A reason to believe something is not under evolutionary constraint directly, I think. If I understand correctly, these reasons you mention are complex traits, meaning they are the result of many things working together. A reason is not a single entity, but a collection of things. The fear of fire is your experience of the shape of fire, your experience of the colour of fire, your experience of heat, your experience of pain cause by hot stuff, etc. Fear of fire is not shaped by evolution. The molecular machinery that allows you to see, feel, smell fire is.

Can you give an example of one of these reasons you talk about. The most simple you can think of. To be honest after reading and re-reading many of your posts, I just don't understand what your point is.

Because we seem able to provide an explanation of why we are disposed to get such intuitions without having to suppose that what they're intuitions 'of' actually exist. — Bartricks

But such intuitions are rooted in sensory faculties which tell about something external. A sensory faculty, by definition, senses something outside itself; they tell us of the external world. An intuition is about something sensed and therefore about an external world.

We seem able to explain why we developed a faculty that produces in us the belief that we have reason to believe things without having to suppose that there are actually any reasons to believe things in reality. — Bartricks

There is a reason to believe things, and it is that sensory faculties tell us exclusively about something external to the sensory faculty. No matter the nature of the external, the sensory faculty necessarily tells us about something external.

Believing you are a human being.

If we consider existence to be a group of properties (one or more, and any), then non-existence or nothingness would be the lack of all properties. It is absolutely undeniable that the current state of the world we live in is not nothingness; however, this does not mean that nothingness will not exist or could not have existed in the past. So, I think the question whether there can be an absolute lack of properties or not is more useful when exploring the topic of nothingness. In my opinion, an absolute lack of properties is not a possibility, and I believe there exists some natural law that prevents this from ever being the case which leads to the necessity of existence - i.e, there always will be at least one property because a complete lack of properties is not possible.

that I hold it to be an order of coexistences — Jackson

Always changing then?

Do objects occupy space or do they create it? — Joshs

Man, this is one of those almost impossible questions. Sometimes I like to think everything is space, and the rest is just differences in space just to kind of escape from having to deal with it. Have you ever tried to define a particular entity (object) without referring to space?....... or vice versa?

No, it isn't. Measurement is the essence of accurately assessed perception. Reality doesn't care about measurements in an active way, only in a chemically balanced way; regression toward the mean. — Garrett Travers

Hey. Could you explain what you mean by "regression towards the mean"?

Relations do the exact opposite, they unite separate objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Relations would require space since they occur among/between? separate objects.

Anything can be sacred given enough people believe it so.

The information that represents a mortgage (whatever its format - hard copy, virtual copy, mental copy) must have a limit (or set of) that defines its individuality - a given mortgage is different from other mortgages or other legal documents, i.e. a purchase and sale agreement. That is, this information has a shape (its shape being a set of particular, finite properties that define it as being information about a given mortgage). That this information has a shape indicates that it is different from wherever it is contained; that is, it occupies a space. In its verbal form, when communicated, the information gets recorded in the brain of the person that hears the information (represented physically by changes in the physiology of neurites, synapses, and other cellular phenomena - changes that are exposed to decay). Even the first person that came up with the idea of a mortgage must have given this idea a shape in its brain, differentiating it from other ideas.

And it occurred to me that if we accept for the sake of discussion that mortgages are not in space, we can differentiate them by the order in which they are created — Arne

What if they (the mortgages) are created at the same time (and taken out by the same person)?

I dont really know how to answer your question. How I see it, legs (or extremities, in general) allow you navigate the environment (they help you move from one place to another and overcome obstacles in the process). Walking cannot be about anything, of course; but just because walking does not have the capacity to be about something, it doesnt mean it is not a complex function; for example, walking in snow is different to walking in sand, and legs are fine tuned to respond to changes in topography, terrain, viscosity, etc; they have the capacity to move really slowly or as fast as their physiology allows; they can jump, stand in different positions, and some can use them as their hands when they have lost them; they help you swim, play sports, etc. Thinking about is an ability of minds, just like moving around is an ability of legs. So, thinking about thinking I would say does not correspond to a given kind of gait but instead would be somehow similar to legs moving in a given walking pattern; legs do not only have the ability to move in a walking pattern (they can jump, swim, crouch, etc) in the same way the brain does not only have the ability to contain/produce a mind (it is in charge of controlling motor activities, autonomous functions, hormonal cycles, etc).

To think about something is plain thinking. The "about" comes from your consciousness which is ultimately plain thinking. With respect to the walking analogy, thinking about something would be equivalent to walking in a different way (backwards, sidewards, moonwalk, etc); the end result of any type of walk is (a change in) displacement, just like the end result of thinking about anything is a change in thoughts.

