Yeah, those explanations of what you mean by 'explanation' are clear as mud! — Janus

They're not at all an "explanation of what I mean by explanation."

. . . seek to have meaning in the sense that the delivery of your creativity and its reception forms a closed, conserved system? — kudos

I have no idea what that is saying, really.

So you do work, labour, for a client. — kudos

Sometimes I work in a work-for-hire/journeyman capacity. Sometimes I work in more or less democratic or partnership capacities. Sometimes I'm the contractor and I have others working for me in a work-for-hire/journeyman capacity. Sometimes it's a combo of two or all three of these.

Besides profit, what are the characteristics of the the social exchange? — kudos

It would be very difficult to exhaustively list "the characteristics of the social exchange."

Do you receive different levels of individual satisfaction from having the identity of a composer, or receive greater insight into the lives of others? The world? — kudos

I'm not sure I understand the latter part of that. I get satisfaction out of doing what I consider good, creative work under the set of limitations at hand. (And there are always limitations, even if you're the boss and you're self-imposing them.)

But RL songs are not like mine. They use words that have been used before, and notes that have been used before, but it is still reasonable to describe them as new and different — Pattern-chaser

Early on, I wrote: "What I mean by 'rearranging' is that with the car, for example, you're taking some metal and plastic and rubber and electronics, etc. that already exist and you're putting them into different relationships with each other to make something different."

Something has been created, not just rearranged. — Pattern-chaser

I'm describing "creation" as a rearrangement. I'm not saying that something hasn't been created.

My point is that Terrapin's division into mental and non-mental - which I appreciate him providing - is very problematic, and for his purposes untenable because inconsistent. — tim wood

There's nothing problematic or inconsistent about it. Among the things in the world are brains, shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, etc. It's a simple matter to locate properties/phenomena in each as opposed to the others (or as opposed to all others). That way you don't try making sauerkraut with your shoes, you don't try sealing a letter with a cabbage, and you don't look for a rock's evaluation of a musical piece.

The crux of the difference here (as I’m seeing it) is that Tim is asserting that mental activity is ultimately based in the physical world, whereas Terrapin is asserting that there is something fundamentally different about mental activity. — EricH

No, I'm not saying anything at all like that.* It's simply that we can create categories like "Fender amplifiers" as opposed to "everything else," or "Trees" as opposed to "everything else," etc.

The reason for bothering to do that with mind and everything else, whereas we don't usually do it with Fender amplifiers and everything else, is that (a) people, including frequently in a philosophical context, tend to reference mental stuff for obvious reasons, including that they want to talk about knowledge, about values, etc., and (b) people frequently say very confused things about mental phenomena versus other things, where they project mental phenomena onto other things, akin to supposing that you could use a tree as an amplifier.

(* Well, or if I'm saying something like that, it's in the same sense that I'd say "there's something fundamentally different about bookshelves and bacteria and stars and automobiles, etc."--a la everything has unique properties, and we can't just ignore that and pretend that everything has all properties in common.)

How do you know anything about the "objective" world? Not do, but how. — tim wood

That's very simple: you observe it via your senses.

I'd love to know, but you haven't told me. I know only that you work with 'creative' people, and that it has something to do with music. — Pattern-chaser

I've made a living as a musician, composer and arranger since the early 80s. I've done a lot of film work, but not only. I've done some film work outside of a musical context, too. I also do some visual art, and I've written fiction, including some scripts.

No it isn't. Everything you say is true, but it doesn't describe what creative people do. I.e. it doesn't describe the part of what they do that is creative. — Pattern-chaser

So what do you think that I'm doing as a creative person other than what I'm describing?

Should people like me be registered predators even if we abide by the law regardless of our nature? — THX1138

I'm not in favor of anyone having to advertise/"register" criminal backgrounds or inclinations period.

if someone is too dangerous to be around everyday Joes they need to be in a separated population. Otherwise we need to not handicap them with any sort of stigma. This includes former felons. They shouldn't have to disclose that fact when trying to obtain work, for example.

Fair enough. So you acknowledge the experience of redness? A what-it-is-like to be a human being? — g0d

Yes. I think those phenomena are obvious.

So you mean something like mental and physical, right? Even then, I don't think it's a clean distinction, however usual as a first approximation. — g0d

I'm a physicalist, so I wouldn't say mental and physical, but mental and non-mental, or alternately, a subset of brain function (which is what "mental" is, physically) and everything else.

The first song and first painting would be no different. You're taking materials at hand and arranging them into something different.

Again, this is not at all a judgment about anything. I don't know how I can stress that to successfully get it across.

