so how can any of that be used to explain or reproduce what the (philo of) human mind does? They tried decades ago to use things like symbolic, predicate calculus/logic but failed to anything useful beyond creating automatic theorem provers. — Sir Philo Sophia
I disagree. You omit utility. There is no meaning w/o some sense of utility. A mere ontology of info/data does not create knowledge if you have not gained any actionable path to beneficially use it. I look forward to your stab at your definitions re what I pose above, which will help ground all of our lose semantics here. — Sir Philo Sophia
Not all thinking is formal-deductive. That would be a serious misconception. I guess that most thinking is probably even not. — alcontali
The true human being is true. Where is the limit of truth.↪Invisibilis
That’s the significance of human life, as we experience it. The ‘meaning of life’ is broader than that: to pursue the ‘truth’ and express it in how we relate to the universe, regardless of the limitations of ‘being human’. — Possibility
The true human being is true. Where is the limit of truth. — Invisibilis
A dishonest one.What is a ‘false human being’?... — Possibility
What are the exclusion implied?The limit of ‘truth’ is in exclusions implied by the potential of its expression. — Possibility
What are the exclusion implied? — Invisibilis
Utility is the reduction of information from meaning to knowledge via conceptual systems. Determining an actionable path to beneficially use information is a process that ignores, isolates or excludes possible information according to a subjective perception of potentiality. Yes, it’s a necessary process for utilising knowledge at a subjective level, but no, it isn’t necessary for meaning. — Possibility
The ‘meaning of life’ is broader than that: to pursue the ‘truth’ and express it in how we relate to the universe, regardless of the limitations of ‘being human’. — Possibility
though information and meaning are certainly related — Arne
How would you say they are related? — Sir Philo Sophia
the meaning of which I care not — Arne
that is not a meaningful relationship, definition, or framework. What you 'care'' about has nothing to do with the metaphysical/logical/causal/scientific relationship between information and meaning . — Sir Philo Sophia
Yes, it is the self which is limited, and not the truth. Whenever self looks for truth, and/or expresses it, it is limited by its own limitations. Truth cannot be limited. There is no such thing as a half/part/limited truth, for it then becomes a deception, and not a truth. Truth is the only reality, and what is not true is unreal. The best the limited self can express only seems true and real.
A true human being is a consciousness of honesty, where truth expresses itself onto our thoughts and feelings. The self had no part in creating the thoughts and feelings to make it seem true and real. When truth reveals itself, uncensored, onto our thoughts and feelings, it is understood without reason or logic attached. It is doubtless, obvious, fearless, and restorative. It even heals what limitations the self has at that time. — Invisibilis
I applaud where you are trying to go with this, but I have to respectfully disagree with your model/ideas on that. For one thing, I'm not seeing 'utility' as being necessarily based on 'meaning'. I see it more based on pattern matching and degrees of causal correlations.
That is, I do not think that meaning or intelligibility is primal when it comes to building knowledge. I expect utility is much more primal because it requires less energy/work/knowledge to enable us to reduce/increase certain entropy as desired to achieve desired outcomes. — Sir Philo Sophia
For example, quantum particles and their behavior is completely intelligible and has almost no meaning to us; however, we can develop and detect statistical (math) generalizations that predict their observed behavior good enough to use them in useful devices/methods or to predict when/where they may occur with what likelihood and at what energy level, all w/ little to know understanding of what they really are about. — Sir Philo Sophia
As another example, consider a pattern/event/object 'A' is observed and found to occur semi-periodically; however, 'A' is not understood in any way and has no intrinsic meaning, we can only detect its occurrence (think like a sub-atomic particle in an accelerator collision). We notice that most of the time shortly after pattern 'A' is observed occurring a desirable, yet otherwise completely temporally unpredictable, resource/object 'B' will be available for a brief moment. Having knowledge of this causal association we prepare ourselves to take advantage of 'B', and right after detecting 'A" we were, finally, able to acquire 'B'. Pattern 'A' is like a sign, we don't have to know what the sign says or means, we just have to uniquely recognize the occurrence of that pattern which we don't at all understand (i.e., pure pattern matching, no comprehension or meaning needed).
what do you say about that? — Sir Philo Sophia
I think you are defining the meaning of a philosopher's life, not human life. At the risk of sounding like a reductionist, the genetically programmed, thus default, meaning of life is to develop and employ a cognitive framework sufficient to acquire and use information to build enough knowledge on how to gain enough food and shelter sustenance to survive good and long enough to acquire a mate and reproduce. The rest is icing on the human cake, so to speak (in metaphors).
So, the premise of this thread is talking about the icing, think the self-actualization in Maslow's pyramid, not not the primal cake (survival). After survival is fulfilled, then the meaning of that post-survival life can step up once in Maslow's pyramid, where info is used to serve more comfort, personal entropy reduction needs, but that is not the primal meaning of life, by any stretch.
eager to hear any solid counter examples/arguments. — Sir Philo Sophia
Information: ‘the resolution of uncertainty’ Is a simplified definition of information, although it invariably leads to a demonisation of entropy and a subsequent rejection of this uncertainty. — Possibility
I think you are defining the meaning of a philosopher's life, not human life. At the risk of sounding like a reductionist, the genetically programmed, thus default, meaning of life is to develop and employ a cognitive framework sufficient to acquire and use information to build enough knowledge on how to gain enough food and shelter sustenance to survive good and long enough to acquire a mate and reproduce. The rest is icing on the human cake, so to speak (in metaphors).
So, the premise of this thread is talking about the icing, think the self-actualization in Maslow's pyramid, not not the primal cake (survival). After survival is fulfilled, then the meaning of that post-survival life can step up once in Maslow's pyramid, where info is used to serve more comfort, personal entropy reduction needs, but that is not the primal meaning of life, by any stretch.
eager to hear any solid counter examples/arguments. — Sir Philo Sophia
I don't see how information is directly and necessarily related to any monotonic change in entropy. I see info as being more about the binding of data values in a certain configuration as a property of something. — Sir Philo Sophia
In nature, variables are not independent; for instance, in any magnet, the two ends have opposite polarities. Knowing one amounts to knowing the other. So we can say that each end “has information” about the other. There is nothing mental in this; it is just a way of saying that there is a necessary relation between the polarities of the two ends. We say that there is "relative information" between two systems anytime the state of one is constrained by the state of the other. In this precise sense, physical systems may be said to have information about one another, with no need for a mind to play any role. Such "relative information" is ubiquitous in nature: The color of the light carries information about the object the light has bounced from; a virus has information about the cell it may attach; and neurons have information about one another. Since the world is a knit tangle of interacting events, it teams with relative information. When this information is exploited for survival, extensively elaborated by our brain, and maybe coded in a language understood by a community, it becomes mental, and it acquires the semantic weight that we commonly attribute to the notion of information. But the basic ingredient is down there in the physical world: physical correlation between distinct variables. The physical world is not a set of self-absorbed entities that do their selfish things. It is a tightly knitted net of relative information, where everybody’s state reflects somebody else’s state. We understand physical, chemical, biological, social, political, astrophysical, and cosmological systems in terms of these nets of relations, not in terms of individual behavior. Physical relative information is a powerful basic concept for describing the world. Before “energy,” “matter,” or even “entity.” — Carlo Rovelli
information on something might reduce your uncertainty/entropy wrt to knowing that something, which may at the same time increase your uncertainty/entropy (e.g., if the info contradicts many more facts/info you thought were true of that something). So, in this context, please explain by example how you find, by definition "Information is the resolution of uncertainty’". — Sir Philo Sophia
Truth is unconditional love. Both share the same descriptives. When truth merges with our consciousness (awareness) it does so without us having to think about it. It can even just pop into our consciousness, and does so when we were not, or no longer, seeking it.
How can something unreal/untrue have meaning?
Whatever meaning the self attaches to it is fantasy and so is the attached meaning. It becomes meaningless due to its own deception. To claim something untrue/unreal as having meaning is the same as saying nothing is something. — Invisibilis
We say that there is "relative information" between two systems anytime the state of one is constrained by the state of the other. — Carlo Rovelli
nformation from interacting with a particular ‘apple’ experience, for instance, reduces your uncertainty wrt that apple — Possibility
This is just one type of info. This is not a complete definition of information. Moreover, nothing new about this idea. Seems to be just one type of information where there are cross-correlations or causal dependencies between things. — Sir Philo Sophia
Here is an example where uncertainty might increase: assume you believed all apples were red and anything spherical and greenish is a Lime. You go to bite what you thought was a greenish lime, but you discover and confirm it was a green apple. This new info that apples can be other colors now makes you uncertain as to whether other properties you believed apples have are true, and you even question what does it mean to be an apple, let alone the red type. Not a great example, but I hope you get the gist of what I mean that new info on something can also make you more uncertain (lest confident or trusting) in your truth or knowledge of that something.
Again, I'm still looking for your explanation of how you believe "Information is the resolution of uncertainty" — Sir Philo Sophia
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