I see you realise your error. But even physio-semiosis would combine information and dynamics.

What transcendent thing is semiosis missing, given it covers both information and dynamics?

What are you trying to say?

But what is so objectionable in enjoying dispelling mysteries then? Seeking explanations is not the same thing as "demanding" them. Nor is uncertainty minimisation "dismissing" mystery.

You know that your argument must be in trouble when you have to revert to these kinds of rhetorical flourishes, this use of loaded terms, to do the heavy lifting.

I am defending pragmaticism. You are pretending to attack authoritarianism. Yes, that rhetorical strategy is going to win you points with the uncritical. Who isn't against authority these days. :s But still, it is my Peircean pragmatism that you need to be addressing so far as this actual argument goes.

Yes, but I would say an adequate notion of the father just is a notion of "pure unformed potential" and certainly not any "sky daddy". The latter is a naïve hypostatization. — Janus

Great. And so this fundamental potential has no connotations of inherent mindfulness or consciousness or purpose for you? Or at least - this being my position - it has the least possible so far as that is imaginable?

I mean theism always wants the fundamental to be special in that fashion. So it is surprising to find a theistic framework that truly argues for the least possible divinity in the origination of humanity and the cosmos.

Some of the best things in life: art. music. poetry, religion, ethics and philosophy itself find their roots in mystery. — Janus

This is clearly where our worldviews differ completely. All these things are creative semiotic habits - the new things that language allows us to do in terms of reality modelling.

Sure, fiction can be fun, but there is no essential mystery in how it is created or why - psychologically - it is enjoyable.

And mathematical science is the most purely creative act of imagination. It goes way beyond every other sociocultural effort of telling the truth of things in terms of complete abstractions. In the modern world, all those other activities you mentioned have become a reaction to whatever science happens to be suggesting at some time in its emergent development.

Radical trinity might seem the same thing as pansemiosis from a structural view, but there is a big difference.

As you say, your approach wants to make a virtue of that which can't be immanently explained - the transcendent cause that is the divine form and telos. So the mystery of the triadic relation is maximised. It explains the least in terms of a naturalistic metaphysics predicated on the search for causal self-organisation.

Pansemiosis does the opposite by minimising the transcendental element - the first cause or prime mover. Now that mystical bit is understood in terms of a foundational vagueness, or firstness, or Apeiron. It is pure unformed potential and not a big daddy in the sky.

So that foundational "materiality" is not explained immanently by pansemiosis. It is a given coming from "outside". But it is also the very least imaginable kind of "divine cause" in being literally less than nothing.

So in terms of metaphysical reasoning, it can lay claim to being the best model of triadic systems causation - if you apply the epistemic constraint of demanding a scheme with the least possible transcendent mystery or uncertainty.

But hey, I get it. Most folk are really into mystery. :)

Nature is a pragmatic harmony of information and matter. Technology relies on the forced divorce of the informational and material conditions of being.

The answer is always the same. Machines are our way of imposing our will on nature. And in doing that, we are being formed as "selves" in turn. We become mechanically minded and disconnected as "human beings".

Hence the essential dissatisfaction of modern life where the balance is too one way or the other - where either we feel ourselves as becoming overly machinelike, or instead, that material nature is "getting out of hand". Illness, power outages, and other sources of unwanted unpredictability.

We want a balance where we are the unpredictable ones and the world functions with machinelike reliability. Or at least we think we do until that gets boring or creates too much responsibility for making up our own individual meanings in life.

Again, top down is real because it really does shape the parts. However the parts are real as well as - in the long run, as an averaged outcome - their collective action must manifest as that constraining whole.

So it is a triadic or hierarchical action. Each is the cause of the emergence of the other.

And you can see that in fundamental physics now. Quantum physics is contextual and thermally decoherent. The whole does on the whole shape events down to wavefunction level. But then spontaneity takes over with the actual collapse of a physical event. History gets written with an irreducible dollop of localised indeterminism. The context itself is being rebuilt as some running story of classical events that have now definitely happened and so act as a constraint on all further quantumness.

The reductionist can now insert himself in the conversation with his presentism and clockwork notions of causality. But the deeper quantum picture is of a world that is self constructing because of a mutuality between its local and global scales. It starts in a strongly quantum state of indeterminacy at the Big Bang and then evolves its way - decohering/dissipating uncertainty - until becoming as classical as possible as the Heat Death.

