Disembodmt Deacon

Disembodiment and intentionality Deacon et al 2006
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 be
incompatible 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 by
highlighting 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 on
something 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 mental
phenomena, 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 of
phenomenology 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 of embodiment to provide a missing bridge
that 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 content
is 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-specific
assumptions. 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 mental
phenomena 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 confusion
than 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 in
need of explanation. Both result in a variant of Whitehead’s 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 demands
explanation is precisely how intentional phenomena come to exhibit this ontologically
ambiguous 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 that
intentionality 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 Aristotle’s notion of final cause. Interpreted literally, a final cause
can 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 something
nonexistent 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 the
past 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 antecedent
representations 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 his
account 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 development—a final cause,
for the sake of which developmental processes occur—is not located in the future state but is
antecedent 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 an
organism, and it remained the basis for vitalistic theories of life for 25 centuries. Although an
abstract 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 Aristotle’s notion of final causality has long
been applied to the problem of mental causality. For example, Aquinas argues in his Summa
Theologia 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 comes
last in execution, still comes first in the agent’s thoughts (in intentione agentis). And in this way
it 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 that
determines 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 to
determine 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 not
immediately 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) and
something 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 have
repeatedly 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 perspective
was 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 19th Century were fueled by the adoption of a
countervailing methodological assumption: that scientific explanation requires replacement of
teleological accounts with mechanical accounts. This change in intellectual climate was
exemplified 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 saw
an 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 which
would have as its subject the study of those features that uniquely characterize mental
phenomena, 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 the
13th 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 to
be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity ... We can therefore
define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an
object 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 phrase—intentional inexistence—is 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, the
existence 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,
Brentano’s concern to specify a trait that is always and only found in thinking, judging, and
desiring 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 Brentano’s 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 ambiguity
in 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 Husserl’s
methodological epoche had a similar effect to Descartes’ methodic doubt. It allowed him to
analyze 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 into
the 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 data
from 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 Husserl’s method to include a phenomenology of the body. Merleau-Ponty argued
that the body is the permanent condition of experience; neither a mental construction nor a
Cartesian machine. All experience, he argued, is both of the body’s 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 problem
of 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 theory
of mental processes. Ultimately, however, Merleau-Ponty’s 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-Ponty’s 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 its
logical 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; and
contributions 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 the
apparent paradox by making both subject and object just different aspects of embodiment. This
ultimately 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, we
consider these sorts of material processes more basic and intentional/teleological phenomena as
emergent from these more elementary phenomena. Consequently, we accept Brentano’s rough
original insight, including the awkward ambiguity it seems to leave us with. However, we
disagree with Brentano’s view that intentionality is a property only found in mental processes. In
this 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 general
terms, 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 constituting
living 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 in
organizing the production of physical processes we first need to distinguish between non-
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existence and absence. Simple non-existence, pure nullity—if such a thing can even be
imagined—has neither extension nor substance, but more commonly, our conception of not
existing 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 to
something 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 they’ve 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 absence
as 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 where
producing a tax return is required, its nonexistence will set in motion events involving IRS
employees coercing the delinquent taxpayer to comply, by writing threatening letters, and
possibly contacting banks and credit agencies who will interfere with the taxpayer’s 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 often
prompt 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 ‘not
thinking,’ ‘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 power—or just
ignorance—can be blamed for allowing mistakes to occur that could otherwise have been
avoided. In these human contexts, then, we often treat presence and absence as though they can
have equal potential efficacy.
These familiar examples are, of course, special cases that invert the general rule about
representation—something present that is taken to be about something not present—and yet they
exemplify 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 no
longer 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 governing
or requiring certain actions, failure to act appropriately—whether to conform or to resist—will
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 these
cases. 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 of function. 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 being
prevented. Though from a teleological perspective we think of this in terms of design purposes
for the device, it is what the device is prevented from 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 “Life’s irreducible structure” (1968). He described these
constraints 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 behaviors
become 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 been
introduced if the engine seizes up as a result, something not-quite-physical has been lost, the
function 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 its
animation, 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 these
ends. 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 between
properties of visible light and the precise constraints on the anatomical relations between the
parts 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 ancient
times, 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 mental
representations 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 many
phenomena. 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 first
explore 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 as the 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 gain
a 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 about
something 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 aboutness
relationship can originate.
Our aim is not to support theories of disembodied representation nor is it to show how
intentionality can be analytically eliminated. It is rather to show how the functional and
informational 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 the
presence 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 or
symmetry. This could be exhibited by a machine, or even some naturally occurring pattern or
tendency, as well as by an organism’s 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 the
context 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, where
habits 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 of
constraints; 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 these
properties.
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 aboutness
relationships) 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 to
define. 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 billiard
table shortly after they have been set in motion by the impact of a fast moving cue ball during a
break. 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 a
state 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 Rudolph
Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell in the 1850s.
This is a rough characterization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a necessary

