An additional thought that just occurred to me: in a string-theoretic model that requires higher dimensions that are presumed to be just very small and undetectable, perhaps the reason why only three of them got large is because there is as yet insufficient entropic advantage to enlarging them compared to other things that could be happening, and perhaps in some circumstances it could become advantageous and therefore more likely to happen.

So I guess the question here is what is it you suspect thermodynamics fundamentally is when you're dealing with two particles in a tube? Because it can't be statistical and be demonstrated by your toy model*. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not really sure; the stuff about gravity was an afterthought to the stuff about expansion, and if that part doesn't pan out, we can move past it.

If you know anything about Verlinde's entropic model of gravity though, I would be curious to hear how something like that might relate to this entropic model of expansion, if you'd care to pontificate on that.

But all that aside, I like the idea that expansion is a kind of quantum tunnelling of the entire universe to a larger version of the universe to increase entropy. That does make some sense. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

Noether's Theorem seems to be a special case of Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action. — Gnomon

I don't see how you're getting that claim. I am both talking about the Principle of Least Action, and also talking about Noether's Theorem, but I don't see why you'd say one is a special case of the other.

The relationship between them that I'm talking about is: if the change that most efficiently increases entropy is for the universe to get bigger, then -- even though that makes a time asymmetry in the universe, and thus by Noether's theorem implies that energy is not conserved -- then that's what will happen. Or, conversely: that we only see energy conserved, even though it doesn't have to be, because there are more efficient means of increasing entropy ("lesser actions") available, and it isn't until all of those options are exhausted (such as in a gaping void of empty space) that we start to see the universe take advantage of other possibilities, like expanding space.

Can you draw this? I'm struggling to see why a line on a 2D configuration space would be well-served by a third dimension representing the size of the line segment. My best interpretation is that you're introducing some non-locality but I'm not sure. — Kenosha Kid

I can't really draw a 3D structure well enough, so I'll just try to elaborate.

Let's imagine you have a bitmap image one pixel tall and n pixels wide. All the pixels are black, except for two white ones, whose positions are variable. That's the system under consideration.

The configuration space for that system would have to be two-dimensional, because you have two free variables. You could depict it as an n-by-n image.

Then let's imagine a system just like that, except that n itself -- the width of the image -- is also variable. There's still only the two white pixels in it, whose positions are also variable.

For that you need a three-dimensional configuration space, because there are now three variables. That three-dimensional configuration space would be the stack of all of the various configuration spaces for the first type of system, with differing values of n.

Within each 2D slice of that 3D configuration space, you would have various gradients of the different degrees of entropy in each possible configuration of the system with some particular value of n. But there would be more and more high-entropy configurations within the 3D configuration space the further down the third dimension of the space you looked.

So overall, gradients of the different degrees of entropy in each possible configuration of the system will tend to run generally down that third dimension. If we define time as a path through the configuration space from less to more entropic configurations, then we would naturally expect the system to wind up with a larger value of n (a bigger image for our two pixels to move around in) over time. But if the entropy goes up faster just from moving one or the other pixel than it would by increasing the size of the image, we'd more likely see the pixels move around over time until that's no longer the case, and then the image will grow once that's the faster way to increase entropy.

But yeah there are other ways: increase the temperature, reduce the number of particles, stir the system up. These usually require work. — Kenosha Kid

Stirring the system up sounds like it amounts to the same thing as spreading the particles around, but increasing temperature and reducing the number of particle both amount to creating or destroying energy (if we're talking about the system of the universe as a whole, I mean). That makes me wonder if, by the same principle I'm on about above, the only reason we see conservation of energy at all is because the quicker route to higher entropy involves moving energy around, and if the universe ever got to a point where there's almost no way to increase entropy by moving existing energy around, we might start to see violations of conservation of energy too. Although I don't see why there would be any expected trend for energy to increase or decrease monotonously, rather than back and forth in tiny intervals at random, so that might just amount to the existing microscopic quantum fluctuations of energy that we have anyway.

