I feel correlation is close, but it is missing something.

Clearly correlation itself is not enough. The word "peanut" correlates with the word "butter", and smoking correlates with heart disease, but these are not their meanings.

On the other hand, "correlation" seems to understate what is going on with meaning. For instance, does "3 + 3" correlate with 6, in the same way that smoke correlates with a fire? It doesn't seem so. Rather, the expression is axiomatically endowed with the meaning, "the sum of 3 and 3", because "3" is endowed with the meaning "three units", and "+" with "the sum of what is to the left and right". Just as a computer opcode ADD more than correlates with an addition, in some sense it *is* addition.

Outside the contexts which endow these meanings, the symbols are nothing. "3 + 3" is just a scribble in a culture where it is not recognized, ADD is just a number outside the computer. Inside them, the meaning seems absolute.

Although you made this caveat, in the context, "my life has no meaning", the complaint not that one's life doesn't correlate with anything.

However, I do think there is a general principle that unites them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about this? Meaning is just the counterpart to representation. "+" is the representation of an addition operation, which is +'s meaning.

Representation has meaning according to a context, which can be physical (smoke/fire), social (money/value, "carrot"/edible orange root), or personal (orange/nostalgia, life/purpose). But the core concept of meaning is agnostic to these possibilities, it applies to all of them.

For any X, one can X, "what does X mean". This means, "treat this X as a representation. What is X's corresponding meaning?". This may or may not have an unambiguous answer, or it may have no answer at all: X is just meaningless.

One thing I think is crucial is that the meaning must in some way surpass the representation. The paradigmatic case of this is signs: signs themselves are nothing. "+" is just two marks intersecting, all the juice is in the meaning, the addition. But all meaning, I think, surpasses its representation.

But aren't looks, actions, poems, and lives all signs? — Leontiskos

A look and poem, I suppose so, yes.

An action? Unless it is an act of communication, it wouldn't seem so. The same for a life, I don't see how a human life can be treated as a sign.

The point I was making is that conveyance or "meaning relationships" does not exhaust the meaning of meaning, and we know this because some signs convey more meaningful things than other signs. For example, a wedding ring is much more meaningful than a crumb on the floor, even though they are both signs which signify a reality. — Leontiskos

This is a good point. Now I wonder if in fact there are two distinct meanings of meaning: sense, and significance. Or, is significance conveyed with "meaningful", a distinct word from "meaning"?

And that's why I say human life doesn't have meaning. It isn't a referent for something else. — GRWelsh

The problem is that people use the word otherwise. Quite a lot of incompetent language users, if you are right. So for instance, is Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" just incompetent?

The meaning is invariably in the human being. The meaning of a word, for example, is only constant at the point of a speaker or listener, her body, and never in the signs and mediums. — NOS4A2

How do you account for something like a stop sign? If a foreigner asks you what it means, and you say, it is a spiritual recommendation to stop, meditate, and appreciate the immediate surroundings, you are quite objectively wrong.

Signs convey meaning, but not all meaning is conveyed by signs... Meaning is more than being signified — Leontiskos

I agree, a look, and action, a poem, a life may contain meaning, not just signs. I am arguing that meaning is to that which conveys it as the signified is to signs. Sign-signified is one form of the meaning relationship.

"Meaning" seems to be a rather root or simple concept, not easily explicable in terms of other concepts. — Leontiskos

Then how did we learn it?

I guess you will find some answers: Meaning — javi2541997

Thanks! looks interesting.

signs and signifiers are arbitrary, and meaning is not fixed but constructed within specific cultural and historical contexts. — Tom Storm

I think it is complicated. A word can be thought of as arbitrary, yet "uzuzzxu" cannot be an English word, while "hamlick" could have been; there are rules. There is no essential connection between word and meaning. Yet once established a word is fairly fixed, though drift happens. Words are not chosen at random, they meet the needs of the physical and cultural environments they find themselves in; "arbitrary" is too strong.

Although some might take the view that every variation of meaning is merely the interplay of signs and signifiers. — Tom Storm

I think it is something like this. Not signs and signifiers themselves, but the relationship between signs and signifiers:

X points to Y, but Y does not point to X. X is subordinate to Y, Y is essential, X is contingent.

Where this relationship obtains, you have meaning. And you can ask of anything, what is a/the Y to this X?

It’s sort of a question of whether the state should involve itself in the moral life of citizens. — kudos

Except, we have both been arguing, convincingly I believe, that it is not a moral issue, prohibition has no moral basis.

That being said, does the state have any duty to guide citizens into a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness... — kudos

Whether or not the state does, prohibition is punitive, and hardly guides its victims to "a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness". Quite the opposite, lives have been ruined. If the state were as benevolent here as you presume, it would be oriented towards treatment rather than punishment.

