Is this your own idea or the idea of another philosopher?

Does it have a connection to Peirce's triad? — ZzzoneiroCosm

The triadic distinction of "I/you/them" is so basic to the logic of relations that it is built into the fundamentals of our grammar. And Peirce had the genius to indeed turn it back into a logic of relations.

There is a technical term in Advaita Vedanta, 'nirvikalpa samadhi', ' a state of awareness where the ego and samskaras have been dissolved and bare awareness remains'. — Wayfarer

Claims about stilling the mind are as believable as claims about levitating the body.

Friston is returning neurocognition to its 19th century roots. The brain as a mix of habits and expectations. Helmholtz’s treatise on perception. Bayes’ work on probability and structures of belief. The brain as a semiotic prediction machine.

In the 20th century, the information revolution hijacked cognitive science. Turing’s theory of Universal Computation became the compelling mathematical framework for thinking about the brain.

This is the Cartesian data processing paradigm. Cognition as an input/output process. You have the sensations arriving and getting crunched into perceptual representations, then motor plans. A simple linear digestion of information.

Bayesian Brain theory flips this around so as to make cognition a cybernetic or autopoietic loop. The brain attempts to predict its inputs. The output comes first. The brain anticipates the likely states of its environment to allow it to react with fast, unthinking, habit - the shortcut, basal ganglia, level of brain processing. It is only when there is a significant prediction error – some kind of surprise encountered – that the brain needs to stop and attend, spend time forming a more considered response.

So output leads the way. The brain maps the world not as it is, but as it is about to unfold. And more importantly, how it is going to unfold in terms of the actions and intentions we are just about to impose on it. Cognition is embodied or enactive.

Friston’s contribution has been to take this commonsensical view and build it into a universalised mathematics to rival Turing computation. He has written out the prediction or forward-modelling algorithm in the language of differential equations.

There are a bunch of technicalities involved as he builds on standard chunks of such maths - formalisms like Markov blankets and self-evidencing information.

But simply put, the maths couples the way we expect our actions to change the world to the way we then find the world changing the states of our sensory systems. Simply put, if we can turn our heads quickly and feel it is us that is moving, not the world that is spinning, then we know our brains have got the hang of things. It is forward-modelling our environments in a way such that there is a self as the stable anchoring point of view. We are implementing an information optimisation principle that can be described in the "physics" of a gradient descent algorithm.

So Friston gives a formal mathematical account of the notion of a forward-modelling intelligence in just the same way Turing did for an information processing machine.

Other theories like Global Workspace and IIT sort of try to tackle the same thing - everyone is feeling the same elephant - but then lean into the information theoretic view rather than Friston's "thermodynamic" one.

So both GW and IIT see the brain as having to create structure and informed points of view via a process of integration~differentiation. To be conscious is to have a point of view ... that meaningfully sorts all things in terms of their relevance and irrelevance. And brains do that over both habit-forming, and attention-forming time scales. As I say, the more you can ignore about the world in advance, the more certain you can be that any Bayesian error is significant and should inform the next step in the rolling evolution of your world model.

But both GW and IIT are ill-suited to cashing in on the obvious. GW is stuck in the world of computer architectures - a rigid structural view that lacks any self-organising or self-optimising dynamic. And IIT has the opposite issue of being all dynamics without any computational structure. It can't measure the logic driving the action, just put some number on the degree of coherence in the neural statistics.

So both reflect Turing computation/Shannon information as the view that a bit is a bit. You don't really know if it is signal or noise. Your maths is set up to be agnostic about that crucial fact.

But Friston starts with a semiotic approach to information where it is mathematically a unit of meaning. It is a Batesonian "difference that makes a difference" - in being a prediction error, and thus something the system is working to suppress.

It is like looking at a switch on the wall and not knowing the world the switch was designed to control. The information theoretic view tells you only that you are looking at a physical device with two states. But it doesn't tell you if it is on or off, or whether its current state is good or bad.

The switch could be the way you turn on the heating, or the trigger for a nuclear bomb. Guess wisely.

But a semiotic view of switches is that they impose a general of/off choice on material reality. You can construct any kind of model of any kind of physical action and - by hooking the two together cybernetically - leave the damn thing to run itself in error-minimising, self-optimising, fashion. In simple terms, instead of a switch, you have something more useful, like a thermostat. Or an intelligent room that handles its own lights, or whatever.

but the division is an inevitable fact; because I don't know what thoughts are going in your head other than what you tell me. — Janus

You and me is a second person view of two individuals in interaction. Peircean secondness, in other words.

