Do you believe that a tornado practises semiosis? I think that this is totally unfounded, and therefore your dissolution of the division between animate and inanimate is also unfounded. — Metaphysician Undercover

I said what I believed is that a tornado is the product of semiosis. As a dissipative structure, it is formed almost entirely by constraints outside of itself. It has no self-stabilising level of memory. So it can't "practise" semiosis.

So my ontology both picks out the critical difference and yet still speaks to the semiotic commonality.

For you, there is an abyssal gap perhaps. But that is simply the product of you not reading what I actually say.

That is something each has to decide, and it's a risk. We might get it wrong, and that is part of what we have to deal with (which is one of the lessons from existentialism). — Wayfarer

Fair enough. But then that is the essence of the scientific method. Have a guess and see how it fares in terms of inductive confirmation.

That is Peirce's epistemology in a nutshell. And then that was his pansemiotic metaphysics - his definition of the summum bonum as the universal growth of reasonableness.

So while as usual you are keen to frame me as dealing in Scientism to legitimate your transhuman perspective, when you have to make sense of your own ontology, it winds up sounding classically semiotic.

Thus yes, we both reject the idea of an engineer God. And humans are somehow - naturally - a deep reflection of the form of existence at the cosmological level. Which is the thesis of pansemiosis. The difference is that pansemiosis also makes sense as actual scientific inquiry now. We have begun to talk in constructs that we can physically measure.

So what is it about the values of satanism, for instance, that convinces us of its claims to being a superior basis for philosophy?

Where in the great anthropological variety of transcendent belief structures and moral values am I going to find "the right one"?

And then, to tackle the OP, what is the value of being animate vs inanimate? Is one better than the other, more foundational than the other? What exactly is your argument?

At the end of the day, you are talking religious conviction.

What about providing a basis for values? — Wayfarer

It gives a naturalistic and immanent basis to value or purpose.

Your other choices are then either the arbitrary or nihilistic answer given by regular materialism, or the transcendent and mystic answer given by the many varieties of religious/romantic belief systems.

I of course have explained many times how both materialism and mysticism are in fact disguised dissipative structure. They both are simply reflections of human social entrainment to the desires of the second law of thermodynamics.

What's the significance of 'dissipative'? — Wayfarer

The same structure or pattern or organisation is sustained by its production of entropy. So it exists because it can waste.

Animate vs inanimate was not my choice of jargon. I don't need to defend it - as it is what I've been cricitsing.

Sure biology is different from chemistry in some fashion we would want to pin down.

Now either one can argue that the differences are somehow metaphysically accidental - so life is "metabolism" or dissipative structure with a bit of extra DNA organisation - or one can take the view that there is a metaphysical strength difference worth noting here. And that is the hylomorphic position I take - information or semiotic constraint being as fundamental to being as material action.

To be honest, I can't remember what holistic properties you reduce things to. Was it God or spirit or some other kind of mystical transcendent cause?

Certainly, I choose the semiotic approach precisely because it is a holism which is immanent and natural. You have an ontic dualism in sign vs matter. And yet you also have the causal machinery to connect the two sides of the equation.

This is why it is important that physics has just found itself describing the world pansemiotically - as in reaching an equivalence at the fundamental level between Shannon uncertainty and Boltzmann entropy. My metaphysics isn't handwaving. It is the new universal basis for the scientific measurement of nature.

Yep. The standard definition of metabolism is the "chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life". Which leaves then the informational processes that stand apart to regulate that chemistry.

Er, no.

You seem confused. I explained the speculative thesis of pansemiosis. It is based on the dichotomy of sign and matter. So it says that the animate and the inanimate are alike in being hylomorphically semiotic. There is formal and final cause acting by way of top-down constraint to shape substantial being. And what is new here is proposing a mechanism - semiosis - by which that interaction generally happens.

Now it is clear how boundary condition information or habits of interpretance impinge on material organisation in animate systems. That information is encoded locally by membranes, receptors, genes, neurons - a range of physical structures that deal in messages or signs.

