Your posts are well-informed and thought-provoking, thank you.

conceptualising something is not to arrive at a static mental image or predefined set of attributes, but a dynamic process that involves engaging with rules, practices, and contexts in a flexible way. — Banno

All physical in nature? Reducible to physics? Able to be replicated in silicon? Oh, I see - 'anomalous monism'. Physicalism with whatever ad hoc admissions that need to be made to accomodate the non-physical nature of intentionality and interpretation. Slick!

I have a suggestion for why 'anomalous monism' even seems plausible. It has to do with history of ideas. Western philosophy devised 'substance dualism' and then defined mind as a 'thinking thing'. That was susceptible to the 'ghost in the machine' criticism. So, there is no ghost - only the machine, which is what any serious or sober thinker must accept. But then, if there seem to be things which the mechanist or physicalist paradigm can't accomodate, we'll call that an 'anomaly', and carry on regardless.

Am I warm?

:up: Good to know.

:up:

Agree in general but of note the Australian legislation to put age restrictions on social media use exempted youtube.

Information content can be measured physically - that is where Landauer comes in - but that is only because there are agreed conventions of what constitutes meaningful information in the first place.
— Wayfarer
:lol:

What's meaning, if not what what is done with the information? Meaning here is just another term for use.

And use is physical. It involves actual processes that produce measurable physical effects in the world. — Banno

You’re reducing Wittgenstein to a slogan.

Meaning is not just “use” in the reductive physical sense of mechanical interaction or behavioral output. Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning operates within language games, forms of life, and shared human practices — none of which can be captured in the vocabulary of physics (and incidentally, as you well know, Wittgenstein detested 'scientism' and presumably physicalism as an aspect thereof.)

The entire discipline of semiotics — from Peirce to Eco to contemporary biosemiotics — is concerned with signs and sign-relations, not with particles and forces. A sign refers to something; it stands for something else — and that referential function is not something describable in physical terms alone. There is no law of physics that tells you whether “dog” means a four-legged mammal, or whether it’s someone’s last name.

You’re not seeing the meaning for the words.

What we have is two differing descriptions of the same physicality. — Banno

Again, not so. Information content can be measured physically - that is where Landauer comes in - but that is only because there are agreed conventions of what constitutes meaningful information in the first place. And what makes information meaningful is not physical nor can be derived from physics nor reduced to it. And not seeing that is precisely what 'the blind spot of science' is referring to. (This was the subject of a marathon thread from about five years ago, Is Information Physical? although I've since come to understand the question is really about the nature of meaning, rather than information, per se, although it's a porous boundary.)

Not. We’ve established the difference cannot be discerned by physical principles alone.

That's just not factually correct. The formatted disk containing data has a lower entropy than a disk containing no information. — Banno

And how would you measure the total entropy, if not with reference to the information? What constitutes “data” or “information” isn’t determined by the physical properties alone. You can’t measure the entropy of a hard drive in bits without first interpreting the bit pattern as information. Entropy, in the information-theoretic sense, is a measure of uncertainty or compressibility — but that presupposes a code, a syntax, and a frame of reference.

Take the disk into a physics lab with no documentation, no file system, and no idea what the code means. Can they measure “how much information” is on it? Not without invoking interpretive assumptions. A completely randomized disk could have maximum Shannon entropy — but also be completely meaningless. It could seem to contain information, when it is really 10 ⁵ repetitions of "quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr".

Incidentally, this brings to mind the oft-repeated story about Claude Shannon asking John von Neumann what to call his new measure in information theory. Von Neumann reportedly replied:

“You should call it entropy, for two reasons: first, the mathematical formula is the same, and second, nobody really knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

That anecdote, whether apocryphal or not (and it is quite well-documented) captures the core of the confusion: entropy in thermodynamics and entropy in information theory are mathematically analogous but conceptually distinct. One concerns the dispersal of energy; the other concerns uncertainty in symbol sequences. Neither tells us anything at all about meaning.

