Meaning and Intentionality = Information + Evolution by Carlo Rovelli

A signal is a physical event that conveys meaning. A ring of my phone, for instance, is a signal that means that somebody is calling. When I hear it, I understand its meaning and I may reach the phone and answer. Carlo Rovelli 2017

Does it covey meaning or is meaning produced from the sound signal on arrival? There is no labelled attached to the sound waves that has its meaning. The information is only what it is. That could be, as examples, a pattern, a structure or a simple physical characteristic such as a frequency of light or frequency of sound. Only if the means to produce the meaning exist is that, which is transmitted, meaningful. That red means stop must be learned before it has that meaning. Stop is not transmitted but the red frequency light is. Likewise, DNA is just a chemical. The protein product is the meaning, that doesn't exist until it is produced. It would probably be better if we stopped saying meaning is transmitted or conveyed and say instead meaning is translated, extracted or produced, only the carrier of the information is transmitted.

What distinguishes its being a signal, from its being a simple link in a physical causation chain? Carlo Rovelli 2017

I think that is a good question. I also think that is a person/people deciding to classify it as a signal because there is clearly transmission happening and specific (receipt)-response correlation. There are very many specific chemicals in biology that are considered to be signals; that bind with specific receptors causing recognized effects. Which works against your next point that the carrier could be different. While in some situations that is true, any buzzer or bell could call an assistant, and in other situations such as 'finely tuned' biochemistry it is not.

Thanks for a thought provoking, well written presentation.

I wrote "meaning is translated, extracted or produced," extracted is definitely not the right word there . I should have said translated, inferred or produced, as i am saying meaning is not carried.

Better still:'...obtained by translation, inference or production.'

Your essay was very readable and held to the boundaries of its topic.

I did not see you discuss the boundaries between the life form and its environment, only correlations between "system A" and "system B". If this means what I think it means, I find it interesting that you find the meaningfulness of information in the correlations that cross the boundaries between life and non-life.

Hi Carlo, I ought to add that I think you have presented some very interesting ideas worth pondering in an accessible, enjoyable, relevant essay. Kind regards Georgina

Hi Carlo,

I do have the feeling you are trying to convince me that the emperor (physics) could be clothed in the ultimate source of meaning.

Working on the "could be" is a good idea. And many of these FQXi.org essays offer some thoughtful ideas. However, at this present moment in history (IMHO) the emperor is Tutta Nuda.

1. You suggest that "to know is to have information about" is misleading. A more complete definition would be: To know is to have information in your mind. The mind being the faculty of consciousness and thought.

2. Your thesis points to a suggestion: "The suggestion is that the notion of meaningful information serves as a ground for the foundation of meaning. That is, it could offer the link between the purely physical world and the world of meaning, purpose, intentionality and value. It could bridge the gap."

I do like this suggestion as a way to spur experimentation and promote new discoveries in physics and mathematics and push the boundaries of what we are about.

3. I think Valentino Braitenberg has done some very interesting work in this area : [link:people.cs.uchicago.edu/~wiseman/vehicles/]

"In the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, Valentino Braitenberg describes a series of thought experiments in which "vehicles" with simple internal structure behave in unexpectedly complex ways. He describes simple control mechanisms that generate behaviors that, if we did not already know the principles behind the vehicles' operation, we might call aggression, love, foresight and even optimism. Braitenberg gives this as evidence for the "law of uphill analysis and downhill invention," meaning that it is much more difficult to try to guess internal structure just from the observation of behavior than it is to create the structure that gives the behavior."

This site and others have programs that run the vehicles. I did not have the plug-in to run them so I don not know how good they are.

This is a very good essay.... forced me to think (a lot).

Thanks,

Don Limuti

Dear Carlo Rovelli

I found really interesting the concept of "meaningful information", which allows quantifying the relative importance of information, a quality measurement essential to support the analysis of global properties of systems, namely of systems of connecting elements, the importance of which I show in my essay. Thermodynamics concerns only systems with non-connecting elements; analyzing systems with connecting ones is much more complex and needs concepts like this "meaningful information".

Your essay is extremely well written, the ideas being presented with such clarity that what is subtle becomes almost trivial. It is focused on how to process information that we know to exist. My essay is somewhat the opposite because I present new information, an information that is critical for understanding the creation and evolution of life. Your essay provides a tool for analyzing the new information I present, while my essay provides new information that may show the importance of the tool you created; namely, the concept of meaningful information seems to be essential for quantifying the "intelligence" of physical systems, considering the non-anthropomorphic definition of intelligence I use.

Given your apparent special aptitude to analyze the subtle side of things, I think that you may find my essay interesting.

Alfredo Gouveia Oliveira

Thanks Carlo for a thought provoking essay.

It is apparent that you have a keen interest in the interplay between living organisms and the external environment and the mechanism that can affect survival. Let me therefore seize the opportunity of this essay contest to extract expert comment from you on two ideas:

(1) If I may paraphrase your statement, "A life form that increases in mass, as the universe increases in mass, and reduces in mass, when the universe is reducing in mass prospers; while that life form that reduces in mass when the universe is increasing in mass, and increases in mass when the universe is reducing in mass has less chances.... Therefore we see many life forms are of the kind that grow in mass, rather than reduce in mass"

What do you think of the idea that dinosaur survival was affected by the later increase in Earth gravity?

