The only way I can make sense of Rolf Landauer's claim is through the necessity of the physical for information storage, manipulation or its transmission. — TheMadFool

good point. He was the head of IBM Labs, probably not much into philosophy as such.

I propose we define physical as whatever has a position in space. Information always has a location in space if you look at it in Aristotelian and not Platonic fashion. So in-so-far as this is true, information is physical - this is because information does not exist independently of the physical structures that transmit it - hylomorphism.

Thinking about Bergson led me to the enlightening idea that things are bifurcated along two lines:

space - time
physical - mental
extension - thought

So the essence of the dichotomy between the two is found in space and time.

So could space and time be two attributes of one substance?

Floridi defines information as well-formed data which is meaningful. — Galuchat

No, I don't think that I agree with this, because "data" implies that the information has already been interpreted, and this would mean that it cannot be information unless it has been interpreted. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think that "meaningful" implies that the information has already been interpreted.

In my current working definition of information, I removed any reference to "meaning" from Floridi's General Definition of Information (GDI) because I don't agree that "data can have a semantics independently of any informee." (GeN)

My current working definitions include:
1) Data: physical or psychophysical variables.
2) Information: relational data.
3) Physical (Meaningless) Information: relational physical variables.
4) Semantic (Meaningful) Information: relational psychophysical variables and queries.

There is a dual problem here, two extremes. One is the question of whether relationships between things, which have not yet been interpreted by a mind, can be called information. — Metaphysician Undercover

That would depend on how information is defined. How would you define information in a general sense (i.e., one which takes into account its physical and mental manifestations)?

The other extreme, which I already outlined, is the question of whether described relationships, which cannot be demonstrated to be actual relationships between real things, can be called information. — Metaphysician Undercover

While I have completed university coursework in Physics, my knowledge of Quantum Mechanics is inadequate. However, I am persuaded that Shannon's Mathematical Theory of (Data) Communication (MTC) quantifies information, hence; provides evidence that information can be physical.

Beyond having a point in common with thermodynamic entropy through probability theory, I currently view the association of MTC with thermodynamic entropy as little more than equivocation. And this may have been the reason for Wieners' comment: "Information is information, not matter or energy."

But the mathematical aspect of data doesn't end with MTC. I find Floridi's comment, "The universe is fundamentally composed of data, understood as dedomena..," intriguing. Is he referring to geometry as a transcendental or abstract universal which constrains that which is physical and that which is psychophysical? Do Aristotelian forms figure into this equation?

Suppose that I don't know about the earth's spin, but I observe the sun setting every evening and rising every morning. So I plot a trajectory, which has the sun moving around the back side of the stars which are behind the earth, every night. Then I hand you this "data". Is this so-called data information or imagination? — Metaphysician Undercover

That would be misinformation.

There is no point debating philosophy against naive realism. — Wayfarer

I wasn't.

Again, is there an actual three-masted Greek ship on the horizon? If there isn't then how can you even say that any structure (flags, a series of dots on paper, etc.) points to that, or means that, or carries information about that?

How did those flags get situated like that? How did those dots get on a piece of paper? If there isn't an actual three-masted Greek ship on the horizon, then you can only say that the sentry lied when he put up the flags. What is the ultimate cause of the flags being put up in a certain way?

If the sentry lied, the you can't say that the morse code points to, or refers to, a three-masted Greek ship on the horizon. The morse code actually points to, or refers to, the lie the sentry told because there is no three-masted Greek ship on the horizon.

That is where I would disagree. Sure it is the usefully simplistic view of what goes on. But my semiotic approach says mind shapes the signs its treats as "information". Out there in the real material world, there is only radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies. The "mind" or brain then does its processing and understands that in terms of colours. It produces its own meaningful symbol that then stands in a mediating relation with the physics.

The primate mind in particular can see the red fruit that is ripe vividly against the backdrop of the green foliage that is of less interest. Well, there has to be some kind of evolutionary explanation for why our primate ancestors dropped a retinal pigment while living their nocturnal existence and then hastily regrew one once they started wandering about the landscape during the day.

So the mind is a virtual reality - reality as it is meaningful in terms of our interests. We don't just mindlessly process the physical information that is "out there". From the get go, we are symbolising the possibilities of that world in terms that are functional for us.

This means that when physicists talk about information and biologists talk about information, it isn't exactly the same.

But then, if we know how it is not the same, that is how we can know the way it is then the same. A mindless theory of information can be the basis for grounding the higher order mindful one. — apokrisis

How can something be functional, or useful, if it doesn't have some degree of truth to it?

To say that there is anything out there that our mind represents is to talk about causation. I have said numerous times that information is the relationship between the cause and the effect. The effect carries information about the cause. The contents of our minds is the effect of the interaction of our senses with what is out there. This is why we can point to the colors in our mind as the effect of light interacting with out eyes and brain system. This is why we can use some color to mean something about what is out there, like a particular fruit being ripe to eat. Is the fruit ripe to eat and others aren't, or is it just a mix of radiant energy that our minds create order from what is ultimately chaos? Do our minds simply make up this distinction that doesn't really exist out there? If so, then how can you say that the mind processes information. It would simply make up it's own world (solipsism) and the contents of our minds wouldn't point to anything, including other minds. Does the distinction in color represent a distinction in radiant energy? If so, then what I'm saying holds true - that distinctions in radiant energy cause our distinction in color and is what the color represents.

