If an atom decays, that is an event that changes the history of the world in definite, digital, fashion. Existence will never be the same again having received that message. It will be that bit - or bit - colder feeling. ;)

But 'information' has many meanings, it is not as if there is a unitary thing, force or power called 'information' which serves a role analogous to (say) 'the atom'. — Wayfarer

You miss the point. Information was given rigorous mathematical meaning by Shannon. It was defined in terms of message uncertainty or information entropy. So a physical result was derived from psychological argument.

And yes, it is obvious that Shannon information in fact stripped out the semantics so as to wind up talking only about its physical signs. He created a universal way to count bits. What any bit meant became absolute general - or rather, it just stood for a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no, a presence or an absence. It stood for a bare metaphysical strength dichotomy - a difference that makes a difference in the most absolute possible fashion.

Thus having stripped out semantics from a theory of information - or reduced that semantics to its ultimate abstract form - information then allows science to build semantics back into its descriptions of nature in controlled and explicit fashion. Useful models are possible.

You have to understand how science builds its tools to understand the metaphysical implications of the new scientific results that then follow.

To protest that "information has many meanings, some of them very colloquial or mentalistic" is missing the point.

When Mr. Apo - "symmetry" "constraint" "triadic" - Krisis accuses you of jargon mongering. You couldn't make this up if you tried. — StreetlightX

It is not the individual words so much - although plenty of them are way more obscure than talk of symmetry or constraints. It is the dense thickets of abstractions with no pauses for illustrative supporting examples.

And on top of that, the overall hesitant tone where a concern is introduced in one paragraph, only for us to be told that wasn't really it, here is the new real concern. Your posts unfold as a series of self-corrections arriving at no resolved point. Clearly you want to make some thread of an idea come out right, but all you can do is point off in a variety of directions as you meander in a maze of PoMo mutterings.

You see my problem:

But the argument is not so much that life itself becomes a commodity but that it has been co-opted into circuits of speculative finance. — StreetlightX

The key distinction is that of temporal orientation: — StreetlightX

The crux of it is that this is exactly the same commodity form as debt. — StreetlightX

In other words this cooption of life into the circuits of speculative finance converges with debt as the high-point of capitalist accumulation — StreetlightX

But even this is not what I'm super concerned with. My real interest lies in the collapse of temporal categories occasioned by such developments: by tethering calculations of risk in the present to the quite literally incalculable speculative promises/fears of the future, almost every and any 'preventative' action is licenced. — StreetlightX

Essentially what is at stake is a temporal 'state of exception' in which the boundaries between the calculable and the incalculable are effaced such that there is cartre blanche to do anything whatsoever in the name of the incalculable. — StreetlightX

these myths don't just spring up out of nowhere - the point is the chart the mechanisms that have brought it into being, and have allowed it to catch on. — StreetlightX

In this tangle of words, what you seem to be trying to argue is that there is this thing called speculative finance. And "human biology" is being sucked into its voracious maw as another asset to be monetised. Neoliberalism is a mechanism that allows every aspect of life to made tradable - and thus to be traded away in a fashion that inevitably favours the few, disadvantages the many, even though the political promise is that a free market floats all boats.

So on neoliberalism and why it is a danger, I'm sure we agree. It is a routine analysis as you say.

And on making human biology a tradable asset, well yes I guess so if you mean medical biotechnology and gene engineering. But I asked how does that add a specific form or precariousness to our individual lives (as you seemed to be suggesting in your tortured prose)?

Why would ordinary folk find that an existential threat? Instead, surely new medicines are a bright promise. Start-up companies generally excite the imagination. A generalised use of biological information has no obvious personal implications.

So in regards to the Precariat - the modern world of uncertain employment - you have made no logical connection here.

Then working back to your notion of speculative finance, this looks to conflate blind risk taking and complex risk-removing behaviour.

As you also acknowledge, financial instruments like derivatives are designed simply to amplify economic actions. So they can work in both directions. They can allow economic actors to take bigger leveraged risks. Or they can be used to insure a future outcome against risk.

Of course again there are the large and now painfully obvious shortcomings of permitting financial complexity. It creates a system that is easy to game - especially if you get the politicians to take away the market regulators.