At the Heat Death, the Universe is left as nothing but a structure of holographic bounds populated by the cold fizzle of the black-body photons they must radiate as event horizons.

So actually, the basic cosmological picture now is quantum thermodynamic. Classicality only "exists" as the limit of that metaphysics. The mutuality between parts and wholes - between holographic or informational event horizons and black body quantum radiation - is explicit in the new formalisms of cosmological explanation.

Plato used reason as the path to a realisation. So he made a logical argument. The world was observed to be changeable matter so - dialectically - that pointed to the complementary thing of the form that could be its timelessly formative constraint. So far, all very naturalistic.

Then he got unnatural in arguing that the realm of form must be the true reality. Having realised something due to an immanent or dialectical argument, he then reified one half of the duality thus revealed and made it the transcendent or the divine.

Or rather that is the telling theists like to remember. Plato tried to do justice to the material pole of being with his late comments about the chora or "receptacle" that could take the imprint of forms. Aristotle also had his go an reuniting the two aspects of being - bottom up and top down causes - in his account of hylomorphic form.

Anyway, there is a metaphysical approach - dialectical reasoning - that has proven itself as a western method. And science has cashed that out in its own largely reductionist way. Science brings the "conviction of pure experiencing" back into it in the form of observations or acts of measurement. A theory is a Platonic assertion of a mathematical form. We then experience directly the truth of that form by conducting an experiment and seeing the expected result.

So that is the essential difference. Scientific reasoning (as defined within Peircean semiotics/modelling relations) is a method that perfectly aligns concepts and impressions. A theory abstracts a Platonic form. Measurements are the way that the validity of the form can be experienced as a fact. If beliefs can become numbers read off a dial, then that is the end game as that is belief fully symbolised by Platonic abstraction.

The kind of religious experiencing you are talking about is relying on the unreliable feeling of "hey, that feels right". Neurocognition can tell you all about the circuits that subserve an "aha!" recognition response - a match/mismatch feeling of salience.

It is a biological kind of world measurement. Psychologically I need to have a judgement that says either "that fits" or "that doesn't fit". We couldn't act in the world without that kind of biological level capacity for "revelation".

But a sense of conviction is quite wrong as a basis of abstract belief. The western method of scientific reasoning is all about rising above our biological embeddeness to find an objectively philosophical point of view. And so that is why we seek to put belief and understanding on a rational footing where our modelling relation with the world becomes one of fully symbolic theory and measurement.

What is the difference between revelation and realisation here? You didn't say.

Another way to see what is going on with reductionism as ontology is how it regards time. It constructs action in a way that conceals issues of development, indeterminism and local emergence.

So time divides into past, present and future. For the holist, the present is the definite boundary between past and future - the point where a history of events forms a fixed global context of constraints. And in doing so, that weight of the past is what shapes a future of definite possibility. It fixes the set of local freedoms which are shortly to be expressed in some particular direction.

So determinism in this view is evolutionary. The reason a billiard ball is so predictable is because, as a mass, all its possibilities have been shaved down to simplest possible symmetries. It has been machined to roll freely in a straight line in simulation of an ideal Newtonian body. It doesn't have bumps on its surface that might knock it off a path or add haphazard friction to its roll. And while in reality no billiard ball could actually be so perfect, we can certainly manufacture balls that are good enough for a context like playing a game or spinning a convincing analogy.

So note the sly trick that Newtonian reductionism is pulling off when it comes to space as a dimensionality too. There is a holistic constraint at play - the global symmetries of translations and rotations which define inertial motion. The symmetries encode a perfect formal limit towards which all roughness and irregularity of material objects can approach ... as it sheds that very particularity in conforming to the ideal.

Anyway, holism takes the developmental view of time where the present is where the global state of constraint - a history - can be said to determine the future to the degree some set of possibilities, some set of directional freedoms, have been made concrete and definite. One could well be attempting to play billiards with some bunch of small rocks. You can imagine how haphazard the resulting game would be. But still, to the extent that the results remain predictable, the history is determining the future.

So the present is the moment which is the line drawn between this idea of global constraint - the shaping hand of the whole - and then the future which consists of the expression of the resulting degrees of freedom ... which can be highly shaped and so approaching the symmetry ideals encoded in our matching notions of material spatiality, or still quite irregular and unshaped and so rather unpredictable and random. It becomes, conversely, impossibly hard to point to something in the past, something in history, which was a particular cause of that random event.

