I wanted to add the following discussion of information by Anthony Chemero, in which he contrasts an enactivist view of it from representational, computational modeling approaches like that typically seen in predictive processing.

“Predictive processing models, and the allied theoretical machinery, bounce back and forth between thermodynamic and information-theoretic understandings of information and entropy. These understandings are not identical or even equivalent, even though they are theoretically related. But the differences are rarely acknowledged by predictive processing proponents. Here is an example from Clark himself, in a recent paper whose main ideas we otherwise endorse:

‘ This is where FEP [the free energy principle] gets invited onto the stage. FEP states that living organisms that persist must minimize free energy in their exchanges with the environment. The ‘free energy' in question here is an information-theoretic isomorph of thermodynamic free energy, which is a measure of the energy available to do useful work. Useful work, in the information-theoretic story, involves fitting a model to a domain, so reducing information-theoretic free energy is improving the model.’ (Clark 2017)

This is cringeworthy, because it runs roughshod over exactly the point where care is needed. As Deacon (2012) points out, there is no analogue of work in information theory. More important for now is that neither thermodynamic nor information-theoretic understandings of information involve semantics, whereas semantics is the key point of the ecological information in dynamic enactive models. Ecological information—the information available to a moving animal in the environment—is inherently semantic because it specifies the affordances of that environment, what the animal can do in that environment, and generates and supports expectations for what that moving animal will experience as it moves. Ecological information reveals the world as significant for a given creature.

In contrast, it rarely crosses anyone's mind that thermodynamic information might be semantic; and many people forget that information-theoretic (Shannon) information is meaningless in itself, because it is generally discussed in the context of a known decoder that transforms the encoded patterns in the transmitted signal into something meaningful. But this way of framing the relationship between an organism and its environment, and the nature of the signals it receives from that environment—in terms of a transition from thermodynamic free-energy to information-theoretic free-energy—is far from theoretically benign. It is this switch that makes free energy minimization seem to have representational implications, and appear to necessitate the various accoutrement of computational theory of mind.

Why is this? Because the most compelling case for a world-representing inner-model-building brain begins by ignoring the richness of ecological information. This leads to the claim that perception offers insufficient information to guide action, and we therefore need a model to do so (Hohwy 2013). The assumption that organisms work with thermodynamic and Shannon (i.e, non-semantic) information builds that poverty in from the start. This is problematic because some (in our view) fairly unpalatable philosophical conclusions can be drawn from this particular well: if our behavior is driven directly by a model, and only indirectly by the world, then the thought that we have only indirect epistemic access to that world can begin to seem compelling (Clark 2013; 2016b; Hohwy 2013; 2016). And if we only have indirect epistemic access to the world, then isn't perception a form of controlled hallucination, a sensory veil cutting us off from the very world we appear to inhabit?”

Life involves copying DNA and producing proteins based on "instructions." — frank

That’s the Dawkins reductionist view. The holistic alternative recognizes that dna and rna are not autonomous structures but components of a cellular and intercellular milieu in which much more than ‘copying’ is going on. Genes are switched on and off in cells in highly complex ways as a function of changes in this larger system.

https://youtu.be/QceGqKZMqIM

the Royal Society is promoting views that life is a process of copying, so information processing. — Pop

It would seem a "change in the state of a system" would be a necessity for a system to register external information? — Pop

If one rejects the tenets of first generation cognitive science in favor of enactive, embodied approaches, then life is not a process of copying, modeling or representing a world, it is a process of action, creation, transformation and production. Awareness does not register and copy external information, it enacts a world.

“ “One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

I am flaunting not just one person’s or one group’s technical jargon here but the great many ways a lot of people have said much the same thing throughout history. — apokrisis

I get that. I traffic in a different kind of technical language originating in a segment of the Continental philosophic community , and I sample from a variety of these positions when I write.