But it is not so clear how the laws of the universe are encoded. Except that there is a striking shift happening in fundamental physics where information itself seems to have substantial existence. Cosmology is understood via the constraints of holographic boundaries or informational event horizons. Quantum collapse is understood via the thermal decoherence of information - again a limit imposed by the constraints of a context.

And generally, all inanimate systems - especially those that grow, move, self-organise and self-optimise to meet the global purpose of the second law - can be understood as dissipative structures. Which means they must be informationally negentropic to be able to maintain the entropic flows that sustain them. I mean, keep them inanimately alive. :)

So you are welcome to argue against that speculative metaphysics. But it does require you to be able to define what you mean by inanimate. As current physics has radically redefined what it might mean by inanimate.

In particular, I refer to those advancements which have created the categories of animate and inanimate things. — Metaphysician Undercover

So inanimate is a category? But it lacks a definite essence? A tornado can move, grow, die, dissipate energy, sort of like something animate, but we can't yet put a finger on why it is in fact inanimate?

Sounds legit.

What your monadism implies, my dualism (which in fact unfolds to a hierarchical triadism) seeks to make explicit.

I'll take that as a "No". — Galuchat

I gave a lengthy answer. You can pretend I didn't if you like.

So forget matter (or rather, substantial being) and give me your definition of inanimate. I presumed you thought of it as some kind of predicate of substantial being. Indeed, surely it is? But now you are being even more strangely evasive.

And you have yet to make the case that life requires something other than metabolism--whatever the metaphysical underpinnings of metabolism might be. — javra

Obviously, metabolism being unstable, it needs the further thing of a stabilising overlay of informational machinery. I think you are presuming that other aspect of a living system as part of your understanding of metabolism rather than breaking it out explicitly.

I still find reason to uphold that metabolism is a sufficient definition of life (granted that it includes the self-generation of the metabolizing self which, in part, requires nucleic acid replication, obviously). — javra

Yep. Metabolism + repair. You can have a metabolic network of components and processes. But the components don't last so some higher level memory must know how and when to replace them. Which is where a hierarchical or semiotic modelling relation is required. It is the instability of the metabolic parts that require some longer term machinery to provide the stability.

Accounts such as those of Evan Thompson in the book Mind in Life (2007) have it otherwise. — javra

Of course Thompson defends autopoeisis. This is a contentious issue with two sides. And it is not that autopoeisis is wrong - it accounts for dissipative structure level self organisation. But the criticism is that it doesn't adequately define life, which has the extra thing of an epistemic cut to separate the self (the auto) from the production (the poeisis) in proper semiotic fashion.

The battle does still rumble on in the background for some - here are papers from both directions...

https://biologyofcognition.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/autopoietic_mr.pdf

http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/Index/DocumentKMOrgTheoryPapers/HallNousala2010AutopoiesisCognitionKnowledgeSelfSustainingOrganizations(final).pdf

If you are addressing nucleic acids replication, isn't nucleic acids replication part of metabolism to begin with? Such as in the production of proteins, etc. It is as far as I know.

Makes it sound as though you are addressing reproduction in general. But, then, mules would be non-living organisms by definition--to list just one example. — javra

I'm addressing what I've been addressing all along - the separation of the model of the self from the production of the self in organisms. Now we can call those the replication and the metabolism, so long as those terms are understood in this generic sense. More precise to me would be Pattee's distinction between rate-independent information and rate-dependent dynamics.

So you are getting bogged down by particular expressions of informational control - the functional ability to repair cellular processes, or reproduce individual cells and whole organisms, or to enter into the evolutionary race first by the free exchange of genetic fragments and eventually via whole genome replication.

But I am talking about the code-matter duality at its most general or abstract level as understood within theoretical biology.

And some of the new points I mentioned - given the excitingly rapid advances being made at the moment - were the proof that there is a thermal quasiclassical zone where this kind of semiosis can physically take place, because that is the scale where material dynamics is so critically poised (between autopoeietic remaking and thermal dissoloution). And so in turn organismic information can tilt action in directions of "its own choice" from safe in its haven of DNA and other information capturing mechanism.

