David Gould

Interesting.

But all you seem to have done (to me) is defined the marks as information - in other words, you have set up a relationship that defines the marks as now being information where before they were not.

You have, for example, another piece of paper that has the code written on it, matching each random mark with a word. This is where the information content of the other piece of paper actually comes from.

And guess what? It is another arrangement of quarks - physical things.

Information does not come from nowhere. It seems to me that it is simply a relationship.

Imagine a tree and the word 'tree'. Each by themselves has a certain amount of information content - the tree has its tecture, size, shape, smell, taste et cetera; the word 'tree' has its shape.

If I now point physically to the tree and say the word 'tree' I am creating a relationship between the two. This now means that each of the two separate things (the tree and the word 'tree') contain the same information - I can point at a tree or I can say the word 'tree' to convey the same concept.

No information has been added from "somewhere else". All the information that now exists existed prior to me assigning the relationship.

The only way to destroy the information is to destroy all trees, all pictures of trees and every mention of the word 'tree' in the world.

As these are all quarks, I must conclude that information is physical.

Unless you have an answer to my question: where does the information go when you destroy the piece of paper?

excreationist

For information on a piece of paper to be meaningful, there must be someone who decodes the information. (e.g. a person with a physical brain)

Filip: do you have any evidence of people or beings who can decode information where they don't have a physical decoding mechanism. i.e. they just get the meaning straight away with no reliance on any long-term memories?

About the paper with meaningless symbols and one with meaningful systems. They both contain the same amount of atoms, but one contains meaningful information. Well actually for information to be meaningful, a decoding system is required, which requires a lot of atoms. e.g. a human brain contains about 100 billion neurons and that would be a lot of highly structured atoms.

So a piece of paper with a meaningless scribble on it doesn't need any decoding system since there is no message to decode (apparently). So all that information system involves is the piece of paper.

For the piece of paper with meaningful symbols, a system that can decode the symbols is required. e.g. a human being and some air, maybe some water, some light for them to read the paper, etc. So that information system contains a lot more atoms.

So information doesn't take up no space, as you seem to think! For information to have any meaning at all there needs to be an information decoding system. Idealists on the other hand believe that information exists as eternal forms in some other realm.

Also, you haven't answered my question about bees:
"Say a bee learns to navigate through a maze or something. The information about the maze is stored in its memories.

Are purely physical processes going on or is some kind of soul involved?"

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

Vorkosigan

If they are qualitatively different from eachother then why can't you believe that they are different things?

Filip, everyone involved in this thread believes that mind and brain are different things. They've put forth various metaphors and analogies to help you understand that although the mind and brain are not the same thing, they are related. Further, they are also trying to help you understand that though they are different, it doesn't mean that materialism is refuted.

Think about it. Scientists can map the entire brain and they will still be left with an apparent phenomenon, *perceived only by the individual possessor of that mind*, that they can't prove even exists!!

On the contrary, we know from thousands of direct observations and experiments that stimulation of the brain by electricity and chemicals produces events in the mind. If the mind is not a material phenomenon, please explain how electrical stimulation of the brain can produce memories, visions, voices and so forth.

What more evidence do materialists need to second guess materialism?

What evidence have you provided? So far, you've maintained that the brain and the mind are different things. Who disagrees with that!? How does this invalidate materialism?

You've been asked several times to put forth positive evidence for your view that something extra-materialistic is going on. Can you provide some for us to evaluate?

If what I've attempted to explain here doesn't at least make you second guess the validity materialism and think about it in a little more depth then I have nothing more to say.

It would take a lot more than noticing that the mind and brain are different things to make anyone here "second guess the validity of materialism."

Michael

PS
I started a couple threads in here a few months back, challenging the validity of materialism, but they seem to have disappeared

Beginning in January, the older threads were moved into the 2001 archives. I apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like me to retrieve one and move it back here, I can.