I'm not sure how you feel about that in light of the above. There may well be fewer macrostates where volume is maximised, but that doesn't mean fewer microstates. For two-particle systems this isn't necessarily important, since, on a line, there are really only a few microstates making up the macrostate of maximal separation (though I'm unclear why you think there is such a state). However for a macroscopic system, there are a huge number of such states, an exponential function of particle number. ({1, 2, 3, 4, ...}, {2, 1, 3, 4, ...}, {1, 3, 2, 4, ...} and so on.) — Kenosha Kid

I'm just talking about the toy system of points on a line. Let's look at our variation on that, the 1-by-n bitmap with two white pixels on a black background. For the sake of illustration let's set n=8 for now. There are exactly two (I mistakenly said one before) states where the white pixels are separated by 6 black pixels: if we call the pixels A and B and represent black space with underscores, those are the states:

A______B
B______A

But there's twice as many where they're only separated by 5 black pixels:

A_____B_
_A_____B
B_____A_
_B_____A

Six states where they're only separated by 4 black pixels:

A____B__
_A____B_
__A____B
B____A__
_B____A_
__B____A

And so on until there are fourteen states where A and B are adjacent. So over time (defined within the configuration space as above) we'd expect A and B to get closer to each other.

And then I was wondering if that could have any implications on gravity as a statistical phenomenon, although since I last posted I realized that perhaps this only works if the space in which the particles are located is finite, since there's equally-infinitely many ways for any two points on an infinite line to be separated by any finite distance... I think?

I suspect he just means that we (leftists like you and I) have no real political representation or power. There are some people like us with left-wing views, but not a proper left wing of American political activity.

So I was thinking about this some more on my evening walk tonight, and remembered that the reason I brought this up in the first place is because I've always been fascinated by the notion that everything that happens does so because it maximizes entropy, and that the arrow of time can thus emerge from a timeless view of the configuration-space of the universe: the future is just downhill on the entropy gradients in that configuration-space. So, it seemed suspicious that there should seem to be a second arrow of time built into the structure of spacetime itself, that just coincidentally aligned with that entropic arrow. Why should it be that the geometry of the universe should just so happen to be such that it gets bigger in the same parts of the phase-space where it is also higher-entropy? It seemed like one should be driving the other, and the entropic arrow is clearly the logically prior one since the statistical mechanics behind it apply to abstract systems that aren't even spatial at all, so the entropic arrow had to somehow be responsible for the geometric arrow.

In response to those thoughts I was mulling over what @Kenosha Kid was saying, about the enlargement of space making room for entropy to increase, and how it seems like the geometric arrow does drive the entropic arrow after all. I imagined to myself a little thought experiment or visualization: a toy system consisting of two points on a line segment, so it would have a very simple 2D configuration space, with obvious (err... note on that later*) peaks and valleys of entropy in it giving an obvious entropic arrow of time. And then, to that model, I added a third variable, and so a third dimension to its configuration space: the size of the line segment. Because higher-entropy states would be available on larger line segments, the entropic arrow of time would naturally point down the dimension of the configuration space that represents the size of the line segment...

...and I was about to say "regardless of what's going on with the entropy gradients along the other two dimensions", but that's not true, and not true in a very important way! It is true that even if there weren't those other two dimensions of the configuration space, like if there was just an empty line segment with nothing on it, there would still be an entropy gradient down the one-dimensional configuration space, corresponding to the size of the line. In other words, in a completely empty space, the entropic arrow of time will be toward a larger completely empty space. But if there's an even steeper entropy gradient in the other dimensions of the configuration space, thereabouts the entropic arrow of time will be angled further away from straight down the dimension of the configuration space representing a larger line segment: in other words, if there's any process that results in higher entropy faster than making more space, that will happen first.

So merely given that it's possible for space to expand, that there's not some law somehow preventing it, we should just statistically expect empty-enough space to expand merely because that's the fastest route to the most entropy, but if there are other faster routes to more entropy available, we should statistically expect to see those happen first before we see expanding space.

*Now for that note about the "very simple 2D configuration space, with obvious peaks and valleys of entropy". I was trying to visualize what that configuration space would look like, where the peaks and valleys of entropy would be, which states of that simple toy system are really more likely or less likely, and something occurred to me. There is exactly one state of the system where the two points are maximally far apart. There are increasingly more states of the system where the two points are increasingly closer together. The most common distance-apart for the two points to be, out of all the possible configurations of the system, is zero. That seemed counterintuitive to me: I initially expected that more-spread-out configurations would be more common, and I started trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. But upon reflection is occurred to me that on that counterintuitive account, we would statistically expect the two points to get closer and closer together... like gravity. And, if I'm not mistaken here, we would still expect more than two points to get more evenly distributed, but still for them to get closer together given a particular evenness of distribution.

In other words, on a purely statistical account, we would expect not just clouds of particles to even out, but also to fall together, and for the space surrounding them to get larger, in decreasing order... which is what happens IRL, no?

