Continuing a conversation with Interbane about how Dawkins' question, why are people, opens themes in metaphysics, indicating a better answer than the Christian idea 'to reflect the glory of God' but also indicating merit in exploring the old answer against a modern framework.

Interbane wrote:… I can conceptualize what you mean by mentioning a self-reflection of the universe as an explanatory device, but there is no foothold on reality with this concept. Where is the proverbial mirror that would do the reflecting? What would be reflected, an image? A concept?

The ‘foothold on reality’ is clear from first principles, and provides a helpful way to explain how the old religious idea ‘man is made in the image of God’ can be rescued from its supernatural context into a scientific framework. A word reflects the thing it names. This is a common usage, as in the question whether a claim reflects reality. You are asserting, wrongly in my view, that the two uses of reflect, as visual and conceptual, have entirely different meanings. My argument is that these meanings have a common core in fidelity of replication, so our words are the image of what they describe.

People are examples of how physical causality results in high complexity in some parts of the universe, in contrast to the low complexity in other parts, such as hydrogen galaxies. At least three generations of galaxies, each lasting around five billion years, have been required to build the elements which enable human life. Joni Mitchell’s line in the song Woodstock ‘we are stardust, billion year old carbon’, is basically empirical, although the carbon in our bodies is more like five or ten billion years old since it was manufactured by the helium-beryllium-carbon triple alpha process in the ancient suns which gave our solar system its heavy elements.

People have varying levels of attunement to their identity as a part of the cosmos, but ignorance does not affect the reality, with our cosmic identity producing behaviour that is in some respects determined and in other respects free. Human consciousness and language are complex effects of the stellar processes, like flotsam from the cosmic crucible. So, human knowledge is the only location known where reality is reflected as concept.

Any reflection our textbooks give are in the form of an incredibly paraphrased and condensed collection of data that must have the human brain as a medium for it to make sense.

Yes, except that your term ‘paraphrased’ is imprecise. Paraphrasing changes from one linguistic description to another, whereas the reflection of reality by words provides a linguistic image of a non-linguistic reality.

RT: “Humans are how the universe has coalesced in a specific complex location, so in our act of reading a scientific text, the universe (reality) is reflected (represented as an image) to itself (the reader).”
That complexity has arisen on our planet doesn’t indicate it was a purposeful incident. It happened within the laws of nature, it was inevitable here, as it likely is inevitable in other locations of the universe. The rarity can be paralleled by the rarity of supermassive black holes. Certain celestial phenomena are more rare than others, but this doesn’t exclude the formulation of life from this scale of rarity.

You seem really twitchy about purpose. I am not saying that the fact that words reflect things indicates a divine ontological purpose in the cosmos, but it does help to explain how people see meaning and import meaning into the cosmos. My agenda here is to provide a scientific framework to explain religious language, not to defend supernaturalism. There was nothing inevitable about human evolution, unless you are a hard determinist. All sorts of accidents could have derailed our emergence.

To be correct, you must assume that it’s impossible for life to arise elsewhere in the universe.

No. Life elsewhere may also have developed language and science, equally reflecting reality.

You’re also mixing metaphorical language with figurative language all within one sentence. Although poetic, it’s entirely nonsensical.

Metaphorical means the same thing as figurative. I assume by figurative you mean literal. Either way, my statement is purely literal and descriptive, not metaphorical and figurative. The conceptual difficulty is in whether the part can represent the whole. It is like when Barack Obama speaks to Hu Jin Tao, we say the USA is speaking with China. My extension of this concept of representation is to say that any part of the universe represents the whole universe, simply because it is a causal product of natural processes. In the science of astrophysics, this representation takes conceptual form, and is far more accurate than anywhere else we can see.

Any representation we have accumulated of the universe by the blueprints of physics aren’t “reflected” back at the universe. Those are instead pieces of objective knowledge which are only relevant when the medium of a human mind is used to translate them. The orbit of an electron around an atomic nucleus is more accurately representative of how the moon orbits the Earth than any textbook depiction (a physical manifestation rather than ink and paper).