Are you saying that other minds are radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies? What does that say about your mind? How does radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies process information? How can something be functional, or useful, to radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies?

So the mind is a virtual reality - reality as it is meaningful in terms of our interests. We don't just mindlessly process the physical information that is "out there". From the get go, we are symbolising the possibilities of that world in terms that are functional for us. — apokrisis

What is the relationship between the reality and the virtual reality? If there isn't one, then you are arguing for solipsism, as there would be no bearing of the real world on the virtual world. There would be no way for you to even talk about the real world as they would be separate and unable to interact (no relationship). In order for you to say anything about the real world, via your virtual world, would mean that some state-of-affairs in the real world influences the state-of-affairs in the virtual world. If there is no connection between the real world and the virtual world, then how can you even talk about the real world? How can you even say that you are informed about anything in the real world? There would be no causal connection and therefore no flow of information.

You are missing the point. Yes, the mind needs to relate to the world functionally and so its beliefs need to be "true". But that correctness is in relation to the mindful organism's purposes, not the truth of the thing in itself. So what we perceive are the signs of reality. We want to make "our" reality - our umwelt - easy to see.

So you talk about the information contained in cause and effect. If wavelength energy is cause, why should it look like hue as its effect? Or why should a fragment of an organic molecule smell like a rose? Why should vibrating air sound like tinkling or grating noise?

The way we read information into the world seems pretty arbitrary if we are to take your simple cause and effect view that demands perception is somehow veridical of how the physics really is, rather than as the useful way we interpret it - the way we make the world easy to see in terms of our evolved sets of interest.

This passage deals with a similar point to that made in the OP but offers an explanation in terms of the 'computational theory of mind'.

The brain's special status comes from a special thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, and act. That special thing is information processing, or computation. Information and computation reside in patterns of data and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that carries them.

When you telephone your mother in another city, the message stays the same as it goes from your lips to her ears even as it physically changes its form, from vibrating air, to electricity in a wire, to charges in silicon, to flickering light in a fiber optic cable, to electromagnetic waves, and then back again in reverse order.

In a similar sense, the message stays the same when she repeats it to your father at the other end of the couch after it has changed its form inside her head into a cascade of neurons firing and chemicals diffusing across synapses.

Likewise, a given program can run on computers made of vacuum tubes, electromagnetic switches, transistors, integrated circuits, or well-trained pigeons, and it accomplishes the same things for the same reasons.

This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky, and the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, is now called "the computational theory of mind". It is one of the great ideas in intellectual history, for it solves one of the puzzles that make up the `mind-body problem': how to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain.

Why did Bill get on the bus? Because he wanted to visit his grandmother and knew the bus would take him there. No other answer will do. If he hated the sight of his grandmother, or if he knew the route had changed, his body would not be on that bus. For millennia this has been a paradox. Entities like `wanting to visit one's grandmother' and `knowing the bus goes to Grandma's house' are colorless, odorless, and tasteless. But at the same time they are *causes* of physical events, as potent as any billiard ball clacking into another.

The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give
rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens.

The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. The computational theory of mind is indispensable in addressing the questions we long to answer. Neuroscientists like to point out that all parts of the cerebral cortex look pretty much alike - not only the different parts of the human brain, but the brains of different animals.

One could draw the conclusion that all mental activity in all animals is the same. But a better conclusion is that we cannot simply look at a patch of brain and read out the logic in the intricate pattern of connectivity that makes each part do its separate thing. In the same way that all books are physically just different combinations of the same seventy-five or so characters, and all movies are physically just different patterns of charges along the tracks of a videotape, the mammoth tangle of spaghetti of the brain may all look alike when examined strand by strand.

The content of a book or a movie lies in the pattern of ink marks or magnetic charges, and is apparent only when the piece is read or seen. Similarly, the content of brain activity lies in the patterns of connections and patterns of activity among the neurons. Minute differences in the details of the connections may cause similar-looking brain patches to implement very different programs. Only when the program is run does the coherence become evident. "

(Steve Pinker, How the Mind Works Penguin: London, 1998)


Pinker says 'the symbols are physical states of matter', but what does this mean? Notice he actually uses the term 'incarnated as configurations of symbols'. An 'incarnation' means 'made flesh' - but it is generally understood that what is incarnated is, or was, discarnate prior to being incarnated. If you were to say to someone 'you are the incarnation of beauty', you would be implying that the quality of 'beauty' is 'instantiated' by that person (not a very elegant way of explaining it, but the point stands.)

I also think there is something very wrong with 'If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it'. First - they are arranged by what? In the case of a computer, they are arranged according to the computer program which is surely the work of a human intelligence. So if the analogy is with a computer, it tends to suggest something very like 'the watchmaker'. If not, they are not 'arranged' at all, or at any rate, the fact of their proximity and relationship can't really be assigned an explanatory role.

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. Conflating 'meaning' with 'physical dispositions of parts' seems very question-begging to me.

You are missing the point. Yes, the mind needs to relate to the world functionally and so its beliefs need to be "true". But that correctness is in relation to the mindful organism's purposes, not the truth of the thing in itself. So what we perceive are the signs of reality. We want to make "our" reality - our umwelt - easy to see. — apokrisis

No, Apo. I get your point, and I know that you are getting mine. I think you are trying to avoid answering hard questions. How can something be functional in the reality "out there" if there isn't some degree of truth associated with it?

