As such, we could not replace sciences like biology or cognitive science with chemistry. — Theorem

I don't want to replace biology with chemistry. I want to replace "information" with biology and chemistry and physics, because I think biology and chemistry and physics are the explanation.

If you think "information" explains something in addition to biology, chemistry and physics, then please tell us what it is. Give an example.

Try DNA. I say DNA works through biology, chemistry and physics. Chemical reactions taking place in living organisms, which could be described in terms of electron shells and all that.

Try DNA. I say DNA works through biology, chemistry and physics. Chemical reactions taking place in living organisms, which could be described in terms of electron shells and all that. — Daemon

We've already had that conversation, Daemon. Every example that is provided to you is taken and replaced by a description at the chemical level. Except that's not what is under dispute. No one is denying the fact that if you zoom in far enough, all you'll find is chemistry.

But you still can't tell us what role information plays, eh?

Tell us the zoom level at which "information" plays a role in genetics. Describe what role it plays.

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

This is how I conceive it. Consciousness for a human being is associated with highly complex forms of awareness(memory and recognition, affectivity, etc). But if one believes as I do that consciousness occurs within living things as a spectrum of complexity, ranging from the simplest proto-consciousness up through social behavior among humans, then one has to imagine how the ‘subjective’ experience of awareness changes as one moves up or down this spectrum of complexity.

The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a dome of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary inbrelation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we see my claim a complete lack of awareness is involved. The same difficulty arises in attempting to pin consciousness to a particular brain area as trying to limit consciousness to the brain as opposed to the rest of the body. While clearly some parts of the brain appear more crucial
for consciousness that others , localizing awareness to a particular structure has been no more successful that trying to connect emotion or memory exclusively to certain brain areas. All these processes , emotion, consciousness, memory, are global processes involving the whole brain. And researchers are discovering that distinguishing brain from body is just as arbitrary. The global scene of consciousness is brain-body-environment.

I simply dont beleive that what we call consciousness or awareness is some adaptive mechanism ,above and beyond the purposive, adaptive behaviors exhibited by very simple living things , that more or less suddenly makes its appearance in certain lines of creatures. But this way of looking at consciousness , as either some kind of special mechanism that emerges somewhere in evolutionary history or a panpsychic metaphysical substance, is what we are left with if we look at a living system as a collection of parts like a car engine.

As Thompson writes:

“The panpsychist argues that we cannot make good on this invocation of emergence, that it is ultimately mysterious. Hence the options would seem to be either some kind of dualism or some kind of panpsychism. But this line of thought is not at all the one we find in Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. Already in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty rejects analytical reductionism for physical forms like waves, soap bubbles, and convection rolls. As he says, “The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fictitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations.”Consider also this passage, which I quote in Mind in Life:

“…each local change in a [physical] form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures us of the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality. And it is no more composed of parts which can be distinguished in it than a melody (always transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression. Possessing internal unity inscribed in a segment of space and resisting deformation from external influences by its circular causality, the physical form is an indi-vidual. It can happen that, submitted to external forces which increase and decrease in a continuous manner, the system, beyond a certain threshold, re-distributes its own forces in a qualitatively differ-ent order which is nevertheless only another ex-pression of its immanent law. Thus, with form, a principle of discontinuity is introduced and the conditions for a development by leaps or crises, for an event or for a history, are given.“

In Simondon and Merleau-Ponty what we find is a reconceptualization of matter, life, and mind, one that does not bring mind down into the domain of microphysical processes nor equate mind with information transfer and self-organization, but rather tries to show how the notion of form as dynamic pattern or individuation process can both integrate or bridge the orders of matter, life, and mind, while also accounting for the originality of each order. This is the path I try to follow in Mind in Life and not panpsychism.“

↪Daemon

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


This is how I conceive it. Consciousness for a human being is associated with highly complex forms of awareness(memory and recognition, affectivity, etc). But if one believes as I do that consciousness occurs within living things as a spectrum of complexity, ranging from the simplest proto-consciousness up through social behavior among humans, then one has to imagine how the ‘subjective’ experience of awareness changes as one moves up or down this spectrum of complexity. — Joshs

I was asking you to explain unconsciousness.

