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Disembodiment and intentionality Deacon et al 2006

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Disembodiment: Absence as the Root of Intentionality

Terrence Deacon,* with Tyrone Cashman and Jeremy Sherman

* University of California, Berkeley, CA; Expressions Institute, Emoryville, CA

Abstract: Although the effort to ground phenomenal intentionality by appealing to its

embodiment in human neurology appears to offer a bridge between contemporary

phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience, it ultimately sacrifices the most definitive attribute

of intentionality (aboutness): its ambiguous ontological status as constituted with respect to

something not present and therefore not currently embodied. An intentional object is curiously at

the same time causally significant but not an intrinsic property of the material dynamics of brain

function. To make sense of this dual nature we argue that a figure-background shift of

perspective is necessary that focuses on the constitutive role of processes of selective

elimination. We identify a property that can be called constitutive absence as the defining

feature of both cognitive and biological processes by which extrinsic constraints, exemplified by

selectively absent alternative forms, become the locus of functional and referential organization.By critically examining the assumptions of embodiment theories, exploring examples of

absence-based significance, and reanalyzing the Shannonian concept of information and its links

to both thermodynamic and evolutionary theory we build the case for absence playing the

critical role in the creation of information and the specification of aboutness. Although this

analysis falls short of providing a full account of mental content, by shifting attention from what

is immediately present to what is not, it traces an unbroken causal path from simple physical

processes to intentional phenomena that does not require explaining away this most

characteristic and distinctive feature of mind.

1. Introduction: From final causality to intentionality

In the history of Western philosophy and science there has been no problem more contentious

than how (or whether) to integrate the logic of mental experience with the logic of physical

causation. Mental phenomena exemplify two properties that seem, on the surface, to beincompatible with other (nonliving) phenomena: 1) they appear responsible for the initiation of

causal processes based on states (goals) that do not (currently) exist; and 2) they appear to have a

sort of dual nature, in which their existence is predicated on being a surrogate for something else,

which may or may not have the possibility of existing. These can be crudely characterized byhighlighting two related uses of the term intention, respectively: 1) the propensity to change or

act with respect to achieving some end, i.e. teleology; and 2) the property of being about

something, i.e. referring. Both are troublesome for science because they seem to depend onsomething not present, and in a sense, disembodied. Here we focus on the second (see Deacon,2006; Deacon and Sherman, 2006, for discussion of the first).

Lack of physical extension was for Descartes one of the fundamental defining features of mentalphenomena, but as his notorious interactionist compromise (via the pineal) exemplifies,

assuming the existence of an extensionless domain introduces a deep logical incompatibility

separating the mental from the merely physical. A significant trend in the philosophy of science


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since Descartes has been the development of separate-but-equal explanatory domains, with

computational approaches to cognitive science and post-structuralist interpretations ofphenomenology exemplifying the current exemplars of this dichotomizing trend.

Recently, however, in an attempt to draw these domains closer together, there has been a

blossoming of interest in appealing to the concept ofembodimentto provide a missing bridgethat can be shared in common. This move can be crudely characterized on the computational side

by the claim that situated computation (i.e. with receptor and effector mechanisms that interact

with surroundings) is sufficient to transform syntactic computation into intention-like states. And

it can be roughly summarized on the phenomenological side by the claim that intentional contentis implicit in the dual role of the body as both the perceiver and perceived, to the extent that all

consciousness is consciousness of states of embodied receptors and their supportive systems.

This rapprochement appears to offer the possibility that these once dichotomous approaches may

be able to converge on the study of embodiment without sacrificing their domain-specificassumptions. Key to the success of this marriage is a denial of a disembodied or extensionless

conception of intentional phenomena.

The tacit assumption behind these efforts appears to be that the dilemma posed by mentalphenomena derives from their erroneous description as involving something not present

nevertheless playing a significant role in organizing experience and action. Our contention is, on

the contrary, that this classic descriptive characterization is not the problem, but rather that the

efforts to remedy what is thought to be wrong with this account have created more confusionthan clarity. We believe that the appeals to embodiment as a way out of this dilemma, whether

from the computational or phenomenological paradigms, though exemplary in their efforts to

find a middle ground, ultimately represent gambits to avoid dealing with exactly what is most inneed of explanation. Both result in a variant of Whiteheads fallacy of misplaced concreteness:

assuming an embodied locus for an irreducibly relational property. To deny the disembodiment

aspect of intentional phenomena is as futile as denying their embodiment. What demandsexplanation is precisely how intentional phenomena come to exhibit this ontologicallyambiguous character, and what this entails in physical terms. We believe that a misunderstanding

of the causal role of absence is behind this problem and that it is possible to show how the

intentional character of both mental and living phenomena is necessarily constituted with respect

to something not present. In other words, contrary to the embodiment approach, we argue thatintentionality is vested in what is specifically disembodied and selectively absent.

Probably the earliest and yet still most compelling characterization of an absence-based physical

relationship was articulated in Aristotles notion of final cause. Interpreted literally, a final causecan be caricatured as a future state bringing about an antecedent state that ultimately leads to the

production of this future state. So on the surface it appears to describe how somethingnonexistent brings itself into existence. But although the experience of acting in order to achieve

a specific future goal is ubiquitous in human life, this literal sense of the future determining thepast is of course incoherent.

The difficulty with a literal understanding of final causality was probably most baldly stated by

Baruch Spinoza, at least when applied to natural processes. He concludes:


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This doctrine concerning the end turns Nature entirely upside down. For what is really a

cause, it considers an effect, and conversely. What is by nature prior, it makes posterior.(Ethics. Part I. Appendix; p. 370)

Few would argue that teleological processes literally involve a future state of things influencing

prior causal processes. Rather, what is generally understood is that there exist antecedentrepresentations of potential future states or goals that are both physically present and play some

role in regulating activities to bring these possible states into existence. Indeed, it is doubtful that

Aristotle ever intended a literal interpretation of his term final cause, and probably had

something similar to this representational conception in mind. This view is suggested by hisaccount of the embryogenesis of organisms. He postulates that each organism possesses an end-

directed active principle, an entelechy,that is responsible for its development toward a mature

target state. This disposition to reach a specific mature end state of developmenta final cause,

for the sake of which developmental processes occuris not located in the future state but isantecedent and intrinsic to the immature organism. For this to be possible the entelechy must

include both something amounting to a representation of this end-to-be-achieved and a means to

achieve it, even if it is never achieved. For Aristotle this is the intrinsic and defining feature of anorganism, and it remained the basis for vitalistic theories of life for 25 centuries. Although anabstract vitalistic agency has been abandoned for empirical analyses of biochemical mechanisms,

the general logic of this account is in one sense still consistent with modern biology. It is

generally accepted that in some form DNA carries a representation of critical information

necessary to guide organism development to a target state.

This representational interpretation of the logic of Aristotles notion of final causality has long

been applied to the problem of mental causality. For example, Aquinas argues in his SummaTheologia that, an end has the character of something ultimate Therefore an end does not

have the character of a cause, but he then goes on to salvage the teleological conception of

human action by shifting the determinative role to the thought process. An end, even if it comeslast in execution, still comes first in the agents thoughts (inintentione agentis). And in this wayit has the character of a cause.

This shift of the locus of causal efficacy from a currently nonexistent end state to an antecedent

representation of this possible terminus, escapes the apparent incoherence of a future thatdetermines the events that lead to it. It does so by positing a surrogate antecedent state in which

this absent state of affairs is in some way implicit and causally potent. This is consistent with our

folk understanding of teleological causation, in which a desired end is first represented in

thought and then can be used to organize the execution of actions to achieve that end and todetermine if it has been achieved. Unfortunately this merely replaces one mystery with another.

