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. — TheMadFool

Good point. Not all information is true. You have tapped on to the emotional/social reason for seeking information. That is really something to ponder.

I think you guys have won me back from another forum that is just beginning. I wanted to be in on the beginning of a forum, but it does not have near the depth of thinking that happens here. You all are awesome!

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

That is a totally fascinating post. I am amazed by how important words are. We can not discuss something without a word for it and you have used words in a most interesting way. I hope to return to your post later when I have time to ponder it. To me, you seem to be speaking of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. Is that close to what you are talking about?

the Royal Society is promoting views that life is a process of copying, so information processing. — Pop

It would seem a "change in the state of a system" would be a necessity for a system to register external information? — Pop

If one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, creation, transformation and production. Awareness does not register and copy external information, it enacts a world.

“ “One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, — Joshs

Life involves copying DNA and producing proteins based on "instructions."

In the interest of starting to specify different kinds of information, here's a Khan academy video. Can you access it? Do you have any good sources?

Life involves copying DNA and producing proteins based on "instructions." — frank

That’s the Dawkins reductionist view. The holistic alternative recognizes that dna and rna are not autonomous structures but components of a cellular and intercellular milieu in which much more than ‘copying’ is going on. Genes are switched on and off in cells in highly complex ways as a function of changes in this larger system.

https://youtu.be/QceGqKZMqIM

I wanted to add the following discussion of information by Anthony Chemero, in which he contrasts an enactivist view of it from representational, computational modeling approaches like that typically seen in predictive processing.

“Predictive processing models, and the allied theoretical machinery, bounce back and forth between thermodynamic and information-theoretic understandings of information and entropy. These understandings are not identical or even equivalent, even though they are theoretically related. But the differences are rarely acknowledged by predictive processing proponents. Here is an example from Clark himself, in a recent paper whose main ideas we otherwise endorse:

‘ This is where FEP [the free energy principle] gets invited onto the stage. FEP states that living organisms that persist must minimize free energy in their exchanges with the environment. The ‘free energy' in question here is an information-theoretic isomorph of thermodynamic free energy, which is a measure of the energy available to do useful work. Useful work, in the information-theoretic story, involves fitting a model to a domain, so reducing information-theoretic free energy is improving the model.’ (Clark 2017)

This is cringeworthy, because it runs roughshod over exactly the point where care is needed. As Deacon (2012) points out, there is no analogue of work in information theory. More important for now is that neither thermodynamic nor information-theoretic understandings of information involve semantics, whereas semantics is the key point of the ecological information in dynamic enactive models. Ecological information—the information available to a moving animal in the environment—is inherently semantic because it specifies the affordances of that environment, what the animal can do in that environment, and generates and supports expectations for what that moving animal will experience as it moves. Ecological information reveals the world as significant for a given creature.

In contrast, it rarely crosses anyone's mind that thermodynamic information might be semantic; and many people forget that information-theoretic (Shannon) information is meaningless in itself, because it is generally discussed in the context of a known decoder that transforms the encoded patterns in the transmitted signal into something meaningful. But this way of framing the relationship between an organism and its environment, and the nature of the signals it receives from that environment—in terms of a transition from thermodynamic free-energy to information-theoretic free-energy—is far from theoretically benign. It is this switch that makes free energy minimization seem to have representational implications, and appear to necessitate the various accoutrement of computational theory of mind.

Why is this? Because the most compelling case for a world-representing inner-model-building brain begins by ignoring the richness of ecological information. This leads to the claim that perception offers insufficient information to guide action, and we therefore need a model to do so (Hohwy 2013). The assumption that organisms work with thermodynamic and Shannon (i.e, non-semantic) information builds that poverty in from the start. This is problematic because some (in our view) fairly unpalatable philosophical conclusions can be drawn from this particular well: if our behavior is driven directly by a model, and only indirectly by the world, then the thought that we have only indirect epistemic access to that world can begin to seem compelling (Clark 2013; 2016b; Hohwy 2013; 2016). And if we only have indirect epistemic access to the world, then isn't perception a form of controlled hallucination, a sensory veil cutting us off from the very world we appear to inhabit?”

