Thanks Wayfarer, I will check Thomas Nagel out.
You are right in your observation that some ideas have been crystalised here in this forum. It is very interesting for me to observe myself at this point arguing for a god.

Seeing that you've expressed an interest, I can tell you that during my university days I was a steadfast atheist. There were these two 7th day Adventists that would keep coming to my place with pamphlets containing scientific evidence for God and I would debate them for sometimes an hour at a time. It was great fun, but I was in no way swayed. I was trying to sway them. I wish I could remember their arguments fully - One was the L-isomer, which I might try and find a way to post on at another time.

At one point I had even arranged to meet a group of them in the park to debate the issue at great length, but when I got there a sweet girl pulled out a picture of Jesus and sat it upright on the rug and asked if I knew who it was. It was one thing to debate for fun, but I didn't want to attack her beliefs so I just held my tongue.

Anyway, like I said, I'm as surprised as anyone at the position I've taken in the forum. I've long wrestled with the ideas, and I may yet argue back the other way.

Thanks for your input Wayfarer.

I get door-knocks from 7th Day Adventist missionaries which I politely decline.

I am not an atheist, but I don't really believe in a God. It's a lot more vague than that - 'higher intelligence' might do. This includes but transcends what a lot of people mean by the name (I hope!)

But, in today's world, if you express reservations about the scientific consensus, then you are usually categorised as being somehow fundamentalist. And there is a reason for that. The 'naturalist project' is monistic - there is one fundamental category of 'substance', and that is matter~energy (it used to be just 'matter' until the discovery of E=MC²). It methodically denies there could be any other dimension to existence.

To illustrate: Thomas Nagel, whom I mentioned, published a book in 2012, called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False; notice that the title doesn't pull any punches. But, long story short, this book was excoriated by the secular intelligentsia; it was promptly dubbed 'the most despised book of 2012', and other scholars lined up to rubbish it. And why? Because it questions the materialist consensus.

The Jealous God of the OT dies hard.

I am not an atheist, but I don't really believe in a God. It's a lot more vague than that — Wayfarer

That about sums me up at this point too. A part of me still feels very atheistic, but I am also aware of an awakening within me - a connection to some spiritual current running through things.

Ironically it was watching Richard Dawkins attacking the church in his debates on god with his knowledge of science that so disgusted me I wanted to defend faith in god and that started me slowly down the path some years ago.

But, in today's world, if you express reservations about the scientific consensus, then you are usually categorised as being somehow fundamentalist. A — Wayfarer

You're right, but I am struck by how many people on this forum share our views. I was expecting a huge defense of science, but it's not materialised. Critically thinking people on the main seem to agree with us.

And the more I probe science with the idea of god force, the more I see how weak science's position on insisting that there is none really is. I want to see some solid ideas from the science community to rule out the idea of a god. I want them to fight back on intelligent design with their life from the soup arguments, but their gun is empty.

In the absence of any evidence that a god does not exist, one must assume that the message the scientific community is putting out is unscientific pontification without even applied reasoning.

It would be great to advertise this forum in the universities and get them on here so we can all stir up a storm of debate.

the more I probe science with the idea of god force, the more I see how weak science's position on insisting that there is none really is. I want to see some solid ideas from the science community to rule out the idea of a god. I want them to fight back on intelligent design with their life from the soup arguments, but their gun is empty. — MikeL

I don't think ruling on the reality or otherwise of God, is 'science's position' at all. Strictly speaking, science ought to be methodologically naturalist - that is, scientists assume for the purpose of their work, that there are not non-natural factors to contend with. But you can do that, while remaining circumspect about the larger question of whether there are metaphysical truths beyond the scope of science. Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable attitude in my view.

I think the idea that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion is pernicious, and is usually peddled by either religious fundamentalists, or scientific materialists (like Dawkins). There are however plenty of religious scientists - I just discovered, for example, that the recently-deceased Vera Rubin, who basically discovered the concept of dark matter (and whom a lot of people believe ought to have won the Nobel for so doing), was a practicing Jew. George Ellis, who is a noted cosmologist, is a Quaker. For that matter, the physicist who came up with the 'big bang' theory, was a Jesuit, although he took great pains to keep his scientific work and his religious beliefs separate.

