I get that, but what I don't get is the gap between 'bio-' and 'pan-', still. I can see that, given DNA, then something language-like exists. — Wayfarer

The answer is that physics takes an information theoretic view of causality these days. That is what folk are really talking about with things like the holographic principle, event horizons or light cones.

So the coding, the memory, the bits, are written into the spatiotemporal structure of the Universe itself. Of course each bit is some material degree of freedom - a particle in some state. But collectively, all those "bits of stuff" count as information, a generalised context that impinges on whatever is happening at some spacetime locale, shaping it as a physical state of constraint.

Think of the standard example of a magnetised iron bar and the way the information that is the global magnetic field keeps all the local dipoles aligned. It is about granting collective activity full status as being ontically real - a real top-down cause that cements a generalised tendency.

Something to do with meaning, one suspects. — Wayfarer

Precisely. So it gets at final cause - that which is the meaning of being, the reasons why things even are.

And it is non-mystical in that hierarchical grades of meaning can be defined. There is a natural gamut of complexity from physical tendency to biological function to psychological purpose.

Still struggling with the meaningfulness of tornadoes, or any sense in which they embody the meaning that seems intrinsic to organisms. — Wayfarer

A tornado is meaningful in the context of a weather system striving to equilibrate its thermal differences. So it is meaningful in terms of meeting the goals of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Again, there is nothing essentially mystical about this. It is just about bringing all of nature under the same general umbrella of Natural Philosophy.

Reductionism appeared to drum finality and meaning out of our scientific account of nature. Holism and systems science have been trying to bring it back in. Pan-semiosis would be a particular formalism for achieving that. Hence why a lot of scientists have gotten keen on Peircean semiotics.

But that is my point.. Why shouldn't a modelling relation feel like something? — schopenhauer1

So you agree with me that it prima facie should? You might have to quote me the bit where you say it was also your point.

Then you throw in the word "neuro" and "trillions" and that is supposed to answer why this triadic modelling is different from all other triadic-modelling... — schopenhauer1

That is a leap that you make, not me.

Is there some other triadic modelling that is different here? It would help if you could reference what you have in mind.

As to neuro and trillions, the point there is obviously to remind that there is a definite ground zero so far as the coding aspect of semiosis goes. This is about neurons in particular as the informational medium, not genes or words. Neurons do have particular qualities that justify talk of "neuro-semiosis".

And then trillions of interconnections is relevant because this is an emergent ontology. You need large numbers to get the kind of useful complexity I am talking about. A few neurons might make up a rather deterministic or robotic circuit. But a lot of them will start to show collective behaviours. This is a familiar concept now from the study of dynamical systems.

So you seem to be latching onto trigger words without understanding the context in which I would use them.

I never just throw things in. ;)

If you say only THIS modelling is experiential, your hidden theater comes into play- an irrevocable split between mind/body (your hated duality) then comes into play (whether you like it or not). — schopenhauer1

Again, you just don't appear to understand the difference between a triadic modelling relation and a dualistic computer model. One is properly connected to the world - it has to learn by doing. The other ain't. It has to be programmed and then at best runs a virtual simulation.

I fear if you can't keep these different concepts separate in your head by now, you never will.

Who said I used Newtonian notions to explain this? Straw man. — schopenhauer1

I can happily accept that you personally don't think scientifically about these things. But what I said is science does.

So, yes, why is it that there is a "feels like" aspect to some modelling and not others is a great question, and Chalmers is willing to say that it is fundamental to the universe- possibly the modelling itself is somehow experiential. — schopenhauer1

It would be a big advance to be able to say a particular notion of modelling - neuro-semiosis - does a good enough job at explaining the issue of "feels". Far better than Chalmers own half-hearted suggestion of dual aspect monism where mind is a property of information (rather than matter).

It would be victory for the triadic view. Wave goodbye to substance monism and information processing dualism.

But neuro-semiosis itself couldn't be "fundamental to the Universe". It is instead only something rather specialised - part of the emergent level of complexity we call biological life.

The pan-semiotic story is the one that talks about the Universe in a fundamental metaphysical fashion. And I have no problem with anyone labelling that a highly speculative inquiry. It is still more philosophy than science.

And either way, the pan-semiotic thesis itself stresses the huge divide between the physico-chemical level of semiosis and the biological one.

As I explained to Wayfarer, for physics, all the "mindful" informational constraints are external to the play of the material dynamics. A tornado arises because of a larger context of thermal gradients making up that day's weather.

But life and mind are the trick of being able to code for that kind of contextual information - form a memory using a symbolising mechanism like genes, neurons or words - and so take ownership of top-down causality as something packaged up and hidden deep inside.

So pan-semiosis is far from the silly mysticism of pan-experientialism or pan-psychism. It includes in formal fashion an account of exactly what changes in the transition from material systems to living systems.

We all know there is a difference. Pan-semiosis is about putting a finger on what that actually is in the most general metaphysical sense.

You aren't getting the point.. willfully perhaps. — schopenhauer1

You are just bad at making your points. You can't explain what your own words like "mentality" might mean in terms of their ontic commitments. And you are unwilling to even have a go at answering the same kind of questions you demand of others.

You ask why should an active modelling relation feel like something? I reply why shouldn't it? If you haven't got the flexibility of thought to even try to see an issue from its reverse perspective, then the problem is only yours. You disqualify yourself from proper discussion already.

Another clarification that might help here is that I have been trying to address the philosophy of mind issue of "strategies of explanation". So that is a meta-level discussion. Then there is also the scientific project that would cash out some actual strategy. But to follow that, you would need to have an understanding of the relevant literature.

