But sometimes (not always) the appeal to emergence is just as much of a non-explanation as appealing to a notion of God. In both cases, we need convincing details. — bert1
Do you have an opinion of how information exists, mechanistically or otherwise, only an abstraction or something physical? I've noticed some physicalislts use information as an abstraction without identifying a means for it to physically exist. — Mark Nyquist
Pardon the intrusion, but could reflect that accusation right back at you. You seem to be confusing what you believe with "what is". Yet, your science-based worldview {insert label here} is what you are convinced exists, not by personal perception, but based on hearsay from those who see by proxy for you, perhaps via artificial technology instead of natural perception. Is that an accurate assessment?Not being as such, but of the objects of experience. Questions about what objectively exists are different to questions about the nature of existence, which are much broader in scope. — Wayfarer
You are confusing what you would like to be for what is. — Restitutor
did Donald Hebb or other neurologists, neuropsychologists identify information as brain state only? — Mark Nyquist
If you are getting at something of a dualist nature I might understand. Brain state is neurons holding mental content. — Mark Nyquist
Different individuals may have different neural activations for the same thought or proposition. This variability makes it hard to pinpoint a universal brain state corresponding to a specific thought. — Wayfarer
I think that's the problem. If any given thought can be the result of many different arrangements of matter, then how can it be that the arrangement IS the thought?Different individuals may have different neural activations for the same thought or proposition. This variability makes it hard to pinpoint a universal brain state corresponding to a specific thought.
— Wayfarer
I've never understood this to be a problem. I mean, you can say the same things about ai. ChatGpt 3 has different array matrices activations for "a cat in a hat" than ChatGpt 4 does. If that makes human minds not physical, then does it also make chat gpt not simulatable? Not digitally encodable?
I don't think so. I think it's completely normal that neural networks encode the same (or similar, anyway - it's never really the same) ideas in drastically different ways. I don't find that problematic at all for physicalist ideas of the mind.
In fact I think it would be incredibly surprising if all humans encoded all learned information in exactly the same way. That would be more weird than what we do see. — flannel jesus
I think that's the problem. If any given thought can be the result of many different arrangements of matter, then how can it be that the arrangement IS the thought? — Patterner
Do you have an opinion of how information exists, mechanistically or otherwise, only an abstraction or something physical? I've noticed some physicalists use information as an abstraction without identifying a means for it to physically exist.
An observation would be that information has specific content so how would you bridge the mechanistic with specific information content? — Mark Nyquist
Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it. We could have chosen a different way of modeling it , but so far this way is quite useful for us. It may not always be so. Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary. — Joshs
I make use a lot of information as noted in a more recent post which i regard as being what our minds are made up from. The part i would disagree with the last sentence. Scientists do represent biology mechanistically, this is what our understanding of biology is based on. I agree don't describe psychological phenomena mechanistically but i would suggest that this is for two reasons 1) Describing psychologically important concepts mechanistically is something most people find psychologically distressing 2) a failure of imagination regarding how to explain psychological phenomena mechanistically. The "different descriptive vocabulary", is in my opinion somewhat disingenuous people are just talking about there psychology's using different descriptive vocabulary, they are sometimes implicitly but mostly explicitly making ontological claims about the nature of the psychological phenomena. These ontological claims go the the core of how we think about and justify our beliefs about psychological phenomena so they are in no was incidental to the discussion. I am interested in how we should change the ontologies of psychological phenomena to make them consistent with a mechanistic universe and what the effects of doing this would be — Restitutor
The inter-action of neurons may well be mechanistic, but the general brain "state" is a snapshot (static) pattern or relationship, which requires a sentient observer to "see". For example, a political "state" is not a physical object or collection of objects, but the collective opinion of those who identify with that particular polity. In mathematical Statistics, a particular "state" is a datum, that in itself has no value, but only in relation to other states or data. Hence, "data" is relevant to "information" & meaning. :smile:I can add that once brain state is identified as the physical form of information then a mechanistic theory works for me and the loose ends have been taken care of. — Mark Nyquist
What are the philosophical consequences of science saying we are mechanistic?
I think that's the problem. If any given thought can be the result of many different arrangements of matter, then how can it be that the arrangement IS the thought? — Patterner
You've seen the range of information definitions that show up here. Two that seem to be scientific but are not are Shannon information and what physicists call physical information. Both of these reduce to abstract concepts that must be supported by brain state. — Mark Nyquist
I think there's probably some base structures that are pretty damn similar between humans — flannel jesus
In this way the information in the original soundwave can be duplicated highlighting that information, unlike matter can be given away repeatedly without ever losing the original information. A record can be copied millions of times from the mold, with the mold changing the shape of molten plastic. — Restitutor
Aristotle observed there are two distinct things about wax which are its substance and its shape. — Restitutor
. This means that to make dualism fully compatible with science all you need to do is stop claiming res cogitans is independent of matter and start calling it information. — Restitutor
A phrase that seems appropriate to summaries my view on the relationship between matter and information could be described as information-matter dualism. So that’s what I think, information-matter dualism is how I personally frame what science says about information. — Restitutor
That analogy can be extended though. If you have an item of information - say, instructions, or a recipe - that can be represented in any number of languages, or encoded in any number of media (digital, physical, and so on). Provided the information is faithfully replicated in each transformation, then the information stays the same, even if the material form of its presentation is completely different. That is the sense in which meaning can be understood — Wayfarer
There's an entire massive website, The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle, which is devoted to this idea. It's a constant reference point for me, I guess you know about it already but for the record it's here https://www.informationphilosopher.com/ . The index of carefully curated articles about individual philosophers and scientists is a fantastic resource. — Wayfarer
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