OK, but I think it is misleading to speak of "panpsychism" in the context of Whitehead's philosophy. As far as I know he never used the term. He may have never used "panexperientialism" either, but at least the notion represented by the latter term is in accordance with his metaphysics. This may seem like a minor quibble, but I think there are very important inherent distinctions between the two ideas, and it would be best not to conflate them.

In any case there is still the apparent problem that the "point of view or the IS of the event itself" is for the interpretant, or experient, and not for the sign or the object. Perhaps this is also a problem for @apo, if he wants to say that there is no ontological (as opposed to merely ontic) primacy to any of the three elements of the sign relation. The question is whether this is merely an apparent, or a deeper, problem.

At what point does modeling not feel like something? — schopenhauer1

So you accept modelling would reasonably feel like something. My job is done.

The alternative question is whether we have to model in order to feel, which leads to the question as to how far down modelling goes in nature, and whether there is anything in nature other than modelling. To me, characterizing all experience as modelling would look somewhat tendentious; that is intrinsically cognitivistic.

My disagreement is not necessarily with modeling, though @Janus brings up a good point that I'd like to see your response to. My disagreement in this particular argument is whether the modeling ENTAILS feeling like something from the point of view of the IS of the modeling in-itself. In other words, if the modeling feels like something, who is to say this feels like something doesn't go all the way down? Just like different gradations of modeling- different gradations of feeling (or more appropriately, experiencing).

The identity of entities is that which is understood to endure, but the notion of changeless endurance is an abstraction. — Janus

What do you mean by that? Are you saying that unity/identity/wholeness exist as an abstraction only in the mind?

Not exactly, I am saying that changeless unity, changeless identity, and changeless wholeness are mental abstractions.

Alternatively, change could be fundamental and somethingness is what we get when unbounded fluctuation is stably bounded. — apokrisis

But what is it that is fluctuating in the first place?

The fluctuation?

To ask which bit of the sign relation is the “conscious bit” is to miss the point.

Consciousness, as a biological phenomenon, is a result of a brain modelling a self in a world. The sign relation captures the irreducible complex nature of that relation.

Pansemiosis would be an extension of that triadic analysis to a non conscious, because non modelling, physical reality.

Organisms are sentient because they have internal models of themselves in the world. The Cosmos is then in some sense a globalised model of itself. The model is not internal but now the actual shape of the system itself.

This makes sense given the information theoretic and holographic turn of current physics. Science has had to give up on matter as substantial being. Instread reality is composed of contextual limitations on individuated events.

So semiotics began as a way to understand language as a causal structure. Then Peirce extended that to include the grammar of logic, and speculatively, a self-organising tale of cosmology and existence.

Semiosis was about the growth of intelligibility and reasonableness - both within human thinking and also in the actual world within which humans arose.

Modern biology showed that life and mind are properly semiotic - language-like in their code-based modelling of states of meaningfulness.

And now modern physics is showing how a world of quantum events is about the power of contexts, or states of interpretance, to determine or individuate particular occurrences - the signs that compose the unfolding history of a universe.

So pansemiosis has the same triadic logical structure as biosemiosis and even just ordinary language use. But there is a huge difference between an organism that is modelling its world and a world that is just in some sense its own model.

Consciousness doesn't cross that line. The Cosmos is not aware, except in the loosest metaphorical sense. Even trees, slugs and ant colonies are not aware in the kind of way we really mean.

So pansemiosis remains a million miles away from panpsychism, panexperientialism, pantheism, etc, etc.

Not exactly, I am saying that changeless unity, changeless identity, and changeless wholeness are mental abstractions. — Janus

Is there any sense in which we can say that there are unities, identities and wholes "out there" in nature? Must we not say, then, that there is some principle of unity at play within nature itself? And furthermore, how is it that the mind is capable of creating such abstractions in a world of pure change?

The fluctuation fluctuates?

In other words, if the modeling feels like something, who is to say this feels like something doesn't go all the way down? — schopenhauer1

The answer is obvious. Complex brains do complex modelling. When I use my eyes, I create a model of a world from some pattern of illumination falling on my retina. And key to that model is also the "me" that is place in time and space as a "receiver" of that point of view.

So that is an example of how the modelling is a model which is of a self in a world. And that is then what we would expect the model to feel like.

But if a slug doesn't have the equipment to make sense of the scrambled EM radiation striking it, then there is no "world" in terms of some self-centred point of view. We can just as reasonably draw a conclusion about a slug having the kind of experience that would follow from not having that level of reality modelling.

None of this is rocket science. It is obvious from the type of modelling being done what we might expect that type of modelling to feel like.