Good point. Not all information is true. You have tapped on to the emotional/social reason for seeking information. That is really something to ponder.

I think you guys have won me back from another forum that is just beginning. I wanted to be in on the beginning of a forum, but it does not have near the depth of thinking that happens here. You all are awesome! — Athena

Sensationalism sells! I dunno!

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? — apokrisis

I think what I suggest leads to good science and practical knowledge in the following areas:

the understanding of affectivity , including mood, emotion and feeling, and its relation to intentionality, perception and cognition( I’m sorry, but Lisa Barrett’s attempt here just doesn’t cut it).

elucidation of the behavioral processes involved in autism, schizophrenia , depression and ptsd

the understanding of empathy, language and interpersonal dynamics ( how first, second and third person dynamics relate to each other)

an alternative to the realism of cogntive behavioral therapy

a grounding for logic , math and empirical science

That’s the Dawkins reductionist view. The holistic alternative recognizes that dna and rna are not autonomous structures but components of a cellular and intercellular milieu in which much more than ‘copying’ is going on. Genes are switched on and off in cells in highly complex ways as a function of changes in this larger system. — Joshs

I don't want to be a reduction nazi because I think they end up unable to talk about anything but illusions. OTOH, if we can't look at what's going on with life from the angle of information because we're leaving something out if we do, that's maybe hammering home a point we all understand. Or do we?

To me, you seem to be speaking of logos, reason, the controlling force of the universe. Is that close to what you are talking about? — Athena

Yes, the old dialectic of logos and flux is another version of the same essential position. The Cosmos is about how logical order becomes the shaping hand that reins in chaos. And yet you need that lack,of order as the basic thing to then have something to rein in. This makes the whole system, the larger relation, a unity of opposites,

then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, — Joshs

As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson) — Joshs

Why do you exclude modelling along with copying and representing? The biosemiotic approach of biologists like Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and many more stress the need for the epistemic cut that indeed produces the closure of autonomy.

And Pattee shows how this even goes back to von Neumann’s mathematical treatment of self-reproducing automata. Rosen likewise provides the strong mathematical arguments. So even just for genetic copying, the need for a model that is separated from what it replicates is an axiomatic basic.

The problem with autopoiesis is that it was fuzzy on this aspect of the story. But there is a good grounding in semiotics to understand how selfhood and autonomy must emerge in life and mind. It is because they are this new thing of a semiotic modelling relation. It is all founded on the logical necessity of making an epistemic cut between self and world so as to start acting as a self in a world.

The informational machinery of a code has its first job in securing a state of enactive organisation. It must have a model of the self in its world so as to organise its metabolic flows and repair its dissipating structures - Rosen’s MR model of anticipatory systems. Then after that enactive relationship is established, there might be some kind of machinery worth replicating by making transmissible copies of a set of genes. The ability to replicate is somewhat secondary - although a logical inevitably because it allows biological development to be joined by biological evolution. And that is a powerful extra.

Note how words and numbers are semiotic codes that first exist as a way of separating a self from its world. Children have minds that become logically organised as they learn language and become able to self-regulate - as was well understood by symbolic interactionism and Vygotskian psychology. Humans have a heightened sense of selfhood because they must socially construct themselves as actors in a cultural drama, and now in the modern era, actors in a techno-neoliberal drama (the world made by thinking in terms of numbers or pure quantification).

And then words and numbers become something that can be transmitted and copied - turned into information or inert symbols to be decoded - by being rendered as marks on a page or electronic fluctuations on a wire. Human culture developed the power to become copyable and thus fully evolvability - capable of explosive change and growth over time as history shows once the digitised habits of writing and counting got started.

Oral culture is weakly transmissible. You had to be there to hear how the story was told and the gestures were used to really get the message. The machinery of copying was still more enactive than representational. It was not symbolic so much as indexical.

But with alphabet systems and numerals, along with punctuation and the sequestering of these marks in inert substrates - in the same way DNA is zipped up and inert and so physically separated from the molecular storm it regulates - humans continued on to full strength symbolism. Or a proper epistemic cut where the transmissiblity of information is separated from the interpretation or enaction of that information.

