We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought.

An interesting article on biology and information...not sure how to quote b/c FT has stringent copy rules:

https://www.ft.com/content/18a58ac4-18cc...351a53f1c3


[url=https://www.ft.com/content/18a58ac4-18cc-11e9-b93e-f4351a53f1c3][/url]

Is this the article entitled Could biological ‘information’ solve the mystery of life? in of all places the Financial Times? This source seems to attempt to protect their content by automatically changing the link to the actual article (which can be found and read by Googling it) to a generic link to a page on the various protections implemented by Financial Times. Tedious and annoying. 

This article is mainly a review of physicist Paul Davies' new book The Demon in the Machine. Apparently the book is about how the flow of information, information science, is supposed to be the missing ingredient that must be added in order to understand biology. He is apparently saying that in order to understand living organisms these organisms must be treated as computers using biological information as both the operational software and the data being processed.

I don't find the review or the new book as it is described very interesting in resolving any of these mysteries. Davies apparently fails to question the faith that Darwinism in some form or other must explain evolution, and seems to believe that information processing is the key to understanding the nature of consciousness (ignoring the well-known "Hard Problem").
Further, he apparently takes the completely scientifically untenable, optimistic view that life spontaneously starts up quite easily and is widespread in the universe.

Starting from the last point you made, my position is strongly against panpsychism, even if it is recently popular.

When the word "consciousness" is used, I don't see it as substitute for the word soul.  To me, it is bio-observation of the "mechanisms" of sense.  Self-awareness is you - experiencing you.  It is information processing - that is turned in - on itself for an "inner" viewpoint.  Life is a more fundamental thing that just trying to take in the experience of it.  I think that the doings and strivings themselves are the fundamentals.

Those things, which have really been deeply lived by me, I only remember the experiencing after the fact.  When lived to the full, those moments are when self-concern is at a low.  At those deeply felt moments it is not a pulling inward to the self, but a breakdown in barriers.  The organism and its environment are more closely integrated and are one in the same, as part of the same niche.

Having a modern Kant sort out biology's metaphysics would be nice. But right in front of us, is a newly revealed language of life.  The creativity of living things manipulates information about its environments and includes it into the genome.  This how it works.  And this means adaptation is right out of Lamarck in some ways.  Mind builds "information objects" and information objects organize biological functions.

So your view appears to be that the essence of consciousness is information processing and the physical actions carried out by this processing. In this you are ignoring the "Hard Problem" of consciousness studies. You are saying that the essence of consciousness is the processing itself that is being carried out by the neural structures of the brain or more primitively by the bio-computer of the cell. Then you are going with the still consensus view of materialist neuroscience that consciousness is inextricably tied to the neural or cellular mechanism that is doing the processing, and simply dissipates into nothingness when this physical substrate dies or is disrupted. Of course, many other tenets of materialism are taken to directly follow from this assumption of strict naturalism in science, including the views that consciousness is basically an illusion and that free will is a myth.    

So I guess you must also reject the mountain of evidence for the nonlocal independence of human consciousness from the physical brain and survival of physical death that exists in areas such as psi phenomena in parapsychology, veridical NDEs, reincarnation research (verified memories of small children), and mediumistic communications (Leonora Piper and Gladys Leonard for instance).

So your view appears to be that the essence of consciousness is information processing and the physical actions carried out by this processing. In this you are ignoring the "Hard Problem" of consciousness studies. You are saying that the essence of consciousness is the processing itself that is being carried out by the neural structures of the brain or more primitively by the bio-computer of the cell. Then you are going with the still consensus view of materialist neuroscience that consciousness is inextricably tied to the neural or cellular mechanism that is doing the processing, and simply dissipates into nothingness when this physical substrate dies or is disrupted. Of course, many other tenets of materialism are taken to directly follow from this assumption of strict naturalism in science, including the views that consciousness is basically an illusion and that free will is a myth. 

I am a strong believer in free-will, and I have the audacity to think that we can have a general understanding of intent and free-will; in terms of the quasi-empirical effects they cause.  Bayes has a lot to say about this.

