the idea of 'neural correlates' is a misunderstanding of the nature of representation. — Wayfarer

See my reply to Gnomon above your post.

I think there's a lot of confusion and equivocation going on in this OP between information theory (from electronic engineering and information technollogy) and philosophy. That's my last comment on this thread.

Part of what’s throwing me here is that , while I do make use a notion of dialectic , it is closer to George Kelly’s concept of the construct as dichotomous. — Joshs

Yep. Kelly starts off being quite Peircean, but then drags things off in the direction of pluralism.

So we see his good start in grounding his psychology in habits of prediction - a modelling epistemology that roots "mind" or "self" in a pragmatic and embodied metaphysics and so begins in the right place, as opposed to the wrong place of Cartesian representationalism.

His fundamental postulate says this: "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events."

This is the central movement in the scientific process: from hypothesis to experiment or observation, i.e. from anticipation to experience and behavior.

And Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructing constructs - the generalities that ground the ability to then particularise in terms of individuated balances on some spectrum that lies between "two poles of being".

The dichotomy corollary

"A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs."

We store our experience in the form of constructs, which he also referred to as "useful concepts," "convenient fictions," and "transparent templates." You "place" these "templates" on the world, and they guide your perceptions and behaviors.

But then he starts to veer off into the dogma of pluralism....

He often calls them personal constructs, emphasizing the fact that they are yours and yours alone, unique to you and no-one else. A construct is not some label or pigeon-hole or dimension I, as a psychologist, lay on you, the "ordinary" person. It is a small bit of how you see the world.

The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things.

Yet if we are talking about the mind and its model of physical reality, then the dichotomies are objectively real in that reality self-organises via its fundamental symmetry breakings. The Universe is not pluralistic but unified as a system.

So it is only at the socially constructed end of our reality modelling - the end where the opposition of the personal and the public is being manufactured, the romanticised dichotomy of individuated self and collectivising society – that these kinds of personal constructs, or localised prejudices, start to become a thing.

And indeed, it is only as we take a universalised view of the human condition - one that sees rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, black and white, toned or lard-arse, as all members of the same tribe – that the differencing also makes sense.

Our chore becomes the one of placing ourselves as free individuals within some vast space of seven billion people all meant to live by the same social code. Any local diversity or plurality is a freedom gained by accepting some even more trans-communal and pan-species moral system and Platonic-strength abstraction.

We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct - which of course breaks into its dichotomies as its must. If there is a coherent leftish position, it is automatic that there is a rightish position that is just as loud and proud in its cultural demands.

Anyway, getting back to Kelly...

The individuality corollary

"Persons differ from each other in their construction of events."

Since everyone has different experiences, everyone's construction of reality is different. Remember, he calls his theory the theory of personal constructs. Kelly does not approve of classification systems, personality types, or personality tests. His own famous "rep test," as you will see, is not a test in the traditional sense at all.

The commonality corollary

"To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person."

Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.

In fact, Kelly says that we spend a great deal of our time seeking validation from other people. A man sitting himself down at the local bar and sighing "women!" does so with the expectation that his neighbor at the bar will respond with the support of his world view he is at that moment desperately in need of: "Yeah, women! You can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em." The same scenario applies, with appropriate alterations, to women. And similar scenarios apply as well to kindergarten children, adolescent gangs, the klan, political parties, scientific conferences, and so on. We look for support from those who are similar to ourselves. Only they can know how we truly feel!

So good. Both the personal and the public are being recognised. But bad. It isn't being framed as a dichotomy of localised construction and globalised constraint.

It is only about the bottom-up construction which thus roots things in the individual and leaves the communal as some kind of collection of accidental choices rather than a larger universalising view that has evolved to provide a generalised constraining hand over local acts of individuation.

We are veering off the good old structuralist road and heading into the familiar post structuralist ditch.

Feelings

The theory so far presented may sound very cognitive, with all its emphasis on constructs and constructions, and many people have said so as their primary criticism of Kelly's theory. In fact, Kelly disliked being called a cognitive theorist. He felt that his "professional constructs" included the more traditional ideas of perception, behavior, and emotion, as well as cognition. So to say he doesn't talk about emotions, for example, is to miss the point altogether.

What you and I would call emotions (or affect, or feelings) Kelly called constructs of transition, because they refer to the experiences we have when we move from one way of looking at the world or ourselves to another.

This ain't too bad a start to the degree it treats affect as a particular class of embodied action - the action of reorienting the mind and body as surprise produces the necessity of revising your expectations.

That is what I was saying about the orienting reflex literature. No one ever realises how much of the brain is devoted to the complexities of knowing how to be looking in the right place most of the time. A large chunk of motor cortex is devoted to getting our senses and physiological state aligned in a forward looking fashion.

Embodied action ain't just about motor plans that might manipulate the physical world in some self-interested way. It is just as much about shifting this "experiencing and deciding self" to a new and better placed set of receptive and affective co-ordinates.

Psychopathology and Therapy

This brings us nicely to Kelly's definition of a psychological disorder: "Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation." The behaviors and thoughts of neurosis, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc., are all examples. So are patterns of violence, bigotry, criminality, greed, addiction, and so on. The person can no longer anticipate well, yet can't seem to learn new ways of relating to the world. He or she is loaded with anxiety and hostility, is unhappy and is making everyone else unhappy, too.

If a person's problem is poor construction, then the solution should be reconstruction, a term Kelly was tempted to use for his style of therapy. Psychotherapy involves getting the client to reconstrue, to see things in a different way, from a new perspective, one that allows the choices that lead to elaboration.

Here we see the problem of failing to distinguish between the biological and cultural sources of semiosis that shape the individual person. It is bad enough to reduce social constructs to personal acts of construction. It is really bad to omit the biological basis of a person's world modelling.

Of course, as pragmatics, PCT can do some good as a therapeutic practice. But I would prefer therapy that is more squarely based on good psychological theory - that is one that is rooted in a social psychology model.