Being about something is being in a definite, potentially efficacious, relation to something notimmediately present. Although this is not the future causing the past, there still appears to be a

dependency relationship between something present (the thought or representing sign) andsomething not present (the content or reference), in which the absent aspect supplies the causally

significant role.


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2. Embodiment and absence

The effort to understand the human mind as arising from the material natural world on the one

hand, and yet as standing apart from it to intentionally comprehend it on the other, has been

severely hindered by a set of methodological constraints that philosophers with a scientific bent

have imposed upon themselves. These constraints were intended to avoid confusions that haverepeatedly arisen in the history in Western philosophy. Unfortunately, they also introduced tacit

assumptions about the nature of embodiment that ultimately make a resolution of the epistemic

cut severing Descartes cogito from the mechanical world appear impossible.

Following the logic of Descartes methodic doubt, the experience of subjective consciousness

was given primacy over the ontology of the material world, which appeared to require an act of

faith to be guaranteed. This quest for epistemological certainty gave rise to a progression of

philosophical perspectives through Berkeley, Hume and Kant in which the subjective perspectivewas taken as given and the properties of the material world were understood in relation to this.

But the achievements of the natural sciences in the 19 th Century were fueled by the adoption of a

countervailing methodological assumption: that scientific explanation requires replacement ofteleological accounts with mechanical accounts. This change in intellectual climate wasexemplified by the development of natural selection theory and thermodynamics at mid century,

which offered rich accounts of biological and cosmic developmental processes that could be

understood in purely mechanistic terms. But the rejection of the adequacy of teleological

explanation was not easily incorporated into psychology. And although the mid 20th century sawan extended flirtation with a non-teleological account of psychological phenomena in the form of

behaviorism, the distinctiveness of mental phenomena has remained the central issue preventing

assimilation of cognition to the rest of the natural sciences.

In 1874, amidst the optimism surrounding the successes of the empirical sciences, the

philosopher Franz Brentano outlined a proposal for an empirically-based psychology whichwould have as its subject the study of those features that uniquely characterize mentalphenomena, as compared to physical phenomena. In his effort to identify a distinguishing object

of study for the new science he concluded that the referential character of mental states (i.e. their

aboutness) was their most fundamental and distinctive property. He called this property

intentionality, reinstating a technical term from the lexicon of the scholastic psychology of the13th century. But he explicitly recognized the problematic nature of what he called the

intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not

wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not tobe understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity ... We can therefore

define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain anobject intentionally within themselves. (Brentano,1874, pp.88-9)

Although this concern for the ontological ambiguity of psychological phenomena in part reflects

the particular 19th century epistemological frame that Brentano was writing within, his felicitous

choice of this unusual descriptive phraseintentional inexistenceis worth closer scrutiny.


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It is clear from this text, and his later explanations of it, that Brentano acknowledged an intrinsic

ambiguity in this notion. He knew that, in the hands of the Aristotelian mediaeval scholastics, theexistence of something intentionaliter indicated an intermediate mode of being between the real

object in the external world and nonexistence. Some kind of internal image or phantasm was

considered to be the medium that made an epistemology of mediate realism possible. However,

Brentanos concern to specify a trait that is always and only found in thinking, judging, anddesiring led him to leave the existence of an object in the external world a little unclear as well.

After all, we are able to think about things that do not exist. And yet there is always an immanent

object involved in each act of thinking, etc., whether there is an externally existent object or not.

The ambiguous ontological status of the intentional object has continued to exercise thinkers for

the century that followed. The first to take up the notion was Brentanos student, Edmund

Husserl. Husserl, like Brentano, was intent on developing a philosophical psychology that did

not rest on unexamined assumptions, and so when he came to the conclusion that the ambiguityin the aboutness relation could not be resolved he proposed a methodological solution: any

judgment concerning the existence or nonexistence of an external object could be bracketed from

consideration in order to focus on the phenomena of mind as the primary data. But Husserlsmethodological epoche had a similar effect to Descartes methodic doubt. It allowed him toanalyze the properties of mental phenomena as though they were internally self-sufficient,

irrespective of material or biological considerations.

In an era when the methods of the natural sciences were generating ever expanding insights intothe nature of material processes, a methodological cut separating the study of mental experience

from the study of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially neuroscience, left those

philosophers concerned with mental experience in an awkward position. Much empirical datafrom the study of bodies, brains, and behaviors would be excluded from consideration. For this

reason, later students in the phenomenological tradition, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued for

expanding Husserls method to include a phenomenology of the body. Merleau-Ponty arguedthat the body is the permanent condition of experience; neither a mental construction nor aCartesian machine. All experience, he argued, is both of the bodys interaction with the world

and with respect to the body as an object of experience. In effect, the assumption of a dual status

of body-as-subject and body-as-object mitigated the need to conceive of an object of thought as

the unchanging object of the natural sciences,and in this way set aside the ontological problemof intentionality because both the thought and its object could be conceived as part of a

primordial unity in this embodiment. In this way, the object of thought becomes an intrinsically

present relationship. But while this provides a non-dualist psychological theory of experience, it

offers little in the way of a bridge from which the physical sciences might build towards a theoryof mental processes. Ultimately, however, Merleau-Pontys commitment to the ontological

primacy of appearances only allows the intentional dilemma to be solved by fiat (e.g. see Dillon,1988, p. 143). The physics of the world beyond the perceiving body is not considered in the

constitution of intentional relationships.

In the late 20th century, this direction of Merleau-Pontys work was picked up by the Chilean

cognitive scientist, Francisco Varela. The concept of embodiment presented by Varela and his

co-authors in The Embodied Mind takes this phenomenalization of the material world to itslogical extreme. Beginning with the ontological primacy of phenomenal experience, reinforced


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by a spiritual practice within the tradition of Madhyamika Buddhism, Varela proposed that, in

cognition, we do not discover a world, but rather enact a world (Varela et al., 1991, p. 173).This expansion of phenomenological analysis to include the world as a construction makes the

Husserlian epoche irrelevant along with the notion of intentionality, because a fundamental

distinction between mental and non-mental phenomena is denied by definition.

So, by a curious convergence from opposite perspectives, both the more extreme proponents of

embodied phenomenology and their most strident antagonists, the more strident proponents of a

computational theory of mind, have each found a way to methodologically deny the existence of

the problematic features of intentional states. But this has not exactly produced agreement.Instead, it might even be described as a reincarnation of the subjective idealism / eliminative

materialism dichotomy, with critiques from each claiming that the other view is incoherent. Even

the less strident embodiment approaches to phenomenology, such as that of the early Merleau-

Ponty, and many recent writers (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Gallagher, 2003; andcontributions to Petitot et al., 1999) argue that the classic understanding of intentional

relationships reflects an error of dualistic thinking, and that recognizing that We cannot think

just anything - only what our embodied brains permit" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), dissolves theapparent paradox by making both subject and object just different aspects of embodiment. Thisultimately privileges phenomenal appearances and leads to doubt about the nature of the external

world. Thus in a 2001 address to the AAAS Lakoff suggests that: "Mathematics may or may not

be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell."

