You see, the value of the dollar only goes down if that 100 trillion enters the economic system. Only then it will drive up prices and thus lowers the value of the currency. But as you have only had the time to buy a Ferrari and fifty boxes of Champagne before forgetting just where you parked the money, your actions haven't crashed the dollar. — ssu

I don't think so. Of course in reality this loan would have been flagged instantly. If this titanic mistake was somehow made, quintupling the total money supply in an instant, the dollar would crash. All confidence in the government's competence to maintain the scarcity of the dollar would be lost. The mere threat that the 100 trillion might be discovered and enter circulation would crash the dollar. Whether or not it ever actually does.

It's not just actual circulating money that matters. Perception also matters. Just imagine that the Fed announced that they were stimulating the economy by printing 100 trillion dollars. The dollar would absolutely tank, as everyone would try to unload them all at once. But then the Fed announces it was just an April Fools joke. The dollar tanked, yet not a extra single actual additional dollar entered circulation.

Hence if there's 100 trillion in some obscure derivatives market, that amount won't wreck the price of the dollar... as long as those 100 trillion stay in the obscure derivatives market! — ssu

That is not how it works. Some obscure derivatives market might have a market cap of 100 trillion. But that money can't actually be accessed. Only a fraction of it can. For the money to be accessed, the derivative must be sold. Selling en masse would crash the market for the derivative, evaporating the 100 trillion. .

Moreover, for a derivative to be sold, it must be exchanged for dollars. If the derivative is notionally more valuable than all the dollars in existence, where would the additional dollars come from?

The means of exchange probably needs to have some kind of )inherent value, such as gold has. — Leontiskos

Gold has some "inherent value" (as problematic as that is) but that (decoration, electronics) has little relation to it's value, the bulk of which derives from it's status as a store of value. Cryptos have acquired this status (during which process it is possible to become rich), like it or not.

. But with a few pushes on a computer, they could make tomorrow 100 trillion dollars. — ssu

What matters is not "actual" scarcity but perception of scarcity. If the belief spread that they might do this, the value of the dollar would plummet to 0, due to the belief in an imminent loss of scarcity.

How could that be scarcity in the meaning that we usually understand it? — ssu

Despite that, people labor long hours performing unpleasant tasks to acquire a few dollars. No one would spend a third or more if their waking time working if dollars were not scarse: that is, if they could be gathered on trees , or printed on a printer.

The common problem money printing creates isn't necessarily a lack of scarcity, but a lack of value stability. — Tzeentch

Loss of "value stability"(that is, decline) happens in proportion to loss of scarcity and loss of confidence in future scarcity.

People's perception of the longevity and value of the currency, I suppose. — Tzeentch

Sure. It was this basic feeling that kept me and most of us from being early investors. And it is this doubt that combined with greed makes the price so volatile.

If people think something is valuable and are willing to buy it, it's valuable. — ssu

They are willing to buy to the degree it is scarce. As I said scarcity is a necessary but insufficient condition for value.

What does "trustworthy" mean here?

At first I agreed with this 100% and this is certainly the traditional view, but then I remembered the sudden rise in dogecoin's value which is the furthest thing from scarce. — BitconnectCarlos

No, even dogecoin is scarce. Unlike Bitcoin it is inflationary, there is no cap on the total supply. But dogecoin must still be "mined", it cannot be otherwise created or found. Just as there is no cap on the usd that will ultimately be created. But that creation is still tightly controlled, creating scarcity.

All cryptocurrency, at least all that is valuable, is scarce.

Language befuddles us as philosophers because we invest into language more than what language actually is, which is a tool for thinking, creating, and communicating. Language is a cultural and biological artifact. But because all of our thoughts are linguistic, to us words appear elemental. It then becomes the seemingly natural task of philosophy to decide the nature of these elementals of thought.

If you look at the epistemic JTB account for knowledge as a justified true belief, it means that the overwhelmingly vast majority of true beliefs are ineffable and cannot possibly be justified. — Tarskian

They are ineffable, so they have no opportunity to be beliefs at all, and therefore no occasion to be justified.

Ineffable truths are never believed. And I guess, numerically, most truths are ineffable. But all of these ineffable truths seem quite irrelevant too.

What is one example of a subset of the natural numbers that cannot be expressed by language?

Also note that mathematical notation is a kind of extension to the natural languages.