But the 'intelligent design' movement is a different matter - they're trying to prove God, by scientific means, which I think does a disservice to both sides. I can't help but find some of the design arguments persuasive, but at the end of the day, they don't amount to scientific proofs, because they point to something that is by definition beyond empirical knowledge.

In my view, philosophy's unique role is to delineate the border between the different domains of knowledge; it can't necessarily tell you what is over the cognitive horizon, but it can at least suggest where the horizon is, in a way that the natural sciences generally can't, or won't.

That's a good point Wayfarer. Let science be science. They do a pretty good job after all.

I think that scientists are a lot like philosophers, philosophers whose ideas are grounded in the natural, which is why they get into trouble when they cross the boundary. It would be great to debate them.

Consider language.

We have letters: a, b, c,...,x, y, z. These letters represent sound and are the fundamental stuff of language. Consider this level 1

Then these letters come together to form words: apple, ball, cat, dog, etc. This new combinations of letters have meaning distinct from the letters. There are rules on how to combine letters to form words and these are distinct from rules that govern level 1. Call this level 2

Letters come together to form sentences: "This cat is brown", "The apple is ripe", etc. These sentences have their own set of rules, distinct from levels 1 and 2. This is level 3

Sentences come together to form expositions, passages, essays, books, etc. Level 4 which has its own set of rules, distinct from the previous 3 levels.

As you can see, each level acquires an extra property, requiring its own interpretation and analysis. I think this works for all complex systems.

So, yes, we can reduce all 4 levels to level 1 but that would be a mistake because all 4 levels have their own state of existence, distinct from each other and thus, requiring a distinct interpretation.

I don't think there's any information lost in viewing the world this way - biology overlaying itself on chemistry, for example - because, in fact, we're on the right path by giving due importance to the complexities of complexity.

I don't think there's any information lost in viewing the world this way — TheMadFool

I like the way you built this argument.

You are right, there is no information lost in viewing this world this way. When I look at the word cat in a book, what I see are the letters c, a, t but when I look at an ion channel I don't see the protein sequence. It is masked behind the colorful blue diagram of a pipe.

You are right that my use of the term semiotics is based on the idea that complex molecules etc can be represented simply by describing function. — MikeL

I am still trying to understand whether your question is related to the philosophical analysis of conceptual, epistemic, maybe even the methodological basis of metascientific inquiry using Pierce' system or even structuralism. I don't see you mentioning him, which makes me doubt you even understand how semiotics could be applied to scientific analysis. Accessibility to scientific literature has indeed enabled a more broader reach by simplifying the exchange of knowledge through signs.

For instance, Pierce' theory is modelled on a tripartite sign system of symbolic (meaning is given to a symbol through an associative process of signification between sign and object), iconic (shared quality defined by a sensory feature) and an indexical (representative of causally identifiable facts). A deduction is an observable fact and thus would feature as an indexical, while an induction is symbolic etc. This is particularly interesting with qualitative analysis in biology among other sciences.

You just seem to be praising it with random statements but there is no substance in what you are saying.

I'm not using Pierce.

The idea I'm using is very straight forward. We ascribe attributes to emergent phenomenon. This is like a sign or a mask for the reality of the object - it says this is an ion channel. It doesn't describe the underlying complexity of the ion channel. Therefore there is information loss.

When we study a system at a certain level we become conversant in that system using the symbols we created to represent each part of it. When we understand how that layer works in relation to the symbols we say 'case closed, I understand'.

Of course it is not a total understanding as information has been lost in providing you with the semiotics you need to understand your emergent layer. It is only by dropping back out of this layer and considering the other layers beneath it that the full complexity of the system comes to bear.

When we are faced with such enormity of information we can no longer hold tenable the assertion that we truly understand the system we are investigating. Outside of our local understanding, when asked why a system works a certain way we enter into infinite regress or egress depending on if you are a top down or bottom up kind of thinker. Ultimately there is no answer to the why question. There is no full understanding that can be derived.

Semiotics is useful for understanding local phenomenon, but blinds us to the bigger picture. It creates a false sense of confidence in our understanding of the nature of things.

That's what I'm saying TimeLine. Make sense?

