This is the prevalent thinking that Barbieri and co are up against. — Pop

Hah. Barbieri has been changing sides. As a good careerist, he has snuggled up more closely with the acceptable mainstream. This is a nice commentary…

In contrast to much of the work in biosemiotics, Barbieri wants to stay within a mechanistic paradigm, assuming that “scientific knowledge is obtained by building machine-like models of what we observe in nature.” In 2012, Barbieri resigned as editor of Biosemiotics and founded the International Society of Code Biology, whose constitution committed it to using “the standard methods of science.” What he is trying to avoid is the more interpretive methods common in the humanities and social sciences. Barbieri does agree that information doesn’t speak for itself, and that it has to be given meaning through decoding processes. In addition to the genetic code, he describes numerous codes that biologists have discovered more recently, and he associates the appearance of each code with a major step in macroevolution.

Where Barbieri parts company with biosemiotics is in his understanding of decoding as a mechanical process rather than a process of contextual interpretation. He grants that humans and other brainy animals are subjects who experience, feel, and interpret signs and symbols. But aside from that, he regards decoding as a mechanical process governed by reliable coding rules, such that THIS information always translates into THAT result; for example, this genetic sequence translates into that protein. This makes the individual cell a “biological machine.” Hoffmeyer, on the other hand, rejects this context-free understanding of codes: “Modern semiotics…has abolished the conception of a code as a ‘simple mechanism for pairing of concept and reference.’”

To answer the biosemiotic contention that even simple organisms have context-dependent information and behavior, Barbieri maintains that this requires no more than a simple coupling of more than one mechanical coding process, such as genetic decoding PLUS transduction decoding. “It takes only two context-free codes, in short, to produce a context-dependent behavior.” Presto, no need for interpretation! I would have liked to see more discussion of how information from many coders using different codes, both digital (genetic) and analog, would be predictably combined, especially as the number and type of decoders expanded over the course of evolution. It seems to me that Barbieri jumps too easily from mechanical predictability at the single decoder level to mechanical predictability in the organism as a whole, at least until he gets to brainy animals. Given that any organism has to act as one, what is the logic by which a multitude of disparate information is synthesized to produce a predictable result?

Both Barbieri and Hoffmeyer say that the genetic code provides only part of the information necessary to construct an actual organism. For Barbieri, the coding rules supply the rest. But I didn’t see why a simple "this-information-equals-that-result" coding would supply the additional information. Hoffmeyer's theory of dual coding makes more sense to me. Analog-coded information throughout the cell provides the context in which the digitally-coded genetic information is interpreted. “Digital codifications…do not specify their own interpretation in the real world of spatio-temporal continuity. This is where living, analog codifications must take over.” In the end, life (not just the brain) requires an ongoing process of interpretation/unification within a living agent/interpreter, which distinguishes life from dead machinery. If that remains much more mysterious than our smartest machines, so be it.

It's certainly a problem for physicalism, not so much for dualism or idealism. I mean, 'if the stuff of the world is mind-stuff....' — Wayfarer

It was a problem that got solved though. So physicalism prevailed.

Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-009-9064-2

Habits belong to entities. — Pop

You tell me what you might mean by an entity. That’s a mighty vague term. I will watch with interest as you try to justify some epistemic cut to separate the living and mindful from the physics of dissipative structure.

Oh I forgot. You will just claim panpsychic dualism as the reason not to have to provide an intelligible mechanism for such a differentiation.

In the early universe there could not have been an interpreter, but form arose and developed.

In one sense everything is a development of form. — Pop

Why are you telling me this when I’ve just told you how my position does not involve an interpreter but habits of interpretance?

Just some thinking that badly needs integration. :sad: — Pop

One can lead the horse to integration, but one can’t make it integrate.

I have always had trouble with the term semiosis as it implies an interpreter. But why should meaning have an interpreter? — Pop

Peirce stresses that it is not about an interpreter - as some kind of ego or subject. It is about systems of interpretance. And that is entirely different …. In ways I’ve now exhaustively describes, starting with Friston’s Bayesian Brain.

A semiotic relation exists when some sort of habit of interpretance reads the world in terms of its “signs” and responds with the certainty of automatic reflex.

The light goes green, I go. That is what a green light means. It tells me that the road is clear of crossing cars.

But then I shoot off on green and I am immediately t-boned. Oh dear, the epistemic cut meant to plug me enactively into the physics of the world suddenly seems to have left me separated from that actual world. It seems there can be surprises in this well regulated life - entropic exceptions to the informational rules.

There are 21 papers we are focusing on, and the broad thrust is a reconsideration of what is meant by "information" at the cellular level.

**These papers an excellent source for getting a feel for the cutting edge in contemporary understanding. — Pop

Sorry to say it ain’t the cutting edge of biosemiosis. I can tell that just from the authors and the titles. I just read Ball’s journalistic summary and skimmed Barbieri - whose position remains a second rate summary of more incisive thinking.

But if you are eager to read and learn, that is great. If you can tag Barbieri and his mates as closet panpsychists, even better. :clap:

We are discussing Barberi's paper. Did you read it? — Pop

What? The paper on biosemiosis? Is that the toipic we are meant to be discussing now?

