None of these. Something is coherent when it is consistent. — MoK

I don't need to prove it. It is a brute fact. — MoK

Seeing a cup in a location is your private perception. It lacks objective ground for anything being coherent.

But beliefs and thoughts could be incoherent. That is why I want to exclude them from the discussion. — MoK

It makes more crucial and important part of your experience is excluded from your premise, while relying on your personal subjective seeing a cup as ground for your belief on the contents of your experience being coherent. There is always possibility what you are seeing could be illusions.

Of course, your computer is coherent. Yet get on the screen what you type on the keyboard for example. — MoK

Computer screen and keyboard either work or don't work. No one describes computer screen and keyboard are coherent.

Of course, your computer is coherent. Yet get on the screen what you type on the keyboard for example. — MoK

Ideas and thoughts could be coherent. Rains, snows, sky, horses, birds, phones, computers and keyboards are not coherent.

Seeing a cup in a location is your private perception. It lacks objective ground for anything being coherent. — Corvus

We couldn't possibly live in a reality that is not coherent.

It makes more crucial and important part of your experience is excluded from your premise, while relying on your personal subjective seeing a cup as ground for your belief on the contents of your experience being coherent. There is always possibility what you are seeing could be illusions. — Corvus

We couldn't possibly depend on our experiences if what we experience is a mere illusion.

We couldn't possibly live in a reality that is not coherent. — MoK

The point is not about living in a reality, but the fact that private experience is not objective ground for coherence.

We couldn't possibly depend on our experiences if what we experience is a mere illusion. — MoK

Again, not the whole experience is illusion, but there are parts of experience which could be illusion.

The point is not about living in a reality, but private experience is not objective ground for coherence. — Corvus

The private experience is an objective ground for coherence. We don't have any other tools except our private experience anyway!

Again, not the whole experience is illusion, but there are parts of experience which could be illusion. — Corvus

Can you give me an example of something you experienced in the past that was an illusion?

The private experience is an objective ground for coherence. We don't have any other tools except our private experience anyway! — MoK

That is an idea of absolute idealist and solipsism. Problem with these ideas is that they cannot appeal to or share objective knowledge.

Can you give me an example of something you experienced in the past that was an illusion? — MoK

Illusions are possibility in daily life of humans. Your seeing a cup in a location could have been an illusion. There is no proof you were seeing a cup.

That is an idea of absolute idealist and solipsism. Problem with these ideas is that they cannot appeal to or share objective knowledge. — Corvus

I don't have an argument against solipsism and I am not endorsing it either. I have faith that other beings exist though. All I am saying is that we only have access to things through our private experiences.

Illusions are possibility in daily life of humans. Your seeing a cup in a location could have been an illusion. There is no proof you were seeing a cup. — Corvus

Here, I am not talking about the cup of tea but my experience of the cup of tea only.

Here, I am not talking about the cup of tea but my experience of the cup of tea only. — MoK

Psychological state or personal experience cannot be ground for objective knowledge.

A substance is something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities. — MoK

As far as 'substance dualism' is concerned, for Descartes, mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa) are of completely different kinds. The soul, res cogitans, is immaterial and lacking in extension (physical dimensions) but is capable of reasoning and thinking. Matter occupies space but is devoid of intelligence. The problem for substance dualism is explaining how non-extended incorporeal intelligence interacts with non-intelligent corporeal matter. Descartes suggest that this was via the pineal gland, but it is generally agreed that this is unsatisfactory and it remains an outstanding problem for substance dualism.

I'm sorry to say that you're not demonstrating a clear understanding of the questions you're raising, and so I have nothing further to add at this time.

I didn't say that the experience cannot be coherent. I said that it does not have the capacity to be coherent. I think I should have said that the experience does not have the capacity to be coherent on its own (I changed the OP accordingly). That follows from the definition of experience as a conscious event that is informative and coherent. An event is something that happens or takes place so its coherence cannot be due to itself but something else namely the object. — MoK

You say that experience is coherent because the object is coherent, but at the same time you accept that coherence is given from the subject. Which implies redundancy. Object coherence is no longer a criterion for inferring dualism of subtances, since that criterion is found in both subject and object don't You think?

