premjan

I guess the theory that matter arises from vaccum on input of energy, and energy (e.g. big bang) can arise simply by chance, would indicate that "vacuumism" (e.g. Buddhism) is more appropriate than materialism.

I also do not think that Buddha was a mentalist. Rather he believed that everything was a conditioned phenomenon and non-existence was the ultimate ground of being.

perfectbite

Premjan,

Can something be greater than the sum of its parts?




(I don't see Buddhism as 'vacuumism'. The Buddha did say to be neither positivist nor negativist and the idea of 'non-existence' in my view isn't evident in the Buddha's writings but I do agree that some Buddhists, through a distortion and misinterpretation of Buddhism in general could extrapolate and propound the idea of non-existence.)

perfectbite

Answerer,

You are a clever person,

I'll leave you to figure out what a hard core Buddhist is.

:wave:

premjan

Yes, most "systems" are greater than the sum of their parts. E.g. a car is greater than the sum of its parts.

perfectbite

Premjan,

The interlocking parts of a car do what they are designed to do and the sum of their parts is that yes one gets to ride and one can go much faster than a walking pace and carry much more than any mere organic could but that was the principal end of the design of the vehicle's interlocking parts.

Language on the other hand is a different kettle of fish. For a written language, from a very limited alphabet or from even the limited number of strokes making up the most complex Chinese characters we can produce, even with homonyms and synonyms, many, many thousands of word 'ideas' which can be juxtaposed to make a cogent sequential series of communicated concepts.

The above paragraph could actually qualify as a metalanguage and, according to Godel's inconsistency theorem, that spells trouble, with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pool (right here in River City) (a joke).

I suggest that even just simple language (not the chicken and egg question associated with the intellectual primacy of language) is an excellent example of something being greater than the sum of its parts.

(Even in rudimentary languages like my dog's language which includes long grunts and short grunts and barks and growls, I can tell the difference in his barks between when there is someone at the door or when one of his toys is stuck under the couch and he wants me to get it for him. On the other hand he recognizes about 27 human word and perhaps their associated concepts, I counted them up once but I am not sure that he actually grasps the difference between the implications of the word 'good' as in 'good dog' and 'good water' or the word 'bad' as in 'bad dog' and 'bad water' but his comprehension, minimal as it is, is still comprehension and his 'human speak' is more fluent than my 'dog speak'.)

Throughout our universe in just this mixing and matching of conscious comprehension, communication and conscious re-comprehension what upper limit would you like your materialism to stop counting at in counting all the conscious states and their expressions, linguistic and otherwise, that have ever been in existence or could ever possibly be in existence or that are just in existence at this instant. (thoughts and expressions would have be cogent wholes to make sense, I'll reluctantly allow memes). Would you like to use Aleph Null? How about Aleph 2? how about Aleph 22?

A photograph of one's family or loved one is of course quantitifiable but its intrinsic quality may be beyond any measure and I think that quantity and measure are the Achilles heel of materialism because it is quite possible, nay, in fact it is entirely likely that elements of our universe are truly unquantifiable pluralities and even those elements that are quantifiable may have qualities that are beyond measure.

Premjan, My argument against materialism is that is tends to reduce what is to manageable concepts or units and I firmly believe that consciousness as it happens really isn't reducible and no I don't think that we should just walk around in a fog but I do think there is something in our reality that will always elude our comprehension and it doesn't even have to hide. Either we are so stupid that we cannot see it or there is something wrong with our understanding and I don't think we are entirely stupid.

Have you ever been in love? (Those who love and who are loved in return are very, very fortunate) That experience would give any materialist cause to rethink their stance. It's a big world.

premjan

The car's parts were designed to work together, but the first time someone put parts together to make a car, they were not really sure it would work, and the intentionality, design and engineering was much less in that instance.

I am not sure what it is about language that makes you think it is more than the sum of its parts. Language follows a grammar of some sort (human languages have a grammar) which makes it a partially formal system. The grammar does not strictly hold and there are a lot of failovers in the case of high noise or poor information. People do make mistakes in such situations though. It is just a well-evolved comprehension-generation system. Using a simple computer algorithm to analyze text is difficult so far, but I do not believe that the problem is not amenable to further analysis.

Godel was invoked by Roger Penrose to argue that intelligence was not reducible to nonquantum phenomena. I suppose intelligence (or all of matter-energy) might involve highly tangled quantum phenomena. But consciousness is not to my mind any different than other phenomena. It does not fall into the Godel trap mainly due to being not formal enough (a perceptual system like a neural net may not fall into a Godel trap since it adjusts its behavior based on the inputs it receives, something a formal system such as the natural number system never does).

I don't think Aleph null even comes into the picture since a brain is finite. We just have to choose which pieces of information to throw away and accept a finite level of intelligence (all of us make do with it).

I think you don't like to believe that consciousness is reducible to bare elements. Well, there is a large memory system involved. The same stimuli produce very different responses depending on the contents of your memory (your "state of mind"). So it is not reducible perhaps in the sense you think, but in some sense nevertheless.