When we are faced with such enormity of information we can no longer hold tenable the assertion that we truly understand the system we are investigating. Outside of our local understanding, when asked why a system works a certain way we enter into infinite regress or egress depending on if you are a top down or bottom up kind of thinker. Ultimately there is no answer to the why question. There is no full understanding that can be derived. — MikeL

The enormity of information is the very reason why we have symbolic representations as part of our associative process to metascientific enquiry; take cosmology, that attempts to build a narrative to articulate the universe both past and present to establish symbolic meaning to our investigations within astrophysics viz., the indexical and iconic. It does not 'blind us to the bigger picture' on the contrary it is our attempt to cognise something that cannot be seen otherwise. That is the point of semiotics, which is why you still are not making sense to me. If you want to give some specificity to your point by providing an example, perhaps we could work from there.

I thought I did a pretty good job explaining it, but I will go again from a slightly different angle. Please also feel free to read my radio analogy a few posts back.

The enormity of information is the very reason why we have symbolic representations — TimeLine

Yes, because it cuts down on the information load.

it is our attempt to cognise something that cannot be seen otherwise. — TimeLine

Yes, to understand something at the local level.

It does not 'blind us to the bigger picture' — TimeLine

In order to understand our local layer we make assumptions about the nature of the objects in it. It is a planet would be an assumption. From a cosmological perspective we see a Planet - this is a semiotic term. It sums up a whole bunch of information into one discreet package.

A planetologist may describe it in terms of their semiotics
It is a gas giant 2 billion miles in diameter with an iron core and sulphur-dioxide atmosphere, a rotational period of 2.3 days, a surface pressure of 10 million KPa and a core pressure of 40 billion kPa, a surface temperature of 600Kelvin and a core temperature of 6000 kelvin.

Between the two there has been information loss.

The cosmologist cannot claim to fully understand the cosmos without fully understanding the planets in it. They can only claim to understand their part of it - the local level.

Similarly a planetologist cannot claim to fully understand the planet unless he can explain why the electrons in the magnetosphere undergo bonding when passing through the most solar part of the magnetosphere or why there is a counter current circulation of lithium hydroxide ions in the storm below the equator.

And so we enter into a regress that contains so much information it is impossible to understand in its entirety. A cosmologists understand the cosmos, a planetologist understands the planet, a chemist understands the chemical reactions and so on, but none of them understands everything as they are using semiotic models to explain their systems and the models are not universal like 'c, a, t'.

Science specialises into fields. Specialists in each field are specialists in understanding the semiotics of that field. They seek complete understanding of that field and believe that the system can be understood in terms of the semiotics. They will not invoke a higher power to explain their system as that is like cheating.

It is not until we remove ourselves from the local level and look at all the information in all the fields and realise that these in turn are only semiotic representations of processes that it begins to dawn on us that the big question is not answered.

In order to understand our local layer we make assumptions about the nature of the objects in it. It is a planet would be an assumption. — MikeL

What? Why would "its a planet" be an assumption?

From a cosmological perspective we see a Planet - this is a semiotic term. It sums up a whole bunch of information into one discreet package. — MikeL

Need I remind you that semiotics is the study of signs? Hence why I mentioned Pierce; something that is symbolic is one part of a tripartite system, whereby a planet is iconic according to Pierce, not symbolic. It thus changes the structure of the argument and how we articulate this to form meaning.

A planetologist may describe it in terms of their semiotics. It is a gas giant 2 billion miles in diameter with an iron core and sulphur-dioxide atmosphere, a rotational period of 2.3 days, a surface pressure of 10 million KPa and a core pressure of 40 billion kPa, a surface temperature of 600Kelvin and a core temperature of 6000 kelvin.

Between the two there has been information loss. — MikeL

?

I can see how the use of semiotics would be possible in metascientific enquiry and the significance our interpretations have to the structure of our representations, but our thoughts of reference that may contain predisposed mental constructs becomes much more complex in the field of science as it is dominated by a sophisticated interpretative structure based on factual evidence. From a Saussurian perspective, language is this tool and at fundamental level requires a signifier (object) and the signified (representation) that are both arbitrary but nevertheless unequivocally inseparable and how much you know about planets are further defined by a structure or flow in syntagmatic meaning or paradigmatic where meaning is formed through a themes between groups. This enables us to articulate, to communicate, to organise our vocabulary.

