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.

Was there some actual question there? I couldn't get anything definite. Perhaps you just wish to assert dualism but are unable to muster the appropriate argument?

Does the ball still break the glass if no one is around to observe? (I am trying to imagine things as you are describing them.)

On the one hand, Hoffman is just making a standard semiotic or modelling argument. We understand the world through a system of sign. But on the other hand, he looks to miss the crucial thing of the epistemic cut where signs are an actual act of mediation in which a material reality comes an informational interpretation.

So he makes a big thing about reality having no objective features. And that is where he turns into sounding like an idealist, not an indirect realist or pragmatist.

However the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. It is objective, and indeed utterly recalcitrant, in its existence. Then the epistemic cut says there follows an act of translation. With our sensory receptors and habits of perception, patterns of physical energy are turned into informational activity - the signs of our qualitative experience.

Consider an interaction without this translation. Shine some red light on a dead sheep eyeball. All that will happen is that the dead flesh might start to heat up after a while. Energy can make an energetic change and that is as far as it goes. There is no hue to this interaction as such. Saying the light is "red" is a meaningless claim from the point of view of the physics. Red just isn't an objective property of reality while we are talking of it as material being. Whereas light being able to heat up the eyeball is a recalcitrant fact of nature. It just happens.

By contrast, when light falls on a live eyeball, we don't experience the heating but instead the construction of some representational pattern of signs. The visual field is divided in hues, like green and red, that "stand for" some neural circuit judgement about relative wavelength frequency information. Green and red are only fractionally different in wavelength as a physical fact, but are experienced as ontically the exact opposite of each other. It is impossible (in any normal way) for red and green to be found together at the same point of experience. Our circuitry is designed to so that their informational state is signalling one or the other in a logically mutually exclusive fashion.

So the semiotic view is that what we construct is an interpretation of reality where our own biological interests are part of the information that shapes the sign. Evolution doesn't want the sign to be "realistic" in that it is some pure token of the material world - like a reading of a scientist's light meter that wants to give an objective reading of an energy level or wavelength. Evolution wants the sign itself to be a sharply dichotomous judgement.

The receptors have to make a simple decision - say green or say red. Break the complexity of physical energy relations into simple pixels of yes/no acts of discriminative judgement. Then that epistemic cut means we can get on with building up our own fully self interested model of the world.

We have already made the first necessary act of interpretance to separate our interests from the material constraints the world seeks to impose on our physical being. In our little neural cocoon of self interested world modelling, we can then construct a whole realm of plans and ideas founded on our system of sign.

The computer interface analogy Hoffman offers does get at this epistemic cut. Our interests are served by seeing an icon on the screen we can click. We don't want to have to care about all the physical complexity in terms of the hardware actions that a little picture might represent. So when we see a symbol that looks like a floppy disk, what we see is our own desire to save a file. The sign appears to be directly representative of the material,world, yet really it is a fragmentary reflection of our own internal realm of felt intentionality. It is a little bit of us.

The trick is to see how the same is true of all phenomenology, like our experience of hues such as red and green. They are shards of self interested judgement hardwired down at the neurobiological level. Energy and matter are exactly what get left at the doors of perception. Consciousness starts with a logical transformation, an epistemic cut, where a digital decision has got made and now we can talk of a selfish realm of sign.

Remember that the maths was developed to deal with idealised point objects. So the Zeno-style paradox of jumping to the first next point to get moving is an artefact of that maths.

Anyhow it is just a bunch of crackpottery, so why bother. — Rich

So you don't even believe in it yourself enough to try to defend it?

So the answer is no?

My take would be this based upon the universe being a holographic field in nature. — Rich

What is a holographic energy field? Only reference seems to be to crackpottery - http://ambafrance-do.org/spirituality/24334.php

The universe has 1 trillion years to live. — Rich

Don't you mean that the Heat Death is eternal? That's quite a surprising conclusion if you think about it.

The muon can be said to be at rest and thus there is no effect on its decay. — Rich

So you can subtract away all acceleration to arrive at an inertial frame. But after constraining second derivative motion to get first degree motion, how do you actually arrive at actual zeroeth degree motion - this "proper rest" you want to talk about?

