If you want to study self-organisation more formally, SO in physics is best approached through dissipative structure theory, as part of thermodynamics. SO as life and mind is best described by biosemiosis.

In physics, we can say that the information that organises material structure is just its globally emergent constraints. That is how mechanics can break it down into a description of initial conditions and boundary conditions.

In biology, the information then becomes something that is represented within an internalised modelling relation. An organism has codes to store the constraints that then bound the dissipative structure which is its body feeding off a world.

So in general, self organisation is hierarchical order. The holism of global constraints acting on local possibility. A tornado self organises as a vortex feeding off a temperature gradient. The information representing that structure is in the world as its local initial conditions and global boundary conditions.

But a wombat is an organism, with a properly informational approach to organising its entropy transactions. It can store its own information using genetic and neural codes. It has a predictive internal model of the states of organisation it want to achieve and maintain.

The difference is qualitative as it isn’t just a higher density of information. It is information in the sense of a Bayesian model of the organism operating in its world.

Thermodynamics is a concept in physics. However, physics is not suitable for describing living systems. Because life follows other organizational principles than inanimate nature. Life is self-sustaining through autocatalysis.
Physical descriptions, even if intended ontologically, do not capture the specificity of life.
And it's not just about self-organization, but about how this is 'controlled'. The structural density I'm talking about is, so to speak, the inner core of life. Various attributes are ascribed to it, soul, I, spirit or - as I said - (free) will.

However, physics is not suitable for describing living systems. — Wolfgang

Of course it is, although it's not enough by itself. As @apokrisis notes, the "other organizational principles than inanimate nature" you refer to have to do with the interactions of constraints from above and below. Life has to work thermodynamically or it doesn't work at all. Every discussion of abiogenesis I've read gets down to thermodynamics eventually.

With his dissipative structures, Prigogine further developed thermodynamics and formulated an ontological principle. But if you want to understand life 'from the inside', this is not enough. Thermodynamics does not explain that autocatalytic process, nor does it explain the steering and control instance that life implies.
Dead matter is passive, living matter is active. This is something completely different. The question of why I don't go for a walk but read a book can only be described with thermodynamics on a very general and abstract level that doesn't really understand the specifics.

Because life follows other organizational principles than inanimate nature. — Wolfgang

Yes. And you will note that I pointed you towards the two bodies of theory that deal with these two different, yet also connected, stories on self-organisation.

You are hand-waving when the actual specifics are readily available.

If you want to study self-organisation more formally, SO in physics is best approached through dissipative structure theory, as part of thermodynamics. SO as life and mind is best described by biosemiosis. — apokrisis

Wolfgang seems to be talking about "self-organization" in a cosmic sense, to raise the question of how living creatures could be assembled out of non-living matter. He attributes that creative & organizing ability to the "four fundamental forces that govern the universe"*1. He didn't itemize those forces, but I assume he's referring to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Those binding & repelling forces certainly have something to do with organization of matter into aggregations, but exactly how lumping & clumping results in the holistic function we call Life remains unclear.

A different life-force was recently proposed by an MIT physicist*2, but it does just the opposite of aggregating & organizing compulsions. Instead of those clumping forces, he postulates that unbinding & dis-organizing Entropy may have a role in releasing Life from bondage to lumps of matter. "Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place" Apparently, Life emerges on the cusp between rigid order and random disorder, in "dissipative structures" that exist "far from equilibrium".

As you noted, another recent approach to the Life question is Biosemiosis (biology + semiotics ; lit. life-signs). This theory proposes that organisms exchange information via "pre-lingustic" signs & symbols. It assumes that some kind of Information carriers, like symbols or codes, exist in cellular biology. And DNA is one such corporeal repository of information that seems to be encoded with algorithms to organize proteins into forms that are suitable for animation. But it omits the Frankenstein lightning-bolt jolt that magically completes the circuit to animate dead flesh --- as-if raw energy was enough to do the job. If you describe that encoded matter as "Enformed Energy" though, you combine the jolt with the data.

