The subject of nested hierarchies is fundamental to how the brain functions and what information is. It's the first I've seen it come up. — Mark Nyquist

Yes. This is one of the places Chomsky got it really wrong because he didn’t know his neuroscience. The brain Itself is a recursion-based structure. Chomsky tried to posit an innate grammar as the Homo sapiens evolutionary leap. But the brain already uses nested hierarchies to analyse any sensation or develop any motor plan.

The “grammar module” of Broca’s area is just a standard bit of premotor planning cortex given over to control of the vocal cords with better connectivity to a matching object representation area over in Wernicke’s area by the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe.

Does quantum physics come to the rescue? It gives us uncertainity. — Athena

Biology is finding that enzymes rely on quantum uncertainty to amplify their ability to make desired reactions happen. Life and mind thrive on zones of instability because they can master that free energy to do work - give the randomness of big fluctuations a cohesive direction that then builds, and keeps rebuilding, the same material structures.

So the usual notion of stable entities is that they are composed of stable parts. A house is built out of bricks and not jelly.

But an organism is a machinery that thrives on zones of instability as it has the means - the information - to just keep rebuilding itself. That is why life thrives in hot sun, intertidal zones, volcanic underwater vents, and anywhere else that there is lots of unpredictability and so the basic raw material to feed a machinery that can turn that into the predictable.

I see. If one considers language as a mode of communication, it needs to be about reality and that invariably requires language to capture causality. Causality, as we all know, true or not, is permutationally sensitive (order matters). In fact, all human enterprises seem to be wholly cause-effect oriented. — TheMadFool

Yes. Because the most important thing for the tribe to be talking about is the switching points where the application of a force will achieve its greatest desired effect.

If we are going hunting today, we could go off in 360 degrees of direction. But wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which direction lies the easy prey? The tribal language will be optimised to deliver a binary choice to coordinate the physical choice.

With civilisation, we even built our environments in terms of causal switches. We built roads, windows, doors, as ways to channel the flow of humanity into logically switched flow. We live inside a logical engine built of reductionist cause and effect principles,

However, the sentence, man ate dog is not the same as dog ate man because there's an order in which the event takes place, causally speaking as the subject is a cause that acts and produces an effect in the object. — TheMadFool

But caution. The majority of languages do tend towards an SVO structure. However any order can work. What is key is the division of causal reality into the three parts into a subject, an object, an action.

The action can be named last in some languages. We are put in mind of the name of the subject and the name of the object first, then supplied with the name of the connecting action. So we get all the same information even if the convention of word order is different.

A language has to be linear, (being a verbal code) so some choice of order must be made. But the information about a causal interaction is holistic - irreducibly triadic. So what a linear sequence must rebuild in out minds is the wholeness of the causal situation being spoken about.

Biology is finding that enzymes rely on quantum uncertainty to amplify their ability to make desired reactions happen. Life and mind thrive on zones of instability because they can master that free energy to do work - give the randomness of big fluctuations a cohesive direction that then builds, and keeps rebuilding, the same material structures.

So the usual notion of stable entities is that they are composed of stable parts. A house is built out of bricks and not jelly.

But an organism is a machinery that thrives on zones of instability as it has the means - the information - to just keep rebuilding itself. That is why life thrives in hot sun, intertidal zones, volcanic underwater vents, and anywhere else that there is lots of unpredictability and so the basic raw material to feed a machinery that can turn that into the predictable. — apokrisis

I totally love what you said. Just yesterday I was reading about wind evaporating water and releasing heat. I need to find that information again and add it to what you said. The transfer of energy is mind-boggling to me and here we are speaking of a transfer of information as well. In fact, I am feeling overwhelmed with information and need to take a break and digest all this. I want to pull out a book and see if I can improve my understanding. What if 70% of our population lived to learn and felt intense pleasure in the process, rather than bashing each other over stupid things, watching WrestleMania, and spreading gossip. It saddens me to know not everyone loves what we are doing here.

