I hoist a flag that means "three-masted ship". You see the flag and write down "three-masted ship". Because i can convey the idea of a three-masted ship with a flag and you can write down the idea of a three-masted ship with ink, the idea of a three-masted ship is not physical. The flag and the marks in ink on paper are physical representations of something, an idea, that is not itself physical. This is the argument, yes?

If I draw a picture of my house, the picture is a physical representation of a physical object. If I draw another picture of my house, I have another physical representation of the same physical object. Having two distinct physical representations of something does not entail that what is represented is not itself physical, not even if those representations are dissimilar in some way, if, say, I use pencil for one drawing and charcoal for the other, of if one is a drawing and the other a photograph.

So, in your argument, it is not that there are multiple representations in different media that leads to the conclusion that what is represented is not physical; it is that what is represented is said to be an idea, not a particular three-masted ship, but a generic object, any member of the class "three-masted ships".

Thus in your scenario I am not conveying a single piece of information, but at least two: by hoisting a flag at all, any flag, I indicate that some object exists; by hoisting the particular flag I do, I indicate that the object is a member of a particular class. More particularly, flags indicate ships, and even more particularly, ships that I can see. I am not to raise a flag hypothetically.

Is the raising of a flag a physical representation of a ship the way a drawing I might make would be a physical representation of my house? Well, it's not a picture of the ship. If anything, it seems more natural to take it as a representation of my state of seeing-a-ship. Is it a picture of that? Hmm. It would seem not. Is it a representation at all? Well, it's certainly a symbol: my hoisting a flag indicates that I am in such a state. I don't think that's exactly what we usually mean by "representation", but I suppose we could make that work by defining our terms suitably.

What hoisting a flag has in common with hoisting a particular flag is that it too is generic: I do not have a flag for each particular ship I might see, and hoisting a flag does not indicate that I am seeing some particular ship, but that I am seeing some ship or other, again, a generic member of the class "ships". Similarly, I am in the state of seeing a particular ship, but what I indicate is that my state is a member of this class, seeing some member of the class "ships".

Thus my flag hoisting conveys two claims of class membership: one about my state, and one about the object that brought about that state. Agreed?

There's all this "grasping" in your approach, as if this explains things. Grasping is what you do to an object. I'm saying there's no immaterial object to immaterially grasp.

If I ask you to draw a house, I'm asking you to draw a picture of a house. (Only Harold can draw an actual house.)

If you draw a triangle, are you actually drawing a picture of a triangle? No. Here are two equilateral triangles:



When you draw a triangle, you're not really drawing a picture, i.e., a picture of some object that happens to be immaterial. What you're drawing is a diagram, a graphical presentation of your knowledge. And this knowledge is primarily procedural, starting with the definition of "triangle", which is after all stipulative.

You can describe it as knowledge of an abstract object if you like, but what really matters here is knowing how to proceed. The triangles above have equal sides because I say they do. You can say this is a property of these triangles, but the point is that in using these triangles you know to treat their sides as equal. That stipulation gives you a rule to follow.

Got it. I believe I am following you, and sometime tomorrow I will move on to thinking about it.

you appear to dismiss semantics. Although perhaps I'm misunderstanding. — Wayfarer

Why would I dismiss semantics? What does that even mean? I think it's safe to say you have misunderstood.

Maybe this would we a good point for us to take a breather. Work and reading call.

Speaking of Chomsky, he gives a reason why animal and human communications are basically different, which I thought I had already mentioned earlier - it has to do with the fact that 'human language involves the capacity to generate, by a recursive procedure, an unlimited number of hierarchically structured sentences', which rely on syntactical order to indicate meaning. — Wayfarer

Are you even reading my posts?

Chomsky's work has always suggested that the key difference between human language and signaling is recursive, hierarchical, generative syntax. — Srap Tasmaner

So the ability of bees to dance and baby chicks to duck hawk shadows, doesn't say anything about semantics in the sense that it applies to language. — Wayfarer

I think it does. I think the shadow means hawk to them in the same way it would mean hawk to us, and that the sense (!) in which the word "hawk" means [[hawk]] is derivative of exactly this "natural meaning". At least that's my working hypothesis. We'll see.

for naturalism, it is an embarrassing question — Wayfarer

No it's not.

