Looks like you are active here but relatively new.
This information question is nothing but trouble...round and round stuff much worse than this thread.

Just encoded physical matter that will be decoded by the receiver.

I was wondering what your view of information is.
This is actually a good example of where physicalism and reductionism used as tools can keep you out of trouble.

So a principal of physicalism is that everything can be reduced to physical matter and you just questioned how information can be physical. Anyone who projects information as something existing outside of brains is going to run into trouble here. Physical signals with information piggybacking along for the ride.

The better view is information exists as brain state which is reduced to physical matter and communication is possible by physical signals. No brain external information.

I think on your very, very long post you went off the rails in your very first paragraph.

A physical object is always going to be primary and it's definition will be secondary. If there is any ambiguity about what the parameters of the physical object are they should be resolved by setting parameters on the physical object.

If the definition of the word you are using doesn't match the physical object.then you are using the wrong word.

Just a thought, but to get away from physicalism, think of how a few calories of energy in your brain can direct millions, billions or trillions of calories in the physical environment. Seems like getting away from the nuts and bolts of physicalism is where the action is.

Sounds like something I would say.
I remember you warning about reductionism and I take that seriously. Actually, how we mentally interact with matter is what seems the most interesting to me. And for some it's the person to person thing so some of that also but I tend to be more physically oriented.

frank asked at the beginning of this if physicalism could be the grounding to your thinking on philosophy. I think for me that is the case. We can go on and on about physicalism but eventually it's good to move on with an understanding of what our basic grounding is.

Generally, I like physicalism, but I think you miss a lot by stopping at reductionism. Maybe physicalism just gets us to our mental worlds and then we can move on from there

I was trying to be clear that I think everything is based on the physical. There is the question of what non-physicals are. They come up often.

So when non-physicals come up you can observe they are always in the form of mental content so obviously not entirely non-physical but just as a mental abstraction (and our physical brains support that). I would classify that as physicalist because everything is accounted for based on physical matter.

I kind of agree.
I sometimes slip and use the term non-physical.
What I mean and how someone else might interpret it could be different. Mental subject matter might be better words. It explains how things that cannot physically exist can exist in a brain state. The way brains handle the number pi for example. And endless other things.

The big picture is that mental content has the ability to drive physical matter, which is a special case in a universe of physical matter.

Yes, neural networks seem the right direction.

I have some reservations though, a puzzle piece but a lot more is going on.

I'm not agreeing that the brain does it like a computer does it. Something seems really off.

Maybe it is okay. On large scales you can have things like feedback and loops. Don't know...

Something that is important to physicalism is the question of how does the brain hold some specific item of subject matter. One model could be than it is somehow encoded directly into specific brain matter but I don't think that is how it works. Help me out if you know more.

My guess is there is some rather complex mental architecture going on that can project and modify non-physical objects.

An example of a problem would be how your brain encodes the number 5 and the number one million. There doesn't seem to be a proportional increase in the mental effort so how is it done.

I have my own categories.

Okay, got it.

Lost me.

Is metaphysics some third thing?
Matter, mind and metaphysics.

Seems like matter and mind are all you need.

There is a problem with defining physicalism as just physical matter. How do you account for anything non-physical? What would that be and how could it exist?

Instead, define physicalism as everything that is physical AND identify that physical brains can deal with non-physical subject matter. That accounts for everything and gives some insight to why matter and mind are different in kind. And doesn't resort to a supernatural.

I have no issue with that at all. Great explaination.

Could you give a little more detail on why a reductionist would have the burden of proof?

And if they do is it proovable?

On the idea of reductionism, I think there is a case for what I call mental content being mapped perfectly to the supporting brain biology. For me there isn't a better alternative. We can certainly map to physical time and location and that's simple enough and convincing to me.

However, I wouldn't end there. Once brains have a sufficiently powerful ability to manipulate non-physicals we have a situation were mental content can drive the physical world. It's a special case of physically supported non-physicals driving physical matter.

So I would focus on driverism not reductionism.
And it has physical results in our physical environment that are obvious.

Also his mom was actually using a false identity on the internet to contact him so he may have had some basis for suspicion or paranoia. My impression was it was an unusual series of events he was reacting to, the best he could.

I was referring to the Dan Markingson case at the University of Minnesota.

All the symptoms that were reported publicly are consistent with mental content driving his condition. For example he self reported hundreds of coded messages and a specific reference I remember from the court records was an unusual reaction to seeing an unusually shaped carpet stain in his California apartment.

That is just some of the symptoms I can recall.
My impression was it was a case of runaway mental content without an ability to recover on his own.

I'm late seeing this but I'll give you my best argument for physicalism (or first attempt). We start from our mental worlds because that's the mode of our brain function. So for me the idea that the physical world is primary is an assumption, not a proven fact at least not on the first attempt. Also, if you assume the world is physical and everything is based on physical matter then you do have the problem of how do 'non-physicals' exist. For me that is the logic problem at the heart of philosophy. Is it monism or dualism?

Well, we shouldn't just take a guess, so where to start? Okay, assuming physical matter really exists then non-physicals should definitely not exist. Non-physicals are by definition non-existent. That's logical right? But we deal with non-physicals all the time in our mental worlds.
Zero, the past, the future, numbers, theories, ideas, words ....and once you see the pattern in all the easy things you can arrive at the conclusion that all mental content is non-physical. But the thing is it's based on physical brain state. A brain is always present, in physical location and physical time, when this perception of non-physicals is occuring so that is the basis of claiming (the ability to deal with non-physicals is a special ability of our biological brains). The logic is we see the components coming together in a physical way that makes the non-physical a tenable proposition. As opposed to a logical impossibility a paragraph ago.

So back to the argument of does physical matter exist. Now you have the logical conclusion that physical matter must exist because the mental worlds we experience could not exist without a physical basis.

