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Information, Q-Bits, and Natural Reference: a bridge from Bit to It to Autopoesis to Mind. Abstract: In this paper I argue that the traditional matter/mind or matter/spirit dichotomy is a false dichotomy, and that the traditionally understood mental attributes, such as intentionality, can be understood as complex constructions of simpler mental and quasi-mental properties of nature such as self-organization and choice of directionality. I show that a wide variety of such quasi-mental properties occur in degrees throughout nature, when nature is properly understood. This argument will rely on replacing the traditional western substance/properties metaphysics with a metaphysics of fields and processes. Since fields and processes are dynamic, interactive and open ended, they do not suffer from the static status and boundary limitations that restrict substances and properties, and so they can act and perform in ways that substances and properties could not. A fields and processes metaphysics is also more compatible with contemporary physics, cosmology, biology and computer science, as I shall argue, than is the Aristotelian and Newtonian substance and properties analysis of reality. Monahan, Paula M. [email protected] 1|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference Information, Q-Bits, and Natural Reference: a bridge from bit to it to autopoesis to mind. Introduction: A Dynamic Information Continuum supplants the false dichotomy between mechanical matter and spiritual mind. This paper argues that information is the most ubiquitous and basic fact about reality; which is present in compounding and self-organizing forms in nature, from the quantum physics of dynamism among quarks through the mathematics of size limits for the universe as a whole, and encompassing all aspects of nature in between, including autopoetic systems, conscious minds, and language. Because this argument relies heavily on dynamic systems theory, however, it is not a reductionist argument. Reductionistic arguments, such as Daniel Dennett’s1 or Fred Dretske’s,2 typically interpret the notion of information as a form of Newtonian logical atomism, and understand the way that information concatenates on the Turing model,3 as strictly computational and quantitative. My argument for the organic nature of reality, and ultimately, for the pan-psychic nature of organicism, in contrast, will rely on a dynamic systems model for understanding information. Because a dynamic systems model for understanding both physics and information focuses on fields of interrelated processes, rather than substances and properties, the restrictions imposed by logical and Newtonian atomism will not apply. Dynamic fields and processes are more amenable to the formation of a continuum that unites large and small, complex and simple, inside and outside, than static rigid atoms and properties are. The argument for placing information in this central role must provide evidence both that there is a systematic, and not merely metaphorical, relationship between information as fact and information as referential content, and also demonstrate that some recent philosophical approaches to analyzing information have been, in important ways, incomplete. This paper presents an argument for the position that once information is adequately understood, especially in its roles in quantum field theory and its roles in evolutionary and ecological nature, it provides a framework for describing a systematic 1 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown, Boston, 1991 Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of information, MIT Press Bradford Books, 1981 3 Alan Turing, ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, Mind, 50: 433–460; 1950 2 2|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference continuum and underlying unity stretching from traditionally understood conceptions of materialistic mechanism to traditionally understood notions of organicism, life and mentality. The argument will show that the traditional philosophical dichotomy between matter, as dead mechanical ‘stuff’ vs. life and mind as immaterial spiritual substances misrepresented the ontological nature of all of reality. The false dichotomy relied on a) a rigid atomistic conception of the diverse bits of nature, and b) cherry picking several bits out of a uniform continuum that could be characterized as radically different from each other, while ignoring the underlying continuum of which the isolated exemplars were both part, and c) failing to see the continuum, the dynamical information processes, that unite them. For example, rocks are paradigmatic mechanical matter on the traditional interpretation, while minds capable of apprehending infinity are paradigmatic free spirits. In historical context, of course, Descartes’ Cartesian dualism was so desperate to avoid materialistic mechanism, that it missed the organic nature of all of reality. Contemporary philosophers who have embraced Newtonian mechanism as the ultimate story of all reality, have merely continued the Cartesian mistake, perhaps out of desperation to avoid traditionally understood spiritual substances. Evan Thompson agrees that the problem of the alleged gap between a mechanical material world and a spiritual, immaterial mind is that both traditional categories misconceive anything that actually exists in reality. Thompson characterizes the problem in terms of methodology and perspective as follows: To reduce conscious experience to external structure and function would be to make consciousness disappear (materialism); to reduce external structure and function to internal consciousness would be to make external things disappear (idealism)…”4 As Thompson observes, this perspectival and methodological problem replaces a universal perspective on both aspects of reality with two partial ones, then advocates of each partial perspective claim 4 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, Belknap Press, Harvard University, 2007, p. 225 3|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference universality for their own. The perspective and methodology used to characterize a rock as an external object is not the same one that is typically used to characterize an autonomous agent. Materialists insist on using the perspective and methodology appropriate for the rock on autonomous agents as well, while idealists project the mental perspective and methodology onto the rock. I see understanding nature as a field featuring a continuum of organicism as a way to include all perspectives and methodologies, while assigning each to its proper place on the continuum. In my interpretation, mechanism is everywhere, and can characterize any sufficiently isolated state space, whether traditionally thought of as material or mental. Likewise, minimal intentionality occurs in the form of informationally pragmatic reference, even when a quartz crystal forms. I am responding, as well, to a challenge that William Lycan has posed to philosophers of mind such as David Chalmers. Lycan argues that “…[I]ntentionality comes in degrees…”5 ranging from detectors, filters and inhibitors, through human creation of referential meaning, to Brentano’s abstract ability to focus mentally on inexistent objects of thought and imagination.6 Lycan points out that this range of intentionalities reveals intentionality to be something that is both more pervasive in nature than human-like cognition, and also more simple at many functional levels of nature than its most complex functioning, which seems to occur primarily within neurological networks in brains. Lycan challenges Chalmers, for example, to explain how the essential unity of mind that he argues for in The Character of Consciousness7 can occur in degrees, or in modular form, or be built up in degrees from simple functional signaling mechanisms. In the arguments that follow I will attempt to outline a preliminary response to this formidable challenge. My first step in the argument will be a largely expository step, outlining the groundwork for this argument laid by Terrence Deacon. 5 William G. Lycan, “The Continuity of Levels of Nature,” in Mind and Cognition, eds. William G. Lycan and Jesse J. Prinz, Blackwell Publishing, 3rd edition, 2008, p. 76 6 Ibid. 7 David J. Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK 2010, p. 537ff. 4|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference I claim that a concept of information informed by adequate quantum and natural understandings does not support the mechanical computer model of mentality presumed in what John Searle called strong AI8. The AI model presumes that a mechanical and reductionistic account of mentality can be given in terms of the syntactical functions of symbolic logic. The Turing test9 has been considered an adequate test for the presence of mental function by many reductionists, and this mechanical account of mind has been considered the most probably true account by many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists, especially those who consider themselves materialists, such as Daniel Dennett10 and Patricia Churchland.11 I will spend relatively little time arguing against the reductionists in this paper, because here I wish to concentrate on the positive task of building the information bridge between mechanism and organicism. In another paper I will argue that reductionism is the wrong way to understand the ubiquitousness of information in nature. In building the information bridge from bit to it to mind I will owe a huge debt to Terrence W. Deacon,12 whose extension of Claude Shannon’s13 view of information theory has already laid a solid foundation for this enterprise, and to James J. Gibson,14 whose ecological account of nature enables expanding Deacon’s insights. Also, the conception of autopoesis, articulated by Francisco Varela,15 Evan Thompson16 and many others, will play a key role in this argument. In the first section I will briefly summarize an outline of how Deacon has built on the work of Shannon, and then add my own analysis 8 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992, p. 44 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 50: 433–4606+5 10 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Co. Boston, MA 1991, chap 2 11 Patricia Churchland, Brainwise, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2002, chap.2. 12 Terrence W. Deacon, “Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin: redefining information, Part 1” and “Shannon-BoltzmannDarwin: redefining information, Part 2” downloaded from http://www.teleodynamics.com/?p=62 Aug.22,2011. 13 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. The University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1949. 14 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates New Jersey, 1979, Psychology Press, 1986. 15 F.G. Varela, H.R. Maturana, & R. Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model” Biosystems, Volume 5, Issue 4, May 1974, Pages 187–196, Elsevier Publishing, on line at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0303264774900318, 16 Mind in Life, op. cit. 9 5|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference of how Deacon’s proposal can be utilized to show a systematic connection among some of the puzzling aspects of quantum physics and some of the puzzling aspects of organic life and mental phenomena. In the process of articulating these connections between information “bits”, physical its, ecological systems, autopoetic molecules, and phenomenological qualia, I will be agreeing with Lycan that all of the above may occur in degrees. A Information: Bit to It: Claude Shannon via Terrence Deacon Claude Shannon was one of the mathematical masterminds behind much of the computer revolution of the twentieth century, who used statistical mechanics to analyze what it means for a signal to carry information. Shannon discovered that if intentionality is read into the reading or interpretation of a signal at the most basic level, one’s analysis disappears in a regress of progressively less and less explanatory homunculi. Shannon avoided the homuncular regress dilemma by discussing only quantities of information; ignoring content and interpretations altogether. He focused on only one aspect of the information of a signal: how likely the signal was to appear. A signal such as white space on a page is generally uninformative because of its high likelihood of appearing on the page. But against the backdrop of the white space, the likelihood of any letter or image appearing can count as signifying something, namely, a reduction in the open-ended uncertainty presented by the white page. Against the further backdrop of a language or code, a specific letter or number appearing can bring a substantive reduction in uncertainty, or noise, and thus constitute a statistically significant signal. So, Shannon figured out that there was a direct relationship between how unlikely a signal was to appear and how informative it was when it did appear. He also, thus, enhanced the mechanical view of information introduced by Turing and touted by proponents of strong AI. Deacon argues, however, that the reductionistic view of information is only one possible perspective on Shannon’s insight. Terrence Deacon points out that Shannon’s insight concerning signals and information outlined in the last paragraph is an insight into the largely negative value of what Deacon calls “constraints” 6|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference imposed on “noise.” Information, as described by Shannon, can be classified strictly quantitatively because it can be understood as a location in a state of statistical constraint viewed against a background that furnishes a broader range of possible states that are not so constrained. Unexpected absences, irregularities, states of disequilibrium, and anomalies provide information against a background that provides regular expectations, is uniform, contains states of equilibrium, or has no outstanding features. Deacon puts this insight as follows: …[T]he very nature of information is a relationship between something present or proximate and something absent or distal. To put this in even more enigmatic terms: what makes something information is its relationship to something it is not.17 Deacon points out that although Shannon’s conceptual and mathematical genius was evident in his capacity to evaluate this relationship in strictly quantitative, statistical terms, Shannon’s artificial intelligence (AI) successors frequently commit a Whiteheadian “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”18 when they interpret information exclusively as a quantitative quality substantially inherent in a signal medium. Deacon argues that the currently dominant computer model of information as mechanical syntactical switching capacity within data storage devises is inadequate for the following reason. …[W]e currently are working with a set of assumptions about information that are merely sufficient to handle the tracking of its most minimal physical and logical attributes but which are insufficient to understand either its defining representational character or its pragmatic value.19 So, although Deacon is impressed with Shannon’s insight into information as a relationship between a salient feature and a uniform background, he thinks that the important content of this insight lies not in reducing information to signal properties, but in identifying Shannon entropy, which he explains as a capacity to evaluate “the improbability of receiving a given transmitted signal, determined with respect 17 Terrence Deacon, “Shannon-Boltzman-Darwin: redefining information. Part 1”, http://www.teleodynamics.com/?p=62 accessed August 22, 2011, p. 4. 18 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, eds. David Ray Griffin, and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, New York 1978, p. 18 19 Terrence Deacon, “Shannon-Boltzman-Darwin: redefining information. Part 1”, op. cit. p.3 7|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference to the probabilities of all possible signals that could have been sent.”20 Shannon entropy is not exhaustively reducible to a mathematical property of a digital bit in a signal medium, for it retains capacity for contentfulness and interpretation, given the gestalt juxtaposition of background and foreground within which it functions, i.e., the relationship between the signal and all possible signals. Pragmatic reference and the intentionality of the signal are thus, not inherent in the signal medium i.e., the white page with a letter on it, but rather in the relationship among page, letter and alphabet. Thus, Deacon claims that Shannon’s insight has enabled the intentional homunculi to be bracketed and compartmentalized, for purposes of computer programming, but he argues that intentionality is not ultimately expurged by this maneuver. Because of the gestalt context, Deacon argues that Shannon entropy is not merely metaphorically, but literally analogous to Boltzmann entropy in fluid dynamics. Both are physical relationships occurring within the context of relationships among natural systems. It is the physically analogous relationship between Shannon entropy and Boltzmann entropy, claims Deacon, that gives Shannon information its “defining representational character” and “pragmatic value.”21 Deacon’s argument for the literal physical analogousness of Shannon entropy and Boltzman entropy rests on his analysis of constitutive absence which he explains as a: …[G]eneric property characterizing everything from biomolecular function to semiotic activities. Constitutive absence can be defined as the property of being structurally or dynamically organized with respect to (or by virtue of) attributes present (also potential or projected) in some extrinsic object or process.22 Deacon argues that such constitutive absences are physical facts about reality that play key roles in engineering, thermodynamics and evolutionary biology, as well as in semiotics,23 and it is this connection that makes the statistical relationships between foreground and background physical as well 20 Deacon, Part 1, p.12 Ibid. p. 3 22 Ibid. p. 9 author’s emphasis. 