Trashing natural selection as a special case.

Well you have me going in two directions.   Do I defend physicality and the empirical data backing math relations?  Or, the kick in the personals with a challenge to quantification of "Subjectivity/Intentionality/Reason"?

So are you taking a sort of "instrumentalist" approach here, and the "physical" is the set of observations that lead to applicable science?

Not really sure what a challenge to quantification of "Subjectivity/Intentionality/Reason"? means to be honest.

I will let the empirical data and the math relations of chemistry and physics fend for themselves.  Physical objects are understood at subconscious levels and in the common view are pretty secure in their role and expected transformations.  Since I have stripped them of their magic and assigned their "essences" to the informational environment, pragmatically they "work" in applied uses.

I don't see how one can assign essences, given the information we gain is relational. As per Smolin:

"We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties.


Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations."

Or are you saying that, as per your concluding statement below, that by assigning essences you accept that "information" is based on utility and not determining what the "Ground of Reality" consists of?

Is information a useful means of modeling events that allows continuity between the "physical" and "mental", as in "the difference that makes a difference"? Or does information precede both the categories of the Dualist in a Neutral Monist sense?

Maybe a better way to pose this question is to ask are you an Information Realist?

Quantification of information spaces/actions is a topic I am poorly qualified to defend.  That said, if reason is based on logic - then it is well modeled and yes/no answers to careful propositions is pretty secure.  Just like a definition of the physical is tied to an innate understanding of objects, so is an understanding (for me anyway) of information objects. 

Regarding the "based on logic" part - The challenge for me is Nagel's question about what is the "groundless ground of Reason"? It seems to me this is part of the Hard Problem when it's split into the aforementioned Subjectivity/Intentionality/Reason.

Here is my rallying cry.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3839564

The concept here is that a simulation and the real thing it models - while one is a source and the other made of mutual information abstracted from it  -  does have useful value in science and engineering.   A computer sim can copy and predict outcomes (to a limited degree) caused by intention and motivation. 

So a limited model that by its nature cannot grasp the causal roots....correct?

Enough so, that they can be studied in a non-subjective framework.  Subjectivity - can be like a biological sim.  Personal experience is made from source sensations and living things have access to mutual information gained from the signals it captures.  Once the mutual information from the senses is combined with personal viewpoints - it is now a source that can be communicated.

We can assign some probabilities to the relations, like they do in marketing plans on who will buy what, but we aren't solving the Hard Problems of Consciousness and Causality?

Which is fine, Information doesn't have to be "stuff". I am just trying to first grasp what Information is to you, though I do agree the opportunities that the concept of Information has for the sciences - including parapsychology - is vast.

I am not looking to answer metaphysical questions, but to nail down the pragmatic and coherent picture created from making information happen in a separate environment.

I confess I am not sure what this means. What does the "separate environment" refer to? Is the original environment the physical, and the separate one the mental?