Modern positive psychology is broadly such an approach. It helps people realise the degree which they have habitualised family, community or general cultural imperatives. They have learnt to make automatic at an uncritical age various ways of thinking that might not be terribly useful in terms of their own lives, especially as humanity becomes increasingly mobile and increasingly rapid in its collective changes.

By this he means it is a way in which two events are alike and different from a third. Your use of dialectic seems closer to that of Hegel. — Joshs

Well yeah. Have you seen the actual mathematical definition of a dichotomy - the one I have cited so many times? Two poles of being that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive?

But one indeed might have to triangulate to start to divide reality into a pair of complementary poles. The certainty of the dialectic might well have to start with the tentativeness of exploring a relation in which the similarity of two things can now start to oppose a mutual differencing from some third.

Or as Peirce said, make that move from the Secondness of bare reaction to the Thirdness of holistic relation.

The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification. — Joshs

Oh quick. Before our start gets us to the "wrong" destination, let's jump our escape hatch and return to the comfort of PoMo pluralism.

There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line. There is just all us little chirping personalised differences - small, accidental, and localised reactions that constitute a Secondness that doesn't want to venture any further into the thickets of grand univocal metaphysics.

One can always see pomo in opposition to what came before it, but a closer look should reveal an intricate development within pomo that bridges what came before such that the appearance of dialectical conflict and othering is replaced by something more on the order of a continuum of historical change. — Joshs

I'm sure the post-structuralists had no violent intentions when it came to smashing structuralism. It was just a helpful conversation to help the old guard come to see the error of its ways.

But anyway, as usual, as always, as a habit you can't avoid, you talk right past my dialectical framing of my dialectical position.

A dichotomy is about the conflict that produces the complementary. Society is about the local competition or individuated freedom made possible by the co-operation or global constraint that could give this freedom is meaningful shape and constructive role.

So for me, unity and pluralism go together as the obvious two sides of the one triadic coin. Hierarchy theory exists to spell that out as a lesson in structuralism making good on its promise.

You are creating excuses for PoMo. But they don't wash.

Of course - as getting into the detail of Kelly illustrates - any individual writer of any note always grasps the systems perspective to some degree. They have to, as that is simply the way reality is.

What I am complaining about is the pervasive tendencies that result as social camps spring up around opposing poles of the dichotomies that thus arise from any critical analysis. The mindless pluralism that seeks out the best available examples to find the mindless universalising that makes its own mindless polarity the "definitely right one".

I think there's a lot of confusion and equivocation going on in this OP between information theory (from electronic engineering and information technollogy) and philosophy. That's my last comment on this thread. — Wayfarer

The various forms of sanity that we see, is the highest form of reality that there is! :halo: It is a reality that we create ourselves. In Yogic Logic, we always create our own reality from the concepts we take to be true. So the saying goes - choose your concepts wisely such that you create for yourself a joyous reality.

One more question. I don’t really understand that mass-energy-information paper you linked to. What do you think the point of it is?

There is no agreement as to what emotions are. — Pop

This is where dictionaries come in handy! :smile:
"Emotion" from Merriam-Webster (First definition): "A conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body"
(Stresses are mine. But disctionaries are not faultless: the phrase "in the body" at the end is not only redundant (since it is implied by "physiological") but also wrongly connected to the word "behavioral" (since behaviour is normally related to the mind and the human being iself).)

Classic example: it is a common fact that fear/stress increases heart rate and adrenaline, that hormones are released by anger, etc.

Logic, maths, deductive knowledge don't need experience. 1+1 = 2. You know it instantly without having to experience anything. — Corvus

No, a child does not automatically know 1+1 = 2. It takes a lot of work to get a child to understand the concepts of math. There are primitive tribes today that do not have the ability to count above the number 3 and it took us centuries to understand the importance of the zero.

Just looked up my Dictionary of Philosophy for "Logos". It says - Greek, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion.

It derived from the verb "lego" which denotes "I say".
Therefore, I say and confirm that Logos comes from language. — Corvus

And human, when broken down to its root meaning, means moist soil, That means contained in our word human is the belief that a god made us from mud, but few of us are aware of that. And to stop at the root of logos being connected to the spoken word and dropping its meanings of being a principle, law, and reason is a failure to understand the meaning of logos. That law meant universal law, not man-made law, and a democracy is supposed to build it isn't laws on an understanding of best reasoning and universal laws, but in our ignorance, we don't know that.

Yes. without that form, there would be no information. It is the fact that something has form, that allows us to interact with it. The form changes the patterning of our brain somehow. This change that the form imposes on our brain patterning, at a subconscious level, embeds us in a meaningful exchange with the object. If mind is a state of integrated information, then a disturbance to that state is more information.

If we accept that information is fundamental, then this process of mutual change between systems ( objects, people ) is what happens in every transaction that can possibly happen in the universe at any scale. Information enables the interaction of form - says to me: because something has form it is able to interact with another something that has form. A change in that form is information.

If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning. — Pop

I am good with what you said up to the last line. Why did you have to add the term "neural system?" Does the universe have a neural system?

No, a child does not automatically know 1+1 = 2. It takes a lot of work to get a child to understand the concepts of math. There are primitive tribes today that do not have the ability to count above the number 3 and it took us centuries to understand the importance of the zero. — Athena

There are some child prodigies who can do high level calculus.

Sure the tribe people must have had very simple life style, for which they only needed 3 fishes to catch, and enough to feed the whole family at a time. That is not necessarily to their disadvantages or shortcomings in their abilities. Because it is all they need for survival and life of happiness.

I am confident that when they caught 1 fish, they would know instantly they must catch another 2 to make up total 3 fishes without having to recourse to observations or experience, making full use of their reasoning.

And human, when broken down to its root meaning, means moist soil, That means contained in our word human is the belief that a god made us from mud, but few of us are aware of that. And to stop at the root of logos being connected to the spoken word and dropping its meanings of being a principle, law, and reason is a failure to understand the meaning of logos. That law meant universal law, not man-made law, and a democracy is supposed to build it isn't laws on an understanding of best reasoning and universal laws, but in our ignorance, we don't know that. — Athena

Principle was listed far behind in connection to logos in the dictionary suggesting that it is not usual usage or connection. I have not come across principle to denote reason. That would be very unusual, if anyone used that meaning.