If you accept the premise that we are the universe in its local manifestation then the claim is true. Again, you argue that a picture is a stronger representation than a concept, but this claim has no necessary basis. A thousand words often tell more than a picture (even if they are sometimes tedious to read).

That we are the crowning glory of evolution is also a terribly arrogant statement. Everyday I see stupidity I wish the rest of the world were more intelligent than I. We must use legal systems to keep in check the failings of our morality (which I believe to be evolutionary). We are far from holding any crown. Our ability to paraphrase reality and describe it may be a recently emerged phenomenon, but it is little more than manipulation of our environment. Artwork can be said to better reflect reality than much of the hocus pocus that passes for philosophy amongst laypeople. But again, such things aren't reflections. They are simple, crude, paraphrased, compressed representations of what we observe our environment to be.

The idea that humanity is the image of God is more a goal of perfection than a description of ordinary life, where obviously many people do not do a very good job of reflecting the cosmos. However, the fact that humanity is the first entity on our planet to be able to leave it through space travel justifies the claim of being an apex of progress. As I recently mentioned, the term hocus pocus is a satire of the Latin Mass - Hoc Est Corpus, translated as here is the body. Of course simplistic ideas of transubstantiation are illusory, showing how badly we reflect reality, but science gives us the potential to clear out the illusory debris and reflect reality more accurately.

tbarron wrote:We can use this logic to prove the existence of centaurs and unicorns -- we can form conceptions of them, therefore they must exist.

Thanks Tom. The point is that imaginary things do exist as concepts, or units of information. The invalid elision is to say that because something exists as a concept it exists as a thing. My previous post wrongly used the word 'thing' as a description of a concept. I don't think that equality is a thing, but its existence as a mathematical concept bears a strong analogy to the existence of genes as units of information flowing through the river of time.

I started to review the book, so I thought I'd bring up points that strike me, though if this is repetitious I apologize. I felt after finishing the book that re-reading was in order. RD's arguments are extremely detailed, so when I was feeling too lazy to stick with him, I lost the thread. And maybe some of his conclusions will continue to elude me.

He begins with bold and provocative claims for his field of zoology and specifically for Darwinism. He credits Darwin with enabling us to dispense with superstition (i.e., religion?) when faced with questions such as "Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?" He goes further by endorsing a seemingly extreme statement from G. G. Simpson: "'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question (e.g., What is man?) before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'" This might be correct regarding that specific question, but it seems that the first two don't get answered by Darwin any better than religion and philosophy answered them. That is, if we are interested in asking these questions at all.

Zoology and Darwin, he says, are still slighted in universities (at least in 1975). They have "profound philosophical significance," as a series of popular books has brought to our attention, although none of them got evolution right. RD confidently tells us he's going to set the record straight in this book. RD strongly believes that the humanities, especially philosophy, don't deserve the monolpoly they have enjoyed on arbitrating the larger questions of our existence.

RD doesn't specify what the philosphical significance is, but he says that "It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity" (1). This clearly means that morality and ethics are centrally involved somehow, unless we should find that we are the one species that has detached ourselves from the mandate of genes. We would then be the species that has defied the rule that covers all the other species. This would of course be important to know. While the selfish gene theory could influence our morality in some way, RD stresses that in this book he is making no claims that evolution binds us to a morality that places our individual selves first. Obviously, many readers didn't listen to him say this.

RD corrects what was a misconception of mine, that evolution selects groups or species for survival. The "good of the species" view is still common with people who believe they understand evolution. Though scientists even in 1975 mostly believed group selection was wrong, the public today (that is, the part that believes evolution at all) hasn't heard.

I'm interested in the sharp contrast between De Waal's view of evolution in Primates and Philosophers and Dawkins' here. Maybe someone else will want to talk about this.

