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

I'm not getting this. Change would be form(1)--->form(2), or f(2) - f(1), right? Is this supposed to be tied to something in the physical world? Can it be multi-dimentional? Does it handle the 'non-physical'? Can you give physical and non-physical examples to show that it works. Maybe something like process notation would work better. Does interaction imply brain presence or not?

↪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

Pardon me for butting-in here. But, I think the point of that article, and others like it, is not that Mass, Energy, and Information are the same thing. But that they are different forms of the same universal "Substance" (essence), each with properties and qualities of its own. For scientists, the take-away is that each of these Forms can be transformed into the other.

A century ago, Einstein showed that causal Energy could be transformed into tangible Matter (Mass) and vice-versa. But later physicists have performed experiments that transform Energy and Mass into abstract-but-useful Information, and vice-versa. Of course, they are referring primarily to Shannon Information, which emphasized the meaningless entropic (empty) forms of Information, that have off-loaded their human-style meaning & values, leaving only mathematical meaning or values. Even the uncertainty of Entropy is a form of Information.

Like Photons, Bits of Information have no intrinsic mass. But like light-speed energy, that information is able to "condense" into massive particles as its "propagation" slows down. This is a relatively new idea to physicists, but they are preparing to take advantage of the knowledge that physical information and mental information are interchangeable. But, it still requires a conscious Mind to make sense of that information.

My favorite fictional illustration of the interchangeability of Energy-Mass-Information is the Star Trek Transporter. Hypothetically, the Transporter could "scan" the atomic structure of a human body & mind with some unspecified kind of radar rays. A computer then translated that reflected abstract data into a digital code, which could be beamed to the planet below over a carrier wave of Energy. And, that coded energy would then be translated back into a flesh & blood living thinking human, complete with memories. It was a neat trick, that may-or-may-not be hypothetically possible in a far-fetched future technology. But the question remains : is that transformed & reconstituted person really me -- or just a facsimile??? :joke:


In the end information is a list of stuff with “stuff” having a very, very, very large, broad definition.
___Thomas Williams, physicist, Quora quote
https://www.quora.com/If-matter-is-energy-and-energy-is-information-then-what-is-information

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. — Pop

Yes. I know that abstractions, such as mental Information, can only be discussed in terms of physical metaphors. We just have to be careful not to reify the metaphors. :cool:

But what was the initial argument? Ah, yes. "There is no agreement as to what emotions are" — Alkis Piskas

My reply to you was clumsy. I wanted to make the point that emotions are the lynchpin of one's philosophy. Emotions, enable experience, and without experience there could be no consciousness. This is the hard problem. Life is a procession of moments of experience.

You too, will have to take a punt on what you understand emotions to be, either from your own understanding, or from the understanding of others. and it will effect how you come to understand yourself, and what you understand life to be. Good luck with it. :smile:

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

You are looking for inconsistencies in my argument, and I appreciate it. Testing for inconsistencies and cracks is so difficult to do on ones own. However, insisting I should know how QM works is a little unreasonable. Who knows how QM works? But clearly form arises from it. No?

either through interaction OR through spontaneous change; — Possibility

How can it occur through spontaneous change?

Everything is articulated, interrelated, and situated within the progressive forming of the universe. as illustrated in this graph. We are situated somewhere in there evolving interrelationally with everything else. The variety of form is open ended. The variety of forms of life is open ended, and the variety of forms of consciousness is open ended. If you accept consciousness is integrated information, you can appreciate the form of the integrated information is progressively evolving and can have no end.

Everything exists as a self organizing system formed bottom up, where the underlying layer creates the layer on top. It is all vertically and then also laterally informationally connected. All the complexity of this can be simply represented by the form of one system interacting with the form of another system ( this captures everything - all the articulations). Information describes the process of form enabling the interaction of form. That something has form, enables it to interact with something else that has form. It does not enable it to interact with something else that does not have form, for our purposes at least since we can never know about it. The Definition information enables the interaction of form captures most of the facts: that things have to have form to interact, and that what is interacting is the form of the things.

