We do use logic to arrive at explanations. Is that what you mean?

And who is the cause of that? The folk who had a reason to manufacture a game of chance. — apokrisis

I just meant that an analysis of a cube doesn't imply anything about how the universe works. Could be a block universe. Could be a multiverse. Who knows?

I just meant that an analysis of a cube doesn't imply anything about how the universe works. — frank

If the angles of triangles didn’t add up to 180 degrees, we would know the universe wasn’t flat.

If knots didn’t stay knotted, we would know the universe has more than just three dimensions.

Of course the ideal cube would tells us something about the kind of cosmos it could be found in.

Never mind. I’m rather past the end of my day, so....more rambling than sensible.

Of course the ideal cube would tells us something about the kind of cosmos it could be found in. — apokrisis

Yea, it just doesn't tell you the mechanics of an event involving cubes. Block universe, holographic universe, many worlds, etc.

Never mind. I’m rather past the end of my day, so....more rambling than sensible. — Mww

:pray: thanks for the discussion

Or are we in a black hole?

If the angles of triangles didn’t add up to 180 degrees, we would know the universe wasn’t flat. — apokrisis

The number of degrees in a circle is arbitrary. It could have been a hundred, four hundred, a thousand, or any number. 360 was a convenient number because it's pretty close to the number of days in a year, and the astrological calendar used a circle, so a day was a degree. Maybe 365 1/4 would have been a better number. But then the right angle, and the number of degrees in a triangle, would have been a more difficult number to work with.

Yea, it just doesn't tell you the mechanics of an event involving cubes. Block universe, holographic universe, many worlds, etc. — frank

I'm lost as to what you think you are arguing about.

You must agree that a cube does a good job of representing the basic geometry of the universe at the spatiotemporal scale with which we are directly familiar. One can see in the cube the fact that space is flat, 3D, and has three rotational degrees of freedom, three translational degrees of freedom.

And that is pretty much the entirety of Newtonian mechanics. The definition of an inertial reference frame. The basis of energy conservation.

But then we observe actual "cubes" more closely and find that we need to loosen the constraints. On the larger view, the ideal cube with its Galilean group of six generators has to give way to special relativity's Poincare group with its 10 generators - the six of rotation and translation, plus the four Lorentzian boosts that allow for changes in relative velocity within a "block" 4D spacetime.

And this is how physical theory goes. We wind up in a succession of other ideal worlds - "Block universe, holographic universe, many worlds, etc." - that seem to become increasingly less constrained ... and yet also, ironically, ever more contrived in their desire to uphold the sacred principle of mechanical determinism.

So all you are doing here is name-checking some well know pathologies of physics speculation - interpretations of useful science that make for useless metaphysics to the degree they want to preserve a deterministic view of reality.

The ideal cube already showed us that the physical reality is less than ideal. And yet interpretations of the equations are always trying to recover that lost certainty - make the world safe again for the rigidities of absolute logical necessity or causal determinism.

So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer

In my personal philosophical worldview, Enformationism, Logical Necessity is Causation. But that meta-physical notion does not compute for physicalists. They think that all causes are physical, in the sense of billiard balls smacking into each other, and imparting momentum. So, I think it's the reductive physicalists who are confused. But, Information science, has concluded that energy, force, momentum are ultimately various forms of generic Enformation (the power to cause changes in form).

I have interpreted that novel concept to mean that Information (mind stuff) is at the root of all changes in the world. For example, thermodynamic Energy is often expressed as a ratio between Hot & Cold. And such proportions/ratios are also found in logical relationships as the essence of meaning. In fact, I equate Logic & Math, in the sense that Logic is mathematics with words (concepts) instead of numbers.

However, I am aware that the connection between mental Logic and physical causation is not apparent to those with a Reductive approach to reality. Logical relationships are found in holistic systems, not in the isolated elements. In fact, it's the Logical "glue" that bonds parts into wholes. Logical Necessity is essentially a Tautology in that both sides of the equation are fundamentally the same. But, imbalance in the equation, is like applying a force to a see-saw to make it move. The motion/change is necessary to re-balance the system. :smile:

Momentum is a Ratio :
Momentum is directly proportional to the object's mass and also its velocity.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/physics/chapter/8-1-linear-momentum-and-force/

Information causality :
Information causality is a physical principle suggested in 2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_causality

Information and Causality :
What is information? Can information have causal consequences?
https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531

ADD A FORCE TO CAUSE THE EQUATION TO BALANCE

The number of degrees in a circle is arbitrary. It could have been a hundred, four hundred, a thousand, or any number. 360 was a convenient number because it's pretty close to the number of days in a year, and the astrological calendar used a circle, so a day was a degree. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confusing the numbering system with the more fundamental relation.

