On the Fundamentality of Meaning by Brian D. Josephson

Oh, this is new to me. When I created my account, I found no such subscribe-option for other essay sites - but perhaps I haven't searched enough, so I will do it immediately.

"But does trying to locate a post in a page you're looking at increase traffic in any case?"

No, of course not, since the page is not reloaded, but only threads are unstubbed. But imagine that you (falsely or not) conclude that the new post somewhat hasn't been yet displayed at a certain page (since you aren't able to find it), you may think by reloading you can find it more easily, since it then may be actualized on this page.

Anyways, the lack to give the full html-adress including the anchor to the thread is very inconvenient. I have to try whether or not emails about follow-up posts at other pages do include such a more complete link.

Personally I did not find that there are any nondisplayed posts on my site. But maybe the exception proves the rule, so to speak (since even computers and software architecture are not immune of having bugs).

Concerning your essay

"As I shall be elaborating in detail, organisation related to thirdness has remarkable consequences, including that of the power of language. Emergence as such cannot account for this ... this is the subtle spontaneous ordering mechanism that has been missed by conventional science."

I like your approach and am looking forward for your results. May I be allowed to email you a complete essay of mine (with footnotes, references and all that) which I wrote for the last essay contest, an essay that has been abandoned due to character limits (it has 12 pages and I couldn't make it shorter without distorting everything). In this essay I examine triads and related formal issues in more detail. I will not upload it here publicly, since I regard it as a highlight of my essay writings that should not be exposed to anybody's pet theories. If you want to read it, just give me a hint and I send it to your Cambridge email adress.

Thank you for the tip! This makes my life a little bit easier when visiting the FQXi contest pages.

I've sent you the essay I spoke of to the mentioned adress. If you can squeeze some reasonable sense out of it, let me know.

Dear Brian,

As I am under the impression that you may find the mass of comments here at times a little overwhelming, I will keep my comments short (but hopefully sharp).

1. I agree that under the current paradigm, "meaning" is not taken seriously enough by physicists and often unjustly dismissed as philosophy, but the possible reification of meaning and what seems to amount to a certain sort of panpsychism, is outside my comfort zone. Unfortunately I know too little about semiotics to be able to tell whether it lends itself to a mathematical representation that is more familiar to physicists (my unfounded suspicion is that it does), but if I were to defend your ideas, putting a greater emphasis on presenting them in a more familiar manner (to physicists) would be a high priority for me, if only to avoid misunderstandings (of which I am sure I had my share reading your paper).

2. Although distinct in some important ways, your approach reminds me a little of the Conceptuality Interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by Aerts. Also, The Vaxjo conference series on the foundations of quantum mechanics regularly features topics in which quantum foundations are connected to completely different fields, including biology.

3. Despite my criticism, I would like to emphasze that I actually consider addressing questions of meaning a fundamental aspect of any scientific activity. Too much of contemporary high energy theory seems to me like mathematical pattern fitting entirely divorced from meaning whereas, in my view, conscientiously reminding oneself of its fundamental importance may even help us discover new ways of thinking about aspects of nature even with theories the meaning of which we thought we already understood. In my paper, I tried to illustrate this by associating a different meaning with Lorentz contraction.

All the best,

Armin

Thanks for the response. I agree that the framing to which you hinted is more likely to prevent physicists from prematurely turning off the ideas you present. I will watch this space.

Armin

I understood it that way:

"The remainder of a base set of 30 finalists will consist of the entries with top Community ratings that have each received at least ten ratings"

For this case you need top community ratings at least 10 community ratings (or maybe this means 10 ratings regardless of community or public).

The additional 10 entries are selected at the descrition of the judges - ohh k., in this case I could have a real chance to be amongst the finalists. I did not consider this in my critics of the rating process. But nonetheless I think that the rating process is not a healthy procedure to 'help' determine the finalists, since I have not counted the auto-induced entries yet but others I think surely have to make numerical calculations that may influence their rating as well as their argumentation habbits.

Anyways, it is what it is.