This is what creativity is. It's what we're actually doing when we're doing creative things.

Could you clarify first what "stored information" versus "stored energy" would even be? I'm not sure what sort of thing(s) you're thinking of. What would be examples of each? Are you talking about something like a computer file (a la magnetic patterns on a disc, say) versus potential energy (a la a wound spring, say)?

In your view then, would art purely for other's sake be a bastardization from it's true aims unless it served oneself in some way? — kudos

No, I'd never say anything like that. I'm the guy rather diametrically opposed to any judgmental normatives like that.

What "rules for explanations"? Are you going to propose that they must be in physicalist terms to count as explanations? That would be very convenient for you. — Janus

Hopefully this link will work for you. I've posted variations on this many times, because it's a crucial issue that never gets addressed (not just here, but in philosophy in general):

https://thephilosophyforum.com/search?Search=explanations&expand=yes&child=&forums=&or=Relevance&discenc=&mem=&tag=&pg=1&date=All&Checkboxes%5B%5D=titles&Checkboxes%5B%5D=WithReplies&or=Relevance&user=Terrapin+Station&disc=&Checkboxes%5B%5D=child

Most of the posts at the top of those search results are about this. I get tired of having to retype the same thing over and over in slightly different wording, so that's why I just gave you the search results.

You are going to use some notion of language as communication between your homunculus and our homunculi, — Banno

Since you're not just using "homunculus"/"homunculi" in a "decorative literary" manner--at least it doesn't seem like you are since you then go on to talk about denying them--I'd need to clarify just what "homunculus"/"homunculi" is amounting to. Otherwise I can't say whether I'm claiming or denying anything like that.

Re "private language," I'm not at all denying private language. Remember that I think that Wittgenstein is mostly garbage. I'm not a fan.

Discussions would proceed better here if there were some interest in different ideas, because of a genuine curiosity, rather than everyone just wanting to "prove everyone else wrong."

The world may not be, but everything we do with, in, or about it is brain based. — tim wood

To do something with it, there has to be an it. Most of the world is the it. The division is between our brains functioning in a mental way and the it--everything else that exists.

It's not meant as a value judgment, or as something with value connotations, although it is meant to "demystify" or "demythologize" the process to an extent. When you create something, you're simply taking pre-existing materials and putting them into some different relationship, one step at a time. That's all there is to it, really.

It's not saying that works are unoriginal or anything like that. We make originality judgments based on (a notion of) whether the creator was trying to emulate someone else's work in some large-scale way. (Smaller-scale or limited-aspect emulation is given a pass, and often lauded, as "influence").

Designing a car involves identifying some existing components/assemblies and creating others. They aren't really arranged, because they don't fit together like Lego. They aren't re-arranged because they haven't been arranged before, and because there's only one place they fit. The steering wheel can't be rearranged onto an axle.... :wink: — Pattern-chaser

What I mean by "rearranging" is that with the car, for example, you're taking some metal and plastic and rubber and electronics, etc. that already exist and you're putting them into different relationships with each other to make something different.

I don't know enough about software to describe it in these terms, but that's all we're doing when we create musical things, and visual art things, and fictional things (films, novels, etc.) and cars and so on.

Synonyms for "phenomenon" include occurrence, event, happening, fact, situation, circumstance, experience, case, incident, episode, sight, appearance, thing. (Source--Google dictionary)

On your definition of subjective/objective, everything is subjective - how not? — tim wood

That's not at all the case, since most of the world isn't brain phenomena.

Why can't we have discussions around here that aren't so patronizing, by the way?

Did you award Up a gold star?

Are all things either objective or subjective? — Matias

Yes. The two categories exhaust all existents.

That was simple. ;-)

Sure. Aren't you rearranging those, then?

You could make it, "Is it possible to develop a heuristic that can predict widespread consensuses about what's interesting, at least within a limited milieu?" That might work for some milieus, like mathematics, as you note.

But the "it's interesting" part is still not objective/it's still a matter of individual judgment.

IME, design involves much more than rearrangement of existing building blocks. Often (usually), the building blocks themselves must be designed and implemented before they can be used in the main project. — Pattern-chaser

What are you building the building blocks out of?

Re subject/predicate form, it's simply a matter of (a) what we're referring to/what we're pointing at, and (b) what we want to say about what we're pointing at.

Thinking about the world, including observed, already-extant language use, structures language.

(Re "substance," the idea of "substance" sans properties is nonsensical.)

Single-celled organism? Less cells to worry about.

This account seems to assume that the necessary 'parts' are already available, and only their arrangement, relative to one another, remains to be done. This is much less than the creativity of taking a problem - a problem which has not previously been solved, or we'd use the existing solution - and creating a solution. — Pattern-chaser

The parts are things like pitches, durations (rhythms), timbres, etc. Or colors, shapes, textures. Or characters (with parts like personality traits, etc.) and conflicts/dilemmas and locations, etc.

I don't know enough about programming to mention what would make sense as parts, but it would be something similar--some sort of cache of unique command words for the coding language in question, some cache of logical statements with particular syntax, etc.

If you're needing to solve a particular problem, yeah, that also requires that you rearrange the stuff you're rearranging in a way that it has a pretty specific result . . . which we unfortunately can't at all guarantee in the arts, so we can't focus on that in the same way, although there are some rough limits to meet more broadly-defined ends that we can apply at least. (For example, we're not going to create free jazz a la Albert Ayler for Britney Spears to sing over if we want to try to retain Britney Spears' audience, anything like her current level of success, etc.)

As someone who does creative work for a living, working with lots of other creative folks, and who has done that for decades, I don't really think it amounts to more than that.

You're basically rearranging things and seeing what happens when you "put this there" and "try removing this from here" etc.

Well, what I meant to ask was is if could exist (or if somebody invented) any "automatic" and "objective" way to recognize meaningful mathematical theorems (or theories) when they are expressed in a formal language.
Probably the answer is NO. But if there is no such thing as an objective "value" of a mathematical sentence, how can mathematicians be able to recognize an "interesting" new theory when they see one? — Mephist

The probability of the answer being "No" is 1.

"Interesting" is a judgment that an individual makes.

Sometimes it seems to me that there are people who don't understand how they can make judgments about anything. Maybe there's some medical condition that makes judgments difficult or even absent?

Creativity: basically rearranging things and seeing what it would be like if I put baubles on it versus removing baubles.

If "'objective' is 'whatever one is willing to accept'" then how does that do any of the work that people usually want to do with the notion of objectivity?

So, a physicalist account (which is itself always a logical and semantic, as well as a physical, entity) would be an account in the language of physics. — Janus

Physicalism is NOT subservience in any regard to the science of physics.

By the way, re saying "Again this shows your physicalist prejudice," I'm a physicalist (and a direct realist, and a nominalist, etc.). I think that nonphysicalism is incoherent, it's obviously incorrect, and you've done nothing yet to make it coherent. So obviously I'm going to have a "physicalist prejudice," because I want to say things that are correct/accurate about what the world is like. The alternate views are obviously wrong, and defending them via used-car-salesman/Christian apologetics-styled tactics underscores what a mess they are.

There was a typo there: it should have read "physicalist account". My point was just that the physical form in which all accounts are given is irrelevant, in terms of their mere physical configurations, to their meaning. Of course this is not to say that the conveyance of meaning is not effected by recognizable physical configurations, but to make the fairly obvious point that there is no necessary, or necessarily physically recognizable, connection between physical conformation and meaning. — Janus

He asked you what would be the alternative. You didn't tell him, aside from telling us what it wouldn't be.

but they are semantically and logically identical which shows that no coherent physicalist account of logic or semantics is possible. — Janus

You can claim they're logically and semantically identical, of course.

Now can you explain how they are, explain how that works, etc.? We'll go over those rules for explanations first. Ready?

Physicalist accounts are not themselves physical, — Janus

Can you get to the ontological account of what they are in unique, non-negative terms already?

you would need to make sense of that claim by explaining the two-ness of the brain state in physical terms. Can you do that? — Janus

Yes, but first we need to go over what the "rules" for explanations are going to be. Can you do that with me?

Also, are you going to get to your alternate nonphysicalist account in terms that aren't just negations once we do that? Or are you never going to get around to that?

Then, since you are talking about a completely different thing to the rest of us, why should we pay you any attention? — Banno

"Not identical" does not amount to "completely different" (in the sense of "completely dissimilar").

Why not treat your argument as a reductio, — Banno

Because I'm not saying anything contradictory.

since it makes language impossible — Banno

That's not at all the case. It simply has different claims about how language works--the underlying mechanics of it, than your account. Your account is not the only account possible, of course.

Numbers are something we do; they consist in our counting and calculating. — Banno

Not at all incompatible with my view of course.

Knowing what 2 is, is not having a particular brain-state, — Banno

So you don't agree with the standard jtb characterization of knowledge?

I'm not paying enough attention to sports stuff I'm trying to watch, so further replies will have to wait until my morning.