpins all else. So substance already has its key property of brute existence and inherent properties (like a location, a motion, a mass, a charge). And the dichotomy becomes one of these causal atoms or causal materials and the acausal void in which they freely exist.

But then there is the process view of Peirce, systems science, and others. Now enduring substance with its inherent properties becomes instead just a generalise potential or state of radical uncertainty. A chaotic fluctuation with no special persistence or direction at all. The material aspect of substantial being becomes the least possible form of substantial being.

And then actual substantial being is what you get once there is some contextual limits in place to give shape to some mass of fluctuations. Something aligns them so that a persistent state with fixed character results.

In other words, quantum mechanics and particle physics.

An electron represents free fluctuation constrained by circumstance to have an eternally fixed identity. At the Big Bang temperature, there are no such definite particles. There is just a directionless sea of fluctuations in one high symmetry (ie: low content) grand unified forced. Then this thermal bath cools and quarks, then leptons, can condense out.

Electrons are fixed in their properties because they break the GUT symmetries down to the simplest possible shapes. U1 gauge symmetry is the last stop in the road. And that gives you the simplicity of an electrical field populated by massive electrons and their massless photons.

So it is a plain mathematical fact that the simplest geometry is U1. That is a law beyond any particular cosmology. It is a Platonic constraint on any possible world. The last form standing is going to be that which creates the properties discovered once all fluctuation has been reduced to the limit of material simplicity.

Of course we have to talk about how the Higgs field gets tangled in this U1 story to make electrons actually massive and so slower than light. And how the symmetry breaking must harbour the asymmetries that prevented even all electrons disappearing in a puff of bare radiation as they encountered all their opposite spin positron twins.

But the point is that physics sees substantial being as this hylomorphic dyad. You have quantum potential. You have mathematical strength constraints. Electrons and other fundamental particles then pop out of the hot brew as whatever becomes the crud that can’t be washed away even as the Cosmos becomes as empty and cold as is at its Heat Death.

I don’t think that’s it. The Peircean approach is not to rid our view of reality of any subjectivism, it is instead to match such a science of the third person view from nowhere with its “other” of a general science of first person points of view. So a science of semiotics and habits of interpretance, in other words.

It is a difficult intellectual dance of course. But it makes the usual dialectical sense - the unity of opposites.

The Peircean approach is not to rid our view of reality of any subjectivism, it is instead to match such a science of the third person view from nowhere with its “other” of a general science of first person points of view. So a science of semiotics and habits of interpretance, in other words. — apokrisis

Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existing entities or aspects?

So Information is a very difficult thing to grasp. — Pop

Well it was fun trying to explain it anyway.

Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.

Have you considered what information is? Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this? — Pop

Merleau-Ponty founds consciousness in gestalt ensembles organized as figure against background. “The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.4) .
The background is the formal (we can call it informational, the irreducible relation of the parts to the whole and the whole to its parts ) aspect of perceptual experience in its most primordial sense. Change is presupposed here rather than being added onto awareness , in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background.

Well it was fun trying to explain it anyway. — apokrisis

Your communication style is very difficult to understand. Particularly for somebody who does not have a physics background.

But then there is the process view of Peirce, systems science, and others. Now enduring substance with its inherent properties becomes instead just a generalise potential or state of radical uncertainty. A chaotic fluctuation with no special persistence or direction at all. The material aspect of substantial being becomes the least possible form of substantial being. — apokrisis

Your comments are an excellent example of 'Showboating' and I especially liked this paragraph. Do you have a room with technical terms tacked to the wall and a ball of yarn or do you use more modern methods? I'd like to know.

Your comments are an exellent example of 'Showboating' and I especially liked this paragraph. Do you have a room with technical terms tacked to the wall and a ball of yarn or do you use more modern methods? I'd like to know — Mark Nyquist

If you re-read all his posts carefully you may find as I do that he is pointing to a consistent and coherent set of ideas. It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. But I’m seeing more than that in apo’s argument. It’s legitimate and interesting to integrate Peirce’s metaphysics, quantum theory and neuroscientific models of consciousness. It may also be threatening or confusing to those who prefer a more classically reductionist approach to these matters.

Change is presupposes here in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background. — Joshs

Yes, the change would be from moment to moment of consciousness.

What I was thinking: If we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change.

From a panpsychist perspective.

Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existence entities or aspects? — Joshs

The grand project would be pansemiosis. The Cosmos would in fact have to have its own organismic point of view.

A place without a point of view would be a vagueness or an Apeiron. A state of boundless fluctuation with neither character nor history. The universe is instead already born as a concrete system dissipating entropy - trading local heat for global expansion. So it is in some scientific sense already organised to constrain fluctuations into a flow of events, a steady accumulation of habits that increasingly reveal its global direction.

But then an organismic view of the universe is too simple when it comes to actual organisms. And the difference is reasonably simple. The information that organises or constrains the actions of the universe sits out at its holographic boundaries. It is literally the outer limit of the event horizon in de Sitter models of cosmology.

Life then discovered the trick of encoding those kinds of shape-giving constraints. It could internalise the constraints it employed as memories for action sequences. It had genes, then neurons, and eventually words and numbers as a machinery for first person semiosis or reality modelling.

So the Cosmos has no memory except in terms of its own actual structure. It is like a tornado in that it spins now because it spun a moment before. And it will spin until it begins to equilibrate whatever combo of source and sink made for an entropic gradient.

But biology evolved code as a means to internalise a point of view. That is both a semiotic ontology, but a very big difference in having this own little store of private information rather than being the helpless product of the collective information of the Cosmos as a whole.

