So, what is happening when we pause and reflect on an action before it is undertaken? Is there indeed some higher order volition operating in the background as we go by doing things? As if some narrator who wants to see things done in a certain way for some ultimate purpose? — Posty McPostface

I am saying this is the socially constructed aspect of human voluntary behaviour. We are taught that we have to be in charge of our every action. That then cashes out as learning to pay attention where that seems necessary.

So just for neurobiological reasons, we might pause and reflect when a situation is uncertain. If unthinking habit can't carry us safely through to our general goals, then we have to let attention try to figure out some plan. And be there ready constantly to keep stepping in as necessary.

Then as modern humans, expected to moderate all our desires and impulses within a framework of social judgement, we are meant to be always in attentional control of our choices - as we are always going to be held responsible for them under prevailing laws and custom.

So a narrator is us standing in for society inside our heads, running everything through that cultural filter.

An exhausting business, eh? :grin:

I think there is some truth to there being a higher-order volition if everyone's mind that guides us through life. Would you agree with that assessment? — Posty McPostface

My view is that this higher-order of choosing is the social one. And that is still so even when modern culture is supposedly all about the celebration of the self-actualising individual.

You can regard it as society's cleverest manipulative trick. There are ways you should behave as that is what is functional at a social level of human evolution. And the best way to get you to behave like that is to get you to own the responsibility.

You know you have "freewill" and so could always act anti-socially. And in having such a sharp sense of what that would be like, you can then safely choose the pro-social path on the whole (that is, in a balanced fashion where your needs are also being served, as they should if society matters a damn).

So I definitely don't see any higher order volition in the sense of tapping into some hidden better self that lies beyond our ugly animal impulses. That is Romanticism.

But also, that Romantic model of the self is exactly the one which has evolved as the best way to sell pro-social modern behaviour. It maximises our individual competitive freedoms within a restraining framework of social co-operation.

So we are taught to believe this myth about the nature of human individuality. We are actually socially constructed creatures. But believing we are completely responsible for all our own successes and failures in life is the way to produce the modern citizen, completely at home in a striving, neo-liberal, self-reliant, upwardly mobile and consumerist world ...

... hey, wait a minute! ...

Yep. The idea certainly would be.

That is why I would accept a restriction on knowing the noumenal. But indeed I go further. I am saying the umwelt is a kind of double fiction. It contains both the self and the world as its double aspect.

When I see that yellow flower, the yellow is the sign that there is a physical world ... for the mental "me".

And now that we can conceive of the physical world in terms of quantities of information, we are extrapolating that semiosis of signs to make it foundational to our ontology. The world itself is understood in this Janus two-faced fashion. The self~world distinction - where self stands for some individuated point of view - is reduced to make it the way we understand the world in general.

Of course, it is still all just ideas - our usefully organised impressions, the tale we tell to form an umwelt. But it offers a neat resolution - one that is dual aspect without slipping into the pan-psychic.

Reality itself can be regarded pan-semiotically as a system of signs. It is formed by its own reductive development of intelligible habits - it's laws or other regularities that frame every event as confirmation of some generalised intent.

So as I say, both "mind" and "world" can only be constructs. The "physical world" is our useful fiction - the one that makes most sense in opposition to that other useful fiction of "the conscious mind".

But then, it becomes something when physics itself starts to embrace that semiotic twist and begin to measure the world in terms of atoms of form rather than atoms of matter. Information or entropy? These are now just two sides of the same coin - the one basic Planckian unit of reality measurement.

So that little move secures the scientific self in a completely objective description. A neat new trick.

Well actually, the job ain't done yet. The major chunks of theory - quantum mechanics in particular - can't formalise the definition of "the observer" in the way they have formalised "the observables".

And yet even here, huge progress is being made. You now have a decoherence version of QM - one with thermal statistical mechanics bolted on - which allows the "environment" to replace the "experimenter" in the effective collapse of a wavefunction.

Again, there is still the huge problem that decoherence just spreads out the uncertainty so it becomes completely diffused - without actually being collapsed. However it is still scientific progress. And recent turns in quantum interpretation keep becoming more overtly semiotic.

So the brain forms a rather particular view of the physical world - an umwelt that is useful for decoding reality in terms of a universe of "medium sized dry goods". We know from psychology that it is all an interpretation, a system of sign, and not the thing-in-itself. Qualia like yellowness mediate a relation between a "mental me" and a "material object" - both aspects of this being useful fictions of thought.

Having grasped the semiotic nature of experience, we can then push that back towards the reality we seek to experience in more true and naked fashion. And surprisingly perhaps, that is not some crazy random move. It turns out to work amazingly well. It fixes physicalism by giving back some of the essential stuff that went missing - like intentionality or formal/final cause.

I think the discussion has always been whether or not the subconscious mind/ habitual/ the autonomic has intentional mental content in competition or subduing with the conscious/attentional mind. — JupiterJess

You mean Freud played on Romanticism to turn it into a "scientific" theory?

The Romantic movement did dramatise a conflict between self and society - how the needs of the one suppresses the desires of the other.

And then late 18th century psychology began to reveal the difference between habitual and attentional processes. The mind more generally was shown to be the result of twitching nerve fibres.

Freud then packaged these various influences in his tripartite model of superego, ego and id. The idea that we live a life of deeply repressed animal urges - which coincidentally happens to be also the source of our wild creative inspirations, the spiritual best of us - was an easy one to sell.

But it was always bad science. The brain didn't evolve to be basically split. It is divided into attentional and habitual level processing so as to benefit from that clear division of labour. And the benefit comes from the two then working together in an accord that "flows".

The best example I have of a sort of competition is that in dreams the subconscious mind (whatever you want to call it) subjects the attentional mind to weird experiences it isn't requesting. — JupiterJess

The problem with sleep is you can't actually turn the brain off. If neurons stop firing, they would be dead. And so they fire all night, even though there is nothing to do except rest and repair, consolidate memories and newly acquired habits.

So the attentional aspect of the brain is still on. But it can't function normally as there is a general desynchronisation of activity. It is turned off as much as is possible.

In dreaming sleep, the brain is aroused to waking levels, but still has no external stimulation. Both sensory input and motor output is gated at the brainstem. So the brain is awake in a state of complete sensory deprivation. And that causes it to generate anticipatory imagery - randomly associative hypnagogic images. Conscious scenes that replace each other every half second of so like a series of disconnected movie frames.

Our narrative self - our habit of trying to pursue the events of life in terms of a coherent thread - is then left trying to catch up with this random phantasmagoria.

So yes. There is then a disconnection. The perceptual brain is awake enough to be doing its thing - striving to anticipate what the world ought to look like in the next instant. But that perceptual habit is not connected to the actual world, so just throws up a meaningless succession of wild guesses.

And then our narrative self is also awake enough to be doing its thing of trying to tell a coherent story about what it is experiencing. Which is difficult when no two images have anything more than a tenuous associative connection.

So it is not hard to explain the phenomenology of dreams in terms of how the brain would normally hang together during normal waking. You get exactly what you would expect when the brain as a whole is unplugged from the world, yet still continues to try to fill in for a world that has gone missing.