But I do think that at a certain point repression can become indiscriminate insofar as totalitarian regimes go, almost to the point of doing it for its own sake, i.e. I don't think every suppressive law in North Korea, for instance, is a cog in some intricate machine that operates totally efficiently and always in a directed manner to serve a greater purpose. — ToothyMaw

No, it is never that, never 4d chess. 4d chess is almost always the wrong answer.

I think the idea is always "stability", where "stability" is implicitly or explicitly the perpetuation of the ruling regime. They achieve this by repression, by squelching any possible threat. And they might do this crudely, stupidly, without regard to human cost.

Ahh, "directly". Just great. So what can your voice directly do then? — NOS4A2

Also "immediate cause" or "proximate cause".
My voice directly stimulates cochlea, or a electronic sensor.

By your "metaphysics", a twitch of an index finger never killed anyone, nor usually a gun, but only bullets. So nothing to fear from someone with a gun.

No, I don’t quibble much in everyday conversation. I would say, “yes, I turned the lights off”. — NOS4A2

But you quibble here?

Why is your metaphysics "quibbling" in one context, but in the more important context of misinformation it is somehow relevant?

If the metaphysics were sound maybe that would be one thing. But it is not. You are confusing "cause" with "direct cause". My voice cannot directly turn off the lights. But it can still turn off the lights with Alexa.

To the extent ignorance is "enslavement", it is an enslavement imposed on oneself (assuming free access to information). While deception is "enslavement" imposed by an other.

But of course the topic is not mere deception, but disinformation, which is deception on an industrial scale.

Actually all air vibrations, including non-speech, are transduced into electrical energy in modern smart-home systems. In the case of speech recognition It is the software that filters out the speech from the non-speech sounds. So the speech has no more causal power than any other sound. — NOS4A2

So the speech, which caused the electrical signal that the software passed and interpreted, did not cause the lights to turn off? The software did? Or the electrical energy did?

If you are at someone's home, and say "Alexa, lights off" or whatever, and the host asks you why you turned off the lights, you answer "I didn't turn them off. The electrical energy did!"

Can you see why this is either a joke or sophomoric nonsense?

I do have a problem with that. The consequences of speech, for instance, is air and sound coming out of the mouth. To be fair, I'm willing to subject myself to a test if you wish to promote your harm theory. Let's see which injuries you can inflict on me with your speech. — NOS4A2

That speech has casual power beyond air vibrations is trivially obvious. Smart home systems are a clear modern example. Or, train a child to believe X, and that child will likely believe X, with all the consequences belief X entails.

It is up to you to demonstrate why speech in the case of misinformation is somehow not casual. I don't like your chances.

Ownership is a triadic relationship between owner, owned, and society that ratifies the ownership.

Between owner and owned, we think and behave differently with things we own than with things we don't. We use them as we please, exploit them, care for them, discard them. They bring us pride, or shame. We attach them to our identities like medals on our breast.

Society sanctions and enforces this special relationship. Enforcement includes shame and loss of social status, financial penalty, confinement, and violence. One of the jobs of parents is to instill the concept of ownership, and mete out (hopefully far less severe) punishments for violating it.

Without this social system underwriting ownership, it would exist only in the owner's mind, and so would be unreal. Because of our training, we implicitly understand our special perquisites with our belongings, and generally have a healthy respect of other's. We attach moral significance to the concept of ownership, and violate it at our peril.

I think you are mostly right, but usually when such laws are created in repressive societies, it isn't to fight the kind of edge case I describe above, but rather to repress for repression's sake or to enable authoritarian rule. — ToothyMaw

You don't repress for repressions sake. The above is not an edge case, it is the main case. They might brand the governments collusion with the neo Nazis as misinformation, or criticism of the neo Nazis themselves. Whilst their political opponents receive no such protection from the misinformation laws, the government itself would probably be an organ for spreading Disinformation about them.

dis

Thus, I think that the intent behind the implementation of such laws is probably a somewhat decent indicator of whether or not they will be easily abused; — ToothyMaw

Intent matters only because a government with bad intent will write the law such that it can be exploited by them. While a more benevolent government would take more care to add safeguards.

Misinformation is just false information. Under its heading falls satire, irony, fiction, exaggeration, miscalculation, and so on. — NOS4A2

Ridiculously overbroad definition. Misinformation and disinformation are

* Either knowingly false, or told with indifference to their truth
* Told for the benefit of the teller, likely at the cost of the hearer and society at large
* Crucially, they target populations, not individuals

The cost of misinformation is clear.