When it comes to models of spontaneous symmetry breaking - symmetry talk again being the deepest level of metaphysics because it goes directly to the issue of global form - the reductionist is forced to admit that "a fluctuation" made the difference. In other words, the pencil balanced perfectly on its point had to fall in some direction as "anything" would have had the same consequence of tipping its balance. No event could be too small to break the symmetry.

The reductionist then takes a very diferent view of time. It is now all about a present moment that ticks along a spatialised notion of temporal flow in a deterministic clockwork of one step following another. The past becomes unreal. The future is still to be realised. The only truly real thing is the present instant.

So reductionism secures absolute determinism by cancelling away any notions of emergence, development, chance or freedom. Both the laws of nature, its fundamental forms, and its initial conditions, its local material state, are imagined as being fixed and unalterable at the beginning of time. Existence begins in counterfactual definiteness and so progression unfolds like logical clockwork.

Reality is a machine that is essentially timeless. There is only a now that is real in being the sum of all that is causal. An ecosystem never had a choice as its fate was dictated by the laws and the momenta of a collection of particles that obtained in the first instant of the Big Bang.

So reductionism is the flattened view of time. It reduces existence to a synchronic theory of presentism or simultaneity where everything is already always fixed and there is no real development or indeterminism. And that is a really useful, really simplifying, way of imagining reality. You don't have to keep wondering about what is the law at the moment, or what are the spontaneitities that might derail our calculations when striking a billiard ball.

But holism is the larger view. And so it sees time in terms of a past that creates a downward acting, degree of freedom shaping, state of global constraint. Then within that is a future of freedoms to be expressed. There remains some element of fundamental chance or spontaneity that may end up making a difference, rewriting what seemed to be inevitable history's "next step".

To holism, quantum indeterminacy is not a surprise. It is a prediction. Uncertainty has to be irreducible, even if the world is a system with the purpose of reducing that uncertainty to a pragmatic minimum.

So you confuse the immanent purpose of naturalism with the transcendence claimed by theism? Finding creative ways to get the issue backwards as usual.

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

But that is part of the argument. If the global telos is to entopify, the complementary local telos is to do work. Order is the way to achieve disordering by breaking down the blockages preventing a free moving dissipative flow.

Just like good requires the other of evil to make sense as a system, so entropy is defined by its other "choice" - negentropy.

It is not a problem if the conscious purpose of humans is negentropy production as that goal also produces more entropy on the global scale. Every organised act must make waste heat.

So at best revelation, and more likely just learning the habit of feeling a conviction?

The question concerned the purpose of nature, of existence in general. Last time I looked, that lay outside any personal concerns I might have.

Well what is the bleeding method then? You've only assured me that there is one.

You keep changing the subject so I'll just repeat the question...

I don't recognise that as 'purpose'
— Wayfarer

What could decide whether the naturalist or the transhumanist is correct here?

But regardless, there are schools, methods, and ways of validating such 'first-person' understanding, that is still scientific in the sense of laying out a way of proceeding and a way of validation as you go along. That is the whole idea of a spiritual discipline. — Wayfarer

That is the question I asked. So more detail please. How does this validation work and how is it demonstrably better when it comes to talking about nature's purpose.

Thanks for clarifying. If I understand you correctly then, yes, the first person point of view is indeed a thing. It is the embodiment of a purpose, an intentionality.

And it arises as "consciousness" is not a passive display but an intentional view, as talking about it as a modelling relation is meant to emphasise. In every moment of comprehending the world, the brain is having to dynamically form the sense of self that is then standing in opposition to the world that is to be mastered. Perception is not merely about constructing a view of the world, it is about creating that intentional distinction which is the self experienced as that which is apart from the world with some agential purpose.

Even to eat my dinner, I have to be able to distinguish what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. So there is agency, a point of view just in understanding the world as that which is not my "self".

The connection to top down causality is then that an organism has a point of view from which it can impose "its" wishes and designs - final and formal cause.

So it is not consciousness, nor even attention, which is the locus of top-down causation. It is the very thing of being in a modelling relation with the world where the other aspect that must be constructed is a running sense of selfhood, or autonomy and will.

To keep things simple: in your worldview, does consciousness hold its own top-down causal ability? — javra

I just don't see consciousness in this kind of entitified terminology. There is no agent, just a process exhibiting what we choose to describe as agency.