So the point of that is we don't just have to talk about high level functional concepts like replication and reproduction. We can talk about this infodynamic duality right down at the nanoscale level of the molecular machinery. We can see that definitional distinction in action down there - where life really begins.

And what you were asked for was the essence of inanimate matter.

Does it not have its own form of nous - its reason for being - under Aristotelian hylomorphism? Is it not Platonically necessary as the indeterminate chora to accept the impression of the eternal ideas?

Remember it was you who brought up the distinction between animate and inanimate. And you are proving my guess that it was an empty distinction as you can't now define what you actually mean by things that lack animation.

You claim that you only won't provide your definition because I would obstinately just then reject it.

I call obvious BS. You don't have one. So there is not even a definition of yours to accept.

Yeah. We will know one way or the other by 2050 - the global bottleneck represented by "peak everything". Population, fossil fuel, probably even medicine the way antibiotics are going (and pandemics still rating higher as a global existential risk than nuclear war).

So this is a great time to be alive if you are the curious type. It is the moment in history when we finally get to see how a lot of exponential growth trends must surely end. :)

Not surprisingly, the major criticism that theoretical biologists would have of autopoiesis is that it undercooks the informational aspect of dissipative structure. It doesn't account for the repair or replication aspect by which an organism is able to maintain its existence through having a model of itself.

So autopoiesis was great - back when mainstream biology was doing the opposite of undercooking the dynamical or developmental aspect of life. After DNA was discovered, the self-model became the big deal. And autopoiesis was one of the many responses, tugging at the mainstream's sleeve and saying, no guys, hang on a minute.

But still it remains the case that both information and dynamics are required to explain life and mind (as well as "inanimate, because lacking a self-replicating model" dissipative structure). So a balanced definition of life - such as to be found in the works of Rosen, Pattee and Salthe - stresses the complementary duality of metabolism and replication, or the material processes and the informational constraints.

I note that you still seem unable to define what you mean by inanimate. That is pretty telling.

Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor? — Galuchat

In science, talk about any quality ceases to be metaphor to the degree the quality can be measured or quantified. And my pansemiotic argument is that the two sides of hylomorphic nature - its informational form and its material dynamics - can be measure in the one shared coin of information (canonical degrees of freedom).

So metaphorically, Shannon information is "mindful" and Boltzmann/Gibbs entropy is "material". And the two can be brought together in a common semiotic framework such as Stan Salthe's infodynamics - https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art3/

The idea is that all existence can be understood in terms of a systems ontology. That is, everything is a case of downwardly acting constraints shaping upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. And so we have Peirce's triadic system of interpretance. The constraints are Shannon information. The degrees of freedom are Boltzmann entropy. The message of one acts on the uncertainty of the other to create a substantial world.

This general pansemiotic framework thus allows you to talk about dissipative structures like tornadoes or the Cosmos itself in terms of the "mindful" constraint of "material" freedoms. There is a common coin of measurement - Planck-scale bits of information. Or to dig deeper, there is a canonical scale of (quantum) indeterminacy - ie: Apeiron, firstness, vagueness - that constraints collapse to classical actuality (the definite microstates that thermodynamics counts).

So pansemiosis has become a pretty concrete proposal for a generalised metaphysics in that it ties any talk of mind - or matter - to a more foundational notion of being ... bits of information. And then even the bits of information are explained in terms of emergence or symmetry breaking, the collapse of indeterminism.

People think they know what they are talking about when they speak dualistically about mind and matter. However the purpose of science is to inquire rather deeper into the true nature of existence. And so it is no surprise if this folk ontology distinction - the oh so familiar Cartesian framing of the question - will come out sounding very different once science has been used to precisify our concepts in ways that actually make them measurable.

Not animate. Duhhh... — noAxioms

So the LEM applies to inanimate, but not to animate? Interesting.

Would you categorise a tornado as inanimate and on what grounds precisely?

A biologist would stress that what is definitional is replication and metabolism. Respiration releases energy, but life also requires the ability to direct some of that into work - the work that rebuilds the body doing the respiring. So somewhere life must have an idea of the material structure it desires to build or maintain. Which is where the imateriality enters the picture.