It is not about being beholdened or enchained by our biological and social contexts. They are the information that informs our being in the first place. — apokrisis

What defines a social context? I have two parents and two brothers. We all lived in the same household in the same city. My older brother is 18 months older than me and went to the same schools with the same teachers. We even had some of the same friends. And yet we all live in entirely different worlds, with different politics and different relations with technology. What was it that made the difference in how each of us was informed by the social world? My explanation is that there is a certain thread of consistency that runs through person’s experience, assimilating the new in a thematic manner to one’s precious history. The novelty of the world always redefines and reinvents from moment to moment the ongoing ‘self’ , which in fact has no strict identity. If we dont see this ongoing self-consistency bin ourselves or in others, we will attempt to understand them by reference to larger categories of social meaning in the way Marx does, or Foucault does in a different way. Individuals become nodes in a social formation. But from what vantage is this formation being glimpsed? One could say it is constantly being realigned as the nodes of the system interact. Most phenomenologically informed enactivists today adhere to a quasi-Foucaultian notion of the relation between self and world. For instance , Shaun Gallagher has written recently about socially distributed cognition:

“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.” Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own
and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities.”

I’ve only encountered 5 writers who endorse what I call a radically temporal model of experience.
Gene Gendlin is one of them.


“The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing
directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you.”

In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
“We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities.

Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's implying of behavior possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate . Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere nuances. The ‘nuances’ are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called ‘nuances’ that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person. Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual
incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social.

The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society.”(What First and Third Person Processes Really Are (2009)

I am trying to point out that shifting the account from the cognitive to the subpersonal ‘neural’ doesn’t clarify disputes about the understanding of human behavior — Joshs

Of course it does. It matters hugely whether a psychological level problem is a manifestation of an organic problem or a situational problem. Is the fix medical or therapeutic?

And even if it is organic, we have to find out if it is developmental or genetic. That again radically changes the fix.

Autism and schizophrenia cross all three levels as even broken brains must live in a society, But we can’t offer a humane treatment until each of these three contributing factors have been clearly teased apart.

Kelly’s PCT - a very semiotic approach, by the way - only might help at one level.

Note that the fundamental issue is UNDERSTANDING the behavior one is witnessing. TOM and interaction theory lead to different predictions and anticipations when we are in the presence of real human beings who we care about who act in ways that may puzzle us , and our puzzlement is well noted by them and adds anxiety and depression to their other issues. So when you meet an autistic person( do you know any?) , what do you draw from when you attempt to form a bond with them? — Joshs

This kind of view is well meaning but unscientific. If we are to correct the excesses of organic medicine by supplying cultural medicine, then it some down to what we can be sure of from social psychology. And that story has to be told stripped of romantic fantasy to be sure of being an effective and predictable therapy.

So sure. It is commonsense to anyone with half a brain that the ordinary social world is a complex and terrifying place if you have some particular cognitive deficits. You want to turn down the demands in a matching fashion.

But to then pretend that the organic difference doesn’t exist and society is the sole problem is the romanticism that creates its own monsters. Lobotomies are matched by cults.

So yes to empathy as a necessary aspect of humans as social animals. But we have to accept the corollary that aggression is the other side of the same coin. The brain is wired to make this epistemic cut, this fundamental neuromodulated shift in state, from love of the group to hate of the outsider.

If your happy, clappy, metaphysics reduces itself to a monism of love and forgiveness, it just doesn’t fly as a model of the neural or social reality. Life and mind are organised by their dichotomies. Intelligent outcomes are based on the right balances between competition and cooperation - hating and loving, in-grouping and boundary policing.

If we couldnt switch modes in binary fashion, we wouldn’t have the basis for making smart choices.

The question then is how as increasingly civilised society - living in the luxury of endless energy to burn - treat those in difficult situations, such as autism and schizophrenia. It is hard to deliver a sound answer if your metaphysics contains a fundamental muddle. Although, pragmatically, we can start with our “commonsense” realism and park the Continental romanticism on the library shelf.

I would say there is a difference between a nature-made object or event and a man-made object of event. This is where I part with Plato and perfect forms. I think the universe just throws it out there and what happens to it depends on its interaction with other forces. Such as the shapes of snowflakes are influenced by the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere. A snowflake is not a perfect form created by a mind such as human objects are created by a mind. There are universal laws, but not universal pre-determination. Whereas a man creating a statue begins with a rough idea of what the finished product will be. — Athena

In that case, what follows is, nature made / caused events or entities are not meaningful in terms of human intelligence, perfect form or logic in its purpose or design.

Nature caused events or entities have been happening randomly without aim, purpose or plans. We can explain the physical cause of the snowfall using the other elements such as humidity, temperature and air pressure, but that is not snow itself.  It is the condition for snowfall, and there is no way to explain why snow flakes looks the way it is without citing God's will.

In that case, I wonder if it could be related to information which is based on predesigned and thought out plans, practical purposes, human intelligence and meanings in abstract form or linguistic content.