Michael

[ January 30, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

crocodile deathroll

I do not falsify materialism so much, there a still plenty of valid arguments for materialism. I am just stating the mind is not one of them. At best materialism just tells us that needs to be a critical mass, molecular diversity, and complexity for consciousness to emerge. Like there needs to be a critical mass of fissionable material for an atomic bomb to go off.

At one time I believed (as a kid) that if one preserves your brain say for instance in a freezing process like cryonics, then you will preserve the person even if one joins up the neural connections differently, because I believed memory was tangible like an organ. this is the kind of materialism which I claim is falsified and people place very great importance of the human body's physical material which is why many Christians do not like cremation as they believe the physical material needs to be preserved for a future resurrection Such freezing processes like cryonics would destroy all data and memory, so you would have go undergo the highly unlikely task of reconfigurating and rejoining all the synapses as they were before the person was frozen. So it is the configuration of that material and not the material itself as what I used in the igloo analogy.
I feel it virtually impossible to contemplate that we are just accidental grouping of atoms in a universe that is so stupendous huge, as those chances are far more likely that those atoms would of course be scattered at such vast distances apart, your existence would so improbable it would paradoxical, because when you calculate the number of ways of not existing (the states where your atoms did not group together to generate you into existence) and the number of ways you can exist then you chances of existing would be so exponentially improbable you would be paradoxical.
But since you are reading this and I wrote it, then there must be a better explanation than just an accidental grouping of atoms.
A more satisfactory explanation would be functionalism and not materialism. functionalism is the philosophy of mind, the view that a mental state is the type of mental state that it is in virtue of its functional role. Functionalists generally compares the brain to a computer, interpreting the brain itself as akin the hardware and mind as being akin to the software.

Like that igloo, it just a long as those arrangements of ice blocks still function like an igloo and not a wet patch evaporating on the Sahara Desert is really all that matters, but it really does not matter if the water you froze up into ice blocks came from a glacier up in the Arctic of was taken from a spring in an oasis in the Sahara.
Same as the atoms that constitute your body. it really does not matter if they came from Earth or from Alpha Centurii

crocodile deathroll

Adrian Selby

"I feel it virtually impossible to contemplate that we are just accidental grouping of atoms in a universe that is so stupendous huge.....ways you can exist then you chances of existing would be so exponentially improbable you would be paradoxical."

For me, the fact that the universe is so stupendously huge makes it highly likely that somewhere in it there would be arrangements of atoms, out of all the multifarious arrangements of atoms, that do conform to a human brain. And anyway, we're not just talking about the chance of this or that, the brain didn't come about by chance, it came about as a result of evolution, there was a process involved, and prior to the brain there were less complex central nervous systems that developed as language developed and subsequent generations' bodies (and brains) adapted and grew in order to continue to survive.

Also, while current freezing methods do cause problems, i don't see it as absurd to think that if one could 'still' the brain in a certain state then revive it with its functioning before, the person would still be there. Because the person is the brain. The problems of freezing techniques are contingently true, but in themselves do not defeat the notion that a brain can't be the person.

The computer analogy you outline for functionalism is too simplistic for me, and too dualistic to boot. If the brain changes its structure dynamically in accordance with experience, then the 'hardware' isn't the means by which a mental life exists, the changes in the mental life are just the brain's conceptualising of the experience of neural pathways altering in itself. The brain is the software as well, I don't see what the problem is to say that an emotion just is a bunch of neurons firing, but when one is the brain which is having the firing in that pattern, one is having the emotion.

Because language distinguishes neuroscience talk and common language talk does not mean any real distinction exists. WHich isn't a direct criticism or anything, but one illuminating post earlier alluded to the problems in being clear on the terms we're using. I think language and its different 'vocabularies' adapted to different purposes can cause conflicts and problematic conceptualising. The idea of finite infinities on the infinity thread fry my brain, but they show that I've been talking about infinity up to now in a very limited way, and I wonder whether I could make more sense of some questions about what it means to have infinite properties if I knew more about different conceptions of infinity.