The cosmologist cannot claim to fully understand the cosmos without fully understanding the planets in it. They can only claim to understand their part of it - the local level. — MikeL

A cosmologist is not a planetologist. They share information, work together in a complex network of interconnected contrasts and negative differentiation, which is why language is arbitrary to afford this flexibility. That is how we progress and learn. A philosopher of mind is not a cognitive scientist neither a psychologist, but by contrasting and sharing they advance their narrative in their respective fields. There is no sudden predefined structural categories.

I don't think you are arguing against me so much as don't understand me. We seem to be talking past each other and repeating ourselves.

You are laboring points that I don't disagree with. I want you to understand what the OP is saying. To do this you must abandon what Pierce or anybody else says about semiotics. Let me try and walk you through the concepts so we know where our opinions diverge.

1. If I showed you a picture of a transport protein in a cell membrane would you agree that the protein channel looks like a colored pipe sitting in a membrane represented by yellow headed lipids with squiggly tails?

Image
Image 2

A doctor may need to understand the protein channel at this level.

2. Do you see any difference to this picture of a protein channel?
Image 3

A molecular biologists may need to understand the protein channel at this level.

3. Do you agree that between the first two images and the third there has been information loss?

Imagine trying to explain neuronal signalling by explaining the energy state changes in atoms – and yet it could be done. — MikeL

What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. We exchange ideas in language, which is signs. Our maths is signs.

Like Wayfarer I am no great advocate of scientising. But one needs a firm grasp of the philosophy of science to criticise it reasonably. Any working scientist must heighten the local detail that matters as much as they can, simplify the rest and hold certain things to be not involved with their locality - ceteris paribus - then do their thing. Scientists at different 'levels' will regard the 'detail' they are interested in in a different way. So we have pluralist understandings, from sub-atomic particle to chemical to cell to protein to organism to social facts. I presume we start from this basis.

It's what comes next in metaphysics, or at least in seeking to explain how the pluralities inter-connect, where the trouble starts.

But I think of the opponents in that argument as equally semioticians. Indeed, sometimes the semioticians are the good guys, refusing the reduction, insiting on the necessity of complexity and of pluralism.

What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. We exchange ideas in language, which is signs. Our maths is signs. — mcdoodle

Actually, I think this point came from a discussion in the thread on life arising from non-life.

I took issue with the idea that 'everything is information' - how, I asked, could an instance of 'radioactive decay' constitute 'information'? The answer was something along the lines of, it narrows the possibilities for what will happen next.

The particular exchange is here. The salient passage is this one:

W: what about atomic decay amounts to information?

A: Christ almighty. It rewrites the state of the Universe. Another bit of history has accumulated and so points all possibility toward a more constrained future.

Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. And don't even start thinking about it computationally as the reading and writing of memory states.

Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. A bit has physicalist meaning as a sign of things to come.

I still think this is mistaken - if everything is information, then 'information' has no meaning.

The point about biosemiosis, is that organisms 'encode' or contain information in the form of DNA. But that information has morphological consequences i.e. it is able to transmit itself, grow, reproduce, mutate, and so on, whilst maintaining itself.

I think MikeL has taken it a different way altogether, but this is the passage that I think is behind this thread.

For semiotics, there is no meaning 'beyond' the signs; no meaning 'out there' or 'in here' in some transcendent sense. So, it is reductionist, just as surely as materialism or physicalism is. — Janus
If you could support that with a citation or example, it would be useful. I would say there are some who appeal to semiotics who would say that, but others who would not. I don't see it as being particularly associated with semiotics. — Wayfarer

Any example could only be refuted by a counter-example. Can you give an example of a statement by any semiotician that shows that the notion of transcendent meaning is incorporated in their system?

I would have thought innumerable exchanges you have had with apo where he unfailingly rejects the transcendent would have been enough to convince you of reductionist nature of semiotics.

It's the logic of the discipline itself, which (inevitably) reflects the limitations of the discursive intellect. To say that all the answers that matter will be given by semiotics is a form of scientism par excellence. I'm surprised you cannot see that so-called "top-down" causation is understood to be the result of countless complex interactions, just as the mind is understood to be the result of unimaginably complex neuronal processes in physicalist thinking. Nothing transcendental is going on according to semiotics any more than it is according to materialism or physicalism.