And then first person points of view become something more like what we really mean - private information, personal action - once nature threw up biological structure with internal codes and memories as its latest trick — apokrisis

Ah, but if the codes of the cognitive system are just tricks, that is, adaptive accidents , then first person points of view in the experiential sense are really just eliminative rmaterialist products of the wider causal cosmic model.
But if you start with a truly fresh model
of causal motivation at the experiential level, you might have an entirely different notion of first person on your hands, one that might require a rethinking of world as objective Cosmos.

f we say that a system is attuned to the world by way of information and information is always acting on a system. A biological system differs from a rock in that it can register fine changes, whilst say a rock can only register coarse changes. So this would be a way of rationalizing what an object is conscious of, by way of what can cause it to change — Pop

What if we say that being an organic system means that the creature has a patterned way of interacting with its environment each moment , that essentially what a living thing is is this patterned interacting which, unlike a stone, maintains its overall integrity and consistency of functioning even as it is incessantly altering its behavior in response to novelties imposed by the outside(the ‘outside’ includes the consequences of the creature’s own functioning, the reciprocal impact on the life form of the changes it makes to its world in the process of functioning).
Information in this sense would be the normative goal-oriented directionality of a living system’s functional organization. It would reside neither strictly within the living thing nor in its environment but would be instantiated in the organism-environment coupling.

Your comments are an exellent example of 'Showboating' and I especially liked this paragraph. Do you have a room with technical terms tacked to the wall and a ball of yarn or do you use more modern methods? I'd like to know — Mark Nyquist

If you re-read all his posts carefully you may find as I do that he is pointing to a consistent and coherent set of ideas. It seems to me that showboating is an unnecessary use of technical terms to illustrate a point that could be made more clearly without them. But I’m seeing more than that in apo’s argument. It’s legitimate and interesting to integrate Peirce’s metaphysics, quantum theory and neuroscientific models of consciousness. It may also be threatening or confusing to those who prefer a more classically reductionist approach to these matters.

Yes, our humanity gets in the way of reality.

Have you considered what information is? Daniel has bought in Change into the mix of considerations. Does information entail change? I think it does. I'm sure you would have some views on this? — Pop

Merleau-Ponty founds consciousness in gestalt ensembles organized as figure against background. “The perceptual ‘something' is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field'.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.4) .
The background is the formal (we can call it informational, the irreducible relation of the parts to the whole and the whole to its parts ) aspect of perceptual experience in its most primordial sense. Change is presupposed here rather than being added onto awareness , in that each moment introduces a new figure as it re-forms the background.

The Peircean approach is not to rid our view of reality of any subjectivism, it is instead to match such a science of the third person view from nowhere with its “other” of a general science of first person points of view. So a science of semiotics and habits of interpretance, in other words. — apokrisis

Does Peirce aim to derive the third person from the first person as a secondary modality or achieve a mutual affecting between them , a matching of already existing entities or aspects?

This is a view of information that leaves out any receiver of the information. It is moot whether an event or degree of freedom is considered to be random noise or orderly signal as there is no higher meaning or symbolism being attached to the mark. The first step is just to discover the foundational thing of a counterfactual - the starting point of it being even meaningful to ask of anything: "are you a 1 or a 0? A presence or an absence? A something or a nothing?" — apokrisis

We can recover the other sense of information as not just about countable physical differences, but differences that make a difference to someone as they are symbols being read as part of an exchange of messages. — apokrisis

This concatenation of information as meaningless mark and as subjectively meaningful signal system sounds compatible with Dan Zahavi’s depoction of metaphysical realism:

“If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve. How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.”

Would it be fair to characterize your thesis as a kind of techno-dialectics? There seems to be a fair amount of Marx in it , with technology moved to front and center. Have you read Richard Lewonti ?

If we can crack fusion in the next decade, it could be game on again. But if it is a civilisational future to be built on wind and solar, then that is a very different growth regime. — apokrisis

Isnt there a distinction to be made between growth defined in classical economic terms ( GDP, etc) and growth of knowledge( scientific, technological, philosophical , literary)? If there were a catastrophic disruption of access to sources of energy for technological use, do you really think this would prevent individuals from continuing to transform their ways of understanding the world?

