Red is not a property of extra-mental (or mind-independent) objects but is a subjective affection which arises from a combination of our innate cognitive capacity and the powers (or properties) objects induce in us. — Manuel

And yet all we have in our brains is neurons firing. Somehow that give rise to both the "subjective affects" and the "objective properties". If we see red as pure quality, and ballness as simple quantity, we are still left with the deeper fact that all that is happening in our heads is neurons firing. Just in different corners of the brain, as we can tell from the damage we can do by plunging something blunt into the "colour centre" as opposed to another spot that is the "object recogntiion centre".

Our philosophical positions are constrained by some pretty basic neurobiological facts. Somehow it is all just "neurons firing". The mystery to be cleared up starts there.

And that is the current neurobiological approach. Shifting the conversation to the enactive and embodied modelling relation that explains the neuron firing in terms of their neural architecture. How what they are doing is imposing a capacity for Bayesian reasoning on the world.

The idealists will complain that this leaves consciousness under-explained. The realist will dismiss it as instead an irrelevent complexification to them.

But because both camps agree that science should stay out of philosophy, at least they can agree on that.

Meanwhile, the science rolls on at a good lick. Sharpening our understanding of how things are.

There is this article about colour concepts and experience. Maybe it is of interest. — Lionino

The article makes my point that we have to acknowledge why there is this idealist/realist tension when talking about perception – why the redness of red is a Hard Problem quandry advanced by one side, and why the ballness of balls is matchingly put forward as something quite untroubling to the lumpen realist tendency.

As Peacocke points out, red just seems to be a psychological construct as all we can do is point to it when asked. It is out there in the world in some generally agreed way, but also essentially private like the good old beetle in the box.

But if asked to point to the circle in a collection of shapes, we can reach out and get our hands around it. A blind person could learn to discriminate circularity as a general concept. We can speak to the general essence of being circular as well as pick out suitable particular examples. The circle is the one with no pointy corners and smoothly symmetric like a ball.

Then as we continue on from shapes to objects, we all know that we can really get our hands around balls. We can feel their shape, weight, texture, even taste and scent. If circles where a bit Platonic as concepts, balls take on a hylomorphic and Aristotelian richness. Ballness becomes the essence of a very large class of possible objects.

And the fact that we are imposing this concept on nature – we sure as heck make all kinds of material balls – becomes what seems most salient. We have now swung across to the other extreme of the spectrum to the position that is most comfortable to the lumpen realist. The realm of chairs, kitchen utensils, puppy dogs and other medium size dry goods.

So idealists will focus on the redness of red to make their essentialist case. And realists will focus on the "ballness" of balls to make their accidentalist case. They will say sure folk can classify balls as a category, but plainly there is no such thing as ballness as a "real essence".

So perception gives both camps what feels like a strong ground in this argument between idealism and realism. But I say we have to dig deeper to get past the superficial language games. Any philosophical account must provide some unifying position on perception so that the redness of red and the ballness of balls can be understood under a single theory of cognition. Such as that of a biosemiotic modelling relation.

Our experience of red and of balls has to be either equally surprising or equally unsurprising. One way or another, we are asking them both to fit the same metaphysics.

Evade away. :up:

How have I not done so?

(This answering a question with a question is just so handy. Always be evading. :up: )

That reminds of this 2008 conference on a general pansemiotic take of "The Evolution and Development of the Universe".

Here is Salthe's summary of his contribution....

I distinguish Nature from the World. I also distinguish development from evolution.

Development is progressive change and can be modeled as part of Nature, using a specification hierarchy. I have proposed a ‘canonical developmental trajectory’ of dissipative structures with the stages defined thermodynamically and informationally.

I consider some thermodynamic aspects of the Big Bang, leading to a proposal for reviving final cause. This model imposes a ‘hylozooic’ kind of interpretation upon Nature, as all emergent features at higher levels would have been vaguely and episodically present primitively in the lower integrative levels, and were stabilized materially with the developmental emergence of new levels.

The specification hierarchy’s form is that of a tree, with its trunk in its lowest level, and so this hierarchy is appropriate for modeling an expanding system like the Universe. It is consistent with this model of differentiation during Big Bang development to view emerging branch tips as having been entrained by multiple finalities because of the top-down integration of the various levels of organization by the higher levels.

Salthe is then accused of being too materialistic by other more idealist contributors. So you can see a range of opinion exists. Horace Fairlamb, for instance, still sees wiggle room for the emergence of mind as "true novelty".

So pick from it what suits your taste.

I'm not evading. — Banno

Yes you are. Have been for years. It's the language game you've developed to protect your language games. :up:

More questions answered by questions. So more evasion as you dare not risk a good faith reply in a public forum. :up:

But I think you lean towards a physicalist interpretation of the inherent ambiguity implicit in the ‘epistemic cut’, so as to avoid the suggestion of being non-scientific or being tarred with the brush of philosophical idealism. — Wayfarer

Why would I care if pragmatism is my judge in these matters? It ain't me who is all caught up in this particular culture war.

And as a ‘science of meaning’, semiotics is not nearly so reducible to predictive formulae as are those of physics. — Wayfarer

Did I mention Friston's Bayesian Brain? Did I mention Hoffman's Ratchet?

The science has been moving along at quite a clip. The genetic code wasn't even cracked when I was born. Now we have 3D animations of armies of molecular machines at work, harvesting entropy to rebuild bodies.

I'm not sure what more could be expected in terms of astoundingly swift progress.