The thought that comes to mind when reading those replies is chaos is essential to creativity, — Athena

I wouldn't quite say chaos is the creative element. We shouldn't forget that things are largely determined. But not entirely determined, there is also a slight element of randomness applicable to every transaction. So determined with a slight element of randomness.

This is one rare situation where Art can inform science. :lol: If you have ever created a painting, or made a sculpture, and I think this would hold for any form of art, and life in general. The product you make is largely what you set out to make, but not quite, elements of randomness creep in and change the final product slightly, and sometimes more then slightly.

As you intimated, this understanding can also be seen in the evolution of Covid, It is largely determined, with a slight element of randomness.

And yet we all live in entirely different worlds, with different politics and different relations with technology. What was it that made the difference in how each of us was informed by the social world? My explanation is that there is a certain thread of consistency that runs through person’s experience, assimilating the new in a thematic manner to one’s precious history. — Joshs

Sure. Our identities are a self narrative. And that is a socially-constructed habit which has developed from the generally group minded world of experience of small bands of hunter-gathers to the romantically exalted sense of self demanded by modern culture. We can no longer have our selfhood confined into any brackets - social or biological - as every bracketing is something we must take personal ownership of.

Frankly that is pathological. We can see that in the mental health statistics of modern society. Individuals striving to be individual are cosntructing their own nightmares and identity crises. Social media reduces social interaction to the binaries of trolling and gushing. It is dialectics, but no longer delivery productive outcomes.

Most phenomenologically informed enactivists today adhere to a quasi-Foucaultian notion of the relation between self and world. For instance , Shaun Gallagher has written recently about socially distributed cognition: — Joshs

A view of reality viewed through a gauzy film of idealist and subjectivist monism is just as partial as the view through the gauzy film of a materialist and objectivist monism. It is not impressive to take the long way around to arrive back at what ought to be pragmatically obvious.

I’ve only encountered 5 writers who endorse what I call a radically temporal model of experience.
Gene Gendlin is one of them. — Joshs

Another example of fingering the dialectic - the one and the many - then picking the side that matches the general socially-approved frame of the speaker.

You can identify yourself as a “phenomenologically informed enactivist” - and direct the collective hate towards its evil “other” - by taking a stand with the correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion.

Academia offers a more complex dynamic of course. We love our enemies and fear our friends as dialectical opposition defines careers, while those treading the same path slightly better are dangerous rivals. :grin:

It’s all a game of pragmatics in the end. Reality will weed out the foolish extremes in the long run.

Biology is finding that enzymes rely on quantum uncertainty to amplify their ability to make desired reactions happen. Life and mind thrive on zones of instability because they can master that free energy to do work - give the randomness of big fluctuations a cohesive direction that then builds, and keeps rebuilding, the same material structures. — apokrisis

This I like. My interest is in brain only information and this is relevent.

But an organism is a machinery that thrives on zones of instability as it has the means - the information - to just keep rebuilding itself. That is why life thrives in hot sun, intertidal zones, volcanic underwater vents, and anywhere else that there is lots of unpredictability and so the basic raw material to feed a machinery that can turn that into the predictable. — apokrisis

This I don't like. If we are going to study information we need to have some order of analysis and studying brain only information should come first, because that's how we use information, that's how we can philosophize and it's the basis of how we do science. If we don't understand brain only information first, these cases of disembodied or assigned "information" start to show up.
Something to observe is this brain only type of information alway occurs in a dynamic state and never in a static state. An example of what this brain only information really is, is what we write as we write it. And what we write is a sampling and record of mental content. Once written it becomes static, basically just encoded matter, not information.
I'm really not complaining about anyones views or writing style, but this thread has been a lot to sort through. Maybe sometime I'll post on why Claude Shannon information theory is a bad idea as a universal theory of information.

So yes to empathy as a necessary aspect of humans as social animals. But we have to accept the corollary that aggression is the other side of the same coin. The brain is wired to make this epistemic cut, this fundamental neuromodulated shift in state, from love of the group to hate of the outsider. — apokrisis

I should explain that empathy as it is understood within phenomenological and cognitive research is not the common meaning of the term. It doesn’t refer to sympathy or positive feelings or caring for one another. It deals with how we learn that other persons are not inanimate objects. In order to be aggressive toward another we have to empathize with them first. That is, we can’t despise them if we don’t perceive them as having thoughts, attitudes and feelings of their own. Autistics often feel like they are observing beings from another planet. Affect in particular is very difficult for them to make sense of, not just in humans but in other mammals , like dogs.