We can't then experience what it is actually like to be a slug, or an echo-locating bat, just because of that scientific account. But we can still answer questions about how far down some kind of experiencing would go when it comes to organisms and their self~world modelling.

But what is it that is fluctuating in the first place? — Aaron R

Wrong question. If nothing has yet been prevented from being the case, then what isn't the case?

A fluctuation is just a way to talk about the barest first imaginable kind of substantial state of being - an action with a direction.

So materialism sees an atom as its simplest possible starting point. But if you flip to a dynamical point of view, that becomes a fluctuation. A fluctuation is what we would call the first expression of any limitation on naked and unbounded possibility. The starting point for in-formed being would be an action in a direction. And being fleeting, both the action and the direction would disappear with it.

The answer is obvious. — apokrisis

When we take for granted the already existing self, sure it seems so.

Complex brains do complex modelling. When I use my eyes, I create a model of a world from some pattern of illumination falling on my retina. And key to that model is also the "me" that is place in time and space as a "receiver" of that point of view. — apokrisis

What is this "me"? This "illusion"? If you go back to mere description, you have lost the trail.

We can just as reasonably draw a conclusion about a slug having the kind of experience that would follow from not having that level of reality modelling. — apokrisis

There is some modeling going on, no? Everything is modeling right? Perhaps the modeling is nothing like ours, but something is happening. There is something of what it is like to BE a slug, not just to describe the slug.

None of this is rocket science. It is obvious from the type of modelling being done what we might expect that type of modelling to feel like. — apokrisis

That there are more complex modeling-types, doesn't negate the question at hand, that there are also possible gradations of being-types.

But we can still answer questions about how far down some kind of experiencing would go when it comes to organisms and their self~world modelling. — apokrisis

And how far is that?

I think you're conflating experience with consciousness.

What is this "me"? This "illusion"? If you go back to mere description, you have lost the trail. — schopenhauer1

That's just you still imposing your dualistic framing on any words that pass your eyes.

A modelled selfhood would be an illusion to you because you - unwittingly still - ache for a noumenal self that exists beyond the phenomenology of self.

To me, that self is simply a modelled construction - along with the world this self is living in. So the whole of this makes for an Umwelt - the world as experienced with a "you" in it.

So it is only once you move up to a triadic framing that the whole of what is going on can snap into place.

If you go back to mere dualistic yearning for the noumenal, you have lost the trail.[/quote]

And how far is that? — schopenhauer1

It is up to you to define the kind of experiencing that concerns you here.

Does a slug lack the kind of visuospatial sense of being a self in a world that higher animals find second nature? What do you think? Where would be the lingering mystery according to you?

It seems to me you're still trying to reify some changeless thing as that which changes. Maybe it's a problem with language. A fluctuation is a fluctuating. Say it is temperature that is fluctuating; there is no changeless entity: temperature that is fluctuating; the fluctuating is temperature, since temperature is never changeless.

I think you're conflating experience with consciousness. — Janus

Think what you like. I'll wait until you define the difference.

From a neuroscience point of view, what most folk really mean by conscious experience involves attentional level processing by a brain capable of that. So more than just reflexive sentience. But less than human-level self-consciousness, which depends on linguistic competence and culturally evolved constraints.

Is there any sense in which we can say that there are unities, identities and wholes "out there" in nature? Must we not say, then, that there is some principle of unity at play within nature itself? And furthermore, how is it that the mind is capable of creating such abstractions in a world of pure change? — Aaron R

I would say there are changing unities, identities and wholes in nature; but I wouldn't say they are "out there" in any absolute sense. Out where? They could be outside your body, but that would be a merely relative 'out there'. I would say that it is regions of differing modes and rates of change that constitute any unity in nature. perhaps you could say they are regions of different intensity.

As to the ability of the mind to abstract; I would say that abstraction is a mental process that is another aspect of change; I think it is an illusion that anything changeless is created by the process of abstraction. Sure, there can be ideas of changelessness, but those ideas are not themselves changeless..

The pan-experientialist view is based on the idea that everything that exists experiences, in the broadest sense of that term, just as the pan-semioticist view is that everything that exists interprets.

The link is that everything that interprets must first experience. A sign cannot be interpreted by an interpretrant unless it is experienced (not necessarily, or even mostly, consciously) by the interpretant.

The interpretant is thereby more primordially the experient. Feeling is prior to response. Affection is prior to cognition. experience is prior to interpretation. Of course interpretation then goes on to modify experience, which leads to further interpretation and so on: I am not denying that.