That's why I prefer to go back to the beginning of the whole shebang, in search of the Life-source. It's what I call, in various contexts, "Primordial Energy" or "enforming energy" or "Causal Information" or "EnFormAction". That's not a physical substance, but merely a meta-physical (not-yet-physical) Potential. As we know, a complete electrical circuit does nothing until it is charged with electric Potential --- which again is not a substance, but a statistical tendency in a particular causal direction. I can't produce tangible evidence for such a Potential to Enform, but merely philosophical conjectures, analogies & metaphors. Yet a few avant-garde scientists have been expanding on Shannon's inert Information Theory --- e.g. dynamic or causal EnFormAction --- in order to explain such scientific & philosophical mysteries as Life & Mind.

In physicist Paul Davies 1989 book, The Cosmic Blueprint, he says "a completely new view of nature is emerging which recognizes that many phenomena fall outside the conventional framework". Yet he discusses several conventional candidates for causing self-organization. "The simplest type of self-organization in physics is a phase transition". Indeed a change of physical phase is an instance of almost instantaneous re-organization of a substance, such as H2O to water to gas to ice. And it might serve as a model for phase transition from protein cell to living organism to thinking thing. But by itself, it omits the enlivening force that causes such a major organizational leap.

Davies discusses many of the items considered by previous theories : fundamental forces, dissipative forces, cellular codes, and such. But he finally comes down to one key feature of those candidates : Disequilibrium*3, which is not a physical thing, but a relationship between things. We find that causal imbalance in all kinds of changes & transitions from Thermodynamics to Information Asymmetry. In my thesis I sometimes call that state of precarious tipping-point Potential : Platonic First Cause or Aristotelian Prime Mover. But in more technical terms, it could be called "Primordial Energy", or "Vacuum Energy", or simply "the generic power to transform & enform". :smile:


*1. The Four Fundamental Forces :
They understand that there are four fundamental forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces — that are responsible for shaping the universe we inhabit.
https://universe.nasa.gov/universe/forces/

*2. A New Physics Theory of Life :
An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

*3. Davies on Self Organization :
"Disequilibrium, claims Prigogine, ‘is the source of order’ in the universe; it brings ‘order out of chaos’."
https://sciphilos.info/docs_pages/docs_Davies_selforgan_css.html

but exactly how lumping & clumping results in the holistic function we call Life remains unclear. — Gnomon

Bollocks. Biophysics speaks directly to the issue.

A different life-force was recently proposed by an MIT physicist*2, but it does just the opposite of aggregating & organizing compulsions. — Gnomon

Right. He is talking about physical SO as dissipative structure. Just talking about it as if it is something he recently discovered. :rofl:

And you then add the woo of calling it a “life force” rather than an entropic principle. :roll:

The question that can be asked of biological life is why does life move on its own and why does it do so in a structured manner.
Two possible answers are conceivable, each of which can be assigned to an epistemic-methodological direction:
1. The complexity of life is simply the assemblage of elements working together according to physical rules. Your collaboration is always traceable back to the individual elements. The fact that life behaves 'sensibly' in the sense that it is capable of surviving is due to the selection of random mutations.
2. Individual elements combine to form complex structures that each work differently than is justified by the properties of the individual elements. Each level of complexity yields new traits after passing through regime-changing tipping points. While physical laws are sufficient to describe 1., new categories are needed to describe 2., namely biological and biological laws that are not already expressed by physical laws.
If, for example, thermodynamics is used to describe physical processes, it must be transformed into biological categories for 2. Example: a trajectory is then not a point towards which the physical system runs, but the point itself is a biological reaction center with high information density (in the sense of structure density) that is constantly changing.
To what extent a description with physical terms makes sense here, even if they have been transformed, remains to be seen. In any case, they are no longer the original terms of thermodynamics.

You'll want to read this to get up to speed on what apokrisis is referring to (but it's also a worthwhile study in its own right. Apokrisis is or was a student of Howard Pattee who is mentioned in the first paragraph.)

I think Pattee is connecting conceptual worlds here that have nothing to do with each other. When we speak of the genetic code, we mean that nature has developed a system from which certain things emerge. Because we don't know exactly what's going on, we call it code. It is not really a code in the information-theoretic sense, because there is neither a sender nor a receiver.
It is completely different in the cultural area. There, for example, a certain social meaning is encoded in the four letters of the word love. There is a sender here, namely society, and a receiver, namely the individual.
In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. Nature knows no meanings and therefore no semiotics. Nor does it know any information, by the way. Therefore, when I use the term information, I always add that it is actually structure. Because the term information leads to the same misunderstandings as those contained in the term biosemiotics.

