Causation and Information: Where Is Biological Meaning to Be Found?
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Causation and Information: Where Is Biological Meaning to Be Found? Mark Pharoah 1 Received: 5 May 2020 / Accepted: 4 November 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The term ‘information’ is used extensively in biology, cognitive science and the philosophy of consciousness in relation to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘causation’. While ‘information’ is a term that serves a useful purpose in specific disciplines, there is much to the concept that is problematic. Part 1 is a critique of the stance that information is an independently existing entity. On this view, and in biological contexts, systems transmit, acquire, assimilate, decode and manipulate it, and in so doing, generate meaning. I provide a detailed proposal in Part 2 that supports the claim that it is the dynamic form of a system that qualifies the informational nature of meaningful interactive engagement, that is, that information is dependent on dynamic form rather than that it exists independently. In Part 3, I reflect on the importance of the distinction between the independent and dependent stances by looking specifically at the implications for how we might better interpret causation and emergence. Keywords Information . Enactivism . Embodiment . Causation . Correspondence .
Emergence . Semiosis . Biological meaning In relation to causation, Hume (1748) talks of a power or force that is entirely concealed from us, describing this power as ‘the secret connexion’ which induces one causal impetus to follow another in an uninterrupted succession: We only learn the influence of our will from experience. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another, without instructing us in
* Mark Pharoah
1
London, UK
Pharoah M.
the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable. (Hume 1748, Section 7, part 1: 108)1 That the secret connexion is entirely concealed should be a cautionary note: is it not the case that the concept of information has found its way into that very role? Information has become a metaphor for this secret connexion.2 As such, it is the unseen ‘commodity’3 which connects one causal agent to the next, ensuring the determination of one event to another in an inexorable chain of informational events.4 Much of this way of thinking is implied, but Johansson (2009: 84) is explicit: ‘we can’t get any information from a system without interacting causally with it … information is a causal process’. Fresco et al. (2018: 547) provide another example: ‘functional information is a special type of causal information’. So, too, does Jablonka (2002: 582), who details the consistent causal role that she says information plays in contributing to functional, goal-oriented behaviours. From this conception, it is but a small step to have this informational commodity appear to bear a correspondence with, and to become a carrier of, meaning.5 It seems that the adoption of information as the secret connexion in causal process has, in general, underscored a creeping bias which has granted causation
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