So sticking to strategies of explanation, I've showed how it breaks down into three levels of increasingly sophisticated inquiry. Stage 1 is thinking consciousness is a monistic spirit stuff - substance ontology. Stage 2 is dualistic representationalism - information processing ontology. Stage 3 is triadic semiotics - sign relation ontology.

Then a separate issue is this constant demand of "explain it so I can understand why it feels like what it feels like". We can have a meta-discussion about whether science should even do this. Science is the business of explaining through sufficiently abstract generalities. Like laws or mathematical forms. If we say a ball rolls due to Newtonian Mechanics, we don't expect to get what it feels like to "be in motion".

The explanatory strategy of science is based on ... modelling. It objectivises and constructs a third person view.

Well, reductionist science certainly does that. A holistic or systems science approach - one that attempts to include subjectivity, meaning, interpretation, purpose, observers, etc, in its larger triadic model - does then have a chance of starting to say something about why it feels like what it feels like.

Even Hard Problem promoters like Chalmers agree that we know a lot about why it feels like what it feels like from neuroscientific explanations. Why is drunkenness what it is? Why do visual illusions have their particular quality? Why are the objects we see made artificial sharp by Mach bands around them, or organised by Gestalt effects?

It is just that Chalmers then calls these easy problems. The game is to raise the bar until it reaches the eternal self-referential metaphysical question of "why anything?". Why should anything be anything, let alone green be green, or the Universe a something rather than a nothing?

Fine. That is another meta-level discussion we can have. It seems obvious that science - and reason itself - can't deal with any question rationally unless it can define its counterfactuals. So the issue is as bad for philosophy as it is for science.

As you can see, there are a variety of meta-issues that lie at the back of any discussion about the best strategies of explanation. You can't just plunge into things in confused fashion. Otherwise only confusion results.

Ah, the neuro brings with it the Cartesian Theaters. — schopenhauer1

You keep repeating what the modelling relation approach explicitly rejects. If you want someone to defend representationalism to you as an ontology, you need to go elsewhere.

Did you even read what I wrote? I was suggesting just that.. It is YOU who are not excepting your own logic to its ultimate conclusion, which is that ANY modelling can be experiential. — schopenhauer1

I was more specific. It is not modelling per se - as that is the representational story of computational information processing and Cartesean theatres that I have criticised. It is the modelling or sign relation of neuro-semiosis - a more advanced notion which you show no evidence of understanding as yet.

Now, I don't think that current philosophical lexicon allows that anything can have a 'degree of reality'; things are either existent, or not. — Wayfarer

And that is precisely what Peircean metaphysics embraces. It is based on there really being degrees of concrete or crisp existence. At a deeper level, things are vague or begin in Firstness. Anaximander started metaphysics rolling with the same idea - the Apeiron.

So the lexicon certainly exists. But as we know, it is not a mainstream approved mode of thought. Reductionism rules. And so vagueness or degrees of reality are standardly treated as being just a matter of observer ignorance or uncertainty, not a genuine ontic issue.

Russell made the famous case for this. Imagine a badly blurred photograph of Mr Jones. Well, the image is vague it seems. It could be Mr Smith or Mr Patel if we squinted. Yet still, points out Russell, the image itself is some definite set of marks. So the vagueness is epistemic - about what we can know - rather than the photograph itself being physically indeterminate.

So you are always up against this attitude. And even when quantum indeterminism showed up, the mindset remains to demonstrate that any vagueness or degrees of reality are only an epistemic issue, not something to do with reality itself.

But anyone dealing with emergence in nature has less of a problem. It starts to become obvious that emergence means starting out actually vague and then approaching counterfactual definiteness or concreteness "in the limit".

However, the fact of neuroplasticity provides sufficient reason to reject epiphenomenalism. In other words, physical and mental conditions and activities have mutual effects. — Galuchat

Yes I agree. That is why the story has to be foundationally triadic. There must be the two things of a separation of causality, and then the third thing which is their interaction.

And neuroscience has no problem with this. It already says that neural firing may be a physical process, but what is "really going on" is an informational process. Or taking the even more sophisticated view, the whole is a semiotic process, a sign relation. Or to borrow from psychology, we are talking about an enactive or ecological process. Mind is not epiphenomenal but just what it feels like to be a model in interaction with a world, really doing something.

This is evidence of correlation, not necessarily of causation. In other words, is it neurophysiological activity which causes recognition, or recognition which causes neurophysiological activity? — Galuchat

The simple answer is that at the informational level of analysis, the causation is holistic - a systems mix of top-down constraint and bottom-up construction. So asking which causes which is just a bad reductionist question. It takes both in interaction for some particular state of experience (or modelling) to emerge.

And then in this representationalist account of perception formation, the physiology falls out of the picture. The information process paradigm makes that clean divorce between the software and the hardware. So physiology simply supports the computations and - by design - plays no causal role in shaping them. It is the logic of the program which dictates the play of the patterns.

But as I say, the semiotic view of neuroscience takes the next step - the same as biology did to get rid of the mysteries surrounding the mechanisms of living processes. We can get rid of the lingering ghost in the machine, the elan vital, in the same fashion.

So this is where the epistemic cut of biosemiosis comes in. The whole point of the informational processes is to be in active regulation of physical processes. A computer may have a hard divorce between information and matter - hence computer analogies adding fuel to the Hard Problem bonfire - but organisms are all about the pragmatic interaction between information and matter.

This is the paradigm shift with enactive/ecological/embodied approaches to perception. The mind is all about regulating material processes, entropic flows. Consciousness is what it is like to be not just some pattern of information, but to be information doing stuff. It is all about the feeling of being intimately connected as a "self" with a point of view, some interest, that serves to control a world of physical events as much as is possible.

