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 — Athena

As I have said before, I will say again. The rock for the geologist to study is just some physical substance with molecules and particles. The geologist will break it and look inside of the rock, and look into the patterns and shapes of the interior of the rock to come to some conclusion on how old the rock is, and what type of rock it is. OK. I don't think that is information in the rock at all. It is just a physical entity with the observable property for the geologist. And the geologist has observed it, and constructed the intelligent data about the rock.

When the observed data had been established with the analysis and expertise of the geologist into some sort of useful and intelligent and organised data, we could call it, then information. But what is just in the rock itself prior to that process is not information. I would like to draw the line in that.

It doesn't matter what all the other scientists or writers are saying in their books and websites about these things. We philosophers shouldn't be blindly accepting their definitions on these concepts without the critical philosophical analysis based on our reasoning. I don't think the physical processes and how they do these things are even in the slightest interest of philosophy. The detailed knowledge on the physical process and structure of the instructions are the topics of science, not philosophy. Philosophy does not go to the fields, observe, investigate and analyse the physical processes of the objects in the universe. Its operations are performed on the abstract concepts on the objects by reasoning.

Philosophy must be able to point out these irresponsible uses of blurred concepts by the scientists who are borrowing and mixing the abstract concepts by their instincts. IOW Philosophy shouldn't be brushed under the same carpet as those sciences, because Philosophy is a different subject in nature and its operations from all other subjects. It's duty is to criticise and clarify all the abstract objects and concepts in the universe.

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

You mean the means by which information is transferred and in which it is stored, right? I am referring though to the content of the information.

I think my approach gives a good perspective on the Monism/Dualism question.
Brain state, if entirely physical, is monism.
The equivalent expansion of BRAIN(Mental content) is still entirely physical but brings into view the elements of dualism.
The examples of non-physicals you give will always share the same location and time of your physical brain so this expansion method gives some useful insights.

To be honest I do not understand quite well what you mean by form. I also don't understand when you say that information is causal. To me, information is not a requirement for anything; instead, the term describes a change in the configuration of a system, a change that results from an interaction.

Hence, dualism, and Descartes' statement "I think therefore I am (exist)". — Alkis Piskas

Descartes thought process:
Brain state(1) = BRAIN(mental content(1)) = Descartes BRAIN(Do I exist?)
Brain state(2) = BRAIN(mental content(2)) = Descartes BRAIN(I think therefore I am)

You have taken a wrong turn somewhere and are doing mental calisthenics to remake physical matter into information.

The change in a system — Daniel

energy is applied — Daniel

emitted energy — Daniel

amount of change — Daniel

system acts on itself — Daniel

the change it causes on itself through such interaction "is" information — Daniel

Why not just admit we can observe physical matter?

The equivalent expansion of BRAIN(Mental content) is still entirely physical but brings into view the elements of dualism. — Mark Nyquist

What do you mean by "mental content"? Are you identifying the brain with mind or saying that part of the brain is mind? If this is so, it is in conflict with dualism, according to which body (brain) and mind are separate things. So, do you reject dualism?

Descartes thought process: — Mark Nyquist

See my above reply.

Are you identifying the brain with mind or saying that part of the brain is mind? — Alkis Piskas

I used an equals sign to mean 'is the same as'. It's my take on monism and dualism and might not be consistent with traditional meanings. But it's a better model.

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? — Pop

"Enactivism" is a new term (to me) for an old concept : interaction, communion. And it seems to be relevant to Information Theory, in that it implies inter-relationship, which is the invisible pattern of links between things. It's that pattern of relationships (metaphysical structure) that constitutes Meaning in a mind. Ironically, our mental image of reality is built mainly from those invisible, immaterial connections between physical things. It's as-if, Reason can "see" intangible energy (information) exchanges between nodes (neurons) in a physical pattern (brain). So yes, I'll explore this further.. :nerd:

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

So I think dualisms is an expansion of monism and monism is an abbreviation of dualism.

