Husserl didn't get into rationalizing about the mystical like Peirce, to his credit

I've nothing against Husserl at the general level as a corrective Kantian approach to psychological theory. I agree and say the same things.

But what was missing, until Peirce finally hoved into my view, was the mechanism of semiosis as something universal in the definition of an organism.

That moves the conversation from a critique to a solution.

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. — apokrisis

Now be nice. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded. I’m not sure why I mentioned it , except that I’m
curious as to what impact the ‘science critics’ of the postmodern left have had on you professionally or personally , if any. Are they a source of amusement, annoyance or worse? I wonder, because I don’t see them going away any time soon. In fact, they seem to be becoming more entrenched in academia. I may identify with certain overarching arguments that are made from their perspective, but I don’t approve of cancel
culture or the general bullying , condemnatory attitude associated with the more strident factions of wokism.

some of the least conservative theoretical biologists and semioticians like Stan Salthe - — apokrisis

Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie.

Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie. — Joshs

Yes. I recall Richard Rorty calling them the old reformist left versus the cultural left.

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. — apokrisis

Would you be able to suggest a link to your favorite source for a thoroughgoing account of affect? I really want to zoom in on a text you can endorse, so I can get a stable textual basis for discussion.

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 — apokrisis

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. — apokrisis

If the informational view and the dynamical view
are complementary aspects of a whole, how does Peirce’s triad relate to this dialectic? How does the three become two?

Well, there’s the old communist-socialist left and the new postmodern left , and the latter often likes to pick on the former, which I suspect is where Salthe’s allegiances lie. — Joshs

Best quit while you are ahead. The whole left vs right nonsense is a sorry level of analysis.

As a systems scientist, my position already starts in the irreducible organismic complexity of the need to balance the dialectical constraints of long-run stability and short-term plasticity in any politico-economic system.

Would you be able to suggest a link to your favorite source for a thoroughgoing account of affect? I really want to zoom in on a text you can endorse, so I can get a stable textual basis for discussion. — Joshs

Nope. I am summarising a vast range of sources I studied about 30 years ago. That spanned the gamut from - to name highlights - Rom Harre's circle of social constructionists to the Evgeny Sokolov/Jeffrey Gray school of Pavlovian orienting responses.

The problem starts with treating "affect" as something separate from the holism of the brain's architecture. My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia.

Now you might rightly say that phenomenologists are also trying hard to crawl out of that pit. But my reply is why ever even start off from down that hole. Let's just avert our eyes from their struggles and get on with those who began in the right place - where "emotions", or "affect", or "valorisation", are part of the general process that is neurosemiosis, and so they are actions more than reactions.

So I can't give you one simple source as my sources would be praiseworthy to the degree they didn't take that wrong turning on affect as something that needs to be dissociated from other stuff, like rationality, or automaticism, in getting to grips with the holism of the neurosemiotic relation.

What it is critical to dissociate - at the psychological level - is the separate forces of biological and social semiosis. So don't even try to make theories about affect until you demonstrate a clear understanding of how all four levels of semiosis stack up in the shaping of something as located and particular as some individual consciousness.

This is the easy rule I apply when winnowing the academic wheat from the chaff. Show you get the difference that matters before you start reifying an aspect of neurology that doesn't.

Desimone, for instance, failed on this score. A skim of Barrett suggests she too fails this reliable sniff test.

If the informational view and the dynamical view
are complementary aspects of a whole, how does Peirce’s triad relate to this dialectic? How does the three become two? — Joshs

Two things (in the form of matched limits) plus the one thing of their interaction.

Well, that is the cartoon version anyway. Have you read Peirce on firstness, secondness and thirdness and understood how it is an irreducibly complex nested hierarchy?

Firstness doesn't even exist - or defines the limit of existence in being naked fluctuation or vagueness. But unbounded fluctuation produces the secondness of two things having some relation. Then the generality of such a connection develops into a regular habit as soon there is a context, an environment, that is formed simply by virtue of having a flurry of things all relating, and that making up the world.

