Not in a reductionist sense, though. We are not one with the exchange, but only with a part of it. The question is, which part? — Possibility

No, consciousness is whole. It is integrated whole information. We cannot slice that in half. Note, the external world is represented by neural patterning somehow. Information of the external world acts upon us to cause a patterning of brain matter - this patterning is identical to the external world. It is a nonsense to think we can extricate ourselves from our neurological state.

This is the issue - Information becomes you - in a physical way. Which also means you inform the world just as it informs you.

you inform the world just as it informs you. — Pop

I think that you assign to ‘information’ the role that is assigned to ‘citta’ in Indian religions. It’s like you’ve had an ‘aha!’ experience - not saying it’s not real - and that you’re translating that into the jargon of information science, or trying to. That’s what I think is going on here.

questions.It does not make any sense to
talk about reality without the INFORMATION about it[/ — Pop

Yes. But this isn't metaphysics exactly. It's that conservation of information has turned out to be the crux of a problem with the way we understand black holes.

As what's his name said: reality is the stuff we can't do without. I think a lot of the preoccupation with trying to sort that out in terms of substances comes from emotional problems with religion and a desire to thwart it on all fronts no matter the cost in terms of making sense. On the other hand there are those eager to push metaphysics into the forefront because they want to license some sort of spirituality.

I'm not too interested in that stuff anymore.

We need therefore a paradigm that goes beyond the two present paradigms of biology. A paradigm that fully accepts the implications of the existence of the genetic code. The implication that life is based on copying and coding, that both biological sequences (organic information) and biological coding rules (organic meaning) are fundamental observables that are as essential to life as the fundamental quantities of physics. This is the code paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information plus codes’." — Pop

I think he's referencing the fact that biology is thought of as a subset of classical physics and this conflicts with the way biologists think and talk about causality and patterning.

So this is philosophy of science, not science per se. Biology mostly gets its money from the powerful pharmaceutical industry. Biologists are free to use whatever paradigms work for them. They don't answer to anyone but industry executives who couldn't care less about philosophy. Biologists are in charge of the conversation, not physicists, and certainly not philosophers.

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. ... "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations." — Pop

Right. I think Isaac was confirming that this is the prevailing view among neuro scientists.

Information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality. — Pop

Do you mean that there's no non-physical information? What about abstract elements, like numbers, concepts, etc. They cannot be used as information?

"Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations." — Pop

Right. I think Isaac was confirming that this is the prevailing view among neuro scientists. — frank

The prevailing view among neuroscientists is that the cognizing organism actively attempts a useful fit between incoming stimuli and internally generated representations, so they do still endorse the idea of computationalist internal representations. Enactivists on the other hand reject computationalism and representationalism.

Non-physical is a tricky concept because it implies non-existence. There is a work around.
If you start with brain state that is entirely physical it can be expanded by ackowledging that it contains mental content such as:
Brain state = BRAIN(mental content), still entirely physical.

A further expansion will give:
BRAIN(content dealing with the physical) and
BRAIN(content dealing with the non-physical)
Still entirely physical.
I think this addresses the issue.

the external world is represented by neural patterning somehow. Information of the external world acts upon us to cause a patterning of brain matter - this patterning is identical to the external world. It is a nonsense to think we can extricate ourselves from our neurological state. — Pop

Let’s say that we define pattern as a particular way in which elements of a plurality or multiplicity are related to each other to form the whole. At a given moment this ensemble can be defined in terms of this internal structuralality. We could further define the elements of the pattern as one and zeros, and their relations with other elements of the pattern in terms of relative spatial location. Or we could describe the elements in qualitative terms , as having a qualitative sense that arises out of its role in the pattern. There are computational descriptions of informational patterns as ones and zeros, and non-computational accounts of the components as qualitative aspects of a gestalt.

Beyond this static , or synchronic account of pattern, there is the diachronic, or temporal aspect. Does it makes sense to talk about a pattern that we can move from place to place or from time to time, intact and unchanged in itself? We certainly are tempted to describe patterns such as dna codes in such mechanically reproductive terms. But what about human language and conceptualization? If we view perception , for instance , as the internal representation of a stimulus , or as a direct fitting between internal pattern and external stimulus,?are we assuming that the internal pattern is stored and waiting to be used? In this case , we are assuming the idea that an internal cognitive or pereceptual pattern is something that remains self-identical at least temporarily, to be drawn upon when needed. That’s why we call it ‘internal’.


The alternative does not accept the idea that in the realm of human perception, cognition and languaging it makes sense to talk about patterns as having self-identicality from one moment of time to the next. Thus these patterns cannot be spoken of as codes in any traditional sense. There are only relative temporary stabilities overlaying a ceaselessly changing neural patterning.

Their dynamical properties determine psychological processes as non-representational and non-decoupleable “...variables changing continuously, concurrently and interdependently over quantitative time...”(Van Gelder,1999)

Varela(1996b) says “...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act”(p.291)

Furthermore , if it doesn’t make sense to talk about an ‘internal’ milieu of stored, temporarily self-identical mental patterns , what do we make of the ‘external’ patterns that we like to in nature , such as dna codes , that appear to manifest temporal self-identicaility, such that they are transmissible and moveable in algorithmic purity? Do we ground our ‘messy’ mental processes in reproducible external pattern and materiality (Reducing human behavior and cognition to the computational , representational dynamics of neurons)? Or do we derive representationalism, computationalism , moveable and reproducible codes and patterns , algorithmic information, from a messy pattern making that is only any of these things in a derived and secondary sense.

What do you think?

