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 — Wayfarer

Yes. That's why I try not to present my notion of "G*D", without some preliminary throat-clearing, to dispel the Judeo-Christian notion of a humanoid heavenly tyrant and magical Intelligent Design (ID). Unfortunately, my alternative of Intelligent Evolution (IE) is not easy to distinguish from ID, for those who have a limited preconception of how a deity "must" create. Oh well, the creator cat is out of the bag now. :joke:

Information enables the interaction of form. It doesn't go anywhere ( does not become immaterial ) — Pop

So, when the material form decays and dissipates, the conceptual Form vanishes? That would make our concept of categories of things-with-something-in-common, meaningless. Does a real Cat participate in the Ideal Form of cats-in-general? What is the material "thing" cats have in common? What kind of information is it made of? :cool:

See this post — Wayfarer

Yes. The ancient beat of Realism versus Idealism goes on, and on, and on . . . . . :wink:

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

Yes. Materialists liked Shannon's statistical definition of "Information", because it allowed us to think in terms of Mechanical Machines instead of Conscious Minds. Machines are real, but Minds are just the abstract notion of an immaterial information processor. To attempt to answer "what is information?" without reference to the pre-Shannon implication of the term is short-sighted. As some recent contrarians have insisted : meaning is in minds, but not in computers. :nerd:

Original meaning of Information was Meaning :
Meaning "knowledge communicated concerning a particular topic" is from mid-15c.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/information

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.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

The strange thing is that the maximum information of a number of particles inside a volume can be calculated from the information content on a surface corresponding to these particles. When these particles form a black hole then the number of Planck areas on the Schwarzschild radius of this hole corresponds to the maximum information to be present inside that volume. Likewise, if we imagine a spherical surface somewher arbitrary in space, the maximum information matter can aquire inside this surface cirresponds to the number of Planck areas on that surface again. If the matter particles, carrying information, have the mass of a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius and event horizon that is the same as the enclosing imaginary surface, then that matter particles are in a state of maximum informatiin. Invariably. That is a boring state though. It the state of all that matter at one point or, complementary, of all matter evenly spread out on the surface.

Now nice forms of information, INformation, that is, are the ones that correspind to intermediate numbers. Which means not complete, or total order (all particles at one point for example, like in the center of a black hole), nor completd, or total disorder (like on the event horizon of a hole). It corresponds to ordered structures of matter or particles. The black hole is a complementary unit jn that it contains bith forms at once. Matter inside a volume (not having the configuration of a black hole state yet, can be nicely ordered and whirl around in formation. Not too much information and not too little being there.

dialectics is the universal logic, the universal rational process, which produces any well-formed construct.

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. — apokrisis

What Kant, Hegel and Peirce had in common was their grounding of Being in divinity. Peirce posited God as the source and creator of the dialectic , a God he said could
produce miracles( he and James had a fondness for spiritualist mediums) . He articulated his divine teleology as the developmentally assured triumph of love over hate.

Peirce infers from the Gospel and Epistles of John that ‘God is love’, and that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of love and loveliness.

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. — apokrisis

I know you’ve said you don’t go along with Peirce’s theological interpretation of his metaphysics, but don’t you think he would defend the dialectic and the divine as inseparable? Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent? More specifically , doesn’t the developmental
model you have been laying out presuppose a hidden hand guiding universal rational process? A number of your colleagues in pan semiotics are quite sympathetic to theological writers like Charles Taylor, Kierkegaard and Martin Buber( Bergson comes to mind also ).

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. — apokrisis

I’m curious. Is what you wrote above consistent with the fact-value interpenetration argument?

Varela writes:

“To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

‘A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.’

Is the above consistent with Peirce’s definition of the real?

“ I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched.”

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. — apokrisis

Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology.
Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism.
Self-actualization as a buzzword made its way into American psychology in the 1950’s due to the indirect influence of European trends such as existentialism, American pragmatism, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. These tropes were not embraced by mainstream intellectual culture until many years later.
In the 1950’s only a handful of American psychologists and philosophers adopted them. The mainstream endorsed S-R positivism and the new discipline of cognitive science, a rationalist offshoot of 19th century idealism.

…..

Not something I've heard said, — Kenosha Kid

Yippee, a physicist is going to help me dispell the woo...

but I guess any microstate is a unique collection of information. — Kenosha Kid

Oh jeez.

Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk?

14mOptions — bongo fury

"Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk?"

Yes. The (in)formation of the brain in terms of information contained in patterns of particles. Entropy is of no use here.

in physics — bongo fury

4mReplyOptions — bongo fury

Exactly. The brain is a physical system.

Ok.

Shannon's information theory defines information as any message that reduces uncertainty from a given set of possibilities to ONE.

Will/should skeptics be offended/pleased that all of them together amount to 0 bits? — TheMadFool

I would say this brings out the need to be able to distinguish two varieties of uncertainty.

We can be uncertain where we agree that the principle of non-contradiction, and we are simply counting the missing information. The skeptic agrees your proposition must be either true or false, 1 or 0. But they await the evidence. They see an informational gap waiting to be filled. There are known unknowns that can be quantified.

Is the cat in Schrodinger's box - the familiar quantum thought experiment - dead or alive? In the classical view, it must be one or the other. The PNC applies. The information may not be received until the lid is lifted, but there is already a fact of the matter. There is a known unknown. If you proposed the cat is by now surely dead from the poison having been released by the radioactive decay event, then the skeptic can say your claim of having reduced your uncertainty to 1 is a little premature. You could still be flat wrong in that assertion.

But then there is the uncertainty that results from the PNC not applying to some description of reality. The quantum view. It is simply logically vague as the two possibilities are in superposition until the wavefunction has been collapsed. The binary choice of 1 or 0 doesn't yet answer to any classical conception of an actual fact - a definite or crisp state of logical counterfactuality.

So you can be skeptical because the information hasn't yet been properly provided. It is person making the doubtful bivalent claim that is missing the information.

Or you can be skeptical about whether the real world is ever truly counterfactual in any situation. Behind the certainties of the bivalently encoded message - a message generated using a model of atomistic or digital information - there is always inherently a vagueness or uncertainty in regards to world as the thing in itself beyond our imposed modelling. Meaning may elude our grasp to the degree we shoehorn a proposition into a blunt binary logical frame of true or false.

Beyond the known unknowns, there are the unknowns unknowns. Beyond the quantified uncertainties, there are the unquantified uncertainties.

What Kant, Hegel and Peirce had in common was their grounding of Being in divinity. — Joshs

Even great thinkers reflect their social era. Doesn't that prove my point about the social construction of even the most independently minded individuals?

Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent? — Joshs

Yep. Logic is logic.

You haven't been able to pick holes in account of that logic and so now you chose to play the man rather than the ball.

A number of your colleagues in pan semiotics are quite sympathetic to theological writers — Joshs

As I keep saying, the hard turn towards material reductionism by Newtonian science was matched by a soft-headed turn towards Romanticism and idealism in Western society. There is a generalised ache to preserve a spiritual and personal dimension in modern folk metaphysics.

So yes. It is the norm in modern society to feel there must be more to existence than just the blind and souless determinism of the "scientific world view". That is why we have cultural responses like PoMo, phenomenology, humanism, and the watered down, pantheistic, notions of the divine that are so common.

And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? — Goodman

As usual, you are quoting stuff that supports my argument. Goodman is asking for a ground in monistic facticity. And I am arguing that what grounds counterfactual definiteness is the "epistemic" process of dichotomisation. Point and line are the complementary limits of the one dialectical conception.

A point stands for the absolutely discrete, the line for the absolutely continuous. And between these two bounds on concrete possibility, we can expect to find our own reality cashed out as a measurable ground. We are always some infinitesimal degree away from arriving at the limit represented by the notion of a 0D point, and always some infinite degree away from reaching the end of the 1D line.

Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology. Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism. — Joshs

Err. OK. So he was constructing himself as an anti-rational renegade ... yet now is recognised as just a rationalist positive psychology type responding early to the spirit of his age?

Self-actualization as a buzzword made its way into American psychology in the 1950’s due to the indirect influence of European trends such as existentialism, American pragmatism, phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. These tropes were not embraced by mainstream intellectual culture until many years later.
In the 1950’s only a handful of American psychologists and philosophers adopted them. The mainstream endorsed S-R positivism and the new discipline of cognitive science, a rationalist offshoot of 19th century idealism. — Joshs

You forgot to mention the dominance of Freudian Romanticism that was in fact the official mainstream in US psychotherapy of that era. Wasn't Kelly reacting against that?

Self-actualisation and humanist approaches took off in the US because there was already the deeply engrained notion of the US being the land of the self-made man. But by the 1950s, corporations and unions dominated the society. People were suddenly rich, secure and leisured, yet still constrained by class and traditional values. So very ready to discover themselves and construct their own personal realities.

Behaviourism was popular among those who liked the idea of mind control. It was hardly central to popular culture. Cognivitism started out naturalistic and ecological - as with Neisser - but became over-run by computer science and the metaphysics of information processing.

I'm not really buying your social history here. If you are determined to make Kelly the base of your argument against pragmatic positivism or social constructionism, that seems a poor choice.

Simply stating that ‘quantum foam somehow develops form’ is a leap of faith you’re expecting us to take with regards to your theory — Possibility

No not faith. Just take a look around yourself and understand all this was once quantum foam.

The Order of Time’ is a good starting point, because it explains why it makes sense todescribe reality as consisting of interrelated events, not objects. — Possibility

Please reread my previous post to you, and point out where I am not describing this. "Information describes the process of form enabling the interaction of form."

I said that form can appear to develop through spontaneous change, depending on your intentional embodiment as observer — Possibility

This was Apo's defence with the epistemic cut. Please yourself, but understand that your subjectivity is not ungrounded, but grounded entirely in information, in the sense I am describing it.

At first glance, they appear to contradict each other. Is it ‘open-ended’ or not? — Possibility

I think we have covered the QM angle of this argument.

Things do not have to ‘have form’ to interact, — Possibility

Right! So something without form - without any characteristics or perturbation or properties can interact?
No doubt due to your subjectivity again?

This notion of self-organisation is your personal focus. You could just as easily say no interaction, no universe. Or no change, no universe. — Possibility

You totally misunderstand. It is all evolution, not arbitrary change. A primer in systems theory would fix this.

This notion of self-organisation is your personal focus. You could just as easily say no interaction, no universe. Or no change, no universe. — Possibility

Self organization is what makes systems organize. Everything is a self organizing system in systems theory. Please catch up on it and we can speak again.

At some stage I will write my thoughts up coherently and in detail. At present, the ideas are just emerging, so nobody could blame you for misunderstanding, given they are presented as disintegrated bits of information here and there.

**In the end our philosophy is only as good as the reality it creates. I have given my views on this previously - why I argue what I do, and where it leads.

Do you mean that if I don't feel anything, I am emotionless, I can't experience anything and/or be conscious (aware) of anything? Do you really believe this? — Alkis Piskas

It is the belief of phenomenology, and the philosophical zombie argument.

Awe, the word "effect" makes all the difference. We are all trying to exchange information and only rarely do we have the pleasure of success.The information can be all around us but that does not mean it affects us. — Athena

:up: Aint that the truth! :sad:

Put it this way, is there any information-talk in physics that can't be (shouldn't be) replaced perfectly well with entropy-talk? — bongo fury

They are formally complementary modes of description now. Two ways of saying the same thing.

Entropy might be composed of an ensemble of microstates, and so a system at equilibrium might appear to contain a hell of a lot of information ... all those individually distinct possible states. But then the only actual information we need about the system is the value of its macroproperties, like its temperature and pressure. In the same way that we only need values for the mean and standard deviation of a Gaussian probability distribution, we can afford to discard all the information represented in the individual microstates as they all smear into the one macro probability distribution encoded in Boltzmann's entropy equation.

Entropy is thus a model of complete randomness or disorder. And then the same equation can be inverted to arrive at the other view - the Shannon information view - where every microstate is treated conversely as a negentropic signal to be separated from the surrounding noise. The world is being modelled not as a self-organising average, a meaningless collection of accidents, but as a place where now every aspect of some particular microstate has been chosen with meaningful care.

So in entropy world, the particular gets absorbed into the general. Differences no longer make a difference worth counting. And in negentropy world, the metaphysics is inverted. Every difference now makes a difference.

Confusion then arises in threads like these because conventional notions of "information" relate to finding meaning in the world. We are semiotically seeking to distinguish signal from noise in any situation. We are discovering where we want to impose the epistemic cut in terms of everything that particularly matters (to "us") and everything that generally doesn't.

But physics is our model of reality that wants to talk about things beyond the point where they are embedded in self-centred points of view. The need to divide the world into signal and noise, meaningful and meaningless, drops out of physics' picture as it is only interested in the naked statistical mechanics - the view that can marry the metaphysical absolutes of blind chance and deterministic necessity.

So that is why physics is making this move to model the world in infodynamical terms - making use of the fact that entropy and information are inverted versions of the one fundamental statistical equation.

Used in one direction, the description of nature can treat everything as just generalised difference. Used in the other direction, the description of nature will treat everything as some matchingly particular state of affairs. Every difference now counts as a difference rather than counting as something that is a matter of indifference.

This is a neat dialectical trick that means physics has reality tied up from both directions in a framework for counting and measuring its bits or microstates.

You just need to establish the Planckscale limit on the counterfactual definiteness this infodynamic view of physics presumes. And also understand how it builds in the Gaussian bell curve version of a probability space - the world of closed systems that can equilibrate as they are statically bounded.

That assumption of a normal distribution becomes a little fraught once you realise that a scalefree or fractal distribution - the log/log distribution that is open and growing and has no actual mean - is likely the more generic story in dissipative systems. The familiar Shannon information gives way to a more general model such as Rényi entropy.

But that is a bleeding edge conversation.

The things of importance is that physicists aren't interested in the issue of meaning. They are seeking the depersonalised view of reality and so their metaphysics deliberate excludes that part of Aristotelean causality which relates to purpose and finalities. So when they speak of information - or when neuroscientists employ that physicalised version of "information" – they don't mean what most of the folk here think they ought to mean.

And then the reason why entropy and information have become fused as a new information theoretic turn in physics is that they are two ways of reading the same formula. And the formula is a step forward in moving physics from the old atomistic Newtonian paradigm to a view of reality that does a better job of rooting the descriptions in the holism of probability spaces and statistical mechanics.

Newton spoke of forces - little pushes and pulls delivered by corpuscular objects. That became generalised to quantities of energy - forceful interactions were turned into some notion of actual conserved substance that flowed. Then the pendulum swung the other way to make energy just patterns in fields. After that, we get to the entropic view of force - patterns in a probability space. And now that has been joined by the informational response that reads global pattern as individuated marks.

The analysis gets ever more remote from the original folk belief that the world is a collision of substantial entities. It becomes eventually some rationalist account of order vs disorder. A tale that is all about the abstractions of the form and purpose of Being - even though that is not something the culture of physics would want to admit.

And again, people pick up on this discomfort. Entropy and information are treated in discussions like these as the "new concrete stuff of reality", because that is what "real" has to mean to maintain a purely materialist discourse.

Panpsychism and other pathologies of reason can then set up camp on the paradoxes that result from not understanding why what is working for physics in fact works for physics.

Even great thinkers reflect their social era. Doesn't that prove my point about the social construction of even the most independently minded individuals? — apokrisis

No, their theologies were well ahead of their time. To the great bulk of the nonacademic culture that surrounded them , their ideas were generations ahead.

Can one embrace the triadic model and discard the theology without doing violence to Peirce’s intent?
— Joshs

Yep. Logic is logic. You haven't been able to pick holes in account of that logic and so now you chose to play the man rather than the ball. — apokrisis

I thought logic was a cultural creation like the rest of philosophy. Isnt that the view of writers like Lakoff and Johnson, who view logic as embodied activity? I’ve read 5 or 6 different interpretations of Peirce’s triadic model and they all differ. You don’t think the variability in how people interpret ‘firstness’ has any bearing on the use od the logic? I think how much the application of his logic will differ from user to user depends on what they want to do with it. The more abstract and complex the aspect of the world one looks at , the greater difference interpretation will make. If you don’t see God in Peirce’a triad, you’re not looking closely enough.

Kelly was opposed to rationalism, which is why he insisted his approach was not a cognitive psychology. Kelly was a renegade who attacked the core presuppositions of rationalism.
— Joshs

Err. OK. So he was constructing himself as an anti-rational renegade ... yet now is recognised as just a rationalist positive psychology type responding early to the spirit of his age? — apokrisis

That’s one reading of Kelly, one he was bemusedly familiar with.

“Cognitive, behavioural, emotional, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and even dialectical materialist and Zen Buddhist: these are some of the ways in which George A. Kelly's (1955) theory has been labelled, as he himself tells with pleased irony (Kelly, 1969/1965, pp. 216-217). Such obstinacy in trying to insert personal construct theory (PCT) within already formalized psychological perspectives, and the odd variety of proposals so distant each from other on the epistemological and theoretical level, in our opinion testify as better would not be possi-ble the originality of Kelly's thought.”( Gabrielle Chiari)

As with any thinker , ther are different Kelly camps. I happen to agree with those who align Kelly with pragmatism , phenomenology and constructivism.

Self-actualisation and humanist approaches took off in the US because there was already the deeply engrained notion of the US being the land of the self-made man. But by the 1950s, corporations and unions dominated the society. People were suddenly rich, secure and leisured, yet still constrained by class and traditional values. So very ready to discover themselves and construct their own personal realities. — apokrisis

Are you kidding me? The 1950’s and early 1960’s were among the most conformist periods in American history. The last thing the average person was ready for during that time was self-transformation.
The counterculture didn’t emerge as a substantial force until after Kelly’s death in 1967.

Behaviourism was popular among those who liked the idea of mind control. It was hardly central to popular culture. Cognivitism started out naturalistic and ecological - as with Neisser - but became over-run by computer science and the metaphysics of information. — apokrisis

Behaviorism ( and psychoanalysis) had such a stifling hold over academic psychology during this period that Jerome Bruner had to establish his own group at Harvard in the 1960’s to wrest control away from information processing and bring psychology back to its roots in pragmatism. That took more than 30 years to accomplish. Neisser’s groundbreaking text in 1967 made little impact until the 1970’s, and even then second generation cognitive science still had a struggle on its hands.

In Britain things weren’t much better. Only a few malcontents attempted to break way from the stranglehold of S-R and rationalistic cognitivism. These included Don Bannister, Rom Harre, Fay Fransella and John Shotter. Bannister had become close friends with Kelly and began to establish an academic community in Britain around Kelly’s approach, which spawned social constructionist , radical constructivist and hermeneutic readings of Kelly.

I'm not really buying your social history here. If you are determined to make Kelly the base of your argument against pragmatic positivism or social constructionism, that seems a poor choice. — apokrisis

The choice of individual shouldn’t be the issue. The issue should be how to divvy up and characterize an entire culture of an era. Claiming that America of the mid 1950’s was ready for what Kelly offered stands in direct contrast to the reality of a profoundly hidebound academic and mainstream culture. Yes, Kelly reacted against S-R, cognitivism and Freud , but I think he went farther than that , challenging even some enactivist notions.
Even if that’s not the case, I can think of any number of original thinkers( Heidegger , Nietzsche, Leibnitz) who were so far ahead of their ‘time’ ( the bulk of the populace) that they could count only a tiny handful of writers to directly contrast their ideas with. Nietzsche had Schopenhauer , Kierkegaard , Darwin and Marx, and more distantly , Hegel. The rest of the culture that surrounded him was living in a much more traditional world. In fact , 120 years later , only a small segment of today’s world has assimilated his thinking.

I think the typical situation for original thinkers is that their closet competition is a tiny handful of writers. Beyond that immediate sphere of influence lies a larger circle of maybe a few thousand thinkers who are regurgitating the previous generation’s cutting edge thinking. Beyond that is a much larger circle of non-academic educated culture which represents the best of an even older generation. And beyond that is an uneducated pluraity that still identify with even more ancient ways of thinking. So as far as the wider culture influencing the work of an original thinker, I think as we move out from the small inner circle in every wider approaches , the numbers of individuals grows, and the influence becomes more and more indirect.

pendulum — apokrisis

"Newton spoke of forces - little pushes and pulls delivered by corpuscular objects. "

That was LeSage. Newton couldn't explain gravity and disagreed stringly with corpuscules. You can compare them somehow with gravitons in modern views on gravity though the corpuscules werd calculated to be non-existent. Gravitons are quantum particles and behave very differently from their classical counterparts.

But that idea exists nowhere except in my Mind, which has no "where" in terms of Cartesian coordinates. So whose Mind is the imaginer or designer of Platonic Forms? :smile: — Gnomon

In other words - who does the thinking? - the thing that integrates the information - my best guess is the anthropic principle. What is your best guess? The anthropic principle integrates the information, but acts on different information ( unique consciousness ) ?? :smile:

I've been thinking about the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, and the notion of an immaterial mind. I would normally think about them as bundled into the one unit, hence monism, but it occurred to me, due to comments you made, that no laws are broken in thinking of mind as either all matter, or all energy, or all information. So this might require a rethinking of monism to some sort of compatibilism?......Informational mind??

What I love about Information Philosophy is that there is so much unexplored philosophical meat!
At least as far as I am aware. :lol:

I was talking about the impressed forces of his mechanics. Gravity as Newtonian action at a distance rather than Cartesian corpuscles is another issue in the long story of the metaphysics of physical models.

What is the material "thing" cats have in common? — Gnomon

DNA.

What kind of information is it made of? :cool: — Gnomon

Code. 100 odd volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica worth . :smile:

Matter inside a volume (not having the configuration of a black hole state yet, can be nicely ordered and whirl around in formation. Not too much information and not too little being there. — Prishon

:up: ....Very nice. thank you for your comment. Are there limits on the minimum amount of information?.... According to my model that would be impossible, since in the end, everything reduces to information, if we are to have knowledge of it.

No, their theologies were well ahead of their time. To the great bulk of the nonacademic culture that surrounded them , their ideas were generations ahead. — Joshs

First you lump and then you split, as suits your rhetorical convenience. Ho hum.

I thought logic was a cultural creation like the rest of philosophy. Isnt that the view of writers like Lakoff and Johnson, who view logic as embodied activity? I’ve read 5 or 6 different interpretations of Peirce’s triadic model and they all differ. You don’t think the variability in how people interpret ‘firstness’ has any bearing on the use od the logic? I think how much the application of his logic will differ from user to user depends on what they want to do with it. The more abstract and complex the aspect of the world one looks at , the greater difference interpretation will make. If you don’t see God in Peirce’a triad, you’re not looking closely enough. — Joshs

I’ve yet to see evidence you understand how it works. So not much to say here.

As with any thinker , ther are different Kelly camps. I happen to agree with those who align Kelly with pragmatism , phenomenology and constructivism. — Joshs

I’m surprised there is any kind of Kelly industry at all. He seems far too minor a figure.

The counterculture didn’t emerge as a substantial force until after Kelly’s death in 1967. — Joshs

True. But I was there and so in retrospect, it seems strikingly non-linear in the speed of the social transition. One minute, only the beats wore Levi’s. The next, jeans were the uniform. So a tension builds over time and then a phase transition results. One state of social conformity is replaced by the next.

Claiming that America of the mid 1950’s was ready for what Kelly offered stands in direct contrast to the reality of a profoundly hidebound academic and mainstream culture. — Joshs

Plainly the US wasn’t ready, and even the UK found him a minority interest. My comment was that he reflected ideas that were in the air - if you were part of the intelligentsia - but he did not feature as a thought leader in the way that “revolt” eventually played out. That is, in the hedonism and other irrational/romanticised responses that masked the US’s economic turn from a production to a consumption based system. People ended up in EST classes and multilevel marketing as the mainstream self-actualisation therapy of the yuppie 90s. :wink:

As I have said, if I am lukewarm on Kelly it is because the cognitive part of his story is already familiar and taken for granted from pragmatist philosophy, social constructionist psychology and anticipation-habit based models of neuroscience.

Then the aspect I say is being overplayed by you is how the individual point of view becomes a justification for the reheated romanticism that animates PoMo pluralism and anti-structuralism.

So you celebrate Kelly as a self-proclaimed renegade. Others might find him not particularly startling, just more of a missed opportunity in the Anglo psychological tradition that never really focused on the social construction of the individual mind.

I think the typical situation for original thinkers is that their closet competition is a tiny handful of writers. Beyond that immediate sphere of influence lies a larger circle of maybe a few thousand thinkers who are regurgitating the previous generation’s cutting edge thinking. Beyond that is a much larger circle of non-academic educated culture which represents the best of an even older generation. And beyond that is an uneducated pluraity that still identify with even more ancient ways of thinking. So as far as the wider culture influencing the work of an original thinker, I think as we move out from the small inner circle in every wider approaches , the numbers of individuals grows, and the influence becomes more and more indirect. — Joshs

Of course.

And yet also, no thinker begins outside the social circumstances that shaped them as their arena in which to begin to react as an individual.

No not faith. Just take a look around yourself and understand all this was once quantum foam. — Pop

That’s not understanding, it’s accepting without understanding. The reason I challenge you to back up these statements is because you have a tendency to make sweeping claims such as ‘everything is information’ and ‘form is fundamental’ without much qualification. The rampant misunderstanding that results from taking these kinds of statements at face value is why posters such as Banno won’t take it seriously.

The Order of Time’ is a good starting point, because it explains why it makes sense todescribe reality as consisting of interrelated events, not objects.
— Possibility

Please reread my previous post to you, and point out where I am not describing this. — Pop

I haven’t said that you’re not. What I’ve said is that you don’t seem to really understand why it makes sense to do so. It feels true, so you run with it. I’m not convinced by that, even though I agree with it. I’d like to see your working out.

I said that form can appear to develop through spontaneous change, depending on your intentional embodiment as observer
— Possibility

This was Apo's defence with the epistemic cut. Please yourself, but understand that your subjectivity is not ungrounded, but grounded entirely in information, in the sense I am describing it. — Pop

What you need to understand is that your interaction model does not include you, but is relative to you: a potential idea in relation to an intentional mind manifesting two-dimensional information as an observable property of both. Relation is the ground, not information. Look deeper.

“Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something” (Carlo Rovelli, ‘Helgoland’)

Right! So something without form - without any characteristics or perturbation or properties can interact? — Pop

See above. You’re interacting with an idea that has no form, and manifesting form in a written description.

This notion of self-organisation is your personal focus. You could just as easily say no interaction, no universe. Or no change, no universe.
— Possibility

You totally misunderstand. It is all evolution, not arbitrary change. A primer in systems theory would fix this.

Self organization is what makes systems organize. Everything is a self organizing system in systems theory. Please catch up on it and we can speak again. — Pop

Yes, you could say that the eternal universe is self-organising. But you have to keep in mind: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” The universe you describe in a system is not absolute, because you exist outside the system you use to describe it. So we can’t really avoid subjectivity here, only recognise it as such. This is why I keep going back to the Venn diagram. We can agree on this logical relation, at least, as a grounding to our discussion/interaction.

So when you attribute self-organisation as a potential of the system itself, you’re attributing your intentionality (ie. form) to the system you have formed. But you can’t presume that self-organisation is the intentionality of the universe, just because it’s how you understand it. The intentionality behind systems theory is form - I get that. The intentionality behind the universe could just as well be information.

This may also be why there are so many interpretations of the Tao Te Ching, and of QM....:chin:

What you need to understand is that your interaction model does not include you, but is relative to you: — Possibility

No, I take a** third person perspective and first person perspective into account and I can see the abyss at its end. Hence my guess with the anthropic principle doing the thinking.

This is a forum. I try to simplify and reduce things to a minimum of wordage. I cannot do what Joshs and Apo do, it would take me all day. Misunderstanding results from this, but I cannot see a way around it.

I have been processing some of the references offered here, and the article ‘What is information?’ from Christophe Adami caught my attention - in particular a Venn diagram showing information as ‘what you don’t know (entropy) minus what remains to be known given what you know’. — Possibility

What you don't know- that's a strange way to define a set. Ok, it's an unknown set.
What remains to be known given what you know- that's even worse! How did this get published? It's junk.

No, It takes a** third person perspective and first person perspective into account and I can see the abyss at its end. Hence my conclusion with the anthropic principle doing the thinking.

This is a forum. I try to simplify and reduce things to a minimum of wordage. I cannot do what Joshs and Apo do, it would take me all day. Misunderstanding results from this, but I cannot see a way around it. — Pop

All I can say is look deeper. The anthropic principle deals with possibility, not perceived potential or intentionality. Many a poor argument starts with this misunderstanding. There’s a deeper level of discussion regarding information that both you and Gnomon are avoiding. It’s what leads to conclusions such as the anthropic principle (or G*D) doing the thinking. But we can’t force the paradigm shift, and you seem pretty comfortable where you are. Oh well.

I have been processing some of the references offered here, and the article ‘What is information?’ from Christophe Adami caught my attention - in particular a Venn diagram showing information as ‘what you don’t know (entropy) minus what remains to be known given what you know’.
— Possibility

What you don't know- that's a strange way to define a set. Ok, it's an unknown set.
What remains to be known given what you know- that's even worse! How did this get published? It's junk. — Mark Nyquist

Information can be simply defined as the opposite of a blank sheet of paper minus the writing on it[/b]

So: ( paper - writing )opposite = information. or Paper + writing = information

But I am interested in a deeper understanding. I want to understand why information changes us.