A sensible paper that. :up:

But it should be clear I am not actually agreeing with your definition of cognition. Whatever you think it might be. Or of affect.

I simply say it is semiosis all the way down and all the way up. Different levels of the same embodied relation.

Sure, we have percepts that are understood as being signs of how we feel, and percepts that are signs of the way the world is. But surely your own drug experiences will have told you how uncertain and constructed those kinds of boundaries actually are.

Cognition likewise is a confused term. Discursively, it means something about working things out in some intellectualised fashion. And yet animals are also said to think things through in dispassionate fashion without the benefit of words. Even a jumping spider has the brains to stop and work out a roundabout path to its target. So cognition doesn’t claim anything particularly specific in mind science. Originally it was just a branding for a generally functionalist/symbol processing turn in 1960s psychology.

A good human example is the affective aesthetic response. No rule can be derived from it. It is impossible to explain what is so good about the greatest works of literature, poetry, painting, music and so on. — Janus

Yeah. But where do I take that mechanistic view of organisms in the first place? That is what semiosis is opposed to - even if the mechanical gets incorporated into semiotics as being systems of rigidly fixed constraint.

But again, refer to your own drug experiences. Didn’t you think this or that was the most sublime thing ever, simply because you were high?

Feelings by themselves are not trustworthy. They only become reliable signs of anything when framed within a well adapted “cognitive” context.

Temporal epilepsy and schizophrenia can leave you feeling you are bathed in the divine. Your pet psychological theory needs to be able to account with little facts like that.

My theory about theories... — csalisbury

As a meta-theory of theories, ain't that kind of vague?

Or is even a unifying meta-theory a dangerous thing to have? There should be as many meta-theories as there are individuals to have them?

I mean if there is no largest model, then also, no model could be too small, could it?

(Whoops. I didn't mean to be so bold as to advance a single meta-model of models there. So like ... just whatevs ... its all good, eh brah?)

Do you have a different theory about theories? You are welcome to explain.

Do you see it as a defect that I should in fact start from the phenomenological stance that would have to ground any grand intellectual assault on a ToE?

Which sin do you want to hang me for? Being too subjective, or too objective, for your tastes? :razz:

Or finally you understood something that was always being said?

(Though I doubt that you see this as a dismissal of "qualia". You are still going to complain that no amount of scientific theory is managing to deliver your missing explanation of why anything should feel like anything. As if that is what theories are meant to do. Theories only feel like something when you can live them in action. That is use them to constrain experience to have some particular quality that you had in mind as a suitable metric. So semiotics explains that because it explains how we construct constraints on experience so as to be able to feel, see - and even count - a world composed of suitably individuated particulars.)

All I'm saying is that we are affected pre-cognitively by bodily processes that are experienced as feelings that cannot be precisely discursively articulated, and that we are directly aware of this. Do you want to deny that this is so, and claim that the totality of what we are is exhaustively down to what is produced processes of cognitive construction? — Janus

Sure. There is plenty of perceptual stuff that we don't notice until we learn how to pay attention to it.

And it is my psychological claim that learning to be this self-conscious kind of conscious self is discursive. It is not biologically natural to frame any kind of percept - affective or otherwise - in this kind of self-conscious fashion that would single it out as "a percept", or qualia. To pay attention to these kinds of "precognitive" goings-on is a learnt, language-scaffolded, socially-constructed, culturally-evolved, discursive skill.

An animal doesn't "feel its pains". It just reacts due to being in pain. And so do we until we learn to take a discursive view of pain as being a sign that speaks to the presence of a mind. We have a higher level of semiotic modelling that now sees the "self" that is the experiencer of the experience, the observer of the observable. Our response to being in pain is no longer a direct embodied state of perceptual cognition. It has been elevated to a disembodied state where we see ourself as a mental being suffering a mental assault.

So you say that affect is primordial. But perception of any kind is primordial in this sense. It is still cognitive, but pre-discursive level cognition - the cognition which goes further to model the self as something essentially disembodied, unphysical and mind-like.

So yes. I am happy to say it is cognition, or semiosis, all the way down to the ground. That is exactly what neuroscience and social psychology tells us.

The division between reason and emotion, cognition and affect, is a Romantic/Theistic notion that doesn't really hold water.

It is sort of true in the sense that the nervous system and brain represent many layers of cognition. So right down at the reflexive level, responses are hardwired and instinctive rather than elaborately reasoned.

But even something so primal as pain - an emergency signal that just says back off quickly right now without hesitating to think or discuss - if filtered through a whole series of processing levels in a large mammalian brain.