Nothing can make sense about the mind/brain connection until you actually stop thinking that this is the fundamental issue. You have to get past the monism of good old fashioned theism - a belief in inhabiting spirits. Then you have to get past the dualism of good old fashion computationalism - all the representationalist psychology where there is a mysterious self passively watching an inner theatre neural display. You have to arrive finally at a triadic sign relation ontology which speaks to the conjunction of model and world.

And yet when you get high, neuroscience finds that messing with neural signalling is the prosaic cause. Or if you recognise your grandmother, specific neural connections light up.

So to claim that brains aren't responsible for consciousness is now a crackpot view. Pass the tin hats.

Poor old Schop. The question was simple. Why shouldn't it feel like something to be modelling the world?

It might be obvious to you that you use a standard term in idiosyncratic fashion. But why should it be obvious to me?

Weird.

What are you talking about?

In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. It is also called dual-aspect monism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-aspect_theory

What we have is a quantum field which is embued with memory and consciousness. — Rich

I'd love to see the Nature reference on that.

(But then Nature is part of the establishment conspiracy against morphic field research, blah, blah, blah, pass around the tinfoil hats.)

The quick answer is that I am talking of a neuro-semiotic process of modelling the world in a self interested way. And so just in saying that, we can see that there is active modelling going on. And why would we not expect modelling - of the vast complexity of a brain with trillions of connections, and plugged into real-time action - should not "feel like something"?

What good causal objection is there to there being something that it would be like to be in a modelling relation with the world? It would have to feel like something surely? Or can you give some good reason why this modelling, this sign processing, can't be experiential?

Sure, no computer processing doing information processing would have this lived experience quality. We can point to a computer's physical disconnect from real life. All it needs is its umbilical cord that plugs it into a wall socket. In sits blindly in its little world.

But a neural network type computer starts to seem something different. It in fact has a semiotic architecture. It works by learning to anticipate the world. And surely there must be something that it is like to be anticipating the world the whole time? Even if a neural network so far is not even at the level of a cockroach so far as its complexity goes.

Anyway, you get the idea. If there is anticipation-based world modelling going on which is based on maintaining a fundamental distinction between "self" and "world", then why shouldn't that action, that process, be felt in exactly those terms? At exactly what point in the analysis does being experiential seem to drop out of the equation?

When questions are so off the mark, yes, ignore them. But if you have a go at defining your ontology with clarity as requested, then sure, we can come back to them.

Although I would mention Peirce insisted on the creative spontaneity of semiosis as a process before Whitehead and others. It is an essential part of anyone's holistic view. Although creativity doesn't then mean "conscious". It means that existence is founded on basic indeterminism - what Peirce called tychism in opposition to the synechism or continuity of constraints.

You have to explain what you mean by discrimination and sign mediation. Explain it, don't repeat the same language. Also, you use the term "emerges". That to me sounds like you just hid the Cartesian Theater in the "emerging" process. This "steam" of emerging ectoplasm (the illusion) comes out of the right amount of sign-signifier-referent- material-form process compilation. — schopenhauer1

Why do I have to explain everything to you when you won't explain anything to me? I keep asking you to say what you really mean by a term like mental. I even helpfully supply you with my view of the differences between the monistic and dyadic ontologies you appear to be mixing up.

Now you simply again reply in terms where you talk about representational analogies - a theatre - or an ontological substance - steam, ectoplasm ... which is then (cue representational analogy) the "illusion".

So sure, I could waste a lot more time explaining a triadic sign relation approach to you. But if you keep just telling me it sounds like disguised monism/dualism to you, then that confusion remains all yours. You haven't yet figured out the ontic difference between treating consciousness as a substance vs as a representation.

That is why I urge you to have a go and defining "the mental" cleanly. You will see more plainly how you are dancing between monism and dualism - using each to criticise the other - and never actually starting to understand a triadic view of ontology.

Yep I agree with the paper that reality really is probabilistic. So a picture of a wavefunction - in picturing a "field" of probabilities rather than an actual material field - is about that reality and not merely our usual observer uncertainty. But you have been arguing for an actual material field. And not just an ordinary one, but some holographic consciousness field that has the substantiality to record an interference pattern on it.

Sometimes it is helpful to ruminate over one's autobiography. It provides lots of insight into oneself. — Rich

Well you had a good go at me. Now its your turn. If you want to advance your own position, let's hear how you would defend it against my specific criticisms.

You need to ruminate on your autobiography. — Rich

I've made a sufficient number of points against your position. If you have no answers, we can all draw our own conclusion.

including one if the great geniuses of modern physics — Rich

Sure, Bohm produced both good science and crackpot ideas. That is not unusual among mathematical/scientific geniuses. Newton was famous for his alchemy too. There are tons of such examples.

But that's OK because science is an institution designed to sort the wheat from the chaff like this. Bohm's good ideas are in the textbooks and did real things like help build nukes. His other suggestions quickly fizzled within science and now are only recycled - with little real understanding - among those who are fans of anything esoteric.

Bohm's pilot wave interpretation had scientific respectability for a while precisely because it was anachronistically materialistic. Like Einstein and many others - still in shock from what quantum mechanics had revealed - felt that science had got as far as it had by presuming reality to be local and deterministic. That metaphysics had really worked for 400 years. So why abandon it until you were really forced to. Bohmian mechanics was one attempt to not to have to change the deep metaphysics of physics. It was respectable on that score.

But it didn't pan out. Roll on 60 or 70 years it is broadly accepted that determinism and locality have to be junked as "images of reality". Or at least, the best they can hope for is that they are emergent features - how things look in the classical limit.

So to cling on to the past hope of yesterday's physicists is what counts as anachronistic materialism.