Have you read the Barbieri team mission statement?….

Since the early 1970s, Italian embryologist and theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri has been developing a biosemiotic framework for biology based on his analysis of the cell’s internal organic codes. Developing his theory of semantic biology in complete independence from the Sebeokian biosemioticians, but now widely recognized as a key figure in the development of 21st century biosemiotics, Barbieri proposes an alternative biosemiotic paradigm that is not organicist and qualitative in its origins, but mechanist and molecular instead – but that is just revolutionary a framework for the attempt to scientifically investigate and understand the reality of sign processes in life processes

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

So, what is crucial here, is that Barbieri is claiming there's an ontological distinction between living organisms and non-organic matter. That is what is resisted by 'the chemical paradigm', because if it's true, then materialism proper - the contention that matter-energy is all that exists - can't be maintained. — Wayfarer

As Pattee put it, the central problem for biology is to explain how a molecule can be a message (and not just a material). :up:

We have been through this before - How is it relevant for irreversible systems? — Pop

How is it not?

You might be suffering from a faulty understanding of irreversibility though. Thermodynamic equilbriums are simply states were reversion has become homogenised and so all fluctuations are confined to a Gaussian bell curve distribution.

In an ideal gas, the particles exchange position and momentum with wild thermal abandon. They bash about gaining and losing in Brownian motion fashion. But at a macro scale view of this microscopic fluctuation - the epistemic cut where the global view is made separate from the local view - all the information you need to describe the system is largely told as a general temperature and pressure reading. A statistical mean.

The irreversibility comes from heat being lost to the environment. The flask of particles can’t head back towards higher pressures and temperatures all by itself (give or take ergodic scale fluctuations).

But heat can be supplied. And work could even be extracted up to a point, as Maxwell’s demon illustrates.

Maxwell's demon
— frank

We are talking about open systems. Natural systems are dissipative. I'm not sure what you are getting at? — Pop

Good lord. Maxwell’s demon is how classical mechanics introduces the epistemic cut that underpins thermodynamics and hence dissipative structure theory.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists-20210422/

And that led to Feynman’s ratchet to show the quantum limit of any such informational demon.

Actually this is excellent as an introductory text…not to full blown semiotics, but too a sensible Aristotelean systems science view. The appetiser to the main course perhaps.

Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT 1999)

As someone who seems to know quite a lot about semiotics and is passionate about its applications to philosophy and science, what books would you recommend someone read to begin learning about it? — darthbarracuda

That is a hard one as the causal model is so different from the one normally supplied by normal culture that you have to relearn your deepest habits of thought. You have to rebuild the boat while still sailing it. It had to be learnt by doing - and failing - as much as reading the instruction manual.

Another problem is that it is an outsider exercise - in being opposed to the mainstream of causal monism - and so you don’t have a single authority. Hundreds of thinkers arrive from different directions with their own jargons and priorities. You have to live with many different camps to discover they are struggling to express the same general holism.

But Peirce is a foundational resource. And then in science, the heavy hitters for me were the systems scientists, cyberneticians, hierarchy theorists, and eventually the biosemioticians these guys have become since Peirce’s deep work got properly discussed in published from about the 1990s.

But I don’t mean the biosemioticians that follow the dyadic semiotics of Saussure rather than the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Bloody Continental philosophy sneaks its hooks into everything. :grin:

So pick anything by Peirce, or the now abundant commentary on Peirce. And read anything by Pattee tagged biosemiosis.

But as I say, it is not merely a view to be learned alongside every other. It is a reboot of how we are all trained to construct our worlds. We need to live it and see the world as very different from what we were told it was.

I should explain that empathy as it is understood within phenomenological and cognitive research is not the common meaning of the term. It doesn’t refer to sympathy or positive feelings or caring for one another. — Joshs

Rest easy. I am well familiar with all this. :smile:

When you say the brain is wired to make the shift from love of the insider to hate of the outsider, it sounds like you are presuming a fairly sophisticated sort of innate neural machinery. Can you elaborate a bit on this? — Joshs

The crude story is that it is a balance of oxytocin versus testosterone. Neuromodulating chemical signals that produce reciprocal states of response. One puts us in a cooperating state of mind - inclined to be sympathetic in terms of our empathic understanding of another’s state of mind. But high testosterone, low oxytocin, switches things. You employ your empathic skills to find the least sympathetic ways to undermine your competition.

This is of course the most reductionistically crude telling of the story. The whole brain is organised by dichotomies of affective response such as approach-avoid, react-relax, concentrate-alert. Our perceptions are likewise poised to make gestalt judgements of integration and differentiation. Sensation is judgement of boundaries that define selves from others.

So as I keep saying, the essential bit of machinery that builds the entirety of life and mind is the thing of an unbalanced switch. If you can turn things on and off, you have achieve material control over the randomness of entropic existence. You have created a grain of regulating information.

The switches in biology, neurology or sociology are all thus reciprocal or dialectic in nature. They have to implement not just the mindless simplicity of a 0 or a 1. They need to be something that carries rational meaning - a switching between intelligibly opposing directions of action.