There is some support for the theory that we are wired, via mirror neurons , to recognize the actors. of others as being akin to our own. Shaun Gallagher explains:


“Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is, we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding their behavior. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do. TT claims that we explain another person’s behavior by appealing to an either innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general; a theory that is framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or motivating behavior. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this, because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate the other person’s mental states. We model others’ beliefs and desires as if we were in their situation.
Claims that such theory or simulation processes are explicit (conscious) are dubious from a phenomenological point of view. That is, if in fact such processes are primary, pervasive, and explicit, they should show up in our experience – in the way that we experience others – and they rarely do.The phenomenological critique also rejects the idea, clearly found in TT, that our everyday dealings with others involve an observational, third-person stance toward them – observing them and trying to come up with explanations of their behavior. Rather, our everyday encounters with others tend to be second-person and interactive.

Long before the child reaches the age of four, the capacities for human interaction and intersubjective understanding are already accomplished in certain embodied practices -- practices that are emotional, sensory-motor, perceptual, and nonconceptual. These practices include proto-mimesis (Zlatev, this volume), imitation, the parsing of perceived intentions (Baldwin et al. 2001), emotional interchange (Hobson 2004), and generally the processes that fall under the heading of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979). These embodied practices constitute our primary access for understanding others, and they continue to do so even after we attain our more sophisticated abilities in this regard (Gallagher 2001).
In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s mind. What we might reflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is expressed directly in their actions and behaviors. This phenomenologially direct understanding is likely made possible by the above mentioned complex neuronal processes described as the mirror neuron system(s) and shared representations.”

When you say the brain is wired to make the shift from love of the insider to hate of the outsider, it sounds like you are presuming a fairly sophisticated sort of innate neural machinery. Can you elaborate a bit on this?

I think I know what the OP means with the information of the universe, and its workings. But should it not be then, the historical data of the universe rather than information. Just my 2 cents. — Corvus

Thanks for that. Your opinion is as valuable as anybody's. It is not as if anybody understands this conundrum. :smile:

The still fuzzy and vague impression I have is that there is a connection between a platonic form ( the formal structure of a substance ) being able to integrate with another substance due only to possessing form - this creates a fundamental state of integrated information. And a state of integrated information is consciousness.- of course, consciousness as we know it is such an incredibly intricately complicated entanglement of form ( assuming thought has its neural correlates ).

So, there is something about the ability of things being able to mash together that is inherently meaningful. And at the extreme other end of this, we see understanding as the ability of new DATA being able to mesh with established data. Dot forget now- DATA is a pattern of information. So, a pattern fits an already existing framework of patterning ( brain ) to cause understanding.

You can identify yourself as a “phenomenologically informed enactivist” - and direct the collective hate towards its evil “other” - by taking a stand with the correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion. — apokrisis

“

It’s all a game of pragmatics in the end. Reality will weed out the foolish extremes in the long run. — apokrisis

What if you are a social constructionist like Ken Gergen, who has certain affinities with phenomenology?
Does the following sound like ‘directing collective hate via a correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion’? And what’s all this about ‘reality’ weeding out anything?

“In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)

So, there is something about the ability of things being able to mash together that is inherently meaningful. And at the extreme other end of this, we see understanding as the ability of new DATA being able to mesh with established data. Dot forget now- DATA is a pattern of information. So, a pattern fits an already existing framework of patterning ( brain ) to cause understanding. — Pop

Yes, I would be happier in using DATA rather than information to denote the universe workings and makings. :)

Strictly, DATA is still in the system as storage. It is when you go and do "SEARCH" and hit the button for the item you are searching, the system will process your request, and present to you as "INFORMATION" that you are after.

Once the information is fed into your brain, I would see it as "knowledge" rather than information. Information comes out from hardware and software of an information system, and the individual or organisations who already own the information, not from human brain, and definitely not from the universe.

The universe may feed you with the raw signals, and symbols which could be classed as data.
With the collected or observed data from the universe, you then compile them into the information you are after.

:up:

No matter what the reasoning for wearing masks, there are some who do not accept the scientific evidence and insist, mandating wearing a mask or getting vaccinated is not what science says it is, but is a government threatening our liberty because those at the top want the power to control us, and we must oppose that threat. Here information does not mean the same thing to everyone. — Athena

A mask or an injection are minor discomforts. But they have been made into binary symbols within a particular society already marked by its deep irrational divisions.

There is geopolitical reason why the US winds up so divided. It is unusual in being so evenly balanced between the urban and the rural. It is fractal in embodying this geographic divide over almost all possible scales. So the tension is wired in and can’t be escaped.

