:up:

:up:

He means that an abacus does not literally compute 2 + 2, or any other computation you use it for. Simply, if you code your 2+2 on the abacus the right way, and if you interpret the abacus' output the right way, you'll get 4. But the abacus itself doesn't interpret anything, or compute anything, it's just a piece of wood. — Olivier5

I get your point and I am stuck by the example of an abacus because at some level the abacus is the only computing machine that does actually physically represent 2+2

:up:

You and your brain interpreting the symbols is the independent fact, not the maths itself. I think. Quote specifically if I'm wrong on this point. — bongo fury

I think you are correct on that point as far as Searle is concerned I'm not disagreeing with you, just struggling with Searle :smile:

It seems that Searle is saying then that consciousness creates the independent fact which I suppose ties in with the quantum mechanics observation effect

It is very questionable whether large governments produce these things, and whether large governments will ever cede their power when they become superfluous. — Tzeentch

I'm sure they don't at the moment and voters are rarely presented with a choice at elections for a government that would.

Judging other people's wealth to be excessive is a very typical thing. Suppose an ascetic came along and started to judge your wealth. They judge that you could do without all of that fancy food, nice-looking clothes, your car, your house, warm showers, etc. After all, they don't need those things so why should you? — Tzeentch

We can base those judgements on the median or mode of wealth. There is a joke in the UK (the "tories" are the right-wing pro-capital, supposedly anti regulation party, the daily mail is a right wing news paper)

A tory party donor, a daily mail reader and an immigrant go to a meeting and there is a plate of biscuits
The tory donor takes all the biscuits except one then whispers to the daily mail readier "keep an eye on that immigrant they are trying to steal you biscuit"


I agree that governments don't currently provide these things, at least in the UK and US, places like Denmark might be better but I do think it should be an aim of government. I also agree that banks should allowed to fail and people who lose out should be compensated directly by the government from money taken from the profits of other banks, even the threat of that happening would change the focus of banking shareholders.

But am I not interpreting marks on the paper or in my brain when I do the calculation without using a machine? The whole of mathematics is an abstract construct, the reality is that I take some bricks and stack some more on top and see that the pile is now bigger. To represent how many bricks I had I could invent an abstract symbology such as numbers to allow me to describe the number of bricks without having to show you a pile of bricks. Is it not the case that at that point I am interpreting the marks as symbols with meaning whether or not I use an electronic calculator?

And when the maths becomes more complex it becomes increasingly necessary to write down the symbols and interpret them, 2+2 most people can do in their head, Fermat's last theorem needs writing down. At what point does it transition from observer independent to observer relative?

The issue is one of balance of power, wealth grants power to the wealthy, either directly though control of companies etc. or indirectly through use of money for influence, lobbying, etc.

A good state for humanity is that everyone leads a flourishing life and we therefore have less crime, better education and health and generally a better society which needs less intervention from governments.

The vast majority of people will seek to protect their wealth, this includes the very wealthy, so very few people will give up any more than they absolutely have to even though there is an enlightened self interest to do so. If you earn 100k per year, in 10 years you will have earned 1 million of whatever currency you are being paid. It would take you 10,000 years to earn 1 billion, yes that's ten thousand years! No one needs to have 1 billion, even 100 million looks excessive.

It is in everyone's interest to have a stable society and not have wild economic fluctuations, bubbles, wars, market crashes, revolutions. Therefore there needs to be regulation and taxation to create a society that is seen as fair and allows everyone to flourish and to do that by curbing the worst excesses of the most acquisitive. The difficulty is that the wealthy have the power but the causal chain between the societal problems of the poor and the effects those have on the wealthy is very long and complex so convincing the wealthy-powerful to accept constraints is very unlikely.

t is when you introduce a human or some sort of human-like observer that we start carving up the world, identifying real things that happen (truth?) and things that don't (falsehoods?). — Jerry

Apologies for being late to this party but I was stuck by this. Surely there are no falsehoods without a conscious entity to make them. I.e. truth is the default state of the universe, those truths might be unrevealed without a conscious entity to discern them but they are still there, simply as properties of the universe. However falsehoods can only be brought into being in the imagination because by definition something that is not true does not exist as a fact outside of a consciousness

IE, perhaps some things have emotional meaning because they offer either general or particular evolutionary benefit. Perhaps they offer an evolutionary aesthetic. — RussellA

I agree that some things probably do such as the sunsets you mention but then one might expect everyone to have similar preferences. In other things, such as music, why do I like some types of music and not others. Is there an evolutionary drive to listen to music and if so why don't we all like the same music?

There is perhaps an interesting distinction here, one can see that we like cute animals because big eyes relative to head size is like human babies and there is an evolutionary drive to be attracted to babies so that they survive. However other more complex symbology, which is often seen as operating at a higher level, is more intellectual and less evolutionary, less base-instinct and perhaps that is why we value it more.

Following some reading around 's post I was lead to "Intersubjectivity" which seems to be the area of thinking that I was looking for. More reading in that area coing up

Perhaps "symbol" wasn't the best word to use but it is the only word I have at the moment. There are certain images, sounds, phrases which are found in art works with which people generally find an emotional connection. By symbol I have in mind things like a picture with a crumbling castle on a hill in the background, a cute puppy, a certain chord sequence in music.

That person has no experiences, symbols mean nothing to such person. — SpaceDweller

But show that person a blue sky, perhaps that instantly means more to them than it does to you and I. I take the point about it being based on experience but my life experience is reasonably typical of a white male and yet I have never understood why the music of U2 is so popular, I have no emotional engagement with it whatsoever and yet there are many other rock bands from the same period that I do engage with.

Thanks, I have seen that art thread, however my interest at the moment is more around why some things make a connection with an audience and some don't and also why some symbology which might be low hanging fruit in terms of getting audience engagement (a cute puppy) is considered lesser than something which is less approachable but when approached has for some people a deeper meaning. What even is a "deeper meaning"?


Thanks, I've found that online and will read it.

Is it? — TheMadFool

Well obviously not in the conventional sense of "cheating" but it sounds better than "delaying for a femtosecond" :smile:

The existential question though is are we fire junkies, knowing that we should stop burning things but our animal brains just keep us doing it anyway or can we escape that destinity?

I have chance to read that article now and it is really helpful, thanks again

Thanks

Donald Rumsfeld famously said "there are unknown unknowns" i.e. things that we don't know that we don't know. However it seems me that as these things are discovered they will add to the breadth of our knowledge rather than the depth.

The search for a "deeper truth" is surely an artefact of the human brain and not something that actually exists in the universe. Did the discovery of quantum physics satisfy our need for deeper knowledge? It seems not and yet it is the deepest thinking that we seem to have currently. Neither does it tell us who will win the next election or how long we will live or whether our children will be happy and content in life.

Thanks, that makes sense

Thank you for taking the time, that is a really helpful explanation. I suppose I was getting hung up on the normal meaning of the words sincerity and authenticity and not really appreciating that he was applying them in quite specific ways of interpreting identity

So not much interest :sad: , I've changed the title of this thread and I'm still interested

For example we learn to associate the sky with the colour blue because people point at the sky and tell us that it is blue. There is no way for me to know what image forms in your brain to represent the colour blue, what you imagine as blue might be different to what I imagine to be blue. We all agree the sky is blue but we are isolated from each other's experience of blue.

It is the same for emotions, seeing someone falling over makes me feel their pain however there is plenty of evidence from the media that a lot of people seem to find it funny that someone fell over. We experience the same world in very different ways and art is one way of one person externalizing their feelings in a way that someone else might comprehend.

I'm no scholar of these things but western philosophy, certainly over the last millennia or two seems shaped by the good-versus-evil, right-wrong world view of the abrahamic religions and has also become over the last few hundred years very academic and abstruse. I think this is why people are often more drawn to eastern philosophy, it is grounded, practical, readily comprehensible and offers a more balanced/less dogmatic world view

I'm new to the forum and late to this discussion and this being an internet forum of course I haven't read all the replies :smile: but "art expresses something about human subjective experience" is exactly it. Science is not art by definition, science is constrained, it is the process of making a hypothesis about a phenomenon and then testing that hypothesis, this is the constraint. Art is free to express whatever the artist wants, usually with the intent of expressing to others how the artists feels about some aspect of the human condition. You cannot know how it feels to be me and I cannot know how it feels to be you, what you see, what emotions you experience; art is a way of conveying those feelings, an attempt to bridge the explanatory gap.

In that sense I tend to think of art as the mathematics of emotion. Mathematics is an abstract way of conveying concepts about aspects of the physical world. Similarly art is an abstract way of conveying feelings.