@Pop

As Frank said (I think it was Frank) this discussion is getting out of control. I see you have several times tried to provide a definition of information taking into account all that's been said in this thread, I think that's wonderful moderation. I have seen that many comments allude to biological information and that many comments agree on the notion that information is a quality of an interaction (information depends on an interaction).

I would recommend you first try to give a general definition of information before you move to discuss other more specific types [as it was said before somewhere, there must be a common quality(ies) shared by all types of information; and I think we should define these qualities as best as we can before we move on to discuss things like genetic information, or sensorial information, or things like these] - it would be very interesting to see all participants give in their own words a general AND CONCISE definition of information. Again, the idea would be to describe information on its most basic terms, nothing complex. The idea would be to arrive to a basic definition of information on which more complex or detailed definitions can be built.

So, for example, if information depends on interaction, it would be interesting to discuss what in the interaction leads to the emergence of information so that we can say that information is the result of this type of change or that type of change. Discussing the dynamics of change (rates of change) that produce information would certainly help us find general characteristic of information.

Finally, I think we should try to find this basic, generally applicable definition of information not from the human point of view, or the organismal/cellular point of view, but from a more objective/general one, if possible - so, instead of thinking about what information is for a human being, or a cell, we should think what information would be for a star, or for a water molecule in an ocean, or for the elements of a multiplicity, as Joshs said. If information is a quality of an interaction, then it plausible that information is not a quality of only human interactions but also a quality of any other type of interactions.

Again, concise, basic, original definitions... that would be fun.

Finally, I think we should try to find this basic, generally applicable definition of information not from the human point of view, or the organismal/cellular point of view, but from a more objective/general one, if possible - so, instead of thinking about what information is for a human being, or a cell, we should think what information would be for a star, or for a water molecule in an ocean, or for the elements of a multiplicity, as Joshs said. If information is a quality of an interaction, then it plausible that information is not a quality of only human interactions but also a quality of any other type of interactions. — Daniel

I see this as an artificial limit were you are enforcing both a dualist form (information is extra-physical) and also brain restricted.
Since the entirety of information of original post and comments on this thread are brain originated how could that be concidered and wouldn't you encourage the opposite (brain based dominance) or tolerate the status quo that is a vetting of all views.
But, yes, I agree with you and frank that some days seem out of control. Maybe weekends...alcohol?

The prevailing view among neuroscientists is that the cognizing organism actively attempts a useful fit between incoming stimuli and internally generated representations — Joshs

Yes, Isaac explained this. I thought Pop was saying enactivists agree with that. Thanks for the heads-up.

Thus these patterns cannot be spoken of as codes in any traditional sense. There are only relative temporary stabilities overlaying a ceaselessly changing neural patterning. — Joshs

You are opposing the stored information of the cognitivist with the lived dynamics of the enactivist. But then there is the third option - the one supported by the neuroscience - where the coding is predictive.

Whatever is happening out there right now can only make sense because it is judged against a running state of expectation. We anticipated some future, and now something has surprised us.

And that is then how we manage to live in the “now” … most of the time. We construct the now ahead of time, and so when it happens - which takes at least 120ms to learn about because neural signalling is not instantaneous - we remember ourselves as having been already there in the moment, synchronised with that reality.

To be enactive or embodied as a cognitive process in fact requires some pretty fancy footwork. It is inaccurate to brush over the processing view and speak as if what the brain does is simply some dynamical dance.

This is why Pattee makes the careful distinction of the epistemic cut - the division between rate independent information and rate-dependent dynamics - in living organisms.

The informational view and the dynamical view are both powerful tropes in scientific thought. And it can be just as bad to push a too dynamical answer as a too computational one. The proper view is the one that can speak of the two as complementary aspects of the one whole - the one biosemiotic modelling relation.

“feelings” are an interaction of two varieties of information - biological and cultural. — apokrisis

Yes, but what kind of interaction? I’ve been presenting a model of affectivty that is only supported by five authors
that I know of, and they are drawing from a radicalized version of philosophical phenomenology , which is too far afield from your background to allow for a useful interchange, I’m afraid. So I’m going to dial it back to notch and attempt to contrast your model of affectivity with writes like Matthew Ratcliffe , who is well ensconced within the enactivist community. I think the differences between his theory of affect and those of the predictive processing group ( in particular Lisa Barrett) are pertinent to your approach to the interaction of the biological and the cultural.

Biology accounts for states of arousal that are functional in that they prepare us for actions that meet the demands of our world. Sociology accounts for how we must give reasons for our responses in a language that is socially accepted. — apokrisis

Are we never capable of giving reasons for our responses in a language that is not socially accepted?
Was the predictive processing account of affect , as a significant departure from the then conventionally accepted idea of emotion , socially accepted when it was first developed? Even with the predictive processing community , was there a progenitor who didn’t even have the luxury of an intellectual community to accept their ideas initially?

I offered the cartoon version of oxytocin. But one of the interesting things is how it is neuromodulator that looks designed to override the usual natural fear and anxiety of “being too close” to others. It allows intimacy to override keeping even your social conspecifics at a certain safe distance. — apokrisis

This sounds like a glorified version of S-R theory. Do reinforcements from discrete centers of ‘pleasure’ have the capability to shape our complex attributions this way? I know conventional
models of addiction rely on a reductive idea of the reinforcing effect of chemicals.

Ratcliffe doesn’t deny that primitive sensory events of pleasure and pain are an important part of the organization of behavior , but what makes his account differ from the predictive processing one is that he integrates the contribution of the biological with the perceptual and intentional in a more complex and holistic way.