And so bodies and brains are structured with a reciprocal logic. Insulin is a generalised signal to all parts of the body to do their part of the job in storing some transitory energy excess. It is anabolic. Then alongside the beta cells of the pancreas churning out this hormone are the alpha cells that send out the opposite general message. The alpha cells detect a lack of circulating glucose and tell the body to catabolise its energy stores. Each group of cells sit close enough together that they take the one point of view of the same reality of the body and hence blood glucose is maintained with a beautiful precision.

Every biological or neurological process embodies the same reciprocal logic. That is just how nature functions once it has established an epistemic cut to regulate its physics via a semiotic model.

Everything is a nested hierarchy of switches that delivers a self-balancing outcome - one that is both stable and yet dynamic, conservative and liberal, loving and hateful, habitual and attentional, or whatever other dichotomy has come to your notice as a nasty dualism that must be hammered flat by your brand of philosophical monism.

If we don't understand brain only information first, these cases of disembodied or assigned "information" start to show up. — Mark Nyquist

It is by taking an information-only view that you arrive at idealism, representationalism, behaviouralism, disembodied cognition and other pathologies of scientific explanation. That is where mind science has been going wrong for decades.

Psychology started off enactive and pragmatic - the habits of reflexes and psychophysics of Wundt, Donders, Helmholtz, and others. But it got overtaken by the dialectics of romantics like Freud in battle with mechanists like Skinner,

Even when a Ulric Neisser or Steven Grossberg started off a new chapter, like cognitive science or neural networks, they got overtaken by the usual cultural wars. The pragmatic beginning becomes another battleground for spirit vs matter, information vs physics - all the ways of speaking of the same epistemic cut that is meant to connect by providing the useful divide.

No matter what the reasoning for wearing masks, there are some who do not accept the scientific evidence and insist, mandating wearing a mask or getting vaccinated is not what science says it is, but is a government threatening our liberty because those at the top want the power to control us, and we must oppose that threat. Here information does not mean the same thing to everyone. — Athena

A mask or an injection are minor discomforts. But they have been made into binary symbols within a particular society already marked by its deep irrational divisions.

There is geopolitical reason why the US winds up so divided. It is unusual in being so evenly balanced between the urban and the rural. It is fractal in embodying this geographic divide over almost all possible scales. So the tension is wired in and can’t be escaped.

That is on top of its other generalised tensions that history has built into its cultural system.

The outcome of tension is positive when it is creative and leads to dynamic adaptation. But the US has reached the end of another chapter in history and the old accommodations are visibly strained. This plays out in the irrationality over little symbols that point towards different views of the best way forward.

In human affairs - ordered by binary symbols - nothing could be more meaningful than signalling your public allegiance to one or other side of a culture war.

The only problem is when this particular discourse bears no pragmatic relation to the dialectic it is meant to represent. A pandemic strikes society at a rather existential level. Liberal or conservative, woke or redneck, rural or urban - disease doesn’t care about your identity that much.

And so your political and economic philosophy has to focus on the immune system and its signalling regime. The self-nonself dialectic remains exactly the same kind of tension to be balanced. But now the social response has to be directed towards that level of semiotics - the game played between virus and immune cells.

You can see here how it all connects. Everything is in the end explained by semiotics - the epistemic cut that allows structural order. Chaos can be tamed and turned into intentional maintenance of some stable sense of identity or functional systemhood.

One metaphysics to rule them all!

And yet we all live in entirely different worlds, with different politics and different relations with technology. What was it that made the difference in how each of us was informed by the social world? My explanation is that there is a certain thread of consistency that runs through person’s experience, assimilating the new in a thematic manner to one’s precious history. — Joshs

Sure. Our identities are a self narrative. And that is a socially-constructed habit which has developed from the generally group minded world of experience of small bands of hunter-gathers to the romantically exalted sense of self demanded by modern culture. We can no longer have our selfhood confined into any brackets - social or biological - as every bracketing is something we must take personal ownership of.

Frankly that is pathological. We can see that in the mental health statistics of modern society. Individuals striving to be individual are cosntructing their own nightmares and identity crises. Social media reduces social interaction to the binaries of trolling and gushing. It is dialectics, but no longer delivery productive outcomes.

Most phenomenologically informed enactivists today adhere to a quasi-Foucaultian notion of the relation between self and world. For instance , Shaun Gallagher has written recently about socially distributed cognition: — Joshs

A view of reality viewed through a gauzy film of idealist and subjectivist monism is just as partial as the view through the gauzy film of a materialist and objectivist monism. It is not impressive to take the long way around to arrive back at what ought to be pragmatically obvious.

I’ve only encountered 5 writers who endorse what I call a radically temporal model of experience.
Gene Gendlin is one of them. — Joshs

Another example of fingering the dialectic - the one and the many - then picking the side that matches the general socially-approved frame of the speaker.

You can identify yourself as a “phenomenologically informed enactivist” - and direct the collective hate towards its evil “other” - by taking a stand with the correct point of view expressed in the most binary fashion.

Academia offers a more complex dynamic of course. We love our enemies and fear our friends as dialectical opposition defines careers, while those treading the same path slightly better are dangerous rivals. :grin:

It’s all a game of pragmatics in the end. Reality will weed out the foolish extremes in the long run.

