Trouble is, Rich, that Bergson has no following in the modern academy. He's a museum piece, hardly talked about outside history of philosophy.

I found Hoffman on the PBS series, Closer to Truth, one of a number of such luminaries and talking heads. What I liked about him is simply that he's not a materialist, and 'the enemy of the enemy is my friend'. I'm hoping that other scientists are persuaded by him, but, myself, I need no persuasion.

I agree. But if people are interested in pursuing this concept Bergson would be the first place to go. He is no longer taught in mainstream academia because the materialists/determinists are as vicious as the Inquisitors, Russell being one of the worst.

If someone doesn't mind sitting through thorough, drawn out presentations which are remarkably perceptive, Stephen Robbins has created a whole series of YouTube videos, but Bergson still stands alone for his penetration of Creative Evolution.

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.

I think there is some truth in that, and I really think I ought to add him to my reading list. I do feel an intuitive affinity with his ideas.

As an aside, a comment on Bergson by Edward Conze, Buddhologist:

Bergson, like Kant, strives hard to show that spiritual values can co-exist with the findings of science. He does this by contrasting the largely false world of common sense and science (in which he, nevertheless, takes a keen interest) with the true world of intuition. He is perfectly lucid and even superb so long as he demonstrates that both the intellect and our practical preoccupations manifestly distort the world view both of everyday experience and of mechanical science. But, when he comes to the way out, to his dur‚e r‚elle and his "intuition," vagueness envelops all and everything. His positive views have therefore been rightly described as "tantalising," for "as soon as one reaches out to grasp his body of thought it seems to disappear within a teasing ambiguity." Mature and accomplished spiritual knowledge can be had only within a living tradition. But how could a Polish Jew, transplanted to Paris, find such a tradition in the corridors of the CollŠge de France or in the salons of the 16th arrondissement? It is the tragedy of our time that so many of those who thirst for spiritual wisdom are forced to think it out for themselves--always in vain. There is no such thing as a pure spirituality in the abstract. There are only separate lineages handed down traditionally from the past. If any proof were needed, Bergson, a first-class intellect, would provide it. His views on religion are a mixture of vague adumbrations and jumbled reminiscences which catch some of the general principles of spirituality but miss its concrete manifestations. Tradition furnished at least two worlds composed of objects of pure disinterested contemplation--the Buddhist world of dharmas and the Platonic ideas in their pagan, Christian, or Jewish form. Here Bergson would have had an opportunity to "go beyond intellectual analysis and to recapture by an act of intuitive sympathy the being and the existence in their original quality." But for various reasons he could not accept either of these traditions. Like Schopenhauer, he regarded art as one of the avenues to the truth, but, otherwise, his "intuition," this "ecstatic identification with the object," this "spiritual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it, and consequently inexpressible, " is never explained as a disciplined faculty.

Spurious Parallels to European Philosophy

There is no clear statement about an epistemic cut that gives you a "duality" of information and matter. — apokrisis

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

Bergson was an academic, and in such capacity had to walk a fine line between what he wished to express vs. what he could express. He was obviously constrained by academia in general and specifically by materialists/determinists.

With that said, we have our own creative minds and can do with his ideas as we wish. One can improve on some of his ideas by reading the unreadable Whitehead, or the very readable Rupert Sheldrake. Stephen Robbins stays away from the Elan vital, but does a beyond remarkable job expanding on Bergson's ideas on memory. Of course background on Eastern philosophy also really helps. It's all good, especially if one is open to the possibility of the primacy of the mind.

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.

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.

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. — apokrisis

You are trying to put the ghost in the machine. Material and information with purpose are not the mental, they CAUSE the mental. Confusing the map for the terrain. Also, you are possibly reifying information here. Information is just a stand-in for the mental. You are getting mental phenomena from the hidden fiat of your information dynamics.

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. — apokrisis

This is hidden Cartesian Theater. Essentially, you are saying the same thing as the "illusion" people. The mind is an illusion (e.g. social construct). However, the "illusion" still exists either "to someone" or "somewhere". Whether it is "supposed" to be different than what it really appears, it is there, and must be accounted for on its own terms. There is still the mental picture/reality/construct going on. The appearance is still a phenomena qua illusion.

