What causes the atom to decay? Is it really some determining nudge or do we believe the strongly supported maths that says the "collapse of the wavefunction" is actually spontaneous or probabilistic? — apokrisis

I'm not particularly math or physics-literate, but looking at it from a simply logical perspective: if some hidden, more fundamental, thing efficiently causes a particle to decay, then would that not beg the question as to what determines the hidden cause? This would then seem to imply either
-an infinitely regressive series of ever more fundamental materially efficient causes
-true spontaneity and randomness at the 'lowest' level
-or a most fundamental "primary uncaused cause".

It would seem, since there will necessarily always be a level below which we cannot penetrate, that we will never be able by any empirical investigation to definitively answer the question as to which of those alternatives obtains. So, it would seem that the alternative is to either sit on the fence or choose based on personal intuition or preference.

Personally, I find the idea of an infinitely regressive series of materially efficient causes to be the least coherent or intelligible alternative.

Heisenberg didn't prove indeterminacy, he proved uncertainty inherent in certain kinds of measurements. — VagabondSpectre

But consider the context. Until that discovery was made, the atom was assumed to be the fundamental ground of physical reality. Not everyone assumed that it was, but it was certainly central to a lot of philosophical materialism. It lives on in the term 'fundamental particle'. But Heisenberg's analysis showed that the basic idea of 'fundamentalism' didn't necessarily apply to material particles. So it throws open the whole question again, what is the basic nature or ground of reality?

I bet if you asked the proverbial man in the street what everything is composed of, the answer will be 'atoms'. But if atoms are not fundamental - then what is? Furthermore the related discovery that the act of observation has a causal influence on the outcome of an experiment opens the door once again to philosophical idealism.

I say all this, because many of your remarks above seem to accept the reality of determinism, however I am trying to show that the grounds for such thinking have been undermined by physics itself.

If we boil this down, life is self-organizing information (and consumes energy to do it, and so requires abundance of fuel). — VagabondSpectre

Can you explain to me what exactly you refer to with the word "information"? The reason I ask is that there are generally two ways of apprehending this term. In one sense, when we interpret some display of existence, we derive information from this interpretation. In that sense, information only exists within a mind, produced by the interpretation. This is how many people think of "meaning". In another sense, "information" is the thing independent from the interpreting mind, the thing which is being interpreted. In this sense, there are patterns of existents, and these patterns are said to be "information".

From your use of the term, it appears like you use "information" in the latter sense. It is patterns existing independently from any mind which might interpret these patterns. But if this is the case, then isn't "self-organizing information" rather nonsensical? The term "information", used in this way implies necessarily, organized patterns in existence. If there is no organized pattern there is no information. So "self-organizing information" implies organized patterns which have caused the existence of themselves. Doesn't that seem nonsensical to you? Imagine the existence of an organized pattern. Can you make sense of the notion that this organized pattern caused its own existence?

if some hidden, more fundamental, thing efficiently causes a particle to decay, then would that not beg the question as to what determines the hidden cause? — John

Yes, any tale of efficient/material causes suffers from infinite regress. Hence the need to posit an "unmoved mover" of some kind to ground being.

One way to do that is to argue the unmoved mover exists in some foundational sense - like a creating God. But that begs a whole bunch of questions - like who made Him.

So my own Peircean preference is to put the unmoved mover at the end of things - as the limit on being that development asymptotically approaches. That is formal/final cause is Platonically what "drives" existence - except it not a drive but the crystallisation of some "always necessary" state of global constraint.

So formal/final cause is immanent and emergent - the regularity that results when everything tries to happen, but almost everything then is going to be self-contradicting and thus self-cancelling. If you can go left, you could have gone right. If you could be positively charged, you could be negative. And so as existence tries to express every possibility, it quickly reduces itself to some tiny organised arrangement of that which survives self-negation. A standard quantum path integral or sum over histories ontology in other words.

That then puts at the beginning - as the initiating conditions, or the material/efficient cause - a state of pure potential or indeterminancy. A Peircean vagueness, firstness or tychism. A sea of unbounded spontaneous fluctuation - sort of like a hot big bang.

So quantumly, as you approach the Planck scale that defines the Big Bang state, you do find that measurement loses its purchase on events and you are just left with "infinite fluctuation" as the answer to your questions about "what exists". The initiating conditions are not some unmoved mover, but the opposite - the unboundedly moving. The radically unlimited. And thus the purest stuff - a vague everythingness - that is exacly what logic requires as a precursor "state" for any immanent emergence of self-negating limits.