The spinal cord can think for itself - whip our hand off a hot stove before we have even possibly felt anything. A short loop creates a reaction before the nerve signals could even reach the brain. That is precognitive in the most literal sense because it takes at least a fifth of a second for the brain to become involved enough to integrate anything in a felt fashion - and half a second if it is a unexpected surprise.

Then there is a big pain area in the brain stem and yet also further pain areas in the "emotional" cortex - the cingulate lobe. There, complex interactions take place.

One bit of cingulate can really amplify the pain, the other can suppress our awareness of it. It all depends on the general context of whether we need to fight through because bigger things are happening - we are fighting for our lives - or instead, we are doing bugger all and so that slight unnoticed pain in your back that I just mentioned is now turning into a burning agony demanding some response.

And all that before we get anywhere near a human socially-constructed sense of pain - accepting of course that, hypnosis or self-distraction techniques apart, pain is canonically about the least controllable feeling we have. As a biological emergency signal, it is designed to grab our attention so that the totality of our cognitive resources become devoted to a suitable response to it as a signal of something wrong.

So yes. The brain has this layered architecture. Affect seems foundational as that which is least ameniable to social construction. Cognition is at the other end of the spectrum. When it comes to the most highly discursive aspects of what the brain is doing - like reasoning - it is pretty easy to just shift attention by changing the subject.

But from a theory point of view, it is semiosis - a modelling relation - all the way down. And if you call that the same as saying it is cognition all the way down to the ground, I can live with that. Just as I would also accept it being affect all the way to the top.

Even when I'm talking about the super abstract - like semiosis as a triadic structure - it has cognitive meaning because the talk comes with some matching "felt state". There is some kinesthetic representation I have in mind of things all intertwined and connecting in a now familiar way. Thought is not a bloodless exercise of computation. We live our thoughts fully if we are doing it properly.

And this consists in what we know directly from experience, that actual experience begins with the body, and the precognitive ways in which it is affected. — Janus

Again, any claim of direct knowledge admits that there is a distinction to be made with indirect knowledge. So you are talking about a noumenal knowledge of the thing-in-itself. And if that is primordial, then it makes no sense. As why would indirect knowledge become a thing if knowledge could already be direct?

Just examine the structure of words you are forced to use to express you own claims.

There is some "we" who knows directly from our "own experience" of ... something or other concerning the primordial condition of "our" bodies.

Much better to just start with interpretance as an embodied state of being. To be embodied is to have already begun down the path of being in a triadic modelling relation.

There is no "self" as some kind of focal entity that stands apart from its embodied condition. There is just that habit of interpretance that is reliably making the embodied distinction of being a self in a world. And this habit can even point to the signs that prove the distinction to be a hard one - hard to the point of a mind~world dualism. It can proclaim, look at all these little affects running about inside my head. Here are the veritable signs that "I" exist ... embodied within my own embodiment in semiotically recursive fashion. The existence of "precognitive" bodily affects is my measurable proof of that claim.

Of course, when any attempt to articulate this kind of thing, to make it "crisp", is made it might be thought to make it look like it is all cognitive all the way down, but that is an illusion created by language. — Janus

No. It is using science to explain the neurobiology of affect as a form of perception - an organism learning to measure its own boundaries so as to be able to behave as a bounded organism.

You might want to treat affect as mystical primal qualia. But you know that a baby doesn't even know that its own hands belong to it until it learns to bring them under a suitably modelled sense of control.

A learner driver on an icy road feels like everything that happens is an out of control imposition from the world outside. An expert driver on the same road will feel the wheels as part of their own embodied state of being.

You can't just ignore all the actual evidence from the developmental histories of habits of experiencing or interpretance. It is not an illusion of language. The illusion of language is presuming that because we have words for speaking about "selves" and "qualia", that these things might be real in the sense of being primal, simple and noumenal.

It would probably help you to broaden your perspective and get this point if you were to read some Merleau Ponty or Whitehead, but you have probably already decided that you know better than they do. — Janus

Thanks for the reading tips. But of course I have read them. And Peirce as well.

So what I "know better" is that Peirce resolved all the metaphysical issues in the neatest way to be found.

Have you read him yourself? If you had, it wouldn't in fact take long to come across many more such hostages to fortune as "matter is effete mind". What is more "pre-cognitive" than the way he often talks about Firstness as pure spontaneity of feeling?

You could quote-mine Peirce for days to support your own preferred position here. I would be left lamely having to reply, well that was exaggeration for effect, look to his logic for a real understanding of what he should have always said to avoid misunderstandings of the transcendental or noumenal kind. :)

Isn't this a contradiction? — Aaron R

No. The stress is on "effectively".

And a logic of vagueness is based on the suspension of the principle of non-contradiction. It is rather the point that what seems to stand in contradiction - everything and nothing - would be indistinguishably the same thing in primordial vagueness.