I know that there are already entropic accounts of gravity (though I don't know a lot about them), but I'm not sure if there are entropic accounts of the expansion of space yet?

entropy does not decrease when space expands — SophistiCat

I wasn't thinking that it did, but rather, that the creation of new energy that comes along with the expansion of space makes the universe an open system with a constant influx of new energy, which new energy can drive a reduction of entropy.

Evening Kenosha (I'm falling asleep in bed; you must be Australian).

I was thinking of dark energy, particularly the inflaton field. I'm a little unclear on the relationship between that and the ground state of quantum fields: is it not just making more space, all of which is filled with that ground level of energy, that accounts for the creation of new energy; or conversely, an increase in that ground level of energy that creates more space to contain it? (I guess since it's low-energy-density space that seems to expand, like the cosmic voids, that last thought doesn't make great sense).

Anyway, if I understand right through my sleep-addled brain, you're suggesting that it's not so much (as I was speculating) that maybe some law of preservation of free energy (/ some kind of equivalent symmetry) requires that more space and so energy be created to counteract the increase in entropy, but rather that the increase in space and so energy requires (or makes room for the possibility of) thermodynamic action to counteract the decrease in entropy. It's not things winding down that inflates space, but inflating space that keeps things wound up.

I thought that according to the law of conservation of energy, that energy is neither created nor destroyed. — Wayfarer

On a local scale that is true, but on a cosmological scale it's not, because of dark energy, which is still a big mystery.

If eternal inflation theory is correct, the normal state of the infinite eternal universe is to be empty space that does nothing but create more empty space at breakneck speed, and the state of our universe as we know it is a "brief" "little" blip where that energy of the constant ongoing creation got dumped into a bunch of other fields instead of making new space; and the current acceleration of the expansion of the universe is our part of it gradually rejoining the rest of it in that normal state of breakneck expansion.

That sounds like it’s just reason to doubt premise 2. Which of course is the actual case in the real world prior to the election: it’s not certain that a Republican will win, a Democrat might win, in which case “if not-R then A” is false too.

He said there is good reason to believe the premises, but not a reason to believe the conclusion. And that is true*. — TonesInDeepFreeze

But it’s not, which is my point. If there is good reason to believe those premises, then there is reason (even good reason) to believe the conclusion.

As I elaborated, whatever reason there is to believe the second premise (R leads in polls, A leads in polls, C trails in polls, etc) is also a reason to believe the conclusion (which is true if either R or A wins), provided the first premise is also supported.

If modus ponens is valid, then if we believe the premises, then we believe the conclusion (not always in fact - people err - but in principle). And the premises are believed but the conclusion is not. — TonesInDeepFreeze

The quote in the OP is not just about whether someone believes things, but about whether they have good reason to believe them. That's also what logical inferences (like modus ponens) are all about: it's not that believing the premises entails believing the conclusion, but that believing the premises gives reason to believe the premises. As you say, people err, and sometimes don't believe what they have reason to. But the quote in the OP is claiming that having good reason to believe the premises doesn't constitute having good reason to believe the conclusion. That's incorrect: having good reason to believe the premises does constitute having good reason to believe the conclusion.

If you have good reason to believe that:

[1] If a Republican wins the election, then if it's not Reagan who wins it will be Anderson.

(say, because those are the top two highest-polling candidates in the Republican primary)

and you have good reason to believe that:

[2] A Republican will win the election.

(say, because Reagan is the top-polling candidate in the general election, so you reasonably think that Reagan, a Republican, will win)

then you do have good reason to believe that:

[3] If it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson

(because that's logically equivalent to "Reagan or Anderson will win", and either "Reagan wins" or "Anderson wins" satisfies that, so if you have, say, good reason to believe that Reagan will win, which is your reason for believing [2], then you also have good reason to believe [3]; or if you have good reason to believe that Anderson will win, same thing; or if you don't have good reason to choose between Reagan and Anderson but you have good reason to expect Carter to lose; anything that gives you reason to believe [2] also gives you reason to believe [3], so long as you've also got some reason to believe [1]).

therefore [modal operator] ~R -> A — TonesInDeepFreeze

I think you're erroneously reading in a modal operator (and which one are you reading in?)

The claim is that the proposition

[1] If a Republican wins the election, then if it's not Reagan who wins it will be Anderson.

and the proposition that

[2] A Republican will win the election.

do not together give good reason to believe that

[3] If it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson.

That "do not together give good reason to believe" is just the writer denying the validity of the argument; modals about belief are not part of the structure of the argument itself.