The semiosis here is about first and third person. So as two people, what counts is that we can share our thoughts because we are part of a community of speakers. We are both shaped by the same common cultural habits. And so already there is tacit mutual agreement that we will deconstruct our interiority in some socially given fashion.

I don't know what your purported religious experience is like, other than how you (probably inadequately) describe it to me. — Janus

In medieval times, monks could be had up for the sin of accidie - a failure to feel the full private fervour of religious experience and merely going through the public semblance of prayer and exhaltation.

Actually experiencing God is of course not required by the Anglican Church these days.

You are trying to take a position outside of human experience and reduce it to a "modeling relation". It's a form of reductionism; despite your claim that it is not atomistic, but wholistic. — Janus

Modelling is reductionist. Atomism and holism would be at opposite ends of the spectrum and thus reciprocally-defined forms of modelling.

So the holism is the triadic holism - and triadic reduction - of Peircean semiotics. Thirdness as holism incorporates both Firstness and Secondness within it.

What I am actually doing is taking a position that wraps first, second and third person points of view together in a single metaphysics - a metaphysics that is triadic.

It stands outside in the same way that the general stands "outside" the particular. That is, it grounds it.

So semiosis is a statement about reality being irreducibly complex. And hence being fully reducible to the complexity that is a triadic structural relation.

Is this really so hard to understand? [Of course it bloody is. :grin: ]

Those views seem to me to be philosophically naive and scientifically worthless, but such views are apparently widely held, our friend apokrisis seems to think they are unquestionable facts. — Daemon

For the record, I don't subscribe to either Global Workspace Theory or Integrated Information Theory. Neither are semiotic approaches.

But I do endorse Friston's Bayesian Brain approach, and others that preceded it, like Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory.

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated. So it can never be evidence in the "public" sense, but only evidence to the individual whose imagination or intuition tells them that there is something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world. — Janus

Phenomenology is socially constructed. It is a modelling exercise using language to externalise the internal in a socially pragmatic fashion.

So what you claim to be the facts of two different realms - the public and the private - are instead a way to frame things in a way that there is this epistemic division ... that can then allow a further level of organismic regulation emerge.

You have to construct the division to exploit the division.

So you grow up in a culture which trades in an economy of personal wants and needs. You have all these "feelings" that give meaning, direction and purpose to you individual consciousness.

If you say you are hungry or tired, those are socially-accepted descriptions of animistic states of mind - pretty much a summary of how you are feeling at a brainstem level about your current physiological state. It is a reflexive response with a clear biological utility. If you tell me you are in pain, I can understand what you mean and respond in some culturally approved fashion that is pragmatic.

But words can also encode almost purely social level states of mind - descriptors like loyalty, alienation, love, the sublime. These are rooted in the public and intersubjective in being largely about the pragmatics of living as a social creature in the human world.

You are no longer describing "private states of mind" reflexively generated at a hypothalamic or limbic level of the brain. You are describing ways of acting that are strongly under the voluntary attentional control of the cortex. The words - the emotion language - is talk about suitable ways of behaviour in a human social setting.

Are you being brave or reckless when cliff-diving? What you feel privately - in brainstem fashion - is arousal and adrenaline, dread and expectation. And what you also feel is the social framing of your action. Are you being performatively a tough guy, or a dumb ass? That becomes a social judgement. Indeed a social judgement poised like a switch between its two binary interpretations.

You can feel brave. That was how you framed it privately. And you can perhaps later re-frame it publicly, taking the third person view that what you "felt" was a moment of heedless recklessness.

Or vice versa. Your first time off the cliff, it might be recklessness that you feel inside - that is how you frame the high brainstem arousal together with a cortical state of conflict, the voluntary attention process that has both the plan to jump, coupled to the difficulty of actually doing so. But afterwards, you can switch that to bravery. You can walk away as if the plunge was no big deal. Do it anytime, as that is the kind of guy you are.

So this public/private distinction is semiotic. It is an epistemic cut both created and bridged. Language is the means of dividing a group into a collection of individuals ... who can then act with even more perfect group cohesion ... because acting as an autonomous individual is also now something quite definite.

For animals, there is no such public/private distinction. Being altruistic vs being selfish, or being cooperative vs being competitive, are not "emotional choices" being culturally policed.

But humans, with their language-structured minds and worlds, are all about this social economy of emotions, feelings and values. The public/private distinction becomes a super-important thing - the basis of the social model.

It is only when we step up another level - to the numbers-based semiosis of science - that we can see that there is this "unconscious" social game going on.

It seems to me that neurosemiosis, or mental processes involving signs, or producing meaning, is the act of modeling itself. — Harry Hindu

Yes. That is what I was saying.