This is why the reciprocity is between the second and first degree derivatives of motion, not between some absolute frame with matchingly absolute resting coordinates.

To put any rate on a muon's decay, some reference frame must be established as your chosen coordinate basis. Conventionally one can make that the global cosmic backdrop. That seems safe enough for SR purposes. A muon's decay could be then measured against that as its inertial frame. A slow muon could be compared to a fast muon from some general cosmic point of view.

But to claim baldly that a muon has some proper spacetime coordinate all of its own - a zeroeth derivative - shows you haven't really thought this relativistic measurement business through.

You know, you are, like good scientist, suppose to say that STR does not apply to accelerating systems... — Rich

You seem really confused. Perhaps you don't get the consequences of SR adopting a Minkowski geometry framework where spacetime is united as four dimensions? That means we can map one inertial frame onto another via a Lorentz transformation. Length contraction and time dilation - the reciprocality - gets handled automatically by now being built into the mathematical structure. The constant c - lightspeed - is now the scaling factor. So you get that inverse relation, c/1 vs 1/c, hardwired in as a new universal constraint.

Restmass arises as the possibility of going slower than c - so slow as to be "at rest". And a muon at rest is experiencing much more time due to dilation, so its decay comes as fast as it possibly can. A muon travelling at near the speed of light has a clock that ticks slower, so its decay is stretched out. All this of course being the view we are seeing having fixed our frame of reference so that one muon is not moving relative to us, the other is moving at near lightspeed.

Which nicely brings me back to my first reply to the OP.

You are very flattering. But its just standard cosmology. You can read all about it yourself.

I can take a photo of the baseball sitting on the glass and one of the baseball at the exact instant it contacts the glass and the photos are identical, and yet one will impart energy sufficient to break the glass and the other will not. — MikeL

But in one, the glass is not bending, nor the ball flattening. In the other, the snapshot looks completely different. The electrostatic bonds holding the glass atoms together are being visibly stretched towards the point where they could break. Even the ball is being tested on that score. It could have been the one to shatter instead.

Most people probably can follow simple math. If the Universe had a temperature of 10^32 degrees at the Big Bang, and the Heat Death is defined by it being asymptotically close to 0 degrees, then it being currently 2.7 degrees tells us what?

Is it: A) We are pretty much at the end of the journey. Yes siree, 32 orders of magnitude is quite a big drop. We are not even talking nanoseconds to midnight (nano being merely 9 orders of magnitude).

Or: B) Bibble, bibble, bibble. Blub, blub, blub....

The humans are the ones accelerating. Muon at rest. — Rich

So you support your position of there being no preferred frame by stating your preference for a frame?You support the reciprocality principle by denying it applies between two frames?

Wow. Your grades as school must have been spectacular. You can't seem to make a single point that isn't a self-contradiction.

You are like someone plunging off a skyscraper, now being inches from the ground, shouting out I'm not dead yet, you don't know what you're talking about, my future has not been foretold, there are no grounds to predict my immanent demise.

Blub, blub, blub....

I am sure many members are awaiting breathlessly for the v final verdict on what will happen billions and billions of years from now as science refines it's calculations. — Rich

Just measure the cosmic background radiation. Its 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. The average energy density is down to a handful of protons per cubic metre.

Again you reveal the vastness of your ignorance of routine scientific facts. The Heat Death is a done deal even if you might also say the clock has another tick or two to actually reach midnight.

Drowning not waving.

I'm just confused about whether you're telling me to quit taking that second mechanism-seeking step, or whether it's just that you're talking metaphysics and I'm usually not. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. I get that you want to get going with real world modelling. That is where correlations between variables start to mess up attempts to model in terms of assuming independent variables.

But my response to that is you have to start with the clean basic models. You have to have a (metaphysically general) foundation which sorts out what you even mean by independent or random. And as I say, it is a huge thing to discover that the statistical world is larger than just the central limit theorem. It is indeed really huge to realise that powerlaw statistics is the more general natural case (as being a system with the fewest actual constraints).