"Enactivism" is a new term (to me) for an old concept : interaction, communion. And it seems to be relevant to Information Theory, in that it implies inter-relationship, which is the invisible pattern of links between things. It's that pattern of relationships (metaphysical structure) that constitutes Meaning in a mind. Ironically, our mental image of reality is built mainly from those invisible, immaterial connections between physical things. It's as-if, Reason can "see" intangible energy (information) exchanges between nodes (neurons) in a physical pattern (brain). So yes, I'll explore this further.. :nerd: — Gnomon

I'm glad to hear it. :up: It is intuitive to think of mind as something immaterial, but it can also be described as something electrical. This way we can think of it in a monistic manner. Then everything has regular properties which can be used to infer about processes that we cannot observe. This is roughly what those papers , previously linked, are calling for. We are inhibited by a Cartesian way of thinking, and to expand our thinking we need a slight shift in paradigm....... In Yogic Logic, a shift in paradigm is enlightenment :starstruck:

What do you think of the Definition? Information enables the interaction of form

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? — Pop

The idea of ‘fitting’ is problematic for enactivism.

Let me introduce here what is considered one of the original texts of enacticism, The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch). In this book, information is linked to internal and external domains which connect with each other in terms of a fitting, matching or mapping relationship. If patterns act as controls, constraints, to effect changes in other entities or patterns such that they deserve the label ‘information’, then a sign and referent , subject and object, representer and represented are implied. But the terms of this relationship are what enactivism is critiquing. Specifically, the above thinking presupposes a gap or cut between the two sides, with each external to and independent of the other, so that their relation is arbitrary.



“At first sight, contemporary cognitive science seems to offer a way out of the traditional philosophical
impasse [between solipsistic idealism and naive metaphysical realism]. Largely because of cognitive science, philosophical discussion has shifted from concern with a priori representations (representations that might provide some noncontingent foundation for our knowledge of the world) to concern with a posteriori representations (representations whose contents are ultimately derived from causal interactions with the environment). This naturalized conception of
representation does not invite the skeptical questions that motivate traditional epistemology. In fact, to shift one's concern to organism-environment relations in this way is largely to abandon the task of traditional a priori epistemology in favor of the naturalized projects of psychology and cognitive science. By taking up such a naturalized stance, cognitive science avoids the antinomies that lurk in transcendental or metaphysical realism, without embracing the solipsism or subjectivism that constantly threatens idealism. The cognitive scientist is thus able to remain a staunch realist about the empirical world while making the details of mind and cognition the subject of his investigations.

Cognitive science thus seems to provide a way of talking about representation without being burdened by
the traditional philosophical image of the mind as a mirror of nature. But this appearance is misleading.”


“… a crucial feature of this image [of naive realism] remains alive in contemporary cognitive science-the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation.”

“ Thus although everyone agrees that representation is a complex process, it is nonetheless conceived to be one of recovering or reconstructing extrinsic, independent environmental features. Thus in vision research, for example, one speaks of "recovering shape from shading" or "color from brightness." Here the latter features are considered to be extrinsic properties of the environment that provide the information needed to recover ''higher-order" properties of the visual scene, such as shape and color. The basic idea of a world with pregiven features remains.”

“…we have slowly drifted away from the idea of mind as an input-output device that processes information.
The role of the environment has quietly moved from being the preeminent reference point to receding more and more into the background, while the idea of mind as an emergent and autonomous network of relationships has gained a central place. It is time, then, to raise the question, What is it about such networks, if anything, that is representational?



“The answer that is usually given to this question is, of course, that these relationships must be seen as embodying or supporting representations of the environment. Notice, however, that if we claim that the function of these processes is to represent an independent environment, then we are committed to
construing these processes as belonging to the class of systems that are driven from the outside, that are defined in terms of external mechanisms of control (a heteronomous system). Thus we will consider information to be a prespecified quantity, one that exists
independently in the world and can act as the input to a cognitive system. This input provides the initial premises upon which the system computes a behavior-the output. But how are we to specify inputs and outputs for highly cooperative, self-organizing systems such as brains? There is, of course, a back-and-forth flow of energy, but where does information end and behavior begin?Marvin Minsky puts his finger on the problem, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:

“Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars. The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves-and this means we cannot separate such
processes from the products they produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we
cannot yet trust our commonsense judgement about such matters.”

What is remarkable about this passage is the absence of any notion of representation. Minsky does not say
that the principal activity of brains is to represent the external world; he says that it is to make continuous
self-modifications. What has happened to the notion of representation?

In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification. This change in stance does not express a mere philosophical preference; it reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure. A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The notion of operational closure is thus a way of specifying classes of processes that, in their very operation, turn back upon themselves to form autonomous networks. Such networks do not fall into the class of systems defined by external mechanisms of control (heteronomy) but rather into the class of systems defined by internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy). The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.

