I'll just point out there are some nice, accessible lectures on youtube from the philosopher Banno cites, Gillian Russell. Highly recommend taking a look!

I'm having trouble following your posts. — fishfry

I just don't understand what the intention of your initial comment was. From my perspective it doesn't follow from the rest of the thread I was following.

I indicated in my post. — fishfry

That would suggest you are implying information is randomness; the original point of my post presupposes this is not necessarily the case.

Yes, but then it is another issue how that might relate to what people call information.

But the error I think the Verasatium presentation makes is then to equate non-compressibility with information - that a completely random string carries the greatest amount of information, because it can't be compressed. Whereas I think a random string embodies no information whatever. — Wayfarer

Yeah, I guess that is fair. I haven't watched the video so I can't comment too much. Maybe it again comes down to this whole use of the word 'information' being ambiguous again. In one sense, when talking about code, you could argue all the semantic information is with the whoever is coding and de-coding, and the information they both have or don't have shapes the kind of messages they are required to send to each other. The information isn't in the code itself.

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design."

Shannon's information theory was I think intended to be about formal constraints on representing variables that produce distinct events probabilistically. (Edit: but the information being represented is with those using the code, not strictly in the code).

At 3:17 where he says that a completely compressed file is completely random - not sure about that, either. — Wayfarer

I don't see how a compressed file can be both random and decryptable — Benj96

Well compressing a file is eliminating all the redundancies or regularities in the data. So if you keep compressing data you are removing all the patterns in it. Like you said, random data cannot be compressed. Why? Has no regularities or redundancies in it. If it did, then it follows you can make further compressions.

The thing is that we have no access to physical things beyond our physiological boundaries. Physical things are themselves only latent in images of experiences. We cannot directly access the physical things beyond our minds, and our physical theories or even metaphysics are occasionally even thrown out for new ones.

So I think its relevant to question whether the invertibility of qualia relative to physical theories is actually a property of the physical things themselves or just a consequence of the way we process information about the world.

I am basically skeptical that our ability to imagine inverted qualia is anything more than my general ability to imagine different objects as having different colors, which would have an information processing origin rather than being inherently about metaphysics. I don't think there is much to reason to consider the difference between physical and non-physical (concepts beyond the) ways we process information. Hence why a p-zombie would have qualia concepts.

Edited: brackets

But surely if they had different labels, they would learn after a while that they were not talking about the same things and they would end up changing their language use?

Edit: or maybe that was your point!?

It depends what you mean by information. The word I think is used so loosely that you may be able to solve this issue purely by working out your semantics.

I think Shannon entropy can be described in terms of either an observer's uncertainty about the outcome they will get out of some system/random variable, or in terms of the kind message-generating capacity of that system (more messages it can produce, the greater the entropy).

I guess the last description could reasonably be a way of describing how we think of information but information as we semantically use it is also about the notion of reducing uncertainty. The more information you have gained from an observation, the more uncertainty you have reduced. So in that sense it could also be conceptualized as almost the inverse of entropy.

Either way, 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 than to refer to the mathematical usage. Care needs to be taken moving from the mathematical notion to the casual semantics of information which may be very different.

(Edited: just clarified some bits in the last section, no pun intended)

No, but their use may be biologically required to fulfil the organism's aim. — AmadeusD

Well I said both.

Can you outline why this isn't hitting? — AmadeusD

I just don't understand the context of what you have said, you'll have to explain the entire context.

Particularly this type of claim. I fail to see how the basis for human decision making toward determined goals (if they be all biologically determined, in an extreme example) isn't politically relevant. Could you explain? — AmadeusD

The point is that biology is redundant as a prescription of what people should do. Saying "humans are like this so people should do this" I don't think makes any sense. Biological facts can obviously be useful if you have a goal in mind where there is biological relevance, but prescribing directly from biology is redundant. We should prescribe based on people's desires.

but how that happens seems determined by the biology of the organism. I can't really understand how this isn't the case - plenty of behaviours just aren't open to humans, or dogs, or horses respectively, if they are to survive and propagate.

The point is there is no objective goal, no intention, no notion that things are meant to be one way or another. Its not fate, its just physical chains of events.

Ok. But the 'how or why' is actually what we're discussing, surely. — AmadeusD

No, what I have been discussing is whether an 'is' means an 'ought' or whether a 'how' entails a 'meant'

This is seems very much unserious to me, and akin to saying "I don't drink water because of biology, i drink water because I want to stay alive". I just can't really take that claim seriously. — AmadeusD

Obviously people drink water because of biology. The point is that we don't prescribe rules because biology says we need water. We prescribe rules because we have desires we want to fulfill.

Because it is there — AmadeusD

Well I don't think it is.

Fire exists without humans — AmadeusD

Well on one hand, what is "natural" is incidental on what happens to happen in the world and the context. Fire could be natural under some purview in that it may occur without human intervention in places. It may seem unnatural in many contexts where it will never occur without human intervention. And obviously these contexts are incidental to how the world happened to pan out. You can then also zoom out and then say surely all human interventions are natural... why not... because its rare? There are also many rare events we would call natural. We can make as many arbitrary distinctions as we like about what is natural or not. Thats why I think its pointless. "naturalness" is a construct we have created which relates us to the rest of the world. It isn't an objective scientific category.

It is empirically a different situation to the one you implied, though? We, in fact, do still have those institutions you relied on no longer being around. — AmadeusD

My point was we have different ways of living in different times. Implying that those differences exist now just in different places is still making the same point i was trying to make.