The most popular meaning of logos is with language in philosophy. If you read some Heidegger, it will be evident.

The universal laws are laws established by the scientists and imposed into the universe. It is all from the workings of human mind and reason. There is absolutely nothing out there in the universe apart from matter and space.

It looks as though they are working according to some clever principles or laws, because you are imagining so.

A common failing in scientific philosophical writing is to blur the line between nouns and verbs. Through a process called nominalization, we morph verbs (and sometimes adjectives) into abstract nouns. This process robs our writing of energy and clarity. — Crystal Herron, blog

Except that, done with flair, it can apparently add tons of energy, and the illusion of clarity.



Do you never look at a sentence you've written and think, what on earth (rather than heaven) am I "quantifying over"? What are the odds my reader will correctly infer what things I'm referring to, and at which I'm pointing some of these other words? Wouldn't those odds improve if those things were relatively concrete, and graspable?

I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation, — Pop

The notion of "neural correlates of consciousness" is an attempt to draw a simple one-to-one map of the inter-relationships between empirical brain functions and rational mental functions. But, as a typical reductive scientific approach, it may place undue stress on the neurons themselves. They are just relay stations (nodes) in a complex web of functional relationships for processing information. Even the relatively-inert glial cells have been found to play a supporting role in the system. So, I prefer a more holistic model of the physical network that mysteriously produces spooky Consciousness as its metaphysical output. Even a silicon analogue (computer) is just a "brick" unless its output includes meaningful information for the human mind.

That's why I think the overall Monism of Information Theory is built upon a dualistic substrate consisting of both physical and meta-physical elements -- equivalent to Descartes's body/mind split. Most scientists try to avoid mentioning "Metaphysics" in their theories. That's mainly because Catholic theologians interpreted Aristotle's metaphysics in terms of the ancient Hebrew notion of "Spirit" (ruach; breath ; life), and the Greek notion of "Psyche" (soul ; mind). Although those concepts were appropriate for their pre-scienfific era, they can be misleading in light of current understanding of how the world works. For example, I prefer to substitute the mind's model of "Self" (a pattern of information mapped directly to the subjective observer) in place of the obsolete concept of a "Ghost", that can act independently from the body. Isolating neurons as the producers of Conscious Minds leaves us with a simple, but incomplete, map or model of the body/mind system. :smile:

Meta-physics :
4. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind. Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is. Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made. Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the “formal” cause of the thing designed.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

Self/Soul :
The brain can create the image of a fictional person (the Self) to represent its own perspective in dealings with other things and persons.
1. This imaginary Me is a low-resolution construct abstracted from the complex web of inter-relationships that actually form the human body, brain, mind, DNA, and social networks in the context of a vast universe.
2. In the Enformationism worldview, only G*D could know yourself objectively in complete detail as the mathematical definition of You. That formula is equivalent to your Self/Soul.
3. Because of the fanciful & magical connotations of the traditional definition for "Soul" (e.g. ghosts), Enformationism prefers the more practical term "Self".
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page18.html

↪Pop One more question. I don’t really understand that mass-energy-information paper you linked to. What do you think the point of it is? — Wayfarer

The point they are making is that Energy = mass = information. That paper was found in a rush. This paper is a better source. "John Archibald Wheeler proposed rethinking of basic physical notions and laws within the informational paradigm, aphoristically summarized as “it from bit”. Read the conclusion of this paper to get a sense of the rush to reinterpret everything in terms of information. Compare this to the 21 Royal society papers, to get a feel for where understanding is heading.

You would understand that E=mc2, and that this justifies seeing the world as made of energy? The trend now is to understand everything in terms of information, as @Gnomon and I have been spruiking to deaf ears for the last year. @Gnomon understands it from a realistic paradigm, so describes it as Enformation ( energy + information ). I used to also, but I like to take things to their logical conclusion and now say everything is information. This is falsifiable. It is not a party trick. It is what it is.
This is something that has been known to idealism since 5000 BC odd. As an idealist, and monist I see energy, matter, and information bundled into one material package. It is not very different to realism. As an idealist, I have slightly more explanatory power.

Do the legwork yourself, see if you can find well sourced counter arguments?

If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning.
— Pop

I am good with what you said up to the last line. Why did you have to add the term "neural system?" Does the universe have a neural system? — Athena

I'm trying to point out that in the process of exchanging information two interacting systems get changed. Change is the necessary thing that needs to occur for information to take effect between any two or more substances. When we look at something it is not immediately clear, that this changes us physically by changing our neural patterning. ...........No the universe does not have a neural system, it incurs a physical change otherwise.

Thanks for reading and citing Kelly. It gives us a shared focus.

And Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructing constructs - the generalities that ground the ability to then particularise in terms of individuated balances on some spectrum that lies between "two poles of being". — apokrisis

I think you understand this correctly , but just to make sure, whereas a concept understood via traditional
metaphysics is a context -independent, universal logical definition, a construct is idiosyncratic to one’s own system. As a therapist, Kelly would notice that what a client meant by a word like honestly could only ascertained, with the client’s help ,by teasing out the contrast pole, which oftentimes the client was not explicitly aware of. So whereas for one person , the contrast pole for honest could be ‘prone to telling untruths’, for another person the contrast pole could be ‘disloyal’. And what is true for common worlds is also true for the most important orienting values of our lives.

The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things. — apokrisis

And even then , the prejudices of the people around him don’t automatically become his prejudices , because the differentiations he forms will be idiosyncratic to his own system of dichotomies. ( I think you gathered that already).