And, you can offer no a posteriori reason because your methodological dogmatism prevents you form considering, let alone judging, the data of self-awareness. — Dfpolis

The reason would be that I have studied the relevant neuroscience and psychology. Self-awareness is a cultural meta-skill, a gift of language. And so all its "data" is socially constructed. That is the place I would start on that subject.

Our intentions occur in, and are part of, the natural world. — Dfpolis

Sure. I'm all for an embodied, ecological, enactive, etc, approach to neurocognition. But that is what underwrites a semiotic understanding of the issues. The natural world for us is an umwelt - a system of meaningful sign.

So on the one hand, our perceptions are always embedded in an active modelling relation with the world - the noumenal thing-in-itself. There is always that necessary aboutness or intentionality. But still, the mind is the product of forming that model of the world. The phenomenal is the other side of the relation. We experience our own umwelt - our experience of a world with "us" in it.

There is an irreducible complexity here. A triadic Peircean story.

And that is why I stress the necessity of being able to cash out any concept in acts of measurement. There always has to be a percept that answers the case in terms of a "fact". The aboutness is really about the umwelt we form as our sign of the world. It reflects all that we could afford to ignore by way of information - the entirety of the entropic physicality of the world - so as to construct an interpretation in terms of personalised meanings.

Look, I see an elephant. It is grey. It is angry.

A chaos of physical possibility has just been reduced to a collection of signs that have meaning for me. Indeed, I am "me" because there is that point of view which forms exactly that set of signs in response to some chaos of physical possibility.

So what I was after was some proper definition of intentionality from you to support your case. Talk of the "data of self-awareness" suggests you are way off the mark.

But I guess in mentioning data you accept that all generalities must be cashable in terms of their particulars. If we have an idea of a quality, then we must be able to quantify that in the sense of point to some sign, citing some particular act of perception or measurement.

I say the elephant is grey. You say look closer. You see more colour, more shades. I shrug and say "gray enough" from where I stand.

The satisfaction of theories are always negotiable. But the way that claims are satisfied is a standard epistemic process.

I have said intentionality is not a quantity and therefore not measurable. — Dfpolis

And what I said was that intentionality is a quality. A general conception. And qualities are only intelligible to the degree they can be particularised or quantified.

You can't actually have a clear conception of something - like intentionality - unless you can point to its specific located examples. That is how intelligibility works. Induction from the particular to the general and then deduction from the general back to the particular again.

If "intentionality" is an intelligible construct, you will be able to present the specific instances which support the general case - the acts of measurement which make sense of the claims of the theory.

I have pointed out that the act of seeing an apple, for example, not only gives us data about the apple (as objective object), but also about ourselves (subjective object) -- for example that we can see, be aware, direct our attention, etc. None of this involves "feels." So please spare me the typical physicalist pap. — Dfpolis

As I say, I fully endorse that enactive, embodied, etc, approach to cognition. I've studied it for many years. I agree that our subjective self is what emerges along with the objective world as the result of there being that modelling relation in place at an organismic level of semiosis.

But when you talk of the data of self-awareness, this is the meta-cognitive stuff that folk often refer to as an abstracted notion of selfhood. This is where the dualism normally starts - the mind becoming something actually separate from the view it is taking.

Again, there is the bit in the middle. The umwelt. And it anchors a state of interpretation. The dualistic error is to see the umwelt as the actual noumenal world being presented to a self, making that self now also its own mentalistic thing.

Our percepts are already only a self-interested system of signs. They are a reduction of the physical world to habits of meaning. And a selfhood is imputed because the habits establish a persisting regularity to a point of view. We can always find "ourselves" in the self-interested logic of that perceptual umwelt.

So I was asking how your concept of intentionality can navigate that enactive understanding of psychology. If you actually do take an ecological and embodied view as you say, then you ought to find it natural that intentionality can be quantified. You would be happy to point to the particular signs that it exists as a general fact of some kind.

As I pointed out above, you have made no case reducing "meaningfulness" to measurability. — Dfpolis

Perhaps now I have. :)

Conflicting desires absolutely, but that doesn't necessarily imply a natural hierarchy or a seperate desire to resolve conflicts. — ChatteringMonkey

Why wouldn't a hierarchy be the natural form here?

If we take brains to be about making smart decisions (on the whole), then desires will generally be adaptive states with known benefits. Over the long run, we would learn to like what is best for us. And I mean this over both evolutionary and developmental timescales.

So we would start from the point of view that our desires are usually correct or functional at some level.

Of course drug-taking stands out as something which cuts across an evolved and generally well-adapted neurobiology. It hits the reward button for no good reason. Or - more functionally - it offers a way to escape what we desire to escape and find difficult to escape.

But anyway. To get back to more normal life choices, the brain would naturally be organised hierarchically so as to weigh desires in best balanced ways. And a key dimension to this would be to be able to balance short term gain against long term gain. Even a cat stalking a bird has to be able to regulate its impulses. It must sneak up carefully rather than rush headlong from the start.

Intelligent behaviour is about being able to manage a hierarchy of action. The further off the goal, the more steps it has to take to get there. A bigger brain allows that kind of organised thinking.

The orbitofrontal cortex in particular is an area that allows us to construct a hierarchy of desire, focusing on the eventual outcome of following a path of actions. It can damp the urgent signals coming from the amydala and other emotional structures, balancing an immediate desire to react (like get out of this burning building) with a counter-desire created at a more general level (well I'm a firefighter here to do my job).

So the brain itself is hierarchically organised. It is designed so that mostly it works in harmony. Our immediate instincts and our general life goals are in accord enough that we can just go with the flow. We don't have to wrestle with any dilemmas.

But also, life quite naturally needs to be broken down into the immediate steps to reach some eventual goal. The larger the brain, the greater the distance there can be between the two. And there is plenty of scope for conflicts that need to be balanced. If you are crossing a river, the desire to get to the other side needs to be balanced against a rising feeling that it is rather faster and deeper than you first thought. Sometimes, if not often, the immediate does have to win out. That has to be part of the neurology too.

And all that is just the neuroscience. Humans are also linguistic creatures. We are socialised to have habits of self-regulation. We learn the habit of talking out our goals and needs in a social light. This adds a whole other layer of complexity to volition. We find it quite easy to take on a cultural agenda and so frame our decisions in a social light where our actions will be judged.

The fire fighter doesn't run from the blaze because s/he IS a fire fighter. S/he has the training. And it is fire fighting school which has thought through the balance of when to stay, when to go. There is a clear intellectual overlay that shapes the neurobiology.

So human volition is structurally complex. It has both a neurobiology and a cultural overlay. But hierarchical organisation is very natural. Our choices need to be adaptive - the first order of business. But then that soon breaks down into what seems most adaptive right now, and what seems most adaptive in terms of long term goals. Volition gets polarised to have these two opposing focuses, so allowing them to be best balanced - that balancing being the higher order of desiring or choosing.

And again, mostly in life, our short and long term desires are in an adaptive balance. We have learnt that higher order state and can just go with its habitual flow. Conflict then reveals that the easy balance is absent. Volition breaks down into a starker choice between what is best right now, what is best long term.