So the economic system in theory might aim to be just - neoliberalism is not intrinsically malign as your argument appears to demand - but the Wall St elite got the safeguards removed so they could screw over nations of home buyers and even whole small nations like Greece and Iceland.

So when it comes to "speculative finance", this becomes just a pejorative term in your hands - a way to win the argument without clearly making one. It is easy to read your uncertainty in applying it. Sometimes you are talking about malign neoliberalism, sometimes about an elite of individual economic actors. Sometimes you are talking about risk-avoidance that went wrong (like CDOs), sometimes about speculative asset bubbles - overly-optimistic risk taking.

You seem aware of the variety of economic and political issues you are trying to shoehorn into a single bogeyman term - speculative finance - but when called on it, you get pissy rather than attempting to mount some further justification or clarification.

So these things need tying together properly:

1) speculative finance as one unitary force.
2) human biology as a new tradable asset class.
3) neoliberalism being inherently a social evil rather than simply a neutral mechanism.
4) the above adding up to an actual source of existential precariousness in the Precariat.

"Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in a manner which attempts to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here).

Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error. — Galuchat

What you are missing is that it is the triadic causality of semiosis that pan-semiosis is generalising.

And I think you don't really get that aspect of Peircean semiosis. This is not surprising if your knowledge of semiosis - as a metaphysical structure - has been shaped by the "Turku crowd". They were pretty mentalistic in understanding semiotics as a theory of meaning making. They weren't working at a level of absolutely abstract metaphysical generalisation.

It was US hierarchy theorists who could appreciate the mathematical bones of Peirce in this fashion.

Peirce himself clearly felt his semiosis applied at the physically and cosmologically general level. He was a scientist - summa cum laude in chemistry at Harvard - so was up with the thermodynamics of his era.

So to the degree that you accept Peirce's triadic scheme, as opposed to Saussure's dyadic one, then it simply can't be a category error. Peirce himself said it wasn't.

So this is the semiotics of dissipative structures? The water sees the channel as a symbol, and interprets the meaning of this sign as "go this way". — Metaphysician Undercover

You aren't going to be able to follow this as you are insisting on a mentalistic reading of anything I say. But anyway, the river channel is an example of history acting informationally. A whole bunch of individual erosive events in the past add up to tell a story about which way to go. The current flow of water doesn't interact with that past directly, in some material fashion, but it does interact with that past indirectly in seeing the current state of the channel as an informational constraint on its possibilities.

So this is a Bergsonian metaphysics if you like. Or at least what he was on about with his cone of memory. :)

Constraint = information = history. It is the difference between background and foreground, context and event, when it comes to analysing causality.

Then why this is not just metaphysics, but physics, is because science knows how to count both contextual information and material entropy in the same coin these days. At the Planck scale, the two kinds of "construction material" are equivalent and inter-convertible.

This duality allows for powerful new mathematical ideas, like the holographic principle. We have a second way of describing - and more importantly, measuring - reality. We can now get exact results that relate the contextual causality of global constraints to the efficient causality of local material events.

If you don't follow modern physics, you likely have no idea how important this new approach is. But it is why fundamental physics is attempting to rebuild itself on thermodynamic principles like entropy, dissipation and emergence.

One doesn't have to label this pan-semiotics. Physics calls it information theory, holography, thermal, etc.

But also, there is the usual confused variety of metaphysical interpretations of what the discovered duality of information and matter might actually imply. Some folk have taken off with ideas like digital physics - the belief that reality is a literal computation of some kind. Others talk as if the informational boundaries, the event horizons, are the new fundamental reality and all the material events they encode on their branes or holographic surfaces are just now ghostly fictions.

So the new physics works. And its metaphysics is up for grabs, just as was the case for quantum interpretations.

My view is that Peircean pan-semiosis offers the best metaphysical framework for interpreting what this new physics is actually struggling to say about reality.

So you can scoff at the triviality of the river in its channel example. But instead, why not think about it carefully. All those little bouncing H2O molecules knocking off one another. And then the mysterious invisible hand that is their collective past. The events of the moment are being shaped by the information which represents the context of a history. But also each molecule has the chance to rewrite the history of the river bed.