23 Ibid. 21 8|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference as being conceptual, semantic or statistical. Following Charles Sanders Pierce’s discussion of nature’s “habits of persistency,”24 Deacon points out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is “nature’s most basic habit.”25 Deacon points out that because of Boltzmann, or thermodynamic entropy, one can always assume that if a state of a system is diverging from disorder, “work” has been “done to perturb the system” and “outside constraints have been imposed.”26 Since the likelihood of disorder in any system greatly exceeds the likelihood of order, “decorrelation of component parameters”27 is what should be expected of any system. Therefore, when correlation rather than decorrelation is discovered in a system, one can justifiably assume “some external interference to push it away from this most probable state….something non-spontaneous has occurred.”28 In the case of Boltzmann entropy, the constitutive absence of equilibrium is thus, physically informative. The sources of entropy in communication channels are the initial improbability of a signal being sent, given the range of possible signals, and the possibility of noise, or corruption in the signal channel. An accurate signal is, thus, a physical reduction in entropy, requiring a physical manifestation in some signal medium, and work to overcome both its unlikelihood of occurring and its surrounding noise. Deacon explains the role of constitutive absence in Shannon entropy as paralleling the Boltzmann case because it; …provides evidence of another absent physical phenomenon—whatever performed the work on the signal to effect this reduction [in entropy]. Information is made available when the state of some physical system is different from what would be expected were its features to be the result of random influences or complete physical isolation.29 24 Charles Sanders Pierce, “A Guess at the Riddle of the Sphinx, ”in The Essential Pierce, vol. 1, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1992, p. 279. 25 Deacon, Part 1, p. 11 26 Ibid. p. 17 27 Ibid. p. 11 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. p. 18 9|Information Q-Bits and Natural Reference Reductionists and Strong AI proponents concentrate on the fact that Shannon’s analysis of information allows one to abstract away from the semiotic content and pragmatic import of information to focus exclusively on the quantitative and syntactical aspects of a signal or its communication channel. Deacon argues that a full understanding of Shannon’s insight requires a natural and contextual approach, more akin to a physicist’s interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, than to a logician’s analysis of disjunctive syllogism or a statistician’s analysis of a roll of a die. The claim here is not that the logic and statistics are not useful and necessary. Of course they are, to give the computer calculable and mechanical analysis that Shannon devised. Rather, the claim is that the mechanistic account of information is incomplete because a full understanding of information requires a) the context of the natural set of relations among background, foreground, and ranges of possibilities for both, and b) the relationship of Shannon entropy among those sets of possibilities. Intentionality is not expurgated from this fuller understanding, it is bracketed into the relational context. The context is a dynamic system of field relations, comprising both foreground and background and the relations among them. Deacon demonstrates in Part 2 of his thesis that the natural set of entropy relations discussed in the last paragraph is also useful in explaining some of the information transfer puzzles that arise in discussions of evolution. For example, controversies arise over how a signal medium such as a genetic code can both sustain useful information across many generations and be adaptable to environmental changes. Extreme responses to the controversy include the reductionistic approach taken by Dawkins that places the entire burden of explanation for the direction of the processes on the signal medium, the selfish genes,30 and divine design approaches that place the entire burden of explanation outside the system, altogether, in divine interference.31 I think that Deacon’s analysis provides a more complete 30 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford university press, UK 1989 St. Thomas Aquinas, “Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God” in Summa Theologica, vol 1. Christian Classics, Allen Texas, 1981, Pgs. 13-14 31 10 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e account than Dawkins’ and a more simple and reasonable account than Divine Design. Darwinian entropy is a form of natural and physical relationship among a genetic signaling system with a finite range of possible states and a natural and physical environment containing a range of possible constraints and opportunities. Constitutive absences and departures from expected states constitute signals within the context of this relationship. Neither the genes nor the environment could bring about change autonomously, or in isolation. But a state of disequilibrium in the relationship between genes and environment can constitute an informative signal that brings about a physical change without the intervention of extra-systematic divinities. To sum up the argument so far, my exposition of Deacon has indicated a way to get from bit to it. Neither Deacon nor I think that his case is proven, and both of us think that much more work needs to be done to explore his claims about physical entropy and constitutive absences. However, I think that Deacon has made a very good start in building a bridge between natural reality and information. I think he has given a much more complete analysis of Shannon information than one ordinarily sees in the AI literature, as well as a far better explanation of what happens to intentionality in the its and bits of nature. He has laid the framework for outlining a response to William Lycan’s challenge: switches and signaling devices contain ground-floor intentionality in the sense that their its and bits constitute a physical system representing two sets of ranges of possibility that interact entropically and interpret difference, absence, or disequilibrium as natural catalysts. The brute, reductionistic mechanism that views the ground floor metaphysics described in the last paragraph as expunged of all homunculi focuses myopically on the signal medium, and fails to see the inter-relational nature of the natural system. So, the Deacon analysis is more complete. But intentionality, in the very minimalist sense of natural, pragmatic reference, is on the ground floor, in Deacon’s analysis. A difference that makes a difference is a relational property of both informational bits and physical its, their respective contexts, and the relationship among them. 11 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e A reader might think at this point, “So far, so mechanical. Where is the promised organicism in this analysis?” Clearly, the signaling processes and physical processes involved in computers, fluid dynamics, genetics, and evolution are all classical physics level mechanical processes, for which the dominant scientific view is that to get intentional elements one would need to add them, and that would be both unnecessary and unhelpful. Why bother identifying and bracketing the referential features on the ground floor, when one can simply eliminate or ignore them? To respond to this question, I will now turn to the quantum piece of this puzzle. B