That's like saying that a phone encodes the information passing down it. — Ludwig V

Or more like saying a street plan encodes a functional map of its world, the city. If you want to move about, there is some habitual pattern that gets you from a to b in an efficient fashion.

A phone line transmits information. A phone system can start to encode the world it serves in terms of its functional pattern of highways and back alleys.

Even our machines can start to have organic form as they become intelligently organised into a civil engineering infrastructure. A system designed on dissipative structure principles.

So a single phone line doesn’t embody much semiotic meaning except that I might want to talk to you. But our infrastructure systems become the meaningful structure of our modern existence as a civilisation level super organism.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. — Ludwig V

Biologists like Robert Rosen would argue that biology is larger than physics as it includes all the ways matter can be shaped by form. It includes intelligent form along with inanimate form.

So biology makes physics one of its subsidiary disciplines. :razz:

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do. — Apustimelogist

Describing wouldn’t be explaining. Simulating wouldn’t be capturing the causality in question.

You won’t read it, but here is how Pattee covers that..
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221531066_Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

Yours becomes a really odd position when physics can’t even settle on an agreement of how a classical realm emerges from a quantum one. Or how a non-linear system can be reduced to a linear model.

Coarse graining is needed because fine graining can’t deliver. Physics delivers only effective versions of “fundamental reality”.

Of course for my position, as an Aristotelian hierarchicalist on causality, that is what is expected. The systems view of causality is that nature is all about global constraints shaping up the local degrees of freedom in evolutionary fashion. Atoms emerge due to the constraints of top-down topological order being imposed on quantum possibility.

But that is another - pansemiotic - story alongside the semiotic story I’ve been outlining here. I’m just pointing out that reductionism doesn’t just fail when it comes to life and mind. It is inadequate for physics itself.

Although of course, for the purposes of building machines, building technology, reductionism is perfectly suited to that task. Mechanics is the right mindset for imposing a mechanical causality on the physics of nature.

Because obviously, in principle one could describe the entire process of cell development and the entire history of the world in which evolution occurs in terms of particles moving in space - it would just not be tractably comprehensible by yourself. — Apustimelogist

I am asking you to ground your account in its causal principles. Because your physics is reductionist, you can’t deliver on that. You can only assure me you could reconstruct the world as some kind of simulation of its shaped material parts. Some set of atoms arranged in space and moving “because” of Newtonian laws.

As a reductionist, you can’t in fact reduce at all. You can only enumerate parts. You can’t speak to the causality of the whole. The only compaction of information you can offer is a mechanics of atoms. The offer to simulate is given in lieu of what is meant by a causal account.

Our observations about reality are grounded on and instantiated in the most zoomed-in scale, fully resolved, fully decomposed — Apustimelogist

You mean reality resolves into its fundamental atomistic detail at the level of the Planckscale? Of the quantum foam? Of quantum gravity?

Yeah. How is that project going exactly?

It takes more mental power to get at the meaning of "philosophy" than "photograph" even though both words contain the same amount of letters. — Harry Hindu

Sure. But then our brain is an expensive organ to run. It uses glucose at the rate of working muscle. On the other hand, that is a constant metabolic cost. There is little change when we daydream or go to sleep.

And the goal of the brain is also to reduce all thoughts to learnt habits. It we figure things out, then our mind can just shortcut to our routine definitions of those words. So what you call mental power is the effort of attending to novelty. But once we have reduced some thing to a habit of thought, it can simply be unthinkingly emitted. It becomes so remembered formula that just needs to be triggered. The metabolic cost of rewiring the brain has been paid.

I could argue that the display of the peacock's tail says something about the Big Bang, as there would not be a peacocks if there wasn't a Big Bang. — Harry Hindu

You could read that into a peacock tail. But two peacocks just have their one instinctual understanding.

You have actual language and that makes a huge difference. Peacocks only have their genes and neurology informing their behaviour. No virtual social level of communication.

It's really just a difference in degrees. More complex brains can use more complex representations and get at more complex causal relations. — Harry Hindu

Your own argument says it isn’t if humans have language and a virtual mentality that comes with that.

Still can’t give a fuck. You’re all over the shop.

This might be a fatal mistake in your reasoning — schopenhauer1

Or else you have no idea what natural philosophy is - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/

The rest is just too dull to address.

Why is it reductionist if I explicitly talk about the importance of higher level explanatory frameworks? — Apustimelogist

I’m talking about ontology rather than epistemology. Life and mind as a further source of causality in the cosmos. The stakes are accordingly higher.

When are you going to refute the idea that all coarse-grainings of behaviors over larger scales are grounded on higher resolution details at smaller scales of space and time? — Apustimelogist

How can I refute that in the face of your refusal to engage with the question of how physics - coarse or fine - accounts for the functional structure of a neuron?

You haven’t yet made the argument. Only asserted your belief system.

Well, unfortunately that doesn't guarantee anything. — Apustimelogist

It at least means I understand more than the gist.

What you are trying to do is deny that there is a core principle, but that is exactly what I am pushing back on. — schopenhauer1

But that is just your failure to understand my position. My core principle is that there is always a dialectical balance in anything that could matter. A trade-off. And trade-offs ought to be optimised in a win-win fashion. That is the answer that is worth seeking.

Your approach drives you to angry dogmatism. My approach leads me to pragmatism. We do the best we can by reasoning. We should always expect a complementary balance to exist in nature. Complementary balances is after all how nature can even exist.

So my approach is rooted in natural philosophy. That is its metaphysical basis.

Yours seems to be some kind of Platonic notion of perfection. A one-note "good". A leap to an extreme that ends all debate.

The slippery slope fallacy, as I say. All answers must arrive in the one place, whereas for me they have many possible balancing points between two complementary notions of "the good".

It is good to take risks as it is good to get rewards. Pain is good as pain tells you what to avoid. Life is good because after that you will have plenty of oblivion in which to rest.

Nature has set us up genetically to think in this natural way. To understand life as a spectrum of possibilities that we must then navigate in a reasonable fashion.

The primary dichotomy of human social organisation is the balancing of competition and cooperation. Individual striving and collective identity. Both of these imperatives are good to the degree they are in a fruitful balance.

So perhaps my way of thinking is a little more complex. But not sure I have to make excuses for that.

The argument that he gave seems to me to be invalid, — Leontiskos

That's a separate matter. :smile:

I just like pointing out how the semiotic approach goes further in emphasising that our model of the world is also the model of "ourselves in the world". The witness and the witnessed are inseparable even in their separation.

So I wasn't meaning to correct you. Just having fun outlining the next step that people never quite arrive at. Rest easy with the covid. :up:

None of your scenario matters to the normative claim of the deontological basis being presented. — schopenhauer1

But that is because I am sensible and don't buy that as a basis. Wrong premise and thus a pointless argument.

It would be bad faith to pretend I went along with your scenario for any other reason than its passing curiosity value.

No, this isn't a slippery slope fallacy because the debate is at the normative level. Murder isn't somewhat wrong, it's wrong. — schopenhauer1

But what is murder? What acts fall into that category without involving shades of grey?

Perhaps you have a conviction in black and white thinking to a degree I cannot even fathom? I sort of suspect that deep down you must be kidding. That a little reasonableness will soon penetrate the pose. I'm still kind of giving credit to the possibility that you aren't completely in the grip of your own rhetoric.

I have said a couple times in the thread I see the importance of different explanatory frameworks on different levels but just seems to me all complex behavior are grounded on and emerge from the smaller scales as described by more fundamental, simpler physical laws or descriptions. — Apustimelogist

Sure. You've certainly said how it seems for you. But as a biologist and neuroscientist, I see this as question-begging reductionism.

This is partly because I am already very biased against attempts to reify meaning and against views that seem inherently strongly representational. The idea of symbols or signs in biology then seem to me something like an additional level of idealization and approximation that is another way of telling stories about biology, perhaps more intuitively - similar to teleology. But it doesn't seem fundamental to me compared to notions like blind selectionism which does not necessarily require things to be packaged up in terms of neat symbols and meanings. — Apustimelogist

This package of prejudices could not be more familiar.

I personally find ideas like active inference and the free energy principle have more clarity, eloquence and mathematical grounding than the Howard Patee stuff, in addition to being prima facie simpler to couple with my enactive inclinations. The epistemic cut idea also seems to draw from ideas in quantum mechanics which I just do not believe to be the case — Apustimelogist

This just shows that you haven't read or understood the stuff.

I'm sure it will make no difference here, but an irony is that I was deep into theoretical neuroscience in the 1990s and meeting up with Friston when he was still trying to find his angle of attack. Back then, he was thinking in terms of dynamical coupling and neural transients. The non-linear dynamics of folk like Scott Kelso. I was prodding Friston about the importance of switching to an anticipatory-processing based point of view.