That is on top of its other generalised tensions that history has built into its cultural system.

The outcome of tension is positive when it is creative and leads to dynamic adaptation. But the US has reached the end of another chapter in history and the old accommodations are visibly strained. This plays out in the irrationality over little symbols that point towards different views of the best way forward.

In human affairs - ordered by binary symbols - nothing could be more meaningful than signalling your public allegiance to one or other side of a culture war.

The only problem is when this particular discourse bears no pragmatic relation to the dialectic it is meant to represent. A pandemic strikes society at a rather existential level. Liberal or conservative, woke or redneck, rural or urban - disease doesn’t care about your identity that much.

And so your political and economic philosophy has to focus on the immune system and its signalling regime. The self-nonself dialectic remains exactly the same kind of tension to be balanced. But now the social response has to be directed towards that level of semiotics - the game played between virus and immune cells.

You can see here how it all connects. Everything is in the end explained by semiotics - the epistemic cut that allows structural order. Chaos can be tamed and turned into intentional maintenance of some stable sense of identity or functional systemhood.

One metaphysics to rule them all!

If we don't understand brain only information first, these cases of disembodied or assigned "information" start to show up. — Mark Nyquist

It is by taking an information-only view that you arrive at idealism, representationalism, behaviouralism, disembodied cognition and other pathologies of scientific explanation. That is where mind science has been going wrong for decades.

Psychology started off enactive and pragmatic - the habits of reflexes and psychophysics of Wundt, Donders, Helmholtz, and others. But it got overtaken by the dialectics of romantics like Freud in battle with mechanists like Skinner,

Even when a Ulric Neisser or Steven Grossberg started off a new chapter, like cognitive science or neural networks, they got overtaken by the usual cultural wars. The pragmatic beginning becomes another battleground for spirit vs matter, information vs physics - all the ways of speaking of the same epistemic cut that is meant to connect by providing the useful divide.

As someone who seems to know quite a lot about semiotics and is passionate about its applications to philosophy and science, what books would you recommend someone read to begin learning about it?

I should explain that empathy as it is understood within phenomenological and cognitive research is not the common meaning of the term. It doesn’t refer to sympathy or positive feelings or caring for one another. — Joshs

Rest easy. I am well familiar with all this. :smile:

When you say the brain is wired to make the shift from love of the insider to hate of the outsider, it sounds like you are presuming a fairly sophisticated sort of innate neural machinery. Can you elaborate a bit on this? — Joshs

The crude story is that it is a balance of oxytocin versus testosterone. Neuromodulating chemical signals that produce reciprocal states of response. One puts us in a cooperating state of mind - inclined to be sympathetic in terms of our empathic understanding of another’s state of mind. But high testosterone, low oxytocin, switches things. You employ your empathic skills to find the least sympathetic ways to undermine your competition.

This is of course the most reductionistically crude telling of the story. The whole brain is organised by dichotomies of affective response such as approach-avoid, react-relax, concentrate-alert. Our perceptions are likewise poised to make gestalt judgements of integration and differentiation. Sensation is judgement of boundaries that define selves from others.

So as I keep saying, the essential bit of machinery that builds the entirety of life and mind is the thing of an unbalanced switch. If you can turn things on and off, you have achieve material control over the randomness of entropic existence. You have created a grain of regulating information.

The switches in biology, neurology or sociology are all thus reciprocal or dialectic in nature. They have to implement not just the mindless simplicity of a 0 or a 1. They need to be something that carries rational meaning - a switching between intelligibly opposing directions of action.

And so bodies and brains are structured with a reciprocal logic. Insulin is a generalised signal to all parts of the body to do their part of the job in storing some transitory energy excess. It is anabolic. Then alongside the beta cells of the pancreas churning out this hormone are the alpha cells that send out the opposite general message. The alpha cells detect a lack of circulating glucose and tell the body to catabolise its energy stores. Each group of cells sit close enough together that they take the one point of view of the same reality of the body and hence blood glucose is maintained with a beautiful precision.

Every biological or neurological process embodies the same reciprocal logic. That is just how nature functions once it has established an epistemic cut to regulate its physics via a semiotic model.

Everything is a nested hierarchy of switches that delivers a self-balancing outcome - one that is both stable and yet dynamic, conservative and liberal, loving and hateful, habitual and attentional, or whatever other dichotomy has come to your notice as a nasty dualism that must be hammered flat by your brand of philosophical monism.

@Gnomon@frank @Wayfarer@Daniel@Athena

I previously linked to a Royal Society paper provided by Wayfarer. In researching it further I found it was one of twenty one papers submitted to the Royal Society on the topic of "Information and DNA."
Initially I felt red faced and disappointed, as the paper was consistent with my understanding and considerably more advanced. I have since skimmed a selection of the the other 21 papers and much to my joy, the thinking is broadly consistent. The new paradigm amongst these, I assume younger, researchers is that Life is no longer just chemistry, BUT Chemistry + Information + Coding.

As a broad impression of the understanding at play amongst the papers I skimmed, I think it would be fair to say that at this level of life, the form of a substance is equal to its meaning - which is right on track with where this thread was supposed to be heading. :grimace:

All the papers can be found here. I find this to be an extremely valuable source of information, as it provides a glimpse into contemporary and future thinking. These are the guys who will create the paradigm of the future, and it seems palpable how they are struggling with a Cartesian framework, and advocating for an understanding that is closer to panpsychism, at least as it relates to life. A number of papers advocate for a reconsideration of what information means in biology, that it is something intrinsic to and irreducible to life.

This validates the view, that @gnomon and myself have been advocating in our own way. That information is in the fundamental mix.

And a change in understanding of how biology fundamentally works @Isaac, should make life easier for neurobiology, because if we come to understand that form is fundamentally meaningful, the search for the immaterial substance will lose all its meaning!** This fits very nicely with the trajectory of integrated information as an understanding of consciousness.

As someone who seems to know quite a lot about semiotics and is passionate about its applications to philosophy and science, what books would you recommend someone read to begin learning about it? — darthbarracuda

That is a hard one as the causal model is so different from the one normally supplied by normal culture that you have to relearn your deepest habits of thought. You have to rebuild the boat while still sailing it. It had to be learnt by doing - and failing - as much as reading the instruction manual.

Another problem is that it is an outsider exercise - in being opposed to the mainstream of causal monism - and so you don’t have a single authority. Hundreds of thinkers arrive from different directions with their own jargons and priorities. You have to live with many different camps to discover they are struggling to express the same general holism.

But Peirce is a foundational resource. And then in science, the heavy hitters for me were the systems scientists, cyberneticians, hierarchy theorists, and eventually the biosemioticians these guys have become since Peirce’s deep work got properly discussed in published from about the 1990s.

But I don’t mean the biosemioticians that follow the dyadic semiotics of Saussure rather than the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Bloody Continental philosophy sneaks its hooks into everything. :grin:

So pick anything by Peirce, or the now abundant commentary on Peirce. And read anything by Pattee tagged biosemiosis.

But as I say, it is not merely a view to be learned alongside every other. It is a reboot of how we are all trained to construct our worlds. We need to live it and see the world as very different from what we were told it was.

I previously linked to a Royal Society paper provided by Wayfarer. — Pop

How do you understand Barbieri's distinction between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm'? Why do you think he mentions Ernst Mayr's contention that living things are fundamentally different from inanimate matter? Do you agree with that proposition?

Actually this is excellent as an introductory text…not to full blown semiotics, but too a sensible Aristotelean systems science view. The appetiser to the main course perhaps.

Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999)

How do you understand Barbieri's distinction between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm'? Why do you think he mentions Ernst Mayr's contention that living things are fundamentally different from inanimate matter? Do you agree with that proposition? — Wayfarer

At the moment I have skimmed a lot of the papers, and I think you should also, to get a broad impression of the thinking. The point you are getting at, and what everybody will have to contend with ultimately is:

Once you recognize that form is meaningful in biology, how will you defend the assumption that it is meaningless outside of biology?

This is the conclusion gained, reading between the lines, when he says that this way of thinking might lead to an understanding of how life arose from matter.

Maxwell's demon

Maxwell's demon — frank

We are talking about open systems. Natural systems are dissipative. I'm not sure what you are getting at?

At the moment I have skimmed a lot of the papers, — Pop

If you can't recognise the distinction that Barbieri is making between 'the chemical paradigm' and 'the information paradigm', then you haven't understood the paper, and whatever conclusions you draw are likely to be false.

We are talking about open systems. Natural systems are dissipative. I'm not sure what you are getting at? — Pop

I wasn't getting at anything, although I do think we're getting semantic information mixed up with the kind of information scientists use, including biologists. Do you think?

whatever conclusions you draw are likely to be false. — Wayfarer

As I said, you should read them yourself. I am not talking about any particular paper, rather the general thrust of the thinking. I don't specifically recall the "distinction" you cite.