In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. — Wolfgang

This is precisely the issue that I have with this paragraph in your opening post:

A functioning organization is something that works according to certain rules, and those rules are made by someone in, say, a social organization. If we assume that there is nothing and no one who has developed rules for life, then it must be life itself that has developed these rules.
In addition to these rules, there must of course be an authority that monitors compliance with the rules and corrects them if necessary. — Wolfgang

Quite apart from the merits of the theory that you sketch further on, the problem here is that you run with the anthropomorphic metaphor without pausing to question its applicability out of its social context.

Must there be "an authority that monitors compliance"? That's not quite true even in human societies, where social rules, most of which are informal, are largely heeded out of habit and good will stemming from mutual interest, without needing any active control and enforcement. In any case, there is no prima facie reason to extend the metaphor of social organization to systems other than human societies. In the end, you may even be right to do so, but to get to that point requires a good deal of reflection. You cannot just assume that the metaphor applies based on suggestive language alone.

Bollocks. Biophysics speaks directly to the issue. — apokrisis

Your snarky responses sound like you think Enformationism is contradictory to Biosemiotics or to Biophysics*1. But in my thesis & blog, I have referred to Biosemiosis*2 as an example of a possible information-processing mechanism in living organisms. The primary difference is that BS & BP are hypothetical mechanisms in Biology, while EnFormAction is a hypothetical organizing (enforming) process in Cosmology. So, although both are science-related philosophical theories, they are not competing against each other.

One of my favorite scientists (evolutionary biology + neuroscience), Terrence Deacon, has contributed several novel ideas that I adopted in my own philosophical theories. And he had this to say about Semotics*3 : In this essay, I argue that we ultimately need to re-ground biosemiotic theory on natural science principles and abandon the analogy with human level semiotics, except as this provides clues for guiding analysis. But, to overcome the implicit dualism still firmly entrenched in the biological sciences requires a third approach that is neither phenomenologically motivated nor based on a code analogy. Deacon apparently sees "implicit dualism" in Semiotics, whereas Enformationism postulates an Information-based Monism/Holism.

The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle*4, notes that, although Biosemiotic philosophy has been around for decades, it has not yet been generally accepted by empirical Biologists. The amateur Enformationism thesis has only been online for about 15 years, and it has not yet been accepted by professional Philosophers or Scientists. Yet, we slog on, pushing our little pet theories on an inconsequential forum of ideas.

The relevant question for Cosmology may not be amenable to empirical evidence. So we may have to get by with theoretical conjectures. Life is a late emergence in the 14 billion years of physical evolution. And materialistic physics has no place for minds & meanings. But biological beings seem to possess the non-physical quality of Agency (goal-setting & pursuing). So where did the cyphers for such emergent behaviors come from? Was the program for Life & Mind encoded in the original Singularity, or did such immaterial phenomena arise spontaneously from the Laws of Physics? If so, whence the pre-bang Laws for limiting & organizing physical evolution : innate or encoded? :smile:


*1. Biophysics : Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ___Wikipedia

*2. Biosemiosis : Life Codes
Biology = empirical science of living matter
Semiotics = theoretical philosophy of linguistic analogies to explain how Life emerges from matter
BioSemiotics = Biology + Phenomenology
Enformationism = theoretical philosophy of cosmology to explain how Life & Mind emerge from matter, due to cosmic causes that are essentially Design (organizing) Information encoded into Causal Energy (EnFormAction). The process of Causation is traced back to a First Cause that precipitated the Big Bang. It's just a theory.

*3. Steps to a science of Biosemiotics :
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281155120_Steps_to_a_science_of_biosemiotics

*4. The Status Of Biosemiotics :
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Biosemiotics/status_report.html

One of my favorite scientists (evolutionary biology + neuroscience), Terrence Deacon, has contributed several novel ideas that I adopted in my own philosophical theories. — Gnomon

Deacon is very competent. But he also has been busily reinventing what already exists in terms of the biosemiotics + dissipative structure space of the structuralist/systems science tradition.

The primary difference is that BS & BP are hypothetical mechanisms in Biology, while EnFormAction is a hypothetical organizing (enforming) process in Cosmology. So, although both are science-related philosophical theories, they are not competing against each other. — Gnomon

That is inaccurate.

