Instead, he compared mental Information to physical Entropy. — Gnomon

Did Shannon ever write or say anything about 'mental information'? And have you read the origin of how Shannon came to start using the term 'entropy' in relation to information, on the prompting of Von Neumann, who was a peer, and who said one of the advantages of using the term is because he would always win in arguments if he used it, because 'nobody knows what it means'?

Thank you. I shall persist with Deacon, I petered out in his polemical section contra ID, although I'm more drawn to Kastrup's analytical idealism.

Meditative emptiness is about not thinking — flannel jesus

spot on.

The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time. — Astrophel

This resonates strongly with Krishnamurti, who's books I read ardently in my twenties. One of them is called 'The Ending of Time' and it's a theme that's always present in his talks. He says that the observer IS the past, that freedom from thought is 'freedom from the known'. A few weeks back, I enrolled in an online seminar run out of Ojai, which was to run over the next two years, comprising recordings of his talks and an online discussion group. But I cancelled my enrollment, for the same reason I stopped reading his books decades ago. I felt that I understand what he's saying, but I can't find my way into it. He would say, meditation is never the effort to meditate. I've got a quote from him on my homepage 'It is the truth that liberates you, not your effort to be free'. But all I know of meditation is the attempt to meditate (which incidentally I stopped making four years ago.)

That's why something about your posts communicates this same understanding, even if it's one that I've never managed to get.

A large portion of thought is so deep into the subconscious level, being purely habitual, learned at a very young age, that it is not even apparent to the conscious mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is something meditators, yogis and even some philosophers understand thoroughly, of course.

fundamental Information — Gnomon

I’ve said this before, but I’ll try again - there’s no such thing as ‘generic information’. Information is always specific. References to information are always to information about something. Sure, ‘information’ is in some way fundamental to living processes, insofar as DNA is said to ‘encode information’, but isn’t that a metaphorical use of the term?

That link you provide to Maverick Philosopher refers to Bernardo Kastrup’s essay on Information Realism. Kastrup writes, in relation to Tegmark’s Pythagorean philosophy:

You see, it is one thing to state in language that information is primary and can, therefore, exist independently of mind and matter. But it is another thing entirely to explicitly and coherently conceive of what—if anything—this may mean. By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carroll did—that the Cheshire Cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means.

Our intuitive understanding of the concept of information—as cogently captured by Claude Shannon in 1948—is that it is merely a measure of the number of possible states of an independently existing system. As such, information is a property ofan underlying substrate associated with the substrate’s possible configurations—not an entity unto itself.

To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.

I read Kastrup’s essay as directly challenging the kind of ‘information realism’ that you seem to be advocating. Instead he says that the ‘reduction base’ is experience itself - not your experience or mine alone, but in the inter-subjective sense he spells out as analytic idealism.

we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself.

What do you think?

As often, because there is no direct equivalent for many terms in the Buddhist lexicon, and vice versa. There are no direct translations for karma, dharma, bodhi, Vijñāna and many other terms, nor direct Buddhist equivalents for words like ‘spiritual’. In any case, the article makes it perfectly clear that ‘emptiness’ has nothing whatever to do with depressive states.

There have been comparisons made between śūnyatā and the epochē of Husserl, and also Pyrrho’s ‘suspension of judgement about what is not evident’ - about not reading things into the raw material of experience but learning to see ‘things as they are’. I thought I noticed a resonance between this and some of the remarks made by @Astrophel but perhaps I was mistaken.

If…you can adopt the emptiness mode—by not acting on or reacting to the anger, but simply watching it as a series of events, in and of themselves—you can see that the anger is empty of anything worth identifying with or possessing. As you master the emptiness mode more consistently, you see that this truth holds not only for such gross emotions as anger, but also for even the subtlest events in the realm of experience. This is the sense in which all things are empty. When you see this, you realize that labels of “I” and “mine” are inappropriate, unnecessary, and cause nothing but stress and pain. You can then drop them. When you drop them totally, you discover a mode of experience that lies deeper still, one that’s totally free.

‘Emptiness’ is the English translation. The actual term is sunnata (śūnyatā).

She says:

We do not see Experience these days as a narrow shaky gangway between the two towers of the Knower and the Known, but as a rich countryside, containing and building both of them. Such a view is both more fruitful and closer to the facts.

Who is ‘we’? Who sees it like this? And how does ‘the relation of Knower and Known’ figure in the account?