*Cost to the individual: one cannot act in ones best interest misinformed.
*Cost to society: The actions of the misinformed are often to the detriment of society at large
*Distortion of democracy: democracy is impossible in both the absence of information and the predominance of misinformation. The will of the people devolves to the will of the most potent disinformers.

There is no obvious solution. The chief danger of misinformation laws is that these same laws can be used to suppress the truth while effectively promoting disinformation. This is a common pattern in repressive societies

What it is like to experience.

This is seen by the inverted colors thought experiment. Suppose your internal experience of colors was inverted to everyone else's, such that everyone's red is your green, and vice versa. No one would no the difference. If this were the case, no amount of questioning would or could ever reveal it. That is because the contents of experience are inexpressible.

This is not surprising. When you learn the word red, your teacher points to a red truck, a red crayon, and says "red". Eventually you associate "red" with a particular color sensation. But the teacher is unable to point to the sensation itself, and say "red" if the sensation is red. The teacher can only point to objects that evoke that sensation in herself. So if the same object evokes your red in yourself and your green in herself, that is both just "red" às far as you two are concerned.

We lack language to express the content of sensations, we can only compare them to other sensations. This is equally true of all five senses, the "other" senses (proprioception, interoception, equilibroception, others?) , and emotion.

You are confusing the chronology. This is what you said in reply to your quote of me:

There is no good reason to believe this. It's just like what atheists say about people who believe in God, you just believe this because it makes you feel more comfortable. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no good reason to believe objects really selectively reflect light? Or that objects really appear the way they do to us?

There is no "true" way objects look, I agree with you. This is due not just to scale, but to the multitudinous perspectives one can have on an object (scale is just one dimension of these perspectives). Perception itself is radically perspectival, the redness of red, and the spherical appearance of a ball, is a perspective, and a co-creation between you and the ball. That is how perception to conscious beings necessarily works, in a world where there is no such thing as how things "truly" appear (to any of the senses).

That's why I objected to your post claiming that things really do "look" the way we perceive them to look, through the sense of sight. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course, I didn't say that.

Moreover they really do look the way they do: appearing this way (to humans) is a stable, mind independent property (just not independent of all minds, it is like a social reality) — hypericin

Read more carefully before knee-jerk replying.

Rather than "objects which reflect light", it might be better to say that we distinguish through our eyes, the energy levels of groups of electrons responding to their environmental conditions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Rather not. The micro scale is just one scale, one perspective, not more or less privileged than the human, planetary, or cosmic. What scale we talk in depends on context. On our human scale, there are not just protons and electrons, but vast assemblages of them which behave in the ways that are meaningful and relevant to us.

If by "coloured objects" you just mean "objects which reflect light which cause colour sensations" then sure. But that's dispositionalism, not naive colour realism. — Michael

Sure, but I feel people conflate two or all three of these different senses in which there really are colored objects out there (one of which is false), which contributes to the endless frustration of these discussions.

Depth is a characteristic of visual sensations, and so it seems as if there are coloured objects outside the body. — Michael

From the indirect realism thread, we have a similar perspective on this topic.

Yet part of what confuses these threads is that there really are colored objects outside the body, in the sense that there are really objects which reflect light in ways that allow them to be discriminated. Moreover they really do look the way they do: appearing this way (to humans) is a stable, mind independent property (just not independent of all minds, it is like a social reality)

Form doesn't seem particularly equivalent to information. Just as the same information might "reside" in different material substrates, it can reside in different forms of the same substrate. (i.e black or white text, small or big) Though form does seem "closer" to information than matter (the shape of text is closer to the message than whatever material the glyphs are composed of).

Information seems more like number, something that doesn't exist at all without interpretation, that almost seems to reside in a platonic realm of its own.

It is because of reification, the 'thingifying' tendency deeply embedded in modern thought, which believes that only things are real. — Wayfarer

Rather the opposite of reification. Instead of treating abstractions as real, it excludes parts of the real from the category "real".

often it seems that attempts to use information in a hylomorphic sense are hamstrung — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why hamstring? If matter has or coexists with form, matter has or coexists with information. What is the problem?

analog values, personal meanings, and perhaps even fractal dimensions, that don't lend themselves to yes/no digitization. — Gnomon

I don't think analog values are not information, while digital values are. Of course analog values are just as representable on machines. The difference with physical values is that in a machine precision is fixed and immutable, you cannot extract more or less. Whereas precision is more fluid in natural values, you can expend more or less work to extract more or less precision. But this precision is also ultimately fixed, bound by physical limitations.