Yet if we are talking about the mind and its model of physical reality, then the dichotomies are objectively real in that reality self-organises via its fundamental symmetry breakings. The Universe is not pluralistic but unified as a system. — apokrisis

I don’t remember if you said that you said Hegel’s dialectical metaphysics was monistic or pluralist. It does provide us a ‘key’ to logic of the dialectic, doesnt it? This gave the phases of historical development a logical necessity. Eventually this gave speculative dialectics a bad name, because one could ignore empirical contingency and just use the ‘key’ to unlock the logic of historical development without paying attention to real material circumstances. Peirce , coming in the wake of Darwin and Marx, wanted facts on the ground rather than a metaphysical key to decide the twists and turns of the dialectic , if I have it right. So when you talk about a unified system , I assume you are not making recourse to a metaphysics.

Our chore becomes the one of placing ourselves as free individuals within some vast space of seven billion people all meant to live by the same social code. Any local diversity or plurality is a freedom gained by accepting some even more trans-communal and pan-species moral system and Platonic-strength abstraction. — apokrisis

I think you lost me a little. Who is it who is claiming there is a trans-communal and trans-species moral
system? Certainly Kant endorsed a trans-human moral universality, and Hegel’s metaphysical ‘key’ points to a different sort of moral universality. If you and Peirce are making the claim for a trans-species normativity how are you differentiating such a moral system from these idealist moralisms?

We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct - which of course breaks into its dichotomies as its must. If there is a coherent leftish position, it is automatic that there is a rightish position that is just as loud and proud in its cultural demands. — apokrisis

So is the above what you mean by trans-species moral system, that which is universally correct? Perhaps, then, this is a sort of metaphysical key , albeit not identical to Hegel’s.

The commonality corollary

Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.

Both the personal and the public are being recognised. But bad. It isn't being framed as a dichotomy of localised construction and globalised constraint.

It is only about the bottom-up construction which thus roots things in the individual and leaves the communal as some kind of collection of accidental choices rather than a larger universalising view that has evolved to provide a generalised constraining hand over local acts of individuation. — apokrisis

You are right about it being bottom up. You left out Kelly’s favorite corrolary, the complement to the commonality corollary. Kelly's Sociality Corollary say that “to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of
another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person”

Kelly explains the difference between the commonality and the sociality corollaries:

“...for people to be able to understand each other it takes more than a similarity or commonality in their thinking. In order for people to get along harmoniously with each other, each must have some understanding of the other. This is different from saying that each must understand things in the same way as the other.” “In order to play a constructive role in relation to another person one must not only, in some measure, see eye to eye with him but must, in some measure, have an acceptance of him and of his way of seeing things. We say it in another way: the person who is to play a constructive role in a social process with another person need not so much construe things as the other person does as he must effectively construe the other person's outlook...social psychology must be a psychology of interpersonal understandings, not merely a psychology of common understandings.”

I’m probably digging a deeper pluralist hole for Kelly from
you vantage , but let’s see how for Kelly an individual is influenced by their society if not in a top down fashion.

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.

Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”
for
Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.

“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”

Here we see the problem of failing to distinguish between the biological and cultural sources of semiosis that shape the individual person. It is bad enough to reduce social constructs to personal acts of construction. It is really bad to omit the biological basis of a person's world modelling. — apokrisis

Kelly initially wanted to be a physiological psychologist. He always said that personal construct theory had a limited range of applicability. It was designed as a psychological theory. He offered that one could just as well use a physiological construct system. One would
get different results of course , but that could be useful depending on how one wanted to look at a phenomenon ( I know , pluralistic ).


“Certain widely shared or public construction systems are designed primarily to fit special fields or realms of facts. When one limits the realm of facts, it is possible to develop a detailed system without worrying about the inconsistencies in the system which certain peripheral facts would reveal. We limit the realm and try to ignore, for the time being, the intransigent facts just outside the borders of that realm. For example, it has long been customary and convenient to distinguish between ‘mental' and ‘physical' facts. These are two artificially distinguished realms, to which two types of construction systems are respectively fitted: the psychological construction system and the natural-science group of construction systems. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we have on our hands two alternative construction systems, which can both be applied profitably to an ever increasing body of the same facts. The realms overlap. Consider more specifically the realms of psychology and physiology.

These realms have been given tentative boundaries based upon the presumed ranges of convenience of the psychological and the physiological construction systems, respectively. But many of the same facts can be construed within either system. Are those facts ‘psychological facts' or are they ‘physiological facts'? Where do they really belong? Who gets possession of them, the psychologist or the physiologist? While this may seem like a silly question, one has only to sit in certain interdisciplinary staff conferences to see it arise in the discussions between people of different professional guilds. Some individuals can get badly worked up over the protection of their exclusive rights to construe particular facts. The answer is, of course, that the events upon which facts are based hold no institutional loyalties. They are in the public domain. The same event may be construed simultaneously and profitably within various disciplinary systems— physics, physiology, political science, or psychology.

No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event', we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. A further idea that we must keep straight is that the physiologically constructed facts about that event are the offspring of the physiological system within which they emerge and have meaning, and that a psychological system is not obliged to account for them. It is also important that we continue to recognize the limited ranges of convenience of our miniature systems.

It is always tempting, once a miniature system has proved itself useful within a limited range of convenience, to try to extend its range of convenience. For example, in the field of psychology we have seen Hull's mathematico-deductive theory of rote learning extended to the realm of problem solving or even to the realm of personality. Freud's psychoanalysis started out as a psychotherapeutic technique but was progressively enlarged into a personality system and, by some, into a religio-philosophical system. This kind of inflation of miniature systems is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does cause trouble when one fails to recognize that what is reasonably true within a limited range is not necessarily quite so true outside that range.”

Maybe pansemiotics is what Kelly was waiting for.

The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification.
— Joshs

Oh quick. Before our start gets us to the "wrong" destination, let's jump our escape hatch and return to the comfort of PoMo pluralism.

There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line. There is just all us little chirping personalised differences - small, accidental, and localised reactions that constitute a Secondness that doesn't want to venture any further into the thickets of grand univocal metaphysics. — apokrisis

How do you reconcile “There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line” with “ We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct.”