The longer you live, the more experiences you have learnt to deal with, and so the less you need to learn. You've long had it all figured out down to the level of automaticism. — apokrisis

I wouldn’t say it’s the number of experiences you cope with that produces growth but the manner in which you organize those experiences. And each useful reorganization propels you into a new world , accelerating the possibilities of further growth rather than impeding them. Personal growth is akin to technological advances in cultural history. They evince an overall accelerative character.

It is completely coherent Josh you just need a higher level of understanding to appreciate it. — Julian Malek

I want what you’re on so I can get as high as you are

Random word generator? Are you related to Alan Sokal?

I am tempted to argue that what you have here is akin to an attempt to use a hardware description to explain software patterns. It’s not that your model is necessary wrong , just that your account ends just where the real scene of consciousness begins. To use the computer metaphor , you leave us with the
power on and the monitor active. But what actually takes place in awareness requires an entirely different causal language that that of physics.

Do you think Lalatos’ approach to the logical proof is consistent with the later Wittgenstein? I wonder i particularly about the notion of truth , as opposed to usefulness , with regard to logical
proof.

The GR assumes that people choose to treat each other with disrespect. Because it focuses on intent, it also assumes that disrespect drives differences in interpretation of the GR. But I think intent is not the crux of the issue when it comes to moral behavior. Rather, the issue is precisely interpretation. That is to say, sincere differences in interpreting or making sense of other cultural values is at the root of violence and what we call immorality, not bad intent or desire to disrespect.Limits in our understanding of each other, not a bad attitude, drives what we call iimmorality.This makes the GM a truism.

Big claim, Joshs. I admire the chutzpah of it. Can you expand on this perhaps with an example of it in action — Tom Storm

First I’d clarify the sense of the golden rule. Do unto ‘others’ only applies to others who are like you in certain key respects that pertain to their humanity. We don’t generally apply the golden rule to livestock, insects or plants, or to any other being that appears to us to be somehow less than fully human in the moral
sense. Thus we see how , at various times in human history, those who were regarded as only 2/3 human, evil, barbarian, heathen, pathological or demented were treated differently than we would want to be treated, without the golden rule being violated.

I believe that every major act of violence in history was committed by an individual or group who thought themselves to be following the golden rule, just as today we incarcerate and punish people based on the golden rule.

The Golden Rule is a recipe for immorality, because it can be used to justify whatever prejudice one harbors. For instance, ‘if I were a homosexual, I would want you to treat me as abnormal’. That prejudice justifies discriminating against others, without violating the Golden Rule.

We all know why the old, the isolated, and the uneducated hold to the views of the past, but there's good reason those views have been swept to the dustbin. I'm willing to hear from the sociologists who discuss our social evolution, but less so to hear directly from the mouths of our dinosaurs who don't realize time passed them by. — Hanover

You’d better be careful. Before you know it, you may find yourself being treated as the next dinosaur whom time has passed by. Foucault would have a field day providing a genealogical analysis both of the ‘reasons’ behind the change in values at the Olympics and your moralistic outrage ar those who dont follow the new orthodoxy . It sounds like you’ve latched onto the emancipatory version of critical theory but haven’t yet made your way into thoroughgoing postmodern territory

I think there are some interesting points that are being ignored here, regardless of Leghorn’s motives. For instance, the concept of competition has changed relative to 50 years ago. Leghorn is correct that athletic courage used to be thought of in terms of ignoring pain and suffering , both mental and physical , for the sake of athletic achievement for oneself and one’s team. Today there is an appreciation that one’s mental and physical well-being is more important than winning at any cost. This reduces the focus on competition and redirects it toward a more balanced concept of excellence. Included in this new thinking is the role of culture in either promoting or hindering personal excellence, which is where the discussion of racial bias comes into play. I think these are all positive and necessary developments but it is quite possible that they may detract from the entertainment value of the Olympics by creating an identity crisis.

Audiences used to expect Olympians to act as John Wayne-type superheroes. Now they like their superheroes (like Batman and Spider-man) to be depicted as angst and doubt ridden vulnerable
mortals. It makes for a different kind of drama. If its working for cinema , maybe it will work for the Olympics.

Forest for the trees.

I was created by something a trillion times greater then your minds doubts.