Biosemiosis is based on the physics of dissipative structure. And dissipative structure is also the basis of cosmology. The Big Bang theory describes the Universe as a cooling-expanding structure of dissipation - a system falling into the very heat sink it is making.

So the big claim now is that it is not just thermodynamics in general that is the basis of everything. It is the specific thing of open-ended dissipative structure. And the Universe is pansemiotically a dissipative structure. The information that forms its constraints is to be found in its lightcone holographic structure. This is what the decoherence model of quantum mechanics argues. It is what you get when you add statistical mechanics to QM to create a description of a cosmos that is cooling because it is expanding, and expanding because it is cooling. Falling into its own heat sink, in short.

So the physical universe can be described in informational/entropic language. It just embodies a thermal structure doing its grand developmental thing.

Then along came life and mind as ways to use semiotic codes to organise this physical world. Genes and neurons, eventually words and numbers.

This was something new in that the information or negentropy could be stored inside an organism with a memory. It was no longer something holographically built into the lightcone structure of the Universe itself - and so as fleeting and dynamical as it gets - but instead information in the new sense of being bits stored in a model of the physical world. Life and mind could stand outside the world they modelled by being able to hide the physical informational configurations safe inside their own bodies.

It is still all about a fundamental basis in thermodynamics and dissipative structure. Life and mind pay their way in the Universe by using their stored negentropy as the intelligence that breaks down environmental stores of energy. Photosynthesis and respiration allows biology to tap sunshine and chemistry and so accelerate the cosmic entropification rate a fraction or two above what it would otherwise be if there was no planetary biofilm and just naked radiation falling on bare earth and lifeless oceans.

But this biosemiosis is obviously different in that it is an organismic kind of dissipative structure. It is dissipation plus intelligence. It is dissipation plus Bayesian reasoning and forward modelling.

A tornado is pretty lifelike in many ways. Almost wilful how it touches down and then weaves across the countryside gobbling up the warm air that sustains its vortex. But clearly it lacks actual semiotics in the sense of working off a model of its organismic self in relation to its sustaining material environment.

So reality as a whole - the entire shebang from cosmology to consciousness - can be modelled in the fundamental coin of thermodynamic theory. That is why information-entropy has become the basic metric employed by physical and mental theories. It is used in quantum theory. It is also used in Bayesian Brain theory.

But then there is this sly twist that separates thermodynamics from the purely physical or pansemiotic view, and thermodynamics with the added thing of a code, and hence an organismic modelling relation of a Iiving and mindful being with its entropic environment.

Biosemiotics still founds itself on information-entropy as the basic metric. But it then has to create suitably complex versions of these things to reflect the addition of the organismic modelling relation.

For example, entropy is understood in derived terms like free energy or exergy - the raw capacity to extract work from entropy production. Or from the informational point of view, the derived units become surprisal, ascendancy, mutual information, or whatever else speaks to the sense of meaning and significance that decides what information gets remembered and stored as habits of behaviour/models of the world.

So my point is that there is a general theory of everything emerging within science that is coming from this new holist perspective. It is about information and entropy at the naked physical level, and then uses suitably derived units to bridge the organismic gap and so allow us to model biological, neurological, sociological and technological levels of living/mindful dissipative structures.

The issues involved are precisely defined. My complaint about your enformationalism is that it lacks any such clarity in its mission. You might think you are groping the same elephant. But now there is a roomful of folk hard at work. And they found the light switch to see what they are doing.

You may cite a lot of these people. But you also claim to be offering philosophical originality. From my point of view, the genre you are working in is at best fan fiction.

Biosemiosis is based on the physics of dissipative structure. And dissipative structure is also the basis of cosmology. — apokrisis

You are talking about Physics, while I'm talking about Philosophy --- on a philosophy forum. That may be why we are not communicating. Physical Cosmology and Philosophical Cosmology are two sides of the same coin*1. But apparently you are not seeing my side : the non-physical metaphysical mental half of the universe that is meaningful only to rational philosophical animals, who think about ideas that are not physical things. :smile:

*1. Philosophy of Cosmology :
Cosmology deals with the physical situation that is the context in the large for human existence: the universe has such a nature that our life is possible. This means that although it is a physical science, it is of particular importance in terms of its implications for human life. . . . As recently as 1960, cosmology was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy. It has transitioned to an extremely active area of mainstream physics and astronomy,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology/

self organisation is probabilistic inevitability in a system where there is "free chaos" where certain states confer greater or less stability to themselves and other states and thus entangle and become cooperatively mutually regulated. That stability within a chaotic system comes primarily from the ability to create cycles - "replication" as replicating the same conditions over and over again (circularity of conditions) within a finite extremes is a stability within a larger set of instabilities. Those cycles can then serve as a stage for further smaller cycles of various kinds to emerge and become stable. These are naturally selected ofc.

