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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see all kinds of things, but I never see a thing I call 'reality'. — Tobias

Where do the laws of nature or the constants of nature fit into your notion of reality as mereologically the sum of all things?

Aren’t you looking at this from the point of view of the current “world of medium sized dry goods”, whereas physics suggests that laws and constants - the absolutely general - are all that constitute our reality at its beginning?

3. Reality is not part of everything — Tobias

So therefore reality is the wholeness of every thing, because - as you say - it aint’t the mereological sum?

And thus reality speaks to the maximally general. Which in physics-speak is laws and constants.

Just analyze the phrase 'reality in total'. Is a 'reality in part' thinkable? — Tobias

Well physics does divide reality - as the bounding wholeness of concrete actuality - into the two parts of laws and constants.

To fix that dichotomy, you then need a systems logic that can find the unity in such opposites.

So the structure of the challenge is familiar.

So you may have a complete system theory, but not a complete explanation. — Possibility

Correct. The argument shows that the somethingness that does exist is organised in this fashion. And thus what we can conclude is that it all starts with an everythingness - an Apeiron or vagueness - and not a nothingness. (Although an Apeiron or vagueness is in fact also a “less than nothing” as well.)

But the “existence” of that Apeiron or vagueness is not explained in any immediately obvious fashion. However you could then wonder what could rule out the “existence” of naked possibility itself.

If nothingness is so easily taken to need no cause to be the case, why wouldn’t the same apply more strongly to that which is less than nothing?

I get that - but surely ‘everythingness’ is not the same as ‘everything’? Sorry, I’m being pedantic, but I would have thought “everythingness is possible” to be more accurate.. — Possibility

The different terms denote the possible vs actual distinction. So everythingness is the state of possibility, everything would be its (impossible) realisation in actuality.

Perhaps you are reifying what can “exist” as only the unbound potentiality for “all things”? So this is a linguistic trap here rather than a problem for the logic of the argument.

Remember also that this bootstrapping argument works it’s way backwards from the physical world as we know it. So the prior potential can be framed in terms of infinite GR dimensionality and infinite QM fluctuation. Or a QG unbound view.

We can explain donuts no problem from the Big Bang on. And we can explain the gauge symmetries that impose a mathematical-strength shaping hand on any initial Planck-scale QG potential.

So the notion of this everythingness has physicalist parameters. It is tied to what are already our notions of fundamental simplicity and not some naive realist or modal notion of the everythingness of a world of “medium sized dry goods (and torus-shaped confectioneries)”.

We can distinguish what is necessary being from what is merely contingent, and so greatly reduce the explanatory load that the argument must bear.

That would be right in the Newtonian mechanics view where the two forces were precisely alike and precisely opposed.

So even in Newtonian mechanics, that is rather unlikely.

Think of a pencil balanced on its point or a ball on a dome. There you do have such a balance. And it’s going to be upset by the slightest perturbation.

What’s the relevance to the OP?

:rofl:

I'm talking about microscopic 5d holes. — EugeneW

Piling speculation upon speculation doesn’t increase the soundness of the speculation. Let’s just establish that there is a compactified and overlooked extra dimension first.

I mean I have nothing against speculation. But you are treating it as if it is some constraining fact I ought to be taking note of.



QFT may be BS if taken literally - reality as a stack of particle fields. But it is a mathematical framework with observables measured to an indecent number of decimal places. So it is BS that works in an everyday practical fashion.

It needs to be taken seriously. As does GR.

But 5D wormholes? Even if they exist, they still wouldn’t support your claim that they are where one finds a “true nothing” in nature.

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

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

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

Without support for the equally reified concreteness, then yes. :up:

I just prefer not to overthink the (existential) question — 180 Proof

Is the balance between over-thinking and under-thinking defined somewhere, other than in your personal opinion? What criteria are we applying here - on, for gawd sakes, PF?

If you are not here to further the OP discussion but simply to voice your discontent with the existence of such a discussion, well ... any number of threads deserve your censure.

What you mean to argue remains opaque.

But I meant to oppose nothingness to everythingness as the path to the “less than nothing” that is a logical vagueness.

So sure, negative space might seem part of that train of thought. But holes in donuts are an overly concrete conception of the issue. They make a “void” seem like an accidental absence rather than a causal suppression of the possibility of an actualisation.

Modern physicalism - rooted in QFT - says everything happens (in probability space) but almost everything also self-cancels. We get left with the decoherent and renormalised path integral.

So my view weds the Peircean metaphysics and the quantum maths. Or at least attempts to.

You seem to be stuck with classical logic and classical physics. But who could really tell when a whole sentence without hieroglyphs and formatting tricks is a stretch.

5. Therefore, nothing exists. — lish

In nothing I've written here or on any other thread have I argued for metaphysical nothingness ("actual void" as you say) — 180 Proof

This is why conversations with you never get anywhere.