It's simply that if experience is coherent, then it follows that something is coherent.

Formerly, f(a) ⊢ ∃(x)f(x). If the individual a is one of the things that are f, then we can derive that there is an x such that x is f.

The class picked out by "f" is not empty.

"Substance" is a pretty archaic term, not much used by philosophers any more. So existential generalisation shows that there is an individual, rather than that something has a substance. Existential generalisation just affirms the existence of an individual satisfying a predicate; it doesn’t commit one to any particular metaphysical framework regarding substance. The vagueness of "substance" is apparent in the discussion in this thread. There's the Bundle theory to dal with - if substance is what "holds" properties, what difference is there between substance and a bundle of properties? Why not just drop the use of "substance" altogether? What is it that makes one substance different from another - and again, if it's just the properties they accept, why not just deal in terms of those properties? What is the relation between substance and essence? And the problem I focused on, how is it that different substances are able to interact?

Logic now pretty much deals in individuals rather than substances. Certainly that's the case in extensional first order logic.

Where do you see the measurable heat (Motion of atoms and molecules) in a sentence like:

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog". — JuanZu

See Landauer's principle, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. But obviously, there are far more ways to arrange the letters randomly than there are ways to arrange them into a sentence of English, so that English sentence has a far lower entropy.

But if someone says #2 can be described entirely in terms of #1, then that is what they are saying, and I would like to hear how it works. — Patterner

Just to be clear, the suggestion that a mental even is exactly equivalent to a physical event is not something I would defend, but at the same time not something that we can rule out.

The reasoning is pretty simple. There are a very large number of physical states that a brain can be in, and we reduce these to a very few intentional descriptions. If someone maintains an equivalence between some physical state and being in lover, they must maintain that there is a commonality between your brain when it is in love with Adam and when it is in love with Eve, and that whatever that commonality is, is also found in my brain when I am in love with Eve. A tall order.

And then go a step further. Supose someone maintains that a brain is in love if and only if it is in State L. And supose that they find someone who claims to be in love, but who's brain is not in state L. Do we say that they are wrong? Or do we say that the theory "a brain is in love if and only if it is in State L" is wrong? That is, there are big issues with falsification and verification here.

Hence anomalous monism - being in love is a physical state but not one that can be set out explicitly and universally as a law. And the power of this approach is not that it is right, but just that it might be right - that there may be no explicit reduction of the intentional to the physical and yet there is nothing more to the intentional than the physical.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"

The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.

Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it? — Wayfarer

I think I've answered that question.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"

The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.

Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it?
— Wayfarer

See Landauer's principle, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. But obviously, there are far more ways to arrange the letters randomly than there are ways to arrange them into a sentence of English, so that English sentence has a far lower entropy. — Banno

Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law, have nothing to do with semantics or semiotics. They're about storage and transmission of information via electronic media.

Take a 1Tb hard drive, capable of storing millions of documents. Zero out all of the information, and the hard drive is physically identical. There would be no way to detect the difference between the formatted hard drive and the hard drive containing information, without interpreting the binary code on the medium. But that intrepretive act is also not anything described by physics. It pertains to a completely different level, that of meaning and information.

The point stands:

Physics can describe the medium — the symbols, the binary states, the characters.

But meaning is not in the medium. It's not in the letters themselves, nor in the physical arrangement of bits on a drive. Meaning only appears in interpretation — in the relation between the symbols and what they signify, which presupposes a system of signs, a language, and ultimately a mind.

That’s the core of the semiotic difference:

The same physical substrate can be either noise or message — depending not on its physical structure alone, but on interpretive context.

No physical law explains that difference, because physics (at least in its classical formulation) abstracts away the subjective, intentional, and semantic dimensions of reality. That’s not a bug; it’s how physics works. But it also marks the boundary beyond which semantics, mind, and meaning begin.

And that’s precisely the blind spot in physicalist accounts of mind and information.

There would be no way to detect the difference between the formatted hard drive and the hard drive containing information, without interpreting the binary code on the medium. — Wayfarer

That's just not factually correct. The formatted disk containing data has a lower entropy than a disk containing no information. And this is so regardless of the data having been interpreted.

Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law, have nothing to do with semantics or semiotics. — Wayfarer

Semiotics requires symbols, which are produced by the consumption of energy, and hence involves Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law.

That's just not factually correct. The formatted disk containing data has a lower entropy than a disk containing no information. And this is so regardless of the data having been interpreted. — Banno

But can you deduce a specific sentence from a given entropy value?

No.

That's just not factually correct. The formatted disk containing data has a lower entropy than a disk containing no information. — Banno

And how would you measure the total entropy, if not with reference to the information? What constitutes “data” or “information” isn’t determined by the physical properties alone. You can’t measure the entropy of a hard drive in bits without first interpreting the bit pattern as information. Entropy, in the information-theoretic sense, is a measure of uncertainty or compressibility — but that presupposes a code, a syntax, and a frame of reference.

Take the disk into a physics lab with no documentation, no file system, and no idea what the code means. Can they measure “how much information” is on it? Not without invoking interpretive assumptions. A completely randomized disk could have maximum Shannon entropy — but also be completely meaningless. It could seem to contain information, when it is really 10 ⁵ repetitions of "quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr".

Incidentally, this brings to mind the oft-repeated story about Claude Shannon asking John von Neumann what to call his new measure in information theory. Von Neumann reportedly replied:

“You should call it entropy, for two reasons: first, the mathematical formula is the same, and second, nobody really knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

That anecdote, whether apocryphal or not (and it is quite well-documented) captures the core of the confusion: entropy in thermodynamics and entropy in information theory are mathematically analogous but conceptually distinct. One concerns the dispersal of energy; the other concerns uncertainty in symbol sequences. Neither tells us anything at all about meaning.

Which is precisely the point.

Then it is like when we say that from a given neuronal synapse we cannot deduce a thought.

If so, then there is no reduction and we must say that the sentence is "something more" than a thermodynamic value.

Sure, but that's a different point to what you suggested first, that there is no physical difference between the two sentences. The difference in entropy is a physical difference.

Not. We’ve established the difference cannot be discerned by physical principles alone.

If so, then there is no reduction and we must say that the sentence is "something more" than a thermodynamic value. — JuanZu

But isn't the physical description also "something more" than the intentional description? The intentional description makes not mention of oxytocin.

Neither description contains the totality of the other description.

We’ve established the difference cannot be discerned by physical means — Wayfarer

Well, no. How the system interacts with the data is physical. What we have is two differing descriptions of the same physicality.

Well, no. How the system interacts with the data is physical. What we have is two differing physical descriptions of the same physicality. — Banno

How is the the idea of the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog a physical description of the squiggles "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"?

Relating this back to the OP, the same "substance" might have multiple descriptions that are not reducible, one to the other.

What we have is two differing descriptions of the same physicality. — Banno

Again, not so. Information content can be measured physically - that is where Landauer comes in - but that is only because there are agreed conventions of what constitutes meaningful information in the first place. And what makes information meaningful is not physical nor can be derived from physics nor reduced to it. And not seeing that is precisely what 'the blind spot of science' is referring to. (This was the subject of a marathon thread from about five years ago, Is Information Physical? although I've since come to understand the question is really about the nature of meaning, rather than information, per se, although it's a porous boundary.)

Information content can be measured physically - that is where Landauer comes in - but that is only because there are agreed conventions of what constitutes meaningful information in the first place. — Wayfarer

:lol:

What's meaning, if not what what is done with the information? Meaning here is just another term for use.

And use is physical. It involves actual processes that produce measurable physical effects in the world.

...the idea of... — Patterner

What's that, then?

Sorry. I don't understand.