The key is, that the creation of information involves abstracting data from phenomena
— Michael Zwingli

Which data? — Prishon

The perception of phenomena yields information within the mind, and said data is compiled from that information.

(I haven't read the whole thread, so ...)

whenever we find information, we find it inscribed or encoded somehow in a physical medium of whatever kind.

This is taken from this page which aggregates various articles about Landauer.

Landauer was the head of IBM Research Labs — Wayfarer

I think this pretty much says it all. From what I've seen, computer scientists tend to view information as physical. What they do is called information technology.

I think this pretty much says it all. From what I've seen, computer scientists tend to view information as physical. What they do is called information technology. — baker

The computing analogy is useful here. Bits and bytes of information are stored on a computer hard drive or other storage device as bipolar charges which can encoded information which can be translated by the software into human languages. The silicon and other media composing the memory chip, and the electrons forming the polarized charges themselves are real things, but the "information" which results from the translation of those strings of charges into human language has no reality outside of the human mind. Facts and ideas only have reality within the mind, and those "mental realities" (for lack of a better term) more-or-less reflect actual, objective reality out in "the universe".

The perception of phenomena yields information within the mind, and said data is compiled from that information. — Michael Zwingli

What information?

The computing analogy is useful here — Michael Zwingli

No. Its not.

but it is. The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism.

The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism. — Michael Zwingli

Here you are wrong. There are no memories stored in the brain. I saw in a children show in TV a "brainstorm-fact" given. The memory storage in the brain should be 20 000 Gb. It's not.

I must disagree. As evidence:

https://news.mit.edu/2017/neuroscientists-identify-brain-circuit-necessary-memory-formation-0406

https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain-basics/memory/where-are-memories-stored

https://theconversation.com/amp/were-capable-of-infinite-memory-but-where-in-the-brain-is-it-stored-and-what-parts-help-retrieve-it-63386

Last link: infinite memory. The only information in the brain is that of connection strengths between neurons. EVERY process in the universe can be whirl around as a process in the brain. A chess board can be really seen as a chessboard fform in the brain when imagining it. On the same neurons a bird can fly.

The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism. — Michael Zwingli

Your references are a bit out of date. The most sophisticated current models of memory dont make use of a computer storage metaphor anymore. Those were all the rage 40 years ago. Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process. — Joshs

Yes, and boy does it play around with the construction work. Often it isn't even up to code...

I see it's an old thread, but an interesting question. Yes. Information is physical. This is not meant as a scientistic claim that anything worth talking about seriously will come about by experiments in a controlled environment. It's just that someone has to tell me in a convincing manner, what isn't physical.

I frequently hear the claim "thought isn't physical. Why? Because thought is immaterial." That's not an argument. Putting thoughts aside now, information, however it exists, is a physical phenomena consisting of physical events in the world.

By physical I mean the stuff I'm touching now, which is "mostly empty" and the stuff that's coming out of my head. I don't think someone would say that the table isn't physical nor my head. I think it's a truism, though no less astonishing because of this.

I simply take it that physical stuff is truly baffling.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process. — Joshs

How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.
— Joshs
How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory. — Michael Zwingli

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712318772778

thank you.

What an interesting topic and question. I would indeed think that information/language is physical. And it's generative, meaning that it constructs reality as "it moves" through spacetime.

I think meaning isn’t physical and a form of information. It tells you that what your doing is worthwhile, which means you have been informed.

Brain state interacting with the physical environment gets you out the front door in the morning.
Brain state interacting with the physical environment can drive your car to work.
Brain state interacting with the physical environment can do all the science we have done.
Brain state of person 1 can be transfered to person 2 by encoding and decoding physical matter.
If brain state is information then you have a coherent theory of everything.
Brain state is physical.
Brain state by expansion is BRAIN(mental content) and BRAIN(specific mental content).
Or in reverse order; BRAIN(specific mental content) = specific brain state.
Monism and dualism should be dropped in favor of this expansion method.

All that the claim "information is physical" means is that it's either matter or energy or both, in and of themselves, or changes in them. So, either information is matter (has mass & occupies space) or energy (can do work) or are changes in mass/volume/energy. — TheMadFool

The relationship between symbolic meaning and form is one of the issues. That was discussed in the other thread 'what is information'. Remember the Norbert Weiner quote, 'information is information, not matter or energy'? Information can't be reduced to the laws of physics, simpliciter. It is one of the many nails in the coffin of physical reductionism.

Of course, in terms of IT, then information has a physical meaning, because it is stored physically, in the form of binary code. But the philosophical implication of what information is, is a different thing again. One of the papers Apokrisis referred me to, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics by Howard Pattee, is very useful on that (although Pattee's material is a tough read.)

All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Pattee

So, they operate on a different level to physical laws. The relationships expressed by basic logic, for example, operate completely independently of physical laws, even though you can devise physical systems to instantiate them.

Killer argument for dualism, in my view.

Brain state interacting with the physical environment gets you out the front door in the morning. — Mark Nyquist

There's no such thing as a 'brain state'. It is an empty rhetorical device pretending to be a theory.

Whatever affects the physical is, at least in part, also physical. DNA, for instance, is physical, no?