Have you no respect for the advancements made by metaphysicians between then and now? In particular, I refer to those advancements which have created the categories of animate and inanimate things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Define inanimate. What is its essence? :)

Do you not see that this is unreasonable? — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not. It makes a change from calling life and mind a physical machinery.

I thought you were the one who believed in all the spooky transcendent shit - God, freewill, prime movers. My way of speaking is faithful to the immanence that is the founding presumption of the natural philosopher.

I conclude that your metaphysics is essentially pantheistic. The Cosmos is a living god. Do you agree with this assessment? — Metaphysician Undercover

As I say, it is essentially pansemiotic rather than pantheistic or even panpsychic. So no, this ain't about gods or minds or anything that requires hard dualism. Semiosis is how physicalism can enjoy all the benefits of dualism without any of its mystic-mongering and question-begging.

As I have been arguing, existence is the product of the dynamic duo of matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And part of the big shift in the physicalist mindset needed to understand this pansemiotic metaphysics is that matter can't be regarded as inert or passive. This deal only works if matter has critical instability ... and relies on semiosis or habit-taking to grant it the stability of informational constraint.

The fact that pansemiosis is the case is pretty much proven by the thermodynamic/information theoretic turn that modern physics has had to take. The same general theory - of information entropy - now describes both sides in the one coin of measurement. We can measurably talk about the same thing when talking about physical uncertainty and mental (or rather message) uncertainty. That is Gibbs vs Shannon entropy.

So pansemiosis is the completely scientific resolution of the ancient dilemma. Yes, the Cosmos has a Mind. And if that sounds whacky, well sorry but this is what we actually mean in terms of modern physical models based on the interchangability of H and S measures of information entropy. We can now talk about particles and brains in the same essential language.

Biophysics finds a new substance

This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.

The key finding:
In brief, as outlined in this paper - http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/publications/Phillips2006.pdf - and in this book - http://lifesratchet.com/ - the nanoscale turns out to a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.

So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.

This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transistion from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. As the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.

The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.

So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.

So the big finding is the way that constrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.

The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.
In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.

A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where in needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.

It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.

A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.

This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.

The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.

But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.

It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.

So contra coventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.

As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.

And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.

The Nous is the mind which orders all the parts of the cosmos to behave in an orderly fashion. That's what you describe when you say that the universe follows final cause (the intent of a mind), and inanimate things behave according to habits (actions resulting from a mind). — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct. So my use of "mind" is clearly deflationary. Especially as I am explicitly generalising it to semiosis, or sign rather than mind. Semiosis is mind-like - in being the mechanism or process by which formal/final cause are understood as immanent in nature. So the Cosmos is thermodynamic. It is ruled by emergent self-organisation. And thus it has a teleology - the desire to maximise entropy. All material existence - including living and mindful creatures - are entrained to that universal purpose.

But immanent constraints are looser than transcendent laws. They only limit freedoms to the degree that any differences make a difference. And so the Cosmic level purpose - of achieving entropification - is highly attenuated, especially on very short spatiotemporal scales at which humans engage with the world. It is only in the long-run that human intelligence must be found to have accelerated the cosmos's grand entropification project.

Now the point in contention here was the difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis. And a critical difference is one of scale. Physics would say the critical scale for semiosis - as in the collapse of the wavefunction, the symmetry-breaking represented by the Big Bang - would be Planck scale or the scale of the fundamental quantum action. However biophysics has recently found that for life and mind - biological processes - the relevant symmetry breaking scale is instead much greater. It is the nanometre scale of the quasiclassical. The tipping point where sign relations can kick in is the poised point, the zone of critical instability, that lies energetically between the quantum and classical scale.

Oh, this thermal region also has to be in a body of water. You also need the right chemistry - water being a solvent of complex molecules and so providing the material base of some actual instability. Things are actually building up and breaking down within a complex medium.

So life and mind are different in that they rely on there being these further "accidents" of nature not foreseen by a purely physical level of semiosis.

