And yet I feel that something fundamental is being concealed by deploying the term in this way. — Wayfarer

In making information a mathematically-defined concept, science is instead being as explicit as possible as to where the conversation starts - out there in the world of measurable difference. Shannon information and Boltzmann entropy are ways to count discrete degrees of freedom.

So you start with the existence of some bare difference. It is measured in the fundamental units of the Planck scale. And then you can start to build the more complex picture back. You can start to construct a semiotic style theory about the differences that make a difference because ... context.

And the idea of 'pure information' seems nonsensical to me, as it has to exist in relationship to an agent or interpretive act. — Wayfarer

My questions from yesterday:

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. — Daemon

So explain how meat can interpret everything it encounters immediately? It prostitutes our conception of everything.

Just look how we worship meat! Where's the neurological connection?

And where is the interpreting subject in each of these cases? Interpretation is something carried out by minds. — Daemon

As I understand it, the principle of biosemiosis broadens the notion of 'intepretation' to include the way in which living cells inter-operate. 'Biosemiotics (from the Greek βίος bios, "life" and σημειωτικός sēmeiōtikos, "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, or production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm.' So, pre-linguistic. In the biosemiotic view cellular processes can be understood in semiotic terms, rather than in terms of chemical interactions, because (I suppose) life is more language-like than machine-like. It represents a paradigm shift from mechanistic models of life.

If that is a true depiction, then I don't have any argument with biosemiosis, although I have profound reservations about 'pansemiosis'.

Regarding DNA as 'conveying information'- how could it be doing anything else? Species DNA conveys the genetic information needed for a specimen of that species. How is that not 'information'? I read yesterday that science may be able to re-animate the dodo - the DNA contains the biological instructions for that.

Long reach is a broad dump fluor acid? I love to walk along with you III, but I'm not sure I can follow... — EugeneW

Language is a bathtub full of acid, where acid is 'as it' or 'as if' or metaphor. We live in an inherited garden of metaflora, the flowers of yesterdaze dreaming. See how those flowers flow.

Language is a bathtub full of acid — lll

A lot of the time, that seems to be where you're writing from. :lol:

As an aside - I sometimes sense a faint echo of the ancient philosophical idea of 'the logos' in the principles of biosemiotics - not in the later, Christian sense of 'the word of God' but in the kind of animistic sense that it appears in the writings of the Stoics.

'the Logos'... reappears in the writings of the Stoics, and it is especially by them that this theory is developed. God, according to them, "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537). — New Advent Encyclopedia

I sense that it's the kind of idea that C S Peirce would have approved.

In the biosemiotic view cellular processes can be understood in semiotic terms, rather than in terms of chemical interactions, because (I suppose) life is more language-like than machine-like. It represents a paradigm shift from mechanistic models of life. — Wayfarer

This is where Pattee’s perspective is helpful. All semiosis can be understood as a system of information-controlled physical switches. So an enzyme is a switch that turns a metabolic process on and off. A neural reflex loop is a switch that turns some muscular action on and off. A sentence is a switch that turns some human behaviour on or off. A circuit is a switch that turns some mechanical process on or off.

That is being very simplistic. But it emphasises that the interpretation of a sign isn’t really about some kind of attentional mental effort. It is about meaningful habits of reaction. It is about learnt patterns of rational response - rational meaning it could be written out as an if/then kind of program in the extreme case. A set of switches organise to do useful work in the world.

A lot of the time, that seems to be where you're writing from. — Wayfarer

Note that in the original it's not 'acid' but 'as it,' which is meant to stress old metaphors dissolving or being repositioned by new ones or, more generally,

"the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit.. — Brandom

He later adds

The idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight... that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant....The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms. — Brandom

I think language is crucial as (1) the medium of philosophy itself and (2) an apparent site of collision of 'mind' and 'matter.' But 'mind' and 'matter' are themselves tokens in this 'raging white-water,' so philosophical language is a fairy trying to catch its own tale.

You mention Logos, and I very much relate to a softened version of that. I love Hegel for emphasizing that philosophy is a conversation that triumphs over the death of its participants. It's like a torch that gets hotter and brighter over time, and in which its mortal participants find a kind of immortality.

Hegel’s universal spirit is sometimes used as an example of “ontological holism”—i.e., the claim that social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities, as opposed to being derived from individuals or non-social entities (Taylor 1975, Rosen 1984).

That is being very simplistic. But it emphasises that the interpretation of a sign isn’t really about some kind of attentional mental effort. It is about meaningful habits of reaction. It is about learnt patterns of rational response - rational meaning it could be written out as an if/then kind of program in the extreme case. A set of switches organise to do useful work in the world. — apokrisis

Nice segue to equivocation and metaphor; the great hope of a new physicalism.

