So you think using the term triadic hierarchy will somehow explain how one type of "process" is different than the rest? — schopenhauer1

It is hardly sneaking anything in in calling semiotics a triadic or hierarchical process. What else was Peirce describing? And what else has natural philosophy been saying since Anaximander and Aristotle?

So yes, a "system" is a quite specific kind of process. It has hierarchical structure.

All those could be good beginnings. But you've already slipped in "mind" in a contentious fashion.

Could you be clearer and say minds are the result of a process, and so not a brute fact on which the process depends. Could you say it is not mind but instead "minding", or at least "mindfulness", that characterises the material outcome, to make it clear a reified substance is not presumed which remains separate to the process itself?

These have been immediate sticking points so far.

A philosophy that depends upon Vagueness as its center is actually more than that, it is deliberately obtuse and full of nothing. Worthless in all respects. — Rich

1) First there is the Vagueness (the Dao) — Rich

Hmm. The master truly challenges us with his koans.

But I will repeat: — schopenhauer1

Of course you will. The same tautology over and over again. Duality is what you presume and dualism is what you conclude. The circularity is why you are on auto-repeat.

Please explain WHAT mental is compared to physical without magical fiat? — schopenhauer1

I have repeatedly - at your demand - explained that I ground my approach in semiosis. So the "duality" or dichotomy of matter and sign. Because it is dichotomy - a symmetry breaking - rather than a duality, how there is both the differentiation and the integration gets accounted for. And then development explains how the simple becomes the complex - how the dichotomised leads to the triadic or hierarchical with time.

If you don't get it, cool. In this thread I was asking you to justify your ontology, not seeking to explain mine yet again.

A theory of the development of semantics is more than just a list, surely?

I denied that there is any in-between. — Agustino

Of course you did. You said there was a boundary in-between. You also denied this. The boundary had its own location. But then it also doesn't. It all seems to make some weird kind of sense as an example of the PNC failing to apply.

There is NOTHING between the white line and the green line. — Agustino

You mean there is A nothing in-between the white line and the green line. Otherwise how are you claiming them to be actually separated if there is no thing to separate them? And if you take that position, you have created some third thing that has some bare property of location, and can somehow effect the change which is a transition, and yet says "nothing" when it comes to the important question of where does one hue leave off, the other one begin.

You are thinking mathematically, but I'm telling you how things are in reality. Mathematics is just an approximation, that's why you can infinitely divide in mathematics, but obviously can't do that in reality. — Agustino

Ah. I see. The problem is now that the maths is "approximate". And when the reason for that is pointed out - the logical vagueness where the PNC fails - you missed the point. You come blundering in with the usual half-baked response of the naive realist, muttering about how you can tell me all about the world as it actually is without all the philosophical bullshit.

Great work!

Doesn't this boundary have a spatial location? Haven't you said this boundary is neither the line that marks the edge of the green area, nor the line that marks the edge of the white area? It is somehow a third line inbetween that executes "a transition". So we have the mystery of a third located entity that is neither the one thing, nor the other, by being a third thing?

You really are making a muck of this.

So now you are saying the boundary is both not a thing and also a thing.

Hmm. See what happens when you think you can get away with glib sophistry in place of serious thought. It might pay you to read up on the philosophy of boundaries before you make too much more of a fool of yourself.

So in that case, a pox on both houses as where experience is slapped on at the starting point in one, it is slapped towards the end of a process in another. I guess they both suffer the same problem. — schopenhauer1

Well it is only you slapping on "mental" as a term. I questioned your customary division of the phenomenal into the "self" and the "world".

There is no boundary as a thing. — Agustino

That's why the PNC fails to apply.

I was thinking about Grice's just-so story about how an animal might make what was heretofore an involuntary signal voluntarily, as a step toward language, etc. But this is already an in-band signal. — Srap Tasmaner

Peirce covers the intermediate cases by talking about three classes of sign - iconic, indexical and symbolic. One just accidentally indicates, one habitually points, the last is fully intentional as it demands interpretation.

What you seem to be saying is that there are two distinct realities. The one out there and the VR in your head. Isn't the VR in your head part of the world out there? If not, then how does information flow between your VR and the world out there? — Harry Hindu

I am saying the "reality" is the wholeness of the modelling relation. So it is the co-ordination between the two - the modeller and the world. And then the point that the mechanism of the co-ordination is not some naive realist "veridical representation", but in fact a useful "irreality" in terms of experiential sign.

For a semiotic relation to arise, first the mental side of the equation must be freed from having to be literal.

Imagine we just felt the radiant energy in some more literal fashion. Standing in the field, the tree would heat the surface of your body slightly differently depending on whether it was reflecting light more in the "green" frequency or more in the "red". In fact the difference would be so slight and so diffuse as to be pretty well useless at telling you anything. A vast amount of signal processing would have to be employed to tell you anything about the world.

But because biology is free to form its signs of the world in more logical fashion - as crisp binary signals of what is vs what is not - the irreality of colour discrimination can arise. Two frequencies of radiation that have a vanishingly slight difference from each other can be treated by the brain as the very opposite of each other - as with red and green.

