Notably to your point, information based physics are quite popular, and some of these posit that information is the only thing that exists. The apparent haeccity of objects, our lived world of three dimensional space and time, are simply the effects of interactions of information. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe we could get one of these physicists in and they could explain what for example "information" actually does, in addition to what atoms and suchlike do?

Until they arrive, I'd just like to say that I have no regard for "everthing is X" type theories. Because they don't tell us anything.

I agree that these terms don't have any work to do at the level of chemistry. They have work to do at higher levels of description. — Theorem

Can you give an example where information does work?

Yes, exactly. My original point was that we shouldn't reject a useful theory just because it has limitations. So I think we're on the same page. — Theorem

I think so too. Is it the begin page or the end page? All theories have limitations on two sides. Only the fundamental theory has a one side limit.

You can fully describe DNA transcription and neurotransmitter binding in mechanical terms too (granted there is some loss of fine detail in these models).

The scare quotes, in the sense I was using them, certainly would apply to how a cell membrane "knows" things as well. None of those systems has any sort of the self-awareness of the type we typically associate with "knowing."

I think the big question here is if the higher level knowing of conciousness is essentially something totally new (type dualism at a high level of emergence), or is the result of something entirely different, something due to the special intrinsic nature of physical symbols such as letters, DNA, etc. (substance dualism).

The latter seems harder to justify because certainly things without intrinsic meaning transmit meaning to knowers. We know the paths of old riverbeds from the paths they cut in rocks. We can tell the trajectory of a plane crash from where debris ends up. My friends and I once got caught dipping out of school to go smoke blunts at a friend's house because, when we fled out the back door upon seeing his dad coming home, someone left a freshly made cup coffee on the table.

My friend's dad knew someone had been home recently because the coffee was hot, that is, it was a system that would have tended towards thermodynamic equilibrium with its enviornment, so the additional entropy in the cup was a signal of a non-equlibrium event occuring in the house recently.

My friend's dad didn't have to be a scientist to pick this up because variance from the enviornmental entropy equilibrium is something our nervous system is specifically adapted to do (hence it tends to extinguish stimuli that are persistent, because monitoring difference from the norm is often as important as monitoring difference for ideal settings for homeostasis).

But if something as simple as heat can be a signal carrying a complex meaning, then it doesn't seem like all meaning must come from the intrinsic features of symbols. So then where does the distinction occur?

The substance dualism approach also seems to run into significant issues when it claims that computer algorithms don't process meaning because they aren't "alive." This seems strange given that they are composed of and use symbols to sustain themselves, symbols that are supposedly inheritly meaningful. The same problem pops up if biological viruses are said to not be alive. Computer viruses can also be set up in such a way that they produce novel information, mutate, undergo selection, and evolve. With the advent of the internet, and their ability to spread across a huge eco system, they are also no longer dependent on intentional human action to keep them alive.

Anyways, my objection isn't as much to the concept of some sort of dualism per say; it's such dualism creating a black box that discourages additional inquiry and that such dualism makes its cut using poorly defined definitions. If some meanings can't be described in our common physical frames, we need to try to define all the meaning that can be described in current frames to define the new frame.

I'm not sure what is meant by language and mathematics violating physical laws. Obviously, they can describe things that violate physical laws, but this is inheritly going to be true of any system that can create its own axioms. It is essentially what we should expect for any such system with limited computational power and energy limits, because it has to try to represent the world using compression.

Since algorithmic entropy is non-computable due to logical contradictions inherit in an algorithm finding the shortest possible algorithm to code Y, where Y is a given set of information, we shouldn't expect to find perfect replications of the external world in self-organizing systems. We'll find internal models full or errors and violations of how the world actually works. These errors aren't going to be selected against unless they are grave enough to stop the reproduction of the system. What we will see is selection towards better representations, not a progression to an ideal a fixed point.



The dividing line for biosemiotics is a tough issue though, right? Physics has the embarrassment of having at least 8 major interpretations of its most central theory. Biology has the similar, perhaps greater problem of having no definition of what constitutes life. Here in lies the problem. If meaning is something that only appears in life, but life is going to be defined in terms of a definition of evolution based on organisms using meaning to maximize survival value, then the definition is circular, and it seems like a viscous circle. In definitions of evolution that avoid this circularity, it seems languages and computer viruses, even crystals, may be living things (as well as biological viruses). Attempts to keep synthetic entities out often have the problem of increasingly ad hoc additions to the definition. If we're talking about a unique sort of substance dualism, we should be able to find a very neat dividing line.