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. — apokrisis

I admire your adherence to this mathematical-based theory (information theory/dyanmics what have you). I am not even saying what you are studying or interested in, in terms of the interconnectedness of informational structures is misguided, or "wrong" as far as explaining material phenomena. What I am saying, is that it does not explain away the hidden Cartesian Theater of the illusion. Whether you say it is all really neurons/axions/glial cells/sodium-potassium ion gates/neural networks/outer neural systems (and a million other biological events), or it's really a "triadic sign relation", that is all well and good, but it doesn't explain the illusion qua illusion- only what causes or is causally associated with it.

Similar to this pansemiosis of Peirce is Whitehead's process philosophy. As you know, Whitehead is no lightweight. This guy, along with people like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege practically wrote the modern underpinnings of mathematical logical proofs. He is a legend in the math world. Anyways, even he recognized the seeming intractableness of experience. His process philosophy is in a way an informational theory but one where experience itself is a fundamental unit of the equation. It is not discussed as an "illusion" and then starts to discuss processes underpinning the illusion. He realized (at least how I interpret it), that the illusion itself is still there "somewhere". It still exists. To call something (experience) something else (information) is not really solving the problem.

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

You pretty much glossed over all my objections there, but okay. That supposed "canard" of being a substance person does not phase me. If that means that I do not discount the fact that the "illusion" of consciousness still has to be accounted for qua illusion (and not quickly turning to something else causing it), then yeah, so be it. What your theory doesn't do is account for this, only the underpinnings. As I stated earlier (and they are pretty much all saying the same thing, but it's good to see in different ways.. also this is to direct you to my actual objections from above):

You are trying to put the ghost in the machine. Material and information with purpose are not the mental, they CAUSE the mental. Confusing the map for the terrain. Also, you are possibly reifying information here. Information is just a stand-in for the mental. You are getting mental phenomena from the hidden fiat of your information dynamics.

This is hidden Cartesian Theater. Essentially, you are saying the same thing as the "illusion" people. The mind is an illusion (e.g. social construct). However, the "illusion" still exists either "to someone" or "somewhere". Whether it is "supposed" to be different than what it really appears, it is there, and must be accounted for on its own terms. There is still the mental picture/reality/construct going on. The appearance is still a phenomena qua illusion.

Similar to this pansemiosis of Peirce is Whitehead's process philosophy. As you know, Whitehead is no lightweight. This guy, along with people like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege practically wrote the modern underpinnings of mathematical logical proofs. He is a legend in the math world. Anyways, even he recognized the seeming intractableness of experience. His process philosophy is in a way an informational theory but one where experience itself is a fundamental unit of the equation. It is not discussed as an "illusion" and then starts to discuss processes underpinning the illusion. He realized (at least how I interpret it), that the illusion itself is still there "somewhere". It still exists. To call something (experience) something else (information) is not really solving the problem.

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.

Matter and information apparently cause it. — apokrisis

Okay, so we can agree on this. But this is not really something many people who are science-oriented would disagree on. However you go on to contradict what I have stated with a straw man that I did not in fact say:

It is fundamental and so not in fact caused by underlying processes (of matter and information I'm guessing). — apokrisis

All I alluded to is that it was fundamental, not necessarily that it is not associated with underlying processes of matter an information.

It is not a picture, or a theatre, or an illusion. — apokrisis

I did not say this either. I did not assent to any real label to it, but I do recognize people call it an illusion. The problem is not that people call it an illusion per se, but what they mean by it. What you really mean by illusion is that, although consciousness seems like a fully formed "thing", it is really just an appearance of something else going. I am okay with this interpretation. However, the illusion itself is still THERE. What is the "there" of this illusion? The apperception of many informational parts is still creating this REALITY that APPEARS, a theater of sorts. So we have THERE, APPEARS, REALITY. Whether it is attributed to informational bits does not matter- there is still a there there, even if it only just "appears" to be. In other words, the THERE in the consciousness is intractable, whether one calls it appearance, illusion, or other such label.

Drops of experience. A mental stuff. — apokrisis

Whitehead called this substrate "occasions of experience" :D.

I'm not one for watching videos myself that I did not particularly assign myself, but I was looking for videos that might explain what I'm talking about more clearly and there was one I found that seemed to be a decent synthesis of many of the ideas I have been discussing in terms of the intractableness of experience. I think you would appreciate it. Can you watch the video and then see if what I am saying makes more sense? Here it is:

neurotransmitters/neuroarchitecture/physiological----------------->Qualia/inner experience
Now, how to bridge this gap? — schopenhauer1

I don't see a gap to bridge. 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).