So - how does 'the conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature' support the idea that this is a physical theory? — Wayfarer

Sure. That is why we biologists have always said biology is bigger than physics. It is large enough to also include semiosis as the new science of meaning.

Pattee himself then puts his finger on how it is a mechanics of information processing – switches, levers, ratchets, latches – that physically gives effect to his epistemic cut. With that, the missing connection is made. Physics gets drawn up into the mothership of pansemiotics.

So if I were to argue that living organisms in whatever form they take, amount to the emergence of intentionality, I don't think I would be saying anything at variance with the passage quoted above. — Wayfarer

I dunno. Pansemiosis is keen to extent intentionality to even the physical sphere as "tendency". That covers the Second Law's extremely general imperative of "thou shalt organise to entropify" as the global tendency of Nature.

Stan Salthe pushed this hard. Pattee himself was rather diffident in these conversations, being ironically more of a hardline physicalist within the biosemiotic camp. Salthe was a full-on Peircean internalist.

I'm not at all sure what that could mean. I, and I think most folks, do not attach numbers to roundness in any intrinsic way. — Banno

Shapes appear to take up a quantity of space and time and materiality in a way that colours don't. Yet both are constructs of our neurobiology. Hence why hue discrimination is what gets rolled out as the mystifying topic and not shape discrimination.

Touch, smell and taste are more "direct" than sight. — Banno

Why the scare quotes? Did you want to make the neurobiogical point here?

If perception is essentially indirect, and yet also pragmatic, then we have to defend that as a way of speaking in terms of some intelligible spectrum that covers both the more "direct" and the more "indirect" poles of this dialectic.

I have argued that this nuance is what your approach lacks. It doesn't even begin to recognise it. And when reminded of it, starts looking for reasons to look past it.

So far as we are addressing a philosophical question, it's not an issue of mere physiology. — Banno

So the Hard Problem is not thrown down as a challenge to the metaphysics of physicalism? You want to pretend that somehow idealism or epistemology in general are somehow "not philosophical topics"?

How much more bullshit do you intend to produce?

But showing that the word "red" is public, not private, does show that there is more to "red" than what has here been called "mental percepts". — Banno

And once again, my question to you. Why might this need to be shown for redness as a quality and not ballness?

As a space and time occupying shape, folk usually find it unproblematic that "the ball" refers to a real thing rather than a private qualia. But for "redness", they become all suddenly twisted about whether it is something that exists "out there" in the world, or something that exists "in here" within the privacy of their minds.

So something is up and your language games story doesn't generalise very well. But perhaps you might have a go at showing otherwise?

I'm not holding my breath of course. Time has taught me only to expect further evasion.

This question is at least in part about the use of the word "red". — Banno

But I just asked you to show how your answer on that applies consistently across the board in terms of perceptual discrimination and object recognition. Why for instance do people think redness speaks to a qualitative difference while roundness speaks to more a quantitative difference.

In their speech, people show that they find the redness of red some kind of deep puzzle – a Hard Problem – yet the ballness of balls is taken to be an Easy Problem. How is this accounted for in your language games approach ... or whatever your approach is meant to be.

I don't find folk being able to reliably hand you red objects or round objects a particularly enlightening fact here. It indeed seems quite irrelevant to the sense of mystification that OPs such as this express.

That is why I say first there is an actual issue. And second, the proper way to start deflating it is not to divert the discussion into the pragmatics of language use but to dig into the neurobiology that could show how hue discrimination is really just another tool in the armoury of shape perception. So if you have a problem with one, you would have to feel that it is equal to any problem you might have with the other.

It's the right start. You are only offering a cheap way to handwave the problem away.

But you have a chance to refute me by showing how folk ought to just shut up and be satisfied by having it pointed out to them they can reliably pick out red objects or round objects or whatever else gets asked for. Metaphysically, this is all there is to know on the matter.

By accident means 'for no reason'. There's the nub of the issue right there. — Wayfarer

Or no particular reason. It wasn't prevented. A fluctuation was possible.

How we understand "accident" is not as simple as you suggest.

But here, are you imputing intentionality, which is the specific attribute of organisms, to 'switches' and 'motors'? — Wayfarer

Switches and motors are only produced because they serve a purpose. Same with the enzymes and kinesins.

An actual light switch doesn't seem proto-intentional as clearly the lighting circuit, and the national power grid it is connected to, don't turn themselves on and off, let alone self-construct themselves as an entropic project of nature.

But enzymes and kinesins are functional little critters. They are embedded in the self-interested metabolic economy of an organism. It matters if they are "off or on". They only get built or degraded, deployed or withdrawn, to the degree they serve the purpose of the organism as a whole.

So that even despite your rejection of physicalist reductionism, you're still employing a reductionist model. You're denying or flattening out the distinction between the mineral and organic domains by imputing intentionality to chemistry. — Wayfarer

You have forgotten Pattee's epistemic cut and so have lost your bearings in this argument.

For example, a plant growing towards light exhibits a form of directed, goal-oriented behavior. His philosophy is teleological, meaning he believes that all living beings have inherent goals or purposes. — Wayfarer

Yep, that is all well and good. But then what is the mechanism? What mediates between the modelling and the world? Is this where he starts waving his hands?

In contrast, what I've gleaned from your posts is that life is treated as a model, — Wayfarer

You mean life embodies Rosen's modelling relation, or Peirce's semiosis? There is an epistemic cut that both separates and then connects in a fashion that allows an organism to build itself while degrading the world.

