But you know that once you do discover the details, that what you will be describing is INFORMATION. — Pop

In the sense that is is meaningful and not merely noise?

No, the 12 inch Tinker Bell Classic Doll has a five star rating and costs $26.88. Sorry, that's more than I can afford...I'm on a fixed income.

but it doesn’t resolve the fundamental role of observation in the formulation of quantum mechanics. — Wayfarer

But the mechanics - the formal model - doesn’t grant observation a fundamental role. It isn’t even in the model. There is no mechanism that determines the actual outcome. QM only describes some constrained space of probabilities - a wavefunction. It shrugs it shoulders about the collapse of the wavefunction. That’s your problem, mate. Open the box and look at the cat yourself.

Decoherence at least now gives us boxes of many appropriate sizes. A cat sized box is so large, crowded and warm that our chances of observing anything weird are too negligible even to consider. But a nanoscale box can be full of fluctuating surprises. We can materialise sudden reversals of the second law that are like bank errors in our favour,

Your every comment manages to be more hurtful than the last. I am at rock bottom now.

A message = information + redundancy + noise

Message = A poodle dog entered the room xptlmz

Redundancy = dog
Noise = xptlmz
Information = A poodle entered the room

What about the grammatical structure? Subject-verb-object was lurking as the generating constraint on your collection of informational units.

Meanings can’t just be composed. They must be subsumed to a holistic pattern, a top-down structure, a semiotic habit of interpretance.

Information theory is particularly silent on this.

10 pages later, we have much talk about many things yet no consensus. As normal, we apply reverse.. not psychology but philosophy. What isn't information? Not random scribbles on a test because that confers information about the scribbler's intellect. So what isn't information? What a sentient being has yet to touch, it would appear?

Edit: But not even this! For as nature as it is understood here to be a non-sentient randomness of conformity can convey what time is best to plant, hunt, or harvest. So where does that leave us?

What about the grammatical structure? Subject-verb-object was lurking as the generating constraint on your collection of informational units.

Meanings can’t just be composed. They must be subsumed to a holistic pattern, a top-down structure, a semiotic habit of interpretance.

Information theory is particularly silent on this. — apokrisis

The way I see it, Claude Shannon treats information as answers to questions which from a certain perspective dissociates the grammar/syntax from semantics.

So, "a poodle entered the room"is rephrased as the answer to a question like so:

Q. What entered the room?
A. A poodle.

There's no discernible grammar/syntax in the answer (the message) as you will have already noticed.

I dunno!

Q: What entered the room?

A: A poodle.
A: The poodle.
A: Some poodle.
A: Poodle.
A: Poodle a.
A: Can you repeat the question in a way that takes up more of the grammatical load so I can pretend my reply has no grammatical structure?

Anything the mind can comprehend? Is there anything the mind cannot comprehend that is not information? We fall back to the senses. Not seeing any. Anyone?

What entered the room?

A: A poodle.
A: The poodle.
A: Some poodle.
A: Poodle.
A: Can you repeat the question in a way that takes up more of the grammatical load so I can pretend my reply has no grammatical structure? — apokrisis

I'm grateful that you thought my views were worth pursuing further but I'm not sure whether your objective was to make me realize that,

I wouldn't feel too grateful at 10k posts the argument is more self-enforced than otherwise. :razz:

I wouldn't feel too grateful at 10k posts the argument is more self-enforced than otherwise. :razz: — Outlander

:smile:

When you go to the hardware store, do you have to ask the nice man to open the cabinet to sell you the spray paint?

But the mechanics - the formal model - doesn’t grant observation a fundamental role. It isn’t even in the model. There is no mechanism that determines the actual outcome. — apokrisis

Hence the 'observer problem' - that the role of the observer is essential but unspecified. The problem which the many-worlds intepretation wishes to sidestep.

Meanings can’t just be composed. They must be subsumed to a holistic pattern, a top-down structure, a semiotic habit of interpretance.

Information theory is particularly silent on this. — apokrisis

What's at the top? Isn't that just what Dennett dismissed as 'sky hooks'? Isn't everything supposed to evolve through the blind shuffling of genetic units of information, sieved through natural selection? Bottom-up all the way? If that's not right, then the acclaimed Neo-Darwinian Synthesis has some major problems.

10 pages later, we have much talk about many things yet no consensus. — Outlander

Well, what would you expect with a question like that as the OP? The only sensible response would have been 'what information?'