Since if it is given that a Republican will win the election, and that the only Republican alternative to Reagan is Anderson, it is valid to conclude that if not Reagan then Anderson will win the election, either there mustn't actually be good reason to believe at least one of those premises, or there is in fact good reason to believe the conclusion, contrary to the writer's claim.

It absolutely does. The supposedly invalid conclusion is valid after all.

If it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson. — Banno

That is logically equivalent to “Reagan or Anderson wins the election”.

Given that a Republican wins the election, it is valid to conclude that Reagan or Anderson wins the election.

If Reagan wins the election, it’s true that Reagan or Anderson wins the election.

So if they have good reason to think that a Republican will win the election because they have good reason to think Reagan will win the election, then they also have good reason to think that Reagan or Anderson will win, or equivalently, if not Reagan then Anderson. Because in believing that a Republican will win, they’ve ruled out Carter already.

I can give one example off the top of my head, though it's probably not useful to Isaac's point: proprioception, our internal sensation of where our bodies are in space. It's how you can (unless you're too drunk) touch your opposite index fingers together with your eyes closed: you have a mental model of where in space your body is as you move, informed by feedback from your joints etc.

I like that there isn't a downvote option. If there was I would definitely say get rid of it. I've felt slightly displeased by its existence, but decided that honestly it doesn't really matter. If I had a bigger number my opinion would probably be different. If nobody but oneself could see one's score, I'd definitely say keep it.

Memory, like the quote said. As Mayr says, DNA basically preserves the whole history of evolution in a single DNA molecule. There’s nothing corresponding to that in inorganic matter. — Wayfarer

An inorganic security camera can sit around for ages keeping a record of the things that happened in front of it.

I expect you'll object that a human built that camera for that purpose, but that's irrelevant to reductionism. Is there some nonphysical aspect to the camera itself that enables it to keep such records, or is it just physical matter in the right form to perform that function? How that matter got into that form is a separate question.

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

[...]

even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than anyone of us, they would infallibly fail in others — René Descartes, Discourse on Method

So he asserts, without argument besides "it's unimaginable".

In any case, it's beside the point, because Chalmers et al are talking about whether, even if you could completely replicate the behavior of a human in the way Descartes asserts you couldn't, that would be enough to say for sure that the thing is definitely conscious in the way a human is.

(I've been encouraged to learn that Ernst Mayr, who is considered a giant of 20th century biology, is likewise not reductionist. He says In The growth of biological thought , that 'the discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of non-living material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’) — Wayfarer

I don't see how that's an anti-reductionist claim. That's a difference in form and consequent function between living and non-living things, which of course there is, that's the most obvious kind of difference between those things. The reductionist view is that if you modeled all of the chemicals involved in DNA arranged in just the right way, you would model everything there is to model about DNA, and nothing would be missing. An anti-reductionist view in turn would be a claim that DNA isn't made of just chemicals arranged in the right way, but that there's something else besides that involved. What is that something else, and why do we need to suppose it exists, or equivalently, what noticeable difference in the world does its existence make?

Form is what life is about. Whether you use these or those molecules of water makes no actual difference, but the form is what 'matters'. — Olivier5

I agree with that, but there are people who don't, and the disagreement between us and them is the subject at hand here. There are people, like Chalmers, who think that even if you had some matter in the exact form of a human, which consequently functions exactly like a human, there's still an open question of whether or not it's "really conscious", even though it does all of the functional stuff like thinking, believing, feeling, perceiving, and sensing. E.g. if you've got a thing that looks just like a human and points its eyes around at things and is able to interact with the world in a normal human way including reporting on the things its eyes see and what it interprets those signals to mean and what states of the world it takes to be the case on account of all that... people like Chalmers say that there's still a question as to whether such a thing really experiences anything, or if it just behaves as if it does.

My kind of panpsychism is the view that whatever metaphysical difference there may be between just behaving as if you have experiences and actually having experiences, that metaphysical quality (which Chalmers et al call "phenomenal consciousness") is already present everywhere, so all you have to do is get some matter into the right form and thus function and it already has whatever else is metaphysically needed to experience things the way a human does. It's that form and thus function that's actually important; the metaphysical capacity to "experience things" in some sense transcending that functionality is a trivial quality that's already everywhere and so can't distinguish between anything.

Thanks for the cheerleading, Proof. Much appreciated. — Olivier5

I do really appreciate it, as I've been feeling rather unappreciated elsewhere in philosophy and life lately.