For an example of the problem: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/why-life-does-not-really-exist/


The other issue is, do other, non-living, self-organizing systems not undergo evolution or other processes considered unique to life? Here there is no good answer either.

Defining evolution for non-biological systems is difficult because they are more diffuse in space and do not have a specific "individual" to use as a unit of analysis. If a phenomena reguarly reappears, is it being extinguished and a new, similar phenomena shows up later, or is the continual reoccurence one system?

Evolution might be something totally unique to life, something that can define life, but it needs a better definition to show that with any rigor.

Plenty of complex phenomena, seeming miracles of life, actually end up being described by the same mathematics that can describe phenomena in diffuse inorganic systems (earthquakes and heart cells sharing the same model for synchrony).

In terms of causes, I think there might be something missing here. There are the material causes, what biology has tended to look at. The efficient causes are actually where I might put information and meaning. The physical descriptions of systems alone does not tell you how it will interact with another system. This is where the idea of synonymity would play a role. The meaning of an interaction for the complex system is what matters (this gets to interconnectivity as a defining feature of complexity).

So, if you kick semiotics down to the efficient cause, what would be the formal cause?

I think this would be the mathematics of the system. This might be a totally wrong way to think about it, but I am very intrigued by the fact that incredibly disparate self organizing phenomena operate through extremely similar functions, and how incredibly common self similarity is. A formal cause that is tied to mathematics opens the possibility of unifying different sciences.

One example of the problems of non-living evolution and applying our current frameworks to them: https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/gavia/essential-character-non-life-evolution

Edit: Another issue for the epistemic cut occuring at the fuzzy boundary of life are modified Wigner's friend experiments showing that the role of an observer in physics may emerge at incredibly small scales, well below scales for the simplest organic molecules. This seems like it would result in two epistemic cuts, one for observation, a second for biologically relevant meaning.

You also have people fiddling around with the possibility of evolution at these incredibly small scales, but they are less convincing (still neat https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96048-6)

Can you give an example where information does work? — Daemon

As already discussed, pretty much every science 'above' chemistry leverages the concept heavily. I think we're going in circles now, so perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

This was sort of John Bell's problem with the information theories his work helped spawn.

What additionally does everything being information tell us? What is this information about?

He was more a fan of objective collapse and pilot wave theories.

Information ontology is sort of a reworking of logical positivism in some cases. It says simply that all you can say about a thing is all that there is to it. It helps make logical positivism no longer anti-realist by saying information is all that there is.

But it isn't just this sort of cheap reformation. There is very good reasons it became popular. It's a bit too much to set down here but if you're interested I would look into the holographic principal and information ontology. I don't know s great survey off the top of my head, but I know I didn't have to search super hard to find them.

As already discussed, pretty much every science 'above' chemistry leverages the concept heavily. — Theorem

Could you provide an actual case where information does something? I know people constantly use the term, but I've yet to see an example where "information" does any work. If you can't find one, have you ever thought about changing your mind?

It's a bit too much to set down here — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh dear what a shame. Couldn't you just find one teeny example in "Information Ontology" where information does some work?

I know people constantly use the term, but I've yet to see an example where "information" does any work. — Daemon

I guess I'm not sure anymore what you mean by 'doing some work'. You don't seem satisfied by the 'work' the concept is already doing within multiple disciplines. Could you clarify what you mean?

The present discussion is already littered with very straightforward examples of what I mean.

In a digital computer the work is done by electrical currents, microscopic bumps and depressions on disks, and so on. When you've described this electrical and mechanical process, there isn't anything left for "information" to do.

In genetics the work is done by nucleic acids and so on, and not by "information".

In our brains the work is done by electrochemical impulses, ion exchanges and so on, and not by "information".

In our brains the work is done by electrochemical impulses, ion exchanges and so on, and not by "information". — Daemon

In our minds, semantic information affects behaviour (e.g., modelling and communication).

How does the semantic information reach our minds?