consequence of the extreme asymmetry of the statistics of distributions: so there are vastly more
higher 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 is
just 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 entropy
state 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 a
new 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, for
different 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 produce
our 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 as Boltzmann
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 away
from 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 something
interferes with the spontaneous pattern of events. If events don’t proceed according to this
asymmetrical 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 of
information, 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 given
signal (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.
Shannon’s 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 possible
signal will be produced). The measure of the uncertainty reduced by a received signal is
Shannon’s 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, the
degree 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 to
something 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).
11
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 messages
conveyed 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 of
information. 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 will
have 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 information
less 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 is
subtle, 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 signal

medium 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 amount of information it can convey.
2) Physical basis of information: The Shannon entropy of a signal is a consequence of its
maximum 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 and
quantified with respect to this absent possibility.
5. Information and aboutness
Many writers, including Warren Weaver (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) who wrote a commentary
12
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 atypical
use of the term. Shannon’s 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 very
expressive 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 not
present 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 a
finite 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 how
this 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 not
in 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 maximally
unpredictable. 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 this
equilibrium, 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 system
itself 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 some
outside 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 for
choosing which extrinsic influence of the infinity of possible factors was crucial. This then
involves something absent from whatever conveys the information—the reduced Shannon
entropy—to provide evidence of another absent factor—whatever performed the work on the
signal to effect this reduction.
13
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 made
available when the state of some physical system is different from what would be expected were
its features to be the result of random influences or complete physical isolation. 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 the
determination 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. The
specific 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 systems’
states 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 of something is
exemplified by the role that pattern plays in each of these analyses. In Shannon’s 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 be
assessed. 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 of
the 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 correlated
by 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 signal
retransmission. 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 critically
grammar 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.
14
So, whereas in Shannon’s analysis redundancy decreases information capacity, it is also what
makes it possible to distinguish information from noise. This inversion offers an important hint
concerning 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 the
redundancy 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 about is dependent on the physical interaction
of 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 not present 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 imposed
constraints. 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 to
the medium itself. In this regard, the embodiment is in some sense the complement to the
aboutness.
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 only
recognizing the way a signal medium is physically embedded in a context that can alter its
entropy—producing the Shannon-Boltzmann understanding of information aboutness,
above—but also understanding how one signal makes a difference for some other signal
production 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.
15
For engineering purposes Shannon’s analysis could not extend further than an assessment of the
information carrying capacity of a signal medium. Specifically, it could not include consideration
of 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 innumerable
points 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 the
selection of a specific ground of aboutness for a given signal—which constitutes the process of
interpretation—is a function of the way this signal constrains and influences subsequent signal
production/transmission, and how the embodied consequences of this process interact with the
conditions 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, muddy
footprints 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 be
treated 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 pragmatic
relevance can be different for different interpretive purposes and the interpretive tools that are
available. This yields another stricture on the information interpretation process:
7) Scope of reference: The causal history contributing to the constraints imposed on a given
medium limits, but does not specify, what its information can be about. Which point in
this 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 fewer
means 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 use
this information to extrapolate backwards many steps from effect to cause. This capacity is
greatly augmented by modern scientific instruments that, for example, can determine the