So this is the crucial thing your argument looks to be missing. You want the world to be the cause, the perception the effect. But the mind wants to be disconnected from that kind of directness so it can invent its own more useful system of sign. It wants to already have converted the physical information available in the world into some logically-processed sensory quality.

Thus I'm not talking about a virtual reality, if you are going to take that as just talk about an attempt at a veridical re-presentation of the world within some Cartesean theatre. I'm talking about the virtuality of a semiotic umwelt. The world as we find it most useful to experience it. The signs that best anchor our habits of interpretance.

No. I was complaining that you were being inconsistent. If you say that we can never reach the truth, but only a semblance of it, then your explanation of reality is as irrelevant as anyone else's — Harry Hindu

That is silly. An epistemology that includes the fact that our view of reality is a purpose-soaked model, a semiotic umwelt, is truer than naive idealism or naive realism.

Explaining why and how the goal of "reaching truth" is naive realism is rather the point here.

It seems to me that natural selection would favor organisms that tend to impose their subjectivity on the world less and see the world more as it really is. — Harry Hindu

That is contradicted by the facts of psychology and neuroscience.

Just one example that always struck me. Compared to chimps, humans have a proportionately larger foveal representation in their primary visual cortex, a proportionately smaller peripheral vision one.

So we have evolved less need to process the edges of our visual field as we are more certain about where we need to focus our attention. A larger brain makes us better at predicting the part of the world which is going to be interesting to us.

Think also of colour vision. Why do birds and bees have more cone pigments than we do? We make do with just three. They get four or five. And it would seem trivial for evolution to generate any number. Why is less also more in hue discrimination?

If we created a world when we close our eyes, then why is there a clear distinction between the world I imagine and the world I experience when I open my eyes. — Harry Hindu

But sensory deprivation experiments (and hypnagogic imagery/REM dreams) show that starved of real world input for long enough, the brain does just completely invent a world of impressions. And we can't distinguish the fictional nature of the experience while that is our state of experience. Even afterwards, hallucinations may never be categorised as unreal.

This is just a way of framing the issue. — Srap Tasmaner

It's a good point. But doesn't the distinction give rise to a four way division as we now have two different dimensions to consider?

One is the intentional vs accidental distinction. The other is the sender vs receiver distinction.

So we can have the sender accidentally sending, but the receiver reading intentional meaning into the signs - as with the U-boat leaking news of its position or the plant seeking the light.

Then we have the three other cases. Intentional sender/intentional receiver. Intentional sender/accidental receiver. Accidental sender/accidental receiver.

A rock heated by the sun lacks the intention (the reason, the purpose, the functional benefit, the semantic meaningfulness) just as much as the sun lacks the intention of transmitting that heat to the rock.

A religious crank with a placard might intone his message to the crowd, but for the crowd it is just background noise. A case of intentional sender/accidental receiver.

Then we have the actual case of transmitted meanings which require the co-ordination of intentional sender/intentional receiver. The two sides of the equation have to become co-ordinated in their mental state. They must have understandings that are similarly constrained.

And of course this is where we get to the "beetle in a box" difficulty of private meanings and have to conclude something about how, in practice, this level of semantic meaningfulness can only be demonstrated by the similarity of behaviour that results. Semantics does boil down to effective limits on material spontaneity or behavioural degrees of freedom.

This is in fact an important point, given Wayfarer wants to defend the mental reality of meaning. He wants to grant understanding some kind of res cogitans status separate from the material signs themselves. But maybe the psychological reality just is established habits of behaviour. The mental does reduce to the actions that make sense of signs, or pragmatic interpretance.

Anyway, the OP does focus on the transmission of information. And it is in itself telling that it was just assumed the transmission was between minds with matchable states of intentionality when it should be obvious that the boundary between the deliberate and the accidental is porous here. Any reader can read too much or too little into any signal. The perfect transmission of semantics in fact looks an impossible dream. The sending and receiving of messages is always fraught with uncertainty.

Which should really make one think about what is going on when one talks things through with oneself. :)

A transition is a process of passing from one thing to another - in this case from a green line to white line — Agustino

You are just playing with words. The talk here is of the boundary that marks the position where the transition happens. It's a well traversed debate in the philosophy of maths.

Your philosophy implies that envy can be white because there is some limit after which the two become indistinguishable in the supreme vagueness of the apeiron — Agustino

Sure, the Apeiron would absorb all differences of any category. But the categories that matter at a metaphysical level are all the product of dialectical reasoning. They are dichotomies.

So there is no dialectical connection between white and envy. One might talk about black and white and the spectrum of gray inbetween. One might talk about envy and whatever its polar opposite seems to be, plus the transition then connecting them which is defined in terms of these limits. But that kind of category forming relation is not being claimed of randomly chosen particulars like white and envy. They are not opposites and so neither in any useful sense the same.

Say what you will, but logically this is the status of your thought. — Agustino

I'll just say I thought you were smarter than this. Looks like you can't in fact rise above glibness. At least MU is passionate about ideas. You don't sound like you believe your own argument for a minute.

