Object permanence comes about in toddlers not by any social design because you have to first be internally aware that other objects exist independently of you and don't share the contents of your own internal states to then go on to understand that language is used to communicate your internal states to others. — Harry Hindu

Humans do have the same neurosemiotic base as all other large-brain vertebrates. But then the add sociosemiosis on top of that.

This is possible because language is another level of code. And it is external as this is based on vocal acts - a meaning-encoding syllabic string.

So yes, you need a brain to shape an utterance. But Homo sapiens also evolved a vocal tract specifically designed for the job. That vocal tract is designed to throw noise out into the world - produce sound waves.

The private could be made public. And the public could also - in fact, more so - be made the private.

Toddlers might first have to learn basic neurosemiotic embodiment in their worlds. But they also have gene-encoded instincts for babbling, gaze following and conversational turn taking that show - along with the right vocal cords, and the right brain adaptations to construct verbal motor plans - they are ready to be thrust straight into the further world of sociosemiosis.

Then how does the code exist if not materially or informationally? — Harry Hindu

It exists by being the least amount of both those things. It exists like a switch. The simplest logical gate.

Genes and neurons and their states are not meaningless in that they are effects of prior causes. — Harry Hindu

Sure, they become meaningful as they accumulate useful distinctions. But I am talking about the principles of any encoding mechanism. I am talking about how a code can even exist as a bridge between the physical and the informational sides of the organismic equation.

DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed. "Encodes" is a commentary on the process. — Daemon


But then it becomes commentary all the way down. What is a protein in your reductionist terms? A chain of peptides. What’s a peptide? The name for a class of amino acids all linked by peptide bonds. What’s an amino acid? Etc. — apokrisis

I think you're misunderstanding. "DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed" is not a commentary on the process, it is the process. "DNA causes appropriate chains of peptides to be formed" is a description of the process at a different level.

Persons encode, persons understand meaning, persons are recipients of information. Those terms are usefully applied figuratively to non-persons, as heuristics, but they mustn't be mistaken for a literal description.

a considerable post. I'm very busy the next couple of days but will respond later.

So reductionism might disguise the fact that it is a four cause analysis - as it must be to describe nature. Folk like yourself might try to make it conform to atomism by saying functional structure just kind of "emerges" as an accident, and so suppress the role of non-holonomic hierarchical constraints. And also then push the global holonomic constraints right out of the physicalist picture by calling those the fundamental laws and constants of nature - equations in the mind of God, or further accidents because, well ... multiverse.

But this is just self-deluding rhetoric. — apokrisis

Well do you mind not putting that rhetoric in my mouth? You don't know enough about me to talk about "folk like yourself". I haven't said any of that stuff.

Even physics has got around to embracing "information" as fundamental these days. — apokrisis

Information in that sense is a measurement. It's not something that plays an active role in the phenomena we use it to measure.

DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed. If you (or physics) think that information plays a role in that phenomenon in addition to what the chemicals do, please tell us what it is.

I'm certainly no longer interested in heroic doses. :smile:

When I perceive myself as ‘stilling’ or quieting my mind, I am not reducing thoughts. — Joshs

My experience is that when I am calm the mind is not "racing". For me it is the difference between a raging torrent and a gently meandering stream. But there's nothing to say we are all exactly the same.

"DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed" is not a commentary on the process, it is the process. — Daemon

I was showing how the epistemology of science is "informational" even without considering the further issue of semiotic encoding. But if you want to continue your denialism regarding even semiotic encoding .... well, what could you mean by "appropriate" except that some structure (ie: form) is functional (ie: finality)?

Persons encode, persons understand meaning, persons are recipients of information. Those terms are usefully applied figuratively to non-persons, as heuristics, but they mustn't be mistaken for a literal description. — Daemon

Yeah, no.

Information in that sense is a measurement. It's not something that plays an active role in the phenomena we use it to measure. — Daemon

But science is heuristic rather than literal, if you must insist on that distinction. If science were "literal", it would be naive realism and not a semiotic modelling relation.

All we have is theories and measurements in science. The encoding of a relation and the prediction of the observables.

DNA causes appropriate proteins to be formed. If you (or physics) think that information plays a role in that phenomenon in addition to what the chemicals do, please tell us what it is. — Daemon

Again, look to your need to include the constraint of "appropriate". Who is applying the Darwinian filter that separates the appropriate from the inappropriate polypeptide sequences? Where in the chemistry do we find the history of the past married to expectations about the future as represented in some DNA strand's choice of particular proteins to be making?