Which is precisely the point.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"

The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.

Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it?
— Wayfarer

See Landauer's principle, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. But obviously, there are far more ways to arrange the letters randomly than there are ways to arrange them into a sentence of English, so that English sentence has a far lower entropy. — Banno

Landauer's principle, and Shannon's law, have nothing to do with semantics or semiotics. They're about storage and transmission of information via electronic media.

Take a 1Tb hard drive, capable of storing millions of documents. Zero out all of the information, and the hard drive is physically identical. There would be no way to detect the difference between the formatted hard drive and the hard drive containing information, without interpreting the binary code on the medium. But that intrepretive act is also not anything described by physics. It pertains to a completely different level, that of meaning and information.

The point stands:

Physics can describe the medium — the symbols, the binary states, the characters.

But meaning is not in the medium. It's not in the letters themselves, nor in the physical arrangement of bits on a drive. Meaning only appears in interpretation — in the relation between the symbols and what they signify, which presupposes a system of signs, a language, and ultimately a mind.

That’s the core of the semiotic difference:

The same physical substrate can be either noise or message — depending not on its physical structure alone, but on interpretive context.

No physical law explains that difference, because physics (at least in its classical formulation) abstracts away the subjective, intentional, and semantic dimensions of reality. That’s not a bug; it’s how physics works. But it also marks the boundary beyond which semantics, mind, and meaning begin.

And that’s precisely the blind spot in physicalist accounts of mind and information.

It certainly covers YouTube shorts. — Benkei

Shorts are a subset of YouTube content. So are we to presume that this doesn't apply to the remaining YT content?

if they can balance the budget... — NOS4A2

Another myth! Trump has no interest in balancing the budget, and none of what Congress is proposing will achieve that end. Trump's proposal to cut taxes will far offset the amounts being saved by Musk's chainsaw, which will hardly make a dent in the overall financial situation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5318072/how-much-money-has-doge-saved-budget-deficit-congress

https://wapo.st/42lkKbL

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksargen/2025/02/21/federal-spending-cuts-the-math-to-lower-deficits-doesnt-add-up/

mandatory programs account for 60% of total outlays. When net interest payments and defense spending are included, the amount of nondefense discretionary spending is only about 15% of total outlays). In 2024, this category totaled about $1 trillion. ....

...it is important to realize that improved government efficiency will not be sufficient to put the federal budget on sound footing. In fact, the plan House Republicans are putting forth would add $2.8 trillion or more to public debt over the next 10 years according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget. The assessment of the Cato Institute, which favors limited government, is that the House budget “pairs wishful thinking with modest fiscal restraints.”

One of the main impediments to deficit reduction is that an extension of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act would reduce federal revenues by an estimated $4.5 trillion over 10 years. And this tally will balloon to nearly $8 trillion if tax cuts that Trump proposed during the presidential campaign for Social Security, tips, overtime work and other items are included.

The idea that DOGE is going to 'balance the budget' by indiscriminate cuts is a myth. Most of the cuts are ideological, driven by Trump's animus towards 'the deep state' (read: the state).

It doesn’t matter if the funds had been approved by Congress — NOS4A2

It does. It is illegal. And no evidence of the alleged waste and fraud is ever presented beyond wild internet memes about millions of condoms for Gaza and the like. It’s all just rhetoric used to justify egregious behavior. All of DOGE’s boasts about how much money has been saved have been debunked.

The so-called checks and balances are working just fine, if you can’t tell by the various injunctions and rulings, and any “subverting constitutional norms and safeguards” will be ironed out in court, the way it always has been. — NOS4A2

Musk's actions speak louder than words. He knows how to come across in interviews. As for 'ironed out in Court', Trump and Musk have already crashed through the guardrails on multiple occasions, a deliberate strategy crafted by Stephen Miller to 'flood the zone', knowing that the judicial system wouldn't be able to keep pace with the scale and rate of Trump's orders. There are now more than 30 legal challenges to Trump executive orders, but even if some are found illegal much of the damage may not be easily remedied. And, not co-incidentally, Musk is campaigning for the impeachment of 'activist judges', those being any judges who have the temerity to stand in the way of Trump's juggernaut - something which even the purportedly Trump-friendly Supreme Court has issued a warning on.