So you have to establish the baseline that legitimates any modelling. And then you can start building back in the kind of sophistication that starts to deal rigorously with messy domains with possible internal correlations you might want to talk about.

Systems with correlations or coordination dynamics have been a big deal for statistical mechanics for a good 50 years. That is what phase transition models are all about. Remember your interest in the logistic functon or S-curve - the reason why transitions can be sudden as global correlations suddenly kick in? Rene Thom's Catastrophe Theory? Spontaneous symmetry breaking? Autocatalytic networks? Ising models? There's a thousand variations of statistical mechanical models that start with a clean baseline of "no interactions", and then find ways to model the realistic emergence of those interactions or collective behaviour.

Take the Ising model - the story of a bar magnet. When it is hot, all the iron atoms jiggle and don't line up. All their magnetic fields are aligned in a non-interacting fashion. But cool the metal and it hits a point where the thermal jiggling gets suddenly overtaken by the potential local attractions. Correlation goes from zero to infinite in a flash. Voila. The bar has a fixed global magnetic field in which all individual variety is completely constrained.

Its the usual story. Modelling has to break the world apart to put it back together. You have to work out the baseline simplicity before you can hope to model the real world complexity.

So it is not about quitting your second mechanism step. My point is that statistical mechanics - at its fundamental level - has only been able to move forward with a new era of thermodynamically-inspired models (ones that deal with coordination or constraint-making as itself emergent within a system) by realising that Gaussian statistics are the special case, not the general one.

For me, I agree, this has metaphysical import. I like to think what it means about existence itself.

You might be just interested in baseball statistics or whatever Nate Silver has in mind as some particular domain. And fair enough.

No preferred frame of reference. — Rich

Ho, ho! Trying to slip out from under the rubble of the wreck of your own argument.

Reciprocality says there is a "preferred" and absolute connection between two inertial frames. So if it looks like acceleration going from frame A to frame B, it looks like a matching deceleration going in the other direction.

You do understand the difference between inertia and acceleration? You got an A for that back at school?

Unless it collapses back into another singularity, and then expands again. Guess we'll have to wait and see ;-) — Wayfarer

No we bloody don't. Dark energy is a fact. The Heat Death is gonna happen.

Of course we now have to account for dark energy. And again - in my view - decoherence is the best hope of that. Because quantum level uncertainty can only be constrained, not eliminated, then that means that the fabric of spacetime is going to have a built-in negative pressure. It is going to have a zero-point energy that causes quantum-scale "creep".

Unfortunately we don't know enough particle physics to do an exact calculation of this "creep". We can't sum all the contributions in an accurate way to see if they match the dark energy observations. And the naive level calculation - where either things either all sum or all cancel - produce the ridiculous answers that the dark energy value should be either zero or Planck-scale "infinite". An error of 130 orders of magnitude and so another of your often cited "crises of modern physics".

Other calculations going beyond the most naive have got closer to the observed value. But also admittedly, not come nearly close enough yet.

But at least, as a mechanism, it could be bloody wrong. ;)

He, like myself, can't accept the idea of 'parallel universes', but the point I'm trying to make is that it is an inevitable consequence of Everett's 'relative state formulation', like it or not. So, let's move on. — Wayfarer

I reject parallel worlds and parallel minds because immanence has to be more reasonable than transcendence when it comes to metaphysics.

An immanent explanation could at least be wrong. A transcendent explanation is always "not even wrong" because it posits no actual causal mechanism. It just sticks a warning sign at the edge of the map saying "here be dragons".

And the Everett formulation is just an interpretation - a metaphysical heuristic. It itself becomes subject to various metaphysical interpretations as I just described. You can get literal and concrete. Or you can take a vaguer approach where the worlds and branches are possibilities, not really actualities. Or you can go the full hog and just accept that the foundation of being is ontically vague and so any counterfactual definiteness is an emergent property.

The real advance of "MWI" is the uniting of the maths of quantum mechanics with the maths of thermodynamical constraints - the decoherence formalism.

This is a genuine step in the development of quantum theory. And it has sparked its own wave of interpretative understanding - even if ardent MWIers claim to own decoherence as their own thing.