Dear Master Rovelli,

You write:

"As long as an organism is alive, S(xn) remains far lower than its thermal-equilibrium value Smax. This capacity of keeping itself outside of thermal equilibrium, utilising free energy, is a crucial aspects of systems that are alive. Living organisms have generally a rather sharp distinc- tion between their state of being alive or dead, and we can...

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Dear Master Rovelli,

You write:

"As long as an organism is alive, S(xn) remains far lower than its thermal-equilibrium value Smax. This capacity of keeping itself outside of thermal equilibrium, utilising free energy, is a crucial aspects of systems that are alive. Living organisms have generally a rather sharp distinc- tion between their state of being alive or dead, and we can represent it as a threshold Sthr in their entropy."

I simply had to stop reading at this point and interrupt you to ask a question.

First I need to give the context before meaning can be understood.

Experiments have confirmed the Born rule.

Within experimental limits, the mathematical pattern in the data is explained by the Born rule.

The Born rule says that the same number can be output from two independent algorithms.

(Bohm and Hiley had previously said "from two independent concepts.")

Confirming the Born rule is the same, mathematically, as confirming through an experiment that there is an algorithm in the data.

It has the signature of a learning algorithm.

What is it learning?

The laws of physics.

The context for the two algorithms is a game. One algorithm is playing against the other.

The correlation to laboratory experiments is that first you starve a rat almost to starvation.

Then the rat can be studied by making it play a game where the bait is food, and it will die if it doesn't play the gane.

The name of the game for the starving rat is then to figure out which door will yield the food when the game begins, and the door from the rat's living chamber is opened and it can enter the feeding chamber, in which there are many closed doors, each down its own channel in the maze.

For what seems like years to the rat, it has been trained to eat here. Every door smells like food, but you never know behind which door the food will be. Go down the wrong tunnel (each by the way made of transparent plastic) and when all the doors open, there will be no food at this door in the tunnel.

But since everything is transparent plastic, the rat can see all the open doors in the feeding chamber, and easily sees where the food was actually hidden. A light and buzzer go off at the missed food door, just to make sure. Then just before the rat can run to that door where the food is, it slams shut before the rat can get to the food. The rat has long ago learned not to even try.

There are two of the kinds of emotional forces of regret, anger, fear and maybe even self loathing that the rat gets into for each door. (In a previous contest I used Shannon like formulas to model regret.)

First there is all the regret of having chosen it, when the food appeared somewhere else. Opposite to this "entropic" force, is the regret of having NOT chosen it, on having chosen another door but seen the food occurred here.

When these two entropic forces balance, "probability learning" is said to have occurred.

Now back to the algorithms seen in experiments on the Born rule.

It's like the particle needs to refuel or die. It has a need to exist.

How does this need of the starving rat or particle in this situation correlate to the numbers you are writing about?

"As long as an organism is alive, S(xn) remains far lower than its thermal-equilibrium value Smax. This capacity of keeping itself outside of thermal equilibrium, utilising free energy, is a crucial aspects of systems that are alive. Living organisms have generally a rather sharp distinc- tion between their state of being alive or dead, and we can represent it as a threshold Sthr in their entropy."

In terms of your essay, what would these algorithms learning?

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Dear Professor Rovelli,

thank you for an intriguing and original contribution to this debate. Your basic strategy strikes me as distantly related to the one championed by Terrence Deacon: while you focus on the notion of correlation, he frames things in terms of constraints, which are, to him, 'absences' that nevertheless may be causally efficacious. Of course, both notions are, in some...

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Dear Professor Rovelli,

thank you for an intriguing and original contribution to this debate. Your basic strategy strikes me as distantly related to the one championed by Terrence Deacon: while you focus on the notion of correlation, he frames things in terms of constraints, which are, to him, 'absences' that nevertheless may be causally efficacious. Of course, both notions are, in some sense, just opposite images of one another: a (multipartite) system possessing constraints on which possible states may be realized is just a system exhibiting nontrivial correlations.

Your approach, however, adds considerable conceptual clarity, together with a precise mathematical formulation---while Deacon on the other hand proposes a more refined theory of how the higher-level concepts of meaning emerge from the basic 'thermodynamic' level of systems possessing certain correlations. Perhaps the two approaches might, in some sense, compliment one another.

However, I have a couple of questions I'd like to pose to you, if I may. First of all, I'm not sure I understand how your 'meaningful information' actually acquires meaning, e.g. for the bacterium. I can see how this information is salient in furthering the goal of homeostasis, and thus, how this information---or rather, the correlation between internal and external variables---is advantageous in guaranteeing the bacterium's flourishing. But does this suffice to fashion meaning for this information?