So the hierarchical story would be that mostly we are desiring at a holistic meta level - the state which reflects a thoughtlessly habitual adaptation to live in terms of the immediate and the distant. The alarm goes. We just get out of bed, get to work on time. It is only when we stop to think "why?" that a conflict may be revealed, a habitual state of desire start to break down into competing impulses.

A hierarchy is a state of integrated differentiation. And so a desire gets broken down into the short term and the long term on its way to being integrated as some generalised and unthinking balance. But that higher level balance can always be decomposed into a conflict or dilemma again.

That is the great advantage of hierarchical design. You get both the integration and the differentiation, the harmony and the conflict, as the possibilities of the one processing structure.

It goes without saying that most of our mental processing, assemblage and filtering of sense data is done below the level of conscious awareness. — prothero

Yet also, every habit was once being learnt at a conscious - that is attentional - level.

So to use a bad computer analogy - computer analogies always being bad - the writing of the subconscious routines involve the full consciousness that allows their writing. But once written, they can be freely executed without that level of development and supervision.

So it is not that the conscious and subconscious are mysteriously divided - raising the question of how our automatic behaviour is so smart and aware. The neurocognitive story is about how consciousness (or attentional processing) is simply the front-end learning and development phase. The whole goal of the mind as a "processing system" is to turn the novel into the routine.

Again, this turns things on its head for most people where it is presumed that consciousness is the highest authority and ought to be in charge of all things.

No. It is the blundering baby level of cognition. The novice car driver. The newborn still discovering it has hands. :)

OK. A bit of an exaggeration. But the goal of the brain is streamlined action. The aim is to turn every action or decision into a thoughtless habit as far as possible. Clearing consciousness of all its responsibilities is the architectural task.

So understood in terms of brain function, it is not at all surprising that consciousness barely seems involved in running the show. But of course, understood in more usual folk psychology terms - especially because humans have the social demand for being consciously responsible for their behaviour - it does come as a neuroscientific surprise that reportable awareness is the blundering about, still searching for an answer, level of mental operation.

I think that why science is currently embroiled in what Jim Baggott calls 'fairytale physics' is precisely the complete and total absence of an 'immanent unity'. — Wayfarer

Well first, very little of science is currently embroiled in string theory or multiverse speculation. It's a small, if prestigious, field.

And second, you are now talking about physics having reached the edge of physical existence so far as it could possibly matter. If it ain't measurable, that means it ultimately can't make a difference what we say we believe. So you are simply accepting that physics has pretty much done its whole job of arriving at a single unifying theory of nature - so far as that was pragmatically possible.

You are complaining that physics has been so successful, the only place left to go is on into frank metaphysical speculation.

So the Baggotts of this world are complaining about an excessive exhuberance - at the tax-payers expense - for investing brains and money in "beyond the standard model" physics. Real scientists ought to get on with improving their models in other more immediately fruitful areas - like biology, psychology, or the humanities in general.

The complaint isn't that physics didn't in the end work or that it was running down the wrong track in its wedding of the rational and the empirical.

Don't you see the confusion of your position on this yet? You say Platonism is what its about, and then exhibit A for your claims of Scientism are all those physicists who say they are quite happy being Platonists if that is all that is left.

Baggott is the argument that empiricists use against that "too metaphysical" attitude. String theorists and multiverse speculators are being caned for abandoning empiricism for pure mathematical argument. So as something that is happening, it directly contradicts what you claim about the mindset of the scientist. It is your worst possible example. Yet you keep trotting it out.

Pierce, semiosis and signs also seems to be a rejection of nominalism. — prothero

It definitely rejects nominalism. But also Platonism.

The key psychological shift for me is to see that the general can be just as real as the particular ... because the particular ain't actually as real as nominalism pretends.

So it is the shift to a contextual view of existence where there are no ontic individuals - atoms of existence - just various relative states of individuation. Persisting regularities produced in the course of a larger process.

In the end, nothing just exists. It all emerges - form and matter. And so it is our notion of the real itself which gets deflated. Nothing qualifies for being real in a hard nominalist sense. Although nature can approach that kind of strong realisation with arbitrary closeness.

Admittedly, approaching it through Aristotle is actually an extremely cumbersome way of going about it, wrapped as it is in layers of often-confusing verbiage (hence my appreciation of Zen which cuts to the quick.) — Wayfarer

One of the mistakes would be to expect Aristotle to be giving a single dumbed down answer. He rather systematically explored the two key alternatives - reductionist atomism and holistic hylomorphism. So he remains relevant in that he attempted a complete working through of the metaphysical possibilities.

It was thought in action in his day. And the surprise is how little has changed in terms of how to frame the business of doing metaphysics.

But at the same time, I have come to realise that the fundamental conceptions of Platonist philosophy - form and substance, matter and causation, and many other basic ideas - were absolutely indispensable for the foundation of modern science, and, arguably, why science developed as it did in Europe, and not in India or China (which were aeons ahead of Europe two millennia ago). — Wayfarer

This is bollocks. Aristotle set the tone (as did Anaximander before him) by talking an immanent and self-organising view of nature. Both were strong on the observational basis of belief, even as they also stressed the ontological status of rational order in the cosmos. So the scientific worldview grew out of a rationality about actual nature.

Now mathematics was also significant in that it showed rationality itself could be understood as a science too - a science of patterns. So once metaphysics generalised nature in terms of parts in relations, it could make a clear distinction between material parts and formal relations. That was the right way to break nature apart so its essential workings could be modelled.

But you are conflating the usefulness of a science of patterns with a nascent dualism of mind and world. This was the distinctive religious turn taken by the Christian church as it adopted Platonism for its theistic metaphysics. The line was blurry when theism was not metaphysical. Folk just believed in a generalised undifferentiated animism. And then Platonism became the conceptual wedge to separate a rational soul from a corrupted world. It was a huge social con trick.

So science flows on from philosophical naturalism - the recognition that nature is divided into matter and form ... in some useful sense ... but is also still an immanent unity. Ancient Greek philosophy laid the rules of this game with Aristotle the pivotal figure in his ability to play off atomism against holism, as well as providing the "deep maths" of logic. He went beyond mere arithmetic and geometry.

Then Plato is who you gravitate towards if you are instead going in the other direction of seeking supernatural accounts of the human condition.

Nature isn't large enough to explain our wondrousness. We need a more transcendental justification for our Being! How else would we see things as they really are, just using our minds?

Of course, Plato himself was also more subtle, more willing to canvas the variety of metaphysical alternatives. But since we are dealing in caricatures here....

I simply wonder how much of his thinking is immediately relevant to any modern science. — tim wood

Do you then simply believe that it is distantly relevant? Could that be a thing?

But as a practicing attorney in a court case does not open - or close - his argument with a reading of Magna Carta, so I imagine that scientists do not consult their Aristotle to do their work. — tim wood

Again, who do you think would claim this is the case? Surely you realise that science - at its bleeding edge - is a matter of current peer review.

A lawyer would be able to appeal to precedent in fact. If some judge made a ruling, that would have to be followed or over-turned. It wouldn't matter how far back the precedent was established. But of course, society moves on, and so there are plenty of ancient rulings and laws on the books that would get knocked down pretty easily if brought to the attention of a contemporary peer review.

But for science, as it is actually in the process of being done, the very logic of a process of creative invention and discovery is to be able to place that work in its currently most meaningful context. You paint a very strange picture of doing science where practitioners would be consulting existing wisdom rather than trying to flag how they are rewriting the books by making a significant departure from that.

In practice, you have to demonstrate your relevance within some highly localised scientific conversation. There is some small community of peers. You are advancing that body of knowledge by asking its next natural question. So much more than a lawyer, you are directly addressing a contemporary audience who will all have a view. It is more equivalent to standing before the jury than poring over ancient law rulings.

I think for present purpose yeses or nos will do. — tim wood

Yeah, but I've shown you were merely asking a loaded question. And - given your apparent love of lawyering - you will know that trying to slip in a yes/no query along the lines of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" is going to be ruled inadmissable by any competent judge.

We can only measure quantities and intentionality is not a quantity. — Dfpolis

Then there ain't anything to meaningful to talk about.

Concepts have to be cashed out in their appropriate percepts. And it is clear that you are doing the usual dualistic thing of wanting to claim that intentionality needs to be measured in terms of it being a qualia - a feel, an affect, something mental, something ineffably subjective and hence beyond simple objective measurement.

But taking the discussion in that direction is not much use if we want to deal with intentionality in some useful scientific modelling sense. For a start, it changes the subject at a basic level. You are stressing the abstracted "aboutness" of consciousness rather than the more prosaic thing of that aboutness being a modelling relation embodying some actual goal.

So yes, modelling the world involves the general thing of being able to take particular - personal and individual - points of view. We could say that there is that general quality of first person perspective which makes awareness intrinsically a matter of "aboutness". But that now leaves out the goal-centric nature of an embodied mind. The aboutness is also always about something that matters. Intentionality might speak to the existence of a subject, but it also speaks to an object in the same breath.

So intentionality ought to be measurable in terms of its objective satisfactions. It is not a free-floating subjectivity. It is a goal-directedness. And that is the bit science can measure. It can ask the question of what the Cosmos appears to be trying to achieve in general. Finality can be approached from that end, rather than having to start with ineffable "feelings" of aboutness.

Merely intelligible information is not intentional. It's defining characteristic is not being about some intended target, but being an aspect of physical reality. Bits encoded in my computer's memory are electronic states with no intrinsic meaning. — Dfpolis

Sure. But the information theoretic turn in physics is based on the realisation that the material world has a fundamental capacity in terms of intelligible bits. The bits might be signal, or noise. But there is a foundational limit on semantic possibility in this basic fact about syntactical quantity.

So what the formal dichotomy of information and entropy does is create a baseline ontology. It says that material energy and formal variety are not only both conserved quantities in nature, they are essentially exchangable. They are two views of the same stuff.

And having united the material and formal aspects of nature like that, right at its root, we can then start to make sense of the semantic aspect of being. Nature - considered as a memory, a record of syntactical markings - is now understood as being composed of atoms of form. And that gives us the ground to make the further distinction of the marks that are being interpreted in terms of being meaningful, or meaningless, to "someone".

We thus can move on from information as uninformed syntactical possibility to information as actually informed semantics - the reduced kind where the variety is collapsed in sharp fashion to a state of signal vs noise. We arrive at a condition of aboutness or intentionality where we know what marks or signs matter, what other marks and signs we can now treat as completely ignorable and meaningless background chatter.

So nature has to first provide the variety. And then develop the mechanism that sorts it into figure and ground, meaningful and meaningless.

Having built in a mathematics of measurement at the root of this ontology - one that understands reality to be composed of individuated marks or material degrees of freedom - we can hope to quantify our notions about semantics or intentionality. We can set up a definition of mind in terms of its ability to reduce the chaotic variety of the world to the simplest binary model of signal and noise.

For instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_function

So you can see why I am being insistent on demonstrating that you are talking in concepts or qualities that are capable of being quantified. Physicalism has moved beyond hand-waving on the issue of semantics, intentionality, finality, etc.

Material variety and formal possibility have been united within scientific physicalism. Time to move on to the empirical modelling of semantics that this allows.

So there cannot be dialectical opposition between matter and form because that would put matter into the category of form. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your logic is a little out of whack. If you are framing matter as the indefinite - in opposition to the definite - then that is just putting matter in the category of the metaphysically dichotomous.

Dichotomies might be regarded as an intelligible form, but the whole point is that they are the intelligible form that subsumes differentiated categories, such as form and matter, into a higher level method of logical categorisation. Dichotomies talk about form and matter as being the limits of a common process of division.

So you are making the reductionist mistake of trying to reduce dynamical processes of opposition to mere standalone categories. And yet you know the logical definition of a dichotomy to be "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive". The coherent relationship - the asymmetry, or broken symmetry - is what it is all about.

My agenda is simply to learn whether anyone who cites Aristotle as a final authority in modern science should, may, must, or should not be taken seriously. — tim wood

Huh? Science doesn't operate by citing ultimate authorities. You must be thinking of the doctrinal approach taken by the Church in medieval times.

Is this the basis of your problem with Aristotle - that the scholastics did treat him as a final authority on matters of science, hence a basic animus against Aristotle ought to remain within contemporary science?

If you keep rewriting your question, you will surely arrive at the answer you seek. :)

Aristotle: dogma, science, or description? Relevant or mere interesting history? — tim wood

If scientists were asked to vote on the most scientific philosopher of ancient times, do you think Aristotle would get top place?

But if you did a citation search on current journal articles, would you expect a work of Aristotle to be touted as a key reference?

C'mon. Ask yourself what it is that actually concerns you here? Do you think that Arisototelian metaphysics is so obsolete as to have no contemporary relevance?

If that is your actual charge, we can then consider the metaphysics that underpins current scientific speculation. As I have said, broadly that divides into atomism and holism. If you are a holist, then absolutely you will be pushing Aristotle ahead of Democritus. And an atomist, the reverse.

Enlightenment science was successful because it went with atomism as it metaphysical model, and the results of this simplification of causal modelling were remarkable. Being anti-Aristotelian - in the sense of rejecting the holism of four cause thinking, or the supposed impossibility of an empty and a-causal void - was a rewarding move.

So in a general way, Aristotle became the scholastic bogeyman, the dominant scientist of the previous generations, that the enlightenment scientists had to leave clearly behind.

But I was deeply involved with theoretical biology, complexity and hierarchy theorists in the 90s. And everyone knew all about Aristotelian metaphysics. So it was mainstream commonsense to those having to work on the metaphysics of life science. It would be embarrassing not to be able to articulate the parallels.

So for system thinkers in contemporary science, Aristotle is important as a contrast to the standard issue causal reduction of atomism. But for a lot of science, Aristotle still would serve as a useful cultural boundary marker between the crazy scholastics and the sensible Enlightenment dudes.

