I do agree with that, but I think you're the only other contributor who has suggested that 'information' and 'meaning' are more or less synonymous in this context. I find that suggestion pregnant with, well, meaning. There is the trend towards saying, hey, maybe information is fundamental in the Universe - maybe it's not too much of a stretch to then say, hey, maybe meaning is fundamental - after all! (After having declared it entirely banished in the aftermath of the Copernican revolution.)
But I'm keeping clear of Derrida and Heidegger. I don't have time to study them in depth, and without studying them in depth, nothing much I say will be relevant. — Wayfarer
'Religion' has many meanings, and some of the connotations of that word are unavoidably negative, even evil, when we consider the chequered history of religion in the world. No question. But what I'm trying to argue is that there are epistemological and metaphysical issues that have become intertwined with religion, in such a way that the social attitude towards religion - the desire NOT to believe - influences our very being. I think that is the meaning of 'unbelief' - it's not that you won't bow to the Pope - I certainly don't - but that there is a kind of pathological hatred of anything that can be construed as religious ('pathological' because the roots are not visible i.e. unconscious.) — Wayfarer
Certainly, religious modes of knowledge are 'subjective' but only in the sense that they involve an understanding which must be first-person, i.e. they don't concern matters about which one CAN be objective; they don't concern objects at all, unless those objects are symbolic. Whereas science only concerns objects, and seeks explanations of everything in terms of objects and forces. But you see, to say this tends to provoke the reaction - ah, you're religious, you don't refer to science to sort out the wheat from the chaff - you're 'not even wrong'. — Wayfarer
'Public' is a key word here. It means 'third person', what can be exhibited in the 'public square'. Again, religious or spiritual truths are not 'public' in that sense, because they can only be understood in the first person. But they're not subjective in the sense of idiosyncratic, peculiar to myself - hence the role of the spiritual mentor or 'guru' in validating your integration of spiritual truths. — Wayfarer
The 'plague of individualism' is only that of nihil ultra ego, 'nothing beyond self'. When the individual is properly anchored both in truth and in the community of the wise, then that individual is indeed a worthy individual (near the original meaning of the 'arya' in Buddhism, which the Nazis were later to purloin for their depraved ends). — Wayfarer
Our understanding nature is not the same as nature, regardless of the predictive successes of any science, what is in-itself is not an obtainable point of view, stronger version it cannot even be thought. The world as it is, it could be otherwise. — Cavacava
Actually the mind 'generates' what Husserl called the 'umwelt', the lived-meaning-world, which comprises 'our world'. — Wayfarer
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? — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
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
Interesting. I wonder why bother persisting with universals at all. Need to read up! — Wayfarer
It's a damned shame that Heidegger.... — t0m
I think we'll continue to see a distrust of any hint of objectivity in religion, at least until it possibly wins and burns all the books. — t0m
As I understand/experience "spirituality," it's a self-justifying experience — t0m
your claim is that what is essential to information is the subject matter, and the physical form is accidental. When the same subject matter has different physical forms, you call this "the same information". So you conclude that the physical form plays no part in the information itself, as "the same content" is equal to "the same information". .
Here's the problem. If this were the case, then we ought to be able, in principle, to remove the physical form from any piece of information, and be left with pure content, pure subject matter, and this would be pure information. Now imagine if there were such a thing as pure content, pure subject matter, a pure idea, this would be pure information with absolutely no physical form. — Metaphysician Undercover
If it has no physical form it is indistinguishable from non-information — Metaphysician Undercover
And I don't see the argument from translatability as establishing that something not physical is being passed around. — Srap Tasmaner
That sounds ever so much like what I said. — Srap Tasmaner
Information could be something else we embodied minds traffic in just as we do other physical stuff. — Srap Tasmaner
For Aristotle, there is only one world - the world of everyday experience - and it includes both particulars and universals. — Andrew M
What is interesting it's that both Bergson and Peirce viewed matter as some sort of decayed or constrained mind. — Rich
Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson
It is possible for something to give false information, without any physical signs of it whatsoever? — Wosret
Hmmm. I wouldn't modernise him too much, he still believed that everything has a final purpose. But I have to get into this book I've taken out about him. — Wayfarer
It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature. The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that.
It is plain then that nature is a cause, a cause that operates for a purpose. — Physics by Aristotle - Book II, Part 8
(Incidentally, there is a nice article on Aristotelean philosophy of maths on Aeon, if you haven't seen it: The mathematical world, Jim Franklin.) — Wayfarer
Because Aristotelian realism insists on the realisability of mathematical properties in the world, it can give a straightforward account of how basic mathematical facts are known: by perception, the same as other simple facts.
What is essential to information is what it specifies. — Wayfarer
The point is, there could be huge variation in the written or printed or electronic form of the information, but the meaning, the output, has to be exactly the same - otherwise, no 'bang'. It's very precise. — Wayfarer
Again, there is the whole domain of pure mathematics. The 'physical form' that it takes is only the symbols in which it is notated, but the domain itself comprises purely the relationship of ideas. — Wayfarer
We've been through this before. How can you claim direct cause and effect if we still see red when the wavelength is not "red"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_constancy — apokrisis
Can you support your bold claim that we must "have the same thought" in order to communicate, instead of merely "similar thoughts" as I suggested?In which case, you and I would never be able to converse! If you say 'apple' and I think 'banana', then it's game over for communicating. That's why language and reasoning are essentially universalising activities - they rely on our grasp of types, of generalities - when you say 'apple', any English-speaking person should know what you mean. Given that, it is of course true that we will 'see things differently'. But we have to have something in common to begin with, for language to even work - that is the store of language with all of its subtleties and depths. — Wayfarer
Same old song and dance.It means bad news for materialism. — Wayfarer
I've heard a different story: http://www.etymonline.com/word/idiot(Actually I read an interesting comment the other day on the etymological between 'idiosyncratic' and 'idiot'. An 'idiot' wasn't originally someone who was intellectually disabled, but someone who spoke in a language nobody else could understand.) — Wayfarer
Of course it's possible to imagine any number of "metaphysical" scenarios in which minds and their abstractions exist in some nonphysical world independent of the physical world we seem in fact to inhabit. But it's not clear to me why we should take any of these divergent and often conflicting fantasies more seriously than the others, — Cabbage Farmer
as if you had a "direct" view of reality itself? — Harry Hindu
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
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