In the two-stage model, ontological chance or indeterminism of quantum mechanics is limited to the free generation of alternative possibilities.

In the second stage, the evaluation of alternatives is an adequately (statistically) determined process that leads to a willed act of self-determination.

This should be all that a compatibilist could want. It adds the fact that our actions are not pre-determined from moments before the decision process begins.

See The Cosmic Creation Process.

The twenty amino acids move about randomly in a cell, the consequence of thermal and quantum noise. Attached to them are tiny bits of transfer RNA, each with three letters of the genetic code that identify them. They bump randomly into the ribosome, which may be moving along a sequence of the genetic code written in the messenger RNA sent from the cell nucleus, signaling that more of a specific protein or enzyme is needed. The random motion shows us that no organized or coherent information is present in the unattached tRNAs that could cause something from the bottom up to control the higher level.

Notice the absurdity of the idea that the random motions of the transfer RNA molecules (green in the video), each holding a single amino acid (red), are carrying the pre-determined information about where they belong in the protein. Reductionism is nonsense.

It is the information processing of the higher-level ribosome that is in control. As the ribosome moves along the string of mRNA, it reads the next three-letter codon and waits for a tRNA with the matching anti-codon to collide randomly. With over 60 codons for the 20 amino acids, it might be some time before the desired amino acid shows up. Note that it is the high speed of the random thermal motions that allows this process to proceed rapidly.

See The Cosmic Creation Process.

When a single neuron fires, the active potential rapidly changes the concentration of sodium (Na+) ions inside the cell and potassium (K+) ions outside the cell.

Within milliseconds, thousands of sodium-potassium ion transporters in the thin lipid bilayer of the cell wall must move billions of those ions, two or three at a time between inside and outside the cell wall, to get the neuron ready to fire again.

All the individual ions, atoms, and molecules in the cell are moving rapidly in random directions. The indeterministic motions of the ions randomly move some near the pump opening, where quantum collaborative forces can capture them in a lock-and-key structure. The idea that the physical/chemical base level contains enough information in the motion of its atoms and molecules to cause and explain the operations of the higher levels of life and mind is simply absurd.

The emergent biology of a sodium-potassium pump exerts downward causation on the ions, powered by ATP energy carriers (feeding on negative entropy).

The sodium-potassium pump in our neurons is as close to a Maxwell’s Demon as anything we are ever likely to see.

When a ribosome assembles 330 amino acids in four symmetric polypeptide chains (globins), each globin traps an iron atom in a heme group at the center to form the hemoglobin protein. This is downward causal control of the amino acids, the heme groups, and the iron atoms by the ribosome. The ribosome is an example of Erwin Schrödinger's emergent "order out of order," life "feeding on the negative entropy" of digested food.

The random motions of the molecules in the cytosol insure that there is no organized "bottom-up" causation directing the ribosome.

Notice the absurdity of the idea that the random motions of the transfer RNA molecules (green in the video at right), each holding a single amino acid (red), are carrying pre-determined information of where they belong in the protein.

When 200 million of the 25 trillion red blood cells in the human body die each second, 100 million new hemoglobins must be assembled in each of 200 million new blood cells . With the order of a few thousand bytes of information in each hemoglobin, this is 10 thousand x 100 million x 200 million = 2 x 10²⁰ bits of information per second, a million times more information processing than today's fastest computer CPU.

The ribosome is an information-processing biological system that has emerged from the lower level of chemistry and physics to exert downward causation on the atomic and molecular components needed to manufacture hemoglobin.

Jakobson's work on communications functions appeared in Thomas Sebeok's 1960 book, Style in Language.

Writing about ten years after Claude Shannon, and making no specific reference to his theory of the communication of information, Jakobson's diagrams clearly reflect Shannon's influence. Jakobson distinguished six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process.

Notes:

1. referential (: the denotative or connotative "aboutness," contextual information, the "third person," someone or something the message is about)
2. aesthetic/poetic (: information )
3. emotive (: the addressee's self-expression, attitude, intention, first person)
4. conative (: vocative or imperative addressing of receiver, second person)
5. phatic (: no information, checking channel working, are you still there?)
6. metalingual (: "about" the language itself, checking code working, agreement on the meanings of words)

Jakobson's famous but mysterious dictum "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination" presages the fall of Saussure's synchronic, time-independent structuralism to the post-structuralist and post-modernist diachronic view, notably Jacques Derrida's "différance" whose meaning of deferral can only be seen and not heard, to displace the Platonic privileging of voice over text.

Derrida showed that meaning is deferred, disseminated, that Saussure's claim that meaning is "différence" is not the whole story. And Roland Barthes showed the dyadic Saussurean s/S becomes the "circle of signifiers" s/Z if one is trapped in Jakobson's "selection axis" of looking up words in a dictionary of dead (non-evolving) languages.

In his book, A Theory of Semiotics, written between 1967 and 1974, Umberto Eco rewrote the "usual communications model" as above (p.141), with strong influences from Claude Shannon and possibly Roman Jakobson.

He wrote:

The information of the message is only reduced by the addressee when he selects a definite interpretation.

i vitelli dei romani sono belli
"Go Vitellius, to the sound of war of the Roman gods?"
"The lambs of the Romans are beautiful?"

Immanuel Kant wrote this famous chiasmos (figure of speech)

Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer.
Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.

KrV B 75.16. Note that Kant had earlier (B 74.19) used "Begriffe ohne Anschauungen" so his chiasmos might have
been symmetric before Peirce. His "ohne Inhalt" is unfortunate. Everything without content is empty!

Charles Sanders Peirce adapted this for a beautifully symmetric chiasmos about the fundamental dualism.

If Materialism without Idealism is blind,
Idealism without Materialism is void.

With a nod to Kant and Peirce, we can say

Kantcepts without Peircepts are empty.
Peircepts without Kantcepts are blind.

And although Freedom and Values are not a dualism, they too require one another and we can observe,

Freedom without Values is Absurd (Continental Existentialism).
Values without Freedom are Worthless (British Utilitarianism).

Link to this presentation: http://informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Biosemiotics/

Email me: BobDoyle@InformationPhilosopher.com or rodoyle@fas.harvard.edu