Putting it simply, semiosis is the construction of a meaningful relation between a self and world using a (meaningless) code.

The code is the hinge point of the affair. To connect the physical and the informational aspects of reality efficiently, it must itself be the least of both. It must be a system of signs or symbols that effectively costs no material effort, and also carries no informed or meaningful content.

So the code can act as a code because it stands outside both sides of the equation. It is neither material, nor informational - as much as that is actually possible. And thus it can mediate between these two realms ... by in fact making them the two realms split by its epistemic cut.

There are four obvious levels where this happens. Biology has the encoding mechanism of the gene. Neurology uses neurons. Human culture uses words. And since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, number has asserted its "world making" potential. Human psychology has been remade in a Noosphere fashion. Technology is new level of organism, feeding off buried carbon.

So a gene costs next to nothing, compared to the energy return on the investment. And a gene means nothing until there has been in fact some considerable spending of an organism's capital in terms of erasing alternative meanings - winnowing the host of free possibilities, or degenerate states, by an evolutionary filtering process.

So some codon on a DNA strand is essentially a cost-free and random choice. It is a switch that could be on or off. And it can just as easily be switched on or off. The bare coding mechanism is just a random bit string waiting to be given a meaningful state - some pattern that says something about the world, and thus about the self that has an evolved and informed point of view about that world.

This is why semiosis, or the modelling relation, is triadic. It has the three elements of the physics (the rate dependent dynamics), the model (the rate independent information), and the coding mechanism that both creates and bridges the sharp divide (the epistemic cut - best represented by the idea of a mechanical switch, or 0/1 logic gate).

Neurons are like genes in being essentially costless in terms of their physics. Humans can afford trillions of synaptic switches. And they are like genes in that each switch is essentially meaningless. The connections have no meaning until the pattern that is a functional regulatory model has been evolved, developed, learnt, habituated, remembered.

Neurons as simple uninformed switches are neither physical, nor mental. At least in the effective sense - the sense essential to their being a coding machinery, the implementation of the epistemic cut. Each neuron is by design as physically costless as a computer transistor. And it is by design as informationally meaningless as a computer transistor - until it has started to repay its small physical investment by doing useful work in the world as part of an informed regulatory model of that world.

The same applies to words and numbers. Each involve minimal physical effort to produce as symbols, so physics doesn't constrain their maximal informed use. And each lacks intrinsic meaning - they are just noises or squiggles. This means each can be endowed with any meaning we choose. And the amount of meaning they come to "contain" is proportionate to the number of alternative interpretations we have in fact - at some effort, some cost - discarded.

So there is one general trick that unites life and mind. Semiosis, or the way that a code can both separate and unite the two "realms" of mind and matter, information and entropy.

As the epistemic cut, the code first enforces a sharp distinction between the two, and then it re-connects them. The possibility of a model (a self) in causal control of a world comes by first breaking the physics of the world into its material and formal causes, then using a model of those formal causes (ideas about order and purpose) to re-connect the two sides in a (self)controlled fashion.

The code is a system of switches. To a reductionist and epiphenomenalist, one could say that that is all there is to see - a bunch of cheap transistors or some other rather costless bit of physical mechanism. And to an idealist or phenomenologists, there might instead be - well, still just be! - a bunch of cheap transistors, or some other rather costless bit of physical mechanism, that can thus have nothing meaningful to say about conscious experience, intentionality, feelings and aesthetics, or any of the other actually meaningful aspects of being a self, a mind, a free spirit, etc.

So what we have in philosophy of mind is realists and idealists locked in Cartesian conflict. And they are too absorbed in this historical cultural drama at pay attention to systems science or semiotics - the scientific account of how codes ground modelling relations.

Language is modeling of our conscious lives - our phenomenology - for others to bear witness to. Our language use is laced with phenomenological terms and projections of our phenomenology onto the world as if light is colored and ice cream is good and brains are physical outside of our own model. — Harry Hindu

Yes, I agree. And that is one of the big problems with the term "consciousness". Those who use it as their central descriptor are failing to recognise the big difference between neural level world modelling and linguistic level world modelling. They conflate a biological "first person" level of awareness with a sociological "third person" level of awareness.

And yet it is obvious that animals only "extrospect". They haven't got the semiotic means to introspect. They are plugged into the moment in all their responses - even if they are intentional, intelligent, capable of planning, etc.

But language gives humans the ability to take a displaced view of their reality. We can stand outside ourselves to see ourselves as selves. And we can stand outside the world - as it currently and concretely is - to imagine the world as it was at other times, or could be in other worlds, or even as it might be for other selves.