HOST: So let's start at the very beginning. In a nutshell, what is the holographic principle?

HEADRICK: Well, as you said, the holographic principle is the idea that the universe around us, which we are used to thinking of as being three dimensional — we have three dimensions of space — is actually at a more fundamental level two dimensional and that everything we see that's going on around us in three dimensions is actually happening in a two-dimensional space.

HOST: Great. So let's break it down even further. This two-dimensional plane, what's it made of? It's made of what you call information?

HEADRICK: Right. So similarly to the bits and bytes that live on a compact disc, which encode, for example, a piece of music — on this plane, that's where the bits that fundamentally make up our universe live. That's where they're encoded and what they're encoding is what we see going on around us in three dimensions.

HOST: And when you say information, can you give me an example of a piece of information or unit of information?

HEADRICK: The concept of information is very general. When we're talking about computers, we think of bits and bytes and megabytes and so on. An example in physics of information would be, for example, the positions and velocities of physical objects.

HOST: And so you're saying that this information on a two-dimensional plane encodes for our three-dimensional universe?

HEADRICK: Exactly. Like in the compact disc example, it encodes some piece of music. In this case, it encodes what's going on in our universe.

HOST: You're now working on a big project with scientists around the world funded by the Simons Foundation to use the holographic principle to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics.

HEADRICK: The problem of combining quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity is one of the hardest problems in physics. So quantum mechanics is a theory that is usually used to describe things happening at very small scales, like atoms and nuclei, and so on. Einstein's theory of relativity is used to describe gravity and the universe on large scales.

As theoretical physicists, we're not satisfied to have two different theories. We need one, unified theory which encompasses both, and that's a very hard problem that theoretical physicists have been working on for the better part of the last hundred years. It turns out that this idea of the holographic principle or the universe is a hologram, although at first, it might seem like a completely random idea, it actually helps us to solve some of the thorniest puzzles that arise when you try to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity. That's why we're excited about and that's why we continue to study it.

https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/november/thetake-podcast-hologram.html

The problem is that, like Many Worlds, the idea seems nuts initially. Like physicists are putting us on. In fact, the holographic world and many worlds (which might coexist) is more taking the logical conclusions of extremely accurate equations that help us predict the world seriously, rather than adding ad hoc components to the theory to make them "make sense" with our pre-scientific, pre-philosophical intuitions (e.g., adding wave collapse to avoid multiple worlds, assuming the reality of space as it seems intuitively to us, etc.)

When you've described this electrical and mechanical process, there isn't anything left for "information" to do.

The corollary of this argument, the one that information ontology rests on is the question "once you've recorded all the information about an object, what else is there?" If the information about the object is the only thing you can show to exist, then the next step is to cut out the unnecessary metaphysics and posit that physical things are information.

I said it's too much to get into because without taking time to understand both the holographic principal and the formalism and experiments that led to "it from bit" being posited in the first place, you're not going understand why obviously very bright people embraced such incredibly counterintuitive ideas.

So, to put the question directly, how can you support the claim that all of the examples he cites here are physical? As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws. — Wayfarer

From a phenomenological perspective, it would not be the case that subjective experience stands apart from physical laws in its own realm, but that it is the condition of possibility of the natural attitude and its accompanying physical laws.

“The purely Objective consideration, which investigates the Objective sense of thingness, requires that things be dependent on one another as regards their states and that they, in their real existence, mutuallly prescribe something to one another, regard­ing, specifically, their ontological content, their causal states.
The question now is whether a thing, which indeed remains one thing under all circumstances, is the identical something of properties and is actually in itself solid and fixed with respect to its real properties; that is, is a thing an identity, an identical subject of identical properties, the changing element being only its states and circumstances? Would this not then mean that
according to the various circumstances into which it can be brought, or into which it can be thought to be introduced, the thing has different actual states, but that in advance- a priori - how it can behave, and, further, how it will behave, is predelineated by its own essence?

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the "Objectivity" of natural science.”(Husserl, Ideas II)

How does the semantic information reach our minds? — Daemon

Upon perception and/or intent, by evaluation of a sign.

HEADRICK: The concept of information is very general. When we're talking about computers, we think of bits and bytes and megabytes and so on.

Yes, we do think about those. That is to say, they are something in our minds. Not something in the computer.

If the information about the object is the only thing you can show to exist — Count Timothy von Icarus

But it isn't. It's something you can't show to exist. Wikipedia says the optic nerve carries visual information to the brain. But what it really does is conduct electrochemical impulses. What does the information do in addition to what the electrochemical impulses do?

The corollary of this argument, the one that information ontology rests on is the question "once you've recorded all the information about an object, what else is there?" If the information about the object is the only thing you can show to exist, then the next step is to cut out the unnecessary metaphysics and posit that physical things are information. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Relating this discussion of information, thermodynamics and semiotics back to the OP, which is the contribution of neuroscience to the elucidation of consciousness, I suggest that to the extent that neuroscience sees itself unproblematically as a naturalistic science, it will fail to grapple with what are emergingas the most relevant t tooics concerning what is inextricably correlated with consciousness , such as self-awareness, emotion, empathy , sense of identity and time.

Put differently, neuroscience needs to radically rethink reductionist models of ‘information’ and ‘code’ in the direction of phenomenology and Wittgenstein.

And how does perception take place? It's those electrochemical impulses (not information) travelling along the optic nerve, for example. And what causes any resulting behaviour? More electrochemical impulses.

And how does perception take place? It's those electrochemical impulses (not information) travelling along the optic nerve, for example. And what causes any resulting behaviour? More electrochemical impulses. — Daemon

Correct.
So, please explain sign evaluation in terms of electrochemical impulses.

You'll understand that "electrochemical impulses" is shorthand for all the brain processes.

In my son's lab they were able to identify individual neurons firing when a mouse saw a line moving on a screen. The mouse would press a button when it saw the line, to get a reward. Is that close enough to "sign evaluation" for you? It all takes place thanks to the bioelectrochemical processes (and not "information").

The mouse would press a button when it saw the line, to get a reward. Is that close enough to "sign evaluation" for you? It all takes place thanks to the bioelectrochemical processes (and not "information"). — Daemon

How would you talk about the difference between the chemical environment of the sun vs the earth. They both involve law-governed interactions among particles. The
chemical environment on earth is clearly different than the sun, but is it just different or different in a particular way? What about the difference between inorganic and living processes, or between lower and higher animals , or the. neurological organization with the brain as we move from early humans up through cultural history? Would you agree that the kinds of differences we are looking at have to do with increases in the complexity of organization?

How do bioelectrochemical processes express increases in complexity of neural organization as opposed to just arbitrary differences? How do we know that a sequence of chemicalinteractions is a pattern rather than an arbitrary causal chain of events? Within a causal physical description , what is the difference between pattern and random causal change?

How do bioelectrochemical processes express increases in complexity of neural
organization as opposed to just arbitrary differences? — Joshs

I'm not sure why you're asking these interesting questions.

I don't think those processes do "express" increases in complexity. A little more explanation perhaps?

It's a hard concept to wrap your mind around. These theories look at information as the ontological basis for reality. Information is more real than electrons; electrons are just an abstraction we've created to understand how the equations we use in physics make sense. We think of them as little balls with charge, but that's not actually what they are in any current physical theory.

A big place people get confused is the difference between information when defined as what is transmitted in a channel for things like web traffic, morse code, etc. versus information as essentially ontic. The same concepts are in play, but in information ontology, we're looking at the maximum amount of information that can be extracted by any observation for all systems.

The Shannon Entropy of a signal in a channel can be much less than the total Boltzmann entropy of the channel; in fact, it almost always will be. There is a lot of confusion around Shannon and Boltzmann entropy, because the two are the same equation aside from one using log2 and one using the natural log. They aren't the same thing though, as Shannon Entropy doesn't follow some of the other laws of thermodynamics.

That leads to even more confusion around information ontology. People are used to thinking of the Shannon Entropy as a portion of a physical channel associated with a signal, something that is less than the Boltzmann entropy.

With information ontology though, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the information content of things (the surface of space time, fundamental particles, etc.). This article on the information content of the observable universe might help:

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0064475

These radical theories are based on the principle that information is physical, the information is registered by physical systems, and all physical systems can register information.25 Accordingly, there is a given amount of information stored in the universe, regardless whether it is observed or not. The proposed existence of this information imposes some fundamental questions about it: “Why is there information stored in the universe and where is it?” and “How much information is stored in the universe?” Let us deal with these questions in detail.