By the way, I think it is impossible for us to conceive a new colour, for the same reasons. — Samuel Lacrampe

I will speak unguardedly for a moment:

Semantics seems to be the big mystery. How do we symbolize? How can something mean something? And there's a view, the sort of thing we associate with Searle, to the effect that machines are merely syntactical, that they can manipulate symbols but not know what they mean.

So here's humanity standing above the rest of creation. We have meaning, but machines only have syntax. We have language, but other living things have signaling at best. It's tempting to identify the two hierarchies, to say that animals must have only syntax but no meaning.

But I think this is a mistake. Chomsky's work has always suggested that the key difference between human language and signaling is recursive, hierarchical, generative syntax. Semantics is not what distinguishes us from other critters, but syntax. It may very well be that "having semantics" is coextensive with "living", or at least with "having sense(s)".

It may feel like Landauer's claim that information is physical is part of an attempted reduction of semantics to syntax, to treating living things like computers, but is it really?

I wasn't just talking about communication. Animals of all sorts clearly respond to types of things. You don't flee a predator because it's Shere Kahn, but because it's a predator, and you flee in a way appropriate to the type of predator it is, if you can. So it is with eating, with building, with mating.

I would even say that a rock becomes part of a landslide based on the momentum of whatever strikes it, not, say, the color of what strikes it. That's a sort of abstraction. For any phenomenon you consider, some elements are relevant and some aren't.

I am arguing that it is the basic ability to recognise similarity and to abstract. It is 'basic', in the sense that language and representation relies on that ability; we employ it all the time, simply to think and speak, and perhaps for that reason it might be somewhat 'hidden in plain sight' - taken for granted. It might suit you to say that animals display that ability — Wayfarer

Bees like certain types of flowers, not particular individual flowers. Vervet monkeys make a certain type of a call when they spot a certain type of predator. Most of nature seems to operate with some degree of abstraction, doesn't it?

I have been quite clear that I've been speaking about processes, and not 'units' of things. — StreetlightX

Perhaps I can put it this - not super precise - way: the question is not 'what is alive?', but 'what is alive?'. This latter is the question of individuation, of what counts-as a-life, a question which I think is opened by a reflection on the process of gene expression. — StreetlightX

I think the first quote there makes it difficult for some of us to understand what approach is suggested by the second quote. You seem to rule out exactly what most of us would be doing if we set out either to choose a criterion for life or apply it. It makes it look as though you want to ask, not whether something that eats is living, but whether eating is living, and that can't be what you're saying.

Is the connection that an organism is "composed" of such processes?

The analogy that came to my mind was the relation between phonemes and morphemes. Morphemes, as the smallest units of semantic content, are by definition made of parts that do not have semantic content. As such, it's no use looking to the phonemes to determine whether a given object is a morpheme; there is in a sense nothing special, nothing directly related to semantics about phonemes. You can't read off morpheme-hood. (You can do some things, given more rules: say what could be a morpheme in a given language, etc.)

But now I seem to be doing the sort of thing the first quote would discourage; and the second quote suggests that the issue is what a unit of semantic content could possibly be, given that the unit is composed of non-semantic units.

Am I at all close to understanding your point?

As a matter of logic, sure, but this is not really in the spirit of the enterprise, is it?

We want to avoid claims that could only be falsified by observing every member of a class. The claims we want are ones that would generate readily testable predictions. "If it comes up blue, my theory is false," rather than, "Only another 10,000 to go."

Can we even presume we can make every needed observation in this way? When you refer to "all known examples of mammals" isn't that a pretty risky way to carve out a class?

Still, you're right about there being a kind of symmetry here, and that makes me wonder if the falsifiability criterion can be made to carry the whole load.

"Some mammals lay eggs" might count as an observation rather than a theory. It would be an observation that falsifies the universal claim "No mammals lay eggs."

@unenlightened okay that was weird.