Because there is a context like that, the connecting becomes constrained by its global statistics and falls into inveterate habit - a state of thirdness. And that state of thirdness is a nested hierarchy in containing both secondness and firstness as aspects of itself. Tychic fluctations and the particularity of individual reactions are not washed away by the blanding smoothness of a synectic accomodation of the collective action. Thirdness may be the stability that is the persisting whole, but it still needs the plasticity of localised fluctuations to keep the whole show alive.

So again, note the reasons why I hold Peirce above others. Or Salthe, Pattee and Friston (within his narrower sphere of interest) as well.

Their approaches to natural philosophy are mathematical strength arguments. They root metaphysics in probability theory, hierarchy theory and statistical mechanics.

And also, you keep finding how well they parallel actual physics in its long journey away from classical Newtonianism to a pansemiotic Cosmos that is turning quantum firstness into the thirdness of a Big Bang dissipative structure ... while also sweeping up the problems of life and mind along the way.

What problem did Peirce have with Hegel, or what did Peirce say that was different from Hegel and not just stated differently?

Best quit while you are ahead. The whole left vs right nonsense is a sorry level of analysis. — apokrisis

It may be a sorry level of analysis , but it is a reality of today’s academic culture, for better or worse . I’m sure you remember Alan Sokal. Like Salthe , he was a proud supporter of socialist causes , but sensed that the academic environment was dividing itself into two incompatible camps. His ‘hoax’ was an attempt to discredit one of those two camps. All he accomplished in the end was to deepen the divide.

Have you read Peirce on firstness, secondness and thirdness and understood how it is an irreducibly complex nested hierarchy?

Firstness doesn't even exist - or defines the limit of existence in being naked fluctuation or vagueness. But unbounded fluctuation produces the secondness of two things having some relation. Then the generality of such a connection develops into a regular habit as soon there is a context, an environment, that is formed simply by virtue of having a flurry of things all relating, and that making up the world. — apokrisis

I’ve begun to read about the three levels. Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it? That is , rather than the whole preceding and determining the parts , here the part, in the guise of firstness, is the origin of what comes after , by contributing an irreducible content ( vagueness , fluctuation) which then defines the nature of the relation that secondness manifests. And finally , the regular habit of an environment is generated from these interrelationalities as thirdness. Do I have this right ?

Whose Hegel and whose Peirce? Fichte’s Hegel? The Peirce that liked Schelling? The early Peirce that attacked Hegel or the late Peirce who was reconciled to him?

These are murky waters and I’ve forgotten the details. But they are easy to look up.

My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia. — apokrisis

Internally there is nothing transcending our nature that does not require our activity to create. Externally there is matter which we are. The sole definition of matter is "that which we are". The world is one material entity with many entities inside. I understand Hegel as saying that the world emerges from it's totality as materiality. I understand Husserl as understanding the transcending of the material world by act as intention, as beyond the totality of it's parts because of it's nature as a acting (verb). Hegel would agree with this. I wish I knew more about Peirce's philosophy but it's style is near impossible to read and I read Hegel!

Like Salthe , he was a proud supporter of socialist causes — Joshs

Salthe a socialist? I don’t know as we never discussed politics in that reductive light. And he didn’t shy from making left field identifications with causes such as ecology, natural philosophy and internalism.

But here is Gare who is a good commentator on such things - https://philarchive.org/archive/GARERO

but it is a reality of today’s academic culture — Joshs

As I say, it’s never been my reality. But then also my understanding of politics has more of a base in the real world of politicians and direct experience. Theory and practice are two different things.

Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it? — Joshs

Why are you already trying to invert some judgement of which pole is right, which wrong? It would be evidence of progress if you instead became sensitive to every instance when you want to launch out like that.

Even reductionist monism isn’t wrong from a triadic and holistic perspective. It is what we recover in the limit from a thorough-going organicism. The mechanical - in the form of symbols and codes - is how life and mind can be semiotically organised.