Adrian

excreationist

Do you think that humans just popped into existence a couple years ago? No, mainstream science talks about us being descended from life which began billions of years ago.
<a href="http://www.ultranet.com/~jkimball/BiologyPages/G/GenomeSizes.html" target="_blank">Genome Sizes</a>
This talks about how many base-pairs are in the DNA of different viruses and forms of life.
The smallest is 580,000 base-pairs. Each base-pair can have 4 combinations, so it isn't that impossible for that simplistic kind of life to appear. And there would also need to be replicating mechanisms, etc.
So I guess you're saying that the evolution of life is impossible and that there must have been a creator... then who created the creator? He was just there I suppose. And his creation is pretty crumby - why do we have to put up with all these mutations all the time?

Farren

Filip,

You sound like a reasonably smart cookie and while I think you make some pompous statements (I do that too all the time), I agree with some of your posts to the effect that your antagonists are needlessly insulting and equally pompous at times. I just want to clarify your position. Are you arguing:

1) TRUE DUALISM: That there are two types of 'matter', namely 'mind matter' and 'material matter', and that human behaviour is a confluence of these although they are somehow independent systems which have seperate behaviours exclusively determined by their own history aside from the behaviours that stem from interaction.

2) That the one may be a result of the other but is not, by extension, the other, like the speed you travel at and the fine you get as a result.

3) UTILITY: That the mind is in fact the matter, inasmuch as there is a one-to-one correlation, but it is _useful_ to abstract a 'mind' from the behaviour of the matter for the same reason that it is useful to abstract '2' from the twinkies in your hand so that you can use a system (in this case maths) to determine whether you are being correctly charged.

4) Note: Points (2) and (3) are not mutually exclusive

5) Any other -ISM that I haven't considered

You SEEM to be arguing (2) and (3), in which case I can't see the conflict with materialism.

BTW I would like to re-iterate the point that I agree that there is an experience/description gap but that is simply because description is not experience, not a major failing in assuming all things being made of common stuff with common behaviour.

I experience &lt;&gt; I describe my experience
I experience &lt;&gt; You describe my behaviour
You experience &lt;&gt; I describe your behaviour
I experience &lt;&gt; You experience my behaviour

The state I'm in is not the state the observaiton of me puts you in.

My little book of logics (I'm not tertiary educated so this is the closest I get to a sound reference ) says that a set of statements is logical if it is consistent with itself. The following are (I hold) consistent statements:

1) The universe is composed of matter/energy (no dualism implied, just state, see next)
2) Matter/energy can have different states
3) The state of any Matter/energy can be transformed by interaction with other matter/energy.
4) All matter/energy will transform in the same way as other matter/energy if it interacts with other matter/energy in the same way (consistency).
5) One material/energetic construct may experience the result of another material/energetic constuct's state as a state.
6) Since experiencing another construct's state in any way does (by experience) not annihilate one's own state, the observation and the experience are different.

No contradiction exists in this set of beliefs. However, a problem exists with the assertion that I can know your state AS YOU KNOW YOUR STATE. I can only know your state AS I KNOW YOUR STATE.

Being ain't seeing. Put another way:

If you are F{Stimuli},
and I am F'(Stimuli)
then my obs of you is F'(F{Stimuli)
and you obs of you is F{F{Stimuli})
unless I am you, F{F{S}} is self evidently not F'{F{S}}

Respect

Farren

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Farren ]</p>

Farren

More accurately

Your experience of you: F{F{S}}
My observation fo you F'{S'}

Clearly dissimilar

regards
Farren

madmax2976

<strong> Really? Is this quanta a physical thing? If so, then obviously you haven't answered the question.

<strong> I don't think your dumb. I do think you've got a chip on your shoulder and are for some some reason compelled to convince everyone that your hypothesis is more than mere conjecture regardless of how little evidence you have for it.

<strong> Since you started the debate the onus is on you to clarify all your terms. Shoveling off the responsibility on to others is useless until you clean up your own act. Why you think it is that the inability of others to define some particular thing actually helps your case bewilders me.

<strong> What sarcasm? What case? This was a perfectly honest and reasonable challenge. One that you have continually failed to meet since you started this issue. I will take notice that you've once again failed to meet the challenge, but instead have attempted another side-step.

Furthermore, the "case" at hand is yours not mine. I haven?t presented any "case" and were I to do so, I'd probably start my own thread. I'm analyzing your case and finding it most wanting.

<strong> I?ll notice how you've characteristically slumped back into the "must" verbiage. You're the only one here who speaks in such terms Filip. Everytime you revert to it, my suspicion that your dualistic hypothesis is nothing more than a product of your own wishful thinking is reinforced.

If your going to create analogies to prove your case, which is a poor methodology in and of itself, then at least use sensible ones. In this case the "oil in a car" would indicate there is a physical process going on that needs lubrication. This indicates the "engine" is physical as well, but I understand you'd probably be more inclined to look at the oil, be unable to find a "combusting" or a "thrusting" when you looked into the engine, and conclude that these must be "meta-physical" phenomena.

<strong> Yes and many us of think you're a illogical dualist with an axe to grind, frustrated by the lack of evidence you have to prove you own case. But fortunately this isn't our problem, its yours.

As for "conjuring up a mental image", I do this often and it gives me evidence of the activity of my brain. I was asking for evidence for this "something else" that you continually claim exists. Obviously you think its more than brain activity and I'm asking you to put up for once rather that just continue to make unfounded claims, argue from ignorance, or make erroneous analogies.

<strong> I stop to "think" about many things, but I require good evidence that supports a hypothesis before I leap to conclusions. This is where we apparently differ.

<strong> This just more of your semantic word games again and also more side-stepping. Neither I nor anyone else is required to define "information". Whether I can do so or not is irrelevant to the validity of your case. Your case will rest on your ability to provide evidence that this "something else" exists. I don't care how you wish to label or categorize it.

So once again Filip I challenge you to provide direct, positive evidence for this "something else" regardless of how you categorize it. I believe a brain conjuring a mental image is evidence of a brain in action. If you believe a brain conjuring an image is evidence for "something else", then please provide argument that directly supports such a case. I tired of your poor analogies, sematic word games, and illogic arguments from ignorance.

<strong> I never said it did. Inventing straw men won't help you. The correspondence is evidence that indicates to us the brain is a physical phenomenon. No one said it was absolute. Only you speak in such terms with your use of "must". However the affect of drugs, injury and disease on the mind is far more convincing evidence in favor of the mind as a physical phenomenon than you have presented for it being a non-physical phenomenon. You haven't even gotten out of the starting gate.

<strong> They cannot be "different things" since the mind is not a "thing" any more than "reading" is a thing. It is an activity of the brain which happens to be a "thing".

<strong> Frankly I don't really give a rat's ass about "materialism". Its just a label to me, one that is very hard to define at its core. What I do care about is the "something else" you claim exists. I'm waiting patiently for you to provide a smidgin of evidence for it, but so far you've completely failed to do so.

<strong> The truth or falsity of materialism is pretty much irrelevant to me, so my second quessing it is just as irrelevant. The truth of falsity of this ?omething else you claim exists is more interesting. I'm waiting patiently for barest amount of evidence for it.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: madmax2976 ]</p>

Francois Tremblay

Maybe I'm being annoying, but I'd still like to know what evidence there is for supernaturalism. There must be evidence to support it, otherwise isn't this whole discussion completely pointless ? What's going on here ? Why are we even talking about this ?

If all we're doing is arguing against materialism, then all we can conclude is that materialism is so far incomplete. That doesn't prove any other position.

[ January 31, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>