Since our time is limited, and since cognitive and social resources are limited, it seems more reasonable to prefer the simplest account, all else equal. — Cabbage Farmer

I'd now say what I was groping for was just a market rather than an auction, which in retrospect is obvious. I can see a case for all sorts of things, such as those you mention here, being usable for trade, but I went with ontological commitments because that's one common form of the razor, and it still feels relevant. Is there an entity that is the meaning of a sentence? Is there an entity that is my eating this sandwich?

Ockham says entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity . If I say I have a satisfactory account of everything you do, but without one of your assumptions, then I'm saying one of your assumptions is unnecessary. (You will counter that my explanation fails and this additional assumption is necessary.)

But so what? Why do we demand that a theory's assumptions be not only sufficient but also necessary? Why this minimalism? I'm trying to take seriously what appear to be our intuitions about such matters, which suggest that indeed there is some sort of implicit accounting going on and that there is something like a market for theories. (Suggests to me, anyway, though I may be the only one.)

I'm struggling to think of any other costs/ benefits apart from those that might involve the opinions of other about us. — Janus

Yes, well, I alluded to this above, and I think it bears looking into.

I'll add this: I've referred several times to what would count as currency, who would decide, and so on. For instance, why does Zeus, whom @Cabbage Farmer mentioned, not figure more prominently in our discussions?

I think there are wider and narrower ways to approach this: the narrower would be the sort of thing that turns up in Lewis's "Scorekeeping in a language game," where what you're allowed to assume, to rely on, is implicitly negotiated as you go along; wider could be very wide indeed, but we can at least say that "As Zeus wills it" is apparently not an option ruled out just in this conversation or that, but more widely.

(I have a feeling I'm not making much sense yet, but thanks for chipping in, guys.)

My old favorite:

A man posts a vague and somewhat mysterious advertisement for a job opening. Three applicants show up for interviews: a mathematician, an engineer, and a lawyer.

The mathematician is called in first. "I can't tell you much about the position before hiring you, I'm afraid. But I'll know if you're the right man for the job by your answer to one question: what is 2 + 2?" The mathematician nods his head vigorously, muttering "2 + 2, yes, hmm." He leans back and stares at the ceiling for a while, then abruptly stands and paces around a while staring at the floor. Eventually he stops, feels around in his pockets, finds a pencil and an envelope, and begins scribbling fiercely. He sits, unfolds the envelope so he can write on the other side and scribbles some more. Eventually he stops and stares at the paper for a while, then at last, he says, "I can't tell you its value, but I can show that it exists, and it's unique."

"Alright, that's fine. Thank you for your time. Would you please send in the next applicant on your way out." The engineer comes in, gets the same speech and the same question, what is 2 + 2? He nods vigorously, looking the man right in the eye, saying, "Yeah, tough one, good, okay." He pulls a laptop out of his bag. "This'll take a few minutes," he says, and begins typing. And indeed after just a few minutes, he says, "Okay, with only the information you've given me, I'll admit I'm hesitant to say. But the different ways I've tried to approximate this, including some really nifty Monte Carlo methods, are giving me results like 3.99982, 3.99991, 4.00038, and so on, everything clustered right around 4. It's gotta be 4."

"Interesting, well, good. Thank you for your time. I believe there's one last applicant, if you would kindly send him in." The lawyer gets the same speech, and the question, what is 2 + 2? He looks at the man for a moment before smiling broadly, leans over to take a cigar from the box on the man's desk. He lights it, and after a few puffs gestures his approval. He leans back in his chair, putting in his feet up on the man's desk as he blows smoke rings, then at last he looks at the man and says, "What do you want it to be?"

Thanks for the reference to color constancy. Don't know if I had ever seen this stuff before and it is way cool.

My son's up at UGA. I'm about 50 mins SW from there. — Hanover

Then you know this one:

What were the redneck's last words?

. By saying there is an incentive is projecting your own purposes onto reality, as if reality has reasons, or incentives, to design things. — Harry Hindu

It's relative, not absolute purpose. For a phenotypic variation to be differentially replicated,* it must provide some survival or reproductive advantage relative to other members of the population. Surviving and reproducing is not an absolute purpose, but it's how the game is played.

I remember seeing an episode of NOVA or something where they were testing chickens as part of a theory that wing flapping might evolve as a sort of turbo boost for running-- that is, helps you survive which helps you reproduce.