We wish to evoke the point that when we begin to take such a conception of mind seriously, we must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.”

To be honest I do not understand quite well what you mean by form. I also don't understand when you say that information is causal. To me, information is not a requirement for anything; instead, the term describes a change in the configuration of a system, a change that results from an interaction. — Daniel

A system has its properties, perturbations, characteristics without which it couldn't be recognized and distinguished from other systems. These properties are the things that interact, when interacting with another system

These properties can all be reduced to the concept of form. So form is a precondition of interaction. Without form there could be no interaction. From there we have an interaction, and this interaction causes a change in form ( change in the properties of the system ).

This is all that can happen in this universe, and it is a precondition for the universe. The definition : "Information enables the interaction of form", describes the role of information in the universe. It is a fundamental quality / quantity - connecting a formed universe that is interacting and evolving.

We did it Dude!! :up: :strong: I think the definition is irreducible and universally applicable. It captures all information in every possible situation?? This is what we have to test now. Can form change without information? It makes no sense.... Would you mind probing and poking it for cracks?

Information is data the brain can perceive. It has nothing to do with Knowledge, nor is it useful in obtaining Knowledge. Peace

stored info[/quote]

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. — apokrisis

Doesn’t the notion of a Markov blanket require a strict delineation between the entity doing the fitting and that which it is attempting to predict? That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? From this vantage it would be incoherent , would it not, to suggest that the fitter co-produces the very substrate that it is alleged to be matching itself to? One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery.

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. — apokrisis

Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa).

As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model.

It seems obvious that speech involves representations, although maybe not as primitive?

Some portion of human cognition is speech that never makes it to the motor cortex for external expression. So it seems we have to accept that we do represent. What's the object of representation?

Information, such as a siren or blinking light is part of it. Some of it is psychic harmonics and improvisations in cultural keys. Some of it is who we are through others' eyes, and so on. IOW, we represent representations, right?

In cognitive science,
this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and
that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.” — Joshs

The first thing we need is a definition of information, so we can all be certain we are talking about the same thing. I think we might just have one now - it requires lots of probing and poking to see if it can prevail: "Information enables the interaction of form"

If patterns act as controls , constraints, to effect changes in other entities or patterns such that they deserve the label ‘information’, then a sign and referent , subject and object , representer and represented are implied. — Joshs

No, the subject object relationship is not necessarily implied, provided meaning is understood as a construction / connection of form. Which I am attempting to do. Please see my post to Daniel above.

It is not an arbitrary relation. Form and the relationships of form are a logical precondition for the existence of the universe. No form, no universe, but then the form has to relate and interact with all other form - it has to evolve. Information enables this. Form is infinitely variable, but the underlying metaphysics is constant. Every post in this forum only varies in form!

In cognitive science,
this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and
that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.” — Joshs

- this statement implies a lack of understanding of what information is. Understandably so as it currently is a variable mental construct.

All of this changes once we have a definition of information, and we understand that what is going on is an evolution of form. Once one accepts that form is inherently meaningful, then much of what you have brought up is solved.

What do you think of this as a definition of information?

"Information enables the interaction of form"

You mean the means by which information is transferred and in which it is stored, right? I am referring though to the content of the information. — Alkis Piskas

Information always exists embedded in a substance, as the perturbations of a substance. Thoughts have their neural correlates.

There is no evidence of an immaterial information anywhere?

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

I’m curious. Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science?

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. — apokrisis

I may surprise you . I have a background in biology and neuroscience. But I have a request. I’ve been reading Pattee and am prepared to go through his texts closely before I render any off the cuff judgements about him. I ask the same of you. You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. I can be prone to some of the same liberties but I don’t like arguing that way. My Continental philosophy background draws me to close and careful readings of original texts.

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

You should speak at that level. That’s the whole point here. That’s the world as you see it , and I need the full
flavor of it.

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.


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. — apokrisis

Yes and no.

Let’s dig into Barrett’s text:



“ Your affect is always some combination of valence and arousal, repre­sented by one point on the affective circumplex. When you sit quietly, your affect is at a central point of “neutral valence, neutral arousal” on the circum­plex. If you’re having fun at a lively party, your affect might be in the “pleas­ant, high arousal” quadrant. If the party turns boring, your affect might be
“unpleasant, low arousal.”