Friston was already clearly the smartest guy in theoretical neuroscience at that time. And events have since confirmed that. But it was because neuroscience and complexity theory still seemed so far from the proper way of thinking about the mind as an enactive process that I went off and stumbled into the path that theoretical biology had already blazed. The systems science, the hierarchy theory, the infodynamics, the dissipative structure, the epistemic cut, the modelling relation. All the parts of the puzzle that come together to form a general theory of life and mind.

So I was hanging out with that new crowd for a decade. I was there as it realised how theoretical biology had been recapitulating the metaphysics of Peircean pragmatism/semiotics. The idea of the sign relation.

A further irony was that Pattee resisted this new biosemiotic turn in our discussions. After all, I guess, he had already made the same points more sharply. He had had the benefit of the genetic code being cracked and so focusing attention on the practical issue of how a molecule could be a message.

Pattee went off radar for a few years in what seemed like a bit of a huff. But then he surprised by suddenly releasing a flood of papers proclaiming himself a biosemiotician. He sharpened what this should mean and so put a couple of the other pretender camps in their place.

So you may talk from your experience, but I talk from mine. The question you deny is even a question is a question I've been academically engaged with for a long time.

For fun, let's test the pragmatic limits to your antinatalism.

So you say you are a signed-up member of the AN charter. Being responsible for a birth is deemed a sin as it is impossible for the resulting infant to have given its explicit consent to this reproductive act in advance of the fact.

But having sex is always going to carry this risk. Even contraception – as a sign of your good faith – can fail. So does your AN charter need to add the clause of no sex at all as that is putting you at risk for breaking the faith? Do you need to go out and get sterilised because you could always get drunk one night or duped into performing a service for some cunning natalist?

One could go on seeking such risks to your hardline AN stance. The risks might be diminishing, but even a vasectomy fails 1 in 10,000 times. At some point do you not eventually get a pass on this? Does even the AN extremist accept that imperatives have their pragmatic limits?

Well if reason is allowed back into the conversation, this becomes the point where we can start winding back towards the practical notion of risks being balanced against rewards. We can get back to my commonsense position that what matters in regard to approaching reproduction ethically is not whether the prospective parents can have the baby sign off on the whole exercise in advance, but that the parents are wholeheartedly engaged in making it a turn of as a positive choice.

One can have a productive ethical debate where there are two complementary imperatives in play – like risks and rewards – and so the way that we "ought to behave" is in the way that aims to arrive at an optimised win-win balance.

But if you set up your ethics on the side of a slippery slope fallacy, then why would you expect that to be useful or persuasive?

It would have shown less bad faith if you had responded to what I actually wrote.

Once you get into a mindset of looking for problems, you are never going to find an end to problems. — apokrisis

If one is simply recognising problems then that is a quite different mindset. But once you declare no line can be drawn, no balance of interests can exist, then that becomes reason eating itself.

If you have an argument against that argument, rather than some further deflection, I’m happy to hear it.

Not to sound rude, but did you actually read my reply? — AmadeusD

It could have been better written.

Recognizing, not seeking. If you do not accept this, that is pure bad faith. — AmadeusD

Well who gives a fuck when you put it like that.

It's speculative. — Banno

You can tell without even reading? Impressive. How mighty are the arguments you make on PF. How you make your foes tremble when they hear the soft padded approach of your wombling form before you turn, fart and waddle off with a small pleased expression.

I can certainly recognise problems when I see them. And going looking for problems is a problem that I can recognise.

If you think looking for only problems is not a problem, then you would have to supply your argument for why this lack of balance is not in fact problematic.

You are no lightweight, but what you serve is also opinion, hidden. Speculative physics mixed with rewarmed dialectic. — Banno

I just served you with a paper by Howard Pattee. Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of the three sharpest thinkers I've had the privilege of learning from.

I accept that you find the task of following the paper's argument rather too daunting, even if it was written as a kind of introduction to the problem.

But is all the spit and splutter really serving any purpose? Shouldn't you be waddling off to bruncheon by now. You seem to have run out of jibes.

More speculation than physics. — Banno

An opinion. Served as usual without argument or evidence. You are such a lightweight.

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics? — Apustimelogist

Seems you are trying very hard to do exactly what biologists complain about. Failing to understand the epistemic cut.

Or as a physicist put it in The Physics of Symbols....

Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code. The converse of control is measurement in which a rate-dependent dynamical state is coded into quiescent symbols. Non-integrable constraints are one necessary conditions for bridging the epistemic cut by measurement, control, and coding. Additional properties of heteropolymer constraints are necessary for biological evolution.