Therefore not only do I have no self doubts, but the very things you doubt are my greatest strengths — hope

I am much happier thinking of my self as something self-creating and re-creating rather than being created by a being outside myself whose knowledge I can never have complete access to. I also have no desire for access to ‘greatness’ , only for intimate, intricate, gentle and peaceful relational understanding of others.

How can there be anxiety if we trust every blade of grass is exactly positioned for its purpose? I credit Hope for bringing this up. — Hanover

Prior to Darwin, biologists believed that God created each species to be exactly suited to its purpose. It was a simple, ordered scheme. They didn’t try to explain the relations between species because it didn’t occur to them to look for such relations. So we have two entirely different kinds of ordered schemes in the pre-Darwinian and the Darwinian model. Similarly, a fundamentalist religious view could post that God put evil in this world to give humans the opportunity to exercise free will. In this approach, the ordered scheme of the world is one of good vs evil. Like the pre-Darwinian model, it doesn’t try to probe the relation between those who do ‘evil’ and those who do ‘good’ because it doesn't occur to it that good and evil are value judgements arising g out of relatively shifting cultural contexts.
My point is that it is not enough to believe in a perfect schematic order of the world. The question is how that order is accessible to us, and what the nature of the order is. One could say that God made every person to be positioned for their purpose just as every blade of grass is positioned for its purpose. But that could mean that one sees each person as either good or evil , of a good character or bad character. In that case, one may believe that anxiety is unnecessary because all is explained. But all one has done is trade anxiety for a resigned, accepting suffering. Why? Because one has settled for a rigid explanatory scheme that fails to make sense of people’s behavior in anything but the most superficial terms.

God knows all the answers. You don’t. That means, unless you abdicate your self responsibility to live your own life. you’re going to have to get up tomorrow morning like all the rest of us and deal with the normal day to day conflicts, frustrations and confusions. You will not call these anxieties because that would make you an unbeliever. If you did call these anxieties you might be prompted by these feelings to try and achieve a deeper understanding of others that would alleviate some of the conflicts, frustrations and confusions. Since you won’t call these
expereinces anxieties , how will you respond to them? Will you assume it is all part of the greater plan and simply accept the conflicts? Will you pray for guidance and try to change your world or your thinking about the world?

BTW, would it be possible to know where you've read all this stuff — Apollodorus

Apparently somewhere in Leviticus

Or maybe it's about realizing your creator is a billion times vaster than you are so you have no right to doubt or hate yourself. — hope

That’s just going to make you feel worse when you do inevitably doubt or hate yourself.

They try to use self-esteem to fix lack of self acceptance. And conditional self-esteem is always a shaky construction therefore prone to causing worry. — hope

You can’t have self-acceptance without self-understanding. And you can’t have self-understanding without an understanding of your world, particularly your social world and you place in it. And you can’t come to a realization of what needs to be understood about your relationships with other people , how and why they care or don’t care about you, without feeling social anxiety. Social anxiety lets us know what we are puzzled about , what we need to work on. It can be an extraordinarily creative emotion because it shakes us out of our complacency and pushes us to change and grow. I don’t know anyone who achieved healthy self-acceptance without allowing themselves to be open to anxiety and to use it to learn about themselves.
Self acceptance isnt easy. It is an endless process of development.

Seriously though. Aren’t you ever kept up at night tossing and turning over concerns about the future? Do you worry about getting older, about illness,? What about work related anxiety, like an upcoming performance review, or conflicts with other employees? Do you have anxiety about speaking in public? Do you get nervous before a sports competition? Do you worry you won’t have enough money to pay the bills , to pay off debt or for retirement?

Or maybe I just think longer and deeper. — hope

work it

Also maybe mine is better, and all the others are coming form the very ignorance mine attempts to expose and remove — hope

That’s cause you Da Man

You seem to be be forcing these labels into the two categories you want to see them as. You want to describe worry over everything bad that may happen to one’s loved ones as fear, and worry over one’s own self as anxiety. And you want to call the former healthy and the latter unhealthy. But this isnt generally how most psychologists define these terms. They see
Anxiety as pervasive in modern society. It reflects our struggle to cope with a fast paced, constantly changing world that we are desperately trying to predict and stay one step ahead of. The quality of this feeling, they argue , is different than the intensity and immediacy of fear. That is why it is is suited to modern times , where immediate dangers to survival are uncommon, but an endless series of smaller threats abound.