RT: “This is the nub of my critique of modern philosophy, that its assumption that universal truth is an obsolete and meaningless concept destroys the theory of value. Where we differ is that I argue the positing of universal truth is necessary as a basis for transformative ethics. You insist on the timidity of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes - “I know nahthink!””

This is the common misconception that makes people resistant to such a philosophy, and is the source of your problem. People are used to thinking in dichotomous and discrete frameworks. What we need to do is shift this type of thinking to a spectrum framework, which more accurately reflects reality. With great verisimilitude, we can say that we know some synthetic proposition with 99.99%(repeated) certainty. What you’re proposing is that there are synthetic propositions which can be known with 100% certainty. I would like to accept your proposal because it is comforting. However, everything I’ve learned shows that it’s impossible. All the reasons you’ve given me to accept the idea that we can achieve 100% certainty with a synthetic proposition are focused on the ends, rather than the means. In other words, since certainty is necessary for an ultimate grounding of a system of values(end), there should be a way to have this certainty(means). But the end does not come before the means. No matter how much we may desire 100% certainty through which to ground a system of values, it is wishful thinking. To approach this with the desire of discovering or producing the means so that we can have the end is antithetical to good philosophical practice. If you search hard enough, you’ll find a way to rationalize the means so that you can have the end. Stahrwe is an excellent example of this, as are many religious apologists. Such practice can only ever by effectively scrutinized by metacognition, and determining where and why your thinking is being motivated not by the search for truth, but by achieving an end which is believed a priori. You know this and have expressed it before, but you seem to dismiss it as soon as it enters your mind, since your a priori belief is so strongly entrenched.

RT: “No, what is at issue here is that you presented the modern critique of Jung and Plato as done and dusted. Asserting that problems in philosophy are long since settled is a way to ignore the effort to critique the dubious presuppositions of mainstream consensus. Plato and Jung offer a method of philosophy that is rejected by the mainstream in their claim of a path of access to absolute spiritual values. This is horrifying for liberal skepticism, but I would argue that the sense of meaning in myth, especially seen in Jung’s analysis of symbol, helps to ground thought in culture, unlike the free-floating conceptions of the mainstream.”

I do believe the modern critique is done and dusted, although Platonism is useful in mathematics as a tool for understanding. I think you’re grasping at straws to support a belief you arrived at for non-smart reasons. Some of Plato’s ideas overlap with those of Popper, as in objective knowledge(which again, makes sense to me), and with the philosophy of mathematics. The book I’m reading right now touches on the ubiquity of mathematics as the language of reality. However, Plato’s formal philosophy fails in the philosophy of mathematics just as it does in listing formal categories. It fails for the same reason, that the shadows of the mechanics of the brain are misconstrued as real, objective essences. The difference between mathematics and formal categories is that mathematics is representative of the structure of the universe. We do not know why, it is a beautiful and profound mystery. However, we can see that as a structural framework for reality, mathematics is still an abstraction of reality.

RT: “But the relation between knower, knowledge and known is the hardest problem in epistemology. True knowledge always corresponds directly to its object. If you say that ideas are entirely a property of the knower rather than the known, you destroy the connection between thought and reality. In any case, this question of epistemology is a distraction from the question I raised of the philosophical antecedents of The Selfish Gene, and rests on a misreading of Plato”

This misunderstanding is core to resolving the discussion. How can an idea be a property of the known?!? I will tell you that an idea cannot be a property of the known, unless the object is a medium or an interpreter. What form would the idea take? Would it be an undetectable presence, an essence? Would there be an undetectable tether connecting every object to a person who also has knowledge of that object? You say that it is true knowledge that corresponds directly. Does this rest on the premise that we are able to claim a synthetic proposition with 100% certainty? If so, see my reply to that thought above. Adding an additional line of reasoning premised on your claim to be able to achieve absolute certainty makes me even more apprehensive. This is starting to appear more and more like wishful thinking, with a great deal of good thinking in the mix with which to maintain the veneer of legitimacy.