The authors of this paper begin with the assumption that subjective phenomena cannot serve as

primary unanalyzed units of scientific explanation. Although we do not claim that mental

phenomena are reducible to physical-chemical processes in which they are embodied, weconsider these sorts of material processes more basic and intentional/teleological phenomena as

emergent from these more elementary phenomena. Consequently, we accept Brentanos rough

original insight, including the awkward ambiguity it seems to leave us with. However, wedisagree with Brentanos view that intentionality is a property only found in mental processes. Inthis respect, our approach has an affinity with the embodiment approach. Though we believe that

it is mere metaphoric extension to describe body relationships in phenomenological terms, we

nevertheless argue that the basic properties of intentionality can be identified in many basic

biological phenomena, irrespective of their involvement in perception or cognition. In generalterms, the commonality between mental and living processes is that the functionally relevant

features of both adaptations and thoughts are constituted by something other than the intrinsic

properties of their embodiment. If we can understand how these absences can come to be

significant causal influences in more mundane and simple phenomena, such as those constitutingliving organisms, we will have a better chance of recognizing their role in the complexity of

thought.

3. Omissions, expectations, and the logic of constitutive absence

To explain how it is that something not present can nonetheless be a significant element inorganizing the production of physical processes we first need to distinguish between non-


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existence and absence. Simple non-existence, pure nullityif such a thing can even be

imaginedhas neither extension nor substance, but more commonly, our conception of notexisting is in terms of absence, in contrast to a presence; something missing as opposed to mere

nothingness. Unlike nothingness, absence has extension, because it is bounded in space by

something else that is present, and in time with regard to when it went missing. Not only does an

absence have a specific locus in space and time, it is often implicitly understood with respect tosomething quite specific that is missing. So there may even be specific physical properties

involved, that happen to be missing, such as the dirt missing from clothes after theyve been

washed. Like the hole at the wheel's hub or the space within a container, an absence can have

definite physical consequences. As we will demonstrate in a systematic examination of absenceas compared to presence in everyday experiences and throughout living systems, this particular

sense of absence is the sort of nothing we need in order to re-link the mental to its physical

foundation.

One way to begin to see how absence can be significant is to consider cases where absence itself

is informative, as in cases of omission. To take just one example: after April 15th if one has not

prepared and submitted a US tax return, it becomes a missing tax return. In a legal context whereproducing a tax return is required, its nonexistence will set in motion events involving IRSemployees coercing the delinquent taxpayer to comply, by writing threatening letters, and

possibly contacting banks and credit agencies who will interfere with the taxpayers assets. So-

called sins-of-omission can also have significant social consequences. Consider the effect of the

thank you note not written or the RSVP that gets ignored. Omissions in social contexts oftenprompt deliberations about whether the absence reflects the presence of malice or merely a lack

of manners. And we are all too familiar with omissions of preparation or attentiveness that can

be the indirect cause of a disaster. Intuitively we are comfortable attributing behaviors to notthinking, not noticing, not doing; the stitch left unstitched that could have saved nine, and so

on. The absence of foresight due to lack of appropriate knowledge or reasoning poweror just

ignorancecan be blamed for allowing mistakes to occur that could otherwise have beenavoided. In these human contexts, then, we often treat presence and absence as though they canhave equal potential efficacy.

These familiar examples are, of course, special cases that invert the general rule about

representationsomething present that is taken to be about something not presentand yet theyexemplify a critical point about intentionality: aboutness need not be based on any intrinsic

properties of embodiment. Indeed, it suggests that embodiment is largely irrelevant! Though not

dispensable, and not in every sense. Omissions are only meaningful in the context of specific

expectations, processes that will be initiated if certain conditions are not met, or tendencies nolonger impeded if some action is not undertaken to oppose them. Where there is a habit of

expectation, something that needs to be actively opposed or avoided, or a convention governingor requiring certain actions, failure to act appropriatelywhether to conform or to resistwill

have definite consequences.

As familiar as these uses of absence may be in folk psychology, they nevertheless assume mental

agency and entail complex multi-level biological, psychological, and social dynamics that could

easily muddle an understanding of how absence can ultimately acquire causal power in thesecases. We therefore need to take a step back from the familiar and start our analysis of how this


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comes about by exploring some more basic instances of how absence can have causal efficacy.

For example, we also invoke causal interpretations of absence in purely mechanical cases, where

it serves as the basis offunction. The function of a machine is actually something less than the

sum of all its parts and the physical laws that govern their interactions. It depends on only certain

of the possible states and behaviors of the mechanism being allowed, and all others beingprevented. Though from a teleological perspective we think of this in terms of design purposes

for the device, it is what the device ispreventedfrom doing that is physically critical to

guaranteeing its function. This figure/ground reversal of logic was eloquently argued by Michael

Polanyi in an influential paper on Lifes irreducible structure(1968). He described theseconstraints on the range of possible component interactions as the boundary conditions of the

system (a term common to dynamical analyses, especially as applied to thermodynamic

systems). In a very concrete sense, then, the function of a machine is defined with respect to

what it is kept from doing. When these constraints break down and other states or behaviorsbecome possible the functionality becomes degraded, as when the lack of sufficient oil in an

automobile engine causes its friction to impede movement of parts with respect to each other.

Though the laws of physics and chemistry have not changed and nothing new has beenintroduced if the engine seizes up as a result, something not-quite-physical has been lost, thefunction of the mechanism.

The function is embodied by the limited operations of the machine, but its physical constitution

is not embodied in something in addition to the material of its construction, the energy of itsanimation, or the physical laws that govern it. When a machine is broken, all these remain as

before, except the function. Of course machines are designed by people, who design and

interpret these functional relationships, and impose the boundary conditions that support theseends. So we implicitly appeal to minds and representations in these cases.

Function is also the essence of a biological adaptation. It is implicit in the relationship betweenproperties of visible light and the precise constraints on the anatomical relations between theparts of the vertebrate eye, or between the viscosity of water and streamlining of fish, shark, and

dolphin bodies. A biological adaptation is effectively the complement to some property or

regularity present in the environment of the organism, and can be said to function to enable the

organism to take advantage of or protect itself from these extrinsic influences. From ancienttimes, this parallel suggested that organisms were designed, like machines, by some extrinsic

divine designer. But, except for the rhetoric of fringe religiously motivated critics, we have come

to understand another way that such self-perpetuating boundary conditions can come into

existence: evolution. This suggests that a comparison of biological adaptations to mentalrepresentations may also provide some useful insights.

As the above examples show, the more general property of having an existence partially defined

with respect to something physically absent is a description that could be applied to manyphenomena. Mental intentionality thus appears to be a special case of a more general property. It

is a property that applies to expected social actions, biological adaptations, and the operation of

machines, as well as to states of mind. It is the property of existing with respect to something

else. So, to understand this peculiar property of intentional phenomena, it may be useful to firstexplore this more generic property, with respect to which mental intentionality is a particular


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species. For this purpose we propose a more generic concept that can be applied to bio-molecules

as easily as to semiotic activities: constitutive absence.This can be defined asthe property of 1)existing (or not existing) by virtue of attributes only exhibited by something else, and 2) being

organized with respect to these extrinsic attributes. This characterizes mental contents, but it can

also describe a significantly wider class of systems and processes. In exploring the

commonalities between the various phenomena exhibiting constitutive absence, we hope to gaina more precise understanding of intentionality in its more specific sense.

In the remainder of this essay we provide a step-by-step account of how something can come to

be constituted by virtue of an absence and as a result take on the capacity of being aboutsomething else. To do this we will approach this challenge by critically reanalyzing the technical

concept of information and its relationship to related physical processes. By exploring its

relationship to thermodynamic processes and then to natural selection processes we will develop

a three-level theory of information that can at least minimally account for how an aboutnessrelationship can originate.