I am trying to point out that shifting the account from the cognitive to the subpersonal ‘neural’ doesn’t clarify disputes about the understanding of human behavior — Joshs

Of course it does. It matters hugely whether a psychological level problem is a manifestation of an organic problem or a situational problem. Is the fix medical or therapeutic?

And even if it is organic, we have to find out if it is developmental or genetic. That again radically changes the fix.

Autism and schizophrenia cross all three levels as even broken brains must live in a society, But we can’t offer a humane treatment until each of these three contributing factors have been clearly teased apart.

Kelly’s PCT - a very semiotic approach, by the way - only might help at one level.

Note that the fundamental issue is UNDERSTANDING the behavior one is witnessing. TOM and interaction theory lead to different predictions and anticipations when we are in the presence of real human beings who we care about who act in ways that may puzzle us , and our puzzlement is well noted by them and adds anxiety and depression to their other issues. So when you meet an autistic person( do you know any?) , what do you draw from when you attempt to form a bond with them? — Joshs

This kind of view is well meaning but unscientific. If we are to correct the excesses of organic medicine by supplying cultural medicine, then it some down to what we can be sure of from social psychology. And that story has to be told stripped of romantic fantasy to be sure of being an effective and predictable therapy.

So sure. It is commonsense to anyone with half a brain that the ordinary social world is a complex and terrifying place if you have some particular cognitive deficits. You want to turn down the demands in a matching fashion.

But to then pretend that the organic difference doesn’t exist and society is the sole problem is the romanticism that creates its own monsters. Lobotomies are matched by cults.

So yes to empathy as a necessary aspect of humans as social animals. But we have to accept the corollary that aggression is the other side of the same coin. The brain is wired to make this epistemic cut, this fundamental neuromodulated shift in state, from love of the group to hate of the outsider.

If your happy, clappy, metaphysics reduces itself to a monism of love and forgiveness, it just doesn’t fly as a model of the neural or social reality. Life and mind are organised by their dichotomies. Intelligent outcomes are based on the right balances between competition and cooperation - hating and loving, in-grouping and boundary policing.

If we couldnt switch modes in binary fashion, we wouldn’t have the basis for making smart choices.

The question then is how as increasingly civilised society - living in the luxury of endless energy to burn - treat those in difficult situations, such as autism and schizophrenia. It is hard to deliver a sound answer if your metaphysics contains a fundamental muddle. Although, pragmatically, we can start with our “commonsense” realism and park the Continental romanticism on the library shelf.

However, the sentence, man ate dog is not the same as dog ate man because there's an order in which the event takes place, causally speaking as the subject is a cause that acts and produces an effect in the object. — TheMadFool

But caution. The majority of languages do tend towards an SVO structure. However any order can work. What is key is the division of causal reality into the three parts into a subject, an object, an action.

The action can be named last in some languages. We are put in mind of the name of the subject and the name of the object first, then supplied with the name of the connecting action. So we get all the same information even if the convention of word order is different.

A language has to be linear, (being a verbal code) so some choice of order must be made. But the information about a causal interaction is holistic - irreducibly triadic. So what a linear sequence must rebuild in out minds is the wholeness of the causal situation being spoken about.

I see. If one considers language as a mode of communication, it needs to be about reality and that invariably requires language to capture causality. Causality, as we all know, true or not, is permutationally sensitive (order matters). In fact, all human enterprises seem to be wholly cause-effect oriented. — TheMadFool

Yes. Because the most important thing for the tribe to be talking about is the switching points where the application of a force will achieve its greatest desired effect.

If we are going hunting today, we could go off in 360 degrees of direction. But wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which direction lies the easy prey? The tribal language will be optimised to deliver a binary choice to coordinate the physical choice.

With civilisation, we even built our environments in terms of causal switches. We built roads, windows, doors, as ways to channel the flow of humanity into logically switched flow. We live inside a logical engine built of reductionist cause and effect principles,

Does quantum physics come to the rescue? It gives us uncertainity. — Athena

Biology is finding that enzymes rely on quantum uncertainty to amplify their ability to make desired reactions happen. Life and mind thrive on zones of instability because they can master that free energy to do work - give the randomness of big fluctuations a cohesive direction that then builds, and keeps rebuilding, the same material structures.

So the usual notion of stable entities is that they are composed of stable parts. A house is built out of bricks and not jelly.

But an organism is a machinery that thrives on zones of instability as it has the means - the information - to just keep rebuilding itself. That is why life thrives in hot sun, intertidal zones, volcanic underwater vents, and anywhere else that there is lots of unpredictability and so the basic raw material to feed a machinery that can turn that into the predictable.

The subject of nested hierarchies is fundamental to how the brain functions and what information is. It's the first I've seen it come up. — Mark Nyquist

Yes. This is one of the places Chomsky got it really wrong because he didn’t know his neuroscience. The brain Itself is a recursion-based structure. Chomsky tried to posit an innate grammar as the Homo sapiens evolutionary leap. But the brain already uses nested hierarchies to analyse any sensation or develop any motor plan.

The “grammar module” of Broca’s area is just a standard bit of premotor planning cortex given over to control of the vocal cords with better connectivity to a matching object representation area over in Wernicke’s area by the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe.