So you can see why huge confusion results from not being clear that syntax and semantics are two different things when we want to talk about “information” in some generalised way. An informational system - like a biological organism with genes and neurons, perhaps even words and numbers - is both enactive and representational. It is involved in both development (of a self-world modelling relation) and evolution (of a self-world modelling relation).

As usual, there is always a dialectic. And academic camps spring up at either pole to defend their end as the right end.

Again, I stick with systems thinkers or hierarchy theorists who can frame things more coherently.

Enaction is about the first person particularity of being in some actual selfish state in regard to the world. Representation is about what can be objectively copied and replicated so as to pass on the underlying machinery that could form such a particular state of world adaptedness.

Genes represent a generalised growth schedule and a list of essential molecular recipes that are the basic machinery for a body having an enactive modelling relation with its world. And genes also are in some active state of enaction when they are part of a body doing and feeling things as it indeed lives and transacts its metabolic flows.

In any moment of active selfish living existence, the DNA is unzipped and coated with all kinds of regulatory feedback signals so that it is functioning as the anchor to a vast cell and body-wide epigenetic hierarchy of “information”. The code couldn’t be more enactive.

And then the DNA is zipped tight, reduced to the frozen dialectic of sperm and ovum, mechanically recombined as now part of a different kind of story - one that couldn’t be more representational in being an inert process of information copying and the seeding of a next generation with the syntactic variety upon which the process of evolution depends.

If we talk about neurology or neurosemiosis, the stress is of course more on the enaction than the representation. Nature relies on genes to encode neural structure. So experience is something that can both be enacted and represented if you are dealing with simple intelligence in the form or ants or jumping spiders. Genes can specify the shape of the wiring to the degree that habits of thought are pretty much hard wired.

But large brained animals become more or less dependent on personal development or enaction. Thoughts, feeling and memories - some package of life experience that shaped the mind of a tiger or elephant - is information gained and lost. Only very general parts of being a tiger or elephant, as a self in some particular ecological niche, can be captured and transmitted as evolvable and representational information passed on to the next generation.

Humans became even more enactive and developmental as a large brain species. Our babies are at a real extreme in being born with unformed circuitry awaiting the imprint of life experience and hence the accumulation of untransmissible states of attentional response and new thought habit forming.

So genetics was strained to its outer limit in this tilt towards the enactive pole.

But then - hey presto - that paved the way for linguistic culture as a new higher level of semiotic code or information enaction/information representation. We could restore the balance between making minds and being minds with oralism, and then oralism’s continued evolution towards literacy and numeracy.

So neurosemiosis is sort of a gap in the story. It is where the baton gets passed as the genes get stretched to the limit and suddenly - with Homo sapiens - something more abstract, something arising out of social level systemhood, arises to continue the semiotic journey to a higher level of organisation.

This is why the neural code is so hard to find, and why we have patent idiocies like integrated information theory or quantum consciousness theories trying to fill the explanatory gap.

Biology can point to genes as the dual basis of enaction and representation, development and evolution. Social psychology can point to words and numbers in the same way. Brain scientists have to talk in terms of neural network principles to feel they are getting at what makes it all tick in terms of a mind that can be both some particular enactive first person state, and then also the other thing of a genetically transmissible algorithm which a new generation of minds can implement.

Again, I return to the neuroscientists who are actually homing in on this understanding of the great hunt for the neural code - folk like Friston and Grossberg. It is easy to see why they are on the right track, scientifically speaking.

The neural code has to be understood not as a train of symbols but as a standard microcircuit design. A bit of computational machinery. An architectural motif. A transmissible algorithm that is the brain’s basic building block.

And the problem there is Turing machine based notions of neurology’s canonical microcircuit - the standard approach - are so far off the mark. The only people to pay attention to are the ones that talk the language of anticipatory systems.

Why do you exclude modelling along with copying and representing? The biosemiotic approach of biologists like Pattee, Salthe, Rosen and many more stress the need for the epistemic cut that indeed produces the closure of autonomy — apokrisis

An epistemic cut, the attempt to glue back together the objective and the subjective, which we decided to separate many centuries ago, is only necessary when we take the following as our ground.