So "consciousness" is just a loose word that covers everything in most discussions. In my view, most people are talking about attention when they say it. But they also mean self consciousness or the linguistically structured skill of introspection. As a word, it just overclaims and doesn't carve the phenomenon at its structural joints.

Just because you don't think that dissipation is a good purpose doesn't negate it being a purpose. A purpose is the reason why things happen.

So it might be consistent with your faith based understanding that the ultimate purpose is the Good. But again, naturalism says look the world in the face and describe it as it actually is.

And 180 was wrong on a key technical detail. Life and mind arise to accelerate enropification over and above the rate being achieved by "dead matter". That is what intelligence is for. To improve on what dumbness can achieve.

You’ve affirmed that consciousness is there due to unconscious process of mind. — javra

Or rather I have repeated back the terms in which the discussion was being framed. I hope I have made it clear enough how I object to the presuppositions with which those terms are loaded. But just for the sake of conversation, I'm also trying to use the preferred jargon of those I might argue against.

In another thread i argued at length why I would instead prefer the terms attentional level and habit level processing. And one of the reasons was that that allows top-down causality to be a part of both. The difference between the two levels then becomes one of spatiotemporal scale.

Consequently, it is naturally assumed that 'science has shown that the Universe is devoid of purpose' and that 'man is simply another evolved species'. It is what sensible people believe, nowadays. You see that in questions on this forum, practically every day. — Wayfarer

But I have taken care to distinguish my holistic naturalism from that reductionist Scientism. So you are not dealing with purpose as a systems science perspective would understand it.

Nowadays we presume... — Wayfarer

Yes. But the question was how you could claim to know.

Naturalism has its way of supporting belief - inductive scientific reason. You seem to be saying that a religious account would be the correct one here, not the naturalistic. So what method are you using to support that belief? Let's see why it is in fact better than methodological naturalism.

I don't recognise that as 'purpose' — Wayfarer

What could decide whether the naturalist or the transhumanist is correct here?

Purpose is the reason why things are done. Naturalism suggests the most general reason it can. And proof would be that the reason ultimately constrains everything.

But how could transcendent purpose be validated? Is personal revelation or religious tradition enough to talk about purpose in that universalising sense?

But my position is triadic. It goes in three directions.

And how meta of you to reply by demonstrating said special gift.

this is just a further indication that apokrisis promotes a backward ontology. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It just illustrates your special gift of understanding everything backwards.

Surely, even a process can be defined. — Galuchat

I defined the core process. Semiosis or the modelling relation.

What types (i.e., classes) of functions do you think brains execute? — Galuchat

I just gave an example. Object boundary detection. Mach bands.

The Tartu Schools of Semiotics (Moscow) and Biosemiotics (Copenhagen) produced work from many scholars beginning in the 1960s. — Galuchat

Yep. It was happening in Europe too.

Bear in mind that you are taking a very partial view of current evolutionary arguments. So the idea that life has the global purpose of surviving is being replaced by the idea it serves the greater purpose of entropification or dissipation.

Then also, cooperativity is a necessary part of any level of systematic organisation. So renunciation or altrusistic behaviours can be explained naturally that way.

Finally to the degree that renunciation is not a fit behaviour given the global goals of life, naturalism predicts it will be minimised. And look around. Do you see much renunciation going on in the modern consumer society?

So naturalism makes predictions. And those predictions look confirmed.

It is a substantive difference as the reductionist is claiming that a system is simply constituted of its events while the holist adds that, collectively, those events result in a generalised state of constraint. A global property emerges that restricts those events by becoming their history, their context.

And then the holist will go further in arguing that emergent constraints can actually shape the identity of the events themselves. So collective causality is making the parts which are producing the functional whole. The parts turn out to be emergent too. Holism claims the dependent co-origination of parts and wholes, in the big scheme of things.

Of course the reductionist always chooses examples of systems that do the best job of disguising the holism of nature. Hence billiard balls.

The holism can't be seen easily because we are asked to imagine a set of parts that some person shaped - smooth hard balls and a flat baize table, then the smack with the cue that set the balls in motion, all bounded both by the table having edges and a world with fixed physical laws enforcing energy conservation principles.

A holist is happier with an ecosystem where the collective, emergent, contextual nature of the organisation is now more obvious. The irreducible complexity of a system - the reality of two directions of causality in action - constraints and degrees of freedom - becomes the thing.

You say it is obvious but then psychology shows that isn't true. You can only think and act like an animal if you don't have language to structure thought and action like a human.

