Ha, sorry, that should read:

"That is, they lack an essential thisness of identity unique to them."

They fail the criteria of Leibnitz Law for indiscernibility, which is:

If, for every property F, object x has F if and only if object y has F, then x is identical to y. Or in the notation of symbolic logic:

∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y.

It's similar to an easier to understand problem in metaphysics. Bundle theories, the metaphysical theories of objects where an object is totally defined by the tropes or universals it possesses (tropes in the case of nominalists, universals in the case for realists) have a hard problem with multiple instances of completely identical objects. They are numerically distinct, yet identical in all their traits. Think of two green balls that are exactly alike. If they are alike in every way, shape, color, chemical composition, etc., how can they be two different things?

You can claim that they do have different properties, properties like Ball A being north of Ball B, or Ball B being below Ball A. The problem here is that these properties are all derived properties; they are contingent on a relationship. Such properties do not define a thing. If they did, then your identity would change as you move, such that the "you" inside your home is not the "you" once you leave, due to a shift in derived properties (note: this whole issue is only problem for bundle theories that posit that an object is just a collection of traits). So, bundle theorists seem to be stuck saying Ball A and Ball B are actually the same ball, appearing in two places. This is a blow to bundle theory, but some will still maintain that always having different spatio-temporal location is enough to maintain a discernible identity as far as Leibnitz Law in concerned.

Now in particle physics, we have the same problem; particles are completely identical. Worse still, while classical objects don't share the same location, that is not always the case on quantum scales. Thus, it ends up appearing that particles have no identity at all outside the type of particle they are. Or, if they are just excitations in a field, they are all the same excitation.

Lately though, there has been some debate as to how indiscernible particles really are. In some cases, they may not be fully indiscernible, the jury is out.

For the most part though, we are told not to assume that an electron we trapped in a box will remain the same electron when we open the box. Or, another proposed way to look at it is to say there is only one electron. The electron is not affected by time, and so it can be everywhere at once.

For a bit more detail:

French & Redhead’s proof is based on the assumption that when we consider a set of n particles of the same type, any property of the ith particle can be represented by an operator of the form Oi = I(1) ⊗ I(2) ⊗ … ⊗ O(i) ⊗ … ⊗ I(n), where O is a Hermitian operator acting on the single-particle Hilbert space ℋ. Now it is easy to prove that the expectation values of two such operators Oi and Oj calculated for symmetric and antisymmetric states are identical. Similarly, it can be proved that the probabilities of revealing any value of observables of the above type conditional upon any measurement outcome previously revealed are the same for all n particles.

The original paper.
An easier write up .

Now, keep this lack of haecceity in mind and think of how different particles might be seen to function very much like the way letters function in a text (a "T" is always a T; the specific T is meaningless, only its role in a word matters). You get a view of reality more similar to how we tend to think of language, than the view we get of particles as tiny balls bouncing around (which is itself just an abstraction).

The model of a normatively based dynamical non-linear reciprocal feedback system is precisely how many are now conceiving of consciousness. — Joshs

So consciousness is a feedback system? I'm afraid I don't get it. I know the brain has many feedback systems, but there's a lot more to it than that.

I see that Evan Thompson argues that "Where there is life, there is mind."

Bacteria direct their movements according to the level of noxious or beneficial chemicals in their environment. In order to swim in the right direction (let's say towards an attractive chemical) it seems that the bacterium must be able to track the change in concentration of the chemical over time. That would seem to require a memory, which is an aspect of mind.

However, we know exactly how this process, chemotaxis, works in bacteria, down to an astounding level of detail. Here's a snippet from a really interesting and detailed article on the topic, little of which I understand:

Increased concentrations of attractants act via their MCP receptors to cause an immediate inhibition of CheA kinase activity. The same changes in MCP conformation that inhibit CheA lead to relatively slow increases in MCP methylation by CheR, so that despite the continued presence of attractant, CheA activity is eventually restored to the same value it had in the absence of attractant. Conversely, CheB acts to demethylate the MCPs under conditions that cause elevated CheA activity. Methylation and demethylation occur much more slowly than phosphorylation of CheA and CheY. The methylation state of the MCPs can thereby provide a memory mechanism that allows a cell to compare its present situation to its recent past.

There's much, much more of this, but the end result is that the bacterium's swimming behaviour is modified so that it swims towards nice things.

I don't doubt that our minds ultimately developed from similar foundations, but we can see that the bacterium achieves what it does without consciousness. So I don't agree with Thompson when he says where there is life there is mind.

Now in particle physics, we have the same problem; particles are completely identical. Worse still, while classical objects don't share the same location, that is not always the case on quantum scales. Thus, it ends up appearing that particles have no identity at all outside the type of particle they are. Or, if they are just excitations in a field, they are all the same excitation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In particle physics, no two identical particles share the same location. Identical particles can take each other's place at most. We never know which of the two identical outgoing particles was the incoming but the particles themselves know.

There is one exception though. If they disappear simultaneously from two points in space and simultaneously appear on two other points, they might be confused. Imagine disappearing at the same time as your identical partner. Then you both appear again at the same time. Who's who?

Thank you Count Timothy, that is sort of interesting but I recently watched this Royal Institute lecture by David Tong, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge and he says that everything is fields and not particles at all.

https://youtu.be/zNVQfWC_evg

He didn't say that under the fields there is information.

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". — Daemon

Your critique is analogous to looking at a painting through a high-powered microscope and saying, 'there's no Mona Lisa here, just a bunch of organic compounds'.

Information is an emergent pattern of relations amongst physical systems that occurs at a higher level of abstraction than the underlying chemistry. It's not 'something more' than the underlying chemistry, just like the Mona Lisa isn't 'something more' than the materials that make it up. And yet if you were to take every individual atom that makes up the Mona Lisa and pile them up on a table, the Mona Lisa would cease to exist. That's because the Mona Lisa exists as a result of the very specific constraints that have been imposed (via the work of the artist) on the underlying substrate.

Biological information is similar. It's just a pattern that emerges at a specific level of abstraction (roughly the level at which life emerges) through the imposition of constraints on the underlying substrates. When you zoom in too far it 'disappears'. When you zoom back out it's impossible to miss. These patterns are most aptly described via the language of information, just like the patterns that arise at the level of the compound are most aptly described by the language of chemistry.

Your critique is analogous to looking at a painting through a high-powered microscope and saying, 'there's no Mona Lisa here, just a bunch of organic compounds'. — Theorem

Or saying "there's no organic compounds there, just a bunch of bosons, leptons and quarks.

Bacteria direct their movements according to the level of noxious or beneficial chemicals in their environment. In order to swim in the right direction (let's say towards an attractive chemical) it seems that the bacterium must be able to track the change in concentration of the chemical over time. That would seem to require a memory, which is an aspect of mind. — Daemon

Bacteria do more than track levels of chemicals. The nature of their functioning is unified such as to form a normative anticipative sense-making. The organism doesn’t just adapt to an independent environment. It co-defines that environment through the aims of its its own functioning. Put differently , the environment is shaped by the organism as much as the organism adapts to its environment. That’s a reciprocal feedback dynamic.

“Bacterial chemotaxis provides a minimal yet rich and fundamental case of living as sense-making in precarious conditions. Sucrose and aspartate, for example, have valence as attractants and significance as food, but only in the milieu or niche that emerges through bacterial liv-ing. Put another way, the status of these molecules as nutrients is not intrinsic to their molecular structure; nor is it even simply a relational feature of how these molecules can bond to other molecules in the cell membrane.

Rather, it belongs to the context of the cell as an individual, that is, as a self-individuating process that be-haves as a unity in dynamic concert with its immediate environment. When Merleau-Ponty writes, in his lecture course on Nature (discussing von Uexküll), “the reactions of the animal in the milieu . . . behaviors . . . deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of objects,” his description applies also to microbial life: the reactions of the bacteria in their milieu—their tumbling and directed swimming—deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of molecules. Clearly, this significance depends on the structural features of physiochemical processes; it depends on the molecules being able to form a gradient, traverse a cell membrane, and so on. For this reason, the physico-chemical world is not formless and undifferentiated, receiving form only from living beings; rather, the physicochemical world is a morphodynamical world of qualitative discontinuities that offer regions of salience for living beings. But the significance and valence of these saliencies as attractants and repellents emerges only given the bacterial cell as a metabolic and behavioral unity—in other words, as a living being.”

we can see that the bacterium achieves what it does without consciousness. So I don't agree with Thompson when he says where there is life there is mind. — Daemon

I would argue that the unified functioning of the bacterium is a kind of proto-consciousness. It involves sense-making, affective valence and intentional purposiveness.

“My proposal, spelled out in Mind in Life, is that living as sense-making in precarious conditions is the living source of intentionality. Sense-making is threefold: (1) sensibility as openness to the environment (intentionality as openness); (2) significance as positive or negative valence of environmental conditions relative to the norms of the living being (intentionality as passive synthesis— passivity, receptivity, and affect); and (3) the direction or orientation the living being adopts in response to significance and valence (intentionality as protentional and teleological). This threefold framework structures my discussions in Mind in Life of the sensorimotor and affective sense-making of animal life, which is made possible by the unique structure of the nervous system, as well as my discussions of human forms of sense-making, such as time-consciousness, emotion, and the participatory sense-making of empathy and social cognition.”
(Evan Thompson)

Information is an emergent pattern of relations amongst physical systems that occurs at a higher level of abstraction than the underlying chemistry. It's not 'something more' than the underlying chemistry, just like the Mona Lisa isn't 'something more' than the materials that make it up. That's because the Mona Lisa exists as a result of the very specific constraints that have been imposed (via the work of the artist) on the underlying substrate. — Theorem

Is the Mona Lisa the result of constraints on the part of the artist or a change in perspectival attitude of both artist and viewer, a kind of gestalt shift that transforms the sense of what one is perceiving?

Now, keep this lack of haecceity in mind and think of how different particles might be seen to function very much like the way letters function in a text (a "T" is always a T; the specific T is meaningless, only its role in a word matters). You get a view of reality more similar to how we tend to think of language, than the view we get of particles as tiny balls bouncing around (which is itself just an abstraction). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m curious. Do you consider this thinking on information and semiotics that you have been discussing to be philosophy, and if so, what do you think is its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers? Peirce tends to be mentioned by semioticians as their patron saint , but there tends to be no mention by this group of the croute word Peirce by Dewey and James and the implications of this for semiotics. Do you think that the role that philosophers used to play in dealing with questions concerning the ground of being has now been usurped by the natural sciences? Is the proper role
of philosophy today merely that of clarification of empirical findings?

The husked kernel-stuff is the latex glove? Are the latex gloves doing the yanking of the a-physical kernel stuff out of the shell it's contained in? — EugeneW

This is a just an analogy, but it'll help me make my point perhaps. Let's imagine 'mind' and 'matter' as $- \infty$ and $+ \infty$ respectively. Then our world is $( - \infty, + \infty )$ and doesn't actually include 'pure' mind or 'pure' matter. Some stuff in the world is especially 'mind-like' or 'mental' while other stuff is especially 'matter-like' or 'physical.' (This isn't delivered on stone tablets as a theory but rather as clog-loosening hypothetical alternative.)

The 'kernel stuff' is the (imagined or abstracted) 'purely mental' stuff. It's like a philosophical thought that is not yes dressed in a human language (or stripped of every garment it's ever owned.) The 'husk stuff' is the shadow of this kernel stuff, cast off as dead, secondary crap. But then resurrected by some philosophers as the obscure grime that's really really really real, whatever it really really is. This is the space junk that'll be left if all life in the omniverse is wiped out.

The abstracting or yanking out is a kind of methodical ignorance that ignores currently irrelevant context. The latex gloves symbolize the necessity of caution when handling the kryptonite of philosophers, the informaniacal Mental.

When you zoom in too far it 'disappears'. When you zoom back out it's impossible to miss. These patterns are most aptly described via the language of information, just like the patterns that arise at the level of the compound are most aptly described by the language of chemistry. — Theorem

Well put.

If they are alike in every way, shape, color, chemical composition, etc., how can they be two different things? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Always wondered if this was the intuition behind Wheeler's one electron universe.

The abstracting or yanking out is a kind of methodical ignorance that ignores currently irrelevant context. The latex gloves symbolize the necessity of caution when handling the kryptonite of philosophers, the informaniacal Mental — lll

I can kill information with bare hands when necessary. I don't consider it kryptonite, rather a modern computer based tool, the it-from-bit tool to explain away an obvious property of matter that cannot be explained otherwise. In that context it's called an illusion, an epiphenomenon, or an emergent property. Which is the question.

I don't consider it kryptonite, rather a modern computer based tool — EugeneW

I'm thinking of the work of 'Lard-rag Rat-gum-slime' and his demolition of so much traditional confusion on the mind-matter issue in that indiscipline noun as mutterphysics. Repeating Nietzsche in his own way, he provides a battery of examples of us flossoffers bean misled by grammar, bewitched by habits in our sign slinging. In 'odor words,' 'lung reach is a broth dump flu of as it.'

I would argue that the unified functioning of the bacterium is a kind of proto-consciousness. It involves sense-making, affective valence and intentional purposiveness. — Joshs

The point of the example was to show that the bacterium's behaviour does not involve sense-making, affective valence and intentional purposiveness.

Sense-making is a conscious activity. The bacterium is not conscious. We know in intricate detail how it moves towards attractants, and it doesn't involve consciousness.

Much of what we do ourselves is also unconscious. If you want to say the bacterium is conscious, then you'll also have to say that say our digestive system is conscious, that it makes sense of the food we eat and acts with intentional purposiveness.

Consciousness is about feeling, experience. There's no reason to think the bacterium feels anything, that it has any conscious experience. We know how it does what it does, we can describe that down to the finest detail, and we know that it's an unconscious process (like our digestion).

Your critique is analogous to looking at a painting through a high-powered microscope and saying, 'there's no Mona Lisa here, just a bunch of organic compounds'. — Theorem

Whereas I'd say your approach is analogous to looking at a piece of burned toast and saying "there is the face of Jesus Christ".

The interpretation of the marks in both cases is a mental activity. Christ is not in the toast, he's in your mind.

Is the Mona Lisa the result of constraints on the part of the artist or a change in perspectival attitude of both artist and viewer, a kind of gestalt shift that transforms the sense of what one is perceiving? — Joshs

We might usefully think about this vertical line:

I

Do you see what I'm getting at Joshs?

Whereas I'd say your approach is analogous to looking at a piece of burned toast and saying "there is the face of Jesus Christ". — Daemon

The difference, as has already been pointed out, is that 'information' is an indispensable theoretical tool used across multiple disciplines, whereas we can get along just fine without the face of Christ in our toast.

The interpretation of the marks in both cases is a mental activity. Christ is not in the toast, he's in your mind. — Daemon

If it were impossible to describe the toast without referring to Christ then you'd have a point.

You seem to have decided (rather arbitrarily) that patterns occurring above the level of physical chemistry exist only in our imaginations. So far you haven't provided any compelling reasons for making this demarcation.

Further to this:

The paper lays out and important area of research, but unfortunately it's not what I was hoping for, which is an explanation of why meaning can't be physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A human author encodes semantic data (thoughts and/or emotions) in their mind into a physical form (linguistic code), such as speech sound (spoken human language) or script (written human language) suitable for transmission (energy propagation) and/or conveyance through a physical medium or channel to other people.

When conveyed linguistic code is received (a message heard or read) and decoded (comprehended) it becomes semantic information in another person's mind.

I reject the notion that physical code is intrinsically semantic (contains meaning), because meaning can only be assigned by a mind (interpretation), and acquired by a mind (comprehension).

For example, after the end of ancient Egyptian civilisation, and before the translation of the Rosetta Stone, nobody knew what Egyptian hieroglyphs meant.

Communication requires that informer and informee have an intersubjective knowledge of the code used in a message.

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

I don't have time to go into all the responses right away, but I think the point is particularly relevant. What the passage seemed to be suggesting is that DNA, letters, mathematical symbols, etc. are unique in their ability to store meaning, particularly meaning that can somehow represent violations of physical laws.

The point here is that such meaning can be derived as the result of signals from non-living systems. Indeed, sometimes the random noise is the signal. For example, when I used to work on combat training sims for National Guard units deploying to Afghanistan, I might spend a day driving around high clearance 4x4 trails on the base with our comms equipment listening not for the music we left playing on a channel, but for static. The random noise was the signal; it held information on the boundaries of where the equipment worked. That's all I cared about at the time, but the boundaries of the equipment were also irregular. The density of the forest, hills, etc. effected the signal, so the noise also contained information on the landscape.

The point is that meaning isn't contingent on something inherit to the symbol being used. The quoted part above rightly mentions the "rational subject," drawing inferences, whereas the idea I don't necissarily agree with is the symbols themselves holding any special role here. The symbols only gain the special properties attributed to them due to their role in computation.

More to the point, I don't think symbols recording things inaccurately or in ways that violate physical laws is anything special at all. Such violations are the natural result of any computation that uses compressed information that has lost fidelity and is subject to error. It's also natural to computation that uses simplification to reduce energy use.

Organisms necissarily take in a tiny fraction of the information they have access too. Recording just the entire phase space of one mole of hydrogen in one liter of gas takes an incredible amount of storage, not to mention you'd need sensory organs able to discriminate between different microstates to record such information.

Organisms have sensory systems that bring in an extremely small amount of information about the environment, with selection of what information can even be discriminated based on natural selection. The default in complex organisms with nervous systems is to then subject this small amount of information to a bunch of computational analysis and also compression for storage. Low levels of discrimination results in a lot of information in the enviornment being treated as synonymous. (This happens at the level of bacteria too, the cell membrane is designed to treat much of the variance in the environment as identical.)

For example, if you saw this text in one shade of red on a background of a different, but similar enough shade of red, one that the human vision system would be incapable of discriminating from the first shade, it'd be meaningless, despite the underlying code representing the text being almost identical aside from a small slice of HTML code for the background color.

Organisms have to be very selective about what information they bring into sensory systems because information is energy. This means they have to rely on computation. Computational systems don't necissarily follow the laws of nature. They can compress and abstract information, formal relations, etc. to make more simplistic models of the world. When they do this, they are going to produce inaccurate models of the world that violate physics.

Newtonian physics is an example of a system mostly developed by the study of non-biological objects. It's the rational observers who derive the model, not anything intrinsically meaningful about the objects. It ends up violating the laws of physics, but it took a long time to recognize this because human sensory systems don't bring in much data from the very small scales at which Newtonian physics breaks down.

A machine learning algorithm is also able to generate inaccurate pictures of physics from data.

To sum up: The whole phenomena of this disconnect between symbols and reality doesn't suggest a black box cut to me at all. It's a logical consequence of data compression and how computation works that computations can be inaccurate. Natural selection won't eliminate inaccurate computation necissarily, the models employed by organisms to navigate the enviornment just need to be "good enough." Natural selection will never push life into an optimal computational structure for representing the world (i.e., computation will always be inaccurate) due to the fact that the minimum algorithmic entropy (Kolmogorov complexity) for representing X is not computable due to logical contradiction (e.g., halting problems with respect to computers).

It would certainly be philosophy. I think people have come around more on the idea that philosophy is still essential for science. Paradigm shifts in science are almost always shifts in philosophy, in how we think about the same data. Day to day, "regular" science within a paradigm is simply accepting a prevailing set of philosohical assumptions and either setting them aside for now to solve a more tractable problem, or attempting to justify said assumptions.

Tests of Bell's Theorem and non-locality have been called "experimental metaphysics." Tests to verify Objective Collapse vs Pilot Wave vs Holographic Universe vs Many Worlds are essentially experimental ontology.

The two are closely related, but there is some friction. This is apparent when biosemiotics is at its worst, in articles where the same system has all of its parts put into every role in the semiotic triad, with rebuttals flying around based solely on whether or not Pierce is being interpreted correctly or not.

Such appeals are anathema to science; the great minds of science are often wrong. Whether a theorists is being accurately interpreted is more of a question for philosophy journals, the point of concern in sciences should be more the predictive and explanatory power of research. The worst cases of this phenomena can be seen in old Marxist journals, where the words of the great prophet seem to take on the weight of the Koran.

But very notably, this is not anything unique to biosemiotics, that's just the topic here. Physics had an even worse problem with "Copenhagen" being the received dogma, the only way to interpret quantum mechanics, and some elevated Bohr to a sort of prophet status too.

Young physicists risked having their careers destroyed if they published in quantum foundations, the study of the ontological interpretation of QM. People were literally hounded out of their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy of the day. It's perhaps the legacy of this craziness that results in us having such a wild mishmash of QM theories today. No one wants to go to hard in taking down a theory, lest they be accused of continuing the sins of the past.


Yeah, physicists can't agree on any interpretation of quantum phenomena. That's why I mentioned the informational approaches as just one group of theories. Field theory is incredibly successful, but has the major issue of one of its core theoretical predictions being so wildly off the mark that field theorists themselves have called it "the worst prediction in the history of science."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

This is the sort of problem all theories have though. Either they are incredibly counter intuitive, or they predict things that don't happen, usually both.

Much of what we do ourselves is also unconscious.
If you want to say the bacterium is conscious, then you'll also have to say that say our digestive system is conscious, that it makes sense of the food we eat and acts with intentional purposiveness.



Consciousness is about feeling, experience. There's no reason to think the bacterium feels anything, that it has any conscious experience. We know how it does what it does, we can describe that down to the finest detail, and we know that it's an unconscious process (like our digestion). — Daemon

I disagree. The key to understanding consciousness is that the functioning of a living system is a
unified totality. Our digestive system isn’t a closed system, it is an aspect of the total functioning of our organism , which inseparably interweaves body, mind and environment as a single system. I wouldnt say much of what we do is unconscious in the sense of subsystems operating completely independently of awareness. I prefer the distinction implicit vs explicit consciousness. Much of our behavior ( like automatically driving a car while taking or watching the scenery) and much that takes place in our bodies we only have implicit awareness of; these process affect awareness in the background.
A bacterium has proto-sensation and feeling. We don’t know what a bacterium does the way we know what a computer progress or other machine does. We only describe and predict the bacterium‘s behavior in the most general possible terms. We used to think we knew what pigeons were doing when we used stimulus -response models to train them. Then we discovered how poorly such approaches explained animal behavior. It was t long ago that we believed even higher animals had no language , cognition, emotion , tool making or cultural
transmission. I guarantee what we know about the behavior of bacteria will be very different decades from now than it is now.

We might usefully think about this vertical line:

I

Do you see what I'm getting at Joshs? — Daemon

Yes, I do.

We could also use the point at the end of this sentence as an example .


From Francisco Varela:

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.”

I reject the notion that physical code is intrinsically semantic (contains meaning), because meaning can only be assigned by a mind (interpretation), and acquired by a mind (comprehension). — Galuchat

Hi Galuchat,

I'm very much in agreement with what you say here, but did I satisfactorily respond to your challenge to "explain sign evaluation in terms of electrochemical impulses"?

The key to understanding consciousness is that the functioning of a living system is a unified totality. Our digestive system isn’t a closed system, it is an aspect of the total functioning of our organism , which inseparably interweaves body, mind and environment as a single system. — Joshs

Can you explain then how we can ever become unconscious? Digestion continues in comatose patients. Can you explain that?

I wouldnt say much of what we do is unconscious in the sense of subsystems operating completely independently of awareness. — Joshs

Well then, there's a learning opportunity for you. I'm currently reading The Hidden Spring: a Journey to the Source of Consciousness by Mark Solms. He writes:

It is generally accepted in neuroscience today that the brain performs a wide range of mental functions that do not enter consciousness. The title of a famous review of the relevant literature by the modern cognitive scientist John Kihlstrom says it all: there is indeed 'Perception without awareness of what is perceived, learning without awareness of what is learned'".

↪Daemon

We might usefully think about this vertical line:

I

Do you see what I'm getting at Joshs? — Daemon


Yes, I do. — Joshs

I don't think you do get it Joshs. I'm making the same point as our friend Galuchat: the meaning of

I

is not in the line, it's in our minds.

Similarly, the meaning of the paint splodges (Mona Lisa) is not in the painting, it's in our minds.

Similarly, the meaning of the marks on the toast (Jesus) is not in the toast.

The difference, as has already been pointed out, is that 'information' is an indispensable theoretical tool used across multiple disciplines, whereas we can get along just fine without the face of Christ in our toast. — Theorem

It's not indispensable. We can describe everything a computer does in terms of electrical and mechanical processes, without mentioning "information". We can describe everything DNA does in terms of chemistry, without mentioning "information".

Talking about information helps us understand the process, but it's not required when describing the process.

The "information" part is something in our minds, it's extrinsic to the thing we are describing.

I'm very much in agreement with what you say here, but did I satisfactorily respond to your challenge to "explain sign evaluation in terms of electrochemical impulses"? — Daemon

No.
Observations and unproven assertions are not explanations.

I've concluded that you are more interested in protecting your position, than in:
1) Accepting the fact that different levels of abstraction require different descriptions.
2) Exploring the possibility of a metaphysics which unifies the Sciences.

So, we are probably done here.

That's unfair. I'm interested in protecting my position because I think it's correct. I don't think the alternatives that have been presented are correct, and I've said why.

Notably, I've repeatedly asked what it is that information does in addition to electromechanical or biological processes, and nobody has been able to say.

I do accept the fact that different levels of abstraction require different descriptions. I don't accept that information plays an active role in the processes we have been discussing, for example computation and genetics. If you think it does, please tell us what that role is.

What exactly is wrong with my mouse example? You asked for an explanation of sign evaluation in terms of electrochemical impulses: the moving line on the screen is taken as a sign by the mouse, and we can literally see the electrochemical impulses associated with the mouse's perception of the line, as well as the impulses associated with the response to the sign, namely the pressing of the lever to get a reward.

Talking about information helps us understand the process, but it's not required when describing the process. — Daemon

I think we agree that the concept of 'information' helps us to understand. Where we disagree is on whether the concept of information is dispensable.

I think we can agree that the concept of information is dispensable when describing things at the level of chemistry. I certainly won't dispute that. Where we disagree (I think) is over the question of whether anything important is 'invisible' when describing things at the level of chemistry. I think there is.

The higher-level patterns that are best described in terms of 'information' are not 'visible' at the level of chemical description. As such, chemical descriptions cannot support the same inferences that can be made when describing something in terms of 'information processing'. As such, we could not replace sciences like biology or cognitive science with chemistry. To me, this indicates that the concept of 'information' is indispensable to science. And since it is indispensable, we are entitled to accept 'information' as a first-class citizen in our ontology.

The "information" part is something in our minds, it's extrinsic to the thing we are describing. — Daemon

But our minds are part of the world. And the sciences study the world. And those sciences use the concept of 'information' to describe the patterns occurring between our minds and other things in the world (including our own and other minds).