The flatness of space is defined by the constancy of the ratio between a radius and a circumference. Only in flat space is this ratio a constant - pi. In curved space, it ranges from the 2pi of the sphere to the infinite pi of a hyperbolic geometry.

So only in flat space does some particular angle retain that value over all its scales of extension. And should you choose, instead of degrees, you can talk about angles using a more fundamental pi-based unit like radians.

I kind of agree on emotional grounds, but I'd like to come up with an argument that is harder for physicalism to simply shrug off. Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter.

(this is beside the point of this thread, but are you familiar with Jesper Hoffmeyer's book Signs of Meaning in the Universe? Would you consider it a suitable primer for biosemiosis?)

are you familiar with Jesper Hoffmeyer's book Signs of Meaning in the Universe? Would you consider it a suitable primer for biosemiosis? — Wayfarer

Yup. I see it as biosemiotics-lite. You will probably like it because it indeed wants to regain a numinous notion of meaning, when Pattee has already rigorously done away with precisely that.

So my go-to source is still Pattee. Yet Hoffmeyer is typical of those who want to reject the mechanical rather than merely place it correctly within the causal frame.

Pattee actually gives you the causal bridge between the information and the entropic sides of the deal for the "organism" - a material system which has life and mind.

The epistemic cut is implemented in the form of a switching mechanism - some bivalent device that can connect logic and causality.

Biosemiotics-lite just sees an organism as some kind of code-using interpreter of reality. The mechanics of this is pretty irrelevant. It is all about how a system of sign can be given its own world-transcending meaning.

But Pattee's biosemiotics stresses that a sign does the work. It actually switches the state of some material process. The meaning of a sign lies in the physical way it stops the world doing this, and thus counterfactually directs it towards doing that.

That is why biology - at its nanoscale basic level - is a system of molecular machinery. An enzyme is both a logical switch and a physical switch in one. It switches on some material process - like cranking out collagen - because the organism, in its wisdom, has realised it needs more collagen at that particular time and place. The enzyme can be switched on or off as an informational whim. And it then switches a material process on or off - remaining on until its told enough is enough.

So it might seem a long way from this physically embedded mechanicalism to brains that can think about .... anything. But that is only if you haven't studied the biology and neuroscience that connects the two.

And it is thus rather missing the point if semiosis is seen as just the encoded genetic and neural information that models the organism's world - some system of signs that can be read ... by a mind.

Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. It is both informational and physical. It connects the logical necessity to the physical causation in a way that is autopoietic or cybernetic - a working feedback loop.

Biosemiotics-lite just wants to treat the sign as a passive mark - something that is physical in being a mark, but then not physical because it doesn't change the world on which it is written in some directly meaningful way.

But a switch is a logical device that both represents the world - some enzymatic process is either on or off - and regulates that world. Flip the switch and you turn that process back on or off.

You will probably like it because it indeed wants to regain a numinous notion of meaning, when Pattee has already rigorously done away with precisely that. — apokrisis

Why?

I remember now where I came across Hoffmeyer, there's a sidebar in the Information Philosopher's entry on Pattee which links to his page.

Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. — apokrisis

I can't see that in what I've been reading of him.

I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call thereal world.

What we call 'the real world'. Very Kantian. So I don't think his approach is as cut-and-dried as you're making it out to be - he still maintains a dualism.

I can't see that in what I've been reading of him. — Wayfarer

Pattee, H.H.. [2001]. "The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut". Biosystems. Vol. 60

In more common terminology, this type of constraint is a structure that we say controls a dynamics. To control a dynamical systems implies that there are control variables that are separate from the dynamical system variables, yet they must be described in conjunction with the dynamical variables. These control variables must provide additional degrees of freedom or flexibility for the system dynamics. At the same time, typical control systems do not remove degrees of freedom from the dynamical system, although they alter the rates or ranges of system variables. Many artificial machines depend on such control constraints in the form of linkages, escapements, switches and governors. In living systems the enzymes and other allosteric macromolecules perform such control functions. The characteristic property of all these non-holonomic structures is that they cannot be usefully separated from the dynamical system they control. They are essentially nonlinear in the sense that neither the dynamics nor the control constraints can be treated separately.

This type of constraint, that I prefer to call non-integrable, solves two problems. First, it answers Lucretius' question. These flexible constraints literally cause "atoms to swerve and originate new movement" within the descriptive framework of an otherwise deterministic dynamics (this is still a long way from free will). They also account for the reading of a quiescent, rate-independent memory so as to control a rate-dependent dynamics, thereby bridging the epistemic cut between the controller and the controlled. Since law-based dynamics are based on energy, in addition to non-integrable memory reading, memory storage requires alternative states of the same energy (energy degeneracy). These flexible, allosteric, or configuration-changing structures are not integrable because their motions are not fully determined until they couple an explicit memory structure with rate-dependent laws (removal of degeneracy).

The crucial condition here is that the constraint acts on the dynamic trajectories without removing alternative configurations. Thus, the number of coordinates necessary to specify the configuration of the constrained system is always greater than the number of dynamic degrees of freedom, leaving some configurational alternatives available to "read" memory structures. This in turn requires that the forces of constraint are not all rigid, i.e., there must be some degeneracy to allow flexibility. Thus, the internal forces and shapes of non-integrable structures must change in time partly because of the memory structures and partly as a result of the dynamics they control. In other words, the equations of the constraint cannot be solved separately because they are on the same formal footing as the laws themselves, and the orbits of the system depend irreducibly on both (Whittaker, 1944; Sommerfeld, 1956; Goldstein, 1953; Neimark and Fufaev, 1972).

What is historically amazing is that this common type of constraint was not formally recognized by physicists until the end of the last century (Hertz, 1894). Such structures occur at many levels. They bridge all epistemic cuts between the controller and the controlled, the classifier and the classified, the observer and the observed. There are innumerable types of non-integrable constraints found in all mechanical devices in the forms of latches, and escapements, in electrical devices in the form of gates and switches, and in many biological allosteric macromolecules like enzymes, membrane channel proteins, and ciliary and muscle proteins. They function as the coding and decoding structures in all symbol manipulating systems.

https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html

:chin:

:chin: — Wayfarer

Pattee's clarity on these gritty matters always makes my soul sing. It also helps that we talked about them most days for five or six years. :grin:

There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws.

As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".

Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink).

For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.

This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms. I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism.

This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics.

Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.

Concluding...

Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?

In other words, biology invented the molecular switch. Suddenly physics could be turned on and off "at will". Nothing like this had ever been seen before in nature. A whole new biosemiotic game had been invented.

What is historically amazing is that this common type of constraint was not formally recognized by physicists until the end of the last century (Hertz, 1894).

Do you think it would be recognised at all in the absence of machines? Does this principles manifest anywhere but in machines and organisms?

Pattee's clarity on these gritty matters always makes my soul sing. — apokrisis

You mean, it provokes the discharge of endorphins?

biology invented the molecular switch — apokrisis

Do you think it is sound to attribute agency to biology?

The difficulty arises when you say what that causal relationship is. — Wayfarer

The nature of the causal relation is another question.

Then there is the teleological cause and effect duo. Mental structures chaotically fall towards the paths engraved in memory. These structures cause the still boundary- and limitless structure of the universe to appear in the forms they appear. Like walking inside the clouds on a mountain makes you loose any sense of motion, depth, focus, and perspective, without this mental happening, the world is still undefined, without focus, and without perspective, delineation, form, angle, depth, or limit. Its all there while nothing is there at the same time. Then in the slow process of evolution, the everyday happenings of cause and effect take shape.

I'm not sure what you are looking for. The nature of cause and effect? The physical meaning? The logic we use to determine cause and effect?

You mean, it provokes the discharge of endorphins? — Wayfarer

:grin:

Do you think it is sound to attribute agency to biology? — Wayfarer

You complaining that I gave you the tl;dr?

Not sure I understand. Why shouldn't determinism be meaningless in such a universe? I understand that from the outside of such a universe all the events in that universe can be known. If you are part of it, your being in it prohibits knowing all happenings, that's clear. But while in it you can still say there is determinism. Without actually knowing what's determined. — Haglund

To put in another way, I am basically arguing that determinism and non-determinism aren't descriptive of phenomena and therefore shouldn't be considered as being applicable to reality considered in itself. Determinism and non-determinism are descriptive of theories and beliefs concerning the consequences of hypothetical actions, but these concepts are not descriptive of phenomena.

For instance, suppose that if Bob (P)resses a button, then it either results in a (B)lue light or a (R)ed light: P --> B OR R. Then we might say this theory is "non-deterministic". Equivalently, we could drop philosophical nomenclature for logic , and simply state that our hypothesis is a product in a suitable category.

But notice that the above theory is simply stating that if Bob presses a button, then one of two possible outcomes are expected. It isn't describing observations of the actual world:

For suppose that Bob presses the button a potentially infinite number of times, and this results in a potentially infinite sequence of 'random' outcomes, {B, R, B, B, R, R, ...}. The previously observed outcomes can be vaguely summarised as 'possibilities' using the co-product, yet there is no objective test for a random process; for at any time t, the sequence of lights generated so far is always describable by some computable function, and at any time t, any previously assumed computable hypothesis about the generating process of the lights might be falsified. Therefore as far as phenomena are concerned, there is no discernable distinction between a deterministic process and a non-deterministic process.

So we have at most a concept of epistemic uncertainty at play. But I don't see anything in the above that refers to the actual world; .

for at any time t, the sequence of lights generated so far is always describable by some computable function, — sime

If the sequence is random, no such function exists. Each outcome (B or R) is not determined by a function. Isn't that the definition of a sequence of random choices? That every choice is based on pure chance? If you assess a finite sequence, BRRBRBRBRRBBRRBRB... (which probably ain't random since I typed it right now) and you find a program leading to this sequence, but can this be done with every sequence? Say that I base my choice on the throwing of a coin. Taking the non-ideal character of the dice into consideration and throwing it randomly (by making random movements). Will there always be a function a pattern, beneath the sequence? Is there non-randomness involved? If the underlying mechanism is deterministic, and we're able in principle, to predict an R or a B, can't we say the initial states of the throws are random?

I'm not sure what you are looking for. The nature of cause and effect? The physical meaning? The logic we use to determine cause and effect? — Haglund

The OP lays it out pretty clearly. Hume's analysis of causation and Kant's answer to Hume would comprise the basis for a semester. I did do the Hume semester as an undergraduate, but only ever discovered Kant years later. It’s a gap in my education.

You complaining that I gave you the tl;dr? — apokrisis

Pattee says there’s no need for an ‘ontological dualism’. And indeed there’s no need to introduce any kind of substance over and above what is already known to physics. But there is a need for concepts which could not be derived from physics by itself. Hence the appeal to organisms and to machines (artifacts). As Ernst Mayr put it, '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.'

Determinism and non-determinism are descriptive of theories and beliefs concerning the consequences of hypothetical actions, but these concepts are not descriptive of phenomena. — sime

How about the genetic code? That determines outcomes, does it not?

Pattee says there’s no need for an ‘ontological dualism’. — Wayfarer

Sure. He is a physicalist just like me.

Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter. — Wayfarer

Can you expand this a bit? ‘Ideas’ ?

The OP lays it out pretty clearly. Hume's analysis of causation and Kant's answer to Hume would comprise the basis for a semester. I did do the Hume semester as an undergraduate, but only ever discovered Kant years later. It’s a gap in my education. — Wayfarer

Kant didn't know relativity yet. He tried to grasp space and put gloves in it to argue for left-right symmetry. He spoke of relative and movable space which exist relative to, say, a room. By moving the room you can carry space along. Absolute space is empty. Einstein showed that empty space cannot exist. The finite and invariable speed of light gives rise to cause and effect which cannot exist in Kant's conception of space, so time can't exist in it either. The finite constant speed of light causes events to be separated in space and time. Mass, space, time, cause, and effect, simply don't exist, can't exist, in Kantian space.

Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter.
— Wayfarer

Can you expand this a bit? ‘Ideas’ ? — I like sushi

Major digression, but very well. It's the general consensus today that ideas are a product of the mind, and so of the brain. That the explanatory chain points back to evolution, 'what is useful to survival', therefore intelligence itself can be understood in terms of adaptation, 'the product of' evolutionary (and therefore biological) interactions. What counts for common sense nowadays.

Whereas what I'm contemplating harks back to the Platonic ideas. These are understood to be real. not simply the product of your or my mind. Consider the real numbers. Frege believed that number is real in the sense that it is quite independent of thought: 'thought content exists independently of thinking "in the same way", he said "that a pencil exists independently of grasping it. Thought contents are true and bear their relations to one another (and presumably to what they are about) independently of anyone's thinking these thought contents - "just as a planet, even before anyone saw it, was in interaction with other planets." Here when he says 'thought content' I think he's referring to concepts such as real numbers, not just anything that happen to be passing through one's mind.

He says in The Basic Laws of Arithmetic that 'the laws of truth are authoritative because of their timelessness: "[the laws of truth] are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this, that they authority for our thought if it would attain to truth."

So a generally platonistic view is that ideas are real in their own right - that for example the real numbers will be the same in all possible worlds. But the question invariably follows, in that case, where can they be situated? In some 'ghostly platonic realm'? I think that answer is due to the inherent naturalism of our culture, which can only conceive of what is real in terms of what is 'out there somewhere', what is existent in time and space. Whereas the ideas in that platonistic sense are what precede the formation of any specific particular thing, being the form of possibility for them to exist. They are part of the fabric the Universe, not something which features within it. That is the sense in which they're 'higher' (i.e. nearer to the unconditioned) than are 'the phenomenal' (existent things. One of the essays on my profile, Meaning and the Problem of Universals, addresses this. It's pretty dense read and I don't understand all of it but it makes some sense to me. Kelly Ross is the emeritus I mentioned previously that I've corresponded with about this subject.)

Kant didn't know relativity yet. ...He spoke of relative and movable space which exist relative to, say, a room. — Haglund

He said nothing of the kind. Have you got a reference? The canonical text is found here and in the next section. The key point that I take from it, is that Kant denies that either space or time are objectively real independently of our awareness of them: 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves, and would remain, even though all subjective conditions of the intuition were abstracted.'

The flatness of space is defined by the constancy of the ratio between a radius and a circumference. Only in flat space is this ratio a constant - pi. In curved space, it ranges from the 2pi of the sphere to the infinite pi of a hyperbolic geometry.

So only in flat space does some particular angle retain that value over all its scales of extension. And should you choose, instead of degrees, you can talk about angles using a more fundamental pi-based unit like radians. — apokrisis

You appear to be contradicting yourself apokrisis. You reify space, by talking about "flat space" and "curved space", implying that space is a thing with these properties. However, to say that space is both flat and curved is contradictory. Therefore you appear to be contradicting yourself by talking about both, curved space and flat space. Or do you know a way to distinguish between some space which is flat, and some space which is curved? How would we sense the difference between the two?

Otherwise, I'd say that it is a mistake to reify space in the way that you do, implying that it is a thing which may in some cases be flat, and in some cases be curved. And I would say that these are just different measuring techniques. If this is the case, then why the radical difference in measuring techniques?

But Pattee's biosemiotics stresses that a sign does the work. It actually switches the state of some material process. The meaning of a sign lies in the physical way it stops the world doing this, and thus counterfactually directs it towards doing that.

...

Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. It is both informational and physical. It connects the logical necessity to the physical causation in a way that is autopoietic or cybernetic - a working feedback loop.

Biosemiotics-lite just wants to treat the sign as a passive mark - something that is physical in being a mark, but then not physical because it doesn't change the world on which it is written in some directly meaningful way.

But a switch is a logical device that both represents the world - some enzymatic process is either on or off - and regulates that world. Flip the switch and you turn that process back on or off. — apokrisis

This is inconsistent with language as we know it. The sign is an independent, somewhat passive thing, a physical object in the material world, which is interpreted by a mind. That's how we communicate. The sign does not interpret itself. And if this were the case, a fundamental feature of language, ambiguity, and misunderstanding would not be possible. Further, another fundamental feature of language, communication between two distinct entities would also be impossible, because there would no longer be a difference of interpretation between two people. So this would necessitate that you and I, and every other human being who communicate with each other are one entity. But we are not, and that's why there is such a thing as ambiguity in language. Therefore, I do not see the basis for your claim, "Pattee is correct."

In other words, biology invented the molecular switch. Suddenly physics could be turned on and off "at will". Nothing like this had ever been seen before in nature. A whole new biosemiotic game had been invented. — apokrisis

Let me show you the problems here. Placing both "the switch" and "the will" as internal to the sign denies the possibility of "free will". It denies the possibility of doing other than what the sign tells one to do, and this is hard determinism. On the large scale, it denies the possibility of random mutations which are an essential part of evolution. Also, it denies the possibility of ambiguity, as mentioned above, and this is essential to indecisiveness, skepticism, and philosophy in general. So the problems with Pattee's proposal are numerous.

The universe could have been different. — frank

The line 12” long could not have been a line 14” long.
Add 2” to a 12” line there is a 14” line, but there is no longer a 12” line.

Take this universe as it is, change something in it, it is no longer the same universe. It isn’t a universe that is different; it is a different universe that is.

That there could have been a different universe is true; that this universe could have been different is not true.

.....and thank you as well.