It seems to me that, ultimately, all the bacterium has access to is its own internal variable; based upon its value---say, L or R---it carries out certain actions---i.e. chemotaxis. Now, if the bacterium had, in some sense, access to the further information that its internal variable is correlated to the direction in which a food source is present---i.e. to the knowledge that the only possible states of the system are 'L, food left' and 'R, food right'---then I could see how the value of the bacterium's internal variable constitutes knowledge about the external situation, i.e. the position of the food. But of course, if the bacterium had such knowledge, it would already have to have some fully-functional intentional system (as the fact that 'the only possible states of the system are...' would have to be represented to it in some way)---hence, postulating this knowledge would be circular.

But then, how does the value of the internal variable, to the bacterium, come to be about the position of the food (or perhaps some more simple description of the outside world)? It's clear how it is about that to us, as intentional beings---because we can represent the additional knowledge regarding the constraints of the system. Thus, the 'aboutness' in this case is derived from our intentional faculties. But I don't see how this meaning comes about sans such faculties.

Furthermore, the 'meaningful information' you define hinges on the goal of an organism, imparted to it by the itself goal-less, random dynamics of evolution, to survive. This is a clever move, since it gets rid of the need for any a-priori goal directed behavior: organisms didn't originate with the goal of survival, it's just that only those organisms that behaved as if they had this goal are the only ones that are still around, thanks to the inexorable logic of natural selection.

But human beings can have goals that go beyond survival, and may find information furthering those goals to be meaningful (or at least, apparently so). As an extreme, take a suicidal person: the information that, for instance, a certain quantity of a substance will be fatal if ingested will certainly be meaningful to them, but quite clearly isn't relevant to survival either directly or indirectly. So, it seems to me that there is meaningful information whose meaning does not emerge from the overall 'pseudo-goal' of survival, but rather, from individual goals that do not necessarily align with (and indeed, may run contrary to) the evolutionary dictate. But if that's the case, then there is some goal-directedness that's independent of the meaningful information you define.

Thank you, again, for your essay---as you can see, I found it quite thought-provoking!

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Carlo –

There are several things here that I find very good, e.g. your explanations of emergence and of signaling. It’s a particularly important idea that physics is “modal” – about structures of possibility, not just structures of given fact. This needs further development from a philosophical point of view, since we still tend to think of possibilities as facts that just...

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Carlo –

There are several things here that I find very good, e.g. your explanations of emergence and of signaling. It’s a particularly important idea that physics is “modal” – about structures of possibility, not just structures of given fact. This needs further development from a philosophical point of view, since we still tend to think of possibilities as facts that just haven’t happened yet. Your Relational QM paper took a different path by describing facts as answers, which can only exist where the physical context poses a specific question.

I think it’s great to focus on the issue of how information becomes physically meaningful, and your argument makes good sense. But by taking meaning as dependent on biological evolution, I think you skip over something important. There certainly is a level of meaning that depends on the survival and replication of organisms – just as there are many further levels of meaning that only come into play in the human world. But the most basic levels of meaning are entirely physical – for example, it’s meaningful that a body weighs 1kg rather than 2kg. It makes a crucial difference to the world that positive charges move in exactly opposite ways to negative charges, etc. etc.

I’ll argue – in my essay yet to be submitted – that all the many kinds of significant differences in physics have meaning because they’re all measurable, in terms of each other. Of course, there’s no clear understanding of what that means, in quantum physics. I recall your position on this – from the RQM paper – that the only reasonable solution is to treat any correlation between two systems as a measurement. That won’t really do though, since entangled systems are correlated whether or not a measurement is made. I think it’s better to say that something is measured where there exists an interactive context that defines and communicates a specific result – Bohr’s “entire measurement situation.” A specific answer only appears insofar as there’s an adequately-posed question.

The problem is that though we know very well what it takes to construct an adequate measurement-context, it’s hard to define such a context theoretically. That’s because there are so many different ways of measuring different physical parameters, and they’re all quite complicated, and every way of measuring one thing depends on measurements of other kinds of things. However, all of this is true of biological reproduction as well. There are many different life-forms that replicate very differently; no reproductive process is in any respect simple; and all these different species depend in various ways on the survival and reproduction of other species.

Happily, Darwin showed us how to understand the hugely complex system of life. In physics, though, the classical mode of explanation still prevails – as in your statement, “Nature appears to be formed by a relative simple ensemble of elementary ingredients obeying relatively elementary laws.” This is of course true down to a certain level, but there’s hardly any empirical support for it in the Standard Model plus gravity. Which aspect of all these interaction-laws do we consider “relatively elementary”? I think we need to work toward a mode of explanation that, like Darwin’s, doesn’t rely on reduction to ultimately simple components.