It is 'life seen from the outside', as it were. — Wayfarer

But it is only when we start to see life from the outside that we can start claiming to see life from the inside as well. If we can claim to stand outside its materiality, that is the modelling presumption – the Umwelt – that places us inside what we call "the realm of the mind".

And this dialectical claim only arises in humans once they have reached a linguistic and numeric level of semiosis. We become self-conscious as that has become the new structure of our world model.

We are now – mostly unconsciously – being shaped by our existence as socially constructed beings. The parts of the larger whole that is the human social organism doing its self-making entropic thing.

And to function as the individual parts of this new greater whole, we have to be objective about the fact of our own sentient existence so as to be able to place ourselves within the larger socialised subjective state that is our collective cultural Umwelt.

As subjects, we objectivise ourselves so as to function as the machinery of entropifying switches that becomes the epistemic cut upon which the collective consciousness of a tribe or civilisation becomes founded.

Philosophy, and existentialism in particular, is concerned with the living of life, rather than its objective description — Wayfarer

There you go. As an individual, you go to school and get suitably programmed for the function that society has in mind. Told who you "really are" and how you "ought to think and behave". So as to best serve the larger system that is now in charge of the entropy project in a way that appears to transcend the usual evolutionary and environmental limits.

Your complicity with "existentialism" is bringing about the opposite of what you imagine. You are objectivising yourself so as to fit the larger requirements of your society.

Or worse yet, learning just how to be a bad fit. Ending up both living in that society and feeling unhappy and confused about how its all panning out. :razz:

A pretty clear explanation, showing the underpinning assumption that there must be a "something" to which "red' refers. Why should this be so? Look to the use of the word, to pick out red pens and red faces. That's what counts. — Banno

Does talk about pens and faces refer to "somethings"? Does talk about circles and squares refer to "somethings"?

Can you run this argument in some way that is consistent across all examples of perceptual discriminations and object recognitions so that is sounds less like a closet idealist speaking, more like an actual pragmatist.

The language game approach fails to engage with what folk are actually interested in when it comes to perception. And so it fails to give them a better way to think about the cognitive realities of what are going on.

An enactive or ecological approach to perception speaks to what really matters. How mental experience is a modelling relation or Umwelt.

The account that works for the redness of red has to work just as well as that for the roundness of round, or the pencilness of pencils.

No one ever seems to have a problem with shape perception, yet they do with hue perception. If they can see how each ought to be equally troubling, and hence equally untroubling, then something has been achieved.

So show how your approach does that.

but I do not have found the explanation of how the epistemic cut and/or the 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place. — boundless

Why can’t it have appeared “by accident”? In the usual evolutionary fashion.

Reality is equally indeterminate at classical scales. — T Clark

It is of course everywhere scaled by h as a constant. But here on Earth, at its average 20 degrees, with its complex planetary materiality, you can say that the nanoscale is the effective semi-classical transition zone between the quantum and the classical.

Biophysicists and chip manufacturers have to take the quantum aspects of biology and electronic circuits seriously. Biologists and car manufacturers not so much.

There are other ways of looking at reality other than the classical Newtonian thermodynamic paradigm. I'm still surprised it has lasted for so long until the modern era. — Shawn

Relativity is also classical. Theories get quantum once they have to include Planck’s constant h in their mechanistic equations. That inserts the indeterminacy into the models.

I ask because if indeterminism is at hand and how intuition grapples with indeterminism, then are we at a limit of how to interpret nature? — Shawn

Indeterminism can be true and also merely relative. The full weirdness of "the quantum realm" is never observed, as at every point since the Big Bang, it has been thermally decohered to one degree or another. The weirdness has been constrained towards its classical limit by the Universe becoming a history of past thermal events.

The future is open. But only to the degree that its possibilities haven't already been dissipated in an asymptotically expanding and cooling void. Or what is called the growing block universe model of time.

So yes, indeterminism is a thing. Nonlocality is the new realism. But it is also pretty undramatic when it comes to our practical descriptions of Nature at the level which we typically experience it – the everyday scale of an ontology of "medium-sized dry goods". For all practical purposes, chairs and tables function like the fully determinate objects of classical physics and classical logic.

There is no crisis of contradicting paradigms. Reality runs its gamut from scales where the Cosmos is almost completely undetermined – as in the Big Bang – to scales where it is as thermally decohered and determinate for the difference not to matter a damn. In our everyday world with its everyday notions of causality.

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting". — Apustimelogist

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence".

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary — Apustimelogist

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist.

We aren't just born with the qualities of being a rationalising and abstracting self-aware beings equipped with a biographical past and an imaginable future. These are habits of thought shaped by social evolution and encoded in linguistic information. Or more latterly, numeric information as well.

The genetic constraints on human behaviour have become weak in proportion to the sociocultural constraints have taken over.

So that's a critical difference. Although it is also just more of the same in semiotic terms. It is still a story governed by the far more general ecological and environmental constraints of the world at large. We remain creatures exist by entropification. And evolutionary selection has the last say on our relative success at that.

P.S. I have a hunch that you might find interesting the Thermal interpretation by Arnold Neumaier. It is an 'ontologically interpretable' interpretation which apparently solves the measurement problem and other issues of other 'realist' interpretations — boundless

Forgot to say that Neumaier indeed argues the same position I take, down to the biosemiotic point about measurement being a matter of imposing metastable mechanical switches on larger patterns of thermal decoherence.

