I have been quite clear that I've been speaking about processes, and not 'units' of things. — StreetlightX

Perhaps I can put it this - not super precise - way: the question is not 'what is alive?', but 'what is alive?'. This latter is the question of individuation, of what counts-as a-life, a question which I think is opened by a reflection on the process of gene expression. — StreetlightX

I think the first quote there makes it difficult for some of us to understand what approach is suggested by the second quote. You seem to rule out exactly what most of us would be doing if we set out either to choose a criterion for life or apply it. It makes it look as though you want to ask, not whether something that eats is living, but whether eating is living, and that can't be what you're saying.

Is the connection that an organism is "composed" of such processes?

The analogy that came to my mind was the relation between phonemes and morphemes. Morphemes, as the smallest units of semantic content, are by definition made of parts that do not have semantic content. As such, it's no use looking to the phonemes to determine whether a given object is a morpheme; there is in a sense nothing special, nothing directly related to semantics about phonemes. You can't read off morpheme-hood. (You can do some things, given more rules: say what could be a morpheme in a given language, etc.)

But now I seem to be doing the sort of thing the first quote would discourage; and the second quote suggests that the issue is what a unit of semantic content could possibly be, given that the unit is composed of non-semantic units.

Am I at all close to understanding your point?

As a matter of logic, sure, but this is not really in the spirit of the enterprise, is it?

We want to avoid claims that could only be falsified by observing every member of a class. The claims we want are ones that would generate readily testable predictions. "If it comes up blue, my theory is false," rather than, "Only another 10,000 to go."

Can we even presume we can make every needed observation in this way? When you refer to "all known examples of mammals" isn't that a pretty risky way to carve out a class?

Still, you're right about there being a kind of symmetry here, and that makes me wonder if the falsifiability criterion can be made to carry the whole load.

"Some mammals lay eggs" might count as an observation rather than a theory. It would be an observation that falsifies the universal claim "No mammals lay eggs."

@unenlightened okay that was weird.

Since our time is limited, and since cognitive and social resources are limited, it seems more reasonable to prefer the simplest account, all else equal. — Cabbage Farmer

I'd now say what I was groping for was just a market rather than an auction, which in retrospect is obvious. I can see a case for all sorts of things, such as those you mention here, being usable for trade, but I went with ontological commitments because that's one common form of the razor, and it still feels relevant. Is there an entity that is the meaning of a sentence? Is there an entity that is my eating this sandwich?

Ockham says entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity . If I say I have a satisfactory account of everything you do, but without one of your assumptions, then I'm saying one of your assumptions is unnecessary. (You will counter that my explanation fails and this additional assumption is necessary.)

But so what? Why do we demand that a theory's assumptions be not only sufficient but also necessary? Why this minimalism? I'm trying to take seriously what appear to be our intuitions about such matters, which suggest that indeed there is some sort of implicit accounting going on and that there is something like a market for theories. (Suggests to me, anyway, though I may be the only one.)

I'm struggling to think of any other costs/ benefits apart from those that might involve the opinions of other about us. — Janus

Yes, well, I alluded to this above, and I think it bears looking into.

I'll add this: I've referred several times to what would count as currency, who would decide, and so on. For instance, why does Zeus, whom @Cabbage Farmer mentioned, not figure more prominently in our discussions?

I think there are wider and narrower ways to approach this: the narrower would be the sort of thing that turns up in Lewis's "Scorekeeping in a language game," where what you're allowed to assume, to rely on, is implicitly negotiated as you go along; wider could be very wide indeed, but we can at least say that "As Zeus wills it" is apparently not an option ruled out just in this conversation or that, but more widely.

(I have a feeling I'm not making much sense yet, but thanks for chipping in, guys.)

My old favorite:

A man posts a vague and somewhat mysterious advertisement for a job opening. Three applicants show up for interviews: a mathematician, an engineer, and a lawyer.

The mathematician is called in first. "I can't tell you much about the position before hiring you, I'm afraid. But I'll know if you're the right man for the job by your answer to one question: what is 2 + 2?" The mathematician nods his head vigorously, muttering "2 + 2, yes, hmm." He leans back and stares at the ceiling for a while, then abruptly stands and paces around a while staring at the floor. Eventually he stops, feels around in his pockets, finds a pencil and an envelope, and begins scribbling fiercely. He sits, unfolds the envelope so he can write on the other side and scribbles some more. Eventually he stops and stares at the paper for a while, then at last, he says, "I can't tell you its value, but I can show that it exists, and it's unique."

"Alright, that's fine. Thank you for your time. Would you please send in the next applicant on your way out." The engineer comes in, gets the same speech and the same question, what is 2 + 2? He nods vigorously, looking the man right in the eye, saying, "Yeah, tough one, good, okay." He pulls a laptop out of his bag. "This'll take a few minutes," he says, and begins typing. And indeed after just a few minutes, he says, "Okay, with only the information you've given me, I'll admit I'm hesitant to say. But the different ways I've tried to approximate this, including some really nifty Monte Carlo methods, are giving me results like 3.99982, 3.99991, 4.00038, and so on, everything clustered right around 4. It's gotta be 4."

"Interesting, well, good. Thank you for your time. I believe there's one last applicant, if you would kindly send him in." The lawyer gets the same speech, and the question, what is 2 + 2? He looks at the man for a moment before smiling broadly, leans over to take a cigar from the box on the man's desk. He lights it, and after a few puffs gestures his approval. He leans back in his chair, putting in his feet up on the man's desk as he blows smoke rings, then at last he looks at the man and says, "What do you want it to be?"

Thanks for the reference to color constancy. Don't know if I had ever seen this stuff before and it is way cool.

My son's up at UGA. I'm about 50 mins SW from there. — Hanover

Then you know this one:

What were the redneck's last words?

. By saying there is an incentive is projecting your own purposes onto reality, as if reality has reasons, or incentives, to design things. — Harry Hindu

It's relative, not absolute purpose. For a phenotypic variation to be differentially replicated,* it must provide some survival or reproductive advantage relative to other members of the population. Surviving and reproducing is not an absolute purpose, but it's how the game is played.

I remember seeing an episode of NOVA or something where they were testing chickens as part of a theory that wing flapping might evolve as a sort of turbo boost for running-- that is, helps you survive which helps you reproduce.

* That sounds like it could be a TMBG song about evolution.

Here's another way to characterize the competition among theories that makes more sense in some ways:

Competing theories offer for sale comparable products, purported explanations of φ, for some phenomenon φ, and the cost, as above, might be measured by the ontological commitments you must make. Competition will naturally place some downward pressure on these commitments,* but purchasers will also have preferences that lead them not always to choose on price alone: they may feel one theory's product is of higher quality, that another doesn't actually work (i.e., explain φ), etc. Some purchasers may choose not to buy at all if they cannot find a price they consider fair.

Here questions of who is paying too much, who might be printing their own money, etc., are shifted to those who espouse a theory.

So that's what one little stall in the marketplace of ideas looks like to me.

* ADDED: If ontological commitments are treated as a limited resource like a currency.

suggested article.... — Wayfarer

I got halfway through it. It's ignorant horse hockey.

Ockham's razor is about competition among theories. One form such competition might take is an auction, and it occurred to me that philosophers do sometimes express their theoretical preferences in terms of cost or price. Quine, for instance, agonizes over whether admitting sets into his ontology is too high a price to pay for mathematics. (It's not. No price is too high for math.)

So what's up for auction is "having explained" something. The way I've presented it is as if only a single bid is above the reserve price.

It was a quickie post, and I'm honestly not sure yet if there's enough here to be worth formulating better. But I am finding the idea of formulating competition among theories in some way like this quite appealing.

It was meant as a gesture toward what a theory of concepts might look like.

Suppose instead of some ideal abstract triangle, you had instead a rule about how to treat a particular triangle "as" a conceptual one. So you ignore its actual proportions, the measure of its actual angles. It still has those, just like any triangle, but you don't use them.

I can understand how that would work. I can see a procedure. I would like such a thing because I don't know what concepts are supposed to be, how we interact with them, etc. My little procedure gives concrete form to the idea of abstraction: it's a rule about what to ignore.

I take a generally Kantian view, that our knowledge is of phenomena, and that what the world is 'in itself', outside those cognitive capacities, is unknown to us. — Wayfarer

Those phenomena, and those cognitive capacities-- it's all about information.

It was fun, Wayfarer! Let's do this again sometime.

It's that 'structure-preserving map' I'm interested in. What is the analogy for the 'structure-preserving map' in reality? That is the activities of the mind. Television, as you say, extends the physical scope of the mind, but the mind is what continually (and generally subliminally) performs all of these transformations. — Wayfarer

?

The way an object absorbs or reflects light is determined by its structure and composition, no mind needed.

When that tree falls in that forest, a wave is propagated through the air whether there's any minds, or indeed any ears, around.

The structure of the object is mapped to the structure of the light, sound, etc. it broadcasts without intention. Living things notice, is all.

I don't think you could infer what the subject's brain was thinking, because I don't think it's 'in there' - any more than the characters of House of Cards can be found in your flatscreen television. — Wayfarer

But there is a structure-preserving map from the actors on set to the digitally encoded signal that is transmitted to my TV. That signal carries information about what the actors were doing. Whether the actors are "only physical" or not, it is only information about their physical characteristics that is captured, encoded, and transmitted: how they looked, how they moved, what sounds they made, and so on. Television just extends the reach of my senses of sight and hearing, and it does so by each step between me and the source of the sounds and images translating in a structure-preserving way.

Lots of other thoughts about my little model, so here's one more.

How is payment made? By committing to uphold what you bid.

Suppose "having explained consciousness" is up for auction. I may choose not to win rather than bid panpsychism. I don't get to claim I've explained consciousness, but I feel it's better to lose than win at such a price. I could even continue to work on my bid in the belief that the winner will eventually also feel he overpaid and give up panpsychism. Then the item goes up for auction again. Some may see this strategy as too risk averse, and some applaud the winner for his daring.

I just found it quite odd that anyone would actually ask why we should want to make few(or the fewest possible) errors. — creativesoul

That is just about the nicest thing you could say to me.

I think I understand what your overall position is, and the specific claim you're advancing in this specific thread, and I know in a vague way they go together. But I can't put them together. So when I said this:

I think your argument really only cares about the first and last steps: seeing something and symbolizing it; seeing a symbol and interpreting it. These functions you attributes to intelligent minds, therefore these functions are mental, therefore they are not physical. I don't think the translation has anything to do with it. — Srap Tasmaner

You didn't like that, and responded:

As my argument is only concerned with establishing that information is not physical, the fact that it can be described as 'mental' is neither here nor there. — Wayfarer

But every time I ask something specific about information and how critters like us share it, you tell me your views on mind:

What I'm saying is that language and abstract thought rely on an ability which I don't think can meaningfully described as 'physical'. Essentially it's the ability to grasp meaning, to say 'this means that'. — Wayfarer

That sounds ever so much like what I said.

I'm not convinced that such a view of mind as non-physical compels you to conclude that information is not physical. Information could be something else we embodied minds traffic in just as we do other physical stuff.

And I don't see the argument from translatability as establishing that something not physical is being passed around. I still think in your version of the argument, meaning is non-physical from the outset.

I think I'm seeing a gap where you don't, and that either you'll make it clear to me that there is no gap or I'll make it clear to you that there is, and maybe then you'll fill it, or not.

I dislike doing these quote cum recap posts, but there's a disconnect here that has me flummoxed.

well, you get the point right? — creativesoul

No.

So was your answer that once hominins are language users, from then on information is not physical for them? Was it physical before? Or did they just not traffic in the kind of information you're talking about before language use evolves?

Yeah, sorry. Should've been clearer.

Sorry. Trying to address you and Wayfarer simultaneously, and that's bound to be confusing!

Instead of responding directly to your last post about computing, I thought I'd take another shot at explaining my general approach to both of you at once.

I'm still mulling over your specific points. (I wasn't actually arguing that machines are just physics, but I did deliberately let the implication hang there in hopes of eliciting the sort of response you gave, which is helpfully specific.)

What do you mean by "mind"? Is there a useful distinction in operation here? — apokrisis

That question wasn't for you.

I hope you don't think I was claiming there's no difference between animal signaling and human language.

The question is whether language has a monopoly on meaning or on information or both. And if there is a sort of meaning unique to human language, does it have nothing at all to do with animal signaling? (I believe Chomsky's position is nearby. As I recall, he postulates a single huge leap to language rather than a gradual development.)

You are of course free to bid 0, but there's a chance your bid will not be taken seriously.

Suppose I'm an earlyish hominin, and a wild dog is biting me. I involuntarily make a sound of pain. Members of my group who hear my cry will take this to mean I'm in trouble and come to help.

Now suppose I'm a slightly later hominin and I can make the same sound voluntarily when a wild dog is about to bite me but hasn't yet. This rocks. Members of my group who hear my cry will take this to mean I'm in trouble and come to help without my having to get bit.

Now suppose I'm a slightly later hominin and I can voluntarily make a sound that to members of my group means "wild dog", rather than a generic "pain/fear/trouble".

Is there mind involved in some of these but not others? Do some of these hominin sounds carry meaning or information but not others?

If programmed to do so by humans.

'Machine - an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.' — Wayfarer

But what the machine actually does is physical, right? Just because a human designs a machine to serve a human purpose, doesn't mean the machine itself is doing something non-physical, does it? We use shovels to move physical dirt, physically, don't we?

@mcdoodle noted the mechanical nature of the translations in your example. So mechanical in fact that a machine could clearly perform these translations and send these signals. I think your argument really only cares about the first and last steps: seeing something and symbolizing it; seeing a symbol and interpreting it. These functions you attributes to intelligent minds, therefore these functions are mental, therefore they are not physical. I don't think the translation has anything to do with it.

It's an explanation. He lists characteristics of the song that he believes are causes of him liking it, rather than reasons for him to (choose to) like it.

The word "reason" and the word "why" are ambiguous this way: you can ask why I'm voting libertarian, what my reasons are; and you can ask why the door is stuck, what the cause of its being stuck is, and you might also call that the "reason" it's stuck.

I think your textbook wants you to see these reasons as explanation-type rather than argument-type because it has thrown in some subjective stuff, like the solo being lovely, that's dependent on the speaker and you couldn't expect anyone else would consider them reasons.

Hey Sam.

Thanks for posting some links. Here's a quote from the first paper:

This is in line with the hypothesis that the core components of a NDE are neurophysiologically determined [4], [18]. If we assume that some physiological mechanisms can account for NDEs (e.g. OBEs caused by a deficient multisensory integration at the right [19], [20], [21] or left [22] temporo-parietal junction or feeling the presence of another (deceased) person possibly caused by left temporo-parietal junction dysfunction [20]), then the subject really perceived these phenomena, albeit not corresponding to occurring events in reality. At this point, NDEs can meet the definition of hallucinations : “Any percept-like experience which (a) occurs in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, (b) had the full force or impact of the corresponding actual (real) perception, and (c) is not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer” [23]. Note that hallucinations are recognized to most often have pathophysiological or pharmacological origins, as we hypothesize, also is the case for NDEs. As for hallucinations, NDEs present a real perceptual bias (due to physiological mechanisms taking place during NDEs) and can include as many characteristics as real event memories. In addition, the effects of emotional and self-referential values of the NDE could make it a kind of “super-real” memory containing even more characteristics than real event memories. Considering together the concept of flashbulb memories and the similarity of NDEs with hallucinations, the higher amount of characteristics for NDEs that was here observed suggest that the memories of NDEs are flashbulb memories of hallucinations.

So these folks think NDEs are hallucinations rather than confabulations.

It's also a tiny, tiny study and I wonder whether those magic p-values mean anything at all.

Not even a mathematician can draw a generic triangle, nor can you think of one. Every geometry or trigonometry textbook you will ever see has illustrations in it that are specific triangles. In working a problem using such an illustration, you simply (!) follow a rule not to rely on features of the triangle that, while they are present in the triangle you have drawn or are given, are not specified in the problem.

This procedure might be what Grice refers to as "deeming".

I wouldn't want to post on any philosophy forum that wouldn't ban me. — Groucho Marx, I think

You should conduct multiple polls with the answers arranged differently so as not to influence how people vote.

Yeah, "number of entities" posited is not a good measure. (Unless positing God is positing one more than you need.) It's really number of types of entities we care about. You could use Dawkins' complexity measure, that a designer for the whole universe would be have to be even more complex than the universe we're explaining.

It still feels to me like a question of how much of some resource or other is too much to pay for an explanation.

Something else I felt my model captured was our sense that adhoc explanations are a kind of cheating, printing your own money as needed.

Simpler typically means less chance of error / higher chance of subsequently discovering errors (and easier to comprehend). — jorndoe

Yes, I agree with everyone's alternative characterizations of the razor. What's missing is why we should care. For instance, why should you want to make fewer errors? I see a related calculation to mine, given above. It's inefficient to waste resources by making errors you could easily have avoided. Implicitly you're designing an auction where we bid time and effort, and if you spend more than I, you've overpaid.

ADDED: there's a coder's maxim that you shouldn't make a program as cleverly as you can, because if it has a bug, by definition you're not clever enough to find it.

That is to say that no additional information about X can be obtained by adding to A - specifying that other things have to happen. Any other account B would be an intersection of A with other events*3* which is less likely than A. In fact, A is the most likely theory. — fdrake

So this would explain Ockham's razor with one more step, that it is rational to select the theory most likely to be true, and that relates to the other usual version of the razor, that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Yes?

It's nice to be able to prove this version of the razor. Violating it, on this view, is just violating a different norm than what I was headed for, but I assume I'll connect them one of these days, when the Grand Theory of Rationality has revealed itself to me.

The Wikipedia article also gives the "original":

"Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" (Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate).

There is a nice edition of David Hume's Enquiries available free online here.

I've spent almost all my life here, just outside Athens.