Mind in action

 I will take your word (your having read the whole book) that Behe quotes many other examples. The thesis seems to be that many, if not most, mutations that may result (in some circumstances, e.g the availability of mainly high-fat food sources) in beneficial effects aren't genuinely constructive. It's more that they're the result of a decrease in the overall activity of specific genes. Which isn't how gradualistic micro-evolution is supposed to work; NS is supposed to select beneficial mutations, not ones that just happen to lessen activity and result in fortuitous advantages in specific circumstances. - Michael Larkin

https://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/b...ost-128576

Genes were thought to be "magic" material that have physical properties, years ago, the idea was they were "good" for the source of the benefit.  I think this stance is long updated away from "feelings" and toward verifiable informational mechanisms.

To make bio-programs work, you need to signal - go now; and then - slow down.  The material is not magic, the communication effects find structures that help command and control through regulation.  The magic falls away, and information structures and processes are revealed.  Slowing a process down will certainly be advantageous some of the time, in terms of communicating instructions.

For life to start - mind - as the abstract term representing all information based activity in biology - had to be activated.  Mind has to program instructions that have outcomes as: go - eat - assimilate - reproduce.  Chickens and eggs came after natural bio-needs where conceived.  Mind had to import information, structure a personal response and have an outcome related to the information processed.

Materialism, as a method is fine.  Exclude all variables except those from empirical tests and report in standards-based units of measure.  The problem comes when a software issue is raised.  Different units of measure are needed besides amps and ohms.

Informational realism dictates an environment where informational processes happen in harmony and resonance with physics and chemistry.  Time and space - look more like logical sequence and Hilbert space when expressed in an informational environment and mind is like energy, acting as activity that changes probabilities for outcomes.   In this environment, the statement that an idea (information object) has a time whose come --- can be a real outcome.  literally.

i think it's called a realized design

The simple straightforward answer is that the action of mind is measured in the changing probabilities in the informational environment.

Imagine a boy and girl teetering on the brink of falling in love. Their minds do something (actions of two minds) and they fall in love.

Do you really think that what happens corresponds to your above explanation?

David

I am reading a brand new book about the science behind the "academic culture", that now leans strongly into information science.  It is hard to read for me, well because it is so well written.  news flash - my own prose is tortured.  The book so far is making a case for a materialist view to all the uproar.   And trying to take the reader on a reality adventure into an interesting topic.     you can imagine all the ugly part of my nature coming out, in nothing but self-pity and jealousy.

ok,  over it now.................. 

here are the things he says that are reasoned.  After calling in John Wheeler's ghost, Caleb Scharf goes for target and makes a case for the fundamental natural role for information:

If we take this view of reality, then decisions of yes or no, red or blue, don't just enable analysis of the world.  At the deepest level they actually create phenomena and their functions.  If you think that it is head-spinning, well yes it is.  But the overarching idea that information is something real, something that actually could pull the puppet strings on the world, and on us, is actually not so hard to grasp.

head-spinning? maybe when K. Sayre wrote about Informational Realism in 1976.  But not so much now, 15 years after Oxford's L. Floridi defended of Informational Structural Realism.  Since then, IR versions have come out as Quantum IR, Buddhist view of IR and the idea of Math Realism is a special case of Information Realism.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/f1d30b...&cbl=75937

I love the content of the above paragraph in the opening of "The Ascent of Information" (Books, Bits, Genes and machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm).  The next paragraph not so pragmatic to me. It begins the defense of his term/concept - dataome. 

Because at its core, the dataome is not just about what we get from our data, but what our data gets from us.

Imagine a boy and girl teetering on the brink of falling in love. Their minds do something (actions of two minds) and they fall in love.

Do you really think that what happens corresponds to your above explanation?

David

absolutely!  Minds look for affordances and respond from a database of probable actions, as its fundamental task.   

The minds of the two detect an informational object (affection, sex, companionship) and their minds responds by changing behavior.  Sub-conscious mind, first, sends hormonal messages based on the detection.  These potentials turn to activity and lead to further states of communication.  Brink of falling in love is non specific - but if romantic love - pheromone releases will convey a powerful physical signal.  Mind has changed the probability.  If the other person's mind does not find an affordance, the sub-conscious signals will be deterrent to connect, even with a conscious effort to be polite.  
  

An affordance is an action possibility formed by the relationship between an agent and its environment (J. Gibson 1977; J. Gibson 1979).

absolutely!  Minds look for affordances and respond from a database of probable actions, as its fundamental task.   

The minds of the two detect an informational object (affection, sex, companionship) and their minds responds by changing behavior.  Sub-conscious mind, first, sends hormonal messages based on the detection.  These potentials turn to activity and lead to further states of communication.  Brink of falling in love is non specific - but if romantic love - pheromone releases will convey a powerful physical signal.  Mind has changed the probability.  If the other person's mind does not find an affordance, the sub-conscious signals will be deterrent to connect, even with a conscious effort to be polite.  
  