I was asking you to explain unconsciousness — Daemon

Look at my edit of the r previous post.

The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a dome of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary inbrelation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we see my claim a complete lack of awareness is involved. — Joshs

Could you rewrite this please?

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. — Daemon

No, it is in both. Objects are what they are to us in relation our pragmatic interactions with them. An object is what we can do with it , how it changes when we move our head or walk around to the back of it or pick it up. An object is our expectation that it will remain self-identical at least over very short periods of time. We invented this notion of physical ‘object’ but there never was in fact anything like that in our experienced world. It a useful fiction that has allowed us to build ingenious devices, but it becomes severely limited when we attempt to apply this way of thinking ( physical causality) to human behavior.

Husserl analyzed how we construct the notion of a spatial object , out of which the natural sciences created their notions of physical matter.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a dome of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary inbrelation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we see my claim a complete lack of awareness is involved.
— Joshs

Could you rewrite this please? — Daemon

What a mess. That’ll teach me to write while hiking.

Here’s the edit:


The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a form of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary in relation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we end up concluding that a complete lack of awareness is involved.

I think the issue of blindsight is a good example:

Laura Chivers writes 'Blindsight is seen clinically as a contrast between a lack of declarative knowledge about a stimulus and a high rate of correct answers to questions about the stimulus . People suffering from blindsight claim to see nothing, and are therefore unable to reach spontaneously for stimuli, cannot decide whether or not stimuli are present, and do not know what objects look like. In this sense, they are blind. However, they are able to give correct answers when asked to decide between given alternatives. Studies done with subjects who exhibit blindsight have shown that they are able to guess reliably only about certain features of stimuli having to do with motion, location and direction of stimuli. They are also able to discriminate simple forms, and can shape their hands in a way appropriate to grasping the object when asked to try. Some may show color discrimination as well . Subjects also show visual capacities, including reflexes (e.g. the pupil reacts to changes in light), implicit reactions and voluntary responses.

People suffering from blindsight are not "blind" because their eyes do not function. Rather they suffer from cortical blindness. People suffering from cortical blindness receive sensory information but do not process it correctly, usually due to damage in some part of the brain. The damage in blindsight patients has been shown to be in the striate cortex, which is part of the visual cortex. The striate cortex is often called the primary visual cortex , and is thought to be the primary locus of visual processing . Destruction or disconnection of the striate cortex produces a scotoma, or a region of blindness, in the part of the visual field that maps to the damaged area of the cortex . Depending on the extent of the lesion, vision can be absent in anywhere between a very small section of stimulus field and the entire field . The person is unable to process the sensory input to the striate cortex, and does not recognize having seen the object. '

Cognitive theorists conclude from clinical examples of blindsight that consciousness is only a part of what goes on in the brain, and that consciousness is not needed for behavior. To argue that blindsightedness is not an example of unconscious processing (experience occuring in parallel with, but independent of conscious awareness) requires a new and different sensitivity to content of experience, and to the understanding of awareness. If there is no 'feeling of seeing' in blindsightedness, as is claimed, then there is feeling of a different sort, a quality of meaning that is overlooked by contemporary approaches to cognition and affect because of its subtlety. Familiarization with Gendlin's focusing techniques is one way to develop sensitivity to what for most is a world they have never articulated. This is the important point; phenomena such as blindsightedness evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need , of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in blindsightedness. One has before one a task involving an intention to see, which implies the involvement of a certain concept of vision that the perceiver expects to encounter.

If the claim for blindsightedness were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in seeing than one normally expects of a visual situation, (for instance, if one expects contrast, color, perspective, one gets instead a vague or incipient meaning that is not recognizable as seeing even though it in fact is normally part of all visual experiences), then I would be in agreement. If, however, the claim is that whatever meaning or information is prompting the blindsighted behavior is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called blindsight is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously, intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Blindsightedness is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced.

The nature of the experience in blindsightedness would not be unlike the way that the 'same' object that one observes over the course of a few seconds or minutes continues to be the 'same' differently even though it is typically reported to be self-identical over that interval. A changing sense of a thing is not noticed until it becomes an intense affect, and then it is ossified as an abstract 'state'. From the perspective of awareness, cognitivism seems to order experiences hierarchically, privileging what is considered conceptual content over affectivity by virtue of its supposed repeatability, and valuing both of these over other events that are labeled unconscious because they are assumed to be devoid of any conscious content. Blindsight involves a barely discernable shift of sense in an ongoing experience of regularity. There would be not only blindsight, but deaf-hearing, numb-tactility and non-conceptual conceptuality. The test of consciousness of a thing:'Can one see that thing emerging from a field of perceived sameness?' is wrongheaded because it doesn't recognize that the field of supposed sameness is already a movement of changing meanings. The conscious-unconscious binary should be re-configured as a spectrum of meaningfulness)

You may be interested in a relatively new approach in philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology(OOO). It was introduced by Graham Harman and has been embraced by a number of writers. It is also related to speculative realism. OOO argues that much of recent philosophy relies on correlationism , which is essentially subjectivism. Objects are claimed to only exist as correlated with a human subjective perspective. We see this in writers as diverse as Hegel, the American Pragmatists, phenomenology and postmodernists. It is also a presupposition of the semiotic and information-based approaches to biology discussed in this thread.
OOO asserts that real objects in the world cannot be assimilated into subjective frameworks of knowledge in the way that subjectivists believe.

Tell us the zoom level at which "information" plays a role in genetics. Describe what role it plays. — Daemon

I'm sorry Daemon. We've been through this already a few times. I don't think working through another example is going to help. I'm going to bow out of the conversation now. I have enjoyed discussing this with you, even though we don't agree. Thanks.

Oh my, for the op. Did they just happen to leave the site? Such a shame, he seemed like he did have something to offer to the topic of consciousness and I was interested if he had any other ideas other than consciousness arising in the posterior cortex?

It did seem that the op was more about attacking philosophy with a small order of hubris on the side. And it's not exactly quite clear what it is we were supposed to be debating against whilst providing our supportive scientific, empirical evidence.

Were we supposed to find opposing evidence that consciousness does not arise in the posterior cortex or in the brain at all?

I think the biggest issue with consciousness being in the way of our current sciences is the inability to quantify consciousness and I think that might be where the op was finding their frustration.

. 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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point about biological information is that it is morphological. It's causal - as said, it retains information and transmits it. Random sounds or patterns may mean something to you, but they don't do that - they don't contain any principle that allows them to store and transmit information.

Try DNA. I say DNA works through biology, chemistry and physics. Chemical reactions taking place in living organisms, which could be described in terms of electron shells and all that. — Daemon

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 [15], p. 124, 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!’

That source, according to all- as in, every single bit, that I know of- established evidence from which to draw conclusions, suggests that such source is, in fact, the human brain itself. — Deleted User

There is a common assumption that intelligence has its source in the brain. But this may be looking at the science from the wrong end of evolutionary development.Intelligent decision-making doesn’t require a brain.

Intelligence is not something that happened at the tail end of evolution, but was discovered towards the beginning, long before brains came on the scene.

From the earliest metabolic cycles that kept microbes’ chemical parameters within the right ranges, biology has been capable of achieving aims. Yet generation after generation of biologists have been trained to avoid questions about the ultimate purpose of things. Biologists are told to focus on the ‘how’, not the ‘why’, or risk falling prey to theology. Students must reduce events to their simplest components and causes, and study these mechanisms in piecemeal fashion. Talk of ‘goals’, we are told, skirts perilously close to abandoning naturalism; the result is a kind of ‘teleophobia’, a fear of purpose, based on the idea that attributing too much intelligence to a system is the worst mistake you can make.

But the converse is just as bad: failing to recognise intelligence when it’s right under our noses, and could be useful. Not only is ‘why’ always present in biological systems – it is exactly what drives the ‘how’. Once we open ourselves up to that idea, we can identify two powerful tricks, inspired by computer science and cybernetics, that allowed evolution to ‘hack’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up. No skyhooks needed.

The claim here is not that there is an "ultimate purpose of things" but that biological systems work toward biological rather than metaphysical ends.

In this way, pattern completion enables connections between modules at the same and different levels of the hierarchy, knitting them together as a single system. A key neuron in a lower-level module can be activated by an upper-level one, and vice versa. Like changing the march of an army, you don’t need to convince every soldier to do so – just convince the general, who makes the others fall into line. Consistent with the many parallels between neurons and non-neural signals, pattern completion shows us how a single event – say, a mutation – can change an army, or build an eye.

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


No, it is in both. — Joshs

If it were, we would be able to decipher the writing systems discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeciphered_writing_systems

Galuchat explains:

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.

But Galuchat, since we see eye to eye on this, and the two topics are related, I can't see why you don't agree with me about "information". Information is not in (for example) DNA in the same way that the meaning "me" is not in this vertical line: I

Giving and receiving information is done by minds in the same way that meaning is assigned and acquired.

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!’

There's nothing there I'd disagree with, the term "information" is used in that way, in the same way a heating engineer will talk about a thermostat feeling a temperature of 25 degrees.

But information doesn't do the work, in genetics. I imagine Ernst Mayr knew that. He's using the word in a figurative way. My issue is with those who claim that information plays an actual role, in genetics, in computation, and in consciousness.

He's using the word in a figurative way. My issue is with those who claim that information plays an actual role, in genetics, in computation, and in consciousness. — Daemon

He most assuredly is not. He is claiming that there's an ontological distinction between living and inorganic matter and so, presumably, in the kinds of laws that obtain.

'The central dogma of molecular biology is an explanation of the flow of genetic information within a biological system.'

It's neither figurative nor metaphorical.

How could information NOT play an actual role in all of those subjects?

How could information NOT play an actual role in all of those subjects? — Wayfarer

I find it a little difficult to understand why you can't understand my argument.

In genetics, DNA and RNA do the work. You can describe the whole process without mentioning information.

In a PC, electrical and mechanical processes do the work.

We say the optic nerve carries information to the brain, but what it actually carries is electrochemical impulses.

Providing and receiving information is, in the literal, non-metaphorical sense, something that takes place in the minds of persons. It's metaphorical or figurative when applied to DNA, a PC or the optic nerve.

So it's a category error to believe that information plays an actual role there.

Information is not in (for example) DNA in the same way that the meaning "me" is not in this vertical line: I — Daemon

How do you know that that’s a vertical line? That’s just one of a potential infinity of meanings we can assign to it. If you tell me that you are intending us to interpet the image as a vertical li e, is there supposed to be something irreducible in this claim, as if there really is such a thing floating around the universe whose absolute in-itself identity is a vertical line? But isn’t vertical a term referring to a spatial orientation relative to a observer? And isnt line a geometric concept? If we remove the observer who knows geometry or other language concepts from the context , does it still make sense to refer to a vertical line existing independently of our interpretation of it? Is there any way of describing it that does not presuppose an observer? Wouldnt it be better to simply say that human beings perceive the world in terms of constraints and affordances whose particular meaning is relative to our point of view? That leaves you with the ability to say that there are in fact real things in the world outside of our interpretive faculties, but any attempt to pin them down takes us back to their relationship to our interpretive faculties.
And isnt it the case that the way that objects interact with other objects is a kind of interpretation also? This would mean that no object exists as what it is outside of its relation to a neighborhood of other objects, and as this environment changes, so too does the essence and properties of the object.

In genetics, DNA and RNA do the work. You can describe the whole process without mentioning information. — Daemon

DNA and RNA encode information. That is why I quoted the 'central dogma of molecular biology'. So I understand what you're saying, but I think it's incorrect. 'Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix carrying genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms'. So how are 'instructions' not 'information'?

@apokrisis - am I wrong in saying that?

We say the optic nerve carries information to the brain, but what it actually carries is electrochemical impulses. — Daemon

That is a different matter. I don't know if the optic nerve 'carries information' - in that context, I'd agree that the use of the term 'information' is metaphorical. It's not 'information' until a subject interprets it. What is transmitted are electro-chemical reactions across cellular pathways.

//I suppose the biosemiotic approach is that all such transmissions involve 'signalling', even on the cellular level. But that's not the same point at issue with respect to the transmission of morphological information via DNA.//

I'm making the same point as our friend Galuchat: the meaning of

I

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

I wouldn't say the meaning of that mark 'I' is in our minds, rather the range of possible meanings is dependent on its culturally embedded associations.

It could represent 1, capital i, or a small L. It could be a stick figure of a tower or an erect penis, or a tree with all it branches removed. If you use your imagination you might find many other things it could be taken to represent.

When it comes to deciphering hieroglyphics it is not individual symbols which possess meaning (although they might be iconic insofar as they might have originally pictorial represented something human, animal, or plant figure, and so on; the meanings is in the individual's place within the referential totality of symbols it belongs to. I believe that is how ancient symbols have been deciphered. The same goes for cracking codes.

In genetics, DNA and RNA do the work. You can describe the whole process without mentioning information ... So it's a category error to believe that information plays an actual role there. — Daemon

DNA and RNA encode information. That is why I quoted the 'central dogma of molecular biology'. So how are 'instructions' not 'information'? — Wayfarer

What @Daemon gets muddled is his conviction that scientific descriptions of nature in terms of information are somehow "just an epistemic metaphor" while scientific descriptions in terms of material stuff - molecules, or chemical potentials, or whatever - are "the God's honest ontological truth".

Yet science would view both the material and informational approaches as theoretical conveniences or pragmatic explanatory constructs. Both only have value insofar that they are tied to the kind of maths that can produce formal models that thus make checkable predictions.

And the reason why the information theoretic framework has become so exciting is that when Shannon information is paired with Gibbs entropy, the two mathematical structures are dual. The way to measure informational events and material events is the same. You arrive at a formally reciprocal uber-framework that fully captures both of the traditional points of view.

So reality - as the thing in itself - is neither information nor entropy. It is always some kind of embodied substantial being, with both matter and form. A oneness that needs to be decomposed by some kind of dichotomising analysis.

And having been working a couple of thousand years on the issue of building comprehensive mathematical models of this reality, what science finds is that the combo of information and entropy arrives at the most abstract view of nature's fundamental dichotomy.

Or at least from the atomistic perspective of the reductionism that wants to reduce everything to a model of effective causes or component parts. Shannon and Gibbs give you a way to count elemental degrees of freedom from either an informational or entropic point of view.

So where we have got to in science is a robust form of reductionism where the job of analysing the whole into its parts can be reduced to a framework of differential equations and the simplest possible acts of measurement - the counting of individual degrees of freedom. And this framework is self-complete. It connects what seem to be opposed because the maths is the same.

The intuitive picture is different. The entropic "it" is a statistical microstate. A global pattern of independently moving particles. The informational "bit" is local distinction. A gate which is on rather than off. A discrete presence where there could have been a discrete absence.

So a local~global difference is concealed there. The contextual pattern that might make an informational bit meaningful as its interpretant is missing from the model of the fundamental bit. And likewise, the entropic microstate is simply one possible state out of an unlimited number of such states composing the global whole of the system. It is essentially an arrangement that can be measured in terms of its meaninglessness, being a difference lost among an ensemble of almost identical random arrangements.

But the point is that the two views are mathematically dual and thus close the door. They see reality from both its angles. Or again, both its maximally reductionist angles.

So for @Daemon, trying to push some kind of unrelenting reductionism on the discussion, his "information is metaphor/materialism is ontic truth" seems particularly anachronistic.

There is the whole holism and semiotic discussion to be had - the one that points to the flaws of the information~entropy dichotomy when only the breaking apart of the whole is understood.

And then even among the arch-reductionists - folk like Crick and Monod in the history of DNA - the revelation that information and entropy make for dual metrics has been metaphysically freeing.

You kinda know now that the whole of reality is within your sights as you apply your reductionist lens, seeking a set of differential equations that can model some system of efficient or mechanical cause. It doesn't matter that the old atomist ontology of reality as being composed of crumbs of matter is "just a model", because now the information theoretic account is likewise "just as real".

So if you want to think of reality in terms of material particles or holographic information bounds, go for it. Either works. They are dual. Doing the sums in one or other way may have advantage. And neither is going to be wrong from a tactical epistemic point of view.

As I say, the issue then is how to add back holism - particularly the semiotic holism that produces an organismic level of infodynamic reality.

But here is a good history paper on how information theory arose via Shannon, Wiener and Schrodinger to shape biology's hunt for the genetic code.

It tracks the move from treating information as "mere metaphor" to "concrete maths", and then the arrival at the reductionist limits of the information theoretic view where the next step - to the semiotic theory that can hope to account for the "epigenome", "proteonome", and all the other new -omes that stand for systems of living biosemiosis (and not the dead, gone to equilibrium, information~entropy descriptions of nature).

That is a different matter. I don't know if the optic nerve 'carries information' - in that context, I'd agree that the use of the term 'information' is metaphorical. It's not 'information' until a subject interprets it. What is transmitted are electro-chemical reactions across cellular pathways. — Wayfarer

As an example of the information-semiosis distinction, information theory would let you count the number of electrochemical pulses that flowed up the optic nerve. But that doesn't show you all the pulses that were prevented from flowing by top-down attentional and anticipatory processes.

The brain produces more inhibition than the sensory cells produce excitation. So even using the crudest measures - counting the flow of spikes coming down the line the other way - will show that every signal is already being contextualised.

The dog that didn't bark in the night can be more significant that the dog that did. And this makes a nonsense of accounts of reality where you only count the barking dogs.

:up:

Incidentally do you happen to know if the James Gleick book The Information is worth reading? There's a copy for $20.00 at the local second-hand store.

James Gleick book The Information — Wayfarer

Haven't read it, I'm afraid.

I can't speak for The Information since I've only read a short bit of it, but his other book Chaos, is pretty good. He keeps the narrative hopping along pretty well, despite it being an easy topic to get bogged down in.

It's light on the mathematics and jumps around in journalistic snippets a good deal, but weaves these stories together into coverage of different different areas of chaos theory.

I almost got The Information, but I ended up swapping it out for the Ascent of Information by Scharf (also haven't started that yet).

Gleick's book is a reference in that paper you quoted. As I say, saw a copy the other day, think I'll pick it up. He is a good science writer.

As @Count Timothy von Icarus says, Chaos was a seminal book. But his later books seemed pretty average to me. So he dropped off my radar.

I'll risk my $20.00 if it's still there. :wink:

That was a good (articulate) summary.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix carrying genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms'. So how are 'instructions' not 'information'? — Wayfarer

We say the optic nerve carries information to the brain, but what it actually carries is electrochemical impulses. — Daemon


That is a different matter. I don't know if the optic nerve 'carries information' - in that context, I'd agree that the use of the term 'information' is metaphorical. It's not 'information' until a subject interprets it. What is transmitted are electro-chemical reactions across cellular pathways. — Wayfarer

Why is it a different matter? If the neural impulses are not information until interpreted, why isn't it the same for DNA?

And where is the interpreting subject in each of these cases? Interpretation is something carried out by minds. Instructions, information and interpretation are metaphors when we are talking about DNA. The genetic process is carried out mindlessly.

Why is it a different matter? If the neural impulses are not information until interpreted, why isn't it the same for DNA?

And where is the interpreting subject in each of these cases? Interpretation is something carried out by minds. Instructions, information and interpretation are metaphors when we are talking about DNA. The genetic process is carried out mindlessly. — Daemon

Yes, genetic processes are carried out mindlessly, but information is mind-independent. Information exists everywhere causes leave effects. Take tree rings in a tree stump. The tree rings develop over time as a result of how the tree grows throughout the year. When an observer comes along and cuts down the tree and observes the tree rings and investigates other trees and forms a theory about what the tree rings are they discover that they are a result of how the tree grows and that each ring signifies a year in the tree's age. The observer did not make up the information. It is there in how the tree grows, and is there independent of any mind. Minds only come along after the fact and either correctly or incorrectly interpret the information that is already there.