But apparently you are not seeing my side : the non-physical metaphysical mental half of the universe that is meaningful only to rational philosophical animals, who think about ideas that are not physical things. — Gnomon

You tell yourself whatever gives you comfort. But I will continue calling bullshit on your conflationary arguments about "information".

But if you want to understand life 'from the inside', this is not enough. Thermodynamics does not explain that autocatalytic process, nor does it explain the steering and control instance that life implies. — Wolfgang

I've discovered that any attempt to explain this to apokrisis, who retracts into a shell of denial accompanied by random ad hominem attacks, is pointless.

This is the deficiency of systems theory. Boundaries are used to distinguish what is part of the system from what is not part of the system. But there are no principles to distinguish a spatially external boundary from a spatial internal boundary, so anything which is not part of the system is generally understood as, "outside the system", or spatially external. A proper understand requires distinguishing between what is not part of the system by being across an internal boundary, from what is not part of the system by being across an external boundary.

You'll want to read this to get up to speed on what apokrisis is referring to (but it's also a worthwhile study in its own right. Apokrisis is or was a student of Howard Pattee who is mentioned in the first paragraph.) — Wayfarer

Apokrisis has directed me to enough material for me to see that Pattee's theory is hugely deficient. Interpretation of signs, or symbols, to decipher meaning, requires an agent which does the interpreting. The agent interprets through what is loosely represented in language and communication theory (Wittgenstein for example) as "rules", conventions, or something like that. Pattee provides no separation between the signs and the reader of the signs (interpreter), to allow for the separate existence of such "rules" of interpretation.

When I asked apokrisis about where the rules for interpretation of meaning might exist in Pattee's theory, the reply was that the rules for interpretation exist within the sign itself. What was implied is that the sign itself (code or whatever you want to call it) consists of all three elements, symbol, agent (interpreter), and rules for interpretation, such that the sign self-reads, and self-interprets.

Obviously, this is a false representation because it leaves no room for error, and error we see as paramount in the existence of evolution. "Error" is better understood here as subjectivity in interpretation. This is because "error" implies wrong, or incorrect, when we assume that there is a "normal way" which is supposed to be the correct way. And, the "normal way" is supported by statistics as the common way, but it is also generalized in order to produce those statistics, so as to ignore all sorts of differences (subjectivities) which don't make a difference to the purpose at hand . The idea that the common way or normal way is the "correct" way is produced by an illusion that the statistics produce an objective truth as to how the symbol ought to be interpreted. Therefore anything outside the statistical norm is seen as an "error" in interpretation.

Such error, what I would prefer to call "subjectivity", is made impossible by Pattee's representation which provides no separation between the sign and the rules for interpreting the sign. If the sign, and rules for interpreting the sign are one and the same thing, then it is impossible to stray from the rules in the act of interpreting the sign.

You tell yourself whatever gives you comfort. But I will continue calling bullshit on your conflationary arguments about "information". — apokrisis

Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you. Perhaps you feel that it denies a belief system that makes sense of the world for you. Yet, my philosophy encompasses a variety of perspectives. That's why I call it "BothAnd". It's both Realism and Idealism, both Reductionism and Holism, both Materialism and Informationism (which some may interpret as ancient Spiritualism). That doesn't mean all perspectives are true, but that the truth typically lies in the overlapping margins of Venn-diagram oppositions.

Anyway, It's not a question of comfort for me, but of making philosophical sense of Quantum Physics in terms of Information Theory. Besides, I'm in good company with several prominent philosophers and scientists. Yet, any comfort I might gain from that camaraderie is offset by the fact that they remain in the minority position among a plethora of pragmatic (and some dogmatic) Materialist scientists and philosophers, defending an outdated classical worldview.

