I was referring to the imaginary stop sign I'm thinking of right now. Not a real stop sign. — ZzzoneiroCosm
That is why a hollow slogan like "everyone just be nice!" is so problematic. — apokrisis
If you think small rural communities have a much greater degree of social cohesion, then why not analyse why that might be the case - and apply those principles to the larger world we all now live in. — apokrisis
We get the lives we design, don't we? At least that was the Enlightenment project. — apokrisis
For now, that actuality is merely a potential. — apokrisis
But such states of anticipatory imagery could be nonsensical - noise rather than information - as when you are dreaming. — apokrisis
generate the image — apokrisis
hold a search image in mind — apokrisis
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. — Howard Pattee, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis
So you agree the image in some sense exists and is non-physical, is held in the mind? Or is it more in the spirit of your schema to eschew the physical/non-physical dyad and focus on function? — ZzzoneiroCosm
As in dreams, states of sensory expectation just drift through the mind in a loose associative flow. — apokrisis
I talk about images as that is the everyday jargon that you wish to employ. From a properly functional point of view, it is a perceptual anticipation — apokrisis
Aren't there at least implied dualisms in biosemiotics? Between symbol and matter, between self and other?
AAt 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.
If you want a rough distinction, life is an organism's model of its body - its metabolic existence - and mind is an organism's model of the environment within which that body must persist.
Physical complexity, a measure based on automata theory and information theory, is a simple and intuitive measure of the amount of information that an organism stores, in its genome, about the environment in which it evolves...
Darwinian evolution is often described as a mechanism that increases the fitness of a population. Such a portrayal is problematic because the fitness of a population can depend on many parameters and is difficult to measure. It is probably more appropriate to say that evolution increases the amount of
information a population harbors about its niche (and therefore, its physical complexity). The only mechanism necessary to guarantee such an increase is natural selection, acting in a single niche, on asexual organisms adapting to a constant unchanging world.
As we saw above, information is revealed, in an ensemble of adapted sequences, as those symbols that are conserved (fixed) under mutational pressure. Imagine then that a beneficial mutation occurs at variable position. If the selective advantage that it bestows on the organism is sufficient to fix the
mutation within the population,(24) the amount of information (and hence the complexity) has increased.
A beneficial mutation that is lost before fixation does not decrease the amount of information, nor does this happen if a neutral mutation drifts to fixation. A deleterious mutation that occurs at a fixed site could lead to an information decrease, but such a mutation can only drift to fixation in very small populations (Muller’s ratchet) or if the mutation rate is so high that the population undergoes a mutational meltdown.
Thus, natural selection can be viewed as a filter, a kind of semipermeable membrane that lets information flow into the genome, but prevents it from flowing out. In this respect, the action of natural selection is very much akin to a device known as a Maxwell Demon in physics, which implies that natural selection can be perfectly well understood from a thermodynamics perspective as we
And in biosemiotic, what is being stressed is that switches are where the action happens as they mediate (as signs) between the informational and material aspects of the system.
Does he have examples? — Count Timothy von Icarus
The DNA does not contain the proteins it refers to, it passes along instructions — Count Timothy von Icarus
Does biosemiotics posit that information is non-physical? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Why can't they model their environment and predict the future without experiencing anything? — bert1
Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world* of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.
At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable.'
The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory. — Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos
I'm not sure I see why this would be the case. DNA is a code, it contains symbols that refer to proteins. The interpretant is the transcription RNA during cellular replication. The DNA does not contain the proteins it refers to, it passes along instructions (meaning/information) that are interpreted by another system. Similarly, in computers, APIs form a full semiotic triangle, with one program being the referent of a string of symbolic code, and a another program acting as the interpretant. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So, there's the coding, then there's the proteins which are subject of - informed by - those instructions. Right there, there's a distinction between the instruction, and the material form. — Wayfarer
If you think "information" does something in addition to what the biochemistry/electrical currents/electrochemical impulses do, can you say what it is? — Daemon
This talk of models is strange considering that we understand models as a smaller scale representation of what is being modeled. Model cars are made of metal and plastic - the same as the real thing. The only difference is scale and detail.I'm always saying "life and mind". The two are pretty synonymous given that they are both about the special thing of a semiotic modelling relation.
If you want a rough distinction, life is an organism's model of its body - its metabolic existence - and mind is an organism's model of the environment within which that body must persist. — apokrisis
Yet the dream appears just like the model in your description of "life and mind". How can one be a model and the other just noise when you can't tell the difference in the moment you are dreaming, and even after the fact as memories of what was dreamed are no different than the memories of "real" events?Past experience is used to predict the future world in terms designed to deliver effective action. So the imagination is just this forward prediction of what it would be like to experience the known world from some other viewpoint.
So you could generate the image of a stop sign just as you could generate an image of your missing keys or the deer you hope to shoot in the woods. The ability to hold a search image in mind is a meaningful and functional action. It speaks to a state of intent that is to be physically enacted at some future time and place. The image informs that material possibility.
But such states of anticipatory imagery could be nonsensical - noise rather than information - as when you are dreaming. — apokrisis
That's all great, but why can't all that happen in the dark? — bert1
What supports your contention that all that neurology - by far the most extreme kilo or two of functional complexity in the known universe - could happen “in the dark”? — apokrisis
How do you get drunk if the neurology has nothing to do with there being a state of experience in your noggin?
...it's because I'm a panpsychist. — bert1
I'm trying to understand the position of the emergentist, — bert1
So we have a situation in which for the vast majority of the lifetime of the universe, and for the vast majority of places in it, there is no consciousness. Then something happens, and there is consciousness. — bert1
And you've already told us what the difference is, which is great, you've said the difference is entering into a modelling relationship with the world. And my reply is, sure, but what is it about that that means it feels like something? We all know it does feel like something, I'm not denying that, obviously. What I'm asking is why does that explanation work, and not others. — bert1
But how do we get from that to the very general conclusion that consciousness, regardless of the content, only occurs when brains do a certain type of thing? — bert1
The fact that consciousness arises from brain processes is utterly uncontroversial. — hypericin
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