I'm grateful that you thought my views were worth pursuing further but I'm not sure whether your objective was to make me realize that, — TheMadFool

I’m sure an insult is buried in there somewhere. But you asked surely I could see there was no discernible grammar in your answer. And yet I seemed able to discern some grammar in your answer.

Was I mistaken or do you accept that and now withdraw your claim? Ball is in your court, sir.

When you go to the hardware store, do you have to ask the nice man to open the cabinet to sell you the spray paint? — Wayfarer

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If there's a point, I didn't get it.

Your gratuitous proliferation of pointless videos reminds me of graffiti.

I'm grateful that you thought my views were worth pursuing further but I'm not sure whether your objective was to make me realize that,
— TheMadFool

I’m sure an insult is buried in there somewhere. But you asked surely I could see there was no discernible grammar in your answer. And yet I seemed able to discern some grammar in your answer.

Was I mistaken or do you accept that and now withdraw your claim? Ball is in your court, sir. — apokrisis

No insults I assure you. I thought you were being snide. No point discussing this. Let's pick up where we left off.

I'm not even sure if what I say makes sense but Claude Shannon's information theory seems to treat messages (carriers of information) as the final answer to a series of yes/no questions aimed at narrowing down the possibiilites that the message could be from an arbitrary n to 1.

For instance, if there are 4 possibilities A, B, C, and D, the message A is the answer to 2 yes/no questions [1. Is it among the first two letters of the alphabet? 2. Is it the first letter of the alphabet?] and thus carries 2 bits of information.

Given this is the case, the message "a poodle entered the room" can be reframed as the following:

Question: What entered the room?
a) A poodle OR b) An elephant OR c) A cow

Answer: a) A poodle

As you can see the syntactical aspects of the answer are covered for by the question itself. In fact, it seems possible to remove the phrase "a poodle" completely and just say a).

Your gratuitous proliferation of pointless videos reminds me of graffiti. — Wayfarer

A thousand apologies! I'll do my best to restrain myself.

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

:up: Take a break.

But not even this! For as nature as it is understood here to be a non-sentient randomness of conformity can convey what time is best to plant, hunt, or harvest. So where does that leave us? — Outlander

... non-sentient randomness of conformity implies a scientific (but not philosophical) objectivity in that within the scope of all observations that conformity is universal. Nature knows when it's time to plant. As for us, we copy and try to improve on nature's way by seeking to extract and make use of information useful for us.

What is information for the cosmologist is not information for the farmer.

I'll give you my version of this using my model notation:
A physical poodle enters the room--->Physical light travels from the poodle to your eyes--->A physical signal travels from your eyes to your brains vision processing region--->Physical signals from this brain region are transmitted to regions that have the ability to instantiate mental content as a specific brain state.
The final state takes the form BRAIN(mental content) as in BRAIN(a poodle has entered the room).
We test for mental content all the time (tests, quizes, exams) so in practice we ackowlegde mental content exist. I'm wondering if it's falsifiable or unfalsifiable... not sure. My default is that mental content does exist. That leads to the idea that information exists in the form of BRAIN(mental content).
If you missed it earlier in this thread it solves the logic problem of how the physical can interact with the "non-physical" (really neuron contained mental content) and vice versa. This would assume full input/output capabilities. Such as Physical input--->senses--->BRAIN(mental content)--->muscles--->Physical output.

We test for mental content all the time (tests, quizes, exams) so in practice we ackowlegde mental content exist. I'm wondering if it's falsifiable or unfalsifiable... not sure. — Mark Nyquist

Turing test? Mimicking consciousness to a T maybe possible. That's the nub of the Turing test. Of course, we may not be able to tell if the AI that passes the test is actually conscious (mental content +). P-zombies?

it solves the logic problem of how the physical can interact with the "non-physical" — Mark Nyquist

I don't see any explanations on how the laws of science aren't violated.

I don't see any explanations on how the laws of science aren't violated. — TheMadFool

If you think they are you could point that out.
I'm thinking about the turning test. Biology and electronic computers each have unique parameters.

:up: Good luck!

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?” — Joshs

Thanks for this abstract. FEP and its pros and cons was touched upon earlier. In contrast to the energy / thermodynamic consideration, life is basically about copying. Life copied itself into existence as outlined in this royal society publication. A copy has to be made before any other consideration, and this seems to be the focus of contemporary understanding.

Abstract: "We conclude that organic information does not have the status of a derived physical quantity because it cannot be expressed by anything simpler than itself. This means that organic information has the same scientific status as the fundamental quantities of physics.
Again it has to be underlined that a similar idea has been proposed by Küppers [26] in respect to the concept of ‘pragmatic information".