The most obvious example of this is when the molecule-occasions and cell-occasions in a body produce, by means of a central nervous system, a mind or soul. — http://www.iep.utm.edu/processp/

This is just repeating the same old. What causes mind as we mean it - human minds rather than rock minds - is a physical structure. The evolved complexity of a nervous system doing information processing.

Then "experience" gets slapped on by fiat as the bit of magic which explains why material complexity alone couldn't do the trick.

It is exactly like saying that a living organism is only living because there is all this biological structure. Plus a vital spirit that then ensures the structure has the added quality of animation.

The division constitutes in a transition from a white line, to a green line and vice-versa. — Agustino

So does the PNC apply to this "transition"? Can we say whether it is white or green? Do we feel moved to claim it has to be one or other because it can't be both? Or do we want to say the question of which colour it is seems vague?

So true, so true. We are all just Grasshopper to your David Carradine, oh wise one. Tell us again how we are all just spinning stories. Tell us again how you sat in disgust as others so much more foolish than you were misrepresenting the holy Dao.

My socks still aren't dry from laughing so hard the last time.

Bless you my child. Take a pew and I'll tell you a story.

Do you think that is something that would be subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by any possible empirical discovery? If so, what kind of discovery might that be? — Wayfarer

Of course. A perpetual motion machine for a start. Plenty of inventors have applied for patents. There have been big controversies like cold fusion.

There is an important place in traditional philosophy for what is beyond measure, — Wayfarer

I'd dispute that by pointing out all ideas are ultimately based on observation of the world. And then Western philosophy in particular got going due to the inspiration provided by mathematics.

So maths showed a deep rationality at work in nature. A necessity and inevitability about ontic structure. But that arose out of the habit of measurement.

First came the rulers, sundials and tally sticks. The Babylonians and Eqyptians were pretty competent in that regard.

Then came the Pythagorean reverence for the pure and absolute order that this habit of measurement eventually revealed.

So yes, Plato talked about the Good that was beyond measure. A lot of theistic talk resulted from the realisation that counting also implied the infinite or uncountable. A sharp definition of what is natural is always going to produce as its own reaction - the folk now saying the highest rung of the ladder is the next one just beyond reach. The supernatural.

The "important place" is about finding some place to ground claims of authority that transcend ordinary human affairs. If I want to tell you what to do - constrain your behaviour for my benefit - then I have to situate the ultimate power on the other side of the finite, put it beyond your reach.

So what is important about the beyond measure? It can't be challenged. It is not testable. It takes away your ability to argue alternatives.

If you want another perspective, you might consider Robert Ulanowicz "ascendency" as a information measure of higher purpose - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendency

Ulanowicz was part of the same biosemiotic crowd - Pattee, Rosen, Salthe. But also a convinced Catholic and so motivated to find a theistic spin where he could.

Ascendency is derived using mathematical tools from information theory. It is intended to capture in a single index the ability of an ecosystem to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size.

One way of depicting ascendency is to regard it as “organized power”, because the index represents the magnitude of the power that is flowing within the system towards particular ends, as distinct from power that is dissipated willy-nilly.

So he was defining a way of measuring the actual negentropic purpose that an organic system could evolve. A measure of action or information in terms of what was meaningful to an organism, as opposed to the simply entropic waste heat that also has to accompany that.

In mathematical terms, ascendency is the product of the aggregate amount of material or energy being transferred in an ecosystem times the coherency with which the outputs from the members of the system relate to the set of inputs to the same components (Ulanowicz 1986). Coherence is gauged by the average mutual information shared between inputs and outputs (Rutledge et al. 1976).

The key as ever is he did derive an equation so that real systems could actually be measured.

And he claimed results....

Originally, it was thought that ecosystems increase uniformly in ascendency as they developed, but subsequent empirical observation has suggested that all sustainable ecosystems are confined to a narrow “window of vitality” (Ulanowicz 2002). Systems with relative values of ascendency plotting below the window tend to fall apart due to lack of significant internal constraints, whereas systems above the window tend to be so “brittle” that they become vulnerable to external perturbations.

This shows scientists do take systems causality seriously and can advance our understanding in terms of actual equations, actual experiments.

Physics provides the base with its foundational work on the equivalence of entropy and information. Biology and neuroscience are now exploiting that by using more complex measures like mutual information or free energy in their new theories.

Because integration in every other phenomena that consciousness apprehends (i.e. the physical events) is radically different in its non-qualitativeness. — schopenhauer1

But that is back to the circularity of how you choose define mind in opposition to matter. You can only arrive at your dualistic conclusion because it is the distinction you have already assumed. Mind and matter are separate, therefore mind and matter are separate, amounts to a tautology, not an argument.

I agree that this dualistic framing is socially acceptable. It is standard cultural practice. But you have to come up with something better than demonstrating that the customary definition of "the world" leaves no room for "experience".

Probably worse that that, your actual claim here winds up being contradictory of your now professed pan-experientialism. Somehow you know that material integration/emergence is non-qualitative. And yet even Whitehead seems to accept that the claims about differentiation and integration reflect what are usually considered material descriptions of the world. He is talking about the physical structure of rocks vs the physical structure of bodies with brains. Otherwise how could we tell a rock isn't integrating information, binding together occasions of experience? Are we to believe its apparent material structure might say its not, but its mental aspects are somehow doing just that despite the materiality not going along on that correlational ride?