If its only a difference of detail, and not of kind — AmadeusD

You can zoom in or out as much as you want regarding differences and similarities. My point of bringing up this whole discussion was about how biological findings can be used to prescribe politics. if the meaningful similarities are far too general to have any actual significance on a political level then how is it going to be useful. the differences are the important things because it is the details on how one country differs from another which informs useful policy, not general broad brushstrokes. the general claim that people live in hierarchies isnt very interesting. the claim that people live in specific kinds of structures is.

Explanation by implication being that its a different requirement to feed a million than ten thousand. That type of volume-driven difference. — AmadeusD

I mean to say that the aim of the (different) behaviours does not seem appreciably different to me, in these various scenarios, unless purposefully ignored/changed to the societies detriment (noted elsewhere in the comment you quote). And, where that is the case, I don't really understand Humans to be askance from the determining factor simply because it was ignored (on this account.. Im not tied to it). — AmadeusD

Sorry, I'm finding it hard to follow what you mean on either of these but nevermind.

"best" reads, to me, on this account, as "what is in line with biological factors(goes to the above response too). The food example was a good one to illustrate that. Hunger Strikes are fine, and have an aim that isn't biological, while over-riding, to the individual's ultimate detriment, the biologically-determined factor of needing sustenance. — AmadeusD

This seems redundant to me. I find it hard to believe what is best is anything other than what brings benefit to people and reduces harm, regardless of biological context. There's absolutely no reason to bring biology into it. The fact that someone wants to eat to survive in order to survive is something that has value or should be respected because of the desire of that person, not because of some set of biological facts. Honestly, do we really care about the biological facts beyond them being a possible means to an end which is ultimately in people's wants and desires? Are we compelled to behave in accordance to what some people believe might be a kind of biological imperative? I don't see any reason for this personally.

Hm, good. I think I disagree that its general, trivial or avoidable in discussion of social development. — AmadeusD

I don't think you understand the point. My point is that if you are not talking about the kinds of differences that I am delineating then you are talking about a phenomena so universal, even in other animals, that it doesn't really have any implication for anything. It might even be that social hierarchies of some kind are unavoidable purely on a basis of things like optimization or game theory or selectionism... in other words, if you have groups of organisms which compete and are capable of certain kinds of basic biologically based capabilities, then maybe hierarchical kinds of behavior are inevitably emergent in how they interact. But if you are talking about something so general as that then it has no political implication. Political or social implication is arguments about things like the nuclear family or whether children need fathers and stuff like that, or whether aociety needs to be authoritarian or egalitarian etc etc. Things that are more specific.

I agree, as enforcement goes - but I would have to bite the bullet that 'hierarchy' (if this view holds any water) is not a purely social phenomenon. I think it would be very hard to argue that co-operation in obtaining food isn't driven by biological need and state-of-affairs (chemical bonding), even though different systems are clearly social in their contrasts. — AmadeusD

I just want to emphasize that its not that I don'tthink that there is a biological, genetic basis in behavior. There obviously is, though generally quite complicated I would say. My issue with the idea is that biology should be seen as implying what people should do. My point about variety in societies shouldn't be taken as a point about social behavior not being biologically influenced but about about the flexibility and context-dependence of behavior. It is possible for peopleto thrive in many different ways and in ways that we have not even foreseen. If people can exist happily in a way that seems to contradict something we have learned about our biological past or present then it makes the idea that biology should inform how we behave utterly pointless. Again, as I said earlier, biology can inform the means to our ends. Like in the sense that may be I am hungry and want food because I biologically require food. But I don't take the food because of I think I should abide by biology, I take the food because I want it. If someone wanted to not eat, maybe like Bobby Sands on hunger strike, then that is up to them and their desires. Maybe we wouldn't want them to do that because it would harm them. But is my concern because of some biological imperative that I think they should abide by or is it because I am concerned about someone's subjective suffering? I think the latter. I think we don't want others to die because we think they would want to live or we want them in our lives. Seems pointless to add some kind of biological prescription or "aim" onto that. Redundant. Who cares.

On the contrary, there's absolutely no reason for me to care about biology if it isn't in line with what I or other people want.

"socially enforced" isnt to imply that there's a conscious intention but that a norm is enforced by the natural (on this view, biologically determined), required behaviour of humans based on their biology in concert with one another toward the organisms aim. Whether that holds weight, who knows. But I'm just wanting to be careful that 'socially enforced' doesn't mean the mechanisms origins are social, but manifest in social relations. — AmadeusD

I don't think its easy to make this distinction when it comes to behavior. I am not sure I would say it exists in the same way that genes and environmental influences are inextricably entwined.

Not the type of novelty I was expressing there. Conscious choice v natural development due to biological factors. — AmadeusD

No, I think am including both; afterall, tools are not biological.

The fundamental driving force is the same, in that their is am aim to our organism (though, this is up in the air, i take survival/propagation to be safe assumptions), but the required behaviour may be changing (epigenetics is a spanner in the works) and biology implores us to meet its requirements, regardless. That's the beauty of evolution! — AmadeusD

I disagree. We use notions of goals and teleology in biology all the time as a kind of convenience but I don't see how we can say that about nature. There are no pre-determined goals that biological orgamisms are evolving towards. Its pure selectionism, what happens to survive passes on its genes regardless of how or why it survived. Its just blind physical interactions.