So I simply tried to show how that does make intelligible sense if we think of "everythingness" in terms of an everythingness of fluctuations.

How much do you actually wind up with if I give you an infinite amount of the infinitesimal? Is it everything or nothing? What does your maths say here?

My point is that to take "experience" as "primordial" is already to frame it as the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is already going beyond expererience to make a claim about the ontology of experience. So your claim that experience is primordially affective is a modelling claim about the structure of experience - even if a claim about some kind of lack of structure in just being this vague thing of "primordially affective".

The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. — Janus

So your claim here is that there can't be conscious experience without affective experience. But note how this unpacks.

What matters is some distinction between an interpreting selfhood and then the signs of being that self. You are claiming that experience has this essential structure of a witnessing ego living in some internal world of recalcitrant affect - all these affective events that come and go of their own accord and speak to the third thing of whatever reality they in turn reflect. Some generalised realm of spirit or idea or mind, I guess.

So you speak of the "me" who stands witness, doing the interpretation. You speak of the affects, which are the percepts of stuff happening - look, there a flash of pain, there a flicker of anxiety, there a jolt of surprise. And to the degree that the witnessing self and the perception of the passing, uncontrolled or "primordial", affects are distinct from each other as interpreter and sign, together they must speak to the deeper reality that could be the intelligible cause of a play of affects. Your framing certainly points attention towards this further thing-in-itself - some noumenal world of generalised mind - even if you prefer to remain diplomatically vague about that implication.

Now if you can explain your position differently, go for it. But it seems clear that you are adopting the basic structure of a triadic semiosis, as all good psychological models will wind up doing. And so your (implied) claims about the noumenal - a realm of mind that is the cause of the affects - have to be judged on the usual pragmatic grounds. They are justified to the degree that the signs are measurements which reliably support a habit of interpretance.

So sure, if I have a pain, or hesitation, or a startle, these are all signs of something happening "out there" which have a habitual meaning for "me in here". Affect is a form of perception that feels very intimately connected to the self as a thing. It is the level of sensation that builds the sharp distinction between self and world. It is the construction of a boundary to the ego.

But that is the sensible psychological model of what an organism does to be a body with intentionality in a physical environment. And you are instead cutting away that actual world by saying "we" only have our experience. And that experience is primordially composed of affect. The physical world has now vanished from sight (well, it was always phenomenal). But in its place - because you still speak in terms of an interpretant and its signs - there still has to be a ghostly beyond of some (now "experiential") kind. The mind or spirit as a general noumenal thing-in-itself that is the ultimate ground of being.

Where does all this confusion start? Note how asserting anything about "experience" at all is already to assert a structure, as now there is also everything that experience isn't. So as soon as you talk about being "inside" the phenomenal, the noumenal "exterior" comes into play.

This is the bind that led Peirce to the logic of Firstness or Vagueness (although I agree, he didn't always quite stick to it himself). If you are going to have some foundational notion - a starting point for a developmental tale - then it can't come pre-loaded with distinctions like inside vs outside. It has to be conceived of as a "state" to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply.

So when it comes to the question of how "we" could have developed, we find ourselves already in that developed state - the one where there must have been a first accidental or fortuitious division followed by its hierarchical stabilisation as now a habit of interpretance.

In biology, that first primordial division would be affectless. It would simply be some biosemiotic distinction that starts a division between an organism and its world. A spherical membrane separating an inside and outside is a definite start. Membrane pores to regulate a difference between the chemistry inside and outside would be a next step. A beating flagella to mark a "conscious" difference between the direction a cell wants to go in, vs those it doesn't, is yet another.

So a lot of semiotic distinctions would get built up before we start to reach your world of a "self separated from the affects that are signs of a more generalised realm of mind". For an organism to develop the semiotic sophistication of seeing itself as a self in a world because it can sense its own boundaries as a general thing is hardly a primordial state of being. It is hierarchically complex, or recursive, already. The modeller modelling itself now.

Thus again, note how you attempt to slap the label of "experience" across everything in sight as a way to flatten all the semiotic complexity. Sure, the Peircean approach agrees that we start stuck inside our own highly developed phenomenology. We can't escape our "experience". In that sense, it seems a primordial condition.

But we can pay attention to the logical structure of that experience. And we can see that the perception of affects requires a higher order of recursive modelling complexity than the perception of "the world outside". To see our affects as affects requires that we don't just hold a model of the world, we hold a model of us as selves in that world having an experience of ourselves as phenomenologically bounded beings. We are so aware of the modelling relation that we feel aware of having to make a choice about which of two worlds - the ideal or the real - that we actually exist "primordially" in.