I think language is crucial as (1) the medium of philosophy itself and (2) an apparent site of collision of 'mind' and 'matter.' But 'mind' and 'matter' are themselves tokens in this 'raging white-water,' so philosophical language is a fairy trying to catch its own tale. — lll

Well stated, and I agree.

As I understand it, the principle of biosemiosis broadens the notion of 'intepretation' to include the way in which living cells inter-operate. — Wayfarer

So it's the anthropomorphism I mentioned. It treats cells as if they were persons, with minds. Have you figured out if they take the other common misstep and treat persons as if they were unconscious?

Switches are mechanical, but signs are semantic. I can see how signs can drive switches, but I can't see how switches can produce signs. It seems a metaphor from engineering.

But 'mind' and 'matter' are themselves tokens in this 'raging white-water,' so philosophical language is a fairy trying to catch its own tale. — lll

Don't know about that. I still see the basic distinction between inorganic matter, living things, and rational beings that goes back to Aristotle.

It treats cells as if they were persons, with minds — Daemon

Not persons, but there is some sense of agency. That is why living things, generally, are referred to as 'beings'. I don't see anything objectionable about that.

It treats chemicals as if they were persons, with minds. In DNA.

It treats chemicals as if they were persons, with minds. In DNA. — Daemon

No - it treats living beings as if they are not simply chemicals, which they aren't.

the principle of biosemiosis broadens the notion of 'intepretation' to include the way in which living cells inter-operate. — Wayfarer

So it brings "meaning" into areas of existence where it doesn't belong.

So what areas of existence are devoid of meaning? Oh wait - don't bother.

Don't understand the "don't bother" part.

The ascription and interpretation of meaning takes place in minds. The interactions of living cells and biochemicals are mindless. When we talk about "interpretation" in genetics, and computation, it's a metaphor.

I still see the basic distinction between inorganic matter, living things, and rational beings that goes back to Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I consider these to be true descriptions of basic ontological distinctions:

I) Inorganic
A) Physical

II) Organic
A) Physical
1) Body
2) Population
B) Mental
1) Mind
a) Non-Linguistic & Non-Rational
b) Linguistic & Rational
2) Culture

Also, I view the notion of Information as a general level (Metaphysical) extension of the Platonic/Aristotelian concepts of Form/Four Causes (motivated by a qualitative, not quantitative, description of Shannon & Weaver's MTC).

So, I think that the general concept of Information can be applied to (or translated into) descriptions provided by the various Sciences (e.g., Mathematical Information, Semantic Information, Physical Information, Biological Information, etc). Semiosis may also be expressed in terms of Information, as I did here.

For the most part, you and @Daemon use the word "information" in its colloquial sense, where I would use the phrase "semantic information".

For the most part, you and Daemon use the word "information" in its colloquial sense, where I would use the phrase "semantic information". — Galuchat

Warren Weaver: The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. https://www.panarchy.org/weaver/communication.html

Information isn't everywhere in the universe, it's in minds. It isn't in the tree stump. Your own example partly acknowledges that, in the way you have the observer come along and look at the tree rings. The information is in the mind of the observer. In the tree, there are only the rings.

If you think the information is doing something in the tree, tell us what it is. — Daemon

Right, so it's not that I didn't understand your argument. You didn't understand mine.

As I said, information is the relationship between causes and their effects. Do you agree that causes and effects are mind-independent? Do you agree that when we say that the tree rings mean the age of the tree, we are saying that the tree rings carry information about the age of the tree. And the tree rings carry information about the tree not as a result of what some human did, but what the tree did. The tree rings would mean the age of the tree even if no one looked at them, because tree rings exist as a result of how the tree grows, not because someone looked at them.

Information is not what comes about as a means of interpretation. It is what is interpreted, and what makes some bit of information valuable (values being a mental object and not something that exists apart from minds) is the present goal in the mind.

Warren Weaver: The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. https://www.panarchy.org/weaver/communication.html — Daemon

So maybe you can summarize or quote the part of the article that information and meaning are not the same thing because the way people use the terms indicates that they are the same thing. In saying that tree rings mean the age of the tree, we are saying that the tree rings carry information about the age of the tree. And when we ask what something means, we are asking about the causes of the effects that we observe. In asking what someone means by their use of words, we are asking what their idea is that they are trying to communicate (the cause of the words appearing on the screen).

This results in a misguided anthropomorphism. So when chemicals pass between trees through the fungal network, it's reported that the trees are talking to one another, conveying information. — Daemon

The misguided anthropomorphism seems to be your own. "Talking to each other" as it is used here should not be taken to mean that trees are doing what we do when we talk. "Conveying information" can be a simple process. A thermostat conveys information to the furnace. The furnace turns off and on in response to information about the temperature.

Information is communicated between persons, not objects. — Daemon

This is a clear example of anthropomorphism. Birds are not persons and yet they communicate information. They can warn of predators. They can also use false alarm calls, that is, lie: https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/21/2/396/322287

It is when you use what humans do as the proper model of what the communication of information means that you end in a muddle.

Wouldn't viruses be non-living things that store genetic history? (Supposing they don't fall under the definition of living things).

It is an amazing fact that life stores information in such a way, but it's also a tautology that only life does this, right?

I can see myriad reasons to keep synthetic entities that live in computers out of biology. You need a whole different set of skills to study them. They don't (currently) behave the same way. A computer virus is at best analogous to a prion, not a virus.

That said, I don't think they are as wholly dependent on intentional human action as people like to think. To be sure, they are obligate parasites/mutualists, but the same can be said of all the living things in the human biome that don't exist in other species.

Countries have officially stated that an attack that takes out IT infrastructure will be considered an act of war, up to the level of nuclear retaliation in extreme cases. The Stuxnet attack destroyed physical infrastructure in same same manner that a bombing run would have. In Belarus, anti-Putin/Lukashanko partisans have fire bombed rail switching stations to stop the movement of men and material to Ukraine, but the more effective action has been the hacking of rail signals, which forced the trains to move only during the day, and slowly, to avoid collisions.

Millions of humans would be at risk of starvation or dying from lack of medicines without the supply chains organized via the internet. The rapid removal of the internet would result in a widespread economic depression that would dwarf the great depression. Realistically, there isn't any stopping the connections through which a digital entity can reproduce across the world.

People seek psychotherapy and even commit suicide over addictions to social media or video games. They can't cut these things, whatever they are, off from replicating. Huge efforts are spent to track down and destroy "revenge porn," and media associated with child sexual abuse. Humans who copy these bits are subject to harsh prison sentences, violence, and ostracism, but the bits keep replicating despite our best efforts.

A paper I read trumpeting some of the benefits of looking at digital information as more similar to living things pointed out the lack of imagination in modern IT crime methods. To be sure, these people deserve punishment, but you don't try to get rid of an infection by targeting at the host level. Algorithms to detect and destroy such media that replicated themselves across servers, hunting its prey as it goes, is going to be way more effective.

Nor are programs now restricted in physical space. The internet allows them to traverse the world, quite literally at the speed of light. With the advent of smart consumer products, internet connections will become ubiquitous, something found in cars, thermostats, refrigerators, dish washers, etc.

Currently, most digital entities lack an important adaptive component that would make them more similar to life. Machine learning is making this a more prevalent factor though. Self-replication is already an old hat for computer viruses. Once they gain the ability to learn from the environment and change their structure in response, I expect we'll see a lot more life-like behavior from self replicators living in the "wild" of the internet. Likely a sort of reverse domestication.

The line between the living and the digital is also blurring at the physical level. You now have Unicode text files and JPG images being written to DNA. A bunch of companies promising DNA hard drives have sprung up. DNA gives you robust long term storage at extremely low sizes (as low as a petabyte per cubic ml, although current efforts yield just 165 terabytes at that size).

It's hard to say when we'll get the really cool sci-fi stuff, but it's certainly an area progressing exponentially. 90% of the world's data was created in about the last two years. We rapidly went from one hour of video going up to YouTube for every hour to 500 hours.

So, interestingly enough, our data is now a major contributor to global warming, and reducing the risks of global warming is probably going to require new data techniques that will make data entities even more life like (AI controlled thermostats to reduce carbon use, self driving subscription car services to reduce vehicle size, DNA storage for data, etc.)

It'll be pretty wild. Hopefully the stuff doesn't get the ability to physically reproduce independently anytime soon; that sounds like a sci-fi apocalypse waiting to happen. I can almost here the creepy transhumanist bioterrorist ranting about how "man was always meant just to be the womb for the machine," in the Hollywood version of mammals' replacement by a newly ascendant form of life.

Don't know about that. I still see the basic distinction between inorganic matter, living things, and rational beings that goes back to Aristotle. — Wayfarer

I see the distinction too, which like most distinctions has its use. 'Rational beings' is presumably reserved for humans? No doubt we are spectacular, but in the context of more biodiversity and the continuing presence of various missing links, I expect it'd be hard to draw the line. Which pre-human was rational? Or was it exactly homo sapiens who crossed that line ? Or imagine in our exploration of space that we come upon a species not quite as clever as us but seemingly using language beyond the abilities of a Koko. Finally we might ask at what age a human being becomes a rational being. A grown pig is surely more intelligent than a sufficiently young baby.

Well stated, and I agree. — Galuchat

Thank you!

Switches are mechanical, but signs are semantic. I can see how signs can drive switches, but I can't see how switches can produce signs. — Wayfarer

It is the state of the switch - is it on or off - that is semantic. The switch itself is an element of syntax. It is the material possibility of one or other state having to be the case.

So it is the possibility of imposing a logic on the world that is the modelling relation, or biosemiosis. And yes, that is mechanical. That is engineering. And that is what biology has discovered to be the case when it comes to how life and mind is organised. It is all about molecular engineering down at the semi classical nanoscale.

Which pre-human was rational? Or was it exactly homo sapiens who crossed that line ? — lll

I think that the Greek philosophers began to realise, and were intoxicated by, the power of reason. We're all their heirs. It dawned on them that they possessed a unique faculty which could explore the causes and the 'why' of everything which their dumb simian forbears could never do. Of course, by that time h. sapiens had already existed for maybe 100,000 years, the Caves of Lasceaux were already ancient. Anyway in my view, once h. sapiens began to master language, tell stories, own property and invent, then they are becoming rational beings. For us moderns, as we don't believe in Gods or God, we're the only apparent instances in the cosmos, to our current knowledge, but the pre-moderns had a different mentality which understood the faculty of reason as continuous with the reason that pervaded the cosmos - Dharma, Tao, Logos. But that is another digression in a thread almost entirely composed of digressions.

Wouldn't viruses be non-living things that store genetic history? (Supposing they don't fall under the definition of living things). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think that's an undecideable question. Advocates of panspermia believe that it's possible that viruses exist in interstellar space and are carried by comets, but even if that is so, they can't replicate until the find a host species to infect, so they're at least dependent on the existence of living organisms. A symbiotic relationship, isn't it?

As for all the multifarious implications of the information revolution - well, yes, it's obviously an enormous factor in current culture, but I still maintain there is an ontological distinction between life and inorganic matter (and thanks @Galuchat for the elaborated categories provided above.)

If so, attention could then more fruitfully turn to the semiotic view of information that bridges that "insuperable gap". As has already been covered in this thread. :grin: — apokrisis

Thought you’d be interested in this from Derrida:

“Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains therefore-in its "principle of principles" -the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence.

The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology : Lambert proposed in fact to "reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs."

According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign."There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself.“

According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign."There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself.“ — Joshs

Excellent quote of Derrida, sir.

Lambert proposed in fact to "reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs." — Joshs

The problem here is that the essence of Peirce is the irreducible wholeness of the triadic relation - the same point as systems science and dissipative structure theory would make.

So Peirce’s ur-reduction would be to the logic of relations.

And then talk of signs is really on this logic applied to systems that also have the further thing of “immaterial” codes. Biosemiosis is defined by being a self-world modelling relation.

The Cosmos might also be regarded as a pansemiotic system as it too is the product of the irreducible complexity of a triadic logic of relations. But the Cosmos patently lacks a self-regulating semiotic machinery - a model of itself that employs a triadic logic, rather than merely exhibits a triadic logic.

So talking about the Cosmos as semiotic is to use the idea of signs in a metaphoric way. But then seeing the Cosmos as a system of signification is also the way science constructs its modelling relation with the world. An observable is the inductive confirmation of a deductive theory, or the sign to a habit of interpretance.

It gets confusing. But that is all part of the irreducible complexity at work. Reality can’t be made simpler than it actually is. :grin:

According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign."There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself.“ — Joshs

As best I can deconstruct the congested wording, I might pretty much agree.

For the conscious brain as a modelling system, it is a process of signs all the way down to the epistemic cut - the point where the model finally meets world in the form of the throwing of some of/then switch that causes some materially-useful act of energetic dissipation.

So there is not even a sensible reason to expect Husserl’s metaphysics of presence as any kind of goal for the enactive world-modelling process. As Bayesian Brain style theory argues, the prime goal is to already have predicted every meaningful event that the world can throw at the self, so that the self can ignore the world in all its “thing in itself” variety and only know the world as a private system of signs - some collection of beliefs, habits and wishes, if you like.

Neurosemiosis is sign all the way down. And this is proved by finding that all the nanoscale receptors at the end of the line for the nervous system are indeed switching devices. They are molecular structures designed to make those sharp edges - like Mach bands.

So the metaphysics of presence - phenomenology as a constellation of experiences - is the opposite of the case. All the brain sees is that it has placed a system of switches over a realm of radical uncertainty and … nothing surprising remains to be seen.

Or if there is some kind of prediction failure and confusion intrudes, then the mop up crew of higher level attentional processes must kick in and massage it to fit with the prevailing “world-cancelling” model as best it can.