Incorrect. Do you know how your car works? And yet, you know the car works because of the things in the car, not because of an intangible non-physical process. If we studied the brain and found things that were non-physical, then we could state, "maybe its this non-physical stuff that causes consciousness."

Does a car work without a conscious component? No, it doesn't.

Base level consciousness is the neurosemiosis. The modelling is the attending. — apokrisis

It seems to me that neurosemiosis, or mental processes involving signs, or producing meaning, is the act of modeling itself. Signs are types of models. Symbolizing is an act of modeling. Language is modeling of our conscious lives - our phenomenology - for others to bear witness to. Our language use is laced with phenomenological terms and projections of our phenomenology onto the world as if light is colored and ice cream is good and brains are physical outside of our own model.

From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world. — Joshs

We can see how strong physicalism winds up going too far because in the end it leads to the crazy metaphysical extremes of quantum theory where either it must be consciousness that collapses the wavefunction and brings the observed world into concrete being, or there is a multiverse of worlds to avoid the “explanatory gap” created by this collapse.

So physicalism winds up confirming the most extreme Cartesian dualism. Or at least we have to choose between human consciousness being the cause of material existence, or there being an infinite splintering of material existence.

Physicalism must be rescued somehow. And the issue is where to place the epistemic cut - or cuts - that bridge the explanatory gap between the experimenter reading the dials of the instruments and the quantum reality doing it’s weird things.

I don’t know what phenomenology brings to the table here. But Peirce’s semiotics is all about this issue. And the modern dichotomy of entropy and information is the basis for our best model of pansemiosis. The epistemic cut is placed at the Planckscale cut-off of thermal dechoherence. The quantum realm is the zone of material criticality or instability. And horizons or information bounds placed on that instability are what produces a dynamically steadying hand, giving us the stable classical world we observe.

Pansemiosis is the dissipative structure that forms a cosmos. And that stable materiality becomes the basis for life and mind as further levels of actual (ie: code based) semiosis. That is, further levels of localised and complex dissipative structure. And each level of life and mind is based on a new kind of coding mechanism, each enforcing its own kind of epistemic cut.

If I am interpreting him correctly, Bert is asking why the kinds of behavior you observe, and capacities you attribute, to the jumping spider, your example, could not exist, for example, in an unconscious robot. — Janus

Yes that's pretty much it

Then you're a naive realist? — Harry Hindu

No.

What does it mean to be physical? — Harry Hindu

To be made up of matter and energy. And I will return the question. What does it mean to be non-physical? What evidence do you have of it existing?

How is it that when I observe your mental processes I experience a brain but when I observe my own I experience a mind? — Harry Hindu

You've made a common mistake of equating the outside observation of something, to the experience of being something. Find any other person in the world. Do you know what it is like to be them? No, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Do you know what it feels like for them to hear the beating of their own heart? No, but that doesn't mean they don't have a heart, that it doesn't beat in their body, and that they can't feel what that's like.

If I open up a brain and look at it, I don't know what its like to BE that brain. You seem to think there should be a picture show going on in there, which is silly. What we imagine in our heads isn't light. Its the communication of hundreds and thousands of electrons at incredibly high speeds.

How the computer works is much the same. If I open up a hard drive, do I see windows running? If I open up the ethernet wires, can I see youtube and sound being streamed over? And yet if you told a programmer that this is evidence that the computer's functionality is a non-physical process, they would laugh at you.

The problem is, sometimes people believe that if they don't understand how something fully works, they can make up things about how it works. You can't. You can't introduce things that don't exist into a system. You can't say, "I don't understand how youtube can be on my screen, yet not be in my computer when I look at it," and think your made up idea that it must be a non-physical process has any merit.

Back to the brain for a second, when we physically and chemically alter the brain, people's experience of BEING a brain changes. We've confirmed that time and again. Go get drunk, then tell me that your consciousness exists on a higher level beyond what physical alcohol can touch. Go read the evidence of anti-psychotic drugs, hallucinegens, and amazing records of brain damage like loss of long term memory, the inability to mentally see colors, comprehend words, etc, then tell me their consciousness exists on some plane beyond the physical.

What does it mean to be physical?
— Harry Hindu

To be made up of matter and energy — Philosophim

But what is matter? What is it that propels it?