So then, to me, it's biologically determined that a lack of clothes outside the tropics would, given enough time, extinct the species. Therefore, its biologically determined that we wear clothes outside the tropics to achieve (or,maintain) the overarching aim of the species (non-extinction, plainly put). — AmadeusD

Well it isn't biologically determined that we wear clothes outside the tropics, its just required that we keep warm or we will die. That isn't biological determinism. I don't think you could even conceptualize that as something we evolved to do. At the same time, the fact I may want to keep clothes on me and stay warm has everything to do with my desires and nothing about biology. There is no overarching aim of a species and there is nothing thay compels people to behave in accord to such a thing if they did not wish to. The desires of people are the immediate concern.

true artificiality and something required by biological function, such as clothes in the example — AmadeusD

I just don't see why you need the distinction or how any fact can uphold that distinction. Its arbitrary and incidental on what happened to happen based on luck.

Although, fire, being a totally natural product, would do the work with the right organisation. — AmadeusD

Another arbitrary distinction. All human technology is "natural" in a similar way.

But, we absolutely still have serfdom the world over, and in fact more slaves than we've had since the dark ages. — AmadeusD

Just means the difference I was talking about is also spatial as well as temporal.

Many believe the working class is in fact a class of serfs. Not entirely dismissable, i think. — AmadeusD

Well it's about where you choose to ignore the differences isn't it.

They only seem to be different by virtue of volume, and not really behaviour. — AmadeusD

Volume?

but I can't see that there's any appreciable difference in aim (which would be the determined feature, i guess). — AmadeusD

What do you mean?

At best it gets us to the question, again, of which laws are 'counter' to biological factors, and which are 'in line' with them. — AmadeusD

What should matter is empirical facts about the actual scenario? There is no need to ask "what is in line with biological factors" because what you want is just what is empirically best for that situation. There is no fact of the matter about biological factors since they are context-depenxent. You are asking about the genetic factors that are related to strict hierarchies in feudal japan to egalitarian hunter gatherer societies to modern democracies. Biological factors behind the structure of a university rugby club compared to a knitting group. All you will get from studying the biology is generality which cannot possibly be compared to any individual situation. I mean, this kind of generality is so general it probably applies to many social animals in some way. I don't think there is some kind of foxed constrained way humans are meant to be, novel behaviors may emerge that adapt in novel situations and humans are probably especially good at this because of their intelligence. The finding that humans may commonly behave in a certain kind of way doesn't entail that that is like an essential inherent thing given that it depends on an environmental context. Saying that laws are some how in or out of line with this is then tantamount to saying there is a certain way humans should be which I disagree with. Nor does the idea of laws being in or out of line with that kind of thing can make any sense without a goal for the law. I'm not sure what that even means. Is murder being illegal out of line or in line? Given that murder is a common human behavior. Are our laws just going against people's impulse to murder? I think the false assumption is that there is such a thing as a policy that is "in line with biology".

I think its more incidental when societies aren't aligned. — AmadeusD

Its incidental both ways because the context could have been otherwise and it often is in different times in history. You may amhave heavily hierarchical restrictive feudal or even slave driven societies in the first millenia as opposed to more egalitarian kinds of small societies much earlier in history. You have completely different norms in different times and place.

Most societies develop in the same direction in lieu of over-riding principle-driven resistance. There aren't multiple strains of secular social development, from what I can tell. Just triffling differences in detail - probbaly based on geography, largely. — AmadeusD

You don't think there are big differences between western society now, medieval europe and maybe some prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe? Sure they may all have some kind of hierarchy in some sense but thats so general its trivial and it isn't even restricted to humans so I don't see how that is useful for anything.

My argument, in a given case, would be that if the supporting conditions are that of social enforcement, it would hard to argue it was 'natural' versus something more general. — AmadeusD

But social enforcement is ubiquitious. Most social behaviors are enforced by ideas of norms and deviance in society, to differing extents of stringency.

where the overarching nature of the society is artificial as no where in nature has that ever occurred without the express intention for that novel situation to satisfy specific, individual sensibilities. — AmadeusD

But everything in biology is artificial in the sense that at some point it was once novel. How do you think evolution occurs? The precise nature of biological adaptation is degeneracy in that biological systems re-purpose and re-organize themselves in novel ways depending on the context. Wings evolved from limbs. Sex is diffeeent for humans compared to a butterfly. The idea of "natural" makes no sense because biology is in flux, biology is always context-dependent on the environment. Biology isn't even perfectly optimized. Just look at a human body. No human can survive outside of the tropics without clothes, a completely "artificial" yet now ubiquitious aspect of human society. Same with things like fire. Tools. We couldn't survive without these things that are not parts of us, especially in a place like Norway or Canada. All of these things were novel at some point. The idea of artificiality is very thin I think in a biological context.

Could you outline how you feel they have? — AmadeusD

Well we no longer have serfs or slaves who are controlled by lords and barons. We have much better laws and rights for workers now. Thats totally different. If you went and traveled back in time there do you really think you would just have the attitude that it was more or less the same? Especially if you were a serf?

Yes, I think our main difference is that you want to hang on to the idea of true sentences and I do not really care for that.

I disagree, and it seems pretty clear that almost every society shares some similar characteristics - even if you're going to take it by stages. Nomadism -> Tribal living-->larger societies->networks. We move in that direction until forced off the path. The conscious choices being subsequent to self-awareness isn't going to defeat a biological basis for whatever impulse is being over-ridden. I'm also not claiming these are the better attributes, but the biologically determined ones. — AmadeusD

But wouldn't you say that all these examples are very different and societies can live in many different ways? Sometimes its more egalitarian, sometimes more strictly hierarchical. So what is biological determinism helping here if there is still a broad range of ways people can live and people can change the way they choose to live and the hierarchies they live in? How does that apply to policy when policies are based on specific situations, cultures, socio-economic climates, not the generality of human biology which itself is diverse and results in a diverse range of societies. The fact that some kinds of societies are more common than others too is somewhat incidental. You can imagine some kind of novel or different society developed the way it did based on specific kinds of rare conditions, but is it not incidental that those conditions may be rare? Is there really an "overriding of impulse" if such conditions naturally led to that kind of society? Just as say the conditions that change with a progressed humankind have led our hierarchies to change since 1100 AD "naturally"?