Let’s view the concept that an idea can be a property of the known. First, we have to make ourselves aware of a very powerful bias. It is the bias that is fundamental to perception. We cannot perceive anything without simultaneously interpreting(or rendering, or assimilating, use whichever word fits best here) it. It(a sense perception) is instantly weighed against prior knowledge, and allocated to whatever part of the brain it corresponds to. The interpreting that must be done applies to everything we perceive, there are no loopholes. You touched on this problem in your 5 point argument about the perception of F. Without discussing the problems with that argument just yet, let’s stick to the bias that results from sensory interpretation.

Let’s say that you see a picture of you and your mother. What happens when the light waves hit your eyes is that the part of your brain that corresponds to your mother is instantly activated. What is activated is mother in a general sense. A picture with some unordinary details, or your mothers perfume, and especially your mother herself, will activate any ancillary parts of the brain associated with her, but they are all held together by a general sense of mother. If you want to picture what this would look like on the neuronal level, it can be shown using MRI imaging as a part of the brain that is associated with identity. This means that whenever your mother is mentioned or referenced or remembered or thought of in any way shape or form, there is a part of your brain is that is always illuminated. Depending on how you associate the thought of your mother, such as with her perfume, or with a good memory, the identity part of the brain illuminates the same time as other parts of the brain. What is invariant is the part that identifies your mother. Such a capability is necessary to identify all sorts of people and objects, and is clearly necessary for survival. However, this does not mean that there is an ‘essence’ of your mother within the picture you’re looking at. You have a vague sense of ‘motherness’ that surrounds the picture, but that is nothing more than a reflection of the workings of your own brain, specifically the activation of the part of the brain that corresponds to the identity of your mother.

The bias of interpretation becomes a bit more confusing if we consider conceptualizing something which is a medium. Consider picturing a book. Although a book is nothing more than paper and ink, we instantly make the association of a book with information. This association makes the information ‘feel’ as real as the book itself. However, we must realize the data within a medium is nothing more than it’s physical structure without an interpreter. Even though the neurons associated with ‘information’ are activated, this does not mean there is some metaphysical ‘essence’ of information surrounding or instilled within the book. It is a reflection of the workings of our own brains, and is extremely difficult to distinguish as such. I use the book example because most people will instantly associate it with a vague sense of information.

Another good example is the genetic code of a tree. While the physical structure of the genes are nothing but proteins and other chemicals, we as interpreters understand that those genes are structured in such a way that through physical processes, an organism will form. What happens when we conceptualize ‘genes’ is that we immediately associate them with their vehicles, the ‘organisms.’ However, this association is merely the firing of neurons in our heads. To be clear, there is an association between genes and the organism, of course, but that association is our understanding of the causal process. The genes of an organism are useless and meaningless without the interpretive function of a physical process. It’s extremely difficult if not impossible to divorce the ‘essence’ of something from the thing itself, since that is the way our brains work. We have no other option but to form generic ‘identities’ of things. In the case of the tree, the identity for the genes and the organism necessarily activate the same neurons.


RT: “No, it does not point to the object, but to the abstraction that is instantiated in the object. “

You’re claiming there is an abstraction instantiated in the object. Does this mean there is an instance of the object abstracted within itself?!? I think this claim is evidence that it is merely a part of your brain which is instantiated, and nothing objective.

RT: “Dawkins asserts, as I read him, that the genetic code does contain the nature of the entity, by providing the information needed for it to grow each time.”

I emphasized the word ‘nature’ for a very specific reason. It’s the wrong word to use and if used, throws off our understanding of the entire concept. By using the word ‘nature’, any explanation of a genetic code is then suggestive of an objective ‘essence’(Using the word “nature” is okay in everyday life, but in such cases as this, it’s necessary to be precise.) We would do much better to say that the genetic code contains the “structural information” for an organism. However, at the same time, it must be noted that this structural information is meaningless without the interpretive function of growth. That genetic information can be long-lasting and produce an organism is ‘note’worthy, but we must remain diligent in holding it only as a note, an understanding rather than an instance of that which is understood.