So it is the physics that is “organic” in being self organising dissipative structure. And then life and mind are a system of informational switches that inserts a top-down hierarchy of regulation into the mix.

This does invert the usual metaphysics of physicalism and idealism, but in a way where the one now incorporates the other as its reciprocal limit.

Most holism fails to get this wrinkle. That again is why I champion semiotics as the brand that finally gets it right.

That is , rather than the whole preceding and determining the parts , here the part, in the guise of firstness, is the origin of what comes after , by contributing an irreducible content ( vagueness , fluctuation) which then defines the nature of the relation that secondness manifests. And finally , the regular habit of an environment is generated from these interrelationalities as thirdness. Do I have this right ? — Joshs

It is a co-production from first to last. The global whole has to constrain local possiblity so that it is the “right kind of stuff” for then re-constructing that whole. Each has to evolve together in a mutualism that results in the synergy of a good fit.

In the first moment of a system’s existence - its Big Bang - the small and the large are still the same size and so not clearly divided. That is the PNC doesn’t apply and the condition is vague.

But then exponentially, the division grows in scale so that the local and global have their clearly different cogent moments. On the local scale, you have the material fabric of rate dependent interactions - secondness. Then on the global scale you have the generalised laws or constraints - the rate independent information - that regulates these material degrees of freedom.

So Firstness is where it starts. But Firstness is already promising its own sharply divided future. To be the kind of tychic fluctuation which could develop, it must already have proposed the essential epistemic cut between figure and ground as a Gestalist would rightly say, or local and global as a hierarchy theorist would want to put it.

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. — Mark Nyquist

I see. OK.

So I think dualisms is an expansion of monism and monism is an abbreviation of dualism — Mark Nyquist

"In the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical – or mind and body or mind and brain – are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/)

As you can see from the image below, there's only one form of dualism. Monism, on the other hand, can take different forms. Maybe one of them is what you are talking about?

(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dualism-vs-Monism.png)

There is no evidence of an immaterial information anywhere? — Pop

I assume you mean physical evidence. Yes, there is. Emotions are responses in the form of wavelengths (physical) produced by non-material information (e.g. thought).

As you can see from the image below, there's only one form of dualism. — Alkis Piskas

Cartesian dualism is only one form of dualism. It’s quite different to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. And there are others.

As you can see from the image below, there's only one form of dualism.
— Alkis Piskas
Cartesian dualism is only one form of dualism. It’s quite different to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. And there are others — Wayfarer

Yes, I know, but they insignificant, not worthy mentioning and much less considering.
Anyway, we have lost focus (since quite a while ago!) and deviated from the topic, which is about "information", not "dualism"!

Cartesian dualism is only one form of dualism. It’s quite different to hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism. And there are others. — Wayfarer

Matter &Energy. All that's needed OR All there is?

I had no need for that hypothesis. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

when being asked by Napoleon, no less, where, in his scientific theory, God fit in.

The graphic given doesn't break down P, Physical matter into the special class of brain matter that can contain mental content. M, Mind and mental content?...I dunno, maybe the same. No mention of information in the graphic. My first post about three months ago discussed a Venn diagram approach.
Since this post is about information, I would identify information as physical brain state and use the useful tool of expansion to give information = BRAIN(mental content). And you can't just say information is mental content because mental content is inseparable from brain state.

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:

↪Athena 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.
a day ago — Pop

Wow, this is a challenge. I still don't think I am getting your meaning. I looked for the meaning of "casual" and got this "not regular or permanent". Is that the correct meaning for the way you use that word? Information is not regular or permanent?