Ratcliffe's causal reinforcement-based model of affect assigns it the role of biasing appraisal via selectively guiding attention toward a heightening or lowering of perceived significance of various world events. The role of affective attunement is to produce “changes in the types of significant possibility to which one is receptive'. (Ratcliffe 2016) “...existential feelings determine the kinds of noetic and noematic feelings that one is open to. “...the existential feeling sets the parameters for the kinds of more localized experience one is capable of having.”(2016). “Emotions “tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. “(Ratcliffe 2002)

Bodily dispositions can actively direct one toward salient objects in one's world, but are “equally implicated in feeling unable to act upon something. Passivity in the face of threat may involve inclinations to withdraw, to retreat, along with the absence of any other salient possibilities.” (Ratcliffe 2015). For instance, in depression one cannot find the motivation to act to change one's situation ( a confident ‘I can' becomes ‘I can't'). Solipsistic self-perpetuating narratives, reinforced and organized by feelings of avoidance and reduced salience, tell one why they shouldn't or can't connect with others.

In order to situate Ratcliffe's orientation relative to the phenomenologists whose ideas he incorporates, it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention.

“...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus “mark” those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.”(Ratcliffe 2002)

You can see that this account is closer to your own than the one I described in an earlier post. But I think there are still important differences.

Chimps have mutual grooming sessions as moments of intimacy. Cats prefer a brief sniff of noses. Humans evolved to tolerate the new behaviours of long term pair bonding and prolonged child rearing. That needed more of an off button for the kind of anxiety that being “overly close for too long” is otherwise liable to evoke. — apokrisis

Here I think Ratcliffe might object that neurohormones mechanisms are too closely and inseparably implicated in the encompassing higher order goal-orientedness of embodied cognition to be able to exert such an important effect on their own like forcing intimacy.

Oxytocin is not, in that light, an on button for intimacy, but an off button on anxiety. Even that is a simplification. But it makes more evolutionary sense and shows how we shouldn’t presume intimacy as some kind of universal good. Biology sets us up to be physiologically intimate as was functional in the typical pre-modern social setting.

Our affect system system is precisely calibrated to our million years of hunter-gatherer living. — apokrisis

But if the discrete contribution of neuro-reinforcers get swallowed up by and subsumed within the integrated goals of the system , then no genetically programmed reinforcement variant can have any more than a superficial effect on behavior. There has been study of ‘rage modules’ and other presumed inborn reinforcement predispositions and their effect on personality. We all know people who have hair -trigger tempers, or are prone to sentimentality. And of course we can cite the breeding of dogs for specific affective dispositions.
But thre question becomes how we are to situate the shaping effect of the biological component on the total personality. If we were able to genetically engineer a powerfully reinforcing olfactory response to human smell, would this amount to a superficial or significant influence on our social lives and propensity to intimacy?

If folk need lots of psychotherapy these days, that is not so surprising. Society has become its own historical project with its own socially-constructed framing of how to think and what to feel. Biology hasn’t had a million years to catch up with some of the ways we are now meant to live. — apokrisis

And if it did ‘catch up’ , no amount of monkeying around with reinforcement contingencies, no amount of dialing down of anxiety juice, would make a significant impact on ptsd or other anxiety syndrome. But then, I shouldn’t present my argument as if you are favoring one side of the equation over the other, the biological over the social.
Your model is consistent. Both the biological and the cultural in your presentation have a quasi s-r character to them. There is a dynamic of overall integration missing in your brain-body-world interaction such as to over emphasisize the arbitrariness and polarization of the pushes and pulls cutler and biology exert on the brain-body-world system.



You will react physiologically even before you can form a clear conscious picture. Your reptile brain - the amygdala in particular - sits poised to react to any sudden rushing object in a fifth of a second.

…whatever socially accepted narrative helps explain your feelings at the time in a reasonable light. — apokrisis

In a way it doesn’t matter whether you talk about fear and anxiety in terms of unconscious reflexivity or consciousness processes of attribution, because both depictions are dealing with response to situations as various kinds of unconsciousness and reflexivity. What I know consciously is what is reinforced via the social
milieu. It by s a kind of polarized causal cobbling with only the most peripheral feature of intricacy , intimacy, consistency and autonomy to it’s moment to moment unfolding. In a way it is a more sophisticated version of the mechanism thinking you reject, one that put probability, uncertainty and algorithm. at its heart.

Generalised anxiety is a pathological state. — apokrisis

Only if we are treating psychological phenomena reductively and missing all today the intricate complexity that makes such phenomena as anxiety much more than reinforced patterns.

Nervous expectation is functional as a way of rising to the expectation of some temporary challenge. It is dysfunctional to get stuck in any particular physiological state for longer than the immediate situation demands. — apokrisis

Who says? Because others define what the immediate situation should entail ? Does the label of pathology imply the forcing of a third person perspective on a situation that doesn’t fit it? Do you think that prolonged nervous expectation is divorced from what the situation demands? What is a ‘immediate situation ‘ and what defines its temporal boundaries? There is no strict sense to immediacy for a human being because our present is always defined by and infused with its grounding past and an expectant future. One could argue that an experiential focus on the most narrowly defined notion of immediacy is itself pathological , or at least a great way to lose all sense of coherence in one’s world. By the same token, the most expansive and dilated awareness can often be associated with a strong sense of belonging, clarity and confidence. The issue with prolonged anxiety isn’t the temporal expanse it involves , but the fact that the issues that obsessively pop up over and over as unresolved and threatening have relevance right now, in ones immediate present. One is not being inappropriately directed to a certain set of ‘immdeiate’ concerns in prolonged anxiety . It is not the concerns that are inappropriate. It is the world as it is being construed that is being uncooperative. To pathologize this situation is to blame the messenger for the message .