Not my cup of tea. — Banno

Always a devastating answer. Shows you take the big questions seriously.

And I know you don't want to countenance anything you can't measure; but that says more about you than it does about the immeasurable. — Janus

Bollocks. It says more about the history of intellectual advance and the very nature of pragmatic inquiry.

The statement that the riverbank experienced the erosive force of the river is a perfectly intelligible one. — Janus

Let's not kid ourselves. We might well choose this more mind-like framing so as to highlight deficiencies in a more matter-like framing. But my argument is that both remain just framings. And you ache to make the mind part of the noumenal, just like you accuse materialists of thinking the material has noumenal status within our phenomenology. Neither such move is valid.

Hence all you can say is that reality is mind-like ... in this measurable fashion. And here - please note - you accept the physical erosion of the river bank as your supporting fact. If I said the dirt just dematerialised, or grew legs and ran away, you would say no. The river eroded it. The river washed that dirt away downstream. Look, here it is washing muddily into the sea. What more proof do you need?

in a relational sense, insofar as they are signified object and interpreted sign they are not the interpretant. — Janus

You did it again.

You framed semiosis in dyadic Sassurean fashion so as to leave the interpretant bit dangling free of the relation. It now has to stand noumenally outside as the mind doing the interpreting, experiencing the meaning, making sense of the inert sign and what it may have to say about the world lying beyond.

One day you'll stop seeing through the lens of your own presuppositions and understand what I am saying. It seems to me to be fairly close to what you are saying, but differs on a couple of fundamental points. — Janus

I have no trouble understanding your defence of a dualism that would allow you to claim noumenal status for "mind".

I'm not sure how to answer this. The answer that the question seems to beg for is "nothing", but that seems incoherent. — Aaron R

Starting with nothing is incoherent as nothing can come from nothing.

But starting with everything is coherent as at least then you only need to limit it to arrive at the something we know to be the case.

And a state of everythingness is effectively a state of nothingness anyway. We know that if we tried to do everything at once, nothing would get done. Any particular action would be at the same instant cancelled by us trying to do its opposite as well. No change would actually result until some possible actions were suppressed, allowing the others to now be released.

So retroductive argument leaves you little choice.

We exist. There is something.

We then notice that the somethingness of our Cosmo is always the result of symmetry-breaking - a constraint or limitation of a larger space of possibilities.

And as we go back as far as we can see - all the way to the quantum-scale Big Bang - that is all we see. A chaos, a quantum foam of spacetime fluctuations, that is a radically indeterminate everythingness, right at the point where symmetry-breaking begins to suppress some actions and so now concretely release some others.

We can then either choose to believe what we are seeing or continue to complain reality is not behaving the way we would expect - the way it should if it were instead some kind of miraculous something out of nothing.

The pan-experientialist view is based on the idea that everything that exists experiences, in the broadest sense of that term, just as the pan-semioticist view is that everything that exists interprets. — Janus

But "experiences" is an empty, question-begging, sort of term.

Sure, everything that is individuated can then react or relate. We can measure that in terms of a model of a spatiotemporal/energetic framework - some set of global symmetries that could be locally broken.

But this "experience". How do we measure it in any sense?

The usual way is to distinguish according to reactions and relations which have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

So there just ain't any good reason to claim that the whole of nature has experience when the only intelligible definition of experience is the one that points to the difference it makes in terms of reactions or relations to have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

A sign cannot be interpreted by an interpretrant unless it is experienced (not necessarily, or even mostly, consciously) by the interpretant. — Janus

A sign is itself the wholeness of the sign relation as a process.

So see what you did there. You slipped in the mediating sign as something dead, static, inert - a mere physical mark that symbolises and thus needs an interpreter with a mind to read it as being about something real out there in the world.

This is the weird thing you and schop both want to do. You want to oppose realism with idealism. You want to oppose an ontology of dead matter with an ontology of living mind.

But that is just doubling down on noumenalism. It is compounding the epistemic error identified by Kant and fixed by Peirce.

For me - accepting that phenomenology is all we got - I treat the idea of "matter" the same way I treat the idea of "mind". I don't buy noumenalism about either of them .... even if the matter vs mind dichotomy are a productive kind of phenomenological distinction to make in constructing our metaphysical models of existence.

So I don't believe in quarks and electrons as "bits of matter", just as much as I don't believe in them as "bits of experience". However, for the sake of scientific modelling, they are measurably more like how we conceive of bits of matter than how we conceive of bits of experience.

And if physics does get around to the semiotic common ground of understanding quarks and electrons as "bits of interpretance, the signs of a triadic relation" then I would be happy indeed.

