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.

One of the challenges for CTM is that all physical processes can be described as computations or information processing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What distinguishes brains and computers from the rest of the universe is their universality. Unlike anything else we know, brains and computers can enact the informational processing part of other physical processes, without the physical part. Computers can even enact the information processing of different computers. Or, they can enact purely imaginary informational processes, which have no physical correspondence. They are of course limited by time and energy (computational power), space(memory), and reliability especially in the case of brains, but given those limitations, they are universal. (That said, they are wildly different, specialized for totally different kinds of problems.)

I'd suggest that some systems are conscious because they are in an ongoing process of melding incoming sensory information with what arises from deep learning, into a model of whatever aspect of the world the system is conscious of as a result of such modeling and model monitoring. — wonderer1

And yet modern AI does such modelling, presumably without consciousness. I think what makes brains conscious is that they are general informational processors whose interface to the world is the result of the modelling of sensory information you are talking. To brains, as far as they/we are concerned, such models are the subjective plentitudes we experience, they/we are wired to interface with the world in this way. Just as computers run on symbolic logic, our wet "computers" "run" on sensory experiences: we perceive, feel, imagine, and think to ourselves, all of which are fundamentally sensorial. It is these and only these sensations, externally and internally derived, that we are aware of, every other brain process is unconscious to us.

Causal closure does not imply epiphenomenalism, unless you interpret it too broadly (i.e., not the way it is usually understood). One could believe that the world is closed under fundamental physics, but that does not automatically imply that everything else, such as consciousness (or chemistry), is causally inert. It just doesn't have a place in the explanatory framework of fundamental physics, and if you put it there by hand, then you would have causal overdetermination. But alternative explanatory frameworks can coexist without conflict. Consciousness (and chemistry) could still take place in a world that is closed under fundamental physics, but you would need other means than physics to identify and describe mental (chemical) phenomena qua mental (chemical) phenomena. — SophistiCat

I think (weak) emergence is the concept here.

Of course you can predict Life, or anything similar. You could do it with a pencil and paper, just apply the rules and go step by step. You can predict any instance of Life by inputting the starting conditions and running it forward, computation works as well here as for calculating orbits of billiard balls bouncing off one another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But only in theory, on the subset of starting conditions that can actually be solved. Some may only reach a steady state after trillions of iterations. Some may never. But the only way to know is to actually do the simulation. No law can predict it in the absence of simulation.

Maybe a cleaner example is the halting problem. There is no way to predict wherever a program will eventually halt. But this in no way implies that the behavior of a program is not reducable to it's instructions.

That and facts about composition is misunderstood as a reduction. To be sure, all cells are made from molecules. All molecules are made from atoms. This isn't a reduction. You can't predict how a molecule works from theory in physics, you need all sorts of ad hoc empirically derived inputs for it to work. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This conflates reduction and prediction. No one can or will predict the steady state behavior of Conway's Game of Life from it's initial state. Yet no one denys the reduction of that behavior to the very simple rules.

He also introduces the Fitness Beats Truth idea and the kinds of experiments that he says proves its validity. — Wayfarer

Does it though? For a perception to be fit, it must correlate to truth in some way. Pure hallucination cannot do an organism any good

Though the same cannot be said of ideas. Some ideas might be perfectly false, and yet have fitness value.

Obviously one does not 'have' reality in one's eye or in one's brain, one has visions and models and heuristics. But crossing the road without attending to what one can see and hear is perilous and foolish.

Hint: "... truly see reality" is a dog's breakfast of a phrase. — unenlightened

Right.

"Truly see reality" is the legacy of naive r realism. You can reject naive realism while maintaining this concept as an impossible standard. That is how we don't "truly see reality". If naive realism is thoroughly abandoned, then "truly seeing reality" is visions and heuristics, when they reasonably correlate with real features. Anything beyond this is a naive realist fantasy.

There's plenty of evidence. — Sam26

You allude to this often. This thread is quite long, so it might be helpful to edit the op with a compilation of the best evidence.

I think the fundamental philosophical issue, apart from life after death metaphysics, is epistemological. Most epistemology focuses (obsesses) on the mundane: "am I really seeing this tree?" Comparatively less attention is given to the epistemology of the extraordinary. What would it take to (rationally) believe such a thing as NDEs? Clearly, testimony establishes that such experiences occur. But can testimony establish their interpretation as legitimate experiences of disembodied souls? What weight of evidence could establish such a thing?

It is the testimony of doctors, nurses, and other witnesses that ultimately counts. How strong is this testimony? They are basically witnesses to miracles. How do we evaluate such testimony?

Also, I haven't seen much attention paid to DMT. You agree that it includes very similar experiences. On the surface, this seems devastating to your argument, if chemical manipulation of the brain can induce this. Moreover , most people who take DMT understand the context, that they are taking a drug, and do not attribute their experiences to anything supernatural. It is only in the context of almost dying that people make such interpretations. I know that if I had a powerful psychedelic experience surrounding my near death, I would be absolutely fooled, and insist on a supernatural explanation. Whether it was, or just a natural trip.

BTW, have you tried DMT? How was it, or, why not?

I for one think this is great fun, and will definitely be submitting an answer. Some people are being way over-cynical. No one here knows whether you would ultimately follow through or not, but even if you do not, it is an enjoyable dream, and great motivation to put our best philosophical foot forward.

That being said, I do hope for your own sake that you follow through. Being dishonest impairs our ability to freely make a rational choice on whether to expend the time and energy in participation, and so is deeply immoral :P

Do you plan on engaging with your respondants?

Let's all enjoy this brief window of hope before they undemocratically shove through another centrist loser offering absolutely nothing, guaranteed to lose to the evil clown.

On the other hand, the science that discusses a tree is not just filling space, not just a lot of empty fictional narrative. Religion, too, taken seriously, is not this. — Constance

I don't want to give an all too easy answer that "everything is just a narrative" and science and religion are"just empty fictions filling space". My point is that cognitive architecture comes first, not some inescapable reality standing outside all narrative.

The cognitive architecture I think drives the religious impulse is the one that allows a hunter gatherer to observe a dragonfly and see:

* The phenomenal impression of the insect, it's appearance and motion through space.
*The apprehension that these phenomenon are not chaotic, but they belong to an organized entity of the category "dragonfly", and more broadly "insect".
* The larger irrelevance of this entity to the current task of hunting a deer.
*The larger still relevance of the early appearance of the dragonfly, possibly presaging an early summer.

At least four levels of meaning, all attached to the same phenomenon, all held by the same brain. But this one-to-many relationship between appearance and meaning begs the question:: is that it? Or is there a deeper meaning beyond all these? What is the meaning of all these meanings?

Religion arises to fulfill the spiritual need, the need to fill in all these "higher", "deeper" meanings whose existence is like a shadow cast by our own cognitive machinery. If it doesn't provide all the answers, it at least provides a framework within which answers can be found. Having such a framework seems to be a deep human need, without which we suffer, as @Tarskian points out.

I mean, we put out of inquiry all, or nearly all, that circulates though typical religious mentalities, in an effort to determine if there is something "real" that religion is truly about; something that is not simply a historical fiction conceived in an ancient mind. — Constance

I think your inquiry about religion itself captures the essence of religion.

Religion is how we fill the symbolic space. The symbolic space is a product of how we think. Any object of thought can have multiple levels of symbolic meaning. "Surface" meaning, and any number of deeper meanings "behind" this. A tree isn't just a tree: it is a source of food or building materials. Beyond this, it might symbolize ecology, a stand-in for the beneficient features of life itself. And it might mean God's benevolence, or timeless persistence. All these symbolic meanings are bestowed upon the tree, none are inherent to the actual tree.

Religion is how this symbolic space is colonized in different cultural arenas. It apparently cannot be left empty, it has to be filled in one way or another. Everything has meaning in religion, because religions fully fill the symbolic space.

So your question, what is the true meaning of religion, is itself an expression of the basic religious impulse to fill the symbolic space. In this case, the space behind "religion".

And this is why science is a competitor to religion. Not because the mechanistic accounts of how things work differ. But because it offers a parallel, and empirically grounded, vision of what explaining the meaning of things looks like. The tree isn't just the tree we see. It is the vast scientific story that explains it.

The two statements are not contradictory. They simply imply ~A.

Kamela? Really? From one deeply unpopular candidate to another. I have long given up on the Democrats actually delivering anything meaningful policy wise. All I need from them is to prevent the descent into outright fascism by defeating a totally unqualified sub moronic evil clown. Even that very low bar is too much for them.

The Democratic party has long ago degenerated into complete worthlessness. In a functioning democracy they would have been swept away long ago. It is our winner take all electoral system that makes a third party impossible, and therefore keeps the existing two parties entrenched, no matter how awful they become. This will be America's downfall.

If that makes you murderously upset, please go elsewhere. — Baden

Was that some kind of inept death threat? I couldn't tell, verbal expression is not this guy's strong suit. If so, I have to wonder why he is permitted to stick around.

Gladly. It's so beneath my effort I require a few sips to simply fit the role, naturally. — Outlander

:rofl: yeah...

You're tolerable. — Outlander

Wish I could say the same.

Please, gtfo. The music is not there to somehow induce tipping (show me this "scientific evidence"). It's there because management decided the shopping public wants to hang out in a place playing music they presumably like. The poor employees have to endure the literal torture of being force fed this drek 8 hours a day. It is cruel as fuck.

And, "most valuable"??

disrupts my intuitive feeling for a place, replacing it with a candied consumerised cadence that I find repulsive and emotionally disruptive. — Baden

Spot on.

I feel like it's the artist, not philosopher, in me whose stomach turns at such auditory assaults. But that may be conceit. — Baden

Death metal eh? I think it is the metalheads that can least abide the ear-vomit that passes for music these days.

I used to be a black metal exclusive, I even wrote it, but I've been expanding my horizons to include goth, quality pop, punk, thrash and death metal. I'm mostly an old school guy, been playing this one quite a bit lately:

That is an interesting perception. I think there is no lack of melody in todays pop, and certainly, they have lyrics. It's just that they are maddening, obnoxious drivel.

Gen-Z gets an undeserved bad rap, yet somehow to me their music embodies some the worst traits attributed to them: smug, narcissistic self satisfaction and self aggrandizement. The overall loss of quality compared to earlier generations (including ones I feel no special connection to) is stark.

Shitty ass modern pop (that is, modern pop)
People blarting their shitty ass modern pop in public places (Beach, park) or next door, implicitly demanding I either enjoy or endure their shitty ass modern pop, or gtfo

I really don't believe Biden is senile — Wayfarer

The way he would become lost, dazedly fumbling between unrelated topics, gazing vacantly, can be explained either by severe anxiety at the enormity of the moment -- what you or I might experience, but not a lifelong politician with his career -- or mental impairment. Given his age and other worrying signs, senility is the most natural and likely explanation.

good for me and the millions of others who aren’t political hobbyists — Mikie

Lol, then what do you think you are?

It's not just a silly debate, or the silly impression it made, it's what it indicated. The man is senile, there is no denying it, we cannot count on anything better from him in the rest of the campaign. Cognitive decline goes one way only. Peoples assessment that he is unfit is correct, to lead a campaign, let alone a country.

I did find out that the name ‘Nosferatu’ is Romanian for ‘the insufferable one.’ — Wayfarer

Lol, it's true

Biden's competent, effective administration is not populated by "senile bitches"; however, The Clown's "Project 2025" will be populated by a fanatically loyal horde of "incorrigible morons" just like him. — 180 Proof

We know this, but does America? Administrations are largely unseen. What was seen was a doddering old fool, next to which the malignant moron seemed sharp. It is America, not you and me, that is set to fail the national IQ test. Again.

Hysterical? As it stands, Trump's victory is all but guaranteed. Even before this, Bidens polling was terrible, losing every swing state. Now, it's over. The arrogant whim of a single, senile bitch is what is guaranteeing neofascist America, to run or not is his prerogative alone.