I just mention all this as there is a fourth metaphysical option which gets beyond the problems presented by the others you mention. And it checks out scientifically - or at least that is what all the quantum evidence, dissipative structure theory, and condensed matter physics should by now suggest.

So why does the particle decay spontaneously? If you look at it from this constraints based view, the particle is not some stable thing that needs a nudge to fall off some shelf. Instead it is already a bagged-up mess of fluctuations - a locally confined state of excitation. It seethes with necessary nudges. And it persists undecayed due to some wider environmental constraint that imposes a threshold on it just popping off right now. So there is a constant limitation (from a stable classical environment) on its decay that keeps it in existence - with a constant probability that that threshold gets breached by some "lucky" fluctuation among an uncounted number of such fluctuations that characterise the "inside" of the particle.

Thus when we talk about the essence of a fundamental particle, it is really the environmental limits being imposed on a wild or vague state of material "everythingness" that define it. Its formal/final causes. And at the abstract level, that environment is mathematically described in purely formal terms - the self-limiting ways that a symmetry can be broken. Symmetry modelling speaks to the simplest possible options that would give matter some dichotomously definite identity - like spin left vs spin right, or break positive vs break negative.

So in this view, the Cosmos as a whole would be a general symmetry breaking in which a vague everythingness became organised into some more limited state of definiteness by become crisply divided against itself - exactly as Anaximander outlined it at the dawn of recorded metaphysics.

The unmoved mover is the simplicity of form that lies at the end of the trail (the Heat Death that is entropy's self-made sink). And the initiating conditions is the very possibility of a material fluctuation (without yet a direction or relative value). All that had to happen was a formless everythingness that negated itself to leave an irreducible residue of somethingness - which in the case of the Heat Death is a spacetime dimensional void filled with the least possible energy, just a blackbody thermal sizzle of quantum fluctuations now with a temperature of (asymptotically) zero degrees.

The way I'm usually referring to information is in the sense of physical data contained in particular arrangements and regimes of interaction between matter and energy. Meaning can be entirely abstract. I'm not interested in information as the thing being interpreted, but rather a given data structure/set as the thing doing the interpreting (of incoming information/data).

"Self"-organizing information might be slightly deceptive phrasing. I'm not looking for an un-caused cause. Complex structure and patterns can grow in size and complexity from a basic set of simple and well defined rules which cumulatively adds complexity the longer they exist. Complex states far into the progression of a given system depend on and can be informed by previous and less complex states of that system and it's inputs. It is specifically the function of data left-over from previous states/inputs informing (giving rise to apparent anticipation) the progression of the system toward more complex states of being which I would illustratively describe as "self-organizing".

The unmoved mover is the simplicity of form that lies at the end of the trail (the Heat Death that is entropy's self-made sink). — apokrisis

Still struggling with how this is not simply nihilism, but I'll keep reading......

he way I'm usually referring to information is in the sense of physical data contained in particular arrangements and regimes of interaction between matter and energy. — VagabondSpectre

Nevertheless, I think any information whatsover must mean something, or bear meaning, or have meaning - otherwise, how is it information? 'Meaning' and 'information' aren’t synonyms, but they’re joined at the hip.

Given that life is an open system, and that the dissipative structures to which you allude depend on an influx of energy (in order to resist the second law of thermodynamics), where does hard indeterminism actually benefit the model? — VagabondSpectre

I've already said that these are two different issues - that the Comos itself might be indeterministic or vague "at base", and that life requires material indeterminism as the condition for being able to control material flows.

I think both are true, but I am arguing for them separately.

The electron transport train is what keeps life warm so to speak, but the self-organizing property of life's data goes beyond that to provide innovative direction well beyond mere random variance. — VagabondSpectre

Now you are conflating material states and information states. We might model material states as "data", but that doesn't mean that entropy is just information.

Instead, the big deal in modern science is we can translate between matter and information using a common unit now. We can count both in terms of degrees of freedom. But that doesn't make them the same thing. Instead, they are opposite kinds of things (atoms of matter vs atoms of form). So there is a subtle duality that we shouldn't ignore by a conflation of terms.