Information: Bit to Q bit: probability amplitudes, superposition, entanglement and measurement Part of the reason that the referential features of computational processes can only be bracketed and not eliminated on what I have, to this point in the argument, called the “ground floor” for macroscopic or classically mechanical processes, is that bits and its are not really the “bottom or basement” floor of reality. Quantum physics introduces processes, objects, properties and concepts that neither Isaac Newton nor Alan Turing considered. Quantum entanglement adds further intentionality to the operations of Qbits, for the anti-correlation between pairs of Qbits provides both the power to do teleportation in quantum computing, and also the quality of non-locality for quantum processes that Einstein found so troubling. It seems that the anti-correlated pairs of particles carry information about one another despite absence of physical contact. Further, the superposition of states that is possible for Qbits means that more data can be represented by Qbits than by classical bits, but the information is not determinate until collapsed (decohered) through a measurement These nonNewtonian properties of quantum bits appear to return ability of particles to cross refer to one another, at least, to the discussion. The non classical properties are better understood as a relationship between two undetermined contexts that collapses into a determinate signal at decoherence. The relational nature of Shannon entropy, as identified by Deacon is uneliminable in the foundational basement of 12 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e reality. While a mechanical perspective remains applicable in the quantum account of reality, the mechanical analysis cannot be completely isolated from the context, or bracketed into it. David Deutsch, Artur Ekert and Rossella Lupacchini32 argue for the mutual compatability of mechanical and computational accounts of quantum information with the physical observations that the material world, at the basement, quantum level, consists of sets of probability amplitudes that are superposed, entangled, non-local, and collapsed to particular values by measurement. These authors argue that the Church-Turing Principle 33can still be considered a thesis about the nature of the quantum physical world, so computational concatenation is there, as well. However, Deutsch et al. argue that the Church Turing Principle can not be interpreted as abstractly and exclusively quantitatively, in quantum computing or physics as it has traditionally been in AI or Newtonian physics. The implications of the Church Turing Principle in quantum physics are that the world is a set of physical possibilities, exhibiting features such as probability amplitudes,34 superposition, entanglement,35 interference by measurement,36 and non-locality. These authors adopt a strongly anti-Platonic stance regarding the metaphysical implications of these aspects of quantum physics for the nature of information. They insist that mathematics, including qubits and their functions, are the language of reality because mathematics is an empirical science that we learn from the investigation of nature that we conduct, including investigation into the nature of machines such as Turing machines or their quantum equivalents. The result of reversing the order of metaphysical priority from ‘pure abstract math implies the nature of reality’, to ‘we derive math from physical reality’ is to supplant the mathematical Platonism and logical atomism that informed much materialistic reductionism and replace it with a dynamic gestalt 32 33 Church-Turing Principle: a claim that a universal quantum computer can simulate the behavior of any finite physical system. David Deutsch in “Quantum Theory, The Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer, Proceedings of the Royal Society A vol 400, 1985, pp. 97-117 34 David Deutsch, Artur Ekert and Rossella Lupacchini, “Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics” arXiv:math/9911150v1 [math.HO] 19 Nov 1999, p. 8 35 ibid. P. 19 36 ibid. p. 5, 10 13 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e relationship between bits and its on the basement floor of reality. Deutsch et. al. use the examples of quantum logical operations discovered in research into quantum computing, which exhibit entanglement among qubits,37 to point out that we must accept the most logically counterintuitive outcomes once machines have shown processes described, thereby, to be real processes.38 Deutsch et. al. propose that we do not apprehend any mathematical forms, including the 1s and 0s of digital information, as abstract forms that exist detached from reality in some pure Platonic space to which we require reality to conform. Rather, we encounter qubits, bits, numbers and calculations of all kinds in our empirical investigation of the nature of the world, and we adapt our mathematics to what we discover. Hence our understanding of logic should evolve to include operations on entangled and superposed states, and we should not use the violations of traditional logic introduced through quantum computing as reasons to reject quantum functions to maintain the classical ones. Indeed, the quantum dynamics is more basic; if anything is artificial it is the contextual bracketing that produces ground-floor atomistic computability. Yet, traditional bits and quantum bits are not discontinuous with one another because different properties are apparent at the quantum level. N. David Mermin used the unorthodox expressions Cbits for classical computer bits and Qbits for quantum computing units, which I have followed in the title of this section, to show a systematic relationship between the two concepts. Mermin regards quantum information theory as an expansion of the resources available within classical information theory, to the range of possible states for bits. Mermin explains: A major part of quantum mechanics consists of an … expansion of the notion of the state of a Cbit, called in this extended setting a quantum bit or Qbit . We democratically expand the set of meaningful states from the 2n special orthonormal states, known in this broader setting as the classical basis (or, in the prevailing but less informative terminology, the computational basis) to arbitrary unit vectors from the 37 38 ibid. p.6 ibid. p. 8 14 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e entire vector space consisting of all linear combinations (called superpositions) of classical basis states with complex coefficients (called amplitudes).39 …. Physics offers many examples of physical systems—Qbits—whose natural description is in terms of states that are precisely these peculiar generalizations of the states of classical bits that expand the constrained set of classical basis vectors to the entire complex vector space that they span.40 So for Mermin, as for Deutsch, Ekert and Lupacchini, the intimate relationship of bits and its that exists in the classical basis, persists at the quantum level of reality, but there this relationship becomes a physical relationship between an expanded and superposed set of possibilities and entangled Qbits which somehow constitute an indeterminate or non-local reality, which is made determinate only through measurement. Mermin points out that the measurement issue, nevertheless, provides a big difference between Cbits and Qbits, because the measurement process on Qbits is irreversible and never yields a determinate value.41 Measurement introduces a measurer, and makes central the “defining representational character” and “pragmatic value”42 of information identified, even in the classical level bits, by Deacon. So, the bracketed minimal intentionality from Shannon Entropy on Cbits is clearly uneliminable at the quantum level. The reappearance of these minimally intentional qualities in the basement and foundation levels of natural metaphysics is a good reason to concur with Deacon that they can, at most, be bracketed to the context and background on the mechanistic ground floor level. C Information: Qbits to a universe that computes Further, it is reasonable to claim that the informational nature of reality extends further than the character of Qbits, and functions of quantum computing, to the structure and processes of the 39 N. David Mermin, “From Cbits to Qbits, Teaching Computer Scientists Quantum Mechanics,” arXiv: quant-ph/ 0207118v1 19 Jul 2002, p. 9 40 ibid. p. 10 41 ibid. p. 13 42 Terrence Deacon, “Shannon-Boltzman-Darwin: redefining information. Part 1”, op. cit. p.3 15 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e universe, as a