“…the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. It is objective, and indeed utterly recalcitrant, in its existence.”

I mentioned in a previous post what I consider to be the practical and scientific implications of the model
of causality I support. You undoubtedly noticed that these have to do with psychological processes that are quite a distance from the physical, biological and psychophysical regions that you are interested in. Although I believe that eventually this approach will impact thinking in these domains , I don’t have any particular criticisms of your thinking as long as it confines itself to territory that doesn’t involve psychological phenomena such as affect, rationality , social and political interaction , and language.


In that light , your view of semiotics as structural coding and decoding strays into the territory of human language,
and clashes with recent thinking in psychology on the nature of language. As psychologist George Kelly wrote

“For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so courageously initiated.

Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system."

I think what I suggest leads to good science and practical knowledge in the following areas: — Joshs

Those are motherhood claims rather than concrete examples. Is there a particular case where phenomenology or continental philosophy delivers an insight that my brand of semiotic holism or systems science couldn’t?

I agree that the general project of internalism is a valid reaction to the excesses of externalism, or objective third person, view from nowhere, metaphysics.

But my physicalism - following on from Peirce and Salthe - is internalist too. Or at least it starts and returns there to the degree that it is a pansemiotic understanding of reality - a view of the Cosmos as itself an organism undergoing a process of enactive development (rather than a Darwinian evolution, or blind play of chance).

So as I have said I don’t want to go too overboard on pansemiosis and an organismic Cosmos. Peirce and Salthe are way to the left of me on that. But I do accept weak pansemiosis rather than strong. And so a weak version of internalism rather than phenomenology’s over-emphasised one.

Again as I have argued, enaction is twinned with representation in semiosis. A code is something which is objectivised - in being syntax divorced from semantics, information divorced from its entropic consequences - and yet is also internal because an organism can curl all its symbols up into tiny DNA threads, or a pocket size book and act on a set of instructions at its leisure.

Selfhood thus becomes objective or mechanical at its anchoring source. The internalism of organismic being had the devil of the third person view at its functional heart. The whole metaphysics of organicism - the romantic naturphilosophie response to Enlightenment Reductionism - is subverted because the machine becomes the precious conceal trick.

Objectivists and subjectivists do their ritual battle. Realism vs idealism. Analytic philosophy against Continental. Externalists vs internalists. Always the response to discovering a foundational dichotomy is to set up camp at one or other end and look around for who wants a fight. Start policing the boundary - the epistemic cut! - that separates self from other.

On the internet, some random dude (me) sounds a little dismissive of phenomenology. Immediately your hackles are raised. You leap forth from your camp to make a challenge to discover whose side ai really stand on. This is the social drama we must engage in - the one written into very formula of the forum’s software. It is a game of taking sides and marking boundaries with our technical vocabularies.

But as I have tried to make clear, there is a third way that is (successfully) Hegelian in being Peircean.

The only problem is that it is rather complicated and so has remained marginalised ever since Anaximander tried to get the show rolling.

An epistemic cut, the attempt to glue back together the objective and the subjective, which we decided to separate many centuries ago, — Joshs

That’s not a deep understanding of what it is. It is instead the enactive production of the dialectical drama which is a self in its world. It is how the objective vs subjective distinction even rises to the level of intelligible categories of being.

In that light , your view of semiotics as structural coding and decoding strays into the territory of human language,
and clashes with recent thinking in psychology on the nature of language. As psychologist George Kelly wrote — Joshs

Oh I just love these examples of boundary policing. Watch out, here comes the bloody social psychologist knocking on the door of our cosy introspectionist Wednesday night group meet. What a nuisance. See him off with a quick quote from one of our cherished authorities.

Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. — Joshs

Happily I’ve covered that in an extensive post on the way codes have to support both copying and enaction. And why neurosemiosis presents a particular issue in the transition from genes to words. Brain circuitry is some kind of standard algorithm - but also not really an algorithm in the mainstream computer science sense. And so neuroscience has more work to do on elucidating the nature of what we would mean in talking about a neural code.

Here's yet another way of looking at it. You accurately tagged my thesis as techo-dialectics. And so I say, look around and see what seems to be evolving in the modern world. Is it the human spirit or is it technology - the world of informational machines?

