Anything extant is (or "has") properties.

I'd not be able to make sense out of saying that something exists (in whatever regard) but has no properties.

First, I wouldn't say that any belief or expression is unethical.

But in general racism is considered unethical because it's conflated with actions rooted in racial discrimination--actions of unfair treatment based solely on mistaken beliefs about "race."

why you want to make such a clear removal of the use of the ink-mark pattern from the actual pattern itself — Isaac

Did you read the part where I said that meanings aren't the same as patterns?

I'm still not clear on what you'd mean by shared, but my view is that objective reality has nothing at all to do with agreement.

Do you think the fact that a hammer is used to drive nails is a property of the hammer? — Isaac

No, that wouldn't just be a property of the hammer. It would be a property of the hammer, the nails, the air between the hammer and the nails, the person or machine swinging the hammer, etc.

It's a question. If no properties of a hammer only exist in the mind of the person observing, then it's utility for driving nails (being a property of the hammer) must somehow reside in the hammer, yes? — Isaac

That's not sorting this out. Asking "So it's utility . . . " suggests that I'd say it's not a property of the hammer, right?

I thought you just responded positively that agreement doesn't give anything more normative weight.

Re "shared mental," shared in what sense?

I don't know if you're going to respond, and I shouldn't move on yet, but this is important:

Hence my question. Are you saying that the fact that the word 'dog' was used to refer to dogs, is present only in the mind of someone recollecting it, such that if humans ceased to exist it would cease to be the case that 'dog' was used to refer to dogs? — Isaac

The disagreement with S isn't at all about "The word 'dog' WAS used to refer to dogs." It's not about something historical.

The disagreement with S is that in S's view, the word dog has a meaning--not past tense, but present tense--at time T2, even if no persons exist at time T2. He's not saying something about how the word was used there. He's saying that the word has a meaning at T2, which is a correct meaning at T2 (not a correct meaning about or in the context of T1, where we're simply reporting usage at a past time).

The reason I wrote it that way, by the way, was because you said this:

" your position with regards to properties of objects which exist only in the mind of the observer. "

That's not my position. I didn't say anything like that.

So I said, "No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer."

It wouldn't make sense to read my "No" as a disagreement followed by an implied comma or period in the context of what I had quoted from you.

No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer. — Terrapin Station


So it's utility for driving nails is not a property of a hammer? — Isaac

Let's slow down for a minute, because I don't want posts to keep getting longer, especially if I'm having to repeat stuff I already said, explain things I already explained, etc.

I wrote, "No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer." There's no comma there. Another way to write that would be, "There aren't any properties of something like a hammer that exist only in the mind of an observer."

You responded with "So it's utility for driving nails is not a property of the hammer."

How would that make sense as a response to what I said?

Well get to the rest after we settle this part up.

people might use the term 'objective reality'; I was just asking if anyone might post what they thought would be a good definition for that term. — wax

subjective = mental
objective = extramental, or the complement of mental (in other words, everything else)

"Objective reality" - reality aside from minds/mental activity

I'm trying to understand your position with regards to properties of objects which exist only in the mind of the observer. — Isaac

No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer.

Meaning isn't a property of objects like hammers. Meaning is a mental activity that we engage in.

Re a word like "dog," as a word, objectively, it's only a sound or a set of ink marks on paper, a set of pixels on a screen, etc. Meaning is not a property of sounds or ink marks, etc.

Patterns occur both mentally and extramentally. Nothing is really a homogeneous soup. And history, as in past events, doesn't actually exist. It existed. It no longer exists.

Anything that exists is physical. Everything has properties. Everything has physical interactions with other things and has physical effects. A hammer waved in the air does affect both the hammer and the air. You can't do anything with no physical effects on the items involved, and everything "does something," everything extant is dynamic.

So where is the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails? If humans capable of recollecting the fact ceased to exist would it cease to be the case that the hammer was used to hit nails? — Isaac

Again, this has nothing to do with meaning. You're changing the topic from post to post. Just pointing that out if we want to stay on topic.

Anyway, the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails would be in the evidence such a the microscopic fractures (or whatever exactly the physical effects would be--I don't know the actual details for that).

That has nothing to do with us/our existence, and it also has nothing to do with meaning.

Right, so you're happy for the pattern to be a property of the text in an objective sense, — Isaac

"Patterns" are simply the fact that not everything is a completely uniform, homogeneous "soup," especially when irregularities have repeated similarities. They don't imply anything about meaning.

History, or the past, isn't an existent property of anything. The past existed. It no longer exists. There would be properties of the hammer that are evidence that it was used to hit nails, but it would be a very loose manner of speaking to say that that "history is presently in the hammer (or anything else)." The present properties of the hammer might include, say, microscopic fracture patterns, that we could then use to deduce that it must have been used to strike nails (or something similar).

You claimed that the pattern is only in the mind of the person observing the pattern, — Isaac

Nope. "Pattern" isn't the same as "meaning." I didn't use the word "pattern" at all. If in your view, meanings are patterns, period, and that's all they are, that's fine for you, but you can't graft that unusual view onto someone else's comments as if they must think the same thing you do, as if they must use words just the same way that you do.

I was only saying something about meaning qua meaning. Meaning in the sense of semantics/semantic content. I wasn't saying anything in general about realism/idealism. I'm a naive/direct realist in general. Apples exist in the external(-to-minds) world. The meaning of "apple" (or of apples if that's the sort of thing that someone applies meanings to) does not exist outside of minds, because meaning is a mental activity, just like desires or emotions are.

I don't see how this differs from Solipsism. The only reason we see an apple on the table is because we assign some meaning to the breaking of the symmetry of the white tablecloth at the point it becomes red apple. It's all just 'stuff' without our meaning applied to it. Yet we do not act as if solipsism were the case, so I can't see how theories which assume it could be much use to us. — Isaac

I don't see how you'd believe it has anything to do with solipsism whatsoever. Solipsism is "the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind."

I didn't say anything even remotely resembling or implying that.

It's not even "meaning solipsism" if you'd want to coin that term, because I'm not saying that there's just one person doing this or that we can only know that there's one person doing it. You could say that it's "meaning idealism" if you like, though.

I also don't at all agree with you that the way that we cleave things perceptually has any necessary connection at all to meaning.

If a thousand people witness something; the individual witness accounts are still subjective, aren't they. — wax

Yes. One of the most common misunderstandings of the subjective/objective distinction is the belief that it has something to do with disagreement and agreement. The distinction doesn't have anything to do with that. And the belief that it does, especially when accompanied by a normative attraction to the objective side, as it almost always is, is a reflection of a tendency for folks to accept the argumentum ad populum fallacy.

It's important to stress here that the distinction only has to do with whether something occurs mentally or not. It's not an implied judgment about the comparative value of anything or anything else like that.

At no point is there any objective evidence that there has been an event, — wax

That I don't agree with, but the disagreement is about the term "evidence." Some people see that term as necessarily epistemological. I don't. And I don't believe that it's commonly used that way. The term is ontological. Evidence exists whether we're aware of it or not. That's why we search for evidence, we discover evidence, we collect evidence, etc. Those phrases wouldn't make any sense if we only used the term epistemically. We can't discover something that we create and that doesn't obtain objectively. We create/construct it instead. So "evidence" is commonly used simply to refer to the objective properties of things, direct or indirect.

So, you claim there is no difference between an ancient tablet and an object that displays naturally produced marks; that both embody no inherent meaning, that meanings are arbitrarily assigned to both, and that researchers who claim to have deciphered ancient texts are merely assigning arbitrary meanings? The researchers couldn't possibly have "cracked the code" and reproduced a translation of the ancient text, because the script on the manuscript or tablet is simply meaningless? — Janus

Re your comments, I'd say that:

(1) nothing whatsoever "embodies" inherent meaning (other than minds, at least),

(2) meanings are not arbitrarily assigned to anything (assuming that you're implying that it's random (or "random" if we don't buy that anything is literally/ontologically random))

I don't know if my use of the word "arbitrary" led you to these comments. The idea behind "It's possible if there are people present for them to assign meanings to any arbitrary thing" and similar phrases is that there is no restriction on the things in question--anything we consider could be something that people would assign meaning to. It doesn't imply that people are arbitrarily assigning meanings.