whole. In identifying both the informational nature of basic physical reality and the representational and pragmatically intentional nature of Qbits, and calculations conducted by them, Paul Davies and Seth Lloyd argue that the universe, itself, is a quantum computer. Davies agrees with Deutsch, Ekert and Lupacchini, that the traditional understanding of the relationship between mathematics and physical reality as : Mathematics Physics Information43 Is a Platonic mis-formulation of the character of reality that reverses the order of nature. Davies advocates a “radical shift in world view” to a new “explanatory scheme:” Information Laws of Physics Matter,44 a formulation which Davies believes better explains the way that information and matter are interrelated in the cosmos. Davies considers his new explanatory scheme an answer to the question, Might laws and states co-evolve in such a way that our world is some sort of attractor in the product space of laws and states?45 Davies replies to his rhetorical question in the affirmative, placing information, once again, in the key role that Deacon assigned to Shannon entropy, negotiating determinacy between two sets of ranges of possibility, now laws and states. Further, Davies argues that the link between information loss and area is a “very deep property of the universe” explained through the holographic principle. 46 This principle establishes limits on the informational size and material and temporal extension of the universe that establish a “cosmic information bound.” The cosmic information bound rules out Platonic understandings of infinite space, matter, or processes. Cartesian Infinity and non-denumerable real numbers, for example, are not 43 Paul Davies, “Universe from Bit” in Information and the Nature of Reality, eds. Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010, p. 75 44 ibid. 45 ibid. p. 73 46 ibid. p. 79 16 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e descriptions of the physical world.47 So the sets of ranges of possibility that can exist on either the matter or the information side of the laws and states relationship are not infinite, and are determined by the size of the “cosmic information bound.”48 It follows from the above observations, according to Davies, that the laws of physics, like the extent of matter, have intrinsically finite sets of possibilities for realization.49 The constraints imposed on the relationship between matter and the laws of physics by the information bound are much like the ones imposed by Shannon entropy. Seth Lloyd has calculated the cosmic information bound of the universe at 10122 bits.50 Lloyd points out that the Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs analysis of entropy described atomic “bits being transformed and flipped when atoms collide.”51 He concludes, agreeing with Davies and Deacon, that the universe “…[I]s literally a computer; a system that can be programmed to perform arbitrary digital computations.”52 The reason that the universe can evolve and create novelty and more complex sources of order, however, is that the quantum mechanical basis of the universe is not the classical clockwork mechanism envisaged by LaPlace and Descartes, but rather a quantum substratum that; …[P]rovides the universe with a constant supply of fresh, random bits, generated by the process of decoherence. Quantum fluctuations are the “monkeys” that program the universe.53 Shannon entropy is, thus, a feature of the universe as a whole, as much as it is a feature operating among its bits and its. Reality is a representational, pragmatic and evolving attractor relationship that unites far more than it divides information and matter. 47 ibid. p. 83 ibid. 49 ibid. p. 86 50 ibid. p. 79 51 Seth Lloyd, “The Computational Universe,” in Information and the Nature of Reality, eds. Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010, p. 97 52 ibid. 53 ibid. p. 102 48 17 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e So far this argument has attributed minimal intentionality, via information, understood as Shannon entropy, to bits, qubits, and the universe as a whole. In my floors of a building metaphor, we have examined the basement (qubits) the ground floor (classical bits and its) and the yard or neighborhood (the cosmos, and its information boundaries.) This provides a framework for responding to William Lycan’s challenge. Intentionality, at least in the form of representational efficacy, pragmatic identification, anti-correlation, and intentional measurement is present in the basement and the yard, and in a bracketed sense, on the ground floor, via Shannon entropy acting on constitutive absences. It is now time to look for more traditionally mental forms of intentionality closer to life and consciousness. More complex self-organization takes place in self organizing ecological systems, on the second floor of my metaphorical building, to which I will now turn. D Information: A Computational Universe to Ecosystems54 I agree with Lycan that consciousness occurs in degrees. We have already seen some of the minimal degrees of intentionality spread broadly through out the quantum world, and preserved in a bracketed sense even within the levels of reality that are amenable to a more reductively mechanistic analysis. When one discusses physical and informational systems in nature, ranging from minimal dynamical systems, such as water boiling in a pot, through biological messages encoded in DNA to complex ecologies of forests, oceans and weather systems, more prominent aspects of informational corelation, cross-resonance, and intentionality begin to emerge. Self organization, for example, is a quantum phenomena that occurs even in deterministic dynamical systems that no one would consider conscious. Gregoire Nicolis explains, Such ordinary systems as a layer of fluid or a mixture of chemical products can generate, under appropriate conditions, a multitude of self-organizing phenomena on a macroscopic scale – a scale orders of magnitude larger than the range of fundamental interactions- in the form of spatial patterns or temporal 54 This section of the paper is a rewritten portion of a paper that I previously published, “Causation in Field Being” In the International Journal for Field Being, http//www. IJFB.org, vol. 1 no. 2 18 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e rhythms. … Non-linear dynamics and the presence of constraints maintaining the system far from equilibrium will turn out to be the basic mechanisms involved in the emergence of these phenomena.55 Convection in thermodynamics, the formation of chemical turbulence and wave fronts in vats of chemicals, oceans or weather systems, and chemotaxis and morphogenesis in biological systems, as well as statistically modeled behaviors of human, plant and animal populations, all exhibit certain properties in common. What is happening when these processes take place is something is acting as an attractor other than equilibrium, which is a universal or default attractor for systems. So, symmetry is broken, and the system must make an historical ‘choice’ among attractors, resulting in a bifurcation of histories for the system. A system undergoes radical change when a critical threshold is crossed, breaking symmetry and resulting in a phase transition. The crossing of the critical threshold forces the system to make a choice which is governed by chaos theory and occurs according to fractal geometry. The way the choice falls will subsequently mark the system as left or right handed, and will become selfgenerating of the organization that has been initiated by the choice. Nichols explains the generation of self-organization in dynamical systems this way. Now, a very characteristic feature of the vast majority of systems encountered in nature is that the Fs [fluxes] are complicated nonlinear functions of Xs [instantaneous states]. In a fluid in motion, this has to do with the fact that the transport of its properties, like, for instance, energy, is carried out by the motion itself, whose velocity is one of the variables to be determined. [by an equation measuring the system’s evolution]. In chemical reactions or in biology it has to do with the ability of certain kinds of molecules to perform autocatalytic and other regulatory functions. And, in animal or human populations, nonlinearity may reflect the processes of communication, competition, growth or information exchange. In short, the equations of evolution of all these systems should admit under certain conditions several solutions, since by 19 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e definition, multiplicity of solutions