We impose a logic of yes/no on a reality that is always larger or vaguer than that classical binary state. And this is where the epistemic confusion arises. Why the idealists and realists believe they have some real argument going.

Sure. Confabulate away. Pretend that colour is covered by "language games" and there is no further mystery to be accounted for. One that deals with the neurobiology rather than the social construction.

That's a question about the way the word "red" is used. — Banno

So when you get into an argument with a dichromat and start insisting that what they call green is actually beige, does your personal preference for language games trump their neurodiversity?

Seems a little unwoke and culturally oppressive for you.

I am not suggesting that, say, a bacterium has a conscious 'purpose').
And IMO that 'something' is crucial. How these kinds of 'proto-intentionalities' appeared in the first places? — boundless

Even an enzyme is proto-intentional. A kinesin or any other molecular motor is proto-intentional. They exist to make things happen in preferred directions.

And intentionality is baked in at every level of structure. A worm has a mouth and sense organs at one end, an anus at the other. Its body plan is set up to plough through the dirt, eating as it goes.

You don’t have to look hard to see functionality in biology. It is there over all scales.

but I think that seeing mind (especially self-consciousness) as a relation structure/process is not enough to 'prove' physicalism so to speak. — boundless

As long as you talk about mind, consciousness, mentation, etc, you are already speaking in an idealist register. All those assumptions about res cogitans, about a mental stuff, about ineffable qualia, float along with you.

Semiotics tries to move us along to a more physically rooted view of life and mind as an informational structure/entropic process - the modelling relation. A kind of dualism if you like. But unmystical as it is closed for causality under its triadic connection.

One view fits traditional cultural practice. The other is grounded in science. You get to pick your side.

If we recognize that we are imperfect beings who sometimes make mistakes and inadequate choices, we can roll with challenges and mistakes more readily and improve our approach. — Tom Storm

Why should we frame ourselves in this fashion? Is it anything more than a way of thinking that grew out of the Enlightenment and its Romantic reaction? The modern moral economy.

How could we be actually "imperfect in our being", except as some over the top social judgement? Why do we have to be the one that changes to fit the norms rather than thinking strategically about how we can tip the social game-playing in our own favour?

So what I am saying is that you are just uncritically going along with this idea that it really is all on us as individuals to police our behaviour and strive to find that upright citizen apparently lost somewhere in our inner confusions and emotional turmoil.

This is certainly the game that modern society would like you to play. Socially, and nowadays economically. "If you suck at life, you need to pull yourself together and try a hell of a lot harder, sonny boy."

And how can you ever feel forgiven for failing if you are in fact being socially labelled as just innately "a failure"?

Of course, traditional societies can be far more constraining on the self even if everyone realises that they are just following the cultural norms. Putting on the required masks.

And the modern world can be lived in a guilt-free and openly negotiated fashion. If we live in families or societies that can own up to their mistakes and roll with them, then forgiveness gets easier in both directions.

It becomes the smoothly flowing economy of debts incurred and debts paid. Messages received and new attitudes promised on both sides of the equation.

Have you come across Rom Harre’s The Social Construction of Emotions or Catherine Lutz's Unnatural Emotions?

Lutz's study of the Ifaluk especially is a good illustration of how it is really a Western habit of thought to believe that the self-regulation of behaviour is an internal affair rather than an external negotiation carried out within the context of the collective "emotional economy".

You did something wrong and thereby incurred a debt, and then the debt was forgiven. That's forgiveness. — Leontiskos

:up: You bring out the essentially social dimension of this neatly.

The science exists - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987397/

The ecological question of whether it is better to be a dichromat or trichromat is a tricky balance. It is easy to delete or add a cone. And across the primate world, there is a shuttling back and forth that appears to boil down to a tale of small comparative advantages.

Perhaps you forage for food that it helps to spot from a distance, then more cones of the same type would help with the computational acuity. Or perhaps you forage for small berries that demand close work with nimble fingers. Then the extra colour pop of the trichromat is favoured as the option which provides more calories for less effort.

So questions about perception are best first addressed in ecological terms. What is a “mind” even for?

If there is anything “philosophical” left unaddressed after that, at least the discussion will be usefully focused. And not another re-run of idealism vs realism.

One has to wonder what the 8% of “colour blind” males make of this debate. Are they missing out on the glory of the red or green frequencies? Does it seem odd that red and green might just be about shared habits of speech? What can it mean that they can’t seem to see much of a difference between red and browny yellow or green and beige?

A philosophical discussion of colour perception - or better yet, hue discrimination - ought to start with a better understanding of the neurobiology involved. And the ecological relevance. Why hue discrimination even matters in an organism’s construction of its world, it’s Umwelt.

None of which is to deny the physics of colour. The scientistic view that "there is no colour in the world" is inept, failing to recognise that humans create and maintain a shared world of language and belief. — Banno

Somehow the neurobiology of perception has gone missing here. And some might think that the most salient part of the story. Curious.

The way I see it, as I said, living organisms, even the most basic ones, seem 'aware' of that they are distinct to their environment, that they are a 'whole', so to speak. Is there a 'global law' (spontaneous symmetry breaking) that describes the emergence of these 'individuals'? — boundless

The best “law” would be Pattee’s notion of the epistemic cut. It sets the divide down at the atomistic level of when a molecule becomes a message. It roots things in the logic of a mechanical switch that regulates an entropy flow for some organismic purpose.

https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html

Do you think that our mind is algorithmic? If not, how 'machine-like' entities can 'give rise' to a non-algorithmic mind shall have an explanation. I think that our mind are not algorithmic but I don't think that I can make a rationally compelling argument of this point. — boundless

Well it is algorithmic looking down at the neural circuit level. You have processing units like cortical columns. And then it is algorithmic looking at the socially constructed level where we are imposing some kind of rational and grammatical order on our thought patterns, especially when we are “civilised” and have internalised a whole variety of cultural rules and procedures. As in how to behave as a driver or at a formal banquet.