It would still be all a pragmatic phenomenological tale, not the noumenal truth of the thing-in-itself. But a ground that is common to both the material and the experiential would give scientific explanation the unified view of nature it is always seeking.

It's kind of off-putting when you keep talking about propper names.

But as a Peircean, I do indeed find Fregeanism the over-simplified version.

Eg: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/viewFile/13383/9918

Propper names do not have a sense. — Banno

So it could just as easily be you who is "Harry Hindu" here.

Sounds legit.

I think you're conflating experience with consciousness. — Janus

Think what you like. I'll wait until you define the difference.

From a neuroscience point of view, what most folk really mean by conscious experience involves attentional level processing by a brain capable of that. So more than just reflexive sentience. But less than human-level self-consciousness, which depends on linguistic competence and culturally evolved constraints.

What is this "me"? This "illusion"? If you go back to mere description, you have lost the trail. — schopenhauer1

That's just you still imposing your dualistic framing on any words that pass your eyes.

A modelled selfhood would be an illusion to you because you - unwittingly still - ache for a noumenal self that exists beyond the phenomenology of self.

To me, that self is simply a modelled construction - along with the world this self is living in. So the whole of this makes for an Umwelt - the world as experienced with a "you" in it.

So it is only once you move up to a triadic framing that the whole of what is going on can snap into place.

If you go back to mere dualistic yearning for the noumenal, you have lost the trail.[/quote]

And how far is that? — schopenhauer1

It is up to you to define the kind of experiencing that concerns you here.

Does a slug lack the kind of visuospatial sense of being a self in a world that higher animals find second nature? What do you think? Where would be the lingering mystery according to you?

But what is it that is fluctuating in the first place? — Aaron R

Wrong question. If nothing has yet been prevented from being the case, then what isn't the case?

A fluctuation is just a way to talk about the barest first imaginable kind of substantial state of being - an action with a direction.

So materialism sees an atom as its simplest possible starting point. But if you flip to a dynamical point of view, that becomes a fluctuation. A fluctuation is what we would call the first expression of any limitation on naked and unbounded possibility. The starting point for in-formed being would be an action in a direction. And being fleeting, both the action and the direction would disappear with it.

In other words, if the modeling feels like something, who is to say this feels like something doesn't go all the way down? — schopenhauer1

The answer is obvious. Complex brains do complex modelling. When I use my eyes, I create a model of a world from some pattern of illumination falling on my retina. And key to that model is also the "me" that is place in time and space as a "receiver" of that point of view.

So that is an example of how the modelling is a model which is of a self in a world. And that is then what we would expect the model to feel like.

But if a slug doesn't have the equipment to make sense of the scrambled EM radiation striking it, then there is no "world" in terms of some self-centred point of view. We can just as reasonably draw a conclusion about a slug having the kind of experience that would follow from not having that level of reality modelling.

None of this is rocket science. It is obvious from the type of modelling being done what we might expect that type of modelling to feel like.

We can't then experience what it is actually like to be a slug, or an echo-locating bat, just because of that scientific account. But we can still answer questions about how far down some kind of experiencing would go when it comes to organisms and their self~world modelling.

To ask which bit of the sign relation is the “conscious bit” is to miss the point.

Consciousness, as a biological phenomenon, is a result of a brain modelling a self in a world. The sign relation captures the irreducible complex nature of that relation.

Pansemiosis would be an extension of that triadic analysis to a non conscious, because non modelling, physical reality.

Organisms are sentient because they have internal models of themselves in the world. The Cosmos is then in some sense a globalised model of itself. The model is not internal but now the actual shape of the system itself.

This makes sense given the information theoretic and holographic turn of current physics. Science has had to give up on matter as substantial being. Instread reality is composed of contextual limitations on individuated events.

So semiotics began as a way to understand language as a causal structure. Then Peirce extended that to include the grammar of logic, and speculatively, a self-organising tale of cosmology and existence.

Semiosis was about the growth of intelligibility and reasonableness - both within human thinking and also in the actual world within which humans arose.

Modern biology showed that life and mind are properly semiotic - language-like in their code-based modelling of states of meaningfulness.

And now modern physics is showing how a world of quantum events is about the power of contexts, or states of interpretance, to determine or individuate particular occurrences - the signs that compose the unfolding history of a universe.

So pansemiosis has the same triadic logical structure as biosemiosis and even just ordinary language use. But there is a huge difference between an organism that is modelling its world and a world that is just in some sense its own model.

Consciousness doesn't cross that line. The Cosmos is not aware, except in the loosest metaphorical sense. Even trees, slugs and ant colonies are not aware in the kind of way we really mean.