When you have no adequate response, you spit. Hegel is not physics. — Banno

I never said Hegel was physics. As a paid up biosemiotician, you would have to show where I am a Hegelist rather than a Peircean. Produce the textual evidence.

And of course you can't. So you splutter. :up:

Meanwhile here is the relevant physics - The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

Deal with it or womble off to lunch. Stop circling the bowl and be on your way.

Extra marks for getting the reference. But shame your skill at subtext is not matched by your diligence at doing actual work.

And they love you.

So here we see the rage of grandiose narcissist in most splendid form. Note the venom dripping out it's mouth when it howls. That is one fine specimen folks. — wonderer1

As insults go, this is pretty weak if not quite odd. Perhaps try getting ChatGTP to give you a hand?

I'll leave you to your crusade. — Banno

Yep. See the science and run for your burrow. Pretend it never happened.

See how this is not physics? QED. — Banno

How is this not physics exactly?

The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

It's the pretence that is irksome. Reworking Hegel is fine, if one is honest about it. — Banno

Be honest about it. My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce.

But you seem quite ignorant of all these metaphysical distinctions. Time to womble off in the direction of your lunch. Don't pretend you have any training in either biophysics or functional neuroscience.

The wombat stirs, farts and leaves. Pleased to have made its small contribution.

Life is a balancing act. Once you get into a mindset of looking for problems, you are never going to find an end to problems.

That ain’t philosophy. It is reason eating itself.

A neuron is characterized as a physical object made up of particles that behave according to the laws of physics. All neuronal behaviors follow from this and we put information processing on top of it. Not the other way round. — Apustimelogist

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?

Sure, the laws don’t forbid the structure. But in what sense do they cause the structure to be as it physically is?

You can always in principle describe whatever a brain is doing in terms of more fundamental physics. — Apustimelogist

Well do so then. Tell me how the physical structure of a neuron is the product of fundamental physics. Tell me how neurons appear in the world in a way that does not involve the hand of biological information.

I'm afraid that my grandiosity detector has become too sensitive to read much of that. — wonderer1

…he says pompously. :up:

What does it mean for something to be useful but not real? — Harry Hindu

To be clear, yes of course information storage as genes or words has some entropic cost. To scratch a mark on a rock is an effort. Heat is produced. Making DNA bases or pushing out the air to say a word are all physical acts.

But the trick of a code is that it zeroes this physical cost to make it always the same and as least costly as possible. I can say raven or I can say cosmos or god. The vocal act is physical. But the degree of meaning involved is not tied to that. I can speak nonsense or wisdom and from an entropic point of view it amounts to the same thing,

As they say, infinite variety from finite means. A virtual reality can be conjured up that physical reality can no longer get at with its constraints. But then of course, whether the encoded information is nonsense or wisdom starts to matter when it is used to regulate the physics of the world. It has to cover its small running cost by its effectiveness in keeping the organism alive and intact.

I could argue that language use is just more complex learned behavior. Animals communicate with each other using sounds, smells and visual markings. — Harry Hindu

There are grades of semiosis. Indexes, icons and then symbols. So I was talking about symbols when I talk about codes. Marks that bear no physical resemblance to what they are meant to represent.

Animals communicate with signs that are genetically fixed. A peacock has a tail it can raise. But that one sign doesn’t become a complex language for talking about anything a peacock wants.

A language is a system of symbolic gestures. Articulate and syntactically structured. A machinery for producing an unlimited variety of mark combinations. Quite different in its ability to generate endless novelty.

I think you are saying that the a physical process can (under the right conditions) be interpreted as an information processing process, and conversely. — Ludwig V

Not really. If we are talking causality, in biology it is the genome that is causing the physics. Enzymes are switches that turn chemical processes on and off. The entropy flow is regulated in a way that builds, and keeps rebuilding, a functional body. The physical blueprint that the genome had in mind.

That is why the information processing analogy fails even if it is somewhat helpful.

Neural information encodes the behaviours that switch entropy flows off and on at the level of a general world model. We move towards food. We move away from danger. By being able to navigate an environment in intelligent fashion, we can again keep rebuilding the body that now also contains a brain as well as a metabolism.

The neural structure of the brain is plastic. Connections are forever growing or disappearing. They do so under selective pressure. They do so because the reshaping is proving functional. It is the "program" that the brain is running that is the cause of the physical structure that underpins its cognitive action.

So brains aren't really like computers as a computer's program does not have to go as far as building and maintaining its hardware. It does not have to get off the desk and ensure it is properly plugged into the socket.