Go read the evidence of anti-psychotic drugs, hallucinegens, and amazing records of brain damage like loss of long term memory, the inability to mentally see colors, comprehend words, etc, then tell me their consciousness exists on some plane beyond the physical. — Philosophim

There is no evidence either way as to whether consciousness "exists on some plane beyond the physical", because all our (intersubjectively corroborable) evidence is physical evidence. You're assuming that the only possible evidence is physical evidence, and then concluding that there is nothing but the physical; in other words, you;re committing the fallacy of assuming your conclusion.

The fact that chemical agents can affect the brain says nothing about whether the brain generates or receives consciousness; we would expect the same result either way. What happens if you de-tune a radio?

But what is matter? What is it that propels it? — EugeneW

A small primer to read. http://ifsa.my/articles/mass-energy-one-and-the-same

It seems to me that neurosemiosis, or mental processes involving signs, or producing meaning, is the act of modeling itself. — Harry Hindu

Yes. That is what I was saying.

Putting it simply, semiosis is the construction of a meaningful relation between a self and world using a (meaningless) code.

The code is the hinge point of the affair. To connect the physical and the informational aspects of reality efficiently, it must itself be the least of both. It must be a system of signs or symbols that effectively costs no material effort, and also carries no informed or meaningful content.

So the code can act as a code because it stands outside both sides of the equation. It is neither material, nor informational - as much as that is actually possible. And thus it can mediate between these two realms ... by in fact making them the two realms split by its epistemic cut.

There are four obvious levels where this happens. Biology has the encoding mechanism of the gene. Neurology uses neurons. Human culture uses words. And since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, number has asserted its "world making" potential. Human psychology has been remade in a Noosphere fashion. Technology is new level of organism, feeding off buried carbon.

So a gene costs next to nothing, compared to the energy return on the investment. And a gene means nothing until there has been in fact some considerable spending of an organism's capital in terms of erasing alternative meanings - winnowing the host of free possibilities, or degenerate states, by an evolutionary filtering process.

So some codon on a DNA strand is essentially a cost-free and random choice. It is a switch that could be on or off. And it can just as easily be switched on or off. The bare coding mechanism is just a random bit string waiting to be given a meaningful state - some pattern that says something about the world, and thus about the self that has an evolved and informed point of view about that world.

This is why semiosis, or the modelling relation, is triadic. It has the three elements of the physics (the rate dependent dynamics), the model (the rate independent information), and the coding mechanism that both creates and bridges the sharp divide (the epistemic cut - best represented by the idea of a mechanical switch, or 0/1 logic gate).

Neurons are like genes in being essentially costless in terms of their physics. Humans can afford trillions of synaptic switches. And they are like genes in that each switch is essentially meaningless. The connections have no meaning until the pattern that is a functional regulatory model has been evolved, developed, learnt, habituated, remembered.

Neurons as simple uninformed switches are neither physical, nor mental. At least in the effective sense - the sense essential to their being a coding machinery, the implementation of the epistemic cut. Each neuron is by design as physically costless as a computer transistor. And it is by design as informationally meaningless as a computer transistor - until it has started to repay its small physical investment by doing useful work in the world as part of an informed regulatory model of that world.

The same applies to words and numbers. Each involve minimal physical effort to produce as symbols, so physics doesn't constrain their maximal informed use. And each lacks intrinsic meaning - they are just noises or squiggles. This means each can be endowed with any meaning we choose. And the amount of meaning they come to "contain" is proportionate to the number of alternative interpretations we have in fact - at some effort, some cost - discarded.

So there is one general trick that unites life and mind. Semiosis, or the way that a code can both separate and unite the two "realms" of mind and matter, information and entropy.

As the epistemic cut, the code first enforces a sharp distinction between the two, and then it re-connects them. The possibility of a model (a self) in causal control of a world comes by first breaking the physics of the world into its material and formal causes, then using a model of those formal causes (ideas about order and purpose) to re-connect the two sides in a (self)controlled fashion.