You have two levels of action to account for. Plus the further fact that they form an interaction. Modern physics has the mathematics to formalise these accounts. Peircean semiosis provides the generalised triadic metaphysics which offers the best interpretation.

But if you prefer the idea that reality is a hologram, or a simulation, go for it.

You are simply highlighting how your abstracted jargon conceals from even yourself the huge logical gaps you are leaving in the wake of your purple prose and frantic cut and paste.

For instance here, if you weren't suggesting the deliberate fostering of a sense of crisis, then why would tying current investments to future returns be automatically a bad thing? Especially when the argument you want to make is that it is merely a vague or indistinct thing.

As I point out, the biotech bubble would be the product of investor optimism. It has nothing to do with debt economics or financialised balance sheets as such. So why - even inadvertently - would it create some dramatic sense of precariousness?

If you tried to write out your clever musings in plain language, they would just fall apart as there is nothing substantive by way of logical links to hold them together. Sorry if it upsets you to have it pointed out.

Hence the widespread 'need' to enact legislation - all around the Western world - that violates fundamental rights in order to protect us from Godknowswhat impending, immanent, but incalculable risk of.... ???. A kind of permanent state of emergency, licenced by temporal collapse. The ubiquitous threat of 'terrorism', unsurprisingly finds a perfectly receptive audience in neoliberal societies. — StreetlightX

So at no point did you suggest anything about the fostering of a sense of crisis? Hmm.

Anyway, as usual you're singularly incapable of holding a discussion without turning it into some sort of dick measuring competition — StreetlightX

Perhaps if you posted a coherent argument it would go better for you. Have a go at writing out your OP in plain language without all the fancy words. And with proper examples to support your point at each turn. See how much sense you think it makes then.

In plain language, where is the promised account of how any of this impacts on the individual's relation to their own body?

How doesn't the biotech bubble impact in a way that makes me feel precarious about myself. Ditto GM crops? Ditto the financial games played on third world farmers?

If this wasn't written in such tortured prose, it would be clear that it is nothing more than a list of concerns with no logical connection.

Fostering a sense of crisis to be able to push through a political agenda is quite the opposite of creating the false market optimism on which speculative bubbles depend. That is just one example of how none of the dots connect here.

So sure, biotech is another bubble asset. But that isn't a "debt" issue.

The GFC was about turning debt into a tradable asset class. The claim was risk could be packaged to create financial instruments that performed like good old unexciting bonds (plus a percent). Biotech is a risky stock, an upfront gamble. You might be buying a future promise, but a naked risk one, not a financialised one that claims to remove the uncertainty in the return.

To confuse the two is financial illiteracy.

I think you need better examples of how biology is being financialised rather than just commodified. And then any actual example of that making folk feel a bodily precariousness of some personal form.

Perhaps you could explain this, because it appears to be the missing link which serves as the foundation of your metaphysics. How are sign relations inherent within a dissipative structure? I — Metaphysician Undercover

I said they were external, not internal. That would be the difference. The water of the river knows which way to go because a channel carved over time points the way downhill.

There are no hidden mysteries here. It is quite prosaic. Until you get into foundational physics with its talk of holographic event horizons or wavefunction collapses.

Of course all the idealists would support such a statement as this, but when pressed, you seem to withdraw it again. — Wayfarer

That is because the idealists want support for a substance ontology. Semiotics is about a metaphysics of emergent process.

My point is, disciplined introspection, such as that practiced by yogis, perfectly reveals the artificial or constructed nature of conscious awareness. — Wayfarer

But my view is that kind of thing is the most exquisitely artificial kind of practice of all. It is wildly unnatural. It takes introspection away from being just a pragmatic habit of social self-regulation and treats it as mystic experience.

I'm sure I already mentioned to you that I had zen training from a Buddhist monk as a kid living in the East. That was when I became personally clear that eastern mysticism was just as much bullshit as the western kind. I concluded it was simply mad posturing to mediate under the tropical sun when all you could hear was the cloud of malarial mosquitoes forming over your head and starting to make their buzzing descent.

Of course you won't agree with me there. But the idea of the stilled and wordless mind is against the neurocognitive facts.

