If the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum is of the red frequency, and this hits rods and cones, and this goes down the optic nerve and the cortical layers, and the neural networks, and the peripheral environmental things of time and space.. how does any of this account for the actual sensation of "red"? — schopenhauer1

We've been through all this. You seem to have completely forgotten about opponent channel processing and how the brain sees "red" as also – counterfactually – not "green".

It is difficult to even begin to give you a neuroscience account that connects to a general biosemiotic or modelling relations account unless you can keep these kinds of beginner facts straight in your discussion.

A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism.

You have to account for this interaction in terms of biosemiotic mechanism – the very clever way that molecules can be messages.

Junk your boring old computationalist tropes. The way brains work is just fundamentally different. And you need to immerse yourself in that difference at the point where semiosis meets world - as in the actual biophysics of sensory receptors.

I would imagine an example of this would be something like language generation creating exponentially greater cultural learning which then favors a trajectory away from fixed innate instinctual mechanisms for purely learning mechanisms. In this way, the higher level language creation influences lower level instinctual mechanisms (in this case reducing its efficacy). — schopenhauer1

The key here to what I was saying, is to see language development as a freely willed activity of individuals, which is a bottom-up form of causation. We tend to think of language as a structure of rules which we must necessarily be obliged to follow, in order to be understood. But this is a false necessity. If it were true, it would render the creation of language, and its evolution, as something impossible. So we must consider the creative power of the individual, with free will, as the true essence of language, being the necessary condition which allows for the existence of language by causing the existence of language, in the sense of final cause.

There is what I would call a faulty interpretation of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", which assumes a "private language argument", as demonstrating the impossibility of the individual's "private language" as having a relationship with language as a whole. This is analogous to the interaction problem of dualism, the private language is portrayed as incapable of interacting with the public language. But this is a misinterpretation because what Wittgenstein's so-called private language argument really demonstrates is how it is possible for the private aspect of language to incorporate itself into, and therefore become a feature of the more general public language, through this causal relation which Wittgenstein saw as necessary to the existence of language.

So what is particular at the globally general level of the Comos – its will to entropify – becomes the context that makes sharp sense of its own "other" – the possibility of tiny critters forming their own local wishes and ambitions within what remains still possible in a small, but personally valued, way. — apokrisis

By no stretch of the imagination can "entropy" be conceived as a particular. This is the problem encountered when you incorrectly portray final cause as top-down causation. You have to assign purpose to the most general, the most global, and this is exactly opposite to what empirical observation shows us, that purpose is a feature of the most particular, the most local.

This can be clearly understood in the principles of holism. The part has purpose in relation to the whole. "Purpose" therefore, is a property of the part, not the whole. And if we were to attempt to assign purpose to the whole, we would have to relate that whole to something else, make it a part of a larger whole, to say that it has a function in that relation.

To see how "purpose" is causal, as a property of the part, in its relation to the whole, requires an understanding of final cause, and it's associated concept, free will. When the part acts purposefully toward being functional in the existence of the whole, the part does this freely, without causal coercion from the whole. Therefore the "principle" which the part adopts, and which gives it purpose, is derived from something other than the whole of which it is a part of. This principle is fundamental to the part's existence as a part, and is causal (bottom-up) in the sense of final cause.

You haven't dealt with my naturalistic argument. — apokrisis

Your naturalist argument is flawed for the reason I explained. You wrongly portray final causation as top-down. This is because you incorrectly conflate final causation, which is bottom-up causation empowered by the freedom of choice, with the top-down constraints of formal cause, of which "entropy" is one. It is very clear, from all the empirical evidence that we have of the effects of final cause, that the purpose by which a thing acts, comes from within the agent itself, as a bottom-up cause, and it is by selecting this purpose that it may have a function in relation to a whole.

I totally buried the lead in my first attempt to answer you and muddled it all.

Summary: The big benefit of information theoretic models of nature is that they can show how phenomena traditionally seen as "mentally constructed," can have an independent existence in nature and how information about these entities can enter the human nervous system. Bridging the subjective/objective gap and finding a solution to highly counter intuitive efforts at eliminitivism helps to make physicalist theory of mind more plausible, even though it also changes that theory in some ways.

Second, information is necessarily relational. Information doesn't exist "of itself," but as a contrast between possible values for some variable. Such a frame work denies the reality of any sort of "view from nowhere," or "view from anywhere," as contradicting our observations of how physics actually works. This helps us understand why we would experience things relationally, and debunks the idea that perspective (the relation of a system to an enviornment) is an arbitrary hallucination unique to consciousness. Information exchange between a rock and its enviornment follows the same sort of logic; the ability or inability to discern between different signals affects the behavior of enzymes as well as people, making elements of "perspective," less mysterious.

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More detail if you're interested information theory allows us to explain how words in a piece of paper, signals in a cable that are part of the internet, DNA codons, the path a river cuts in rock, etc. can all be thought of as the same sort of thing. It connects different levels of emergence (this can also be done using Mandlebrot's concept of fractal recurrence, and the two concepts complement each other).

What this let's us do vis-á-vis the subjective/objective divide is identity entities that we previously thought must exist only in the mind, out in the world. For example, Galileo thought color did not "really," exist; color was reducible to the motion of fundemental particles. This sort of reduction has been popular throughout history, but comes with significant conceptual problems, not the least of which being that it says that many objects of study are somehow unreal despite their explaining large scale physical events. This is the view point that something like "Japanese culture," is not real, it is something we can eliminate and/or reduce to patterns of neuronal activation. The same is said to go for color, taste, economic recessions, prices, etc. They are "mental and/or social constructs," with a hazy ontological status.

Of course, the view that Japanese culture is reducible to diffuse patterns of synapse development, physical media, etc. is different from the eliminitivist view that such things are somehow "unreal," but they often go together. Information-based conceptualizations of nature give us a way to locate incorporeal entities like recessions or cultures in the natural world. A key benefit of information is that it is substrate independent, so we don't have a problem speaking of an entity that exists as a collection of neurons, printed symbols, vases, films, etc. Conceptually we can talk about morphisms within an entity that remain even if its physical components shift radically. E.g., if I wrote this post on paper with a pen, then typed it into the browser, then submitted it so that it now exists in a server and is reconstituted when accessed, we would be able to identify the signal throughout its shifts in physical media, including how the signal reaches human eyes and is then encoded in neuronal behavior.

This seems to at least partially dissolve the subjective/objective barrier provided we already believe the body causes consciousness. It addresses the Hard Problem by filing in gaps in the physicalist view. If the body generates mind, then we can see how interactions in physical systems can bring information from a chair into the brain, thus creating a holistic model. But the "how is first person experience generated," question does remain unanswered here. The most the concept can do there is explain how any system, conscious or not, will have a "perspective;" different signals are relatively indiscernible depending on the receiver.

There is what I would call a faulty interpretation of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", which assumes a "private language argument", as demonstrating the impossibility of the individual's "private language" as having a relationship with language as a whole. This is analogous to the interaction problem of dualism, the private language is portrayed as incapable of interacting with the public language. But this is a misinterpretation because what Wittgenstein's so-called private language argument really demonstrates is how it is possible for the private aspect of language to incorporate itself into, and therefore become a feature of the more general public language, through this causal relation which Wittgenstein saw as necessary to the existence of language.

Great point. This seems to be key to popular computational frameworks for investigating AI (e.g. Kowalski's "Computational Logic and Human Thinking or Levesque's "Computation as Thinking"). These embrace the idea of a private language, but because the language is itself a logical system it can be translated into a social language via computation.

This translation isn't always effective. Understanding communication requires that we understand that agents have goals, and that communication is a means of fulfilling these goals. If current public languages are insufficient for communicating something an agent wants to communicate, it can use other means to try to transmit the semantic content, e.g. drawing a diagram of inventing a new word. You see this with kids all the time. They want to convey something, but lack the relevant linguistic knowledge base, and so attempt to combine existing words into new ones.

Such combinations can enter the public language, but diffusion varies, e.g. in the US we say "sandbox" but it seems like in the UK "sandpit" is more popular. Once established, the phrases can be mapped to new semantic content, hence the sandbox/pit differences appears even when the term is referring to the more recent concept of a computer programming "sandbox."

Your naturalist argument is flawed for the reason I explained. You wrongly portray final causation as top-down. This is because you incorrectly conflate final causation, which is bottom-up causation empowered by the freedom of choice, with the top-down constraints of formal cause, of which "entropy" is one. It is very clear, from all the empirical evidence that we have of the effects of final cause, that the purpose by which a thing acts, comes from within the agent itself, as a bottom-up cause, and it is by selecting this purpose that it may have a function in relation to a whole.

Right, this is why, for the universe as a whole to have a "purpose," its relation to God, an agent who creates it, is often invoked. However, does this rule out theories of natural teleology to you?

These have a conception of teleology/final cause that isn't dependent on an agent, at least not in a straight-forward way. Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos," proposes a sort of teleology of immanent principles underlying the universe that in turn result in its generation of agents. That is, the principles come first and in turn generate the agents that fulfill them. Aristotle's teleology is generally considered "natural teleology." Max Planck seems to have had ideas of this sort too, maybe Liebnitz for another example. I'd add Hegel but it's unclear if it fits the same sort of type, but his system is certainly interpreted that way fairly often.

I find these hard to conceptualize at times. The principles are what generate the agents who can recognize the principles and whose existence is part of the process of actualizing them. But then it seems like the agents are essential to defining the principles as teleological, even though the principles predate them, which, if not contradictory, is at least hard to explain in a straight forward fashion.




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The thing to remember is the hard problem is a problem about fundamental “stuff”. — apokrisis

It can be framed in those terms but doesn't have to be. It's a problem for anyone who thinks that consciousness arrived late in the universe, however that is construed.

It's a problem for anyone who thinks that consciousness arrived late in the universe, however that is construed. — bert1

That’s an assertion and not an argument.

Provide the evidence for a belief that consciousness had to arrive early. Provide a definition of consciousness that could even meet the counterfactuality criteria such that you could have evidence either way.

I can't answer your challenge to bert1 regarding the scientific theory of consciousness as a development that started without it and appeared after some time. Bateson approached that in a paradigmatic fashion where Chalmers is trying to rank different kinds of reduction.

On the other hand, the Aristotelian interpretation of structure you have presented does bring the problem of time front and center as a matter of principle.

Aristotle did not have a "hard problem" because he had an unmoved mover contemplating what it had set into motion.

On the other hand, the Aristotelian interpretation of structure you have presented does bring the problem of time front and center as a matter of principle. — Paine

Yep. Time is tricky. But at least modern physics agrees on some general things, such as the Universe embeds a cosmic temporal asymmetry. There is a global thermodynamic arrow pointing every event in the same general direction.

If current public languages are insufficient for communicating something an agent wants to communicate, it can use other means to try to transmit the semantic content, e.g. drawing a diagram of inventing a new word — Count Timothy von Icarus

More than this, the means for communicating is often chosen on the grounds of simplicity. Communication in general is a tool formed for the purpose of facilitating action. So in many cases the public language is sufficient, but sort of like overkill, so the agent may create a very simple demonstration to take the place of a long explanation which might be required if conventional language was employed. This is sort of like the way we use acronyms and short forms. As we gain experience we find simpler ways to do (or say) the same thing.

However, does this rule out theories of natural teleology to you? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't know how one would conceive of "natural teleology", so I cannot answer this.

These have a conception of teleology/final cause that isn't dependent on an agent, at least not in a straight-forward way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

From my perspective an "agent" is something active, and something active is required for causation. So we can't really remove the agent from final cause, but you might have something different in mind for "agent", which is an ambiguous term.

Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos," proposes a sort of teleology of immanent principles underlying the universe that in turn result in its generation of agents. That is, the principles come first and in turn generate the agents that fulfill them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem I find with much of this type of metaphysical speculation is the difficulty in determining the active principle which is responsible for causation in a teleological explanation. So for example, you mention "immanent principles" which result in the "generation of agents". Well, a "principle" is fundamentally passive, and so we still need something active, to act as the actual cause of this generation. But this active thing, acting in a teleologically generative way, would really be an agent itself. So it doesn't make sense to say that this would result in the generation of agents, which from this precept must already exist. And if we remove the prerequisite prior agent, we just have a disguised form of emergence.

The need for the prior agent, the actuality which acts as cause, is explained by Aristotle's cosmological argument. If we remove all actuality, to start with a pure potential, like prime matter is supposed to be, then we supposedly have a time, at the beginning, with pure potential, and nothing actual. But any potential needs to be actualized by something actual, to become actual, so the pure potential could not actualize itself, and this would mean that there would always be pure potential, and never anything actual. This is the problem I find with Plotinus' One. It is supposed to be a pure potential which is the source of all things. But this idea falls to Aristotle's cosmological argument, so the Christian God is a pure actuality.

I find these hard to conceptualize at times. The principles are what generate the agents who can recognize the principles and whose existence is part of the process of actualizing them. But then it seems like the agents are essential to defining the principles as teleological, even though the principles predate them, which, if not contradictory, is at least hard to explain in a straight forward fashion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, it seems like you grasp the problem I described above, quite well. Notice that the problem is really the result of a reversal of the actual-potential order expressed by the cosmological argument. The principles which are posited, in the idea you expressed, are supposed to be responsible for the actualization of the agents, but it's really the activity of the agents themselves which accounts for the actualization of the agents.. The problem obviously, is that the action of the agents is supposed to generate (cause) the existence of these agents. So we have a vicious temporal circle where the agents, through their actions, cause their own existence. The point of the cosmological argument is to show that an agent (in the general sense of something actual) must be prior to any actualization of potential. So the actualization cannot be the cause of the agent, it is necessarily caused by the agent. Keep in mind though that "agent" is used in the general sense, so God as an immaterial "agent" is somewhat different from a human being as an "agent", existing with a material body.

A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism. — apokrisis

How is a series of this responding not some sort of Cartesian theater fallacy? How is "sensation red" that experience I have, the same as "A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism."

Why does:

Red (the experience of)

=

"A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism.

And why is it not rather


"A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism.

=

"A "red" cone cell responds to all the light. It switches off when it "sees" too much "green" light. It can switch on when it "sees" a general lack of "green" light. So right from the get-go, it is turning physics into information. It is reacting to electromagnetism with its own interest-driven logicism.

How is a series of this responding not some sort of Cartesian theater fallacy? — schopenhauer1

Brains and nervous systems model the world, they don’t display the world. Just start with that thought.

The fallacy is only being committed by those who believe in homuncular reifications like “consciousness” and “experience”.

The premise of a shared reality is incompatible with the premise of non-representational perceptual access for all. For if I judge my own perception of the world to be direct, deflationary and non-representational, then I must judge everyone else's perception of the same world as being indirect, and representational according to truth-by-correspondence.

The only way I can reconcile everyone's claims to be non-representational direct realists, is to interpret each and every person as referring to a different world.

It's a problem for anyone who thinks that consciousness arrived late in the universe, however that is construed.
— bert1

That’s an assertion and not an argument. — apokrisis

I wasn't trying to make a substantial point, merely to rebut your mischaracterisation of the hard problem in too narrow terms.

A rebuttal would be a counter argument. It is pretty obvious why consciousness is a bigger problem for anyone who thinks it arrived early in the Universe’s evolution. So much more than your glib assertion is required here.

You won’t even support a definition of consciousness that could be counterfactually determined one way or the other. You don’t even have the beginnings of a real argument.

The only way I can reconcile everyone's claims to be non-representational direct realists, is to interpret each and every person as referring to a different world. — sime

Where’s the problem with always different and yet also usefully similar?

The standard pragmatist answer that has the benefit of explaining both the similarity and the differences - the differences being constrained to the degree they are differences that don’t make a difference and hence ensure the useful degree of similarity observed.

A rebuttal would be a counter argument. It is pretty obvious why consciousness is a bigger problem for anyone who thinks it arrived early in the Universe’s evolution. So much more than your glib assertion is required here. — apokrisis

OK, I'm not being clear. You said the hard problem was about fundamental stuffs. It isn't necessarily, Chalmers doesn't characterise it that way. It applies to any view that says consciousness 'arises' (pick verb of choice) from a physical system or entity or whatever. Acknowledging the existence of this challenge doesn't mean it isn't solved. Maybe your theory solves it. Maybe it's not a hard problem at all, only it seems hard to people, like me, stuck in outmoded habits of thought. It's just a name for an issue (possibly a pseudo-issue) that needs addressing. Acknowledging that there might be a burden to explain such an emergence does not commit you to thinking that the hard problem is unsolvable. Similarly, I'm a panpsychist, but I don't deny that there is a serious issue called the 'combination problem' that panpsychists have a burden to address. Maybe it's easy to address, maybe not.

Maybe it's not a hard problem at all, only it seems hard to people, like me, stuck in outmoded habits of thought. It's just a name for an issue (possibly a pseudo-issue) that needs addressing. — bert1

Sure. And I always address it with the specific anti-reductionist stance that is enactivism, pragmatism, biosemiotics, Friston's Bayesian brain, Rosen's modelling relation, systems science, and so on.

I've addressed it plenty.

but I don't deny that there is a serious issue called the 'combination problem' that panpsychists have a burden to address. — bert1

So address it. All I ever see is folk saying consciousness is a fundamental simple of the Cosmos, but somehow the complex functional neurology of creatures with evolved nervous systems are needed to get it to the point of being able do stuff that gives evidence it exists.

It feels like the panpsychists just copy our homework. :wink:

All I ever see is folk saying consciousness is a fundamental simple of the Cosmos, but somehow the complex functional neurology of creatures with evolved nervous systems are needed to get it to the point of being able do stuff that gives evidence it exists. — apokrisis

How about, consciousness is a fundamental simple of experience? Even despite the fact that I comprise billions of cellular operations, many existing on a sub- or un-concious level, nevertheless the fact is I also possess subjective unity of experience. I don't learn about a pain in my foot by being informed of it.

Why do we attribute agency to evolution? Saying that evolution does things or creates things or produces outcomes? When the way natural selection acts is as a filter - it prevents things that are not adaptive from proliferating. Evolution pre-supposes living organisms which adapt and survive, but to say that evolution is the cause of the existence of organisms seems putting the cart before horse. I think there is a tendency to attribute to evolution the agency that used to be assigned to God. It's kind of a remnant of theistic thinking.

As regards consciousness being the product of an evolved nervous system - what about the panpsychist (or maybe even pansemiotic) idea that consciousness is an elemental feature of the Cosmos, that exists in a latent state, and which then manifests itself through evolution. Not that consciousness should be reified as some existing force that can be identified as a separate factor or influence. The lecturer I had in Indian philosophy used to say, 'What is latent, becomes patent'. I'm pretty sure this is conformable with C S Peirce's metaphysics also.

But the idea that it is real as a latency in the cosmos, taking form as organic life, at least addresses:

It is pretty obvious why consciousness is a bigger problem for anyone who thinks it arrived early in the Universe’s evolution. — apokrisis

How about, consciousness is a fundmental simple of experience? — Wayfarer

And yet it is "fundamentally" dichotomised into attention and habit. I can drive a car in busy traffic on automatic pilot. Not to mention that I can go to sleep, get drunk, or feel time freeze in bike crash, etc.

Neurology explains the vast variety of our mental states. It also explains the generality of "being conscious" in terms of being an organism in a pragmatic modelling relation with its world.

So calling consciousness fundamental is wrong from a naturalistic point of view. It ain't fundamental so far as our best models of natural causality.

And calling it a mereological simple is also wrong. What we lump under the singular title of "consciousness" could not be gunkier. Where do the neural and biological aspects of being an organism with mindful unity bottom out in some particular necessary parts exactly?

Why do we attribute agency to evolution? Saying that evolution does things or creates things or produces outcomes? When the way natural selection acts is as a filter - it prevents things that are not adaptive from proliferating. Evolution pre-supposes living organisms which adapt and survive, but to say that evolution is the cause of the existence of organisms seems putting the cart before horse. — Wayfarer

Well yeah. That is what the holists in biology keep telling the reductionists. Evolution is fine and dandy, but don't forget the other – dichotomous – thing of development.

My departure point here is that view from within biology which says evolvability itself had to evolve. It was a pretty purposeful step in its own way.

So reductionism always leads to chicken and egg issues. Holism instead focuses on the dialectical logic of mutually dependent co-arising, or what Haken called synergistics.

I think there is a tendency to attribute to evolution the agency that used to be assigned to God. It's kind of a remnant of theistic thinking. — Wayfarer

Or rather, German and Russian biologists tended to be pretty comfortable with holistic thinking and so were ready to read agency into organisms, thus never had to be too hardline in their rejection of theistic versions of agency.

Peirce likewise.

But the Anglo world did embrace hardline material reductionism and so had to police its language, rid itself of any hint that evolution was anything other than blind chance.

A lot of this is just where you were brought up. A cultural thang.

As regards consciousness being the product of an evolved nervous system - what about the panpsychist (or maybe even pansemiotic) idea that consciousness is an elemental feature of the Cosmos, that exists in a latent state, and which then manifests itself through evolution. — Wayfarer

Hand-waving. What is latent consciousness when it's at home? What kind of causal model lies behind this "manifesting"? How can it be both a general elemental feature, and yet not an active feature, except in the most exceptionally particular and materially atypical circumstances – like life on Earth?

The lecturer I had in Indian philosophy used to say, 'What is latent, becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

Sure. And biosemiosis is a theory of exactly how that happens. It can specify the physical conditions where semiosis first becomes a possible thing.

But panpsychism is just hand-waving. There is no causal theory of how a potential got actualised. Unlike biosemiosis, it can't pinpoint a moment when the latency became present in the Cosmos – due to the very particular circumstances of the being a watery planet circling the free energy source of a sun – and so just handwavingly says "the latency was always present as a fundamental simple of material existence itself".

The fallacy is only being committed by those who believe in homuncular reifications like “consciousness” and “experience”. — apokrisis

It's not a reification that I am sensing things :roll:. That there is this persistent "experiential quality" is what is at question. You can call it "illusion" but then that has to be accounted for.

It's not a reification that I am sensing things — schopenhauer1

Who is this "I" if not a reification? It is the socially constructed objectification of the quality of "you-ness" that arises as a necessity of semiosis.

So yes, we do feel like a self in it is world as that is the essence of the modelling relation which makes for a sentient organism. That is what the enactive view is about.

But the idea that this "I" is an inhabiting spirit, a soul, a fundamental simple, is just the dualistic claim that underwrites panpsychism.

Semiotics says it is just how modelling gets done. A sense of self emerges in opposition to a sense of world. Both the self and its world are the two halves of the one-ness that is the modelling relation.

No need to rewrite physics. You just need to look for the point at which a machinery of semiosis could begin to earn its entropic keep in organismic fashion.

Feeling the self as "other" to the world is how the organism functions. Feeling the self as "other" to society – the burden you always complain of – is just this same organismic organisation being lifted to another semiotic level.

Semiosis in terms of genes and neurons becomes colonised by the even more abstracted semiosis by words and numbers. We have the rise of society as a super-organism.

You as a person in his world now have to be able to talk about being a person within the "other" of the social collective.

So it is no surprise that propaganda about spirits and souls, or eventually the magical material property of "consciousness" and "the authentic self", etc, becomes such a big social deal.

Individuals must be taught to objectify their existence in this fashion to become the suitably constrained elements composing the next level of an entropy-driven modelling relation.

Who is this "I" if not a reification? It is the socially constructed objectification of the quality of "you-ness" that arises as a necessity of semiosis. — apokrisis

Why does socially constructed change the fact that there is a sensation any more than the rods and cones? Causation doesn’t equal ontological identity. So it’s the same Cartesian theater trick at a different level. How is this semiotics equivalent to an experience of sensation. Map and terrain. You know the argument. The terrain is matter not experience and the map is semiosis, but where’s the experiential aspect? It doesn’t add up even if you mention top down causation of social construction. It’s just more map but also a bit of consequent on the premise, etc. the feedback mechanism of higher and lower skips the part to be described. social construction needs minds that can sense already in the equation.

Also, information isn’t necessarily experiential just computational. You’d have to prove this information can be identical to experience.

Why does socially constructed change the fact that there is a sensation any more than the rods and cones? — schopenhauer1

You get taught to see that a postbox is red rather than merely being able to see the postbox easily because your neurology is designed to dichotomise small hue differences into striking shape-revealing differences.

So the brain "looks through" the redness as all that is is a way to really emphasise the fractional wavelength differences that can give away something ecologically important like a ripe fruit among green foliage. This was the reason primates added a third cone to their vision – to create an exaggerated visual boundary between red and green so that hidden shapes would pop out.

But human society turns it around. It makes use of red as a hue that really forces itself on our attention for these 10 million year old reasons. It paints postboxes in the easiest to spot visual differences. And it creates a whole vocabulary of descriptions for red hues, making us even more conscious of how we might think and react to the "colour itself". Through culture, we learn to objectively notice what nature never designed us to do. That the world is full of colours as well as shapes.

Then along come philosophers pushing warmed-over theistic beliefs about eternal souls and heavenly rewards. They too all gravitate to talking about colours when they want to motivate arguments about Hard Problems and ineffable qualia.

Colour perception just seems so arbitrary once you pull the trick of completely ignoring the role it actually plays in the ecology of perception.

If you put blinkers on, the horse doesn't stray.

The terrain is matter not experience and the map is semiosis, but where’s the experiential aspect? — schopenhauer1

I'm bored with explaining the same thing again and again. The model is a model of the self in its world. It is an Umwelt.

You need to think more deeply about how the "map/territory" thing is just Cartesian representationalism all over again. The real thing and its mental image.

Semiosis stresses the three-way relation where the map is the sign that is pragmatically interpreted.

Does it get you where you want to go? Great. Were you moving in the real world or a Metaverse simulation? Well was there a difference that made a difference?

Haven't you come across the Noumenal Problem yet? :rofl:

Unlike biosemiosis, it can't pinpoint a moment when the latency became present in the Cosmos — apokrisis

You mean, ‘manifested’.

You mean, ‘manifested’. — Wayfarer

Let’s not trivialise something this amazing - the discovery that a convergence zone of physical forces allowed semiosis to become a thing on a watery planet some 10 billion years into the Universe’s existence.

Life and mind could only have existed because there was this remarkable intersection of lines…



So contrast this level of hard evidence for the metaphysical claims biosemiosis might make with the wishy-washy pretentiousnes of Panpsychism.

Something like this had to be the case to close the causal gap and conclusively put paid to the Hard Problem’s “causal gap”. The natural philosophy route really came up trumps.

As I explained…

As outlined in this paper - http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/publications/Phillips2006.pdf - and in this book - http://lifesratchet.com/ - the nanoscale turns out to a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transistion from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. As the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that constrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery

I wasn’t attempting to trivialize anything. All I meant was that the fact that living beings began to appear on the earth doesn't undermine the idea that consciousness might be concieved as existing as a latency or potentiality in the Universe prior to the appearance of simple organisms, which enable it to manifest, providing a way to conceive of it as a cause, rather than simply as a consequence or epiphenomenon. That writer you told me about, Søren Brier, seems open to that kind of perspective. Agree that may not be an empirical theory at least according to current naturalism. (Incidentally the Life's Ratchet domain name seems to have lapsed although I am aware of the book.)

No need to rewrite physics. — apokrisis

Actually, the uncertainty principle, to begin with, is an obvious demonstration, of the reality of this need. Producing a metaphysics which incorporates the deficiencies of science, instead of recognizing them as deficiencies, and seeking the way to resolution, is a meaningless exercise.

You keep touting "naturalism", as if this categorization was sufficient to justify your metaphysics. But naturalism just reifies mother nature, in a similar way to the way that theology reifies "God". The principal difference is that theology allows that the aspects of the universe which appear to us as unintelligible, actually are intelligible, but only appear not to be intelligible because the method we are applying toward attempting to understand them is inadequate. This method is the method of natural philosophy, the scientific method, which has its limitations. Naturalism, on the other hand, treats the unintelligibility of these aspects of the universe as inherent to the nature of the universe itself, rather than as the consequences of deficiencies of the mind and its method of understanding. The difference therefore, is that naturalism approaches something which appears as unintelligible as inherently unintelligible, where theology approaches it as inherently intelligible, but appearing as unintelligible due to a deficiency in the approach.


So naturalism and scientism wrap each other up in mutual support of denying the reality of the supernatural (that which could only be understood by a superior intelligence). But this mutual support is really nothing other than a vicious circle of unintelligibility. Use of the scientific method reaches its limits and finds anything beyond that to be unintelligible to this practise. The naturalist metaphysician models the aspects of the universe which are rendered by the scientific method as unintelligible (chance, randomness, etc.) as ontological (symmetry breaking, etc.). The proponents of scientism take these ontological models as "truth", and therefore proof that the scientific method is the only means to the goal of truth. So the scientific method continues to produce more support for naturalism by demonstrating that these aspects of the universe are inherently unintelligible, as naturalism continues to produce the ontology which represent them, in its support of scientism.

So yes, we do feel like a self in it is world as that is the essence of the modelling relation which makes for a sentient organism. — apokrisis

No it doesn't. Sentience makes for a sentient organism. Why can't you have a modelling relation without sentience?

I'm bored with explaining the same thing again and again. The model is a model of the self in its world. — apokrisis

Then explain it better. Why does a self have to be sentient?