Our aim is not to support theories of disembodied representation nor is it to show howintentionality can be analytically eliminated. It is rather to show how the functional andinformational features associated with life and mind can come to exhibit an absence-based mode

of being.

4. Two entropies

The one thing common to all the examples where something absent is causally significant is thepresence of a habit or regularity with respect to which something missing can stand out. This is

an important hint about how an absence can come to be significant and even causally efficacious.

In this regard we use the term habit in its most general sense: not merely referring to a learned

pattern of action, but to any tendency to behave redundantly or exhibit some regularity orsymmetry. This could be exhibited by a machine, or even some naturally occurring pattern or

tendency, as well as by an organisms behavior, or people following a social convention. It is

with respect to some habit as the ground of regularity that absence of some regular feature can

become the figure with respect to a background, and thus take on a kind of indirect efficacy.

Thinking in these terms requires a figure/background shift from our normal way of

conceptualizing cause and effect, because (as in the case of machines described above) we tend

normally to ascribe causal power only to what is present. This is relevant even beyond thecontext of functional analysis. On the one hand, the habits of behavior involving material

substrates (human bodily actions in the case of conventions of conduct or expectations of others)

are what supply the pushes and pulls that change things in these cases. On the other hand, wherehabits and tendencies are linked, a deviation in one can have extensive ripple effects,

producing much more than that one irregularity. This is because dynamical regularities are

maintained by the stability of the boundary conditions, and these can themselves be understood

as higher-order (contextual) habits. In the most general sense, all regularities are the result ofconstraints; limits of scale and of interaction or relational probabilities. So while the capacity to


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induce physical change depends on things present and their intrinsic properties, the form of the

change depends on higher-order regularities and boundary conditions extrinsic to theseproperties.

This figure/background shift is the epitome of the shift from physical analysis to information

analysis. So to make sense of how intentional phenomena (characterized by aboutnessrelationships) can be both causally present and yet materially absent, and to explain how an

embodied sign vehicle could be constituted by extrinsic relationships, rather than intrinsic

properties, we must come to understand intentionality in terms of habits and constraints.

Let's begin with one of nature's most basic habits: the spontaneous tendency for entropy to

increase. Entropy is often defined as the measure of disorder in a system, so this property is also

described as the tendency for disorder to increase spontaneously. This definition can be a bit

misleading, however, since we often consider order as something that requires an observer todefine. Perhaps a more accurate (and more technical) definition, is that the entropy of a

collection of elements is a measure of how uncorrelated they are from one another in some

measure. For example, consider the familiar case of billiard balls rolling around on a billiardtable shortly after they have been set in motion by the impact of a fast moving cue ball during abreak. Each second after the initial collision the balls become progressively more divergent from

one another in the velocities and directions of their movement, until friction brings all motion of

the balls to a stop.1 What begins as a single ball colliding with another and causing both to careen

off in different directions to hit still other balls and set them in motion, quickly develops to astate of motion in as many directions and with as many velocities as there are balls. Entropy of

the system has spontaneously increased. The tendency for moving-colliding elements to become

increasingly uncorrelated in their movements over time was independently described by RudolphClausius and James Clerk Maxwell in the 1850s.

This is a rough characterization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a necessaryconsequence of the extreme asymmetry of the statistics of distributions: so there are vastly morehigher entropy states of a given system than there are lower entropy states. It is also unlike

determinate laws of physics (like those of Newton) because the actual course of things could in

principle proceed otherwise (e.g. billiard balls poured randomly onto a table could spontaneously

happen to all collide in just such a pattern that they ended up arranged into a neat triangle), it isjust astronomically improbable that they will.2 All other things being equal (and neglecting the

downward distributing effects of friction), a state near maximum entropy will transition to

1 Cessation of movement of the balls due to friction transforms this to an even higher entropystate as the uncorrelated interactions of rolling and colliding get transformed into the vastly more

numerous uncorrelated movements and vibrations of atoms comprising the balls, the table, and

the surrounding air.2 This is not to claim that the triangular arrangement after the balls are racked and ready for anew game is any more improbable than any other singular highly specific arrangement, but at

higher levels of description this symmetry quickly breaks down. For example, there are far more

arrangements where the balls are more evenly distributed around the table than clustered

together, and more clusters where the balls are just close versus all touching, and so on, fordifferent levels of global descriptions.


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another state near maximum entropy.

The term entropy was coined by Clausius in 1857 (to become the central concept in his 1865

ground-breaking analysis of the relationship of mechanics to thermodynamics) to describe the

dissipative loss of the capacity to do work in a mechanical interaction, even though energy is

conserved. These ideas were later synthesized by Ludwig Boltzmann, among others, to produceour modern understanding of thermodynamic processes. Boltzmann was also influential in

recognizing that the concept of thermodynamic entropy could be generalized in terms of order

and disorder. We will therefore refer to this conception of thermodynamic entropy asBoltzmann

entropy.

This reliably asymmetric habit of nature provides the most basic background against which

absence can produce significance. The reason is simple: When something is highly reliably

present its absence typically means that there has been some external interference to push it awayfrom this most probable state. So when something that normally occurs suddenly fails to occur, it

typically means that something external is influencing it. In this way the relentless reliability of

the second law of thermodynamics provides the background for noticing when somethinginterferes with the spontaneous pattern of events. If events dont proceed according to thisasymmetrical trend (and e.g. entropy decreases) it can be reliably inferred that something

external has done work to divert it.3

There is another use of the term entropy that has become widely applied to the assessment ofinformation, for similar reasons. In 1949 the mathematician Claude Shannon used the concept to

measure the amount of information that could be carried on a given communication channel. The

entropy of a communication medium, according to Shannon, is the probability that any givensignal (state of the channel) will be sent, with respect to all other possible signals that could be

sent (and their probabilities of being sent). We will call this conception of entropy Shannon

entropy to distinguish it from Boltzmann entropy.

Shannons analysis takes into account both how many states of a medium are available and the

relative probabilities that each will be produced. For example, in a communication medium in

which all possible signals are equiprobable any received signal can convey the same amount of

information because each would remove the same degree of uncertainty (about which possiblesignal will be produced). The measure of the uncertainty reduced by a received signal is

Shannons measure of the amount of information a given signal actually conveys. In other words,

the measure of information conveyed involves comparison of a received signal with respect to

possible signals that could have been sent. To put this in slightly more technical terms, thedegree to which the potential Shannon entropy was reduced in the process, is the basis for

measuring how much information could have been transferred.

Information is not then intrinsic to the signal itself, but is rather a function of its relationship tosomething absent. Without reference to this absent background, information cannot be assessed.

3 Indeed, this is what makes self-organizing dynamics so intriguing and makes living dynamics

often appear planned and executed by an external or invisible agency (see Deacon and Sherman,this volume).


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It is always, necessarily, a relationship to what is not present.

There is no analogous equivalent to the 2nd law of thermodynamics when it comes to the entropy

of information. The arrangement of units in a message doesn't necessarily "tend" to change

toward equiprobability. And yet there is something like increasing entropy that becomes relevant

when the effects of real thermodynamics are factored in, as in the case of real messagesconveyed by transmission devices (such as a radio transmission or a computer network). In the

real world of signal transmission, no medium is free from the effects of physical irregularities

and functional degradation. This unreliability of the medium results from the physical effects of

the 2nd law of thermodynamics. So these two kinds of entropy are both relevant to the concept ofinformation. The Shannon entropy of a signal is the probability of a given signal being present

and the Boltzmann entropy of the signal is the probability that a given signal will be corrupted.