But prime matter, according to the concept cannot have any form, and that's why it's impossible in reality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Matter and form are just the useful conceptions that divide reality for us. Being is a whole. So we are speaking of taking a dialectical opposition to its limits so as to have a causal tale that makes a generalised sense. It sustains a mode of metaphysical analysis that works better than any other general scheme.

So you are confused to say the fundamental source of materiality would somehow exist by itself in concrete fashion - even as the hypothesis here. That is not hylomorphism. And that is why I in turn invoke the further foundational concept of the vague and the crisp to allow for conception of the development of the dialectically divided themselves. You can start with a hylomorphic state of matter~form without either of these aspects of causality being clearly in effect.

It all makes logical sense. If there is a beginning in a symmetry, then a symmetry breaking can follow. A lack of distinction is the perfect ground for the birth of distinction.

Your constraint is your refusal to recognize that matter is purely conceptual, in the mind only. You want it to be an active thing within the reality which you model, when in reality it is just a symbol in the model. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course it is conceptual. Metaphysics is about developing the most useful constructs for making sense of existence. It is all modelling.

But also, some modelling actually works. The hylomorphic division into material and formal cause works. As does the attempt to understand reality as being divided with degrees of sharpness into the dichotomy of stasis vs flux. Or chance vs necessity. Or atom vs void. Or now, information vs entropy.

For me, matter and form both have to be active in the sense that both have to themselves develop. And both have to be causes - a reason for concrete change. Yet still, those other contrasts, like active vs passive, will start to apply somewhere along the line. We wouldn’t hold on to these other dichotomies of existence if they didn’t have strong explanatory value.

But a characterisation like active vs passive doesn’t seem to make much sense until reality has developed enough to become crisply divided against itself in this categorical fashion. Everything is relative. And so action can only be treated as something general and actualised once hylomorphic being is developed enough for action to be measured against some kind of countering passivity in its world. To be a thing, somewhere, it also has to not be a thing elsewhere.

So you are wrong to say all this metaphysical talk is purely conceptual. It is an attempt to dissect reality in terms of its actual logical oppositions. But also, it is definitely an exercise in modeling. So it is conceptual. But what seems missing in your replies is an understanding that what is central to the conception is the dialectical logic - the logic of symmetry breaking - that is at the heart of a hylomorphic analysis of nature.

You keep thinking vagueness should be a thing in my arguments, then getting angry because monistic existence of that kind is impossible. Vagueness could only ever be relative to crispness, you say.

And I agree. That is the very point I make. Metaphysics only makes sense once all the conceiving is understood in terms of how the logic of symmetry breaking or dichotomisation would work. It is the mechanism by which primal divisions arise that is the key take home here. Categories are limits - the complementary limits of some deeper process of dichotomisation.

I already answered that question. It is completely contradictory to dfpolis' position in which laws are inherent within matter. And, both of you claim to represent the principles of modern physics. So, modern physics allows both, that "something could accidentally change", and that accidental change is impossible because the laws of nature are inherent within matter. That's what's wrong with it, it is a representation of deep inconsistencies within the discipline of physics. — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s a really weird mash up, not an answer. It is just you lumping everyone else into a general category of those who seem to be in disagreement with MU. You right, thus everyone else is definitionally wrong. :razz:

The fact that it has been identified as a difference indicates that it has made a difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It says the criteria has been changed. A different point of view has been adopted.

My approach starts by granting the reality of finality in nature. And goals are constraints. Once a purpose has been adequately served, anything more doesn’t make an intelligible difference.

So I simply apply that commonsense view of finality or intentionality to nature as a general principle.

Every river is different. But not in a way that makes a difference to nature, in terms of its general purpose of maximising entropy.

So regardless of what you say, this way of conceiving of existence is already basic to the metaphysics of science. It just makes obvious sense.

My point was that this is completely different from dfpolis' position that laws are inherent within matter, so no such "accidental change" is possible. Yet both of you claim to have a metaphysics which represents modern physics. Is modern physics that confused that it supports contradictory metaphysics? — Metaphysician Undercover

Dfpolis was taking a position on Hyle. I disagreed with that, making the argument that he was treating the material principle as already having formal organisation in having an inherent and active intentionality. So in terms of "prime matter", his starting point had already crossed the line and ceased to be prime.

However, that is also a reasonable view if we are talking about the actual world where it is only in our conceptions that we are wanting to insist on some absolutely dualistic separation. So it is also the case that any notion of prime matter is simply a state of being that is the least tellic, the least organised, the least shaped and directed.

And as we have discussed multiple times, I would then go beyond that qualification to say that both matter and form would have to co-arise from something even more extreme - a state of "actual" vagueness. It is at this point any conversation we have completely breaks down. You were already lost at step one - the idea that prime matter reduces to a notion of undirected flux, making matter already an active thing, just a chaotically unformed kind of active thing.

So I am quite sympathetic to Dfpolis on the characterisation of Hyle as already intentional and active - given my qualification that that is then the least intentional form of activity we could possibly imagine. It would be simply a blind and formless striving to be.

And I am completely opposed to your characterisation of prime matter as some kind of passive substratrum that awaits a shaping intentional hand to magic it into a world of objects. This is just the materialism of atomism. And Aristotle was a good deal beyond that.

Unlike my story which avoids those contradictory facts of modern science altogether. — Metaphysician Undercover

Talk about wishful thinking.

How would you quantify one degree of freedom, to ensure that it is maintained, in continuity from one moment to the next? — Metaphysician Undercover

Physics does that by counting the microstates of a bounded system. So what is conserved is all the possible configurations of some collection of parts. A block of spacetime can contain some maximum number of different arrangements.

So that is how the model achieves conservation. And now the ontology works the other way round. It is the closure by being bounded - constrained - that underwrites the energy conservation. In general relativity, for example, energy is no longer conserved as a necessity. This is because the spatiotemporal boundaries are no longer globally fixed. They have a plastic geometry.

So energy conservation becomes an output of the model. The modelled world starts open. You add constraints to close it in suitable fashion. It is no longer a universal fact to be taken for granted - even if our actual Universe does look pretty closed in terms of its energy content.

And remember I asked you a direct question:

A constraints-based view of substance says limits on instability create stability. So in every moment, something could accidentally change. And very often in life, things do. But to the degree there is a global order or law in place, such accidental changes are suitably restricted. Things can't change enough to matter.

This is a perfectly intelligible ontology. Tell me one thing wrong with it.

...I'm sure you were just about to give an answer.

I think that you are not quite grasping the concept of "matter". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm simply not agreeing to your half-baked thoughts on the issue.

When change occurs, there is always an underlying substratum which remains the same, and this is called matter. This allows us to say that a changing object maintains its identity as the same object despite undergoing change. It is essential to the concept of "change". — Metaphysician Undercover

Your view is familiar. Along with its defects.

Without this concept, change becomes unintelligible because at each moment of change there is something new. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'll repeat. A constraints-based view of substance says limits on instability create stability. So in every moment, something could accidentally change. And very often in life, things do. But to the degree there is a global order or law in place, such accidental changes are suitably restricted. Things can't change enough to matter.

This is a perfectly intelligible ontology. Tell me one thing wrong with it. And it fits the facts as science knows them. Unlike your story.

What I was saying is that the concept most often used today, to account for temporal continuity, is energy rather than matter. This is expressed as the law of conservation of energy. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are still a century out of date. Energy is now countable as quantum information. Degrees of freedom are the conserved quantity. Cosmology measures the entropy of event horizons. Things have moved on.

Matter is completely conceptual, it is the concept which human beings have developed to account for the temporal continuity of existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confused. The point I was pushing was how physics is no longer based on that kind of material atomism. It agrees that it is form that gives persistent shape or individuation to raw potential.

So substantial being is again understood in hylomorphic terms. Of course, this ain’t much trumpeted. But it looks undeniable.

In modern physics the concept of matter has been replaced by the concept of energy as the means of accounting for temporal continuity. — Metaphysician Undercover

And energy in turn has become entropy and even information. There is a trajectory here. Persistent being is now dominantly described in terms of form or ontic structure.

And to complement that, we need an equally updated notion of the material potential that is getting shaped into something. That is where Aristotle is not much help. But Anaximander’s Apeiron or Peirce’s logic of vagueness is.

I am not talking about an information realm, but about physical and intentional theaters of operation and their relation. — Dfpolis

And so the crucial question becomes how do you measure intentionality in your scheme?

Information and entropy complement each other nicely as measurements in the two theatres of operation as physics and biology are coming to understand them. If you have some personal idea here, then you will need to say something about what would count as a measurement of your explanatory construct.

So the laws cause matter to behave the way that it does, by informing it? I assume that they exist as information then. — Metaphysician Undercover

How does form in-form matter then? You are just repeating the usual issues created by your own particular notion of hylomorphism. It is because you presume the material principle to be already substantial and passively existent that you keep encountering the same logical difficulties.

The way physics is making sense of hylomorphism is as the informational constraint on entropic degrees of freedom. So nature is taken as dualistic in a sense. It is divided into the necessary and the accidental. The substantial or actual is then the third part, the middle part, where the two combine as a fact of physical development.

This means the material aspect is best understood in terms of fundamental contingency - action that could happen in any direction without purpose or coherence. Prime matter would be active, not passive. But active in the sense of pure undirected fluctuation with no stable identity. It would be utter flux. Which then gives form and purpose a useful job to do.

The other aspect of the actualised is then whatever history gets recorded in a fashion that it becomes a material or immanent constraint on further flux.

A shower of rain falls randomly on a new bare hillside. Little rivulets form and combine. Eventually, because the hillside can erode and form patterns - information - a deeper system of brooks, streams and rivers develop. We have bodies of water that seem now fixed and permanent features of the landscape - substantial beings. The accidental gets channeled to become the necessary. It is a physical law what happens to every rain-drop now.

Although of course - taking this process view of nature and its habits - we can see that the drainage pattern can still evolve with time. Accidents continue to happen. The channels will keep readjusting so as to maintain a steady and efficient flow through their network.

So you are stuck with the intuition that the material substrate must be a rock-solid and passive - that kind of materiality. But understanding materiality as undirected flux is how you can make room for the matching thing of a constraining purpose that is encoded as information and gives steadying shape to the flow of that flux as now a material process with a direction.

If you simply refuse to accept that prime matter is essentially active - or indeed, the complete lack of any stabilising constraint - then you will keep failing to make any sense of a naturalistic metaphysics which hylomorphically invokes the "other" of that stabilising constraint.

(Of course, I realise that your theism also depends on failing to make sense of a naturalistic metaphysics. :) )

Thus, teleology and mechanism are two projections of the same reality. Instead of being contraries, they are complimentary -- related as ends and means. Mechanism fixes on means, teleology on ends. — Dfpolis

So, I'm using "logical" to refer to the information (intelligibility) specifying a state, whether that state be physical or intentional. "Logical Propagators" in nature, then, transform the intelligibility of one state into that of another. — Dfpolis

I think I agree on these points. So we may be arguing towards the same general picture. Reading your other replies, I am clearer now that you want to focus on your logical propagator story.

Broadly I take a view on causality that is Aristotelian and Peircean. Which then cashes out in the kind of current physicalism which sees information and entropy as bridging the old mind-matter divide.

So we do have an information theoretic turn in fundamental physics that takes a constraints-based view of natural laws. The laws exist emergently and immanently as contextualising states of information - the holographic principle. And then material events are the observable concrete happenings that emerge locally as actualised states of being.

Being the informational side of the equation, the constraints on a system embody the downward acting formal and final causes. So we can speak of logical propagators as representations of intentions.

Talk of an "informational realm" is pretty general. Having established it as a legitimate part of modern physicalism, the issue becomes how to describe the structure of the realm. And it is pretty standard to apply logic rather directly to our ontological modelling. You have quantum information approaches where the issue becomes how can one ask two opposing questions of reality at the same time. You can inquire about the location of an event, or the momentum of an event, but not get a complete answer on both in just a single act of measurement.

So yes. Seeing reality as being shaped top-down by an intelligible or logical structure is the new metaphysical perspective I would say. Plenty would believe the Universe is a computer, even.

But then your proposal strikes me as having a particular problem. It seems to have to presume a classical Newtonian backdrop notion of time - a spatialised dimension. And modern physics would be working towards an emergent and thermal notion of time as a better model. So any logical propagator would have to unfold in that kind of time, not a Newtonian one.

On the other hand, the classical is what does emerge in a coarse grained fashion. So, with care, a Newtonian notion of time, and hence of logical intentions unfolding in time, does make sense.

And that is again where I would insist on a clear distinction in terms of history vs anticipation.

Brains are the kind of devices that can record personal memories. So they can form a prediction, expectation or goal and remember that in such a fashion that the information does act to constrain future eventualities. You get the clear intentionality of Mary planning to speak in the room tomorrow and all that logically follows from her having that intention today - and being likely to still be in a similar state of mind tomorrow.

But the bare physical world - the world that does not have this kind of anticipatory intentional modelling of its tomorrow - has only its tendencies, not its plans. So it is "intentional" in an importantly different way.

Yes, the full physical description needs to recognise final and formal cause. And an information theoretic perspective now gives physics a suitable mathematical, or logical, framework for describing the world as being constrained by its history - its "memory" in terms of holistic informational states. We can see how "law" gets baked into the fabric of the Cosmos as a fact of its dissipative development. It evolves a structure that stands as a context to all further material events. All this is a great advance on the old notion of transcendent laws floating somewhere above everything they regulate in some kind of eternal and perfect fashion.

Yet still, Mary can today form a plan of what she will do tomorrow. But an iceberg or hurricane can only form a propensity. A small hairline fracture in the melting berg today is possibly highly likely to be the vast chunk that calves off tomorrow.

We could even model that in terms of deterministic Poisson statistics. Likewise we can predict which way the hurricane is likely to swerve as it knocks about the Carribbean islands. There is a statistical band to which it must be constrained - given a set of measurements we might obtain to day to encode an informational picture of it in terms of a set of dynamical parameters obeying some intelligible framework of state-dependent laws.