So, I keep plugging away on this forum, refining and developing my understanding of the new directions in science, stemming from the post-classical philosophy of physics, better known as Quantum Physics. Of course, it's a free forum, so you are free to prefer the fragrance of your own deflationary BS. :joke:

Both/And Principle :
*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in the universe of many parts.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html


https://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/physics/origins_of_information/

This is the deficiency of systems theory. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a deficiency of your knowledge of systems theory. Read Salthe. Boundaries are what systems form by symmetry breaking and dichotomies. The Big Bang Cosmos, by moving towards the opposing limits of locally cooling content and globally expanding extent, is its own self-bounding structure. It exists by falling into the heat sink it produces.

The rest of your post is just as ill informed.

Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you. — Gnomon

It’s the crackpottery. Simple enough.

Apokrisis has directed me to enough material for me to see that Pattee's theory is hugely deficient. — Metaphysician Undercover

I respect Pattee and have learned from him. I'm also cognizant that biosemiotics is a wide-ranging discipline accomodating divergent perspectives (that's why I linked to the Short History article, which is an overview.) It's a rich tapestry! From a reading of that article, I'm drawn to some of the European theorists, like Anton Markoš:

Markoš underlined that in human affairs we do observe real change, because our history is ruled by contingency, and entities like literature and poetry show that creativity does exist in the world. He maintained that this creative view of human history can be extended to all living creatures, and argued that this is precisely what Darwin’s revolution was about. It was the introduction of contingency in the history of life, the idea that all living organisms, and not just humans, are subjects, individual agents which act on the world and which take care of themselves. ...According to Markoš, the present version of Darwinism that we call the Modern Synthesis, or Neo-Darwinism, is a substantial manipulation of the original view of Darwin, because it is an attempt to explain the irrationality of history with the rational combination and recombination of chemical entities. Cultural terms like information and meaning have been extended to the whole living world, but have suffered a drastic degradation in the process. Information has become an expression of statistical probability, and meaning has been excluded tout court from science.

(The dread spectre of materialism...)

Markoš' view is convergent with what Thomas Nagel presents in Mind and Cosmos:

The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists (I would say: is real) as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them. — Thomas Nagel - Thoughts are Real

I respect Pattee and have learned from him. I'm also cognizant that biosemiotics is a wide-ranging discipline accomodating divergent perspectives (that's why I linked to the Short History article, which is an overview.) — Wayfarer

Yes, he has a deep understanding of the workings of biological organisms, and many clear thoughts. However, his speculative theory of biosemiotics is deficient for the reasons I described. When you study biosemiotics further, in the future, keep in mind the issue I mentioned, and now that it's been pointed out to you, it ought to become evident that it's a very real problem, indicating that biosemiotics is quite insufficient.

Yes, he has a deep understanding of the workings of biological organisms, and many clear thoughts. However, his speculative theory of biosemiotics is deficient for the reasons I described. When you study biosemiotics further, in the future, keep in mind the issue I mentioned, and now that it's been pointed out to you, it ought to become evident that it's a very real problem, indicating that biosemiotics is quite insufficient. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree. It seems like a mix of scientific understanding and pseudoscience that is trying to explain way too much, way too simplistically.

Yes, he has a deep understanding of the workings of biological organisms, and many clear thoughts. However, his speculative theory of biosemiotics is deficient for the reasons I described — Metaphysician Undercover

I read 'the physics and metaphysics of biosemiosis'. I felt the physics aspect was better than the metaphysics. I get the feeling that the philosophical analysis is subordinated to the needs of engineeering. But I don't agree that it's simplistic.

I think "pseudoscience" is an appropriate word. It is a presentation of metaphysics which does not stand up to a critical philosophical analysis because the principles are lacking. So it is presented as if it is supported by science rather than metaphysics, which it is not.

Apokrisis has directed me to enough material for me to see that Pattee's theory is hugely deficient. Interpretation of signs, or symbols, to decipher meaning, requires an agent which does the interpreting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Try reading again and realising that biosemiosis doesn’t talk about agents who interpret but systems of interpretance. The whole bleeding point is to understand things in terms of the irreducible holism of the triadic modelling relation.

So as usual you are flailing away at a straw man because you can’t focus on the critical technical distinctions being made by a precise choice of words.