I think I have to ask for an elaboration on what your view is exactly to answer any of this because I am not sure of the direction you are coming from.

Is a fact of life. — AmadeusD

Biology trivially determines behavior in the way that physics does. All our behaviours are the output of biological processes, scaffolded on processes of fundamental physics.

Yes, but what does it mean in the context of a political or social topic like under this thread? Almost nothing imo. What is nature, what is biology... its just whatever happens to happen.

When you take quotes like this:

... the biology of males [ ... ] Simply put, the necessity for governors, administrators, military, and more for a society to function calls upon the male biology of a hierarchical structure. The female biology of gathering and caring for children [ ... ] gender roles arise naturally ... and women are meant to be the homemakers and child caretakers, while men are meant to be the organizers [ ... ] Most women are simply not capable, by biology — ButyDude

With uses of words like 'meant' or 'necessity' in these quotes, I don't see them as justifiable. They assume or presume these things function in some preferrable way or even perfect way in the first place and could not be done in any other way. Moreover, they don't consider that when you get deviations from the norm, then surely those deviations or changes are too just natural, because its just the consequence of biology in exactly the same way - because biology is what caused them. So how can you use biology as a foundation for discussions about the social or political? You cannot. You can have arguments based on merit, but if certain merits happen to - or happen to not - be general common occurrence in nature, that should not be the point at all. Thats just completely incidental.

Arguing the benefits of social norms or hierarchies should have nothing to do with biology. Yes, social hierarchies tend to happen in various ways and this is a consequence of biology in the trivial sense that any organism behavior must be an output of biology.

But this is the interest of the biologist, not the concern of a politician.

Well, why not play the game? — Banno

Yes, I do play the game, there's no other choice, but there's always a caveat. I think its impossible to view the world outside of some particular perspective and so in that sense I would say that our notion of objective truth is an idealization. We might say there is an objective way the world is but I don't think there is a single perspective-independent way to characterize it. If I were to say there are objective truths, I don't think I would be able to give a satisfying characterization without caveats. I don't want to conflate my belief in an objective state of the world and my ability to articulate things about them because the latter is something I cannot do.

Are you saying it is better to play the game in the wrong way? — Banno

No, I mean right way in the sense of avoiding and ignoring caveats which makes the veracity of "truths" seem obvious.

Trouble is, that's just an idealisation. — Banno

Honestly, I feel like my views on the world would actually be less consistent if I didn't think that my views or the things I said did not suffer those kinds of qualities of idealization or related issues. Part of the central basis of my views is that what we do or say is at the mercy of the constraints of how our minds, brains work as computational systems. It would actually be not as coherent if I didn't think these kinds of things to my own mind and thoughts, beliefs, theories all the time. Why would I be exempt from things I apply to the rest of the academic and cognitive world in its entirety?

The idealization thing is only an issue for people with a certain kind of goal here... which I do not think I share.

There are true sentences — Banno

Yes, when you agree to play the game in the right way. Even better when you ignore the parts where it breaks down.

The way I see it, these paradoxes show in a nice way how all truth is an idealization. Why? Because we never have direct objective access to some kind of objective truth. The best we have is a kind of proxy that involves sequences of events with some kind of formal structure, enacted by some kind of observer. In other words, we can't talk about truth, we can just act: say things or assert things or behave in ways that seem coherent in the context of our environment. Our talk about truth cannot be separated from this: from how truth-talk, inference and observation occurs. There needs to be certain assumptions filled to make this stuff valid and "coherent"... but they can be broken.

The subject matter of truth is an idealized model of the "truth" process, of the process of these acts, inferences, observations. But because it is idealized, the required assumptions are only implicit. I like to think the best model is a communication process: an environment provides a signal and the observer responds with an appropriate signal (this in itself is an idealization ignoring how or the means by which the observer validates its signal to itself, in terms of use). We also have state transitions: producing a signal implies a change of state in the observer / environment.

Maybe not a universal explanation, but I think a big feature for many notable paradoxes... the major assumption broken is the underlying assumption that for communication to occur there must be a clear object/subject divide. To talk about the environment, the environments behavior must be completely independent of the signal the observer uses - something which seems like our assumptions about objectivity in the world. The world or things exists or have truth objectively and independently regardless of the signal the observer produces to respond to it in the communication game - context independence. If we see the observer's state transitions as being induces by the environment then the world can provide a signal which induces an observer state transition to a matching signal (which contains information of what is the case) and that is that. The communication problem is finished and the observer state will be stable so long as the environment doesn't change.

But if the world is dependent on the signal then stability is broken because, like the observer changes their signal due to the environment, now the environment changes due to the observer's signal. The observer's "truth" description of the environment then induces the environment to change its signal. If the signals that the environment and observer can make are all easily distinguishable and unique to every possible new situation, then stability is lost and the environment and observer will keep changing, inducing changes in each other. Like a (idealized) mirror scenario: you hold up a signal of what you see in the mirror, but the second you hold up your signal, the mirror image has changed to you holding a signal. So to communicate what you see, you must now hold up a signal which is about you holding a signal... but that changes the mirror image again. The stability of the observer's signal is impossible because any signal they make changes what they are observing which then changes their signal and it goes on and on. It seems to me, all these paradoxes are only ever made salient when you talk about their consequences in a sequential fashion like this which never stabilizes. Obviously the mirror alludes to how self-reference is a special case of this.