The point? Syntax plays a critical role in reducing uncertainty as captured by the disjunction bolded above. Claude Shannonesque if you ask me - the idea is to narrow down possibilities to a point wherein we're left with only one, the correct one, the message and its meaning. — TheMadFool

As Pattee says, it comes down the the Janus-faced notion of a mechanical switch. That is where information and physics intersect at a fundamental level so far as life and mind - systems that model the world and thus construct meanings - are concerned.

A switch is the simplest way to turn the lights on or off. Either the electricity flows or it doesn’t. The switch opens or shuts a gate. And any amount of physics can be regulated by the least actual physical effort. The switch could be the little red button that triggers a nuclear war. A puffy old hand could change its state with a careless dab.

So information theory is about 1s and 0s. The simplest logical counterfactuals. They are a definite choice represented in the baldest possible terms. You either have one thing or it’s other. The switch obeys the laws of logic - the law of the excluded model upon which rational meaning is based. A binary switch either tells of a presence or it’s absence, with nothing else as a possibility inbetweeen.

And what makes this switching state meaningful - for life and mind - is some power always flows through it. A switch is pragmatically employed. The body is set up as a hierarchy of informational switches that regulate physical flows.

An enzyme is a way to switch on or switch off some particular metabolic reaction at the nanoscale. The same metabolism is switched between anabolism and catabolism by the opposed signals of insulin and glucagon at the whole body scale.

Neurons are whole networks of switches switching switches that can thus encode learnt habits of physically appropriate reactions - reactions that are muscular and so again a hierarchy of dichotomous or counterfactual acts. Fibres are set up in lines to expand or contract. Arms are moved because muscles work against bones. A bicep pulls one way and relaxes to allow the tricep to pull in the other.

If Shannon reduced information to a binary code, it is because this just is the natural logic of semiosis and its epistemic cut. For it to be possible for information to regulate physics, the physics must become switchable with the least actual physical effort. Just as a signal must be differentiated from the noise with the least informational effort.

It all comes together - physics and information - at the hinge point which is the structure of a logic gate, a mark that can be made or erased at no effective cost for the system employing such marks.

I'm at a loss as to how language can be syntax-less. — TheMadFool

The claim is that it lacks recursion. It does have a regularity of word order - a general subject-object-verb organisation.

So the basic narrative structure is there. But it is a simpler language that doesn’t make it easy to construct nested hierarchical statements - long sentences with multiple clumps of sub clauses - much like the way I write, to general bafflement and annoyance.

All this reflects bigger philosophical battles. Chomsky is some variety of a structuralist (like me) who has tipped over into frank Platonism about rational structure. He drew some silly lines in the sand over the genetic innateness and biological determinism of grammar as hardwired neurology. The Continental types hated this naturalism mixed with extreme structuralism and hyper rationalism. They want grammar to be utterly arbitrary and cultural - rainbow diversity with no one’s system better or worse, more evolved or more primitive.

Linguistics became its own little private shit show for many years. It also was entangled with the shit show debate between the cognitivists arguing thought precedes language and the constructionists who argued language precedes thought.

. Is there anything worth investigating here? — TheMadFool

Linguistics devotes much of its energy to disproving Chomsky’s claims about universal grammar. The lack,of syntax in the Piraha Amazonian Indians is the celebrated challenge.

So I”m not saying the causal structure is hardwired. There is an arbitrariness to how much strong grammar some culture might find useful to its way of life. Chomsky made a big mistake in claiming a genetic template.

You also have pidgins and creoles as living examples of how much, or how little, grammar is needed for functional social order.

There are also arguments for why English is particularly good for rational thought as it is so easy to turn verbs into nouns - construct reified abatractions. But these days, such theorising would be forbidden as racist.

It is also obvious that formal education is all about getting us to speak proper like, eh? As we moved to writing, language really did become strict in form with manuals on how to write and speak the code.

So this is all hugely researched and disputed. I give my own distillation which at least has passed a decent level of peer review.

It is written all over your posts. — Pop

Balls. I say the opposite. Selfhood is enactive both neurally and culturally. Cognition is all about constructing the self in a world. The epistemic cut is how such a useful fiction can come about.

Thanks for the link. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it is ticking the boxes.

You are basically saying your self concept is something separate from the environment you grew up in, different, and set apart, to the experiences that created it, all the while you are relating to me the historical basis of your attitudes and understanding. You seem to be a product of your history and times, as we all are. — Pop

Where did I say that?

If you mean that I can think in a grammar that is both linear and non-linear, then that is true. But I provide the social context in which I developed that skill. Peirce, Pattee and several hundred others in the long tradition of systems science and organicism.

In evolutionary psychology, it is thought that language developed before a self concept, and obviously an epistemic cut a considerable time after that. — Pop

Yep.

Out of interest, what is your source for saying that?

An epistemic cut is a belief. I can respect your beliefs, so long as you respect mine. — Pop

That isn’t how truth is decided. But I will respect any coherent argument and supporting evidence if it eventuates.

No. But "as we know it" is not remotely the same as the "everything" you stated the BB was "the start of". — 180 Proof

Great. I’m interested. What is missing from the story? Do you have a list?