Built into the very meaning of the entity as I experienced it right now is its particular relevance to me. Relevance is covered over by the third person mode of thinking. — Joshs

Now this I can agree with.

And that possibility obtains also in the empirical sciences, which are perennially defensible. — Janus


No, I do not. Coffee is my vice, and that's it. I also want to apologize for that response yesterday, it was out of line and rude. — Philosophim

Hey no worries, man; I didn't take it as being rude, anyway; more as just an expression of exasperation. By the way that should have been "perennially defeasible".

Human intuition and feelings are often wrong. However, there is nothing wrong with being honest that it is only human intuition and feelings. As long as you state, "Yes, there's no evidence for this, but wouldn't it be fun to explore!" there's no issue. Its when people start claiming that their intuitions and feelings are true claims about reality without any evidence, but claim there is evidence as I've defined, that the exploration has become dishonest and outside of the realm of truth. — Philosophim

Human intuitions and feelings about empirical matters are often wrong. When it comes to intuitions about metaphysical matters we don't really know.

All I've been saying is that inter-subjective evidence has to satisfy inter-subjective criteria; whereas someone can count their intuitions or experiences as evidence for themselves alone. Such "subjective" evidence can never be counted as inter-subjective evidence, though, because "intuition" is not a satisfactory criterion for inter-subjective evidence.

Yeah. I was thinking the question of pansemiosis versus life-specific emergence of semiosis should be its own thread, but didn't have time to write it.

Plus, I'm not totally sure how to pull apart the factors that might support one or the other.

I don't know if anyone can say what "physics" thinks things are. There are too many perspectives, from the logical positivist influenced, Machian Copenhagen Interpretation, where only observations exist, which can verge on idealism or solipsism, to hyper-determinist, realist models like objective collapse and pilot wave theories.

Notably to your point, information based physics are quite popular, and some of these posit that information is the only thing that exists. The apparent haeccity of objects, our lived world of three dimensional space and time, are simply the effects of interactions of information.

In these systems, information plays a key ontic role, as either all that there is, or as denoting the difference between modalities (decoherence is a shift from probable states to actual ones, information transfer generates the actual).

The problem is that (almost) all of these views have some things to recommend them, but there is nothing conclusive.

Biosemiotics is an interesting field, but one with some major problems. When I read papers telling me that the enviornment is the interpretant of a genome, then rebuttals saying no, a genetic lineage is, with the current population of an organism acting variously as object, symbol, or interpretant, it seems like the theory has a problem. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Biosemiosis is a label many started claiming about the same time. Some had Saussurean leanings. Others were Peircean. And then some tried for a very direct use of the object/symbol/interpretant model from linguistics. Others - the camp I was in - saw the triadic relation as another way of expressing the same things as hierarchy theory had been doing in theoretical biology circles.

So I would see biosemiosis as a hybrid of hierarchy theory and Peircean semiotics. The aim is a marriage of both. And there is a third ingredient in the mix as dissipative structure theory is also an essential part.

I would say what generally binds biosemiosis is the belief that symbols deserve their own science. Information theory accounts for how symbols can be fundamentally meaningless. And semiotics then accounts for how they can be fundamentally meaningful.

Peirce gives you a model of the modelling relation - the relation that a code can anchor. Hierarchy speaks to the structure that such a relation will generate. Far from equilibrium thermodynamics then gives you the raw material that is the matter which will be thus in-formed.

Yeah. I was thinking the question of pansemiosis versus life-specific emergence of semiosis should be its own thread, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Biosemiosis is definitely a scientific project. There is no reason why you can't have a general science of codes and the modelling relation they enable.

But pansemiosis is perhaps just a metaphysical project. The nearest I get is understanding the Cosmos as a dissipative structure.

The physical world is different in that it lacks an internal coding mechanism. Its constraints are information written into its holographic boundaries - in the current vernacular.

So pansemiosis could be defined as development - a constraints driven unfolding, or Pattee's rate dependent dynamics.

Biosemiosis is then development coupled to evolution. You have the extra thing of a code, an epistemic cut, and thus the emergence of a Darwinian filter, a selective memory, that can act as Pattee's rate independent information.