The "truth" then cannot be beyond the assumptions and processes that embody how observers enact their epistemic behaviors. And once the formal or mechanical or physical scaffolding that supports that fails then so does notions of truth. Without the strong object-subject divide enforcing context-independence then it is impossible for the signals of the environment and observer to match up at any point in time (denoting stable, coherent communication). This doesn't necessarily need to be between one observer and environment (or an observer and themself) either but maybe networks of observers communicating to each other in a way that context-independence fails for all of them because the signals directly influence other signals in the network of communication.

The fact that these paradoxes can occur just reflects the mechanical or formal capabilities of the system being described and the same which underwrites any communication process - sometimes the system cannot settle in its dynamics. Our notions of truth or even the notion of communication are secondary; communication as we commonly see it assumes that there is an objective fact of the matter about a meaning of what these signals represent which is somehow beyond the formal or physical mechanics of the situation. In reality, the mechanics are all there is, just like the epistemic activities of humans is nothing more than brain behaviour, or maybe sequences of experiences - depending on how you want to view the mind. Our everyday coherent notions of truth or communication require constraints beyond what is constrained in these mechanics and so it is no surprise they sometimes fail.

I think probably another reason why things like these fail sometimes, which I won't go much further into, is something which I crudely refer to under the umbrella of factorization assumptions. which sometimes we cannot but help make, but also may make things like computation or representation easier. For instance, If we want to make statements about the world, and that information is in both the word meanings AND syntax, well they cannot be independent when it comes to any kind of truth descriptions of the world (but maybe speech isn't just about truth so I am deliberately ignoring part of the picture). However, for whatever reasons, whether trivial or sophisticated, syntax and semantics are obviously independent, which allows you to make nonsensical statements - e.g. colorless green ideas sleep furiously - which again reflect the fact that the mechanics and formal constraints on truth are much tighter than the constraints on the systems which enact or embody these things for us. Its interesting that when you look at machine learning and occasionally computational neuroscience, things like factorization assumptions that enforce statistical independence are used because it makes inference easier... however, it also amounts so something like making a deliberately false assumption about the data. You can even see this kind of thing in a slightly different way in moral statements: many statements are very coarse like "stealing is bad" but in reality we all know that whether stealing is bad depends on the situation - its different in every scenario (e.g. what if stealing was involved in some operation which was about national security) - but because there are regularities we can assume we can make the simplifying statement "stealing is bad" is independent of the situation.

Yes, I wasn't necessarily trying to identify meaning with function but more like there isn't anything more to what we call meaning than 'function' which is just a vague way of me talki g about sequences of events. Like Kripke, Wittgenstein, Quine suggest, I think meaning becomes completely deflated. There's no objective essence about it. We can concpetualize ourselves as complex brains which just go through sequences of brain states. Or alternately sequences of experiences. But with experiences it gets vague and I feel like my intuition of experiences are very different from some other people.

there are neither intensional nor intentional states imo

It seems to me that the identification of meaning and function per-se doesn't distinguish function realism from function anti-realism and idealism. (Kripkean skepticism comes to mind again) — sime

Not sure what you're saying here but definitely a fan of Kripkenstein.

I appreciate the answer and I like your forthrightness. But I don't think Chalmer's point in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' really is a call for an explanation. It's not pointing out a flaw in the naturalist account, by saying the nature of consciousness is a problem for naturalism as currently understood. Or that scientific accounts of the mind leave something important out. — Wayfarer

I am not sure what you are suggesting the problem of consciousness is then. I think it must be related to explanation because if there was an explanation then there would be no issue for physicalism. I think though there are alternative ways of looking at naturalism if we go through the avenue of looking at how there may be inherent limits on explanation.

Ultimately, I think as metaphysical frameworks, naturalism and physicalism are pretty thin; but they also capture strong intuitions myself and other people have. As I have mentioned elsewhere I suspect maybe it could be conceptualized instead in terms of the rejection of certain scientist hypotheses about the world e.g. about dualism, the supernatural.

Philosophy itself is very much concerned with the meaning of being. I — Wayfarer

For me, meaning is functional. If our behavior is functionally explained by brains entirely then meaning is as well.

Not at all. I'm saying there is nothing special about science. I believe knowledge and methodology evolves in different ways to best suit the field. That's how physics has arrived at its methods, same with biology, same with history, sociology, musicology, theology, sabermetrics, anthropology, etc, etc.

I genuinely don't think that there is any possibility of explaining phenomenal consciousness through the lense of a biologist or anyone else. Because I don't think phenomenality can be explained by anyone, I have no motivation to look at things from any different perspective that were to be radically different from modern neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology. I am not casting away phenomena. I just don't think there can be given a compelling, satisfying explanation for what-it's-like-ness.

And I think the motivation for that is to try bring the issue into the ambit of science, neuroscience in particular, as if this makes it tractable to scientific method. It is exactly one of the targets of the hard problem. — Wayfarer

I think science is just how human knowledge naturally manifests for particular kinds of subject matter. If the hard problem cannot be resolved in science, it cannot be resolved in any area of human knowledge.

We can imbue machines with that ability, because we already possess it. If we can discern it in brain functions to some extent it's because we know what it is, and so, what we're looking for. And we know what it is, because it is internal to thought. If it were not already so, we would not be able to discern it in anything. We can't see it from the outside, though, because in order to see it, we must already possess it. — Wayfarer

Yes, but surely this is the case with all knowledge. Knowledge doesn't come in a vacuum without our own prior knowledge, prior abilities. I don't think it changes the empirical relationships we observe, which suggest that the cause of what we possess is brains.