RT: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism states “Platonism is considered to be, in mathematics departments the world over, the predominant philosophy of mathematics, especially regarding the foundations of mathematics. One statement of this philosophy is the thesis that mathematics is not created but discovered.”

Platonism
“Platonists, such as Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), hold that numbers are abstract, necessarily existing objects, independent of the human mind”[1]
Formalism
“Formalists, such as David Hilbert (1862–1943), hold that mathematics is no more or less than mathematical language. It is simply a series of games...” [1]
Intuitionism
“Intuitionists, such as L. E. J. Brouwer (1882–1966), hold that mathematics is a creation of the human mind. Numbers, like fairy tale characters, are merely mental entities, which would not exist if there were never any human minds to think about them.” [1]

If it is as difficult as we have just examined to divorce the identity of something from the object itself, then it stands to reason Platonism would be a popular philosophy; it still falls victim to the same problems. This isn’t to say that it’s not ‘useful’, which I would never claim. What should be noted here is that mathematics holds a unique position in our discussion. There is something about the empirical nature of the universe that mathematics describes it perfectly. The reason why is unknown. However, this unknown should not be confused with the closely related topic of abstraction versus instance, or category versus instance. Using the problems with the foundations of mathematics as a segway into supporting a philosophy of universal values is more evidence that you’ve arrived at the ‘ends’ first, and are now attempting to rationalize a ‘means’.

RT: “So the ‘reality’ of a person/entity includes its entire genetic heritage, embedded in what Dawkins calls the River out of Eden.”

Does Dawkin’s use the phrasing that the ‘reality’ of a person/entity is it’s entire genetic heritage? The word ‘reality’, as you emphasized, is crucial to understanding or misunderstanding this concept. Here you’re again blurring the boundaries between an understanding and that which is understood.

Robert Tulip wrote:

tbarron wrote:We can use this logic to prove the existence of centaurs and unicorns -- we can form conceptions of them, therefore they must exist.

Thanks Tom. The point is that imaginary things do exist as concepts, or units of information. The invalid elision is to say that because something exists as a concept it exists as a thing. My previous post wrongly used the word 'thing' as a description of a concept. I don't think that equality is a thing, but its existence as a mathematical concept bears a strong analogy to the existence of genes as units of information flowing through the river of time.

Thank you for the clarification, Robert. I agree that concepts exist as concepts. The only thing I want to add is that a concept can only exist if it's represented in some way. It can't exist apart from the instances that embody it -- those "out there" in the physical world or those "in here" in a physical brain. So I would claim that equality and genes *don't* have independent existence of their own. They only exist as concepts in some kind of representation -- written, depicted, recorded on videotape, or thoughts in someone's mind.

tbarron wrote: So I would claim that equality and genes *don't* have independent existence of their own. They only exist as concepts in some kind of representation -- written, depicted, recorded on videotape, or thoughts in someone's mind.

tbarron, did you mean to write 'memes' instead of 'genes'?

DWill wrote:

tbarron wrote: So I would claim that equality and genes *don't* have independent existence of their own. They only exist as concepts in some kind of representation -- written, depicted, recorded on videotape, or thoughts in someone's mind.

tbarron, did you mean to write 'memes' instead of 'genes'?

Thank you for the question, DWill.

No, I meant 'genes' in the sense of something that persists over long periods of time. The instances don't persist beyond the individual organism that contains them, and that's all I would say exists in the physical world. A genetic pattern is an idea. A species is an idea. What we see in the world are instances of those ideas, not the ideas themselves.

Memes, of course, are another example of something that we encounter only as instances.