chemical 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 19th
century, it is simply that more of these have become interpretable, and to a greater depth. This
16
enhancement of interpretive capacity can be described as increasing the Shannon entropy of the
subsequent signal generation processes.
Although from an engineer’s 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 to
an 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 be
called 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, then
the 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 affecting
work:
8) Transfer constraint: The potential Shannon entropy of a chain of systems (e.g. different
media) through which information is transferred can be no greater than the system with
the 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 from
medium 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 with
transmission 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
medium’s modifiability and its capacity to modify other systems. We create instruments (signal
receivers) 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 can
produce 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 we
draw 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 the
channel 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 natural
information sources, such as in scientific investigations. This is because there is always more
17
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 signs
illustrates 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 become
information 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 uncorrelated
signal 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 organism’s genetic information is “interpreted” via the process
of development to produce phenotypic functions that correspond to extrinsic conditions to the
extent 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 error
correction, 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 Shannon’s analysis it doesn’t matter what the signal is about or if
it is about something, so long as there is redundant transmission and redundancy checking. But
in 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, a
redundancy or correlation between extrinsic signal features and features of an independently
produced 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 and
dynamical 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 redundancies—or more
specifically correlated constraints—shared by the signal medium and the dynamics of a
recipient system, by which the latter is selectively dynamically coupled to some but not
all 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 substrate—the sign or signal—but the regularities intrinsic to a dynamical
system that result from constraints on its modes of possible behavior. In other words, it is a
18
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 to
eliminate 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 natural
selection. 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 organisms
with 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 parents
and exemplifies features that correlate with the environment. The general form of this process is
analogous in many respects to Shannon’s model of the transmission of information. We can thus
consider the initial variety of phenotypic forms in the prior generation as the potential entropy of
the system, and can treat the reduction in transmitted forms that occurs due to differential
reproduction 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 this
entropy 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 produces
information.
11) The measure of evolutionary information: The reduction of phenotypic variety by virtue
of differential survival and reproduction of certain organism forms that are better suited
to a given environment is directly analogous to the reduction of signal entropy in
Shannon’s 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 the
reduction 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 biological
evolution the outside source of influence that is responsible for the reduced entropy of
phenotypic variations within the population is the selecting environment. Which organic forms
get 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 their
surroundings are most likely to reproduce and thus transmit these variants, while others will be
19
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 about this environment with respect to the processes
critical 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 something
about 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 often
not yet in existence.
12) Adaptation as a form of aboutness: The boundary conditions on molecular and

mechanical processes that constitute biological adaptations complement critical
regularities of environmental conditions. Thus the transmission of these constraints from
generation to generation is the transmission of information about these 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 signal
transmission over a communication channel, then evolutionary change occurs when noise
introduced 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 the
transmission 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 are
intrinsically 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 DNA
molecule 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 to
produce 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.
20
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 badly
translated 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 higher
level. The redundancy being relied upon is between the intentional information in the
signal—specifically, what it is about—and 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 that
system 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 to
interpretive 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 a
structure 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 about these extrinsic
features. So if one’s 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 than
that of most alternative lineages. Of course there are an immense number of features of the
organism 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 to
generation, 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 take
place. 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 with
context. 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 error
correction. But in this case it is referential error 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 determined post hoc with respect to
21
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 signal