From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world. — Joshs

We can see how strong physicalism winds up going too far because in the end it leads to the crazy metaphysical extremes of quantum theory where either it must be consciousness that collapses the wavefunction and brings the observed world into concrete being, or there is a multiverse of worlds to avoid the “explanatory gap” created by this collapse.

So physicalism winds up confirming the most extreme Cartesian dualism. Or at least we have to choose between human consciousness being the cause of material existence, or there being an infinite splintering of material existence.

Physicalism must be rescued somehow. And the issue is where to place the epistemic cut - or cuts - that bridge the explanatory gap between the experimenter reading the dials of the instruments and the quantum reality doing it’s weird things.

I don’t know what phenomenology brings to the table here. But Peirce’s semiotics is all about this issue. And the modern dichotomy of entropy and information is the basis for our best model of pansemiosis. The epistemic cut is placed at the Planckscale cut-off of thermal dechoherence. The quantum realm is the zone of material criticality or instability. And horizons or information bounds placed on that instability are what produces a dynamically steadying hand, giving us the stable classical world we observe.

Pansemiosis is the dissipative structure that forms a cosmos. And that stable materiality becomes the basis for life and mind as further levels of actual (ie: code based) semiosis. That is, further levels of localised and complex dissipative structure. And each level of life and mind is based on a new kind of coding mechanism, each enforcing its own kind of epistemic cut.

But a Cartesian theater is what you are implying in talking about models that are attended. — Harry Hindu

Base level consciousness is the neurosemiosis. The modelling is the attending. Then humans structure their own relationship with themselves with language. We can attend to the fact of our attending as a socially constructed habit. We can learn to adopt a third person point of view on the first person experiential facts. We learn to give a phenomenological account of our selves as selves with perceptions, intentions, feelings, memories, images, etc.

Through the socially externalised means of linguistic semiosis we can model ourselves as modellers. We can take an objective view of the fact we are subjective beings.

Correct. To attribute semiosis to anything other than a mind is category error. So, terms like "biosemiosis" are misnomers. — Galuchat

Or biological scientists showing that they see life and mind as the same essential kind of mechanism.

And Peirce saw semiosis as the logic organising the Cosmos.

It's off topic Apo. — bert1

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Bert is asking why the kinds of behavior you observe, and capacities you attribute, to the jumping spider, your example, could not exist, for example, in an unconscious robot. — Janus

Why would an entity doing all the semiotic things an organism like a jumping spider does be unconscious. Or even a robot?

The shortcomings of computational analogies is in fact instructive here. Semiosis is something quite different.

See for instance: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2520546_Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

it is your choice to assert but not support the position that consciousness is something that can exist without a content.

And if I have failed to provide the support you seek for that position, then so be it.

You won’t do it, and I can’t imagine how to do it. That just leaves us with my semiotic approach I guess.

:lol:

So, back on topic: — bert1

Look at you. Ducking and diving like mad.

C'mon. Where is the evidence or the logic that says that consciousness can exist in the absence of a content?

I also asked you for a relatively theory-free definition, but you ignored that question as well.

Why would I be in interested in aping your fact-free, theory-free, model-free, content-free, approach to an important question?

Your position depends on consciousness being able to exist without these kinds of contents - modelling, selective attention, etc.

All of biological and neurological science speaks to my position. You have made zero argument in favour of yours. All you rely on to mask your embarrassing nakedness here is panpsychism - a theory that is not even wrong.

If you don't care to defend your claim that consciousness can exist without a content then I accept that you quietly find that an indefensible leap of rhetoric yourself.

The fact that consciousness arises from brain processes is utterly uncontroversial. — hypericin

It is what people think they mean when they say "consciousness" that is the controversial bit. What they usually mean is that somehow the world is "represented" as an "image" in some kind of Cartesian theatre.

Consciousness is a word with Cartesian dualism baked into it. And that is why those who bang on about "consciousness" find that its usage leads to a feeling there is some unbridged explanatory gap.

It is not a philosophical problem as such. Just a linguistic snare. A trap for the unwary.

...it's because I'm a panpsychist. — bert1

A theory that is not even wrong as it offers no measurable difference.

Yet you demand such evidence from others....

I'm trying to understand the position of the emergentist, — bert1

Well there's two types. The reductionist and the holist.

One argues that qualities simply "pop out" due to a sufficient quantity of complexity - the supervenience approach. The other argues that the emergence is a self-organising semiotic relation where both the local stuff out of which a system is made, and the global constraints that inform the organisation, are emergent from a vagueness or firstness of unformed potential.