Of course the genes are far more directly connected to the basic chore of regulating the entropic flow that is our metabolism. Neurons are much more removed from that nitty gritty level of ensuring the functional integrity of the body. Biology builds the neurons as cells, and experience in the world is just sculpting the connectivity of the pathways.

But still, in causal terms the neural information is paying for its own keep. If the brain has a bad world model, then the whole organism is likely not to last long as a physical device.

I am sure you feel your opinions are well qualified. I could reply if I spotted some argument.

In case you are interested, the supporting detail can be found here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/679203

Well this just ignores the context about which of two things is more fundamental — Apustimelogist

Well of course the cosmos is more fundamental than the bios. One creates the possibilities that the other exploits. Life and mind don’t contradict the second law. They accelerate entropification.

Again, just because it may not be your preferred level of explanation, does not preclude it from being more fundamental or at least perform a role of grounding the other more preferred explanation so that preferred explanation itself would in principle be explained by and depend on this more small scale perspective. — Apustimelogist

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits?

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials.

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier. — Apustimelogist

This ignores the fact that organisms are organised by codes and so exist in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

This neatly inverts things. An informational mechanics is precisely what biology and neurology impose on the physical world. Not the other way around.

The world is organised by dissipation. It has an emergent structure of entropy flow. This starts down at the quantum level with thermal decoherence. Our best causal model of this is symmetry-based. Complexity arises as symmetry-breaking phase transitions – step ups in terms of the holistic constraints of topological order.

Nature is holonomic in the physics jargon. Then life and mind arise as information systems able to impose non-holonomic constraints on the prevailing systems of entropic flow. A machinery of photosynthesis can be constructed that stands between the sun's rays and the earth crust that would otherwise just bounce it off into space as waste heat.

So life and mind embody the Newtonian ideal of a cause and effect system. A mechanical construction that regulates physical flows. Billiard balls roll smoothly and recoil with constrained linearity because we have carefully machined things to be that way on a baize surface with ivory spheres.

But the world itself is not a machinery of linear cause and effect. So its non-linearity is only a comment about the degree to which it has been constrained or not in regards to some entropic process. Reality is fundamentally "non-linear" if that is our best term. And linearity or classicality is something reality can only approach asymptotically or effectively.

For all practical purposes, we may regard a wave function as collapsed as some probe with a switch mounted on its end has been heard to flip state. Holism can be considered localised. Another bit of thermodynamic history has now definitely been added to universe's equation of state.

If neurology relied on ions crossing membranes as its deep explanation, then it would be getting us nowhere. What matters in terms of a suitable causal explanation is in what sense a switch was flipped. And what meaning did that flip have within a larger holistic informational economy.

All this only works in the first place by the "information processing" being as causally separate from the physics it means to control as is possible. An organism has to stand outside its world to regulate that world. Or at least swim along in a purposeful manner while also caught in the midst of its tremendously strong entropic flows.

Anyway, my general point is that complexity theory is often reduced to just complicated dynamics – which already begs the question in that dynamics is inherently not mechanical if you dig into its causality. Non-linearity is its default as linearity is only ever some emergent tendency towards an organising topological order.

And then compounding the confusion over causality, life and mind arise by being able to impose mechanical order on entropic flows. A logic of switches can tame a river to become a transport system, an irrigation system, a power generation system. Or down at the level of organic chemistry, a logic of switches turns a bag of reactions into an an information-regulated metabolism. A cell with the intelligence to repair and reproduce itself despite the storm of entropy flowing through it.

This is proper complexity when it comes to the possible causalities of nature. The combination of entropy flows and negentropic memories. The ability to construct sluice gates across non-linear dynamics and so regulate nature in intentional fashion.

More concretely, suppose a scientist observes that they can evoke some form of experience via brain stimulation. Hanover thinks this proves that experience is untrustworthy, and yet the scientist's observation is nothing other than an experience. So why isn't their experience untrustworthy? *crickets* — Leontiskos

But isn’t this approach failing to take into account that the witnessing selves are part of the semiotic construction of a witnessed reality? And there is a difference between the scientistic and the folk phenomenological account on this ground.

One view speaks to that of “ourselves” - our socially constructed notion of being an actual experiential being. The one having the experiences when we move our heads, widen our eyes, see something come into focus and mumur to ourselves, “I see a red pen”.

My point is that already we are constructing the self as the ultimate subjective witness, when objectively - as science can tell us - this is merely a socialised narrative.

