The quote made by a poster referencing another party's paper on Searle about being not natural, an artifact of the observer, raises some cautions to me even if I get the drift.
I think man is part of nature, is nature, and therefore arguments couched from the 'supernatural' perspective are faulty from the get go.
Take the hexagonal pattern of honeycombs. Nobody really knows yet how bees actually pull it off. There are hypotheses about the pheromone or chemical trail fading, and circle-walking they carry out with the hexagaonal shape being an emergent property. The hexagonal shape also happens to be one of the 'Close Packing' methods, HCP, or Hexagonal Close Packing.
I am re-reading Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe by Andrew Ilachinski published in 2001. I am on the chapter about possibly defining a new physics, "Information Physics", section 12.4 to be exact. Paraphrasing a bit, the term 'primordial information', or the notion that information exists independently of the semantics used to ascribe meaning to it. That "all observables found in nature are essentially 'data structures' that the universe uses to encode information with."
It goes on to remark that all computations are inherently physical processes (slide rule, electrons in computers) and that information is possibly more than just a concept, but one of the fundamental units woven into the very fabric of the universe.
I have become less of a reductionist as I get older, and I have been following Complexity Science since the 1980s/90s. I am starting to lean towards 'information' as not being just a concept, but something real and physical no matter how it is encoded or contained. I guess from a superficial point this puts me at odds with Searle, or the indirect quote of his works.
I'll have to read Searle; I've only learned of him via second-hand quotes, and his counters with Daniel Dennett.
I deeply appreciate your detailed response. Back to bees, they are natural and honeymaking is natural too, but only bees make honey. Something being natural does not imply some sort of universality in the form of natural law. Computation has a universal interpretation appeal to us, but it might also do so in the context of our observational reference frame.