Fear is a natural response to prediction of external harm. Anxiety is something else. — hope

Yes, I think fear and anxiety can be usefully distinguished. Fear involves the anticipation of imminent, serious harm or loss. Anxiety involves the anticipation of an event that may produce a less severe harm or loss , and is not as imminent. Anxiety is worry, rumination, apprehension, restlessness. Anxiety over the upcoming medical test can turn to fear once the result is known. Both fear and anxiety can be described as neurotic or healthy, depending on the circumstances.

Anxiety is caused by your irrational self doubt and self hate related to those things, triggered by those things, etc... — hope

You just made that up. Do you have any sources for this peculiar definition of anxiety? It seems to me all you’re doing is trying to distinguish a neurotic from a healthy anxiety. You could do the same thing with all other emotions, including joy.

Basically stop doubting and hating yourself, and start accepting and loving yourself, and your anxiety will be gone. — hope

What if most of your anxieties concern the welfare of those around you that you care about?

Is there anything wrong in stating that neurotransmitters are scientifically assumed to play a role in the regulation and experience of affective behavior? — Shawn

I appreciate that you’re making this claim as general and open-ended as possible. In fact , I suspect that the claim is so flexible as to run the risk of saying very little. What is a neurotransmitter? Well, it’s the ‘fuel’ that allows neurons to communicate with each other. So affect implies a brain, a brain implies neurons, and neurons imply neurotransmitters. Not sure what else one can learn here.

what is wrong with assuming that moods are really just neurotransmitter levels working in the brain? — Shawn

As long as you realize that no mood ca be reliably induced by manipulating levels of single neurotransmitters. Neurohormones are involved in affect just as they are involved in all aspects of cognitive function. But moods are much more complex that anything that can be reduced to individual hormones. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors do not always alleviate depression for this reason. I would go so far as to say that the way neurotransmitters are involved in moods is inseparable from the way they are involved in cognition in general.

The implication is that there is something that is the same in each expression. This is an assumed, almost unconscious transcendental argument: You understood the meaning of my utterance, therefore there must be a thing that we call the meaning of that utterance that has been transfered from you to me. — Banno

My understanding of the meaning of your utterance is just a sense that is produced via my construal of your utterance. That sense may include my assuming that what you mean to say is exactly the same as what I am construing as the recipient of your utterance. Or I might make no such supposition. I may instead assume that I construe something that is likely similar enough to what you intended to convey that we can have a useful interaction , but whether that is in fact the case must be born out by my observation of your subsequent behavior. I may later decide that you intended to convey something very different from what I was assuming and I will either have to resign myself to concluding that your utterance is incomprehensible to me or begin exploring ways of making sense of your utterance that is useful to me.
So nothing has been transferred from you to me. You fell into an utterance , and I received an utterance that was somewhat different from what you experienced ( or so we can both demonstrate to each other by repeatedly surprising each other with mutually unpredictable behaviors ) but close enough for both of us to be able to benefit from the interchange.


“ For about three centuries now Anglo-Saxon man has labored under the somewhat mislead-ing assumption that knowledge is transmitted through the senses. This was John Locke's great notion in 1690' In expressing it, he provided the essential spade work for both modern experi-mental psychology and the courageous empiricism of Sigmund Freud. But great ideas, like great men, sometimes have a way of eventually blocking the very progress they once so coura-geously initiated. Thus it is, even after continued experience in psychotherapy, most of us still hold doggedly to the belief that one man's understanding of the universe can be somehow encoded within a signal system and then transmitted intact to another man via the senses. The signal system is often called "language." Indeed, Pavlov's psychological term for "language" was simply "the second signal system.” George Kelly

Because ongoing experience is a carrying forward of a past. That past enters into, participates in, what occurs into it, even as that past is changed by what occurs into it. That’s why there can be neither absolute novelty nor absolute identity.