The universe is finite and consciousness is also finite.

I have been in love before, and the memory of that does not change my basic impression that it was a chemical response, along with conscious elements.

perfectbite

Premjan,

I did not mean that mechanical serendipity was equal to something greater than the sum of its parts but it isn't immediately obvious that graceful or clumsy bipedal motion is an inherent property of having two legs and feet and that is the sort of thing I refer to when I said 'greater than the sum of its parts'.

I used language as an example because the mind/language problem really is a stumper for me and involves conscious thought directing matter to pronounce meaningful communication for another consciousness. To me that is incredibly complex but... I can see where it is just a matter of time before, as you say, some simple algorithm 'solves' the problem but I won't hold my breath if that is alright by you. I suggest you also not hold your breath.

As far as Roger Penrose goes I have heard the name but have not read any of his stuff but I will say this that even if we go away from consciousness into the realm of matter on the micro scale, the nexus of any atom perhaps has more than Aleph Null directions that it could potentially move in and any space between any two atoms would have Aleph Null points for either atom to position itself in relative to the other atom (I am disregarding the very discrete quantum effects which, from my very limited understanding, are electron based) and the behaviour of matter, whilst perhaps itself not subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem any formalized attempt to account for its possible behaviour would certainly be subject to Godel's incompleteness theorem. I am sure that Penrose intended perhaps not that the things in themselves were formalized and susceptible to inherent error but that any attempt on our parts using the fallible tools we have available to us would be susceptible to errors that we would not be aware of.

I don't care if a flower is a certain colour because an electron was out of place. Let me revel in the colour of the thing. When was the last time you went to an art museum just to look, not to analyze? That is what concerns me. A true materialist would have absolutely no use for art or beauty because, like very complex arrangements of Lego blocks, not only would such things be reducible they would be easily reproducible so the library at Alexandria burns, 'No big deal.' Every building in the Louvre simultaneously is blown to smithereens, 'No big deal.' The love of one's life dies, 'No big deal, it was all just chemistry and smoke and mirrors anyway.'

Premjan, you would make some country a wonderful minister of science and technology but a horrible minister of culture.

premjan

I do enjoy good art, and I don't think it is amenable to analysis, but not because of some consciousness component of the micro-universe or infinite degrees of freedom (perhaps there are more degrees of freedom than we see, but perhaps not), but because it is simply quite complex and not too well-defined. Complexity underlies most things in the universe, and it is in fact a surprise when simplicity emerges, and we have to explain it. One explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of physics is that there was a big bang which created the universe whole at one go (hence the early properties of the big bang have propagated through the entire universe and caused it to be simple in some aspects). However time has passed and change has occurred, inevitably making the universe complex in some aspects.

Language and consciousness are the result of signal feedback from an organism onto itself, and this kind of feedback being sustained due to it being useful from a survival point of view. There are of course ultimate whys of a universe which are not answerable from a purely materialist viewpoint (hence I lean towards sunyavada) such as "why does the universe exist?". We can merely say that the existence of the universe is a statistical possibility and leave the rest to the anthropic principle (universes in which minds did not evolve could not come to question their existence).

It is true that I think of art as a pattern not as an artifact. If a great Picasso were destroyed, I might be content to an extent with a facsimile. And love is also replaceable in my view. People live in a moment and not for all eternity. Today I fall in love, perhaps after 7 years I fall out of it and move on to another love. Or perhaps I invest in one person for a lifetime. There is no ultimate meaning to these events in themselves. I don't think a lot is gained by imposing morals or expectations on an essentially fluid universe.

Perhaps I would not be a conventional minister of culture. I would value art in its practice rather than in its creation of eternal artifacts. I would encourage the vigorous production and consumption of art. I would probably never personally commission a pyramid or pay 2 million dollars for a painting, other than to step aside to market forces in these matters. Eternity is to be observed, why intrude upon it to that extent?

Perhaps you are simply not "spiritualist" enough. If you were, your attraction to artifacts might cease.

perfectbite

"Language and consciousness are the result of signal feedback from an organism onto itself, and this kind of feedback being sustained due to it being useful from a survival point of view."

That basically is the "which came first the chicken or the egg?" mind/language question. As you say, our universe has had time enough to settle itself down and look at itself in the mirror.

I have enjoyed our conversation and have come to view your materialism as a rational pragmatic materialism although I will admit that it at first alarmed me greatly because from my experience a materialist 'a wheel is a wheel is a wheel' view can easily be matched by an equally insistent and equally disruptive and equally misleading spiritist 'a holy book is a holy book is a holy book' view.

Thank You.

premjan

As a materialist, I believe that language emerged along with consciousness and none of them precisely came first (though we could draw an arbitrary line of precedence).

Perhaps the question of how such a complex universe came to be is ultimately a spiritual question. The more materialist we are, the more spiritualist we have to be to compensate perhaps? Purusha/Prakriti, Matter/Mind, Yin and Yang.

thanks.