What is not actually algorithmic about any of this is that all the “computation” is about the end outcome of regulating some self-constructing entropy flow. We are turning matter into bodies. And that is not something you associate with computers. That is what makes us organisms and them machines. Or rather our tools, as computers only have use for us when they are woven into our general entropy regulation projects.

So being algorithmic or mechanical is a tricky issue. If we turn a natural river into a system of canals, irrigation ditches and water wheels, is that “algorithmic”?

It isn’t purely organic. But it does display the finality we expect from organismic purpose. The landscape has been shaped by a desire. And this was possible to the degree that an algorithmic form could be imposed in terms of a logic of entailment or a causality based on a mechanics of form.

A complex system of switches was imposed on the river. And that served a holistic entropy-harnessing purpose. This is the self-organising and self-sustaining kind of state of affairs that we would recognise as being organismic. It speaks to the presence of life and mind.

Do you think that a 'proto-proto-awareness' of sorts is there in anything else besides living organisms and biomolecules? — boundless

The mistake here is to speak of awareness as a stuff rather than a process. An inherent property of “mentation” rather than a relational structure that is semiotic. Mind as simply what it is like to be in a regulating modelling relation with the world.

Yeah. Conscious microtubules!

Give us a break.

You say that but I’m inherently distrustful of mechanistic metaphors past a certain point. — Wayfarer

Did you watch the video? A swarm of little machines? Surely that must give you pause. But if your distrust isn’t swayed by evidence….

Will read with interest — Wayfarer

On the particular point of “why”, think of it this way. Maths progresses as an inquiry by abstracting away constraints. The physical world develops as the series of topological phase transitions characterising the Big Bang by emergently adding new forms of constraint.

So they are the inverse of each other. What physics adds, maths subtracts. This is why each informs the other at a deep level … if folk are willing to talk across their academic divides.

Which is essentially what could be said about causality and entailment. There is a reason why we should seek the common root so as to understand the whole in better fashion.

But boundary policing is a favourite human pastime. If folk find a synergy between domains is possible, this is not just surprising but verging on “the unreasonable”. :grin:

it does suggest to me that the cosmos is more mind- than machine-like. — Wayfarer

Remember then that biosemiosis is in fact a surprising story of how machine like is the basis of life and mind. Semiosis is about how informational switches regulate entropic flows. And this is what we find right at the base level of biology where metabolism is no longer the cellular bag of chemical reactions it was in the 1970s. It is now a tale of nanoscale machinery.

But since then the “surprise” is how the physics has pushed the maths.

But over the past 30 years a new type of interaction has taken place, probably unique, in which physicists, exploring their new and still speculative theories,have stumbled across a whole range of mathematical “discoveries”. These are derived by physical intuition and heuristic arguments, which are beyond the reach, as yet, of mathematical rigour, but which have withstood the tests of time and alternative methods. There is great intellectual excitement in these mutual exchanges.

The impact of these discoveries on mathematics has been profound and widespread. Areas of mathematics such as topology and algebraic geometry, which lie at the heart of pure mathematics and appear very distant from the physics frontier, have been dramatically affected. The meaning of all this is unclear and one may be tempted to invert Wigner's comment and marvel at “the unreasonable effectiveness of physics in mathematics”.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2009.0227

How does this connect to Wittgenstein? — Ludwig V

The point about vagueness in relation to the constraints of nested hierarchies was the OP issue. It was also an accusation quickly thrown at Wittgenstein's general position as – following Russell – vagueness tends to get dismissed as merely missing information. If we dig down, the information could be found.

But from my perspective – based on Peirce, systems science and hierarchy theory – that grounding presumption is quite wrong. Precisification follows instead from sharpening the constraints that limit the scope of our uncertainty. The ground of pragamatic truth becomes this top-down process of limiting our scope to be wrong. The nested hierarchy story where order arises by a relation of subsumption rather than composition.

That deals with epistemic vagueness – the natural structure of our thoughts. We apply schemata to the world in pragmatic fashion. Every division we impose on the world splits it into categories – a dialectical divide being the most informational. But every such division is also grounded in some pragmatic agreement that we "don't have any reason to care" about the details or particulars beyond the arbitrary point where we "lose interest". There are still differences to be found, but they have become the differences that don't make a difference.

Is that a lion or a tiger you ask? It is in fact a liger, I reply. Oh, then is it not more tion looking than liger looking because its mane is quite pronounced and the stripes are quite faded?

Well, I could say, at this point, do either of us really have a reason to give a stuff? The exact ratio can be consigned to a logical vagueness as the truth value for all that we say doesn't particularly matter in that general epistemic fashion.

So in a debate about nested hierarchies as epistemic representations of logical relations, vagueness does change up the game. Russell and Wittgenstein were wrong in dismissing it on the grounds they did.

And then, more interestingly to me, is the continuation of this little logical escapade into metaphysics and ontology.

Perhaps there might really be a reason that Bohr, Heisenberg and other quantum pioneers were concerned with "unsharpness" rather than "uncertainty". Maybe they were already thinking more in terms of missing global constraints rather than missing local information in their speculation about how the world could behave in its fundamental quantum way.