What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. — mcdoodle

I don't think that, and I'm not saying that mcdoodle.

Any working scientist must heighten the local detail that matters as much as they can, simplify the rest and hold certain things to be not involved with their locality - ceteris paribus - then do their thing. — mcdoodle

I have stated that this happens and have not suggested they should not understand their local layer.

Scientists at different 'levels' will regard the 'detail' they are interested in in a different way. — mcdoodle

This is my contention, yes.

I presume we start from this basis. — mcdoodle

This is the critical part. There is no place to start. All is semiotic.

if everything is information, then 'information' has no meaning. — Wayfarer

Yes, that about sums it up. It has meaning, but only in context. It is not a universal meaning. It is only when we pop out of our local level we see that everything we have predicated our understanding on is much more complex then we can possible grasp, but even that complexity is just a semiotic respresentation of an infinitely regressing or egressing system. So we go from have a high degree of certainty in our local semiotic system to having hardly any at all.

Can you give an example of a statement by any semiotician that shows that the notion of transcendent meaning is incorporated in their system? — Janus

What is 'transcendent' anyway? Might be worth having a go at trying to define it. Perhaps - a feature or attribute of experience, which can't be explained on the basis of anything in experience. That is close to the Kantian meaning. Take (for instance) mathematical reasoning and inference - both those are essential attributes of rational thought, but I don't know if they can be explained by rational thought; we all know how to count, but 'theory of number' is a notoriously difficult. In other words, we use numbers easily, but it is not at all clear what number is.

But the point about my debates about naturalism and semiotics, is that there are naturalistic interpretations of the subject which are not necessarily essential to semiotics as such. In other words, one could study semiotics apart from a commitment to a naturalist worldview. I still say, they're separate topics. It's like I said to MikeL - you can be 'methodologically naturalist' without being 'metaphysically naturalist'. So you might argue for a 'naturalist' philosophy on the basis of semiotics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that semiotics must assume a naturalist philosophy.

So it's not a case of not being to truly know everything, its a case of not being able to truly know anything.

What is 'transcendent' anyway? Might be worth having a go at trying to define it. Perhaps - a feature or attribute of experience, which can't be explained on the basis of anything in experience. — Wayfarer

Kant deliberately distinguished 'transcendent' from 'transcendental'. He rejected the coherence of the idea of the transcendent. The transcendental he thought as being the conditions for possible experience, which do not themselves appear in experience. In other words, the 'in itself', the 'noumenon'. So, I don't think it is so much " a feature or attribute of experience". I agree that it is not clear what number is; but that may be as much because of the way the question is framed. We think of what things are in terms of constitution, like water is H2O, and so on. What are we asking when we want to know what number "is"? On the phenomenological side, I think it is perfectly clear to us what number is. Most of us get it.

I certainly agree that one could study semiotics without being committed to a naturalistic worldview. There was a very bright Christian Peirce enthusiast on here for a while, for example. Everything we do is semiotics whether we study it as a conscious discipline or not. The side of it that gets forgotten by the 'systems' and 'information' people is the domain of arts and music; they are semiotic too.

I certainly agree that one could study semiotics without being committed to a naturalistic worldview. — Janus

That's all I was trying to say.

I still think this is mistaken - if everything is information, then 'information' has no meaning. — Wayfarer

Semiotics isn't saying everything is information. It is saying "everything" is the sign relation that has the three parts of an interpretation, a world, and a mediating sign.

So information is the physical mark that stands in-between the "self" and its "world". The information bit is a Janus-faced element that points in both directions. It can be freely read as meaningful precisely because it is so actually lacking in the usual "physical meaningfulness".

An ideal bit of information is a mark or a symbol. It has the special quality of being permanent and unchanging. That makes it really unlike "normal physics" which is all about dynamism and entropy and wear and tear.

If I scratch a rock with my name, the mark is likely to still be there in 10,000 years. So that endurance puts the mark at the limit of normal physics. It is an exceptional thing. And it is also just as exceptional (well, a lot more so) that a rock face might have my name scratched on it. Physics left to itself would be highly unlikely to produce such a striking pattern. What could have done it naturally - a succession of micro-meteorite strikes catching the face of the rock just so?