An animal lacking language just exists in its world in a direct embodied fashion. It reacts to a red pen in terms of appropriate learnt behaviours and without any extra internal narrative about witnessing the world as a self who might thus have done something otherwise than react in a direct animal fashion.

So your eyeball may be pressed to the microscope, but there is also this idea of a “you” in play that comes at reality with already a theory. It is possible “you” were dreaming, hallucinating, distracted, careless, or whatever, when you saw what you thought you saw.

Even just at this regular linguistically constructed level of being a reliable observer of reality, you felt equipped to be able judge the rationality and soundness of your verbal reports about what was in fact the case. You can contrast a real red pen and a hallucinated red pen in terms of being a counterfactually theorising kind of self.

So the next step to a mathematically informed observer - the fully scientific ideal - is not such a great difference. We can swap out our phenomenological stance for the laboratory stance at a drop of a hat.

What we can’t do so easily is recover what being a self would have been like as a languageless animal. What it would be like not to live in this narrative haze of counterfactual possibility that adds so much complexity to our sense of self - our sense of always being both firmly rooted in reality and yet also floating somewhere else beyond it at the same time.

I have come across reports that suggest some animals can learn to do basic small number counting. — Janus

You know yourself that three, four or even five things can be seen as different sized collections at a single glance. And remembered as such. But the difference between seven or eight apples starts to require a method of checking if you want to be sure of your mathematical correctness. Whereas as for a hungry monkey, it becomes a difference not making a difference. It is just seen as a lot of apples.

But I think animals have a sense of number. — Janus

Or of perceptual grouping. Human working memory famously tops out at about “7 ± 2” items. The kind of grouping in the test that Trump aced when he could recall “Person, woman, man, camera, TV.“ And probably even manage that feat in reverse order.

Animals all have working memory too. The ability to juggle a small set of particular aspects of some larger cognitive task.

But that is not the same as counting. Just the reason why we struggle with holding number strings longer than seven in our working memories.

The word "form" in information seems to reflect the relationship between information and form. — Janus

Indeed. I would call the abstracted notion of information our “atoms of form”. Form reduced to the counterfactuality of a binary switch. We can count how many distinctions it takes to arrive at something completely specific.

The game of Twenty Questions is a good example. Ideally, every question cuts the number of remaining choices in half. And that way we cut through a world of possibilities with an exponentialised efficiency.

The form I have in mind is … well you will just have to start guessing. And each guess is an atomistic act of counterfactual switching. If you are any good at this game, you will switch off half the world of possibilities as you zero in on the possibilities still left switched on.

My error was only in re-entering a long stale discussion.

Semiosis would say that animals are rational at the level of genetic and neural encoding. — apokrisis

This seems a useful clarification. Information is encoded meaning. Genetic information encodes for constraints on chemical actions. Neural information encodes for constraints on environmental actions. Verbal information encodes for constraints on intentional actions. And numeric information encodes for constraints on mathematical actions.

So information is about the pragmatic encoding of meanings. It is how an organism regulates its world by having the kind of memory that acts as a store for data and algorithms – to put it rather computationally. An organism can construct states of constraint because a meaningful relation with the world has been atomised into a system of syntax acting on semantics. Habits or routines that can be run. Behaviours which can be switched on or off.

Numbers are then just the form that information takes at the level of a complete semiotic abstraction in terms of the self that is aiming to regulate its world by the business of constructing states of constraint. A numberline gives both the data points and the algorithmic logic that are needed to encode an absolutely general – but also perfectly mechanistic – modelling relation with the world.

So four levels of information or mechanistic regulation. With maths and logic at the end of this trail as the most evolved form of pragmatic rationality. The ultimate way that an organism could think about the world. If also then, the least actually "organic". :razz:

Were you addressing me? :chin:

Animals obviously recognize forms. Should we say they are rational? — Janus

But anyway, animals obviously have good object recognition. The recognise pragmatic forms. But are they apprehending form at a rational level? Or is that level of abstraction how we humans learn to view the world for our own new purpose of seeing reality in general as one giant rational machine?

Semiosis would say that animals are rational at the level of genetic and neural encoding. They see the world in terms of a regulated metabolism and a patterned environment.

Humans have linguistic semiosis which gets us to a level of seeing the world in terms of a pattern of interaction between intentional agents. The play of viewpoints captured by being able to speak of me and you, before and after, good and bad.

And the OP concerns mathematical semiosis. Pattern abstracted to the point of a mechanical generality. The ability to construct forms in algorithmic fashion. What seems to us the ultimate level of rationalised structure.