Try reading again and realising that biosemiosis doesn’t talk about agents who interpret but systems of interpretance. — apokrisis

That's exactly why the theory is faulty. We know that systems of interpretance are just tools used by agents who interpret. To remove the agent (therefore subjectivity) from the interpretation, and present the interpretation as if there is an automatic objective system of interpretance, doing the job on its own, denies the reality of subjectivity within interpretation, which is really an essential aspect of interpretation.

In conclusion, biosemiosis makes interpretation into something which is inconsistent with interpretation as we know it. There is an agent (subject) who applies systems, makes judgements, and produces an interpretation which is unique to that agent (subject).

It is only by denying the reality of the agent, that the system can be presented as top-down causally, rather than the true bottom-up causation, which is indicated when the agent is included.

It is only by denying the reality of the agent, that the system can be presented as top-down causally, rather than the true bottom-up causation, which is indicated when the agent is included. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well you are certainly right that it is only by correcting the faultiness of Cartesian dualism and its res cogitans dilemma by moving up to the triadic and hierarchical metaphysics that underpins biosemiosis that one can finally resolve that old logical quandary.

But you are still stuck in the immediate post-medieval stage of theistic thought. Even Kant and Schelling are adventures yet to be undertaken.

But you are still stuck in the immediate post-medieval stage of theistic thought. Even Kant and Schelling are adventures yet to be undertaken. — apokrisis

Kant and Schelling are for the most part consistent with theistic thinking. top-down causation of intentional acts is not consistent. The problem is that since top-down models cannot account for the reality of "self-determination", since such acts are caused in a bottom-up manner, and top-down models do not allow for the reality of bottom-up formations, these models are left to represent such constructions as the product of chance, symmetry-breaking or some such thing. Kant and Schelling represented the bottom-up as unknown rather than pretending that it could be known as top-down. This is the problem i described here:

This is the deficiency of systems theory. Boundaries are used to distinguish what is part of the system from what is not part of the system. But there are no principles to distinguish a spatially external boundary from a spatial internal boundary, so anything which is not part of the system is generally understood as, "outside the system", or spatially external. A proper understand requires distinguishing between what is not part of the system by being across an internal boundary, from what is not part of the system by being across an external boundary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Systems theory, which is employed exclusively as the tool of such thinking, does not have the means to properly separate the external from the internal. You represent this as a resolution, a "correcting the faultiness of Cartesian dualism", but there is no resolution at all, just the bold, unsupported claim that the same "systems" principles can be applied equally to animate as well as inanimate systems.

This directly contradicts the position of the purported founder of "general system theory", Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He very explicitly distinguished between inanimate "closed systems" which are dealt with in physics, and "open systems" which are living systems. The distinction is primary to general system theory, and very significant. These two distinct types of "systems" cannot be reduced one to the other, as you seem to think, as they are fundamentally different.

Closed and Open Systems

Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i.e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment.

However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.

It is only in recent years that an expansion of physics, in order to include open systems, has taken place. This theory has shed light on many obscure phenomena in physics and biology and has also led to important general conclusions of which I will mention only two.

The first is the principle of equifinality. In any closed system, the final state is unequivocally determined by the initial conditions: e.g. the motion in a planetary system where the positions of the planets at a time t are unequivocally determined by their positions at a time t°.
This is not so in open systems. Here, the same final state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways. This is what is called equifinality.

Another apparent contrast between inanimate and animate nature is what sometimes was called the violent contradiction between Lord Kelvin's degradation and Darwin's evolution, between the law of dissipation in physics and the law of evolution in biology. According to the second principle of thermodynamics, the general trend of events in physical nature is towards states of maximum disorder and levelling down of differences, with the so-called heat death of the universe as the final outlook, when all energy is degraded into evenly distributed heat of low temperature, and the world process comes to a stop. In contrast, the living world shows, in embryonic development and in evolution, a transition towards higher order, heterogeneity, and organization. But on the basis of the theory of open systems, the apparent contradiction between entropy and evolution disappears. In all irreversible processes, entropy must increase. Therefore, the change of entropy in closed systems is always positive; order is continually destroyed. In open systems, however, we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible processes, but also import of entropy which may well be negative. This is the case in the living organism which imports complex molecules high in free energy. Thus, living systems, maintaining themselves in a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop towards states of increased order and organization. — Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General system Theory (1968)

https://www.panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html

The significance is clear. Maintaining the true status of "open" in a biological system, requires that the system's interaction with its environment cannot be modeled as top-down causation, which is the modeling of a closed system.