I'm sure the post-structuralists had no violent intentions when it came to smashing structuralism. It was just a helpful conversation to help the old guard come to see the error of its ways. — apokrisis

But don’t you think one could lay out a spectrum of positions within ‘structuralism’ and pomo such that it becomes difficult to discern the actual
boundary between them? Isnt this why no one can nail down exactly what these terms refer to , except by pointing to very general families of resemblance, and why even those commonly labeled as within one camp or the other can’t agree on a category?

Yes, this kind of thinking about the parasitic dependence of oppositions on each other is very pomo. It is also very deconstuctive.

The mindless pluralism that seeks out the best available examples to find the mindless universalising that makes its own mindless polarity the "definitely right one". — apokrisis

That wasn’t true of Hegel was it, unless we consider his metaphysical ‘key’ as the ‘definitely right one’ to unlock the logic of dialectical becoming.
What about Kelly’s constructive alternativism? How would you state the mindless universalism and polarity he settles on? Elevating the personally psychological and its dichotomous processes to pre-eminent status?

In this passage, Kelly confuses us by waffling on the question of an ordered universe.

“ Do I not believe the universe is organized? My answer to that is that I would not claim to know that it is. Whether it is organized or not is still one of those things that are unknown. I don't even know whether it is a good question or not.But while I don't know the answer to the question, I need not be immobilized. There is a psychology for getting along with the unknown. It is a psychology that says in effect, "Why not go ahead and construe it to be organized-or disorganized, if you prefer-and do something about it.” (Kelly 1963)

Earlier in the same paper, he clarifies what I think was always his real aim.

“Let us say that the whole of truth lies ahead of us, rather than that some parts of it ahead and some behind. What we possess, or what we have achieved so far, are approximations of the truth, not fragments of it. Hopefully we are getting closer, in some sort of asymptotic progression, and, at some infinite point in time, science and reality may indeed converge.“

There is no agreement as to what emotions are.
— Pop
This is where dictionaries come in handy! :smile:
"Emotion" from Merriam-Webster (First definition): "A conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body"
(Stresses are mine. But disctionaries are not faultless: the phrase "in the body" at the end is not only redundant (since it is implied by "physiological") but also wrongly connected to the word "behavioral" (since behaviour is normally related to the mind and the human being iself).)

Classic example: it is a common fact that fear/stress increases heart rate and adrenaline, that hormones are released by anger, etc. — Alkis Piskas

This is a description of the effects of emotions. Not a description of what emotions are. Emotions are what we feel deep down. We never take side against our emotions. Emotions are something that can only be felt. If it was not for emotions all experiences would be the same. There would be no feeling good or bad or happy or sad, there would just exist an indifference to everything, including life and death. Whilst information can be conceptualized, emotions absolutely cannot be, so you will not find them described in a dictionary any time soon.

Instead read this Wiki source, and focus on all the different theories of emotion.

That's why I think the overall Monism of Information Theory is built upon a dualistic substrate consisting of both physical and meta-physical elements -- equivalent to Descartes's body/mind split. Most scientists try to avoid mentioning "Metaphysics" in their theories. — Gnomon

For me, monism means everything is made of the same substance, and we can describe that substance as energy + matter + information, or any other configuration of these that we choose. We can choose to see the world as all matter, or as all energy, or as all information.

When I speak of metaphysics, I'm speaking of the underlying logic that gives rise to something. I analyze things like information at their metaphysical base, the deepest depth that I can reach.

In the absence of information only nothing can exist is a metaphysical fact. I play with these logical constructs until I understand their limitations and potential, through this I gain a sense of how they work as the underlying patterning that underpins higher level complexity.

Perhaps I should drop the term metaphysics if it is so variously construed.

I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation,
— Pop
The notion of "neural correlates of consciousness" is an attempt to draw a simple one-to-one map of the inter-relationships between empirical brain functions and rational mental functions. But, as a typical reductive scientific approach, it may place undue stress on the neurons themselves. They are just relay stations (nodes) in a complex web of functional relationships for processing information. Even the relatively-inert glial cells have been found to play a supporting role in the system — Gnomon

Neural correlates is a commonly used expression, of course I'm referring to the neuroplasticity of the brain, and as I said I am assuming that a change in brain matter occurs at the same time as perception.

The best we can ever achieve is to conceptualize mind at some level, and I think IIT has done a good job in this regard. Integrated information, and the difference of one state of integrated information to the next is much like Shannon's difference of a blank sheet of paper and the writing on it. The writing being information.

Who is it who is claiming there is a trans-communal and trans-species moral
system? — Joshs

Do you believe in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? That kind of thing. [Oh, and I meant to write pan-species of course.]

In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture. — Joshs

My constraints-based systems approach also stresses the personal creativity that is inherent here - especially to the degree the culture has developed a rhetoric of self-actualisation … because it means to shape up that kind of personal creativity.

Again, we are biological selves - that kind of social creature - before we are modern cultural selves - that other kind of creature. So there is alway going to be a deeper evolved level of self-social group action that a culturally-constructed system of self-group interaction is going to have to contend with.

One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless. — Joshs

Seems odd there can both be a cultural milieu and yet deny its existence in the same sentence.

But maybe that’s only a paradox for a view of social systems that doesn’t get the notion of how global constraints are also the source of local freedoms.

If we are all limited to using the same language, then we are also all freed to be definitely (and not vaguely or tentatively) saying different things. Unity and plurality go together if you have the right understanding of systematic organisation - an organismic one rather than a mechanical one.

No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event', we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. — Kelly

This sounds fine. But why doesn’t Kelly talk about the duality of physiological and cultural events?

Psychology is where these two sources of self-world construction intersect. But let’s carve the problem at its actual naturalistic joints.

How do you reconcile “There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line” with “ We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct.” — Joshs

The systems view - as Salthe makes clear - is based on the structuralism of nested hierarchies. So a local-global balance is something struck in fractal fashion over all possible scales of organisation.

So there is no iron law than floats abstractly above the system. That is an externalist and mechanical trope. Instead, an organism is a unity of its habits. It is aligned to achieve its end over all scales of its being.