So pansemiosis remains a million miles away from panpsychism, panexperientialism, pantheism, etc, etc.

At what point does modeling not feel like something? — schopenhauer1

So you accept modelling would reasonably feel like something. My job is done.

Doesn't change presuppose something that changes? Isn't this something more fundamental than the changes that it undergoes? — Aaron R

Alternatively, change could be fundamental and somethingness is what we get when unbounded fluctuation is stably bounded.

How does a star exist when it is both a violent fusion explosion and a gravitationally collapsing ball of gas? You have two extreme and uncontrollable types of change in the one place. But a star can exist for billions of years because these two opposed kinds of change must find a stable equilibrium balance.

So all somethingness could be the stable equilibrium balance emerging from violent underlying change.

Any precisely opposed directions of change will have this result. And if it seems unlikely that such dichotomous pairings would arise in nature, consider the fact that if this is how existence works, then for anything to exist, only neatly complementary actions capable of striking a stable balance would be around to be observed. Everything out of balance would not be the case.

So a reasonable position is that anything might have been the case. And that is a maximally unstable or dynamical starting point. But if stable balances were possible, then stability would have to emerge. The fact that the forms of such stability - such as realised in stars - might seem rare is beside the point. They would be the ones that actually prevail as only they could prevail. And we know they could prevail, as here we are here to note the fact.

But no need to exaggerate the mysteries.

How could a living, running, intentional model of the world - a model which includes a model of “ourself” - fail to feel like something?

Not seeing your slippery slope to panpsychism. Only seeing that you don’t get pansemiosis.

Yeah. Just look at everything made impossible in just the past 50 years. Chaos theory. Complexity theory. Fractals. Dissipative structure theory. The list of advances in mathematical modelling that did not happen due to this “disaster” just goes on and on. ;)

Rosen’s point about incommensurability in all those fields still stands. But it was also overcoming the issue in a pragmatic fashion that has brought home the underlying trick involved.

Non linear maths demonstrated that measurement error is not necessarily linear. Indeed, as Rosen says, it is almost generically the case that it ain’t.

But rather than mathematical modelling just curling up and dying, it seems rather invigorated at finding ways to handle non linear measurement error.

You don’t understand Peircean triadicism.

Secondness is the particular. So it arises from firstness as brute reaction and then becomes a repeatable act of individuation after the thirdness of a global habit is formed.

So it starts out as accident. Then it becomes a habitual regularity - the reliable repetition of a difference.

And as to your dualistic moaning about the phenomenal being absent, I’ve just explained how it is you who ache for both a noumenal self and a noumenal world. Peircean semiotics is an internalist metaphysics. It is the view from the phenomenal. But with enough dimensions to capture the structure of phenomenal being.

Self and world are not dualistic realms. They are the complementary limits on a phenomenology rendered finally intelligible by that structure-recognising move.

And I don’t know if the Greek philosophers really did think in terms of a ‘creator God’ — Wayfarer

OK. Blame that on the scholastic rewrite if you like.

there’s no biological reason why a species ought to be able to know the kinds of things we already know — Wayfarer

But once culture, language and technology came along, could it have ended differently?

That was the further level of semiosis that laid the ground. What then prevented a mathematical/rational level emerging on top of that?

So as soon as language became a thing, a formal grammar was on the cards, no?

That is not explained by physicalism, which refers to some unsupported, random and therefore unreasonable speculation of abiogenesis. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you show no signs of being up to date on that science. @Read Parfit gave you excellent reading suggestions from a researcher in the front line. So your comment here is supported only by your ignorance of the available evidence.

Nick Lane’s latest book indeed makes the case that life anywhere could only take the form of electron respiratory chains and proton gradients.

This is a neat conclusion as it fits the predictions of a biosemiotic approach to abiogenesis. And it even flows from the very particle asymmetry that permits a Cosmos that is more than just a featureless bath of radiation.

A universe with proper matter - lumpy bits of gravitating stuff with charges and sub-lightspeed inertial freedoms - is only possible because electrons wound up having the negative charge, and protons the positive charge.

And then life also depends on this fortunate asymmetry. Because of the physical size difference, electrons could be used to capture the energy to drive life as a process. Protons then could release this energy back in a controlled fashion to spin the molecular machinery.

So it is not all a tale of irrational randomness. That semiotic distinction between rate independent information and rate dependent process is not just about the genotype-phenotype distinction. It arises directly out of the possibilities created by fundamental particles being of different size.

Suddenly all it took was a membrane to hold protons back and then a turnstile to let them pass in a regulated fashion.

As accidents go, in a place like a warm alkaline sea vent, it was an accident waiting to happen. Abiogensis in this form suddenly seems so reasonable that alternative stories become matchingly hard to imagine.