That does not make sense to me, because some information is eternal but a rock mountain may wear away. I am thinking we can learn something about the rock by using ultraviolet light or grinding it into a powder, or by applying chemicals to it. :lol: If we use oil shale rock to build a fireplace, we can watch it burn like coal. That had to be amazing to the first people who found burning rocks. My point is we can read nature and learn about the earth's elements and apply what to learn to study the universe. The information of everything is in it, what we can learn depends on our ability to perceive. Does that work with what you are meaning or is there a gap between our understandings? I am feeling like my tie to the spaceship got broken and I am drifting with no connection to your thought.

You speak of information we can see, but we can also smell information, and if we can't smell the milk is sour, and drink it, we will taste if it has gone sour or not. I am probably strange, but it absolutely fascinates me how an odor becomes information. It is easier to understand how what we see becomes information we can use. And perceiving things through touch is a totally different experience. That is really experiencing information. Am I lost in space or do my words make sense?

Anyway, we have lost focus (since quite a while ago!) and deviated from the topic, which is about "information", not "dualism"! — Alkis Piskas

The various models of monism and dualism are inconsitstant in what they model. Some model physical matter and others model mind. I think it gets brought up because the fundamentals are intertwined with the fundamentals of information.

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. — Corvus

Oh, oh I am afraid we have an argument of conflicting ideas. Every creature on earth must perceive and use information for survival. I also think the planet and sun can share information but that is going too far for "normal people". Our concepts of god are very different when we believe information is in the rock or believe it is only information if a person thinks it. Logos is reason, the controlling force of the universe. For me, that does not mean there is reasoning being, but that things are as they are for a reason, and it is up to us to learn that reason. Which also leads to a notion of predetermination versus quantum uncertainty.

I so disagree with your reasoning and it is weird how people can have totally different understandings of the same thing. Geologists read the earth and get the earth's story. That is the ability to understand the information that is there. To think it isn't information until we put words to it, is incomprehensible to me. Like oh my gosh, your preception eliminates the reality of animals also perceiving and using information for their survival. I can not think like that because my way of understanding reality is so different from yours.

Wow, science is not blindly accepting their definitions on these concepts. :gasp: Are you one of those people who refuses to wear a mask and get a vaccine? You sure do seem to present their thinking, and this is fascinating to me. How many times do you have to prove to yourself the truth of what science says or do you disregard it all? I think we would be stuck with a very primitive reality if we could not trust what others think. But do you trust the Bible is God's truth? Excuse me, but your line of reasoning reveals a lot about people's completely different senses of reality and what is believable. That makes this thread extremely interesting.

A scientist is not thinking with instincts. Everything is tested and reviewed by peers and then the facts become an agreement on the best reasoning. But it does not stop there. New information will lead to a review of old facts, and that stated fact will be changed if there is better reasoning. Understanding this is very important to understanding democracy. I wait with excited anticipation for your explanation of the way you see reality and if you are a religious person or not.

OK

It may be so

Oh, oh I am afraid we have an argument of conflicting ideas. Every creature on earth must perceive and use information for survival. I also think the planet and sun can share information but that is going too far for "normal people". Our concepts of god are very different when we believe information is in the rock or believe it is only information if a person thinks it. Logos is reason, the controlling force of the universe. For me, that does not mean there is reasoning being, but that things are as they are for a reason, and it is up to us to learn that reason. Which also leads to a notion of predetermination versus quantum uncertainty.

I so disagree with your reasoning and it is weird how people can have totally different understandings of the same thing. Geologists read the earth and get the earth's story. That is the ability to understand the information that is there. To think it isn't information until we put words to it, is incomprehensible to me. Like oh my gosh, your preception eliminates the reality of animals also perceiving and using information for their survival. I can not think like that because my way of understanding reality is so different from yours.

Wow, science is not blindly accepting their definitions on these concepts. :gasp: Are you one of those people who refuses to wear a mask and get a vaccine? You sure do seem to present their thinking, and this is fascinating to me. How many times do you have to prove to yourself the truth of what science says or do you disregard it all? I think we would be stuck with a very primitive reality if we could not trust what others think. But do you trust the Bible is God's truth? Excuse me, but your line of reasoning reveals a lot about people's completely different senses of reality and what is believable. That makes this thread extremely interesting.