The analogy between physical measurement and biological self-replication seems remote, since they accomplish such different things. But I hope to show in my essay that they’re two very different instances of the same kind of dynamic structure, through which meaningful information is able to evolve. And also, that a third instance of this structure is at the root of human communication.

Nonetheless your essay is as usual very clear and insightful, and on the track of what seem to me the most fundamental issues.

Thanks – Conrad

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Dear Carlo Rovelli,

you made a nice effort to describe the first tender emergence of some ‘meaning’ on our planet, as you imagine it to have possibly happened, so i like to leave some comments about what came to my mind by reading your essay.

In your essay abstract you wrote „I discuss what makes a physical process into a "signal".” You also wrote in this abstract “I study...

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Dear Carlo Rovelli,

you made a nice effort to describe the first tender emergence of some ‘meaning’ on our planet, as you imagine it to have possibly happened, so i like to leave some comments about what came to my mind by reading your essay.

In your essay abstract you wrote „I discuss what makes a physical process into a "signal".” You also wrote in this abstract “I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived.”

By discussing what makes a physical process into a ‘signal’, you have tacitly correlated the term ‘process’ with a mindless physical process, whereas your term ‘signal’ should signal! to the reader that somehow there is an observer of that signal (bacterium) and knows how to interpret it.

So you have correlated ‘process’ with mindless matter and ‘signal’ with a kind of observer. You wrote that your definition of ‘meaningful information’ is a purely physical one. The question for me is how a mindless physical process can, via selection and reproduction, become an observer. Surely, if this would be possible, it would happen in small evolutionary steps, but i see no such steps existent other than an essay author correlating the term ‘process’ with the term ‘signal’. But this would be only ‘relative information’, because there is no observer existent for the ‘signal’ to recognize it. I think the meaning of your ‘meaningful information’ can only come into play, because the reader projects her/his experience with hunger and death into the situation of a bacterium, *as if the reader himself would be that bacterium*.

As long as we do not define this bacterium to be conscious to a certain extent, i think one cannot speak of some food in front of a bacterium as a signal. This does not exclude that we assign a certain meaning to this signal, but by doing so, we *do* it, and surely not the bacterium. It is true, that whenever the bacterium finds its food, its chances to exist longer are increased. But we conclude this from our point of view. A mindless physical process, driven by chance, cannot meaningfully have any point of view. There is no meaning of death and hunger in a purely physical definition of that process.

Your attempt gives the impression that whatever ‘survives’ a certain selection process, must necessarily be able to discriminate between an advantage and a disadvantage. Surely, it is imaginable that the bacterium could have some rudimentary sense of advantage and disadvantage. But this would presuppose also some rudimentary state of inner awareness of what is going on out there. Unfortunately, for explaining how this rudimentary state of inner consciousness could at all come about in a purely physical universe, one had to begin with the whole inquiry from where one started it - because the emergence of this inner awareness would be left unexplained (unless one simply claims that it emerges and period). This is - in my opinion - part of the hard problem of consciousness. I really appreciate that scientists are concerned with these questions, but as you rightfully note at the end of your essay, the results should be received with cautiousness.

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In the Kyoto lecture of 1922, Einstein said:

"There is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity."

Wikipedia states that: "The signal velocity is the speed at which a wave carries INFORMATION.

It describes how quickly…"

"…a MESSAGE can be communicated between two separated parties."

An "informationalist"— as I understand it— might read the...

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In the Kyoto lecture of 1922, Einstein said:

"There is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity."

Wikipedia states that: "The signal velocity is the speed at which a wave carries INFORMATION.

It describes how quickly…"

"…a MESSAGE can be communicated between two separated parties."

An "informationalist"— as I understand it— might read the above paragraphs in the following way:

In nonstandard analysis, Robinson taught us about languages and models.

Looks like there is a model in these paragraphs.

But it would be the first step in informationalism to think— instead— about languages and SITUATIONS.

As in: "situation theory" from Jon Barwise's book "The Situation in Logic."

(Robinson and Barwise were friends long ago at Yale.)

Back to "the situation":

"What type is it?"

If you ever read The Informationalist's Handbook, that is the very next question.

Well— to support all this talk about "information," "message," "sender," "receiver," and so on, there clearly must be an "information channel" in this situation. It must be -that- type of situation. Otherwise, how would the information be transmitted, how would the message be carried?

The term "information channel" comes from Barwise's second to last book, the one with Jerry Seligman: "Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems."

On the cover, there are diagrams of information channels between pieces of office equipment.