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. — Joshs

This is more along the lines of my understanding of how information embeds an organism in its environment in an enactive manner.

The world is enactive at all scales, and a generic platonic information seems to facilitate this. This Information seems to be the currency of an enactive world, but it is such a slippery concept to get a metaphysical fix on. Has anybody explored enactivism specificaly in terms of information such that they have arrived at a definition that befits an enactive world?

Thus far with the help of @Daniel We have :
Information describes the physical structure of entities, and enables them to interact with and change other entities, in a reciprocal manner.

But I hope to significantly improve on this. Anyone??

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? — apokrisis

The claims I made included models of schizophrenia and
autism. These illnesses involve deficits in empathy whose elucidation requires a theory of empathy, how we recognize others as having minds, thoughts , feelings. The discovery of mirror neurons which fire not only when Chimps perform an action but when they see another chimp perform the same action has led to a new range of theories of empathy. The three leading candidates for theory theory simulation theory and interactionism. Theory theory relies on classical information processing models of in which an internal representation is generated of the other’s actions and compared against that action. According to this perspective, Autistics fail to pedicure a theory of other minds. Interaction theory, borrowing from phenomenology, argues against the idea that we generate a theory of other minds as the main way that we relate to others. They argue empathy is no mediated by representations but is immediate and directly in the world. They point out that autistics have difficulty in this immediate and direct relating and so fall back on a theory of mind as an inadequate substitute for direct interaction.

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. — apokrisis

It is a common misunderstanding to consider phenomenology as an idealism, internalism, introspection, a philosophy of the ‘inside’.

But as Zahavi puts it :”…the very alternative between internalism and externalism – an alternative based on the division between inner and outer – is inapplicable when it comes to phenomenological conceptions of the mind-world relation.


As Husserl already pointed out in the Logische Untersuchungen, the entire facile divide between inside
and outside has its origin in a naive commonsensical metaphysics and is phenomenologically suspect and
inappropriate when it comes to understanding the nature of intentionality (Husserl 1984b, 673, 708). The
same criticism can also be found in Heidegger, who denies that the relation between Dasein and world can
be grasped with the help of the concepts “inner” and “outer”. As he writes in Sein und Zeit:

In directing itself toward...and in grasping something, Dasein does not first go outside of the inner
sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already
“outside” together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner
sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its
character. Rather, even in this “being outside” together with its object, Dasein is “inside” correctly
understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what
is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one
has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Dasein that knows
remains outside as Dasein (Heidegger 1986, 62).
The notions of internalism and externalism remain bound to the inner-outer division, but as the following,
final, quote from Merleau-Ponty illustrates, this is a division that phenomenology plays havoc with:

“Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (Merleau-Ponty
1945, 467 [1962, 407]).

Considering the way in which phenomenologists conceive of intentionality, of the mind-world
relationship, I think it is questionable whether it really makes much sense to classify their views as being
committed to either internalism or externalism. Avoiding the two terms obviously won’t solve all the problems,
but might at least permit us to avoid letting our investigation be guided by misleading metaphors. The mind is neither a container nor a special place. Hence it makes little sense to say that the world must be either inside or outside of the mind. Ultimately, we should appreciate that the phenomenological investigations of the structures and conditions of possibility for phenomena are antecedent to any divide between psychical interiority and physical exteriority, since they are investigations of the dimension in which any object – be it external or internal – manifests itself (cf. Heidegger 1986, 419, Waldenfels 2000, 217). Rather than committing the mistake of interpreting the phenomena mentalistically, as being part of the mental inventory, we should see the phenomenological focus on the phenomena as an attempt to question the very subject­-object split, as an attempt to stress the co-emergence of mind and world.”

I think it is organised data for certain purpose or use.

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. — apokrisis

I may have missed the post where you get into the details of this. There are a number of fans of the later Wittgenstein on here, and they may be of help in clarifying whether your model of neurosemiosis, of language in general , is at all compatible with the radical contextuality of Philosophical Investigations. I mention this because phenomenology and Wittgenstein move in the same direction on semiology, and we could save a lot of time by being able to refer the topic of language back to some very helpful previous threads.

↪Pop I think it is organised data for certain purpose or use. — Corvus

I'm assuming monism, where information has it's neural correlates. So information causes a physical change ( in brain structure ), and this physical change embeds and orients an entity to its environment.

So there is a physical thing going on, where environmental information acts upon an entity and changes them physically, thus creating an enactive situation.

This is entirely subconscious, similar to the way the skin tans in the sun.

@apokrisis RIP "epistemic cut"