That is a rather strange definition of "experience", as equal to the difference between a real entity and a fictional one. — Olivier5

I'm not the one who started talking about that concept; look at Chalmers or Block for blame on that (though it certainly goes back even further than them).

I think the obvious answer to the question "even if you arranged some non-living matter into the exact form and function of a real human being, such that it walked around and talked and lived life like a real human, and even reported on mental states it supposedly had, might there still be something missing that's not accounted for just by the functionality?" is "basically no".

But other people say "yes". Those are the real dualists.

Some people say "I suppose there could be in concept, but there never would be, because..." and then give different reasons:

- either that even real humans don't have that whatever-else, that "phenomenal consciousness" or "first-person experience",

- or that some kind of magic always happens to give that whatever-else to things with the right function, out of nowhere, not built up from other forms of it,

- or else (like me) that that whatever-else is already everywhere, in different forms of course, and all that differs is the form and function of things, nothing ontological or otherwise metaphysical.

How does that definition apply to panpsychic tables? — Olivier5

The table is ontologically and otherwise metaphysically no different from a human being; whatever je ne se qua a real human would have and a philosophical zombie would lack, even tables (and rocks and atoms) already have that. What differs between a table and a human being is their functionality, and consequently the particular form of their experience, which like its behavior is nothing much to speak of for a table.

What you interpret as 'what exists', is always that which can be made an object - which is why you think of it as 'stuff'. — Wayfarer

If what you're talking about is not 'what exists', 'objects', 'stuff', etc, then what you're saying is not in disagreement with anything I'm saying. I'm only talking about what kind of things, stuff, objects, etc, exist. There can be forms, patterns, organizations, structures, etc, to those things, objects, that stuff, etc, that exists; and in that sense, those forms, patterns, organizations, structures exist too, but not as different kind of things, objects, or stuff, just as forms, patterns, etc, of that one kind of stuff.

And when you really get down to my own view on things, in an important sense there isn't really any "stuff" at all; there is only form, only structure, and in saying that there's "only one kind of stuff" I'm really saying that all forms and structures are in principle trans-formable into each other; all of the apparent different "kinds of stuff" are just different forms of the same one kind of stuff, at which point there's not really any point in talking about "kinds of stuff" anymore, just about forms. The only point of talking about kinds of stuff is to discuss whether or not (stuff or things or objects or whatever of) one form can be trans-formed into (whatever of) a different form, e.g. can a bunch of quarks and electrons etc get transformed somehow over billions of years into a thinking experiencing human being, or not? If changing the form can't get you from one kind of whatever to another kind of whatever, then it's implied that there's something besides form "underlying", or "sub-standing" if you will, the difference between the whatevers; some sort of different kinds of sub-stance. If there's only one kind of substance, we needn't ever talk about it, as in...

I note that you have not even tried to express the map-territory relation in monist language. — Olivier5

I expressed the map-territory relationship in a way that didn't require talking about different kinds of substances or properties, which is thus completely compatible with ontological monism. There isn't any specifically "monist language": monist language is just ordinary language.

I also note you sport yourself as a panpsychic, which I take as being the dualist view where tables have thoughts — Olivier5

Panpsychism as I formulate it is not dualist in the ontological sense under discussion here. There's not different kinds of stuff or things, nor even different kinds of properties (like mental and material) of the same kind of stuff or things.

There's just two perspectives to take on any thing interacting with any other thing: as the thing being experienced, the object, or as the thing doing the experiencing, the subject; which on my account is identical with the thing doing something (every experiential property of a thing is just a propensity of that thing to do certain behaviors when interacted with in certain ways), or the thing being done-unto (every experience of something else is just that something else doing some behavior to you). Every thing can both do, and be done unto; and so can both be experienced, or experience.

But "experience" in this sense is not thought, belief, or even feeling, perception, or sensation. It's whatever the supposed difference between a real human being and a fully functional replica of a human being who is "not actually conscious" (a philosophical zombie) is supposed to be. Panpsychism like this -- the view that everything always has that je ne sais qua that a philosophical zombie is supposed to lack -- is just the only remaining option after you rule out the options that either (1) no such thing as consciousness in that sense actually exists, and (2) some kind of fundamentally irreducible magic makes it come fully into being for certain things but not at all for others, rather than just taking different forms in some things than others.

I expect you might want to call that a "dualist view", but not every distinction between two facets or aspects or whatever (like form and substance) constitutes a kind of "dualism".

Is taxing the rich just as bad as not taxing them when we could just be removing the billionaires all together? — Albero

If the options are: 1) Not tax billionaires, 2) Tax them and use the money for harm reduction, or 3) Not have billionaires or people in need of harm reduction in the first place, obviously 3 is preferable. The question is, if we are denied 3, but have a chance at 2, is taking that next-best thing somehow worse than taking the worst thing, 1? Obviously not. 1 is the worst. 2 is better. 3 would be better still. If we can get 2 but not 3 now, we should take 2 now... and then keep pushing for 3. Preferring 1 over 2 is "heighten the contradictions" unpragmatic ideologue bullshit.

So it is both food and poison at the same time. — Leghorn

Yep. Food poisoning is totally a thing (getting poisoned by your food), and this is the reverse of that (getting fed by your poison).

Therefore it both nourishes and poisons the body, and the body is both bettered and made worse at the same time. — Leghorn

No. It is intended by its user to poison the body, make it worse, but it has the effect of nourishing the body, bettering it. It's thus poison by its use-intent and food by its use-effect.

But I must make note of this apparent caveat in what you said: “TO THE EXTENT THAT the use of something”, etc.... — Leghorn

That caveat is because I'm not yet certain that this (new to me) idea of use defining a thing applies to all things. Do we use stars for something and is that what makes them stars, or are stars just stars because they are what they are? They don't seem to fit the pattern by which a rock can be made a chair not by any change to the rock, but by its being used as a thing to sit on.

Which also seems to connect to the gender example in the OP: a person is made their gender (but not their sex) by them being treated by society as a person of that gender. I guess maybe what all of this thread boils down to is that "chair" is a social construct; "food" and "poison" likewise? But not stars, or sexes?

Neutral in English, feminine in French. — Olivier5

That's the grammatical gender of the words for "table" in those languages, not the gender-as-in-not-quite-sex of the actual table.

What is the materiality of such a thing as the scale of a map? — Olivier5

What is the "materiality" of my height in meters? They're the same kind of thing. Relational properties aren't metaphysically spooky, they're normal kinds of things that normal physical things have all the time.

Beside, a map can be printed on many copies, each of which is a different material thing, but the map itself is one. It's the same map on all copies. A map can be translated into another language, and it will look differently on paper but essentially it remains the same map. So the map is more abstract a form than just the paper form on which it is printed. This abstraction of maps vis-à-vis both the territory and the map's physical support is very difficult to think in a monist logic. — Olivier5

That's the form-substance distinction again, which as stated already is not something anybody is denying: you can have multiple things of the same form. The question at hand is whether there's more than one kind of underlying substance, such that you can't in principle trans-form one kind of thing to another because those kinds of things have to be made of different stuff, e.g. such that you can't in principle transform a bunch of CO2 and H2O and misc other chemicals into a self-aware thinking person.

Then what use is the term, "physical" if it doesn't distinguish from something else? — Harry Hindu

Some people suppose that things that aren't physical exist, things that (as above) you can't get by changing the form of some physical stuff. It's only the supposition of some other kind of stuff, that's fundamentally discontinuous with all of the ordinary stuff we're familiar with like that, that calls for the need of a term for that ordinary stuff.

What is the gender of a table?

Physical things have different properties than other physical things, but they’re still all physical properties, so pointing out properties that some things have and others don’t doesn’t establish the need for ontologically different kinds of properties.

This is just form and substance again. Nobody is denying that there is a difference between those. The disagreement is about whether there’s more than one kind of substance. (Or property thereof).

In this case, is the word whose meaning is in conflict “food”, in your statement, — Leghorn

I'm not saying that there's literally a conflict over the meaning of a word here, but that use-of-a-thing-defining-what-it-is is analogous to use-of-a-word-defining-what-it-means.

And none of that requires, or involves, the 'roles' of 'subject and object'. Roles require actors, and chemical substances are not actors - well, not unless you want to argue for panpsychism. — Wayfarer

I didn't say that those were the roles of subject and object specifically, but they are nevertheless roles in an interaction, in the usual way that chemists talk about that.

I do argue for panpsychism in any case, but that's not the point here.

You wouldn’t describe the interaction between minerals in those terms. — Wayfarer

In chemistry we do that all the time: whether something is an acid or base, for instance, is defined by its role in an interaction with another substance.

The point about the dualism implied by signs and symbols, is that it comprises the relationship between signs, not the relationship between objects or any kind of 'stuff'. — Wayfarer

Then it's not dualism in the sense under discussion here, and conflating it with that sense only causes unnecessary confusion.

No, that quote of me tracks perfectly with what I just said. You had one intent, but a different effect occurred, so you used it with one intent, but got a different use out of it in the end. To the extent that the use of something for some purpose makes it a thing of a some kind, the conflict between intended use and effective use creates conflict in defining the kind of the thing. It's just like how if I use a word to mean something, but that word means a a different thing to you than what I intended it to, there's conflict over what the meaning of the word is.

In other words, whether what I ingest is food or poison depends, not on my intent in ingesting it, but rather on its effect on my health. Would you agree with that? — Leghorn

I think either intent or effect can be used as the criteria to define it, as I said just above in response to your question "When you use something for some purpose, does the use of it lie in the outcome or the intent?"

What is the difference between the map and the territory, in your opinion? — Olivier5

A map is a compressed copy of the territory: a map stores information about the territory in a smaller amount of space. This can be literally smaller physical space, as in a paper map of a geographic territory, or it can be informational space, as in compressing a file on a computer. In either case the compression can be either lossy, saving space by leaving out irrelevant details, or lossless, saving space by identifying patterns in the underlying territory and representing instances of those patterns symbolically rather than actually repeating the same information over and over again.

If philosophy uses words differently than the every-day use of the words, is philosophy talking about a different world than everyone else when they use those words? — Harry Hindu

No, just using a slightly different language, a different dialect if you will.

If philosphy is an attempt to explain the world and our relationship in it, you would think that we would all be using the same words in the same way - philosophically or not. — Harry Hindu

It's not at all unusual for different subsets of a linguistic community to develop slight differences in their use of language. While I can easily think of some exceptions to this, I would suspect that philosophical language usage is typically more conservative, sticking to the older uses of words, while colloquial usage changes more over time due to the accumulation of errors and misunderstandings by less-educated laypeople.

You're obfuscating a very real, and very fundamental, distinction in philosophy, in fact even in ordinary discourse, between objects, objectivism, objective view, and subjects, subjects of experience, beings. But then, this is a consequence of your philosophical view, which has conditioned you to ignore this distinction. — Wayfarer

I completely recognize the object-subject distinction, I just don't think it's a distinction between kinds of stuff but rather roles in an interaction. But more to the point, I just find your use of the words "existence" vs "being" to mean about the same as "object" vs "subject" to be idiosyncratic and not in keeping with the usual way those words are used in philosophy.

If Elon Musk does succeed in going to Mars, would he expect to find anything there answering to the description of 'a being'? — Wayfarer

Yes; though I do recognize that in colloquial (non-philosophical) usage in that context it might be taken to mean "creature", a living thing, probably an animal, even an intelligent human-like one perhaps, in which case no. But we're talking philosophy here, not colloquialisms.

The other point you haven't addressed is the dualism of symbols on the one hand, and physical matter, on the other. — Wayfarer

That was the main thing I was addressing in the post that mentioned your odd use of "being", which I guess distracted you from the rest:

That's the distinction between form and substance. The question at hand is whether there are irreconcilably different kinds of substances (i.e. stuff that's not just a different form of some other stuff), or at least irreconcilably different kinds of properties of those substances; not a question of whether there's a difference between something having a form (or function, as above) and being made of a certain kind of stuff. — Pfhorrest

Humans are beings, they are called 'human beings'. If you think that's peculiar, the problem is yours. — Wayfarer

That's not peculiar at all, but it also makes perfect sense if "being" is taken to mean "thing that exists", rather than... "transcendent subject of experience" or whatever you take it to mean.

So you think there's no essential ontological difference between beings and devices? — Wayfarer

Not an ontological difference, no; not a difference in the kind of stuff they're made out of. (I'm ignoring for our purposes here your peculiar use of "beings" as something more specific than "things that exist", since devices of course are things that exist and so "beings" in the usual sense).

The other point is, cameras are built and operated by humans. They have no ability to decide or intend, nor is there anything about them that is even analogous to those abilities, which are intrinsic to human beings. How can that not count as an ontological difference? — Wayfarer

Those are important functional differences between humans and cameras, but there's no reason why that functional difference has to entail they're made of different kinds of stuff. There's also a huge functional difference between a rock and a camera, or further still between air and a camera, but there's no debate about them having to be made of stuff that's metaphysically, ontologically dissimilar to accommodate those differences.