To answer the first question, let us imagine an observer tracking and analyzing a random elementary particle. Let us assume that this particle is a free electron moving in the vacuum of space, but the observer has no prior knowledge of the particle and its properties. Upon tracking the particle and commencing the studies, the observer will determine, via meticulous measurements, that the particle has a mass of 9.109 × 10–31 kg, charge of −1.602 × 10–19 C, and a spin of 1/2. If the examined particle was already known or theoretically predicted, then the observer would be able to match its properties to an electron, in this case, and to confirm that what was observed/detected was indeed an electron. The key aspect here is the fact that by undertaking the observations and performing the measurements, the observer did not create any information. The three degrees of freedom that describe the electron, any electron anywhere in the universe, or any elementary particle, were already embedded somewhere, most likely in the particle itself. This is equivalent to saying that particles and elementary particles store information about themselves, or by extrapolation, there is an information content stored in the matter of the universe. Due to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle,22 we postulate that information can only be stored in particles that are stable and have a non-zero rest mass, while interaction/force carrier bosons can only transfer information via waveform. Hence, in this work, we are only examining the information content stored in the matter particles that make up the observable universe, but it is important to mention that information could also be stored in other forms, including on the surface of the space–time fabric itself, according to the holographic principle.13

Now, in all quantum theories I know of, particles lack haecceity. That is, they lack an essential thisness of identity unique to them; this is sort of the opposite of substratum theories in metaphysics. That alone is a tough concept, but this is a fairly good, accessible article on it: https://nautil.us/quantum-mechanics-is-putting-human-identity-on-trial-3977/

Without haecceity, all a particle is, is the information it carries. That is the first essential thing for information ontology. The second is the aforementioned holographic principal, discovered in black hole research.

The information of a system is represented by its area, not its volume. Experimental results and the mathematics of how information works has convinced some people that information is more ontologically basic than fundamental particles or quantum fields. This is a decent intro: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-in-the-holographic-univ/

So, when you say: "the information going through the optic nerve is just electrical impulses," you are correct (if we simplify how sight works considerably). The pattern of action potentials in the optic nerve is a signal, mostly carried by electrical currents. What information ontology is saying is that, when you look very closely, at the most basic level, you will not find electrons. What you will find is information representing electrons; information is the basement of ontological entities, it doesn't go any deeper.

I don't think those processes do "express" increases in complexity. A little more explanation perhaps? — Daemon

Much of our orientation toward science and other aspects of life is based on learning and growth of knowledge. Standard of living is measured by economic productivity , which is a product of innovation. Is there a direction to knowledge or just random
change?

Descartes thought we were born with a divinely given ability to ascertain rational truths about the world. Kant believed truth was pattern
or scheme-based. We contribute our own categories to our experience of the world, so that causal
relations of physical stuff come pre- ordered in some fashion. Biologists now talk about living systems as self-organizing. Their functioning is norm-based tether than just arbitrary relations among chemicals.

What’s crucial in these examples are the concepts of complexity , pattern, scheme, thematics, normativity. I think they imply a non-linear, reciprocal feedback idea of interaction between physical entities that is a more sophisticated understanding of causality than linear causal dynamics allows for.

Now, in all quantum theories I know of, particles lack haecceity. That is, they an essential thisness of identity unique to them; — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's an error in this Tim, could you correct it so I can understand?

What’s crucial in these examples are the concepts of complexity , pattern, scheme, thematics, normativity. I think they imply a non-linear, reciprocal feedback idea of interaction between physical entities that is a more sophisticated understanding of causality than linear causal dynamics allows for. — Joshs

What's the relevance to consciousness or the mind?

So, when you say: "the information going through the optic nerve is just electrical impulses," you are correct (if we simplify how sight works considerably). The pattern of action potentials in the optic nerve is a signal. What information ontology is saying is that, when you look very closely, at the most basic level, you will not find electrons. What you will find is information representing electrons; information is the basement of ontological entities, it doesn't go any deeper. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What does the information do in addition to what the electrons do?

