The walls of a hole are made of something too. A hole is a way that a surface can contour in 3d space. Nothing mysterious.

To me there is nothing puzzling about holes. Holes are a topographical feature, the opposite of hills. If there is a hole in a ground, the ground is shaped in such a way that there is an empty cavity it partially encloses. The word "hole" may refer to the topographical feature, the cavity, or both at the same time. But even if it refers to the cavity alone, there is no lack of reality in the space which the walls of the cavity enclose.

Trying to think of other things that are ontologically parasitic. — fishfry

How about shapes? Shapes can't exist in isolation. They must be molded from something.

Holes are properly thought of as shapes. Their only distinction is concavity.

Their appearance is certainly an illusion as well cannot perceive them at all without "projecting them onto an imaginary plane"

But this raises more questions, what has a "stable reality"? — Manuel

Both objects and processes exist independently of anything that may or may not perceive them, this is what I meant by "stable reality"

We'd have to say that it is a hallucination within a hallucination or something along these lines. — Manuel

I don't have a problem with this.

So at some points our mapping converges in some crucial areas. — Manuel

I'm not sure if you are understanding me here. The only requirement is that there is some stable mapping from a sensory constellation to "cliff". But the form that mapping takes is irrelevant. Trivially, my red might be your green. Or my color might be your sound, or it might be some other form you can't conceive of. As long as qualia masks reality in some stable manner, it can take any form at all and be functional.

If you are going to argue by analogy, the analogy has to at least make sense. Time seems to move from past to future. Distance having a length does not compute.

This argument presumes that time is only the instant we are currently experiencing. If this were so, I agree. The cough ofa fly 10000 years ago may have no impact on the universe: it's state would be identical to it's state has the fly not coughed. So I'm every sense the cough ceases to exist.

But our best understanding of the universe is that space and time are coequal, and the universe is a 4d hypersphere. In this case, past events have the same reality as present, as all are in a sense contemporaneous. Only memory and causality seem to separate past from present.

A simple proof I came up with a while back demonstrates this. Do you buy it?

Suppose time had a speed.
If time sped up or slowed down, the universe would speed up or slow down, everything would speed up or slow down together.
Therefore the speed of time has no observable impact on the universe.
Therefore there is no speed of time.
Therefore time is not moving.

Certainty and uncertainty are not binary choices. Nothing is truly certain. Any knowledge you gain from experience may be contradicted by new experience. Any logical, mathematical, and especially philosophical conclusions may be tainted by flaws in the argument you cannot perceive.

Nothing is absolutely certain, and most things are not absolutely uncertain. You can only do your best to accurately assign degrees of certainty to the propositions which are relevant to you.

Ok, so being isomorphic with a natural number means being in a system capable of distinguishing at least that specified whole number of different items? — bongo fury

Yes, so for instance your apple glyph can be encoded with some number [0, N) where N is the number of glyphs in the fruit language. This number would then be an encoding of an encoding. In general by information I mean: Being an encoding or being encodable in such a way that the encoding is representable as a natural number.

Perhaps there is an additional requirement that you and the rest must be symbols? — bongo fury

I don't want to include only encodings, I want to include everything encodable. So the informational content of a physical system is the minimum encoding that would permit someone with the encoding and the means to completely reproduce it. Of course you can modulate this requirement with a fidelity. Given an apple, this can range from indistinguishable reproduction, which would be an enormous amount of information, to mere membership of the right fruit class, where a glyph would suffice.

You are probably aware that digital data is stored as 1s and 0s. These are interpreted as base-2 numbers, which are just like the familiar base-10, except at every digit only 2 values are possible, instead of 10 So, every file on your computer can be interpreted as an enormous number. In the case of a movie, if it is well compressed and HD the file size might be ~4GB. This is 2^32 base-
2 digits, corresponding to a single base-10 number of around 1.2 billion digits! — hypericin

I think your premise is right, some but not all metaphysical questions are in fact simply language questions. But it is interesting that you have your examples perfectly backward.