Yes, I think this is reasonable insofar as it doesn't devolve into dualism.

I don't know if I think epistemological priority comes into this. For me its about consistent observations we make.

This stuff:

ability to make inferences, to infer causality, to say that this phenomena must mean that [x]. — Wayfarer

Might be one.
Facts about things like brains can be another. They don't really contradict each other at all, and why would they? What we know about the world and have observed tells us that they are intimately related to a deep, deep extent. Its pretty much certain at this point that our abilities to do anything mental - to see, think, behave, whatever - are a direct consequence of brain function. Thats just the status of our knowledge about the world at the moment and I don't think things like the hard problem of consciousness give us any reason to doubt that. In light of the hard problem, nothing about the mind can be reduced, abstract or not. That doesn't mean these things are not a consequence of brain function. Computers and machine learning programs can perform abstraction. In theory, any kind of abstraction could be performed by some kind of neural network.

Reading this article is like trying to translate a completely different Kuhnian paradigm. Its just completely disconnected from the way I think about it that I don't think it is saying anything or addressing anything that touches how I conceive of things. The brain is basically a neural network that can make inferences about sensory data, predict what goes next, generate behavior under a model of what should come next embodied in its physiology/anatomy. Abstractions are just a product of what these neural networks are calable of doing. Just completely alien to what this article talks about.

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from. I'm pretty sure its been proven neural networks are like universal computers that can pretty much learn to perform any task in principle.

I like this doppelganger thing. Think most interesting question is how you would treat an identical copy of say, a family member or friend. Maybe to make it less trivial, frame in in a scenario where your friend goes off somewhere, some event happens, and they come back but there is the possibility this family member or friend could be a doppelganger. You don't know and they are otherwise identical in every single way including memories etc. They don't even know they may be a doppelganger.

Another interesting question possibly is how the transporter scenario meaningfully differs from say a scenario where someone has become clinically dead and their brain shuts down but then are brought back to life. Is there a point in such a kind of scenario where the discontinuity would render them a different person when they are resuscitated. Would other changes to the scenario make a difference like, when the brain is shut down, we replace some brain cells with different ones of an identical structure. Or maybe we scramble up the brain parts and then put them back together. Why would any of this make a difference while the brain is shut down before resuscitation?

I am not sure I see how mind-body dualism affects the scenario though.

I actually agree with you in how brains do time perseption but there is more to it. In dealing with the past or future, brains are picking up on something non-physical, retaining it, and using it as input for further mental processing. It's like the brain deals in these non-physical things. — Mark Nyquist

Why does this need to be the case? I don't see why the brain needs anything else other than, effectively, remember its own activity through processes such as synaptic plasticity and recurrent feedback.

As you say, recurrent neural networks, but there seems to be an ability to 'go off the page' of what is possible with physical matter and do things in a non-physical environment. Seems like math for example is an exercise in manipulating non-physicals — Mark Nyquist

Seems to me basically everything we experience is modeled off activity at our sensory boundaries. Things like math are just an abstraction of that information from our sensory boundaries. All our concepts are abstractions though. When I see a dog, that involves an abstraction because even though all dogs look different I can recognize that there is something the same about them and I can categorize them accordingly. The concept of similarity is as much an abstraction where I can identify different objects as the same. Once I can see objects as the same I can count them numerically, just as a direct consequence of sensory information. Obviously though, these concepts are so abstract that they can apply to virtually any different arrangement of sensory information. Simultaneously, this kind of abstraction is not qualitatively different from my ability to recognize a dog or recognize that lines have different directions. All perceptual categorization involves lumping different things into the same concept and this doesn't seem any different from how we have come upon concepts in math.

And what wound that mechanism be? — Mark Nyquist

Recurrent neural networks.. essentially. Not literally.. but similar concept in regard to allowing time-sensitive, history-dependent behavior.

Unfortunately for many of you, I am 85% sure the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. Unfortunate, because it is very boring and marks a return to the realism of classical particles with the caveat that they move about randomly. But it literally answers every single interpretational issue in quantum mechanics in very commonsensical parsimonious ways.

I guess there's part of the issue with bringing with bringing quantum mechanics into it ... interpretations are so controversial because everyones got very different opinions. Then again, its hard to ignore because if the quantum mysticists are correct then it does have possibly very big metaphysical implications. Big implications no matter who is correct I guess.

I'm still not entirely sure whether you mean some kind of dualism or just that something like math is obviously not a physical concept. The way I see it, all our categorizations are just high level abstractions of sensory input. Something like a dog is such an abstraction. Math is abstraction in the exact same way imo, only that it is so abstract that it doesn't pick out any specific physical object in the world. We can then make abstractions of abstractions, systems of rules for these abstractions in and of themselves in which we learn to manipulate content and then even superimpose onto other concepts (like when creating a mathematical model of empirical phenomena).

But when you say mental content drives the physical, this sounds like dualism.

I feel as though something needs to be said about physical reductionism and it's place in culture. One of the quotations I often fall back on is from Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

This 'poweful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality' comprises the basis of what is generally described as the modern scientific worldview. Although science itself has already overflowed those bounds on many different fronts, it still retains considerable if not always obvious influence in philosophical discourse: that what is real are the objectively-measurable attributes of the kinds of entities that science is able to analyse. 'The subject' was bracketed out of this reckoning at the very outset. (The quotations that Joshs provided in this post both diagnose and remedy this issue from the perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.)