This is what is so ghastly about panpsychism. It falls apart under the slightest prod like a mouldering corpse. But ah well.

You use the word, integration, how is this not magical fiat where you are getting quality from quantity? — schopenhauer1

Jeez. You asked me to comment on Whitehead. I just agreed that he at least did argue for standard systems causality - emergent organisation or the birth of autonomy as the result of a symmetry-breaking process of differentiation and integration.

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity

But I did say how it can't explain it: — schopenhauer1

I'm not following your logic. Didn't you cite Whitehead employing a systems-type emergence argument to explain why rocks aren't conscious and yet brains are? One has something extra the other lacks - global constraint to organise and create generalised integration.

So given a basic acceptance of this approach to causation, why can't experience be a materially emergent property?

Yes, I hear you claim a categorical dualistic difference. But I am waiting for your argument that supports that as the necessary conclusion.

Ah, smug snootyism, one of the most satisfying and least valuable philosophies. — T Clark

Zing! (Y)

Panexperientialism. — schopenhauer1

Right then. So how do you deal with the criticism that claiming agency at the level of particles is causal overdeterminism? What use is there in granting choice to particles unless there is evidence of them making choices?

There is this basic problem of claiming a mental aspect to materiality as a brute fact. We can certainly track material being a long way down. But mental being seems to disappear as soon as the complexity of a neural modelling relation with the world disappears. You haven't yet said why emergence can't explain this, only that you "can't see it yourself".

What I said - what I spelled out, in plain view, and plain English, was this: — Wayfarer

I agree with much of that. But you prefaced it with:

That is true, as far as it goes, but it is not the final say. I am working towards the idea that the 'domain of meaning' really is independent of the physical world. It's not dependent on it for its reality, and it doesn't arise on account of anything that happens on the physical level; it's not the product of evolution (which everything is supposed to be). — Wayfarer

So the key difference is that I am arguing that all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative. Thou shalt entropify. Life and mind cannot escape that general constraint (even though there is plenty of freedom to invent within that restriction).

So what bothers me ... is that the universe remains basically dumb stuff. — Wayfarer

It bothers you. You find "dumbness" to be personally distasteful. An imperative to disorder seems a literal waste of time.

I'm in the spirit of facing facts. Let the answers play out as they may. What is it that nature is telling us when we listen closely with an open mind?

Think about your example in terms of Chinese Whispers. What are we to make of the information loss that results from the message - "three-masted Greek boat this PM" - being transmitted down a chain of speakers?

yet you retain the overall materialist view of there being nothing intentional, there being no kind of 'telos'. — Wayfarer

Saying the telos of existence is dissipatory is not saying there is no telos. It is just mentioning a telos which you have some personal distaste for.

I could say this a billion more times and you will still pretend that's the first time you've even heard me say it.

Why is that exactly?

No need to get huffy. — Wayfarer

Just trying to rouse you from your dogmatic slumbers.

What I observed was that, the same information can be represented in a limitless variety of forms and media. So given a meaningful sentence or proposition, if the meaning stays the same, and the representation changes, then the meaning and the representation are separate things. — Wayfarer

Yes of course. Translation is possible. But information theory is about boiling down to the limits of that possibility. At some ultimate level, information gets grainy. You have to worry about whether "all the information" is being converted. And so you have to be able to count information in some physically rooted fashion.

It was a major discovery of the last century that this can be done in a definite fashion. Information and physics can be two sides of the same coin. They can be defined by the same equation, or system of measurement.

You want to talk about the meaning of information and not its mechanics. Its semantics rather than its syntax.

That's fine. There is that conversation to be had. But you can't then employ that to side-swipe the physics of information in passing. You can't pretend to be talking about Landauer and proving his kind wrong by simply making the argument "hey guys, there is also this".

As I argued, you are just wanting to talk about the issue of semantics or interpretance in unplaced fashion. If you can get away with that, you hope no one will notice you pushing meaning away into Platonia. You can make subjectivity safe from reductionist attack.

But science is laying a necessary foundation for a semiotic approach to the fundamental questions about reality. Ignore that if you choose. However that is what is going on.

That's really a form of dualist argument - that the 'information layer' and the 'physical layer' are different things. — Wayfarer

Computers are literal dualism. They are machines. A dualism of hardware and software is the feature that is designed into them. The divorce between the physics and the information is made as perfect as we can humanly imagine.

Then Landauer comes along to remind where this mechanised dualism encounters its material limits. Hey guys, we can create information at no entropic cost (as entropy itself produces some negentropy "accidentally"). But then to erase that information - reverse an accident with deliberate intent - requires us to pay back on this loan with interest. The whole deal has to wind up producing more frictional heat than useful work.

I also don't see how you can have the 'epistemic cut' without an implied duality between the semantic and the physical level. Is what you're trying to establish, a bridge from the physical to the semantic? — Wayfarer

Hell's bells. What do you think the epistemic cut is other than the means to then build a bridge?