The point is to recognise that a "realm of information" or semiotic interpretance becomes possible at the limit of physics. It is itself a natural or immanent fact. The world is on the whole entropic and dynamic - always in motion and running down an energy hill. But immanent in that is then inherently the "other" which is the possibility of a "non-physical" mark. Well, of course every symbol has to be some actual physical mark - a negentropic constraint on dissipation. The circuits of a computer don't want to be organised like that. But we can make them behave that way ... by plugging the computer into some wall socket and paying the electricity bill.

So the first point is to establish what we are actually talking about when talking about "information". We are talking about physics in a special way. We are talking about the material world's own limits on its dynamism and erosion. That is why information theory has become so central to modern physics. We can model reality itself in terms of "marks" or countable degrees of freedom. We can measure the negentropic constraints that form existence in a direct fashion.

Physics was once classically atomist - reductionist in presuming reality was just composed of definite lumps of matter. We learnt better. So now we use the notion of information to describe reality in terms of its formal limits. The "ultimate stuff" becomes the "outputs" that regulate being - the emergent constraints - rather than the "inputs" that supposedly compose it.

So at the level of physics (or pansemiosis), we are finding a different way to describe nature. The true material world is being understood in terms of its indeterminacy and dynamism. Materiality wants to be going off in all directions with no regularity. There just ain't any stable atoms to count.

But then we can start to count that mess of action in terms of its own limitations. We can imagine it converted into some giant collection of scratches or marks, each one symbolising a conserved "degree of freedom", or bit of "negentropy". And pragmatically, that new way of doing physics - of conceiving of material reality - really works.

So physics has found a way to distance its descriptions of nature. The Universe is mediated by its own system of sign. The unholy mess that is the continuity of physical interactions can be understood as being organised via its own emergent limitations. The meaningfulness that is incomprehensible at the one level - as the confused blur of material motions - is rendered comprehensible by viewing it now as an arrangement of information, each bit standing as the token of a primal event or interaction. Or rather, a physical and spatiotemporally localised act of constraint.

OK. That is what "reduction" amounts to in talking about information and semiotics as applied ontically in the physical modelling of reality. Instead of being Scientism - the claim that material reality is essentially meaningless (and observerless) - this is now a formal way of building those things into the scientific picture.

The material world is now flooded with meaning - more things going off in more directions than could ever be counted. You might as well be living in a multiverse where everything happens.

But if we can now build a constraining observer into that world - one that reduces the blur to its critical individual events, its countable degrees of freedom (exactly the bits which escapes constraint) - then we can construct the kind of meaningful relation with the world we are interested in. Or pansemiotically, see existence as the state that emerges out its own meaningful self-interest via this basic "epistemic cut".

So to return to my initial point, the key to "information" is that it is becomes meaningful to a system of intepretance as it is also the arrival at the limits of material meaning.

A mark like a name scratched on a rock is just a nothing to the ordinary material world. It is having just no effect - unlike the wind, the rain, the volcanic eruptions, and all the other hot shit going on. If materiality is defined by its hot mess dynamism, the physical mark is the most immaterial aspect of that world.

And then in being so apart from regular dynamics and flux, the physical mark becomes the start of something else. It can become the rock-solid sign that anchors an interpreter. It can be the basis for meaning at a different formal level.

But what prevents this then being unnatural is that systems of interpretance or sign relations must always be pragmatic. They actually have to live and survive in the worlds they arise from. They may regulate material flows, but they can't transcend those flows. In the end, any local system of interpretance has to be entrained to the generic purpose or meaning of the most global or cosmic level system of interpretance.

So again, that throws us back into the arms of physics. Although a physics itself now hopefully understood pansemiotically and so not "bereft of meaning" in any simplistic sense,

OK. but the salient point is that semiotics cannot take you beyond naturalism. Just as you can nonetheless think beyond naturalism despite being a semiotician, many scientists are religious. Even some materialists are religious, so being a materialist doesn't necessarily commit you to naturalism. It doesn't follow from that that materialism can take you beyond naturalism.

We can model reality itself in terms of "marks" or countable degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

I don't understand what 'a countable degree of freedom' is.

Furthermore - and without wishing to sound trite - who is counting?