If there exist individuals that do not occupy a space, how can they be differentiable? How do you separate an individual that does not occupy a space from another individual that does not occupy a space?

I think that if you wanted to transfer someone's consciousness into another body, you would either have to replace the whole central nervous system of the host (or maybe only a part of it) with that of the person whose consciousness you want to transfer, or rearrange the host's central nervous system (or maybe only a part of it), at some level of organization (probably at the molecular level), so that it resembles the current organization of the central nervous system of the person whose consciousness you want to transfer. In either case, the transferred CNS would become under the influence of the host's body - I think its organization would end up resembling the organization of the host's CNS. So, if you are transferring something from one body to another, it would be the (current) physicochemical state of the CNS of the person whose consciousness you want to transfer; as you might see, in the rearrangement scenario we would be rearranging your molecules into the arrangement of mine, which might be a problem if either of us has something the other one doesn't.

Change, then, is simply what occurs when a property true of some individual is no longer true of that individual. — Banno

change is not a property. — Banno

I think I understand. But let me ask you something: an individual must occupy some sort of space (an individual must necessarily be different from whatever it is that contains it to be categorized as such - it must differ from its "background", or it must be discernible from it); if individuals are contained within a space and properties are features of individuals, could we conclude that properties are features of space and not of individuals, the latter being a property of space itself?

If I was "transferred" to your body, I assure you I would act more like you than you like me. Why would you act more like me when I am experiencing your body?

This is how I kind of see the mind/brain thing.

The interaction of the body with the environment changes the physicochemical composition of the body, including that of the brain. If we imagine there exists an organ able to integrate changes in the physicochemical composition of the brain, we could suppose that the mind is the net result of such integration. In this scenario, the mind is not identical to the brain (the whole brain is not the mind); however, the mind is a part of and dependent on the brain. Keep in mind that in this scenario, such integrating organ is not affected, at least directly, by the (external) environment but by the physicochemical composition of the brain. The mind is NOT the molecular mechanism responsible for integrating changes in the physicochemical state of the brain; instead, it is what happens when the integrating molecular mechanism is activated.

Edit: you are not seeing a computer screen, you are "seeing" molecular processes that occur as a result of your body interacting with the computer screen.

Now, there is nothing like a sensation except another sensation. Thus, if we have a sensation of change, then change itself must be a sensation. — Bartricks

But sensations detect change (something in the environment must activate them beyond a threshold). Change is implicit in the function of the sensation. If you block the ability of the sensation to change (if you keep the the sensory machinery in a dynamic equilibrium) it will be unable to report changes in the environment - the sensory machinery still changes (due to random motion), but if the rate of change does not reach threshold, the sensory machinery will not report what we consider to be a change in the environment. In this sense, sensations are change, but change is not a sensation (or not only a sensation). I guess the sensation of change comes from putting together the respective environmental changes each of our senses is able to capture, an action carried by our minds. Change is ubiquitous and not only a sensation, in my opinion.

These are some thoughts that as you will see are not very well constructed but might help you look at change from a different point of view, maybe.

Change is some sort of natural law (or the result of) which prevents that the probability of a point in space contains x, where x is anything that can be contained by a point in space, be always 1. That is, there is not a point in space that will always contain x. Change makes sure this never happens. Change is a natural variation in the probability that a point in space contains x (this would mean that the probability is changing - leads to nothing). I ask myself why a point in space cannot always have the same properties (why a point in space cannot contain x forever)? Change results from the incapacity of a point in space containing x forever. That a point in space cannot contain x forever leads to change; that the probability of a point in space containing x cannot be always 1 (because there is something preventing this) leads to change... why a point in space cannot contain x forever?

@Bartricks I believe the mind is physical. In your analogy of the house with two floors, the kind of dependency of the second floor on the first (a structural dependency) I think is misleading when applied to the dependancy of the mind on the brain. Imagine that instead of the first floor, you are given 4 walls, a roof, a couple windows, and a door which you could arrange to your will. Not all arrangements of these things will give you a floor; only some of these arrangements will give you a floor. Also, it would be really hard to make a floor with materials that are made of liquid water and liquid water only, for example.

If you organize all the materials required to make a brain in the shape of a straight line, I assure you, you will have no mind. If you mix these materials randomly and shape them like a brain, I assure you the same thing will happen, there would be no mind. However, if you organize these materials in the shape of an actual brain [at the micro- (quantum?) and macroscopic levels], I am confident you would obtain a fully functioning brain (one with a mind like mine or yours). So, the mind does not depend only on the materials that make the brain (cells, ions, extracellular molecules) but also on their arrangement in 4d space. The first floor is not a first floor if you use the roof as a door, and a window as a wall (or if you use concrete for the windows and glass for the walls - it would be a really weird floor; or if you use foam for your walls). There is no second floor, the mind and the brain are the same thing (or the mind is a process occurring to brain components inside the brain itself). Think about this, the mind changes; the brain changes; why could the mind not be the result of change occurring to brain components (where the rate of change changes with time)?

Very good point.... any ideas?

If it’s an illusion why would even the illusion ever come to exist unless it has some advantage or is it just a funky by-product of complexity — Benj96

I think you should read about this (Constructive Neutral Evolution)... it might help you in your investigation.

On the Possibility of Constructive Neutral Evolution
Arlin Stoltzfus
This is in article.

This is a "Scitable" article.

Physical matter is not information; instead, I was trying to argue that the term "information" describes the present state* of a system which belongs to an interaction**. In other words, information is stored in the configuration that the physical matter of a system adopts when it interacts with something else.
I do not agree with @Pop on the statement that "everything is information" because what about things like matter, or space? As I mentioned before, I believe information is a quality of something, and as such it cannot be a fundamental thing, for it needs the existence of something else (that which it is information of/about) to exist.

* ALL properties of an object at the present time (i.e., properties such as density, frequency, velocity, acceleration, packing, absorption, amplitude, etc).
** An interaction being an event on which the properties of an object (something that exists) are influenced by the presence of its interacting partners, and vice versa; that is, if something's existence affects the properties of another existing thing, and vice versa, then those things are interacting.

To be honest I do not understand quite well what you mean by form. I also don't understand when you say that information is causal. To me, information is not a requirement for anything; instead, the term describes a change in the configuration of a system, a change that results from an interaction.

Ok, I'll try hopefully with some success (which might not be the case).

I wanna say information describes a change in some physical quantity of each system in a set of interacting systems (or elements); that is, for there to be information in a set of interacting systems the change that takes place in the set as a whole or in its individual systems must, directly or indirectly, affect the amount of change the interacting systems will experience in some future time (a feedback loop).

The change in a system (which could be represented by a change in the velocity, position, or mass of its constituents, or by a change in the distance between its constituents, etc) which occurs when energy is applied into such system (as the result of an interaction) is information only if when the system decays or loses energy (that is, when the system emits some kind of signal) such emitted energy changes the configuration of its interacting partners in such a way that a future change in the configuration, or state, of the system will depend on the amount of change it experiences presently* (keep in mind that the system is not acting on itself directly but indirectly - you could say the system acts on itself through an interaction, and the change it causes on itself through such interaction "is" information; and the same is true for each element of the set).

* I understand that a system in a given configuration, or state, requires energy to change such configuration and that with time, and given that no energy is being transferred into the system, the configuration of the system will decay to some ground state. It is also in my understanding that it is possible that a system may have different configurations that satisfy a given energy level such that the input or loss of a certain amount of energy into or from the system may lead to different changes in configuration (relative to a given one) which are all equivalent in the amount of energy they contain. The fact a system possesses energy-equivalent states I think implies that in "cycles" of energy transfer an interacting set will evolve in contrast to maintain a constant state since the probability of a system reaching a given energy-equivalent state is the same for all energy-equivalent states.

So, a concise definition would be, roughly, information is change in a system which amount (the amount of change) is bounded (dependent) to some extent by the effect of the system on its interacting partners.

Edit: Information is a limit to the amount of change a system can undergo which arises due to the system being part of an interaction; and because it is an interaction, such limit depends to some extent on the system itself.

@Pop

As Frank said (I think it was Frank) this discussion is getting out of control. I see you have several times tried to provide a definition of information taking into account all that's been said in this thread, I think that's wonderful moderation. I have seen that many comments allude to biological information and that many comments agree on the notion that information is a quality of an interaction (information depends on an interaction).

I would recommend you first try to give a general definition of information before you move to discuss other more specific types [as it was said before somewhere, there must be a common quality(ies) shared by all types of information; and I think we should define these qualities as best as we can before we move on to discuss things like genetic information, or sensorial information, or things like these] - it would be very interesting to see all participants give in their own words a general AND CONCISE definition of information. Again, the idea would be to describe information on its most basic terms, nothing complex. The idea would be to arrive to a basic definition of information on which more complex or detailed definitions can be built.

So, for example, if information depends on interaction, it would be interesting to discuss what in the interaction leads to the emergence of information so that we can say that information is the result of this type of change or that type of change. Discussing the dynamics of change (rates of change) that produce information would certainly help us find general characteristic of information.

Finally, I think we should try to find this basic, generally applicable definition of information not from the human point of view, or the organismal/cellular point of view, but from a more objective/general one, if possible - so, instead of thinking about what information is for a human being, or a cell, we should think what information would be for a star, or for a water molecule in an ocean, or for the elements of a multiplicity, as Joshs said. If information is a quality of an interaction, then it plausible that information is not a quality of only human interactions but also a quality of any other type of interactions.

Again, concise, basic, original definitions... that would be fun.

Yeah that was just for fun. Don't do drugs!

Drugs.

HEY, I just wanted to leave this here. Very interesting video - I have not read the paper.



https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37969#Sec7

As Daniel has intimated, we only receive the information of the substance. — Pop

I didn't say that. I said: the change that occurs in each element of a set of interacting objects is information, and as such information is not a property of an individual object but a property of a set of interacting objects. You don't receive information from substance; instead, substance "imprints" information onto you by acting on you - by causing you to change in a way that depends on the nature of the substance and on the degree of change you are able to support (and also on the medium on which the perturbation travels). The fact that the amount of change you undergo depends also on your physicochemical composition (and not only on the nature of the perturbation, or the physicochemical composition of the object, or the medium between you and the object, or the change you cause in the object) I think points toward the conclusion that information is not a property of individual objects, although I could be missing something.

What the substance is changes as more information becomes available of it. — Pop

I don't agree with this. The substance is what the substance is. Your perception of what the substance is will change as you interact with the substance in different ways.

I think you are assuming that because an object has properties (properties that allow us to differentiate between objects) then all there is are properties; I think properties are of an object and therefore there is something in addition to properties. So, not all is information because information is information about something (information about information?), and the information we gather about something is, to some extent, dependent on things different to the object the information is about.

Imagine a card deck. If you shuffle the cards and place them side by side in a flat rectangular shape (i.e., a 4 x 13 rectangle) - and do this several times - from the plane of the whole deck there is absolutely no change between shuffles as long as you keep laying the cards in the same rectangular shape (4 x 13) and keep using the same number of cards. However, from the plane of the individual cards, each time you shuffle them their neighbours in the rectangle change. So, in this scenario, it is the change in neighbouring cards which stores information about the shuffling, and the plane of the whole deck has no information about the shuffling. In the hypothetic case that the shuffling has no effect on the neighbours for each card (i.e., each time you shuffle the cards, they appear in the same order), information about the shuffling would not be stored neither in the plane of the whole deck nor in the plane of the individual cards.

We can see that information about the shuffling is stored in the object that is shuffled (and not in the object that shuffles - you) and the object that is shuffled does not contain information about the shuffling until it is shuffled (that a card deck can be potentially shuffled does not mean that the card deck contains information about shuffling - again, it must be shuffled for it to contain "shuffling" information - and even so it contains information about the shuffling only at certain levels of its existence (that level which is affected by the shuffling).

So, information about shuffling is not in this case a fundamental quality of the card deck, for card decks can exist without being shuffled.

Potentiality requires an entity that realizes such potentiation therefore anything that can exist potentially cannot be fundamental; something fundamental is something that exists only actually.

In other words, I agree that information is a quality of objects if and only if it is a quality that results from an interaction.

, you are saying information describes a primary substance. If information describes (I am using "information" as the subject of my sentence), how does information describe? In other words, what is required for information to be able to describe.

If you say, every object has the capacity to interact (and thus cause a change in other object), I would agree with you (not that it matters). What I understand, however, is that you believe all is information, and that even in the absence of interaction information prevails (although irrelevant). What kind of information is there in the case of a universe with a single object? As you said, in a universe where everything is grey (there is only one thing), what kind of information could we extract? If information would no exist in a universe covered by greyness, I do not understand how everything is information and how information can be considered a fundamental quality (you said quantity, but I believe you meant quality). If a universe where there is only greyness has no information, then information would not be a quality of this particular object (the greyness). If greyness and some other thing is required for there to be information then I would be inclined to thing that information is not a fundamental quality of an object but a quality produced in an object as a consequence of its interaction with another object. Causes are not information.

What's the difference between the primary substance and the information about it?

So, in the hypothetical scenario in which there exists only one thing, this lonely thing would be in its entirety pure information; is this correct?

Call me stubborn, but I keep thinking of information as being subjective; with that I mean that it is not a quality of an object, but it is instead (in its basic form) the effect caused by a given object onto another (the amount of change depends on the "strength" of the effect and on the amount of change the affected object is able to support). Thus, information is a quality of an object if and only if it is caused by something else [and information is not a quality of the object that causes the change but of the object(s) on which the change occurs]; this way, I think information is not a fundamental quality, for in a universe in which there is only one object, information would not exist (although the object does?).

Edit:

We could say information is potentially a quality of an object if such object has the capacity to interact with other objects. But information can only actually be a quality when it has been caused by another object (it is the result of an interaction). I dunno, what do you think?

even though no answer can be given for “what is not information?” — Possibility

Hey. I am interested in knowing why you think no answer can be given to such question; it's just curiosity.

This post gave me anxiety.