So we have a situation in which for the vast majority of the lifetime of the universe, and for the vast majority of places in it, there is no consciousness. Then something happens, and there is consciousness. — bert1

What's the problem? A planet formed. It had self-organised entropic flows, like warm sea floor thermal vents where alkaline fluid bubbling up from the crust had to flow past acid seawater, creating a natural proton gradient. Life could then evolve a proton gradient existence by packaging it up as a cellular metabolism. The smarter life got at this - using a genetic code to produce a rate-controlling enzyme machinery - the better it did. It could move out of the vents and take over the planet.

Evolution continues to act as an informational filter on this metabolic complexity and eventually you have a vast variety of organisms of all sizes, living in all niches. The creation of a complex environment like this then favours the evolution of nervous systems as a way to navigate the world that biology is so busy making.

You surely agree with this emergentist view so far? The more complex you make your own world, the more complex you must evolve to be to remain in this world.

Eventually nervous systems evolve to the point that they are living models of an individual organism surviving and thriving in their particular evolutionary niche. What emerges is a way of seeing the world that is functional for the kind of organism they are.

So all I see here is a continuous story where knowledge of the world develops as an evolutionary arms race. The more complex organisms make their world, the more selection there is for the complexity of neural modelling required to flourish in that world.

At what point did consciousness "pop out" exactly? All large brain animals are surely conscious and not operating "in the dark". Even jumping spiders can spot their prey, circle around through a maze of foliage to find a spot to pounce on their target. With a pin-prick of neural matter, they show the basics of selective attention and short-term memory.

To honestly hold to the Hard Problem of consciousness requires a vast amount of ignorance about the biological and neurological facts. There is so much you need to avoid knowing to find a philosophical zombie story convincing.

And you've already told us what the difference is, which is great, you've said the difference is entering into a modelling relationship with the world. And my reply is, sure, but what is it about that that means it feels like something? We all know it does feel like something, I'm not denying that, obviously. What I'm asking is why does that explanation work, and not others. — bert1

Why would modelling a self in a world not feel exactly like that? If an organism is successfully modelling itself in the world then how could it also be unsuccessfully modelling itself in the world?

All you are doing here is showing your willingness to stick with an endless regress of skepticism. If any fact is claimed to be true - bang - there is your chance to voice your doubt. A pointless and irritating habit.

But how do we get from that to the very general conclusion that consciousness, regardless of the content, only occurs when brains do a certain type of thing? — bert1

So there is consciousness even when it is empty of content? News to me. Where's your evidence for this?

That's all great, but why can't all that happen in the dark? — bert1

What supports your contention that all that neurology - by far the most extreme kilo or two of functional complexity in the known universe - could happen “in the dark”?

How do you get drunk if the neurology has nothing to do with there being a state of experience in your noggin?

So you agree the image in some sense exists and is non-physical, is held in the mind? Or is it more in the spirit of your schema to eschew the physical/non-physical dyad and focus on function? — ZzzoneiroCosm

I talk about images as that is the everyday jargon that you wish to employ. From a properly functional point of view, it is a perceptual anticipation - a prediction of a future sensory state uncorrected by any actual such sensory state. So it is something you thought was liable to happen, but it then didn’t happen. And you are left with the impression of what it might have been like if it did happen.

So in broader terms, the mind is an intention-soaked forward model of the world. And an image is the start of that modelling cycle - the forming of a grounding state of expectancy and readiness.

The ordinary Cartesian view of the mind is that is is a passive stage for the play of sensations. The semiotic view is the enactive or embodied view where consciousness is primarily active and intentional.

So what explains the mind is the active way it does it’s best to predict the sensory changes - the physical energies - that the environment may be about to impose upon it. Then something that seems passive and off-line - like mental images - is just the brain striving after active meaning at a time when very little of interest is happening out in the world.

As in dreams, states of sensory expectation just drift through the mind in a loose associative flow. The engine on idle.

The mind is an accumulation of habits of interpretance. Past experience is used to predict the future world in terms designed to deliver effective action. So the imagination is just this forward prediction of what it would be like to experience the known world from some other viewpoint.

So you could generate the image of a stop sign just as you could generate an image of your missing keys or the deer you hope to shoot in the woods. The ability to hold a search image in mind is a meaningful and functional action. It speaks to a state of intent that is to be physically enacted at some future time and place. The image informs that material possibility.

But such states of anticipatory imagery could be nonsensical - noise rather than information - as when you are dreaming.

I was referring to the imaginary stop sign I'm thinking of right now. Not a real stop sign. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well if it ever materialises,you’ll know what to do.

For now, that actuality is merely a potential.

