I think "meaning" is very much like "implication", as in, "to mean" something works the same way as "to imply" something. Viz: by saying something to someone else, maybe I imply something to them, and also in any case, I mean something with the words I'm using; both implication and meaning are things that I am doing. But to that other person, the words I spoke mean something to them (it is not I who mean something to them, but the words); and also, the proposition that those words convey can imply something (it is not I who does the implying, but the proposition).

These two different senses of each of those verbs are related, in that by my actions I am trying to effect something in the listener's mind, trying to get them to think some way; but it is not so much my actions directly, but the words themselves "cast" (as it were) by my actions, that actually has any effect on the listener. I can't directly do anything to the listener's mind, but I can do something with the hopes of it indirectly having some particular effect, and the things I do can have some effect or another, and if everything goes according to my plans the effect that those words actually has on the listener will be the effect that I hoped for, but maybe they won't: maybe I'll mean something by my words, but those same words will mean something else to the listener.

Commonly, sure.

Do you really believe that people who ingest poison on purpose, in order to commit suicide, are fewer in number than those to whom it is administered in order to commit murder? — Leghorn

I don't have a strong belief about it either way, but that was my initial expectation, yeah. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that it was wrong.

That's a strawman. Dualism only implies that he who does the empirical observing recognises said observing to be 1) fundamentally different from the observed thing; and 2) important or even critical to one's knowledge of the observed thing. — Olivier5

That's neither substance dualism nor property dualism, which are the things under discussion here. If you want to make up a different thing and call it "dualism", you do you I guess, but that's only going to cause needless confusion with other people using the word in the usual ways.

In any case, it's not clear to me what your point 1 even means. The act of observing is not identical to the object being observed? I think most everyone (besides Berkeleyan subjective idealists) would agree with that; even eliminative materialists would agree with that (the act of observation is a thing the observer's brain is doing, which is not identical to the object being observed).

You couldn't mean that the being doing the observing is constituted of a fundamentally different kind of stuff than the object being observed, because that's substance dualism, which is what you say is a straw man.

Nor could you mean that the mental properties that constitute the state of mind of undergoing an observatory experience are constituted of a fundamentally different kind of stuff than the physical properties of the object being observed (even though those properties are "stuck in" the same underlying kind of substance), because that's property dualism, which has the same problems (against my foregoing argument) as substance dualism, which you say is a straw man.

That raises the complication of whose intent we’re taking about, since I expect usually the people ingesting poison themselves are not intending to harm their bodies and merely don’t know that it will harm their bodies. They are using it as food. Someone else may have given it to them with the intent to cause them harm, though.

In fact, my first or second thread was over really quickly when the consistently helpful Pfhorrest sunk the hypothesis in about three posts flat. I liked that. Saves wasting time believing in things erroneously. — Kenosha Kid

Happy to be of service. :grin:

You said that dualism can be proven false a priori. Would you mind trying to do so? — Olivier5

I'll sketch the argument for you, at least; I don't feel like spending a lot more time on this discussion.

- Dualism implies some kind of transcendentalism, as in supernaturalism, the existence of something of a kind ontologically different from the sort of stuff that can be empirically observed.

- Claims about such things cannot in principle be tested for falsity, since there's nothing we could tell to differentiate a world where they're true from a world where they're false, and thus they could only possibly be taken on faith, dogmatically.

- Accepting any such dogmatic claims, taking any claim without possibility of question, would leave one's views unchanging even if they're wrong, so if one should happen to start out with wrong views, one would stay with them forever instead of improving upon them.

- Presuming one aims to have correct views, it is thus prudent to leave all views open to question, which consequently demands rejecting any claims about things that cannot be questioned, including all claims about things that make no empirical difference, including all supernatural, transcendental things, like those implied by dualism.

Oh well, your idea of what it means to live better is obviously very different from mine. — Janus

You ignore the emphasized phrase "in that sense". We were discussing what it is to be biologically alive, and to be successful at doing that, i.e. to be "good at living", in that particular sense. You sound like you are conflating that with some kind of phenomenological or ethical notion of "living well" ala eudaimonia or such, which is a completely different sense.

How would your brain know that? — Olivier5

Are you asking for an argument against dualism in particular, or an account of how brains can know anything in general?

In any case, am I misremembering that you were also a panpsychist much like me? Am I confusing you with somebody else?

So you didn't explain you just asserted that life is matter. — Protagoras

You asked for an explanation of how non-living matter can become living, not an argument that that must be what happened. I'm happy to explain the view if you're just not clear what it is, but it doesn't seem like it would be productive to actually argue with you.

Any examples of matter suddenly becoming lifelike? — Protagoras

Who ever said "suddenly"? But matter becoming lifeline in general, sure: somewhere in the range of 4.5 to 3.5 million years ago, on Earth, some matter gradually became more lifelike until things we're happy to call "alive" without qualifications were around.

My subjectivity sure doesn't feel like matter or seperate gluons. — Protagoras

Phenomenal experience ("subjectivity") and life aren't the same topic. In my view (as I implied in my first post in this thread), phenomenal experience must be omnipresent, because the alternatives are either that it doesn't exist, or some inexplicable magic happens somewhere, and I have reasons to discount both of those alternatives.

Does all matter have the potential for life? — Protagoras

Since life is a functionality and functionality is multiply realizable, many kinds of matter could in principle potentially implement life. I'd hesitate to claim they all could, but I also wouldn't say for sure that not all could.

What drives matter to become more complex?

And why does most matter remain inorganic? — Protagoras

Complexity is a separate issue from life. Matter doesn't always become more complex. Not even living things always become more complex. When they do, it is because the complexity confers a fitness advantage: the more complex stuff is better able to make more of itself and keep more of itself alive, so over time more of that kind of stuff accumulates, possibly at the expense of other kinds of stuff. There are more possible kinds of complex stuff than simple stuff, so once some kind of complex stuff has beaten all the simpler options, the only possible options for future winners will be more complex stuff.

And organic is also a separate issue from life, as already clarified; but most matter remains non-living because it doesn't yet have the opportunity to live.

So dualists just have a poorly functioning brain? Is that what you are saying? — Olivier5

Not as categorically as you seem to impute, but inasmuch as any error constitutes some failure to function, sure. Dualism can be known false a priori, so incorrectly thinking it is true is to some extent a "malfunction". Nobody's brains are without malfunction, though.

But you haven't explained how matter turns to life. — Protagoras

Life is matter, and I explained already how that matter takes on the form of life.

Your assertion would have us being better at living than hunter/gatherers, which I think is patently false — Janus

"Forms of matter that are better at living become more common over time" is not equivalent to "over time, matter becomes better at living"; it doesn't mean that life-forms have to get better at living over time, it just means that when life-forms get better at living (in the sense of become better at making more of themselves and keeping more of themselves alive) then over time more and more of those accumulate, possibly at the expense of other life-forms that aren't as good at that.

And if we count our learned cultures as part of ourselves, then yes in that sense modern post-industrial people are better at living than hunter-gatherers, since our populations are larger and our lifespans are longer, often at the expense of peoples who still practice the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

In "linear" universe, the heat death would mean the end of life for all eternity. — TheMadFool

A heat death only necessarily applies to an energetically closed universe (where no energy is created or destroyed); only in a closed system must entropy always increase. But according to our latest theories of physics the universe is energetically open, with new energy being constantly created everywhere (though not in an easily accessed form), so in principle it's possible to keep entropy in some part of the universe (the part with life in it) at low entropy forever, no cycling required.

Sure.

What I wonder is where does your distinction between good and bad thinking originates from? If them gluons (or neurotransmitters for that matter) make all the thinking, what makes for good or bad thinking? Bad gluons? — Olivier5

Better or worse structure and thus function of the really complicated systems built out of them.

Is a better car (a thing better at doing what a car is for) made from better atoms, or are the atoms just arranged in a better way to make a structure that functions in a better way?

So life just started randomly from dead matter? — Protagoras

Whoever said random?

Matter that’s better at making more matter of the same kind becomes more common. That process of propagating more of your own kind is life. So forms of matter that are better at living become more common over time. Nothing random about that.

I’d say it’s something being used for that purpose. If it’s not actually useful to that purpose, it’s a bad thing of that kind, but still a thing of that kind.

But this is just materialism. — Protagoras

Physicalism, but sure, close enough.

How does matter go from inorganic to organic? — Protagoras

I think what you actually mean to ask is how life arises from non-life. Organic matter is just carbon-based matter, which is created all across space all the time through the mundane chemical interactions of atoms created through nuclear fusion in stars. The atmosphere of Jupiter has tons of organic chemicals in it, for example.

That non-living organic matter became life when some of those chemical reactions formed cycles (one reaction instigating another instigating another etc... which eventually instigates the first kind again) that produced more of the same kinds of chemicals used in all of those reactions, thus turning more and more matter into the kind of matter that reacts in such cycles. Cycles of reactions that were more efficient produced more of the chemicals involved in themselves, so those kinds of chemicals and thus the cycles of reactions involving them became more widespread over time, and every possibility of improving on the efficiency of such cycles of reactions resulted in those more efficient reactants becoming more and more common.

Eventually we ended up with oceans full of complex self-replicating molecules like RNA and DNA constantly spreading and mutating and competing with each other for the most efficient and so most widespread kind of chemical, and then some of those started producing protective shells of molecules around themselves and those were the first cells of life. The process of replication and mutation continued, and that's what evolution is.

...reverse the entropy to lower levels or to zero if that's possible. That would mean a Cyclical Universe. — TheMadFool

Not necessarily, and if time really were cyclical that would be a problem for life just as much as heat death would be, because there was a time when there was no life in the universe, so cycling back around to that would imply the death of all the life that currently exists.

To really save life, there needs to be an open-ended future with an unlimited source of new energy to continually counteract the ever-increasing entropy. Fortunately, if eternal inflation cosmology is correct, that's exactly what our universe is like, and all that's left is the monumental challenge of actually harnessing the new energy that's being constantly created in tiny, tiny amounts everywhere across the entire universe, and putting it to some productive use.

Yes, living things are made of matter. But not all matter is living, so yes there is a distinction. Living is a thing that matter can do, but not all matter actually does it.

Is there a number a greater than which cannot be conceived? For any number that one might conceive, it seems a larger can be found. — Banno

Funny enough, Cantor did think there was a number larger than any conceivable (or inconceivable) number, which he did identify with God: the Absolute Infinite. And he did straight up admit that the very notion thereof is inherently inconsistent.

I just realized that I misread your "panpsychism" as "pantheism" and I guess wrote that word in my own response by mistake too. Please substitute "pantheism" for "panpsychism" in my previous response.

I don't follow what panpsychism has to do with anything here (which I guess is why my brain autocorrected to "pantheism", as that would make a cromulent question on the topic of this thread).

Do you think that there is no such thing as bad art?

No individual gluon is alive, but all living things we know of are made of them (and other things -- the focus on gluons specifically was kind of a joke for the physicists in the audience, about where most of the rest-mass of matter comes from), which are at least physical if not material.

Are you saying that your gluons can think better than mine? — Olivier5

Nope.

Not just one, but you’re made of them, among other things.

The gluons (etc) are us.

The bit you elided there in the "[...]", "...that I was poetically personifying...", is the answer to your question. Saying "reason loses" is a poetic way of saying that reasoning has not been done well.

I was parodying this movie's tagline, if that's not obvious:

What sort of material stuff is reason made of, in your view? Or are you arguing vice versa, that all matter is made of reason? — Olivier5

I didn't say anything about material stuff.

But in any case, reason isn't a stuff, it's an activity, that I was poetically personifying, which activity is usually done by brains, which are made mostly of gluons if we're measuring by mass, which are material particles, that confine quarks into the nucleons of the atoms from which are built the complex molecules from which the tissues of the many, many cells of those brains are made.

Or if you want to interpret "reason" as a stuff anyway, I guess that would make it abstract stuff, like mathematical objects and such, the stuff that can be reasoned about; in which case yes, matter is in a sense made of that, inasmuch as matter like the above is a feature of the abstract object that is our concrete universe, where "concrete" here just means "the structure we're a part of".

Panpsychism is a position on the separate question of what God is (or would be, if he existed). One can take any of the aforementioned positions on any notion of what God is, and take a different position on each different notion of God.

Provided it's used by the right people, the ones who are in the position to determine whether something is art or not, and whether it's good art or not. — baker

What makes whom the right person or not?

You could frame a painting done by a naive artist, put it into a fancy gallery, and it still wouldn't be art proper. — baker

I disagree completely. It could even just be pinned to their mother’s refrigerator and it would still be art. That says nothing, however, above the quality of it as art, whether it is good art, good at doing what art is to do. Even if it fails miserably at doing what art should do, it’s still art; it’s just bad art.

Yes I agree with that, I was only avoiding a straight “yes” before because I was unsure if you meant to imply more with the integers analogy.

Dualism vs dualism: whoever wins, reason loses.

Though with property dualism reason loses slightly less, I guess?

(There is only one kind of substance, which is just the abstract grouping together in space of many properties, all of those properties of the same ontological kind, merely dispositions to interact in particular ways with another of that same one kind of substance — which interactions can each equally well be seen as either the physical behaviors of one substance or the phenomenal experiences of the other substance, whence the dualistic appearance).

More or less yes.

And the strongest argument from a logical standpoint? — frank

There definitely does not exist anything that should reasonably count as God, and most of those things could not possibly exist, although there definitely do or probably could (in different cases) exist a few different things some people might count as God anyway.

So you left out "I don't believe that god doesn't exist"...presumably a weak form of atheism. — Banno

Yeah, someone of that opinions is either a weak atheist or a theist, so it ends up just a grouping of two of the other positions.

They’re positions on different axes, not different positions on the same axis.

One axis has:
I believe God exists. (theism)
I don’t believe God exists. (weak atheism)
I believe God doesn’t exist. (strong atheism)

The other has:
I know that for sure. (gnosicism)
I don’t know that for sure. (weak agnosticism)
Nobody could possibly know for sure. (strong agnosticism)

You can mix and match your answers to both questions.

I'd even say it's pragmatic, in terms of the classical American tradition. — Manuel

:up: I am a fan of that tradition.

I agree that it’s also very important to be able to feel about yourself that you’re good enough already — and to let other people know that they’re good enough for you, so that they can feel allowed to feel that way about themselves too.

It’s one of those... what @Gnomon would call “BothAnd”... things. Like my simultaneous optimism and pessimism (success is possible... but so is failure), or my endorsement of joyful passionate sanguine experiential input but also peaceful sober phlegmatic behavioral output. You’re good enough, you don’t have to be more... but you can be more, you’re never just stuck as you are.

the act of curating something and hanging it up in a space for art makes it art. The question of merit is separate. — Tom Storm

:up: Although the way I would phrase more or less the same idea is that “framing” something makes it art: presenting it to an audience for their consideration, making it the content of a communicative act. It’s not so much it being in any particular place that makes it art, except inasmuch as being somewhere indicates that it is being used as art, and it’s being used as art that makes something art, just like being used as a chair makes something a chair.

I don’t try because I’m afraid of the anxiety/embarrassment/shame I would experience if I did try. — Pinprick

Would you feel that still if you tried and succeeded? Or only if you failed? Assuming the latter, that’s the point of adopting the “try just in case” attitude: it reframes the failure from something new to feel bad about, to just the already-existing status quo, with nowhere to go but up.

Seems like every popular leftist finite ordinal is coming out as trans these days. Pretty soon they’ll make it illegal to be a cis finite ordinal at all!

Can you explain more fully what you mean by “negatively nourishing” and “actively bad”? — Leghorn

Like something poisonous, something that reduces your health rather than preserving it.

I’d say that things can be nourishing to a greater or lesser degree, so some things can be better or worse as sources of nourishment go. Something that’s not very nourishing, or negatively nourishing, is not very good, or actively bad, for use as food.

The way I phrased that last bit raises another interesting philosophical point. I go on a lot about how to be is to do, things are defined by their function, but perhaps that’s as much about the purposes they are put to as it is about their (efficient) causes: a chair is made a chair by its being used to sit on, and something is a good or bad chair inasmuch as it is useful for that purpose.

Maybe this was more the point on Aristotle’s “final cause” and associated teleology: not so much about someone having a purpose in mind being responsible for enacting the efficient cause of its existence, but about the very definition of it being a thing of that kind at all hinging on its being used for some purpose. A rock can “become a chair” without someone efficient-causally doing something that changes its form or substance, but just by putting it to the use of sitting upon.