Now I can ask you what is the relationship between imagination and metaphysics? — ucarr

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. — Albert Einstein, What Life Means to Einstein (1924)

Recall how important thought-experiments were to Einstein in devising his theory.

The imagination of protein-based sentience — ucarr

Lumpen materialism ;)

The puzzle is, what gave Descartes’ vision its extraordinary force? — Mary Midgely

The zeitgeist. The emergence of 'the individual' as the arbiter of truth and the mathematical sciences as the royal road to certainty.

One, perhaps, likes to think that serious meditation is a true negation of the self, but this is, I would argue, mistaken. — Astrophel

Oh. I thought that was what you meant by

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". — Astrophel

serious meditation is a method of discovery and liberation FROM this mundane self. — Astrophel

But, never mind. I was only trying to discover some common ground between phenomenology and Buddhist Studies.

It's very interesting that "emptiness" is the descriptive term often associated with depression in psychology. — Metaphysician Undercover

Also entirely mistaken, perhaps you might read the article in full (although I won't argue the point).

It means falling short or not reaching the goal. It is said to be the etymological origin of the word 'sin' (although that is contested.) Nevertheless I see it as a useful interpretation.

Is it, though? What I took from it, was the sense of ‘misunderstanding the point of being alive.’ It works as a religious metaphor but also as a philosophical one.

Whatever it's called, isn't that some explanatory power? — Patterner

100%. I guess I didn't explain myself very well. What I was getting at is the issue of treating information as if it is a reduction base, in the way that matter was supposed to have been by materialism. But of course DNA encodes biological information and that information is causative, there's no disputing that. But biological information is very different from the information encoded in binary on a computer, or written content.

But that doesn't mean a scientist can't have irrational, fanciful and religious beliefs in his personal life. — Vera Mont

Can't help but notice your categorisation of 'religious' with 'irrational' and 'fanciful' there. That is a value judgement, no?

Paul Davies has a great anthology called "Information and the Nature of Reality," with entries by Seth Lloyd, Terrance Deacon, and others, including philosophers and theologians, that is quite good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm reading his Demon in the Machine at the moment, and I've been reading Deacon. But I'm still dubious that 'information' has fundamental explanatory power - because it's not a metaphysical simple. The term 'information' is polysemic - it has many meanings, depending on its context.

I have a suspicion that a famous Norbert Wiener quote, in Cybernetics, is behind a lot of this theorisation. He said “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day." So what do we do? Admit it, and start developing a metaphysics, so-called, which accomodates it. And just as 'the machine' became the prevailing metaphor during the industrial era, so 'information' becomes the prevailing metaphor during the information age. But it's still entertained within a generally physicalist framework, at least for a lot of people (although maybe the times they really are a'changin'.)

I guess a key point is that when hearing people talk about information with regard to entropy, one should interpret them as talking just about the mathematical meaning of entropy first and foremost in order to understand what they are saying, rather than paying attention to the word 'information' which is often not being used in any specific way other thsn to refer to the mathematical usage. — Apustimelogist

There's an amusing anecdote I often re-tell in this context about the connection between information and entropy. A famous conversation is said to have occurred in around 1941 in a discussion between Claude Shannon and John von Neumann, during Shannon’s postdoctoral research fellowship year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Neumann was one of the main faculty members, and during this period Shannon was wavering on whether or not to call his new logarithmic statistical formulation of data in signal transmission ‘information’ or ‘uncertainty’ (of the Heisenberg type). Neumann suggested that Shannon rather use the ‘entropy’ of thermodynamics, because: (a) the statistical mechanics version of the entropy equations have the same mathematical isomorphism and (b) nobody really knows what entropy really is so he will have the advantage in winning any arguments that might occur (source).

The concept of entropy also became combined with Erwin Schrodinger's 'negentropy' from his What is Life? lecture series. It's become part of the conceptual architecture of bio-informatic philosophy.

There is a huge gulf between physics and materialism. — Vera Mont

I know you've already discussed this, but I wanted to draw out a point. This is the view that physics is paradigmatic for science generally, and by extension, as a model for reliable knowledge. That is the basis of physicalism, which is how 'philosophical materialism' is described nowadays. And that is a theory about the nature of reality, which claims that the fundamental constituents of reality are material in nature. Usually it is associated with the idea that the mind is also a product of those material constituents, mediated by the brain. And that, I think, is more or less the default view of scientific culture.

Will there be a trial of the soul after all? — javi2541997

Bear in mind, one possible derivation of the word 'sin' was 'to miss the mark'.