But of course, culture can frame your reality as a state of constant threat, or a dread of a moment’s boredom. It can play all sorts of manipulative tricks.
— apokrisis

Yes. but it is your personal culture, as it connects with your past. It is you who are experiencing the crisis, not the entire culture you interact with.

you too have an amygdala as well as a prefrontal cortex. The neurology tells you what part of your responses are preverbal - or at least limited to the kinds of shrieks, screams and swear words the amygdala, in cahoots with the anterior cingulate, might cause you to emit even as you are trying to make sense of something scary that is in the middle of happening. — apokrisis

Pointing to the role of the amygdala in fear. is not the same as assigning it the role of a reinforcement.
There is plenty of research attributing to the amygdala a contribution to the processing of the event. If you can’t recognize and process the rapid changes i.n a situation , you will not be able to fear it. Brain injuries slow down processing of events.

Try stepping out on to a stage or the finals of a tennis tournament and not feel butterflies. It is essential to react physiologically and neurologically in a way that gets you up for the occasion. — apokrisis

Try performing the same speech in the privacy of your living room and with one audience member. No butterflies and arguably a better performance. Or play that tennis match without the huge crowd and see how your nervousness is reduced and how your focus may improve. You’ll notice that the benefits of the hormonal circuit only make sense in the context of additional assessment pertaining to risks to self-esteem ,worries of potential embarrassment and failure. The hormonal ‘ boost’ is only half of the anxiety equation . The other half is what defines it as a negative feeling. it is the experience of potential loss, the feeling of interruption of cognitive activity , a gap in awareness. This is the pain component of fear and anxiety. There are plenty of stimulants on the market, but only intentional attribution can produce the pain of potential loss. The persistent suffering of potential loss inherent in chronic anxiety and ptsd is what makes them emotional crises. The hormones are not producing the pain, and they do not have the power to trigger memory of loss. Only a relevantly meaningful thought of threat can do that. The hormone , in fact, is the only positive contribution to this cycle of anxiety, by encouraging rapid action.

habits take long to form and a split second to emit. Attention takes longer to develop, but offers more immediate fruits. — apokrisis

I would agree if you substituted for ‘automatism’ , the contribution my system of anticipations makes to
the recognition and construal of the event.
If it is truly unthinking, unconscious and automatic it will play no relevant role in my subsequent thinking This is why subliminal advertising never worked.

The very idea of "physical stuff" is what the idea of "physical patterns" is meant to replace. — apokrisis

Yes. Quantum Theory has made the old Atomic theory obsolete, except in the sense that it is much more intuitive for non-scientists. A Quantum Field is not made of a swarm of atoms, but of a mathematical pattern of relationships.

A metaphysics of statistically emergent regularity can replace that by starting with the "everythingness" of a vagueness or uncertainty. — apokrisis

What you refer to as "statistically emergent regularity" sounds similar to my own metaphysical notion of "Order from Chaos", to explain how Something (objects) could emerge from Nothing (potential). Plato's myth (likely story) of CHAOS (uncertainty) described how the Real World could magically appear as-if from nowhere, by organizing the disorderly randomness of Chaos. Aristotle seemed to think of "Potential" simply as an abstract Principle, but ultimately, the word "principle" refers back to Princeps (ruler, lawmaker).

That hypothetical speculation still sounds reasonable to me, since the Big Bang theory implied that the world (Where) had a sudden beginning, along with its inherent Space & Time, from Nowhere or "who knows where?". Although the theory doesn't speculate on what came "before" the Bang, it seems to assume that at least Energy (creative power) and Laws (orderly patterns) were eternal.

Creative Chaos :
For Plato the primeval chaotic stuff of the universe has no inherent preexisting form that governs some course of natural development toward the achievement of some goal, and so the explanatory cause of its orderliness must be external to any features that such stuff may possess.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-timaeus/
Note -- His implicit "explanatory cause" was an intentional being, but not a typical Greek god.

Even chaos ain't just chaotic but a specific kind of natural pattern - one described by fractals, criticality, powerlaws, Levy flights, 1/f noise ... that kind of "mathematical stuff". — apokrisis

Yes. Colloquially, the term "chaos" now implies a complete absence of pattern. But for Plato, Chaos was empty of actual (physical) things, but it was full of creative "Potential".

Chaos :
In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the eternal/infinite state from which the Big Bang created space/time. In that sense of infinite Potential, it is an attribute of G*D, whose power of EnFormAction converts possibilities (Platonic Forms) into actualities (physical things).
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html

Chaos theory states that, under certain conditions, ordered, regular patterns can be seen to arise out of seemingly random, erratic and turbulent processes. . . .
"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order" -- Douglas Hostadter
http://www.patternsinnature.org/Book/Chaos.html

What Aristotle likely meant by prime matter before the Catholics subsumed his metaphysics into their theology, — apokrisis

Yes, The Catholic theologians gave “metaphysics” a bad name, as far as Enlightenment science is concerned. But Quantum Theory and Information Theory are making the idea of something “beyond” (meta) physics (atoms, matter) more plausible.

So the need - as cutting edge physics moves on to a unified quantum gravity theory - is to find a suitable metaphysics which can measure both lumps of formed matter and the backdrop spatiotemporal void in the same fundamental units. — apokrisis

Quantum Theory has forced us to think in terms of cloudlike “fields” instead of hard little “atoms". And Information Theory has given us a new vocabulary (e.g. bits & bytes ) for “mind stuff”. I call my personal metaphysics : “Enformationism”, as an update to Atomism and Materialism.

