Words are patterns of physical vibrations propagating through the air, or physical text. — wonderer1

All of Greene's books....consist of paper and ink. Is that all they are? How does the meaning they convey arise from the combination of ink and paper? — Wayfarer

The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm — Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?

but that is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. This is the information paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’.

Of course I don't expect that to make any sense to anyone so unwilling to consider physicalism charitably as yourself. — wonderer1

The semantic elements in your stream of thought are physically detectable. — wonderer1

Pagels argues that John is a "gnostic gospel," which might be a bit much, but there is something to the idea. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What you say is not true. — Janus

Beyond those kinds of concerns do you think the answer to whether consciousness is physical or not could matter for any other reason? — Janus

I’ve been listening the last two years to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. …
— Wayfarer

Yes, I have watched most of that series. I noticed he discusses Hegel but does not have one on Schopenhauer. I think that's something revealing. — schopenhauer1

But trying to sort out what it means exactly has been...knotty. I get conflicting accounts on how it says that reality can be real or local but not both. — Darkneos

I'm pretty sure physics doesn't really have anything to say about realism, anti-realism, or idealism — Darkneos

Apokrisis always said it can be understood in terms of a semiotic model of physicality, if I read him right. I don't have the background to properly assess the soundness of Apo's posts, and I freely admit that. — Janus

However, if we are to be justified in thinking that such imaginings are anything more than fictions then we need some substantive evidence or reason for thinking so. — Janus

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. — Richard Lewontin, Review of Carl Sagan Candle in the Dark

It (neuroscience) deals with the brain, which is physical — Janus

substantive evidence or reason — Janus

the Origenst Crises that came after his death — Count Timothy von Icarus

In 399, the Origenist crisis reached Egypt.[1] Theophilus of Alexandria was sympathetic to the supporters of Origen[1] and the church historian, Sozomen, records that he had openly preached the Origenist teaching that God was incorporeal.[13] In his Festal Letter of 399, he denounced those who believed that God had a literal, human-like body, calling them illiterate "simple ones".[13][14][3] A large mob of Alexandrian monks who regarded God as anthropomorphic rioted in the streets.[15] According to the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, in order to prevent a riot, Theophilus made a sudden about-face and began denouncing Origen.[15][3] In the year 400, Theophilus summoned a council in Alexandria, which condemned Origen and all his followers as heretics for having taught that God was incorporeal, which they decreed contradicted the only true and orthodox position, which was that God had a literal, physical body resembling that of a human.

If you wish to question the neurological account, which is a physicalist account insofar as it looks for explanations in terms of neural patterns and activity, then you need to come up with a compelling alternative. — Janus

Instead, you say proponents of physicalism are suffering from fear of religion. — Janus

What's the alternative? Posit the existence of another realm? — Janus

The meaning arises as a brain (containing neural networks trained to recognize the written language the book is written in) detects patterns in the writing which are associated by that brain with the meaning that arises. — wonderer1

The nature of the causal relationship is physical. — wonderer1

Perhaps we just don't understand the physical well enough. What's the alternative? Posit the existence of another realm? — Janus

Origenst Crises — Count Timothy von Icarus

suppose we found that specific patterns of brain activity in Yo-Yo Ma’s brain reliably correlate with his playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. This finding wouldn’t be surprising, given his years of training and expertise. Although that information would presumably be useful for understanding the effects of musical training and expert performance on the brain, it would tell us very little about music, let alone Bach. On the contrary, you need to understand music, the cello, and Bach to understand the significance of the neural patterns. — Why I am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson

Wayfarer is not going to attack you physically, by sending bullets over the internet. Instead, he could affect you metaphysically, by causing you to believe that you have been psychically injured (offended). — Gnomon

The meaning arises as a brain (containing neural networks trained to recognize the written language the book is written in) detects patterns in the writing which are associated by that brain with the meaning that arises. — wonderer1

When listening to Tulsi, she is the best thing ever that could happen to Putin, especially if she will lead the US intelligence community. — ssu

How then does a whirl of particles inside a head - which is all that a brain is— — Greene

Seems to me that attitude refects nothing other than your own prejudices. — Janus

Do you think we can demonstrate that feelings are not the product of physical events? — Tom Storm

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

Sure we enjoy drinking the beer or whatever, sometimes more sometimes less consciously. Drinking the beer may initiate feelings in the body that we can be more or less aware of. I don't see any reason to think machines have such experiences. The redundant feature is that these feelings are reified as a kind of entity we call qualia, which are over and above the drinking of the beer or whatever. — Janus

I'm not saying that our feelings and creative imagination have no value but that there seems no substantive reason to believe they are not real, physical, neuronal, endocrinal and bodily processes. — Janus

(his?) — Patterner

I have no emotional investment in believing what I believe. — Janus

I'm afraid I still disagree. Intentional activities, interpretations and affects can all be understood to be neuronal processes — Janus

I haven't spoken with ChatGPT in more than a year. — Patterner

What effects do you think our (purported) experience of qualia has over and above the effects of the neuronal and bodily processes which seem almost unquestionably to give rise to it? — Janus

Despite what some Westerners like to believe, Buddhism is not a philosophy and is not intended to be discussed at philosophy forums, in the manner of Western secular academia. — baker

One area would be the idea of prime matter as sheer, indeterminate potency with no actuality, no eidos (form), and thus absolutely lacking in any intelligible whatness (quiddity) — Count Timothy von Icarus

But unless one is enlightened, one cannot talk about these things with any kind of integrity — baker

The "Nihilsum" represents a state that defies conventional logic by existing in a realm between what we establish as being and non-being. It cannot be fully categorized as something or nothing; it is also the absence of either. — mlles

Quantum math is notorious for incorporating multiple possibilities for the outcomes of measurements. So you shouldn’t expect physicists to stick to only one explanation for what that math means. ... One of the latest interpretatations appeared recently (September 13 2017) online at arXiv.org...

In the new paper, three scientists argue that including “potential” things on the list of “real” things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of “reality” is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum’s mysteries disappear. In particular, “real” should not be restricted to “actual” objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or “potential” realities, that have not yet become “actual.” These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are “ontological” — that is, real components of existence.

“This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of ‘what is real’ to include an extra-spatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility,” write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.

Considering potential things to be real is not exactly a new idea, as it was a central aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle, 24 centuries ago. An acorn has the potential to become a tree; a tree has the potential to become a wooden table. Even applying this idea to quantum physics isn’t new. Werner Heisenberg, the quantum pioneer famous for his uncertainty principle, considered his quantum math to describe potential outcomes of measurements of which one would become the actual result. The quantum concept of a “probability wave,” describing the likelihood of different possible outcomes of a measurement, was a quantitative version of Aristotle’s potential, Heisenberg wrote in his well-known 1958 book Physics and Philosophy. “It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.” — Quantum Mysteries Dissolve if Possibilities are Realities

But do you believe I can find in your critical comments something more insightful than the willful non-engagement I've found in Strawson, Nagel, Searle, etc.? — goremand

"Our immensely sophisticated hominid forebrain generates the world in which there is space, time, and perspective", then there is an immensely sophisticated hominid forebrain, logically prior to there being a generated world. I can't imagine how you could reconcile these two things. The brain is a part of the world it supposedly produces. — Banno

They first set up the objective/subjective dichotomy and then ignore half of it. — Banno

This is no longer a country where belief in democracy prevails. — frank

The part on which it seems we disagree is that since not just any understanding will do, there is something else that places restrictions on the understanding we construct. — Banno

For Putnam, metaphysical realism boils down to the idea that the facts of the world (or the truth of propositions) are fixed by something mind-independent and language-independent. As a consequence of this idea, Putnam suggests that the Metaphysical Realist is committed to the existence of a unique correspondence between statements in a language or theory and a determinate collection of mind and language-independent objects in the world. Such talk of correspondence between facts and objects, Putnam argues, presupposes that we find ourselves in possession of a fixed metaphysically-privileged notion of ‘object’. Since it is precisely this possibility of dictating a right notion of concepts such as ‘individual’ and ‘object’ that Putnam takes the phenomenon of conceptual relativity to undermine, he naturally concludes that conceptual relativity presents a deep and insurmountable challenge to Metaphysical Realism. — Hilary Putnam and Conceptual Relativity, Travis McKenna