So the first order of business is simple description: what IS pain, examined like this? — Astrophel

From an article on 'emptiness' in Buddhism:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. — What is Emptiness?

See also this wikipedia entry on Buddhism and phenomenology containing this quote from Husserl:

Complete linguistic analysis of the Buddhist canonical writings provides us with a perfect opportunity of becoming acquainted with this means of seeing the world which is completely opposite of our European manner of observation, of setting ourselves in its perspective, and of making its dynamic results truly comprehensive through experience and understanding. For us, for anyone, who lives in this time of the collapse of our own exploited, decadent culture and has had a look around to see where spiritual purity and truth, where joyous mastery of the world manifests itself, this manner of seeing means a great adventure. That Buddhism - insofar as it speaks to us from pure original sources - is a religio-ethical discipline for spiritual purification and fulfillment of the highest stature - conceived of and dedicated to an inner result of a vigorous and unparalleled, elevated frame of mind, will soon become clear to every reader who devotes themselves to the work. Buddhism is comparable only with the highest form of the philosophy and religious spirit of our European culture. It is now our task to utilize this (to us) completely new Indian spiritual discipline which has been revitalized and strengthened by the contrast.

maybe the spirit and the mind are more tangled than I used to think. — javi2541997

some more than others :lol:

Do you deem these reasons for classifying philosophy within the humanities? — ucarr

I understand that German has a term 'geistewissenschaften' meaning 'sciences of the spirit', in which they include philosophy. There is no English equivalent for that term that I can think of.

:lol:

The greatest degree of information is found in the most random or irrational sequences. — Benj96

That's a misleading way of putting it. Random strings of characters are impossible to compress because they contain no order. An ordered string, say a sentence, folllows rules, which enables you to compress it because the rules can be used to eliminate redundancies or repetition. Compression relies on patterns, repetition, and predictability. If a sequence follows a set of rules, as ordered strings like sentences do, redundancies can be identified and used to compress the data. In essence, the more predictable or ordered a sequence, the more it can be compressed, reducing its entropy. Whereas a string of several thousand random characters can't be compressed at all - but, so what? That doesn't mean it contains 'more information'. It means it's harder to compress.

I think you might be applying Shannon's theory beyond its intended scope. Shannon's theory is fundamentally a mathematical framework designed to optimize the encoding and transmission of data over communication channels. It deals with the quantity of information, measuring how much information is present or how efficiently it can be transmitted and stored, without regard to the content's meaning or significance. It's tremendously fashionable to try and extract a metaphysic from it, but it really isn't one.

The difference between philosophy and science is a philosophical difference, and, so, not necessarily amenable to scientific description. The inability to make that distinction is one of the main causes of scientism. Suffice to say, science is principally concerned with what is objectively measurable and empirically verifiable, and with accomodating whatever discoveries it makes within the bounds of an hypotheses that respects those principles. Philosophy is more concerned with qualitative questions and with questions of meaning.

If philosophy of science governs scientific practice... — ucarr

'Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds' ~ Richard Feynmann.

:chin: (bows out.)

Only that it suggests some form of dualism, although nearer to traditional than Cartesian.

Then, where do we find that Good in our process of discerning if not 1) by ultimately constructing it, or 2) locating it prefab in memory, or 3) a combination of 1 and 2, I.e. revising what has already been input prefab from history? — ENOAH

Good question. 'Locating it pre-fab in memory' is a bit facile, though. We have proclivities, innate abilities - which is not to say 'innate ideas' - and we also have archetypes (which I learned about from Jung, but which I think go back much further.)

All that is Real is Brahman or Buddha Nature, and ironically we tap into that by being a human being, that animal which shares its nature with the rest of Nature. — ENOAH

You toss these phrases out very casually, as if they're slogans, but I would say that does convey the gist of my view. We are able discern 'the Good' due to that innate capacity (arguably what Christian doctrine also means by 'conscience'.) Yes, we evolved just as biological science says (although the details are constantly changing) but at a certain evolutionary threshhold, then the horizons of being widen, so to speak, and we are acquire these capacities. And notice, even if they are acquired by way of evolutionary development, I maintain that through them, we transcend the biological, in other words, we are no longer simply biological beings (which again in Christian doctrine of the unfortunate doctrine that animals lack souls, something which I don't accept.)