Look at your post. It is an explanation of reality itself, not the virtual reality in your head, but the one out there, and it's relationship with the virtual reality in your head, right? If not, which reality are you talking about? How can you say anything about the one out there and how it relates to your VR if you're implying that we can never get to it, or at least know some truth about it? What part of your post is a truth about your VR and which is a truth about reality out there and how both interact? How do you know anything about the reality out there and your relation to it?

Let's say that I associate red apples as being delicious and green apples as disgusting. In this instance, I'm relating a color to one of my subjective experiences. I think this is an example of what you are talking about. The apples aren't really different colors, except in my head, and they are delicious and disgusting only in my head. But the apples do have different properties that cause a different interaction with the same wavelength of light that gets reflected into my eye and processed by the eye-brain system, which results in me seeing different colors, or interacts with my taste buds and nervous system that results in a taste of deliciousness or distaste for me.

While the apples don't have properties of color or taste in themselves prior to or after any interaction with reflected light and an eye-brain system, or taste buds, they do have objective properties that result in them being represented a certain way for any sensory information processor to use in order to accomplish any purpose (goal) it has at any given moment.

Even our own minds don't have properties of color independent of looking at the world. Even closing your eyes, you end up looking at the inside of your eyelids, which is the dark side of your eyelids, which is why it appears black. Color is the effect of the level of light environment interacting with the eye-brain system, and only appears when light interacts with an eye-brain system. You can't see any other color other than black when there is no light at all. In this sense, light is a cause of color as much as the existence of an eye-brain system is. Color is the effect of both causes interacting.

Both causes have their own objective properties that interact and create a new effect. This is what the effect provides information about - the objective properties of the causes. How is it that your mind has a certain quality, structure, attribute, or property that is persistent and follows certain logical rules that allows it to be functional, but everything else doesn't? If everything else is just a function of the mind, then that would include other people, therefore solipsism would be the case.

So you talk about the information contained in cause and effect. If wavelength energy is cause, why should it look like hue as its effect? Or why should a fragment of an organic molecule smell like a rose? Why should vibrating air sound like tinkling or grating noise?

The way we read information into the world seems pretty arbitrary if we are to take your simple cause and effect view that demands perception is somehow veridical of how the physics really is, rather than as the useful way we interpret it - the way we make the world easy to see in terms of our evolved sets of interest. — apokrisis

I never said that effects and their causes are the same things. That would absurd. Effects are the result of more than one cause interacting over time. This is why effects carry information about ALL their causes. Color carries information about the wavelength of light and the state of your eye-brain system. The question is, which information is it that you want to know right now about the color? What is it that you want to know that some color is representing, or carrying information about - it's wavelength, the state of a particular eye-brain system, the state of the apple (ripe or rotten), the taste of the apple, etc.?

It is your theory that implies that we project our purposes onto reality and would make it pretty arbitrary. I'm not saying that we don't do that. What I'm saying is that there is a two-way street where information flows from the outside to the inside and information flows from the inside (projected by intent) to the outside. This is how we are able to know about the world as well as project our own purposes onto it, which includes making our views known to others and trying to influence them to accept our view.

How else do I or anyone else get the gist of what you or anyone else is saying? The information crosses the boundary between your VR and the real world, back into my VR. If I make your post into what is functional to my purposes, how can you ever expect express yourself at all. How is it that language works at all?

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. Conflating 'meaning' with 'physical dispositions of parts' seems very question-begging to me. — Wayfarer

Sign or symbol starts where physics leaves off. A physical mark can "mean anything" only because that mark has zero dynamics. There is, in short, an epistemic cut. The normal physics of dissipative decay are suspended. And so the semiotics of information can then arise. A mark can be used to mean anything you like. The mark becomes the coin of this newly emergent realm.

And when I say mark, in practice we are talking about a switch. A binary mark.

I can scratch a mark on a rock - something tough like granite. It meets the requirement of having zero physics (for all practical purposes). I could go away a million years and come back and find it again (given some weathering). So the effective lack of dissipative physics creates the possibility of memory. The mark is timeless, changeless. It is not even located if I can make that exact same mark anywhere I go.

But also we want to be able to erase marks. And just as easily and physics-free as we can create them. That is really getting into a realm of pure information.

Thus the ideal of a binary switch. We have a reversible mark. Just flip the switch. That takes a little bit of effort each time you do it. But otherwise, it is physics-free. The mark (or marks - 0 or 1) are effectively eternal and placeless. Well, there is a material cost in manufacturing the switch itself. But then it is as outside normal physics as a chisel mark on a lump of granite.

So we can see that information relates fundamentally to a zeroing of physical dynamics. Information exists to the degree we can eliminate the ordinary material dissipation that reality seeks to impose. And yet, by the same token, there is some fundamental scale of connection. A switch has to be made. The switch has to be flipped. Some minimum and constant energetic price must be paid to create this parallel abstract or physics-free world (constant as we can't have the cost of switching switches become a final physical fact impinging on the freedom to create and erase states of memory or sign).

And now note how the fact of going physics free is the cause of a crisp digitality, a binary logic. To be able to create and erase a mark freely, at zero cost, gives rise to on and off, yes and no, either or. Definite counterfactuality is the unphysical possibility that arises. The state of a switch virtually demands an explanation. An intelligible choice is implied.