Biosemiosis is the transition to the true organism - a dissipative structure living its own purposeful and private history. The Cosmos is organismic in a lesser sense in that it only develops and doesn't evolve.

Biosemiosis is then development coupled to evolution. You have the extra thing of a code, an epistemic cut, and thus the emergence of a Darwinian filter, a selective memory, that can act as Pattee's rate independent information. — apokrisis

The epistemic cut is exactly where we are situated. The physical world is projected into our world of the brain, which analogously represents and actively shapes that world to which it belongs. There is however an element needed to accomplish this and the materialistic approach lacks this element. It's the element of the soul.

My experience is that when I am calm the mind is not "racing". For me it is the difference between a raging torrent and a gently meandering stream. But there's nothing to say we are all exactly the same. — Janus

Interesting. I rarely have racing thoughts. Only when stressed. I can sit still and barely have anything going on thought wise - generally I visualize a line across a grey horizon and that's all I see or think of. I never worked on this it just came to me.

Right, I probably framed that backwards. When I am not calm (stressed) the mind is racing. But that is not the characteristic state which tends more towards the calm.

There is however an element needed to accomplish this and the materialistic approach lacks this element. It's the element of the soul. — EugeneW

You say there need to be two elements or essential substances - matter and soul. That is dualism. You might call the divide an epistemic cut, but it lacks the key bit - the bridge that connects what it also divides.

A Peircean logic is designed so that division and connection (or differentiation and integration) are two sides of the same coin. You start with firstness or vagueness - that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. And then you dichotomise that. You get the Hegelian thesis and antithesis that makes the synethesis. You discover how what you think are two very different things - like matter and mind - are in fact formally the inverse of each other. A reciprocal pair defined by the law of the excluded middle.

A is A to the degree it is not not-A. So the definition of matter is the degree to which it is not soul (in your example). Matter becomes 1/soul. And soul is likewise defined as 1/matter. Each - in Yin Yang fashion, (all ancient wisdom understood the same trick of the unity of opposites) is what it is to the degree it is not measurably anything like its other.

So this is a symmetry breaking that develops to become an asymmetry. Two things are connected - they were together as the undivided possibility that is a Firstness or a Vagueness. Or an Apeiron, Tao, Ungrund, etc. Then they became as divided as possible - divided until they became the opposing limiting extremes on free possibility.

This is the standard logic underpinning all useful metaphysics. It produced every fruitful distinction that science employs, like the one~many, form~matter, atom~void, chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, local~global, vague~crisp, etc, etc.

So we know just from this fact - the huge pragmatic success of dichotomous reasoning - that dualism is flawed to the degree it divides nature and then fails to see the reciprocal relation that also connects what seems divided.

That is why triadic metaphysics trumps the brokenness of dualism. It has the extra dimension that allows for the integration of a holistic thirdness as well as differentiation of the reductionist secondness.

So if you just tell me that reality is some kind of interaction between an immaterial soul and a material world, I say fine, but how were they both once the same, how did they become divided, and where now is that interaction in your scheme ... as a measurable.

Materiality and the soul would have to be two reciprocal limits on being. And thus being is what arises within those boundary limits. We now have to be able to measure what it might mean in concrete terms to be nearer one or other limit. A maximally material state is a minimally soulful one, and vice versa. How does that cash out in observables?

It doesn't really work because matter and soul doesn't get you to a robust dichotomy. It is kind of useless for doing scientific modelling.

But once you arrive at the dichotomy of information vs entropy, then you have something that is properly cashed out in a reciprocal mathematical formalism. You can start to build a proper model of semiosis - as in Friston's Bayesian mechanics, or other notions like Ulanowicz's Ascendency Theory.

Where in the chemistry do we find the history of the past married to expectations about the future as represented in some DNA strand's choice of particular proteins to be making? — apokrisis

Nice!

The paper lays out and important area of research, but unfortunately it's not what I was hoping for, which is an explanation of why meaning can't be physical. Obviously, certain types of information can be explained in fully physical ways. A gas nozzle "knows" to shut off when the tank is full because an increase in air pressure due to the tank being full is a signal about the gas level in the tank. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That example is entirely bogus, which is why you had to enclose “knows” In scare quotes. It’s medieval - the stone “knows” is must be nearer the earth. Tosh!