(2) The cosmological history of the parameter, Ω being approximately one. This approximation as you know is described as the 'flatness riddle'. This ratio of the density of the universe, ρ (or when multiplied by volume, the mass, M) to the critical density, ρc (or critical mass, Mc) suggests a universe whose mass is increasing with its expansion.

I touch on these two ideas in my paper and would value an expert's commentary.

Regards,

Akinbo

Dear Carlo Rovelli

I inform all the participants that use the electronic translator, therefore, my essay is written badly. I participate in the contest to familiarize English-speaking scientists with New Cartesian Physic, the basis of which the principle of identity of space and matter. Combining space and matter into a single essence, the New Cartesian Physic is able to integrate modern physics into a single theory. Let FQXi will be the starting point of this Association.

Don't let the New Cartesian Physic disappear! Do not ask for himself, but for Descartes.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show potential in this essay I risked give "The way of The materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I shall do the same.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

Carlo Rovelli,

Can we see from perspective of matter? Why matter sustain (survive)? What is that makes atom resist to disintegration?

Why matter has inertia?

Anything that exist has to have the goal of survival.

What are differences between animate goals and inanimate goals?

Dr. Rovelli,

I withdraw my questions. Good luck to you.

James Putnam

Dear Professor Carlo Rovelli,

Thank you for a richly stimulating and most enjoyable essay. I relate to your approach toward finding the link between the physical world and abstract concepts such as mathematics more easily that many of the other essays I have read in this contest. Claude Shannon and David Wolpert have done great work and I would like to add Charlie Bennett (IBM TJ Watson Research Center, NY) as being a pioneer in this regard.

I have a question regarding the exchange of information across different levels of emergence. Do you have any indication if the same process occurs when going down beyond the sub-elementary particle level? For example, how do electrons know their charge, mass, spin, etc.? Said in a different way, if we have a computer simulation of a physical process, we can say the program operating on top of the hardware level (actualized as traveling voltages) is what drives the simulation. But what about the physical world? How do the elementary particles know how to behave? Where does that information originate?

I wanted to let you know I enjoyed your essay very much and have in the meantime rated it as well.

Regards,

Robert

Carlo, I see you will be the winer of this first essay contest... congratulatios, I already read your essay and rated it.

Please, consider to have into account my essay which main proposal is:

"A essay that could revolutionize the future of Cosmological Physics: Aristotle, Newton, Einstein,..."

The Dynamic Laws of Physics (and Universal Gravitation) have varied over time, and even Einstein had already proposed that they still has to evolve:

ARISTOTLE: F = m.v

NEWTON: F = m.a

EINSTEIN. E = m.c2 (*)

MOND: F = m.a.(A/A0)

FRACTAL RAINBOW: F = f (scale) = m.a.(scale factor)

Or better G (Gravity Constant) vary with the scale/distance due to fractal space-time: G = f ( Scale/distance factor)

(*) This equation does not correspond to the same dynamic concept but has many similarities.

Dr. Rovelli,

Your essay is one of the best I've read so far. How information comes to be processed does seem to be one of the main puzzle pieces to the mystery of agency in evolution. I really like the concept of relative information as a way of narrowing down the phase space of a given system to only its possibilities. It confuses me a bit here as it would seem that subtracting the allowed possibilities from the entire phase space of all conceivable relationships would yield only the un-allowed states. I'm hoping that as I digest this concept it will become clearer to me.

The essay begins to lose traction at the point where you define the notion that meaningful information serves as the ground for the foundation of meaning. It becomes circular at this point (by inspection).

Consideration of the various forms of information and correlation are steps in the right direction. But it does not quite span the explanatory gap. Nothing I have ever read does this. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing. Your objective description of the internal and the external 'truth' relation between the internal state of an organism and the external state of its environment gets close to the heart of it. As an observer (conscious subjective scientist) intelligently observing (performing computations on and extracting meaningful correlations between naturally patterned bits of information) another observer (the presumably sentient object of study), the meaning is projected from subject to object. But how did the object acquire its agenda; the feeling of need for a selected condition to accrue? From whence comes the sense of existential threat?

If I may offer my own phenomenal definitions: a sentient being is nothing more than an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Intelligence is the quantitative and qualitative capacity to process and organize information. By this definition, the computer Watson is highly intelligent. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject.

It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized picture of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise?

Jim Stanfield

French scientists have no right to ignore the Descartes.

Dear Carlo I have read the first part of your essay with interest and as always in your writings you present your ideas carefully with due regard to the reader. In the second part things get rather too technical for me, so I will just write of what first came to mind when reading of your notion of "meaningful information". What popped in my mind is a concept in aesthetics that came out a century ago: significant form

For what its worth I mention this here, because in both your and Bell's definition (not *that* Bell !) it is the conscious human mind that is at work - to be sure in very different ways in physics and in art, nevertheless with some similarities.

I will be honored if you have a look at my fqxi essay

Best of luck.

Vladimir

Carlo,

Since it nears the end, I have been returning to essays I have read to see if I've rated them and discovered I rated it on February 24th.

Hope you have enjoyed the interchange of ideas as much as I have.

Jim Hoover

Dear Sirs!

New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

Hello Carlo Rovelli,

I very much enjoyed your essay; I think that you are spot on. I think that you have written an excellent foundational essay. You have a great beginning.

I think that there is a lot more to say about the emergence of semantics. Beyond Shannon information theory and Turing machines, there are semantics machines that operate with semantics analogous to how computers operate on symbols. Human thought and language are just two examples.

Thanks for the good read.

Cheers,

Bruce Amberden.