See for example this paper on quantum vagueness....

In classical physics, which is known to describe correctly macroscopic objects (to a hitherto practically unlimited accuracy) when quantum effects are imperceptible, all magnitudes have a definite value at any given time that can in principle be simultaneously known with certainty at that moment by their measurement, even though they may not always then be predicted with certainty; for example, when the classical evolution is chaotic, or may be difficult to measure. Hence, vagueness is considered alien to classical physics.

In the case of microscopic entities to which Quantum Mechanics pertains, there is vagueness the origin of which is substantially different. Vagueness in quantum mechanics appears endemic, arising directly from the indeterminate nature of quantum entities themselves rather than a choice of concepts within a flexible theoretical framework. Indeed, in quantum physics spatial location can be almost entirely indeterminate, such as when the momentum is specified with extremely high precision, say in the case of a free electron.

Unlike the situation of macroscopic entities with vague geographical characteristics, it is not the case that the concept electron is overdetermined in the sense that the criteria for it to have a unique spatial location—or for that matter, for it to be spatially dispersed—cannot be satisfied in principle; nor is the concept of electron underdetermined in the sense that the definitions of its physical properties are insufficiently precise.

In the case of quantum systems, properties can be considered objectively indefinite and sets of propositions regarding them complementary to specific other sets of propositions, so that it becomes impossible to jointly attribute them. Thus, quantum mechanics involves a unique form of vagueness distinct from those considered before.

As to why this is so effective, that seems to be the source of some bafflement — Wayfarer

Well yes. Until you start to understand the physics of dissipative structure and topological order. The physics of symmetry breaking and emergence. Then it is maths of “that type” which is what is effective, for perfectly natural and unbaffling reasons.

It is all about the holistic constraints that form can impose on matter. Poincaré symmetry imposes its structure on what can even be the case as a relativist spacetime manifold. Gauge symmetry - the Lie algebra story - then does the same thing to produce the particle physics of quantum field theory.

So it is only maths of a particular type. A maths that speaks to the mathematical necessity of topological emergence. There are only certain geometries that Nature could even arrive at as it shakes itself down into its fundamental patterns.

Wigner and Dirac were leaders in just going with that kind of maths even before they could really understand how far it would lead.

It was crazy effective. But not actually baffling anymore.

But on the semiotic and enactivist view, it's really not so baffling, as the structure of experience is in some fundamental respect also the structure of 'the world'. — Wayfarer

But pansemiosis is not biosemiosis as I have been at pains to explain. So really, Poincaré and Lie algebra have little application to the way organisms are self-organised. The maths that is crazy effective there is Bayesian probability perhaps. The maths of predictive modelling. Or the maths of hierarchy theory if we want a more general metaphysical frame that does show some deeper unity between the physics of dissipative structure and the biosemiotics of the modeling relation.

So, according to him, even the most simple physical objects have a 'mental aspect' so to speak, a very very rudimental ability to 'read' information and meaning, so to speak — boundless

Yep. Once you are stuck with the Cartesian metaphysical division into a mind stuff vs a world stuff, then this kind of wooly Panpsychism is where you must logically end up. It is built into the premises. You can’t think your way beyond the casual trap you have prepared for yourself.

Semiosis or systems thinking is just different. The world is divided at best into an entropic process and an informational process. You have a material world of dissipative structure organised by its emergent topological order. And you have a semiotic world of organisms in an enactive modelling relation with that material world, organised by its Umwelt that is what you would call a first person point of view of a third person version of “the world”.

Our mind is the model of the world as it would be from the point of view as it would be with us acting in it. The modelling relation is anticipatory. When you turn your head, you know it is you that is turning and not the world that is spinning, because your motor commands are fed into your sensory experience in a way to subtract your voluntary motion from your sense of what is happening “out there” in the world.

A first person vs third person contrast is what must arise for the modeling of the world to even function. This is the enactive or embodied argument. This is the trick that is generic to any notion of sentience or intelligent in an organism. Does it subtract its own actions in a way that makes “objective” the state of the world as it is sensed beyond. This is the basic semiotic algorithm that defines an organism with some kind of mind, some level of mentality.

Now one can speak of the physical world as if it is particles reading information. There are versions of pansemiosis where physics is treated as particles in a sign relation with their world as well.

But this is as best metaphoric. Not much maths in it. And really not an explanation in any theoretical sense. More a comforting fairy tale. A way not to be “reductionist”. A placeholder for a better worked out holist account.

However as I argued, biosemiosis now clears up the life and mind side of the equation, leaving the dissipative structure and topological order side much more plainly seen. The new holistic view of fundamental physics. The cosmological view that has to be fundamental as after all, it is all about dissipative structure if reality is that trajectory from a Big Bang to a Heat Death.

And this new semiotic view of reality is mathematically grounded in a statistical mechanics. We actually have a connection between semiosis as modelling and semiosis as dissipation as information theory is reciprocally related to entropy theory. Entropy is missing information. Information is absent entropy.

So both same yet different in a complementary or dichotomistic fashion. Physics puts all the information that specifies a physical system into its holographic boundary. Organisms then do the opposite thing of bringing all its self-regulating information inside its own boundaries as the information it encodes or remembers. Some collection of entropy controlling habits or routines.