This view is at the back of many of the arguments in favour of physical reductionism, as to admit an alternative philosophy is to have to defend some form of dualism or philosophical idealism and their attendant metaphysical baggage. — Wayfarer

I was talking about general explanations appropriate to their respective scales of being as opposed to mind-physical reduction.

I don't have the same issue as put forwarx in your quote because I simply don't believe that subjective experiences can be explained and so they don't really have a role in any of our explanations anymore than they already do in psychology. The only explanations we have are the kind of functional ones that cannot apply to experience.



One thing you have to understand is that because of the hard problem, it is impossible for there to be an intuitive connection between how brains work in a mechanistic manner compared to how we experience the world.

I think its less about trying to explain what minds are doing as we directly experience them and toward just finding neuronal architectures and objective functions that will lead to reasonably realistic replications of behavior that humans can do. The most you can do is correlate neural behavior and experiences or behaviors. There is no assumption of some kind of interaction with non-physical things. Obviously, many people will find this unsatisfying but for me, replicating complex behavior, finding information information processing principles is enough. We can't do more than that.

Yes, I think it makes sense that we cannot and maybe sometimes should not go for the most reductive explanations. I don't think of science as having a goal toward explaining things in increasingly reductive or decomposed ways.

But I do think, insofar as we have a spatial conception of the world, there is still this asymmetry of larger scales depending on the small in that kind of supervenience sense, which maybe is quite weak (too weak for decomposition? not sure, need to think about that) as opposed to a full blown reduction (Again, I think probably there are various ways of construing reductionism so its about strength of reduction). But then it has to be weak because then manner in which our models are incomplete and give different conceptual and empirical perspectives / reference frames, the taxonomy of our models and theories do not neatly match up at all to our ideal vision of a world full of objects with rigid boundaries organized at different levels. They may never match up to that ideal, even in principle, because we only can have insight into reality vicariously. We kind of blindly prod at reality and it prods us back, and obviously the prods we feel shouldn't be conflated with the cause of the prod. At the same time, maybe physics shouldn't be conflated with scale since physics works on all scales and some physics applies across multiple scales.

That said, I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which reductive physicalism is the default view of the public, and seen broadly as what "science says the world is like. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I can see that, though I also think maybe the general public might not really know what reductive physicalism means their views might be still quite vague even if they lean toward reductive physicalism. And I think its possible to lean or are drawn toward reductive physicalism even if they don't actually hold the view. I think I am probably in that category. I don't think I am actually a reductive physicalist at all but there is this kind of gravitational pull tugging at my intuitions. I don't know if it just has something to do with how compelling a person finds science, or something like that.

this is also why compatibilism doesn't seem appealing to them. The problem isn't just that the mind is determined by what comes before any volitional act, it's that mental life has no causal efficacy because real causal power rests with the atoms and molecules. Often I also see a conflation where "if determinism is true then reductionism/smallism is also true," so that evidence for determinism (strong in some contexts IMO) becomes evidence for smallism (weak IMO). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think I know what smallism is but tbh I don't find compatibilism that compelling for reasons like these.

But equally, it's obvious that organisms can learn to differentiate signals by the "sensori-motor loop". — Ludwig V

Yes, just that representations and symbols are not fundamental nor necessary to this picture.

But what's that like? — Ludwig V

Yup, thats the big mystery. I just fall on the position that that kind of thing is just outside the realm of explanation, description, anything. I can only assume that my experiences are what it's like to be certain kinds of structure in the world around the vicinity of the brain. Our models don't capture phenomenal experience but they are just that - models, not reality - I don't think they capture intrinsic ontology at all, nor do they carve out objective boundaries for ontologies. As you say, we prod and nature prods back, and all the proding can be done in various different purviews or perspectives.

What do you mean by "syllopsistic"? — Ludwig V

Often the way that it is looked at is that Brains are doing inference so that their models optimally match what it's like in the outside world. But obviously a non-representational view isn't about that nor does the brain ever have access to that to know if it is right or not and it cannot know in principle. I guess I just mean talking about things like efficient coding without needing to explicitly refer to objects outside the head (in the sense that the brain is trying to match some kind of representations to something it doesn't have access to).

I think one issue with this whole thing is there are various ways you could conceptualize physicalism. On one hand, you can just define it as explanations for everything being directly reducible to fundamental physics explanations. And people have pointed out this almost eliminativist view is very difficult to hold up just by virtue of how we explain and conceptualize a lot of things outside of fundamental physics. But then, is this the kind of physicalism most people hold? Probably not. I think most people are intuitive physicalists and haven't thought too precisely about it but it just seems intuitive to them. I wouldn't be surprised if those big phil surveys, where most people end up being physicalist, are full of respondents of that kind. Maybe they aren't really physicalists but more like naturalists of a general kind in the kind of manner I proposed on the first page of this thread - essentially they are anti-woo.

I think there are probably various different ways and extents of conceptualizing reduction too. I would actually speculate that not much actually outright reduces to something else without needing to invoke some kind of prior assumptions about how different theories connect. Maybe not everything can be satisfactorily explained in physical terms because different fields can have very different conceptual and empirical reference frames and then we have things like emergence and multiple-realizability. But if you accept the models that have held up in science then I find it very difficult not to accept that the objects and structures you find everywhere in your theories about the world in principle depend on, are constrained by, supervene on the structures we find in fundamental physics. You see that their behavior is enacted in or realized within the dynamics of those fundamental physical entities when looking at it from the lense of physics and the scales it operates in. Nothing additional in principle is involved in determining those dynamics even if we may want a more amenable higher-order description / explanation of those dynamics. Even if our fundamental theories are incomplete or cannot pragmatically do all the work on their own, it seems reasonable to suggest that we can describe things in the world at various different scales but the resolution at smallest scales will always produce distinctions that are more fundamental to which others can be decomposed, given the assumption of placing our models within spatiotemporal contexts where there is inevitable nesting.