And mistaking the pictures of quantum field theory to be pictures of actual quantum fields, rather than field-like pictures of quantum statistics, doesn't make this less anachronistic. Whether it is classical particles or classical waves you have in mind, both are just as much old hat when it comes to what QFT is about.

I figure you'd be back trying to save particles. — Rich

No. I'm just pointing out the beginner's mistake you are making about what a QFT picture of an atom or anything would represent. You are thinking of some actual substantial entity - like a wave. A scientist is thinking of the geometry of some collection of statistical predictions.

I agree MU makes the same mistake in complementary fashion. He thinks physicists really might believe fundamental particles to be dinky spherical objects.

You are both as wrong as each other in a perfectly complementary fashion.

Bohm's causal model says the probabilistic quantum potential field is very, very real, and propagates through distance and effects through form. — Rich

Sure. Bohm gave it a crack and fair enough. But it fell at the first hurdle. It couldn't be relativised (without making unrealistic presumptions about Born probabilities). And given Bell's inequalities, there is no hope of recovering any kind of conventional determinism anyway.

So these days to be a Bohmian is a pretty surefire way of telling the world you are a crank. Much like going on about Bergson. And if you bring in Sheldrake, it's a slam-dunk. Bring on the dancing Wu-Li masters.

Maybe it's more an epistemic matter than an ontological one, i.e.more about the nature of knowledge than the nature of matter. Thorny question, I know. — Wayfarer

It's thorny because quantum theory says it cannot be merely an epistemic issue. It has to be an ontic strength problem.

That is why folk feel it is legitimate to argue for almost anything that seems to sidestep the observer issue, like hidden variables determinism or many worlds realism.

The alternative is then a nice rational approach to observer-created reality, such as Peircean semiotics.

However it is somewhat harder to see how that applies to physics and chemistry - that's where pansemiosis looses me. — Wayfarer

Don't worry. It loses pretty much everyone. And as far as explaining life and mind, it only has to apply at that level.

But really, it is already mainstream physics. Quantum interpretations are increasingly comfortable with the idea that puzzles like complementarity and uncertainty boil down to the questions that reality could even ask of itself. In the end, a single act of measure can't go in two opposite directions at once. And so the classical constraint of uncertainty has an ultimate limit on its efforts to achieve counter-factual definiteness.

See for instance news just in - https://phys.org/news/2017-09-entanglement-inevitable-feature-reality.html

Anyway, quickly, living semiosis is semiosis internalised to an organism. A cell or body has internal coding machinery - receptors, membranes, genes, neurons - to act as the informational constraints that shape up physical processes or material flows.

Then pansemiosis - or semiosis at the physico-chemical level of "dumb matter" - is external semiosis. It is the wholeness of the context that forms the constraining state of memory which then gives shape to the particular dissipative actions and flows within it.

So with bodies, the information is trapped inside by a coding mechanism. With worlds, it is the fixed history of the past itself which is this running memory. The necessary information bears down from outside every individual material event.

This is a big difference of course. But also it does then allow us to track how life and mind arise in terms of organismic causality. The interpretative sign relation remains the same. It is just that there is this clever flip from the memory, the information, being always at a larger physical scale than the material events, to it instead being shrunk and made tiny enough to fit inside some dissipative flow itself.

A cell is its own wee universe with DNA sitting inside a whirling blizzard of metabolic activity, pulling all the strings.

You can't afford to scoff if you mistake quantum field theory as talking about a literal field rather than a field of probabilities. Like a graph, it is a picture of the observable statistics. It is not a picture of "reality itself".

Your equation is an expression of Aristotle's form (species-specific genetic predisposition to develop and exercise a particular set of functions) - matter (body) unity which is species substance (dual aspect monism). — Galuchat

Dual aspect monism simply collapses the triadic systems-style causal explanation that Aristotle was aiming for. Substantial being is the intersection of formal habit and material potential. So yes, there is a resulting unity of "stuff" that emerges. But "mind" and "world" - as formal habit and material potential -go into its making. They are not the dual aspects that emerge from it. They are the contrasting species of causality - constraints and degrees of freedom - that produce concrete being in systematic fashion.

Dual aspect monism just starts with substance as unexplained fundamental stuff and then claims it has two different faces - the material and the experiential. It is not a causal story of nature at all.

Aristotle was proto-semiotic in talking about how substantial being is causally emergent from higher level constraints on lower level potential. Two complementary aspects of causality result in a state of in-formed matter.

Pansemiosis was not devised by Peirce. — Galuchat

Peirce didn't have to coin the term because semiosis was itself already "pan" in his metaphysics. It is a distinction that Peirceans would want to make now because it is just obvious to theoretical biologists in particular that life and mind are semiotic processes. There is no problem at all on that score. Where it then becomes controversial is whether chemistry, physics and material existence itself is properly semiotic in its origin, as Peirce argued.

In the modern view, for a mindless cosmos to be modelled in terms of a self-organising semiotic process, it would have to implement this epistemic cut between information and matter. The scientific model of physical reality would have to be one based on the universality of semiosis as its causal machinery.

So that is why we would add pan- to -semiosis these days. It is to distinguish weak semiosis - the kind we have no problem at all with - from Peirce's far more radical metaphysical project.

However, semantic information is processed by living beings on a psychological level, not by inanimate objects, and not on any other level. — Galuchat

You accept the weak form and reject the strong form. And yet quantum theory says the epistemic cut - the issue of observers and measurements - is fundamental in some causal fashion. Thermodynamics also has discovered it describes an epistemic cut. Information is now taken to be as fundamental as matter in describing nature.