What's the relevance to consciousness or the mind? — Daemon

The model of a normatively based dynamical non-linear reciprocal feedback system is precisely how many are. now conceiving of consciousness. See Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life’.

I think the big question here is if the higher level knowing of conciousness is essentially something totally new (type dualism at a high level of emergence), or is the result of something entirely different, something due to the special intrinsic nature of physical symbols such as letters, DNA, etc. (substance dualism). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of Biological Thought he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’ — Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?

Hence the emphasis in biosemiotics about the centrality of signs and signalling to biological processes.

things without intrinsic meaning transmit meaning to knowers...... if something as simple as heat can be a signal carrying a complex meaning, then it doesn't seem like all meaning must come from the intrinsic features of symbols. — Count Timothy von Icarus

'Transmitting meaning' to knowers requires that there be a knowing subject. Rational subjects can draw conclusions based on inference. I don't see how that is relevant.

The substance dualism approach also seems to run into significant issues when it claims that computer algorithms don't process meaning because they aren't "alive." This seems strange given that they are composed of and use symbols to sustain themselves, symbols that are supposedly inheritly meaningful. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Computers are human artefacts. Whatever meaning they convey, is dependent on that.

About 'substance dualism' - There's a significant discrepancy with how the term 'substance' is used today and what it originally conveyed in philosophy. Recall that the original Aristotelian term was 'ousia' which is a derivative of the word 'to be' or 'being'. It was translated into Latin as 'substantia', and later as 'substance', meaning 'the bearer of attributes', 'that which stands under' 1. But in ordinary language substance means 'a material property with uniform properties'. So, in practice, the idea of 'res cogitans', 'thinking substance', seems to connote some kind of thinking thing or stuff - indeed, 'thing' is the literal meaning of the term 'res'. And I personally believe that it is the idea of a 'thinking thing or stuff' that seems most implausible in Cartesian dualism. That is the subject of comment by Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences, because he felt that there is an inevitable distortion that crept in by way of the 'objectification' of the res cogitans, even while recognising the fundamental point that Descartes made.

Hence my point that in reality, the 'thinking being' is never the object of perception - so, not a thing! Sure, we can think about thinking, but the 'thinking being' (i.e. the transcendental ego of Kant and Husserl) is always 'the unknown knower'. (This ties into the 'blind spot of science' argument. But this is still not satisfactory from the 'objectivist' attitude as there is no thing there to objectify. It requires something like a gestalt shift to grasp it.)

From a phenomenological perspective, it would not be the case that subjective experience stands apart from physical laws in its own realm, but that it is the condition of possibility of the natural attitude and its accompanying physical laws. — Joshs

Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the "Objectivity" of natural science.” — Joshs

:clap: Precisely. It's very compatible with the idea of 'dependent co-arising' in Buddhism, hence the ease with which Varela and Thompson were able to synthesize Husserl and Abhidharma.

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? — Joshs

Asked Nāgārjuna :smile:

In definitions of evolution that avoid this circularity, it seems languages and computer viruses, even crystals, may be living things (as well as biological viruses). — Count Timothy von Icarus

For my money, definitions like Pattee’s epistemic cut, Salthe's infodynamics, Rosen’s metabolism-repair systems, Friston's Bayesian mechanics, all put their finger on the critical biosemiotic issue. Life and mind are all about rate independent information in control of rate dependent dynamics.

So nature has plenty of examples of physico-chemical dissipative structure - energy being turned to entropy and creating informational structure so as to stabilise that flow in a "far from equilibrium" fashion.

A tornado exists as the vortex structure that it is because it dissipates a heat gradient. And a tornado even seems half alive as it runs around a plain "eating" where there is the most gradient to eat.

But actual life adds the modelling relation by being able to encode information and form first person memories of the past that inform its first person expectations about the future.

Computers fail the "living organism" test as they don't use information to construct their own metabolisms or manage their own physical environments. They are not plugged into their own "world" or umwelt, in cybernetic, self-interested, fashion. Some human comes along to plug them into a wall socket and away they go - crunching memories that aren't their own to produce expectations that aren't for them.