It is how the radically uncertain becomes stabilised by the constraining necessity of achieving a generalised self-consistency. — apokrisis

I envision that “radially uncertain” state in terms of Plato's Chaos. And the “stabilizing” “necessity” is what he implied was Divine Intention. Some kind of Intentional Lawmaker is necessary, unless as some physicists imagine, the Laws of Nature were just floating out there in Eternity before an accidental quantum fluctuation lit the fuse of the Big Bang. Plato was somewhat ambivalent about the Lawmaker, in some cases referring only to an abstract principle of LOGOS, and otherwise to a Demiurge. To account for the necessary "intention", I ambiguously label the Lawmaker as "G*D", which is not the Jehovah of the Bible. In place of the workman, following orders, I simply call it "Nature" or "Evolution" or "The Program" :nerd:

Yes. But this isn't metaphysics exactly. It's that conservation of information has turned out to be the crux of a problem with the way we understand black holes.

As what's his name said: reality is the stuff we can't do without. I think a lot of the preoccupation with trying to sort that out in terms of substances comes from emotional problems with religion and a desire to thwart it on all fronts no matter the cost in terms of making sense. On the other hand there are those eager to push metaphysics into the forefront because they want to license some sort of spirituality. — frank

People interpret metaphysics differently. For me, it is the underlying logic that enables subsequent construction. Wave theory, QM, etc are metaphysical to me. And yes, as you suggest, there is talk of a substance, normally matter, as being fundamental in the Empirical view, but what we are seeing broadly is a kickback against that view, as being an impediment to understanding, particuarly in biology, but also in physics ( zeilinger ).

So this is philosophy of science, not science per se. Biology mostly gets its money from the powerful pharmaceutical industry. Biologists are free to use whatever paradigms work for them. They don't answer to anyone but industry executives who couldn't care less about philosophy. Biologists are in charge of the conversation, not physicists, and certainly not philosophers. — frank

Yeah, there are all sorts of political, social, economic, etc vested interests at play. In recent years technology has provided insights into what is occurring at the deep cellular level , and as that knowledge spreads it is hard to ignore the sophistication of the "mind" at work at that level. The chemical mechanical paradigm just can not cut it, so there is a push to extricate from it - which would have far reaching consequences, imo, for the better. The originators of enactivism are almost all biologists come philosophers. They started the embodied movement in the late 70s early 80s , and now their view is being largely validated through the latest findings, which are being distributed widely through Youtube, etc. So there is some momentum for a change in paradigm. Of course it is not something we will see any time soon.

but what we are seeing broadly is a kickback against that view, as being an impediment to understanding, — Pop

Materialism will sink slowly from view with a few fringe elements holding out until it appears again some decades or centuries from now, born fresh from the waves in a new guise. That's how this stuff goes.

The chemical mechanical paradigm just can not cut it, — Pop

It's pretty handy in many ways.

I think that you assign to ‘information’ the role that is assigned to ‘citta’ in Indian religions. It’s like you’ve had an ‘aha!’ experience - not saying it’s not real - and that you’re translating that into the jargon of information science, or trying to. That’s what I think is going on here. — Wayfarer

Thanks for that. I'll look into it. This is the view of enactivism, which I appropriate in my understanding.
There are parallels between yogic understanding and enactivism. The way Enactivism understands the self is particularly beautiful in regard to the concept of enlightenment. In Eastern religion / philosophy as you would know, the self is destroyed and rebuilt, in a process that takes years. Enactivism can do this in five minutes, and hand you back your self fully intact, but with far greater possibility.

It is a Red Pill moment for those who buy into enactivism.

Information is merely relations between physical entities viewed from our modeling perspective, a distinctly human formal causality.
— Pop

Do you mean that there's no non-physical information? What about abstract elements, like numbers, concepts, etc. They cannot be used as information? — Alkis Piskas

That was one of a variety of definitions presented in the OP. I believe you are quoting @Enrique there.

I believe information always has a physical basis, either as frequency or vibration, or the patterning of something.

Red Pill moment — Pop

I had to Google this. It's a reference to the 1999 film "the Matrix".

I’ve been presenting a model of affectivty that is only supported by five authors
that I know of, and they are drawing from a radicalized version of philosophical phenomenology — Joshs

What were their names again?

And this sounds much like me with biosemiosis. There is what I regard as the inner circle versus the many levels of fellow travellers. :razz:

Are we never capable of giving reasons for our responses in a language that is not socially accepted? — Joshs

I don't want to promote Wittengenstein, but didn't he make a valid "beetle in a box" argument about such private languages?

This sounds like a glorified version of S-R theory. Do reinforcements from discrete centers of ‘pleasure’ have the capability to shape our complex attributions this way? I know conventional models of addiction rely on a reductive idea of the reinforcing effect of chemicals. — Joshs

I am forced to talk in these kinds of cartoon accounts to the extent you wouldn't be able to follow a neurocognitive account in terms of dopaminergic influences on working memory, or the critical role played by the nucleus accumbens in the switching of the brain from a smooth endogenous focus to an abrupt state of alert or surprisal - the classic reorientation response. The aha! that is either then further interpreted as a nasty shock or as a pleasant surprise.

It is not your fault that we aren't speaking at that level. It is simply a fact here.

Ratcliffe doesn’t deny that primitive sensory events of pleasure and pain are an important part of the organization of behavior.... — Joshs

You see, there is the problem. My argument would be that pleasure and pain are already socially-constructed concepts. They place the discussion squarely in a space of phenomenological accounts, and so bypass my more nuanced efforts to separate the neurobiology from the social constructs.