Once the Universe, in its Bang state of being a bath of radiation, cooled/expanded enough to undergo a succession of phase transitions, it had the crud of massive atoms with their classically described motions condensing out and starting to do their own semiotic thing, with their own new laws. And after stars made heavy elements, you had the production of watery planets, you finally arrive at the rather accidental looking conditions for organic chemistry, and so organic life and mind as the highly complex avatars of the Second Law.

So while in a general sense, there is one principle to rule them all - pansemiosis in the general thermodynamic sense of a dissipative structure - it is also clear that biosemiosis is a whole other story in that it requires its own quite different quasiclassical scale of critical instability, and that in turn is quite narrowly defined in terms of its material conditions.

However this is like nous in granting mind - the power of self-organising purpose - to the cosmos. And it is kind of dualistic in granting fundamental reality to a realm of sign or symbol, as well as matter or physics. But - as I understand it anyway - it is critical that nous is immanent and not transcendent. It is not about some spirit or external hand acting on an inanimate and purposeless world. Instead, pansemiosis is a theory of immanent self-organisation - the taking of habits that forms a cosmos obeying its own accumulated laws.

I will now add an old post from PF that explains the recent biophysics that now directly supports the biosemiotic side of this argument....

You mean Apeiron, or even apokrisis? Or are you mixing up your Anaximanders and Aristotles? Easily done.

Anaximander's "Nous" — Metaphysician Undercover

Hu?

Any description of mind which uses psychological terms only as metaphor (e.g., accept, desire, rage, self, autonomy, as above) is inadequate, leading to confusion rather than clarity. — Galuchat

I said it seems like it rages ... and then specified why that could only be anthropomorphic projection because there is no internal semiotic model in play.

OK, fixed. :)

The bowling ball isn't actually heavy, it's just someone's subjective experience of the bowling ball which they find to be heavy. Yet, the statement says that the bowling ball exhibits the property of heaviness, which makes me think the claim is objective. — TphalfT

It's a good question as it does get to the heart of a big controversy.

A simple answer is that yes, all properties are relative - and that in turn means relative to "some observer".

So in the case of people lifting things, that observer is the particular thing of being some human making judgments. And two humans can routinely agree the bowling ball is heavier than the ping pong ball while also disagreeing about whether they themselves think a bowling ball is actually heavy - because they are strong and can lift far heavier things by comparison.

But even in physics, relativity rules. Properties are relative to some context that speaks to what they are. The job of physical modelling is to discover the most invariant or unchanging notion of a stable reference frame from which the necessary measurements can be made. So instead of the observer being subjective - the view from some particular mind - the observer is treated as being objective ... the God's eye view that anyone making the same kind of measurement would see from anywhere in the Universe.

So we have properties defined "relative to me" and "relative to the world". And when we talk about the bowling ball being heavy, we can be meaning either.

Science as it is now practiced is constitutionally incapable of incorporating mind, having gone to great lengths to exclude it from its reckonings. — Wayfarer

That's a bit harsh when science is all about placing empirical or observable constraints on metaphysical speculation. So the observer is included within the very epistemology of science - as the viewpoint which is to be constrained in some pragmatic/semiotic fashion.

So you are criticising that science does not explain mind. But science exists to shape the mind. It is the reasoning mind in action with the benefit of a sharper method of practice. You want mind incorporated as a scientific output, when it is instead incorporated as the input - a way to refine the modelling that minds are there for.

Now science can also produce theories of mind. A model of semiosis is a model of modelling. And forming a modelling relation with the world is what minds do. And it seems obvious that to be in such a modelling relation ought to feel like something. I mean logically, why would it not? Why would we expect being in a lived, intimate, modelling relation with the world to be simply zombie-style computation and not some particular expectation-driven point of view?

So sure, mind science isn't moving towards the discovery of some kind of "mind stuff that lights up with consciousness" - a good old reductionist story of a dualistic mental material with awareness as a property. But mind science already can give a quite reasonable semiotic explanation for "qualia" as what it is like to be in a modelling relation that forms signs of things.

CogSci had a computational or representational view of consciousness as some kind of data display or abstract symbol processing. But neurocognition has gone back to a more organismic or gestalt psychology understanding of mentality as being "ecological". This makes counter-intuitive but accurate predictions about modelling having the purpose of minimising the physical surprises that the world can impose on the mind, rather than the mind having some need to completely simulate the physical world as some mental simulacrum.

Minds are maps of territories, so they are all about turning messy reality into some simple arrangements of signs, like the lines on a scrap of paper that simply represent in compact fashion a way to get about with the least effort or even thought.

So in that sense, science is mind. It is map-drawing taken to another level of simplified habit. What you complain about as a bug - the vast reduction of information that science achieves in forming its models of the world - is its semiotic feature. To be more scientific is to be more mindful - if being a mind is about reducing the physical world's capacity to surprise or confound us to the bare minimum.

Apokrisis argument is that biological life perpetuates itself at the most fundamental levels by governing dissipative structures: intelligent data governing engines of the dissipation, but human minds themselves cannot readily be described as dissipative systems/structures. — VagabondSpectre

In my opinion, the best neuroscience model of the mind is Karl Friston's Bayesian Brain approach. And that does describe it as a semiotic dissipative structure - http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20-%20a%20rough%20guide%20to%20the%20brain.pdf

The mind as informational mechanism is all about reducing the uncertainty that a physical/material world has for an organism. So it is all about modelling that is intimately tied to physical regulation. And that is why a lack of such a tie makes artificial intelligence so impoverished - unless it is, as I argue, tied back into human entropic activities as yet a further level of semiosis.

It is accepting formal and final cause as real at the cosmological level. Even if that is just the general desire for entropification served by the form of dissipative structure. And that does account for life and (actual) mind as biology is ultimately explained as dissipative structure.

I agree that pansemiosis is still a speculative thought. Does it add anything or systematise our thought in any new useful way? And clearly it is a big difference that the interpretance forming non-living being is information outside that being, not information internalised as a model.

So as I said about a tornado, it seems rather lifelike as it rages about a landscape. But it is being sustained by boundary conditions, not by any internal model that makes it a self with some degree of autonomy.

But on the other hand, it feels important to shake up physicalist ontology rather boldly - to show that it is just as weird to call physics a matter of "material" as it is to call it "deadened mind".

To use the words means being able to cash them out as acts of measurement. So it is a semiotic coupling of models and measurements, concepts and percepts, intepretants and signs.

If I use the word "cat" successfully - in ordinary language - it means we agree on some interpretation of a sign. And if there is semantic vagueness, I could draw you a picture of my conception, or point to some "actual cat" - perhaps point to that lion sitting over there on a mat, and say "except a lot smaller and friendlier, without the mane, etc". A whole lot of further measurables to constrain your state of conception.

So on what side of the concept-percept or model-measurement divide does the semantic essence reside? Is it the theory that defines the cat, or the acts of measurement? Or the two functioning reliable/usefully/pragmatically together - over time? That is, the formal/final cause - as captured by the model - is coupled to the material/efficient cause, as captured by the acts of measurement (or the physical fact of "the sign of the thing" being triggered, so to speak).

So we start in good Peircean fashion with an epistemology that is personal and covers pragmatic ordinary language use. We all have our private interests and can define our languages of thought. When I see cats in a "perceptual fashion", I might have all sorts of feelings of cuteness and loveableness. But you might look at them with fear, loathing or even indifference. We each come at the world through our own lens of self-interest, our own story of individuated self and private arrangements of purposes or desires.

But when semiosis, through the syntactic machinery of speech, lifts such mindfulness to a communal level - humans as socially constructed creatures - then of course private meanings have to be now shaped by some common purpose (a group or cultural identity). And that means they must have a common form - the constraint of a common response to hearing a word like "cat" used "the right way".

So there is an ideational essence of catness - the one that functions at the cultural level of mindfulness to act as the tacit model of what sufficiently conforms to our contraints-based definition of "a cat". And yes, that definition certainly seems hazy. It sort of includes quolls ... or tiger-cats. But that is no big deal. That is how constraints are meant to function - limiting the variety of semiotic interpretation to the point of indifference.

There might still be further differences if we were to get out our metaphoric boundary atomising microscope - like the three-legged cat - but they don't in fact make an essential difference. At least within some community of ordinary language speakers (as opposed to the good folk running the local cat fanciers show who reject both the quoll and the three-legged critter you turned up with at the competition).

So right. That establishes the epistemological side of the argument for "essences" as being the information that constrains interpretive uncertainty. And clearly such definitions of essence are loaded with self-interest. That is why they speak to formal/final cause as it plays out in minds. The essence includes our reason for looking at the world in some particular way. It is not necessarily a fact of the thing, just necessarily a fact of the pragmatic relation - the fact that speaking this way achieves a (communal) purpose in terms of interacting with the noumenal world (the thing that is resistant or causally "other" to our wishes - the material/efficient causes that we are seeking to control, in short).

If you are with me this far - grind, grind, grind - then you will have already remembered how Peircean metaphysics then flips epistemology into ontology.

If we now want to answer scientific/metaphysical strength questions about natural kinds or essences - talk about the facts of the thing-in-itself, with no distorting human lens of self-interested speech - then we have to have a model of how the physical world is itself a mind doing semiosis. We have to be able to find a way to model formal/final causes "for real". And that is when we start to focus on how nature is in general a self-organising entropic habit. It is modelling itself into existence via acts of measurement.

So now the essence of a cat is whatever a cat genome says it is. To the degree the genome cares about the details. Then the essence of this cat here is whatever its neural or other developmental information has to say about the matter - to the degree that information sweats the fine print. Is the three legged cat still a cat? As far as the three-legged cat is concerned, probably yes. And probably functionally for other cats who come across it.

And then - if we can keep careful track of the information that stands for what is essential and necessary in terms of some individuated identity, not merely accidental or arbitrary differences that don't make a difference - we can cross the boundary between life and non-life to continue to put a finger on natural kinds or essences when talking about non-living systems, like weather patterns, plate tectonics, or stars.

So for you, as an instinctive reductionist, the issue is wherever does essence get to enter the picture? And for me, as a holist, the question is turned around so that it is wherever does essence get squeezed out? If we are now talking about ontology - the real world - what is it like for it to be at its least mindful or purposive, its most accidental or meaningless?

So we are chalk and cheese. My way sees nature as a unity. Even epistemology = ontology in rigorous fashion. Your way always leads to a division - and a division that doesn't even dare speak its own name at that. This is why your arguments always end up as muffled transcendence while claiming the cover of commonsense realism.

Look, he exclaims, the cat is on the mat. If everyone's head turns and nods in agreement, honour is then satisfied. Meaning is use. Syntax is sufficient to demonstrate coordinated behaviour. Actual private semantics be damned as unreachable metaphysics.

Philosophy by dog-whistle. It's just so seductively simple. And just so metaphysically wrong.

I had to grit my teeth in order to work my way through that post, Apo — Banno

That is really interesting information Banno - rolleyes....

The difference seems to be that you continue to call this use, the "essence", while I don't. — Banno

Thanks for again illustrating the narcissistic essence of life and mind. Whatever else you don't know, you know you are right and all that remains to be determined is how everyone else is wrong. Anticipation-based world modelling in a nutshell.

Get back to me if you have some more interesting reply to my arguments than that. Clue: four causes.

I put the case that biology succeeds despite not having a hard definition of the essence of life. — Banno

Definitions are never going to be hard if they have to track the crossing of some critical boundary. It is always going to be the case that the line between non-life and life is going to look hazy under the scientific microscope.

So that is why your problem with metaphysical essence is so misguided. You think the essential difference has to be marked on reality as some binary borderline. On this side life, on the other side, not-life. And the arbitrary nature of such lines on a map are obvious.

So yes, biology succeeds because it finds the essential in generalties - the constraints that speak to global or top-down formal/final causes.

You are imagining the search for essence to be the search for local material/efficient causes - the usual atomist/reductionist approach to understanding "the real". And that then leads to a crazy "natural kinds/rigid designator" style essentialism. That is what promotes the argument that the stuff on one side of a material border must be "non-living", the other side "living", thus provoking a metaphysical implosion and logical crisis.

But once you accept that generals are real, formal and final cause exist, existence itself is simply a state of constraint on foundational vagueness, then the problem of "essence" goes away. We know we are trying to talk about different kinds of hylomorphic substances - different forms of material constraint. So it something globallly functional rather than locally material that we mean to pick out as defining the boundary between living and non-living matter.

So that is why the semiotic approach to definition works. And is the one that theoretical biology keeps picking out, as your reference confesses...

One working definition of ‘life’ that has become increasingly accepted within the origins-of-life community is the ‘chemical Darwinian’ definition. A careful formulation (Joyce, 1994a;b) is: ‘Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.’

So life is different in that it localises formal/final cause. It is organismic in being able to remember the negentropic shape that is its entropic advantage.

Non-living matter does not have this internal model of itself. Non-living matter is regular and self-similar only due to global information, or pan-semiosis.

Dissipative structures do seem lifelike. A tornado seems to chase its way across a plane of temperature gradients, sustaining its vortex by "eating" the differences. Physico-chemical nature is ruled by all sorts of such growth and entropification processes. They have common forms - like vortexes and fractals. And they have a generic purpose - as encoded in the Laws of Thermodynamics. So - like even fire - they are sort of life-like ... in being pan-semiotic, or constrained in a global fashion by formal/final cause. But then the ability to internalise this kind of information - form a self-organising model of "self" - marks a functional crossing of a boundary.

But again, if we are to put this under a microscope - ask about life as a natural kind - then we have to actually understand the question we want to ask from nature's own point of view.

The whole point is the functional "having of a self-describing model" - the internalised information that is captured by a whole array of semiotic machinery, but principally genes, neurons, words (and now numbers). So life is semiotic modelling - internally generated constraints over less constrained non-living physico-chemical entropic flows. And now at the material borderline things look hazy because life only needs a stochastic cut-off point between what it - it itself - defines as living vs non-living, self vs non-self, regulated vs haphazard, meaningful vs meaningless.

That is, in being a system able to interpret the differences that make a difference, the system defines its own border of indifference. We humans can stick life under a microscope and complain that this borderline looks hazy to us. But so what? In the "mind" of the organism, it has set its own probabilistic threshold in terms of what is "good enough" as the constitution of its material/efficient self. It has an idea of its formal/final essence. And that is what it is busy living out as an entropic process.

So essence is use. ;)

It is just that life is in fact defined by making essence personal. Essence for the physical world is its global identity in terms of formal/final cause. And essence for the biological world is information that is internalised to "a self". It is a local capacity to add constraints or bounds on entropic activity.

I personally don't feel much need for "essence" as a term. It suffers from the substantive confusion I outlined. Substance was a theory of metaphysical hylomorphism - a "four causes" story about how formal/final cause acted to constrain material/efficient degres of freedom. But then along came atomistic reductionism - in competition with Platonic religious spiritualism. That produced the familiar modern confusion of a sustance dualism.

Folk had to pick a side. Either reality was just material/efficient cause, or there was this other mystic stuff call formal/final cause. And Fregean logical atomism picked its side, pretty soon ran into a ditch, and was left to walk away from its own smoking wreck, muttering bitterly about nothing being certain except that if logical atomism couldn't make metaphysics work, that proved no-one could make it work.

Meanwhile Peirce had already sketched out a much bigger four causes metaphysics that explained the hylomorphic divide in terms of semiosis. Instead of a mind-matter divide, he provided a sign-matter bridge. And now modern thermodynamics is cashing that out in information theoretic terms. We can actually make scientific measurements on both sides of the sign-matter division in terms of entropy or fundamental degrees of freedom.

And as I've pointed out, definition is theory plus measurement. Definition can be precise to the degree we can make exact measurements of what we claim to be believing. The metaphysics of the modern information theoretic approach at last does give us a fundamental measurement basis. And so biology -
already a very recent discipline - has started to really move in the last 30 years.

So life can be defined as a natural kind, and yet that is not an implicit theory of essence? Ah, how you Fregean scholastics love dancing on your pinheads.