Your point is the boundary between syntax and semantics is fuzzy with the former having some kind of effect on the latter e.g. take the two sentences, M = The man ate the dog and D = The dog ate the man. M and D have different meanings because of syntax - the order of the words, a grammatical feature, changed the semantics. — TheMadFool

Yes. The load of conveying meaning is shared by a machinery that places constraints on uncertainty. And so this devolves into the familiar things of words and rules. A word is a unit - some noise uttered in punctuate fashion. The sentence is the formal structure that imposes a sequential logic to build a statement - some chain of word units that tell a causal story of who did what to whom.

Language is narrative and builds in the way we are meant to think as socialised humans. The rules of grammar encode the very notion of subjects acting on objects. And this is why it is so hard to escape from this kind of linear causal analysis when we start to reason. It is already hardwired into our rhythms of speech. Any different notion of causality (such as the non-linear holism I so regularly employ) literally fails to compute.

So human language is already a code, a form of information, with a rather particular pragmatics built in. It is not designed for abstract philosophising. It is designed for turning our realities into social narratives where “we” are actors, an we live in a world of all kinds of actors, And then actors can be expected to desire their concrete effects. They are the forces that push and pull objects into place.

Thus grammar is our global general model for capturing a complex reality in a single linear statement. Words are like the free variables in an equation. Any x can go in the position of the subject, any y in the position of the verb, any z in the position of the object. The rules of grammar constrain the logic - they carry that part of the burden. And if the separation is clean and not fuzzy, then the x, y and z are unlimited in their variety, Any word could appear in those places. The certainty about the grammatical rules are matched by the uncertainty of the words that might appear in the speech act.

“Hey, I ate an elephant for breakfast.”

You can also see how words also then share the burden in that you might want to check you heard me right. Or believe that I might lie.

If I catch your drift, you mean to say that a theory of information must include syntactical elements such as the one described above. Right? — TheMadFool

You have to have a system of semantic elements and syntactical rules. So you have the uncertainty of the one matched by the certainty of the other. Together, you share a communication space where the general format is agreed and yet you can also formulate an infinity of particular statements.

Then there is the further business of actually interpreting those speech acts. Did we get the intended meaning of some message? Did we hear it right? Was it a lie? Was it too vague or overly pedantic?

You have the three things of sentence structure, word meaning, and social pragmatics.

A whirlwind, created by a larger biologic system that is distinct from itself, can however strengthen and prolong it, and in theory, allow it to exist indefinitely. See Jupiter's Great Red Spot that has been "repairing" itself for at least 400 years — Outlander

Err, what biological system is maintaining the Great Red Spot.

It is weak to revert to claims about never really knowing whether or not something is the case. Can you offer good reasons to doubt the Big Bang is the start of spacetime and mattergy as we know it?

And if you want to argue a further regress, like Linde’s eternal spawning inflation, that also is past finite due to the same Planck presumptions being built into it. You just chuck out the dimensional constants that particularise our little bubble of that larger Planck multiverse.

So a serious discussion is one that asks about the triadic and reciprocal nature of the three Planck constants and the way they place all known physics on the vertices of Okun’s cube.

It is all suspiciously Peircean when you peer under the covers of the maths that works. :razz:

Category mistake, my friend. — 180 Proof

That depends on your definition of an organism.

"Life" – homeostasis-reflexive metabolic self-replicators – is a dissipative, entropic subsystem that's niche-adapted along a cosmic entropy-gradient. — 180 Proof

I agree. But then follows a path from semiosis to pansemiosis. And are you arguing that cosmology’s turn towards quantum information and holographic principles ain’t a metaphysics of pansemiosis?

I’m not saying the work is done and we can all go home. This is the bleeding edge of modern thought. We are seeing big efforts in terms of a Cosmos defined in terms of rational structure. String theory, loop quantum gravity, entropic gravity. So the fundamental relation is certainly far simpler than a living and mindful system. It boils down to the bare thing of a symmetry breaking. And that in turn requires an Apeiron or Peircean vagueness … the GUT field of Big Bang theory or whatever other notion of vanilla potential exists at the Planckscale.

"The Big Bang", it seems to me, is just the temporal horizon of the Hubble volume. — 180 Proof

It is both where the spatiotemporal metric is at the smallest it will ever be, and the energetic fluctuation is the largest it could ever be.

So it is not just one thing but a dialectic of two complementary things. If you want to discuss cosmogenesis, it starts with this telling duality, or a symmetry breaking that is already asymmetric in terms of how we conventionally view spacetime expanse vs energy density.

How could the start of everything be both the smallest possible in one sense, and yet the largest possible in the other?

For some metaphysics, that is a bug. For a better metaphysics it is a feature - just what is predicted.

Try Prion. Mitochondria, white blood cells. Think proteins inside a cell, if you are going to be so obstinate. — Pop

It isn’t obstinate to understand the distinction between dissipative structure that is physical and dissipative structure that comes with added biological information.

One is just rate dependent dynamics. The other is rate-independent information added to the mix.

A whirlwind can’t repair itself and so it falls apart. Life can not only repair itself, it can seek out the zones of instability which can propel its own existence. It expects to have to repair itself continuously because it handles hot stuff.