What is deemed local acceptable custom will be so deemed to the degree that it institutionalises what is globally acceptable custom. And being constraints based, this doesn’t demand absolute homogeneity. Indeed, creative variety is necessary. Every organism must have variety to keep evolving and adapting to a world that is also forever changing.

An organism must also have its aligned structure of habits as well so as to even be a persistent, because adequately adapted, organism.

Again, an organism is a balance of plasticity and stability. And that means also that it is a fruitful balance of unity and plurality, sameness and difference, integration and differentiation - and all the other ways of saying the same thing.

So the organic view starts from that as its dichotomous ground. Which is helpful as it is then already equipped to ask more useful questions about what some particular balancing of the dynamic ought to look like. You could have a political discussion, for example, where both poles of the spectrum are taken for granted and the debate turns to how much liberty there should usefully be in your conservatism, and how much conservativism there should usefully be in your liberalism.

That is, the kind of debate that exists in countries happy to label themselves social democracies.

But don’t you think one could lay out a spectrum of positions within ‘structuralism’ and pomo such that it becomes difficult to discern the actual
boundary between them? — Joshs

Sure. But what if structuralism is the position that is built on the dichotomous trick that produces such connecting spectrums and PoMo treats dichotomies as monistic and politicised choices?

Why do so many folk gravitate to Wittgenstein? Is it not because he represents the “clarity” of the division between the univocal and the pluralist factions? First he was all about rationalist certainty, then he was all about language games. His career path embodies the schism. And his fans applaud him for landing eventually on the “right side of history”.

What we possess, or what we have achieved so far, are approximations of the truth, not fragments of it. Hopefully we are getting closer, in some sort of asymptotic progression, — Kelly

This is Peirce’s pragmatic definition of truth as the limit of rational inquiry by a community of thinkers, by the way. Just saying. :grin:

What about Kelly’s constructive alternativism? How would you state the mindless universalism and polarity he settles on? Elevating the personally psychological and its dichotomous processes to pre-eminent status? — Joshs

Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructs. His repertory grid technique is designed to find - and even construct - robust dialectical structure in some Kansas farmer’s habits of social reaction.

And how should we then read his efforts to impose a therapy that indeed imposes a universalising rational structure on the perhaps idiosyncratic and fairly contingent social learning of that farmer?

Is it the farmer that does all his or her own self-actualising? Are the constructs truly personal creations that are merely being excavated and brought finally to light?

Or are they vaguely organised thoughts being constrained within a cultural context - such as the US circa 1950 - that prized both rationality and individuality, and so made it natural to frame its therapeutic interventions in that fashion?

And then you come along with your phenomenology, affect, and PoMo pluralism, and somehow shoehorn your reading of Kelly into that.

I wonder why the circa 2020 Kansas farmer might seem such a different creature if Kelly were still around? Did something happen to the dream of universalising rationally-structured individuality in the decades of mindless culture wars inbetween?

And how should we then read his efforts to impose a therapy that indeed imposes a universalising rational structure on the perhaps idiosyncratic and fairly contingent social learning of that farmer? — apokrisis

But is it a universalizing structure? The asymptotic approach to truth that Kelly envisioned doesn’t originate at the intersubjectively normative but at the personal level.

Kelly says:

“The universe that we presume exists has another important characteristic: it is integral. By that we mean it functions as a single unit with all its imaginable parts having an exact relationship to each other. This may, at first, seem a little implausible, since ordinarily it would appear that there is a closer relationship between the motion of my fingers and the action of the typewriter keys than there is, say, between either of them and the price of yak milk in Tibet. But we believe that, in the long run, all of these events—the motion of my fingers, the action of the keys, and the price of yak milk—are interlocked. It is only within a limited section of the universe, that part we call earth and that span of time we recognize as our present eon, that two of these necessarily seem more closely related to each other than either of them is to the third. A simple way of saying this is to state that time provides the ultimate bond in all relationships.”

Kelly says all events in the universe are interlocked via temporal succession. What does he mean by interlocked? He says “all its imaginable parts have an exact relationship to each other”, but by ‘exact' he doesn't appear to mean an objectively causal exactitude, even though he describes it as all working “together like clockwork”. The order of material causality is dictated by the empirical content, which is inherently arbitrary. A car engine's parts have an exact causal relationship with each other, but not an inferential one. If one part were removed, the others would retain their identity, even if the engine no longer worked. By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is different than saying they are just causally connected.

Certainly Kelly never gave up a realist-sounding language that spoke of a universe seemingly ‘out there' and which we are mirroring more and more accurately through successive approximations, but If one follows the implications of the theory itself, it seems to me what one ends up with is not a correspondence theory of truth, but rather a developmental teleology of intentionality itself directed toward endlessly increasing internal integration. This subordinates what would be external' in reality to relational activity between subject and world. I think that's what Kelly(1955) was aiming at with the following awkward rendering:

“The truths the theories attempt to fix are successive approximations to the larger scheme of things which slowly they help to unfold.”

Notice that Kelly does not say our approximations UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality. I interpret this to mean that our approximations co-create the ‘larger scheme of things’ in contingent fashion.

This sounds like a constructivist rather than a realist idea. The asymptotic convergence of ‘outer reality' and human formulations, then, far from being a progressively more exact inner mirroring of an outer causal process, has the character of Kelly's Organization corollary, the events of the universe functioning as sequential variations on a moving superordinate theme. The content of the theme seems to be beside the point. In fact content doesn't seem to play a significant role either on the side of the subject or the world. A psychology in which the in-itself content of events plays second fiddle to the relationship between events and the psychological system is not much of a realism. By the same token, a construct system guided by no ‘internal gyroscope' other than the abstracting of events along dimensions of similarity and difference doesn't seem to accord with the kind of inner content- based rationalism that his critics attribute to him.

Is it the farmer that does all his or her own self-actualising? Are the constructs truly personal creations that are merely being excavated and brought finally to light?