So my opinion is that abstract patterns and categories (genes, memes, species, equality) are concepts that we create based on similarities among objects and events we see in the physical world. Those concepts are often very useful and in part because they are, we find it easy to confuse the concepts with things and come to see the concepts as having an existence of their own, independent of their representations (mistakenly, IMO).

Maybe I should be writing in the thread about "What I believe but can't prove."

tbarron wrote: No, I meant 'genes' in the sense of something that persists over long
So my opinion is that abstract patterns and categories (genes, memes, species, equality) are concepts that we create based on similarities among objects and events we see in the physical world. Those concepts are often very useful and in part because they are, we find it easy to confuse the concepts with things and come to see the concepts as having an existence of their own, independent of their representations (mistakenly, IMO).

Thanks for that reply. I have been arguing that, concerning memes, a mistake is to speak of them as hthough they have some independent existence in the world. You seem to go much farther than I'd be inclined to when you disqualify genes and species as things with physical existence. True, it is objects or instances themselves that have this realness, but once we hang a name on even one individual, we have created the concept of a group. So this seems unavoidable if we are to use language at all. Is your concern that if we detach the name from the physical instance, we will be mistakenly wielding it as a real thing in itself? Maybe we do this with concepts such as communism and freedom. Or this may not be what you mean, and perhaps giving an example would help me understand.

Before continuing the marathon on the philosophy of evolution and knowledge with Interbane, may I say thanks and warm welcome to Tom Barron for finding us here at Booktalk and engaging in this discussion. The idealist theme Tom raises of persistence through time as the criterion of reality is one that I have mentioned often, without finding traction, perhaps because idealism has come to be seen as such anathematic wool.

I’m tempted to say where there’s wool there’s a way, along the lines of where there’s smoke there’s fire, but the pun is too bad and the content rather dubious. Too much woolly thinking is simply false. However, my sense is that the high Dawkins ethic of precise quantified logic does wrongly exclude areas of thought that are potentially allies to his cause, with Platonic idealism a prime candidate.

A key issue here is that there are two sorts of reality, the reality of matter and the reality of information. The philosophical challenge, as I see it, is to produce a systematic schema in which the relation between matter and information is properly described. Information persists through time in a way that has a material substrate but which cannot be simply explained in terms of that substrate. We see this clearly in genes, where the information embedded in the DNA code persists as adaptivity to an ecological niche, so the reality of the gene is seen in its phenotype (embodied trait) rather than simply in the chemical bases. The ‘river of time’ is made of matter, but its direction and logic is made of information.

tbarron wrote:

DWill wrote:

tbarron wrote: So I would claim that equality and genes *don't* have independent existence of their own. They only exist as concepts in some kind of representation -- written, depicted, recorded on videotape, or thoughts in someone's mind.

tbarron, did you mean to write 'memes' instead of 'genes'?

Thank you for the question, DWill. No, I meant 'genes' in the sense of something that persists over long periods of time. The instances don't persist beyond the individual organism that contains them, and that's all I would say exists in the physical world. A genetic pattern is an idea. A species is an idea. What we see in the world are instances of those ideas, not the ideas themselves.

Where I take issue here is the claim that a concept exists only as represented. Genes persist in the world as units of information. Like the truths of mathematics, these units and their relations can be discovered, and are not created by human description. The information exists in the physical world, but its existence is ideal rather than material.

Memes, of course, are another example of something that we encounter only as instances. So my opinion is that abstract patterns and categories (genes, memes, species, equality) are concepts that we create based on similarities among objects and events we see in the physical world. Those concepts are often very useful and in part because they are, we find it easy to confuse the concepts with things and come to see the concepts as having an existence of their own, independent of their representations (mistakenly, IMO).

Here I see the problem, as I alluded earlier in my summary of the battle of Gods and Giants from Plato’s Sophist, that modernism has been so heavily indoctrinated with the claim that only material things exist that people find it very hard to recognise an alternative schema in which information has its own existence, as concept rather than as thing. The helical pattern of the genetic code was not created by Crick and Watson (or Franklin or Miescher), it had existed in all organisms since the dawn of life, waiting to be discovered. The same applies to phenotypes, which are abstract universal concepts that describe how DNA is expressed in the world. These concepts are not created by scientists, but describe what is uncovered as a conceptual reality that persists through time.