I see human consumers queuing up all night to be the first to purchase Apple's latest generation of iPhones. What is going on there - from a George Kelly point of view? What kind of diagnosis and remedy does your hero provide to what we both surely agree is some mad, or at least odd and fetishistic, societal behaviour?

This is a concrete example to test a contrast in our world views.

I claim my techno-dialectics gets down to the root of things in providing a naturalistic explanation - one that ties the construction of the modern self to the driving impulse of thermodynamic necessity.

But what say you?

Now we’re getting somewhere...
I have an enormous amount of respect for both approaches here. I am reading along, taking notes and doing background research. I’ve let you know because I’m hoping you keep us spectators in mind with handy references and refrain from academic shorthand. And try and keep it respectful, gentlemen.

Carry on...

If one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, creation, transformation and production. Awareness does not register and copy external information, it enacts a world. — Joshs

I am totally with you in an enactive understanding. I think you will find "Information" is what enables it.

Not feeling so well today, will reply more fully later.

I think as we explore the full meaning of information we will find it is the currency that enables the whole cosmos.

Some refs to Howard Pattee:

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/

https://www.academia.edu/234713/The_Physics_and_Metaphysics_of_Biosemiotics

https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html

Dan Zahavi (phenomenology)

Michel Bitbol (Philosophy of Science). He has some fascinating papers and online lectures.

These are all sources I've discovered or been shown through this Forum.

“…the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. It is objective, and indeed utterly recalcitrant, in its existence.” — Joshs

Not 'utterly', according to John Wheeler. The following from his paper, Law without Law

(Also learned of that paper through this forum...)

I think I've seen that video. Its mostly Shannon communication theory? It is relevant but does not lend itself to a simple philosophical understanding, such that we can speak of information as something that enables the full cosmos really.

Not feeling to well currently, will take a little break.

HEY, I just wanted to leave this here. Very interesting video - I have not read the paper.



https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37969#Sec7

Not feeling to well currently — Pop

Might be suffering from information overload. :wink:

Not 'utterly', according to John Wheeler. — Wayfarer

Wheeler is one of the greats. But this also reflects the era of Copenhagen quantum mechanics before quantum maths had decoherence, or the missing bit of statistical mechanics, bolted on to give us quantum field theory.

Now decoherent quantum physics is a problem as lesser minds than Wheeler carried on with a mechanical understanding of physics and so arrived at the popular metaphysics of the many worlds interpretation.

But Wheeler’s participatory universe just needs to adjust the position of its epistemic cut. It has to be moved from the default Copenhagen position - something do to with being the boundary defined by a conscious human observer reading a needle on a dial (how semiotic!) - to being a Cosmos that pansemiotically observes itself.

The decoherence mod to quantum maths - the addition of statistical mechanics to the wave mechanics - is a way of universalising the epistemic cut so it exists freely at every physical scale of being. You get a practical story where the quantum turns classical with an exponential speed as it encounters its thermal surrounds.

Sometimes - if interactions are sparse because the events are in an empty and cold vacuum - then decoherence, the collapse of the wavefunction, can take a long time. And that is how we trap quantumness in the lab. Chill it and let it swell larger in a vacuum.

But most of the time the collapse - in the hot and crowded thermal environment that makes our comfortable human home - happens almost immediately as far as we are concerned. It just isn’t a visible factor in a world we experience as concrete and classical.

And if we do look up at the twinkle of a star, that means we are trained to see it as a distant object and not a remarkable photonic interaction that is nonlocal in the way Wheeler’s quantum eraser emphasises.

So Wheeler was free thinking enough to give voice to a semiotic view that incorporates the necessity of placing the classical vs quantum epistemic cut somewhere. But Copenhagenism was just science being methodologically strict and saying we can’t yet place that cut out there as some physical mechanism. So hold on and just say all we can do so far is know we are reading a dial.

And then the maths was added that gives the whole universe a thermal structure. Quantum theory still can’t speak directly about the actual collapse of the wavefunction - hence why the many worlds interpretation has legs. But it has placed the epistemic cut out in the world as a grid of constraining structure - classical measurements we can agree on using a thermometer, stopwatch and ruler. Quantumness is confined in classical boxes of every size, just as we observe to be the case.

