Brian -
I was quite interested in your essay, and took a look also at your slide presentation and Hoffmeyer's "Semiotic Scaffolding". I have some familiarity with this line of thought going back to Gregory Bateson, whom I had pleasure of studying with in my grad school days. I've also written about meaning as fundamental in physics, making some analogies with biology (the links are below). -- --
So I agree with your general perspective - to quote one of your slides, "Reality resembles an orchestrated dance, more than it does something constrained by the rigid equations that are the norm in the physics paradigm." But I don't think semiotics gives us a deep enough concept of meaning to make the connection with physics, or to explain why we have these particular equations rather than others. -- --
At a basic level, what makes something meaningful is not that it signifies something else - rather, what's needed is a context in which it can make a difference to something else - which also makes a difference, in some other context. The physical world obviously provides such contexts, that make all the various parameters of physics meaningfully definable and observable. The context in which any one thing gets measured always consists of other things, measured in other contexts. And when it comes to quantum systems, these contexts clearly play a key role: the determinacy of any given parameter of a system depends on there being a physical context that can measure it. -- --
We usually think of measurement only at the level of signification - in that our measurement results tell us something about the system being measured. But that implies that the system was already in some well-defined state prior to the measurement. While that makes sense for classical physics, it's evidently not the case in the quantum realm - so I think we need to understand measurement at a deeper level. My my current essay discusses what's needed in the structure of physics to make any kind of information meaningful or measurable. I also explored the kinds of meaning built into the mathematical language of physics in an earlier FQXi essay. In The Accidental Origins of Meaning I compared the different ways in which meaning arises in physics, biology and human interaction. -- --
Thanks for contributing this essay - I appreciate your bringing this kind of perspective into the mix. -- --
Best regards, Conrad