I mean, how many drug users do you know whom you would call satisfied and fulfilled individuals (… be honest)? — kudos

I divide drugs into a spectrum between "pleasure" and "insight". Abusing pleasure drugs (i.e. opiates, dopaminergic stimulants, alcohol) can clearly trash a life. Whereas you will find many users of insight drugs (psychedelics being the purest example) reporting increased life satisfaction. These days I just smoke weed, which favors the insight side of the spectrum. My life has its ups and downs, but overall weed has had a positive impact.

Prohibition is merely the most extreme example of regulation. — LuckyR

So what is your point? I am against the extreme regulation of drugs. But there must be at least some regulation, as your pilot example shows (although weakly, as it seems at least as much a regulation of pilots as drugs).

I do not argue against regulation, but rather prohibition.

There are some who take comfort in normal behaviour, but honestly isn't this point a little old fashioned now? You can do pretty much anything nowadays and get away with it more or less. — kudos

I think this is somewhat true now, but not true when attitudes against drug users hardened.

What about my other points?

I think there are several reasons:

There is a general contempt for drug users, especially among the upper class, in part because primarily the lower class is drawn to them. This contempt finds expression in punitive laws.

There is a fear of neuro-atypicals, especially among conservatives, who demand and take comfort in conformity. Drugs mechanically induce atypical thoughts and behavior, which must seem fearful to the conservative mindset.

Kids are especially intrigued by drugs, and prone to abuse them if they get the chance. This provides a fertile ground for moral panic, for the dirty chemicals and their users defiling their pure children.

There is the well known fact that the war on drugs was consciously formulated to punish Nixon's leftist enemies. This war was exported by the US to the rest of the world, and other autocrats have taken note and emulated it.

There is the institutional corruption surrounding drug prohibition, where local governments and other actors profit from its harsh enforcement.

There may even be an element of harm reduction, though this is likely the weakest reason, especially as drug prohibition is well known to fail at this, and it doesn't apply at all to psychedelics and weed.

Therefore,
(The form of meaning is X means Y) to hypercin. — unenlightened

You misread, I said that this was the mistake OP was making.

The form, in general, is that X means Y to Z.

but I suspect that when you say 'life', you are speaking personally, such that your formula is:– niki wonoto means "nothing" to @niki wonoto. — unenlightened

I would suggest that his formula is "@niki wonoto means nothing", and that the form of meaning is X means Y. The delusion that meaning, if it is to be meaningful at all, must lie latent in the thing itself, the X instead of the Z.

But I think your post captures another delusion, that meaning of your life comes from others, not yourself. Sure, you can devote your life to others, even others devoted to you. But your meaning is not contingent on others. This is the social butterfly's view on life, who surrounds themselves with as many friends as possible. Do social butterflies live especially meaningful lives? This has not been my impression.

Today I am walking around a local lake. This seems to be an objectively meaningless activity, after all I end up where I started. Yet the moments of the walk are filled with meaning, meaning that I choose, though not necessarily freely, and at the end I will not be quite the same person that started the walk.

You can also walk around the exact same lake, bored, thinking of nothing except gripes and dissatisfactions, and at the end think, "what a waste of time, I'm never doing that again!". I've done so as well.

Life is like a walk around a lake. We all end up where we begin: the ground. Yet, the moments in between may have meaning, and you might even make a journey worth repeating. Or, you might not.

But it still must be chosen, don't you think? — Patterner

Yes, I think so. My point is that the act of choosing in itself is not enough. What is chosen must stand in some "meaningful" relationship to oneself, that I can't elucidate right now.

There are so many meanings, that more than merely "regretting the choice", are objectively wrong choices, in that they don't stand in this (for now, mystery) relationship with the chooser. For instance, the pursuit of money or fame cannot be the meaning of your life, no matter how earnestly chosen, if you are unfulfilled and haunted by precisely the thought that your life is meaningless.

I began to wonder, is this person getting some kind of kick out of simply trying to spread notions that life is not worth living? — universeness

Almost certainly they are just depressed.

Does a lion search for a meaning to his life? Does a dolphin? Why should they? — Vera Mont

They lack the conceptual capacity. Only man is so blessed and cursed, afawk, with the ability to add concepts onto what is.

Anybody/thing capable of understanding the concept is free to choose the meaning of their own life. — Patterner

i'm not sure if one's life meaning can necessarily be chosen. Do we really have that much agency? Many meanings we might choose will turn out to be false, and reveal themselves as such with hollowness and dissatisfaction. I would say, it must be discovered.