Plenty of complex phenomena, seeming miracles of life, actually end up being described by the same mathematics that can describe phenomena in diffuse inorganic systems (earthquakes and heart cells sharing the same model for synchrony). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is why I would treat dissipative structure as the new core model of physics. It would be the pansemiotic theory of existence. A metaphysics based on natural thermodynamic structure rather than an atomistic materialism.

And of course, that is where physics is going. Particles and vacuums become quantum topological order in quantum condensates. The universe is a Big Bang spreading~cooling its way to its holographic Heat Death - a hot excitation falling into its own heat sink. Whether you are talking strings, loops or preons, the motivating idea is that of irreducible topological order from which you get the macro-emergence of an entropic spacetime filled with a randomness of thermalising particle events.

So all of physics and chemistry can be cashed out as the structuralism of "far from equilibrium" statistical mechanics. As with a tornado, half the job of being alive and mindful is done. Then life and mind become a simple, mechanical, addition to the organic flows - semiotic codes colonising the great entropy gradients like the original "earth battery" of plate tectonics that drove the sea vent origins of life, and the daily solar flux that eventually put life on a much more generic photosynthetic footing.

So pansemiosis = dissipative structure theory. And biosemiosis is dissipative structure brought under informational regulation in organismic fashion.

Quite a number of biological scientists have been describing the same elephant using their own jargon for the past 40 years. Harold Morowitz had already said it by the 1960s.

The efficient causes are actually where I might put information and meaning. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. Those are the levers that you would want to know about so you can pull them. Rosen's modelling relation says this.

In Rosen’s (1991) account, a material system is an organism if and only if it is closed to efficient cause. A system is closed to efficient cause if its components have efficient causes generated within the system, and effects that contribute to the production of other efficient causes....

...When explaining the (M, R)-systems, Rosen (1991) points out that it is closure to efficient cause that solves the problems of metabolism, repair and replication of the system. In an organism, the final cause of a component is its contribution to the self-maintenance of the (metabolism, self-repair and organizational invariance of the) system.

So, if you kick semiotics down to the efficient cause, what would be the formal cause? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The model needs to be cashed out as a set of efficient causes. The organism needs to break down its intentions into the simplest and most economical actions that will produce the outcome state it desires. It has to reduce its world to an arrangement of buttons and switches as far as it is concerned.

For example, if the finality is the desire to turn some metabolic cycle on or off, then the smart form of things is to have a chemistry that is all set and ready to go, as a self-organising dissipative gradient, but then add a tiny regulating switch in the shape of an enzyme that can be synthesised at any time and inserted into the mix at the critical point, so releasing the material cause to do its self-organising thing.

That is why reductionism is so wonderfully effective as pragmatic science. It is all about modelling reality as an entropic gradient that has its various easy tipping points, and so the job is to get in there and design the little mechanical devices that can do the tipping on a human command. Scientific theories are models closed for efficient causality, just as Rosen describes.

But that doesn't mean an organism is only a matter of material and efficient cause. Every organism is informed in globally coherent fashion by its past experience. Its world model, as a whole, has Darwinian-filtered structure that embodies an intentional and functional point of view.

I am very intrigued by the fact that incredibly disparate self organizing phenomena operate through extremely similar functions, and how incredibly common self similarity is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Self-similarity is a generic feature of nature because being an open system is more generic than being a closed one. Stephen Franks did a good paper on the statistical patterns of nature.

So a log/log or powerlaw statistical pattern is simpler than a normal/normal or Gaussian bell curve distribution because the powerlaw relation is "truly unbounded randomness". The bell curve only can arise by adding bounds that confine the variety to some single mean value, some single scale of being and not the greater symmetry of fractal being.

All this is part of the same paradigm shift. Physics has been built on closed system perspectives - the bounded equilibrium view. But that is essentially a dead world, gone to its final state. It is a description of nature in which formal and final cause have been excluded - because the system already has been granted fixed bounds and has already got to wherever it wanted to go.

There is a huge sleight of hand going on here that no-one ever notices. But the dead world view is also the one that focuses all the attention on efficient and material causality. So the human imagination finds great value in seeing the physical world as dead (and not pansemiotic) as that then gives it the most freedom to "bring the world alive" with humanity's own god-like animating hand.