Pansemiosis was not devised by Peirce. In fact, there is disagreement within the semiotics community whether the field should include physiosemiotics and, by extension, pansemiotics (which would presumably include physiosemiotics and biosemiotics), or be limited to biosemiotics.
http://biosemiosis.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/re-pan-and-bio.html

In my opinion, pansemiosis is a physicalist device which attempts to reduce "mental" to "physical". However, semantic information is processed by living beings on a psychological level, not by inanimate objects, and not on any other level.

I guess a lot of you will have heard of Donald Hoffman. He's a Californian (natch!) professor of Cognitive Science, whose philosophy is called 'conscious realism'. — Wayfarer

Observe how he uses the behavior of the beetle to show how we could be inaccurately perceiving reality. If we aren't perceiving reality accurately, how do we know that there is actually a beetle there misinterpreting it's perceptions and mating with a bottle? There would be no sense in doing science if we don't have some consistent reality that we share in order to test each other's theories! - and he's a scientist? No, he's a hack.

Yes, we project a lot of ourselves on to what we perceive. Yes, our sensory systems aren't perfect (this is what would be expected by evolution by natural selection - a blind feedback process that simulates selection). But to say that there is no correlation between the degree of accuracy of one's sensory systems and one's fitness is ridiculous.

What does it mean for some sensory representation to be useful? For anything to be useful, there must be some degree of truth associated with it. There must be something about the relationship between the representation and what is being represented that is accurate for it be useful. The beetles' misinterpretation isn't a problem humans have. We tend to not have much of a problem finding mates for procreation. If it does occur, it is the result of being under the influence of drugs, or a mental problem, not a common misinterpretation most humans share - like bent straws in water. But seeing bent straws in water, and mirages, are the result of how light behaves (an external mind-independent process), not a result of our "construction of reality". Because we see light, and not the objects themselves, mirages and bent straws in water are what we should see.

What about when we look at each other? He seems to admit that other perspectives exist independent of his own mind. Why, then is the rest of reality constructed? What is it that separates each perspective from each other, if not space-time?

been discussing in terms of the intractableness of experience. I think you would appreciate it. Can you watch the video and then see if what I am saying makes more sense? — schopenhauer1

I enjoyed the video in the manner it poses "new possibilities". It is fitting that Whitehead and Sheldrake are featured in the video, both of whom are heavily influenced by Bergson.

I don't see a gap to bridge. 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

I am not sure I get you as how species substance answers the explanatory gap. I'd have to hear more.

I enjoyed the video in the manner it poses "new possibilities". It is fitting that Whitehead and Sheldrake are featured in the video, both of whom are heavily influenced by Bergson. — Rich

Yeah it is interesting. Actually, I was more impressed by David Chalmers, David Ray Griffin, and Galen Strawson. Also, the use of John Searle in terms of posing the questions and framing some of the objections was pretty neat too. It was actually Sheldrake and Dyson at the end where I thought it fell a bit flat. I am not as versed in the free will debates at the quantum level, so perhaps that is why I am disinterested. It also seemed a bit too much of a stretch. Searle does have a point- how is it that the indeterminancy of the quantum level is left at higher orders but not the randomness? The main thrust was so apokrisis and others can see what the pansychists and property dualists are getting at. Essentially, you cannot take the experience out of the equation, especially by just calling it an illusion. The illusion is still "there" and needs to be accounted for. There is a field/theater/appearance/reality that is playing out- whether socially constructed, informationally constructed, or both. This field/theater/appearance IS a phenomena. The phenomena cannot be immediately deflated to the causal constituents (information/physical systems what have you) without actually understanding what the phenomena is in and of itself. If you say the phenomena IS the physical system, then you have some explaining to do of how the illusion of experience IS the physical system without simply describing the physical processes over and over again, as if that is answering the question of how it is one and the same.

Sheldrake is a biologist who has developed an entirely new way to conceive of life forms. In his books he is meticulous in laying out his injections to current theories and suggests a new theory that is fundamentally based upon energetic forms which he calls morphic resonance. When I initially read their works I quickly recognized the synergy between Bergson, Whitehead, Sheldrake, and Bohm but it was wasn't until recently that I read an interview where Sheldrake acknowledged how Bergson influenced him.