Physics was once classically atomist - reductionist in presuming reality was just composed of definite lumps of matter. We learnt better. So now we use the notion of information to describe reality in terms of its formal limits. The "ultimate stuff" becomes the "outputs" that regulate being - the emergent constraints - rather than the "inputs" that supposedly compose it. — apokrisis

Does 'physics' really think that? Where are some examples of that kind of thinking in the literature? Where does it come into the thinking about 'the standard model' and the alternatives to it? I do know that this is likely to be a difficult question, but just an indication of where this kind of thinking is showing up in physics itself would be helpful.

If I scratch a rock with my name, the mark is likely to still be there in 10,000 years. So that endurance puts the mark at the limit of normal physics. It is an exceptional thing. — apokrisis

But the point is, that scratch mark conveys something - it is made by an agent, and interpreted by another agent - 'aha, Apokrisis was here'. How is that like atomic decay, or some other non-directed process?

There is (as you know) a school of argument for intelligent design, based on the observation that living organisms - DNA, actually - encodes information, in a way that non-living matter does not (see http://www.iep.utm.edu/design/#SH2a.)

The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, by Pattee, seems to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living matter:

Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and semantics.

In respect of 'the epistemic cut', Pattee says:

The origin of life question is: How did this separation, this epistemic cut, originate? As Hoffmeyer (2000) has pointed out, the apparently sharp epistemic cut between these categories makes it difficult to imagine how life began and how these two categories evolved at higher levels. The epistemic cut appears to be a conceptual as well as a topological discontinuity. It is difficult to imagine a gradual cut. The problem arises acutely with the genetic code. A partial code does not work, and a simple code that works as it evolves is hard to imagine. In fact, this is a universal problem in evolution and even in creative thought. How does a complex functioning set of constraints originate when no subset of the constraints appears to maintain the function? How does a reversible dynamics gradually become an irreversible thermodynamics? How does a paradigm shift from classical determinism to quantum indeterminism occur gradually? At least in the case of thought we can trace some of the history, but in the origin of life we have no adequate history. Even in the case of creative thought, so much goes on in the subconscious mind that the historical trace has large gaps.

I will state at the outset that I have not solved this problem.

Whereas, you seem to be saying that there is no such 'topological discontinuity' at all? Am I understanding you right?

I don't understand what 'a countable degree of freedom' is. — Wayfarer

A degree of freedom of a physical system is an independent parameter that is necessary to characterize the state of a physical system. In general, a degree of freedom may be any useful property that is not dependent on other variables.

The location of a particle in three-dimensional space requires three position coordinates. Similarly, the direction and speed at which a particle moves can be described in terms of three velocity components, each in reference to the three dimensions of space. If the time evolution of the system is deterministic, where the state at one instant uniquely determines its past and future position and velocity as a function of time, such a system has six degrees of freedom.[citation needed] If the motion of the particle is constrained to a lower number of dimensions, for example, the particle must move along a wire or on a fixed surface, then the system has fewer than six degrees of freedom. On the other hand, a system with an extended object that can rotate or vibrate can have more than six degrees of freedom.

In classical mechanics, the state of a point particle at any given time is often described with position and velocity coordinates in the Lagrangian formalism, or with position and momentum coordinates in the Hamiltonian formalism.

In statistical mechanics, a degree of freedom is a single scalar number describing the microstate of a system.[1] The specification of all microstates of a system is a point in the system's phase space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(physics_and_chemistry)

Furthermore - and without wishing to sound trite - who is counting? — Wayfarer

Well obviously physicists in the first instance. But in an information theoretic model, reality itself is "counting". Or rather, a countable number of degrees of freedom are just the totality that emerges dynamically. It is what counts when things have gone to their limit.

Right now, we can say there is an electron here and moving in direction x. The universe knows that too. Our realities have thus converged. We are both saying the same thing about what is happening in terms of the countable, or physically orthogonal, ways they could otherwise be happening. Description has been reduced to fundamental bits of information, or formal signs.

Does 'physics' really think that? — Wayfarer

http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, by Pattee, seems to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living matter: — Wayfarer

Of course. There is a vast difference to information (constraints) being internalised. This is what creates an autonomous point of view. Life and mind are discontinuous from physics (dissipative dynamics) because they can construct an epistemic cut.

But pansemiosis then also allows us to talk of a fundamental continuity with nature.