A transmission affected by physical perturbations that make it less than perfectly reliable willhave an increased entropy. And this will also increase the Shannon entropy of the received

signal. The reduction of the initial entropy that would have been the basis for the information

being conveyed is thus partially undermined by the introduction of this new source of entropy.This is a complicated way of saying that physical unreliability of the medium makes informationless reliable as well. But now we have two contributors to the Shannon entropy of a signal, one

associated with the probability of a given signal being sent and the other associated with the

unreliability of the medium. This correlation is a hint that the physical and informational uses of

the concept of entropy are not merely analogical uses of the same term. But the connection issubtle, and its relationship to the way that a signal conveys its information content is even

more subtle.

At this point, we can identify three general rules about the nature of information and its

relationship to the material-energetic processes on which it is dependent:

1) Information potential: Aboutness is dependent on the physical features of a signalmedium and so (as the phenomenological embodiment argument suggests) the capacity

of that medium to assume different states (its maximum possible Shannon entropy)

determines the maximum amountof information it can convey.

2) Physical basis of information: The Shannon entropy of a signal is a consequence of itsmaximum possible Boltzmann entropy, measured in terms of its independent physical

variables (only a small fraction is typically available for signal). But the thermodynamics

affecting the transfer of a signal will conversely reintroduce new entropy where it has

been previously reduced.3) Information as absence: Information is necessarily determined with respect to a reduction

below the potential Shannon entropy of the medium. It can only be defined andquantified with respect to this absent possibility.

5. Information and aboutness

Many writers, including Warren Weaver (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) who wrote a commentary


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article that appeared with Shannon's original paper, have commented that using the term

information to describe the measure of unpredictability reduced by a given signal is an atypicaluse of the term. Shannons notion of information is agnostic with respect to the aboutness of a

signal. This has led to considerable confusion outside of the technical literature because, as we

have seen, this is not concordant with the standard colloquial use of the term information. As

Collier (2003) comments: "The great tragedy of formal information theory is that its veryexpressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been

designed to describe." Because he was interested in measuring information for engineering

purposes, Shannon concentrated exclusively on the properties of signals, and ignored what we

normally take to be information, i.e. what something tells us about something else that is notpresent in the signal itself. This was not merely an arbitrary simplification, however, because the

same sign or signal can be given any number of different interpretations. In fact, there is no limit.

Dirt on a boot can be information about anything from personal hygiene to evidence about what

racetrack north of London Sherlock Holmes' client recently frequented. In order to provide afinite measure of information Shannon had no choice but to stop the analysis prior to including

aboutness. But although there is nothing intrinsic to the sign or signal that specifies reference, its

potential aboutness is constrained by how much the entropy is reduced and specifically by howthis reduction was effected.

This is where the relation between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy turns out to be more than

merely analogical. In both cases a reduction of entropy will not tend to happen spontaneously.

When it does, it is information.

Returning to Boltzmann entropy, if within the boundaries of a physical system such as a chamber

filled with a gas, a reduction of entropy is observed, one can be pretty certain that something notin that chamber is causing this reduction of entropy. This non-spontaneous change is evidence of

extrinsic perturbation. Analogously, in the case of Shannon entropy, no information is provided

by a signal displaying the full entropy of the channel with each transmission maximallyunpredictable. But reduction of this entropy indicates that outside constraints have been imposed.This is obvious in the case of a person selecting the transmission, but it is also the case in more

subtle conditions. Consider, for example, a random hiss of radio signals received by a radio

antenna pointed toward the heavens. The normally distributed signal represents high

informational entropy, the expected tendency. If this tendency were altered away from thisequilibrium, one could assume that there was some outside factor altering the signal. The change

could be due to an astronomical object, or if neither random nor regular it might even suggest an

extraterrestrial intelligence. In either case, if we should encounter such a signal it would point us

toward the likelihood the information was about something, something not present in the systemitself but rather something outside the system altering and thereby imposing non-spontaneous

constraint on the otherwise random signal. So the reduction in signal entropy indicates that someoutside influence has done work to change it. In simple terms, the fact of this deviation is the

basis for something to be about something else, the form of this deviation is the basis forchoosing which extrinsic influence of the infinity of possible factors was crucial. This then

involves something absent from whatever conveys the informationthe reduced Shannon

entropyto provide evidence of another absent factorwhatever performed the work on the

signal to effect this reduction.


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To specify what information is about, then, requires both an assessment of its Shannonian

capacity and the organizing constraints imposed by its physical properties. Information is madeavailable 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. So not only is

the Shannon entropy of an information bearing process important to its capacity, its physical

dynamics with respect to the physical context in which it is embedded is important to thedetermination of what it can be about. Reference is provided to the extent that an external

perturbation of its physical states alters it from this resting entropy by differently constraining

its properties, thus reducing this entropy. The extent to which this occurs is a measure of it

Shannon entropy reduction and thus the quantity of information that can be conveyed. Thespecific form of the interaction and of the constraints this imposes provide the grounds of

aboutness. If this influence is persistent in a continuously dynamical system it results in an

increase in predictability, which means that the signal has become to some extent more regular,

or redundant. In purely physical terms this can be described as a coupling between two systemsstates or dynamics so that the behavior of one will partially re-embody some aspect of the

regularity or form of the other. Through this transfer of form (as constraint), then, a signal can be

seen as mediating the transfer of constraints from one system to another.

A first hint of the relationship between information as form and as a sign ofsomething is

exemplified by the role that pattern plays in each of these analyses. In Shannons terms pattern is

redundancy. From the sender's point of view, any redundancy (defined as predictability) of the

signal has the effect of reducing the amount of information that can be sent. In other words,redundancy introduces a constraint on channel capacity. Less information can get transmitted if

some transmissions are predictable from previous ones. From the receiver's point of view,

however, there must be some redundancy with what is already known for information to even beassessed. In other words, the context of the communication must already be redundantly

structured. Both sender and receiver must share the set of options that constitute information.

Indeed this is a necessary condition for the relationship between sender and receiver.

Shannon realized that the introduction of redundancy is also necessary to compensate for any

unreliability of the medium. If the reliability of the signal is questionable this introduces an

additional source of unpredictability that does not contribute to information; described as noise.

Just as redundancy reduces the unpredictability of signals, it can also reduce the unreliability ofthe channel, by virtue of redundancy in the message transmitted. In the simplest case, this is

accomplished by resending the signal. Because noise is by definition not constrained by the same

factors as is the selection of the signal, each insertion of a noise-derived signal error will be

uncorrelated with any other, but independent transmission of multiple signals will be correlatedby definition. In this way, noisy components of a signal or received message can be detected and

replaced. But error-reducing redundancy can be introduced by means other than by signalretransmission. In a language like English, only a fraction of possible letter combinations are

utilized and the probabilities of different letters can also be very different. More criticallygrammar and syntax limit appropriate and inappropriate signal even further, and finally the

distinction between sense and nonsense limits what words and phrases are likely to occur in the

same context. This internal redundancy of written language makes typos relatively easy to

identify and correct.


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So, whereas in Shannons analysis redundancy decreases information capacity, it is also what

makes it possible to distinguish information from noise. This inversion offers an important hintconcerning the basis of the referential function of information. A signal is redundant to the extent

that the process that selected or generated it exhibits some predictable features. This consistency

of influence is reflected in the redundancy or pattern of the signal. In general, we are interested

in signaling systems in which the redundancy of the signal interacts in some way with theredundancy of some other process directly or indirectly affecting the selection of signal elements.