Clearly the OP is about metaphysical nothingness and not the relatively lack of some concrete thing - like the bit of dough that you noticed was missing from the centre of your donut.

( And where I come from, doughnuts didn't even used to have holes, as it happens. They were piped full of raspberry jam and whipped cream.)

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

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

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

I may be mistaken, but I’m getting the feeling Daemon may want to protect an insuperable gap between the meaningfulness of mind (and information as communication of ‘facts’) and the extreme reductiveness of physicalism. — Joshs

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

In between the walls of the hole would be nothing. Time might stand still on these walls, but in between is still nothing. A hole of nothingness. — EugeneW

Even the psuedo-scientific attempts to imagine macroscale wormholes accepts tremendous energy would fill them to keep the walls from collapsing - some suitable source of negative energy, or phantom energy, or some other made-up shit.

The energy ground state of the vacuum – empty space – is "a sea of virtual particles" (i.e. quantum fluctuations), so thanks for illustrating my point. — 180 Proof

But that was my point. :brow:

From your reference -

According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of the quantum field.

And we haven't even discussed dark energy or the cosmological constant yet.

So if you want to argue for relative states of emptiness, sure. But if you want to sustain your donut argument as evidence that actual voids exist, then its a hard no.

There would be a hole in space, connecting two spaces that wouldn't be connected otherwise. There would be a hole of nothingness between the two spaces. — EugeneW

You've been watching too much Star Trek or Dr Who. But even if such a macroscale connection between two spacetime locales could be sustained, it wouldn't be a hole in spacetime, it would be a connection. It wouldn't be a void-like nothing, it would be an extreme energy something.

During discussions like this one, people are continually switching between the technical sense and the everyday sense of the word. — Daemon

But that is what you are doing by insisting that "information" should be still synonymous with "meaningful".

The everyday sense of the word embodies the confusion that science - using mathematical formalism - is doing its best to sort.

So by stripping information down to meaningless bit strings, that becomes the foundation for building semantics and semiotics back into the story. Information theory can start constructing new higher level metrics - like surprisal, ascendency, mutual information, free energy - that start to model what you think "information" really ought to mean.

That is the reductionism you seem to so admire. Break things down into their simplest parts so that you can build them back into complex wholes.

Information theory defines reality at an atomic level of form. It counts reality in terms of its naked degrees of freedom - the level where it is shorn of all added meaningfulness, context and particularity.

Then comes the next step of building back up to complex reality, but this time thinking in terms of atoms of form rather than atoms of matter.

What's the best way to learn more about this? — Theorem

That's a broad question. But at the physical level, holography makes the case....

http://old.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

Thanks. :up:

To be fair though, most explanations are such that they rely on something exterior, usually more basic, to that which is being explained e.g. Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering. — Agent Smith

Is that true at the level of metaphysics? Don't fundamental concepts there become grounded in the logical manoeuvre of a dichotomy?

What is it to be discrete? Well, it is to have the least degree of continuity. What is it to be necessary? Well, it is to have the least degree of chance about it?

Etc, etc. The dialectical argument, the unity of opposites, that lays the self-justifying foundation for any kind of rational thought about the structure of existence.

This gives me an idea. If explanations must always move in the direction from the complex to the simple, there'll come a point when we'll have hit a wall, the simplest, which would need no explanation at all. — Agent Smith

A dichotomy does that by instead constructing opposing pairs of limits. So the discrete is one ultimately simple extreme, and the continuous is its dialectical "other". And then what can actually be must lie in the space thus created inbetween.

Actuality becomes then the more complex thing of a mixture. All actual things are relatiively discrete, or relatively continuous. No thing can be absolutely discrete or continuous. They are just more of the one than the other in a spectrum of variety fashion.

A wormhole is a physical hole. So holes exist even in voids. — EugeneW

Even if wormholes existed for real, they would still be a path connecting two moments in time, not a nothingness.

But that doesn’t explain the whole, only what it can produce. — Possibility

In my systems science/hierarchy theory view, the whole is produced by what it produces. The whole shapes its parts - it contributes the downward-acting constraints. But the parts then construct the whole - they contribute the upward-building material being, the suitably shaped "atomic" components.

So it is a bootstrapping or cybernetic causal model. And if it sounds unlikely, it is at least less unlikely than creatio ex nihilo. :grin:

But this structuralist thought is not contained in the explanation, but in our relation to it. Without a relation to your position as conscious observer, or mine, there would be little structure to your explanation that everything was possible. We tend to take this for granted in these discussions. — Possibility

I don't follow your point. But given that I'm taking the internalist perspective of Peircean logic and semiotics, I would have thought that our position as rationalising observers of nature is covered by that.