The one paragraph that I quoted from Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis already gives an account of the sense in which information can’t be reduced to the physical.

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, to put the question directly, how can you support the claim that all of the examples he cites here are physical? As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws.

As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws. — Wayfarer

To me that's only plausible 'in the limit.' The costs are relatively 'infinitesimal' but nevertheless positive. Imagine two programs using the 'same' computer to steer some gargantuan machine. Tiny 'physical' modifications in one place lead to huge 'physical' modifications elsewhere. Still, it's not free to program the computer (arrange a little bit of 'Stuff' that 'controls' much more ).

We can also imagine a human reading a book and radically changing their life thereafter. A strong predictive model would have to have the equivalent of historical-semantic insight to make use of the book. A silicon version is vaguely plausible in some far flung future.

'In the limit' we can yank out a 'purified' or 'a-physical' content from what thereby become the instantiations or husks of this kernel-stuff, which I playfully call 'informagical' as a substitute for latex gloves.

When you have to enclose terms like physical in quotes, you don’t have an argument.

You say there need to be two elements or essential substances - matter and soul. That is dualism. You might call the divide an epistemic cut, but it lacks the key bit - the bridge that connects what it also divides — apokrisis

The body is the bridge between the outer part of matter and the inner, soul-like part.

:up: ‘The soul is the form of the body’ ~ Aristotle

In the limit' we can yank out a 'purified' or 'a-physical' content from what thereby become the instantiations or husks of this kernel-stuff, which I playfully call 'informagical' as a substitute for latex gloves. — lll

The husked kernel-stuff is the latex glove? Are the latex gloves doing the yanking of the a-physical kernel stuff out of the shell it's contained in?

‘The soul is the form of the body’ ~ Aristotle — Wayfarer

Well, I'd rather say the body can express the soul, reach out to other souls, for whatever reason.The bodily form stands in unbreakable (?) contact with the soul, as far as I can see. Likewise it stands in unbreakable (?) contact with the outer part of the physical world. Matter and soul seem to play with each other continuously. Mutually tickling one another, with us, the bodies, mediating between them two.

So I would see biosemiosis as a hybrid of hierarchy theory and Peircean semiotics. — apokrisis

Peirce was an objective idealist, so invoking his name (ad nauseam) in support of any kind of physicalism is misrepresentation.

I would say what generally binds biosemiosis is the belief that symbols deserve their own science. — apokrisis

A symbol is a particular associated with intersubjective meaning. And a signal is a particular that causes and/or controls action (cf., Sebeok, Thomas A. 2001. Signs: An Introduction To Semiotics. Canada: University of Toronto Press).

Calling a signal a symbol is also misrepresentation.

In general relativity, the Earth [becould[/b] be considered the center of the universe. Like the Sun or the center of the galaxy. Motion is relative. — EugeneW

Ha, very cheeky. I was thinking more along the lines of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, but fair enough. In any case, General Relativity has it's own well-known limitations.

So here's Count Tim using "meaning" in a way that doesn't explain anything new, in much the same way people misuse "information". When you've said "some chemicals have the same effects as neurotransmitters" you've said it all. The "meaning" part doesn't have any work to do. — Daemon

I agree that these terms don't have any work to do at the level of chemistry. They have work to do at higher levels of description. As such, they have every right to be included in our 'ontology' until such time as we don't need them anymore. But for now, we do need them. And I suspect we always will.

Humans do have the same neurosemiotic base as all other large-brain vertebrates. But then the add sociosemiosis on top of that. — apokrisis

I think the whole neocortical layer is added. That includes a semiosis that isn't fixed, like it is in large-brain mammals. The new cortical layer is shaped by the world and at the same time shapes that world.

A 1000 brains by Hawkins springs to mind.

Ha, very cheeky. I was thinking more along the lines of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, but fair enough. In any case, General Relativity has it's own well-known limitations. — Theorem

All theories have limitations. The fundamental theory might be gap-less, but its applicability is very limited. It might underlay and explain the fundamental workings of nature. And thats its virtue. Which physicist doesn't wanna know the fundamental workings? But when applied to higher level laws these workings are useless. So what's the use of knowing the fundamental workings? Satisfaction? Assurance? What good does it to me if I know these workings?

All theories have limitations. — EugeneW

Yes, exactly. My original point was that we shouldn't reject a useful theory just because it has limitations. So I think we're on the same page.