While personal meanings are not in themselves information, but rather frameworks of interpretation. I think the conflation of information and interpretation is one of the main confusions of this topic.

The whole point of my op is that information and numbers are the same thing

As she sent it with a computer, absolutely.

so, my friend, if we speak of the real number line. — jgill

True enough. Instead of points I should have said integer marks

I've been thinking more about this. At first I thought I was just mistaken in my op. The set of all possible arrangements of bits is countable, so it is no wonder that we can uniquely assign a whole number to every arrangement. Just because bits are countable, doesn't establish some kind of identity between bits and numbers.

But then, the set of all quantities is countable, as is the set of points on a number line. Are these two any more inherently number than bits? Quantities have arithmetic operations defined for them that don't make sense for bits, and bits have binary operations that don't make sense for quantities. Is one set of operations more "number" than the others? Or are bit arrangements, quantities, number lines, all just countable things, and so all equally numeric?

Information crucially depends on the sender and the receiver (and noise, if any) - this is what is being neglected here. Divining from patterns of tea leaves or decoding random marks on clay gives you no information, because no information was sent in the first place, despite there being a message. Similarly, numbers in themselves are not information, because they do not encode any message - they are just there. — SophistiCat

This seems like a conflation of information and communication, where communication is the transmission of information from A to B. Tea leaves and random marks are rich with information, it would take a lot of work to accurately represent their states. But they are not communications, which are intentional acts.

The message "The cat is on the mat. The cat is on the mat." gives you no more information than the message "The cat is on the mat." even though the former contains more bits than the latter (I am discounting noise for simplicity). The message "Your name is X" gives you no information if your name really is X and you are not suffering from amnesia. So, information depends on the receiver as well. — SophistiCat

Information is not the same as how informative the information might or might not be to a receiver. "The cat is on the mat. The cat is on the mat." may be no more informative than "The cat is on the mat", but the former still carries more information (it requires more bits to represent, but less than "The cat is on the mat. The dog is on the log.") "Your name is X" may not be informative, but it is still information.

Similarly, numbers in themselves are not information, because they do not encode any message - they are just there. — SophistiCat

Just where exactly? If information is distinguished from communicative acts, and from being informative, then numbers are pure information: they are answers to a series of yes and no questions, seen clearly in their binary representations.

Exactly, how is it that the same marks on dry clay can carry more or less information in different contexts? — SophistiCat

I think they can't. They carry the same information, whether or not it happens to be decodable at the time.

And note that it's not just any marks that transmit information. Some random indentations and scratches on the same tablet would not do. How could that be if marks themselves were information? — SophistiCat

Why does that preclude the marks themselves being information? Marks, arranged in certain ways, are information. Arranged randomly, they are not.

and in your OP you went back and forth between numbers and computers, which, of course, are not the same thing — SophistiCat

The point was that computers, thought of as information processing devices, are just as much number processing devices.

Numbers or bits can serve as an abstract representation of an encoded message. — SophistiCat

Why not
Numbers or bits can serve as an abstract representation of an encoded message

As for Shannon's information theory, I think it tends to be somewhat over-interpreted. Shannon was an electronic engineer trying to solve a particular problem of reliable transmission of information. Of course one of the fundamental discoveries of cybernetics, we all rely on Shannon's work for data compression and tranmission every time we use these devices. But there's a lot of hype around information as a kind of fundamental ontological ground, kind of like the digital geist of the computer age. — Wayfarer

I guess I've bought into the hype. For me, thinking about a piece of information, say a snippet of song, pass somehow unchanged through multiple wildly different physical media, such as sound waves, tape, CD, mp3, cable internet, wireless internet, streaming buffer, then back to sound waves as you finally hear it, led me to start conceiving of information and matter as being independent, and both as fundamental elements of the universe (maybe not unlike Aristotle's hylomorphism).

"Information" is a vexed term, as it is used differently (and often vaguely) in different contexts. A crucial thing about Shannon's theory in particular, which is often lost when it is casually mentioned, as you do here, is that it is a theory of communication, in which bits are only one part of a system that also includes, at a minimum, the encoder, the channel and the decoder. Taken in isolation, numbers or bits cannot be identified with information in any meaningful way. — SophistiCat

I'm not sure. Suppose an archaeologist uncovers tablets on which are inscribed a lost language. What did the archaeologist discover? Seemingly, information that can no longer be decoded. Years later, the language was translated. Did the information spring into being? Or was it always there?

but yes I would say that in order to be 'true knowledge' (and not a 'provisional', 'pragmatic', 'transactional' or even an 'approximate' one) it must be unmistaken. Do you think that a false (but reasonable) belief can be said to be knowledge? — boundless

"Unmistaken" is not "certain". To be knowledge, a belief must be true. That means for empirical beliefs we can never be totally sure that our beliefs are knowledge or not. And that is ok.

But at the same time if we interpret the same statement in a non-literal way, in some sense is true. — boundless

I feel you are muddling things here. Statements are only true or false wrt an interpretation. Given the same statement, some interpretations may be true, others may be false. This just demonstrates that uninterpreted statements, "statements in themselves", don't have truth values.
Only interpretations do.

How can I have a certain/true knoledge** of them? — boundless

You are making the common mistake of equating knowledge with certainty. Certainty has no place in empirical knowledge, only in math and logic. Your over restrictive "true knowledge" limits knowledge to the latter. I suggest you abandon the obsession with certainty.

This is a world map from 1892. This perspective of the world was unobservable in a time without spaceships and satellites. While there are obvious distortions, I think they managed to do a pretty good job of inferring the major features and their relationships from the evidence they had.

I think this is a pretty good analogy with our relationship with the external world, which is unobservable as it is (as the concept is incoherent), but about which we can know quite a bit inferentially from evidence and conceptual modelling.

he problem comes up only when it is assumed that it is impossible to see the world as it "really is," because such knowledge would require "knowing the world without a mind." The problem is not only that both experience under normal conditions and conditions of error share in unreality, but that we have no means of saying which is closer to "what things are really like." If the way things "really are" is inaccessible, if even space and time are the unique products of the mind, then there is no possible comparison of experience and reality. Correspondence is out. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This seems untrue. Maps are never their territory; if a map was, it would just be the territory. Yet, we can clearly distinguish maps that faithfully correspond to their territory, and those that do not. The non-identity of bad maps with their territory is not the same as the non-identity of all maps with their territories. We distinguish the two kinds of non-identity conceptually and in practice.

Modeling relationships," might be another tricky term here. Does a dry river bed model past flow of rainwater? We probably wouldn't want to say that, but it certainly does contain information about past rainfall. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that "modelling" refers to informational processes, where one system maps or reflects the relevant informational process of another, without actually reproducing the physical system.

A combat drone uses video, IR, radar, etc. inputs to get information about the world. It puts this information into a model. But presumably this isn't "sensory" information because it doesn't involve sensation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are wired to interface with the world via sensations, whereas fundamentally a combat drone isn't: it translates sensory input into logical symbols, performs symbolic transformations on those symbols, and acts according to those transformations. There is a symbolic reduction that happens with drones, that doesn't with us. That same reduction that makes engineering possible might preclude conscious experience.

I think we will only truly understand the sensations we experience when we figure out, at least in principle, how to engineer them in a machine. Of course, we just don't.

An important part of philosophy is criticism, especially of poor analogies and misapplied categories. — Wayfarer

I'm not complaining about criticism, but about the weird appeal to authority. You didn't actually say why my analogy was poor.

In the heart example, what is being talked about is a single anatomical context or perspective within which heart and blood co-exist and interact directly.

But various claims in the mereological fallacy link talk about things like "decision", "belief", etc. which cannot be defined directly in terms of brain content. — Apustimelogist

Heart and blood don't just co-exist and interact directly. They both interact with the circulatory system, lungs, metabolic system, etc. Without any of these, the heart wouldn't function, it functions only in the context of a whole organism. Yet, we say without issue, "Hearts pump blood".

Not in the context of physiology and anatomy, but it’s not an apt comparison with cognition and judgement. It appeals to the supposed authority of neuroscience to make philosophical claims about the mind - very different thing to the circulation of blood. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what the philosophical claims are supposed to be. That the brain integrates sensory information and acts upon it seems to be no less an empirical claim than that the heart pumps blood. Nor was I aware there was a special authority required to make philosophical claims. Maybe we should be verifying everyone's philosopher cards here.

It's a mistake to say that brains do anything - that is what is described in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as the 'mereological fallacy', attributing to the part what only a whole is capable of. — Wayfarer

Is it a mistake to say that hearts pump blood? Only a whole organism is capable of sustaining blood circulation, not an isolated heart. Yet that is the function of the heart within the whole organism.