Within that metaphorical framework, enlightenment (both scientific and spiritual) represents the culminating stages of that awareness becoming self-aware. — Wayfarer

That's nice, but I don't think human intelligence is the crown on evolution. All life can be seen as culmination. With different degrees of knowledge, awareness, and self awarenes. Science and spirituality are just forms of knowledge and awareness.

That's nice, but I don't think human intelligence is the crown on evolution — Cartuna

Yes, I know it's a very non PC idea.

Yes, I know it's a very non PC idea. — Wayfarer

A non PC idea? Non personal computer idea? Apart from Darwinian evolution there is also Lamarckian evolution. Not genes are central or heritage al la Mendel, but organisms, giving protein life a context.

The upshot is that if it were purely a matter of chance - the 'million monkeys' kind of idea - then the Universe is not nearly old enough to have provided enough time for all of the possibilities to have been realised. — Wayfarer

That depends on the knowledge which proteins can form life. How does he know that most forms can't give life? It's collections of proteins that form life. Later on additional stuff joined the scene.

Very few of these configurations give rise to the kinds of proteins that are actually useful for propogating life. The upshot is that if it were purely a matter of chance - the 'million monkeys' kind of idea - then the Universe is not nearly old enough to have provided enough time for all of the possibilities to have been realised. — Wayfarer

A quantum hypothesis proposes that atoms of molecules are in superposition with themselves and their immediate surroundings, meaning they are in multiple wave-phase states simultaneously, so an individual molecule can be in hundreds if not thousands of different configurations at once. This is currently being researched in relationship to DNA mutation. It means that evolution would be selecting from a vast array of structural forms almost instantaneously, greatly reducing the time necessary to adapt and coevolve. Once biochemistry was buffered in favorable, differentiating cellular environments, microscale evolution may have been extremely rapid, with dynamics of superposition accommodating the need for huge quantities of intermediate stages and counterbalancing the improbability of a successful lineage.

A quantum hypothesis proposes that atoms of molecules are in superposition with themselves and their immediate surroundings, meaning they are in multiple wave-phase states simultaneously, so an individual molecule can be in hundreds if not thousands of different configurations at once — Enrique

From my very limited knowledge of physics and chemistry, I'm sure this is nonsense. For if it were so, how could any physical substance retain its properties?

How does he [Simon Conway-Morris] know that most forms can't give life? — Cartuna

It's a matter of fact. 'The number of possible protein sequences is astronomically large. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that there are 20¹⁵⁰ or the order of 10¹⁹⁵ possible proteins with 150 amino acids length alone. Only a very small percentage of them exists, or ever existed, in nature.' And also, he's a professor of paleobiology.

Yes, I know it's a very non PC idea.
— Wayfarer

A non PC idea? Non personal computer idea? — Cartuna

No - a non-politically-correct idea. I'm referring to a philosophical tendency called 'orthogenetic' which is generally frowned upon by mainstream science. But you will find it in such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Pierre Tielhard du Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Brian Swimme. And even in Julian Huxley:

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley

It's a matter of fact. 'The number of possible protein sequences is astronomically large. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that there are 20exp150 or the order of 10exp195 possible proteins with 150 amino acids length alone. Only a very small percentage of them exists, or ever existed, in nature.' And also, he's a professor of paleobiology. — Wayfarer

.The point is, there is a limited amount involved. But why should the ones not involved would not be able to support life? Pointing out that they are not used is no proof. They are obviously not, but what if? Stating that with 150 amino acids 20exp150 forms are possible is actually not exactly true. It's half that number, which is still rather big though...Nature could have chosen a lot of proteins! All of them could have started an evolution ("viva la evolution!").

Man is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself. His supreme task is to increase that conscious comprehension and to apply it as fully as possible to guide the course of events. In other words, his role is to discover his destiny as an agent of the evolutionary process, in order to fulfill it more adequately. — Julian Huxley

What needs to be fulfilled? Animals are part of that reality too. Consciousness has not developed to become aware of the process it is based on and it's certainly not man's supreme task task to increase that comprehension (science) and to apply it as fully as possible to genetically modify the course of the process on which his becoming conscious is based, in order for some divine destiny. That thought is one of the about 10exp(exp100) possible patterns of thought, but if he wants to think that... I don't think man is obliged to conform though. It's no evolutionary imperative.