Or are they vaguely organised thoughts being constrained within a cultural context - such as the US circa 1950 - that prized both rationality and individuality, and so made it natural to frame its therapeutic interventions in that fashion? — apokrisis

Does the cultural context constrain the theory like a frame that limits the range of variations that can occur within it, or does each individual participant redefine the boundaries of the frame in some measure?
Of course, no theory is born of immaculate conception, but isnt the frame just an abstraction generated from individual variations?

What was the cultural context of Kansas in the 1950’s? It depends on who you asked. There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians, So there was a range of ideologies, and certainly they all interacted with and were defined in relation to each other and with Kelly’s thinking. But is any major thinker just a product of their time or does a Descartes, Kant , Hegel extend the frame and move slightly beyond their ‘time’? Of all the ideas circulating around the American Midwest in the middle 20th century, postmodern constructivism was nowhere to be seen except in the work of George Kelly. Even today , 70 years later , one can hardly claim that Kelly’s perspective characterizes the mainstream intellectual climate there yet. Phenomenology was the closest thinking to his approach, but he had never read any of the original authors.

wonder why the circa 2020 Kansas farmer might seem such a different creature if Kelly were still around? Did something happen to the dream of universalising rationally-structured individuality in the decades of mindless culture wars inbetween? — apokrisis

The vocabulary Kelly used showed the influences of the experimental psychology of the time, but the content of the ideas are much more at home in 2021 American psychology.

This is an assumption, that a system is already recognised and distinguished prior to interaction (by whom?). It’s the interaction that exists prior, and these properties that interact consist of unattributed quality, taking on form only with interaction, by structuring different quality according to pre-existing logic.
— Possibility

This is true, but we have to describe it somehow. There are certain attributes necessary before information can take place, such as form, interaction, and change. Of course we don't find ourselves at the beginning of any process, but in the midst of it. — Pop

So there is no ‘before’ - but I get that language structure doesn’t help us here. If information is the variable interrelation of form, interaction and change, then the question becomes ‘how would one describe/define these attributes?’

To describe interaction, for instance, we embody the relation between form and change.

interaction = x - (form, change)
form = x - (interaction, change)
change = x - (form, interaction)
Where x is information.

But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know? How do we determine what remains to be known? What is the ground on which we can understand what information is? I don’t think any of these three will suffice. You need to look deeper. What does interaction consist of, for instance?

The quantum foam has to develop to form. Without form there is no information, so no interaction is possible. — Pop

But how does quantum foam develop form without interaction? As I said, you need to look deeper. If quantum foam has no form, then what does form consist of? Let me try: quality, logic and energy...

So we can look at a rock without experiencing any change in neural patterning that would amount to information at that level.
— Possibility

No, I don't think so. Try shutting your eyes and opening them. Or turn your head to the side. Its quite different. Of course the environment is probably memorized and so you will not see anything new that can draw your focus. — Pop

Sure - as long as you recognise that you’ve relinquished any intentionality in this model. There is no mind or cognition here, just interrelated events. You’re mindlessly going with the flow, not intentionally turning your head to the side.

We CAN look at a rock without gaining information, if we recognise that the change is in turning our head to the side, not in looking at the rock. But if we’re looking FOR changes in the rock, then of course we’ll find them. This determination occurs at a level deeper than your interaction-form-change model can explain. It’s a slippery slope of panpsychism not to acknowledge the intentional shift in embodiment when deriving information from interaction, form or change.

But is it a universalizing structure? — Joshs

Of course. The dichotomy is the basis of rational analysis itself. There would be no philosophy without the dialectic.

By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is different than saying they are just causally connected. — Joshs

Not making much sense here.

If there ain’t also differentiation then any claim of integration becomes meaningless. Things must be separated to also stand in some relation. As they say, time had to exist so not every happens all at once.

Certainly Kelly never gave up a realist-sounding language that spoke of a universe seemingly ‘out there' and which we are mirroring more and more accurately through successive approximations, but If one follows the implications of the theory itself, it seems to me what one ends up with is not a correspondence theory of truth, but rather a developmental teleology of intentionality itself directed toward endlessly increasing internal integration. — Joshs

You seem to be reading a lot into Kelly.

Notice that Kelly does not say our approximations UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality. I interpret this to mean that our approximations co-create the ‘larger scheme of things’ in contingent fashion. — Joshs

Or maybe he was thinking like an organicist who also sees the natural world as an unfolding development rather than a grounded construction. Maybe it was that he was trying to articulate? Reality as a series of ever more definite symmetry breakings.

Does the cultural context constrain the theory like a frame that limits the range of variations that can occur within it, or does each individual participant redefine the boundaries of the frame in some measure? — Joshs

As usual, you are advancing a false dichotomy because you haven’t got how this goes. The global social constraints are meant to shape the individual’s psychological development in some time-proven useful way. But as I’ve said, the same system wants to be able to learn and adapt, and so a tolerance for local variety is also part of the deal. If every individual interprets cultural norms according to their own local contingencies, then that feeds back cybernetically to ensure the collective social order can change its own global settings. The whole system can adjust.

So culture makes frames and individuals can promote change. Sounds like the usual way evolution gets done to me.

There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians, — Joshs

But perhaps not one communist for every one fundamentalist. Care to guess at a realistic ratio?

But is any major thinker just a product of their time or does a Descartes, Kant , Hegel extend the frame and move slightly beyond their ‘time’? — Joshs

Again, why would I be arguing that folk are prescriptively products of their upbringings when I was quite explicit that global constraints are meant to shape the local productive freedoms of a system?

Even today , 70 years later , one can hardly claim that Kelly’s perspective characterizes the mainstream intellectual climate there yet. — Joshs

So much for the diversity you claimed for Kansas folk just a sentence or so earlier.

But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know? — Possibility

I don't think it is about us Possibility ( nonanthropocentric ). I think it is about the creation of form. In the creation of more and more complex form, new function arises. In the case of our interaction, random elements will click, but we will maintain the momentum of our personal knowledge Juggernaut. Its direction and momentum cannot shift drastically, but will shift in some small respect in the process of interaction, even if only in understanding each other.