Your talk of "mind" is just another ontic construct. We believe it to the extent it helps us make sense of "the world".

You don't seem to realise how anything you might say here is already trapped inside a language game.

The problem is that "the world", "complexities", and "systems" are all things created by the mind. Now you're trying to turn this around, and claim that the world, and complex systems create a mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. But that epistemic problem is accepted as the starting point of pragmatism. That is the bleeding difference here. Pragmatism doesn't pretend to do more than organise experience in a way that minimises our uncertainty and so warrants our beliefs.

We make ontic commitments as abductive hypothesis. And then we believe them because they work so far as we can judge.

So your perspective is no further along than Plato's people in the cave. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well in fact it is.

'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.' ~ Max Planck. — Wayfarer

I both agree and also again make the point that this is really saying "nature" and "mystery" themselves form a dialectical construct. They are a thought made concrete by creating a convincing opposition.

So the "eternal dilemma" is that if there is something definite and unmysterious, like a nature that exists, then logically - by the accepted convention that is dialectical reasoning - there must be its "other" of a mystery which is "why even that existence".

So the issue becomes whether there really is a problem, or the problem is the logic we feel so compelled to apply ... in metaphysical analysis.

Clearly my answer is that it is analysis that is the problem. You need to have also a logic capable of synthesis.

Hegel made the same mistake as Aristotle in how he approached a logic of synthesis. They didn't quite get it. But Peirce - through his logic of vagueness - did.

So Peirce at least offers a metaphysical logic that can - in the mode of scientific reasoning - do the most to minimise mystery. The story of nature can never be absolutely certain. But a logic of vagueness (a triadic sign relation logic) can minimise that uncertainty the best of any logical approach.

You have misinterpreted the point. The 'blind spot' was simply for illustrative purposes - the actual processes involved are of far greater depth and subtlety than that. — Wayfarer

My point was that we can uncover the fact that there are underlying processes. Indeed it is common knowledge as you say. And so after that, treating consciousness as not being about those underlying processes becomes bullshit. The burden shifts to having to justify why there might be anything extra to say.

So here, he seems to be asking, how did the separation between 'observer and observed' originate? Because this is implied in the very origin of life itself. — Wayfarer

Pattee rightly points to the crucial question. But also he didn't accept Peirce's approach - the logic of vagueness - as the way to deal with the issue. That is the further step that Salthe takes.

But that is common knowledge. You yourself are not conscious of the fact that your perception is a stream of momentary saccades which the mind then integrates into a simple unity. Think about 'the blind spot' - I'm sure you know that there is a simple experiment you can perform that shows that there is always a spot in your field of vision that you don't see. But you don't notice you don't see it until you perform that experiment. — Wayfarer

But you see the point. Consciousness ends up being conscious of how it must be the product of unconscious processes. A gap that was being filled can be noticed under special controlled circumstances. The believable explanation is then in terms of some straightforward realist account of the structure of the eye and the role of anticipatory neural processes.

So what consciousness discovers is that it is these anticipatory neural processes that must be causing it. When the processes are absent, there is a blind spot. When they are acting, there isn't - there is a consciously experienced filling in.

As usual, talk of consciousness as an ontic simple implodes as soon as you give it a slight push. The fact that "everyone knows" that there are unconscious processes behind conscious experience should give the game away. The process is the thing, and talk of "consciousness" as the thing is the reification of that process.

It is the metaphysics of physics.

Thanks. To start, I question the value of trying to define consciousness as that already puts it in the class of a thing rather than a process. I don't see consciousness as anything fundamental in the world, just what it is like to be a really complex version of a modelling relation.

That doesn't mean I dismiss the problem of "raw feels" or qualia. It is just that I don't think that is the correct explanatory target. Once you know enough about how the brain executes any function, you can see why it has the particular qualitative character that it does. Mach bands is a good example.

But the question of "why any qualitative character at all - when perhaps there might be just zombiedom?" is the kind of query which already reifies awareness in an illegitimate way. It turns it from being the consequence of a process (a modelling of the world which prima facie ought to feel like something) to being a state of being, a kind of extra glow or ghost or spirit, that then appears to deserve an explanation in terms of being "a fundamental stuff or realm".

To think the Hard Problem actually makes sense is to have already concluded consciousness is an ontic "simple", against all the scientific evidence that it is what you get from an unbelievably complex and integrated world modelling process.

And this approach is familiar to any biologist. Folk used to believe that life must be the result of a ghost in the machine. Life had to be a simple, some kind of fundamental spirit or force of animation. But biology got to work and dispelled the mystery. The body is not exactly a machine. However once we see it as a semiotic relation between information and matter - genes and chemistry - then we can see we are talking about a self-creating process. Rather than life, we are talking about lively. Instead of seeking an explanation of what special thing makes inanimate flesh light up with "life", we understand that it is the unbelievably complex and integrated process that adequately accounts for the flesh being what we would then call "alive".

So that is why I take the approach I do. The metaphysics that worked to fully account for life should also continue on to account for mind. The Hard Problem - which is tied to a metaphysics of simples - just doesn't have the bite that people so easily presume.

So I am starting with the belief that awareness is the outcome of a certain species of systems complexity. And the way to explain that causally is to identify the essence of that complex process. What in general is the organisational trick that explains what the brain is doing in its now vastly elaborated way?

To answer that, one has to look to what metaphysics and science has to say about complex systems. Most of science, and even philosophy, is strictly reductionist. It breaks the complex world down into simples. Which is fine as part of the story, but also limited. Then there is a long tradition of holism or organicism. And that shows reality to be irreducibly complex. Even when things are made as simple as possible, they are still complex in terms of their essential structure of relations. Nothing is atomistic. Everything starts as already a process, some basic kind of relation.

One can start with Anaximander, the first true metaphysician. Apokrisis of course was his term for the "first process" - dichotomisation or "separating out". Then there is Aristotle with his four causes, his theory of hylomorphism, and the true start of systems thinking. Hegel and Kant got it. Then Peirce really managed to crystalise it. And finally the systems approach has become increasingly concrete and mathematically definite through the last century of scientific modelling.

So the basic trick of life and mind is that it is a particular kind of complex organisation - a modelling relation (as the mathematical biologist, Robert Rosen, defined it). Stan Salthe and Howard Pattee are then two of Rosen's circle who fleshed out a full understanding of what this means through the 70s and 80s under the general banner of what was hierarchy theory then. A connection got made to the new thermodynamics of dissipative structures (the follow-on from Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium open systems).

Salthe coined the idea of infodynamics. Pattee really sharpened things with his epistemic cut. And then this particular group of systems biologists heard about Peircean semiotics - which had pretty much been lost until the 1990s - and realised that they were basically recapitulating what Peirce had already said. So as a group they did the honourable thing and relabelled themselves bio-semioticians.

There were other allied groups around. Dozens of them. I was part of Salthe and Pattee's group - having looked around and found they were head and shoulders above the rest. But there were plenty of other important theoretical circles, like second order cybernetics, or generative neural nets, or complex adaptive systems, or dissipative structure theorists, or general system theorists, or .... well really, dozens and dozens.

So what is really the story is that there is a systems perspective. Instead of life or mind being ontic simples - animating spirits - they are understood in terms of a particular species of complexity. And the job is to seek explanations in those terms. Once you get that and start looking around, you find there are a whole range of people and groups who have been feeling the same elephant. They might all use different jargon. But they are arriving at the same kind of insights.

Again, this is only my perspective, but I find Peircean semiosis is the best way to zero in on the esssence of systems causality. It has a set of features I could list. And indeed I am always mentioning them.

But for now, in this thread, the key point is why I reject the usual demand of "answer the Hard Problem". Framing that as the crucial question is already to presume that the answer has the form "consciousness is an ontic simple, a substance". It gets to be like being asked "when did you stop beating your wife?".

The proper question we ought to be asking is what kind of fundamental system or process is a brain (in a body with a mind)? That is, we know the brain with its embodied modelling relation with the world is a really complex example of living mindfulness. It meets your working definition in terms of "the set of conditions experienced, and functions exercised, by a psychophysical being which produce personal and social behaviour."

But boil down an actual human that has grown up as a set of interpretive habits in the world into the simplest description of the trick involved, and you get the general thing that is the irreducible triadic relation described by Peircean semiosis.

And I also put all my money on this being a pan-semiotic deal as fundamental physics is arriving at the same irreducible triadic process as the causal explanation of how existence itself could come to be. A story of constraints and degrees of freedom emerging from the symmetry-breaking of fundamental indeterminism.

Or going right back to Anaximander, the dialectical process of apokrisis which organised the formless and boundless chaos of the Apeiron.

Why not say something interesting rather than make lame garbled posts like that?