So physics is certainly made intelligible by its propensities. The today does actually constrain the tomorrow. And that is the best we can mean by formal/final cause as even human intentionality is only ever an intention. Things can go awry for Mary in ways she didn't expect. Worst of all is that she might not even remember.

So everything can be brought back to the notion of constraints. And how that is then neatly matched by the capacity of reality to surprise. Spontaneity can be limited and yet not eliminated. A physicalism based on information and entropy is then in a great position to model that. Entropy treats the material now as uncertainty, surprise, fluctuation, or other action in want of a shaping, constraining, hand.

The ship of science is thus better balanced. The old materialism did make the mistake of reification - seeing matter in fallaciously concrete terms. An entropic view of materiality reduces it to random fluctuation - something that would be nothing if it weren't taken in hand. And then bringing in an informational view of the physics allows for the explicit modelling of the formal/final causes that do the hylomorphic shaping of the active material potential into something that is reliably substantial.

Again, if the back story is understood in that light, then I think I can see where you are going with logical propagators. However the sharp distinction between ordinary physical systems, and living/mindful organisms, must still be maintained when talking about "intentionality".

Still, since the analysis does not address the issue of an intending mind, we need to be agnostic as to their origin and its character. — Dfpolis

Why would we need to be agnostic when intentionality is something neurocognition studies? We have reason to make a definite distinction between brains and universes, purposes and laws.

This is a common misunderstanding. Quantum theory restricts probability to observations and asserts that states evolve deterministically between observations. — Dfpolis

Given that it is probability states that evolve deterministically, then I would say that makes it literally part of the equation.

The model physics finds adequate today is that all of the past is summed up in the present physical state (with no detailed "memory" of how that state arose). Future states are completely determined by the laws of nature acting on the present state. There are no "probabilities" involved unless one wishes to predict a measurement (observation). — Dfpolis

And yet the principle of least action is basic to physics. And classical determinism is an emergent feature of reality at best. Events are certainly constrained by contexts. And the constraint can be so universal - no detailed memory of its origins, as you say - that it is pretty absolute and deterministic looking. But then underneath this classical emergent description lies the deeper quantum one.

So you are taking an approach to the laws of nature that seems really dated.

The idea that transcendent laws could some how reach down, God-like, to regulate the motions of particles was always pretty hokey. An immanent view of nature's laws is going to be more useful if we want to make sense of what is really going on.

I am not seeking to conflate anything. Broadly, I'm saying that physicalism (as opposed to physics) is an instance of Whiteheads Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness -- that it confuses an abstraction (resulting from the Fundamental Abstraction of natural science) with the complex concrete reality from which it is abstracted. We have two disjoint abstractions -- the objective world of physics, and the subjective world of Cartesian mind. What we need is to understand is how the concrete world bridges these abstractions. In other words, the mind-body problem is not a problem of the lived world, but of confusing our abstractions with reality. — Dfpolis

Sounds good. But I'm not getting much sense of how you mean to proceed from here.

Talk of "laws" is definitely nonsense if we are to understand that as meaning anything like the kind of law-bound behaviour of reasoning social creatures like us. But the irony, as I say, is that our human concept of law is all about reification. We create these abstract constructs like truth, justice and good, then try to live by them. A lot of hot air is spent on debating their "reality".

And yes, the realms of the material and the mental are rather disjoint abstractions. But the problem is not that they are modelling abstractions. That is just how modelling works. The problem is that they don't work very well - at least to explain "everything". Materialism does a pretty good job of modelling the physical world - as a finite state automata. But that then sets up this dualism where everything materialism leaves out - mainly formal and final cause - gets left unexplained as part of the "mental".

However physicalism has moved on. You now have a better dichotomy in play - information and entropy. And these are not disjoint realms. They are formally reciprocal. So - while still being just models, just abstractions - we can understand how these two aspects of being are bridged in concrete fashion.

So first up, science just is modelling and hence abstractions are how it goes about its business. That won't change.

Second, physicalism can now be better understood in terms of information and entropy rather than mind and matter. And that semiotic view even explains why science - as an informational process - should be a business of abstractions ... so as to be able to regulate the world insofar as it is a concrete and entropic realm of being.

A pivotal thesis is that the laws of nature are essentially intentional. — Dfpolis

Well, yes and no. The laws don't cause material events in the sense of a willing, planning, intending mind. So they can't be essentially intentional in the usual psychological definition of intentional. It can only be some kind of analogy.

It is also true that physics needs to recognise final cause in some proper fashion. The one thing we have learnt about the Big Bang universe is that it was born with an inherent general direction. It has a thermodynamical arrow of time.

Also, pure determinism can't be correct. Quantum theory shows that probabilistic spontaneity is part of the equation. And so at best, the "laws" speak to generalised constraints on action. Events can be directed towards propensities, but they can't be absolutely controlled.

So physics knows that the classical Newtonian/mechanical model of "cause and effect" is the coarse grain view, not the fundamental view. But the job then is to expand the classical metaphysics just as far as needed to make more sense - not jump all the way over to a mentalistic or idealistic metaphysics.

So the metaphysical project - from a physicalist point of view - would be minimalist. Let's recognise that classicality is the coarse-grain picture. Now how do we incorporate the "intentionality" without claiming that the universe is like a brain making intelligent, personal, particular choices?

A broad difference between physical intentionality (propensities or teleomaty) and mindful intentionality (biological functionality, or psychological purpose) is that physical intentionality is a matter of historic constraint. A system develops a record of its past as some kind of memory. And that history constrains all further free possibility. The physical future is still free - a matter of unconstrained accident - but also a freedom that is shaped into some definite set of likelihoods.

Then psychological intentionality is quite different in that it involves a model of the physical world which allows the anticipation of its future states. And so, by being able to predict the propensities of the world, an observing self becomes included in the future outcomes of that world. The self becomes a player who can act to constrain outcomes, even at a future date, so as to serve locally particular goals.

So physics is just history. A state of constraint limiting freedoms. And psychology is anticipation. A self with purposes is being inserted into this more basic equation so that self-serving actions can be added to the evolving mix.

I think you are aiming to conflate the two stories. Physicalism - seeking to make a minimal expansion to its causal metaphysics - would agree that finality has to be part of its fundamental story now. But it can already see how psychological finality is its own semiotic story. It is discontinuous with the physicalist picture in the important regard of introducing a modelling relation with the world.

Groovy.

speculative realism, speculative idealism, or speculative metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

Speculate away.

Yeah. Let's talk about the thing-in-itself ... without actually talking. I will enjoy your silence.

Pfft.

No answer. — schopenhauer1

Where was the question that was cogently expressed and relevant to the discussion?

Where's that world's smallest violin emoticon when you need it.....

So, modelling doesn't have a "feels like". — schopenhauer1

Again, now that you have actually read the thread, you will appreciate that your old hobbyhorses are irrelevant.

Yes. Sorry to drop such arcane concepts into the conversation. For all those without access to google, here's a link that might just help - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling

That is one kind of experience and the experience of a rock or electron might be another kind of experience — Janus

OK. So define this other kind. What would be its difference that makes it a difference, while also not being different?