In sum , our interoceptive sensations which regulate our body budget lead to predictions as to the cause of those sensations. The simplistic S-R model is replaced by an internally mediating one in which interpretation and prediction stand between sensation and behavior. Has the reinforcement component been removed? Not at all, it has simply been complexified. The arbitrary link between valence-arousal and behavior remains , but with a lot of intermediate variables added between the two polles of input and output. For instance:


“Scientists in Israel found that judges were significantly more likely to deny parole to a prisoner if the hearing was just before lunchtime. The judges experienced their interoceptive sensations not as hunger but as evidence for their parole decision. Immediately after lunch, the judges began granting paroles with their customary frequency.
When you experience affect without knowing the cause, you are more likely to treat affect as information about the world, rather than your ex­perience of the world. The psychologist Gerald L. Clore has spent decades
performing clever experiments to better understand how people make de­cisions every day based on gut feelings. This phenomenon is called a!ffective realism, because we experience supposed facts about the world that are
created in part by our feelings. For example, people report more happiness and life satisfaction on sunny days, but only when they are not explicitly asked about the weather.”

Ratcliffe’s model also maintains the link between valence and behavior, but the difference with Barrett is that her predictive subsections of the brain are only loosely linked to eaxh other in reciprocal dependency , and only indirectly linked to the outside environment.

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. — apokrisis

I thought that for Barrett approach-avoid was a function of predictions , not the interoceptive senses of the body budget.

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. — apokrisis

Barrett uses the same language , and just like Ratcliffe , she is able to break this language down to physiological, interpretive and social aspects. Don’t preemptively holler Cartesian before you’ve seen how the common emotional terms are broken down.

Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. But as we know now , far from ignoring the elucidations of process contributed by S-R, cognitivism dug deeper, complicating Skinner’s model , and made it possible for you to complain about my using the terms ‘pleasure and pain reinforcement’.

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. — apokrisis

What is this ‘habit’ that somehow resists
time, context and an outside , to maintain its structure? What are these rate-independent codes’ that transmit or reproduce without producing novelty and changing themselves in the process? What are these natural laws, these natural causal dynamics that martian their externality? Believe it or not , the ‘us’ is more complexly and deductively delineated in enactive accounts than in your own. Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other.

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. — apokrisis

What is Cartesianism? Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning.


You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. From the postmodern pole , your keeping as irreducible a vocabulary of dynamical natural law alongside a semiotics of sign-referent is a latter day form of Cartesianism.

It seems obvious that speech involves representations, although maybe not as primitive — frank

Have you ever gotten into it with the Wittgensteinians on here about his critique of the idea of language as representation? If you look up some of the threads, especially those begun by Antony Nickles , you’ll get a good taste of the issue.

That is , must there not be presupposed a sphere of independent , extrinsic environmental features that the system is recovering , reconstructing, fitting itself to? — Joshs

I don’t get this criticism. You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.

How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.

I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around.

So it is in our imposing constant motion or a changing point of view on the world that we form a vivid sense of being the very thing of an enactive point of view. Note how eyes must shift in microsacades even as we fixate on a stimulus. If a stimulus is actually stabilised on the retina, it fades almost immediately as the neurons are set up to detect informational difference. They must be predicting to even respond.

So if the world ain’t in fact on the move, the retina has to impose a motion that keeps refreshing the necessary possibility of their being an error in prediction. The eyes dance to prevent the world fading into a habituated state of zero possible surprise. A state of plain representation is avoided by the necessity of always being in the middle of making a best guess.

It seems simple enough. We know we are ourself to the degree we know we are not he world. And that is a constantly lived boundary making. We micro-predict by imposing motion on our point of view and then demonstrating we can ignore that motion, thus confirming ourselves to be separated from the world in a pragmatic and action-based processing fashion.

One can ask the same question of language. If a sign is not simply ‘about’ a referent but partially invents that referent in the act of pointing to it , then representation and fit become invention and production rather than capture and recovery. — Joshs

Sounds like you are pointing out the flaws of a PoMo/Saussurean dyadic view of semiosis rather than talking about the Peircean triadic model - the modelling relation version.