The mind body problem is not just some people making associations with matter and "unthinking stuff". If that's all there was to it, the problem would have dissolved a long time ago. It is an inquiry into how two seemingly unrelated domains, matter and thought, are related. This is about as unlinguistic a metaphysical question as you can get.

However, questions of identity are in fact a perfect example of a linguistic question posing as metaphysical. Whether John's cremated body "is" or "isn't" the same as the once living one is entirely up to language and convention. Some languages and cultures may say yes, some no. Others may call John different after he had a stroke. There is simply no ontology which dictates the boundaries of words. These boundaries are ultimately human contrivances.

At least, the above is a plausible approach to tackling the problem, and is a good example of a metaphysical problem being attacked as merely linguistic.

So your admirable (for me) nominalism, as embraced in paragraphs one thru five (of eight), depends on grammar? — bongo fury

Of course not, grammar merely reflects it

Couldn't it easily have happened that we referred to apples as "apple" (with no article) even while only ever accepting a (any) whole one as answering to the name? — bongo fury

When referring to a single, definite apple, we say "the apple". The point is, "the apple", once established, may only refer to a singular physical object. Whereas "the book", when denoting a work of art and not a specific copy, may apply to any extant copy, as the information (or meaning), not the physical medium, is the referent.

...Treat an apple as a character in a discrete alphabet (e.g. of fruits) and the analogy is complete... — bongo fury

I don't follow this argument. A pictogram is a symbol, and so information, not an apple.

Would some version of your "informational" exception then not apply? — bongo fury

There is no "exception". Matter is one kind of thing, information another. Being different, we think about them differently.

Why on earth not? — bongo fury

Because we don't. This is just a fact.

Hypericin: I finished reading my copy of "The Eyes of the Overworld" today.
Bongo Fury: Oh, I just finished reading "The Eyes of the Overworld" on e-book today.
Hypericin: Wow. What are the chances, we finished the same book on the same day.
Bongo Fury: Same book? No we didn't. You read a paperback, I read an e-book.

An observer would conclude either this is your version of humor, or you suffer some kind of brain damage.

But what is that? — bongo fury

That which is encoded or encodable. That which is isomorphic with a natural number. That which is the same between a paperback and e-book copy of a book.

Sure. But not if you merely studied, however carefully, the digital or analog recordings themselves (literally, as opposed to the sound-and-light events produced from them). — bongo fury

But the information itself could be discovered. Context, and therefore meaning, is not deducible from information. If it was, it would be redundant.

the screenings and plays (sound-and-light events) which collectively constitute said artwork — bongo fury

Considering the screenings, they depend on and are completely reflective of the film reels.

Sorry. Seems like Platonism to me. — bongo fury

Maybe. But you aren't understanding me.

Hell of an album

Thanks, that was clarifying.

I'm in Portland now, so I can readily imagine a coffee table book for hipsters called "13". In it are a collections of photographs of various forms of the token "13": "13" scrawled on a note, birthday candles in the shape of "13", "13" in gothic font, the sign of The Lucky 13 Saloon, and so on. These tokens are numerically distinct, and members of the same class of "depictions of the numeral 13". And this book reflects your conceptual model of the two "13" tokens on a page in our example.

We can treat other groups of material objects the same way: I have a bag of apples, some are red, others are pink, some are delicious, others are mealy. These are numerically distinct, qualitatively similar, and conceptually unified by the term "apple" (in my terms from before, the word "apple" carves reality in such a way that the contents of this bag all fall on one side of this conceptual cleavage).

This is in general how language, and therefore thought, treats the physical world. How else can we reason about the welter of similar and dissimilar objects that confront us every day? The word "a" betokens this kind of reasoning: by "an apple", the speaker asserts an object which belongs to the class "apple".

And I think we agree that these classes are ultimately human inventions, there is nothing of words in objects themselves. There is no "appleness", either in apples, or as some Platonic abstract, apart from the collection of traits by which apples are distinguished from everything else in the world. Thinking otherwise is the error of reification.

