So I don’t yet understand how your arguments can support the reality of different subjects sometimes sharing the same meaning. — javra
No two subjects will ever experience identical phenomenal information at any given time, this because each will be a unique first person point of view (nor will the same subject ever experience two identical bodies of phenomenal information during the entirety of its lifetime—but I’ll drop this second line of argument for now as regards stable meaning over time). — javra
Then, how does your argument not result in a solipsism regarding the body of meaning that any individual subject holds?
Seems to me this very conversation would then be nonsensical as a conversation since no meaning whatsoever would be common to us (i.e., the same relative to each of us). — javra
Abstractions can only be expressed as "concrete particulars of physicality"; what can they be apart from that? Even when you think an abstraction, the thinking of it would, according to current neuroscience, consist in a concrete particular neurological process.
Is something being a "product of mind" somehow different from it being a "product of brain"? If so, what precisely would that difference consist in? — Janus
(Actually I read an interesting comment the other day on the etymological between 'idiosyncratic' and 'idiot'. An 'idiot' wasn't originally someone who was intellectually disabled, but someone who spoke in a language nobody else could understand.) — Wayfarer
Teacher writes a problem on the board, and I have to solve the problem. The chalk marks on the board are surely physical, but the algebraic problem that I have to solve, comprises the relationships between ideas, I would have thought. — Wayfarer
The point is that a lack of meaningfulness is as much a matter of interpretation as the presence of meaning. Which blows a big hole in any belief in a "Platonic realm of meaning" — apokrisis
are you suggesting there can be a pile of pebbles that is not arranged in any particular way? — Srap Tasmaner
Certainly number, laws. conventions, logic and the like don't exist as objects of the senses. However they certainly exist as phenomena, — Janus
we cannot think of any intelligible way in which they could exist apart from objects of the senses; the idea simply makes no sense. — Janus
You calling me an idiot? — Metaphysician Undercover
Does the algebraic problem deal with the relationships between ideas, or does it deal with the relationship between symbols? I think the latter. — Metaphysician Undercover
There are rules concerning the relationships between symbols, which must be followed in the logical process. — Metaphysician Undercover
a pile of pebbles does not convey any information, whereas something spelled out in pebbles might. — Wayfarer
Communication of an abstraction via concrete physical particulars is not the abstraction that is being communicated via concrete physical particulars. — javra
the imagining of this can only be a product of minds but not of mind-devoid brains. — javra
I can hardly wait to be explained how hallucinations, too, consist of physical information — javra
physicalism being only one such possible ontology of mind amongst numerous others. — javra
I can look at the symbols and tell you quite clearly, 'x' is on the left hand side of 'y', and about an inch apart. But ask me what is the value of x, given that y is such and such - then I have to do the math, that is the domain of ideas. — Wayfarer
This is the whole point of Searle's Chinese Room argument - you can logically execute a series of instructions to translate Chinese, without knowing what they mean. In which case, you haven't grasped the ideas - which illustrates my point. — Wayfarer
Logic is the relationship of ideas - surely you of all people aren't going to disagree with this. Otherwise I might revise the above opinion. ;-) — Wayfarer
It is inorganic precisely because it is not ordered in the way that living things are ordered, and so the distinction between symbol and matter is not evident in it. — Wayfarer
You're just restricting the word "information" to mean "something a person thought of", making it a synonym for "semantic content". On your usage, the senses have nothing to do with information and that's patently absurd. — Srap Tasmaner
They don't exist as phenomena. That is the crucial point. — Wayfarer
Algebra and other abstractions exist as ideas in the mind. The fact that you can't think of them in any other terms doesn't detract from that. — Wayfarer
In the context of the thread, the original post was about the fact that 'information' and 'representation' can be separated, thereby showing that while representation might be physical, the information it encodes is not. — Wayfarer
I do not believe that different subjects ever share the same meaning unless the meaning is within the physical object which is shared between them. — Metaphysician Undercover
Are you willing to grant access to Platonia.... — apokrisis
This is where I disagree. — Metaphysician Undercover
They [numbers, laws, rules] do exist as phenomena, — Janus
give an account of what that existence is — Janus
Information and representation cannot be "separated", but they can be distinguished between, which is not the same thing at all. — Janus
Emotions and sensations are phenomena — Janus
One way of putting it is this: numbers don't exist. You will say, of course they do, here's 7, and 5. But they're not numbers, they're symbols. — Wayfarer
Russell actually discusses this in the Problems of Philosophy - he notes that the word 'exist' is wrong for universals, that the term should be something more like 'subsist' (I can't remember the exact details).