We divide ourselves from the world by the construction of an Umwelt or system of signs. Our experience of the world is not a representation of that world, but an experience of the degree we have reduced our interactions to some habit of interpretance, some panorama of affordances that invites our actions. We experience the world beckoning us in terms of all we could be doing, or wanting to avoid doing. So we experience the world as a model of the world as it is from the point of view of having this “us” in it. The actor who is its “still” centre in being the one that can ignore all its forms of self-motion. And that includes this self’s thoughts, imaginings, ambitions, and even affects (as in the ability to suppress pain signals when you know thrusting your hand into a bush is going to scratch a bit).

So words are the same. They speak to a relation between a self and its world. And in so doing, they construct both this self and it’s world. If “I” can point to something using a word, then the pragmatic success of such an action creates both the pointed at and also its pointer.

It is a co-creation. But one rooted in the reality of the physics. All this pointing has to be tied to its pragmatic success. It has to actually control the material dynamics of the world, not just be some arbitrary system of noise-making.

The actions have to fit the reality. And finding that they do continually - as in microsaccades - is also how we recapture a sense of being a self in a continuous flowing manner. We become stable selves to the degree we can freely change our point of view and predict how that will produce differences that don’t make a meaningful difference.

Am I right to read Pattee as wanting to preserve the role of dynamical natural laws as well as informational language in a kind of mutual necessity? Does the issue of an epistemic cut arise at all for him in non-living domains? If not, then he certainly isn’t wanting to ground dynamics natural law in an ontology of symbolic processing( or vice versa). — Joshs

Pattee was never enthused by pansemiosis. That was Salthe’s thing. So no. He was only making the biosemiotic case.

As you likely already surmised, enactivism, via the increasing influence of phenomenology and pomo language philosophy,wants to make both the language of natural law and symbolic computation derived and secondary in relation to an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-producing model. — Joshs

Everyone wants to assimilate anything new to the world they already thought they knew.

As I have said already, monism abounds, And so every dichotomy must be reduced towards one of its two available poles. Folk are swept helplessly towards either PoMo or AP when entering philosophy, for instance. They are forced to construct their identity along those divided lines.

Or I guess they can cluster around the life raft of Wittgenstein as the guy who made a dramatic flip-flop from the one to the other without ever resolving the dichotomy of paradigms.

I instead follow the systems science tradition that is Aristotelean in origin. Or in fact dates to Anaximander. This understands the dialectic to be a triadic paradigm. So both sides of any well formed view are “secondarily derived” from each other … in being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

That mutual derivation is the feature and not the bug. It is how anything definite exists, having managed to emerge from its swamp of vagueness via the rational mechanism of semiosis or an epistemic cut.

Have you ever gotten into it with the Wittgensteinians on here about his critique of the idea of language as representation? If you look up some of the threads, especially those begun by Antony Nickles , you’ll get a good taste of the issue. — Joshs

Did Wittgenstein actually critique language in general? Or just suggest that much of language use is game-like?

Do you not want to promote him because you have issues with his model
of language and science? — Joshs

I'm just playing the game of talking sides - the social acts that construct a self identity. It is more about taking a dig at those who follow him as if the PI is the fount all philosophical truth and an excuse not to engage with either metaphysics or science.

You accuse specific authors I mention of cartoonism and Cartesianism, when I have the distinct impression that at least in some cases you have never read a word of their work. — Joshs

You will find I have sampled most things. And that is how I know what is ignorable on the whole.

Let’s dig into Barrett’s text: — Joshs

I'd rather not. It seems like another dumbed down version of affect - a story I've already deconstructed into its biological and cultural spheres with the aid of better sources.

Skinner hollered just as loudly as first generation cognitive science re-introduced language of internal processes that he thought had been permanently banished. — Joshs

I think Skinner in fact liked the idea that inner speech served as an externally-imposed constraint on behavioural responses. It was the cogsci notion of mentalese - thought before language - that was a problem.

Your ‘collection of interpretive habits’ suffers from lack of rich internal implicative connectivity to the same extent that it reifies and isolates components of cognition from each other. — Joshs

Your bug is my feature. The point of semiosis as a science of meaning lies in its generality. Semiosis has to be defined as something completely abstract so it can then be applied as a model across all levels of organismic systemhood.

It is not just for talking about cognition but also metabolism, and maybe even dissipative structure, as well as also epistemology and the habits of logic.