If we boil this down, life is self-organizing information (and consumes energy to do it, and so requires abundance of fuel). — VagabondSpectre

Again this lumps levels that I want to keep apart. Dissipative structure occurs in non-living systems - like the atmospheric convection cells that are the weather. So we have to be able to distinguish the informational extra that life brings to harness dissipative structure towards private ends. The weather serves no higher person than the second law. Life is still ultimately entrained to the second law but also does form its own local purposes. And that is information of some new level of order. Which is in turn a significant enough disjunction to needs its own terminological distinction.

Learning digital information networks are also physical structures which give rise to physical complexity that can rival the complexity found in nano-scale biological machinery. Even though it all exists materially as stored charges (what we abstract as bits), the connections and relationships between these parts can grow in complexity by more efficiently utilizing and ordering it's bits rather than by acquiring more of them (although more bits doesn't hurt). — VagabondSpectre

But again you are ignoring the evidence that life is fundamentally different in seeking hardware instability of a kind that permits its informational control to exist. Digital hardware is just basically different in that it depends on instability being engineered out. Computers don't create their own steady-state environments. They have to be given them. But life does create its own steady-state environment. It makes them. So apples and oranges in the end.

We don't have an AI yet capable of taking control over it's own existence (in the way that biological life does as a means of perpetuation), but I think that chasm is shrinking faster than most people realize. — VagabondSpectre

Again, my argument is that the chasm is not shrinking at all. There is no trend towards hardware designs with inherently unstable switches rather than inherently stable ones. Computing remains defined by its progress towards a lack of entropic limits on computation, not its steady progress towards computation that is entropically limited.

So to sum up, I don't have a problem with the idea that computation can add another level to human semiotics. We can express our desires to build these kinds of "thinking machines" because for us it is meaningful.

But it is another thing to think we are moving towards artificial mind or artificial life. And I just raise that new point about hardware instability as another definitional reason for how far we are from what we tend to claim about what we are doing in our computer science laboratories right now.

Still struggling with how this is not simply nihilism, — Wayfarer

Why does it have to be not nihilism? My argument is that the goal of the Comos is entropification. Then life and mind arise to accelerate that goal where it happens to have got locally retarded. So life and mind are the short-term cost of the Cosmos reaching its long-term goal.

That's not just nihilism - the idea that our existence is cosmically meaningless. I am asserting we exist to positively pick up the pace of cosmic annihilation. So super-nihilism. :)

Why does it have to be not nihilism? — apokrisis

Because it means the long-term goal is non-existence. And hihilism means literally 'nothing-ism'. It is one of the lurking maladies of the day (as Nietzsche correctly foresaw) - nothing is ultimately real, nothing really exists. IN saying that, I am on board with a large percentage of what you write (well the parts I understand) but I think this particular point reflects a gap or hole in your metaphysics. (Mind you I know it's a deep and difficult issue.)

Why does it have to be not nihilism? My argument is that the goal of the Comos is entropification. Then life and mind arise to accelerate that goal where it happens to have got locally retarded. So life and mind are the short-term cost of the Cosmos reaching its long-term goal.

That's not just nihilism - the idea that our existence is cosmically meaningless. I am asserting we exist to positively pick up the pace of cosmic annihilation. So super-nihilism. :)

Then we (Kim jong-un, or Trump) should press the red button then, and get back on track.

Apart from the apparent Nihilism in this perspective, it begs a diminutive ignorance on our part. Or in other words we soon regress into a primitive embryonic life form in an insignificant minuscule swamp in a far of corner of a vast, even endless cosmos in which super life, super minds, even Gods play out inconceivable entropic games and we are hopelessly ignorant, naive of what is actually going on.

You may have an aversion to the word "essence", but your "common use", which is full of ambiguities and equivocations is quite useless for any deductive logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

What is required for deductive logic is that the use on the left be the same as the use on the right.

I've already said that these are two different issues - that the Comos itself might be indeterministic or vague "at base", and that life requires material indeterminism as the condition for being able to control material flows. — apokrisis

Unless hard material indeterminism is indeed what you're arguing for (switches of un-caused wobbliness) I would happily abandon my disagreement that indeterminism is a requisite for life (I can just substitute material indeterminism for material sensitivity). I prefer pseudo randomness if and when unpredictability need be incorporated into the mechanisms of life because it does the same job without added spookyness.

If so, then our remaining disagreement concerns the comparability of a hypothetical AI organism to familiar biological organisms. If not, then I'm still not grasping how or why material instability to the point of hard indeterminacy functions as a control path for the expression of stored data or is a necessary element in dissipative structures. I see material instability as being useful (but hard to design with because it is so dynamic) in the various mechanical processes of biological life, but there's no difference between a fundamentally sensitive/wobbly switch and a group of interconnected un-wobbly/unsensitive switches whose overall output is itself wobbly.

Your objection to my argument for a hypothetical AI organism as life might depend on whether or not you think hard indeterminism is required for life or the organization of dissipative structure/engines (which drive entropic flux?), so I'll wait for clarification on this before trying to go any further.

P.S I do think we more or less agree though that there is some sort of "informational-extra" which binds dissipative engines into a greater system which fuels all the mechanics of biological life, including the on-going maintenance, development, and reproduction of "the data" itself. It's precisely that informational extra that I too want to distinguish from all the other rudiments of life.

But we have good telescopes. We can see the heat death already. The Universe is only a couple of degrees off absolute voidness. The average energy density is a handful of atoms per cubic metre. Nihilism is hardly speculation.

What is required for deductive logic is that the use on the left be the same as the use on the right. — Banno

As if syntax were semantics.

Nevertheless, I think any information whatsover must mean something, or bear meaning, or have meaning - otherwise, how is it information? 'Meaning' and 'information' aren’t synonyms, but they’re joined at the hip. — Wayfarer

I've been using the words information and data loosely because in a way that's what I'm interested in investigating.

When you look at a photograph on a computer screen, you're seeing a representation of data contained in light that came from the real world; the information conveyed by the image on your screen reflects real world data. How it actually gets that way though entails many transformations and what we might refer to as abstractions between the original existent data and the stored representation that reflects it. When I try to talk about "stored information" what I'm attempting to describe is material structure storing complex real-world information by abstracting it (transforming it via some consistent principle) from real world input into something less fleeting (something which can then be refined and acted upon).

I equivocate between information as an abstraction between physical states in a complex system because they are mathematically equivalent. The physical state of your computer monitor showing an image containing details of the real world is composed of an ordered grid of pixel positions with three associated numbers representing light intensity (RGB light). This grid of numbered triplets is itself composed of a long string of 1's and 0's. The string of 1's and 0's is an abstraction representing arrays of ordered memory cells where the 1's correspond to the "on" states and the 0's correspond to the "off" states.

It's a similar story from the business end of the camera (or digital scanner): data-bearing-light enters a lens which focuses it onto an array of light sensing elements which detect the various intensities of red, green, and blue light at given points on the array. These individual elements then deliver an electrical output that gets abstracted into a numeric value that represents the intensity of a given light at a given pixel position. These various numeric triplets are then stored in a particular order which creates the abstract matrix which constitutes the information that comprises your computer image. The state of a given memory array is a physical arrangement of matter which stores some kind of data in an abstract form (which can then be somehow recalled for later use).. This is the kind of data required for the complex hierarchies of networks of data that I'm interested in.

Newtonian physics carries on working. Uncertainty inherent at the quantum scale collapses and gives way to classical particle behavior at the larger scales. It may be that the universe does behave in some fundamentally undetermined ways, but we have a hard time identifying them, we can never make sense them, and we can never prove hard indeterminacy experimentally. A probabilistic collapse of uncertainty in particle-waves isn't exactly indeterminism.

But we have good telescopes. We can see the heat death already. The Universe is only a couple of degrees off absolute voidness. The average energy density is a handful of atoms per cubic metre. Nihilism is hardly speculation.

Yes, but that is only the material conditions we experience, which might be like navel gazing in reference to the bigger picture.

Perhaps this whole universe you are referring to is just some fabricated sideshow, or less? People who consider transcendent realities look to the bigger picture in the realisation that in some sense that bigger picture is in the here and now.

When you look at a photograph on a computer screen, you're seeing a representation of data contained in light that came from the real world; the information conveyed by the image on your screen reflects real world data. How it actually gets that way though entails many transformations and what we might refer to as abstractions between the original existent data and the stored representation that reflects it — VagabondSpectre

But it also takes many abstractions and transformations to see it as a photograph. I mean, show a photograph to a dog (whether on a screen or hardcopy), and the dog will smell it, and because it doesn't smell like anything interesting, the dog will not respond to it; it won't recognize it. (Sometimes my cat used to watch tennis, but I'm sure it's because of the apparent movement of an object going back and forth, which is the kind of things cats can 'grok'). It's the human mind which not only transformed the image into bits, then pixels, in the first place, but then also comprehends the image that it has created and recognises it as an image.

So I think what any physicalism wants to say is it that it is the bits or pixels which are fundamental, and the mind then interprets and abstracts meaning on the basis of what it sees. That is undoubtedly true, but there seems to me a lot of ambiguity sorrounding which level is actually the fundamental or foundational level. If 'the meaning' is in some sense fundamental then it seriously challenges physicalism - which is exactly why, I think, Apokrisis' style of semiotic analysis and the rest, has suddenly become such a big deal.

A probabilistic collapse of uncertainty in particle-waves isn't exactly indeterminism. — VagabondSpectre

The wave-function collapse is the single greatest philosophical/metaphysical issue arising out of modern physics. Ironic, considering how strongly positivists had hoped that physics would once and for all drive a stake through the heart of metaphysics.

"Self"-organizing information might be slightly deceptive phrasing. I'm not looking for an un-caused cause. Complex structure and patterns can grow in size and complexity from a basic set of simple and well defined rules which cumulatively adds complexity the longer they exist. Complex states far into the progression of a given system depend on and can be informed by previous and less complex states of that system and it's inputs. It is specifically the function of data left-over from previous states/inputs informing (giving rise to apparent anticipation) the progression of the system toward more complex states of being which I would illustratively describe as "self-organizing". — VagabondSpectre

Perhaps you were not looking for an uncaused cause, but that's what you described. When you introduce "a basic set of simple and well defined rules", then you assume information which is outside of the "self-organizing" system. You avoid an uncaused cause by positing a set of rules. But by doing this, you have changed the description of the thing (life). It is no longer "self-organizing information", it is now described as a capacity to follow some rules. And since the rules must exist as some form of information, now your described thing (life) must have the capacity to interpret information.

Do you agree, that your self-organizing thing requires these two things for its existence, a set of rules, and the capacity to interpret rules? There is one other thing which I must add though, and that is the will to act. Rules and interpretations of rules do not create any organized structures without the will to act according to the rules.

What is required for deductive logic is that the use on the left be the same as the use on the right. — Banno

Sure, I agree Banno. Logic is basically rules, and the symbols used need not symbolize anything at all. But even in saying that the use on the right must be "the same" as the use on the left, you are invoking an essence. Notice, that by your description, one is on the right and the other is on the left, so they are clearly not the same usage. Yet you give yourself the right to assert that the use is the same. You do this by dismissing this difference between right and left as accidental, and your claim that the usage is "the same" is only supported by the assumption that it is "essentially" the same.

Here's the classic example of "essence" in use in deductive logic:
p1 all men are mortal
p2 Socrates is a man
c Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Notice that p1 sets out an essential aspect of "man", and that is "mortal". In order for the logic to work, it is necessary that all men are mortal. if mortal is not essential, then not all men are mortal, p1 is false, and the following logic is meaningless.

If 'the meaning' is in some sense fundamental then it seriously challenges physicalism - which is exactly why, I think, Apokrisis' style of semiotic analysis and the rest, has suddenly become such a big deal. — Wayfarer

Computers can translate one language into another without any actual understanding of language.

To a computer the data (a greek text in this example) is abstract (in fact it's meaningless because computers aren't alive) but it can still act on and compare that abstract data to other abstract data and achieve stunningly accurate translations. This would be like a human translating one language to another without having a single sweet clue what either languages mean, and relying purely on examples of known accurate translations (which are also not understood) to do it. It would be a mess of abstract and meaningless symbols.

If meaning exists anywhere, it would definitely be within written language, which exists as an abstract property of certain arrangements of matter. Light bouncing off of objects and entering our eyes contains data pertaining directly to it's source or the object it last bounced off of, but we need a complex brain to transform and arrange the data in a way that makes sense to our minds; it's meaning is something that conscious intelligence gets out of the data; the act of interpretation itself. A computer which can work somewhat objectively in translating languages or a camera which takes a picture and records light data are not aware of the meaning contained within the data they manipulate and store, but they somewhat objectively work with that data none the less in a way that retains meaning.

To me this implies that meaning is something contained within data, and it can only be gotten at by something which has the intelligence to consciously interpret it with some kind of intention rather than merely transforming the data. The way new data fits in to a the complex data structure of a mind I reckon has something to do with where meaning comes from. Cameras have no data structures capable of interpreting anything about the data they record in terms of meaning, and an unthinking translation program doesn't primarily fit new data into a complex (thinking) network, it primarily abstracts new deparate and discrete data packages from packages of old data and some relatively basic rules of operation.

I would say meaning is information which exists inside of a mind capable of perceiving it. In a way they're the same thing, but maybe that's like saying the shape of a raindrop is the same as gravity + aerodynamics.

The wave-function collapse is the single greatest philosophical/metaphysical issue arising out of modern physics. Ironic, considering how strongly positivists had hoped that physics would once and for all drive a stake through the heart of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

I'm no positivist prepper, but I would say I've got a few choice stakes laying around...

Like most things we'll probably all have to settle for an unsatisfactory middle; some things determined, some things not. Reality is a bullshitter.

In respectable times, if any of our intellectual children brought home a particle-wave, the look we would give them would be so stern that they would suddenly annihilate each-other and collapse into non-existence, as things of course should be :D

Perhaps you were not looking for an uncaused cause, but that's what you described. When you introduce "a basic set of simple and well defined rules", then you assume information which is outside of the "self-organizing" system. You avoid an uncaused cause by positing a set of rules. But by doing this, you have changed the description of the thing (life). It is no longer "self-organizing information", it is now described as a capacity to follow some rules. And since the rules must exist as some form of information, now your described thing (life) must have the capacity to interpret information.

Do you agree, that your self-organizing thing requires these two things for its existence, a set of rules, and the capacity to interpret rules? There is one other thing which I must add though, and that is the will to act. Rules and interpretations of rules do not create any organized structures without the will to act according to the rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

The basic rules of the system (physics) guide the apparent self-organization of the system. So it's not really "self-organizing" it's just that we're recognizing certain behaviors of certain arrangements of matter (which through basic rules) produce a pattern of interaction that exhibits more complex behavior as a whole than the bits following simple rules that comprise it.

All I need is a first cause, or a first state, and then complexity emerges from that:

You are simply identifying use and token. They are not the same.

I just mention all this as there is a fourth metaphysical option which gets beyond the problems presented by the others you mention. And it checks out scientifically - or at least that is what all the quantum evidence, dissipative structure theory, and condensed matter physics should by now suggest. — apokrisis

Is it really a fourth option, or just essentially an elaboration of the second option I listed?

A computer which can work somewhat objectively in translating languages or a camera which takes a picture and records light data are not aware of the meaning contained within the data they manipulate and store, but they somewhat objectively work with that data none the less in a way that retains meaning. — VagabondSpectre

So this is syntax and not semantics.

A computer can mechanically map a set of constraints specified in one language into the same set of contraints specified in another. A faithful translation like this is semantics preserving. The constraints would still serve to reduce a mind's uncertainty in the same fashion. "Cat" and "chat" can mean the same thing in different languages because they are both verbal signs meant to limit their users to some common viewpoint, some common state of anticipation, of the feline variety.

So - in Chinese Room fashion - machines can be constructed that "make the same interpretations" as we would, without having the faintest possibility of being minds that actually understand anything. The ability syntactically to manipulate signs in a "proper" fashion isn't actually functioning as a constraint on informational uncertainty in the machine. The machine has no such information entropy to be minimised. And it is that kind of information which is the semantic "data" that matters.

Again, you are thinking that computers are doing something that is mind-like. And so it is only a matter of time before that gets sufficiently scaled up that it approaches a real mind. But syntax can't generate semantics from syntactical data. Syntax has to be actually acting to constrain interpretive uncertainty.
It has to be functioning as the sign by which a mind with a purpose is measuring something about the world.

So syntax operates only as the interface between mind and world. It is the sign that mediates this living triadic relation.

If I hear, or read, or think the word "cat", I understand it as a constraint on what I expect to experience, or imagine, or anticipate. I am suddenly feeling radically less uncertain or vague in my state of mind (it is now concretely infused with cat expectations). And so it can become a meaningful surprise that the critter I've just seen raiding the chicken house turns out to be a quoll. What I took to be the sign of a cat can return the truth value of "false" ... sort of, as the quoll is a little cat-like in its essential purpose, etc.

A computer could be designed to simulate this kind of triadic relation. That is what neural networks do. But they are very clunky or grainy. And getting more biologically realistic is not about the number of circuits to be thrown at the modelling of the world - dealing with the graininess of the syntactic-level representation - but about the lightness of touch or sensitivity of the model's interaction with the world. And so again, it is about a relation founded on extreme material instability.

The more delicately poised between entropy and negentropy - falling apart and becoming organised - these interactions are, the more semantic information they contain. It is no surprise if a mechanical switch is still in the same position half an hour later, or a week later. That stability is engineered in. But if that switch is an organic molecule in constant thermal jitter, then the persistence of a state has to be deliberate and purposeful - maintained by an interpretive state of affairs that is holistically larger than itself.

So any AI or AL argument based on "more circuits" is only talking about adding syntactic capacity. To add semantic capacity, it is this triadic or holistic semiotic relationship that matters. And it is "more criticality" that would be key to that. Which is not something to be added in fact. It has to become foundational to the very notion of a circuit or switch. The machine-like stability is something that has to be removed from the very stuff from which you are trying to construct your AI or AL.

Again, this is not an easy argument to track as neural network approaches do try to simulate critical behaviour. That is why they are good at some tasks like pattern matching. But there is a big difference from faking criticality with software that runs on completely mechanical hardware, and actually doing what life/mind does, which is to exist in an entropically open relation with the world. Semantic information has to be organising the state of the hardware from the ground up. It has to run native, no emulators.

And biophysics has arguments that only a certain kind of organic chemistry is the "right stuff" when it comes to creating this kind of living and mindful "machinery". AI/AL would have to be the same protoplasmic gunk from the ground up. Silicon and electricity are simply the wrong stuff for biophysical reasons.

Silicon and electricity are simply the wrong stuff for biophysical reasons. — apokrisis

Electricity is extensively utilized by living things. Brains use it.

Is it really a fourth option, or just essentially an elaboration of the second option I listed? — John

It is different in that it explicitly embraces the holism of a dichotomy. It says reality is the result of a separation towards two definite and complementary poles of being - chance and necessity, material fluctuation and formal constraint, or what Peirce called tychism and synechism, that is, spontaneity and continuity.

So you can't merely elaborate chance or fluctation to build a world. Instead, the world emerges by the dialectic which separates chance fluctuations (like a particle decay) from the global constraints (like the experimental conditions that specify the observational context for said decay).

So that is how quantum theory works. On the one side (inside the deterministic wavefunction description of a quantum system) you have all the indeterminism. A purity of spontaneity or uncertainty. Then on the other, you have the determining context - the observer's world - that serves to fix the wavefunction and thus give the quantum probability its very certain measurement basis.

Thus if we are talking ontically - taking quantum theory as our cue - then the particle decays because its probability space was shaped a certain way. And by the same token, that wavefunction defines some scope of pure and unreachable uncertainty. True spontaneity is being manufactured - by virtue of the dialectic or symmety-breaking which is the other side of things, the determining of an observational context.

How could we talk about particle decays in the dense heat of the first instant of the big bang? In a thermal chaos without clear divisions, there is nowhere to definitely stand so as to be able to see something else definitely happen. The hot fog has to dissipate for events to become either classed as deterministic or spontaneous. You need a dark, cold void for it to become a thing that a particle has not decayed and so to have a statistical history that says something about the degree of spontaneity exhibited by the fact of its decay.

So it is not just an elaboration of the claim that nature is fundamentally indeterministic. When considered in full, the argument is really that both spontaneity and its other emerge as crisply definite via a process of dialectical development or symmetry breaking. So quantum weirdness is a thing - only because local classicality is also a thing. And they both become more of a thing together as the cosmos expands and cools.

It is different in that it explicitly embraces the holism of a dichotomy. It says reality is the result of a separation towards two definite and complementary poles of being - chance and necessity, material fluctuation and formal constraint, or what Peirce called tychism and synechism, that is, spontaneity and continuity. — apokrisis

OK, I can agree with that. Although I would have called the poles 'materiality' and 'thought'.

Electricity is extensively utilized by living things. — Mongrel

That's a vague claim. Modern biophysics would agree that electron transport chains are vitally important as "entropic mechanism". But even more definitional would be proton gradients across membranes. It is those which are the more surprising fact at least.

So it is the ability to separate the energy capture from the energy spending - the flow of entropy vs the flow of work - which is the meaningful basis of life.

We can talk of a machine being driven by energy - because we are there to turn it off and on. But life has to build in that semiotic difference at the foundational level, down at the nanoscale, where a separation between entropy production and negentropic work has to be maintained via a physical or chemical difference.

So again, silicon/electrons is just not that kind of stuff.