To describe something, you have to step off that something. And the epistemic cut is how a division between "self" and "world" is actually established so that "acts of description" become even a thing.

Out of curiosity: How do you generally feel about holistic systems like Hegel's, Schelling's, or Goethe's? Mostly organicism, naturaphiloshopie - the world as a macroanthropos. — Marty

For me, it is a move towards the correct organic causal logic, but then still mired in the ultimate goal of making religion and romanticism come out right. There is a desire to argue for an ultimately transcendental or supernatural response in answer to the apparent brute materialism and personal meaninglessness of Enlightenment physics.

So a tick for the analysis of general causal structure. But then a problem with an unwillingness to just go with the immanence, the naturalism, the self-contained organisational principle, that that causal structure is pointing directly at.

Yes. Mechanical reductionism deserves a good bashing. That is a big motivation for any holist or organicist.

But I trust to science to be clever enough to get to where it needs to go. If science is the one that has the biggest problem with reductionism, it is also in the best position to fix that.

And that isn't an anti-philosophical stance. It simply reflects the reality that science drives any progress in metaphysics these days.

No, I think a switch is different to a mark. A switch does something; a mark means something. — Wayfarer

You are hoping to get away with ordinary language use definitions in the discussion of information theory. Nice.

Feel free to walk right past the careful argument I just made ... the one you claimed your OP was about in citing Landauer on the very issue of the difference between creating information, and creating and erasing information.

Really. The hypocrisy.

It seems to me you can't avoid the element of intentionality or the requirement for a 'meaning maker', if you like. — Wayfarer

I made a careful argument for how a meaning maker is implied by the possibility of there being that next level of meaning. So the physics itself creates the potential for the physics-free in the very fact that dynamism has its limit.

The fact that entropy flows downhill in the Cosmos means that any movement uphill - no matter how accidental it might seem - is negentropic. To the degree that physics is one thing, its "other" is also made counterfactually possible. And if the possible turns out to be the useful - as it is in the case of dissipative structure - then it becomes "Platonically" necessary that it develop as a further habit of nature. Negentropic order must arise if it increases the downhill flow.

Sure, you can just ignore the fact that I made this argument. That is normal human behaviour. I've explained the semiotics of that. But still. Philosophy is about dealing with arguments in systematic fashion. That is suppose to be the special thing about it.

So get back to me when you have something less vague to say than "seems to me that you can't avoid....".

I think you are trying to avoid answering hard questions. How can something be functional in the reality "out there" if there isn't some degree of truth associated with it? — Harry Hindu

I don't like the term "truth". I would use the pragmatic term, justified belief.

Truth is about an absolute claim of certainty. Pragmatism accepts that knowledge can only make claims about a minimisation of uncertainty.

So sure, you can talk about "some degree of truth" as your way of acknowledging the pragmatic approach to knowledge. Truth is the absolute limit. In practice, we can only approach that state of perfect certainty with arbitrary closeness. In the end, you are saying the same thing.

But I prefer to say that upfront and directly. I don't say a truth is (almost) certain. I say the uncertainty of a belief has been measurably minimised.

I am hardly avoiding any hard question. I am stressing the pragmatically provisional nature of any claims to truth or absolute certainty.

And there is no denial of a "world out there" to be read into this epistemic position. It is pragmatism, not idealism.

Look at your post. It is an explanation of reality itself, not the virtual reality in your head, but the one out there, and it's relationship with the virtual reality in your head, right? — Harry Hindu

You are complaining that I am concealing the very point I have attempted to make. I am talking about the triadic sign relation of pragmatism/semiotics. So yes, it is taken as basic that there are three players in the equation.

But the wrinkle is that this is a more generic level of analysis than just the usual me/sign/world relation of indirect realism or standard issue psychology. Sure, for us humans and other creatures with complex nervous systems, it is all about the "subjective self" and the "objective world". We are just talking about useful reality models mediated by a sign relation. Nothing to scare any realists. The world is actually out there ... just as the self is actually in here. >:O

LOL. That should give the naive realist game away surely? It is always just concealed dualism when it comes to its own theory of truth.

Anyway, the triadic sign relation is more generic than just our functional psychological relationship with an actual, real, material, completely physical, world. It doesn't even need to care about there being a real world as it is paying attention to the prior thing which is the very manufacturing of a state of information division. It is talking about how "selves" and "worlds" arise as the two complementary aspects of a sign relation.

Which is why Peircean epistemology can become a model of ontological being itself. It drills down to the very causality by which self~world could arise as a self-organising symmetry breaking.

Let's say that I associate red apples as being delicious and green apples as disgusting. In this instance, I'm relating a color to one of my subjective experiences. — Harry Hindu

Look at how you are having to treat the "self" as real here. You are having to reify this little person in your head doing the looking at the representations, experiencing the qualia. Already an inadequate ontology is going badly wrong, headed off down the path labelled infinite homuncular regress.

It is tough to give up the habit of talking about a reified self at the back of it all. But that is what you need to be able to do.