I'm assuming monism, where information has it's neural correlates. So information causes a physical change ( in brain structure ), and this physical change embeds and orients an entity to its environment. — Pop

By assuming you mean conflating. A correlation isn’t a cause. And no one is delivering on the neural correlates anyway. That was only ever a panpsychic tactic mounted by Chalmers, Koch, and the like. I was there at the conference at which their manifesto was launched. I had lunch with them to discuss it.

A consequence of that is that you are already, by using language, embedding yourself in a community of language users. It follows that you can set solipsism aside. — Banno

And so we move the conversation from the tradition of metaphysics to the tradition of philosophy of language as an apophatic and anti-metaphysical stratagem. We call it “our” common ground to signal which way the in-group lies.

Same old, same old.

Hence, idealism doesn't set out what is going on. Mind does not build reality, but finds itself embedded therein. — Banno

Yes, yes. We don’t need to exhume the rotting carcass of idealism and ritually bash it to death all over again.

The OP rightly raises the metaphysics that goes beyond either brute realism or mystery-mongering idealism. It asks about rational structure - the structuralism of a logical relation. An ultimate kind of thing as it runs like a shining thread through every level of human discourse from maths to physics. But also the discussion of rational structure usually stumbles over the “mental” aspect - the place that meaning, purpose and point of view have in a structuralist metaphysics.

So it is a live debate - metaphysics that physics is still cashing out as it learns more about the organismic point of view and so comes to understand the Cosmos as a thermodynamic system.

A primer on the technicalities - https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/layzer/growth_of_order/

If by "ultimate reality" you mean the most general property, that is, the property possessed by every something, it is the property called variously identity, logical consistency, or existence. — litewave

Instead of talking of some ultimate property - which is a monistic concept - we can instead switch to seeking some ultimate relation, or form of interaction. And that then becomes a triadic concept (as it irreducibly involves two complementary opposites in a synergistic spiral of development).

But of course we can reify the two sides of the relation. We can see that the most general property of reality is logical consistency (global law) applied to naked possibility (local action). Or Logos and Flux, synechism and tychism, the laws of physics and its material degrees of freedom - the many ways the same story has been told down the years without every really being understood as the meta-metaphysics behind the metaphysics and even physics.

Even 'metaphysical idealists' are only speaking in analogies when they speak of "ultimate reality". — 180 Proof

But doesn’t the discovery of the BIg Bang give the Cosmos a true starting point and thus justifies an inquiry into “whence it came”?

When materialists could regard the universe - as some structure of laws and matter - as eternal, there wasn’t a lot of room for an apophatic counter. Things just were what they were. Brute fact and no metaphysics.

With the Big Bang as a developmental and even possibly evolutionary process, suddenly reality looks rather more organic. It must share something with life and mind. It must be a matter of self-organised Becoming rather than merely brute Being.

That ought to send materialists in search of a new metaphysics. We don’t need a creating god, as that never solves the riddle. And a creating ground of spirit or mind - the monism of idealism - is just as inadequate.

But since Anaximander first argued for the spontaneous self-organisation of an Apeiron, a metaphysics of sense-making rationalisation - a dissipative structure - has been kicking about in the back room of organicism. We can certainly see it in Hegel and Peirce, as well as others,

A Cell is an individual organism inside a body — Pop

You are thinking of a cancer.

A cell is constrained by a body. It gets the plug pulled by apotosis as soon as it starts to falter in dectable ways. A key step to branching out as a cancer is thus to knock out this self-regulating machinery.

So individuation or differentiation takes place against a backdrop of holism or integration. What is known technically as a nested hierarchy. You have a stable balance between top-down imposed constraints and bottom-up constructive action.

Quanta did a good article on the information theoretic approach to this biological issue - What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory.

And surprise, surprise. It too ends up reacting against the Santa Fe brand of informational complexity to arrive at a semiotic or cognitive model based on Friston’s Bayesianism.

Ramstead hypothesizes that their approach is missing a consideration of how an individual maintains the boundary that delimits itself. “Organisms aren’t just individuated,” he said. “They have access to information about their individuation.” To him, the kind of information that Krakauer and Flack’s framework uses might not be “knowable” to an organism: “It’s not clear to me that the organism could use these information metrics that they define in a way that would allow it to preserve its existence,” he said.

As an alternative, Ramstead is collaborating with Karl Friston, a renowned neuroscientist at University College London, to build a theory around Friston’s “free-energy principle” of biological self-organization. Ramstead sees this line of thinking as compatible with Krakauer and Flack’s formalism but usefully constrained by an account of how a biological entity maintains its own individuality.

The free-energy principle asserts that any self-organizing system will look as if it generates predictions about its environment and seeks to minimize the error of those predictions. For organisms, that means in part that they are constantly measuring their sensory and perceptual experiences against their expectations.

“You can literally interpret the body of an organism as a guess about the structure of the environment,” Ramstead said. And by acting in ways that maintain the integrity of those expectations over time, the organism defines itself as an individual apart from its surroundings.

I bet today he would be a panpsychist — Pop

You wouldn’t win that bet.

At the heart of systems theory, it is just noise, then particles with noise begin to interact, and form a clump, and soon we are on our way to elementary particles. — Pop

This is bullshit. But you seem happy enough with it.