Some people will never discover theirs, or even may not have any.

Regarding the positioning I doubt that is considered. Remember that even closely related species can have very different numbers of chromosomes, let alone genes. What must count is the number of matching protein-encoding genes.

there's a lot of different genetic ways to get to similar physiological solutions. There's really no good reason for the DNA of two completely independently developed lineages of life to look that similar. — flannel jesus

But what is similar between us and bananas (60% similarity) is not physiology but basic cellular machinery and communication. Are there a lot of genetic ways to get that?

It's only not inconceivable by a technicality. It's more than astronomically unlikely. — flannel jesus

I don't think it is. Our genetic code isn't a product of mere chance, more like a directed stochastic process. It might be that the basic cellular machinery common to all multicellular life is the best or even only possible solution to large scale lifeforms. (I sure would like to see the similarity of its mitochondrial DNA. )

In order to estimate the probability we'd have to come up with possible alternatives that work as well, and estimate the difficulty of the evolutionary steps to arrive at those.

I'm wondering about the 30% genetic difference. If they didn't evolve on earth, where did they get all the humanoid genes? — Vera Mont

A 30% genetic difference is HUGE. No mammal is so genetically remote from humans. This number is closer to the difference between humans and reptiles.

It is not inconceivable that both DNA itself, and its content, could evolve independently this closely, if in fact they represent globally maximal solutions to the problems they solve.

More likely though it is shaped croc meat.

I put this in the Epistemology subforum because I feel that the most interesting questions about this release of information are epistemic questions. Questions like, should this footage elicit a change in beliefs at all? Do we have good reason to trust that these are real aliens? — flannel jesus

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence we have now is hardly that. We need imaging of the "alien's" insides, for starters. If it turned out the genetic similarity is 70% to EVERYTHING, that would be something.

there's some "thing" that goes to the future, finds out what value needs to obtain, and then comes back in time and takes that value. — flannel jesus

Sounds pretty unaesthetic to me. If it comes to that I might prefer MWI.

:chin: :chin: :chin:
It's the right question, and a doozy... I'll have to get back to you on that one!

are you eschewing a casual explanation altogether? If not, how does the casual narrative look? — flannel jesus

So, Alice and Bob are 11 and 10 light seconds away respectively from a dual photon emission. Charles is at the emission site, and Dave is travelling at high speed in a spaceship, away from Bob, towards Alice.

When Alice and Bob measure their spins of +A,-A, they immediately send signals telling the result. Charles measures Bob's first, and believes Bob "caused" the virtual world to become actual where Alice measures +A. Dave believes Alice received the photon first, and "caused" the virtual world to become actual, where Bob measures -A.

Both are equally correct. "Cause" is in quotes to distinguish it from ordinary cause and effect, which always involves forces. I'm speculating that this situation is OK, because unlike with forces, the resolution of virtual worlds into the actual world is invariant wrt sequence. No matter the frame of reference, the end result is the same, that Alice and Bob occupy the same actual world, and measure the opposite spin.

How this cosmic bookkeeping actually works might be beyond our ken.

I'm by no means attempting to convince you to change your mind. I just think all this stuff is interesting to think about. — flannel jesus

:100: Absolutely

I hope that makes sense. — flannel jesus

Yes. I retract my amendment, my theory as originally stated stands: the virtual worlds collapse immediately.

When you combine Relativity with Copenhagen, you get this strange picture of causality. You can't objectively, universally say A caused B, because it's equally valid to say B caused A. THIS is what "spooky action at a distance" means. This is what's spooky about it. This is why Einstein couldn't stand QM when he first learned of it. — flannel jesus

I think the word "causality" is misused when applied to virtual worlds collapsing. "Causality" in the physical, actual world involves the action of forces. You can't have a situation where A can cause B, or B can cause A, depending on the frame of reference. This is illegal *not* because it bothers our intuition, but because forces are asymmetric: you can't generally get the same result if you change the sequence. The universe can't allow that, because there is only one actual world, and this would result in multiple conflicting versions of reality.

The collapse of a virtual world into actual is not caused by a force (though it can be triggered by a force). Could a force somehow push or pull a virtual world into actuality? It doesn't make sense. Rather, this operates at a deeper level, it's the underlying logic of the universe that makes causal interaction via forces possible. Unlike forces, collapses are symmetric, so it doesn't matter if A or B happens first in different frames of reference, what matters is that the outcome is the same.

:chin: Lemme think about it. Feel free to elaborate if you like, you've got a real knack for it, I love your lucid explanations.

In that case, I hereby modify my "theory", the virtual world collapsing also happens at the speed of causality (aka light?) :P

This means that MW and Copenhagen aren't just interpretations, they are different theories, and there must be a way to test their differing predictions, right?