"For this case you need top community ratings at least 10 community ratings (or maybe this means 10 ratings regardless of community or public)."

'Top community ratings' mean for me that you should have a community rating that is amongst the 30 top community ratings.

Dear Professor Josephson,

I agree that meaning is fundamental, though I would argue that it is subjective meaning (corresponding to subjective information) that is fundamental to the way the universe works.

In the Notes [10] you say: "...Yardley writes ... : "There is a symbolic man, in mind, which is the idea of man, which had to be present somewhere hidden (imaginary, an idea) before man could appear". This assertion recalls analogous facts such as the fact that, for example, the idea of a computer had to be present in someone's mind before computers could come into existence."

This is an example of how your essay seems to assume absolute, objective meanings for signs and symbols, i.e. the essay seems to assume the existence of a Platonic realm. But a Platonic realm is never mentioned in the essay except in the References section (the book chapter What can music tell us about the nature of the mind? A Platonic Model, Josephson, B.D. and T. Carpenter (1996a), in Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn C. Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness, MIT).

I would have liked you to mention the Platonic realm assumption upfront, because a Platonic realm is an assumption that the universe itself is a poor, incomplete thing that needs something external like a God or a Platonic realm to bring it to life. I believe that this type of view is an insidiously damaging and inherently disrespectful way to view our universe, a view that has real consequences for the way we treat the Earth and it's living things.

Best wishes,

Lorraine Ford

My point is that, I think you are saying that, the source of signs, symbols, ideas and meaning is external to the universe: the source is a Platonic realm which somehow inputs ideas to the universe.

This seems to 1) assume the preexistence of all possible signs, symbols and ideas - which live in a Platonic realm, and 2) makes the universe itself to be a poor, incomplete thing, a thing that does not have the capacity to create its own ideas - it only has the capacity to implement externally input ideas.

This is my impression of what you are saying in your essay.

Best wishes,

Lorraine

P.S. When I say that "This is my impression of what you are saying in your essay", I mean that I am reading between the lines to see what your assumptions/preconceptions are.

Dear Brian,

according to music I like to make some minor comments.

Pythagoras found out that the mathematical music intervals of fifth, fourth, major third as well as the octave. If we built a ton scale from the harmonic series, as Pythagoras may wanted to achieve, there is a certain problem that prevents this.

The problem is that one cannot factorize the harmonic series such that 12 triads (chords) with their respective root notes derived from building fifths (around the cycle of fiths) results in a fifth that is what it was at the beginning. The final fifth is 23,46 cent to sharp and every ear can hear it.

So, on a musical instrument tuned with Pythagorean fifths, there are no equally distant half-steps to change musical keys.

Therefore equal temperament was introduced. The main instrument for this kind of tuning is the guitar. If one compares tuning the guitar with the standard method and with the 5/7 flageolett method, one recognizes that with the latter, the high e-string will be 21,5 cent too flat, destroying the possibility to change musical keys without having strong dissonances.

These dissonances result from out-of-phase frequencies within the plugged tones, since every plugged tone contains more or less the 'complete' harmonic series.

Now it is interesting what the mathematics says about the difference between equal temperament and harmonic (pythagorean) temperament.

The dissonant out-of-phase frequency regarding the high e-string (compared to the low e-string) is called the syntonic comma (21,5 cent). Its mathematical representation as a frequency fraction is 81/80. The inverse gives the fractal decimal expansion

0,98765432098765432098...

the fraction 1/81 gives us

0,0123456790123456790123...

The first decimal expansion lacks the digit '1', whereas the second decimal expansion lacks the digit '8'. This is interesting, since it seems to show for me that within the tuning system of pythagorean temperament, one cannot build a scale with 7 notes that has the feature to be consistent in the sense that its initial value ('1') determines conistently the final value ('8').

As an analogy, one could say that such a system is inconsistent in the logical-formalistic sense that its starting premise does not lead for every iteration (cycle of fifths) to the same final result again. The result diverges for every iteration, so to speak.