But this is not how we generally think about what I've been calling "informational objects". For these, we don't speak of them in terms of set membership, we treat them as proper nouns. You don't watch *a* "The Wizard of Oz", you watch "The Wizard of Oz". There is only one. This, in spite of the fact that you might have watched it on dvd, and your copy is one of 5 million extant in the world, each qualitatively (at least microscopically) and numerically distinct from all the others. We are not referring to the physical mediums when speaking of informational objects. We are referring to the information itself. Or maybe, the information in it's proper context, its meaning (the dvd in a dvd player).

Information also allows for categories, but across the dimension of informational variation, not physical variation. So, if you watched a copy of the movie dubbed in Spanish, or maybe even a stage production, you might say you watched "A Wizard of Oz". These would fall into the category "versions of The Wizard of Oz".

But, there are not as many "Wizard of Oz"es as there are copies of the movie floating around. If you accept this, then it logically follows that two copies of the dvd contain the same, numerically identical, information. This is not some esoteric, woo belief, it is just our common sense approach.

The dream person exists, but mistaken about its identity: it is in fact the dreamer.

Any of them.
"13" might mean the tokens, it might mean the integer 13, it might mean 13th day of christmas, or an order to buy 13 pounds of chicken fat. The meaning is totally dependent on context. This is the power and efficiency of symbolic communication, it abstracts away all the shared context. Information with no context gets you nowhere, the meaning of a message is a function of its information and context:

F(I, C) -> M
F("13", A child's writing exercise) -> The tokens 1, 3
F("13", A math exam) -> The integer 13
F("13", KFC kitchen restock order ) -> Buy 13# chicken fat
F("13", A christmas carol gone wrong) -> 13th day of Christmas

In all these messages, the information is not just similar, it is the same. Only the context varies.

I don't quite understand the choice of example. — bongo fury

Just consider the numbers "13, 13" as they appear on your screen. Are they two different numbers, both classifed as "13"? Or the same number?

I'm lost here. Please help. — bongo fury

You are probably aware that digital data is stored as 1s and 0s. These are interpreted as base-2 numbers, which are just like the familiar base-10, except at every digit only 2 values are possible, instead of 10 So, every file on your computer can be interpreted as an enormous number. In the case of a movie, if it is well compressed and HD the file size might be ~4GB. This is 2^32 base-
2 digits, corresponding to a single base-10 number of around 1.2 billion digits!

So qualitative identity of distinct physical objects is as I see it perfectly easily established, as in the example of distinct tokens of a digital signal, or of a notational text — bongo fury

But look at the examples you chose. These might be informationally identical. But physically? Is the signal comprised of the same number of elections, with the same energies and relative positions? Is the ink on the page perfectly identical, forming the same shape down to the molecular level? True qualitative identity of distinct physical objects is both statistically impossible and impossible to verify, due to the uncertainty principle. This is opposed to informational objects, where qualitative identity is trivial. Moreover I claim that with information qualitative identity *is* numeric identity. As in the example of "13, 13". Hence the woo assertion that two copies of "The Wizard of Oz" are qualitatively and numerically
the same information expressed in two qualitatively and numerically distinct physical media .

mystical about information — bongo fury

Not mystical at all (although to a true reductionist, everything must look like mysticism). I'm just taking information seriously, as something with its own nature and laws, and as something distinct from matter. Whether information is something fundamental in the universe, or emergent from (and so reducable to) matter, is up for debate. But either way there is more to be said than

Information is patterns. Facts. — bongo fury

Why the woo? Why not, here are two different things both classified as "apple"; here are two things both classified as "Wizard of Oz file"? — bongo fury

No more "woo" to say that two numbers, i.e. "13, 13", are the same number. Two different things, classified as "13"? Sounds woo to me. And consider that, in binary form, the movie is a single (beyond-cosmically large) number.

How — bongo fury

Two spatially distinct objects cannot be numerically identical, only qualitatively similar (even qualitative identity cannot be established). Two spatially distinct informational "objects" may be numerically the same object.