Interesting. Does MW "solve" this somehow?

it seems to me the last part is what is meant by "entanglement." — tim wood

:up:

As to randomness, I'll add this: that randomness is really hard to define. I suspect that at the level of the things themselves, nothing is merely random, for reasons I think obvious (yes?). — tim wood

I'm not sure. Intuitively it might seem so, but this is a domain that is far far away from that where our intuitions were formed. God may or may not ultimately play dice with the universe, how can we say?

If it is Copenhagen, does this slant make it any more agreeable to you?

Cool, I don't know either if this meaningfully diverges from Copenhagen or not.

I think so, yes.

At the moment one particle gets measured, by exactly what mechanism does the other particle know to come out measured the opposite? — flannel jesus

When particles s,t are emitted, there are infinite virtual worlds where s,t can have any allowable spin. But crucially, these are the same virtual worlds, since their spins are linked. Upon measurement of s to have spin +A along one axis, the virtual worlds collapse to an actual state of affairs, where s has +A, and t has -A. The particles don't "know" anything, their spin just belonged to the same set of virtual worlds.

To me MW is only palatable if the "worlds" are virtual, not actual. The universe consists of a finite set of resolved state and an infinite, virtual, unresolved state: the set of everything that is consistent with what is resolved. There are infinite possible worlds which are consistent with what is actual.

So for instance, an electron cloud represents all the probabilities of locations an electron may be that is consistent with the position of the nucleus (itself a tighter cloud), and the surrounding fields. These can be thought of as virtual versions of the world, and none is more actual than any other, just more or less likely. The infinite worlds collapse to a definite state of affairs when interaction with other definite states of affairs make it necessary. But this then is just the basis for a new set of virtual possible worlds.

So in the Bell experiments the two particles don't have a definite spin, the actual, resolved world is consistent with an infinite number of potential spins they may have. When they encounter a magnetic field, these virtual worlds collapse to an actual one where one has one definite spin, and the other the opposite. Since there is no consistent world where the particles have anything but opposite spins, the collapse creates the appearance of action at a distance.

This combines the genuine randomness of Copenhagen with the "out" for non-local causality of MW, without the egregiousness of gigatons of matter being created every nanosecond, at every point in space (I don't know if anyone actually believes that last bit).

Is this kind of interpretation a "thing", or am I talking out of my ass?

"Touching" in common use (as in this thread) does not mean occupying the identical space, it means exerting pressure on another object. — LuckyR

That is what it entails. What it means, in common use, is that two objects are physically adjacent, so that a surface of one is in contact with a surface of the other. This commonsense notion doesn't happen at the micro scale, so that part is strictly speaking impossible.

I've appreciated your comments here, thanks for that. Frankly I feel like he is flailing without knowing what he is talking about.

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf — tim wood

I thought this was a really good article. I understand the subject now way more than I did, though I'm still trying to sort through it and the ramifications in my head. How did you find it, I guess you had a physical copy lying around?

To give an idea of the caliber of writer SA used to employ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_d%27Espagnat


FWIW (probably nothing), my take on "quantum ontology" is that there is a kind of tolerancing to the universe. The universe is as exactly as specified as it needs to be, and no more. If something (a quantum state) may remain unspecified, it remains unspecified, and the range of possible states and their likelihoods exactly describe it. It is a bit analogous to "lazy evaluation" in software programming. I find this elegant and efficient, not spooky.

I am a brain in a vat iff “I am a brain in a vat” is true — Michael

But the first part is (presumably) not expressing what the second part is, as they are (presumably) different languages. So Tarski doesn't apply.

Given this, it must be that the sentence "I am a brain in a vat" in my language is false, and so I am not a brain in a vat (this is simply Tarski's T-schema). — Michael

I'm not following this. If you accept semantic externalism, the object language "I am a brain in a vat" does not and cannot speak to the meta language assertion that the speaker is a brain in a vat. If the "two languages" are split apart, then the falsity of a claim in the one can't imply the falsity of the other.

2. If semantic externalism is true then we cannot be brains in a vat — Michael

Should this be, "If semantic externalism is true then we cannot claim to be brains in a vat"?

But even that doesn't seem right. A BiV can experience an in-world simulation. Suppose a BiV denizen plays SimTree on their (simulated) computer. It may then wonder, "suppose there is a tree that stands in relation to the tree outside my window, in the same way the tree outside my window stands to SimTree"?

After all we do this same sort of thing, hypothesize the existence of things that we have no direct experience of. We can happily use language to refer to these theoretical entities. If a theory eliminates a real feature of real language, chuck it.