What is actually going is a process of interpretance where it is the world that is being reified in sign. The world is being rendered as "qualia". And then the "self" doing that is also interpretive reification. The system is taking its own actions as a sign that there must be a homuncular observer sitting in back of it, doing its job.

Of course, "we" never see this "self" who is doing the real experiencing. But we hear people invoking it by name the whole time. People are always talking in terms of I, me, you, we, them, us. People even give each other actual names. So we encounter the signifiers of selfhood constantly. No wonder the self really comes to seem to exist .... like a faux real object. Rocks and selves just become part of reality's collection of objects. If we doubt the existence of "a self", we only have to look in a mirror.

The apples aren't really different colors, except in my head, and they are delicious and disgusting only in my head. But the apples do have different properties that cause a different interaction with the same wavelength of light that gets reflected into my eye and processed by the eye-brain system, which results in me seeing different colors, or interacts with my taste buds and nervous system that results in a taste of deliciousness or distaste for me. — Harry Hindu

Isn't that what I plainly said? The world is what it is. Then we represent it in a way that is useful. What we want to see is reality as it looks through the eyes of our purposes.

Colour sensation arose as a fast route to object discrimination. As with all other sensory processing, it is about hardwiring for pop-out recognition. If you see the world in black and white - simple luminance contrast - then there is quite an information load in sifting out the million shades of grey. Of course you can do it - there is a lot of black and white hardwired pop-out mechanism, like Mach bands, to draw quick and sharp contrast lines around every boundary, group features in coherently guessed fashion.

And yet still, adding sharp hue contrasts takes object perception to another level of quickfire automatic discrimination. You just look at fruit in a bowl and each different object just leaps out as the colour processing removes a vast amount of borderline ambiguity. No one could confuse green for red, or yellow for blue. I mean it is literally impossible to see greenish red or yellowish blue due to the opponent channel processing principles of our primate visual pathways.

Even our own minds don't have properties of color independent of looking at the world. Even closing your eyes, you end up looking at the inside of your eyelids, which is the dark side of your eyelids, which is why it appears black. — Harry Hindu

But I don't see black. I see the photic rustle of retinal neurons seeking missing input. I get the vague impression of swirling lights and coloured dots that are my own endogenous baseline brain activity. So actual phenomenology confirms the constructedness of visual experience. Our brains are so hungry to make a visual world that they will restlessly imagine colours and patterns even in the complete dark. That is, unless we stare into the dark and interpret it as black, ignoring this photic rustle that wants to get in the way of our "reality experiencing".

In this sense, light is a cause of color as much as the existence of an eye-brain system is. — Harry Hindu

The real world might be the cause of our having a way of modelling it. But there is no direct reason why the phenomenology of colour experience should reflect the reality of wavelength energy the way it does.

The only physical requirement or constraint is that the system works. That the signs we form do an effective job of achieving the basic goal - which is quick and sure acts of discrimination. The cause of colour is that colours are "completely obvious". They do the best job of removing visual scene ambiguity. The information we need is just going to pop out.

How is it that your mind has a certain quality, structure, attribute, or property that is persistent and follows certain logical rules that allows it to be functional, but everything else doesn't? If everything else is just a function of the mind, then that would include other people, therefore solipsism would be the case. — Harry Hindu

You keep wheeling out an argument built to attack idealism against my argument based on pragmatism.

I'm not seeking to deny there is a world.

I'm pointing out the degree to which both self and world are an imaginative co-construction - a semotic interpretive relation. The actual world - the Kantian thing in itself - in fact drops out of the picture for us. We end up having as little do with it as we can .... as that then means we are completely plugged into it only in a way that matters most to "us".

Hence why signs are about the usefulness of information loss. Mastery over the world is demonstrated by the growth of our capacity to ignore it. Signs are how we deal with the world only to the extent "we" need to care.

What I'm saying is that there is a two-way street where information flows from the outside to the inside and information flows from the inside (projected by intent) to the outside. — Harry Hindu

I thought I was saying that. You only think I can't have being saying that because you have labelled me as an idealist, even a closet solipsist. Your personal system of sign has been imposed on the reality that is the pragmatist me.

Another good illustration of how this works. :)

The information crosses the boundary between your VR and the real world, back into my VR. If I make your post into what is functional to my purposes, how can you ever expect express yourself at all. How is it that language works at all? — Harry Hindu

Yeah. Minds need to be connected by physical symbols. And a lot of energy gets expended in transferring information. Especially because another mind really only wants to see the world in the way to which it has become accustomed. The other mind always wants an easy life where it can pretty much ignore other minds and deal with anything they might say as a labelled, pre-packaged position that can be given a quick tick. Yes for true, no for false. Trip the memory switch flag and move along.

And how can a symbol be understood as a 'physical configuration' at all? The whole point about symbols is that they are abstract, which is exactly why meaning can be transferred via symbols so easily. Conflating 'meaning' with 'physical dispositions of parts' seems very question-begging to me. — Wayfarer

Sign or symbol starts where physics leaves off. A physical mark can "mean anything" only because that mark has zero dynamics. There is, in short, an epistemic cut. The normal physics of dissipative decay are suspended. And so the semiotics of information can then arise. A mark can be used to mean anything you like. The mark becomes the coin of this newly emergent realm.

And when I say mark, in practice we are talking about a switch. A binary mark.

I can scratch a mark on a rock - something tough like granite. It meets the requirement of having zero physics (for all practical purposes). I could go away a million years and come back and find it again (given some weathering). So the effective lack of dissipative physics creates the possibility of memory. The mark is timeless, changeless. It is not even located if I can make that exact same mark anywhere I go.

But also we want to be able to erase marks. And just as easily and physics-free as we can create them. That is really getting into a realm of pure information.

Thus the ideal of a binary switch. We have a reversible mark. Just flip the switch. That takes a little bit of effort each time you do it. But otherwise, it is physics-free. The mark (or marks - 0 or 1) are effectively eternal and placeless. Well, there is a material cost in manufacturing the switch itself. But then it is as outside normal physics as a chisel mark on a lump of granite.

So we can see that information relates fundamentally to a zeroing of physical dynamics. Information exists to the degree we can eliminate the ordinary material dissipation that reality seeks to impose. And yet, by the same token, there is some fundamental scale of connection. A switch has to be made. The switch has to be flipped. Some minimum and constant energetic price must be paid to create this parallel abstract or physics-free world (constant as we can't have the cost of switching switches become a final physical fact impinging on the freedom to create and erase states of memory or sign).

And now note how the fact of going physics free is the cause of a crisp digitality, a binary logic. To be able to create and erase a mark freely, at zero cost, gives rise to on and off, yes and no, either or. Definite counterfactuality is the unphysical possibility that arises. The state of a switch virtually demands an explanation. An intelligible choice is implied.

So you don't need to start with a "meaning-maker". The fact that the mark, and then the erasable mark, stand as the limit on ordinary dissipative physics means that an interpreter is implied by the switch's very existence. It is ready-made for interpretation. It is only going to be an accident or two before interpretance actually gets going ... if that closes a feedback loop with the physical world where the interpretance is functional.

If the use of the switch is something that increases the physical dynamics of the world - such that there is spare physics to build switches and flip their states - then interpretative states of switching are going to evolve.

This is of course the story at the level of biological, neurological and linguistic information. But your question has shifted to that of personal or autonomous meaning. And so I'm challenging your use of "abstract".

Yes, to go from a physics-determined world to a physics-free world involves abstraction. It is physics that must be abstracted away. Yet still, we can see the impossibility of a complete disconnection. There is a minimal energy dissipation requirement to create and run a set of erasable marks or switches. And then more crucially, the evolution of interpretive systems - systems with meanings - can only happen if those systems are increasing the entropy of the worlds they arise in. There is this basic requirement that shapes the interpretive system from the get-go ... if it is to get going.

So while one can marvel at the freedom of the human mind to spin any kind of fiction, or entertain apparently unlimited personalised meanings and abstracted notions, the whole show remains rooted in the real world physics. In the long run or on the microscale, it comes back to paying for this unphysical freedom. You won't get far scientifically or philosophically in pretending it isn't.

So have you decided what you are defending? Is it correlationalism or panexperientialism?

You are missing the point. Yes, the mind needs to relate to the world functionally and so its beliefs need to be "true". But that correctness is in relation to the mindful organism's purposes, not the truth of the thing in itself. So what we perceive are the signs of reality. We want to make "our" reality - our umwelt - easy to see.

So you talk about the information contained in cause and effect. If wavelength energy is cause, why should it look like hue as its effect? Or why should a fragment of an organic molecule smell like a rose? Why should vibrating air sound like tinkling or grating noise?

The way we read information into the world seems pretty arbitrary if we are to take your simple cause and effect view that demands perception is somehow veridical of how the physics really is, rather than as the useful way we interpret it - the way we make the world easy to see in terms of our evolved sets of interest.

Oh that's right, you are going to follow the Daniel Dennett routine of denying that mental states exist, but then never explaining the illusion itself. — schopenhauer1

As usual, when you are under pressure to defend your claims, you divert to ad homs like eliminative materialism. Telling.

I don't see how "reality is information" necessarily entails idealism. — Harry Hindu

It doesn't. That is my point. And so it is ironic that some scientist are going overboard with the idealism.

Minds process information, which has to exist prior to being processed. — Harry Hindu

That is where I would disagree. Sure it is the usefully simplistic view of what goes on. But my semiotic approach says mind shapes the signs its treats as "information". Out there in the real material world, there is only radiant energy with some distribution of frequencies. The "mind" or brain then does its processing and understands that in terms of colours. It produces its own meaningful symbol that then stands in a mediating relation with the physics.

The primate mind in particular can see the red fruit that is ripe vividly against the backdrop of the green foliage that is of less interest. Well, there has to be some kind of evolutionary explanation for why our primate ancestors dropped a retinal pigment while living their nocturnal existence and then hastily regrew one once they started wandering about the landscape during the day.

So the mind is a virtual reality - reality as it is meaningful in terms of our interests. We don't just mindlessly process the physical information that is "out there". From the get go, we are symbolising the possibilities of that world in terms that are functional for us.