(Interesting point from Advaita - 'viveka', विवेक, 'to discern', means 'to know what is essence and what is not essence (saar and asaar), duty and non-duty properly' - Wikipedia. It is also the root of the name of Swami Vivekananda with whom I presume you are familiar.)

do you not think a lot of metaphysics/religion have focused upon "Spirit" at the expense of the Body? — ENOAH

That's Nietszche, isn't it? "Twilight of the Idols". He outlines the history of the idea of the "ideal world" and declares its final dissolution into mere fable. He posits that the notion of an ultimate, ideal, or "true" world beyond our physical reality is not only fictitious but also detrimental to our appreciation and understanding of lived reality. But I don't think it's the only way of seeing it. (Besides, I've never quite understood the idolisation of Nietszche in modern culture. It seems ironic to me.)

My reading of the history is completely different. The dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, is post-Cartesian, in particular. It was Descartes' philosophy that gives rise to the 'ghost in the machine' which typified the modern period. I think the genuinely transformative spirituality of pre-modern cultures is something completely different to that. That is why I often refer to the non-dualism characteristic of Indian and Chinese cultures.

Here's my sweeping claim. That there is a real 'dimension of value'. It is neither a social construct, nor a matter of opinion, nor a matter of biological adaptation. H. Sapiens - recall, 'sapiens' meant 'wise' athough that is nowadays dubious - is capable of discerning that domain of value. That is Plato's 'idea of the Good' among other examples. We are able to discern it, but it takes certain qualities of character and intellect to be able to do that. And that the advent of modernity represents the loss of the sense of that domain or dimension, in the transition to the flatland of scientific materialism, where the only values are pragmatic and utilitarian. That conviction is what makes me a generically religious thinker.

'Whatever' sounds about right.

the entire history of metaphysics and religion has been our desperate effort to do the opposite: to suppress the flesh and silence Real organic being, for the sake of glorifying the very thing displacing it. — ENOAH

'Entire history', eh?

Answer 1: Because the penultimate domino made it fall.

Answer 2: Because the number 7 is prime.

Answer 1: efficient cause

Answer 2: formal cause

The meaning of a word supervenes on these letter-changes, and because written letters are physical realities, the meaning is supervening on physical realities. — Leontiskos

I'm inclined to believe that the same principle applies in the case of rational inference and neural biology, contra 'neural reductionism'.

a mind is infusing material reality with meaning — Leontiskos

Consider this analogy. There is a sentry in a watchtower, looking through a telescope. The watchtower stands on top of a headland which forms the northern entrance to a harbour. The sentry’s job is to keep a lookout. When he sees a ship on the horizon, he sends a signal about the impending arrival. The signal is sent via a code - a semaphore, comprising a set of flags. One flag is for the number of masts the ship has, which provides an indication of the class, and size, of the vessel; another indicates its nationality; and the third indicates its expected time of arrival - before or after noon. When he has made this identification he hoists his flags, and then tugs on a rope which sounds a steam-horn. The horn alerts the shipping clerk who resides in an office on the dockside about a mile away. He comes out of his office and looks at the flags through his telescope. Then he writes down what they tell him - three-masted ship is on the horizon; Greek; arriving this afternoon. He goes back inside and transmits this piece of information to the harbourmaster’s cottage via Morse code, where it is written in a log-book by another shipping clerk, under ‘Arrivals’.

In this transaction, a piece of information has been relayed by various means. Firstly, by semaphore; secondly, by Morse code; and finally, in writing. The physical forms and the nature of the symbolic code is completely different in each step: the flags are visual, the morse code auditory, the log book entry written text. But the same information is represented in each step of the sequence.

In such a case, what stays the same, and what changes?

I am a little bewildered at how often I've heard versions of this in response to submissions that God either doesn't exist, or if It does, is beyond good and bad, right and wrong, (and all other dualisms arising only to a species like us who have constructed difference.) — ENOAH

Recall that question I asked you about 'biological reductionism'. Here you are deploying that again. The ability of a 'species like us' to understand the fact of mortality, and to understand that there are moral and immoral acts, is what differentiates us from animals. And that difference is not only biological, it is also existential.

You might recall I mentioned Alan Watts' book, The Supreme Identity, earlier in this thread. The 'supreme identity' means realising one's identity as being beyond life and death. I think this is what is mythologised by popular religion, as clearly it is something that seems inconceivable. (There is, however, a 2011 book by an analytical philosopher named Mark Johnson, called Surviving Death, which approaches a similar point but from a more technical and ostensibly naturalistic perspective.)

The problem arises from appealing to Darwinism as a philosophy of life. Darwinism, or more properly, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is not a philosophy of life. It's a biological theory dealing with the origin of species. So viewing existence purely through the lens of Darwinian theory is inevitably reductionist, which is one of the unfortunate characteristics of today's culture. This is why appeals to Darwinism feature so prominently in new atheist polemics from the likes of Dennett and Dawkins - were are gene machines, blindly following a survival program that dictates our existence in the service of survival of the species. It's actually the complete opposite of philosophy.

Here are a couple of opinion pieces which tease out some of the implications - It Ain't Necessarily So, Antony Gottlieb, Anything but Human, Richard Polt.

I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts. Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense. — Richard Polt

meditation is an annihilation of ones "existence". — Astrophel

It's a dramatic way of putting it, but I believe this means 'the negation of ego'. 'Not my will but thine', in the Christian idiom. Dying to the self. It is fundamental to religious philosophy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Another passage from the Buddhist texts. 'The Tathagata' is the Buddha (means 'thus gone' or 'gone thus'. 'Reappears' refers to being reborn in some state or other. 'Vaccha' is Vachagotta, a wandering ascetic who personifies the asking of philosophical questions in the early Buddhist texts. )

Freed from the classification of consciousness, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Both does & does not reappear' doesn't apply. 'Neither reappears nor does not reappear' doesn't apply." — Aggi Vachagotta Sutta

I think my position on faith is fairly robust. What approach do you have to demonstrate which person's faith is correct and which one is not? — Tom Storm

We all have to make a decision. It's quite possible that we'll make a wrong decision, that goes with the territory. I was attempting to address the question of 'why belief?' Many will say that matters of religious faith are only ever a matter of belief, as there's nothing that can be known, they're illusory in principle, but then, the person to whom my comment was addressed does not see it that way. There are many with their minds made up already, I generally won't attempt to change that.

Spoken from the true secularist perspective!

Now while this is clearly racist bullshit, where do we draw the line between a legitimate appeal made to faith and one which is dubious? Could it be that all we have is reason after all? — Tom Storm

You also have conscience.

Craig says he takes theological disputes to the "bar of Scripture." — BillMcEnaney

Protestants say that, but because every matter of faith is then taken to be arbitrated by the individual conscience, in practice this results in a kind of hyper-pluralism. (Subject of a book The Unintended Reformation, Brad Gregory.)

:up: Thanks for the recommendation.

Chalmer's view is based on his intuition about whether he can conceive of something or not. — Malcolm Lett

Not so. The distinction between the feeling of pain and the objective description of pain is a factual distinction.

Sometimes the answer is: "You don't understand, because you're not ready to understand it." - highly unsatisfactory, but nonetheless true sometimes? — Tzeentch

:100:

why is the belief superfluous to spiritual repose? — javi2541997

What I meant was, for those who know, belief is no longer necessary, but that up until then, it has to be taken on faith. That is illustrated in this Buddhist text, which says those who have not known have to take it on conviction, whereas those who know and see would have no doubt or uncertainty:

...Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it [Nibbana] by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. ... — Pubbakotthaka Sutta

I think religious faith is not necessary for those who are able to retrace the footsteps of the sage and understand their teachings. — Tzeentch

I wanted to circle back to this as it makes an important point. Originally this pursuit of 'retracing the footsteps' was very much the practice of ancient philosophy (as Pierre Hadot explains in his books). 'The sage' was regarded as exemplar, one whose conduct and understanding were exemplary, and whom the students, often referred to as disciples, were to emulate and follow. In that respect ancient philosophical schools were more like a religious order than is today's philosophy (a point Hadot also makes).

But there's another factor in respect of religious traditions, and that is the idea of revealed truth or spiritual illumination which provides the liberating understanding that is being sought by the disciple. 'You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free', said the Biblical Jesus. But it turns out that 'knowing the truth' is a pretty difficult ask. 'Be ye perfect, even as your father in Heaven is perfect', was another commandment. Also daunting, right? We don't know, and we know that we don't know, and we also know that we are sometimes in:

a state of awareness where I feel my soul is rotten — javi2541997

It may be true that we can reach a state of perfect equanimity, insight and eternal repose, but it seems very hard to square with the reality of the human condition which is typically considerably more fraught. And that is where belief enters the picture, even if, in an ideal existence, it may not be necessary, or it might become superfluous.