Wrong question. If nothing has yet been prevented from being the case, then what isn't the case? — apokrisis

I'm not sure how to answer this. The answer that the question seems to beg for is "nothing", but that seems incoherent.

Say it is temperature that is fluctuating; there is no changeless entity: temperature that is fluctuating; the fluctuating is temperature, since temperature is never changeless. — Janus

But there is presumably some stable entity that has a temperature, which endures through fluctuations in its temperature.

I would say there are changing unities, identities and wholes in nature; but I wouldn't say they are "out there" in any absolute sense. — Janus

I'm not concerned with absolute vs. relative at the moment. I am only now concerned with the question of whether the concept of change depends on the concept of stasis such that we cannot think change without also positing an underlying unity or substratum.

This has been my main point as well with app.

The answer to both those questions would be that there is no actual stasis beyond the relative stability of enduring different regions of intensity. So, a bar of iron, for example, is a region of a certain kind and rate of change. It undergoes fluctuations in temperature. These are changes due to the environment (the regions of different intensity) surrounding the bar of iron.

There will also be changes that are inherent to the bar of iron itself, changes at the elemental level. But there is no absolute stasis, just as there is no absolute boundary between the regions of intensity which are the iron bar and its surrounding environment.

I agree that we need a concept of stasis (as well as concept of unity and identity) in order to think about change; I haven't been arguing against that. I have been arguing against reifying such concepts, and imagining that there are real entities which correspond to them.

The pan-experientialist view is based on the idea that everything that exists experiences, in the broadest sense of that term, just as the pan-semioticist view is that everything that exists interprets. — Janus

But "experiences" is an empty, question-begging, sort of term.

Sure, everything that is individuated can then react or relate. We can measure that in terms of a model of a spatiotemporal/energetic framework - some set of global symmetries that could be locally broken.

But this "experience". How do we measure it in any sense?

The usual way is to distinguish according to reactions and relations which have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

So there just ain't any good reason to claim that the whole of nature has experience when the only intelligible definition of experience is the one that points to the difference it makes in terms of reactions or relations to have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest.

A sign cannot be interpreted by an interpretrant unless it is experienced (not necessarily, or even mostly, consciously) by the interpretant. — Janus

A sign is itself the wholeness of the sign relation as a process.

So see what you did there. You slipped in the mediating sign as something dead, static, inert - a mere physical mark that symbolises and thus needs an interpreter with a mind to read it as being about something real out there in the world.

This is the weird thing you and schop both want to do. You want to oppose realism with idealism. You want to oppose an ontology of dead matter with an ontology of living mind.

But that is just doubling down on noumenalism. It is compounding the epistemic error identified by Kant and fixed by Peirce.

For me - accepting that phenomenology is all we got - I treat the idea of "matter" the same way I treat the idea of "mind". I don't buy noumenalism about either of them .... even if the matter vs mind dichotomy are a productive kind of phenomenological distinction to make in constructing our metaphysical models of existence.

So I don't believe in quarks and electrons as "bits of matter", just as much as I don't believe in them as "bits of experience". However, for the sake of scientific modelling, they are measurably more like how we conceive of bits of matter than how we conceive of bits of experience.

And if physics does get around to the semiotic common ground of understanding quarks and electrons as "bits of interpretance, the signs of a triadic relation" then I would be happy indeed.

It would still be all a pragmatic phenomenological tale, not the noumenal truth of the thing-in-itself. But a ground that is common to both the material and the experiential would give scientific explanation the unified view of nature it is always seeking.

I'm not sure how to answer this. The answer that the question seems to beg for is "nothing", but that seems incoherent. — Aaron R

Starting with nothing is incoherent as nothing can come from nothing.

But starting with everything is coherent as at least then you only need to limit it to arrive at the something we know to be the case.

And a state of everythingness is effectively a state of nothingness anyway. We know that if we tried to do everything at once, nothing would get done. Any particular action would be at the same instant cancelled by us trying to do its opposite as well. No change would actually result until some possible actions were suppressed, allowing the others to now be released.

So retroductive argument leaves you little choice.

We exist. There is something.

We then notice that the somethingness of our Cosmo is always the result of symmetry-breaking - a constraint or limitation of a larger space of possibilities.

And as we go back as far as we can see - all the way to the quantum-scale Big Bang - that is all we see. A chaos, a quantum foam of spacetime fluctuations, that is a radically indeterminate everythingness, right at the point where symmetry-breaking begins to suppress some actions and so now concretely release some others.

We can then either choose to believe what we are seeing or continue to complain reality is not behaving the way we would expect - the way it should if it were instead some kind of miraculous something out of nothing.