A scientist is not thinking with instincts. Everything is tested and reviewed by peers and then the facts become an agreement on the best reasoning. But it does not stop there. New information will lead to a review of old facts, and that stated fact will be changed if there is better reasoning. Understanding this is very important to understanding democracy. I wait with excited anticipation for your explanation of the way you see reality and if you are a religious person or not. — Athena

Reason is unique to human beings.  It is also a priori. You don’t learn the reason a posteriori.  That is empirical learning.  So you seem to be confused between reasoning and empirical learning from the start. 

I don't believe other species of animals use information for their perception and survival.  They use their instincts, not information.

If you think the controlling force of the universe is reason, then I feel that you are stretching the concept of reason too wide.  The universe works the way it does, because that is what they do, you cannot ask why. Because they will keep silence to your questions. It is humans, who have been observing the workings of the universe, and found the universal laws out of the workings of the universe with the application of human reason, and have been explicating how and why the universe work the way they do.  IOW the universe does not have reason like humans do.  

I repeat (yet again), the universe does not observe, investigate, analyse and work as humans do.  It sounds to me as if you are some shaman or the pegan religious people who believe and propagate vociferously that nature has spirits and souls, and do all the weird funny things,  when you say the universe has reason, and works by reason. 

I always try to tighten the philosophical concepts wherever possible, but you (just like those scientists) seem trying your best widening it, so no wonder we disagree.  

I have been fully vaccinated against covid19, and been wearing masks all the time outside. So I am afraid that your inference is wrong and groundless.

 I could write here how scientists work on their research, projects and find new principles and laws, but it would take up much space,  and also  it would be  off topic for this forum, so leave you to find it out yourself.

I understand Husserl as understanding the transcending of the material world by act as intention, as beyond the totality of it's parts because of it's nature as a acting (verb). — Gregory

I think you’ve got it backwards. It’s the material
world that transcends our intending acts. Material nature for Husserl is an abstraction, an idealization that we never actually fulfill completely in our experiences of it. We never see complete spatial objects , but only a flowing continuum of partial perspectives. We hypothesize that self-identical objects exist. That is, with every néw perspectival view , we intend the ‘object’ as a self-identical unity. But we never actually see this perfect identity, so the object ‘transcends’ what we actually experience.

Would you say that this relation of part and whole is the opposite of a gestalt as the German psychologists saw it?
— Joshs

Why are you already trying to invert some judgement of which pole is right, which wrong? It would be evidence of progress if you instead became sensitive to every instance when you want to launch out like that. — apokrisis

Let’s not worry about which is right and which is wrong. I’m simply trying to determine how Peirce’s model
of the relation between whole and part differs from
that of the Gestaltists. They certainly are not identical.

So it is the physics that is “organic” in being self organising dissipative structure. And then life and mind are a system of informational switches that inserts a top-down hierarchy of regulation into the mix.

The global whole has to constrain local possiblity so that it is the “right kind of stuff” for then re-constructing that whole. Each has to evolve together in a mutualism that results in the synergy of a good fit.


But then exponentially, the division grows in scale so that the local and global have their clearly different cogent moments. On the local scale, you have the material fabric of rate dependent interactions - secondness. Then on the global scale you have the generalised laws or constraints - the rate independent information - that regulates these material degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

Does this mean that the ‘parts’ of the whole ( local
possibility ) can be understood or defined outside of their role within the whole, or would such a separation count as an artificial abstraction?

So Firstness is where it starts. But Firstness is already promising its own sharply divided future. To be the kind of tychic fluctuation which could develop, it must already have proposed the essential epistemic cut between figure and ground as a Gestalist would rightly say, or local and global as a hierarchy theorist would want to put it. — apokrisis

I’m confused about Firstness. I thought that Peirce describes it as without relation , as a pure in-itself , inherence, identity. Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty based his model on the gestalt For him the irreducible basis of the world is the figure/ground ensemble , and the figure has no identity, sense or essence apart from its role with respect to the ground.