Three relevant conclusions can be drawn from this analysis with respect to the problem of

intentionality (aboutness, reference) and its embodiment :

4) Ground of reference: What a signal can be aboutis dependent on the physical interactionof a signal medium with some relevant features of its physical context and the extent to

which this changes the Shannon entropy of the received signal.5) Reference = open system: This change in Shannon entropy is formally analogous to a

physical system being shifted away from equilibrium. In both cases it is evidence of work

imposed from an external locus. This relationship is the physical basis of aboutness.6) Constraint and absence: Both the reference conveyed (5) and the ground of the reference(4) of a signal are functions of something not present, which is reflected in reduced

Shannon and Boltzmann entropy. What is notpresent is thus the effect of constraint, and

constraint is a boundary condition; something imposed from outside the system under

consideration. Aboutness is conveyed by the transfer of constraints.

What we can conclude, thus far, is that the intentional object that any sign or signal provides is

not an intrinsic feature of the signal or its medium. This is because it is a function of imposedconstraints. The aboutness is carried by some formal contributor to these constraints, that limited

which signal features were been made available and which not. In other words, the constraints in

question are boundary conditions on signal production/transmission, not properties intrinsic tothe medium itself. In this regard, the embodiment is in some sense the complement to theaboutness.

6. From Shannon plus Boltzmann to Darwin

What is so far missing from this analysis is an account of the interpretation process itself,

without which the relationship of aboutness remains unspecified, and ultimately undefined.

Expanding the concept of information to fully account for aboutness requires not onlyrecognizing the way a signal medium is physically embedded in a context that can alter its

entropyproducing the Shannon-Boltzmann understanding of information aboutness,

abovebut also understanding how one signal makes a difference for some other signalproduction process with respect to that same context. In other words, what a signal is specifically

about is ultimately determined by its pragmatic consequences, not by anything intrinsic to the

signal or even to the direct physical relation it has to the context of its production.


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For engineering purposes Shannons analysis could not extend further than an assessment of the

information carrying capacity of a signal medium. Specifically, it could not include considerationof the aboutness relationship derived from its interactions with an extrinsic context. It could not,

because to do so would introduce an infinite term into the quantification; an undecidable factor.

What is undecidable is where to stop with the analysis of the Boltzmannian interactions that

contribute the constraints that convey the aboutness. The reason is simple: there are innumerablepoints along a prior causal history culminating in the signal in question that could be construed to

be the relevant feature represented. Which of these is the signal about? Well, of course it

depends; and not on any feature intrinsic to the signal.

As everyday experience makes clear, what is significant and what is not depends on the context

of interpretation, the capacity to follow the trace to the relevant source of constraint, and the

usefulness of doing so. So in different contexts and for different interpreters the same sign or

signal may be taken to be about very different things. What we will try to show is that theselection of a specific ground of aboutness for a given signalwhich constitutes the process of

interpretationis a function of the way this signal constrains and influences subsequent signal

production/transmission, and how the embodiedconsequences of this process interact with theconditions affecting both amidst the larger system of information processes they are a part of.

To gain a sense of the openness of the interpretive possibilities, consider the problem faced by a

detective at a crime scene. There are many physical traces left by the interactions involved in the

critical event: doors may have been opened, furniture displaced, vases knocked over, muddyfootprints left on a rug, fingerprints on the doorknob, filaments of clothing, hair and skin cells

left behind during a struggle, etc. In this example, there is one moment in time, one complex

event defined by its consequences, that will determine how each of these physical traces will betreated in terms of the information they could possibly convey. But this is not always the case.

The causal history reflected in the physical trace taken as a sign need not be relevant to any

single event, and which of the events in this history might be determined to be of pragmaticrelevance can be different for different interpretive purposes and the interpretive tools that areavailable. This yields another stricture on the information interpretation process:

7) Scope of reference: The causal history contributing to the constraints imposed on a givenmedium limits, but does not specify, what its information can be about. Which point inthis causal chain is the relevant object of reference is not determined; only linkage to this

causal history is provided by the immediate signal-context interaction.

In the late 19th century world of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes there were far fewermeans available to interpret such physical traces. Even so, to the extent that Holmes had a

detailed understanding of the physical processes involved in producing each trace he could usethis information to extrapolate backwards many steps from effect to cause. This capacity is

greatly augmented by modern scientific instruments that, for example, can determine thechemical constitution of traces of mud, the manufacturer of the fibers of a sweater, the DNA

sequence information in a strand of hair, and so on. With this expansion of interpretive means

there has been an increase in the amount of information that can be extracted from the same

traces. These traces contain no more physical differences than they would have in the late 19 th

century, it is simply that more of these have become interpretable, and to a greater depth. This


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enhancement of interpretive capacity can be described as increasing the Shannon entropy of the

subsequent signal generation processes.

Although from an engineers perspective every possible independent physical state of a system

must be figured into the assessment of its potential Shannon entropy, this is an idealization. What

matters are the distinguishable states. The distinguishable states are determined with respect toan interpretive process that itself must also be understood as a signal production process with its

own potential Shannon entropy. In other words, one information source can only be interpreted

with respect to another information production process. The maximum information of the

interpreted signal is consequently the lesser of the two Shannon entropies, since what can becalled the usable entropy of interpretation is no greater than the entropy of the signal it interprets.

If the receiving/interpreting system is physically simpler and less able to assume alternative

states than the signal system, or the relative probabilities of its states are more uneven (i.e.

constrained), or the coupling between the two is insensitive to certain causal interactions, thenthe interpretable information will be less than the potential information of the source. This, for

example, happens with the translation of DNA sequence information into protein structure

information, since there are 64 possible nucleotide triplets (codons) to code for 20 amino acids.This limitation suggests two interesting analogies to the thermodynamic constraints affectingwork:

8) Transfer constraint: The potential Shannon entropy of a chain of systems (e.g. differentmedia) through which information is transferred can be no greater than the system withthe lowest entropy value. Each coupling of system-to-system will also tend to introduce

an entropy reduction.

9) Degradation of reference: Thus, information capacity tends to be lost in transfer frommedium to medium, and with it the uniqueness of the causal history that it can be about.

Since its possible aboutness is negatively embodied in the form of constraints, what a

sign or signal can be about tends to degrade in specificity spontaneously withtransmission or interpretation.

This also means that, irrespective of the amount of information that can be embodied in a

particular substrate, what it can and cannot be about, also depends on the specific details of the

mediums modifiability and its capacity to modify other systems. We create instruments (signalreceivers) whose states are affected by the physical state of some object of study and use the

resulting changes of the instrument to extract information about this object, by virtue of its

special sensitivities to its physical context. The information is thus limited by the instrument and

its material properties, which is why the creation of new kinds of scientific instruments canproduce more information about the same objects. The expansion of reference that this provides

is implicit in the Shannon-Boltzmann logic since it is effectively an arbitrary choice where wedraw the line between what is signal system and what is context. Indeed, when we extrapolate

backwards from physical evidence to some possible cause we are implicitly imagining that thechannel embodies the entire causal chain extending to this point.