Friston’s Bayesian Brain now takes this to the point where the predictive world modelling is expressed in dissipative structure terms and as the differential equations of a new Bayesian mechanics. The semiotic approach has become mathematically formalised as a theory both in terms of life/mind and also - in the de Sitter holographic view - in cosmology.

And why this isn’t widely understood is baffling. It can only be that dyadic Cartesianism still rules the cultural imagination at large. Along with the monisms of realism and idealism as the two ways to reduce what the Cartesian divide has left separated and competing for our social affiliation.

Meanwhile on the other historical track is the holistic metaphysical tradition that saw some kind of triadic relation as being foundational. The threeness that is a dialectical unity of opposites or the substantial being arising out of the hylomorphic pincer movement of material potential and necessitating form.

This way of thought became Peircean semiotics, systems science, hierarchy theory and far from equilbrium thermodynamics. It has gained its mathematical expressions. Yet it is still on the outside looking in as far as the limits of the cultural imagination goes.

It ain’t reflected in our popular notions of causality or logic. It indeed rouses great hostility from defenders of the Cartesian divide, too absorbed in their own ritualistic battles of idealist vs realists and not wanting to start all over having to learn a perspective that is both entirely new and also irreducibly complex. :smile:

But I'm not sure that "graded" necessarily implies "relativities". The colour spectrum is a series of graded stages in a continuum, all of which is, in a sense, deterministic (definite). — Ludwig V

Not a good example because colour vision is the outcome of three real cones and one virtual one that are dialectically structured into two opponent channel processes. And then mixed further with luminance information.

If we just stuck with the simplicity of luminance – the spectrum between white and black (as in the sun when it is out shining or hidden behind the horizon), then we can see how that becomes the middle ground of any number of shades of grey we find worth specifying.

And now if you want to add back hue, it could be all the reds from whitest pink to blackest scarlet. Or the same for green and blue.

This doesn't convey any clear meaning to me. Perhaps I'm just being dense. — Ludwig V

Its systems science. A system is the hierarchical story of top-down constraints shaping local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees in turn acting bottom-up to (re)construct the globally prevailing state of constraint. So in Peircean jargon, the continuity of global lawful synechism and the discreteness of local tychism or chance events.

Chance and necessity, flux and stasis, are various ways of saying the same thing, capturing the same systems logic, that should be familiar from Greek metaphysics.

Let's say that 'ontological idealism' means that fundamental reality is mental and every other kind of 'realities' are dependent on that ultimate reality. — boundless

No. I was making an argument completely in a realist register there. No "mind stuff" or "qualia" at all. Our cognition has a physically real structure (or physically realised structure), just as the world has a physical structure too. And the semiotic point is that the cognitive structure is an embodied modelling relation which has the general purpose of regulating an organism's extended environment.

What we "experience" is not a re-presentation of reality, nor some epiphenomenal illusion, but a semiotic Umwelt. Which is what it feels like to be in the flow of living a life from a self-ish point of view.

This is a structuralist metaphysics that stands opposed to the usual materialist story. And it is thus – according to semiotic theory – an irreducibly triadic story, not the usual tale of some fundamental or monistic "stuff".

The triadic relation is the fundamental reality. And while it is easy to talk in a phenomenological register about the mind as being its own separate realm of experience or qualia, we know even from neuroscience that there is no structured experience without our brains being in interaction with an already structured world.

In a sensory deprivation chamber, we soon loose any normal sense of being in a body, and even being in a normal flow of thought. Just to see the world in a stable fashion, we need to jitter our eyeballs and keep "surprising" the photoreceptors with the fact that the boring backdrop that was there an instant ago is still there – and remains ignorable – right now.

So my argument starts from an enactive cognition perspective. There is a brain in a modelling relation with a world, and so already we are talking about the reality of a functional, physically-embodied, process.

After that, in talking about our intellectual modelling of causality and logic, we can assign each to its "realm" in the fashion of the good old Cartesian mind~world divide. This is the conventional socially-constructed way of looking at things which of course was the basis for how humans even added self-awareness, "freewill", complex feelings, and all the rest as sociocultural habits of cognition.

Breaking things into mind and world is physically incorrect (a cognitive neuroscientist would say), but it is also the cultural convention which turns a smart ape into a self-actualising human being.

Sorry, that is a lot of complexity. But it goes to the stress I lay on there being not just a triadic semiotic modelling relation in play, but with the physical reality of life and mind, this dynamic plays out at four key levels of semiotic mechanism – genes, neurons, words and numbers. So in terms of causality vs entailment, I was making a case of how this applies semiotically at the level of human sociocultural organisation once it has become a talk at the level of "pure abstraction" – a symbolism of number systems.

I ask you this because, unless your view is a sort of 'panpsychism' it should be called 'realism' as defined above. — boundless

After my explanation, you can see I am definitely neither arguing for a monistic, nor dyadic, version of panpsychism. But also I am not arguing for a conventional realism.

I wasn't trying to argue a general case at all, just saying something about how – after the ancient Greek "mathematical turn" – logic and causality became their own divergent academic domains. That can be simply described as scholarly convenience. It could be construed as causality speaking to the experiment-restricted physics and entailment speaking to the Platonically soaring maths.

However if you want the full Peircean semiotic position, that says we know life and mind to be biosemiotic. That is just everyday psychology and biology now. It is grounded in biophysics and gives us a consistent account of the structure of human relations with the world through all its four levels of semiotic mechanism.

Controversially on PF, that means all of the humanities fall under the domain of biosemiosis as a general science of meaningful thought and behaviour.