The issue is this: that philosophical naturalism, by definition, only admits one substance (in the philosophical sense) - as I already said in this thread, nowadays 'existence' can only mean one thing; something either exists or it doesn't. Whereas in pre-modern epistemology, there were different levels of reality. Now I'm not saying this is necessarily correct but I think I am putting a modernist type of case for the sense in which I think it is. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway. — Wayfarer
Clearly 6 =/=7, and 7 exists, whilst the square root of two does not. — Wayfarer
in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too.
The existence of trees is not the same thing as the existence of any particular tree; but the general existence of trees is not separate from the existence of particular trees, either. — Janus
I don't see any of them as having an existence which is completely independent of the physical: I don't even know what that could mean; what such a reality could be. — Janus
Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.
For sure some phenomena are only associated with living beings; digestion or homeostasis, for example. — Janus
It seems to me that you are also insisting on some naive realism every time you talk about reality being a triad, as if it were ultimately true. Even saying that it's indirect realism all the way down is an objective statement about reality - independent of any observation of it. It also seems to imply that nothing is real, so it seems contradictory.My argument was against naive realism and in favour of indirect realism. And indirect realism accepts both the fact that knowledge is grounded in the subjectivity of self-interest, but can then aspire to the objectivity of invariant or self-interest free "truth" by a rational method of theory and test, or abductive reasoning.
So there is available to us a method for minimising the subjectivity of belief. We know how to do that measurably. It's called the scientific method. Pragmatism defines it.
You seem to both accept and reject indirect realism. It sounds as though you want to insist on some naive realism at base in talking about a cause and effect relation between the dynamics of the world and the symbols then generated within the mind.
The thing in itself is actually a pattern of radiation. The experience we have is of seeing red rather than green. Somehow that is veridical and direct as there is a physical chain of events that connects every step of the way.
But even the fact that the world is constituted of patterns of radiation - everything can be explained by the different possible frequencies of a light wave - is simply another level of idea or conception. It is a further level of theory and test.
Naive realism fails. It is indirect realism all the way down. All we can say is that a particular way of looking at the world is proving to be a good habit of interpretation over some larger scale of space and time. — apokrisis
Are you making more objective statements about reality or not? Is what you are saying accurate? Why should I believe you? What makes your statements more accurate than mine? How did you come by all this information? Where did it come from if not from "out there"?Meaning or semantics arises by a symmetry breaking of information. The information must be divided into signal and noise. The greater the contrast - the more information that is discarded as noise - the more meaningful the remaining information which is being treated as the signal.
So that is what the information theoretic approach is about. First establishing a baseline understanding of information in itself - as a physical capacity for variety, as some actual ensemble of possibilities. And then we can get to where we want to go - a principle for extracting the meaning of a message (or the physics of the world).
Semantics can be defined in a measurable fashion as the differences that make a difference ... because they are not a matter of general indifference.
That is why Landauer's principle was one of the important advances in turning attention to information discard or erasure. In the real world, eliminating noise is a big energetic cost. — apokrisis
A geologist would vehemently disagree.Left to its own devices, a pile of pebbles won't convey information; it has to be arranged in order to convey information. — Wayfarer
I have no idea what that means, sorry. — Wayfarer
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.