Also note that you are using a computer information processing analogy to describe semiosis. You talk about "semantic" information (how homuncular!) being processed by "living beings" on a "psychological level". So on one level, you accept a mechanical model of causality - a calculation machine. On another, you simply claim in tautological fashion the existence of mind - a realm which somehow gives mechanical action its meaning, its life, its "feeling of being something that it is like to be".

This is dual aspect talk of course. You take two notions of substantial being - matter and mind - then mix up the terms of both throughout the same sentence and sit back satisfied, hoping no one notices that you simply dualised your terminology, buried your presuppositions in a flow of doubled-up words.

Again. It was semantic + information, living + being, psychological + level. Do you see the verbal trick you played even on yourself?

It is like all the varieties of panpsychism. The aim is not to explain nature's duality (as semiosis does via the epistemic cut, the modelling relation) but to bury it deep in language and hurry on, feeling that because it can be spoken, it is thus explained.

I did not assent to any real label to it, — schopenhauer1

I know. I'm still waiting for your definition of "mental" or "experience" or "consciousness".

You seem to be circling in on "field/theatre/appearance/reality" now. So the usual representational and homuncular story of an inner picture or display. Except it is also a field - a substance.

That is why I say your position is too confused to make any serious reply. You are mixing a little bit of everything going.

The problems of representationalism are as well traversed as the problems of substance dualism.

Sure, the pictures in the head story makes at least one good point. There is a disconnect - an epistemic cut - where what we experience is not the thing-in-itself but our constructed impression. An appearance, a display, an illusion, a hidden theatre, a virtual world, etc, etc. But then that very idea just pushes the experiencer of the experience to yet another remove. In seeming to account for how mind and world can be separate - one is the map, the other the territory - it then creates the mystery of who is then experiencing the map, watching the theatre, appreciating the appearance.

So that is what a triadic semiotic approach - an enactive or modelling relations approach - tries to fix in a formal fashion. In simple terms, the map side of the equation has to become "self-experiencing". That is, the self is also what the mapping produces in dynamical or process fashion. A sense of self, a point of view, is what emerges as the other half of the same act of discrimination or sign mediation.

In a sensory deprivation tank, we lose our clear sense of self very quickly. We have to be acting in the world so as to be constructing the actual experience of being a self (as that which is not then "the world"). It is this emergent and dynamical nature of selfhood, of being an observer, that any "better theory" of consciousness has to be built on.

So consciousness is not a monistic stuff, nor a dyad of world and image, but a triadically irreducible relation - a modelling relation in which sign-making results in a lived co-ordination between a "self" and its "world". The actual world is then only experienced through the lens of this selfhood. All that is felt is the world's invariant or recalcitrant being - in opposition to the freedom and creativity of the interpreting "self". All we are psychologically interested in is the limits the world can impose on actions, so we can know what limits to push.

It is a simple thing. The most naive theories of consciousness see it as 1 stuff. More standard psychological theories see it as 2 realms - a picture and the world that is pictured. But modelling relation or semiotic approaches see it as an irreducible 3. And now we are talking about a causality of self-organising emergence.

The male beetle apparently gets so sex-frenzied that he forgets about the value of a living mate and aims simply to deposit his seed. — darthbarracuda

And on other occasions he suddenly comes to and remembers the value of a living mate, feels ashamed and remorseful over how he is behaving?

Come on. You completely bypassed the moral agent issue point I made. Rape is about choice and consent within human sociocultural frameworks. It is anthropomorphic nonsense to talk about rape in diving beetles unless you believe that they think about their actions as moral agents.

Nature doesn't actually have "species", we put that label on things that are similar enough to each other and have a similar genetic history. — darthbarracuda

Nothing in nature has a hard line around it. So words do that to anything.

On the other hand, species do exist as they are defined by populations of individuals that can mate and produce offspring with normal fertility.

It is nonsense to say that biology defines species by a similarity of look, or even a similarity of genetics. It is phenotype behaviour that counts. A species is an evolutionary unit because it is a level at which selection acts on a connected whole.

I could respond if you can explain what you mean by "mental".

Matter and information apparently cause it. It is not a picture, or a theatre, or an illusion. It exists "to someone" - another thing that needs fuller explanation. It is fundamental and so not in fact caused by underlying processes (of matter and information I'm guessing).

It still sure sounds like you are saying phenomenal experience is a substance. A stuff that receives impressions in some special way. Drops of experience. A mental stuff.

Perhaps you could have a go at clarifying.

You are stuck in the mode of regarding experience as a substance. That all it is.

Anyone can go out and observe the mating ritual of diving beetles. Anyone can see how the female beetle frantically tries to escape the male beetle. — darthbarracuda

But who is to say miss diving beetle isn't just being coy, discovering which male is tough and fit enough to overpower her?

And if you find that framing of the situation objectionable, it is only the reverse of claiming instead it is a case of male rape. We shouldn't anthropomorphise in either direction.

The hesitation to call this an instance of "rape" is from a general belief that morality is a "human construct" that is not suited to be applied to descriptions of reali — darthbarracuda

Exactly. Rape is to do with human sociocultural capacities for choice and consent. It describes a circumstance framed by cultural expectations about how sexual connections ought to be negotiated.

The funniest defence heard from child rapists is that they just happened to have an unfortunately erect penis when they tripped and fell on the child. No one believes that. But the point is that if it were true - there was no conscious intent - then it would be a reason to say it can't have actually been an act of rape.