You keep waving a hand vaguely. I am asking for a reason to take this seriously as some form of counterfactual-based claim.

but, as I said earlier the difference in kind between life and non-life is a relative one, on Whitehead's view, not an absolutely radical one. — Janus

Handwaving.

I made a clear distinction between biosemiosis and pansemiosis. To the degree that the physical world is constrained by an informational model, all the information is on the "outside" of any supposed entities. Whereas with life and mind, it is actually encoded inside the organism as information stored in a memory.

So I provide the story that underwrites the continuity - semiosis as a generalised causal mechanism based on the information~entropy distinction. And also the story that accounts for the discontinuity - the epistemic cut which distinguishes the actually living and mindful from the non-living and non-mindful.

And it is not as if biosemiosis is not already being incorporated into science - https://link.springer.com/journal/12304/11/1/page/1

If you want Whitehead to be granted a similar respect, you would need to start being specific about how it is actually suppose to work.

Everyone knows that life and mind arise from the physical realm that is nature. So there is a continuity somehow. But also a discontinuity somehow. To say that it is a relative divide - that it is a mix of the continuous and the discontinuous - is thus utterly vacuous. We already know this is the case. I am asking you how all this waffle about "non-conscious experience" takes things any further.

Semiosis clearly does take current physicalism further. That is why it is catching on in science.

Anything that is affected has some kind of "interiority"; rocks will be affected according to their internal constitution, and so will electrons. This is not animism, though, since it acknowledges the almost negligible sense in which things like rocks and electrons could be said to have an "interiority". — Janus

Waffle.

Because their experience, though of course non-conscious, and however minimal, and which is determined by their own constitution, is not epiphenomenal precisely because it is what determines how they will respond to any affect. — Janus

So what is experience when it is also non-conscious? C'mon. Seriously now. Address my actual question.

Of course rocks have some kind of internal structure. But in what sense does that structure model anything?

And are you saying electrons have internal structure? This might be news to particle physics. You best explain.

We know what we mean when we says things like "The cliff experienced the erosive force of the wind and rain" , or "the electron experiences the attraction of the nucleus". — Janus

Yeah. We don't mean the cliff or the electron are alive, model their worlds in terms of some interior system of sign, and hence felt something one way or the other.

So we can all cope with anthropomorphic analogy in everyday language. Just because we talk like the animists of old, doesn't mean we are metaphysical animists.

Human experience is a difference of degree not an absolute difference of kind. — Janus

That would be news to a lot of folk. If they experience erosion, they tend to go "ow". We would understand their behaviour as telling us something that is a lot more than just the physics of friction and fragmentation.

What is experience if not information; and conversely what is information if not some kind of experience? — Janus

Great. First step taken. Now how are you going to continue on to show they are two ways of talking about the same thing?

Information in-forms entities, that is changes them, and so all change is relational. — Janus

You mean like the standard Batesonian definition - the difference that makes a difference?

Change is experienced in different ways by different entities, and talk of interiority even in the case of biological entities, even humans, is a relative matter, not an absolute one. — Janus

So change is experienced in different fashions. But let's not suddenly abandon the position you were starting to develop. What does all such experience have in common? You seem to think it might be ... life ... and interiority.

I would say semiotics agrees. But pan-experientialism wants to say something else.

Apparently electrons are also alive and have minds according to Whiteheadians. A baffling leap indeed.

Well, @prothero's angle is that the kind of experience enjoyed by electrons is the non-conscious kind. And so we should indeed expect it to make no difference to their physical behaviour.

And yet the great advantage of Whiteheadian experiential physics is that it does away with the usual dualistic charge of epiphenomenalism. Somehow. Even though the non-conscious experience of electron now makes their experience as epiphenomenal as it could get.

Gee. This Whiteheadian metaphysics really seems something. If you contradict a contradiction, do you arrive at the truth? ;)

Maybe you can answer the question he is not answering then. :lol:

A description of the experience using informational constructs, is not the experience. — schopenhauer1

We are talking about bleeding electrons here. And therefore, why a description of electromagnetic interactions using experiential constructs is crackpot.

Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians?

That's like saying "When one human experiences another, what is the maths involved? — Janus

But we have good reason to credit humans with "experience", even if it is just a folk psychology term. We know what we mean by the word, and we know what to expect of organisms with the kind of complex nervous systems to have it.

If I kick a dog, I expect it to feel something. Now its behaviour might be somewhat unpredictable or indeterminate. It might attack me back, or cower in submission, or run off as fast as it can. But those are the sort of responses I would expect from a creature with enough of a brain to be modelling the world in terms of rational choices.

We could certainly aim to model that complex psychology with complex maths. And science does. But just at a level of commonsense, we think experience is a thing for all animals with enough of a brain to be modelling a world.

An electron? Not so much. There is zero reason to suspect that it has experience or that experience can still mean anything in terms of its action.

But if any of you Whitehead fans can make a case for why an electron must operate by experience, now is the time to lay that story out. Where is the intelligent complexity in their behaviour? Where is the complexity in their structure that could sustain a complexity of behaviour?

On the other hand we can say, and it is said, that electrons experience and respond to the kinds of subatomic forces that have become codified in particle physics and chemistry.

I think this is probably all that Whitehead intended; to suggest that human "interiority" is primordially prefigured in the the quasi-interiority of the electron, the atom, the molecule, the cell, and so on. It's a way of thinking that parallels semiotic thinking and information theory, which also rely on the idea of surfaces and interiority. — Janus

If it is just a vague analogy, then who cares. Old Whitehead just had a colourful psychological way of speaking, but he meant nothing by it.

However you guys have been defending him as saying something significant - something which completes the incomplete science ... even though it changes none of the science and adds nothing in terms of measurement or prediction.

The difference with semiosis is that it is already scientific hypothesis. Fifty years after Peirce, biology cracks the genetic code. Semiosis is shown to be true at a fundamental level for the sciences of life and mind. That is how complexity works.

Now extending the notions of semiosis to the physical realm is still a stretch. But very clearly, one big difference would be that no interiority is being claimed for the physico-chemical world. All the information or interpretance is on the outside - contextual. The interoricity ain't even quasi. Pan-semiosis would be the metaphysical extension saying that we are now talking about an obviously different kind of semiosis - different in ways that are well-defined and make sense.

The notion of “photons” is however an abstraction. — prothero

Of course. And ones that can be measured. That is the (scientific) point. As a construct, it is one with observable consequences.

But you are claiming electrons and photons would have non-conscious experience. I asked how that would change anything worth a damn about our best current physical descriptions of particle interactions. You then went off to talk about physics being incomplete, and not how a Whiteheadian physics offers any concrete step forward in terms of measurable consequences.

Admit it. Nothing is added. Nothing is explained. Talk of experience is an empty word - a good example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness indeed.

But in the case of Schroedinger's cat we cannot. This is why it's said it was neither dead or alive. If the cat knew it or not is not taken into account. — Heiko

What do we hear from the box when we shake it? A dull thud or sudden feline screeching noises ... or something spookily both at the same time?

There was good reason this thought experiment was constructed to poke fun at naive QM interpretations.