So you don't need to start with a "meaning-maker". The fact that the mark, and then the erasable mark, stand as the limit on ordinary dissipative physics means that an interpreter is implied by the switch's very existence. It is ready-made for interpretation. It is only going to be an accident or two before interpretance actually gets going ... if that closes a feedback loop with the physical world where the interpretance is functional.

If the use of the switch is something that increases the physical dynamics of the world - such that there is spare physics to build switches and flip their states - then interpretative states of switching are going to evolve.

This is of course the story at the level of biological, neurological and linguistic information. But your question has shifted to that of personal or autonomous meaning. And so I'm challenging your use of "abstract".

Yes, to go from a physics-determined world to a physics-free world involves abstraction. It is physics that must be abstracted away. Yet still, we can see the impossibility of a complete disconnection. There is a minimal energy dissipation requirement to create and run a set of erasable marks or switches. And then more crucially, the evolution of interpretive systems - systems with meanings - can only happen if those systems are increasing the entropy of the worlds they arise in. There is this basic requirement that shapes the interpretive system from the get-go ... if it is to get going.

So while one can marvel at the freedom of the human mind to spin any kind of fiction, or entertain apparently unlimited personalised meanings and abstracted notions, the whole show remains rooted in the real world physics. In the long run or on the microscale, it comes back to paying for this unphysical freedom. You won't get far scientifically or philosophically in pretending it isn't.

A physical mark can "mean anything" — apokrisis

No. It means what caused it. The physical mark would be the effect of more than one cause interacting over time, and that is what it can be used to mean.

Pinker says 'the symbols are physical states of matter', but what does this mean? — Wayfarer

I think he means that they can interact with each other and establish causal relationships.

Notice he actually uses the term 'incarnated as configurations of symbols'. An 'incarnation' means 'made flesh' - but it is generally understood that what is incarnated is, or was, discarnate prior to being incarnated. If you were to say to someone 'you are the incarnation of beauty', you would be implying that the quality of 'beauty' is 'instantiated' by that person (not a very elegant way of explaining it, but the point stands.) — Wayfarer

I think he means that the information, which is a relationship - one between causes and effects - is converted from an analog signal into a digital signal in order to be useful for a purpose.

I also think there is something very wrong with 'If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it'. First - they are arranged by what? In the case of a computer, they are arranged according to the computer program which is surely the work of a human intelligence. So if the analogy is with a computer, it tends to suggest something very like 'the watchmaker'. If not, they are not 'arranged' at all, or at any rate, the fact of their proximity and relationship can't really be assigned an explanatory role. — Wayfarer

The foundation is arranged by natural selection and then built upon as we experience the world and establish new neural connections.

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. Conflating 'meaning' with 'physical dispositions of parts' seems very question-begging to me. — Wayfarer

Read what he says about the tree rings in the tree stump in that same book.

when I say mark, in practice we are talking about a switch — apokrisis

No, I think a switch is different to a mark. A switch does something; a mark means something. Different levels of explanation.

So the effective lack of dissipative physics creates the possibility of memory. The mark is timeless, changeless. It is not even located if I can make that exact same mark anywhere I go. — apokrisis

So here, for instance, a 'mark' might have been made by a hunter in 15,000 BC. Or you could scratch the Pythagorean Theorem into granite. They're both 'marks' but their meaning and what they signify is completely different.

It seems to me you can't avoid the element of intentionality or the requirement for a 'meaning maker', if you like.

The foundation is arranged by natural selection — Harry Hindu

You ought not to anthropomorphise natural selection, to make of it an agent that 'does' something. Neither natural selection nor evolution 'does' anything. It is simply a description of how species evolve, but by saying that it 'arranges' something, you are attributing to it something that it doesn't have.

Read what he says about the tree rings in the tree stump in that same book. — Harry Hindu

Tree rings mean something to an arborist, but nothing to the tree.

I think you are trying to avoid answering hard questions. How can something be functional in the reality "out there" if there isn't some degree of truth associated with it? — Harry Hindu

I don't like the term "truth". I would use the pragmatic term, justified belief.

Truth is about an absolute claim of certainty. Pragmatism accepts that knowledge can only make claims about a minimisation of uncertainty.

So sure, you can talk about "some degree of truth" as your way of acknowledging the pragmatic approach to knowledge. Truth is the absolute limit. In practice, we can only approach that state of perfect certainty with arbitrary closeness. In the end, you are saying the same thing.

But I prefer to say that upfront and directly. I don't say a truth is (almost) certain. I say the uncertainty of a belief has been measurably minimised.

I am hardly avoiding any hard question. I am stressing the pragmatically provisional nature of any claims to truth or absolute certainty.

And there is no denial of a "world out there" to be read into this epistemic position. It is pragmatism, not idealism.

Look at your post. It is an explanation of reality itself, not the virtual reality in your head, but the one out there, and it's relationship with the virtual reality in your head, right? — Harry Hindu

You are complaining that I am concealing the very point I have attempted to make. I am talking about the triadic sign relation of pragmatism/semiotics. So yes, it is taken as basic that there are three players in the equation.

But the wrinkle is that this is a more generic level of analysis than just the usual me/sign/world relation of indirect realism or standard issue psychology. Sure, for us humans and other creatures with complex nervous systems, it is all about the "subjective self" and the "objective world". We are just talking about useful reality models mediated by a sign relation. Nothing to scare any realists. The world is actually out there ... just as the self is actually in here. >:O

LOL. That should give the naive realist game away surely? It is always just concealed dualism when it comes to its own theory of truth.

Anyway, the triadic sign relation is more generic than just our functional psychological relationship with an actual, real, material, completely physical, world. It doesn't even need to care about there being a real world as it is paying attention to the prior thing which is the very manufacturing of a state of information division. It is talking about how "selves" and "worlds" arise as the two complementary aspects of a sign relation.

Which is why Peircean epistemology can become a model of ontological being itself. It drills down to the very causality by which self~world could arise as a self-organising symmetry breaking.

Let's say that I associate red apples as being delicious and green apples as disgusting. In this instance, I'm relating a color to one of my subjective experiences. — Harry Hindu

Look at how you are having to treat the "self" as real here. You are having to reify this little person in your head doing the looking at the representations, experiencing the qualia. Already an inadequate ontology is going badly wrong, headed off down the path labelled infinite homuncular regress.

It is tough to give up the habit of talking about a reified self at the back of it all. But that is what you need to be able to do.

What is actually going is a process of interpretance where it is the world that is being reified in sign. The world is being rendered as "qualia". And then the "self" doing that is also interpretive reification. The system is taking its own actions as a sign that there must be a homuncular observer sitting in back of it, doing its job.

Of course, "we" never see this "self" who is doing the real experiencing. But we hear people invoking it by name the whole time. People are always talking in terms of I, me, you, we, them, us. People even give each other actual names. So we encounter the signifiers of selfhood constantly. No wonder the self really comes to seem to exist .... like a faux real object. Rocks and selves just become part of reality's collection of objects. If we doubt the existence of "a self", we only have to look in a mirror.

The apples aren't really different colors, except in my head, and they are delicious and disgusting only in my head. But the apples do have different properties that cause a different interaction with the same wavelength of light that gets reflected into my eye and processed by the eye-brain system, which results in me seeing different colors, or interacts with my taste buds and nervous system that results in a taste of deliciousness or distaste for me. — Harry Hindu

Isn't that what I plainly said? The world is what it is. Then we represent it in a way that is useful. What we want to see is reality as it looks through the eyes of our purposes.

Colour sensation arose as a fast route to object discrimination. As with all other sensory processing, it is about hardwiring for pop-out recognition. If you see the world in black and white - simple luminance contrast - then there is quite an information load in sifting out the million shades of grey. Of course you can do it - there is a lot of black and white hardwired pop-out mechanism, like Mach bands, to draw quick and sharp contrast lines around every boundary, group features in coherently guessed fashion.

And yet still, adding sharp hue contrasts takes object perception to another level of quickfire automatic discrimination. You just look at fruit in a bowl and each different object just leaps out as the colour processing removes a vast amount of borderline ambiguity. No one could confuse green for red, or yellow for blue. I mean it is literally impossible to see greenish red or yellowish blue due to the opponent channel processing principles of our primate visual pathways.

Even our own minds don't have properties of color independent of looking at the world. Even closing your eyes, you end up looking at the inside of your eyelids, which is the dark side of your eyelids, which is why it appears black. — Harry Hindu

But I don't see black. I see the photic rustle of retinal neurons seeking missing input. I get the vague impression of swirling lights and coloured dots that are my own endogenous baseline brain activity. So actual phenomenology confirms the constructedness of visual experience. Our brains are so hungry to make a visual world that they will restlessly imagine colours and patterns even in the complete dark. That is, unless we stare into the dark and interpret it as black, ignoring this photic rustle that wants to get in the way of our "reality experiencing".

In this sense, light is a cause of color as much as the existence of an eye-brain system is. — Harry Hindu

The real world might be the cause of our having a way of modelling it. But there is no direct reason why the phenomenology of colour experience should reflect the reality of wavelength energy the way it does.

The only physical requirement or constraint is that the system works. That the signs we form do an effective job of achieving the basic goal - which is quick and sure acts of discrimination. The cause of colour is that colours are "completely obvious". They do the best job of removing visual scene ambiguity. The information we need is just going to pop out.

How is it that your mind has a certain quality, structure, attribute, or property that is persistent and follows certain logical rules that allows it to be functional, but everything else doesn't? If everything else is just a function of the mind, then that would include other people, therefore solipsism would be the case. — Harry Hindu

You keep wheeling out an argument built to attack idealism against my argument based on pragmatism.

I'm not seeking to deny there is a world.

I'm pointing out the degree to which both self and world are an imaginative co-construction - a semotic interpretive relation. The actual world - the Kantian thing in itself - in fact drops out of the picture for us. We end up having as little do with it as we can .... as that then means we are completely plugged into it only in a way that matters most to "us".

Hence why signs are about the usefulness of information loss. Mastery over the world is demonstrated by the growth of our capacity to ignore it. Signs are how we deal with the world only to the extent "we" need to care.

What I'm saying is that there is a two-way street where information flows from the outside to the inside and information flows from the inside (projected by intent) to the outside. — Harry Hindu

I thought I was saying that. You only think I can't have being saying that because you have labelled me as an idealist, even a closet solipsist. Your personal system of sign has been imposed on the reality that is the pragmatist me.

Another good illustration of how this works. :)

The information crosses the boundary between your VR and the real world, back into my VR. If I make your post into what is functional to my purposes, how can you ever expect express yourself at all. How is it that language works at all? — Harry Hindu

Yeah. Minds need to be connected by physical symbols. And a lot of energy gets expended in transferring information. Especially because another mind really only wants to see the world in the way to which it has become accustomed. The other mind always wants an easy life where it can pretty much ignore other minds and deal with anything they might say as a labelled, pre-packaged position that can be given a quick tick. Yes for true, no for false. Trip the memory switch flag and move along.