RT: "Before continuing the marathon on the philosophy of evolution and knowledge with Interbane"

Better than crosswords puzzles! You won't get alzheimer's at this rate.

My problem with the distinction between what is real and what is merely for our understanding is that I haven't yet encountered a criterion for demarcation between nonphysical things. Focusing on the physical aspect of it all is like limiting yourself to spatial dimensions. Finding a framework that integrates time is essential. There are some things we can point to as real in time, such as causality and motion. However, I'm sure there is much more. For example, arbitrary 'rules' can be said to be real if whatever framework we use includes a good understanding of the human brain in order to link a 'rule' to a process. It may sound silly at first, but I think some criterion of demarcation is necessary. There should be an anchor to the spatio-temporal.

Rules have real impact, but an examination of them at first glance has no anchor to anything spatio-temporal. However, we can rely on the description that information is real contingent upon an interpreter. There is no 'reflection of reality' unless we have a way to interpret it as such. Perhaps this is a better way to understand the two sorts of reality as you mentioned. Genes are interpreted by the interpretive function of growth. If what is interpreted does not fit within the niche, the information isn't selected for the gene pool. The phenotype which is interpreted from the gene is the interface with the environment, but the phenotype is contingent upon the genes. It is the genes that are selected for, vicariously through the phenotype.

There is something to be said of states of mind. If there is a rule we all decide to live by, the neural arrangement is similar amongst all people that abide by that rule. One thing to note is that I'm not saying the category of 'rules' is real, but rather each rule as an instance. They govern our physical action. The realness of rules is different from other types of information. Some information is an abstraction, a loose reflection of reality. Rules are known to be within our minds, as contingencies we abide by, they don't claim to reflect anything in reality. Their reality is that they are a part of the system of human behavior, an 'on/off' switch of neurons. With this reasoning, we can say that rules are a real part of a process. The reasons we come up with rules are a different topic. If you'll note, this is a concession of mine. I've also used the word 'reflection'. However, all of this fits within my worldview. This is your best segway into returning to the discussion of guiding principles.

RT: "A key issue here is that there are two sorts of reality, the reality of matter and the reality of information."

I agree with this, but I would include 'processes, energy, and forces' in with 'matter', to include temporal reality rather than only spacial reality. As I said before, I think the reality of information is contingent upon an interpreter or an interpretive function. If we try to picture 'information'(such as a magazine) as drifting idly through space with no humans or aliens or computers anywhere near, we still have the sense that it contains something real. However, I think that is a reaction that is based on the fact that we immediately interpret our perceptions(this would be an internal perception). We can't divorce our own interpretive tendencies from our thoughts, it's what we are.

So this intuition pump would be better served by thinking of some different type of information, such as an exact 'replica' model of a solar system. This does away with most of the interpretive requirement to see it as representing something else. However, without an interpreter, what is it, really? Just a jumble of organized matter? I would hesitate to be so reductive again. We can perhaps assign some objective characteristic to this piece of information so that it is unique from random matter. We could say that it has 'interpretive potential', similar to how a heavy rock on a hill has potential energy. I am okay with this explanation.

RT: "We see this clearly in genes, where the information embedded in the DNA code persists as adaptivity to an ecological niche, so the reality of the gene is seen in its phenotype (embodied trait) rather than simply in the chemical bases."

This doesn't fit. A phenotype is still a concept we use to understand reality. We can find instances of the category everywhere, but connecting the dots is done within our minds to form the category. This is an example of the type of information that is different from 'rules'. There is nothing special about phenotypes unless we look beyond them to the genes that specify them. The genes have interpretive potential, but the phenotypes do not.