(When I say "everythingness", that is a placeholder for logical vagueness - the everythingness that is both and everything and a nothing in standing metaphysically for an Apeiron of unstructured potential.)

And (baryonic) donuts consist mostly of "voids". — 180 Proof

Not according to QCD. Instead the interior is a "proton sea" of quantum fluctuations.

In maths. Not so much in the physics of voids.

Why's that? The relation would be that the whole is explained in terms of all that it could produce.

The whole "nothing exists" premise is already defeated by the simple fact that something indeed exists. So any argument that arrives at such a conclusion must have employed false premises.

Now false premises can be useful. They are justification for taking the opposite as being true.

So my own position would be that everything was possible. What needs explanation is why reality - as realisable actuality - is the something that it is observed to be.

That leads to the structuralist thought that not everything can be actual because many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel each other out. So reality does contain its own explanation, its own cause. Actuality is the path integral - the sum over all possibility that limits an everythingness to a somethingness.

If everything could actually cancel, there would be nothing. And we know that isn't true. So we know that everythingness was both limitable, and yet not a complete elimination of the possibility for a resulting somethingness.

As @Count Timothy von Icarus says, Chaos was a seminal book. But his later books seemed pretty average to me. So he dropped off my radar.

2. Reality in total cannot have an explanation (PU). — lish

How secure is this premise? Why can't reality in total contain its own explanation?

So particular things get particular explanations and universal things get a universalising explanation.

The hidden bit in the logic is that explanations are "another thing outside the thing". But the container is also a kind of thing. Reality might have contents, but it also needs a container.

Even the null set at the foundations of maths requires the brackets that contain the no things found within.

James Gleick book The Information — Wayfarer

Haven't read it, I'm afraid.

In genetics, DNA and RNA do the work. You can describe the whole process without mentioning information ... So it's a category error to believe that information plays an actual role there. — Daemon

DNA and RNA encode information. That is why I quoted the 'central dogma of molecular biology'. So how are 'instructions' not 'information'? — Wayfarer

What @Daemon gets muddled is his conviction that scientific descriptions of nature in terms of information are somehow "just an epistemic metaphor" while scientific descriptions in terms of material stuff - molecules, or chemical potentials, or whatever - are "the God's honest ontological truth".

Yet science would view both the material and informational approaches as theoretical conveniences or pragmatic explanatory constructs. Both only have value insofar that they are tied to the kind of maths that can produce formal models that thus make checkable predictions.

And the reason why the information theoretic framework has become so exciting is that when Shannon information is paired with Gibbs entropy, the two mathematical structures are dual. The way to measure informational events and material events is the same. You arrive at a formally reciprocal uber-framework that fully captures both of the traditional points of view.

So reality - as the thing in itself - is neither information nor entropy. It is always some kind of embodied substantial being, with both matter and form. A oneness that needs to be decomposed by some kind of dichotomising analysis.

And having been working a couple of thousand years on the issue of building comprehensive mathematical models of this reality, what science finds is that the combo of information and entropy arrives at the most abstract view of nature's fundamental dichotomy.

Or at least from the atomistic perspective of the reductionism that wants to reduce everything to a model of effective causes or component parts. Shannon and Gibbs give you a way to count elemental degrees of freedom from either an informational or entropic point of view.

So where we have got to in science is a robust form of reductionism where the job of analysing the whole into its parts can be reduced to a framework of differential equations and the simplest possible acts of measurement - the counting of individual degrees of freedom. And this framework is self-complete. It connects what seem to be opposed because the maths is the same.

The intuitive picture is different. The entropic "it" is a statistical microstate. A global pattern of independently moving particles. The informational "bit" is local distinction. A gate which is on rather than off. A discrete presence where there could have been a discrete absence.

So a local~global difference is concealed there. The contextual pattern that might make an informational bit meaningful as its interpretant is missing from the model of the fundamental bit. And likewise, the entropic microstate is simply one possible state out of an unlimited number of such states composing the global whole of the system. It is essentially an arrangement that can be measured in terms of its meaninglessness, being a difference lost among an ensemble of almost identical random arrangements.

But the point is that the two views are mathematically dual and thus close the door. They see reality from both its angles. Or again, both its maximally reductionist angles.

So for @Daemon, trying to push some kind of unrelenting reductionism on the discussion, his "information is metaphor/materialism is ontic truth" seems particularly anachronistic.

There is the whole holism and semiotic discussion to be had - the one that points to the flaws of the information~entropy dichotomy when only the breaking apart of the whole is understood.

And then even among the arch-reductionists - folk like Crick and Monod in the history of DNA - the revelation that information and entropy make for dual metrics has been metaphysically freeing.

You kinda know now that the whole of reality is within your sights as you apply your reductionist lens, seeking a set of differential equations that can model some system of efficient or mechanical cause. It doesn't matter that the old atomist ontology of reality as being composed of crumbs of matter is "just a model", because now the information theoretic account is likewise "just as real".

So if you want to think of reality in terms of material particles or holographic information bounds, go for it. Either works. They are dual. Doing the sums in one or other way may have advantage. And neither is going to be wrong from a tactical epistemic point of view.

As I say, the issue then is how to add back holism - particularly the semiotic holism that produces an organismic level of infodynamic reality.

But here is a good history paper on how information theory arose via Shannon, Wiener and Schrodinger to shape biology's hunt for the genetic code.

It tracks the move from treating information as "mere metaphor" to "concrete maths", and then the arrival at the reductionist limits of the information theoretic view where the next step - to the semiotic theory that can hope to account for the "epigenome", "proteonome", and all the other new -omes that stand for systems of living biosemiosis (and not the dead, gone to equilibrium, information~entropy descriptions of nature).

That is a different matter. I don't know if the optic nerve 'carries information' - in that context, I'd agree that the use of the term 'information' is metaphorical. It's not 'information' until a subject interprets it. What is transmitted are electro-chemical reactions across cellular pathways. — Wayfarer

As an example of the information-semiosis distinction, information theory would let you count the number of electrochemical pulses that flowed up the optic nerve. But that doesn't show you all the pulses that were prevented from flowing by top-down attentional and anticipatory processes.

The brain produces more inhibition than the sensory cells produce excitation. So even using the crudest measures - counting the flow of spikes coming down the line the other way - will show that every signal is already being contextualised.

The dog that didn't bark in the night can be more significant that the dog that did. And this makes a nonsense of accounts of reality where you only count the barking dogs.

In definitions of evolution that avoid this circularity, it seems languages and computer viruses, even crystals, may be living things (as well as biological viruses). — Count Timothy von Icarus

For my money, definitions like Pattee’s epistemic cut, Salthe's infodynamics, Rosen’s metabolism-repair systems, Friston's Bayesian mechanics, all put their finger on the critical biosemiotic issue. Life and mind are all about rate independent information in control of rate dependent dynamics.

So nature has plenty of examples of physico-chemical dissipative structure - energy being turned to entropy and creating informational structure so as to stabilise that flow in a "far from equilibrium" fashion.

A tornado exists as the vortex structure that it is because it dissipates a heat gradient. And a tornado even seems half alive as it runs around a plain "eating" where there is the most gradient to eat.

But actual life adds the modelling relation by being able to encode information and form first person memories of the past that inform its first person expectations about the future.

Computers fail the "living organism" test as they don't use information to construct their own metabolisms or manage their own physical environments. They are not plugged into their own "world" or umwelt, in cybernetic, self-interested, fashion. Some human comes along to plug them into a wall socket and away they go - crunching memories that aren't their own to produce expectations that aren't for them.

Plenty of complex phenomena, seeming miracles of life, actually end up being described by the same mathematics that can describe phenomena in diffuse inorganic systems (earthquakes and heart cells sharing the same model for synchrony). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is why I would treat dissipative structure as the new core model of physics. It would be the pansemiotic theory of existence. A metaphysics based on natural thermodynamic structure rather than an atomistic materialism.

And of course, that is where physics is going. Particles and vacuums become quantum topological order in quantum condensates. The universe is a Big Bang spreading~cooling its way to its holographic Heat Death - a hot excitation falling into its own heat sink. Whether you are talking strings, loops or preons, the motivating idea is that of irreducible topological order from which you get the macro-emergence of an entropic spacetime filled with a randomness of thermalising particle events.

So all of physics and chemistry can be cashed out as the structuralism of "far from equilibrium" statistical mechanics. As with a tornado, half the job of being alive and mindful is done. Then life and mind become a simple, mechanical, addition to the organic flows - semiotic codes colonising the great entropy gradients like the original "earth battery" of plate tectonics that drove the sea vent origins of life, and the daily solar flux that eventually put life on a much more generic photosynthetic footing.

So pansemiosis = dissipative structure theory. And biosemiosis is dissipative structure brought under informational regulation in organismic fashion.

Quite a number of biological scientists have been describing the same elephant using their own jargon for the past 40 years. Harold Morowitz had already said it by the 1960s.

The efficient causes are actually where I might put information and meaning. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. Those are the levers that you would want to know about so you can pull them. Rosen's modelling relation says this.

In Rosen’s (1991) account, a material system is an organism if and only if it is closed to efficient cause. A system is closed to efficient cause if its components have efficient causes generated within the system, and effects that contribute to the production of other efficient causes....

...When explaining the (M, R)-systems, Rosen (1991) points out that it is closure to efficient cause that solves the problems of metabolism, repair and replication of the system. In an organism, the final cause of a component is its contribution to the self-maintenance of the (metabolism, self-repair and organizational invariance of the) system.