There are no meanings "in" anything but minds. There is no "embodied" meaning in anything other than minds (the embodiment there is via brains, since minds are identical to subsets of brain structure/function). No inherent meaning in anything other than minds, etc. But that doesn't imply that there's anything random(/"random") to the way that minds assign meanings to things (at least not normally--I wouldn't say it's impossible to "randomly" assigning meanings to some things, but that's not at all what people usually do).

And as I said above, in a reply to creativesoul, which is pertinent to "cracking codes": "there are interpretations that allow consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts, where that can be opposed to interpretations that do not allow that." Part of what we consider to be cracking a code is that we've arrived at an interpretation that allows consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts. That in no way implies that the meaning is in the texts in question. The meaning is in our heads.

A potential decipherability is still a decipherability and indicates the presence of meaning to be deciphered, — Janus

It doesn't indicate the presence of meaning (to be deciphered).

It's simply that just in case there are people present, and those people think about the phenomena in question so that they assign meanings to it, there are meanings. It's possible if there are people present for them to assign meanings to any arbitrary thing.

Machines are built, but organisms grow. The organic and the mechanical are different. — Wayfarer

If the structure and processes are the same, it doesn't make a difference how it was achieved.

Re the rest of the comment, dismissal of nominalism aside, the fact that brains can do "the same things" in different ways is no sort of argument against physicalism. And neither is that we don't have some blueprint yet.

Oh you know Joe, Bob, Suzy, Liz, Brian, and Barry. — schopenhauer1

So it's not a common enough thing to argue that we could find a record of it anywhere?

all known laws of science are mathematical. — TheMadFool

It's just that that's the language we're using to describe phenomena.

If we used a "natural language" instead, we could say, "All known laws of science are in English."

It's just like the world being in "black & white" with black and white film, or the world being only shades of red/pink/white if we only have red and white paint.

How much did my thought weigh? — Andrew M

Didn't we do this already? (Or was it someone else?--I don't recall). It doesn't make sense to talk about the weight of all physical phenomena. I didn't pick apart each property he was listing in the post, and I didn't talk about the fact that mental phenomena are not identical to the entirety of the brain at all times--it's a subset of brain structure/function, because I knew it was pointless to get into details with him.

If the universe exists without conscious minds inhabiting it, then of course it must embody meaningful information. Which would just mean that there is information there which would be meaningful to a conscious mind if there was a conscious mind. Why is this so difficult to understand? — Janus

It's easy to understand that you're reifying a potential.

Is anyone here arguing that the universe would hold meaningful information without conscious minds existing to make it “meaningful information”? — Noah Te Stroete

That's S's (the thread-starter) view.

So... when looking at a text how do you know that it's been correctly deciphered? — creativesoul

My answer to that is "there are no correct interpretations."

There are interpretations that either match (if more or less exact with respect to a particular expression) or that people interpret to match (if more paraphrased in one's opinion) what other people, including the author, explain as an interpretation.

And there are interpretations that allow consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts, where that can be opposed to interpretations that do not allow that.

But neither of those amount to an interpretation being correct.

Relevant quote from Rene Descartes:

if there were machines that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, nonetheless, they are not genuinely human.

The first is that they would never be able to use speech, or other signs composed by themselves, as we do to express our thoughts to others. For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs—for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what one wishes to say to it, or if it were touched somewhere else, it would cry out that it was being hurt, and so on. But it could not arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of everything that is said in its presence, as even the most unintelligent human beings can do.

The second means is that, even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than any of us, they would infallibly fail in others. Thus one would discover that they did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action. — Rene Descartes


Discourse on Method, 1637. — Wayfarer

If we were to artificially build a human out of just the same materials that naturally-formed humans are made of, in just the same relations, undergoing just the same processes, then they would be genuinely human.

That's building a machine. We'd just be building it out of materials and in a manner that we do not usually build machines.

We don't have the knowledge or technology to actually carry this out yet, but it's maybe not too far off.

Mathematics is an abstracted way of thinking about relations, with some basis in external-world relations as we observe and think about them (which doesn't imply that any mathematics is identical to external-world relations, of course), but the bulk of it is extrapolated from that, creating a sort of construction/game upon that in an erector-set manner.

Because of that, there's no reason to say that any mathematical statement is universal.

As it is, no mathematical statement is universally constructed by humans, but we have very stringent socialization procedures in place to enforce conformity to the norms.

It's easiest to understand if we add theoretical stuff to it. But it's important to remember that the theoretical stuff is just that. So from that perspective, a popular way of accounting for it is to say that it's things we experience/that we're aware of without experiencing/being aware of it being an experience or without there also being an attendant phenomenon of us being an individual who is aware of something, who is in a relation with something else, something not us.

The point is that for these phenomena, to arrive at "well this is really just an experience I'm having" or "this is me experiencing something that's not me, filtering it through my perspectival apparatus, where what I'm really experiencing is a representation that my mind is creating," or anything like that, we have to be doing theoretical work. For these phenomena, the stuff in quotation marks above are not the phenomena that appear. The phenomena that appear are just the sidewalk, just a computer monitor, or whatever.

You really don't remember? — S

Really. (And people expect me to remember something like a Schopenhauer book I read 40 years ago., haha.)

Sometimes I can't even remember what movie I watched yesterday (I'll remember it when I look it up, but offhand, sometimes it's a challenge to remember what it was without looking it up). I would blame it on age, but I've always been like that.

Just speaking of conscious experience, if you notice something, you experience it. — Michael Ossipoff

Not all appearances are of us experiencing something though. Not all appearances are of us, as subjects, experiencing something. I'm just talking about appearances there, not what's really going on.

I deny that they are identical by pointing out that share nothing in common and you retort by re-asserting that they are identical. Nice one! — Theorem

If "they share nothing in common" is sufficient as a comment, why isn't "they are identical" sufficient? Why should I be doing more than you're doing?

Look, brains are wet, solid, made of neurons, weigh about 3 pounds on average, have a volume of about 1450 cubic centimeters on average, etc. Thoughts, feelings, sensations and values literally have none of those properties — Theorem

Likewise, here, I simply have to say, "Thoughts, feelings, sensations and values literally have those properties"--why wouldn't that be a sufficient comment if your denial is a sufficient comment?

Yes. It's not deterministic.

Re looking for an advocate, presumably you guys mean something other than someone saying "I'm in favor of political correctness," right?

Also, would you agree that there are cases where it's pretty widespread/mainstream to advocate people losing jobs, say, because of something they said on twitter, photos on Facebook, etc.?

I think it's possible for someone to "truly love" everyone.

Can't we be talking about loving events, actions, situations, etc., too, though?

No, they're not. — Theorem

Yeah, they are. What they have in common with brain states is that they're identical to them. That seems painfully obvious to me.

Because some people argue that change is not real, while others argue that permanence is not real. — Theorem

So just in case someone argues that x is not real, then x needs to be explained?

yea - My posit was they really can't. — Rank Amateur

I was agreeing with you. "A fortiori because I don't buy the notion of unconscious mental phenomena" was an emphasis of that, where I was trying to imagine how someone might even say that it would be possible.

There are people who argue that by not having children, are depriving people of pleasure, — schopenhauer1

I'm asking who, though. (As in I was hoping you could give some actual examples, because this seems very dubious to me.)

Anyways, it usually is accepted that we don't want to impose suffering on others. — schopenhauer1

Okay, but no one is going to accept that they don't want to impose suffering on a nonexistent person. They'd say that the person has to exist for that to even be a consideration.

can you explain to me how prostitution increases love of yourself or of others? — Rank Amateur

First, love is simply an emotional disposition towards things, right? A very complex and variable emotional disposition (enough so that it's probably not a good idea to tag such a wide range of things with the same term), but it's an emotional disposition nonetheless. So it would just be a matter of having that emotional disposition towards oneself (and others, possibly, including the prostitute) when engaging in prostitution/solicitation.

What concept in our discussion would you say in "unconscious mental content" — Rank Amateur

I was trying to imagine ways that it might make sense to say that someone is "lying to themselves."