I’m posting you carefully worded thoughts. I’m hoping they might constrain your state of mind so that we share some point of view. — apokrisis
Yet your responses come back as saying your understanding is at best vague or uncertain. Or actually you are in the habit of interpreting signals you can’t follow as “this just has to be wrong - it is not the formula of words that I am accustomed to responding to with the return signal of a thumb’s up,” — apokrisis
So sure. Signs can be intended to function as constraints, but they can regularly fail in that intended function. — apokrisis
And the resident interpretations don’t welcome the threatened intrusions. — apokrisis
I think that this is an incorrect representation. The sign itself does not constrain the interpretation, it is completely passive in this respect. All constraints on interpretation occur within the mind of the interpreter and this can be expressed as habit, or lack of habit. There are no constraints on interpretation within the sign itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
The mind is simply the fact of the process of interpretation. — apokrisis
You yourself believe that the Platonic forms amount to 'social conventions', and then fault the realists for thinking that! — Wayfarer
You cannot build a language out of nothing but variables and expect it to be able to describe the feeling of kissing a cute girl. — Akanthinos
How can the sign carry its function if it doesn't not act as a restraint on interpretation? — Akanthinos
Weither 1) is true or not does not impede the function of a sign to inform. As long as a non-null amount of meaning can be assigned to a sign, communication can still occur. With 2), however, you can quickly see how this would deprecate languages. You cannot build a language out of nothing but variables and expect it to be able to describe the feeling of kissing a cute girl. — Akanthinos
The words don't constrain my mind at all, that is a completely deterministic assumption. — Metaphysician Undercover
I can follow the words, but my mind follows the words due to habits it has produced. The constraints on my interpretation are these habits, they are not the words. — Metaphysician Undercover
The words themselves have absolutely no power over the human being. — Metaphysician Undercover
That's where "Romanticism" comes in, which thinks in terms of these fundamental interpretations. It's "pre-science" or "pre-metaphysics" in that it thinks the conditions of possibility for metaphysical, scientific, and religious frameworks. On the other hand, it is itself such a framework, self-consciously holding itself at a distance from (other) particular commitments. — t0m
You often refer to that, but this was part of his paper on sending and receiving information, wasn't it? It wasn't a philosophical theory as such, was it? — Wayfarer
This still assumes that the fundamental forms are physical. I have been researching the Forms, which is the 'formal' side of hylomorphism, and the original concept of the Forms is that they are outside space and time altogether. The motivation of early philosophy was not instrumental or scientific in our sense- it was as much 'the quest for the transcendent' as the quest for useful knowledge about the sensory domain. — Wayfarer
In the end, the claims of being fundamental are stronger for the Enlightenment view - the method of objective reasoning.
You can dispute that and we can weigh the evidence.
(See, the scientific method wins again as the best way to do actual philosophy.) — apokrisis
But Romanticism was also literally the reaction to the Enlightenment. So it is post that science and metaphysical turn. — apokrisis
Where I fault the realists i — Metaphysician Undercover
A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.
The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has any meaning.
It was a vague "philosophical" distinction given solid mathematical/empirical foundations at last. And so that has had immense consequences if you actually believe in progress in metaphysics. — apokrisis
Information theory studies the quantification, storage, and communication of information. It was originally proposed by Claude E. Shannon in 1948 to find fundamental limits on signal processing and communication operations such as data compression, in a landmark paper entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include lossless data compression (e.g. ZIP files), lossy data compression (e.g. MP3s and JPEGs), and channel coding (e.g. for digital subscriber line (DSL)).
Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a coin flip (with two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy) than specifying the outcome from a roll of a die (with six equally likely outcomes).
I am with Aristotle rather than Plato on that score. — apokrisis
A sign does not carry its function. Its function is determined by the mind of the author or by the mind of the interpreter. If this were not the case, misunderstanding and misinterpretation would be impossible, because the sign would always deliver the correct function to the interpreting mind. Since the interpreting mind often makes mistakes, then it is necessary to assume that the function of the sign is determined by the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover
By "pre-science" I mean the establishing of what counts as evidence in the first place. — t0m
We started to think that this non-intuititive way of "deworlding" objects gave us the real object. I'd say that it just rips the object from the fullness of our experience of it in a way that's good for certain purposes. Beyond the usual "sentimental" objections to this, there is also the question of not wanting to inaccurately understand the world by uncritically being trapped in just one framework. — t0m
I'm not 'shrugging it off', but I am pointing out that Shannon's theory was originally published as a theory about information transmission — Wayfarer
So, what is the relationship between logical and thermodynamic entropy? it seems to me that they're being equivocated. — Wayfarer
But my point is that something can't count as evidence unless there is a theory framed to be countable. — apokrisis
So what is Romanticism counting? As a theory, what actually possible measurements does it suggest. If it doesn't offer any, then it is not even a theory. It is just an idea that is "not even wrong". — apokrisis
There is a rational sociological explanation for the fostering of irrationality. Convincing folk they are self-actualising beings creates the pool of requisite variety that rapid cultural evolution can feed off. Society becomes this great big competition for attention. Apply a ruthless filter over the top of that, and hey bingo, out pops out your master race. Or at least the ruling elite.
Of course there is then the rational reaction - the PC response to try and declare everyone some kind of cultural winner. Prizes all round. Everyone gets an equal share of the social limelight.
Yeah right. Dream on. — apokrisis
Information entropy is exactly about semantic content, isn't it? It's how many bits can be lost before the information contained in the string loses its meaning? Yes or no?ike everyone else, you are obsessed by the semantic content of a message. — apokrisis
You go check the equation and tell me where you see any equivocation. — apokrisis
Do you not yet get the Copernican nature of that revelation and why it now reverberates so loudly through the sciences? — apokrisis
You believe that it must exist - even though you've search high and low and nowhere does it seem to have physical existence. It is spookily immaterial - a transcendent ghost haunting the world. — apokrisis
Do you not see the genius in discovering that materiality can only hold a certain amount of meaning? — apokrisis
What is it to mean something? What is intelligibility itself? — t0m
ou’ve then lost a lot more than information - you’ve lost an idea, that might have had profound and far-reaching consequences in the physical sciences. How could you possibly quantify the consequences of that? You might be able to encode it in - I don’t know - a few hundred bytes. But the principle the equation describes might have ramifications and applications that revolutionise industry. So - how much information was actually lost? — Wayfarer
The point I made was that words can only constrain an interpretation, they can't determine an interpretation. . — apokrisis
The best my words could do is constrain your state of mind in a suitable way so that you more or less shared my intended meaning. You would have the same point of view - down to the level where any differences didn't make a meaningful difference. — apokrisis
But my words can fail even to achieve that. You can categorise the incoming text as a bunch of internet static lacking any embedded signal. So I can't determine your state of interpretance. And much of the time, I can't even limit its free variety in any measurable way.
And that's fine. That is what semiotics explains. — apokrisis
Remember that in the context of the discussion about ‘reality of universals’, I mean by ‘realism’, not ‘modern realism’, but ‘realism with respect to universals’. It has a very different meaning to today's realism. — Wayfarer
If the meaning of a sign is determined by the author or by the interpreter, then again communication would be impossible. All direct conversations would be spent trying to establish a common vocabulary and semantic, and all indirect communication would be simply impossible. — Akanthinos
The meaning of the sign is established at the moment of its formation as a sign. "&" means nothing until someone assigns meaning for it, by making public another bit of information with at least some degree of authority, which is that "'&' means 'and'". Before this, "&" was the sign of nothing except perhaps of random human activity as scribble. — Akanthinos
It can be made public, but it is inherently private. — Metaphysician Undercover
A clue to the origins of Shannon’s genius can be found in the sheer scope of his intellectual interests. He was a peculiar sort of engineer – one known for juggling and riding a unicycle through Bell Labs’ corridors, and whose creations included a flame-throwing trumpet, a calculator called ‘THROBAC’ that operated in Roman numerals (short for ‘Thrifty Roman-Numeral Backward-Looking Computer’), and a mechanical mouse named Theseus that could locate a piece of metallic cheese in a maze. Genetics, artificial intelligence, computer chess, jazz clarinet and amateur poetry numbered among his other pursuits.
How come that is not the very same subjectivism you’re criticising in the top paragraph of your post? — Wayfarer
Sorry, I did not understand that paragraph. Could you perhaps rephrase it?Perhaps put more simply : It is up to the information processor to establish the identity between the information particulars encountered across multiple mediums. This identity belongs to the interpreted information, not to the information medium, and therefore does not inform us on the medium, which means that this does not contradict the claim that information is material. — Akanthinos
You bring a good point, but yet I think we can still think without using words or images, or imagining any other containers. Think of the concept of 'justice'. Can you describe this concept with words? It may be possible but I can't because I don't know its essence yet. Can you use an image for it? The concept itself does not seem to be physical. And yet, the word 'justice' is not a meaningless word, and I'm sure we can all use it correctly to describe a specific situation. This goes to show that we can think about some concepts like 'justice' without having to rely on containers.For me the issue is that language itself is a "container" -- at least to the degree that we believe in translation. Do we think in words? In my experience, we do, with maybe a little wiggle room for some kind of spatial-temporal reasoning. Can we generally strip meaning from its body? It's not so clear. — t0m
Perfect. Then we agree that the form our ability to learn a language takes is innate - physical - a product of evolution. So then how do you go from saying it is a product of evolution to saying that those explanations don't explain some aspect of language that isn't biological. That seems like a pretty big assumption - that language isn't biological in every sense. If biology can't explain all of it, then what do you think will - and what is it that is missing? The way our minds work is also biological, and would therefore be acted on by natural selection. What do you think learning is, if not natural selection acting on our minds and shaping the way they interact with and understand the world in order to propagate genes more efficiently?Human infants are born with the ability to learn language. It is innate. Certainly it is in some sense a product of evolution, what I'm questioning is the extent to which language and abstract thought can be understood solely through the prism of evolutionary biology. Because to do so, invariably reduces the subject of the enquiry to 'how does that help the species survive?' That is the sense in which biological explanations are often reductive. While the neo-darwinian synthesis is a biological theory, it is often taken as a philosophical principle to support positions and conclusions which are outside the scope of biology per se. But it is, as I say, a separate question. — Wayfarer
Then we agree that the form our ability to learn a language takes is innate - physical - a product of evolution. So then how do you go from saying it is a product of evolution to saying that those explanations don't explain some aspect of language that isn't biological. — Harry Hindu
I don't think that you understand meaning at all. I can write &, and it has some meaning for me. it symbolizes something for me, without making anything about what it symbolizes public. Meaning is not something public. It can be made public, but it is inherently private. — Metaphysician Undercover
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