I am trying to describe information as something far deeper then what we normally conceive it to be. Information links all entities in the universe. It is a necessary component for the universe's existence, that it's components are linked, and interacting. Information understood as an enabler of the interaction of form achieves this. In the process of being informed we become embedded to the object / person informing us. There is no choice, If we accept neural correlation. We are transformed slightly in this process, and in the process become embedded in our personally construed reality, but due to an external informing. ( it is such a labyrinth to untangle :angry: )

This informational linkage of form creates all physical structure bottom up, and then laterally also everything is informationally linked. We can reduce everything to information, but we cannot reduce anything beyond information. We cannot interact with anything beyond information. So it is fundamental, and because of this we know logically that it is present in everything as the basis of everything. It is more then just a receiving of a message, it is fundamental reality.

To exist things have to have form, and they have to exist through an interrelation of other things. So information enables the interaction of form. This occurs in an ongoing evolutionary manner.

But how does quantum foam develop form without interaction? As I said, you need to look deeper. If quantum foam has no form, then what does form consist of? Let me try: quality, logic and energy... — Possibility

The theory is that through random interaction form develops. Daniel posted a video earlier of one way it might happen.

Form is endlessly variable. Form varies, but the underlying informational process is constant.

.

I was surprised you held out for so long.

The theory is that through random interaction form develops. Daniel posted a video earlier of one way it might happen. — Pop

Except that you also said:

Without form there is no information, so no interaction is possible. — Pop

I did watch Daniel’s video, hence my question.

You’ve said that:
1. Information enables interaction of form.
2. Form develops through interaction.
3. Interaction is not possible without information.
4. Information is not possible without form.

But that’s not really saying anything much at all.

I’ve said before that the most stable description of reality consists of three interrelated (4D) events, which is what you’ve described here. That’s all well and good - it’s satisfyingly symmetrical, if anything.

The truth is that form can appear to develop either through interaction OR through spontaneous change; and that information can be perceived as either a cause OR an effect of interaction, form and change - depending on your intentional embodiment as observer, on what you think/feel/believe you’re interacting with, and what kind of information you’re looking for.

Information is this variable interrelation of interaction, form and change. But you still don’t have a useful definition. You have a description of variability at the level of interrelated events.

It isn’t until the dimensionality shifts that information becomes useful to any aspect of reality, including us.

But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know?
— Possibility

I don't think it is about us Possibility ( nonanthropocentric ). I think it is about the creation of form. In the creation of more and more complex form, new function arises. In the case of our interaction, random elements will click, but we will maintain the momentum of our personal knowledge Juggernaut. Its direction and momentum cannot shift drastically, but will shift in some small respect in the process of interaction, even if only in understanding each other. — Pop

Why only form? It could just as easily be about the creation of an interaction, or of change. It’s really about intentionality creating an object by subtracting information from entropy - a momentary dimensional shift from (4,4,4) to (3,4,5). In the case of our interaction, it’s possible to shift as far as (5,2,5), recognising a two-dimensional difference (direction and momentum) between two minds.

But the point I was making was that your model appears to assume zero entropy, which we need to keep in mind when we apply it to real interactions. This is where the twelve aspect values (dimensions) come in handy for me. If I embody a 5D intentional mind in relation to a 3D object I assume exists, then the information that remains to be known will be x = 12 - (5+3) = four-dimensional: that is, an ongoing informational event that varies over time. If I understand that my interaction is with another intentional mind, then the information that remains to be known need only be two-dimensional: x = 12 - (5+5). Put simply, if the structure doesn’t add up to twelve, then I’m missing information, denying an aspect of form or capacity for interaction or change somewhere.

More importantly, if information appears as an ongoing event (consciousness), and I assume that the universe exists as an ongoing event (physics), then the stable part I play in this interaction as observer is that of an unintentional, ongoing event (organism). It is the variability in this dimensional arrangement that informs, enabling an awareness of intentionality: the capacity to shift and rebalance a relational structure of form, interaction and change by rearranging energy, quality and logic.

Form is endlessly variable. Form varies, but the underlying informational process is constant. — Pop

Form is not endlessly variable in reality - its possibilities are limited by a relation of energy, quality and logic.

This is a description of the effects of emotions. Not a description of what emotions are. Emotions are what we feel deep down. — Pop

How does "feel deep down" differ from "experienced as strong feeling" in the definition I brought up? And why "deep down"? Emotions can be very light and subtle and easily felt. But maybe by "deep down" you mean the elements that exist in our subconscious that produce emotions as reactions. Because emotions are reactions. And as such they are always felt (sensed) at the surface, not somewhere deep.

If it was not for emotions all experiences would be the same. — Pop

Experiences do not necessarily produce emotions. "Experience" from Merriam-Webster: "Practical contact with and observation of facts or events.". But as I can see, you don't like dictionnaries much. You prefer creating your own concepts about terms, risking to use baseless descriptions like "deep down" ...

so you will not find them described in a dictionary any time soon. — Pop

You can find anything in a dictionary. Not that dictionaries are faultless or desrcibe something in the best way. But if you cannot find something in a dictionary or you cannot define it yourself better, then you cannot talk about it!

Instead read this Wiki source, and focus on all the different theories of emotion. — Pop

I did. (I also use Wikipedia very often -- sometimes, it's the first reference I use, depending on the subject.) Emotions are biologically-based psychological states brought on by neurophysiological changes, .... It's also a good description. In fact, it is a little better, because the term "state" is more appropriate than "reaction" as far as emotions are concerned.

But what was the initial argument? Ah, yes. "There is no agreement as to what emotions are"! :smile:

:sad:

There's a certain pathos in someone who can't understand what it is they don't understand.

So much for the diversity you claimed for Kansas folk just a sentence or so earlier. — apokrisis

‘We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.’





Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

What is information? — Pop

I'd be hugely grateful to learn from @Kenosha Kid or other physicists precisely if and where it is, within modern science, that one is compelled to interpret the probability of a thermal microstate as the probability of a message?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory?wprov=sfla1