Why only form? It could just as easily be about the creation of an interaction, or of change. — Possibility

Form represents the underlying self organization that creates order in the universe. No form, no order, no universe.

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. — Possibility

You may as well be talking Swahili. Sorry. :sad:

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. — Possibility

I would say you do not play a stable part. You evolve interrelationally with everything else. In the variability of this dimensional arrangement, the multiplicity of causal factors converge to allow the emergence of random novel form. Because of the role the novel form plays in future integrations novelty of form is assured......... But for the most part I would agree with this paragraph. Intentionality is variously construed, particularly in phenomenology - can you be more specific?

↪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
Pardon me for butting-in here. But, I think the point of that article, and others like it, is not that Mass, Energy, and Information are the same thing. But that they are different forms of the same universal "Substance" (essence), each with properties and qualities of its own. For scientists, the take-away is that each of these Forms can be transformed into the other. — Gnomon

:up: That is a better explanation, thanks. We should also say it is not absolutely a done deal, but seems like it might be. :smile: **The actual conversion is supported by theory, but has not actually been done, yet!

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. — apokrisis

But there are different ways of looking at universality. One could say , for instance , that there can be no existent , no experience, no world without time, and time
presupposes both similarity and difference. So absence and presence , sameness and difference , form and content are irreducible , universal requirements for any kind of world. Notice that there is nothing in this assertion to differentiate Kant’s notion of universality from Hegel’s or Nietzsche’s or Kelly’s . But when we start inquiring as to whether there are universal contents constraining the dynamics of dialectics, such as Kant’s transcendental categories subtending time, space, causation and morality, we can distinguish different kinds of universality. Like Kant , Hegel fills in the dialectic with a universal content. For Hegel, however, this content doesn’t subsist in static categorical schemes , but in the ordering logic guiding the movement of the dialectic.

With Nietzsche and the postmodernists there is no longer any universal content determining either schematic form or dialectical movement. Both schematic form ( value systems ) and dialectic movement are utterly contingent and relative.
One could say that such a notion of universality is, as Derrida put it , a quasi-transcendental , or quasi-universal, idea. It is always a new ,contingent, relative sense ( content) of absence, presence, sameness and difference that appears to make up a world.

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. — apokrisis

Yes, differentiation and integration together form the irreducible basis of any world.

But look at the difference between the ‘flow’ experience of the intuitive , organic unfolding of a dance duet, and the hostile , conflictual exchange of a political disagreement. Both situations are built upon a ‘separation of things’ , but yet they differ vastly in the relation between separation and integration. There are a number of dialectically based philosophies that make a certain irreducible violence, or at least conflict, a necessary precondition of social change. Kelly’s isn’t one of them. Where does Peirce stand on the necessity of conflict in cultural development?

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. — apokrisis

A global system implies that each of its components be co-determined by reference to the functioning of the whole.

If an Islamic fundamentalist and a pan semioticist engage in a debate about metaphysics , every word that each uses in the conversation will be interpreted by the other according to their own construct system. Does this mean the contribution of each to the exchange has no effect on the other’s thinking? No, my perspective and that of another are not to be understood as independent, private regions. The interpersonal relation directly remakes my sense of what my `own' perspective is, as well as what I assume to be the other's integral position. It is always a new sense of `me' and `other' that emerge in conversation. And yet , this mutual affecting between us is not to be conceived in the same way as our personal
construct systems. My own system , my own world , is
a global system in which each of its components is co-
determined by reference to the functioning
of the whole, and so is my debating opponent’s in relation to his global system. But there is no such global system BETWEEN. us , or encompassing us and a much larger culture within a superordinate global system. Each word I use gets its sense from its categorical inclusion within a superordinate hierarchy of personal meaning. The trivial day to day events of my life get their relevance from the broader themes of my life, and the most superordinate of these involve my sense of myself as a social being.
I can’t perform the same hierarchical move in drawing up a global , between person system. There simply is no neutral vantage point from which such a system can be determined. My personal meanings aren’t determined by a global cultural system the way that my superordinate system determines the sense of my day to day trivial experiences.