I didn't bother with the video as a glance at the thumbnail was already enough. The reply to these artificial notions of life and mind - self organisation with no epistemic cuts - is contained in this paper, Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology.

A self is something that forms in the midst of a self organizing informational system. How can the system cut itself off from what it is interrelating with. Sorry, it makes no sense to me. — Pop

The question cuts both ways. How can a self cut itself off from the world with which it interacts? And how can a self interact with a world unless it is separated from that world in some pragmatic sense?

If things make no sense, it is because you don't get the logic of modelling relation theory, or biosemiotics, as the right kind of systems theory for systems that have life and mind and which aren't simply physical systems (or their informational simulations).

In the end no paradigm can be absolutely true. We mustn't lose sight of that fact. — Pop

There is a race. But all must win prizes! I remember that from Alice in Wonderland.

You mentioned earlier you have explored different paradigms. Did you step over the fence, or did you push the fence further. — Pop

When I first came across Peirce, I thought it was nuts. Everything I hold true is the product of engaging fruitfully with the opposition.
.

As per the OP, without information, everything would be nothing. — Pop

But everything is nothing if it is just noise with no signal. So you are no better off until you take the next step of producing a theory that offers an epistemic cut that separates signal from noise - something like the algorithm of a Bayesian Brain engaged in minimising its surprisal or free energy.

If you have a TV screen and it is just a display of white noise static, isn’t that both everything and nothing? Every random flashing pixel is some part of the instantiation of both every great film ever made, and even every great film that could possibly either get made.

So you have the problem in saying “everything is information”. It is the kind of monism that is bounded by two self-ridiculing notions - the idea of absolute nothingness and of infinity. Two equally unrealistic notions of “a limit”.

If you can’t introduce an epistemic cut into your ontic model - the constraint that separates signal from noise - then that is how you wind up with metaphysical idiocies like the many worlds quantum interpretation or modal realism. You have the TV screen that is showing you every great movie that could ever be made in its featureless static. You have the panpsychic nonsense where even a stone is conscious because it implements an unbounded number of informational states in the random thermal jiggling of its constituent atoms.

So your approach to the big question of “what is information” is doomed to failure until you can offer a machinery or formalism that separates signal from noise.

When does a difference make a difference? When does it cease to be merely a difference, like the flash of a pixel or a crackle on a telephone line?

(A: When it has a context that could make that the case.)

I think your starting point is too over-determined and abstract. Individual sense and interpretation get lost when we begin from a monolithic ground of natural objects. — Joshs

Given I take a process philosophy point of view, that can’t be the case. Semiotics starts from the other end of the spectrum. It begins in the monolithic ground of structuralism if anywhere. And it others monism by being irreducibly triadic.

So on all scores, it stands apart from a metaphysics of "middle-sized dry goods". It is the opposite of an object oriented ontology.

But each perspective remains one’s own , even when we convince ourselves that we can be conditioned, shaped, indoctrinated into larger social structures. — Joshs

As said, I agree that experience is the construction of a point of view that yields a clear distinction between a self and the world this self is in.

Where we differ - or the flaw I read into phenomenology- is that my natural philosophy approach sees this modelling relation as so general that it is the trick that underlies all life and mind. And maybe even - pansemiotically/thermodynamically - the Cosmos itself. Whereas the Continental habit of thought is socially shaped by the ideology of Romanticism and so the “right answer” becomes the one that most celebrates individuation and personalised truths.

To make psychology something owned by an individual, both biology and culture must be rejected as legitimate sources of this selfhood. The constraints that form us in pragmatic fashion are turned into the chains that bind us. To be “true to ourselves” we must learn to hate hierarchy and “monolithic” structure.

But as I argue, that is an entirely false notion of personhood. The Romantic model of self ironically is employed against humanity by fossil-fuel driven modern economics. The entropic game is kept going by the mass production of individuals eager to accumulate some life store of personalising material objects and even socially-ranked bucket list experiences.

The dysfunction stares us in the face. So I asked whose model can better diagnose the human reality we have managed to co-construct as an interaction between information and entropy.

Well, I know whose model is based on that epistemic cut rather than bemoaning the fact of such an epistemic cut.

We are only indirectly beholden ton techno ,economic -and language structures, but we are , each one of us , directly beholden to our own personal construals of the sense of language , technology, economic structures. — Joshs

It is not about being beholdened or enchained by our biological and social contexts. They are the information that informs our being in the first place.

Your phenomenology gets the causality the wrong way around.

And to forestall your next attempt to simplify my irreducibly triadic ontology to some too simple and plainly false monism, the systems view is all about the co-construction of the functional modelling relation.

A society or ecosystem has a natural interest in producing well fitted parts. And those parts have a natural interest in constructing a well functioning whole.

Rather than antagonism, what drives things is the search for pragmatic synergy. A balance of opposites such as competition and cooperation, or plasticity and stability. The kind of dichotomies that characterise a “system”.

. There are a number of fans of the later Wittgenstein on here, — Joshs

The later Wittgenstein who had Ramsey softly whispering the Peircean corrections to his earlier logical atomistic realism in his ear?