The code is a system of switches. To a reductionist and epiphenomenalist, one could say that that is all there is to see - a bunch of cheap transistors or some other rather costless bit of physical mechanism. And to an idealist or phenomenologists, there might instead be - well, still just be! - a bunch of cheap transistors, or some other rather costless bit of physical mechanism, that can thus have nothing meaningful to say about conscious experience, intentionality, feelings and aesthetics, or any of the other actually meaningful aspects of being a self, a mind, a free spirit, etc.

So what we have in philosophy of mind is realists and idealists locked in Cartesian conflict. And they are too absorbed in this historical cultural drama at pay attention to systems science or semiotics - the scientific account of how codes ground modelling relations.

Language is modeling of our conscious lives - our phenomenology - for others to bear witness to. Our language use is laced with phenomenological terms and projections of our phenomenology onto the world as if light is colored and ice cream is good and brains are physical outside of our own model. — Harry Hindu

Yes, I agree. And that is one of the big problems with the term "consciousness". Those who use it as their central descriptor are failing to recognise the big difference between neural level world modelling and linguistic level world modelling. They conflate a biological "first person" level of awareness with a sociological "third person" level of awareness.

And yet it is obvious that animals only "extrospect". They haven't got the semiotic means to introspect. They are plugged into the moment in all their responses - even if they are intentional, intelligent, capable of planning, etc.

But language gives humans the ability to take a displaced view of their reality. We can stand outside ourselves to see ourselves as selves. And we can stand outside the world - as it currently and concretely is - to imagine the world as it was at other times, or could be in other worlds, or even as it might be for other selves.

There is no evidence either way as to whether consciousness "exists on some plane beyond the physical", because all our (intersubjectively corroborable) evidence is physical evidence. You're assuming that the only possible evidence is physical evidence, and then concluding that there is nothing but the physical; in other words, you;re committing the fallacy of assuming your conclusion. — Janus

Basically you're stating there is no evidence of the non-physical. The only conclusion we can reach then, are physical ones. All I asked is to give me evidence of non-physical reality. Its like magic right? Give me evidence that magic exists. If someone said, "Well the problem is all of our evidence of things I might consider magic is in physics and chemistry," I would say, "Then there doesn't appear to be any evidence of magic."

I am not precluding that non-physical evidence cannot exist. So no, I am not committing a fallacy. I'm simply asking you to provide evidence that the non-physical exists. Its very clear. What is it? What does it do? How does it interact with the brain? How does it surpass the physical elements of the brain?

We can use alcohol as an example. We all agree that getting drunk impairs our consciousness. So you need to give non-physical evidence and explanation for this. We can likely conclude that the non-physical must interact with the physical, as a physical alteration also alters a person's consciousness. If so, we should be able to detect or find something that is interacting with the physical brain that is not physical. Can you provide such evidence?

Matter is not the same as energy. Equivalent yes, the same no. Pure energy particles are different from massless matter particles. Pure energy particles, like photons, are responsible for interaction. They exist between massless matter particles, together with two other fields, and are an aid for matter to interact with and reach out for other massless matter particles. The particles have a drive.

Matter is not the same as energy. Equivalent yes, the same no. Pure energy particles are different from massless matter particles. — EugeneW

I've given you a link to science article which clearly mentions that energy and mass are different expressions of the same thing.

From the article:
"Mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind."
Albert Einstein, Atomic Physics (1948)

Feel free to explain why the quote is wrong, or the article is wrong. I'll need more than just a quick opinion on this. Again, I'm not stating you aren't correct, but you need to give some evidence if I'm to know that.

I am not precluding that non-physical evidence cannot exist. So no, I am not committing a fallacy. I'm simply asking you to provide evidence that the non-physical exists. — Philosophim

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated. So it can never be evidence in the "public" sense, but only evidence to the individual whose imagination or intuition tells them that there is something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world.

The fact is we don't know either way. The question is undecidable. Sure, you can say that the idea that there is nothing beyond the physical is the more plausible, but that is a subjective value judgement; there is no empirical warrant for judgements of plausibility.

Theories of information, semiotics, etc. are useful heuristics. — Theorem

Thank you Theorem. Yes, I completely agree about that. Wikipedia says:

A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation.

A heating engineer will say that a thermostat is feeling 23 degrees or that it is calling for heat. We all say that computers process information and that information can be stored on disks or memory cards. And we say that the optic nerve carries information to the brain.

All this is fine, the problem arises when the suboptimal, imperfect and/or irrational heuristic is taken to be the optimal, perfect and rational explanation and description of the world.

The person who started this discussion suggested that Global Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory are the leading theories on consciousness in neuroscience. A proponent of Global Workspace Theory, Stanislas Dehaene, says that "consciousness is nothing but the flexible circulation of information within a dense switchboard of cortical neurons". According to Integrated Information Theory, consciousness is the integration of information.

Those views seem to me to be philosophically naive and scientifically worthless, but such views are apparently widely held, our friend apokrisis seems to think they are unquestionable facts.

So again: I think consciousness is caused by biological electrochemical phenomena, and if we could describe them in full, we would have exhaustively explained the cause of consciousness.

If you are among those who think information plays some role in addition to what the electrochemical processes do, please explain what it is.

Yeah, but the point is that they are not the same thing. Energy fields are interaction fields, gauge fields, if you like. Matter fields couple to them to interact.

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated. So it can never be evidence in the "public" sense, but only evidence to the individual whose imagination or intuition tells them that there is something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world. — Janus

Stop telling me what I will and will not accept, and just give me the evidence. I can intuit and imagine. Why do you think we can't corroborate that? I intuit that there is not something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world. I also intuit that invisible magical men exist that guide my every move. That's called a "belief". A belief is a very real thing. Beliefs are inductions, meaning that the premise of the belief does not necessarily lead to the conclusion someone holds.

The difference between an induction and a deduction, is that in a deduction, the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. So though I might have an induction that my consciousness is separate from my brain, the premises of neuroscience conclude that my consciousness comes from my brain. A deduction is always more rational to hold than an induction. To prove the deduction wrong, you need to introduce a premise that demonstrates we cannot conclude that consciousness is purely physical. That requires evidence of something non-physical, not an induction.

Stop telling me what I will and will not accept, and just give me the evidence. I can intuit and imagine. Why do you think we can't corroborate that? — Philosophim

It's obvious; we intuit and imagine differently. I cannot feel your intuitions and vice versa. They thus cannot be evidence in the public sense you are asking for.

It's obvious; we intuit and imagine differently. I cannot feel your intuitions and vice versa. They thus cannot be evidence in the public sense you are asking for. — Janus

Janus, you just ignored the rest of my post. You are running away. Don't do that.

I'm not running away. I didn't require a lesson on the difference between induction and deduction, I'm already clear on that. It seems to me you are the one running away; deflecting because you can't come up with a counterargument to what I'm saying about the difference between public and private evidence, the subjective nature of judgements of plausibility in relation to metaphysical questions; and their consequent undecidability.

It seems to me you are the one running away; deflecting because you can't come up with a counterargument to what I'm saying about the difference between public and private evidence, the subjective nature of judgements of plausibility in relation to metaphysical questions; and their consequent undecidability. — Janus

You did not address my entire post. Its been a pleasant conversation until now. I told you to give me your evidence, that I can intuit and think as well. I've been very clear what viable evidence would be. I indicated deduction vs. induction, because of this very important claim:

So though I might have an induction that my consciousness is separate from my brain, the premises of neuroscience conclude that my consciousness comes from my brain.

Do you get it? I want to know I will live forever Janus. I want to die, go to heaven, see family and friends again. I want to be able to drink and smoke dope all day and it not affect who I am. I have an intuition that this could be. But that's an induction. And there is no evidence that this will happen. You claim you have evidence. Well give it! Why are you holding out? Why can't you give me something where I can rationally pursue my induction?

If you truly believed you had evidence of what was non-physical, you would rush out to help me like the good soul you are. But you don't, do you? Because I believe you're a good soul, and if you had it, you would. So don't run away. If you're a good soul, try. And if you know you can't, then just say you don't have it. We'll both be happier that way.

That consciousness is generated by the brain, though no one has explained how, is a premise of neuroscience? Why call it science, then, and not neuroinduction?

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated. So it can never be evidence in the "public" sense, but only evidence to the individual whose imagination or intuition tells them that there is something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world. — Janus

Phenomenology is socially constructed. It is a modelling exercise using language to externalise the internal in a socially pragmatic fashion.