With these authors you have to go to the source. Modern authors totally mangle the ideas in their desire to walk the line between what is academically acceptable (they want to preserve their careers) and what the original authors were presenting. Sheldrake it's the exception. He had no problem calling a spade a spade. So much so that a Ted sponsored talk was banished by the Ted powers to be under pressure from the "scientists" who control the board. As unintended consequences will have it, thanks to the controversy, the video had received over 1 million views.

https://youtu.be/JKHUaNAxsTg

Hoffman's papers have all the hallmarks of an academic crank. — apokrisis

I think that this is the kind of statement you're referring to:

Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects—including brains—don’t exist.

Sheldrake is a biologist who has developed an entirely new way to conceive of life forms. — Rich

Actually that is a bit of an exaggeration. His big idea is 'morphic resonance' - that nature forms habits (an idea found also in Peirce.)

Morphic resonance is one component of how it perceives life forms (and the universe as a whole) as conscious habits, however his description of how he arrives at the idea is quite instructive because he's is coming at it from a biological point of view as opposed to a philosophical one. He quite conscientiously and methodically presents all of the "miracles" in current biological "facts". It's a nice read.

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.

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.

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

Sounds like an incontinent mental patient with vertigo. ;)

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" — apokrisis

Interesting fact - in translations of the early Buddhist texts, the term 'self-and-world' is frequently encountered where one would expect to see the word 'self' or perhaps 'mind'. I interpret this to mean that in that cultural context, there was much less of a sense of the 'otherness' of the world from the self which I think is innate to more modern mindsets.

And yet quantum theory says the epistemic cut - the issue of observers and measurements - is fundamental in some causal fashion — apokrisis

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.

because it is just obvious to theoretical biologists in particular that life and mind are semiotic processes — apokrisis

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

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.

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. — apokrisis

Yes! But that is MY point!

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. — apokrisis

You lost me. The only thing I got from this is that there is a triadic process that creates experience. Why is THIS triadic process so different than any other triadic process? At that point, wouldn't any old triadic process then create experiential qualities? Obviously not, because that would be dangerously close with panpsychism.

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. — apokrisis

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.

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. — apokrisis

You finally said something interesting (which doesn't get across with much of your self-referential language and snarky comments). Freedom/creativity is oddly a part of Whitehead's philosophy as well. You may have some common ground there. How is it that freedom against an invariant world looks like green, feels like this or that? AGAIN, wouldn't OTHER processes then be in the same boat? What is this extra "illusion" built into specifically this semiotic process? After all, it is a PAN-semiotic theory- indicating that essentially it is all the same bits of information being processed in the same manner. Yet this one gives rise to the very experience which is used to understand the other processes..hmm.

Can you watch the video and then see if what I am saying makes more sense? — schopenhauer1

Pretty good compilation. I liked Sheldrake's comments on Whitehead, about 'the past' being fixed and 'the future' as the realm of the possible, and how that maps against the 'observer problem'.

I don't like the attempt to locate 'mind' as a property or attribute of fundamental particles. I don't think mind is ever known as an object; mind is always 'what is knowing' not 'what is known'.

Then pansemiosis - or semiosis at the physico-chemical level of "dumb matter" - is external semiosis — apokrisis

Seems to imply that the universe is a living thing.

A cell is its own wee universe — apokrisis

A microcosm, right? There's a lot of that kind of thinking in hermeticism.

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.

So you ignored this?

Freedom/creativity is oddly a part of Whitehead's philosophy as well. You may have some common ground there. How is it that freedom against an invariant world looks like green, feels like this or that? AGAIN, wouldn't OTHER processes then be in the same boat? What is this extra "illusion" built into specifically this semiotic process? After all, it is a PAN-semiotic theory- indicating that essentially it is all the same bits of information being processed in the same manner. Yet this one gives rise to the very experience which is used to understand the other processes..hmm. — schopenhauer1

This quote above explains what is wrong with your theory. You are in fact, running dangerously close to panpsyhcism and you don't even know it. If you answer one way you are a protoexperientialist (a more sophisticated form of panpsychism), if you answer another way, you have illusion. See here: "How is it that freedom against an invariant world looks like green, feels like this or that? AGAIN, wouldn't OTHER processes then be in the same boat? What is this extra "illusion" built into specifically this semiotic process?"

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.