While the material limits of communication media are a constant source of loss in human symbol

transmission processes, it is not necessarily a serious limitation in the interpretation of naturalinformation sources, such as in scientific investigations. This is because there is always more


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Boltzmann entropy embodied in the object or event treated as a sign, which may be eventually

interpretable. This interesting open-ended potential in the interpretability of natural signsillustrates a key point about interpretation. Besides requiring the transcription of constraints from

one medium to another, it also requires something more: an independent correspondence

relationship with the physical regularities that imposed the constraints being transcribed. So the

surplus uninterpreted entropy inherently present in any physical signal can only becomeinformation about something to the extent that the interpreting signal production process is

somehow independently constrained with respect to this same source and, as a result of this

correspondence, does not reduce this additional source of entropy. In other words, for

information to be interpreted as being about something and to be distinguished from uncorrelatedsignal variation, the interpretive signal needs to be constrained in such a way that its regularities

both correlate with signal regularities and with some extrinsic contribution to those signal

constraints. So, for example, an organisms genetic information is interpreted via the process

of development to produce phenotypic functions that correspond to extrinsic conditions to theextent that this also correlates with an accurate habit of passing this information to future

generations.

In this regard, the interpretation of what something may be about is related to the process of errorcorrection, in that there is a sort of double redundancy involved. As described in the previous

section, Shannon demonstrated that any amount of unreliability in a communication process can

be overcome by introducing a specified degree of redundancy into the signal, enabling an

interpreter to use the correlations to discern signal from noise due to the non-correlation of noise.Of course, this requires the existence of an interpreting system that responds to what is redundant

and not to what is variable. In Shannons analysis it doesnt matter what the signal is about or if

it is about something, so long as there is redundant transmission and redundancy checking. Butin the case of information about something, this same principle applies at a higher level. The

interpretive process we generally describe as recognition involves a matching of redundant

signals between what is received and what is generated in response. So analogously, aredundancy or correlation between extrinsic signal features and features of an independentlyproduced interpretive signal is the ultimate basis for signal detection. But how do such

correlations come into existence? The answer, in part, lies in recognizing that such redundancies,

or habits, must be achieved by the imposition of extrinsic constraints, or boundary conditions on

the behavior of the interpretive system. So we need to ask how certain of the material anddynamical possibilities of a system can be selectively eliminated so as to leave a residue of habit

that is redundant with something else outside itself that it thereby distinguishes from the

background variation.

10)Recognition: The process of recognition is effectively a higher-order version of the

process of error-correction based on redundancy. It involves redundanciesor morespecifically correlated constraintsshared by the signal medium and the dynamics of a

recipient system, by which the latter is selectively dynamically coupled to some but notall of the possible signal regularities of the former.

This shifts the level of the analysis upwards. We are now not merely considering some regularity

produced in a physical substratethe sign or signalbut the regularities intrinsic to a dynamicalsystem that result from constraints on its modes of possible behavior. In other words, it is a


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problem of relationships between alternative systems rather than alternative signals. In many

ways, however, the logic is parallel. A further higher-order reduction step is necessary toeliminate alternative interpretive media/systems that are uncorrelated with one another and with

the environment. This requires treating information systems themselves as though they are

signals and using some corresponding extrinsic constraining influence to reduce their variety

with respect to one another. This effectively describes the logic of evolution: a form of naturalselection. So an analysis of natural selection processes in terms of their parallels with

information processes may offer clues to the logic of interpretation.

In the standard Darwinian account of evolution by natural selection, many individual organismswith variant forms constitute a pool of options from which a small subset are able to successfully

reproduce to generate the next generation. This subset succeeds because of their comparatively

better fittedness to prevailing environmental conditions, and as a result of genetic inheritance the

new pool of variant individuals that is produced both shares features in common with the parentsand exemplifies features that correlate with the environment. The general form of this process is

analogous in many respects to Shannons model of the transmission of information. We can thus

consider the initial variety of phenotypic forms in the prior generation as the potential entropy ofthe system, and can treat the reduction in transmitted forms that occurs due to differentialreproduction and elimination processes as the "received" signal. Analogous to the imposition of

constraints that produces a signal in information theory, the process of natural selection produces

a reduction of the original entropy exemplified by the initially more variable phenotypes and in

so doing increases the redundancy of forms. In theory, one might even be able to quantify thisentropy reduction in a biological system, and thus the amount of information produced over a

given number of generations in evolution. It is this parallelism that warrants talking of this

process in communication terms, and describing evolution as a process that producesinformation.

11)The measure of evolutionary information: The reduction of phenotypic variety by virtueof differential survival and reproduction of certain organism forms that are better suitedto a given environment is directly analogous to the reduction of signal entropy in

Shannons analysis by which the entropy difference between received and potential

Shannon entropy provides a measure of information transmitted. Thus, in principle

natural selection can be quantified with respect to the amount of information produced.

But we can extend this analysis to make sense of what this newly evolved information is about.

The fact that many lineages with variant phenotypes do not reproduce, and only a few do, points

to the causal efficacy of something outside the pool of variants, analogous to the way thereduction of Shannon entropy points to an outside influence constraining signal variety (e.g. a

sender selecting a message or environment interacting with a scientific instrument). In biologicalevolution the outside source of influence that is responsible for the reduced entropy of

phenotypic variations within the population is the selecting environment. Which organic formsget transmitted (so to speak) through genetics to future generations, is a function of a

correspondence relationships with respect to certain regularities of the environment that are

critical to this reproduction. In other words, organisms whose metabolic needs, predator defense

tricks, or reproductive habits are most concordant with complementary features of theirsurroundings are most likely to reproduce and thus transmit these variants, while others will be


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selected against and reduced in probability in succeeding generations. The individuals in the pool

of variant individuals that do in fact survive to reproduce and pass their forms into the future,succeed because they carry in their structure and behavior information about the environment

that selected them. Their's was a difference that made a difference in the probability of

reproducing that difference. This difference in comparison to the non-persisting variants can for

this reason be said to convey information aboutthis environment with respect to the processescritical to maintaining that information.

In organisms this kind of aboutness is the often tacitly assumed property that warrants talk about

adaptation and function in biology. Adaptations must be described with respect to somethingabout the world outside the organism and with respect to its critical causal dynamics: the

dynamics of maintaining and reproducing its dynamical forms. Functions accomplish some task

with respect to achieving some end or producing some benefit to a recipient (for their ends).

Both are defined with respect to something they are not, something other, and something oftennot yet in existence.

12)Adaptation as a form of aboutness: The boundary conditions on molecular andmechanical processes that constitute biological adaptations complement criticalregularities of environmental conditions. Thus the transmission of these constraints from

generation to generation is the transmission of information aboutthese conditions.

Offspring bodies can be thought of as interpreting this information into functional

consequences; i.e. work done with respect to these environmental attributes. Scientific(mental) interpretation of phenotypic function as being about environmental features

involves additionally representing this correspondence.

One crucial difference between the abstract logic of traditional communication theory so far

elucidated and the evolutionary process is the shifting status of signal versus noise in evolution.

If we liken the transmission of traits from generation to generation via reproduction to signaltransmission over a communication channel, then evolutionary change occurs when noiseintroduced into the channel in one transmission becomes signal in the next iteration of signal

transmission. One might describe this as mistaking noise for signal.

But whereas it is possible to compensate for equivocation of signal and non-signal if thetransmission and interpretation processes can take advantage of signal redundancies, how is this

to be accomplished if there is no prior information to let the receiver (offspring) know that

signals (nucleotide sequence patterns) are being sent redundantly? In human communications

there are often conventional features of the signal (e.g. that it is written in English) that areintrinsically redundant according to principles anticipated by the receiver. As noted above, there

is both some redundancy in the genetic code and redundancy in the double-stranded DNAmolecule that can be used for genetic error correction. More importantly, the structural

complexity and specificity of the molecules involved means that molecular damage is likely toproduce deviant forms which can also be recognized as not one of the four allowable base-

pairings. But beyond this, modifications to DNA molecules that simply replace base pairs with

others will offer no basis for redundancy-based error correction.