is the most typical feature of a nonlinear equation.56 So, we see again in self-organizing dynamical systems, the properties that Deacon attributed to Shannon entropy: relations among sets of possibilities, constrained in some ways, and detecting an absence or state of disequilibrium, form a directed reference making a pragmatic difference in a way that is determinate only to a statistical degree, and is made more determinate through measurement. Nicolis’ discussion of phase transitions and symmetry breaking adds yet more intentionality to the processes being described since there is a degree of randomness in the way that these choices are made, and real options exist for the direction in which the choice will lead the system to develop. Obviously, whether the choice is random or creative will be relevant at the conscious level of organization, and either irrelevant or ‘creative’ in some very minimalist sense at lower levels of organization. What is more important to observe here is that the choice in question goes in a specific direction; and it exhibits behavior that becomes self-generating of a new form of order initiated by the choice. I think that these points are sufficient to characterize the change as adding to the minimalist forms of informational intentionality that I have already outlined, and further demonstrating the dynamical interaction of information and physical reality. One more statement from Nicholis will further clarify and summarize the interrelatedness and networked nature of information and physical nature in dynamical mechanical systems. In short, we arrive at a simple, appealing picture of how order can emerge in a system. In somewhat anthropomorphic terms, order appears to be a 56 Gregoire Nicolis, “Physics of Far-From-Equilibrium Systems and Self-Organization”, in The New Physics, op.cit. 20 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e compromise between two antagonists: the nonlinear chemical-like process, which, through fluctuations sends continuously but incoherently, ‘innovating signals’ to the system and the transport-like process which captures, relays and stabilizes them. Disturbing the delicate balance between these two ‘actors’ leads to such qualitative changes as an erratic state in which each element of the system acts on its own, or, on the contrary, a ‘homeostatic’ fossil-like state in which fluctuations are crushed and a full uniformity is imposed. Complexity and self-organization appear, therefore, to be limited on both sides by two different kinds of states of disorder.57 I hope my reader finds the parallels as striking as I do between Deacon’s descriptions of the relationship between its and bits as constitutive of a physical system representing two sets of ranges of possibility that interact entropically and interpret difference, absence, or disequilibrium as a natural catalyst, and Nicolis’ descriptions of homeostatic and self-organizing relations above. In both cases, a dynamical relationship between two sets of possibilities is generating a determinate dynamical outcome, as the fields of possibilities interact with eachother and with sets of constraints and constitutive absences in the environment. It is further striking that Nicolis feels the need to use the words “anthropomorphic terms,” “actors” and “sends…innovative signals” in the above passage, but he also feels the need to apologize for using them by putting them in scare quotes. I think that Deacon’s argument has provided a good reason to say that Nicolis’ apologies for anthropomorphizing represent the form of bracketing of intentionality for the purposes of doing a mechanical analysis that Deacon identified in computer science. The dynamical systems are mechanical, but the bracketed minimal intentionality, and pragmatic reference, have not been eliminated. Dynamical systems such as convection in thermodynamics, wave fronts and chemotaxis in biological systems are small scale ecological interactions. Such systems also function using feed back loops, energy exchanges with areas outside the system and homeostatic mechanisms to maintain equilibrium. Disequilibrium in any of the above will initially catalyze more fervent activity to maintain 21 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e equilibrium within the system, followed by radical disruption, should the feedback systems fail to return the system to homeostasis. The information component of feedback-loops, energy exchanges, and maintenance of homeostasis encapsulates a more sophisticated distinction between self-reference and other-reference than we have seen so far on the bridge from it to bit to mind. Even a system such as a hurricane can be said to be self-maintaining, as long as its supply of warm water is unlimited, but its equilibrium falters once it moves over cooler water or over land. The classical mechanical description of such systems brackets the intentionality that Deacon and I have been arguing is really still there. Bracketing intentionality serves less purpose, however, once one is dealing with living ecological systems. James J. Gibson has advocated understanding living dynamical systems, such as animals and humans in their environments, in perspectival terms, revealing rather than suppressing, their inherent intentionality. E Information: Ecosystems to Environments Gibson recommends against using even the concepts or vocabulary of Newtonian physics to describe the relationships among living things and their ecological surroundings. He argues: Our failure to understand the concurrence of persistence and change at the ecological level is probably connected with an old idea --- the atomic theory of persistence and change, which asserts that what persists in the world are atoms and what changes in the world are the positions of atoms or their arrangements.58 …So different, in fact, are environmental motions from those studied by Isaac Newton, that it is best to think of them as changes of structure rather than changes of position of elementary bodies, changes of form rather than of point locations, or changes of the layout rather than motions in the usual meaning of the term. 59 Gibson points out that the interaction between a living thing and its environs should be characterized as a relationship of actor to affordances60, resident to niche61, knower to layout, texture and surfaces62. 58 J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group, NY, 1986, p. 14 59 ibid. p. 15 author’s emphasis 60 ibid. p.127 61 ibid, p. 128-130 22 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e The feedback loops, homeostatic relationships and capacity to refer to self and others already noticed in dynamical systems take center stage and eclipse more mechanical interactions once organic living systems are the ecological systems under discussion. Here, explicitly intentional notions such as perspective and perception must be explicitly introduced to understand the role of information in an ecological dynamical feed back loop. For example, to analyze the role of information in the environmental feedback loops of living systems, Gibson distinguishes the role of light as radiant atoms from the role light plays as ambient light, providing affordances in an ecology for living things, as follows. Ecological optics is concerned with many-times-reflected light in the medium, that is illumination. Physical optics is concerned with electromagnetic energy, that is radiation… The ambient light has structure, whereas the radiant light does not.63 The importance of the difference between structured ambient light and unstructured radiant light, for Gibson, is that only the former is capable of conveying information to a plant or animal, for by now familiar reasons cited by Deacon. Uniform light or darkness, like the blank sheet of paper, contains no information. Gibson explains; In the case of unstructured ambient light, the environment is not specified and no information about an environment is available….In the case of ambient light that is unstructured in one part and structured in an adjacent part, such as the blue sky above the horizon and the textured region below it, the former specifies a void and the latter a surface.64 So, Shannon entropy, now with explicit intentionality, is providing the informational capacity for an environment to furnish affordances for a living system. Indeed, Holmes Ralston III argues that ecosystems, of the type described by Gibson, are more basic aspects of reality than the creatures or species that inhabit them. Ralston points out that individual 62 ibid.p. 258 ibid. pgs.63-64 author’s emphasis 64 ibid. p. 52 63 23 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e plants or animals last for short periods of time, ranging from days for some insects to hundreds of years for some trees. The average age of a species is five million years, and the constant within which species arise and become extinct is an ecosystem. He points out that species and individual animals are dependent on ecosystems in ways that ecosystems are not dependent on any animal or species. So he argues the ecosystems are the most basic facts of nature, not DNA, plants or animals, or species. 