But you just pointed out that digital identity of symbols isn't affected by their physical diversity, so... — bongo fury

... whereas physical identity is not only completely dependent on physical diversity, but also impossible to establish anyway, and also impossible anyway (for two things to be physiclally identical, they must be coincident, in other words, the same, singular thing).

My point is that information operates under very, very different rules from matter, to support my woo claim that matter/information is the actual dualism in the universe.

Incidentally, let's distinguish between The Wizard of Oz the set of its plays or screenings (sound-and-light-events) from The Wizard of Oz the set of its recordings on reel or disk etc. — bongo fury

Such events of the first sort are where information interacts with, and drives, the physical, material world.
But consider that the light and sound is the same information as that in the reel or disc, just in another physical medium, and spread across time. This can be seen by the bootlegger who then records this and captures it back to disc, albeit with much information lost. Here you can meaningfully say that the bootleg "wizard of oz" is an object in the same category as an authentic "wizard of oz". But this is not an apt description of an authentic copy. An authentic copy of "the wizard of oz" is the very same "wizard of oz".

Using my own words against me? Rude!
Re: the Wizard of Oz, I'm not so sure the naming of it is just semantic (I'm also very sure I don't believe everything I say). In the case of lossless media, you can show, with mathematical rigor, that the information content of the movie on dvd, and on hard disc, is identical, bit by bit, in spite of the total dissimilarity of the physical medium. In a sense, the information is not just the same, but it is the same informational "thing" residing in two places simultaneously.

This is in contrast to physical objects, where this assertion of identity simply cannot happen. At best you can say that two things are very similar. And as is familiar, the more you increase the accuracy of this evaluation, the more you disturb the object itself.

This is one aspect of what seems to be a deep divide, which leads me to my own verbal cleavage of the world into matter and information. I assert that mind is far more information-like than matter-like, and so falls on the information side of this split. In order to reconcile mind and brain, one must first reconcile information and matter.

An ontological distinction - would you agree? — Wayfarer

No. You can divide things into groups on any basis whatsovever. These divisions may be more or less relevant, more or less salient, but thats a far as it can go.

Because 'appears' requires a subject, i.e. an agent to whom something appears. Nothing appears to a rock. — Wayfarer

Ergo, the rock is mental?
I don't follow your reasoning.

The issue I see with ‘vitalism’ is actually caused by the impossibility of taking the ‘elan vital’ to be an object or an objectively real existent — Wayfarer

The issue is that it is redundant. It has no explanatory relevance. Everything that can be explained about life can be explained without reference to "elan vital". The same will likely prove true of consciousness.

That is a very poor argument. Doing things to A affects B does not imply that B 'is' A — Bartricks

Not "A affects B". Rather, changes to A result in changes to B. When this relationship is observed, it provides evidence that either:
* A is B
or
* B is causally connected to A — hypericin

every impression of being immaterial — Bartricks

You keep referring to these appearances and impressions as if they had evidentiary status .

You have now claimed that material objects cannot interact with immaterial ones. That is absolutely not - not - a tautology. — Bartricks

Despite your bald assertion, it is in fact a tautology. If a ghost picks up a rock and throws it, by definition this is not the nonphysical interacting with the physical. Rather, by virtue of throwing a rock, the ghost enters the physical realm, and textbooks must now somehow account for the physics of ghosts, or be incomplete.


So in your odd world view, if a meteorite, undetected by anyone, fell from the sky and hit you in the head, in whose mind did this mental meteor exist before it struck you?

You also seem to overlook a basic asymmetry: the mental world is exquisitely sensitive to the "supposedly" physical one: a little electric current, a speck of hallucinogen, a leak in a blood vessel, can have dramatic impact on internal life. But if everything were mental, then you would expect the obverse to be true: powerful acts of mentation should have at least as powerful impacts on your supposedly physical world. But mentate as you like, you cannot alter the trajectory of even a mote of dust with thought alone.

Same. However you treat numbers, numbers are one thing, sets of numbers are another. You can't treat these the same either (even the degenerate sets {1}, {2}, {3} are not the same as 1, 2, 3)

Is the problem that "things" and "concepts" are being lumped together? The number of things is finite, and the set "universe" contains all of them. But there is no cap on the number of concepts that one can come up with. Concepts are second order wrt things, and cannot be treated the same way.

The linguistic distinction between alive and dead could prove to be questionable. Things are rather neither alive nor dead. — spirit-salamander

I'm not sure this makes sense. The word "life" cleaves reality so that some things fall on one side, some things on another. And there are things where the cleaving is ambiguous such as viruses. But you can't say, "well in reality things are neither dead or alive". This misunderstands words, they do not and cannot point to the true nature of things. Rather they carve the world into sets.

To your second sentence: I think that panpsychism need not be associated with vitalism. It is only about the sober and neutral attribution of conscious experience to material entities. — spirit-salamander

I think the thinking which lead to vitalism is identical to panpsychism. In both cases, it is supposed to be inconceivable that life or consciousness emerges out of matter without presupposing an additional element: either vital force, or an elemental psychic quantum, or some such thing.

The premise you've added to get to the conclusion is that there cannot be causation between different kinds of object. — Bartricks

You phrase it is as if I were saying bears and apples could not interact. I am saying that the material and immaterial; better, the physical and non physical, can not interact. This is a simple tautology: if the nonphysical interacted with the physical, then it would be a part of the physical description of the universe, and so be physical.

my mind does not appear to be material, yet does appear causally to interact with things quite dissimilar to it - a — Bartricks

Both of these "appears" may be in fact be mere appearances.

and even if it were true, the fact my mind appears immaterial not material would mean you should conclude that the sensible world is mental, not that the mental is material. — Bartricks

Why should I favor "the physical world is mental, and only appears physical" over "the mental world is physical, and only appears mental"?

I'm asking whence the idea that it can or should be. Is this just rebellion against religion, or is there something else to it? — baker

It seems simple enough. Religious claims are epistemologically invalid to the atheist. If moral claims only originated in religion, they would be similarly invalid. If they are considered worth keeping (most atheists do), then the atheist must find another foundation for these claims.

How would a panpsychist explain the incredibe fragility of our consciousness? All you have to do is apply a moderate blow to the head, or administer an anaesthetic, and consciousness disappears utterly. And yet these brain configurations are infinitely closer to conscious ones than a brain in a blender, or a brick. It is apparent that consciousness requires not just stuff, but stuff in a excruciatingly exact configuration.

Anything that appears suddenly and erratically is in itself a problem. But between the non-conscious and the conscious there seems to be an infinite gap. — spirit-salamander

Between the non-living and the living there also seems to be an infinite gap. Panpsychism is a modern vitalism.

Not "A affects B". Rather, changes to A result in changes to B. When this relationship is observed, it provides evidence that either:

* A is B
or
* B is causally connected to A

But if the mind is causally connected to the brain, then by virtue of its causal interaction, it too must be material. But if it is material, then what else can it be, but the brain? There is no room in the skull for anything else. Therefore, A is B, the mind is the brain.

That is, must consciousness always only occur, or exist, in a first person, present tense mode? — charles ferraro

This seems tautologically true: the notion of "first person perspective" is derived from the notion or experience of consciousness.

What is it about consciousness that it must always be personified, or require personhood? — charles ferraro

Just that persons are the only conscious things we know of?

Is there a Consciousness in General? — charles ferraro

Abstracting consciousness out of the limitation of personal perspective might be the essence of the concept of God.

I don't have a sophisticated understanding of what information is. That which can be encoded and transmitted, I suppose. Which rules out all the stuff: you can't send a dog in a message.

.I just think there's no evidence that minds are material things - and thus no evidence that consciousness is a property of something material - and stacks and stacks that they're immaterial things. — Bartricks

Damage the brain, damage the mind. Destroy the brain, destroy the mind. Alter the brain, with alcohol or LSD for instance, alter the mind.

it is motivated by the need to avoid having to suppose that matter which is not conscious can, in some combinations, somehow give rise to consciousness — Bartricks

My point is, if you treat consciousness as informational, then this problem dissolves: matter can manifestly serve as the substrate of information, and so there is no contradiction in informational consciousness coinciding in a material body.

nformation is not a substance, but a property of a thing. So, I have some information, but I am not the information. — Bartricks

I agree information is not a substance, it is something distinct from material substance. But calling information a property is inapt, it belies the independence of information from matter. "The wizard of Oz" is the same movie, whether it is stored on a film reel, a dvd, a magnetic tape, a hard drive, or an eidetic brain's memory: all completely different physical media. Certainly when we watch and later evaluate the movie, we consider it as its own thing, not as the property of a specific object.

Information is not matter, it has no mass, no energy, no extent. Nonetheless every time you visit a web page, information is driving the physical output of your computer screen and speakers.

Matter/information is the real dualism, and demonstrates how ontologically distinct entities nonetheless interact. Consciousness is a rarefied and complex species of information (or perhaps a species of information in motion, analogous to magnetism as electricity in motion). And the smallest particle is informational as well as material. No need to resort to implausible panpsychism.

What value do you put on a human life? — Wayfarer

Various countries have different estimates:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life

Who maintains the 'equality of humans and animals' - well, apart from fanatical animal liberationists? — Wayfarer

Reasonable people argue against anthropocentrism. Moreover the point of my post is that both answers to the question seem untenable

I think that rights are only meaningful to beings that are capable of exercising free choice. — Wayfarer

So then human rights rests on the philosophically very shaky foundation of free will? Becuase otherwise animals seem to move about as freely as we do.

So the Holocaust was ok so long as the Nazis felt nothing?

Humans are presumed to be equal in value. That being so, the basis of this mother's choice must come from personal preference.
Mother or no (imagine your poodle vs the live of someone else's child), the choice of the animal seems monstrous.

So might say an apologist for the worst tyrants of history.

So is the thought that the crucial auditory simulations that this neurological development facilitated were simulations of the organism's own vocalisations? — Welkin Rogue

Right

Prior to language, these vocalisations would have been, I guess, various emotive vocalisations. — Welkin Rogue

If you think about it, many modern words which can stand alone as a sentence could have served as primitive vocalizations: hmm. wow! huh. huh? awwww. yes! no!

The development of this increasingly complex subvocalisation must be informed by social and cooperative processes, as everyone is going through the same developmental process. — Welkin Rogue

Right. Before this neuroevolutionary event, there was only public "language". After it, there is public and private "language", each informing and contributing to the other, in a cycle. Individual innovations could e transmitted to the group, who would transmit their collective innovations to other groups, and to the next generation. I believe the expressive limit of prelinguistic vocalizations would be quickly reached.

but we all like an explanation in terms of adaptation. — Welkin Rogue

I think the key immediate benefit is improved general cognition, without spending too much neurally. Something like what we do with the visual feedback loop. At least for me, the visual loop is not nearly as developed as the auditory. It is non-linguistic. And yet, it is indispensable for thinking, if it were to disappear (as it does sometimes when I am under a lot of stress) I would be mentally crippled.

And even though I am linguistic and so I predominantly use the auditory loop for saying words to myself, I sometimes use it to think in other ways, for instance musically. Sometimes music will accompany my visual thinking, in such a way that the "logic" of the music is somehow analogous to the logic of the problem. There is more utility to playing sounds to yourself than words.

This advantage gives the trait breathing room before the point is reached when a female be seduced with savvy vocalizations. As soon as this is possible, vocal flexibility, linguistic ability, and general brain power along with it, explode like an atom bomb.

everyone's life is bracketed by the permanent, omnipresent possibility of death. Does that make it trivial?

One necessary condition is that there be a sufficient richness of vocalizations already present for thinking to be able to do anything at all. Otherwise as you say it would just be playing sounds in the head to no effect.

You can't subtract warmth from a fire and get something simpler.