So diving beetles may evolve sucker arms to clasp the females. And the females counter-evolve ridges and pits on their shells to make grasping harder. But where is the intent here? Where is the choice in the biological design? Are you arguing that the lady beetles do give willing consent to some males that take their fancy?l

All I'm saying really is that a common form of sexual reproduction is in fact rape, no quotation marks, and scientific terminology disguises this, softens the blow. — darthbarracuda

It's not correct to call it rape unless you have redefined rape so that it does not involve matters of choice and consent. There has to be the ability to act otherwise to claim there is a moral choice.

If you really think diving beetles are a bunch of psychopathic rapists, then I expect to see you down at the local pond fishing out all the males and punishing them according to whatever is your society's penal code.

Yes, "triumphalist" is a good way of putting it.[/quote

But still, who are you talking about. The usual suspects like Krauss and Dawkins?

And isn't best sellerdom a consequence of a public taste for triumphalist science (matched by the triumphalism batting for the other side) rather than because science itself is philosophically unsophisticated?

quote="darthbarracuda;102228"]"The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements." — darthbarracuda

That's a general beat against reductionism. And one I agree with. It is the nature of all reasoning to be dialectical - to be torn between two opposite truths. The resolution of this tension is then seeing the larger frame that makes them complementary truths.

So all our institutional modes of inquiry - the sciences and humanities - do get into the game of hard either/or. There is no academic game unless the field has divided itself into maximally opposed camps. Every action must have a reaction to be legitimate.

Even in aesthetics, if you have realism, you must have idealism. Abstract art justifies photo-realism as its aesthetic antidote, and vice versa. Each must have the honourable enemy that can most sharply define its own claim to existence.

It's all standard stuff. So to complain about antagonistic divisions is missing the point. That is how dialectical contrasts are developed. It is the necessary main step of any rational institution of inquiry.

So the legitimate complaint against the institutions is that they then tend to be great at the analysis, but poor at the synthesis. Very few people get paid to do that job. Certainly in science, mostly it doesn't happen until someone is 70 and safely emeritus.

The problem, as I see it, is that they are given an audience to speculate, which makes their wild speculation come across as more grounded than they really are. Additionally, they get embolded by this new fame and start making stupid metaphysical claims - see Lawrence Krauss declaring the universe can come from nothing (but only if we re-define something as actually nothing). — darthbarracuda

Yep. Krauss is bad. But worse then Dennett? And in what way are either of them "wild" as opposed to "speculatively limited"?

And again, I don't thing that fame embolden these guys. Instead they got famous by giving the public the unsophisticated stuff that sells.

For instance I think Cartesian dualism is not tenable, but it's fine to let someone follow that path and defend Cartesian dualism. Whereas in science it's less flexible - perhaps because scientific theories are easier to formulate given the restricted subject matter. — darthbarracuda

More horsefeathers. Science is only inflexible in demanding the constraint of measurable testing. And that allows a more "anything goes" approach when it comes to hypothesis formation.

Philosophers - at least outside PoMo - feel constrained only to advance reasoned positions. Science allows reasonless ones.

What could have been more lacking in metaphysical reasonableness than quantum mechanics? And yet a whole bunch of scientists dreamt up a revolutionary paradigm in just a decade.

When science is working at the edge of things, the spirit is "can this new idea be crazy enough?" Science can afford to speculate wildly because experiment sorts it out. It is at the other end of things that the discipline kicks in.

I am not antagonistic to science - I am antagonistic to the philosophically-illiterate scientists of today. They are brazenly arrogant and have little understanding about anything they're talking about. — darthbarracuda

Who do you have in mind exactly? And how much is this simply just a fact about what the public wants to buy?

The best-sellers are probably those that take the triumphalist reductionist tone you may be objecting to. And the same will then apply to philosophical best-sellers, like anything Dennett writes.

Another point is that you already seem convinced that naturalism can't explain stuff like morality and aesthetics. I find that to be the unsophisticated philosophical view - left-over 1800s romanticism and theology.

But mathematical physics makes simplifying assumptions to allow tractable calculation. Understanding is then demonstrated because the equations make predictions that match observation.

If you want to "understand" the landscape you want to cross, you could chose an oil painting as your guide, or you might buy a map. Whatever you do, it's still a story about reality and not reality.

So no. Mathematical physics is smart in that it knows what it can leave out. It is not ignorant about what it then leaves out. It has already thought about the issue much more deeply.

That was Newton's very great genius. He knew what to leave out when everyone else - like Aristotle or Descartes - was saying you couldn't possibly.

The others were saying nothing could move unless there was something to actually there as a force to push it along the whole time. Newton said just accept inertial motion. And then when it came to gravity, throw away local pushing entirely. Just have action at a distance. Newton was as torn as anyone by this apparent lack of "philosophical" commonsense. But as a simplification it worked.

Ever since, science has understood the game. Anything we can conceptualise in a metaphysical sense is merely a mental crutch for the real business of model building. The intuitive images we have of waves or billiard balls or fluctating strings or whatever are just an aid to thought. We shouldn't start believing our own "free creations of the mind", as Einstein put it.

So sure, Newtonian mechanics might have a hole in the calculations right where at the instant where a force acts and a motion changes. But that was an inconsequential kind of hole - a necessary shortcut for the maths. The real holes in Newtonian mechanics were the ones later tackled by special and general relativity, and also quantum mechanics. There were consequential holes as well. Which were worth fixing.

But what do we count as "a computer"? — Bitter Crank

A von Neumann machine or programmable computer. That is what made Turing computation practical.

But then that throws the spotlight on to transistors and the technology to implement a digital logical circuit. And then in turn, it was the photographic approach to printing chips that paved the way for miniaturisation.

So it becomes like asking which was more important, the invention of electricity or the invention of the switch?