But this "experience". How do we measure it in any sense? — apokrisis

You can't. And I know you don't want to countenance anything you can't measure; but that says more about you than it does about the immeasurable. Experience, feeling is immeasurable; interpretive responses are not (or not always, at least).

So there just ain't any good reason to claim that the whole of nature has experience when the only intelligible definition of experience is the one that points to the difference it makes in terms of reactions or relations to have something extra by way of autonomy, intelligence and self-interest. — apokrisis

This is not true. The statement that the riverbank experienced the erosive force of the river is a perfectly intelligible one. The conscious (and subconscious) experience enjoyed by humans is different in degree, not in kind, from the experience of 'higher' animals, 'lower' animals, plants and even inorganic entities. And this has nothing at all to do with consciousness or even mind.

So see what you did there. You slipped in the mediating sign as something dead, static, inert - a mere physical mark that symbolises and thus needs an interpreter with a mind to read it as being about something real out there in the world.

This is the weird thing you and schop both want to do. You want to oppose realism with idealism. You want to oppose an ontology of dead matter with an ontology of living mind. — apokrisis

No, I haven't slipped in anything at all. I'm not saying that the sign or the object are dead, static or inert; what I have said is that, in a relational sense, insofar as they are signified object and interpreted sign they are not the interpretant, or by extension, the experient. So for example the tree does not experience me looking at it, but it does experience the rain; it thus does not interpret me as anything at all, but it may interpret the rain as a sign to start growing.

So, it is not an ontology of living mind or living matter, but an ontology of life; something which is both living mind and living matter, and neither (exclusively) living mind nor living matter, that I am advocating. i am not advocating idealism or realism as they are usually understood, but a kind of hybrid of both. One day you'll stop seeing through the lens of your own presuppositions and understand what I am saying. It seems to me to be fairly close to what you are saying, but differs on a couple of fundamental points.

And I know you don't want to countenance anything you can't measure; but that says more about you than it does about the immeasurable. — Janus

Bollocks. It says more about the history of intellectual advance and the very nature of pragmatic inquiry.

The statement that the riverbank experienced the erosive force of the river is a perfectly intelligible one. — Janus

Let's not kid ourselves. We might well choose this more mind-like framing so as to highlight deficiencies in a more matter-like framing. But my argument is that both remain just framings. And you ache to make the mind part of the noumenal, just like you accuse materialists of thinking the material has noumenal status within our phenomenology. Neither such move is valid.

Hence all you can say is that reality is mind-like ... in this measurable fashion. And here - please note - you accept the physical erosion of the river bank as your supporting fact. If I said the dirt just dematerialised, or grew legs and ran away, you would say no. The river eroded it. The river washed that dirt away downstream. Look, here it is washing muddily into the sea. What more proof do you need?

in a relational sense, insofar as they are signified object and interpreted sign they are not the interpretant. — Janus

You did it again.

You framed semiosis in dyadic Sassurean fashion so as to leave the interpretant bit dangling free of the relation. It now has to stand noumenally outside as the mind doing the interpreting, experiencing the meaning, making sense of the inert sign and what it may have to say about the world lying beyond.

One day you'll stop seeing through the lens of your own presuppositions and understand what I am saying. It seems to me to be fairly close to what you are saying, but differs on a couple of fundamental points. — Janus

I have no trouble understanding your defence of a dualism that would allow you to claim noumenal status for "mind".

We might well choose this more mind-like framing so as to highlight deficiencies in a more matter-like framing. — apokrisis

Of course anything at all that we say will be a "framing"; but some framings make more sense than others, and I am making no claim that any framing is the reality.

So, there you go again re framing what I said so that you can attack it. I would prefer to say that it is bodies, (or regions of intensity), not minds, that experience in the affective sense which is prior to any mind-like cognitive framing, modelling or interpretation of the experience.

The problem for your position is that it is incoherent if you try to eliminate the affective experiential dimension since you cannot coherently explain how there can be interpretation without some prior, or at least present, experience. Unless you want to claim that interpretation just is, in some primordial, 'proto' sense, experience. I might not argue against that. but then pansemiosis and panexperience would be synonymous.

I have no trouble understanding your defence of a dualism that would allow you to claim noumenal status for "mind". — apokrisis

Again you display your tendentious misunderstanding; I am certainly not defending any kind of dualism, and I nor am I claiming "noumenal status for mind"; I don't even know what that could mean. What do you think it means? Tell me and I'll tell you whether I would want to claim that.

You may be mistaking me for Peirce, it was he, not I, who said that matter is "effete mind".

Yes, I do see that. :smile: