The trouble is, as ever, that you want to declare all that to be the actual state of affairs. You're claiming that the world is such that we only ever have differing models of what is the case, true or not, relative only to the internal assumptions of that model.

But "the world is such that we only ever have differing models of what is the case, true or not, relative only to the internal assumptions of that model" is itself a claim about the way the world is, and so suffers from the same problem. It's only true relative to it's own internal assumptions.

This means that - relative to it's own internal assumptions - it's also true that the world is such that our theories directly correspond to the external state of affairs and some are just right and others just wrong.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it, presenting, as true, a theory about how the world is which within it claims that there are no absolutely true theories about how the world is.

Einstein’s work should neither be held up as the resolution of an error nor as proof of an error. Rather, it should be seen as an invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices. — Joshs

The problem is then what's left to be described as 'the resolution of an error'? Surely everything we'd previously described that way falls into the same camp, no? Which means we've just defined away the term 'error'. No longer in use. Seems a daft way to go about things, since we all quite happily use the word.

Far better to say that an "invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices" is just what "resolving an error" is, it's what it means when we use the term.

To think that Russia would leave it's neighbors alone if there wouldn't be NATO is extremely unlikely: it still thinks it has the right to control at least in some way it's former parts of the past empire. It hasn't given up on it's imperial aspirations. — ssu

Possibly, but you've still not countered the objection that they would never invade without any excuse (note 'excuse' not 'reason'). Every single invasion Russia has ever carried out in its modern incarnation has been for 'supporting separatists autonomy', or 'repelling NATO', or 'supporting legitimate governments against foreign intervention',... and so on. Never, not once, has it been "because we wanted that land".

So the policy of deliberately and knowingly providing Russia with whole raft of very real, gift-wrapped excuses is reckless at best, at worst deliberate provocation. We know full well that without those excuses it will not invade. Yet American interventions deliberately emboldened Neo-Nazi groups, deliberately stoked Anti-Russian sentiment in regions declaring their autonomy, deliberately pushed toward integration of Ukraine into NATO and the EU. In other words American interventions deliberately served up the exact excuses we all knew in advance were the difference between Putin merely wanting to invade a country (but not doing so) and Putin actually invading a country. I can't think what more deliberate provocation of a war a third party could have done.

To be clear. The rest of the world doesn't give a shit whether Putin wants to take over Ukraine, or Moldova, or Lithuania... What we care about is whether he will actually try to do so. The historical record shows categorically that the difference between the two is the presence of a legitimate-sounding excuse. Deliberately providing one of those excuses is therefore monumentally reckless, knowing the consequence of doing so. Deliberately providing an entire gift-basket of them is beyond reckless, it's manifest warmongering.

The direct connection I theorize, and can observe, is the skin touching the tea cup, the hand grasping it, the arm lifting the hand, the light hitting the eye, and so on. — NOS4A2

Just begs the question. we're asking about the directness of the data stream from the cause of you thinking "That's a cup" to your thought "That's a cup".

The argument is that the object of your experience 'the cup' is produced indirectly from causes external to the Markov Blanket of the system constituting your experience of the cup. If you then simply declare those external hidden states to be unhidden you are declaring that the cup on the table actually forms a direct connection (no intervening nodes) to the system whose function you'd describe as 'experiencing the cup'.

You'd basically be denying everything neuroscience has discovered over the last decades which demonstrably shows that there is no such direct connection, that several data nodes lie between the cause of a sensation and the conscious experience of that sensation.

I can even prove it to you from afar, if you're willing to undertake a little experiment?

Look straight ahead at something about 3m away (a door knob or light switch works well). Shut one eye. Look up, then back down to the object. Nothing ought to move (if it does, have your eyes tested!), your experience is of a static room which you just briefly examined the ceiling of. Now look back at the same object. Shut one eye. Gently place your finger on the lower part of your eye (over the eyelid, not directly on the eyeball) and gently press. The object you're looking at will appear to move. Your experience is now of a moving object.

You just replicated with your finger the exact same process you initiated with your eye muscles the first time. The only difference is the means by which the eye moved, not the sensation it received from the external world. Your brain adjusted the information in the first to give you a static picture because it knows that eye muscle movements cause this 'wobble' and so it filters it out. In the second, it's not used to you moving your eye with your finger so it doesn't filter out the wobble. It makes a prior guess that the wobble is what's actually happening in the world.

If you were to do this experiment every day for several weeks your brain would start to filter out this wobble, it would improve its guess to better fit the prediction that the external room is generally static.

What this shows is that there is, without doubt, at least one process (a data node) between what you refer to as your experience of the cup and the cause of that experience (which we refer to as 'the cup').

What is it, then, that creates 'res actual' from 'res potentia' if not 'res cogitans' — Wayfarer

I think the authors answer that when they say...

measurement is a real physical process that transforms quantum potentiae into elements of res extensa, in a non-unitary and classically acausal process, and we offer specific models of such a measurement process.

Since they're not arguing that the two 'substances' (Aristotelian substances) are not causally connected in any way (only in a classical sense) then nothing prevents a purely physical effect of res actual effecting res potential.

Even if some as yet unspecified factor were required, it's bizarre to suggest this factor simply must be res cogita, as if it were the only remaining option, and it certainly doesn't "support" your position without this.

That coheres with the Platonist idea that number is real - not real as an object or 'something in the world' but as what Augustine calls 'an intelligible object'. — Wayfarer

No. If absolutely doesn't. The argument is that our classification of what is real needs to include possibility. It does not, in any way mean we now have free reign to just chuck in anything else we feel like into the category. The need to expand the set hasn't, mentioned at all whether number should be included in that newly expanded set.

It comes back to the question you still haven't answered. What criteria does a thing have to meet to be counted as 'real'?

As to the sense quantum objects don't obey the 'law of the excluded middle', this doesn't make logical principles any less real in their domain of application - but shows that logic is not all-encompassing or omniscient, that it has limits. — Wayfarer

But your only proof offered so far that number is real is its universality. If universality isn't one of the criteria for being in the set {real things} then what's to stop just anything from being a member of that set? Are Unicorns real? If not why not?

Fuchs argued, the wave function does not describe the world — it describes the observer. “Quantum mechanics,” he says, “is a law of thought.

Says nothing about the non-physical nature of this thought though.

And I would dare to say that Russia would behave as Russia even without NATO.

I would just take the example of Moldova, a country that has no intensions of joining NATO, and the end result there: Russian forces, frozen conflict. — ssu

I think that's a strong possibility, but note that in Moldova Russia also had the excuse of a Russian-friendly breakaway and a corrupt main government, conflict over allowed languages even. No NATO, but still a raft of 'justifications'.

But Georgia? Well there's the President's intent to join NATO, the US backing to get pipeline access to oilfields, Putin telling the world that NATO's intentions to expand would be considered a threat to Russia at Bucharest. Practically a pre-run of Ukraine. Really makes the lie of the idea that NATO's actions did not have clearly foreseeable consequences. The exact sorts of consequences Mearsheimer warned of, in fact.

I think the real difference has been in just what reasons are seen as the most important. — ssu

Yes. That's the direction I've tried to take the discussion since the start, but there's been considerable resistance to people explaining hwy they consider their preferred reasons to be the 'important' ones.

I've been clear about my reasons. NATO, America, and Europe's culpability is the most important reason because I am a European and these are the political bodies I give my mandate to and have a duty to hold to account.

I remain unclear as to why the others seem so desperate to talk endlessly about how bad Putin is.

What do you think the objectives of Putin's Russia are towards Ukraine if NATO wouldn't exist? — ssu

Objectives? Possibly political control (particularly over Donbas), complete control of Crimea and economic influence of the whole of Ukraine.

Actuality? Without the excuse of NATO expansion, American hypocrisy, Right-wing extremism, I don't know how much of that agenda would actually have got off the ground. Putin's not an idiot, his standing on the world stage has taken a massive hit from even a war he can plausibly claim to be a 'Special Operation'. I very much doubt a war without even the shreds of plausible justification would have been considered.

I know how much your ilk love the Putin Madman hypothesis, but the Putin Idiot hypothesis isn't even getting a look in. There's no way he would have just up and invaded Ukraine with nothing but "I want that bit" as pretext.

It's you who are having this one sided approach to the issue. — ssu

Where have I said that NATO is the only reason for Russia's invasion?

Two paragraphs - one complaining about people selecting opinions (among many) that are convenient to their narratives. The second literally selecting an opinion (among many) that is convenient to your own narrative.

Do you even read these through before you post them?

My interpretation here with a supporting citation

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/711348 — Wayfarer

I don't understand how that citation supports your interpretation. The authors (of the paper) state...

This new duality omits Descartes’ res cogitans

...and...

it should be noted that with respect to quantum mechanics, res potentia is not itself a separate or separable substance that can be ontologically abstracted from res extensa

I'm also interested in how you square your belief earlier that...

I claim that numbers, scientific principles, lexical and logical laws, and much more, are real. — Wayfarer

...with the author's prescription that...

QP ... do not obey the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) or the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC).

If you believe the laws of logic are real and yet also believe that res potentia are real then it seems you believe two contradictory things.

Also, you've argued the primacy of the interpretation of the observer. I wonder how you square that with the corollary of the res potentia concept that...

measurement is a real physical process that transforms quantum potentiae into elements of res extensa, in a non-unitary and classically acausal process, and we offer specific models of such a measurement process.

Fantastic articles both. Thanks for linking them.

The latter particularly said 'narrative' a lot, so it gets my vote. I shall have to up my game if I want to win (genuinely playing 'lifetime use of the word 'narrative'' with some colleagues - apparently I say it a lot! Personally I think that just happens to fit their narrative)

My comment went unnoticed. — Real Gone Cat

All the very best comments go unnoticed, see it as a badge of honour.

How current campaigns are financed is the problem. That means violates the Constitution.

Again, not a problem with the system, but rather with improper implementation. — creativesoul

The constitution is not the sum total of the system.

Oh the irony! — Olivier5

You're confusing 'talking about persons' with 'making it personal'.

Seriously, though. One of the things I do at work is provide a social psychological element to economic risk analysis. Actually, this kind of response to complex global events is a hot topic at the moment. People's economic choices are being swayed by the psychological impacts of the way social media platforms can alter our interactions. This is just such a good example.

what do you make of his vacillating between aggressor and victim in the span of on average two posts?

Edit: no need to answer, I'm just demonstrating a point. — Benkei

Oh yeah, there's at least a book in this, if not a lucrative new line of consultancy!

American elections are expensive. We agree there. I'm not seeing the relevance that the above has to that agreement. — creativesoul

It means that anyone wanting to run needs lots of money. That places restrictions on who can run and on what demands will be made of them. Securing finance is never free of constraint.

Not clear of the actions he performed or the charges he faces. — creativesoul

The US government is trying to prosecute him for espionage for revealing information about their war crimes to the electorate.

Who gets to be the final arbiter of truth? — creativesoul

I don't understand why this question has all of a sudden become an issue. Caught between the right-wing individualist answer "we do", and the current trending answer "the government".

We already have a system of expertise measuring in place where previous experts judge whether newly minted experts are, in fact, sufficiently knowledgeable about their field. It's not exactly flawless, but it's crazy to speak as if the question has only just arisen.

A professor of medicine is qualified to speak to the truth of facts about medicine. A professor of international relations is qualified to speak to the truth of matters regarding international relations. A professor of military strategy is qualified to speak to the truth of military strategy.

I don't understand what the reasons were for people abandoning trust in that system, but to pretend it never even existed is madness.

still lost. — Real Gone Cat

The idea doesn't deserve this amount of scrutiny. It's simply that Einstein solved what might have otherwise been put down to mind-dependence. It's ironic that he's now used to defend mind-dependence. He showed that there was an observer independent reason for the difference in measurement, that it was not all in the mind of the observer, that it was, in fact, caused by the external state of the universe (the speed of the objects and the location of the observers).

It doesn't seem that way because no-one ever made such measurements to be confused about.

I thought it would clarify if presented a hypothetical world in which the odd measurement came first and the explanation after.

It clearly didn't.

Yes. Still surprised at how much gets lost in this medium of communication. It seems I'm understood less often than than I am misunderstood. I never have this trouble at work.

... Or maybe I do and no one ever dared say... now there's a thought.

The one where virtually all media in America is owned by just six companies and five of them are effectively owned by two asset management companies? — Isaac


IS NOT THE RESULT OF TOO MUCH GOVERNMENTAL REGULATION — creativesoul

No. It's the result of exactly the right amount of government legislation to achieve that state of affairs.

Unaware of this case. — creativesoul

Assange.

Freedom of speech is not unfettered. Especially when so few have so much power over what gets put into the public sphere for it's political consumption. — creativesoul

Restrictions on freedom of speech are not the issue, the issue is who wields that power.

Not sure what you mean. What was the original error? — Real Gone Cat

It was a hypothetical. I'm just saying that it has always been the case that two observers would measure objects at different lengths depending on their relative speed. We might hypothetically have put this down to the idea that the ship's length is a feature of the observer, until Einstein showed how that was not the case, but rather actual physics could cause that phenomena.

I just find it odd that rather then being seen as a resolution of a potential error (seeing the ship's length as a feature of the observer), Einstein's work is so often held up as proof that this is the case.

It's odd. It has always been the case (though few would ever have found out) that two observers viewing objects moving at different relative speeds would measure them to be different lengths, Two cavemen would have experienced this (had they ever measured near light-speed moving objects). Up until Einstein, we might have been tempted to see this as an indicator of the relativity of truth. "Bob says the ship's 10 feet, but Jim says it's 40, we've no reason why they're measuring it differently, I guess the truth of it is just different for Bob than Jim".

Someone really smart comes along and explains the exact cause of that difference, explains the factors of the real world which cause it to be 10 and 40 feet respectively (and not 3 inches, 6 miles, or anything else), and instead of putting the matter to rest, his work gets held up as proof of the original error being right, rather than the resolution of that error.

That isn't a simple question. — Wayfarer

So how can we have a discussion about what is real when you've no criteria for membership of that set?

There is no "tightly regulated media coverage" of an American election. — creativesoul

I'm sorry, are we on the same planet? The one where a journalist is currently facing inhumane imprisonment for his media coverage? The one where the government are actively instructing social media platforms on what content to ban? The one where virtually all media in America is owned by just six companies and five of them are effectively owned by two asset management companies?

That planet, is the one where there's no tightly regulated media?

When preventative safety measures deliberately built into the system are blatantly ignored, it is not a flaw inherent to the system if the neglection of the rule results in exactly what the rule guards against. — creativesoul

If a system cannot provide adequate means for it's integrity then it is a failed system. But...

what is happening now is not an index of systematic failure, but of systematic success. — Streetlight

...is absolutely right. I should not be talking in terms of system failure when the intent has actually been met. I should talk instead in terms of system atrocity.

As I keep saying, I'm questioning the culturally-normative sense of scientific realism. As one of the authors I like writes, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.' So it's a real basic disagreement about what is real. — Wayfarer

But the underlined is not what you've written above it at all. What you write as precursor is that you're dissatisfied with the way in which people have a arrived at their world view (by simply accepting the one they're told about). This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether that worldview is right, useful, ethical... It may be all of those things and still be just blindly accepted by most people.

You're talking here to people with a deep layman, if not, in some cases, an actual professional, interest in philosophy. It's condescending to assume they haven't thought about it just because they haven't arrived at the same conclusions as you.

We can have a disagreement about what is real, but to have that disagreement you need to present arguments in favour of what you think is real - you've not even answered my very simple question from pages back about what criteria you're using to judge when something is real. Very basic stuff in any discussion about what is real.

Labour seem to think you can only win from the centre, and so offer no policies and sit on the fence on everything. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I think actual policies are only of limited importance. A lot of people still vote on the basis of wider issues such as trust, tradition, ideology... Policies aside, a lot of the red wall don't see Labour as centrist at all on those issues which matter to them. The red wall has become older (as the young leave for London) and their concern for progressive social issues is not notoriously deep. Most own houses. Their issues are things like inflation, working practices (most still have a decade or more employment left), and local issues. Labour simply has to not just offer a better package to tackle these issues, but do so believably. Right now they're just playing the same stupid political games, jumping on whatever bandwagon is going making themselves seem utterly without either conviction or universality. The metropolitan centres are won already, yet Labour keep fighting as if they were the only seats available.

I'm not sure what tou both mean by or undestand with "direct connection". Is it a physical connection, involving perception via our senses? — Alkis Piskas

Yes. Some physical stimulus from the external system perturbs the first nodes (the sensory nerves, in this case) of the internal one. I'm using 'internal' and 'external' here for clarity, it's to do with systems, not necessarily bodies of brains.

I undestand that we can also experience other things thn external objects, e.g. feelings/emotions/sensations, is that right? — Alkis Piskas

External to one system, yes. Internal to another. It depends on what system is doing the inferring. Any systems can only sense the outputs from those nodes to which it is directly connected, it must infer the state of those nodes to which those circumferential nodes are themselves connected.

What I didn't understand was "nor that we experience all external world objects". Do you maybe mean "nor that we can experience all external world objects"? — Alkis Piskas

Lots of eternal world objects (external to the bodily system) are not perceived (in the broadest sense) despite being in contact with internal systems. my nerve endings are detecting all the movements of my clothes right now, but I don't experience those sensations, they're filtered out by the thalamus before I'm even aware of them.

You've yet to show that this teacup is also the thing in contact with my nerve endings. — Isaac

Is this what "direct connection" implies or requires? — Alkis Piskas

Yes. I think so.

What is needed is for enough elected officials to act in the best interest of the nation instead of self-interest. — creativesoul

Well, yeah, but that opportunity has already been headed off by having such a high threshold of expensive and tightly regulated media coverage required to even stand a chance of being elected.

It's another of those systematic failures. The sheer volume of people whom a national politician needs to persuade means that both finance and media are absolutely essential.

This puts financiers and media moguls in charge of who can even stand a chance of getting elected.

The only solutions I can see are to forget national politics entirely - get things done at local level (where media need not be involved), or to bypass media by mass protest, or to simply make existing political agendas impossible by refusal to comply.

I think the innocent deserve that no harm befall them, and that others, those who exist already before the innocents, have a duty to prevent such harm. — baker

Well, then I amend my proposition to "...very few people believe...". The point still stands that if the premises are heterodox, one can hardly be surprised by the novelty of the conclusion.

There is no Russian "establishment" in the American sense of that word. Russia's government is retrograde, like an organized crime ring. — Tate

Can you explain, then, why they have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council? Seems a reckless oversight on the part of the world's primary governing body, to allow a madman-led crime ring one of only five permanent seats on the element in charge of global security.

in the civilized part of the two Americas, the left are experiencing a golden age (everything pink is governed by a left party, the latest inclusion being Colombia, whose left party won just the other day): — Streetlight

Plus Lula, in Brazil - still ahead in the polls.

The Teals are not a political party as such but a loose aggregate of those sick of inaction on climate change, women, and other social issues. — Banno

Odd because we have the opposite problem in the UK. The left's power-base has been lost because of a concentration on climate change, women, and other social issues at the expense of more traditional leftist values of worker's rights, employment, poverty reduction and progressive taxation. It will take years here to win back those workers lost to the conservatives because they felt they had to pick between a progressive social agenda they weren't comfortable with or a taxation and rights agenda they weren't comfortable with. For one reason and another they chose to lose the rights/pay rather than lose the culture. Crazy decision, in my opinion, but there it is. Doesn't excuse the left's failure to deal with it.

The rail strike going on in England right now is a bright-spot, and the union leader Mick Lynch has been absolutely murdering the corporate media who have been trying to play 'gotcyha' games with him all day. — Streetlight

Yeah. Really hoping that his zeal might win back some of the support from the working class lost to the Tories from Labour's recent wet-blanket routine.

A false sense of what YOU think is right for someone else doesn't justify harm — schopenhauer1

As I said earlier...

all antinatalist arguments ... start with a bizarre premise with which no-one else agrees and then proceed to show that it yields bizarre conclusions with which no-one else agrees. — Isaac

Yours is no exception. We cause harms to others to achieve what we think is right all the time. So long as we feel satisfied that the harms were the minimum necessary most people consider this quite ethically unproblematic.

If you take a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal type approach, then maybe this isn't going to work. Maybe it does lead to antinatalism. One good reason (among many others) to discard such a morally decrepit position.

I mean to say we can only experience that with which we are in direct connection — NOS4A2

...

If someone is to experience a doorknob he must see it, touch it, turn it, etc. — NOS4A2

What the latter shows is that direct connection is necessary to experience a thing. It does not then follow that all things we experience are external world objects, nor that we experience all external world objects.

For your argument to hold it is necessary to show that the causes of our sensations match the objects we experience since the 'direct connection' you theorise is between an external world and a sensory receptor. But I do not experience 200,000 firing neurons when I lift my tea cup. I experience the lifting of my teacup. So the object of my experience is the teacup. You've yet to show that this teacup is also the thing in contact with my nerve endings.

Do you mean to say that only a part of them are experiencing? — NOS4A2

No, nothing of the sort. Your argument is that we are in direct connection with the outside world therefore we directly experience the outside world.

You've not shown that that with which we are in direct connection is that which we experience.

They have not proposed to force Ukraine to do anything — Tate

Why are you deciding that military action constitutes force, but economic pressure, diplomatic pressure, intelligence operations and bribery do not?

I was talking about negotiations to end the conflict. That is between Russia and Ukraine. Neither the US not the EU is actively fighting Russia. — Tate

Why have you decided that the supply of weapons, training and intelligence is insufficient to generate a duty to seek a negotiated settlement?

It does follow that we experience the world directly and that there is a connection between oneself and the object for the same reasons I stated earlier. Real, physical connections, for instance light touching the eyes, hands touching the object etc. occur in these interactions. — NOS4A2

That shows only that we contact the world directly. To show that we 'experience' the world directly, using that argument, you'd have to also show that what we call 'experience' is the sum total of all processes from the sensory receptors onward.

You think of these two claims a) innocent people do not deserve to come to harm and b) innocent people do deserve to come to harm, it is 'a' that is the bizarre one? — Bartricks

The dichotomy is bizarre. If I were to say that fishermen either did or did not deserve sports cars, you'd think me mad. It's obviously nonsense to claim that everyone must either deserve or not deserve anything you care to mention (where by 'deserve' you mean it's someone's duty to provide it). Once you introduce the element of a duty to provide that which is deserved then the dichotomy becomes between that for which a person benefits from another's duty to provide them, and that for which no such duty exists.

The opposite of the claim that innocents deserve non-harm (entailing a duty on others to provide such a state) is that there is no such duty on others to provide such a state, not that they actually deserve the opposite.

If one says that nurses deserve a pay rise, the opposite position is not that they deserve a pay cut, it's just that no such duty to provide a pay rise exists. They might incidentally get a pay rise. It's not a requirement of the argument "nurses don't deserve a pay rise" that the proponent actually go out of their way to avoid a pay rise happening, even incidentally. They would just be claiming that no one has duty to provide them with one.

The opposite of the position that innocents deserve protection from all harm is not that innocents ought to be harmed, it's that no such duty exists.

This phrasing as innocents "deserving harm" is ludicrous. It ignores the possible (and indeed prevalent) state where innocents neither deserve harm (no one has a duty to cause it), nor deserve non-harm (no one has a duty to provide such a state). Ie, no one has a duty to either cause harm to Innocents, nor to protect innocents from all harm.

I'm personally quite comfortable with taking side,...where there's a clear aggressor. — Olivier5

So how did you determine that there was a 'clear aggressor' prior to such taking sides?

The process of enculturation, ... of which physics, and the physical, is one parameter. — Wayfarer

I don't see how this relates to the matter of where meaning inheres? Physics is a practice of our culture, sure. I don't see what you could mean by 'parameter' other than perhaps that what we can culturally choose to believe is constrained by the physical (we can't fly, for example). I don't find anything there to disagree with, just nothing which seems to bear on materialism (the OP), or how meaning is carried (this little section of the OP).

Building is not inherently house-making, though, but structure-making, And structure is inherent to building, just as meaning is inherent to thought. — Janus

I'm just going to flag in here because it's a similar issue.

I think we're getting crossed wires over the meaning of 'inherent' here. The argument Feser gives is that thoughts cannot be just neural patterns because they have a property (inherent meaning) which neural patterns lack. So whatever your personal understandings of what 'inherent' means here, fro the argument, it has to mean something which neural networks cannot have as a property.

So it's insufficient (for Feser's argument) for 'inhere' to simply mean that we find meaning in it. We can find meaning in a painting, and no doubt a neural network (for some), so this cannot be Feser's intended use. It's also insufficient to argue that, say, meaning is inherent to thought the way structures are inherent to the activity of building. Again, Feser's argument requires that thoughts have a property neural networks cannot have, not simply one which they may or may not have.

The use of 'inherent' in Feser's argument seems, to me, to require it either point to something non-interpretable (it has that meaning independent of any observer - something objects don't have), or that he uses 'inherent' to mean something like 'cannot exist without...' (again, something external object lack as they can exist without having meanings assigned to them).

I dismissed the latter as there would be no possible way of knowing if thoughts could exist without meaning as we would be unaware of them. The argument then begs the question.

So we're left (by my reckoning) with the former. That 'inherent' means that the thought has meaning regardless of the interpreter (inherent), as opposed to meaning assigned by an interpreter as external objects like ink marks, trees, structures etc.

Hence the counterargument to Feser shows that thoughts do not have inherent meaning in this particular sense. Whether thoughts have inherent meaning in any other sense of 'inherent' is irrelevant to the argument at hand.

And where does that originate? What is the medium through which that is transmitted? — Wayfarer

Culture.