Well, you use the term when you want to point out a content that supposedly resists its own contextual change, that makes a claim to irreducibility, that simply dropped down from heaven or the metaphysical beginning. — Joshs

I use it to point to the dualism that inevitably ensnares the monist. The triadic systems thinker can recognise the dichotomy or dialectical relation that is the source of the monist's dualised confusion and so sidestep that trap.

You probably won’t agree, but this is a political conversation as well as a philosophical one we are having, and you have positioned yourself at the conservative pole of the science wars. — Joshs

Are you giving me fair warning of being cancelled? I need to fear your mounting of a woke witch-hunt? :rofl:

Just look at how passive aggressive your little sally there was. All the things I have done to myself by my own poor choices. I cannot blame anyone else for the beating I am about to be doled out.

Pathetic.

You start with a state of vagueness so far as the states of the model are concerned. A blooming, buzzing confusion. Then it develops the self-world differentiation as it starts to act on the world in prediction stabilising fashion.

How do I know that I and turning my head or shifting my eyes to rather than it being the world that jumps about? It is because of reafference or the predictive messaging that warns my spatial brain that my motor cortex is about to launch into the planned movement, so kindly subtract that from my kinesthetic phenomenology.

I decide to move, and I know that ahead of time. And in being able to subtract that from the experience of the world lurching past my eyes, I then recover an embodied sense of self. I experience myself as the moving point of view in a stable world, and not the other way around — apokrisis

Have you ready any Husserl? There is a lot of him in here.
Husserl told us that to get to the ‘things themselves’ we have to bracket what we already know about the world, by performing a ‘reduction’ to the most primordial
sphere. So that includes bracketing off the awareness of ourselves as a human self in distinction to other humans. It includes the recognition of objects in our surround as intersubjectively determined empirical objects. It even includes eliminating any notion of object as an enduring spatial identity with properties. Att first there are only phenomena , not yet a ‘world’ in any sense, and certainly not an ‘external’ world. So what is left after all of these levels of constitution have been stripped off? There is no ‘I’, there is only a zero point of activity. This zero point is the intersection of retention , presencing and protention. It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. I suppose this could be called a pre-self self or a proto -self , in that there is awareness of continuity and familiarity of a sort.

Next, one can imagine how an unpatterned flow of phenomena first begins to show regularities and correlations in the sense data that unfold. Even before there is any construction of ‘my body’ as a psychophysical unity of organs of sensing and kineshtesia, of controlled movement, there is the constituting of spatial objects as identities out of reguglaties in the unfolding of sensations. But without correlating one’s own deliberate movements in a regular and predictive fashion with the changes in sensation and perspective of the ‘object’ that occur in synch with it, there still will not be an ‘object’ as an identity. But is this developing process of constituting an experiencing of the ‘real’ natural objects of the world? We can’t say that, because these are ongoing, tentiave hypothesies of what will happen next , and things can always happen to disappoint. So the ‘real’ world is always contingent and relative, a changing product of our constitutive acts. As far as a separation of subject and object , the aim of experiencing isnt to create separatism , but to ascertain harmonious unities and similarities in a constantly changing stream of sensations.

Primordially, there is no subject-object split, only a past-present-future differentiation. Subject and external
world as separate sides of a divide are higher order constituted products.
So if there is a dialectical grounding in phenomenology , the subjective protending , anticipative striving and the objective ‘now’ which occurs into this protending would be it. But notice we’re still along way away from natural empirical objects , much less natural laws , or formal symbol systems.

If you're a strong externalist, which I think you must be if you're thinking Wittgenstein ruled out any sort of representation, then there is no semantic information from your point of view. Which just means you and I can't agree in the common sense of that word. You can't be surprised by anything I say, because you never really understand anything I say, again per the common meanings of those terms.

So your main interest in this thread is a discussion about how cognition works? Without information?

The distinction as I see it is between language as the corespondence between a symbol system and a pre-existing source of information , and language as a way of channeling and organizing a changing stream of meanings.

It is the ‘now’ , always as a new now with new content , but the now always manifests itself as a presencing that retains a past and protends a future , anticipates beyond itself into the next moment. So the first thing that is ‘known’ is the flow of ‘nows’ as a kind of synthetic unity. — Joshs

For what it's worth - speaking from my oh so conservative position in the science wars, that I seem to share with some of the least conservative theoretical biologists and semioticians like Stan Salthe - this is yet again a collapse into monism. And Salthe, shows this with his concept of the "cogent moment" and the semiotics of hierarchical order.