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In this case one must rely on redundancies that arise extrinsically, from contextual and

environmental sources. For example, consider the human-level problem of following badlytranslated instructions from an unfamiliar language. Lacking nonsensical usage or grammatical

errors as clues, one could assume that all aspects of a signal provide accurate information, use

this to attempt to accomplish the task it was intended for, and see whether it works or not. This

trial and error approach can also be understood in terms of redundancy testing, just at a higherlevel. The redundancy being relied upon is between the intentional information in the

signalspecifically, what it is aboutand the properties of the application context. If the

information accurately represents features of some physical system (for example being

instructions about operating a device) its interpretation in terms of some action performed on thatsystem will correlate well with physical constraints required to achieve a given result. This is

another way of saying that information about the system is a set of constraints on the signal that

stand in some correspondence relationship to the physical boundary conditions that determine a

given function.

13)Aboutness error correction via contextual redundancy: The correspondence implicit in

aboutness is also susceptible to error correction via redundancy, but with respect tointerpretive context.

This trial and error approach to discovering a correspondence relationship is basically the logic

of natural selection. In this case, the problem is to hit on the best combination (so to speak) to

unlock access to some important resources for survival and reproduction. An adaptation is astructure or behavior that corresponds in an appropriate way to some important constraints

embodied in the physics of the environment or the in the habits of other creatures in the

ecosystem. In this sense it is appropriate to say that an adaptation is aboutthese extrinsicfeatures. So if ones genetic inheritance contributes to producing a body with appropriate

adaptations, it is because these are in some degree redundant with some aspects of the

environment. The correspondence does not have to be exact. It merely needs to be better thanthat of most alternative lineages. Of course there are an immense number of features of theorganism and its possible environments that need to be maintained in some correspondence

relationship with each other, and so the real situation is immensely more complicated.

In the case of biological evolution the genetic signal also gets modified from generation togeneration, both by combinatorial shuffling in sexual reproduction and by mutational noise. We

might analogically describe evolution in sexual organisms as a process that iteratively shuffles

the signal and then eliminates those modifications that show the least correlation with the

conditions that will allow another iteration of this transmission and shuffling process to takeplace. So the distinction between information and noise is not made with respect to its source, as

in the case of a designed communication process, but in terms of this extrinsic redundancy withcontext. One might, then, think of the environment as providing the redundant comparator signal

against which the genetic signal is to be compared in each generation, providing a form of errorcorrection. But in this case it is referentialerror correction. Although the logic of error correction

is still based on accepting only that which is iteratively redundant and rejecting the rest, the

comparison is between signal and context. No a priori determination of what distinguishes signal

from noise is required. What counts as useful information is determinedpost hoc with respect to


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its ability to pass through the error-correction redundancy checking mechanism of selection,

allowing further iterations of this process.

14)Evolution generates aboutness: Evolution is a process in which aspects of a signalinitially lacking aboutness (and thus noise from the perspective of its source) can come

to acquire aboutness because they happen to embody internal redundancies that are alsoredundant with certain physical conditions of further transmission. There is, in this sense,

new reference and new aboutness generated by natural selection, as well as new Shannon

information.

What is most often ignored in discussions of the evolution of biological function, is that the

generation of new information and new aboutness by the evolutionary process not only

legitimizes the use of teleological (i.e. functional) and intentional (i.e. semiotic) language in

biology, it demonstrates that these uses are not merely analogical uses. Biological adaptationsand functions are constituted as intrinsically teleological and intentional even though the

evolutionary process that produced them is not. They acquire functional and referential status by

virtue of a quasi-cybernetic equivocation-testing cycle extended across generations and amongalternative lineages.

Students of evolution have not usually insisted that the absence of the lineages that go extinct is

necessary to comprehend the particular traits of the species that persist. One could see the

surviving lineages and their adaptations through the lens of engineering design in terms ofidentified functions that are responsible for their success. But although this analogy has

superficial validity it is undermined by the fact that few if any biological structures can be said to

have only one distinguishing function. Their fittedness internally and externally is irreduciblysystemic. The absence of the non-reproduced forms is thus necessary for understanding the

source of the particular structural and functional correspondences that surviving forms exhibit

with respect to the constraints of their environment. It is precisely because evolutionary theorydoes not posit a designer with forethought crafting the adaptation of each organism to itsenvironment, that extinct variants are part of the explanation of the biological concept of

function. It is only against a background of many variations that are generated uncorrelated with

survival that the space of possible fits to environmental forms is explored and information about

the environment is generated and passed on. Biological function is thus not positivelyconstructed but is rather the evolutionary remainder that occupies the constrained space of

correlations that have not been removed.

In more familiar terms we can think of this as a semiotic conception of evolution, not merely aninformational view (which for current theorists is limited to the Shannonian conception). In this

sense, natural selection theory plays a role similar to the pragmatist theories of the developmentof referential correspondence (aka truth, with a lower case t). It is a theory about the generation

of forms that can be successively modified to be in ever-greater correspondence with regularitiesencountered in an external environment. The evolutionary process can also be understood as

exemplifying the importance of physical intervention in the world as a means of elaborating and

refining correspondence relationships over time. The production of new information interpreted

into the form of a physical body that must acquire the raw materials to maintain this incessantprocess, both encounters the brute otherness of the regularities of its environment and, in acting


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with respect to them, changes them. In this regard, embodiment theories are in agreement with

the approach taken here in their insistence that the mediating role of the body is a criticalcomponent of intentional relationships. However, this is not consistent with the additional

assumption that our perceptions and experiences of the world are forever trapped by the limits of

our senses and our nervous systems computational limits. This expansion of the subjective

idealist perspective is challenged by this Darwinian parallel. The challenge derives from the factof embodiment itself. Information must be conveyed by constraints imposed on some substrate.

There is no point at which they can be transferred without substrate. But from a physical

perspective this means that information processes necessarily entail physical work and the

imposition of material consequences on the surroundings. When Samuel Johnson reputedlyresponded to Bishop Berkeleys subjective idealism by kicking a stone and exclaiming I refute

it thus! he was providing only half a refutation. By acting on the world to change it against its

resistance to change the physicality of the semiosis enacted by ones body (whether

microorganism or human being) and its degree of correspondence with extrinsic conditions, thenbecomes available as part of the information one can gain about the world (see Cashman, 2006,

for a further development of this position). And there is literally no end to this capacity to coax

new information from this interaction if the results can accumulate due to an evolutionaryprocess, or for that matter a scientific tradition.

By describing biological evolution in terms of an information-generation process we can begin to

discern a hierarchical logic leading from syntactic (Shannonian) to semantic (Boltzmannian) to

pragmatic (Darwinian) conceptions of information, and to see the higher-order parallels betweenthem. Thus, for example, where the production of Shannonian information is due to selective

reduction of the entropy available in the ensemble of potential signal forms, the production of

Darwinian information is due to the selective reduction of the entropy available in theensemble of potential information transmission systems that constitute separate vaiant

individuals. For all three forms of information it is an existence with respect to what could have

been that is the defining characteristic. This also provides a crudely similar criterion forinformation measurement at these three levels. The greater the reduction of signal entropy thegreater the information; the greater the Boltzmannian work done to reduce the entropy of a signal

the greater the potential for referential specificity; the greater variety of forms initially produced

compared to those that ultimately get reproduced in evolution the greater the precision of

adaptation or correspondence. Though the aboutness, significance, and value of information maynot be s

Disembodmt Deacon

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