You want a serious answer about how the telephone system is run by a computer? — frank
What's your background in electronic engineering? — frank
Yes (e.g. a community – more than any "subjective mind" – that uses the public conventions of "stop signs" & "traffic lights"; see below).Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020
Yes (e.g. thermal EM radiation from stars, etc). The "experience" may be "subjective", though "red" is acquired publicly, but (except for those who are colorblind) what "red" corresponds to in every instance (e.g. EM frequencies) is not "subjective".If there is no mind to experience and conceptually designate “red” does red ever aquire aninherentexistence independent of a third party mind?
Does the color “red” exist outside of the subjective mind that conceptually designates the concept of “red?” — Mp202020
If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want? — Banno
but our personal experience of the color red may very well differ from the actual experience of the same light wavelength another may have, which we’ve all agreed to call “red.” I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.” — Mp202020
I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.” — Mp202020
what if the concept of a “red pen” exists within the realm of every subjective mind’s ideas? — Kizzy
The illusion of autonomous symbol systems
There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws. As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".
Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink). For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.
This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms.
I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism. This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics. Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.
https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html
Hi jkop, It seemed to me at first that Banno's reply to mp202020 was worth a deeper dive. I am now finding myself struggling to explain where I was going with my shared contributions. When you put it so simply it's clear I was mistakenly considering how the red is noticed perceptually in the brain when its not actually being seen in person. The red pen must be enough in order to do that! Duh....a swing and a miss for me.what if the concept of a “red pen” exists within the realm of every subjective mind’s ideas? — Kizzy
Is a red pen not enough? — jkop
I got ya now and see where I went off the rails.First, the experience cannot solely be an experience of redness unless it is the seeing of something red, say a patch of red paint. Or else it would be an hallucination. — jkop
Predictive processing is an ambitious theory in cognitive and computational neuroscience. Its central thesis is that brains self-organize around the imperative to minimize a certain kind of error: the mismatch between internally generated, model-based predictions of their sensory inputs and the externally generated sensory inputs themselves (Clark 2016; Friston 2009, 2010; Hohwy 2013). Clark (2015) has recently suggested that this overarching theory of neural function has the resources to put an ecumenical end to what he calls the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. Specifically, he argues that it implies an understanding of internal representation that can accommodate important insights from the enactivist tradition without renouncing the theory’s representational credentials.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6566209/
If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want? — Banno
Not when marking papers. Another lost skill.Asking for a 'green', 'red', or 'blue' pen is simply picky. — javi2541997
but our personal experience of the color red may very well differ from the actual experience of the same light wavelength another may have, which we’ve all agreed to call “red.” I am speaking solely on the subjective experience of “redness.
the mind could be trained to use ideas or visions from past memories or brain activity patterns? — Kizzy
What if we watch the brain activity looking at a painting of a red pen? The painting itself is not a real pen, but it still conveys the idea of “redness” and “pen” to anyone who views it. — Kizzy
Another example of how colours are social conventions. — javi2541997
I had only heard of human and octopus, and thought that was amazing!!Did you know the eye has evolved independently about 50 times on earth? Crazy. — frank
but the color itself probably has to do with our biology, right — frank
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