My complaint about phenomenology has been about the degree to which it places the discussion back in the land of Cartesian sensory experience and ineffable qualia. — apokrisis

Either you are misreading phenomenology( especially Merleau-Ponty) or you have an unusual definition of ineffable qualia. A direct quote from him to buttress your claim , along with a clear definition of ineffable qualia , might help me to decide which of the two it is. If you’re going to tell me you don’t need to bother with a quote because you already know all you need to about phenomenology, I’ll take that as a failure to provide any evidence.

As far as the meaning of ineffable qualia, I take the target of Dennett’s critique in Quining qualia’ to be a good exemplification of the sense of the term for proponents of qualia like Strawson. I don’t think Dennett would have the slightest problem with Merlea-Ponty’s approach in this regard. The last thing his model of perception is doing is glorifying qualia.

I’m confused about Firstness. I thought that Peirce describes it as without relation , as a pure in-itself , inherence, identity. Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. — Joshs

Peirce had many goes at describing what is a pretty ineffable concept. His incomplete project of creating a logic of vagueness I find the most useful as it is mathematical, Vagueness is defined as that to which the principle on non-contradiction fails to apply (as generality is that to which the laws of the excluded middle fails to apply).

Firstness would not be a figure/ ground structure in Gestaltist terms if it PRECEDES relation , or has identity outside of relation. — Joshs

For there to be the definite things of a definite figure AND its definite ground - a state of developed thirdness - there must have been the vagueness out of which such a coupled or dialectical distinction arose. A concrete void awaiting its events can’t be taken for granted. That is atomism.

Either you are misreading phenomenology( especially Merleau-Ponty) or you have an unusual definition of ineffable qualia. — Joshs

The accusation of being rooted in Cartesianism is simply standard. To speak of consciousness as a thing is already reifying a process.

Edmund Husserl, who along with Franz Brentano is usually acknowledged as the founder of the phenomenological movement, described Descartes as “the genuine patriarch of phenomenology”; he dubbed his own transcendental phenomenology as “a new, twentieth century Cartesianism”, and insisted that “the only fruitful renaissance is the one which reawakens .

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278321582_Descartes_and_the_Phenomenological_Tradition

Wow, this is a challenge. I still don't think I am getting your meaning. I looked for the meaning of "casual" and got this "not regular or permanent". Is that the correct meaning for the way you use that word? Information is not regular or permanent? — Athena

I must take blame. It is a challenge to follow the story given all of the irrelevant posts. Perhaps I'll start another thread. :lol:

A lot of evidence has been provided that information is a fundamental quantity. That it is much more then what we normally understand information to be. That information is everything! The below tries to illustrate how information works as a fundamental quantity.

A system ( or any object / being ) has its properties, perturbations, characteristics, persona, etc without which it couldn't be recognized and distinguished from other systems. These properties are the things that interact, when interacting with another system ( or person or object or anything ).

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. Without form a substance can not be! From there we have an interaction, and this interaction causes a change in form ( change in the properties of the system ) - when we look at a rock, we experience a change in our neural patterning.

This is all that ever happens in this universe ( that information causes change to form ), and it is a precondition for the universe. The Universe, to exist, needs to have form, and needs to be interrelated and connected, acting upon itself and giving form to itself. Hence all of its component parts are in the same act, including ourselves. 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.

I'm trying to get at the fact that information is present in every transaction in the universe ( this being a result of it being fundamental ) but we are normally blind to it, and this thread largely remains blind to it :angry:

"Form" here can be any characteristic whatsoever - form is endlessly variable and open ended. Our consciousness is the form of our mind - it is often referred to as a state of "integrated information". Form is "integrated information", and information effects a change to it.

Any philosophy that is out of touch with this, is out of touch with fundamental reality, and sadly due to this being a fairly recent observation most are.