So even here, in the world of music and its reference to the ability of the human ear to distinguish fine dissonances, diverging from the natural harmonic series, seems to imply that human consciousness can well distinguish the departure from consistency to inconsistency, the latter in the sense of in-phase or out-of-phase relationsships.

Maybe 'meaning' has also something to do with in-phase relationships and is somewhat the opposite to out-of-phase relationships? I a broad sense I would think so, at least for human relationships that must have a minimum of in-phase attributes for being able to properly exchange some information, emotions, thoughts etc. How to generalize the importance of in-phase relations to the material realm other than by the term 'coherence' - I don't now at the moment. I only know that the several interpretations of quantum mechanics are out-of-phase in the sense that they are incoherent to each other. Moreover, consistency does only arise on the macroscopic level when certain measurement results have been macroscopically fixed. Then there is some 'meaning' of what happened physically until measurement. Well, the old problem of how to unequivocally interpret QM.

Oh, oh, its early in the morning and I need a coffee. Correction:

"Pythagoras found out that the mathematical music intervals of fifth, fourth, major third as well as the octave."

Pythagoras found out that the mathematical music intervals of fifth, fourth, major third as well as the octave harmonize with each other. Since these intervals mean small integer fractions, the latter are better suited to please the ear, because they have the least out-of-phase relationships, means every note's entire harmonic series involved in such intervals is more in-phase with with all other notes played according to these intervals.

I thought that what I posted in Terry Bollinger's forum is relevant to your essay as well.

Terry,

I've been mulling this over. If I accept the Kolmogorov (Kolmogorov-Chaitin) complexity as the ultimate foundation standard, let me understand:

You would have me believe that the world is fundamentally made of information bits that are algorithmically compressible. Okay, I'll entertain that notion.

Except that you used the example of Einstein, E=mc^2, to serve as a minimum Kolmogorov complexity, arguing that mathematical conciseness is the standard.

The equation, however, is not irreducible. The meaning of the equation is in the expression E = m. The second degree addition tells us that the relations in the equation are dynamic, that energy and mass may take infinite values. The binding energy then was discovered through experiment, setting a practical limit.

So I find myself moving ever closer to Brian Josephson's premise that meaning itself is fundamental. And meaning seems to be that which contains the requisite first degree information to "Be fruitful and multiply" as the Bible has it. So I suspect that meaning precedes construction. Or compression.

Enjoyed the essay.

Best,

Tom

Cumulative Coordination founded upon Dyadic and Triadic Relationships

My apologies for taking so long to produce this supplement to my essay -- it has been tricky deciding on the best way to formulate these rather intricate concepts, the eventual outcome being to a considerable extent informed by the approaches of Barad and Yardley. In the essay itself I took biology as the foundation, with biosemiotics (the use of Peirce's sign theory in the context of biology) as an essential mechanism underlying the effectiveness of biological processes. I have since realised (a) that a number of Peirce's ideas are relevant in a wider context than biology, and (b) as discussed in Barad's work, processes involving patterns of change feature in biology in a different way to how they feature in physical systems generally. The argument that follows begins with a discussion of Peirce's dyadic and triadic relationships, the latter being a somewhat unusual kind of situation, which does however naturally manifest in certain situations such as with Jupiter's satellites. Whereas the kinds of order studied in physics can often be characterised purely in terms of dyadic relationships, in biology triadic relationships play an equally important part, giving rise to dynamic phenomena of a radically different character, with a complexity rendering conventional kinds of analysis problematic, though other approaches appear feasible. The phenomenon of language appears to be explicable in terms of the concepts proposed here, providing a dramatic illustration of the power of the type of organisation that will be discussed.