As regards the USAID and Foreign Aid, regardless of whether there was wastage and fraud, those funds that were held back had already been approved by Congress, and Foreign Aid in particular is scrutinized by no less that four congressional committees. If Congress hadn't been completely cowed by Trump, there's no way he and Musk could have perpertrated these outrages which are indubitably going to affect many millions of people in the developing world and beyond. "World's Richest Man Sets Records for Misanthropy" would be an appropriate headline.

He (Goldberg) was mistakenly invited and stayed, silently, eavesdropping, long past the time he realized he was not supposed to be there. — NOS4A2

Classic victim-blaming. At first, Goldberg didn't know if it was a scam, and didn't really know until the actual action sequences that Hegseth posted. And - he's a journalist! He did what any journalist would do, and did it entirely responsibly. At first, he only posted that he'd been included - it wasn't until he was accused of being a 'bottom feeder' and liar that he posted the entire chain, which, in any case, MAGA was saying was not classified information (another lie on their part.)

The whole thing is a sorry saga and a complete indictement of the amateurish nature of the MAGA administration. There are many vignettes of Hegseth stridently demanding that Hillary Clinton be prosecuted for a far less serious offence than what he did. In any normal administration, he would have been dismissed on the spot.

I know nothing personal about the Atlantic editor, beyond what I have seen of him and read. — tim wood

Here's a profile (gift link). He's a serious journalist, and The Atlantic is a highly-respected magazine, founded 1857 by Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, and now being published successfully with financial backing from Laurene Powell Jobs.

A substance is something that exists and has a set of properties or abilities. — MoK

As far as 'substance dualism' is concerned, for Descartes, mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa) are of completely different kinds. The soul, res cogitans, is immaterial and lacking in extension (physical dimensions) but is capable of reasoning and thinking. Matter occupies space but is devoid of intelligence. The problem for substance dualism is explaining how non-extended incorporeal intelligence interacts with non-intelligent corporeal matter. Descartes suggest that this was via the pineal gland, but it is generally agreed that this is unsatisfactory and it remains an outstanding problem for substance dualism.

I'm sorry to say that you're not demonstrating a clear understanding of the questions you're raising, and so I have nothing further to add at this time.

I'm curious, what is the difference between physics and a physical ontology? — JuanZu

You can pursue physics without any commitment to physicalism. You can be an instrumentalist, for example, and hold no view as to whether the objects of physics are ontologically fundamental. ‘Whatever works’.

Why do you hate these people? — NOS4A2

Because of what they are doing. It's not hate - that subjectivizes and trivialises the issue. It is an objection to the way that they are subverting constitutional norms and safeguards and indiscriminately destroying and degrading many legitimate functions of Government without any Congressional authority or oversight.


The Doctor will See you Now

The latest episode of stunning hypocrisy - NY Times points out that the Administration has refused to provide details of the flight times of the Venezulanen accused gang members on the grounds of 'national security'. But the leaking of war plans via an unsanctioned comms channel - no problem! Nothing to see here foks! What utter bullshit. Surely there must be a reckoning coming.

I watched that election from a friend's place. Very dissappointing, but Shorten's Labor was too complacent by far, they were certain they had it in the bag. Sure as hell hope it doesn't happen this time. Much as I'm unimpressed by Albanese, I think a Dutton government would be a very bad outcome. I'm not worried by the prospect of a minority government split between Labor, Greens and Independents, in fact it might give some of the Independents a bit more clout.

Oh, and Zali Steggel. She’s effective. Besides she disposed of the Mad Monk

I would vote for the likes of Pocock or one or two of the others, but collectively, independents are pretty useless, as a matter of definition. My local member is Susan Templeman, I guess she's a backbencher as you never hear much of her, but she will be getting my vote.

These two character strings all comprise identical elements. As far as physics is concerned, there's no discernable difference between them as they both comprise the exact same elements.

"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

"quc hye vko jum tfb lrx dog wna zie ped ohr"

The difference is, obviously, that the first is a meaningful sentence, and the second is the same set of characters in random order.

Question: is that a physical difference? If so, what physical law describes it?

Physically, the two strings may be identical in terms of material composition — same number of letters, same frequency of each character, even the same total length. To a physicist concerned only with particles and energy, there may be no measurable distinction.

But semantically — from the perspective of meaning, structure, or information — they are worlds apart. The first is an intelligible sentence with syntactic and semantic coherence. The second is a jumble, with no meaning (unless you're trying to hide a code in there!).

So: is that a physical difference?

In the narrow sense — mass, charge, spin, energy — no. Physics doesn’t (yet) have a law that accounts for the meaningfulness of symbolic forms. Shannon's information theory quantifies information capacity, but it doesn't (and doesn't try to) account for meaning as such.

Yet obviously, for minds — for us — there's a difference that matters. A big one.

And this gets to the heart of the issue:

There is a kind of order — semantic, functional, interpretative — that is not captured by the physical description.

But what is it that makes a theory fundamental, as opposed to merely phenomenological? — SophistiCat

:clap: Quite.

Bandt is a bit too left for my liking. The Greens are a party of protest and are too immured to green-left ideology. I might have mentioned I once handed out How to Vote for Greens in a state election. Then I went to a State party meeting and got disillusioned with them quick smart. I wish there was a viable alternative party, but there's not.

What does constitutional oversight mean? — philosch

I'm not going to do your homework. Trump has zero interest in balancing the budget, by all projections the national debt will balloon under his proposals. I'm not going to respond point by point, other than to say that I think the Trump Presidency is an absolute disaster for both America and the world, and that Trump and Musk between them are doing terrible damage to fabric of society. If that's 'hyperbolic' then so be it.

I’m disappointed with these cheap vote-buying gambits from both sides (tax and excise giveaways). There’s no vision being offered. I think Albanese a mediocrity although Dutton is worse, and I think Labor overall has more political talent. I can’t abide Dutton’s pissweak scare campaigning. Plus the nuclear option is a non- starter. So I will be holding my nose and voting Labor (although I think mine is a safe Labor seat.)

This paragraph is not meant for you but for all the posters who pretend to know what Musk's motives are. I see other posters claiming that this is all being done to benefit the 2 men in question — philosch

I don't see Musk as acting purely for personal gain or benefit. He has complex motivations, one of which is his often-stated aim of colonizing Mars. Aside from being the legendary 'world's richest man', he also has many business interests, and indeed, were it not for his obnoxious right-wing ideology, I would have found much to admire about him. But this DOGE campaign he is running is completely outside the bounds of constitutional oversight and political convention. The abrubt termination of the greater part of US foreign aid is endangering lives all over the developing world. Many of DOGE's actions on the domestic front have been slipshod and palpably cruel. Thousands of workers have been summarily dismissed by form emails, often with virtually zero notice. This included, it turned out, some highly skilled workers at the nuclear oversight commission, who all had to be hired back. DOGE has made no secret of the fact that federal workers who are known to support Democrats or are Democrat party members will be fired on grounds of insufficient loyalty to Trump. (One of the rationales for the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D was that it was a largely Democrat-leaning organisation.) Musk and DOGE have also amplified and repeated baseless lies in support of their activities.

So, no, I don't Musk is in it for the money. I think he's intoxicated with power, with the ability to bend the entire Government of the US to his will, and to ruthlessly manifest whatever strange vision he has for the kind of society the US is to become.

As for Trump, there's a separate thread for that.

The assumption that cupidity is the sole motivator seems banal — Tom Storm

Indeed. I think it’s about power. And ideology.

Hrm, what is substance then? — DifferentiatingEgg

My question also.

What do you mean by the subject here? — MoK

Subject of experience. Not simply human subjects, but sentient beings, generally.

While Hegseth is not holding himself accountable, the chances that he or any other officials will face outside discipline or investigations appear slim. The White House has installed Trump ultra-loyalists at the Department of Justice and the FBI – agencies that in a normal administration might investigate such breaches as the Signal thread. Independent watchdog officials known as inspectors general have also been fired throughout the government. And Republican lawmakers have proved loath to submit the Trump administration to serious oversight.

Crash-testing the Justice and Congressional Oversight Subversion plan. Holding so far.

Flirting with bribery? — jorndoe

Musk looks after the bribery side of the operation. Trump handles the extortion side (by threatening to kill all government contracts for law firms who have been associated with his past prosecutions.)

By "ontic" I intended: Pertaining to being, as opposed to pertaining to a theory of it (which would be ontological).. Otherwise I would have said, "ontological" — javra

Sure, I get that. And I'm not trying to be contrary or antagonistic, generally speaking I find in you a kindred spirit. But the vocabulary of 'ontic' and 'ontology' is Greek rather than Buddhist.

Plotinus: Ontological Monism
The One is beyond, yet the source, of all being.

Reality is hierarchy: the One → Intellect → Soul → the material world.

The return to the One is a ascent of soul realizing its divine origin through contemplation, culminating in henosis.

The One is a positive ontological principle—ultimate, simple, ineffable, and yet the ground of all.

Buddhism: No ultimate unitary source

All phenomena (dharmas) are empty of inherent existence (śūnyā).

Even nirvāṇa is not a separate realm but the cessation of clinging and conceptual proliferation.

The highest realization is not union with a supreme being, but insight into the non-dual, inter-dependent, and empty nature of phenomena.

---

That's pretty much a textbook description of the distinctions. That said, arguments can and have been made for a 'transcendent unity' among different diverse traditions and the case can be made - I myself often make it. But it has to take into account the real distinctions also.

Perhaps you might elaborate on what ‘ontic reality’ means?

So, you think the Signal cock up couldn’t get worse? Now, Der Speigel reports:

Donald Trump's most important security advisers used Signal to discuss an imminent military strike. Now, reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the contact data of some of those officials, including mobile phone numbers, is freely accessible on the internet.

Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials.

To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.

Where’s that popcorn emoji when we need it?

can you think of any good reason why the Buddhist notion of Nirvana (at least it was addressed in my previous post) is not an epistemic understanding of the very same non-physical ontic reality which in Platonism and Neoplatonism gets termed “the Good” – this as interpreted via the lenses of two otherwise very distinct cultures, and as reasoned via their respective ways of prioritizing premises and their derived conclusions? — javra

‘The same as’ is problematical. They may appear the same to us, but (for example) Buddhists and Brahmins have spent millenia debating their differences. (It was instructive to observe the attitudes of traditionally-trained Buddhist scholastics towards Vedanta on Dharmawheel forum, which was generally dismissive.) The theosophical, ‘many paths but one mountain’ attitude has its advocates, but Buddhists and indeed adherents of the other schools often take great pains to differentiate themselves. But it can take quite a bit of study to appreciate the distinctions (not to mention familiarity with Sanskrit in the case of Indian religions.)

Obviously there are many convergences and resonances, but there are also distinctions. Case in point - like a lot of my generation, I once had the popular Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, trs W Y Evans-Wentz, which featured extensive comparisons of Tibetan Buddhism and Plotinus. But later translators point out that Evans-Wentz, a Theosophist, never left California during his work on that translation, and relied entirely on a single translator. A much later edition of the same text is vastly different to the Evans-Wentz version even though nobody casts doubt on his noble intentions. Myself, I don’t think it hurts to see the common threads in these traditions, but only up to a point. It might validly be argued that ‘what unites them is more important than what divides them’ but the distinctions ought to be born in mind.

But then, this whole topic is very much the subject of ‘silk road spirituality’, where all these great traditions mingled and debated. Fascinating topic in its own right.

Musk's activities have been elbowed out of the news for a few days by the Signal leak scandal. Coverage will resume when the chainsaw comes back into view.

In that sense Kant is Aristotelian following what you are saying. — JuanZu

Quite. Kant did, after all, adopt Aristotle's Table of Categories practically unchanged. But the main point I am trying to draw out, is the nature of this 'substance' in 'substance dualism'. It's important in relation to philosophy of mind, generally.

Consciousness does not fit into what Aristotle called Ousia. — JuanZu

The term nearest to 'consciousness' in the Greek lexicon (incidentally I'm not schooled in Greek, but this passes as general knowledge) is 'psuche', which is usually translated as 'soul', and which has come down to us as 'psyche'. And that fits perfectly well into the Aristotelian corpus. There are two principle sources, D'Anima ('On the Soul') and one of the books of the Metaphysics. But the cardinal difference between the Aristotelian and Cartesian philosophy, is that Descartes' depiction of 'res cogitans' as 'thinking thing' ('res' means 'thing'.) There's nothing like that in Aristotle. Rather in Aristotle the rational intellect ('nous') is what is capable of perceiving essentials and universals. That capability is fundamental to Aristotle's hylomorphism (matter-form dualism), which is very different to Descartes' matter-mind duality, because it depicts intellect (nous) more in terms of a capacity than as some ethereal 'thinking substance'. //very roughly, the correspondence between intellect and body, is analogous to that between form and matter. Which is why the soul (psuche) is called 'the form of the body.' Here, 'form' does not mean 'shape' but 'organising principle'.// That's why hylomorphism is still a live option in current philosophy. See Contemporary Hylomorphism (.pdf file) for a long bibiography.

I brought this up, because the Cartesian 'thinking thing' is still very much written into the way we think about mind-body relations, often without us being aware of it. It provides the 'grammar', so to speak, of the way it is thought about. That is the origin of the 'ghost in the machine' allegory (@Banno)

He is a waste of time and effort. — tim wood

beats me why there are so many replies. They're pretty easy to starve.

It is trying, but can't. — Banno

You're anthropomorphising, projecting human emtions on to a device. A signal is not being sent, due to the conditions for its transmission not being present. Nobody is trying to do anything, unless a technician is trying to repair it.

And then, what evidence is there that emotion and value cannot themselves possibly be subject to some measure of the discursive rationality which we consciously engage in? — javra

Freud's depiction of 'the mystical' was as 'a feeling of oceanic bliss', which he characteristically described as an unconscious memory of existence in the womb (that comprising the full extent of his epistemological repertoire). There is an element of truth in that, but I think there is rather more to it! Certainly the sense of union seems fundamental, so too the dissolving of the sense of otherness which pervades normal existence. After all that is one of the meanings of 'non-dual'.

But it's something far more than emotion, no matter how exalted. Emotion is a visceral reaction. It is rather an intellectual (or noetic or gnostic) insight, an insight into 'the way things truly are'. Recall Parmenides prose poem, in which he 'travels beyond the gates of day and night', symbolising duality. The Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese traditions all have these kinds of elements at their origin, but due to our

Western bias — J

They are seen as outside the scope of 'rational discourse' due to their association with religious revelation rather than empirical science. Of course, the times are changing, and there are many ways in which this is no longer true. I think they're regaining a place at the table, finally.

Unplug the thermostat from the heater, and drop the temperature - the thermostat tries to turn the heater on, but can't... (a description in terms of intent, not physics) — Banno

'Tries' here is clearly metaphorical. What actually happens is, nothing. The events do not trigger the response. Nothing has 'tried' to do anything.