So what you claim to be the facts of two different realms - the public and the private - are instead a way to frame things in a way that there is this epistemic division ... that can then allow a further level of organismic regulation emerge.

You have to construct the division to exploit the division.

So you grow up in a culture which trades in an economy of personal wants and needs. You have all these "feelings" that give meaning, direction and purpose to you individual consciousness.

If you say you are hungry or tired, those are socially-accepted descriptions of animistic states of mind - pretty much a summary of how you are feeling at a brainstem level about your current physiological state. It is a reflexive response with a clear biological utility. If you tell me you are in pain, I can understand what you mean and respond in some culturally approved fashion that is pragmatic.

But words can also encode almost purely social level states of mind - descriptors like loyalty, alienation, love, the sublime. These are rooted in the public and intersubjective in being largely about the pragmatics of living as a social creature in the human world.

You are no longer describing "private states of mind" reflexively generated at a hypothalamic or limbic level of the brain. You are describing ways of acting that are strongly under the voluntary attentional control of the cortex. The words - the emotion language - is talk about suitable ways of behaviour in a human social setting.

Are you being brave or reckless when cliff-diving? What you feel privately - in brainstem fashion - is arousal and adrenaline, dread and expectation. And what you also feel is the social framing of your action. Are you being performatively a tough guy, or a dumb ass? That becomes a social judgement. Indeed a social judgement poised like a switch between its two binary interpretations.

You can feel brave. That was how you framed it privately. And you can perhaps later re-frame it publicly, taking the third person view that what you "felt" was a moment of heedless recklessness.

Or vice versa. Your first time off the cliff, it might be recklessness that you feel inside - that is how you frame the high brainstem arousal together with a cortical state of conflict, the voluntary attention process that has both the plan to jump, coupled to the difficulty of actually doing so. But afterwards, you can switch that to bravery. You can walk away as if the plunge was no big deal. Do it anytime, as that is the kind of guy you are.

So this public/private distinction is semiotic. It is an epistemic cut both created and bridged. Language is the means of dividing a group into a collection of individuals ... who can then act with even more perfect group cohesion ... because acting as an autonomous individual is also now something quite definite.

For animals, there is no such public/private distinction. Being altruistic vs being selfish, or being cooperative vs being competitive, are not "emotional choices" being culturally policed.

But humans, with their language-structured minds and worlds, are all about this social economy of emotions, feelings and values. The public/private distinction becomes a super-important thing - the basis of the social model.

It is only when we step up another level - to the numbers-based semiosis of science - that we can see that there is this "unconscious" social game going on.

Those views seem to me to be philosophically naive and scientifically worthless, but such views are apparently widely held, our friend apokrisis seems to think they are unquestionable facts. — Daemon

For the record, I don't subscribe to either Global Workspace Theory or Integrated Information Theory. Neither are semiotic approaches.

But I do endorse Friston's Bayesian Brain approach, and others that preceded it, like Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory.

So though I might have an induction that my consciousness is separate from my brain, the premises of neuroscience conclude that my consciousness comes from my brain. — Philosophim

The premises conclude?

Do you get it? I want to know I will live forever Janus. I want to die, go to heaven, see family and friends again. I want to be able to drink and smoke dope all day and it not affect who I am. I have an intuition that this could be. But that's an induction. And there is no evidence that this will happen. You claim you have evidence. Well give it! Why are you holding out? Why can't you give me something where I can rationally pursue my induction?

If you truly believed you had evidence of what was non-physical, you would rush out to help me like the good soul you are. But you don't, do you? Because I believe you're a good soul, and if you had it, you would. So don't run away. If you're a good soul, try. And if you know you can't, then just say you don't have it. We'll both be happier that way. — Philosophim

It's obvious you can't drink and smoke dope all day without being physically affected. I haven't claimed that I have evidence that you could do that without being affected; why would you think I would claim that?

As to whether you will live forever; well, we know the body will die, and that's the extent of the possible publicly available evidence. I think you need to read a bit more closely.

Phenomenology is socially constructed. It is a modelling exercise using language to externalise the internal in a socially pragmatic fashion. — apokrisis

I don't disagree that phenomenology is socially constructed.

So what you claim to be the facts of two different realms - the public and the private - are instead a way to frame things in a way that there is this epistemic division ... that can then allow a further level of organismic regulation emerge.