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. — Wayfarer

Yeah but, your post isn't made of abstract types, it's made of concrete tokens, which brings us right back to where we started from. Hurray!

No, I think a switch is different to a mark. A switch does something; a mark means something. — Wayfarer

You are hoping to get away with ordinary language use definitions in the discussion of information theory. Nice.

Feel free to walk right past the careful argument I just made ... the one you claimed your OP was about in citing Landauer on the very issue of the difference between creating information, and creating and erasing information.

Really. The hypocrisy.

It seems to me you can't avoid the element of intentionality or the requirement for a 'meaning maker', if you like. — Wayfarer

I made a careful argument for how a meaning maker is implied by the possibility of there being that next level of meaning. So the physics itself creates the potential for the physics-free in the very fact that dynamism has its limit.

The fact that entropy flows downhill in the Cosmos means that any movement uphill - no matter how accidental it might seem - is negentropic. To the degree that physics is one thing, its "other" is also made counterfactually possible. And if the possible turns out to be the useful - as it is in the case of dissipative structure - then it becomes "Platonically" necessary that it develop as a further habit of nature. Negentropic order must arise if it increases the downhill flow.

Sure, you can just ignore the fact that I made this argument. That is normal human behaviour. I've explained the semiotics of that. But still. Philosophy is about dealing with arguments in systematic fashion. That is suppose to be the special thing about it.

So get back to me when you have something less vague to say than "seems to me that you can't avoid....".

the one you claimed your OP was about in citing Landauer on the very issue of the difference between creating information, and creating and erasing information. — apokrisis

No need to get huffy. The basic argument I made has nothing to do with entropy, or negentropy, for that matter. What I observed was that, the same information can be represented in a limitless variety of forms and media. So given a meaningful sentence or proposition, if the meaning stays the same, and the representation changes, then the meaning and the representation are separate things.

Landuaer's claim seems to come down to 'whenever we find information, we find it inscribed or encoded somehow in a physical medium of whatever kind'. But the fact that the 'physical medium' can be completely changed, while retaining the same information, indicates that the information itself is not physical. That's really a form of dualist argument - that the 'information layer' and the 'physical layer' are different things.

And besides, I am not dismissing the argument: how does 'a mark' constitute 'meaning'? If there is a simple scratch on a piece of granite - that's 'a mark', but it's not necessarily a symbol. It might have been made by a glacial rock, in which case it doesn't refer to anything. But if it was made by a human being, to signify something, then it has meaning. So please explain to me how 'a mark' is 'a switch', because it's something I really don't see.

I also don't see how you can have the 'epistemic cut' without an implied duality between the semantic and the physical level. Is what you're trying to establish, a bridge from the physical to the semantic?

your post isn't made of abstract types, — Srap Tasmaner

All human language relies on abstractions, doesn't it?

The fact that entropy flows downhill in the Cosmos means that any movement uphill - no matter how accidental it might seem - is negentropic. To the degree that physics is one thing, its "other" is also made counterfactually possible. And if the possible turns out to be the useful - as it is in the case of dissipative structure - then it becomes "Platonically" necessary that it develop as a further habit of nature. Negentropic order must arise if it increases the downhill flow.

Sure, you can just ignore the fact that I made this argument. That is normal human behaviour. I've explained the semiotics of that. But still. Philosophy is about dealing with arguments in systematic fashion. That is suppose to be the special thing about it. — apokrisis

Also, I really don't want to *ignore* this argument, but as it keeps coming up again and again, I will try and articulate what I don't like about it. I think it's because the 'second law of thermodynamics' - that everything progresses towards maximum entropy over time - is essentially a physicalist argument, is it not? Because it is saying that everything that occurs, does so out of basically physical necessity, as a consequence of thermodynamics. So what bothers me, is that whilst on the one hand, you seem to accept that old-school materialism has been undermined by quantum physics (something we both agree on), yet you retain the overall materialist view of there being nothing intentional, there being no kind of 'telos' or purpose, that the universe remains basically dumb stuff. Living systems are in some sense an inevitable part of the running-down of the Universe towards it's final state of 'maximum entropy', but nothing more than, or other than, that.

Have I paraphrased that correctly? Because, if so, I don't want to ignore it, I would rather try and spell out what I think is wrong with it.

Yes but we don't utter abstractions, which might be part of Landauer's point.

If I sound dead certain about all this, that's an illusion.

Yes but we don't utter abstractions, — Srap Tasmaner

We do, though. Almost every sentence you utter relies on generalisations, and they are a form of abstraction.

No need to get huffy. — Wayfarer

Just trying to rouse you from your dogmatic slumbers.

What I observed was that, the same information can be represented in a limitless variety of forms and media. So given a meaningful sentence or proposition, if the meaning stays the same, and the representation changes, then the meaning and the representation are separate things. — Wayfarer

Yes of course. Translation is possible. But information theory is about boiling down to the limits of that possibility. At some ultimate level, information gets grainy. You have to worry about whether "all the information" is being converted. And so you have to be able to count information in some physically rooted fashion.

It was a major discovery of the last century that this can be done in a definite fashion. Information and physics can be two sides of the same coin. They can be defined by the same equation, or system of measurement.

You want to talk about the meaning of information and not its mechanics. Its semantics rather than its syntax.