So to call it monism or dualism is a linguistics problem that should be postponed until you understand these relations.

I would say all is physically based but our brains have this ability to deal in the non-physical realm.

There is an extremely good application of this principal in the field psychology and psychiatry in solving psychosis and schizophrenia (not endorsing the terminology, it's archaic). The assumption has been these condition are biologically based (strict physicalism) but the evidence points strongly to non-physical mental content driving these unfortunate conditions which are then treated with forced medication.

Or here in Minnesota, forced enrollment in clinical drug trials for the pharma industry leading to the suicide of the patient. No small matter but nowhere near the end of the problems of getting it wrong.

I don't really disagree with you on the importance of words and definitions in philosophy but if you want to make progress in philosophy you need to go beyond common usage. Common usage might have the effect of ingraining false beliefs into our thinking that we don't realize.

Also strict definitions might have a straight jacket effect of not going outside the lines when we should be crossing some false mental thresholds.

For example information and consciousness are two separate things by their common definitions but in their physical state are one in the same. A prime example of words gone wrong.

Consciousness is physically a brain state.
Information is physically a brain state.

If you want to argue that information is not a brain state I would advise against it. The definitions that say otherwise are fantasies of the mind.

I can give an example of where words fail.

Say you wake up in the morning and are deciding what clothes to wear for the day.

Is your brain using consciousness, information, thought or ideas? Or any of some other words?
It's really physically one thing but relying on one word gives a false sense of the physical circumstance (mental circumstance) being defined by a single word.

Okay, you agree and added something.
Wayfarer disagrees.
Anyway, I'm done for the day.

Aside from your discussion with Wayfarer, I think the idea of grasping is at least worth going over.
So if non-physicals exist one possibility is the only place and way for them to exist, at all, is in this biological grasping. It seems to be a physical circumstance were non-physicals can exist in an identifiable physical form. If non-physicals are showing up you should observe they always can be mapped to a physical brain in location and time.

Numbers are one of those questions in philosophy that reduces to state A or state B.
I think you are right and they don't have a special existence. We might have arrived at that point from different paths. I think anything more than mental function (ability) would be the burden of the other view to prove.

Actually things exist in a singular state so the choice is between the correct answer and all the other wrong answers....which are generally a lot.

I'm extremely focused on physical risks around me and focus on the moment. However I see people do crazy things they shouldn't because they are distracted. In some cases people will take extreme risks because their mind set is that it's all up to fate anyway. It's possible a personal philosophy could be dangerous.
But I think we get safer on the risk side as we get older.

Also, architecture is an extremely physical undertaking so no doubt you deal with physical issues.

You seem to deal with a lot of perspectives that you reply to and something came to mind about materialism. A person's life experience might have an influence on what philosophy they adopt regarding consciousness. In my case, my occupation deals with a lot of material objects such as moving a mass from point A to point B, machine operation, operating in dangerous environments, bad weather, physical environments that are not controlled,...that sort of thing. Since my personal approach to consciousness and the material environment affects my safety I might naturally have a more materialist view than someone coming from a historical or academic view. Things like eye to hand coordination or safely operating a machine for example.

So that's a consideration as to why I comment or criticize the way I do.

I would admit in your example of the orange that that too is immaterial so maybe all mental content is immaterial...I'm okay with that as long as it's paired with a physical brain.

Maybe we get lazy and want to deal with the immaterial as an abstraction because it's generally understood that way. Maybe subconsciously we know better.

See the little graphic next to my name. So x would be the orange and Y(o) the brain-immaterial pair.

I'm saying we need to be rigorous in how we approach the problem of the immaterial or non-physical.

Non-physical means it does not exist.
But the physical brain has the capability to handle the immaterial. For example zero, the past and future. So the immaterial, stand alone, does not exist but the paired brain-immaterial does exist and that is exactly the form of immaterial we experience.

I was making the point that since consciousness is mass and energy dependant then thoughts are not immaterial.

The hotter when thinking link is interesting.
I think I used to notice brain warming when playing Tetris at a high level. A little worrying.

Good graphic.

You could actually do rough math on this for example how much energy a single mental task would require using a fraction of a daily total available. Consciousness isn't a freebie.

I'm still on the energy-consciouness relation.
Our brains use 20 percent of our bodies total energy. In terms of power it's about as much as a 10 watt light bulb. So we should suspect consciousness is energy driven. I don't think that's the end of it though. Once we have functioning consciousness the subject matter can drive physical matter.

Dictionary definitions seem like a really bad idea.

You seem to be focusing on small peculiarities.

Here is a list of the brain biology words that have shown up in the last few days:

Consciousness, cognition, sentience, thinking, perception, senses, mental images, deliberation, knowledge, judgment, thoughts, information, emotion, understanding, mind, language, imagination. More if you go back further.

From a materialist perspective they all involve the same brain biology, have some energy draw from the body's metabolism, are location and time specific and operate always as a whole.

An over reliance of definitions in this discussion will just cause problems. There is a connectedness to these words not a separateness.

I know it's a philosophy forum, but you said yourself that things are going in circles.

For me something that takes the same form as consciouness is our 5 senses. They are all connected to the brain and the brain has full access. I think you will find a good consensuses on how these senses work. But if I move on to consciouness there is less consensus. And if I move on to information I get a lot of disagreement on the brain being the basis for information. Or there might be an acknowledging that brains process information but some would like information to exist in other places too.

I am thinking that most of you approach this problem from from a ' don't know' perspective.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Just read what has been written.

Wayfarer, I actually agree with you on your criticism of reductionism, not sure if you picked up on that. I'm a materialist, but there is a special case here. Mind can drive matter... no doubt.

I could add than any solution will be singular, not this endless procession of alternatives.