Are pleasure and pain just "feelings" - qualia? Or are they brains responding in a generalised and coherent fashion to the bare fact of having a state of prediction - a state of ignoring - interrupted by some form of unexpected surprise.

The surprise could be good - a matching in the form of finally discovering something long sought. You wanted it, but just didn't know exactly when or where it would show up. Now your whole physiological economy can readjust to support a positive state of approach. Having found it, you want to grasp it, hold it, even get more of it.

Then the surprise could be the opposite thing. Something nasty, dangerous, repulsive, damaging. Your embodied response must be coherently organised around the idea of getting as far away as possible, right here and now!

So there are not going to be pain and pleasure producing modules in the brain - centres for the production of Cartesian qualia. That expectation is the patent product of a culture soaked in the representational dualism of Cartesian metaphysics.

Instead, an embodied approach to neurocognitive architecture talks in terms of the basic rationality of coherent pragmatic action. We must start with some system of dialectically-framed definite choices - like the dichotomy of approach~avoid, or ignore~attend. And that general dichotomy we would expect to find distributed in a relevant way over the entirety of the brain's structure. It would be a dialectic that was hard-wired.

This is why the tiny nucleus accumbens pops up as a critical organ - a neural intersection in the striatal mid-brain that throws the switch in terms of ignore~attend. Or why the anterior cingulate is its match at the level of the cortex - adding extra regulation in terms of a working memory capacity to ignore pain so as to pursue longer-term pleasures (like thrusting your hand into brambles to pluck blackberries). Or why your amygdala makes rapid and crude approach~avoid choices, while it also is being regulated by the more thoughtful working memory attentive processes of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The point here is not the detail, but the fact that neuroscience does in fact have stories about what is going on that is now incredibly detailed. These are what make talk about pleasure and pain - Cartesian qualia talk - so quaint and socially-situated.

“Emotions “tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. “(Ratcliffe 2002) — Joshs

Sure. This is making the point about dialectical structuralism when it comes to neurosemiosis. But now invoking the Cartesian division of some "us" that "feels" and "deliberates".

Both languages may aim to describe the same thing. I'm sure Ratcliffe feels informed by an understanding of the current neuroscience. But that way of speaking still builds in its own folk metaphysics.

Who is this "us" when it comes to the embodied brain? All there really is is some collection of interpretive habits with sufficient plasticity to keep learning from its errors of prediction.

If this system feels itself to be a self, that is because a large part of what it must do is construct that epistemic cut that separates the model from its world (its umwelt, to use the jargon).

I am the limit defined by what I can reach and affect. Normally that might mean my finger tips. But we have all seen those experiments with mechanical hands, or know how the skin of cars become something we feel as we nearly scrape the curb.

it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention. — Joshs

Oh God. Damasio. Not wrong, just a light-weight still weeded to cognivitist tropes.

You can see that this account is closer to your own than the one I described in an earlier post. But I think there are still important differences. — Joshs

As is clear from my response, it is a very watered down and middle of the road account. Rather blah.

Not wrong as such. Just rather half-baked and still trailing its Cartesian framing.

It is only with a code-based semiotic framing does it become sharply clear that the whole account must be rooted in the generality of the embodied modelling relation perspective, and also do justice to the separate levels of semiosis that get united in the psychology of individuals.

The human mind, even as a neural economy, must be reduced both to neuroscience and social science, as neurons and words are the two semiotic spheres of information shaping its actual functional architecture.

An enactive cognitivist is no better than a representational cognitivist to the extent they don't respect that fact.

But if the discrete contribution of neuro-reinforcers get swallowed up by and subsumed within the integrated goals of the system , then no genetically programmed reinforcement variant can have any more than a superficial effect on behavior. — Joshs

Huh? Have you got such a clear understanding of neurodevelopment that you can explain why there is this problem?

Sure, it is a problem for a cartoon S-R view perhaps. But not for the post-Pavlovian "orientation response" neuroscience of the likes of Evgeny Sokolov and Jeffrey Gray.

If we were able to genetically engineer a powerfully reinforcing olfactory response to human smell, would this amount to a superficial or significant influence on our social lives and propensity to intimacy? — Joshs

Or perhaps you should be asking the other evolutionary question of why pheromones signalling became down-regulated in hominids?

Was that another genetic trick to promote social behaviour that came to revolve around the overly-intimate lives of hunter-gatherer tribes? Small bands united by language and thinking now with group minds.

And if it did ‘catch up’ , no amount of monkeying around with reinforcement contingencies, no amount of dialing down of anxiety juice, would make a significant impact on ptsd or other anxiety syndrome. — Joshs

More cartoon-level framing of the story. So not wrong as such. But certainly too light weight to carry the conversation far.

Try performing the same speech in the privacy of your living room and with one audience member. No butterflies and arguably a better performance. Or play that tennis match without the huge crowd and see how your nervousness is reduced and how your focus may improve. — Joshs

I've done both. That's why I used the examples as phenomenological evidence. My real experience contradicts your disembodied assertions.

The hormonal ‘ boost’ is only half of the anxiety equation . The other half is what defines it as a negative feeling. it is the experience of potential loss, the feeling of interruption of cognitive activity , a gap in awareness. This is the pain component of fear and anxiety. There are plenty of stimulants on the market, but only intentional attribution can produce the pain of potential loss. — Joshs

I've put that into more precise neurology for you now. The amygdala is plugged into the ventromedial cortex. The nucleus accumbens is plugged into the anterior cingulate. The lower brain itches to do its thing of reacting in fast, learnt, and even genetically instinctive, habit - the bottom-up response. And then the higher brain sits over that as the attentive, interpreting, novelty-handling, plan prioritising, top-down intelligence.