Your complaint about Scientism is that it negates Spiritualism. It pretends nature - even life and mind - are fundamentally meaningless.

My pansemiotic reply is always that the trick is then to see nature, the Cosmos, as also meaningful ... in some properly justified sense, not merely a transcendental, supernatural, mystical hand-waving fashion.

So the new information theoretic physics is about doing that. In measurable fashion, it anchors metaphysics in the basic notion of "a sign".

Whereas, you seem to be saying that there is no such 'topological discontinuity' at all? Am I understanding you right? — Wayfarer

You are doing your usual best to misunderstand I would say.

Pattee is hardly sympathetic to the metaphysics you want to promote here. He is just honest that abiogenesis remains a tough nut for science to crack.

And yet even as we speak, huge inroads are being made due to new experimental possibilities. Pattee was writing before one of the most critical discoveries I have mentioned to you many times now - the realisation that life arises at the quasi-classical nanoscale where a variety of different forms of energy all converge in scale (in the chemistry of water) and so become eminently "switchable" when you stir in "information" (or molecular machines).

See - http://lifesratchet.com/

... in an information theoretic model, reality itself is "counting". — apokrisis

The universe knows that too. — apokrisis

"Counting" without anyone who counts, "knowing" without anyone who knows. That's the problem I have with 'pansemiosis'.

http://lifesratchet.com/ — apokrisis

"" Yet powered by energy, microscopic molecular machines—the ratchets of the title—work autonomously to create order out of the chaos. Life, Hoffmann argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. ""

-- I haven't read the book but that's seems like a no brainer. I find it hard to see how it is an argument rather than an observation. The only problem is it doesn't explain the origin of life at all. It only explains the propagation of life from life. It seems that everyone is converging on the same points. For more of my ideas read the OP on "The First Few Steps Required to Believe in Primordial Soup Theory"

As for switching, I've considered switching as a possible cause for starting life - namely the circadian rhythm all things seem to have - day night, hot cold all function as on-off. The idea seemed pretty revelational to me until I realized I couldn't make molecules do too much with it other than dance around a bit and change conformation. I don't see how switching can begin life.

I heard of a research group in Japan who denied a tree of any sleep by keeping the lights on, and it grew sick and died. I briefly read up on the circadian rhythm in plants and it said it uses the day night break to conduct different functions in the leaf (redistribute resources for other activities).

So I don't consider any of these to be huge inroads at all into explaining abiogenesis. Perhaps I am failing to see the broader implication of the findings or there are other details I don't know of to strengthen the position?

"Counting" without anyone who counts, "knowing" without anyone who knows. That's the problem I have with 'pansemiosis'. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. And I have the same problem with imagining some big daddy super-mind in the sky who counts or knows.

Given that you too want to avoid that kind of transcendental/supernatural entity, then what is your alternative option - reality as just some kind of generalised, disembodied, counting and knowing stuff? Where does your "mind" exist in physical reality?

Do you want to argue for panpsychism?

If so, why isn't pansemiosis better, in that it doesn't seek to found itself either on meaningless physics, nor mystical disembodied "mind-stuff". It starts from good old obvious semiotics - the fact that counting and knowing are a particular kind of useful epistemic habit based on "a sign relation".

So there is a science of meaning-making. Semiotics. And it begins right at the intersection of physics and symbols. It is embodied or rooted in an pragmatic interaction between "a mind" and "a world".

It seems just obviously the best place to begin the larger metaphysical project of recovering nature from the mangling jaws of the reductionist scientists and the reductionist theists.

I haven't read the book but that's seems like a no brainer. I find it hard to see how it is an argument rather than an observation. — MikeL

Hmm. I'm sensing a connection here between the "not reading" and the "failing to see".

Trust me. This stuff is fundamentally surprising to the biologist. It makes you go wow! :)

The only problem is it doesn't explain the origin of life at all. It only explains the propagation of life from life. — MikeL

It explains how life even makes sense thermodynamically. It explains how it is quite wrong to think in terms of a "chemical soup". And so it is critical to the general abiogenic explanation.

If you want to talk about specific abiogeneic scenarios - like alkaline hydrothermal vents - I pointed you already in the direction of Nick Lane's books.

So I don't consider any of these to be huge inroads at all into explaining abiogenesis. — MikeL

Err, OK.