Diagramming tools, of course, were in-scope for that workshop with Barwise—

"'Business Applications of Situation Theory:

Algebra, Relativity, Diagrams, and Situations' at Work"

You can imagine the T-shirts.

I've still got one around here somewhere. (A colleague had paid a friend to do the artwork. It's Alice in the Red Queen's race.)

To understand TIME in his own mind, Albert Einstein went outside himself to imagine clocks, situated on machine bases if you will.

It's always been opaque to me as to how this imaginary apparatus of clocks and rigid rods puts into operation anything like the most profound idea that Einstein had ever had about time:

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

If we only had just one more model of time!

Then we could compare it against Einstein's, above, and see which model comes closer to this deep, intuitive insight.

Here's how I found such a model—

There were millions of dollars at stake in a monster manufacturing line. Nobody could say for sure whether or not it would work. It did look great in blueprint form. And in those days, it actually was a blueprint!

So they did an RFP for a computer simulation from a local conveyor company. But I told them I could get it done in half the time.

So I wrote the purchase order for Smalltalk80, which had just come on the market no more than a couple of months previous.

Then I went to OOPSLA in San Diego, got another Smalltalk80 with every class for every queuing mathematics, semaphores, scaleable parallel computing system, everything you needed to write a multi-threaded, parallel simulation.

This became a diagramming tool I then used to draw the Petri net of the manufacturing system. Each Petri net transition would generate it's own code. I could just point and click, to add code to a transition here, a transition there. There were hundreds and hundreds of transitions. But really, it was just a small net.

Here's the problem I ran into:

Say I had a conveyor feeding parts into a press. In the real world, they can back up till everything stops. But in the very first stages, what my Petri nets would do is just keep feeding every part into the press as soon as it came along— destroying all my simulated work!

So to every transition in the simulation, I added a "feedback loop." It was an INFORMATION CHANNEL.

The feedback loop held a place for a game coin.

When it finished its work, each transition in the net would place a coin in it's own feedback loop slot. It was the SIGNAL "ready for more work."

Only when that SIGNAL existed, could a part then move into the press.

(Moving a part into the press somehow "removes" the coin.)

Those were the rules.

I had to give the press some simulated TIME so it could do its work.

And to give it that TIME, I had to:

"Keep everything from happening at once."

*****

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

Now, we have another model for comparison.

So here are two models for saying some things about TIME:

1. Clocks on bases of rods sending signals

2. State transitions with feedback loops to "self," running an algorithm in a simulation that "keeps everything from happening at once." I.e, a STREAM.

It looks like #1 is better for a model to say things about "coordinate time."

While #2 is better for saying things about "proper time."

As I understand it, so far in GR, proper time is DEFINED based on coordinate time. Here, both would be "independent" processes.

That would pretty much be like Bohm and Hiley's statement about the Born rule— that the two sides of the equation are two "independent concepts."

Here then, the two independent concepts are "coordinate time" and "proper time."

To an informationalist, the defining equation for proper time based on coordinate time now looks like an "infomorphism," like the Born infomorphism.

But an infomorphism can exist only if an information channel exists.

There needs to be an information channel so the defining equation of proper time from coordinate time can become a transmission of information.

Please see previous post— objects (using language about coordinate time) and processes (using language about proper time) both swim in a stream. The stream affords the information channel.

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Dear Sir,

Your paper was quite thought provoking. You have rightly described Shannon’s “relative information” as “correlation” or as you say “downright crude physical correlation”. In a previous contest here in our paper “INFORMATION HIDES IN THE GLARE OF REALITY”, we had written “Information Theory is based on the concept of writing instructions that will make the...

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Dear Sir,

Your paper was quite thought provoking. You have rightly described Shannon’s “relative information” as “correlation” or as you say “downright crude physical correlation”. In a previous contest here in our paper “INFORMATION HIDES IN THE GLARE OF REALITY”, we had written “Information Theory is based on the concept of writing instructions that will make the computer follow and run a program based on those instructions or matching perceptions of the transmitter with the receiver. Perception is the processing of the result of measurements of different but related fields of something with some stored data to convey a combined form ‘it is like that’, where ‘it’ refers to an object (constituted of bits) and ‘that’ refers to a concept signified by the object (self-contained representation)”. Your examples and definition at the end conform to this view. But we fail to understand why you distinguish it from “meaningful information”?

All information is meaningful to the receiver. Otherwise it will be data only. Firstly, Darwin dealt with biological evolution. Part of biology can be related to physics, but “intentionality” (we presume it is the same as freewill) is not a part of it. It can be dealt with cognitive sciences, and partially in psychology and linguistics. Secondly, the same information can have multiple meanings for multiple systems or persons. To that extent, it is relative. But each such information is correlated to something in the system and person, to make it meaningful. The “intentionality” is an outcome of that information – making it meaningful.