That's fine. There is that conversation to be had. But you can't then employ that to side-swipe the physics of information in passing. You can't pretend to be talking about Landauer and proving his kind wrong by simply making the argument "hey guys, there is also this".

As I argued, you are just wanting to talk about the issue of semantics or interpretance in unplaced fashion. If you can get away with that, you hope no one will notice you pushing meaning away into Platonia. You can make subjectivity safe from reductionist attack.

But science is laying a necessary foundation for a semiotic approach to the fundamental questions about reality. Ignore that if you choose. However that is what is going on.

That's really a form of dualist argument - that the 'information layer' and the 'physical layer' are different things. — Wayfarer

Computers are literal dualism. They are machines. A dualism of hardware and software is the feature that is designed into them. The divorce between the physics and the information is made as perfect as we can humanly imagine.

Then Landauer comes along to remind where this mechanised dualism encounters its material limits. Hey guys, we can create information at no entropic cost (as entropy itself produces some negentropy "accidentally"). But then to erase that information - reverse an accident with deliberate intent - requires us to pay back on this loan with interest. The whole deal has to wind up producing more frictional heat than useful work.

I also don't see how you can have the 'epistemic cut' without an implied duality between the semantic and the physical level. Is what you're trying to establish, a bridge from the physical to the semantic? — Wayfarer

Hell's bells. What do you think the epistemic cut is other than the means to then build a bridge?

To describe something, you have to step off that something. And the epistemic cut is how a division between "self" and "world" is actually established so that "acts of description" become even a thing.

Well that's what the whole thread is about, so just asserting it seems ... unhelpful.

Besides "relies on" ≠ "is".

yet you retain the overall materialist view of there being nothing intentional, there being no kind of 'telos'. — Wayfarer

Saying the telos of existence is dissipatory is not saying there is no telos. It is just mentioning a telos which you have some personal distaste for.

I could say this a billion more times and you will still pretend that's the first time you've even heard me say it.

Why is that exactly?

Saying the telos of existence is dissipatory is not saying there is no telos. It is just mentioning a telos which you have some personal distaste for. — apokrisis

It's not a 'personal distaste'. We're discussing a metaphysical principle - how we see the fundamental cause or ground of existence. (But of course in today's world, that can only be 'personal', can't it.) I am making an effort to understand your arguments, I have gone off and read up on Peirce and Pattee and articles on semiotics and the like, specifically because of interactions on these forums.

It was a major discovery of the last century that this can be done in a definite fashion. Information and physics can be two sides of the same coin. They can be defined by the same equation, or system of measurement. — apokrisis

If you're referring to Shannon's information theory, that was not a general theory about the nature of information as a constituent of the Universe. It was specifically about transmission of information between a sender and a receiver, data compression, and related issues. The purported equivalence of physics and information is another step altogether.

you can get away with that, you hope no one will notice you pushing meaning away into Platonia. You can make subjectivity safe from reductionist attack. — apokrisis

What I said - what I spelled out, in plain view, and plain English, was this:

When the mind evolves to the point where it can grasp meaning, then it begins to get an insight into 'the formal domain', the domain of possibility, forms and rules (including number). But that domain is not 'something that exists', in the way that material phenomena exist. That is why it is regarded as a 'spooky realm' - but that depiction of it is caused by the habitually naturalistic tendency, which is to try and locate everything within the domain of time and space, amongst the objects of perception. Whereas, the elements of meaning (so to speak) are not 'out there somewhere' - they are instead the constituents of reality, but in a radically different way to objects. They are that which enable us to think rationally, but are not themselves the objects of perception; we see the world through them. The are the 'constituents of the world' insofar as they constitute the very mind which is looking at it (per Kant).

Hence Plato's 'objective idealism' - the notion that ideas are real, independently of anyone's opinion. So I think that amounts to a kind of dualism, with the qualification that Descartes' error was to depict 'res cogitans' as something that could be understood objectively. But there is literally no such thing, there is no 'mind-stuff' anywhere to be found. The reason for that is because it is literally prior to any notion of what exists 'out there somewhere'. It is what informs our thought, by providing us with the ability to see meaning and reason, but you can never see it 'from the outside', so to speak. That is the sense in which it is 'the stuff of thought'. — Wayfarer

Think about your example in terms of Chinese Whispers. What are we to make of the information loss that results from the message - "three-masted Greek boat this PM" - being transmitted down a chain of speakers?

What I said - what I spelled out, in plain view, and plain English, was this: — Wayfarer

I agree with much of that. But you prefaced it with:

That is true, as far as it goes, but it is not the final say. I am working towards the idea that the 'domain of meaning' really is independent of the physical world. It's not dependent on it for its reality, and it doesn't arise on account of anything that happens on the physical level; it's not the product of evolution (which everything is supposed to be). — Wayfarer

So the key difference is that I am arguing that all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative. Thou shalt entropify. Life and mind cannot escape that general constraint (even though there is plenty of freedom to invent within that restriction).

So what bothers me ... is that the universe remains basically dumb stuff. — Wayfarer

It bothers you. You find "dumbness" to be personally distasteful. An imperative to disorder seems a literal waste of time.

I'm in the spirit of facing facts. Let the answers play out as they may. What is it that nature is telling us when we listen closely with an open mind?