(Or rather you will execute another bait and switch because you won't ever really make your own case, just carp about mine.)

What can I say, you can in the same breath deny the presence of substance while affirming the triadic relation as the substance. — javra

This systems approach is as old as Aristotle's hylomorphism. So no need to sound so put upon in a discussion on metaphysics,

Substance in a process philosophy view is an emergent limit on individuation. So yes, it is irreducibly triadic. It is the meat in the sandwich. You have formal/final cause and material/efficient cause in interaction. Substance is the emergent result of these two sources of cause - constraint vs potential - arriving at some steady state of balance or equilibrium.

Each side goes at it until the changes don't start to make a difference anymore and things look solid, or at least static enough to become a ground of further developments.

I admire the persistence with which you hope to trap me into a formula of words which you can then claim to interprete dualistically rather than triadically.

So I will just remind that I am happy with the idea that the personal exists because what else is it that I might hope to explain as being the emergent limit of a bio-social semiotic process here?

There has to be an I that experiences the power of his beliefs in terms of their measurable outcomes.

Or at least, that is the emergent structure one might observe in the blood and flesh creature successfully navigating its world via developed habits of interpretance that minimise the entropic uncertainty connecting his intentions to their results.

If you want to celebrate guys who can stick their arm in the sky until it withers and locks, go for it.

If you believe in levitating monks, present the evidence.

No point just promising me that you can upturn my arguments by suddenly presenting the supernatural abilities of those steeped in the exotic mysteries of the east.

Get on and show us what you got. Leave the really poor puns out of it. Flames that lame aren't even entertainment.

How do you justify its presence?

Do you need a reasoning based on personal awareness? Or can you justify it without any personal awareness? — javra

Huh? It forms awareness - biological, in the flow, extrospective awareness - into considered, rationally structured, introspective awareness.

You just did the usual thing of treating awareness as a substantial state - "personal awareness" - when I have explained that as the interaction between two levels of semiosis, the biological and the cultural.

A habit of interpretance is hardly nothing if it becomes the cause of everything.

Maybe you should slow down and actually think all this through some time, not just pile in in desperate and defensive fashion.

My question to you nevertheless remains: can there be epistemology sans awareness (quite importantly, entailing the awareness we all know to be via the experience of being first-person points of view)? — javra

That kind of awareness would have to be sociocultural - Peirce's community of reasoning thinkers.

So epistemology only exists in the form you mean - rational inquiry - if you grant the ontic reality of social level mind.

We each individually then become shaped by that culturally evolved habit - and rather assume we just are born as reasoning linguistic creatures. Even without words and the conceptual structures they encode, we would have the necessary ideas in want of expression.

So the ability to divide the world conceptually into first person and third person point of view - the fundamental epistemic cut of modern metaphysics - is not something that would ever arise within biological level individual consciousness.

It is an epistemology that emerged at a higher level than that particular level of awareness, even if it is the habit that now shapes all us who have been brought up educated to think that way.

So I asked the question, when does mind enter the picture, and the answer was, 'right at the beginning'. So I'm trying to pinpoint what 'mind' means, if it has been there 'right from the outset'; and it seems obvious to me that this has metaphysical implications which don't really fit within the naturalist paradigm. — Wayfarer

Maybe I'm being too complex for your tastes but I've explained a thousand times that I am working on two levels here.

There is good old ordinary semiosis which would just be the biology of the epistemic cut. Life and mind begin as soon a molecule can function as a message. And that is a physicalism based on information and dynamics.

Then the more speculative metaphysical project is the Peircean one of pan-semiosis where the Cosmos itself is understood as an interaction between information and dynamics.

You could have one without the other. So life and mind only needs to begin on Earth some 4 billion years ago in a hydrothermal vent. Or we could talk about how the Big Bang was semiotic in marking the first moment that differences could make a difference.

Material events - as in particle interactions - could start definitely happening and result in a developing temporal history. And that could be described as "mindful" in a theoretically useful fashion. Semiosis gives us a particular tool - an irreducibly triadic metaphysics - that allows us to formulate a new physicalism to replace the old reductionist one.