From my very limited knowledge of physics and chemistry, I'm sure this is nonsense. For if it were so, how could any physical substance retain its properties? — Wayfarer

That IS its property! New science though, not everyone knows about it yet, and a ways to go before we've figured out exactly how it works.

The idea is that a relatively large biomolecule is composed of a complex coherence/decoherence pattern that can evolve in thousands of differing directions almost instantaneously as different portions of the molecule decohere, greatly reducing the time necessary to achieve a particularly adaptive form.

You might be interested in this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220433962_Concepts_and_Semantic_Relations_in_Information_Science

I've also had luck following its citations and those citing it.

At first the classification looks like a basic semiotic triangle, but it goes into the numerous methodologies for classifying concepts, defining synonymity, etc. via different epistemologies.





I'm not exactly sure how you would model this purely mathematically, perhaps you can't. However, I have a pretty good idea how this could be networked in a SQL database and how one might connect it via DAX or something similar.

You could have, for each word, connected tables with lists of intension and extension, then you'd also need the words grouped into hierarchies in something like the arrangement you tend build for an OLAP analysis server. But of course, you'd need to do second and third order pairing because "three sided shape," would be equivalent to "triangle." Then you'd also want AND and OR relations logged in different tables.

Producing such a database, and getting it to run well with millions of text lookups and many to many relationships would be another matter. My guess is I don't understand the right tools here. You'd probably want to incorporate machine learning and include probability values for words following one another somehow, as well as a database of known contradictions (e.g., "a four sided triangle).

For the original example, you can think of the brain as just such a database, relating different sensory inputs and internal permutations of thought to each other.

I'm not sure if your example contradicts information being physical however. I think the large distances and variations in type might be confusing things.

I could have a computer database that lets me upload pictures to it. I can't speak the language of the person I need to talk to, so I upload a picture of a helicopter. Visual recognition software is already good at this sort of things, it recognizes "helicopter," from my photo and send it along. However, my interlocutor is blind, and speaks Arabic, so the database has to flip the visual representation over to one in sound, in the appropriate language, something computers can already do. If we need to transmit the message back into text, a visual medium, we can do so as well, all within a single computer system.

If information is some sort of non-physical being, how is it that every step of the transformation can be written out as code enacting physical changes in transistors? Brains aren't well understood and make things confusing, but microprocessors are well understood and can do the same things being done in your example. Or are they working with concepts as some sort of Chinese Room? Perhaps. Obviously they don't have subjective experience of the concepts, but that is the only difference apparent in the transformations of information through various mediums of storage that I can see.

Information science tends to focus more on electronic communications. I think there is something to the fact that the entropy of a message in terms of how many meanings it can have is less than the total Shannon Entropy due to synonyms (just made a thread on this point in this same section). Concepts aren't easy to define so they get ignored.

I use a Borges story as a point of reference there and I think another works here, "Funtes and His Memory." The basic plot point is a guy with perfect memory. He can spend 24 hours remembering a day exactly as it happened, fully reliving it. He grows frustrated with decimal systems and just wants to refer to whole numbers by random names, so for example, 7,891 is "Napoleon Bonaparte." The idea being, once he gives a number a name, he never forgets it. He has the ability for perfect extension in definitions. Why talk of dogs when you can refer perfectly to THAT dog, or THAT dog of THAT specific moment?

Unfortunately, Borges doesn't get into the role of universals in compressing information for communication or for predicting the future from imperfect information, where even for Funtes, universals would be useful.

Concepts are necissarily wide nets for groupings of different objects, that is from whence they derive their usefulness. Their ability to be sent via numerous different codes has to do with the fact that they reduce all the information about a particular, to a bite sized amount of information that can easily be coded and transmitted.

The role of concepts in cognition is a bit more interesting, since they help construct subjective experience, but that is neither here nor there.

As to mathematics being known a priori, I would follow Quine on being skeptical on this. The definition of natural numbers requires a circular definition of zero. Parallel lines never met, an a priori fact, until non-euclidean geometries emerged. It seems just as likely that natural selection primes us to understand mathematical relations that reflect the physical world well (indeed, our brains would be based of these same mathematical relations), then that these relations are somehow existent outside their instantiation. Abstract mathematics has developed all sorts of mathematics that don't correspond to physical reality.