Anything one might attempt to say about it would apply differently to each of its participants. There are as many global systems as there are participants in a culture. Try getting agreement on the nature of this global system. You might respond, sure, each of us are accessing and contributing to this system from own vantage within it. But I’m saying there is no ‘it’, no same system and no same world.

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields.

In a ‘community’ of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

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? — apokrisis

But what’s your point , that one can articulate a global system here using evidence of a majority worldview? If indeed the fundamentalist perspective was much more prevalent than the communist view in Kelly’s social environment , this certainly didn’t constrain Kelly’s model. You could claim that his approach was in dialectical opposition to it , but the central critique in his work was directed against positivism, Feduaniam and Marxism, not fundamentalism.

I don’t really understand that mass-energy-information paper you linked to. What do you think the point of it is?
— Wayfarer
Pardon me for butting-in here. But, I think the point of that article, and others like it, is not that Mass, Energy, and Information are the same thing. But that they are different forms of the same universal "Substance" (essence), each with properties and qualities of its own. — Gnomon

I asked the question because I found it a very difficult technical article, with a lot of terminology and equations I couldn't understand, and I suspected that Pop didn't really understand it either, but simply linked to it because of the title.

(It appears to be trying to validate Rolf Landauer's claim that 'information is physical' by proposing that a hard drive full of information should have a different mass (i.e. be heavier?) than when it is empty of information, thereby proving that information has mass. But the mass proposed seems to be of minute dimensions and is extremely hard to measure, and so this paper is just a proposal awaiting validation at some future time. Which seems to me pretty poor support for Rolf Landauer's initial claim.)

I suspected that Pop didn't really understand it either, but simply linked to it because of the title. — Wayfarer

You would be correct that I don't understand the math. :sad: My understanding comes from a different perspective, and I cited that paper, as well as all the others in support of my views - in the delight that different perspectives are converging to this same conclusion. :smile:

↪Wayfarer I was surprised you held out for so long. — Banno

Banno, I'm sure you could find us something that is not information?

And whilst your at it, what is your theory of everything?

(It appears to be trying to validate Rolf Landauer's claim that 'information is physical' by proposing that a hard drive full of information should have a different mass — Wayfarer

To say that Information is "physical" could mean two different things. Either that it has mass like all other physical objects, or that it has the ability to transform into mass, similar to the E=MC^2 equation. In it's meaningful mental form, Information is weightless. But in its physical forms, information may have a variety of masses, depending on its structure.

Landauer's notion of weighing a hard drive to see how much information is has gained or lost, reminds me of the doctor who carefully weighed a terminal patient, before and after death, to see how much the Soul weighs. Apparently, he thought the human soul was a physical object, with a mass of its own. But that's like asking how much the number 4 weighs. How much does Energy weigh -- before and after transforming into Mass?

Souls and mathematical objects are abstractions. They may have Meaning without Mass. :joke:

Landauer's notion of weighing a hard drive to see how much information is has gained or lost, reminds me of the doctor who carefully weighed a terminal patient, before and after death, to see how much the Soul weighs. — Gnomon

Actually that story comes from the early Buddhist texts, where the experiment was conducted by a character called Prince Payasi, who was a charvaka, materialist philosopher, although it might also have appeared in other cultures.

It is my view that ideas are real but not physical. That includes real numbers, logical syllogisms, theories, principles, much else besides. Of course that is unacceptable to materialism, hence all the blather about information having to be 'encoded' before it is real. And that in turn is based in a deficient idea of the nature of reality. But that's a whole other can'o'worms and I'm not going to re-open it again now.

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 — bongo fury

That is a good point. I would like to hear Kenosha's opinion also.

The way I would reason it is: I would ask what is a thermal microstate to you, If not a message? And on the basis of my monist model, I would say it is the same thing to everything else that it interacts with.

To say that Information is "physical" could mean two different things. — Gnomon

I just a moment ago read an article by science writer John Horgan : What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common. But, it's actually about the reason why he is an Agnostic about notions that require belief without plausible evidence. And, he makes a statement that resonates with me, as a fellow skeptic and agnostic, who nevertheless finds reasons, not to believe, but to take seriously, some ideas that are on the fringes of Empirical Reality.