Darwinian evolution is still a postulate and there are many contra views to contest his concept of selection. You have rightly pointed out that “A dead organism decays rapidly to thermal equilibrium, while an organism which is alive does not”. But this does not flow from Darwinian evolution. Also we fail to understand how “we can legitimately reverse the causal relation between the existence of the mechanism and its function”? Can a chicken be converted back to an egg? It is true that the mechanism exhibits a purpose. But is mechanism independent of the system, within which it functions? Why is the digestive system different in different species? Are our digestive system made for us or are we what we are because of our digestive system? Certainly our digestive system regulates our food habit. But we are not the product of our food habit.

The Darwinian concept of “life on Earth may be the result of random happening of structures, all of which perish except those that happen to survive, and these are the living organisms” cannot explain why the uni/multi cellular organisms are still the same as they were at the beginning millions of years ego? Why the monkeys are still there? The role of variability and selection in the evolution of structures are different. While there is no dispute over variability to explain divergences, the role of selection is questionable.

It is true that “surviving mechanisms survive by using correlations” and “mechanisms that lead to survival and reproduction are adapted by evolution to a certain environment”. In fact only in that way they become “meaningful”, as your example with bacteria shows. But here we land into a sort of chicken and egg problem. We find similar species with slight variations in different geo-climatic locations. Did the geo-climatic conditions varied the species or the species varied the geo-climate? Obviously the answer is geo-climatic conditions varied the species. A snake anywhere cannot move in a straight line and the only way to escape from a rampaging elephant is to run zig-zag. Here physics of biological structures gets precedence over earthly terrain. But this cannot explain the differences between a tropic goat and a mountain goat. The meaningfulness comes from geo-climatic adaptation.

There is nothing as “accidental correlations that are ubiquitous in nature” and there is nothing that “have no effect on living beings, no role in semantic, no use, and correlations that contribute to survival”. Nature is highly ordered and economical. We fail to understand its elegance. True, “today’s newspaper is not likely to directly enhance mine or my gene’s survival probability”, but newspaper is not a creation of Nature. And we avoid many problems due to the information we get from today’s newspaper.

Truth and meaningful are related concepts. If something motivates us in a certain way or induces a reaction that remains invariant in all similar perceptions/encounters, the commonality arising from such perception is truth. In such cases, our reaction is meaningful.

Regards,

basudeba

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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...

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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 :

"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

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Dr. Carlo Rovelli,

"The first is Darwin’s theory, which offers evidence on how function and purpose can emerge from natural variability and natural selection of structures [2]. Darwin’s theory provides a naturalistic account for the ubiquitous presence of function and purpose in biology." (2) [2] C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. Penguin Classics,

2009.

Darwin...

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Dr. Carlo Rovelli,

"The first is Darwin’s theory, which offers evidence on how function and purpose can emerge from natural variability and natural selection of structures [2]. Darwin’s theory provides a naturalistic account for the ubiquitous presence of function and purpose in biology." (2) [2] C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species. Penguin Classics,

2009.

Darwin acknowledged or better announced that evolution occurs. Where does he provide an account for the presence of purpose? I did change the wording. Please respond in your own words. I assume that you are suggesting that he provided an explanation for the existence of biological purpose? If this is not correct, then I stand corrected. Where did Darwin correctly explain how biological changes occur purposefully?

Quoting you: "The first is Darwin’s theory, which offers evidence on how function and purpose can emerge from natural variability and natural selection of structures [2]."

Your use of the word 'can' instead of 'does' is at the root of my question. Darwin did show that function and purpose do emerge? What evidence did he offer to show how function and/or purpose can emerge? I understand that you said that "The first is Darwin’s theory, which offers evidence on how function and purpose can emerge from natural variability and natural selection of structures [2]." and then followed it with this: "Darwin’s theory provides a naturalistic account for the ubiquitous presence of function and purpose in biology." Your first statement uses the words 'on how' instead of the word 'that'. Your second statement uses the words "provides a naturalistic account for" instead of provides a naturalistic account of". Can you please explain where Darwin provided the 'on how' and 'a naturalists account for'?

I am aware of natural selection and that it is an after-effect that destroys biological designs that have occurred for reasons that are not due to the later occurrence of natural selection. Where does Darwin explain correctly how failed designs are purposefully followed, at anytime afterward, by an improved design. I do not use the word 'design' other than in the context of the Universe's ability to produce the new life-form.

I do have other questions, but I will wait to see how this one is received. Thank you.

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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...

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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

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