So, if you kick semiotics down to the efficient cause, what would be the formal cause? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The model needs to be cashed out as a set of efficient causes. The organism needs to break down its intentions into the simplest and most economical actions that will produce the outcome state it desires. It has to reduce its world to an arrangement of buttons and switches as far as it is concerned.

For example, if the finality is the desire to turn some metabolic cycle on or off, then the smart form of things is to have a chemistry that is all set and ready to go, as a self-organising dissipative gradient, but then add a tiny regulating switch in the shape of an enzyme that can be synthesised at any time and inserted into the mix at the critical point, so releasing the material cause to do its self-organising thing.

That is why reductionism is so wonderfully effective as pragmatic science. It is all about modelling reality as an entropic gradient that has its various easy tipping points, and so the job is to get in there and design the little mechanical devices that can do the tipping on a human command. Scientific theories are models closed for efficient causality, just as Rosen describes.

But that doesn't mean an organism is only a matter of material and efficient cause. Every organism is informed in globally coherent fashion by its past experience. Its world model, as a whole, has Darwinian-filtered structure that embodies an intentional and functional point of view.

I am very intrigued by the fact that incredibly disparate self organizing phenomena operate through extremely similar functions, and how incredibly common self similarity is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Self-similarity is a generic feature of nature because being an open system is more generic than being a closed one. Stephen Franks did a good paper on the statistical patterns of nature.

So a log/log or powerlaw statistical pattern is simpler than a normal/normal or Gaussian bell curve distribution because the powerlaw relation is "truly unbounded randomness". The bell curve only can arise by adding bounds that confine the variety to some single mean value, some single scale of being and not the greater symmetry of fractal being.

All this is part of the same paradigm shift. Physics has been built on closed system perspectives - the bounded equilibrium view. But that is essentially a dead world, gone to its final state. It is a description of nature in which formal and final cause have been excluded - because the system already has been granted fixed bounds and has already got to wherever it wanted to go.

There is a huge sleight of hand going on here that no-one ever notices. But the dead world view is also the one that focuses all the attention on efficient and material causality. So the human imagination finds great value in seeing the physical world as dead (and not pansemiotic) as that then gives it the most freedom to "bring the world alive" with humanity's own god-like animating hand.

But actually, the more generic view of nature is the open systems one. The one that dissipative structure theory now models. Even cosmology is stumbling towards that - but without really considering the metaphysical reasons why that is so.

One example of the problems of non-living evolution and applying our current frameworks to them: https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/gavia/essential-character-non-life-evolution — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an example of what I'm talking about. Abiogenesis is currently split between the warm alkaline vent model of the origins of life and the stagnant muddy pool model.

The first is about an open dissipative gradient - a proton force at the boundary of alkaline vent water flows and its mixing with acid seawater - that must then get enclosed and harnessed for the manufacture of complex organics.

The other says much the same evolved in a stagnant and dead situation. So it explains the present of the organics - a soup of crud that accumulates as the result of local gone-to-equilibrium chemical processes - but then not the proton motive force that starts to spin the wheels of the metabolism. It has the closure before the open bioenergetic flow. And it seems more logical to have the flow before its closure.

Edit: Another issue for the epistemic cut occurring at the fuzzy boundary of life are modified Wigner's friend experiments showing that the role of an observer in physics may emerge at incredibly small scales, well below scales for the simplest organic molecules. This seems like it would result in two epistemic cuts, one for observation, a second for biologically relevant meaning. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Absolutely. Quantum decoherence has its epistemic cut at the Planck scale. That is where Heisenberg uncertainty defines the fundamental level at which some distinction between the metric background and the entropic action can be made.

Then life and mind have their epistemic cut at the semiclassical nanoscale. This is where molecular machines can first be constructed without being blown apart by entropic forces or quantum uncertainty. Enough bulk properties can emerge for molecular switches and ratchets to be built and used to implement an intentional structure of dissipation-harnessing biological machinery.

I highly recommend Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos, as a book that sums all this up.

So yes, that is key to making sense of pansemiosis vs biosemiosis. First the wavefunction must be collapsed to create a classical world fit for mechanical structure. Gluing statistical mechanics to quantum mechanics to get thermal decoherence gives you that. The Planckscale is built in because that defines k, or Boltzmann's constant, at the heart of all the thermo/informational maths.

And then - only widely realised in the past 15 years - the nanoscale of physics in warm water is a "magical" convergence zone in the scale of many different forms of energy. Thermal, chemical, mechanical and electrostatic forces all converge to be equivalent in scale - a fact that means one form of energy can be converted into the other forms of energy at "no cost". And this scale is the typical size scale of biological macromolecules. So these molecules can become the free choices of some higher intelligence - the many kinds of devices, such as motor proteins and enzymes, that a living organism throws into the fray to get the chemistry organised and constructing a body with its global intentional structure.

So life and mind are completely an accident of the fact that all the different kinds of physical energies come together in a way that the cost of switching from one form to another is a near frictionless transaction. Only the slightest nudge is needed to convert the potential of a chemical gradient into some useful mechanical action.

Life and mind are thus accounted for by semiosis - the further possibility of nature having codes and modelling relations.

Nature has the open and flowing dissipative gradients. It has a zone of convergence where all its different energies have the same scale. All life had to do was add the judicious nudges that tips these energies in helpful directions. It can then store energy as chemical potentials, and spend energy as acts of material construction.

So biosemiosis is physicalist and material at root. But it is also, as a "four causes" story, the least constrained by its basis in the reductionist paradise of material and efficient cause. It is thus - reciprocally - the most free in terms of being able to then structure reality according to its own wishes and designs.

Phillips and Quake first fingered the significance of this nanoscale convergence zone in a review paper.

You also have people fiddling around with the possibility of evolution at these incredibly small scales, but they are less convincing (still neat https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96048-6) — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you can see why this particular approach - which wants to start life off down at the photonic/absolute zero level - makes a big wrong move?

Life and mind arise in an already complex world - the semiclassical nanoscale. You need to have a variety of energies to play off against each other. And you need a warm thermal environment as the free gradient that you ratchet for work.

You even need to start at a classical level above the quantum effects so you can go back in an harness those quantum effects - the quantum tunnelling and entanglement that enzymes and photosynthesis employs.

So the pansemiotic epistemic cut of the Comos has been discovered. It's the Planck scale. And the biosemiotic epistemic cut of life and mind has been discovered. It is the semi-classical convergence zone of the nanoscale chemistry of room temperature solutions.

Excellent post. :up:

There is however an element needed to accomplish this and the materialistic approach lacks this element. It's the element of the soul. — EugeneW

You say there need to be two elements or essential substances - matter and soul. That is dualism. You might call the divide an epistemic cut, but it lacks the key bit - the bridge that connects what it also divides.

A Peircean logic is designed so that division and connection (or differentiation and integration) are two sides of the same coin. You start with firstness or vagueness - that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. And then you dichotomise that. You get the Hegelian thesis and antithesis that makes the synethesis. You discover how what you think are two very different things - like matter and mind - are in fact formally the inverse of each other. A reciprocal pair defined by the law of the excluded middle.

A is A to the degree it is not not-A. So the definition of matter is the degree to which it is not soul (in your example). Matter becomes 1/soul. And soul is likewise defined as 1/matter. Each - in Yin Yang fashion, (all ancient wisdom understood the same trick of the unity of opposites) is what it is to the degree it is not measurably anything like its other.

So this is a symmetry breaking that develops to become an asymmetry. Two things are connected - they were together as the undivided possibility that is a Firstness or a Vagueness. Or an Apeiron, Tao, Ungrund, etc. Then they became as divided as possible - divided until they became the opposing limiting extremes on free possibility.

This is the standard logic underpinning all useful metaphysics. It produced every fruitful distinction that science employs, like the one~many, form~matter, atom~void, chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, local~global, vague~crisp, etc, etc.

So we know just from this fact - the huge pragmatic success of dichotomous reasoning - that dualism is flawed to the degree it divides nature and then fails to see the reciprocal relation that also connects what seems divided.

That is why triadic metaphysics trumps the brokenness of dualism. It has the extra dimension that allows for the integration of a holistic thirdness as well as differentiation of the reductionist secondness.

So if you just tell me that reality is some kind of interaction between an immaterial soul and a material world, I say fine, but how were they both once the same, how did they become divided, and where now is that interaction in your scheme ... as a measurable.

Materiality and the soul would have to be two reciprocal limits on being. And thus being is what arises within those boundary limits. We now have to be able to measure what it might mean in concrete terms to be nearer one or other limit. A maximally material state is a minimally soulful one, and vice versa. How does that cash out in observables?

It doesn't really work because matter and soul doesn't get you to a robust dichotomy. It is kind of useless for doing scientific modelling.

But once you arrive at the dichotomy of information vs entropy, then you have something that is properly cashed out in a reciprocal mathematical formalism. You can start to build a proper model of semiosis - as in Friston's Bayesian mechanics, or other notions like Ulanowicz's Ascendency Theory.

Biosemiotics is an interesting field, but one with some major problems. When I read papers telling me that the enviornment is the interpretant of a genome, then rebuttals saying no, a genetic lineage is, with the current population of an organism acting variously as object, symbol, or interpretant, it seems like the theory has a problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Biosemiosis is a label many started claiming about the same time. Some had Saussurean leanings. Others were Peircean. And then some tried for a very direct use of the object/symbol/interpretant model from linguistics. Others - the camp I was in - saw the triadic relation as another way of expressing the same things as hierarchy theory had been doing in theoretical biology circles.

So I would see biosemiosis as a hybrid of hierarchy theory and Peircean semiotics. The aim is a marriage of both. And there is a third ingredient in the mix as dissipative structure theory is also an essential part.

I would say what generally binds biosemiosis is the belief that symbols deserve their own science. Information theory accounts for how symbols can be fundamentally meaningless. And semiotics then accounts for how they can be fundamentally meaningful.

Peirce gives you a model of the modelling relation - the relation that a code can anchor. Hierarchy speaks to the structure that such a relation will generate. Far from equilibrium thermodynamics then gives you the raw material that is the matter which will be thus in-formed.

Yeah. I was thinking the question of pansemiosis versus life-specific emergence of semiosis should be its own thread, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Biosemiosis is definitely a scientific project. There is no reason why you can't have a general science of codes and the modelling relation they enable.

But pansemiosis is perhaps just a metaphysical project. The nearest I get is understanding the Cosmos as a dissipative structure.

The physical world is different in that it lacks an internal coding mechanism. Its constraints are information written into its holographic boundaries - in the current vernacular.

So pansemiosis could be defined as development - a constraints driven unfolding, or Pattee's rate dependent dynamics.

Biosemiosis is then development coupled to evolution. You have the extra thing of a code, an epistemic cut, and thus the emergence of a Darwinian filter, a selective memory, that can act as Pattee's rate independent information.

Biosemiosis is the transition to the true organism - a dissipative structure living its own purposeful and private history. The Cosmos is organismic in a lesser sense in that it only develops and doesn't evolve.

"DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed" is not a commentary on the process, it is the process. — Daemon

I was showing how the epistemology of science is "informational" even without considering the further issue of semiotic encoding. But if you want to continue your denialism regarding even semiotic encoding .... well, what could you mean by "appropriate" except that some structure (ie: form) is functional (ie: finality)?

Persons encode, persons understand meaning, persons are recipients of information. Those terms are usefully applied figuratively to non-persons, as heuristics, but they mustn't be mistaken for a literal description. — Daemon

Yeah, no.

Information in that sense is a measurement. It's not something that plays an active role in the phenomena we use it to measure. — Daemon

But science is heuristic rather than literal, if you must insist on that distinction. If science were "literal", it would be naive realism and not a semiotic modelling relation.

All we have is theories and measurements in science. The encoding of a relation and the prediction of the observables.

DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed. If you (or physics) think that information plays a role in that phenomenon in addition to what the chemicals do, please tell us what it is. — Daemon

Again, look to your need to include the constraint of "appropriate". Who is applying the Darwinian filter that separates the appropriate from the inappropriate polypeptide sequences? Where in the chemistry do we find the history of the past married to expectations about the future as represented in some DNA strand's choice of particular proteins to be making?

Object permanence comes about in toddlers not by any social design because you have to first be internally aware that other objects exist independently of you and don't share the contents of your own internal states to then go on to understand that language is used to communicate your internal states to others. — Harry Hindu

Humans do have the same neurosemiotic base as all other large-brain vertebrates. But then the add sociosemiosis on top of that.

This is possible because language is another level of code. And it is external as this is based on vocal acts - a meaning-encoding syllabic string.

So yes, you need a brain to shape an utterance. But Homo sapiens also evolved a vocal tract specifically designed for the job. That vocal tract is designed to throw noise out into the world - produce sound waves.

The private could be made public. And the public could also - in fact, more so - be made the private.

Toddlers might first have to learn basic neurosemiotic embodiment in their worlds. But they also have gene-encoded instincts for babbling, gaze following and conversational turn taking that show - along with the right vocal cords, and the right brain adaptations to construct verbal motor plans - they are ready to be thrust straight into the further world of sociosemiosis.

Then how does the code exist if not materially or informationally? — Harry Hindu

It exists by being the least amount of both those things. It exists like a switch. The simplest logical gate.

Genes and neurons and their states are not meaningless in that they are effects of prior causes. — Harry Hindu

Sure, they become meaningful as they accumulate useful distinctions. But I am talking about the principles of any encoding mechanism. I am talking about how a code can even exist as a bridge between the physical and the informational sides of the organismic equation.

DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed. "Encodes" is a commentary on the process. — Daemon

But then it becomes commentary all the way down. What is a protein in your reductionist terms? A chain of peptides. What’s a peptide? The name for a class of amino acids all linked by peptide bonds. What’s an amino acid? Etc.

The reduction to material/efficient cause is always done through the lens of formal/final cause. As @Theorem says, we can identify some suitable compositional level of description, such as "amino acid", because it is characterised by its functional and structural properties. An amino acid is the "right stuff" because it is in-formed substance.

So if you are just saying that "information" is a reified concept, that's fine. It is. But then so is "matter". Each describes the reciprocal pole of a metaphysical abstraction - the division of reality into its top-down and its bottom-up causes. The classical systems account of Aristotle.

Information theory counts the degrees of freedom in nature. It reduces reality to its simplest possible 'bits". In physics, this cashes out as Planck-scale materiality - the probability of being able to measure a definite difference. A bare fluctuation. An entropic microstate.

So the epistemology of reductionism is hierarchical. And as such, it cannot escape dealing with all Aristotle's four causes.

In practice, our models of reality must be efficient. And that optimisation involves striking some balance of the two sides of the story. We find focal levels like - "proteins", or "amino acids", or "amine groups"; or eventually "atoms", "quantum particle fields" and "vacuum expectation values" - that do the job of defining both the material/efficient causes, and the formal/final causes, that are involved in some level of explanation being able to work as a level of explanation.

So reductionism might disguise the fact that it is a four cause analysis - as it must be to describe nature. Folk like yourself might try to make it conform to atomism by saying functional structure just kind of "emerges" as an accident, and so suppress the role of non-holonomic hierarchical constraints. And also then push the global holonomic constraints right out of the physicalist picture by calling those the fundamental laws and constants of nature - equations in the mind of God, or further accidents because, well ... multiverse.

But this is just self-deluding rhetoric. Even physics has got around to embracing "information" as fundamental these days.

I don't think you'd say that if you had experienced it even for a few moments. — Janus

A few moments is not hard. As you say, you can't stop stuff bubbling up, but you can just let it go. You can get into a dissociated state where nothing is sticking in working memory. At which point you either fall asleep or suddenly notice with a start that you weren't noticing.

But even Ram Dass said managing a whole 12 seconds would count you among the professionals. It is not a natural state for the mind to be in.

Ignoring the mosquitoes in lotus position - that's a good start - but it doesn't follow that you've achieved a meditative state. — ZzzoneiroCosm

No. It confirmed to me that the whole thing was pretentious bullshit. But still, it was another thing that got me in interested in the real story of how it all works.

Instead of meditation, I like to get "in the zone" playing sport. And that is of course more in keeping with my enactive metaphysics. Transcendence as a flashing down the line backhand. :wink:

I didn't see this particular triad in a list of Peirce's triads... — ZzzoneiroCosm

He didn't make a direct mapping as the first person became not the crisp boundedness of the individual but its diametric opposite of the radical vagueness of the completely unbounded "individual". So Schiller's first person as "infinite impulse".

Peirce was wanting to move from atomism to holism. So what is primal is pure unbound possibility - that then becomes an atomistic kind of firstness when a suitable system of constraints evolve.

Which is why James talked of newborns as experiencing a blooming, buzzing, confusion. The real first person point of view - before anything has developed - is just a wide open, tychic, state of everythingness.

Likewise, his second person point of view only made sense in terms of the generality of thirdness. "All thought is addressed to a second person, or to one’s future self as a second person."

So the transition is to speaking to a second person in a way that depends on them being a member of a common linguistic community ... and thus being constrained to be another now suitably atomistic individual ... like yourself has started to act to be.

So Peirce used first, second and third person grammar to get started in his early work. But that doesn't stick out because his achievement was in fact to subvert it - turn it from a static and atomistic account to a dynamic and holistic account.

I would have said it could be either a first person view; I feel me, and I take it for granted that you feel you, even though I cannot feel you. I also take it for granted that you cannot feel me. I don't understand what you are taking the second person view to be; IE how it would differ from both first and third person views. — Janus

You've pointed out the difference. I feel that I am me - the principle of identity. And I feel that you are you and not me. The principle of non-contradiction. I can't be both me and you at the same time, so we are distinct.

But then you and me can both be part of them. The law of the excluded can fail to apply because we find ourselves not distinct but part of the same collective generality where the distinction is sublated.

So secondness stands for the possibility of distinction or reaction - a difference. You just want to elevate this secondness to something fixed and standalone when it can only, in Peirce's analysis, arise within a logic of relations.

I wish I could grasp what you said there and its significance, but I lack the background. If it is so hard to understand and only grasped by a few specialists after long study, then it would seem arcane, and I'm not seeing how it could therefore be useful to the vast majority of people, and to society and mankind in general. — Janus

That's what folk say about science in general. Tl;dr.

And then they get back to sermonising on the Hard Problem.

That's something you'd need to experience. I can attest that it is possible, but that it does not involve the cessation of all thought. So, it's not what the inexperienced might think, and it really cannot be explained. — Janus

I've taken part in sensory deprivation experiments. My judo teacher was a Zen monk and we had to sit in the tropical sun, lotus style, ignoring the arriving mosquitoes.

So I've done the phenomenological research as well as understanding the neuroscientific reasons why this is a BS ambition.