"Maudlin does not examine interpretations that recast quantum mechanics as a theory about information. For positive perspectives on information-based interpretations, check out Beyond Weird by journalist Philip Ball and The Ascent of Information by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf. But to my mind, information-based takes on quantum mechanics are even less plausible than the interpretations that Maudlin scrutinizes. The concept of information makes no sense without conscious beings to send, receive and act upon the information." ___Horgan

That is a pertinent point in Information Theory, that many hypotheses, including IIT, tend to ignore : Information is ultimately mind-stuff. The necessity of an observer, or knower, of Information (meaning) makes the early universe, prior to the emergence of humans, seem to be devoid of the First Form of Information : meaning in a mind. Energy and Matter are the second and third Forms of Information. Unfortunately, Shannon made it seem plausible to think of Information without spooky souls, or minds, or consciousness. But the term originally referred to meaning in a mind.

That's why, although I remain agnostic about anything outside the universe, or prior to the Big Bang, I have been forced by Logic to assume, as an axiom, the existence of a universal Mind of some kind. A First Cause, who is the Prime Enformer. :cool:


What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common :
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-god-quantum-mechanics-and-consciousness-have-in-common/

Information :
* Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
* When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

G*D :
* An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to LOGOS. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
* I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. That’s because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

That is a pertinent point in Information Theory, that many hypotheses, including IIT, tend to ignore : Information is ultimately mind-stuff. — Gnomon

I don't think so. If you consider it in terms of evolutionary psychology, where language evolved before self awareness, and then a subsequent self concept, in terms of self awareness. You see a progression of form. Language > self awareness > self concept > then and only then do our interpretations of universe, god, the plot, etc come into being. As the progressive evolution of form?

hence all the blather about information having to be 'encoded' before it is real. — Wayfarer

Yes. Where is Information before it is "encoded" in material form? An idea can be "encoded" in a thousand languages and a variety of mathematical equations, or even in dots & dashes of ink, or flashes of light. But where does the Meaning go, in between those transformations? Is it stored in a physical Brain, or a hard disk, or a floppy disk, or a metaphysical Mind? Materialism views matter as fundamental, but Enformationism postulates that ideas & meanings & intentions are primary and primal. Not Real though, but Ideal. :smile:

Where is Information before it is "encoded" in material form — Gnomon

Nowhere. It is a noThing before it becomes form.

If you were to say mind was integrated information, and integrated information is equal to form, then I would agree with you. IIT is on the right track, imo.

That is a pertinent point in Information Theory, that many hypotheses, including IIT, tend to ignore : Information is ultimately mind-stuff. The necessity of an observer, or knower, of Information (meaning) makes the early universe, prior to the emergence of humans, seem to be devoid of the First Form of Information : meaning in a mind. Energy and Matter are the second and third Forms of Information. Unfortunately, Shannon made it seem plausible to think of Information without spooky souls, or minds, or consciousness. But the term originally referred to meaning in a mind. — Gnomon

Cribbed from various sources:

Biosemiosis studies 'pre-linguistic meaning making' - that is, production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm, on several levels. One level is the cellular level, 'vegetative semiosis occurs in all organisms at their cellular and tissue level'; zoosemiotics or animal semiotics, or the study of animal forms of knowing. Then you have semiotics in its original sense, meaning interpretation of signs by humans. Code biology builds on that by the analysis of the sense in which living processes encode and transmit biological information e.g. by dna. That is the subject of the paper from Marcello Barbeiri that I linked earlier. (Note that code biology distinguishes itself from 'Peircian biosemiotics' which is Apokrisis' speciality, even though they're both in the same general field.)

But you're correct in saying that it seems very suggestive of a mind, or of being the product of a mind. There is actually an Internet theist meme based on the 'argument from biological information'. This argument says that as DNA is a code, then it must have been produced by a mind, as codes are invariably associated with minds - in the case of living organisms, then the mind in question is God, of course. This is very much associated with the intelligent design movement and has very little presence on this forum (and I certainly wouldn't want to be involved in introducing it to this forum, but it should at least be acknowledged. See this summary.)