Peirce's sign theory invokes two kinds of relationships between systems, secondness and thirdness, the former involving two systems exerting a significant influence on each other, and the latter a more complex situation where a relationship exists between three systems but not between any of the pairs. The latter is exemplified by the case of Jupiter's three satellites Io, Europa and Ganymede, between whose orbital phases there exists the linear relationship:

[math]$\Phi \equiv \lambda_{Io} - 3 \times \lambda_{Eu} 2 \times \lambda_{Ga} = 180^\circ$[/math]

The stability of this relationship against other influences present, such as that of Jupiter's fourth major satellite, Callisto, implies that the order involved in the relationship will emerge spontaneously should the three-satellite system at some point find itself in a situation where it is approximately satisfied. On the other hand, a sufficiently large disturbance could lead to a situation involving large deviations from the relationship concerned. The situation envisaged here is one where relationships are being continually formed and dissolved, with alternating stability and instability, leading to the emergence of constructs that are progressively more resistant to instability, and effective in their ability to stabilise.

Triadic relationships enter naturally in biology, as for example when a third element defining a process links the current situation to some desired state. Elementary computations of this kind can be concatenated into highly complex but effective computations, in which connection note that regular electronic circuitry makes use of systems of this kind, transistors with their three leads providing triadic relationships whilst other circuit elements such as resistors involve simply dyadic relationships. The idea now is that learning has as its basis systems settling into such triadic relationships. Two conditions must be satisfied before this can happen, that the required constituents be available, and that the process associated with the triadic relationship should support stability of the outcome. This may be thought of as a process of trial and error, changes continually being made until some error is resolved. The first requirement involves in principle a meta-process that determines which systems are active at any given time. It is here that significance arises, given that particular aspects of a given situation are relevant for success in that situation. These metasystems are the equivalent of the semiotic scaffolding of the approach of Hoffmeyer.

Two other aspects relevant to the understanding of the intricacies of the situation being addressed are those of the role of signs, and Yardley's concept of oppositional dynamics, which is related to Barad's intra-action. The latter involves two entities X and Y that cooperate to generate some specific process. Such cooperation is a consequence of the error-correction process discussed, involving a situation where, as the consequence of previous acts of error correction no further error correction is needed in the given situation. Thus if X is fixed then under certain conditions its complement Y can be built up over over time through error correction. This in addition provides a mechanism for replication, since if Y is fixed a complement similar to X can also be built up over time. Language provides an instructive example, X being the processes involved in producing speech and Y processes involved in interpreting speech. Here language learners have to learn how to interpret the productions of others (creating Y from X), as well as how to produce speech that others can interpret (creating X from Y), the criteria in both cases being that of success in whatever additional process is involved on the side.

One function of signs, related to the above, involves their potential role as proxy. This can be accomplished with two systems x and X linked in the manner indicated, so that a system related to an entity X becomes reversibly linked with a system related to the corresponding sign. The utility of signs lies partly in the fact that they form a comparatively stable aspect of a given situation that may be adaptable to many different situations by acting in conjunction with systems adapting to the context (this is the concept of code duality. In other words, the same sign x may linked to different Xs in different situations, an example of a triadic relationship (involving X, x and a system related to the context). Human language can be seen as an advanced form of this process, enhanced by syntactic mechanisms sensitive to relevant aspects of speech. This is all about the existence of mechanisms able to generate specific actions, and the fact that specific systems work together, supporting each other.

Yardley's circles can provide a useful general picture to help understand the above. A circle can be envisaged as an object, with a structure that supports an activity. This activity can create or manipulate other circles in ways discussed in detail, including moving from a state of affairs more in accord with a single entity and one more in accord with a pair of entities. Such close relationships between two entities can form a basis for the emergence of oppositional dynamics.

The above is essentially a sketch, intended as a starting point to encourage more detailed research by others involving more resources than those available to the author, starting perhaps with detailed specification of specific situations, and appropriate models, thereby testing the validity of concepts such as oppositional dynamics. Previously, a student working with the author was able to test ideas of mathematician Nils Baas in this way. On the basis of similar developments it should be possible to critique in detail proposals of authors such as Barad and Yardley. Ultimately one would hope to establish connections with current physics, and end up establishing the picture proposed here as a definitive extension of current theories in physics, including demonstrating its applicability to situations where mind and meaning play roles denied to them in current physics.