Chaos is controlled, order is regained, the scientist feels good.

And quantum biology is showing now how life itself has long mastered this semiotic trick of boxing up quantum uncertainty to extract useful work from its thermal environment. Every enzyme looks to use classical structure to harness quantum superposition so as to beat the odds when it comes to driving chemical reactions uphill against the prevailing entropic conditions,

Reactions that might only happen once in a thousand years can be forced to happen in a millisecond. Physics had become life’s plaything down at nanoscale. Life thrives on uncertainty because randomness is something it knows how to control. And quantum uncertainty is the most high powered form of randomness. Life can do jujitsu by using its opponent’s own helpless weight against it.

I think people make a lot of the marvels of the mind. Consciousness seems mysterious and fantastic. But biology - the trick of being alive - is revealing its own deep underpinnings at long last. Even biologists are stunned by how little they understood just 15 or 20 years ago.

This video isn’t about the harnessing of the quantum realm directly, but it is about the nano-machinery which colonises that physical boundary layer with its remarkable molecular motors…..

I think people make a lot of the marvels of the mind. Consciousness seems mysterious and fantastic. But biology - the trick of being alive - is revealing its own deep underpinnings at long last. Even biologists are stunned by how little they understood just 15 or 20 years ago. — apokrisis

Yeah, but no room for epistemic cuts here! All is enactive, with a mind in the background, but also intrinsic to it ( every member and the whole ), causing the informational bodies to integrate. Thus creating meaning / life.

Yeah, but no room for epistemic cuts here! — Pop

So the genes don’t measure the state of the body, the state of its metabolism, and turn the dials accordingly? There is no separation between the regulation and the action? An enzyme doesn’t have both its quantum pocket for doing its physical magic and also separately it’s regulatory receptor site for listening out for its instructions?

The body is a nested hierarchy of epistemic cuts. And that is only expanded by evolving an immune system and a nervous system.

It is ridiculous that you now just go boo, hiss in pantomime fashion when the epistemic cut is mentioned. Show that you understand what it even means as a technical term from theoretical biology.

My opinion is you've taken a wrong turn somewhere and are trying to rationalize it by using technical terms. You're trying to make everything information by sprinkling your magic pixie dust on it. I'm going over to Amazon now to buy you a Tinkerbell award.

So the genes don’t measure the state of the body, the state of its metabolism, and turn the dials accordingly? There is no separation between the regulation and the action? An enzyme doesn’t have both its quantum pocket for doing its physical magic and also separately it’s regulatory receptor site for listening out for its instructions? — apokrisis

You do not need to resolve all the details / cannot currently resolve all the details,. But you know that once you do discover the details, that what you will be describing is INFORMATION.
So, there is a logical way to describe it, if all information can fit a singular definition? This is the aim of the thread. You have agreed that the plot is feasible, grudgingly! Thus far @Daniel has been the prime mover. Can you capture all information in a singular definition?

this also reflects the era of Copenhagen quantum mechanics before quantum maths had decoherence, — apokrisis

Decoherence has been developed into a complete framework, but there is controversy as to whether it solves the measurement problem, as the founders of decoherence theory admit in their seminal papers.[3]

[3] Joos and Zeh (1985) state ‘'Of course no unitary treatment of the time dependence can explain why only one of these dynamically independent components is experienced.'’ And in a recent review on decoherence, Joos (1999) states ‘'Does decoherence solve the measurement problem? Clearly not. What decoherence tells us is that certain objects appear classical when observed. But what is an observation? At some stage we still have to apply the usual probability rules of quantum theory.'’Adler, Stephen L. (2003). "Why decoherence has not solved the measurement problem: a response to P.W. Anderson". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. 34 (1): 135–142. arXiv:quant-ph/0112095. Bibcode:2003SHPMP..34..135A.

My take is that decoherence explains why Schrödinger’s cat is never actually both dead and alive, but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental role of observation in the formulation of quantum mechanics.

I checked. They are out of stock.

Or did you buy the last one? Please don’t disappoint me after raising my hope so, :cry: