This is a very comforting view of hopelessness. The comfort of this view actually creates it's own sense of hope. — Noble Dust

As I said, the pessimist is just as hopeful as the next guy.

It is despair is the opium of the pessimist. Isn't this just as fair? — t0m

Pessimists have hope just as much. No one is excluded.

But a certain kind of lifestyle is so engrossing that one doesn't reflect on this futility much. One swings from object to object, becoming more complex and skilled at pursuit. I don't see how the "ultimate futility" makes life more or less valuable in itself. We could just as easily be grateful that the wicked human heart is insatiable. In Brave New World, they chew aphrodisiac chewing gum. Why? Because lots of sex is available in the world of Find The Zipper. So appetite is desirable. Indeed, lust and hunger are even enjoyable when mixed with the pleasure of anticipation. — t0m

Well, what does an opiate do? It dulls the mind. It makes one not see the bigger picture. One is trapped in the narrow confines of each opium den of the new hopeful pursuit. It is just another and another and another. Whether you use terms like grateful for the wicked insatiable human heart, doesn't negate the situation any more than "challenges need to be overcome to make life better" does. If you are alive, human, and self-reflecting, this is your situation. Slap on as many terms as you'd like to make spin it a certain way, but it is just one damn goal after the other, and the hope that a future state will be better. Otherwise, the situation would be too stark to fully manage.

Hope is expectation. Expectations can be realistic or not. If the latter, it leads to a downward spiral...into pain, suffering and despair. If it is the former then you're in sync with the truth - reality - and the cycle is merry go round. What do you think? — TheMadFool

But then another goal takes its place. And another. It is not whether you achieve the goal that I'm getting at, but the insatiableness of goals, the neverending quality, and their instrumental nature. Also, its ability to narrow our focus so we don't see the absurd instrumental nature of the repetition. It's an opiate indeed.

Which is to say, only suckers put hope in the future. — T Clark

Yet that is the driver of our continuance on the cycle. No one can really avoid it. The strain of the instrumental nature of existence would be too much without...something. It could be the weekend, the tribal ceremony, that hunt, that X entertainment, that relationship. You name it, you are hoping for something. No one is above it. Sagely words don't negate its affect on the average (read all) humans living.

How about those with mental disorders or way out of the ordinary experiences that cannot be reconciled with the rest of the group? These are the isolated ones I guess. Empathy is only gleaned at through sympathy as the pain is not really felt together (no reference) only through analogy.

So I'm making something like a Kantian point. We are hardwired to assume the uniformity of nature. Hume's problem is unanswered, as far as I see it, but we keep building skyscrapers and getting in airplanes. We don't/can't really doubt the laws of nature, despite their logical groundlessness.

But these laws are also applied between entities. We input initial conditions and output predictions. The "box" works. We trust it for the same reason we trust the laws. We trust what serves us. All of this is great. But applying the "machine" of this kind of thinking to the whole of reality doesn't make sense. From what could reality be deduced? From what initial state? The laws themselves are what we would also want a "cause" for, philosophically. But this is absurd. And this absurdity is what is revealed by thinking all of this through. — t0m

Good points. Don't take the epistemology for the metaphysics. What is, what is being, what are beings, what is a process in itself, etc. may not be gathered through pure synthesis of empirical evidence through logical construct. But this is where the major divide lies. @apokrisis believes that this process-system of the human mind, being a part of a larger pansemiosis can reveal its own pansemiotic nature through synthesizing the logic of the empirical evidence, and thus get at the root of metaphysics. All or almost all can be revealed empirically and logically to the human mind, and thus there is no noumena that is missing.

And you're also right that this means that what matters is the evolutionary history of any particular network, such that we can't say what ought to or not belong to any particular network in advance (isn't one of the marvels of evolution it's ability to hijack or incorporate the environment into it's dynamics?). But this, I want to say, has conceptual consequences for what we understand 'life' to be, and how fragile a notion it is. — StreetlightX

So what would you say are some consequences of this idea that what matters in biology is the situatedness of the molecules and the environment in its unique historical evolutionary development?

Perhaps I can put it this way: if one can't identify the biological alone with life (insofar as there can be no such thing, strictly speaking, as 'biology alone'), then how exactly are we to situate 'life?'. I don't think, by the way, that this question can be answered categorically. I ultimately think that this is a political and even ethical question, rather than a strictly empirical one, but I want to specify, on the side of the empirical, as it were, why this would be the case. — StreetlightX

The problem I have is with the idea of "biology alone". Biology is not a self-contained set of substrates, but a fluid dynamic between certain macromolecules and the environment in a series of physical processes- some described probabilistically, some perhaps more straightforward (and all of it it perhaps biosemiotically). Thus it isn't just DNA, but the networks that they produce to create more complex processes. The networks that you describe may be analogous, if we were to isolate it in a network mapping way, but it is its situatedness, along with other biological substrates like DNA, cells, proteins and generally all the macromolecules that are found in lifeforms, that make it biological. The evolutionary history of how these networks came about and its unique way of solving problems using its structural constituents to influence its growth and development is what matters here.

Yeah, biosemiosis fits into this insofar as signs serve to regulate the dynamics of both development and evolution and helps us to speak of 'directedness' in both, but I'm unsure how to triangulate that with the question of life posed in the OP. — StreetlightX

Doesn't it have to do with something like negentropy? Life appears to go against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but it really isn't because its an open system that takes in free energy from its surroundings and produces heat and entropy back. Life is what is a negentropic open system.

I guess that may be more at the biophysics level of definition. But, are you asking whether life needs to have some sort of material substance like genetic material, to be considered life or is it more about the arrangement of the material? And if it is the arrangement of the material, what makes it different from any other arrangement of material? I'm just wondering if you can break down your post into a succinct question as far as the question of life you are proposing.

Now, what's philosophically interesting to me about all this is that, if I understand the implications correctly, it throws into question the specificity of life itself, or rather what does and does not count as 'alive'. That is, if we think in terms of networks, how is it possible to think the specificity of life itself, insofar as the dynamics of genome networks are defined as much by extra-biological factors as they are biological ones? Because extra-biological factors are as just as important as biological factors in the process of gene expression, it becomes very hard to draw any kind of hard diving line between the two. This also follows, as a matter of principle, from the fact that networks are simply indifferent to the 'content' of the nodes which constitute them: it's all just a matter of the organization and threshold levels.

There's alot more to say, but as usual, I'm going to stop before I go on too long. — StreetlightX

Have you not heard of biosemiosis yet? I am sure @apokrisis can explain this. I am not even being facetious here, this seems like a great example of how this fits into the biosemiosis framework.

Meh. It is a self consistent story about how existence could develop. So of course it may not totally do away with brute fact, but also it minimises the brute factness that normally dominates most folk’s metaphysics. — apokrisis

I don't see how this is justified. Other than saying metaphysics is process-based and not substance ontology, that is not well developed. It's okay to not want to speculate, but you see how that could be unsatisfying as far as philosophical inquiry goes.

Christ you’re basically such a miserable bugger. Don’t you find any joy in encountering new ideas? — apokrisis

I don't see how this has to do with dodging metaphysics. You have a well-developed epistemology, and philosophy of science, no doubt. But part of the problem is that some philosophical topics are trying to ground a metaphysics of being, and that really does not cohere to a lot in the pansemiotic theory which is based on the logic behind the mechanics of hierarchical processes, not what the processes are in and of themselves.

That makes pansemiosis a reasonable metaphysical framework. And biology certainly now recognises that life is not about bringing dead matter into action. It already wants to develop order. The trick then is to find material processes balanced at the edge of chaos - where they are at the point of critical instability and so easy to tip with just an informational nudge. — apokrisis

I can accept pansemiosis as an overriding philosophy of science, but does it really solve the larger metaphysical problems? Does it, for example, solve what it means for something "to be"? If so, how does it even approach this question? Does it explain the noumena of the in-itself?Most of the time, when this kind of question appears, you seem to balk, claim that we are these lowly substance ontologists (perhaps unfoundedly so), and then proceed to describe epistemological claims, and dodging the metaphysical questions. This is a philosophy forum, so speculating on the nature of being is not so far fetched or uncalled for.

As I say, it explains how semiosis is even possible due to an emergent scale of physical convergence. — apokrisis

Would you say that pansemiosis may suffer from being too elegant? What of the idea that the universe is simply messy? Quantum mechanics is probabilistic, for example. But, even if that is not a good example, why should the universe follow some form of logic and not be discrete events that can have some empirical regularities, but no overriding ones? Wouldn't you say that this kind of theory would be self-reinforced by those who already have a penchant for logical systems in the first place?

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.

In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell. — apokrisis

I see how this can possibly lead from chemical to biophysical, but how is it semiotic?

Well semiosis arises as a science of meaning - a way to account for language use, both in the ordinary sense and propositionally. Or do you doubt that it even applies there? — apokrisis

I don't really. I like the elegance of it like I told you. Does it have predictive value or only explanatory value? Can it be tested for, or is it something you think is not testable? To use your phrasing, what is the counterfactual to this, and how can it be proven either way :D?

Would you accept that hierarchy theory is regarded as a universal natural organisational structure just as natural selection is held to be held a universal natural organising process? — apokrisis

Well, I may well accept it, but then, if this is THE way to look at nature, why is science itself not really concerned with it? If it is so thoroughly explanatory, its actual usage in scientific theories ranging from physics to sociology would be much more far-ranging. As we have it now, it is positioned in a sort of enclave of an enclave if you will.

And aren't Pattee and Salthe among those who have literally written the book on hierarchical organisation? Yet now they are really keen on calling it semiosis when talking about evolving systems. — apokrisis

Now, yes there are some fairly well-lettered scientists involved with this theory, but again, they seem to have more of an enclave. Why wouldn't their work be diffused to a far wider range of problems, audiences, and works in general? It seems that everything would lead to this overriding theory eventually, so it would be constantly referred to in many distant scientific papers, aims, and experiments. It would have also more explanatory value in hypothesis and thus be a just as central as Darwinian mechanism, for example. As far as I know, I don't see that.

Now, I will grant you,the appeal of your theory is its totalizing nature. There is kind of an elegant aesthetics of seeing the world in more-or-less a framework that can explain everything in terms of semiotic principles, but it seems to be a niche and not THE theory that science is advancing towards.

More importantly, its main weakness is what I stated before: The explanation is implications taken after the fact and interpreted in a light that matches the overriding theory. All theories can thus never NOT fit into triadic theories because it is always there after the fact. Thus, what can ever disprove it? The traditional fields and experiments do not explicitly try to strengthen or weaken its explanatory ability, as it is rarely if ever tested, if it can ever really be tested.

The "help cycle" is complicated. At a community level one can choose to participate depending upon circumstances. At the government level it is automatic with unpredictable results. I chose whether or not to participate based upon my experiences, which are constantly changing. There is no straightforward answer, there are only choices we make in our lives when there are choices to be made. — Rich

My question is what are we doing by continuing this whole community thing in the first place? If I am duty-bound to help others (something I nominally agree with), then why are we keeping community going in the first place? Helping others is always instrumental. We help others to..help others to..help others.. to help others. Thus ethics is a means to an ends. But what ends?

Care is a feeling that may manifest as action or inaction. It all depends — Rich

Yes, but what of the problem I mentioned? What is it that we need to perpetuate the help-cycle to begin with? In other words, why do we keep the whole society thing going where people are in constant need to be helped? Why is this a good thing to persist and continue into the future for more people? This becomes circular reasoning, and rather absurd.

Virtue-care-ethics is elegantly simplistic because it puts the emphasis on the individual to extend their sphere of interest to include others than one's self. I'd rather live in a democratic collectivist ethical society than have a benevolent dictator tell me what is good. — Posty McPostface

To deflate this a bit, all you're really saying is that helping others in need is moral. What if no one ever needs help. Does morality need to exist? If we know that there will never be a case that needing to help others will go away, why do we keep the whole society thing going where people are in constant need to be helped? Why is this a good thing to persist and continue into the future for more people? This becomes circular reasoning, and rather absurd.

That is why Pattee, Salthe and other hierarchy theorists get semiotics. — apokrisis

Okay, but this theory still seems non-standard. It is an overriding framework that is not assented (or probably known) by most scientists in their respective field. For example, a microbiologist or physicist who work for a company, non-profit, or university research grant, would probably not be publishing their findings in Peircean scientific terminology or even perhaps be aware of this framework. It is highly theoretical and looks like it started mostly as abstract ideas that though based on Peirce, were essentially applied in anthropology (Bateson) and biology (Pattee) and then evolved into the other sciences as people divined more areas where this logic looked like it made sense to them (everything is triadic hierarchies.. it was seen by them as immanent throughout nature). So, to me, though it is using highly technical language and maths (especially thermodynamics, energy distribution in an open system, and the overriding principle of entropy, etc.), it is still not necessarily something that the hard science fields will pick up as "the" theory of the universe. It reminds me of physics forums where every poster had a new idea for the Unified Field Theory (TOE). The postings were by no means non-technical (many deeply involved mathematical concepts and scientific principles involved), it is just that they were/are unprovable, or unlikely to be championed by any actual scientific communities to be proven in any experimental way. Semiotics theorticians (i.e. systems theorists?) can always claim a scientific fact as fitting in their theoretical framework, but it is not actually what the scientists involved were aiming for or even discussing in their work- it is implications taken after the fact and interpreted in a light that matches the overriding theory. All theories can thus never NOT fit into triadic theories because it is always there after the fact, and not as a the explicit hypothetical framework the scientific team was trying to prove or inform.

A counter example would be Darwinian evolutionary theory. Here is an overriding theory at the core of biological sciences. It is a theoretical framework, just like semiotics. It is not a tangible "fact" but a principle that is informed over time and keeps getting strengthened with each passing year with more nuanced details of how evolution/genetics/biochemistry works/worked to explain the variation, novelty, and relatedness of species over time. However, semiotic theory which is only discussed by a small group of theoretical biologists/systems theorists, unlike Darwinian evolutionary theory, is NOT constantly being tested/hypothesized with it being the overriding theoretical assumption or principle the community was trying to inform.

Split, cut, yadayada. It all amounts to there being something that is interpreting and something that is interpreted. This is where you bring in the idea of all this is emergent order from triadic modelling.

One question, off topic of mind-body problem- what does triadic modelling (like I guess Pattee's cut and just about every other physical process it seems according to pansemioisis) add to the biological and/or physics traditional frameworks? Is this overarching theory a way of describing how physical/biological systems emerge hierarchically into more complex phenomena? Is this theory non-standard for most scientists? If so, why? If it is non-standard, why is it not recognized? In other words, this is very theoretical and more to do with playing around with experimental/applied concepts and already established theoretical concepts.

When you understand how they might be the wrong questions is when you will start to know that you might be getting the organic approach that is biosemiosis.

You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy. — apokrisis

Here, I'm willing to go along with the theory for arguments sake- there is a subject/object split that happens between interpreter and what is interpreted. How does this not devolve into panexperientialism though? If "mental states" are a well-formed umwelt/world image that is ramped up from previous epistemic splits all the way down to the very beginning of epistemic splits (the apeiron I guess in your terms).. it's really looking at the process from the other side of the equation. Instead of all experiential it is all semiotic- but in this case the two are the same unless you are trying to reify this particular semiotic event!

In other words, both are saying the same thing- both panexperientialism and pansemiosis are totalizing nature to a certain process dynamic. Both vigorously deny that there is any difference all the way down in what's going on. Functionally, they are the same!

You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy. — apokrisis

You are funny. I must have unwittingly drank the Koolaid of the non-Peircean brand of panexperiential process theory at some point and must be deprogrammed from my current state of hysteria :P!

You really haven't described the process of emergence of self/world modelling. I can see how constraints and downward causation can lead to let us say, DNA message coding/decoding and programming in general. I just don't see it creating qualia from fiat. It all seems either a) qualia does not exist (which is denying the very thing you are using right now) or b) epiphenomalism which is essentially just saying "I give up.. it just exists as some mystical steam rising up at the end result of physical processes". I know you are not B, so you seem to fall under A.

You mean how should you understand semiosis as if it were Turing computation? Yeah, that'll work just fine. That'll will let you preserve the mystery of the writer, the storer, the reader.

Really, if you want answers, spend weeks or even years getting to learn a different way of thinking. And Pattee is a really good and clear start. — apokrisis

I don't know why you persist in thinking that I don't trust in the empirical sciences or that I don't get the general gist of how complex systems arise. There is just ONE particular phenomena that I think is harder to explain ontologically from a mapping point of view. That's it. I don't even have an ax to grind, or a particular reason to want to be skeptical other than I see the hard problem as almost intractable. You want to characterize it though as if that means I don't agree with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, biology, physics, and chemistry in one fell swoop simply for being a bit conservative on its application to this ONE problem. It's also not the case that, I am now some religious mystic or anything either. At this point, I am just more of a mysterian in terms of its intractableness, with an understanding of panexperientialism's attractiveness in solving the problem, though I really don't necessarily feel comfortable with that view either.

Have you found time to read up on Pattee's epistemic cut? Yes, there is something novel about life and mind according to biosemiosis. — apokrisis

A lot of it is language I don't usually work in, but the general theory seems to be how physical systems turn into symbolic representations that store memory, or something like that. How is it written, stored, and read.

Right. Let's plunge back into the mysteries of how appearances can be felt. Let's not stop to think how this is itself a division of your reality into "self" and "world" - the feeling bit vs the appearing bit. — apokrisis

Clearly there is something novel going on- despite it all being pan-semiotic though. This self/world modelling is very different than other modelling in terms of the felt aspect that no other modelling has. Do you not disagree?

At the psychological level, it is self and world that emerge to organise experience, give it a useful phenomenological structure. — apokrisis

How does that emerging look? And what is the nature of this event that is emerging?

I think you say it is because that is all kinds of "mind", whereas I say it is all kinds of "minding" - or actually more generally, all kinds of semiotic world modelling. — apokrisis

Is there a difference in aspect when we discuss semiotic world modelling on one hand and minding on the other?

In other words.. process is process is process.. experiential process is experiential process is experiential process.

But more generally - when the issue is what is continuous across all the hierarchical scales - the idea that mind only exists at some one privileged brute fact scale of being is one that carries remarkably little weight. It just becomes an obvious habit of reification, a way folk have got used to talking about mindfullness, points of view, and selfhood. — apokrisis

But how is seeing, hearing, feeling a reification? I simply call that experience and more specifically "qualia". How is that reification when there is an event of experiencing qualia happening? I don't think there is a privileged brute fact scale. I just think some sort of experiencing is happening and that experiencing is something in-itself. You do not want to recognize this because it is not quantifiable and that doesn't compute for you. Instead of dealing with it, you will simply go back to what is quantifiable. This is a dodge. Qualia is qualia is qualia. Electrons are electrons are electrons. Qualia is happening. Whether it "seems" like it is happening does not deflate the qualia event, as the term qualia just gets switched out with the "seems like qualia" is happening. The physical correlates are important, but looking at the correlates won't ever answer the qualia. Oh and switching electrons to process.. does the same thing..

What it is like to be doing that. No need to reify the feeling as something further that must be caused, or worse yet, have brute fact existence and yet you still demanding of me its causal, intelligible, reasonable explanation. — apokrisis

But we agree there is a "what it's like aspect" going on right? Whether we call it brute fact or whatever else. It is an event happening in the universe. Experiential events are happening. If you were to say that this is triadic-modelling system (or X other constituents) that is switching the subject matter. So, do we agree, experiential events are happening?

I've explained that limit in terms of counterfactuality - the limits of intelligible explanation. I've also said that in practice, that epistemic limit is at the very far end of a lifetime's worth of biology, neuroscience and social psychology. Gorge yourself on the knowledge that is available. Stop obsessing with that knowledge running into some ultimate limit. The details we can't know turn out to be insignificant. — apokrisis

You realize this comes off as a lot of "don't look at the man behind the curtain".. So here we have limit- a very deep problem and you are saying simply back off from it. That doesn't sound suspicious at all :-} . Also, I am interested in what you say, but the question at hand is not one of causation but one of metaphysics in respects to the aspect of the "what it feels like".

Why is red so red, and not instead ... well anything whatsoever? Why do we need to care? Have we already understood the story of colour processing so well that we have arrived at this issue as a scientific matter? — apokrisis

No, you are slightly changing the question. What is this "feels like red" aspect to things? Not, why is red red and not green or some such other issue that I never stated. What is "feels like qualia" as opposed to all the form and matter that causes red that can be empirically derived from third-person mapping? You keep pointing to causes and not the aspect itself. What is this aspect of "feels like" itself as it is in-itself? Is this event of "feels like". If you answer "the feels-like aspect is just what it's like to be this particular process" then what IS this "what it feels like to be the process" as compared to every other part of the universe which is not this aspect of "what it fees like to be the process"? It is a question of what it is in-itself- its ontology, not its causation. Causation does not necessarily = what it is. You can say it is process, that is getting closer to ontology because you are getting more at the is, than the cause. However, clearly just saying it is process does not describe why this process is different than other processes in its ontology. You seem to only go back to causitive answers and then don't want to be bothered with the hard question of ontology. Sorry, but that's the question at hand here as it relates to physical processes that are not "what it feels like to be a process".

As I say, my view is that people who promote the Hard Problem are generally looking to put down that vast weight of scientific achievement. They want the last laugh - without having to get their hands dirty reading actual neurology textbooks. — apokrisis

That is simply a generalization that you have that really is not justified. It's a bias you have. I can imagine someone very steeped in neuroscience who still respects the Hard Problem- in fact I can probably find some with a simple Google search!

So my response is that - knowing all that there is to know about how brains model worlds - why would we say it wouldn't just obviously feel like something to be doing all that? — apokrisis

I don't disagree with you! The modelling obviously feels like something to be doing that. But what is "feels like that" aspect of the process in the first place! That's the question, not the cause or the third-person empirical structures that can be mapped.

Of course, if you haven't seriously studied the science, there is going to be no reason it would. That is the other side of the message I hope you can see by now. — apokrisis

But you assumed I never gave credence to the serious study of the science. It's not a one or the other thing here. I am a naturalist essentially, and know the scientific stance is the best one to gain causal and explanatory understanding of what is going on. It is you who keep assuming I do not because I ask a question about the this hard limit on a philosophy forum.

I see it as a particular kind of process - a modellling relation - and so awareness is simply about how such a relationship is going to feel. — apokrisis

What is this "feel" qua feeling? If you are going to say it is a metaphysical limit that cannot be answered, then does that qualify "feel" as a basic property of the universe like charge or spin?

I am interested in exploring more of the existentialist and nihilist ideas but I will not restrict my reading to any particular philosopher or ideology. I am open to any suggestions at all. — Jamie

The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer. It's imaginative if nothing else. He understands the constraints of human will and freedom more than any other existentially-oriented philosopher in my opinion.

Yes, this is attractive because it sounds like it is saying something. But unless this being the case makes some reasonable causal difference, then it is just empty words.

So in what way does the presence or absence of experience make a difference at the microscale? What would we expect to observe as a reasonable or causally-motivated counterfactual. — apokrisis

There is non in speculative metaphysics- it's like defining the noumena when phenomena is based on time/space/causality/principle of sufficient reason. As you stated, there is a hard problem, and its relatively intractable.

Except that my approach does travel a long way before a lack of counterfactuals kicks in. There is a huge amount of textbook science to traverse before one begins to feel any sense of the air growing thin. — apokrisis

Well, let's be clear, your approach is rather theoretic in itself, not strictly scientific per se. In other words, you are taking a somewhat unorthodox approach of totalizing science under a broad theoretic framework of Peircean semiotics which is not strict science qua science per se. Science per science has somewhat self-contained and discrete frameworks with less of an overriding pansemiotic bent. However, if for the sake of argument, we conflate your pansemiotic (non-traditional) approach with the more discrete approaches of the various hard sciences for the sake of argument, if you noticed I did say:

What is this spooky-like quality? Well, if we hit a wall of the hard problem because there is no "counterfactuals" that can be tested, that indeed is the very problem that we are getting at. Otherwise, yay for semiotics and systems approaches to neuroscientific/biological problems. However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question. — schopenhauer1

So I am not denying the easy problems are hard (in the sense that they are not easily obtained- I recognize the extremely hard work of hypothesis, experimentation, making sense of the data, publication, review, and repeat). but that the easy problems don't dissolve the more philosophical questions which are the proverbial intractable ones which are only gotten at with speculation.

Most folk love the hard problem because it means they can prattle on about the mind without having to actually study much mind science. Because no can know the answer - according to the hard problem - then no one need feel guilty about not even making a start on the vast amount of understanding that does exist. — apokrisis

I think you are creating a straw man here and seeing enemies where there are not any. I am not an expert in neuroscience indeed- I have some basic knowledge of some concepts. I probably know more and have generally read up on more books related to the concepts than the average person, but definitely less than an expert in the field. However, I never denied the hard science that goes into understanding how the brain functions- how the different regions of the brain form networks. One great author on this front is Gerald Edelman, for example. Christopher Koch and Francis Crick also write some good work on this front. There are countless many more in academic publications and numerous books in the science sections of the library. I am in no way trying to leap over the fact that indeed, many answers of cognition and the correlates to consciousness have been and will be found through the usual scientific methodologies of neuroscience and related fields. I also think theories should take into account what the evidence provides from the hard sciences.

That being said, we must define what the debate is. The debate is the nature of mental events. Now, usually if you want to be good at communicating your ideas, you don't want to automatically condemn the opponent, no matter how wrong you think they are. You want to bring them to a point of enlightenment by starting at their point of view, and systematically breaking it down showing the inherent contradictions that make it unstable. Now, you are trying to do this by stating that panpsychism, though attractive due to its totalizing of mental events, has no way to disprove it. That is a good place to start. It is not even provable, so where can one go at this point? It is of a highly speculative nature as it is not grounded on what can be gleaned from empirical data. The only data we have is the fact that we know there is an internal aspect to certain processes. So all speculative metaphysics for you is illegitimate and so that, for you, this is where the argument stops. However, speculative metaphysics can have its own logic. It may not be grounded in empiricism, but it can have its own logic and rigorous structure that can be debated on its own merits, even though its speculative in its way in answering certain intractable problems. That is satisfying to some and perhaps unsatisfying to others.

So, for example, you have a notion of entropy and that the universe is in general entropifying while certain parts of the universe (i.e. living organisms) are negentropic locally but contribute to entropification as a whole. What does this mean for you? How does this contribute to our view of existence in general? Does that inform your theories of mind? You seem to be attached to semiotics. What does semiotics add to the scientific disciplines, that the standard models don't already say? How does semiotics solve problems that science qua science is not doing anyways? Isn't it redundant? How does semiotics really make a difference in these fields?

Anyways, I am interested in how how qualities arise due to epistemic cuts and downward causations, as long as the actual question at hand is not abandoned, which is how it accounts for mental events.

I've given you the simple answer many times. If you understand how the brain models the world in a really detailed fashion, then it is hard to imagine all that being the case and it not feeling like something. — apokrisis

Again, I don't discount neuroscientific explanations for how the neural correlates of consciousness model the world. However, we do know that there is a qualitative "something what it's like to be". If this is a process that exists, and we are both naturalists, then it is a natural process. But how odd it is that this one event of qualitative inner experience is a feature of the universe. If it is the result of a long series of physical and biological events, what is this feature that results in comparison to everything else in the universe that does not do this? That question is not meant to recount the neuroscience that goes into the event, by how it is that this radically different phenomena of experience is even a feature. One can say "it is the model understanding itself" but that is a tautology. The model is modelling. But if this is the only model that has qualitative aspects, what is the qualitative aspects in comparison to the non-qualitative aspects? I know that is beyond what you call "counterfactual thinking" which is just a fancy word for empirical testing, but that is why it is a question on a philosophy forum and not a neuroscience one perhaps.

What is mind-boggling is that people actually take this Thermodynamics Purpose seriously. Humans just love their myths. This never changes, pre-historic or modern, always weaving myths. — Rich

Kind of sounds like a postmodern stance- everything is just narrative. Here was something I found on Stanford Encyclopedia under postmodernism that sounds similar to what you are getting at:

Indeed, for Lyotard, the de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into “clouds” of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games. Furthermore, within each game the subject moves from position to position, now as sender, now as addressee, now as referent, and so on. The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. But as Lyotard points out, while the combinations we experience are not necessarily stable or communicable, we learn to move with a certain nimbleness among them.

Postmodern sensibility does not lament the loss of narrative coherence any more than the loss of being. However, the dissolution of narrative leaves the field of legitimation to a new unifying criterion: the performativity of the knowledge-producing system whose form of capital is information. Performative legitimation means maximizing the flow of information and minimizing static (non-functional moves) in the system, so whatever cannot be communicated as information must be eliminated. The performativity criterion threatens anything not meeting its requirements, such as speculative narratives, with de-legitimation and exclusion. Nevertheless, capital also demands the continual re-invention of the “new” in the form of new language games and new denotative statements, and so, paradoxically, a certain paralogy is required by the system itself. In this regard, the modern paradigm of progress as new moves under established rules gives way to the postmodern paradigm of inventing new rules and changing the game. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

Okay, well-stated and very clear. Thank you. I actually agree with much of what you stated. I am not comfortable in the home of panpsychism/panexperientialism. I think one of your best critiques in your previous post was when you stated:

And then mind does less and less until it is apparently doing nothing. We have the mind of a rock. But that is OK. because all the counterfactual heavy lifting is granted by the panpsychist to the standard material side of the equation. — apokrisis

I don't want to make a rebuttal really, but just a reasoning for why this option might be attractive. If experience is there all the way down, experience is accounted for as a foundation. It is the ground- the non-counterfactual "is" (or perhaps in Kantian terms- the "thing-in-itself; that is to say, experientialness).

What is the other option? To me, the other option is dualism. However, dualism seems to imply a strict split between material and mental which we both agree seems at odds with science. Dualism seems to posit a transcendental split between matter and a ghostly mind that correlates/interacts but is not equivalent to the material on which it correlates. This to me seems problematic. What I fear about your brand of semiotics philosophy is that it has a hidden dualisim (because it is not accounting for the nature of the difference between quality and material interactions) in that there is a spooky-like quality that results from the semiotic process. What is this spooky-like quality? Well, if we hit a wall of the hard problem because there is no "counterfactuals" that can be tested, that indeed is the very problem that we are getting at. Otherwise, yay for semiotics and systems approaches to neuroscientific/biological problems. However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question.

Now, perhaps ideas like sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc. may be the light which leads out of this cave, but it has to be done with at least keeping in mind what I stated earlier about how the experientialness of certain processes should not be taken for granted as just "there" as the result of a series of processes without account for what "there" is.

Okay, I'm making another attempt at actually trying to have a fruitful dialogue. I was trying to understand your position better, and have to explain it more succinctly in relation to the conversation at hand. I was trying to see if our versions are actually more similar if we make our positions more clearly stated and see where we agree and disagree. Dual aspect monism is more where my theory lies. However, I don't see how it can be wrong to think about what it is like to be the process itself from the process' point of view. Afterall, you seem to be making a connection with the semiotics of cognition and the semiotics of materials. It would seem that we have: semiotics of material, material matieral.. then the ghostly steam of semiotics of mental mental mental. This stark split, you seem to point out as a epistemic cut, which seems to be Howard Patee's idea of the epistemic cut which seems also similar to downward causation of top to bottom systems. I just don't get how pointing to the fact that there is a difference of the final process (cognitive events) and the material constituents (material events) and that mental events can change physical events, says very much except a tautology of common sense (mental events exists and affect physical events and vice-versa). That does not seem to be answering the question.

Yeah. I mean anyone woulda thunk dis was a philosophical forum or sumthink. Next people will be making their case by posting large slabs of impenetrable text from blogs called larval subjects, or suchlike. I mean it's not like we can just google unfamiliar terms and start to educate ourselves.

Get over yourself man. — apokrisis

Okay, I'm done talking with you. I'm asking you to teach, and you are going to taunt and insult instead.

I am clear that life and mind are different in having an epistemic cut that puts hierarchical constraint "inside" the organism. I am arguing for the evolution of autonomy, not against it. — apokrisis

Explain the epistemic cut without too much jargon. Explain hierarchical constraint "inside" the organism without too much jargon. Define it first, provide examples maybe. Then from there explain how it applies to the solving the mind-body problem. You can be lengthy but not jargony. I'm demanding this because I've seen your tendencies. We can either have a constructive, beneficial discussion or an ongoing hostile debate where no one gets anywhere. Ordinary language sometimes prevents talking past each other. And no snarky remarks about reading this or that (name drop systems philosopher). Anyone can simply say to go read their favorite philosopher and end the conversation.

All those could be good beginnings. But you've already slipped in "mind" in a contentious fashion.

Could you be clearer and say minds are the result of a process, and so not a brute fact on which the process depends. Could you say it is not mind but instead "minding", or at least "mindfulness", that characterises the material outcome, to make it clear a reified substance is not presumed which remains separate to the process itself?

These have been immediate sticking points so far. — apokrisis

To me, saying minds are the result of a process is cleaving too close to "minds are epiphenomenal". Is that your take? I'm pretty sure you don't mean to say that.