And then also speculatively and controversially, one can go with Peirce and wonder about pansemiosis as a metaphysics of reality in general. The same triadic relational structure could account for the deep causality of the Cosmos as a whole. The Big Bang Universe becomes Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness". The emergence of hierarchical or topological order from out of a "quantum foam".

You say you did condensed matter physics? Dissipative structure can be seen as this pansemiotic thesis now being realised in physicalist theory.

Peirce's position was that what works as a structure of phenomenology – the givenness of our experience – should work as the structure of logic as the refined product of how we find ourselves thinking and feeling and reasoning. So the first step is from our psychology to our logic.

Then the second step is finding that the world beyond is also structured by the logic that we found in our minds. It too has a causality that is a process of reason – or at least triadically structured in some meaningful way.

Of course Peirce didn't know about genes and so had no concrete model of how there could be an actual machinery of semiosis. So that meant he got a little woo in treating mind and cosmos as being a little too literally the same. But the Universe, as a dissipative structure, lacks an encoding machinery. We only kind of imagine that as the case in now talking about holographic spacetime boundaries and suchlike. A useful metaphor with calculable consequences.

Biosemiosis has since come along to make that difference clear. And that also sparked the conversation about pansemiosis as now being covered by dissipative structure theory.

So it is all a concrete realist project. But one that hopes to ground the sciences of life and mind in the sciences of physics and chemistry, with now an "epistemic cut" to glue the two sides of the divide, and so get rid of the tired old "Cartesian gap".

This is why I take my pragmatist approach in this thread. Logic and causality are both modelling constructs so come from the same place – human matheo-semiosis. They are taken to speak to a Cartesian divided reality, but we should expect them to be pragmatically related by the triadicism of the semiotic modeling relation.

If one seems to deal in entropic relations, the other in informational relations, then well, this is just what a biosemiotician would expect. A biosemiotic story is all about how this division is actually necessary to get to the next thing of its fruitful interaction which is the "living and mindful" point.

I am not saying that your view is wrong but IMO grounding logic in an uncertain knowledge doesn't seem a real 'grounding'. — boundless

Isn't this like being nervous of riding a bicycle as its obviously unstable and only going to get more dangerous the faster you pedal?

A tripod is a firmer base than a single point of contact, no? So just think of how soundly based pragmatism seems when compared to the instability of the folk flipping between whether maths is a free construction or a Platonic truth. Trying to balance the pencil on it tip and wondering why it always falls.

Or another metaphor, calling for a grounding does the very opposite as we find with the "tower of turtles" infinite regress. If we try to find solid ground, it immediately drops endlessly away.

The triadic hierarchical approach instead grounds in the pragmatism of the dialectic. The middle ground is that which is bounded both looking up and looking down.

Looking down, the middle ground dissolves into a blur of smallness. A random jitter of events that just smooths over into one kind of continuum. And likewise, looking up and any differences swell until just one "difference" so completely fills our vision, like the sky, that it becomes a global continuum to match the local one.

So our middle ground is secured by the closure of being the meat in a sandwich of complementary limits. Or in the parlance of cosmology, a de Sitter conformal universe. A global container specified by general relativity with a local contents specified by quantum field theory.

So your instinct is to demand a reduction to a single monistic ground. The Peircean counter-argument is that reality is a hierarchical structure of relations, and that makes it irreducibly triadic.

Reality doesn't come stacked up on an infinite tower of turtles. It instead is a structure of relations that exists by growing in de Sitter fashion. It expands and cools, doubles and halves, in geometric fashion until – as far as any middle-grounders living at the classical scale of medium-sized dry goods knows – any quantum small and hotness dissolves into a lower bound blur, while any relativistic difference smooths over into the large and coldness of a cosmic event horizon. The de Sitter Heat Death void as it becomes at the effective end of time. The ultimate largeness that stretches way past the edges of our merely middle ground scale of view.

If 'semiotic modelling' - I am wrong to call it 'mentation'? - has only been working since a certain point of this universe history, doesn't it lead us to an emergentist view? — boundless

Again, there are two conversations. The first is that life and mind are now explained by the causality/logic of biosemiosis. It is a conventional view in the relevant sciences. We can talk about its mineral beginnings in warm ocean floor sea vents where you had a natural starting point of alkaline vent mixing with acid ocean and setting up a proton gradient across thin vent walls suitably laced with the chemical "enzymes" to start producing complex amino acid crud.

The second is pansemiosis – just dissipative structure before informational mechanism started getting its hands on it. So that covers everything out to the Big Bang as the foundational dissipative event. A hylomorphic mix of its energy potential or quantum indeterminism and the symmetry structures that Platonically lay in wait to shape it topological transformations.

BTW, are you familiar to the late Bohm views on 'active information'. I think that you would find them akin to yours. — boundless

Sort of the same. Everyone is feeling the same elephant once they get fed up enough with reductionism.

There's a rather awkward neologism I've heard several times of late, 'transjective — Wayfarer

Thanks for the pointer to John
Vervaeke. If you skim this review article, you can see he talks about all the same stuff as me. Modelling relations, anticipatory models, enactive cognition. So sits pretty squarely in what has now become the mainstream paradigm of cognitive science.

Vervaeke coins a few of his own terms. All academics have to brand themselves as adding something to the debate.

If I were criticising, I would say he would do better if he could root his general cognitive story in the nitty gritty of the brain's functional anatomy. Close the gap between the psychology and the neurology.

But generally his published papers are coming from the same place.