You have to construct the division to exploit the division. — apokrisis

Of course how we talk about the division is culturally constructed; but the division is an inevitable fact; because I don't know what thoughts are going in your head other than what you tell me. I don't know what your purported religious experience is like, other than how you (probably inadequately) describe it to me. You are trying to take a position outside of human experience and reduce it to a "modeling relation". It's a form of reductionism; despite your claim that it is not atomistic, but wholistic. This whole question is not worth arguing about.

For animals, there is no such public/private distinction. — apokrisis

Of course not; animals don't make distinctions. But it's still the case that one animal doesn't feel another's pain; whereas as they do respond to each other's body language, so there is a private/ public dynamic going on there nonetheless.

Fine, then don't give me the evidence. I go about my way unchanged. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Fine, then don't give me the evidence. I go about my way unchanged. Enjoy the rest of your day. — Philosophim

Thanks, I hope you don't drink and smoke dope all day. All I'm really saying is that religious or mystical experiences or intuitions can be evidence for beliefs for the person who experiences them, but cannot be evidence for anyone else, because there is always the possibility of being wrong. And that possibility obtains also in the empirical sciences, which are perennially defeasible.

but the division is an inevitable fact; because I don't know what thoughts are going in your head other than what you tell me. — Janus

You and me is a second person view of two individuals in interaction. Peircean secondness, in other words.

The semiosis here is about first and third person. So as two people, what counts is that we can share our thoughts because we are part of a community of speakers. We are both shaped by the same common cultural habits. And so already there is tacit mutual agreement that we will deconstruct our interiority in some socially given fashion.

I don't know what your purported religious experience is like, other than how you (probably inadequately) describe it to me. — Janus

In medieval times, monks could be had up for the sin of accidie - a failure to feel the full private fervour of religious experience and merely going through the public semblance of prayer and exhaltation.

Actually experiencing God is of course not required by the Anglican Church these days.

You are trying to take a position outside of human experience and reduce it to a "modeling relation". It's a form of reductionism; despite your claim that it is not atomistic, but wholistic. — Janus

Modelling is reductionist. Atomism and holism would be at opposite ends of the spectrum and thus reciprocally-defined forms of modelling.

So the holism is the triadic holism - and triadic reduction - of Peircean semiotics. Thirdness as holism incorporates both Firstness and Secondness within it.

What I am actually doing is taking a position that wraps first, second and third person points of view together in a single metaphysics - a metaphysics that is triadic.

It stands outside in the same way that the general stands "outside" the particular. That is, it grounds it.

So semiosis is a statement about reality being irreducibly complex. And hence being fully reducible to the complexity that is a triadic structural relation.

Is this really so hard to understand? [Of course it bloody is. :grin: ]

All this is fine, the problem arises when the suboptimal, imperfect and/or irrational heuristic is taken to be the optimal, perfect and rational explanation and description of the world. — Daemon

But we don't have any theories that are 'optimal, perfect and rational' explanations and descriptions of the world, at least as far as I am aware. Therefore, every theory we have, whether scientific or otherwise, satisfies the definition of an heuristic.

If you are among those who think information plays some role in addition to what the electrochemical processes do, please explain what it is. — Daemon

I'm not sure what you mean by the words 'in addition'. I don't get the impression (from what I've read) that the proponents of GWT and IIT see information as something that operates 'in addition' to electrochemical processes. These theories simply operate a higher level of abstraction, analogous to the way that chemistry operates at a higher level of abstraction than particle physics. That's my understanding anyway. I'm not an expert in the literature on GWT or IIT by any means.

(By the way, you may be right that GWT/IIT are both garbage from a scientific perspective. I don't know enough right now to weigh in on that. My intention here isn't to defend those theories specifically, but to the question your assertion that 'information' can't be a legitimate explanatory concept).

(By the way, you may be right that GWT/IIT are both garbage from a scientific perspective. I don't know enough right now to weigh in on that. My intention here isn't to defend those theories specifically, but to the question your assertion that 'information' can't be a legitimate explanatory concept). — Theorem

My assertion is that it's being used in such a way that it doesn't explain anything. The particle physics and the chemistry levels do each explain something, but the Informationists are saying it's information that is doing the work in both cases.