But, saying we can measure and model stuff with science is not to say that there are not other levels on which to have personal knowledge.  While thinking that ethics and spirituality have a place in knowing reality, they are observing things that are not measured in physical units or in informational units.  While not pushing away religion/philosophy, there are still ways in which science works.  There are no science tools observing free-will in flow or the volume of intent in a message.

However, it is my stance that we can learn how messages get sent, how the message is encoded and what are the real-world results of the communication of functional information.

So, "essence" is an semantic abstraction and not a "distillate" of reality.  Essence is not a measurable. The essence of consciousness is life and love itself, in my humble personal metaphysics.

Modern science has found found living things communicate information at every level.  Mind is this activity of living things.  Living things freely will their own desires into reality.  It seems science has evidence that the minds of living things maybe active in apprehending the futures states and signaling for change via the genome.

  Caporale argues that some DNA sequences are more prone to mutational events because of their chemical nature and the biochemistry of DNA replication machinery. She points out that blocks of genetic information can be shuffled within a genome and even passed to the genome of another species. The strength of her book is in collecting and detailing relevant examples from the literature. She maintains throughout that not all mutations are random and that "focused, regulated variation is biochemically possible."

Caporale's idea of "variation-targeting mechanisms" has been criticized for implying foresight in the selection process. She argues, however, that naturalistic mechanisms can explain what appears to be directed purposeful mutation. Caporale offers an approach to working out the molecular and biochemical details, and challenges us to consider the idea that the mechanisms for generating genetic diversity can themselves evolve.....
She uses informal language, attributing "anticipation" or "strategy" to genomes. Although it should be clear to biologists that these are rhetorical devices, this distinction may be lost to others, and could provide fertile ground for that creationist specialty, quotation out of context. To talk of genomes as having "worldviews", or to say that "information can flow back from survival to the places in the genome that affect the generation of diversity," will leave some readers uncomfortable. - Finn Pond 

https://ncse.com/library-resource/review-darwin-genome

Lynn Caporale is a member of the the Third Way of Evolution.  You can believe that there is a natural way that the chemical signalling happens.  But, I think it is is clear that the logical structure behind strategy  is not random and comes from an accounting for future activity.  Mind is behind strategy and it comes from/as environmental feedback.

However, it is my stance that we can learn how messages get sent, how the message is encoded and what are the real-world results of the communication of functional information.

So, "essence" is an semantic abstraction and not a "distillate" of reality.  Essence is not a measurable. The essence of consciousness is life and love itself, in my humble personal metaphysics.

Would you say science, insofar as it is tied to mathematical description, can ultimately say little about actual causation?

It does feel like if Science is "The discovery of patterns through observation of change" then what makes the Pattern hold, what is the mental aspect of Observation, and what drives Change would be ultimately axiomatic and thus mysterious to that method of investigation...not a hard argument, just spit-balling here...

Would you say science, insofar as it is tied to mathematical description, can ultimately say little about actual causation?

It does feel like if Science is "The discovery of patterns through observation of change" then what makes the Pattern hold, what is the mental aspect of Observation, and what drives Change would be ultimately axiomatic and thus mysterious to that method of investigation...not a hard argument, just spit-balling here...

I appreciate encountering insightful questions from you both.  I may not be to the task of expressing ideas, which address them.

I strongly agree that science works by: "The discovery of patterns through observation of change"  and this phrase is right out of Gibson's theory of visual perception.  You then ask, "what makes the pattern hold"?  I would point to Dispositional Essentialism as the context I would frame an answer.  I am not well-read enough on the subject to make a decent case.  (see Ian Thompson)


My primary target for attack is to answer the question: what puts the "fire in the equations".

As to how mentality works, I would start droning on about information objects, as variables in Causal Models and Causal Networks.

Stan Wooley posted this link on another thread... but then the thread disappeared... but the link is good (so I'm copying it here)... as the OP's original Financial Times link hits a paywall for me...

http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/its-th...we-know-it

Great article Stan & Max.

Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Molecular biologists have been describing how those factors form networks of complex interactions. Together, they self-organize according to changing conditions around them. Being sensitive to statistical patterns in the changes, they anticipate future states, often creating novel, emergent properties to meet them.  - ibid 

Great article Stan & Max.

"Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Molecular biologists have been describing how those factors form networks of complex interactions. Together, they self-organize according to changing conditions around them. Being sensitive to statistical patterns in the changes, they anticipate future states, often creating novel, emergent properties to meet them."

The information inherent in this complex developmental self-organization process, though probably not all in the DNA, must still exist encoded somehow in all the non-DNA substances and structures in the cell (the vast variety of factors he mentions) inherited from the fertilized egg cell. Either this, or he is saying that a very complicated developmental biological mechanism and process, probably irreducibly complex, is being created "on the fly" so to speak by the cell. 

I consider this latter view to be scientifically untenable - a great amount of complex specified information appearing de novo from nothing. To borrow a little from the early history of the Darwin debate, it's like suggesting that Paley's watch, rather than either being made by a watchmaker combined with the creativity of several generations of earlier intelligent human inventors, or even formed by the blind purposeless Darwinian RM + NS process mechanism (where the organizing information is supposed to ultimately come from the environment via natural selection), instead simply appeared spontaneously out of nothing by some sort of self-organizing process of the constituent elementary particles of the various elements in the final watch. And all this really does is "kick the can down the road" in the sense that the origin of the developmental plan information is just pushed back in time somehow to whatever the origin process was of the constituent elements of the watch.  Doesn't seem plausible when put this way.

Yet another problem with this: If the intricate development process is basically self-organization affected by changing conditions during development, then why isn't it different every time (every time the organism replicates through the development process), rather than being what is actually observed, a complex choreographed dance executed nearly identically countless times in the development of all the different individual organisms?

I am a strong believer in free-will, and I have the audacity to think that we can have a general understanding of intent and free-will; in terms of the quasi-empirical effects they cause.  Bayes has a lot to say about this.

But, saying we can measure and model stuff with science is not to say that there are not other levels on which to have personal knowledge.  While thinking that ethics and spirituality have a place in knowing reality, they are observing things that are not measured in physical units or in informational units.  While not pushing away religion/philosophy, there are still ways in which science works.  There are no science tools observing free-will in flow or the volume of intent in a message.

However, it is my stance that we can learn how messages get sent, how the message is encoded and what are the real-world results of the communication of functional information.

So, "essence" is an semantic abstraction and not a "distillate" of reality.  Essence is not a measurable. The essence of consciousness is life and love itself, in my humble personal metaphysics.

Modern science has found found living things communicate information at every level.  Mind is this activity of living things.  Living things freely will their own desires into reality.  It seems science has evidence that the minds of living things maybe active in apprehending the futures states and signaling for change via the genome.

https://ncse.com/library-resource/review-darwin-genome

Lynn Caporale is a member of the the Third Way of Evolution.  You can believe that there is a natural way that the chemical signalling happens.  But, I think it is is clear that the logical structure behind strategy  is not random and comes from an accounting for future activity.  Mind is behind strategy and it comes from/as environmental feedback.

From your previous post,

"To me, it is bio-observation of the "mechanisms" of sense.  Self-awareness is you - experiencing you.  It is information processing - that is turned in - on itself for an "inner" viewpoint.  Life is a more fundamental thing that just trying to take in the experience of it.  I think that the doings and strivings themselves are the fundamentals."  

In other words, you were saying that consciousness is information processing and its outworkings. Perhaps I misunderstood your words, but they seem clear to me.

In your current post you confirm this by saying, "Modern science has found found living things communicate information at every level.  Mind is this activity of living things."

In my last post I was simply exploring some of the materialist implications of this view. It's good that you acknowledge the reality of free will, but this is contradictory to materialist-determinist ideology.  

"However, it is my stance that we can learn how messages get sent, how the message is encoded and what are the real-world results of the communication of functional information."

I do certainly agree with this - and that this is all that we can learn scientifically about consciousness, this is the extent to which science and engineering can penetrate it.