And I didn’t ask, can you can recognise the ontological distinction being made in the passage quoted? — Wayfarer

That's the distinction between form and substance. The question at hand is whether there are irreconcilably different kinds of substances (i.e. stuff that's not just a different form of some other stuff), or at least irreconcilably different kinds of properties of those substances; not a question of whether there's a difference between something having a form (or function, as above) and being made of a certain kind of stuff.

But within the analogy, the person taking the photo/video is ontologically different from both the image and the camera. — Noble Dust

That's the claim in question here. The argument offered in support of it was that an observer isn't present in the stuff they're observing. But a camera isn't present in the images it records, yet it's uncontroversially made of the same kind of stuff, so why can't an observer be made of the same kind of stuff they're observing?

:up:

Nope, supernaturalism was what I objected to. Dualism, at least my garden variety, is a natural, common sensical philosophy. It's not really about demons and fairies. — Olivier5

Supernaturalism just is transcendentalism about ontology: the claim that there are aspects of reality that are beyond empirical observation. Demons and fairies as usually conceived, if they existed at all, would be empirically observable and so natural, not supernatural. You're confusing "supernatural" with "paranormal".

Indeed, this difference is not about the map being magical or supernatural. — Olivier5

Then it's not about dualism in the usual philosophical sense under discussion here. If the map and the territory can be made of the same kind of stuff, and have only the ontologically same kind of properties, then the map-territory relation is not a dualist relationship in the usual philosophical sense, and calling that "dualism" is needlessly confusing.

A camera can't operate itself, decide what to photograph, and interpret the image. All those are done by the subject, who is not part of the picture. — Wayfarer

Sure, but the camera is also not part of the picture, so "not being part of the picture" doesn't have to mean being of an ontologically different kind than the things in the picture, which is the point. The camera doesn't have all the same functionality as a person (operating, deciding, interpreting, etc, as you list), but no argument has been offered as to why that functionality requires any ontological difference, only that not-being-in-the-picture requires such, which the camera example rebuts.

Both, in different senses. This reminds me of a post about whether speakers mean things or the words they say mean things, that I made in another thread yesterday: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/563120

You meant to use it as poison, but you ended up using it as food. So something you meant to be poison was instead food. It was also bad poison (ineffective at doing what poison is for), and at least marginally good food (somewhat effective at doing what food is for).

There's a form of dualism. — Wayfarer

That's neither substance dualism nor property dualism, which are the things under discussion here. If you want to make up a different thing and call it "dualism", you do you I guess, but that's only going to cause needless confusion with other people using the word in the usual ways. — Pfhorrest

You don't see mind, because you are it. Everything you know empirically is presented to you as an object or relation of objects or a force. But the very thing which weaves all that together into a world is mind, which is not amongst those objects. — Wayfarer

A camera does not film itself; you can't see the camera on film. Does that require that the camera be an ontologically different kind of thing than the things the camera is filming? Or is being a camera and filming just one of the many things that can be done by the same sort of stuff that gets filmed by a camera?

There is of course a difference between filming and being filmed, but that doesn't have to be an ontological difference: the same kind of stuff could both film and be filmed.

a flat ontology, without any room for transcendence — Olivier5

I thought you said transcendence was a straw man? If you now agree that dualism is transcendent, see the rest of my earlier argument against transcendence and thus dualism, which you skipped because you objected to the first sentence implying dualism is transcendent.

Monists reject the fundamental difference between map and territory because they are monist — Olivier5

A literal map of a geographic territory and the literal territory itself are both made of the same kind of stuff, and yet there is a difference between them. Why is that not a problem, but a mental "map" can't be made of the same stuff as whatever "territory" it's a "map" of?

I think "meaning" is very much like "implication", as in, "to mean" something works the same way as "to imply" something. Viz: by saying something to someone else, maybe I imply something to them, and also in any case, I mean something with the words I'm using; both implication and meaning are things that I am doing. But to that other person, the words I spoke mean something to them (it is not I who mean something to them, but the words); and also, the proposition that those words convey can imply something (it is not I who does the implying, but the proposition).

These two different senses of each of those verbs are related, in that by my actions I am trying to effect something in the listener's mind, trying to get them to think some way; but it is not so much my actions directly, but the words themselves "cast" (as it were) by my actions, that actually has any effect on the listener. I can't directly do anything to the listener's mind, but I can do something with the hopes of it indirectly having some particular effect, and the things I do can have some effect or another, and if everything goes according to my plans the effect that those words actually has on the listener will be the effect that I hoped for, but maybe they won't: maybe I'll mean something by my words, but those same words will mean something else to the listener.

Commonly, sure.