But actually, the more generic view of nature is the open systems one. The one that dissipative structure theory now models. Even cosmology is stumbling towards that - but without really considering the metaphysical reasons why that is so.

One example of the problems of non-living evolution and applying our current frameworks to them: https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/gavia/essential-character-non-life-evolution — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an example of what I'm talking about. Abiogenesis is currently split between the warm alkaline vent model of the origins of life and the stagnant muddy pool model.

The first is about an open dissipative gradient - a proton force at the boundary of alkaline vent water flows and its mixing with acid seawater - that must then get enclosed and harnessed for the manufacture of complex organics.

The other says much the same evolved in a stagnant and dead situation. So it explains the present of the organics - a soup of crud that accumulates as the result of local gone-to-equilibrium chemical processes - but then not the proton motive force that starts to spin the wheels of the metabolism. It has the closure before the open bioenergetic flow. And it seems more logical to have the flow before its closure.

Edit: Another issue for the epistemic cut occurring at the fuzzy boundary of life are modified Wigner's friend experiments showing that the role of an observer in physics may emerge at incredibly small scales, well below scales for the simplest organic molecules. This seems like it would result in two epistemic cuts, one for observation, a second for biologically relevant meaning. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Absolutely. Quantum decoherence has its epistemic cut at the Planck scale. That is where Heisenberg uncertainty defines the fundamental level at which some distinction between the metric background and the entropic action can be made.

Then life and mind have their epistemic cut at the semiclassical nanoscale. This is where molecular machines can first be constructed without being blown apart by entropic forces or quantum uncertainty. Enough bulk properties can emerge for molecular switches and ratchets to be built and used to implement an intentional structure of dissipation-harnessing biological machinery.

I highly recommend Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, as a book that sums all this up.

So yes, that is key to making sense of pansemiosis vs biosemiosis. First the wavefunction must be collapsed to create a classical world fit for mechanical structure. Gluing statistical mechanics to quantum mechanics to get thermal decoherence gives you that. The Planckscale is built in because that defines k, or Boltzmann's constant, at the heart of all the thermo/informational maths.

And then - only widely realised in the past 15 years - the nanoscale of physics in warm water is a "magical" convergence zone in the scale of many different forms of energy. Thermal, chemical, mechanical and electrostatic forces all converge to be equivalent in scale - a fact that means one form of energy can be converted into the other forms of energy at "no cost". And this scale is the typical size scale of biological macromolecules. So these molecules can become the free choices of some higher intelligence - the many kinds of devices, such as motor proteins and enzymes, that a living organism throws into the fray to get the chemistry organised and constructing a body with its global intentional structure.

So life and mind are completely an accident of the fact that all the different kinds of physical energies come together in a way that the cost of switching from one form to another is a near frictionless transaction. Only the slightest nudge is needed to convert the potential of a chemical gradient into some useful mechanical action.

Life and mind are thus accounted for by semiosis - the further possibility of nature having codes and modelling relations.

Nature has the open and flowing dissipative gradients. It has a zone of convergence where all its different energies have the same scale. All life had to do was add the judicious nudges that tips these energies in helpful directions. It can then store energy as chemical potentials, and spend energy as acts of material construction.

So biosemiosis is physicalist and material at root. But it is also, as a "four causes" story, the least constrained by its basis in the reductionist paradise of material and efficient cause. It is thus - reciprocally - the most free in terms of being able to then structure reality according to its own wishes and designs.

Phillips and Quake first fingered the significance of this nanoscale convergence zone in a review paper.

You also have people fiddling around with the possibility of evolution at these incredibly small scales, but they are less convincing (still neat https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96048-6) — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you can see why this particular approach - which wants to start life off down at the photonic/absolute zero level - makes a big wrong move?

Life and mind arise in an already complex world - the semiclassical nanoscale. You need to have a variety of energies to play off against each other. And you need a warm thermal environment as the free gradient that you ratchet for work.

You even need to start at a classical level above the quantum effects so you can go back in an harness those quantum effects - the quantum tunnelling and entanglement that enzymes and photosynthesis employs.

So the pansemiotic epistemic cut of the Comos has been discovered. It's the Planck scale. And the biosemiotic epistemic cut of life and mind has been discovered. It is the semi-classical convergence zone of the nanoscale chemistry of room temperature solutions.