There is an activity which creates and interprets the information. — Metaphysician Undercover

And which bit of this creating and interpreting of genetic information can’t be explained by physicalism?

You say logically there must be something beyond the physical goings on. And yet there is no evidence of that.

And it wouldn’t even be hylomorphism for the formal/final aspects of substance to exist in some removed and non-substantial sense. It isn’t actually logical on that score.

Sure. We can grant noesis as an advanced skill of a suitably trained human mind. We can have such a well developed concept of the abstract that we can perceive it’s structures in a mental imagery sense.

But your thesis is stronger. It follows from the Greek claim that what we humans can do with our rational faculty is a diminished form of the omnescient rational vision that would be native to a creator god.

So I say we climb the semiotic ladder of our own ability to conceive of the Cosmos as a whole.

You are aiming at the story that we aspire to the kind of rational perception that a creator would be endowed with. We are cut down gods rather than cranked up animals.

Your theory of meaning is that the name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of you. — Banno

You missed some vital punctuation. It should be: The name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of “you”.

And really, even your “my” should be in quotes. Or is there some you that is separate from the sum of “your” willing actions? How do you hope to escape representationalism concerning pictures in the head while still talking about the kind of conscious self that could have that type of detached observing, rather than embodied and enactive, relation with anything?

But as I think we have agreed, the 'furniture of reason' is not the product of the brain. At that point of evolution, the mind is sufficiently advanced to discover a pre-existing order: — Wayfarer

But what we see is a world divided into its structural necessities and its material accidents. And is the world actually divided, or instead hylomorphically whole?

So it is impressive once we reach a mathematical level of semiotic engagement with the world. But it is still a modelled “world” we end up “perceiving”. You are talking as if the mind is the kind of thing that eventually arrives at direct access to the truth of being. All we have is a more sophisticated umwelt forming our phenomenal experience.

Yes. There is something deeper about that view. It sees the whole of the Cosmos in getting down to the structural necessities of “existence” itself.

But it is still a model - indirect. The mind does not discover in some simple fashion, like finally opening its eyes to find what is nakedly right there. It has to build up to an understanding by way of conceptual abstraction. It has to in fact erase and forget every particular or detail it can. The grand structure is then whatever is finally left as that which cannot be cancelled away.

Semiotics does overcome this to some extent, but only by its ability to impart or project mind-like attributes to the natural domain; however this is still supposed to be a result or consequence of an essentially mindless process, so ontologically it is still derivative rather than primary. — Wayfarer

Nope. Semiotics does reimagine the fundamentally simple as being pansemiotic and thus as much mind-like as matter-like in some good sense. But consciousness - and its material technological products - are derivative of this simplicity in being the product of complexity. Or multiple levels of increasing informational and abstracted semiosis.

So the simple becomes semiotic. And complex semiosis arises out of that. You are conflating the simplest form with the most highly complex form in talking about the world being mind-like in some conscious, and even super sensible or divine sense of the word.

So we have humans and their machines. We have the semiotics of maths piled upon speech, piled upon neurons, piled upon genes, to result in some sharp division between conscious beings and their mechanised environments. In one tiny corner of the Cosmos where a steep entropic gradient was begging to be colonised, there was a brief eruption of this fantastical complexity.

But only hubris would lead you to want to read that exceptionalism into the generally far simpler tale of a thermalising Cosmos, doing everything it wants with far less semiotically developed machinery.

So “disaster” is claimed merely for dramatic effect. Thank goodness for Pythagoreanism. It reveals the true epistemic nature of modelling. We could become scientists having established the clear difference between formal model, acts of measurement, and the world “as it really is”.

How splendidly Peircean!

Your question isn’t clear. But perhaps you mean that what we signify by “consciousness” is a really complex lived relation with the world.

I’ve given the sparsest possible description of the semiotic relation - the point of view that is the taking of a sign and then a shrugging of “whatever” about anything that might be thus ignored. There is then that basic trick being a lived and mindful process. And it gets really complex. The point of view becomes not some single static instance but itself a constantly adapting and predictive state of affairs - the self that is assimilating a world as a flow of perceptual experience.

In a curious way, I think your dualism is convincing you that any such talk of the self - as just the emergent fact of a continually adapting neurocognitive point of view - must be talk of some “thing-in-itself self”. Beyond the play of habitual signification - the realm of the phenomenal - there must be the noumenal self. The soul, the spirit, the will. The force behind the scenes that gives selfhood a sturdy dualistic reality.

So as I say, you are trying to make sense of what I say from a dualistic position. But that is then why it seems a necessity that there is both a real self and a real world beyond the realm of the phenomenal. You can’t be content with a theory of mind that is merely one of semiotic emergence, no matter how hierarchically complex the tale.