But a symbol is always a symbol of something and a representation is always a representation of something. But in the case of mental states, we have no access to the "something" in either case — Ludwig V

Yes, I think the causes of sensation are inherently underdetermined, indeterminate. There is no inherent fact of the matter of what they mean or represent in reference to some external context.


""

The problem with taking this as conveying information about the specific physical structures of stimuli beyond the organism's sensory boundary is that the only thing sufficient for this process is the receptor perturbation, regardless of what caused that perturbation. All that is required is the presence of something sufficiently stimulating and eventually this results in action potentials that communicate information to the brain through action potentials: membrane depolarizations with stereotyped amplitudes and time-courses. Effectively, the only information the brain can receive are one-dimensional signals denoting the presence of some stimuli as distinct from the presence of others. By having different neurons whose firings are statistically independent, in the sense that they have been specialized to receive signals from some stimuli independently of others, signals do not get confused. However, given that all of the different types of receptor cells use the same form of membrane potential signaling, neither we nor the brain can in principle identify the cause of membrane activation by just looking at the nature of the membrane activation.

We have real life examples of this underdetermination. In nature, spurious signaling has been known to occur such that thermal fluctuations in the retina can cause perceptions that are indistinguishable from flashes of light in the dark. Rhodopsin which is used for detecting light in human retinal rod cells is in fact used as a means for light-independent thermosensation in fruit flies. Therefore, not only could an unidentified receptor cell's membrane activation be conceivably caused by any type of receptor interaction, the change at a given type of receptor could be caused by alternative possibilities. It's well documented how neuroscientists can even stimulate sensory receptors or downstream neurons to artificially produce sensations. In one radical case:


Paper - Embedding a Panoramic Representation of Infrared Light in the Adult Rat Somatosensory Cortex through a Sensory Neuroprosthesis; 2016.


Rats were fitted with prosthetic infrared sensors that sent signals directly into the whisker parts of the somatosensory cortex, allowing them to distinguish sources of infrared light in their environment. While the rats eventually learned to be able to discriminate between sources of infrared light and touch, they initially seemed to perceive infrared light sources as somatic whisker sensations. It is clear that given the initial confusion, the downstream neuronal architectures are incapable of discriminating the stimuli purely in virtue of the nature of the external causes of stimulation, whether from somatic vibrations or infrared light. Whether communicated through organic somatosensory afferents rooted in vibrations, electrodes from prosthetic infrared sensors or even re-routing of other modalities into the somatosensory cortex, all information is communicated via the same manner of membrane stimulation. What distinguishes the different sources of information is not anything inherent about their physical causes, but the statistical properties of the patterns of the homogeneous one-dimensional signals which are generated by those causes. These are in some sense incidental to those causes; neurons can perform blind-source separation on these signals but in theory those signals can be artificially mimicked like in a brain-in-vat type scenario. Given that the physical causes of signaling are underdetermined and the way that these signals can only convey a one-dimensional signal about the presence of something, we might see the information communicated as having no explicit notion of representational content beyond their binary states ("bits") of activation or silence. In a sense, the possible repertoire of states that can be generated by these "bits" is what actually gives the possible contents of experiences, independent of and irreducible to the extrinsic causes of those states. Insofar as different patterns or combinations of these states can directly cause distinct downstream responses, these contents then become actionable or usable and might be considered to have meaning in the context of other states.

No measurements are inherently capable of identifying what is being measured without the external observer having prior knowledge about what is being measured or how to interpret the outcomes; without something like an external observer role who assigns meaning to the membrane potential signals and then uses them appropriately, reducibility to the physical causes of sensory activation as we know them is not a given. Such semantic ambivalence is even implied in information theory, as stated by its most preeminent founder, Claude Shannon:

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design."

""

(Taken very out of context from https://hl99hl99.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-impossibility-of-reduction.html?m=1 which looking back on it I regard as unfinished and in need of lots of editing.)


'Meaning' is a superficial but maybe useful/intuitive idealization that does not fully reflect how cognition and brains work - purely mechanistic enaction or transformation between brain states (not representations). It is about predictive mechanisms in neurons from which sensori-motor loops emerge, about cause and effect. I would say experiences are like a coarse-graining of the structure of brain dynamics.

Nice article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30714889/

Nice quote:

"Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action.... We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

(quote from Dynamic Systems Theories - Esther Thelen, Linda Smith - Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition, Volume One: Theoretical Models of Human Development; 2006)

Important to recognize is that any input-output configuration relating one (set of) neuron(s) can be seen as a sensori-motor configuration in itself. There is a nesting of sensori-motor loops on different scales. We might consider even eco-systems as behaving as if it were a big sensori-motor loop in some ways. Then we have individual humans, brains, neuronal systems inside a brain at different scales. It even gets smaller than a neuron, on the scale of the dendrite where signals propagate and interact along the membrane in terms of excitation/inhibition/modulation.

Efficient coding should be syllopsistic and action-oriented -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010728/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09063

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006899321004352#b0340

https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal2020/32/121/98428

Indeed, they do not, this is why I said they aren't specific to the hard problem of consciousness. — Skalidris

I think my point on is that these aren't really part of the nature of the hard problem, fullstop. And my quote was never intended to directly refer to those things.