* That sounds like it could be a TMBG song about evolution.

Here's another way to characterize the competition among theories that makes more sense in some ways:

Competing theories offer for sale comparable products, purported explanations of φ, for some phenomenon φ, and the cost, as above, might be measured by the ontological commitments you must make. Competition will naturally place some downward pressure on these commitments,* but purchasers will also have preferences that lead them not always to choose on price alone: they may feel one theory's product is of higher quality, that another doesn't actually work (i.e., explain φ), etc. Some purchasers may choose not to buy at all if they cannot find a price they consider fair.

Here questions of who is paying too much, who might be printing their own money, etc., are shifted to those who espouse a theory.

So that's what one little stall in the marketplace of ideas looks like to me.

* ADDED: If ontological commitments are treated as a limited resource like a currency.

suggested article.... — Wayfarer

I got halfway through it. It's ignorant horse hockey.

Ockham's razor is about competition among theories. One form such competition might take is an auction, and it occurred to me that philosophers do sometimes express their theoretical preferences in terms of cost or price. Quine, for instance, agonizes over whether admitting sets into his ontology is too high a price to pay for mathematics. (It's not. No price is too high for math.)

So what's up for auction is "having explained" something. The way I've presented it is as if only a single bid is above the reserve price.

It was a quickie post, and I'm honestly not sure yet if there's enough here to be worth formulating better. But I am finding the idea of formulating competition among theories in some way like this quite appealing.

It was meant as a gesture toward what a theory of concepts might look like.

Suppose instead of some ideal abstract triangle, you had instead a rule about how to treat a particular triangle "as" a conceptual one. So you ignore its actual proportions, the measure of its actual angles. It still has those, just like any triangle, but you don't use them.

I can understand how that would work. I can see a procedure. I would like such a thing because I don't know what concepts are supposed to be, how we interact with them, etc. My little procedure gives concrete form to the idea of abstraction: it's a rule about what to ignore.

I take a generally Kantian view, that our knowledge is of phenomena, and that what the world is 'in itself', outside those cognitive capacities, is unknown to us. — Wayfarer

Those phenomena, and those cognitive capacities-- it's all about information.

It was fun, Wayfarer! Let's do this again sometime.

It's that 'structure-preserving map' I'm interested in. What is the analogy for the 'structure-preserving map' in reality? That is the activities of the mind. Television, as you say, extends the physical scope of the mind, but the mind is what continually (and generally subliminally) performs all of these transformations. — Wayfarer

?

The way an object absorbs or reflects light is determined by its structure and composition, no mind needed.

When that tree falls in that forest, a wave is propagated through the air whether there's any minds, or indeed any ears, around.

The structure of the object is mapped to the structure of the light, sound, etc. it broadcasts without intention. Living things notice, is all.

I don't think you could infer what the subject's brain was thinking, because I don't think it's 'in there' - any more than the characters of House of Cards can be found in your flatscreen television. — Wayfarer

But there is a structure-preserving map from the actors on set to the digitally encoded signal that is transmitted to my TV. That signal carries information about what the actors were doing. Whether the actors are "only physical" or not, it is only information about their physical characteristics that is captured, encoded, and transmitted: how they looked, how they moved, what sounds they made, and so on. Television just extends the reach of my senses of sight and hearing, and it does so by each step between me and the source of the sounds and images translating in a structure-preserving way.

Lots of other thoughts about my little model, so here's one more.

How is payment made? By committing to uphold what you bid.

Suppose "having explained consciousness" is up for auction. I may choose not to win rather than bid panpsychism. I don't get to claim I've explained consciousness, but I feel it's better to lose than win at such a price. I could even continue to work on my bid in the belief that the winner will eventually also feel he overpaid and give up panpsychism. Then the item goes up for auction again. Some may see this strategy as too risk averse, and some applaud the winner for his daring.

I just found it quite odd that anyone would actually ask why we should want to make few(or the fewest possible) errors. — creativesoul

That is just about the nicest thing you could say to me.

I think I understand what your overall position is, and the specific claim you're advancing in this specific thread, and I know in a vague way they go together. But I can't put them together. So when I said this:

I think your argument really only cares about the first and last steps: seeing something and symbolizing it; seeing a symbol and interpreting it. These functions you attributes to intelligent minds, therefore these functions are mental, therefore they are not physical. I don't think the translation has anything to do with it. — Srap Tasmaner

You didn't like that, and responded:

As my argument is only concerned with establishing that information is not physical, the fact that it can be described as 'mental' is neither here nor there. — Wayfarer

But every time I ask something specific about information and how critters like us share it, you tell me your views on mind:

What I'm saying is that language and abstract thought rely on an ability which I don't think can meaningfully described as 'physical'. Essentially it's the ability to grasp meaning, to say 'this means that'. — Wayfarer

That sounds ever so much like what I said.

I'm not convinced that such a view of mind as non-physical compels you to conclude that information is not physical. Information could be something else we embodied minds traffic in just as we do other physical stuff.

And I don't see the argument from translatability as establishing that something not physical is being passed around. I still think in your version of the argument, meaning is non-physical from the outset.

I think I'm seeing a gap where you don't, and that either you'll make it clear to me that there is no gap or I'll make it clear to you that there is, and maybe then you'll fill it, or not.

I dislike doing these quote cum recap posts, but there's a disconnect here that has me flummoxed.

well, you get the point right? — creativesoul

No.

So was your answer that once hominins are language users, from then on information is not physical for them? Was it physical before? Or did they just not traffic in the kind of information you're talking about before language use evolves?

Yeah, sorry. Should've been clearer.

Sorry. Trying to address you and Wayfarer simultaneously, and that's bound to be confusing!

Instead of responding directly to your last post about computing, I thought I'd take another shot at explaining my general approach to both of you at once.

I'm still mulling over your specific points. (I wasn't actually arguing that machines are just physics, but I did deliberately let the implication hang there in hopes of eliciting the sort of response you gave, which is helpfully specific.)

What do you mean by "mind"? Is there a useful distinction in operation here? — apokrisis

That question wasn't for you.

I hope you don't think I was claiming there's no difference between animal signaling and human language.

The question is whether language has a monopoly on meaning or on information or both. And if there is a sort of meaning unique to human language, does it have nothing at all to do with animal signaling? (I believe Chomsky's position is nearby. As I recall, he postulates a single huge leap to language rather than a gradual development.)

You are of course free to bid 0, but there's a chance your bid will not be taken seriously.

Suppose I'm an earlyish hominin, and a wild dog is biting me. I involuntarily make a sound of pain. Members of my group who hear my cry will take this to mean I'm in trouble and come to help.

Now suppose I'm a slightly later hominin and I can make the same sound voluntarily when a wild dog is about to bite me but hasn't yet. This rocks. Members of my group who hear my cry will take this to mean I'm in trouble and come to help without my having to get bit.

Now suppose I'm a slightly later hominin and I can voluntarily make a sound that to members of my group means "wild dog", rather than a generic "pain/fear/trouble".

Is there mind involved in some of these but not others? Do some of these hominin sounds carry meaning or information but not others?

If programmed to do so by humans.

'Machine - an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.' — Wayfarer

But what the machine actually does is physical, right? Just because a human designs a machine to serve a human purpose, doesn't mean the machine itself is doing something non-physical, does it? We use shovels to move physical dirt, physically, don't we?

@mcdoodle noted the mechanical nature of the translations in your example. So mechanical in fact that a machine could clearly perform these translations and send these signals. I think your argument really only cares about the first and last steps: seeing something and symbolizing it; seeing a symbol and interpreting it. These functions you attributes to intelligent minds, therefore these functions are mental, therefore they are not physical. I don't think the translation has anything to do with it.

It's an explanation. He lists characteristics of the song that he believes are causes of him liking it, rather than reasons for him to (choose to) like it.

The word "reason" and the word "why" are ambiguous this way: you can ask why I'm voting libertarian, what my reasons are; and you can ask why the door is stuck, what the cause of its being stuck is, and you might also call that the "reason" it's stuck.

I think your textbook wants you to see these reasons as explanation-type rather than argument-type because it has thrown in some subjective stuff, like the solo being lovely, that's dependent on the speaker and you couldn't expect anyone else would consider them reasons.