initially 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 also
redundant 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 adaptations
and 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 among
alternative 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 of
identified 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 irreducibly
systemic. 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 theory
does not posit a designer with forethought crafting the adaptation of each organism to its
environment, 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 positively
constructed 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 an
informational 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 development
of 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 regularities
encountered 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 incessant
process, both encounters the brute otherness of the regularities of its environment and, in acting
22
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 critical
component 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 system’s computational limits. This expansion of the subjective
idealist perspective is challenged by this Darwinian parallel. The challenge derives from the fact
of 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 reputedly
responded to Bishop Berkeley’s 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 one’s body (whether
microorganism or human being) and its degree of correspondence with extrinsic conditions, then
becomes 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 evolutionary
process, 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 between
them. 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 the
ensemble 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 for
information measurement at these three levels. The greater the reduction of signal entropy the
greater 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 may
not be so clearly quantifiable as its Shannon entropy, these features should be susceptible to
precise definition in a hierarchical expansion of the theory of communication. This would be the
first step toward a scientific semiotic theory.
6. The fallacy of misplaced aboutness
This exploration of the relationship between thermodynamics, information theory, and evolution
is useful for helping to unpack some of the hidden complexity of the causal logic underlying
intentionality. It is particularly instructive in demonstrating how easy it is to become seduced by
what can be called the fallacy of misplaced aboutness: an analogue to the Whiteheadian fallacy
of misplaced concreteness, involving the tendency to seek the ground of an intentional
relationship in some one or more of the embodiments of an information processing medium. This
analysis demonstrates that even simple intentional relationships emerge from a complex
23
interdependence of processes that produce specific absences. These absences embody, in the
negative, the constraints imposed on the physical substrates of thoughts and communications that
can be transferred from one substrate to another.
In this essay we have only provided the barest outline of the logical structure of an information
theory that would be sufficient to include intentional relationships. Even this has required
broadening the concept of intentionality considerably from its typical use in discussions of the
philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Massive complexity separates even simple cellular
forms of intentionality from human symbolically mediated intentionality, and the abstract
approach to biological phenomena that we have provided is far too simple to discuss even the
simplest living systems (but see the discussions in Deacon 2006; Deacon and Sherman, 2006).
Spanning this gap would take us far beyond the scope of this essay to the extent that it would
entail a re-examination of much contemporary neuroscience. Nevertheless, by providing an
account that expands traditional information theory—which is entirely agnostic to issues of
referentiality—to the point where we can see how it addresses some basic philosophical concerns
about intentionality and its ambiguous embodiment, we have opened up a new channel for
dialogue. We believe this provides some of the tools required to unify phenomenological and
scientific accounts of mental processes. We realize that this argument only establishes the
plausibility of a non-eliminativist physical theory of mental phenomena, and will need to be
significantly elaborated to make sense of the intentional experience of being human. It does,
however, suggest that this unification will not be accomplished by either denying intentional
phenomena or treating them as identical with some concrete substrate.
Rather than bringing phenomenological and physicalistic approaches together by appealing to

their common interest in embodiment, we have attempted the opposite: to find common ground
in the concept of absence. In this regard, our approach can be thought of as expanding the
physical sciences to accommodate the most troublesome feature of intentionality rather than
trying to make intentionality fit the limitations of an overly concrete interpretation of physical
relationships. We want a physical theory powerful enough to make sense of mental phenomena,
and can account for—rather than exclude—their most distinctive attributes.
It should come as no surprise that the key to expanding the physical sciences so that they can
accommodate the special characteristics of mental phenomena should come by virtue of an
elaboration of evolutionary theory. First, as we have shown, many features of biological systems
exhibit features that, if not intentional in the cognitive sense, at least involve relationships of
representation, communication, and adaptation which share many characteristic features in
common with the aboutness of thoughts. Second, since the time Darwin first demonstrated the
non-teleological character of natural selection, it has been recognized that this curious form of
causality could do much of the work of prior teleological assumptions, but without unopenable
black boxes. This is because the post hoc nature of this process is at root a variation on the theme
of final cause, in that that achieves adaptation by virtue of adaptive consequences (sometimes
described as the ‘law of effect’). But just as the mediaeval clarification of Aristotle’s enigmatic
conception replaced the nonexistent future with an antecedent represented possibility, the
Darwinian logic replaces antecedent representation of future aims with the transmission of only
those representations that are correlated with beneficial consequences (beneficial with respect to
the success of these production and transmission processes). It does this by virtue of the fact that
24
(genetic and phenotypic) representations with the least correlation with environmental
regularities will not be transmitted (reproduced). The evolutionary logic merely takes another
step back into absence from the representational theory of final causality.
Although this essay offers a critique of the embodiment gambit, it is mostly a pretext to suggest a
different path toward establishing the scientific and even materialistic legitimacy of intentional
phenomena (not that the legitimacy of the mental was ever in doubt for anyone but philosophers,
physicists, and cognitive scientists). So the embodied mind approach which we critique and our
argument for a disembodiment interpretation of intentionality are aligned with respect to this
common goal. We do not differ on the issue of the causal reality of intentional phenomena. Nor
do we differ about rejecting a fully disembodied subjective idealism. We agree that intentionality
must make sense in the physical world and through the medium of a physical brain and body as a
necessary substrate. We do not propose that intentionality or mental phenomena in general could
exist in the absence of embodiment. We offer only a figure/background shift in the effort to
establish the locus of intentionality with respect to these material substrates. In locating
intentionality in what is absent rather than what is present we have placed it in the same category
as concepts like adaptation and function, which we would argue also are more accurately located
in the negative space that selection and design processes create; i.e. the fittedness constraints and
boundary conditions that constitute function space.
The mystery of mental phenomena, then, is not enshrouded by ineffable metaphysics, strange
looking-glass quantum effects, or even intractable complexity, but rather simply by our intuitive
prejudice against thinking of causality in post hoc terms.
References
Aquinas, Thomas (1267-73/1952) Summa Theologia. (English translation reprinted in The Great
Books of the Western World, Vols. 19-20; 1952).
Boltzmann, L.(1886/1974). The second law of thermodynamics. Popular Schriften, Essay 3. In
S.G. Brush (Trans.) Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical problems.
Boston: Reidel. (Original work published in 1886).
Brentano, Franz (1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
Cashman, Tyrone (2006) What Connects the Map to the Territory? Biosemiotics (in press)
Clausius, Rudolf (1865). Ueber Vershiedene für die Anwendung bequeme formen der
Hauptgleichungen der mechanishen warmetheorie. Annalen der Physik und Chemie, 7, 389-
400.
Collier, John (2003) Hierarchical Dynamical Information Systems With a Focus on Biology.
Entropy 5: 100-124.
Deacon, Terrence (2006) Emergence: The hole at the wheel’s hub. In P. Clayton and P. Davies
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(eds.) The Re-emergence of Emergence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deacon, Terrence and Sherman, Jeremy (2006) How teleology emerged: bridging the gap from
physics to life. [In Press in John Michael Krois (ed.) Embodiment].
Dillon, M. C. (1988) Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2003) How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff , George and Johnson , Mark (1999) Philosophy In The Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its
Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J-M., eds. (1999) Naturalizing Phenomenology:
Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Polanyi, Michael (1968) Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160: 1308-1312.
Shannon, Claude and Weaver, Warren (1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
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Spinoza, Baruch (1677/1952) Ethics. Part I. Appendix (English translation reprinted in The
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Acknowledgements: The authors are indebted to Julie Hui, Jay Ogilvy, and James Haag for their
extensive editorial inputs as well as their contributions to the formulation of the ideas expressed
in this essay.
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Disembodiment and intentionality Deacon et al 2006

Disembodiment: Absence as the Root of Intentionality

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

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

1. Introduction: From final causality to intentionality

2. Embodiment and absence

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

This is a rough characterization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is a necessary

another state near maximum entropy.

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

1) Information potential: Aboutness is dependent on the physical features of a signal

5. Information and aboutness

6. From Shannon plus Boltzmann to Darwin

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

12) Adaptation as a form of aboutness: The boundary conditions on molecular and

14) Evolution generates aboutness: Evolution is a process in which aspects of a signal

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

6. The fallacy of misplaced aboutness

Rather than bringing phenomenological and physicalistic approaches together by appealing to

Brentano, Franz (1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.

(eds.) The Re-emergence of Emergence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dillon, M. C. (1988) Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Polanyi, Michael (1968) Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160: 1308-1312.

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