Remember that at the dawn of computing - in the 1940s - analog was bigger than digital. There were also plenty of non-Turing notions of computation. And many thought those were the future. But programmable switches that could encode information digitally were an idea that could be cost-effectively shrunk towards the limits of physics. And the software could be written out in ways that could also be mass produced without limit.

So "true computation" was about this double thing of separate programs and separate logic circuits. Which Turing imagined and von Neumann turned into a practical design with a few clever tricks to fool programs into thinking they had an infinite memory and an infinite time to do their stuff.

The combination of scientific discovery and its application through invention of new devices doesn't seem to go back all that far. When did this begin -- after the Renaissance? — Bitter Crank

It was happening tacitly. And then Newton made the strong connection between maths-strength theories and the inventions that could ensue. Newton saw the Universe as a machine, wrote that down in terms of equations. Then invention became engineering and not just craft or trial and error learning.

The answers show that "one technology" is an ambiguous idea.

All technology traces itself back to the one critical formal thought of "a machine". That is nature constrained in a particular mechanical fashion so that it does useful work. An engine is a machine to give useful shape to an explosion. A city's sewerage system is a machine that gives useful shape to another kind of "explosion". :)

To then single out just one most important machine in all history requires some defendable framework of judgement. What are we actually awarding points for? The OP asks us to target "quality of life".

Most would say health - broadly construed - is our number one priority when it comes to quality of life. It could be power, or self-actualisation, or growth. But health is still arguably tops.

That then narrows the field to the usual replies like public sanitation as the "machine thinking" that has had the most general impact.

Fire maybe did have an even greater impact on general health, but was not itself a conscious product of technical thought in the same way as the theory-led design of sewers as a solution in squalid big cities.

And the advances of the agricultural revolution seem only semi-technological. In some ways, crop rotation, hoes, paddy fields, are the imposition of mechanical thinking on the landscape. But as technology, it is more heuristic, less mathematically imagined. In a ranking, early agricultural technology would lose marks on that particular score.

And also it might be questioned how much it improved individual health or quality of life. Turning to farming wore out paleolithic bodies rather faster. It also led to crowded settlements and stratified societies.

The computer is clearly another impactful machine with also questionable outcomes in terms of the generalised quality of life.

Municipal utilities perhaps are the only unadulterated good here - unless you are a wee fish that has to live downstream of the local sewage and stormwater outfalls.

What is in the mind is some memory of the event, also stored as an interference pattern outside of the brain in the holographic universe. — Rich

We know how a hologram can be recorded in a material medium. How is it recorded in an immaterial one?

If we are to grant Bergson some subtlety of thought, then he was a holist taking a constraints-based view of temporal duration. He generalised the notions of time and memory so that the past is an accumulation of constraining information that conditions the present so that it has now its well defined degrees of freedom that constitute its future.

It is an organic and hierarchical model of why time unfolds with an entropic direction and a "cogent moment" spatiotemporal structure. The speed of light means that every event is constrained by a lightcone structure. The sun may have disappeared seven minutes ago. It is only now that its heat and gravity are a loss we can suddenly notice.

So sure, Bergson can be understood as another telling the systems science tale. But even he would be horrified by the mechanical crudeness of this hologram analogy. And if you aren't just taking that analogy literally, you will be able to say in what sense an interference pattern is being stored or recorded, without that being a claim that the mind or mentality is some kind of (im)material substance.

The problem applies to the movement of any object. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confusing a problem of maths with a problem of reality. Calculations break down when they arrive at a singularity - a point of circular self-reference. But that's just calculations for you. Don't conflate the map with the territory.

He doesn't believe matter is real at all. He says that at several places in the Atlantic article - only experiences are real. — Wayfarer

I was reading his published papers. The Atlantic article is a gloss.

In his papers, he at least makes a separation between the ontic agnosticism of his MUI argument, and the "some kind of monistic idealism" of his Conscious Realism.

Maybe he just had to say that so as not to come across as a total fruitloop. But still, he himself says you can have one without the other - one doesn't have to lead to the other. And then his conscious realism is left ill-defined in ontic terms in my view.

It could of course be that his mathematics is somehow good for talking about "conscious agents" in some kind of fundamental fashion. That is certainly his claim. He keeps saying he is formalising something in the fashion of Turing's Universal Computation.

I started reading the maths section but it just didn't seem interesting enough to continue. The papers were crackpot enough to put me off the effort by that stage.

I know he is an academic and all. But every kind of bullshit gets published in fringe journals. Life is too short to take everything seriously. And Hoffman's papers have all the hallmarks of an academic crank.

By contrast, Turing's papers are instantly lucid. There is not the same tell-tale floundering about constructing a motivation. Just a quick sketch of some ontic basics and on to resulting mathematical framework. You are not asked to believe anything ontological before getting going. The maths just speaks for itself.

neurotransmitters/neuroarchitecture/physiological------------------------------>Qualia/inner experience

It's like there is some HIDDEN theater of inner experience that is always in the equation but is never explained away. — schopenhauer1

The Hard Problem, or explanatory gap, can only exist philosophically to the extent that you believe in the metaphysical constructs of both self and world, consciousness and matter. That is, hard dualism arises because the mind and the world are both being imagined in substance terms. They are both kinds of "stuff" - a material stuff and an immaterial stuff. And imagined this way, there seems an over-supply of stuffs making up the one reality. Also there seems no substantial connection - no causal link - between these two kinds of stuff. Being different in kind, how can either act on the other?

So the first step to tackling the Hard Problem is to start to deflate it. One can delve deeper into the notion of substance - as Aristotle and others did - to start to see "stuff" in terms of a systems causality. You can start to see all "stuff" as a process with a functional structure. The question then becomes whether what we call mind, and what we call world, turn out to have a common causal architecture, a common fundamental process.

The Peircean pansemiotic position is that they do. And that commonality of process is semiosis or the triadic sign relation. That involves the "dualism" we need to have anything actually happen - a separation (via the epistemic cut) of a causal realm of information and a causal realm of material dynamics. But semiosis also then accounts for the subsequent interaction of the two species of causality thus divided. Together they make a functional whole with a purpose.

From a scientific point of view, that global purpose is entropy dissipation - as described by the laws of thermodynamics. And that entropy dissipation is then evolutionary. It is shaped by the demand to always get better in terms of its structural organisation. Complexity and mindfulness must emerge if it can locally accelerate the Universe's telic desire for its Heat Death.

Or from a more philosophical point of view like Peirce (when he wasn't being a scientist taking a thermodynamic view), we can talk about existence as the universal growth of reasonableness. The Universe is "mindful" in the sense that it is always growing more fixed and habitual in its ways. The laws - like the laws of thermodynamics - are becoming ever more clearly expressed.

Anyway, the point is that the Hard Problem itself depends on a misplaced concreteness when talking about both mind and matter. It is a hard problem because it is a dualised substance ontology.

Given that our starting point is simple experience, we need to realise that even our notion of "being a conscious being" is a social construct. It is a story we learn to tell to organise our experiences. We reify both the world, and our selves, then wonder why we have this explanatory gap.

Peircean metaphysics in particular seeks to wind all this assumed ontology back to basics. It wants to categorise experience differently. Indeed it begins with the question about the very mechanism by which experience gets categorised - how reasoning might operate as the most general and universal process.

That eventually leads to semiosis with its triadic structure of interpretation, sign and invariance; its dichotomy of information and matter, its ontic foundation in the notion of vagueness, Firstness or Apeiron.

And science is catching up. Semiosis can now be measured. At the physical level, the Planck scale defines the common unit for information and matter. The material cost of one bit of information - or a physical degree of freedom - is precisely defined in a way we can convert between our material descriptions of nature and our information theoretic ones. We can speak of entropy equivalently as either a quantity of material events or a quantity of informational uncertainty. It is part of the maths now.

What is a major new discovery in biophysics is that the same looks true of biosemiosis. There is a particular physical scale - the quasi-classical realm of the nanoscale - where material events and informational uncertainy become intercovertable. They can be quantified in a common coin.

It might have been thought biology was going to be messy in its underpinnings. It would be hard to define a level where physics and chemistry stops, biological organisation gets started. But instead, an actual scale of being has been identified where biological information suddenly kicks in as a thing which could regulate living material processes - all the tiny genetically-coded actions that structure a flow of metabolism and organism building.

So life has a hard lower limit, just like physics has.

Next step might be to find the same is true of brains and neural coding mechanisms. There may be some characteristic scale where neuro-semiosis suddenly kicks in as a hard fact of nature. Or maybe not. Maybe the biophysical limit - the action down there at the nano level of molecular machines - is where "mindfulness" kicks in already. This is a question so new and open, that it hasn't really been considered.

But whatever. The Hard Problem has its bite mostly because folk are used to thinking of existence in terms of a causally disconnected substance dualism. The truck has been driven all the way up a philosophical cul-de-sac and has got stuck.

But science is quite capable of talking a functional process view of existence. And it is already doing this with physics.

The Universe is a dissipative structure doing the second law's bidding. Classical reality is the organisation that emerges out of a more fundamental quantum vagueness or indeterminism. There is a basic "duality" of description anchored by the Planck scale. Observers and observables may seem divided by the quantum "hard problem" of the measurement issue, but now we can in fact quantify both sides of this divide in information theoretic terms. We can unite the divided in terms of holographic horizons, thermal decoherence, entropic forces, and other new-fangled physical conceptions which embed their observers pansemiotically.

Now biophysics has started to find its own ground zero for uniting it and bit, material dynamics and informational constraint. The laboratory equipment to observe cellular machinery on the nanoscale has only been around a decade, so this is all extremely new. And it might take another 10 years for the import of the discovery to become widely recognised.

So we are talking about the difference between a dead philosophical position - substance dualism - and a fast moving scientific project - pansemiosis.

And pansemiosis isn't about solving the hard problem by showing how "consciousness works". That would be to accept the goalposts of a dead philosophy. It is about reconceiving the metaphysical constructs which we would use to organise our experience so that we are no longer dazzled by either the "illusion" of the material world, or the aware mind. As we learn to think differently - existence understood as a common functional process, semiosis - then the old problems that obsessed us will slip away.

We might still have explanatory problems, but they would at least be different ones. Which would make a refreshing change.

His philosophy of mind is not: dualism, idealism, panpsychism, or physicalism. It does not contradict dual aspect monism, and MUI is consistent with species-specific semiotic modelling. Beyond that, I understand very little. — Galuchat

Yeah. Hoffman starts off with his MUI story, and that is reasonable as an analogic account of psychologiocal processes. Then he goes of into weirdness with his conscious realism.

Despite what Hoffman says, the conscious realism part does appear to claim idealism of some stripe. In calling his ontology monistic, he does look to back himself into that.

So in talking about conscious agents everywhere, causing the organisation of being through a sign interface, he might in fact be thinking pansemiotically.

But as I say, he doesn't give himself a working basis of that. There is no clear statement about an epistemic cut that gives you a "duality" of information and matter.

And he never tries to deflate the notion of consciousness as being some kind of unexplained psychic substance. Or rather, MUI would reduce consciousness to a functional process - a system of informational icons for coordinating material interactions with the world - and then consciousness comes back in its "sentient stuff" form in the conscious realism second half of his papers.

So I think he is just confused and falling between various stools.