A triadic paradigm has the extra dimension to see that hierarchical complexity in a holistic fashion. It can see emergence because it can see development - the change from the vague to the crisp.

So think about that. You must keep thinking that my triadic account leaves out the noumenal self that “has to be there” ... according to the paradigmatic conditions of dualistic representationalism. No noumenal observables without also that noumenal strength self ... experiencing a phenomenology of sign perhaps. :)

What is this "our" and "it"? — schopenhauer1

The separation of the observer from the whatever by the semiotic formation of an umwelt.

So “we” are the point of view shrugging our shoulders about the thing-in-itself because that world of possibility has been reduced to our own world of experience - some configuration of habitual signs.

Try thinking about all this triadically rather than dyadically. It may then click into place.

Such things as logical truths and geometric proofs are known with a directness and intuitive certainty that is not characteristic of the knowledge of the sensible (sense-able) domain — Wayfarer

If this is so, why do 99% of humans really suck at maths in this fashion? :razz:

Either they lack a rational soul or in fact it takes considerable training to routinely look past the immediate world and “see” it’s abstract structures.

So very simplistically, intellect perceives the form (morphe), and the senses perceive the matter (hyle) which is 'accidental'. But this is very different from Cartesian dualism, because there's no conception of 'spirit' and 'matter' being separable in that way. I suppose it is more like a dual-aspect monism in some ways; 'the soul is the form of the body'. — Wayfarer

This works better. It speaks to the information theoretic view of physical reality. You have the complementary duo of information and entropy.

So it is a kind of dual aspect monism. But that says the two faces of reality are simply ontically different. And I would argue that everything slots into place once we can see the two aspects composing physical reality as being formally complementary. We need them to be a dichotomous pair of limits connected by a reciprocal relation.

So Aristotle - before the manglings of scholasticism - was on the money. Form does in-form material accidents, or entropy/degrees of freedom, with necessary limits.

The physical - that is the substantial and not just the material - is a story of the complementary things of top down constraints and bottom up accidents of history. Forms stabilise the instability of unrestrained potential.

We do need a duality of some kind at the heart of substantial being. And physics now agrees with hylomorphism to the degree it understands information and entropy as the complementary faces of the one physicalist world.

That leaves out “mind” of course. Physics talks about the simple and life and mind are another angle on the story - where you get to when the basic semiotic trick of the informational regulation of entropic instability evolves to have incredible hierarchical complexity.

If the living body only exists as directed activity, then the thing which directs the activity must be prior to the physical bod — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean, like the information of a genome?

Physical configurations encode constraints and thus tendencies generally. So finality, as globalised or collective tendencies, can simply evolve so long as physical configurations are a thing. You just need enough cohesion for the world to have a history being written into its state.

Time itself can thus evolve like the way a river gets established with a direction. Once constraints arise on material possibility, you get the emergent thing of a past as the information now fixed in a physical configuration, the future as the limits being imposed by that configuration, and the present as the point in between where possibilities are being actualised and being added to that configuration information.

The signs sums up what matters to us about our relation with it. So beyond that begins all we don’t need to care about. It becomes the possible differences not making a difference.

Of course this might then become some kind of ultimate reality that obsesses folk who want an exhaustive account of all those indifferent differences as well. They want to take every possible point of view .... even when the very point of the semiotic relation is to create that selective thing of there being just some actual concrete point of view that represents the indifference the observer can afford to have towards the thing-in-itself. The mediating sign by itself becomes enough. Until some difference that makes a difference arises and an observer is forced to modify a habit.

Your thinking is reductionistic, not in the atomistic materialist sense, but in the sense that you want to objectify and reduce everything to being understood by science and mathematics. — Janus

Sure. I am reductionist in the sense of reducing things to models. In this case, a general holistic model of causality that stands in self-conscious contrast to the atomistic/materialist one.

So that means I see structure or form as an element of reality. I don't eliminate them. Modelling is reductionist only in homing in on what matters in having explanations.

I think this is probably due to the fact that you lack a feel for the other three senses of the numinous, you have a kind of 'tin ear', I think. — Janus

Unfair. I have a highly educated aesthetic response. And you seemed to agree that an appreciation of the structure of nature can be a numinous feeling.

It is true that I don't feel any generalised thrill contemplating the kind of mystic and religious social constructs you might have in mind.

What we are at root is all about what we feel, not what we think. — Janus

I've taken the opposite message. It is so easy to socially construct our states of feeling that one has to accept a post-modern absurdism about them. We have to wear our emotions lightly because they are not authentic in that root Romanticist sense.