You will notice that it is precisely the question of where biological codes originate that is left unanswered in Barbieri's paper. He refers to Hubert Yockey, also a favourite with some ID proponents, who says that the origin of DNA is formally unknowable, in the same sense that some propositions of logic are formally undecideable. That attitude is satisfactorily apophatic from my point of view.

Where is Information before it is "encoded" in material form? — Gnomon

Where is 'the domain of natural numbers'? Silly question, of course. But it's instinctive for us to ask it, because we've become so conditioned by naturalism as to conceive that everything real exists on the objective plane. This is really the crucial point. We nowadays tend to conceive of what is real in terms of it being 'out there somewhere', existing in time and space.

Check out this excerpt from what is math?, Smithsonian magazine:

“I believe that the only way to make sense of mathematics is to believe that there are objective mathematical facts, and that they are discovered by mathematicians,” says James Robert Brown, a philosopher of science recently retired from the University of Toronto. “Working mathematicians overwhelmingly are Platonists. They don't always call themselves Platonists, but if you ask them relevant questions, it’s always the Platonistic answer that they give you.”

Other scholars—especially those working in other branches of science—view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.

See? That expresses the entire problem in a nutshell.

Shannon made it seem plausible to think of Information without spooky souls, or minds, or consciousness. — Gnomon

Shannon was dealing with a very specific problem i.e. transmission of encoded information across electronic media. But that has then been re-interpreted in all of these metaphorical ways to say things about life and mind that maybe it actually doesn't say at all.

But where does the Meaning go, in between those transformations? I — Gnomon

Information enables the interaction of form. It doesn't go anywhere ( does not become immaterial ) since everything is situated and interrelated, evolving as a great mass of order. Articulated by information. As far as I can see. **Everything has to be integrated as a whole, by the form systems posses.

Then you have semiotics in its original sense, meaning interpretation of signs by humans. Code biology builds on that by the analysis of the sense in which living processes encode and transmit biological information e.g. by dna. — Wayfarer

Semiotics implies a dualism. One has to drop the idea of a mind ( interpretor ) in cellular biology to make any sense of it - that is what Barbeiri was on about. Instead one has to see form as identical to code, and their interaction as information, in the sense that I am using it.

**Information enables the interaction of coded form :100:

So absence and presence , sameness and difference , form and content are irreducible , universal requirements for any kind of world. — Joshs

It is a matter for argument whether those are the right fundamental constructs (they may or may not be). But what is truly fundamental is that dialectics is the universal logic, the universal rational process, which produces any well-formed construct.

Notice that there is nothing in this assertion to differentiate Kant’s notion of universality from Hegel’s or Nietzsche’s or Kelly’s . But when we start inquiring as to whether there are universal contents constraining the dynamics of dialectics, such as Kant’s transcendental categories subtending time, space, causation and morality, we can distinguish different kinds of universality. Like Kant , Hegel fills in the dialectic with a universal content. For Hegel, however, this content doesn’t subsist in static categorical schemes , but in the ordering logic guiding the movement of the dialectic. — Joshs

Kant fell down with his antimonies. Hegel got things a little wrong because he lacked a concept of vagueness. That is why I say Peirce worked it out best with his triadic systems perspective.

To achieve the goal of arriving at a dialectical unity of opposites, you have to find a reasonable way in which both sides of any such metaphysical symmetry breaking can actually be real - present in the one world while apparently also representing some essential contradiction.

That is why we end up understanding dichotomistic constructs as complementary limits on Being itself. The two poles of a spectrum can be part of the same reality by marking the two bounding extremes of what is possible.

Hierarchy theory then arises as the most general way of representing such a structure of Being. The simplest way to have two opposites in the same world is if they are placed as far apart as possible - as in the divide between the local and the global scales of Being. Local~global is the ur-dichotomy.

But then because synchronic structure is itself opposed to diachronic process, we also have the other ur-dichotomy of the vague~crisp - the extension to dialectical reasoning made explicit in the triadic logic of Peirce.

Peirce was always trying to connect these two dichotomies in the one world description, which is why you wind up with his super-dichotomy of tychism~synechism. The local is pure chance or pure spontaneity, so also as vague and unformed as it gets. The global is continuity and universalised habit or law, so as crisp and definite as its gets.

Thus the content that results from dialectical inquiry is that which in the end can't be done away with. Peirce makes sense to me in his reduction of existence to these two complementary ur-dichotomies - the local~global and the vague~crisp, or the dichotomies of structure and of development.

But look at the difference between the ‘flow’ experience of the intuitive , organic unfolding of a dance duet, and the hostile , conflictual exchange of a political disagreement. — Joshs

Social organisation boils down to the dialectical balancing of competition and co-operation. It needs both in balance for a society to persist as a system.

That in turn reduces to the general systems story of local~global hierarchical structure.

Competition is local differentiation and creative contest. Hostile disagreement, if you want to get rhetorical about it. Or useful individual variety, if you want to get evolutionary about it.

Co-operation is its "other" of global integration or stabilising habit. The organic unfolding of a dance duet if you want to get PoMo rhetorical about it. Or useful collective uniformity, if you want to get evolutionary about it.

So of course you will seek to frame things in a way that befits the cultural agenda of PoMo. But that is itself a highly particular viewpoint when it comes to metaphysics. My interest is in arriving instead at the most general possible one.

And as you can see, that opposes your habit of forever seeking plurality at every level of Being with the other habit of spotting the two ur-dichotomies that underlie every form of existence.

No, my perspective and that of another are not to be understood as independent, private regions. The interpersonal relation directly remakes my sense of what my `own' perspective is, as well as what I assume to be the other's integral position. — Joshs

To defend PoMo as a political set of beliefs, you must argue against the structuralism of hierarchical order. I get it.

The world must be an egalitarian network where no node carries any more weight than any other. Every interaction has the one scale - an informational symmetry rather than an informational asymmetry. You must resist any notion of the natural world as a system of nested order where some folk might actually have a more successfully generalised metaphysics than others.

Each word I use gets its sense from its categorical inclusion within a superordinate hierarchy of personal meaning. The trivial day to day events of my life get their relevance from the broader themes of my life, and the most superordinate of these involve my sense of myself as a social being. — Joshs

And this is something you learnt ... from reading some book?

My personal meanings aren’t determined by a global cultural system the way that my superordinate system determines the sense of my day to day trivial experiences. — Joshs

Have you read up on symbolic interactionism - George Herbert Mead's take that stems from the same Peircean sources? That gives a balanced account of the semiotic interaction between personal possibility and its environmental constraints.

Perhaps because Peirce himself was so notoriously awkward, he didn't cash his semiotics out at the level of social theory. :smile:

[Symbolic interactionism is a frame of reference to better understand how individuals interact with one another to create symbolic worlds, and in return, how these worlds shape individual behaviors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interactionism

In a ‘community’ of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system. — Joshs

Again, you are describing the necessity of dialectics rather than the fundamentality of the plural.

A successful network - the one with the best balance of stability and plasticity - is going to be neither over-connected nor underconnected. So neither too bound by groupthink, nor too unbound by excessive individualism.

We have formal models of these things, like tensegrity. Emergent balances that minimise the collective tensions of individuals arriving at commonality.

If indeed the fundamentalist perspective dominated the communist view in Kelly’s world, this certainly didn’t constrain Kelly’s model. — Joshs

My point was that Kelly's approach was constrained by the certitudes of 1950's US intelligentsia - the tropes of rationality and self-actualisation. He saw his impoverished Kansas farmers as needing training in how to become rational and self-actualising in a way that was a society's generally stated goal.

Now for an Islamic fundamentalist, that is a cultural goal that still might not compute. But for a systems scientist, one would say of course! If you want the right kind of self-organising whole, you must shape up the right kind of self-fitting parts.

One has to drop the idea of a mind ( interpreter ) in cellular biology to make any sense of it - that is what Barbeiri was on about. — Pop

Biosemiosis is saying that interpretation takes place on the level of cellular biology, i.e. that cellular biology can be understood in terms of interpretation and signalling. That is called 'vegetative semiosis' and no conscious mind is implied or required.

Besides, you're still not seeing the distinction that Barbieri makes between the chemical and information paradigms. That is a dualism - the dualism of information and matter. Information operates in a different way to chemical causation by encoding and transmitting information. That doesn't happen in non-organic matter. It's a clear distinction, and arguably also a dualism of form (morphe) and matter (hyle).

The necessity of an observer, or knower, of Information (meaning) makes the early universe, prior to the emergence of humans, seem to be devoid of the First Form of Information : meaning in a mind. — Gnomon

See this post

Besides, you're still not seeing the distinction that Barbieri makes between the chemical and information paradigms — Wayfarer

Politics of paradigm? He makes a case for information as a fundamental observable, non measurable quantity. Every cellular structure then is code and their interaction is an exchange of information - in the sense that I am using it. It becomes just a matter of time, before this approach is extended to chemistry.

** This approach is then extended to mind, and outside the body, to transform monist materialism to monist panpsychism. :fire:

How do you link a post, pls?

If you mouse-over the bottom of a post, there's an icon that appears with an arrow to the right - click on it, a Link to This Post window appears, copy the URL and paste it in like any other URL.

(There's also a really neat feature I only learned of recently- if you quote from some source, enter a semi-colon after the quoted source and then paste in the URL of the source. Sometimes if the URL is very long you need to enclose the whole string in double-quotes as well. That way, the quoted source becomes a clickable link.)

Does anyone see the logic of studying, understanding and defining brain based information first? It's an order of analysis issue. Brains are the tools we use to sort these things.
Most of these models can't explain how we remember our own birthdays.

First Form of Information — Gnomon

Gnomon calls it First Form of Information so I'm not the only one thinking about it.

Thanks, neat :smile:

I'm not getting this. Change would be form(1)--->form(2), or f(2) - f(1), right? Is this supposed to be tied to something in the physical world? Can it be multi-dimentional? Does it handle the 'non-physical'? Can you give physical and non-physical examples to show that it works. Maybe something like process notation would work better. Does interaction imply brain presence or not? — Mark Nyquist

Process notation includes a directional flow of energy, so no, it wouldn’t work better. The equations refer back to a Venn diagram on entropy from earlier, and the notion that ‘everything is information’. There is no distinction between physical and non-physical here - this is a logical relation only - no directional flow of energy, and no particular quality attributed to any of the elements. I thought we could use the Venn diagram to explore the logical relation between information, interaction, form and change. When all four terms refer to purely logical events (no energy, no quality), then each element in the Venn diagram is interchangeable. You can literally put the terms in any of the four spaces, and the relationship makes sense.

An interaction consists of ongoing form, change and information. Form in this sense is not a static measurement, but a process. It refers to the Aristotlean notion of arrangement or organisation (of matter). So we’re not talking about the static form of a rock, for instance, but the process of looking at a rock. An observer is always involved in the event somehow - here’s your brain presence. If you’re going to relate any two of these events, it implies a living system. Any three, and it implies a brain.

All the elements here are four-dimensional on purpose - a five-dimensional perspective of reality as consisting of interrelated events takes the human experience of ‘time’ out of the equation. Time necessarily involves a directional flow of energy, as a distribution of attention and effort. Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ suggests this as a way to incorporate quantum theory into a more accurate understanding of reality that dissolves the physical/mental divide. I find it’s particularly useful in discussions about information.

I hope this helps a little.

First Form of Information
— Gnomon

Gnomon calls it First Form of Information so I'm not the only one thinking about it. — Mark Nyquist

I don't think so. If you consider it in terms of evolutionary psychology, where language evolved before self awareness, and then a subsequent self concept, in terms of self awareness. You see a progression of form. Language > self awareness > self concept > then and only then do our interpretations of universe, god, the plot, etc come into being. As the progressive evolution of form? — Pop

As a monist, panpsychist, I would argue the first form of information is form itself. This is what seems to be evolving, creating everything in it's path.

We have to exist in some form!

The form of our existence is meaningful to us!

But I am happy to go wherever you like. :smile:

It helps. The thread is getting so long I forget who made what comments.