So hopefully answering your question, the objective world becomes the pansemiotic story where there is perhaps a first person view in operation, but one that is so generalised that it is hardly a view at all as far as we are concerned. The universe just comes with a bunch of simple content obeying some simple laws. It is basically raw thermodynamics with no particular concerns, memories or feelings.

And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick.

Your communication style is very difficult to understand. Particularly for somebody who does not have a physics background. — Pop

I must take the blame for your lack of grounding in the position you want to argue? That’s saucy.

But I’m not complaining.

I must take the blame for your lack of grounding in the position you want to argue? That’s saucy. — apokrisis

Nobody is to blame. But it would be appreciated if you could dumb it down for us non physicists.
I interact with the physics that I cannot avoid. I agree with your minimization of brain energy principle :smile:

f we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change — Pop

What if we say that being an organic system means that the creature has a patterned way of interacting with its environment each moment , that essentially what a living thing is is this patterned interacting which, unlike a stone, maintains its overall integrity and consistency of functioning even as it is incessantly altering its behavior in response to novelties imposed by the outside(the ‘outside’ includes the consequences of the creature’s own functioning, the reciprocal impact on the life form of the changes it makes to its world in the process of functioning).
Information in this sense would be the normative goal-oriented directionality of a living system’s functional organization. It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling.

It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. — Joshs

Hah. Part of it is that I spend so much time having to make very complicated things very simple for mass audiences. So it is something of a relief just to blow off steam and use the direct technical language that draws on - and thus alludes to - the vast fragmented intellectual landscape that is systems thinking. I am flaunting not just one person’s or one group’s technical jargon here but the great many ways a lot of people have said much the same thing throughout history.

And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick — apokrisis

Ah, but if the codes of the cognitive system are just tricks, that is, adaptive accidents , then first person points of view in the experiential sense are really just eliminative rmaterialist products of the wider causal cosmic model.
But if you start with a truly fresh model
of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos.

I am flaunting not just one person’s or one group’s technical jargon here but the great many ways a lot of people have said much the same thing throughout history. — apokrisis

I get that. I traffic in a different kind of technical language originating in a segment of the Continental philosophic community , and I sample from a variety of these positions when I write.

It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling. — Joshs

The thread is quite deep now so you would have missed a lot. We have pretty much established that information goes all the way down to the most fundamental substance, and even the Royal Society is promoting views that life is a process of copying, so information processing. We really can find no limits to how information links things. And now we are at the stage of trying to describe how precisely information effects a state of "integrated information", which I take to be an irreducible conception of consciousness. It would seem a "change in the state of a system" would be a necessity for a system to register external information?
And then, is this universally applicable to all systems including rocks?

But if you start with a truly fresh model of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos. — Joshs

True. But I am happy just making physicalism work as a model of reality. I don’t see it as a failed project but instead as an already stunning metaphysical achievement.

Do you think what you suggests leads to good science or practical knowledge?

We have pretty much established that information goes all the way down to the most fundamental substance — Pop

That assumes there is such a thing.

A place without a point of view would be a vagueness or an Apeiron. — apokrisis

Perspective is what rational sentient beings bring to the picture. ‘A physicist is an atom’s way of looking at itself’, said Neils Bohr. So, ultimately, this actually provides place for humanity in the grand scheme, rather than just being 'an accidental collocation of atoms’ (Russell).

Freud remarked that ‘the self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by science’ referring to the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, and Nietszche’s declaration of the Death of God. In a strange way, the Copenhagen Interpretation gave back to humanity what the European Enlightenment had taken away, by placing the observer in a pivotal role in the constitution of the fundamental constituents of reality

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

There are so many different ‘kinds’ of information. The common quality, in my view, is variability in an interaction. So the focus is a point of interaction, but the variability in question can be in time, energy, space, direction, intention, meaning, etc. It is how our own relation to this variability can be qualitatively structured in relation to the point of interaction that differentiates information.

This may be why apokrisis focuses mainly on the Planck scale - because it is at this point we have minimal qualitative variability in an interaction. This is where our predictions are most certain. From here, we need to account for variability in energy, space, time, etc. It’s where an understanding of information starts. And it starts with us, because the variability we can’t account for is the quality of our own interaction.

(@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.) — apokrisis

Thank you for adding this - it prompted me to re-read your reply a couple more times to see if I could better grasp what you’re saying (I must admit that I don’t often understand your posts fully). But in this case, I do agree with all of it.

Personally, I think the tendency to talk about ‘substance’ and ‘objects’ and ‘properties’ only sustains the confusion here - but I do recognise that this makes sense to most. Rovelli talks about understanding the world as consisting not of objects in time but of interrelated events, and I think this is an important paradigm shift that in my view gives ‘information’ a more predictable quality.

I will admit that I understand QM only intuitively (qualitatively), though, if at all. It makes more sense to me in how I think about the world than classical physics - even though I can’t do the math, and my interpretations are rarely understood. I’m not entirely sure why that is.

the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, — Daniel

Quite close to Claude Shannon's - father of information theory - own thoughts but with one small difference: not just change but also the degree of change as in more extreme the change, the greater the information content in a message that relates that change. C'mon, mathematize information and this is bound to happen. We need to quantify something. Why not measure the extent of the change (from the baseline)? A rough marker that this is how ordinary people actually view information is the sales figures of so-called tabloid news. I believe they sell like hot cakes.

What are your thoughts, queries, arguments, definitions, and insights? It would be great to have a general understanding of information on this forum. — Pop

While reading the OP I was wondering how an animal would answer your question, because information is essential to all animals and insects. Information regarding food, mating, and survial in a hostitle world an awareness that is essential to life. However, what humans do with it is very interesting. :lol: A pack of dogs or troop of apes is not going to sit around and discuss what is information. That said, I think your question is fascinating.