This means that when physicists talk about information and biologists talk about information, it isn't exactly the same.

But then, if we know how it is not the same, that is how we can know the way it is then the same. A mindless theory of information can be the basis for grounding the higher order mindful one.

Ah religion. Aren't you always popping up every 10 seconds to tell us it's a "just so" story like science?

Yep. The story has to be told in a way that slips God and soul-stuff in through the back door even when talking about causality from a systems perspective. The Church was hardly going to take the set-back of the Enlightenment lying down.

Before I answer your questions, can you first read the quote I had earlier to T Clark about Whitehead's process philosophy. I'd like to know your take. — schopenhauer1

Sure. In strangulated language, Whitehead is making the essential systems argument. The whole shapes its parts, the parts (re)construct that whole. You have a causal interaction in which the material system forms a functional relation. A tree turns photons (as free energy) into some material structure that is meaningful to "it" as an autonomous lifeform. And you can situate that tree within the physical world where that also makes sense. A tree is like a more sophisticated tornado in that it is a form that survives as entropy "blows through it".

So Whitehead is trying to employ a systems ontology. We even get a nod towards triadicism.

The tree is the global entity that embodies a purpose - it is the general habit that "prehends". The photon energy is then the "datum" - the external material flow it seeks to regulate. And that photon energy gets turned into the material structure needed to compose the tree, maintain that regulatory structure.

So you have the basic causal logic that describes a hierarchically-organised system - the kind of structure that emerges dissipatively in nature as a material process.

But then Whitehead just pastes "mental" over everything in unwarranted fashion. Everything gets labelled as "experiential".

As I've said, you take it obvious that the "mental" exists. You know that because you believe you know that there is also this other thing called the "material". The material only explains half of reality - by definition. The mental is the half that it does not explain - again by definition.

So there is this baked-in ontology to be blindly applied. The existence of a dualism is taken at face value. The game therefore becomes to shoehorn that division back into nature at some fundamental level. And Whitehead plays that game. No need to justify that photons have experience. They must do once ontic dualism is presumed.

The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; — schopenhauer1

Here is the essence of the systems view. The fundamental dichotomy it is talking about is differentiation~integration. So local degrees of freedom in interaction with global states of constraint.

As a causal logic, it might be hard to get your head around. But it is basic to neuroscience understanding. It was what Gestalt psychology demonstrated. As a process, awareness is about doing both together. Integrating and differentiating. Awareness is the high contrast "representational" state that forms by lumping and splitting at the same time. The sharper the supporting detail, the more vivid the coherent whole.

So yes, the functional logic is all about this interaction between two complementary directions of action - integration and differentiation, or the emergence of constraints and degrees of freedom. Normal causal analysis gets hung up on wanting to argue "either/or". But systems causality is irreducibly "both".

However it is a functional logic that is agnostic about whether it is applied either to the "mental" or the "physical". It is prior to the kinds of dualistic pronouncements that reductionist thought is wont to make.

You have already decided reality is ontically divided into two disconnected categories. But I say wind that back. Start again and show your working out. Consider that the problem here is a product of your analytic tool kit. There could be a holistic understanding of causality - one that is triadic, and indeed semiotic - which avoids the strife that dualism creates.

So Whitehead is annoying just for his strangulated language. But he is grasping after a systems causality - just like many others were in his day. However he then just slapped dualism all over this half-articulated picture.

Which of course is why he is remembered. Giving into dualism like that suits many folk's agendas, especially the theistic and anti-science ones.

But in so doing, it also risks losing any relationship with reality. That is why Jim Baggott's book, referenced in the above blog post, is sub-titled 'Farewell to Reality' — Wayfarer

Of course I agree that an idealistic understanding is just as bad as a materialistic one. I'm just pointing out how many physicists are indeed "going over to the other side" and taking information as the literal basis of being. You have scientists actually saying they believe the Universe actually is a hologram, rather than merely like a hologram.

It is the new Platonism.

But I'm still pushing the middle road metaphysics of semiotics. So it is important to that project that we are seeing matter and information being formally granted equal causal weight. Or even more importantly, that we can actually measure both sides of the epistemic cut in the same coin. We can establish the symmetry relation which connects them ... and thus the symmetry relation which pan-semiosis can break.

Actually my point is really rather prosaic. It is simply this: that ideas are not material, but real in their own terms. They are not composed of material units of any kind, and can't be derived from physics, but exist in their own right, and on their own terms. — Wayfarer

Yes. You are concerned with semantics. And from there, with minds, observers, interpretance, spirit, values, etc.

This is hardly a prosaic concern. I agree that even semiotics is not much cop unless in the end it really has something to say about complex lived experience.

But biological life certainly looks well explained by biosemiosis. That is killing the accidentalism of Darwininan reductionism as surely as it is killing the vitalism of spiritualism or theism. Both the brute materialist and the brute idealist has lost out as we come to understand life as a semiotic process.

So now we are seeing physics and cosmology also turning semiotic - or at least building up an information theoretic position to balance the materialistic one. And mind science is also turning semiotic in overt fashion (it always was, but now it has better "physical models" as a result of advances in information theory/thermodynamic theory).