The two halves were already part of my architectural whole. My positions are always fully resolved as dialectic.

If it is truly unthinking, unconscious and automatic it will play no relevant role in my subsequent thinking This is why subliminal advertising never worked. — Joshs

You are walking into another minefield there. You have further wrinkles like iconic memory and the attentional blink that bear on the temporal story of how the brain integrates~differentiates its world.

The fact that subliminal advertising doesn't mean anticipatory priming ain't a thing or that plastering your energy drink logo all over an extreme sport isn't a sly why to legitimate a certain habit of consumption.

...

So a lot of words have been expended now. You've convinced me that people are right when they say phenomenology is Cartesian in spirit even when it starts dressing up in the clothing of physical embodiment.

And that is just a general problem for any version of psychological science which isn't rooted in semiotics, and so equipped to understand the human mind as the intersection of cultural semiosis and biological semiosis.

That is why Vygotsky and Luria made a great team who really got it back in the 1920s. The social scientist and the neuroscientist who could unite the two halves of the story.

Aristotle seemed to think of "Potential" simply as an abstract Principle, — Gnomon

Well, he rather messed things up by reversing the order so that being begets becoming. A substance has its potential or properties, rather than arriving at such properties as a matter of in-formed constraint on infinite variety.

So there are two notions of potential in play here. There is the unboundedness of chaos vs the boundedness of countable alternatives, or well-formed properties.

Some kind of Intentional Lawmaker is necessary, unless as some physicists imagine, the Laws of Nature were just floating out there in Eternity before an accidental quantum fluctuation lit the fuse of the Big Bang. — Gnomon

But to insert some disagreement here, you also cited the fact that chaos can self-organise. Chaos that is too chaotic will find some way to be patterned.

So we don't need some outside hand. The drive to order lies within the chaos of "everything trying to happen all at once" itself.

As Feynman models in his path integral or sum-over-histories approach to quantum theory, everything does try to happen in terms of a quantum event. But much of this then turns out to be self-cancelling. A leap to the left is cancelled by a leap to the right. And so everything boils down to something. The only outcome which hasn't cancelled away its own possibility of definite existence.

This is another way of understanding the least action principle - about the deepest principle of all physics. Only one path emerges to connect the world in its simplest possible way.

I ambiguously label the Lawmaker as "G*D", which is not the Jehovah of the Bible. In place of the workman, following orders, I simply call it "Nature" or "Evolution" or "The Program" — Gnomon

Now add the least action principle to the list. :smile:

Again, concise, basic, original definitions... that would be fun. — Daniel

I'm glad your back. Yes, I have tried to encourage something of the sort, but these threads are "self organizing" it seems. :lol:

I would like to define information in general, but now I'm particularly interested in information in the Enactive world. I don't believe the Enactive world has been explored from the perspective of information? So it might be fun, and also we might discover something new - who knows?

if information depends on interaction, it would be interesting to discuss what in the interaction leads to the emergence of information so that we can say that information is the result of this type of change or that type of change. Discussing the dynamics of change (rates of change) that produce information would certainly help us find general characteristic of information. — Daniel

Sounds good to me. Would you mind kicking it off and I'll follow up and try to encourage others to.

You have my views from previous posts. Roughly speaking.......information - the forming of a substance is what is going on from metaphysical base all the way to the top. Information forms us vertically up, and then also laterally. Interaction and information are inseparable. We are describing Platonic form interacting and giving form to the world through infomation.

Your thoughts?


ps. I will try to summarize the "informational" aspect of the thread once its momentum fizzles out, so don't think its all a waste of time. I'm determined to get somewhere though it may take some time.

↪Pop
Red Pill moment
— Pop
I had to Google this. It's a reference to the 1999 film "the Matrix". — Mark Nyquist

:up:

I think everything is up to interpretation. And if we agree God is out of the boundary of human reason, then it is comforting for some people to base all the mysteries and unknowns to him.

But still, information is something that people seek, provide, supply and use. If something is information, then it cannot be unknown. If something is not unknown, then it must be able to be demonstrated and verified when required. If it cannot, then it is a myth and speculation. — Corvus

Everything might be up to our ability to precieve and our interpretation of what we perceive, but to think that covers everything that can be known, is a bit presumptuous. Because our consciousness is limited to our perceptions and vocabulary there is far more that we do not know, than what we know. To think we know God's truth, and God's will is pretty presumptuous because we do not experience that. That puts God outside of our comprehension and it is a huge mistake to not be aware of that. This is an edited insert. I am not saying there is a god, only that if there is a god we can not know that god because we can not experience god.

How about this, information is what is. A geologist can read the earth's history in the rocks. Information is everything in the universe, and our ability to perceive and understand it is growing, but thinking information is what we possess instead of what there is to learn, is a mistake.

Information is causal!!

Rocks have their neural correlates, because information is causal ! I think we are getting somewhere? — Pop

Ouch, I am not understanding what you said. Can you reword that?

From my perspective, the information is in the rock if we are conscious of it or not.

What do you think? — Joshs

I think you have been very tactful and kind. Thank you. On reading back on my comments I can see I led @Possibility astray a little in not emphasizing that the interaction is two way, and that a self is an artifact of this interaction, rather then something standing outside looking on. I am foaming at the bit to explain the self, and the third and first person point of view in enactivism. This is the most brilliant piece of theory that I have every come across. It gave me such joy to understand it.

I think constructivism is firmly embedded in enactivism, but it is not really a brick like knowledge building, so much as an organic informational body that interacts with incoming information to construct a world view from which emerges a self concept and direction. All the while there exists an informational physical forming as neuroplasticity - that is never static, but a building onto of already established form, whilst at the same time we can introspect on our expandng understanding - it doesn't make sense not to equate the two.

What this forming is precisely, how it becomes meaningful - we can never reach it's essence, just like we can never reach the essence of anything - we can only ever be informed about it! This needs to be considered?

Because we can not reach anything's essence we have to conceptualize what is going on at some level.
I think the approach by IIT is good in many ways. Of course here we are talking about an internal language. An internal interaction. Integrated information is an artefact of the system, but it is all we have to work with. :smile: I'm still trying to understand the finer details of enactivism. A lot of it I like, but some of it does not fit established understanding. :lol:

The thread is making some progress in equating formed structure and meaning generally. We have found form and information are fundamental, so this might be relevant to the picture of why neuroplasticity is meaningful?

The rough impression is that new form has to fit old form in order to be meaningful, If it does not then it is meaningless, and lost - this is similar to Shannon entropy. I think the concept of information is relevant to enactivism, and I can not see that anybody has explored it from this perspective specifically? Does enactivism have a definition of information?

Ouch, I am not understanding what you said. Can you reword that?

From my perspective, the information is in the rock if we are conscious of it or not. — Athena

Sorry that must have been confusing. I'm trying to define information, and you said something that made me realize that information is causal. In monism, rocks have their neural correlates - the usual counter is that correlates are not causal, BUT information is!

So I realized from your comment that information causes neural correlates.....Thank you. :up:

Information in the third person point of view is an internal representation - which you are talking about.

Information in the first person point of view is a causal process - the qualities the rock possesses travel via light waves to effect a change in our neural state. Thus informing us physically.

Ok, I'll try hopefully with some success (which might not be the case).

I wanna say information describes a change in some physical quantity of each system in a set of interacting systems (or elements); that is, for there to be information in a set of interacting systems the change that takes place in the set as a whole or in its individual systems must, directly or indirectly, affect the amount of change the interacting systems will experience in some future time (a feedback loop).

The change in a system (which could be represented by a change in the velocity, position, or mass of its constituents, or by a change in the distance between its constituents, etc) which occurs when energy is applied into such system (as the result of an interaction) is information only if when the system decays or loses energy (that is, when the system emits some kind of signal) such emitted energy changes the configuration of its interacting partners in such a way that a future change in the configuration, or state, of the system will depend on the amount of change it experiences presently* (keep in mind that the system is not acting on itself directly but indirectly - you could say the system acts on itself through an interaction, and the change it causes on itself through such interaction "is" information; and the same is true for each element of the set).

* I understand that a system in a given configuration, or state, requires energy to change such configuration and that with time, and given that no energy is being transferred into the system, the configuration of the system will decay to some ground state. It is also in my understanding that it is possible that a system may have different configurations that satisfy a given energy level such that the input or loss of a certain amount of energy into or from the system may lead to different changes in configuration (relative to a given one) which are all equivalent in the amount of energy they contain. The fact a system possesses energy-equivalent states I think implies that in "cycles" of energy transfer an interacting set will evolve in contrast to maintain a constant state since the probability of a system reaching a given energy-equivalent state is the same for all energy-equivalent states.

So, a concise definition would be, roughly, information is change in a system which amount (the amount of change) is bounded (dependent) to some extent by the effect of the system on its interacting partners.

Edit: Information is a limit to the amount of change a system can undergo which arises due to the system being part of an interaction; and because it is an interaction, such limit depends to some extent on the system itself.

So, a concise definition would be, roughly, information is change in a system which amount (the amount of change) is bounded (dependent) to some extent by the effect of the system on its interacting partners.

Edit: Information is a limit to the amount of change a system can undergo which arises due to the system being part of an interaction; and because it is an interaction, such limit depends to some extent on the system itself. — Daniel

This is good. :up:
So, for information to occur, these are the requirements:

1. Form
2. Interaction
3. Change
4.

Can anybody add to this?

because it is an interaction, such limit depends to some extent on the system itself. — Daniel

I think you are really talking form here. The form a system possesses interacts with the form of another system to effect a mutual change in form? But it needn't be mutual, as only when change is effected does information occur?

The requirements for interaction are form. That is what we recognize in something that we can interact with- HEY- from the first person point of view, that we recognize form means we can interact with it. When we do it causes a change in us ( neural correlates ).

So. Information enables the interaction of form.??

So, a concise definition would be, roughly, information is change in a system which amount (the amount of change) is bounded (dependent) to some extent by the effect of the system on its interacting partners. — Daniel

When we add the view that "everything is information", we can conclude that all that can happen in this universe is the interaction of form. Form is endlessly variable. What do you think?

"Everything is information because information enables the interaction of form".

I think we have captured all information?

Is it a quality or a quantity?

Non-physical is a tricky concept because it implies non-existence. — Mark Nyquist

It depends on how you interpret the term "existence". In fact, it is mostly used for physical things. And this because science is totally materialistic as most people also are. However, this is only a bias, and a stupid one. Because Ideas exist, numbers exist, and all sort of abtract, non-physical things. If I say "I exist" this doesn't mean that only my body exists. I also exist on a mental, spriritual plane. Hence, dualism, and Descartes' statement "I think therefore I am (exist)".

Your "brain state" approach is quite interesting. However, my remark was just about the existence (as the word is explained above) of non-physical information. Which, it seems that you still deny! But it's OK with me. :smile: