SoS, while you seem to have a far better grasp of consciousness as mechanism than most others, in this latter discussion, your words about information have been positively .... wooish.

Words are largely lies, including and especially those we use to ourselves in our heads (it's a profound and shocking experience when you finally *believe* that - the only way you can truly believe that, below the level of words, inside your own head). The only meaning they have comes from something that we physically sense in the external world. So can you, even vaguely, give a starting point from likely shared experiences that are going to enlighten me as to your idea of information?

As near as I can tell, you seem to be pledging allegiance to Platonism. A lot of philosophers seem to be closet Platonists, even when they publicly sit with us grungy materialists. But we dirt-under-the-fingernails-and-ideals-are-just-pretty-pictures types will agree with their denials of solipsism only long enough to mutter onanism. As all other words *must* be grounded in reality, so must "real".

-- TWZ

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Looking at it one way we have physical laws. Looking another way we have perceived objects like trees. I have arguments about whether or not 'treeness' exists on the planet. Whether our categories are real or all in our heads. I support the former. Treeness is just as real as the physical laws. Just another pattern or transform.

Our brains evolved to take advantage of the patterns in the particulars. They are wonderful statistical machines that glean the pattern at many different levels and perspectives.

I want to refer you to the current set of papers I am tackling. All by O'Reilly and friends. Particularly McNaughton. They are developing a theory of learning that matches the evidence very well and is basically that there are two different systems. The cortex which is a slow statistical learner and the hippocampus which is fast and keeps an index of current time and space cards that compress information from the cortex into episodic memories.

This system is tripartate actually but for the sake of this discussion we can think of just the two systems, the fast compressed system and the big cortical stat machine.

This I am calling the currency of our reality. It's not actually reality but it is very tightly coupled to actual reality. The persistent illusion of our reality is persistent precisely because it is damned good at representing the patterns in the particulars.

The information, the patterning, of the world is mirrored in the brain, and is the same attribute in our awareness of the world? This makes it the medium of exchange, or currency, between consciousness and the external world? Am I still missing the point?

I think we are getting close.

To go a little further. (note: I haven't a clue where the fuck I'm going. Just somewhere)

I would like to introduce a term. Systemic reality. A system of relationships that might as well be a thing in themselves and work as reality should. Pretty weak and nebulous so far.

Consider that the physical laws we have found describe a great deal about the universe. But they do not describe THIS universe entirely. There is no scientific law that says this should be sodium here and this should be carbon over here. The fact that there is this variation is due to some informational content in the universe that, in my opinion, is a much bigger set of facts than the physical laws that describe causality.

In addition to that large set of facts there is another supervenient set of facts that are the many patterned relationships that exist in this information. I have claimed that the physical laws are a subset of these patterns. Also that our biological or organismic reality is a subset of those patterns.

Some of these sets of patterned relationships form a Systemic Reality. I claim these things are as real (as physical if you must) as anything else about the universe because these patterns do exist as facts.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Chrisw wrote:That just sounds like the difference between the general and the particular. For example, on the one hand we have general laws of physics and facts about the sort of particles and forces that can exist. On the other we have the particular facts about exactly what is where at any particular moment. Or what is where at one moment if we were strict determinists (we can derive the rest of the universe from one snapshot and the laws that describe how the universe develops over time).

Notice that you characterize it with 'just'. We trivialize the particulars and concentrate on the general. The physical laws of the universe in my inverted view of it are a result of those particulars not the other way around. But that's just my emphasis not the reality. The reality is that the two things can't be separated.

That sounds like Humean Supervenience, as championed by the philosopher David Lewis.

"all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact… There is no difference without difference in the arrangement of qualities. All else supervenes on that." -- David Lewis

I like Humean Supervenience but I don't think reifying the patterns and relations of properties in the world as "information" is very helpful. And it contradicts with normal usage where information is not fundamental but is something that supervenes on the physical facts of the world.

Information has an everyday meaning that is quite different. For example, you might say that the information contained in a volume of the complete Works of Shakespeare is the facts about the atoms that make up the book. But most of us would say that it is the text. How can it be both?

In a deterministic world knowledge of the initial individual facts about that world together with the laws of physics suffices to give us all future individual facts about the world. If you give the label "information" to these facts then information always remains constant in a deterministic world. But we know that information can be created and destroyed. We create and erase information all the time and we don't need to invoke quantum randomness to explain this. There is even a law that specifies the minimum amount of heat that is dissipated for each bit of information you erase: Landauer's Principle.

To develop this idea and see why I think it important you have to start to think about those particulars, what I call the information, in a purely mathematical way. I see space-time as a matrix of values. There is a way that it IS. A particular shape to it. In that shape we do not have random goo. We have patterns up the ass at every level and between levels. It's like a fractal.

Looking at it one way we have physical laws. Looking another way we have perceived objects like trees. I have arguments about whether or not 'treeness' exists on the planet. Whether our categories are real or all in our heads. I support the former. Treeness is just as real as the physical laws. Just another pattern or transform.

I agree with all that. You aren't saying anything original here but I think you are right.

Have you read Dennett's essay "Real Patterns"? I think you'd like it.

SpeedOfSound wrote:To go a little further. (note: I haven't a clue where the fuck I'm going. Just somewhere)

I would like to introduce a term. Systemic reality. A system of relationships that might as well be a thing in themselves and work as reality should. Pretty weak and nebulous so far.

Consider that the physical laws we have found describe a great deal about the universe. But they do not describe THIS universe entirely. There is no scientific law that says this should be sodium here and this should be carbon over here. The fact that there is this variation is due to some informational content in the universe that, in my opinion, is a much bigger set of facts than the physical laws that describe causality.

Quibbles about the word "information" aside, I don't think anyone could disagree with that.

In addition to that large set of facts there is another supervenient set of facts that are the many patterned relationships that exist in this information. I have claimed that the physical laws are a subset of these patterns. Also that our biological or organismic reality is a subset of those patterns.

Yep, that's Humean Supervenience.

Some of these sets of patterned relationships form a Systemic Reality. I claim these things are as real (as physical if you must) as anything else about the universe because these patterns do exist as facts.

In "Real Patterns" Dennett poses some interesting questions about what counts as real. For example he asks, are centres of gravity real? If so what about "Dennett's lost sock centre" - the point on Earth that minimises the sum of the distances to all the places where Dennett has lost socks. Such a place must exist but how "real" is it?

Chrisw wrote:For example he asks, are centres of gravity real?

He might better ask what the difference is between saying that "CG is significant" and "Shakespeare's Hamlet is significant". Try flying an airplane whose weight and CG are out of certified limits.

No, if all you do is pick fruit off the trees all day and chow down, CG is not significant. Until you have to get up and run away from a predator.

Chrisw wrote:

Have you read Dennett's essay "Real Patterns"? I think you'd like it.

No. I'll check it out. I suppose I could have saved myself a lot of time and thinking if I had the time to read philosophy.

So I need a new word for the particulars that does it justice. No one likes me using information. Got any ideas?

When I get my head straight I want to comment on the info and Shakespeare.

SpeedOfSound wrote:I suppose I could have saved myself a lot of time and thinking if I had the time to read philosophy.

Yes you could.

So I need a new word for the particulars that does it justice. No one likes me using information. Got any ideas?

You could reduce "information" to its non-observational origin, "form". On the other hand it could then be mixed up with "Platonic form", meaning universals, not particulars. The problem is that all possible terms in this area already have several meanings.

"Information" never means the original form, but an "observer-coded reference", which is necessary to understand and store it. A difference between a particular form and an information referring to it is, that there can be infinite forms of information referring to the same particular form.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Chrisw wrote:

Have you read Dennett's essay "Real Patterns"? I think you'd like it.

No. I'll check it out. I suppose I could have saved myself a lot of time and thinking if I had the time to read philosophy.

It can save time sometimes. But I don't want to give the wrong impression - that there are answers to all these questions out there just waiting to be read. I don't think it's that easy.

I always understand philosophical writing much better if I've already had some of the ideas in it myself. Obviously the professionals are more rigorous and thorough and they can point you to other related areas. But if I haven't struggled with the issues a little myself first I find it hard to appreciate what they are getting at. I'm sure that's not an uncommon experience. I can't just swallow other peoples' philosophies whole. Though why would I want to, where would be the fun in that?

Rilx wrote:"Information" never means the original form, but an "observer-coded reference", which is necessary to understand and store it. A difference between a particular form and an information referring to it is, that there can be infinite forms of information referring to the same particular form.

I almost agree with that. But I don't think observers are necessary. DNA really did encode information even before there were any sentient beings to observe it and would encode information in a universe that never evolved anything more complex than amoebas.

Chrisw wrote:

Rilx wrote:"Information" never means the original form, but an "observer-coded reference", which is necessary to understand and store it. A difference between a particular form and an information referring to it is, that there can be infinite forms of information referring to the same particular form.

I almost agree with that. But I don't think observers are necessary. DNA really did encode information even before there were any sentient beings to observe it and would encode information in a universe that never evolved anything more complex than amoebas.

IMO, DNA is an ambivalent case. As you notice, by my definition DNA is "information" only to humans who translate it to "code". Protein synthesis, "nature", doesn't use DNA as encoded information but as a physical selector of amino-acids. IOW, protein synthesis doesn't decode DNA from pure information to control the physical process; it is a part of the physical process as such. And, strictly speaking, nothing encodes information into DNA, least DNA itself.

Our cells observe their environment by several receptors, which can be seen as elementary 1-bit senses. "Sentient" is again quite ambiguous term. Cells are not conscious but may we say that they are "unconsciously sentient"?

SpeedOfSound wrote:So I need a new word for the particulars that does it justice. No one likes me using information. Got any ideas?

Form? Structure? Pattern?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Information” has been causing this kind of problem for the professionals recently.

the SEP wrote:For many biologists, the most basic processes characteristic of living organisms should now be understood in terms of the expression of information, the execution of programs, and the interpretation of codes. So although contemporary mainstream biology is an overtly materialist field, it has come to employ concepts that philosophers will recognize as intentional or semantic ones, concepts with a long history of causing foundational problems for materialists (and, to some extent, for everyone else).

Fossicking around in the SEP, the article on structural realism may be relevant to your views (particularly in the comment "we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves only to the mathematical or structural content of our theories"):

the SEP wrote:Structural realism was introduced into contemporary philosophy of science by John Worrall in 1989 as a way to .... have “the best of both worlds” in the debate about scientific realism. With respect to the case of the transition in nineteenth-century optics from Fresnel's elastic solid ether theory to Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, Worrall argues that:

There was an important element of continuity in the shift from Fresnel to Maxwell—and this was much more than a simple question of carrying over the successful empirical content into the new theory. At the same time it was rather less than a carrying over of the full theoretical content or full theoretical mechanisms (even in “approximate” form) … There was continuity or accumulation in the shift, but the continuity is one of form or structure, not of content. (1989, 117)

According to Worrall, we should not accept standard scientific realism, which asserts that the nature of the unobservable objects that cause the phenomena we observe is correctly described by our best theories. However, neither should we be antirealists about science. Rather, we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves only to the mathematical or structural content of our theories.

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:So I need a new word for the particulars that does it justice. No one likes me using information. Got any ideas?

Form? Structure? Pattern?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Information” has been causing this kind of problem for the professionals recently.

the SEP wrote:For many biologists, the most basic processes characteristic of living organisms should now be understood in terms of the expression of information, the execution of programs, and the interpretation of codes. So although contemporary mainstream biology is an overtly materialist field, it has come to employ concepts that philosophers will recognize as intentional or semantic ones, concepts with a long history of causing foundational problems for materialists (and, to some extent, for everyone else).

Fossicking around in the SEP, the article on structural realism may be relevant to your views (particularly in the comment "we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves only to the mathematical or structural content of our theories"):

the SEP wrote:Structural realism was introduced into contemporary philosophy of science by John Worrall in 1989 as a way to .... have “the best of both worlds” in the debate about scientific realism. With respect to the case of the transition in nineteenth-century optics from Fresnel's elastic solid ether theory to Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, Worrall argues that:

There was an important element of continuity in the shift from Fresnel to Maxwell—and this was much more than a simple question of carrying over the successful empirical content into the new theory. At the same time it was rather less than a carrying over of the full theoretical content or full theoretical mechanisms (even in “approximate” form) … There was continuity or accumulation in the shift, but the continuity is one of form or structure, not of content. (1989, 117)

According to Worrall, we should not accept standard scientific realism, which asserts that the nature of the unobservable objects that cause the phenomena we observe is correctly described by our best theories. However, neither should we be antirealists about science. Rather, we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves only to the mathematical or structural content of our theories.

Hey. Thanks for the clues and links. What I am struck by here is the difficulty we have naming or talking about one of the most fundamental realities of the universe. That is it's variation and relationships between that variation. Perhaps our inability to accept certain evidence about consciousness is not so surprising when it is clear that even information confuses us and divides us.

I have set out to model the specifics of conscious mechanism in the brain a number of times. 600 colored pens and 16 square foot sheets of paper and whiteboard. My attempts always fall apart. I end up with a confused mess. There is something fundamentally wrong with how I approach the modeling. So one thing I am doing here is attempting a re-think of some of the fundamentals of how we approach things of the mind. Specifically I want the anthro- out of it.

If this information concept is hopelessly tied up in observers and our idea of mind then I must find a way to release it. Else it just degenerates into splitting hairs, arguments, and cirlcles.

Thanks to Chrisw and all the others too. I will keep reading and babbling here for a while in the hope that I will sober up and come up with something of some use.

zoon wrote:

the SEP wrote:Structural realism was introduced into contemporary philosophy of science by John Worrall in 1989 as a way to .... have “the best of both worlds” in the debate about scientific realism.

SR seems to carry with it the baggage of an attack on realism. Am I wrong about that?

If I'm not then this is not what I'm saying though perhaps in subtle ways. I'm saying that our views of reality from the particular angle that we view them are probably mostly accurate. More expansive or higher resolution views may render these current views as seeming naive but not untrue. In my fractal idea of realities a view from a different magnitude or perspective is just another truth.

I'm too lazy to follow the links right now but I seem to remember that structural realism comes in two forms: Ontic structural realism and.... the other sort (epistemic?)

Ontic structural realism is an ontological theory. It says that the world fundamentally is just structure or pattern. I'd argue against that. But the more moderate form of structural realism, perhaps the sort described in the quote that Zoon provided, talks about what things we can "epistemically commit ourselves to". So it's really just a theory about how science works and what we can know.

The physicist Max Tegmark is probably someone who qualifies as an ontic structural realist. Here is his paper "The Mathematical Universe" where he argues that "our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure". Even if you don't follow all the maths and physics (I don't) his writing is very clear and there are lots of nice diagrams. He has other papers available on line too.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote:

the SEP wrote:Structural realism was introduced into contemporary philosophy of science by John Worrall in 1989 as a way to .... have “the best of both worlds” in the debate about scientific realism.

SR seems to carry with it the baggage of an attack on realism. Am I wrong about that?

If I'm not then this is not what I'm saying though perhaps in subtle ways. I'm saying that our views of reality from the particular angle that we view them are probably mostly accurate. More expansive or higher resolution views may render these current views as seeming naive but not untrue. In my fractal idea of realities a view from a different magnitude or perspective is just another truth.

Unlike Chrisw, I hadn’t come across structural realism before reading that SEP article, so I’m only going by what I’ve understood from the article. Structural realism seems to “carry the baggage of an attack on realism” in the sense that it was invented in order to stave off an attack; it is itself a form of realism. The attack on scientific realism came from the fact that a number of scientific theories which were generally accepted and had predictive power then turned out to be fundamentally wrong (like the theory of light as waves through ether), so it could well be that any of our current theories could turn out to be equally mistaken, so it’s not a good idea to assume that current scientific theories are about real things. That was the attack: structural realism answers the attack by claiming that what is real in a scientific theory is the mathematical structure (in the light example, the light has a wave structure whether the waves are supposed to be electromagnetic or going through ether), and the rest (e.g. the ether) can be regarded as inessential. I think that’s very similar to what SpeedOfSound is saying, though SpeedOfSound is the judge there, and structural realism avoids saying anything about consciousness, so it’s less comprehensive than SpeedOfSound’s version.

Again going by the SEP article, structural realism seems to be a lively area for philosophers of science at the moment. A number of different versions are argued for, and the versions are classified broadly into two groups: epistemic structural realism (ESR) and ontic structural realism (OSR) (the article lists seven kinds of OSR). Worrall’s original 1989 article was ambiguous as between ESR and OSR.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

A crude statement of ESR is the claim that all we know is the structure of the relations between things and not the things themselves, and a corresponding crude statement of OSR is the claim that there are no ‘things’ and that structure is all there is

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly the distinction between ESR and OSR which Chrisw was drawing:

Chrisw wrote:Ontic structural realism is an ontological theory. It says that the world fundamentally is just structure or pattern. I'd argue against that. But the more moderate form of structural realism, perhaps the sort described in the quote that Zoon provided, talks about what things we can "epistemically commit ourselves to". So it's really just a theory about how science works and what we can know.

Chrisw wrote:I'm too lazy to follow the links right now but I seem to remember that structural realism comes in two forms: Ontic structural realism and.... the other sort (epistemic?)

Ontic structural realism is an ontological theory. It says that the world fundamentally is just structure or pattern. I'd argue against that. But the more moderate form of structural realism, perhaps the sort described in the quote that Zoon provided, talks about what things we can "epistemically commit ourselves to". So it's really just a theory about how science works and what we can know.

The physicist Max Tegmark is probably someone who qualifies as an ontic structural realist. Here is his paper "The Mathematical Universe" where he argues that "our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure". Even if you don't follow all the maths and physics (I don't) his writing is very clear and there are lots of nice diagrams. He has other papers available on line too.

Tegmark is right on. The other papers linked clarify for me what I am not saying. Tegmark's 'birds eye view' is what I am trying to say. I' just looking at from the perspective of NS and the reality of our statistical neural networks. It seems I need a basic concept of the physical world that sheds human baggage and then I need to think in terms of transforms to explain the relationship between patterns and brain.

Thank you so much for the link. Things are getting clearer.

...

Maybe.

zoon wrote:

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

A crude statement of ESR is the claim that all we know is the structure of the relations between things and not the things themselves, and a corresponding crude statement of OSR is the claim that there are no ‘things’ and that structure is all there is

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly the distinction between ESR and OSR which Chrisw was drawing:

Chrisw wrote:Ontic structural realism is an ontological theory. It says that the world fundamentally is just structure or pattern. I'd argue against that. But the more moderate form of structural realism, perhaps the sort described in the quote that Zoon provided, talks about what things we can "epistemically commit ourselves to". So it's really just a theory about how science works and what we can know.

And here is me trying to approach this issue through a, dare I say it, spiritual POV. I prefer to say a subjective POV as the exploration of subjectivity is the essence of a spiritual practice.

I am coming to the same place. I have been told there is no seer and no seen, just the process of seeing. In other words what is real is the relationship, not the things themselves. The subjective arises because of the relationship - it is not a thing itself. And while subjectivity is primal it is of no consequence as it is not a thing - it is not in relationship to anything. And that is also where thingness - treeness if you like - arises as well. Until there is a relationship there is no thing.

It seems to me subjectivity exists wherever there is a relationship, yet is somehow different to the mathematics.

"I" am still pretty lost in all this, but the pieces - the "things" - are pretty well explained. And consciousness is a property of "I".

zoon wrote:
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

A crude statement of ESR is the claim that all we know is the structure of the relations between things and not the things themselves, and a corresponding crude statement of OSR is the claim that there are no ‘things’ and that structure is all there is

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly the distinction between ESR and OSR which Chrisw was drawing:

Chrisw wrote:Ontic structural realism is an ontological theory. It says that the world fundamentally is just structure or pattern. I'd argue against that. But the more moderate form of structural realism, perhaps the sort described in the quote that Zoon provided, talks about what things we can "epistemically commit ourselves to". So it's really just a theory about how science works and what we can know.

I would stop just short of OSR in that I suspect it will just be the structure but I'm not certain. Often I don't even care.

When I try and delve into what it might be and think in terms of particle and law I get the feeling that this is all too provincial for me. The strangeness that is will likely be so much stranger than that. Tegmark doesn't seem to be claiming that structure is all there is either. Haven't finished though. But I think any understanding we have of it will by necessity be only mathematical.

My thoughts last night were that separating the two things, structure and substance, is a false duality itself. These false duals are why we have so much trouble thinking about or talking about any of this. We talk past each other because one of us is paranoid about the other claiming some ontology that would take us down the Evil Path of Woo.

I have been stricken this last year with a certainty that ontology and ideas of reality is just another silly human trick. When I accept ESR all of that stops mattering. Then I can get on with talking about the transforms that our brains do on reality.

Make any sense?

Steve wrote:
And here is me trying to approach this issue through a, dare I say it, spiritual POV. I prefer to say a subjective POV as the exploration of subjectivity is the essence of a spiritual practice.

It takes a brave man to do that here.

All of this that I am working out here and talking about has helped me to marry my love of the certainty of science with my spiritual POV and my spiritual practice. It is so good to have a whole that knits together.

The only parts you have posted that make me cringe are the parts about 'for the good of man and society' and other teleological hints. I strongly believe that those things will be the natural side-effect of a spiritual life but making them the purpose of one is just another one-up substitution of ego. My ego for the ego of man.

It really doesn't matter to me if we all go extinct. I look forward to it.