So is the imaginary stop sign considered (basically) pure information? — ZzzoneiroCosm

The semiotics of traffic networks is based on switches. And in biosemiotic, what is being stressed is that switches are where the action happens as they mediate (as signs) between the informational and material aspects of the system.

So a traffic light is a better example as it tells you when to stop and go. It encodes on and off - in terms of the fossil fuel burning that moves the cars about in some kind of socially optimised flow.

A stop sign seems like a purer informational thing because it is more remote from the physical consequences involved. Occasionally you might get caught by the cops. Occasionally you might get T-boned for not halting to check properly. But an on-off switch like a traffic light is far more directly tied to its material consequences.

A pure form of information might be more like an art installation which says “don’t press this button”. Something as nonsensical and disconnected from useful material consequences as possible.

The shitness of the modern world is largely due to a failure to continue the Enlightenment project. Once you assert the primacy of either values or facts, then you have fallen into a deep misunderstanding about how intelligent dissipative structures, or Bayesian mechanics, are meant to work. — apokrisis

....but I just don't see how what is really an arcane discipline, pretty much incomprehensible to those who haven't spent sufficient time studying it, is going to help humanity. — Janus

What I was saying is that if folk could shake off their romantic notions of causality then they might be able to focus on the rational solutions that are indeed the bleeding obvious.

That is why a hollow slogan like "everyone just be nice!" is so problematic. It flows directly from Romanticism. It sets up the false expectation that is followed by its deep disillusion.

If you think small rural communities have a much greater degree of social cohesion, then why not analyse why that might be the case - and apply those principles to the larger world we all now live in.

And then think also about whether a small rural community grants a matchingly pleasant degree of individual freedom. Analyse why that is the case and how it can be applied to a larger scale of human organisation. Or instead, decide small communities can be parochial and small minded. Maybe they can learn something from large city communities?

We get the lives we design, don't we? At least that was the Enlightenment project.

If the imaginary needs to be couched in physical terms aren't we left with a physicalist monism? Sure, there's symbols in the mix, but it has the ring of a physicalism. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Information would be the part of reality which is the least material, and matter would be likewise the part of reality with the least information. Physicalism is then the triadic relation in which information and matter are tied together by this dichotomistic or reciprocal story.

So a computer is a machine designed for manipulating information. It zeroes the cost of representing a digital bit. And so that bit can stand for "anything". The imagination has free rein to assign any kind of value to a bit string. The cost of running the program is the same no matter what the program is supposed to be about.

The CPU must consume some juice. It can't avoid having some materialism in the mix. But in practice, the cost is small enough to be easily afforded, and it is a cost that has zero bearing on the freedom of the software to represent "any world".

It is the same with genes, neurons, words, numbers. As codes, they are all designed to have this maximal informational freedom because they minimise and standardise the underlying entropic costs of their materiality.

A word is a puff of air in the throat. Grammar gives us the finite means for infinite expression. Talk is so cheap we can afford to speak any amount of nonsense. But that is also because speech is so powerful that it allows H.sapiens to dominate the resources of a planet. Speech easily pays for itself in terms of entropy disposal.

The same goes at the biological level for genes and neurons. The genes can code for any polypeptide chain and thus an effective infinity of protein structures. Useful or useless, the cost is near zero. And also - with the functional need to persist as an organism in an environment - this vast landscape of imaginary possibilities gets passed through a Darwinian filter.

So with words, the evolutionary filter on speaking nonsense isn't so apparent. Even if it is there in the long run.

Anyway, you get the principle of Pattee's rate independent information vs rate dependent dynamics. Semiotics is about how codes anchor evolutionary stories. By being "costless", the informational machinery opens up a trans-material version of physicalism. Even the genome has an imagination and can play with billions of times more molecular possibilities than it actually needs. Living a life then applies a Darwinian filter to ensure genomes focus back on the practicalities of the molecules that do the right job.

How would we go about trying semiotics? What is it going to tell us about the world situation which is not already obvious? — Janus

Nice. Either I'm original but wrong. Or I'm right, but not original. You win either way. :clap:

If people changed such as to care more, then we would see how it pans out. It can't be engineered. So, we'll muddle through as usual, semiotics aint going to help either. No better than snake oil. — Janus

At least you can try the snake oil and see if the claims on the bottle match its real world effects.

You're stomping about making the claim to have the magical potion which cures all ills. But you're not going to let anyone taste even a drop.

What you seem to be failing to see is that the simple notion that the world would very different if we all, or even a significant number of us, cared about others, about the collective, as we do about ourselves does not require analysis. — Janus

How can I see what you won't properly flesh out. You haven't shown that adding more sugar to the recipe in fact makes it taste more delicious. You are just sloganeering and - on a philosophy site! - proclaiming your view to be self-evidently true.

I'm not indulging in utopian thinking because I'm not suggesting it will come to pass, either; it most probably won't, — Janus

What is it exactly that is going to come to pass, or not come to pass? What does this "caring more" look like in everyday lived practice? How does it cash out as something different in our social, political and economic institutions?

Nonetheless the 'shitness' of the modern world is due to lack of sufficient care to raise it out of its cesspit, mixed with the bewilderment that comes with being faced with unmanageable complexity. — Janus

You keep on with your slogans - and the bewilderment when asked: well how its this "more care" put into effect? How would society be organised differently?

I mean do you think it would be a good thing to rewire the brains of the general population with oxytocin in the water supply?

Let's get into the mechanics of what makes humans "care for others" and see how the options pan out.

In H. Sapiens, life reaches a threshold where it can contemplate 'the meaning of being'. — Wayfarer

All hail H.philosophus . Nature's most grandiloquent animal.

That's what philosophy started out as. — Wayfarer

Or was it instead the metaphysical inquiry into the basis of being - the search for the universal substance, the logos of the cosmos?

I've often said that once h. sapiens crosses the threshold of reason, abstraction, meaning-seeking, then horizons of meaning open up that aren't necessarily visible or intelligible from a strictly functionalist or scientific viewpoint. — Wayfarer

And haven't we often agreed that that applies to Scientism - the kind of physicalism that rejects formal and final cause and is only concerned with models of reality that employ material and efficient cause.

My brand of physicalism is the full four cause analysis. It makes meaning and purpose part of the model.

So a stop sign is a symbol and a stop sign is matter.

What does your theory say about the distinction between the real and the imaginary stop sign? — ZzzoneiroCosm

A stop sign is social level switch. It is enforced by social level mechanisms. You might risk getting physically stopped by a patrol car and physically locked in a cell.

A stop sign down at the level of biology could be a messenger molecule that literally jams the jaws of an enzyme's binding site. The mechanism is pretty immediate and direct.

Is there room for the word "mind" in this schema? Or must the word "mind" be completely rejected for this schema to work? — ZzzoneiroCosm

I'm always saying "life and mind". The two are pretty synonymous given that they are both about the special thing of a semiotic modelling relation.

If you want a rough distinction, life is an organism's model of its body - its metabolic existence - and mind is an organism's model of the environment within which that body must persist.

How can I describe what doesn't exist? — Janus

You said the words. You unpack them and show there is some kind of theory behind the hippie slogan.

You know as well as I do that the world would look very different if we all cared as much about others as we do about ourselves. — Janus

Aha. So it starts with equal quantities of caring? If the quantity is x for the self, it should be x for others.

Now is this x an amount granted each and every single other, or instead spread out over all others in some average way (so diluted by a factor of 8 billion currently). Or do you advocate a proximity scale factor, so more care is spent on those closest, matchingly less is invested in those far distant.

You see how with even a cursory analysis, we start to arrive at the usual fractal dissipative structure of any triadic system.

But this your theory. You unpack what you think it means in practical terms to say we should "care for others as we care for ourselves".

I mean what do we do about those with low-esteem. What happens if they apply the Golden Mean? Are they doing something wrong within your moral economy?

Surprise me. Describe how their dualism is fruitfully connected.

In any case since humans do not consist of a majority of intellectuals (for better or for worse) our problems are far more basic than a mere failure to grasp semiotics. More broadly, it is a failure to care enough. — Janus

Describe to me this world where we all "care enough". What does that look like precisely? How does it operate in a way that might maximise the upside of the dichotomy it must be founded upon. Give me your pragmatic recipe for this utopia and not just the empty slogan.

They are pointing to two equal but different categories of judgement. — Joshs

And they then fail to point to the third thing of their fruitful connection?

What did you have in mind beyond surviving and thriving?

Sure, people can find the unpragmatic in philosophy. Some around here even celebrate the lack of utility. It becomes a badge of honour for them. Philosophising is about having a throbbing intellectual engine ... and sitting in an armchair idling.

But historically, philosophy has made the claim it is the path to higher things. It should be useful if it is true. And indeed, it aims to be a training in how to think in the ways that would get you there.

You state that as though it is a fact; but it's a dogma or else it's merely an opinion, depending on how you look at it. — Janus

Why is it not a falsifiable theory?

The world has many countries running somewhat different functional balances. The societies that manage the healthiest pragmatic balances of the ecologically constraining and economically progressive shouldn't be hard to spot. Or if you want to measure more narrowly, you could look to their mix of social cohesion and individual freedom.

One could argue over the right measure - as being a complex thing, it is multidimensional. But the theory says what works is synergy - the classical unity of opposites that got the Enlightenment started in ancient Greece. And what thus fails is to misunderstand the logic of systems as a broken and disconnected duality - a tragic choice between good and evil, value and fact, spirit and flesh, god and beast, art and science, machine and nature, etc, etc.

The Hard Problem is simply another example of the flawed metaphysics of Romanticism. A broken way of thinking about systems has become the popular understanding of all causality, all reality.

And I frame this as falsifiable theory. There are two views in play - dualism and triadicism. Which project laments about all its failures, which gets on with its evolutionary progress?

You can tell that a claimed dualism or dichotomy is wrong to the degree you can’t find a hierarchical reciprocality built into it.

So does fact-value feel like an opposition, even a paradox. Or a synergy - a fruitful win-win?

Values are drive by emotion, which is a subjective and intersubjective response , whereas science is fact-based. — Joshs

Biosemiosis and neurosemiosis build the biological organism - the one that is “driven by in-the-moment emotions”. The semiosis of word and number - language and maths - then build the social level of organism that is the human animal with its extra level of “dispassionate, reasoned, self-regulating behaviour”.

In a functional social setting, the two sides have an evolved harmony. They result in a group of like minds, being fed, housed, nurured, living meaningful lives.

The Enlightenment was a project to construct just such a practical philosophy in a world starting to be transformed by the new mathematical physics and its ability to model the rate dependent dynamics that is the burning of fossil fuels to drive a new “machinery of life”.

We had to learn to live in the new world we were creating by socially constructing a new model of how to be a self in harmony with such a world.

But then there was the Romantic reaction. A counter philosophy arose that said too much change was happening too fast. The belief hardened that humans were a mix of god and beast. That spirit was opposed to body, art to science, etc, etc. The divisions on which levels of semiotic complexity are based were tragedies of the human condition and not instead productive synergies to be constructed.

So this values-fact distinction reflects the tendency to spot the semiotic dichotomy and treat it as a fundamental opposition rather than a burgeoning synergy. The division gets painted as two sides, only one of which can be the right path, or the fundamental story. But really, the philosophical issue is the one fingered by the Enlightenment. How do we bring the two sides of a system into fruitful conjunction?

The shitness of the modern world is largely due to a failure to continue the Enlightenment project. Once you assert the primacy of either values or facts, then you have fallen into a deep misunderstanding about how intelligent dissipative structures, or Bayesian mechanics, are meant to work.

Aren't there at least implied dualisms in biosemiotics? Between symbol and matter, between self and other? — Wayfarer

Sure. But the dualisms are in a functional and causal relation. So they are really a triadic semiotic relationship.

Pattee says life is symbol and matter. The symbol side is the rate independent information. The matter side is the rate dependent dynamics. The two sides are connected by the third thing of mechanistic structure.

The simplest conceptual example of this connecting structure is the notion of a switching device. A switch is either on or off. And the current either flows or is stopped. So a switch provides an atomistic grain for constructing complexity. It is a little lump of material. But it also stands for something in a network of information.

An enzyme is a kind of switch that the genes can turn on and off. And turning it on and off causes chemistry to start and stop.

The genes are an evolutionary script of a material structure that they want to build. Building that structure then results in all the machinery that allows for the sustaining of that realm of gene-inscribed information.

So the two sides - symbol and matter - are yoked together as a functional and self-organising whole. They are in short locked in the embrace of a semiotic modelling relation. The model is the information that builds the structure, and the structure is the materiality that sustains the encoded model.

The relation is holistic or autopoietic. But it hinges on there being a scale of action - the switches - where the two worlds of information and dynamics get properly connected … as a grain of mechanism.

This is biosemiosis.

Fristion’s Bayesian mechanics makes the same case for neurosemiosis.

This time the switches aren’t the enzymes but the various sensory transducers, like a pressure receptor or light cone.

The organism is studded with an array of transducers of physical energy that get tripped by the dynamical changes of the world outside. Photons flick the switch of a retinal cell. A bump flicks the switch of a pressure sensor in the skin.

The nervous system is then a model that attempts to interpret what is going on in terms of a meaningful world of events - an Umwelt. This involves Bayesian reasoning and the minimising of prediction error.

Again we have the two worlds of symbol and matter. Rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, connected by a system of switches. The world imposes the dynamics, the mind interprets them in functional fashion.

Like all things biological, the purpose is to survive and thrive. The aim of the nervous system is to maintain the integrity of the organism as the thing it has learnt how to be.