Filip Sandor

Clutch, you are greatly over-simplifying and exadurating the concept of Unity in your analogies.

I could just as easily claim that my computer desk is 'property' of reality (which it is) and that the computer on my is also a 'property' of reality (which it is) and conclude that both my computer and the desk that it's on are one and the same thing because they can be viewed as 'properties' of one thing, when clearly, they are entirely different things!

Seriously, if I claimed that my computer and the desk that it's sitting on are one and the same, would you believe me???

Of course you wouldn't.

So why should I believe that a mental image and the physical activity that it corresponds to are the same, Clutch?

madmax2976

<strong> You misunderstood me. I wasn't attempting to say I agree with that statement which Filip orginally posted. What I was saying to Filip was that, even if I assumed his claim was correct, his argument still isn't logical.

Clutch

I don't believe I mentioned "Unity". The only thing I've worked with is the notion you introduce in your argument: the instantiation of properties in objects. My use of this is in no way idiosyncratic, I assure you.

How on Earth could these be properties? They are particulars.

And if you are suggesting that we assume mental states and physical states to be distinct particulars, you are, again, simply begging the question. That's half your dilemma -- the other half being that if you don't assume this, and merely observe the distinct properties with which mentalistic and physicalistic vocabularies are concerned, your argument simply fails. Different properties does not entail different objects.

I think you've lost track of the direction of argument. You can, of course, choose not to believe it. That's rather different than having an argument against it!

Filip Sandor

Pardon my ignorance Synaesthesia, but is labelling it with a different name supposed to make it materialize somehow?

You still haven't been able to show me or demonstrate how it has been shown by anybody that this physical stuff you call 'information' or 'notion' or whatever the heck else you're going to label it, actually exists physically!! Yet. remarkably enough.. you do appear to keep on insisting that it is indeed a physical phenomena!

Hope you don't get all pissy on me, but am I in need of some freakin' glasses here or WHAT??!!!

Of course, materialism just conveniently denies the blaring contradictions that suggest ontological dualism (see above).

P.S. I thought we were actually getting somewhere with our last discussion, which seemed to be going well, but now you come here with this crap... I dont' get it, was it something I said.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Filip Sandor ]</p>

Filip Sandor

He wasn't implying that you were agreeing with me.

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Filip Sandor ]</p>

Filip Sandor

I hope you guys don't mind, but I'm going to take a break now and come back tomorrow or maybe some time after tomorrow and continue our debate.

You guys can have some free time to 'laugh' at all the 'ridiculous assumptions' I've made and prepare some more bizarre theories and excuses about how or why things can be physical without exhibitting any physical properties!

Christopher Lord

Using this assertion, one could claim that computer software is 'immaterial' as well, since software exhibits no physical properties. Unless you address this major problem with dualisim, the position seems completely unfounded.

I'll throw my opinion on the burner as an example.
Software is a set of very complex rules running on general-purpose semi-reconfigurable hardware. Its only physical manifestation is that its various elements eventually tigger electron movements. No element of the CPU 'understands' what an integer is, or what an IF statement is, but none-the-less the hardware is capable of supplying the needed abstraction for higher-level logic. At some point, the parts come together, and then a computer can truely understand an integer, in all its glory, and use it in a meaningful way.

With the two orders of magnitude of complexity the brain has over a CPU (not to mention completely different processing methods), its no wonder its has the capability to do what it does.

Theophage

Various versions of the same question by Filip Sandor appear here in bold:

Where is this 'information' substance?

Where is the actual, physical information, Theophage??!!!

Hope you don't get all pissy on me, but am I in need of some freakin' glasses here or WHAT??!!!

Yes, Filip, I think taking a rest for a bit is a good idea. You seem to be literally missing the forest for the trees here. But that's okay, look at it again with a fresh mind, and it will all make sense, I promise.

In my last post, I had written something which already answers your question. I will repeat it here and try to explain it a bit further:

"Note that it is an abstraction only, information itself simply does not exist outside of a format, but it can be "ported" between various formats."

Let me isolate the critical part of that sentence again:

"information itself simply does not exist outside of a format"

When you ask where is the "missing information", my answer is simply that it isn't missing, its either in some format, or it simply isn't there.

Let me say that I agree with the other posters in this thread that information is not a physical thing in and of itself, it is simply an arrangement or pattern of physical things. Asking where the information is outside of its physical format is like asking for a particular arrangement without anything to arrange.

Going back to my sunset example, where is the actual information of the sunset? If we assume that the "actual information" somehow exists outside of an encoding format, we run into the following problems:

Is the actual information the photons? No, that is only the information as encoded into photons. Is the actual information the .JPG file stored by the digital camera? No, that is only the information stored as ones and zeros. Is the actual information swimming around in my brain? No that is simply the information encoded into the brains electrochemical reactions. So where is the actual information? It must be missing!

Yes, it appears missing if you think it exists outside of the format by which it is represented, but the fact is that it isn't. If there is any "actual information" at all, it is the encoded pattern. In other words, yes, the sunset is the pattern of photons, yes, the sunset is the .JPG file, and yes, the sunset is the electrochemical brain reactions.

In each case, a particular pattern of one format caused a particular pattern in another format. Photon pattern to digital pattern and photon pattern to electrochemical pattern. These patterns are more or less isomorphic to each other, and thus are basically the same informationally. (not exactly the same, of course, since there is usually some kind of information loss and change when going from format to format)

Similarily, that is why I say that the electrochemical brain patterns that represent our thoughts are our thoughts. Just like information has no existance outside of a format, so thought has no existance outside of our electrochemical brain format.

I don't see why you keep insisting that they are somehow different. Perhaps If you get me that list of properties or qualities by which thoughts are different from the brain patterns they are represented by, I'll understand. But until that time, you'll excuse me if I don't consider there to be any difference.

EDITED TO ADD THE FOLLOWING:

Actually, I think I can give a better example here:

Get some pebbles and make a triangle out of them.

Now get some sticks and make a triangle out of them.

Now take a pen and paper and draw a triangle in ink.

Now erase all of these. Where are the triangles?

The triangle is a pattern of things, it is "information". It does not exist outside of the physical form which takes on the pattern. Like any other information, it can be represented by physical objects in myriad ways.

We have a concept of a triangle in our head, but again, that is simply a pattern of physical things (electrochemical reactions). We weren't born with a knowledge of triangles in our brain, we had to acquire that knowledge through our senses and store it in the same physical format in our brains where we store all of our memories.

Perhaps if you are a neo-plaonist of some sort (and I don't know if you are or aren't) you would say that triangles do exist outside of their physical representations. I'm not a neo-platonist, so I think that idea is silly.

What is or is not a triangle has to do with a certain pattern of physical things. And just like any other information, the pattern does not exist outside of its physical representation.

I hope that made things a bit clearer.

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Theophage ]</p>

crocodile deathroll

Yes I am very inclined to agree to some extent, but to have more information capacity you may require a larger hardrive to accommodate the extra bit capacity which is one major reason why the human brain has to be a lot larger than that of a mouse's.

The information capacity of the human genome inside a single zygote is no where near enough to accommodate a human mind, nor is the case would be with a small cluster of neural stem cells, but it is enough to let the cerebral cortex of the brain grow to an enormous size and thus increase bit capacity with in the neural nets exponentially. I believe that as soon as the neurons reach a critical mass then consciousness will emerge as an emergent property which may be at around 19 weeks gestation .

I the mind and self is however is the physical capacity of the brain then one will lose it if a brain surgeon removed a substantial percentage of it or you lost part of it in a stroke. I know a few people who have had a large percentage of the brain removed in say a tumor removed and they all still feel like the same person. Now if 1% of cells were removed from the cerebral cortex and 1% cells removed from the thalamus, 1% percentage from the hippocampus, and 1% from each of all the vital regions of the brain etc and then kept repeating this procedure over and over again . For a while the patient will lose some his memories and and after about say 20% of the cells in his brains were removed he will lose a lot of them and exhibit symptoms similar to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's combined, then at a critical phase he is unconscious So I believe there is a critical limit where if the surgeon had removed a few too many neurons the patient will no longer be conscious like and 18 week old fetus. Because the brain has been reduced down to a subcritical level for any expression of consciousness.

Like if I remove some of the bit capacity of you computer hard drive and memory , you will not be able to run some of your programs, And by doing that you have lost a lot of the most important information process in you computer, and you may not even be able to run the latest operating system from say Mac OS 10 or windows.

I am of the view the human mind is like a sophisticated operating system in a computer but the has to be a critical level of neural mass for those neural nets to run. When those neural nets start running when your at 19 weeks gestation you will have no idea when and where you belong in the world as these processes are paralleled all around the world by millions of 19 week old fetuses, so gestalt switching is the key, as first you are at one with the lot of them and then you switch to just one and follow a trajectory through space and time until your death. Then with all your life's memories obliterated you will forget that you were ever born in the first place, and you will again be at that collective oneness with all neurological matter in the universe.

We all share the same matter, like an atom in my body that is a part of me may once of been a part of you at one stage.
Matter parallels the same processes when all said and done. And all also on the very bottom level share the same neural net operating system.

crocodile deathroll

Theophage

Filip wrote:

Why doesn't my harddrive increase or decrease in weight when I add or subtract this physical information substance to or from it??
Is information a weightless, physical phenomena, like light?

I guess I really missed this the first time around.

Filip, information is a pattern or arrangement of physical things, nothing more. Did you think that I thought information was a substance that is added to things?

Do you yourself think that information is a substance added to things? Do you think that the materialist view is that information is some kind of substance added to things?

The hard drive doesn't weigh any more because the information it contains is simply a rearrangment of its constituent parts. Do M&M's weigh differently if I arrange them in different patterns? No, of course not.

Let's continue this once we've gotten such silly notions out of our respective heads, shall we?

[ January 28, 2002: Message edited by: Theophage ]</p>