And yet each of those steps is done without mind. I just don't believe that a mind (as distinct from a brain) can be built up out of non-mental components.

Otherwise you could invent all sorts of paradoxes. For example if A and B are components that are just not complex enough (or whatever the criteria is) to be minds, you can put them together and boom - you have a mind.

It is exactly the sort of magical thinking you are trying to escape.

And yet each of those steps is done without mind. I just don't believe that a mind (as distinct from a brain) can be built up out of non-mental components.

Otherwise you could invent all sorts of paradoxes. For example if A and B are components that are just not complex enough (or whatever the criteria is) to be minds, you can put them together and boom - you have a mind.

It is exactly the sort of magical thinking you are trying to escape.

You have completely misunderstood.  Mind interacts with information and meaning, in a similar way that energy interacts with physical objects. The primary function (not component) is detection of real-world probability and changing those probabilities by realizing possible responses.  This is a compact and quantifiable vector of action for mind.  Mind makes informational outcomes by enforcing decisions and perceived needs and wants.

Why is this important?  It is important because minds dealing with the currency of structured information and ability to order and organized environments.  Psi drops out as the activity of understanding.  Psi is just this, as advanced a phenomenal manifestation of instinct, intuition and feelings of integration in life at deeper levels.

You have completely misunderstood.  Mind interacts with information and meaning, in a similar way that energy interacts with physical objects.

The problem is that I only recognise two kinds of information:
1) Shannon information - which isn't a useful concept here.
2) Information that had been generated - directly or indirectly - by a mind, human, animal, alien or spiritual. I simply do not accept that information exists in any other way.

The only obvious apparent exception to case 2, is the information encoded in DNA, and maybe other biological molecules. However, as you know, I think that this has been generated by a mind of some sort.

Persuade me that information of another sort exists, and we might be talking, alternatively try discarding that idea and see how the world seems then.

David

The problem is that I only recognise two kinds of information:
1) Shannon information - which isn't a useful concept here.
2) Information that had been generated - directly or indirectly - by a mind, human, animal, alien or spiritual. I simply do not accept that information exists in any other way.

The only obvious apparent exception to case 2, is the information encoded in DNA, and maybe other biological molecules. However, as you know, I think that this has been generated by a mind of some sort.

Persuade me that information of another sort exists, and we might be talking, alternatively try discarding that idea and see how the world seems then.

David

I have resisted the usual knee-jerk response for me.  Retreat to the safety of published thinkers to make a point.  Instead, here is how I arrived at the IR perspective.  

Information, both as Shannon info and as meaning, are real because they successfully model natural events.  This is symmetrical to physical sciences, where the interaction of materials and energy model natural events.  Physical science is balanced by a working understanding of the role of information.  Communications in nature are as important to science understanding as are mechanics.

Abstract
The scope of the development of physical objects is ahead of the scientific development of information objects, in the cultural view.  Electronic devices have surely changed somewhat that perception, as information is streaming at a rate never seen.  A balanced and open-minded view gives both information and physical science equal roles - each with distinct laws, equations and units of measure.

Matter and energy are concepts that are integrated, even being integrated in mathematical expressions.  Informational Realism - for me - is the simple idea that Shannon information and its structures are matching as a category to materials science.  And further; the activity and outcome-based view of physics works for observing mind-enforced meanings in actual behavior.

This is the otta-the-box claim, that real-world meanings are being imported and manipulated by mind and are predictable like the activity of energy.  

The further claim is made that mind exists- as simply the concept of information processing whose output changes the inner and outer information associated with an agent.  Therefore mind is a set of measurable variables.
 
I would be ontologically committed to this model of natural biology.  But that is just personal.  This model of mind is pragmatic and ice-cold, as a heuristic method  The objective nature of outcomes and the math underlying real-world probabilities makes it computational.  The hope is that the reification in science analysis is removed while containing concepts that have subjective meaning.  The fundamentals of matter, energy, Shannon info and real-world meanings generate relations and variables that accurately connect the past, present and future with predictable outcomes.  The key process to be mapped is understanding.

Might be of interest:

Only what exists can cause: An intrinsic view of free will

Giulio Tononi, Larissa Albantakis, Melanie Boly, Chiara Cirelli, Christof Koch

This essay addresses the implications of integrated information theory (IIT) for free will. IIT is a theory of what consciousness is and what it takes to have it. According to IIT, the presence of consciousness is accounted for by a maximum of cause-effect power in the brain. Moreover, the way specific experiences feel is accounted for by how that cause-effect power is structured. If IIT is right, we do have free will in the fundamental sense: we have true alternatives, we make true decisions, and we - not our neurons or atoms - are the true cause of our willed actions and bear true responsibility for them. IIT's argument for true free will hinges on the proper understanding of consciousness as true existence, as captured by its intrinsic powers ontology: what truly exists, in physical terms, are intrinsic entities, and only what truly exists can cause.