65 Moving from the second to the third floor of my metaphorical house, brings us to the level of field complexity and dynamism characterized by life. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and many others have argued that life, starting with bacteria and building to humans exhibits a special feature which they call autopoesis. Thompson would characterize the auto catalytic activities described by Nicholis, above, such as the functioning of a hurricane, as failing the test for autopoesis, because there is no semi-permeable membrane boundary on an autocatalytic set of activities, and the set has no capacity to reproduce itself.66 Auto poetic systems are more autonomous of the environment, and more capable of maintaining their own equilibrium. Thompson, likewise, excludes viruses and DNA or RNA molecules from status as autopoetic systems because they “are not dissipative systems or metabolic entities… and have no metabolism of [their] own.”67 Thompson argues that “significance and valence” enter the scene with autopoesis because the clear sense of interiority and value on equilibrium that the autonomous systems have raises them to a level that surmounts mere exteriority, and mere status as physical systems.68 For this reason, Thompson, Varela and ultimately, Deacon, as well, resist the move that I am making from information in physical systems to information in autopoetic systems. All would insist that life presents a radical break from information systems in the physical world, and mind is an autopoetic function of life. 65 Holmes Ralston III, A New Environmental Ethics, Routledge Press, New York, New York, 2012, chaps. 7 & 8 Thompson, Evan, Life in Mind, p. 105 67 ibid, p. 123 68 ibid. 225 66 24 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e While I agree with these authors that life, featuring semipermeable membranes and strong senses of equilibrium, adds substantially to the level of autonomy of a field, I don’t think the break between life and non-life is as radical as Thompson, et.al. insist that it is. The homeostatic feed back loops and persistence through change, interchange of energy and resources with an environment, and ability to react to destabilizing environmental changes were all already there in ecosystems and dynamic systems. The philosophers of autopoesis all think of minds and lives as embedded in ecosystems in important ways, and I hope my arguments will encourage them to see more continuity than division between the embeddedness of live in an ecosystem and the existence of life, itself. In the next section I will argue that the embedednesss of autopoetic fields within fields of significance for them counts in favor of seeing the inherent intentionality of information throughout nature, and not only in its organically living sectors. To summarize the argument at this point: I have transitioned smoothly, I hope, from describing a relationship between its and bits at the quantum level, through its and bits at the mechanical level, in which intentionality is bracketed, to its and bits in the universe as a whole, in dynamical systems and in ecological systems, and on to dynamical autopoesis. In every case, I have shown the relationship to be an intentional one. Although the intentionality is bracketed at the most mechanically understood ground floor level, its minimal manifestations on the ground, basement and back yard levels are growing substantially on the second floor; among dynamical systems and ecologies. Additional features arise on the third floor with autopoesis, but the process of accumulating additional intentional properties along with increasing dynamical field complexity, has been systematic, and progressive. We now have accumulated the following intentional characteristics for the distributed informational resources of the natural world: signal recognition, reference, pragmatic meaning, constitutive absences serving as entropic catalysts, homeostasis distinguishing equilibrium from disequilibrium, self-organization, selfreference and other reference, feed-back loops with an environment, ambient arrays of surfaces and 25 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e textures and affordances. That, I submit, is a whole lot of gradually increasing dynamic intentionality inherent in the world that Descartes, Newton and Turing characterized as exclusively inert mechanistic matter. The final section of this chapter will argue that the transition is equally smooth to human mentality. F Information: Ecosystems and Autopoesis to Minds A substantial body of literature has been arguing in recent years that human minds should be thought of as embodied in an ecosystem,69 rather than as isolated in a brain70 or free-floating, as an immaterial substance71. Andy Clark,72 and Francisco Varela et.al.,73 for example, argue that a human mind is as much an ecosystem incorporating a social and ecological niche as it is a functioning brain. Some of the central features of a mind are its ability to use environmental feed back loops to identify and exploit affordances of the type identified by Gibson, ability to use space and environmental structures as markers, and sorting tools and to do active problem solving, and perform memory tasks using the environment.74 Clark, Varela, and proponents of what Clark calls the ‘extended mind’ argue that a brain in a vat would not be capable of experience at all, as we know it, much less capable of the full range of thinking and action that we perform. First of all, unless there were basic motor relationships such as reaching and grasping, turning ones head to see or hear better, a sense of locatedness in a space and a sense of self-image as bounded, but capable of moving within the space, as dwarfed by some of one’s environment, but dwarfing other aspects of it, as upright, sitting or prone, as needing to approach some aspects of the environment and avoid others, while socially interacting with 69 for example, see work by Jose Bermudez, The Body and the Self (Cambridge MA, MIT, 1995) co-edited with Antony and Marcel and Naomi Eilan Andy Clark, Being There, and Supersizing the Mind. 70 For example Churchland, op. cit, and Michael Gazzaniga, (Human, 2008)Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained, 1991)and Joseph LeDoux(Synaptic Self,2002). 71 For example, Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 72 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2008 73 Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1993 74 Clark, Supersizing the Mind, pgs. 81-82 26 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e still others, the brain modules identified by Michael Gazzaniga75 would have little or nothing on which to operate. While some inclinations to interact with the context may be innate, operating as modules within the brain as Gazzaniga claims, these inclinations could neither develop thoroughly nor persist through subsequent evolutionary history if they were as exclusively brain-bound as he claims. Second, as Clark and Chalmers have argued, there can be modules of the thinking processes that are stored outside the brain. Their Otto example explains a man with very limited memory capacity who remembers how to get places by writing directions in a notebook. They argue that his knowledge is truly in the notebook rather than in his head, and that the notebook is as much a part of his mind as the memory of the location of a destination is for someone else.76 By extension, of course, most of us now house considerable portions of our knowledge base and perceptual memory in computers, blackberries, ipods and the like. I have long argued that our knowledge of the standard height of stairs is in our legs, and our knowledge of the placement of doorknobs is in our hands, not our heads. This knowledge is for most of us dynamical and kinesthetic, unlike the case for the construction manager, who must have cognitive knowledge of the standard regulatory measurements for stair height and doorknob placement.77 In each of these cases, the information structure is as much in the environment as it is in the brain or in any potentially immaterial Cartesian or Platonic mental space. Henry Stapp explains a way for Deacon’s analysis of the dynamical interface among informational and physical dynamical fields to be realized in the case of the relationship between physical neurological events in brains and phenomenal experiences of an ecological environment. First, Stapp describes the quantum condition of the brain; 75 Michael Gazzaniga, Human: the Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique, Harper/Perennial Press, New York, 2008, pgs. 291-308 76 David Chalmers and Andy Clark, “The Extended Mind” in Philosophy of Mind, ed. David Chalmers, Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, p.226-230. 