Killer argument for dualism, in my view. — Wayfarer

Whatever affects the physical is, at least in part, also physical. DNA, for instance, is physical, no? — 180 Proof

Hah. I just spent the morning on this point.

DNA is necessarily physical, but also as little involved in the physics of the world as possible. Every cell has 2m of genetic sequence - several billion nucleotide pairs - packed into space about 6 microns across. A compression ratio of 333,333 to 1.

So from the dynamical perspective of physics - real-time interactions in 4D - DNA barely registers as a dot of material. It has basically no dimensions to speak of. It is physical - but in a way that negates what we normally mean by physical.

However is that a killer argument for a dualism that is any way unphysical ... in the manner this is normally understood by idealists and others?

Well the whole point of Pattee is about the epistemic cut, the modelling relation. Genetic information is meaningful only insofar it regulates entropy dissipation. It is information doing work by running down environmental gradients. It is thus a response to the constraints of the laws of thermodynamics. It is local creativity harnessed to the same old general cosmic project of achieving the equilibrium of a heat death.

Whatever affects the physical is, at least in part, also physical.... — 180 Proof

How does this statement make any sense to you? You have a classification of things predicated with "physical". Then you claim that anything which affects a thing of this type, the physical type, must itself be a physical thing. Where's your missing premise? Anything which affects something else must be the same type of thing as the thing affected?

X causes changes in physical systems or things. Name a non-physical, or merely abstract, Y which causes such changes.

There's no such thing as a 'brain state'. It is an empty rhetorical device pretending to be a theory. — Wayfarer

Sure there is. If you back engineered your brains exact physical states in the moments you composed these quoted sentences, you would have a progression of brain states. The quote is direct evidence that your brain has the ability to hold content by using brain states.

...at least in part, also physical — 180 Proof

Dualism has always recognised that. 'Partly physical' is a long way from physicalism per se.

If you back engineered your brains exact physical states in the moments you composed these quoted sentences, you would have a progression of brain states. — Mark Nyquist

Do you believe in God, or is that a Software Glitch?

However is that a killer argument for a dualism that is any way unphysical ... in the manner this is normally understood by idealists and others? — apokrisis

I think so, but I don't want to try and express that here, besides, a lot of it was discussed at the start of this thread a couple of years ago now.

I think the problem with dualism generally is the inveterate tendency to attempt to objectify the non-physical. Because of science's exclusive concentration on what can be quantified and measured objectively, when talk turns to the nature of mind or consciousness, then there is an overwhelming tendency to try and objectify that or imagine what it must be. But it can't be done, because the mind cannot make an object of itself. That the subject of e.g. Michel Bitbol's paper It is never known but it is the knower. (.pdf file. Bitbol is one of the great discoveries I've made through this forum, via @Pierre-Normand.)

Also, as you well know, there is a world of difference between hylomorphic dualism, the duality of matter and form, and Cartesian dualism, the duality of matter and mind.

there is a world of difference between hylomorphic dualism.., — Wayfarer

Yep. But then also, hylomorphism is essentially triadic. The actuality of substantial being arises out of formal constraint on material uncertainty.

So what Pattee argues is this triadic story. Life and mind have substantial being as a result of the biological interaction between information and dynamics.

I will also add - although this is a can of worms - that I think you’re confusing semantic representation with what can be explained through neurobiology. When we say that something is represented by letters, words or symbols, that is something very different from how neural processes operate. It’s not as if some specific array of neurological elements ‘stand for’ concepts in the way that words ‘stand for’ concepts. The latter is dependent on the process of judgement and interpretation, which is a high-level ability.

I have read about some studies that were carried out in the so-called ‘decade of the brain’ in the late 90’s in which researchers tried to identify the neural pathways associated with very simple learning tasks, such as learning a new word. But the patterns of activity were so diverse and unpredictable that the never came close to establishing any kind of true correlation. This was also subject of a recent article I read about representational drift.

So I’m very dubious about the suggestion that ‘brain-states’ provide the kind of explanation you’re talking about. In philosophical terms, all you’re saying amounts to ‘brain-mind identity theory’ which is not highly popular in philosophical circles nowadays.

The actuality of substantial being arises out of formal constraint on material uncertainty. — apokrisis

What I’m tempted to believe, is that those ‘formal constraints’ can be conceived as being latent possibilities that become actualised by evolutionary processes. I remember my Indian Philosophy lecturer, Arvind Sharma saying ‘what is latent becomes patent’.

The 26 letters, when written on a piece of paper, contain about the same entropy. This means that their information content is expressed by the same number. Nevertheless, when combined in a book they contain different information eventhough their Shannon entropy and physical entropy are the same.

What I’m tempted to believe, is that those ‘formal constraints’ can be conceived as being latent possibilities that become actualised by evolutionary processes. — Wayfarer

Yep. That is structuralism. It is why maths of that ilk - the maths of symmetry - has proved so unreasonably effective in physical theory.

So plenty of different traditions of thought get it.

The actuality of substantial being arises out of formal constraint on material uncertainty. — apokrisis

Can you give an example of a formal constraint on material uncertainty in the animal kingdom?