Psi research is the one I've had close contact with. I can speak to the sociology of that as science as it is in the field.

If you want to talk about yogis, I've only read the biofeedback research. So I know that science is happy to research these things. And it is possible to learn to control the autonomic nervous system - the involuntary smooth muscles of the body.

But then no one is that amazed by toddlers eventually learning not to shit their pants. I guess it's all context.

I'll state the same differently: do you justify the ontic presence of reasoning/maths/logos via awareness OR do you justify the ontic presence of awareness via reasoning/maths/logos? Of course reality is a perpetual conflux of both, but that's not the question. — javra

The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around. Epistemology also turns out to be ontology.

So semiotics starts off simply how humans (and lifeforms generally) make sense of the world. Then - ontically - the claim becomes that the Cosmos itself arises by the same "reasoning process". This is the pansemiotic hypothesis that Peirce dubbed objective idealism.

So for you, the world must be strictly divided into our epistemic view, and the ontic reality beyond.

Maths then sits in some curious Platonic realm. The philosophy of maths is torn over the question of whether maths pre-exists human thought and so is a realm to be discovered, or instead humans just construct convenient fictions. Maths is all a product of our contingent invention.

So for you, you speak for the conventional either/or framing. Either maths is an epistemic construction or a Platonic ontic reality. Them's your only two rational choices.

And I am taking the much more radical Peircean step of saying epistemology is onotology. The Cosmos is a form of mindfulness as much as a composition of materials. Maths then is the invariant structure that cannot help but emerge as the limit on chaotic or vague dynamics.

That is, the particular maths which centres on symmetries, or the groping after the maths of "pure invariance".

Again, I think it's more a matter of your view being supported by the kinds of ideas that the natural sciences are prepared to consider. Other schools of philosophy proceed according to different principles. — Wayfarer

I know that is bullshit as I've had close involvement with parapsychology research for instance. Science can afford to be open minded because it works. And sometimes investigation shows there really is nothing significant to report.

Stop asking for definitions and start listening to explanations.

A definitions based mindset is itself anti-pragmatic. It is key to the philosophy of science that definitions arise out the measurements that seem to make sense. Understanding emerges out of pragmatic interaction with the world. You can't impose understanding with some formula of words.

This is a basic fact of how language works. Any sentence is open to multiple interpretations. So if - like Galuchat - you develop an obsession with "the right definition", you have already lost the game. Understanding involves mastering a skill, a habit of thought, that reliably sees you always popping out on the right side of any particular speech act.

Definitions become a waste of breath if your goal is truly to arrive at some new state of understanding. You have to be able to live the words, not merely recite them as some kind of reverential incantation.

Now you appear to be talking about the basis for self-awareness. I know that I am a self because in modern human culture, that is a well-defined socio-linguistic construct. We are all taught the same habit of introspective self-regulation. We internalise a useful socially evolved habit where we understand our being in those very terms and do our level best to comply.

Check out anthropology and this vaunted Western sense of self - which really became crystallised as a the foundational myth of Socrates - is a reasonably new thing.

So I am careful to make a distinction between the usual conflated notion of consciousness as being inherently introspective - a view in which the self is already being seen - and an "extrospective" awareness which is the biological, pre-sociolinguistic, experience of the animal mind.

An animal just is a self. It is always acting from a selfish first person point of view. It sees a world, an umwelt, in which it's self is implicitly represented, not explicitly represented. It doesn't see itself experiencing that selfhood in a second order recursive fashion like we all learn to do.

Even the Hard Problem acolytes dismiss self consciousness as an easy problem. Anthropology and developmental psychology can explain it in mundanely comprehensible fashion.

So it is biological level extrospective awareness that is the scientific mystery. And then that is in turn already much less of a mystery because extrospection would produce a different kind of "feeling".

Schop, Wayfarer and the rest just presume an explicitly felt sense of self is intrinsic to consciousness. That is then the reason why they can't get their heads around an explanation which targets what it would feel like for "self" to be only an implicit and "unobserved" aspect of the flow of an umwelt - experience as an animal experiences it.

So just the experience or interpretance relation, no ghostly experiencer or interpreter.

Nope. I can only keep telling you that speaking of mindfulness as a noun rather than a verb is where folk always go wrong. If you assume mind to be a substantial state rather than a variety of process, then already you have painted yourself into an intellectual corner from which nothing will ever make sense.

Reason and observation. The usual combo of metaphysical speculation and scientific test.

Mind still continues to enter the scene. Even just 2600 years ago, we were simply linguistic minds, not mathematically and logically formed minds. Who knows where mind goes as the internet and AI takes on a mind of its own. Or how we might view the evolution of mind as we recognise formally the ability of fossil fuels to so thoroughly reorganise human culture and its organisational structure.

So mind is a journey of open-ended semiosis. You are doing the usual thing of treating it as a static, already fully substantial and realised existence. Hence you have a whole lot of questions about nature that make perfect sense within your paradigm and are incoherent - not even wrong - within mine.

So my story can't see any necessary end to the development of mind. It just sees a pragmatic limit in terms of what we know about the entropy balance sheet of the Universe. Minds, as negentropy, exist only by earning their entropic keep.

By the same token, mind enters the picture right from the start. As soon as there is the vaguest speck of semiotic mechanism in play.

I can see that is just as incoherent within your paradigm as what you assert is within mine. I only have the advantage that my paradigm is thoroughly supported by scientific investigation. Yours is the view from comparative religion.

I can't make you change your paradigm. You have to want to do it fo yourself.

Our difference is that you seek what concretely must exist as a foundation, I instead think everything fluidly emerges.

So for me, the question is what then concretely limits the inherent dynamism of "existence". And that is where maths (of symmetry) comes in. There are universal mathematical structures we can describe that are the invariant and necessary features of nature as they are the limits that must eventually emerge. Chaos has no choice but to throw up certain eternal regularities even in its attempts to be as unstructured as possible.

OK, so I understand that you assume two distinct types of constraints, the constraints which act on material potential causing substantial being, and semiotic constraints which act on substantial being. This is what you just told me: — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Remember that a dissipative structure is organisation produced by environmental constraint. All the information involved is just how the world around it is organised.

Then a living system internalises that information. It takes control for itself by being able to build its own environment. That starts just by building a membrane with ion pores that can create a proto-cell.

So yes. Two quite distinct situations. And that is the mainstream understanding. Only the second is explicitly semiotic - an autopoietic point of view based on an informational machinery.

Pan-semiosis is then a further speculative metaphysical project where dissipative structure is also understood as a generalised sign relation. It connects to the mainstream of current physics now that it has turned productively from talking about reality in terms of particles to bits of information.

Rich has illustrated how deeply confusing this turn is for traditional metaphysics. The holographic principle now makes it sound like information - as some kind of magical stuff - paints a representation of reality on some outer surface, then a universe of matter particles flying about is some kind of projected illusion.

As usual, the map of the territory is being confusedly treated as itself the new territory. We are back into the dualism of representationalism that pushes the question of interpretation into homuncular infinite regress.

So the way out of this observer problem that dogs the metaphysics of physics is the same - the triadic observer-including modelling relation. That is where pansemiosis comes in. Semiosis can apply to physics too. But there is still a big difference between semiosis based on an epistemic cut and internalised points of view, and semiosis without that coding machinery, simply an environmental structure which creates some generalised, or universally coherent, point of view.

I talked about a modelling relation rather than a map as that involves the interlocking causality of all three things - world, symbols and habits of interpretance. What we label consciousness is the wholeness of that lived and embodied relation.

The obsession with explaining feels is a hang over from dualism. If you think the Hard Problem is central, you are still stuck in the metaphysics of a different era.

We know substance dualism can't work in any sensible causal fashion. So just move on. Quit banging your head against that particular tree. Try on a triadic picture of the issues for a change.

The key thing the Peircean view does is deflate the notion of a mysterious witnessing self. Instead we just have a habit of interpretance - which at its core involves a running, or emergently-constructed, self vs world distinction.

So the self exists only like a whorl in a stream. It is not a substantial thing - a first person witnesser floating above the whole show. It is simply a state of organisation that emerges within an embodied flow of action. In regulating the world, there is then selfhood or autonomy.

We can see this quite simply from falling asleep or lying inside a sensory deprivation chamber. The ego dissolves as soon as there is nothing doing. There is nothing more to account for but the fact that an ego is what appears because of a particular kind of semiotic interaction where interpretance - an entropic modelling relation - is what is busy going on.

No rushing stream, no backward whorl either. The Hard Problem really is that simple.

Yes, the striking thing that comes through from Hoffman is that the basis of life is way more mechanical than we knew. It is all a bunch of little switches and rotors and pumps and chains and conveyor belts. So out of utter instability, a little bit of genetic information can conjure a fantastic apparatus. We used to think metabolism was a chemical soup. The cell was a bag of reactants. Now we can see it is a factory with structure.

So the explanation of life back a decade or two was focused on genetic information and metabolic reactions. At school, we all had to learn a bunch of chemical equations like the Krebs cycle. Now there is this third intervening level of mechanical organisation.

That is a huge realisation in terms of the metaphysics of life. No one was predicting that ATP production would actually involve a proper little rotating spindle device. That is just so outlandish.

Hoffman's book also makes it clear how just the tiniest, simplest scrap of mechanical structure can have outsized impact at the nanoscale. And that is key to the abiogenesis issue. It is much less of a step from nonliving to living than we imagined.

Nick Lane's book then comes from the other side and talks about how - with alkaline sea vents - the nonliving world closes the gap to make it a much tinier leap than we ever previously imagined. In terms of a chemical soup (with no biological machinery), there can be a dissipative energetic process in full swing.

So biological machinery can then just hop aboard a ride that is already going. It doesn't have to invent a metabolism de novo. It just has to offer that metabolism some extra degree of stability. And so it is easy to see evolution happening. Nothing needs to be created. All that is asked for is regulation. And natural selection is all about that kind of whittling away what doesn't work.

The standard complaint about natural selection is that it can't be creative. It is a constraint that can only remove possibilities. And biologists fully realise that.

Now we can see that if the nonliving metabolic cycle already exists, all the first life had to do was take away the possibility of that metabolic cycle collapsing.

It all adds up to a revolution in abiogentic thinking. Just 10 years ago, the answer seemed as though it must be some kind of RNA world hypothesis. The thinking was all focused on how a coding mechanism might have spontaneously appeared in some autocatalytic fashion (RNA being able to function as an enzyme as well as a memory). But now the first step looks far simpler. You just need a protein that wants to curl up and act as a physical gate - a sodium ion transporter.

I note you continue not to answer my question to you. Too dangerous.

But anyway, your question to me has already been answered. The reply is that it is a flawed question in that it is a dyadic semiotic framing of things and not a triadic one.

The metaphor of maps and territories of course in reality demands the third thing of "an interpreter" - a further habit of interpretance. The map itself is the physical sign, the symbol, the information that connects the interpreter to the world in terms of the interpreter's own interests.

You will of course immediately jump to the presumption that the interpreter is now the conscious part of the whole equation. You won't see how this is just a continuation of a substance monism that you feel forced to impose on any framing of the issues.

But there you go. You are stuck with a particular habit of interpretance. I can offer you a better map, but you are only going to insist again on holding it upside down and complaining you don't get it.

Did you have a point or just feel the need to vent?

I ask why shouldn't it feel like something as that exposes the fact you don't really have any clear definition of feeling yourself. You keep telling me what can't have feeling - matter or information - and yet you have no real basis for that claim as you can't, in counterfactual terms, say what ought to have feeling.

Well I suggest such an empirical basis and ask for an honest response. Why is a brain's lived modelling relation with the world so sure not to be experiential? Doesn't modelling seem like it might be experience creating?

You take fright at this question as you realise how much you have to lose from an honest answer.

What I am I not seeing? — MikeL

That it is not a window into a functional understanding of cognition. Quite deliberately, it doesn't go there.

Of course even Skinner couldn't be satisfied with not trying to go further. He did later try to extend to cover associative or Hebbian networks. But he started from such an underpowered position that it had about zero influence. If you want to understand the mind in terms of Hebbian networks, Hebb had already made a better start.

Operant conditioning is still employed for behavioural training. It is important to slot machine design for instance. Or crude forms of psychotherapy, like desensitisation to fears.

If I understand correctly, substantial being exists only as the result of constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover

Constraints on "material potential". So there has to be something to act on. Then the question becomes what is the least kind of action that can be imagined? This is what leads to modelling the "prime matter" as simply a vagueness or "unbounded fluctuation".

Substantial being emerges from the interaction between material and efficient causation — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It arises from constraints on a vague material potential (that thus become the concrete degrees of freedom of the system because there are those limits that produce some distinct variety of substantial being).

So in terms of the four causes, it is formal/final cause constraining vague potential to produce definite material/efficient causes. The causal loop is then closed as these material/efficient causes must be of the right character to re-construct and perpetuate the global state of constraint.

Hence why Peirce's system logic is said to be irreducibly complex. It has to be understood as one entire developmental whole.

We also see the purpose becoming more intentional as we move up through the layers. Intentionality and behaviour can be explained by psychology - Operant Conditioning would fit best. — MikeL

Having studied operant conditioning way back when, I'm afraid I can't share your enthusiasm.

Operant conditioning is such a simplistic approach you could learn everything that matters in a week. It talks about frequencies of observed behaviour when circumstances are either "rewarding" or "punishing". You the experimenter determine what counts as a behaviour and then sit back and count the frequency as you find ways to make the reinforcement either a clear cut "reward" or "punishment" situation.

It was bloody crude. A drop of milo for positive reinforcement, an electric shock to the feet for negative reinforcement. If you had an uncooperative rat, the lab technician would change it for you. Or maybe starve it a bit longer the next time.

So yes, there is semiotics of course. But it is you as the experimenter ignoring everything complex that might be going on in a real rat to interpret a push on a lever as a sign of the rat's mental state. As a sign relation, it is as crudely reductionist as it gets. And the whole point of Behaviourism is to dismiss any real interest in the complexities of cognition. It avoids having to say anything about the rat's point of view on life - the semiotic relation which explains its view of the world.

So as an experimenter, it is not behavioural frequencies that tell us anything about "mind". We want to be able to model organisms in terms of their functional cognitive architectures. What are the processes going on inside their heads?

Or again, what are the semiotic processes?

Thanks for pointing that interesting result out. My three immediate thoughts are:

1) The claim is that Landauer's Planck-based limit was violated, and yet still, it is not zero cost computing. Energy still has to be expended to erase a bit of information. So less energetic cost is not no energetic cost. Landauer's principle stands, even if his calculation of the limit might be faulty.

2) Then there look to be possible concealed costs in the circuit set-up. It is an odd semi-analog device where the inputs are electrostatic forces and the output is the degree of bending in a bit of metal.

So one concealed cost could be wear and tear on the bending metal. Eventually it might break from mechanical fatigue, or melt due to heat build up in its metallic bonds.

3) Then the other loophole would be that the bending of a metal cantilever as the output is an analog response which has to be converted into a digital input by being "read correctly" by the next metal cantilever in the chain.

I wonder if instead of an entropic cost, this means there is a steady information loss. Being analog and so continuous, no two "reading the output" acts might be exactly the same. It would be hard to rule out some environmental effect that causes the next metal cantilever to react fractionally before or after the "proper degree of bending" had been achieved.

So maybe a whole bit is not being reliably propagated in this hybrid set up. There is a steady information leakage which means less energy would have to be expended to erase "a bit".

My money is still on Landauer being right. It was such an elegant result.

In case you hadn't noticed, or more likely refuse to acknowledge as an inconvenient fact, Psychology and Sociology are sciences which investigate phenomena that are not physical. — Galuchat

In case you hadn't noticed, my physicalism is semiotic. So as science, or indeed metaphysics, it starts from psychology and sociology.

I'm not sure why that makes you so angry. You claim to be a fan of semiotics yourself. Did you want to be the only one, or something?

Yep. Back in the real world, the analogy is still proving useful to try and explain stuff to lay folk.

You are very good at replying why being a state of matter shouldn't feel like anything. Likewise a state of information.

But you go curiously silent on the question of why wouldn't a lived neural model of the world feel like something?

Hmm.