77 Laura Weed, The Structure of Thinking, Imprint Academic, Thorverton, UK 2003 27 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e The quantum state of the brain is reduced by …interactions to a collection of parallel potentialities….[E]ach of the classical possibilities must be slightly smeared out to bring it into accord with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the potential location and velocity of the center of each particle is smeared out over a small region….78 Stapp’s quantum description of the operation of a brain enables him to then describe the interaction of brain and ecological system as, once again, a system of two sets of probability amplitudes interacting in conditions in which decoherence will bring about specificity. Disequilibrium creates salience, resulting in a measurement, which results in the collapse of superposed states to one determinate state, which is at once a neurological brain state and an informational state, now a full psychological qualia experienced by a measurer rooted in an ecosystem. As Stapp explains: According to this picture your physically described brain is an evolving cloud of essentially classically conceived potentialities. Owing to the uncertainty principle smearing, this cloud of potentialities can quickly expand to include the neural correlates of many mutually exclusive possible experiences. Each human experience is an aspect of a psycho-physical event whose psychologically described aspect is that experience, itself, and whose physically described aspect is the reduction of the cloud of potentialities to those that contain the neural co-relate of that experience79. Stapp is claiming that the same type of dynamic relationship exists between neurons and qualia, or between brains and experiences, as we have seen between its and bits in the rest of reality. The level of complexity and the variety of types of intentionality possible have increased many fold in the dynamic relations between neuronal assemblies and experiences, and in the dynamic relationship between brains and an ecological environment, over those expressed in the simplest examples of Shannon Entropy operating on constitutive absences. The basic processes of Shannon Entropy, are still at work in Stapp’s analysis, however. A qualia is a meaningful, i.e. referential and pragmatic signal, because it is a relationship between sets of environmental possibilities and sets of brain states that is at once, physical and informational, building on Shannon entropy and constitutive absences. There is no need to bracket 78 Henry Stapp, “Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe,” in Information and the Nature of Reality, eds. Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, Cambridge University Press, UK 2010, p. 109 79 ibid. 28 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e the intentionality into the background, here, and in fact it would be perverse to do so. Lycan can have his degrees of intentionality, and there is no metaphysical reason to exclude the element of consciousness from any aspect of reality, although the practical argument for bracketing it off from mechanical analyses still applies. Also, for practical reasons, Thompson’s arguments for the specialness of autopoesis can be accepted. Creatures with membranes are intentional creatures operating in ecological niches in concentrated ways. And mind is special because creatures with phenomenal experience are exploiting and using their entropic abilities in a very concentrated way in the dynamical interaction of neuronal assemblies, perceptual systems, experience and an ecosystem. I hope I have shown that a deeper continuity unites basement, ground floor, second and third floors, attic and yard in my metaphorical house of nature. G Conclusion: Panpsychic Nature In this paper I have outlined a bridge from information through dynamical fields to mind. My intention is to demonstrate that far from establishing reductive materialism, what this bridge reveals is the inherent intentionality of all of nature, the naturalness of reference and the metaphysical reality of information. Understanding reality as dynamical systems of inter-relational fields of information, rather than as static things with transitional properties, enables the conceptual transition beyond traditional philosophical dichotomies between material and spiritual substances. Some of the key principles that have enabled this transition from bits to mind are the following: Shannon Entropy; which points out the inherently referential, inherently relational, inherently physical and inherently gestalt quality of information. Constitutive absences and disequilibrium, as identified by Deacon, which show how Shannon entropy can produce physical catalysts for dynamical change. The bracketing of all of the pragmatic reference and intentionality of the above into the context and the background, for a quantitative analysis required by AI, The Church-Turing Principle, and a computational account of information. Logical and Newtonian atomism both depend on the bracketed and exclusively quantitative account of information. The mechanical analysis of any state space 29 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e is always possible, and is useful for many purposes, but is misrepresentative if it is understood to provide a comprehensive analysis of all of reality. Superposition, entanglement, possibility amplitudes, non-locality and measurement provide the sets of possibilities to interact in dynamical relations. Decoherence conditions result from interactions triggered by constitutive absences and disequilibrium, at the quantum level, introducing an observer and further showing the dynamic field-like nature of the relationship between information and matter. Information is metaphysically prior to matter, the Laws of Physics and Platonic accounts of mind, as explained by Deutsch et al and Davies et al. Homeostasis, feed-back loops and self-organization increase the intentionality level of dynamical systems which form dynamical systems and ecologies, as specified by Nicolis. Interactive and intentional dynamics among plants, animals and humans and their ecological niches promote more meaningful dynamic relationships between more fully intentional users of an environment and the affordances offered by the environment, as identified by Gibson. Autopoetic activities function in living creatures, molecular and organic life, providing increased autonomy for creatures with membranes, as identified by Varela and Thompson. Dynamic interrelations among quantum features of brains and their environments produce both specific neurological states in human brains and psychological states of experience, as phenomenal qualia, and environmentally embedded experience for humans, as identified by Stapp. Nature so described forms a dynamical system of interrelated fields, some of which are many times embedded within one another. The principles of operation of the entire system are consistent at the informational core of reality, although more complex principles evolve in more complex autonomous and semi-autonomous fields within nature. Basic intentional principles connected to information, Shannon Entropy, constitutive absences and systemic constraints operate throughout the system, providing its underlying unity. This view of nature is a form of panpsychism and not materialist reductionism, for most of the properties traditionally conceived of as mental have been dispersed through the system in varying degrees, or (for mechanical systems) exiled to the context, not eradicated. Even in the mechanical levels of reality in which intentionality has been bracketed to the context, it has not been expurgated. This is a view of an organically interrelated, semiotically meaningful, and self-organizing cosmos, not a world of dead, atomistically separate, inert Newtonian matter. 30 | I n f o r m a t i o n Q - B i t s a n d N a t u r a l R e f e r e n c e