I propose we define physical as whatever has a position in space. Information always has a location in space if you look at it in Aristotelian and not Platonic fashion. So in-so-far as this is true, information is physical - this is because information does not exist independently of the physical structures that transmit it - hylomorphism. — Agustino

This definition is problematic. Space is conceptual. We have concepts of space, and these are developed to help us understand and use physical objects. When you say that "information always has a location in space", you appeal to a concept of space which allows that things have a fixed position in some sort of fixed space. But this is a very naïve concept of space, because things really don't have fixed positions. Furthermore, much information is known to be associated with the activities of space rather than things assumed to be in fixed positions. So this type of definition is rather inadequate.

I think that "meaningful" implies that the information has already been interpreted. — Galuchat

This is not really true though. The author of a piece of information puts meaning into that piece. And this act of creating is completely different from the act of interpreting. So it is not true that "meaningful" implies that the thing has been interpreted. There are two distinct, but very related senses of "meaningful", one implies that the object has been created with intent, the other that it has been interpreted. One does not necessarily require the other, such that naturally occurring things, like geological structures, can be interpreted as informational, without assuming an author, and things created by an author can be said to exist as meaningful things, despite not being interpreted.

If we conflate these two distinct senses of "meaningful", one might insist that naturally occurring structures, must have been created by an author to be meaningful, or, that something created by an author must be interpreted to be meaningful.

That would depend on how information is defined. How would you define information in a general sense (i.e., one which takes into account its physical and mental manifestations)? — Galuchat

I hope that answered this question. I would define "information" in such a way as to separate these two distinct senses. In both cases, information may be physical, meaning the property of physical things, but it is not necessarily physical in each case.

But this is where the difficulty arises. Like any other property, we can abstract the property from the object, and start talking directly about the property without necessarily attributing it to any object, as if the property is an object. In this way, the property becomes an immaterial object, a concept. So for example, we can take the property of being red, and talk about "red" itself, as if it were an object, what does it mean to be red, etc. Now we have made "red" which was a property of some objects, into an object itself. We can't assign physical existence to "red", the concept, but we can assign physical existence to red as the property of an object. The same is the case for "information". We can assign physical existence to information, as the property of an object, but "information", in the conceptual form, without being attributed to a physical object, can't have physical existence.

But the mathematical aspect of data doesn't end with MTC. I find Floridi's comment, "The universe is fundamentally composed of data, understood as dedomena..," intriguing. Is he referring to geometry as a transcendental or abstract universal which constrains that which is physical and that which is psychophysical? Do Aristotelian forms figure into this equation? — Galuchat

If we invert things, we can assume that the immaterial concept, "information" is the object. Then we can claim that the physical universe is a property of that immaterial object. So the physical universe is seen as a property of the immaterial object, the concept of information. I would say that this is imaginary.

That would be misinformation. — Galuchat

But how would you distinguish information from misinformation? In the example, it's easy because I described it as misinformation. But just like stuff we call "knowledge", sometimes later turns out to be wrong, so stuff we call "information" may later turn out to be misinformation. This is the problem, with associating information with data. If we take a look at some collection of data, we have no way of knowing whether it's information, or misinformation.

But the fact that the 'physical medium' can be completely changed, while retaining the same information, indicates that the information itself is not physical. — Wayfarer

This argument is very problematic as well. The word "same" here is used in a very unphilosophical way. You are saying that two distinct physical occurrences convey the same information, when this is impossible or else we could not call them distinct occurrences. It's like saying that two cars of the same make and model are the same car. The only reason that the occurrences may be said to be distinct is that they convey different information. Each time the information is represented in a different medium, the information there is not actually "the same". The interpretation will vary depending on the medium. Each time a statement is translated from one language to another, the information conveyed by that statement does not stay the same. Also, when different people interpret the same statement, the meaning which is taken away by each,, is not the same for each. These issues with the notion of "the same", indicate that the information really is a property of the physical structure, and the immaterial aspect, how the information is interpreted, remains within the individual human mind.

If you want another perspective, you might consider Robert Ulanowicz "ascendency" as a information measure of higher purpose - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency

Ulanowicz was part of the same biosemiotic crowd - Pattee, Rosen, Salthe. But also a convinced Catholic and so motivated to find a theistic spin where he could.

Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.

One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as “organized power”, because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated willy-nilly.

So he was defining a way of measuring the actual negentropic purpose that an organic system could evolve. A measure of action or information in terms of what was meaningful to an organism, as opposed to the simply entropic waste heat that also has to accompany that.

In mathematical terms, ascendency is the product of the aggregate amount of material or energy being transferred in an ecosystem times the coherency with which the outputs from the members of the system relate to the set of inputs to the same components (Ulanowicz 1986). Coherence is gauged by the average mutual information shared between inputs and outputs (Rutledge et al. 1976).

The key as ever is he did derive an equation so that real systems could actually be measured.

And he claimed results....

Originally, it was thought that ecosystems increase uniformly in ascendency as they developed, but subsequent empirical observation has suggested that all sustainable ecosystems are confined to a narrow “window of vitality” (Ulanowicz 2002). Systems with relative values of ascendency plotting below the window tend to fall apart due to lack of significant internal constraints, whereas systems above the window tend to be so “brittle” that they become vulnerable to external perturbations.

This shows scientists do take systems causality seriously and can advance our understanding in terms of actual equations, actual experiments.

Physics provides the base with its foundational work on the equivalence of entropy and information. Biology and neuroscience are now exploiting that by using more complex measures like mutual information or free energy in their new theories.