Peirce starts by flipping things the other way around. Continuity is the global scale of being - synechism. And fluctuation is the local scale of being - tychism. And neither is the ground as both are each others ground as complementary or dialectial limits on being. Neither owns priority as both requires its "other".

Peirce was implicitly a hierarchy theorist, but not explicitly one. Salthe provides the explicit model of what is going on semiotically.

The cogent moment is the spatiotemporal scale over which entification - the integration~differentiation that produces "objects on a void" – occurs. So it is the "now" that is both synchronic and diachronic in being both extended in spacetime, but also a coherent one-ness in terms of being a fully integrated process as defined over some size of moment - some characteristic duration and extent.

This is a maximally general model of any hierarchical order. We could be talking about "now-ness" of any size. A mountain exists for a long time in the same place as essentially the same thing. It is only over much larger - or smaller - spatiotemporal scales that we can see the mountain either flows as a fleeting fluctuation of plate tectonics, or crumbles as tiny weathering events down at the scale of chemistry and dust.

So the cogent moment of Mt Everest might be a few hundred millions years. The cogent moment of some other dissipative structure might be a morning for something like a thunderstorm.

The point then is that human cognition is tuned to its cogent moment. And in fact, it is itself - so as to build in prediction - an interaction between two levels of cogency. The attentional and the habitual. But generally speaking, the brain is striving to make sense of the world as experienced from the body's own particular characteristic scale. We live in a realm where mountains are permanent distinct features and clouds are shape-shifting flows. That is "reality" from a certain cogent scale.

We have some natural scale of cogency that is tuned to the realm which itself is dissipatively cogent in a way that makes it the familiar world of middle-sized dry goods. So that certainly works pragmatically.

But if we want to speak of grounds or foundations, Salthe's hierarchy theory makes it explicit how this can be achieved via a metaphysics of entification over all possible scales of being.

Looking up from our own middle position, we start to see the world as a process that unfolds so largely and slowly that it entirely fills our field of view. From one perspective it is a mountain - just another local fluctuation on the continuous flow of plate tectonics. And that is the view of third person physics. It is the view where the cogent moment is defining the Universe as itself a single fluctuation or solitary entity.

And likewise we can also look down to see all the weathered crumbs of rock dissolving away our Everest. Now Everest is just a pile of atoms, or even some decohered pattern of quantum probabilities. The lower limit of a reality is also entified - made definite as some theory about integration~differentiation as the way an entity arises from vagueness. However now it is not a solitary event but a sea of events. It is not a one-ness that completely fills our view with its sameness, but a many-ness that becomes a continuous blur of distinctions in which any distinctiveness is lost.

So sitting at a middle scale of entification is how you can become semiotic bounded by dialectical limits. The largest "now" or cogent moment fills our view to create a boundary on information ... a holographic horizon as exists with the visible universe. And the smallest now does the same thing in complementary fashion by becoming an irresolvable blur of differences that don't make a difference ... the other holographic bound that enclosed information falling into a black hole.

I mention the visible universe and black holes just to show that this is a metaphysics which directly grounds actual real-life science. It is not just some metaphysical fluff but a general mathematical way to understand hierarchical organisation in terms of cogency and entification.

So when it comes to the beginnings of phenomenal experience, we can safely say it doesn't begin in an already given temporality, let alone a given spatiotemporality. Any kind of particular cogent scale that might establish some situated point of view is precisely what has to evolve. And that is a dialectical symmetry-breaking story. A fit between model and world has to develop by producing its suitable contrasts in Gestalt fashion.

And again, any talk about experiential nows has to reflect the reality of the neurological hierarchy - a brain set up to operate with two cogent scales, the attentional and the habitual.

Then on top of that, we layer the human social constructions of a cultural cogent moment in relation with a psychological or personal cogent moment. That is, there are now social truths so large that they are how things always have been done (traditional society), or indeed how they should universally be done (post Enlightenment society). And then these super-habits or new laws of human existence are meant to interact with the second by second freewill choices of effectively self-regulating individual human actors. The familiar Romantic psycho-drama.

Maybe Husserl meant to mumble something intelligible along these lines?

I mean I would hate for you to have to take the word of notorious scientific conservatives like Salthe and Peirce. :groan:

Meanings require some context. It doesn't have to be an ideal context kept frozen in a vault in Paris.