It is exchanged between physical sources and resident in them. Information is created by physical beings. Categorically speaking, do we have a non-physical subject to compare it to? Is there criteria?

Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are “out there,” waiting to be discovered—a position known as Platonism. It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own—not a physical world, but rather a non-physical realm of unchanging perfection; a realm that exists outside of space and time. Roger Penrose, the renowned British mathematical physicist, is a staunch Platonist. In The Emperor’s New Mind, he wrote that there appears “to be some profound reality about these mathematical concepts, going quite beyond the mental deliberations of any particular mathematician. It is as though human thought is, instead, being guided towards some external truth—a truth which has a reality of its own...”

Many mathematicians seem to support this view. The things they’ve discovered over the centuries—that there is no highest prime number; that the square root of two is an irrational number; that the number pi, when expressed as a decimal, goes on forever—seem to be eternal truths, independent of the minds that found them. If we were to one day encounter intelligent aliens from another galaxy, they would not share our language or culture, but, the Platonist would argue, they might very well have made these same mathematical discoveries.

“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.” — What is Math?

If information is some sort of non-physical being, how is it that every step of the transformation can be written out as code enacting physical changes in transistors? Brains aren't well understood and make things confusing, but microprocessors are well understood and can do the same things being done in your example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Platonist answer is that humans have a foot in both worlds - physically embodied beings who can by virtue of intellect peer into the realm of ideas. That is how we've been able to devise such amazing inventions.

And microprocessors don't build and program themselves. They're simply an extension - a very powerful extension to be sure - of human capabilities.

It takes its name from the ancient Greek thinker Plato, who imagined that mathematical truths inhabit a world of their own — What is Math?

It sounds a bit like obsessing over ideals leads to the thought that there's a place they come from? Maybe there is, but the ideas I know of seem to rattle around in this world. And there's communication among animals about their physical environment. So, plenty of examples of ideas existing within the physical realm. I'm in no place to judge Penrose's interpretation of mathematics, but hesitant to suppose another realm of existence just to fill in the space my ignorance occupies.

Concepts are necissarily wide nets for groupings of different objects, that is from whence they derive their usefulness. Their ability to be sent via numerous different codes has to do with the fact that they reduce all the information about a particular, to a bite sized amount of information that can easily be coded and transmitted. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's a certain circularity at work here. Concepts are grounded in abstraction. And abstraction is dependent on sophisticated intellectual operations - 'like', 'unlike', 'same as', 'different from', and so on. It's easy to take these operations for granted as they're the very constituents of thought, and we perform them automatically; but they're the elements which make it possible to speak and reason.
So such objects of thought - abstractions, if you like - are universal and invariant; the same for any mind capable of grasping them, but only graspable by a mind. They're not physically existent. But without them, what concepts could you form?

In a similar vein, Kant argued that the structures of logic which organize, interpret and abstract observations were innate and were true and valid a priori. Mill, on the contrary, said that we believe them to be true because we have experienced enough individual instances of their truth to generalize: in his words, "From instances we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones, past, present and future, however numerous they may be." But ironically his explanation still nonetheless manages to demonstrate that there is no way around Kant’s a priori logic. To recap Mill's idea in an empiricist twist: “Indeed, the very principles of logical deduction are true because we observe that using them leads to true conclusions” - but that itself an a priori pressuposition, in that in order to know a true conclusion, we need to appeal to reason.

And it's because we as rational beings have that ability that we can encode information into bits and bytes and transmit it. But the recognition of what is valid information is always prior to that.

The Platonist answer is that humans have a foot in both worlds - physically embodied beings who can by virtue of intellect peer into the realm of ideas. That is how we've been able to devise such amazing inventions. — Wayfarer

The past (observed) is the physical. The future (unobservable) is the realm of ideas. Human beings live at the present. However, it has become evident that the present, which the being occupies, is not a clean and precise, non-temporal point of division. In Peirce's words, it is a vague boundary, described by the ancient Greeks as the medium of "becoming", matter. This necessitates the conclusion that the human being, as composed of matter, has "a foot in both worlds", the past and the future, occupying a vague boundary between the two.

Quantum Entanglement.

Instantaneous communication occurs between entangled particles. Nothing physical can do that! Vide Albert Einstein (speed of light).

Information has to be nonphysical!

:grin: