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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Can morality have meaning in a materialist universe?
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Oh no, Marvin, that is heretical, for meaning and morality just are; they exist as transcendent thingybobs, which we must not investigate, but must worship from afar. Heaven forbid, that nasty neurologists and others should actually begin to correlate brain activity and mental activity.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
Well, symbolic meaning in the brain is largely processed by the premotor cortex (PMC) - the PMC plays out everything we see, think, read, do, hear, as if we are doing it ourselves, so that we understand what it would be like to move that meaning - i.e. in the brain everything is converted into a symbolic language, and the alphabet and grammar of that language reside in our muscular system. Well, actually the entire mesodermal web. So there is no getting away from the fact that you cannot chart out the brain unless it also has a body to refer to. Neurologist or not. Meaning does not reside in thoughts.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Is it so much of a leap to think that morality is just one more idea that we have created? That meaning is just something we came up with as part of our developing ability to analyse the world in which we live?
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
'Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
Two plus two equals five.
As I was going down the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.
We came up with meaning as part of our developing ability to analyse the world in which we live.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
Your point being?
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Some interesting research is beginning to be written about, about the effect of a magnetic field, stimulating the brain, upon memory. This could eventually be used with patients with stroke or Alzheimer's, and is particularly valuable as it does not involve surgery or drugs.
Of course, memory ≠ morality; yet may be required for some kinds of moral thinking.
It will be interesting also to see if this method works with 'dysmoral behaviour' caused by brain damage.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/28/magnetic-brain-transcranial-stimulation-technique-memory-function
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
the problem with technological fixes like that is that they teeter at the top of a very slippery slope - both in terms of experimentation/proving and application
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
the problem with technological fixes like that is that they teeter at the top of a very slippery slope - both in terms of experimentation/proving and application
You mean that it could be abused? Yes, it's possible.
I think there are many lines of research into possible improvements in speech/language/memory and so on, amongst brain damaged people. But surgery and drugs seem to carry so many risks.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
But surgery and drugs seem to carry so many risks.
I saw a documentary recently about the dangers of using a drug to cure Alzheimers.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
Your point being?
Just stringing together words such as 'meaning could be something we came up with' doesn't necessarily result in an intelligible sentence. What does it mean to come up with 'meaning'?
It's intelligible to say that 'matter cannot produce meaning' fails to adequately define meaning, and therefore is just too vague to be a refutation of materialism. But saying that we could have come up with meaning is just as vague as that, if not more so; it fails to even make the process described intelligible.
(We can understand how someone could come up with a hand axe: cutting meat is something that we did with teeth. Wheels are a better way of carrying things. But meaning doesn't fill any function that pre-exists meaning.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Dafyd
Interesting point about something that might pre-exist meaning. How about data processing? Even bacteria do that, I believe, although not with words! But they communicate with each other.
I am not saying that data-processing = meaning, but maybe there is a connection between them.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Oh no, Marvin, that is heretical, for meaning and morality just are; they exist as transcendent thingybobs, which we must not investigate, but must worship from afar. Heaven forbid, that nasty neurologists and others should actually begin to correlate brain activity and mental activity.
Is there a real need to be snarky about all of this? ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Just stringing together words such as 'meaning could be something we came up with' doesn't necessarily result in an intelligible sentence. What does it mean to come up with 'meaning'?
It's intelligible to say that 'matter cannot produce meaning' fails to adequately define meaning, and therefore is just too vague to be a refutation of materialism. But saying that we could have come up with meaning is just as vague as that, if not more so; it fails to even make the process described intelligible.
I find I agree here quite a lot with
The Shipmate posting here as Dafyd.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Oh no, Marvin, that is heretical, for meaning and morality just are; they exist as transcendent thingybobs, which we must not investigate, but must worship from afar. Heaven forbid, that nasty neurologists and others should actually begin to correlate brain activity and mental activity.
Is there a real need to be snarky about all of this?
My doctor told me that my absolute mental health requires snark several times a day. Well, what can I do, snark just is.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
What does it mean to come up with 'meaning'?
FFS, on this thread we've been trying to get Chast to define what he's talking about when he says "meaning". So far we've had meaning as significance/purpose. Human beings finding their own apparently does pass muster because its not ultimate enough. We've had, "I can't describe it or define it, it just is and I know it when I see it and it's not molecules." And now we've got meaning as in semantics. Hopefully it will go down a DH black hole of specified complexity and creationist information theory, which is nearly as entertaining a subject as mystic quantum woo.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
What does "meaning" mean?
Do we have any philosophers here who can tie themselves into a Klein Bottle in order to explain it?
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
We are so grandiose about our little, monkey impulses.
Read Viktor Frankl, especially Man's Search For Meaning.
And above it all, ALL will be well. Or we'll never know: take Pascal's Wager.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
Do we have any philosophers here who can tie themselves into a Klein Bottle in order to explain it?
I think they'd say, in what sense are we talking here? The meaning of life? Meaning in linguistics? They might even recommend looking up the word, "equivocation".
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
"Meaning" in all the meanings it has being used above
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Russ
Old salt
# 120
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
Computer software is something else, and in that case, the question of whether or not its choices could be meaningful or if its nature excludes that possibility remains, perhaps, where it us unless this software comes into being. (And if it turns out to make moral choices and be, basically, a person, then we'd damn well better treat it like one
I concur with both your moral judgment, and your point that we don't yet know whether it is emprically possible to create person-grade artificial intelligence.
But you seem here to be admitting that this is a not-logically-inconsistent scenario. That there is no reason in principle why a mere arrangement of the atoms inside a computer should not give rise to a moral obligation. An obligation to the software, not the hardware.
Just as it would be a sort of moral crime to destroy the Mona Lisa. For reasons which have nothing to do with the ownership of the pigment and canvas. A hypothetical alien which rearranged the molecules of the Mona Lisa for artistic reasons of its own would destroy the image - the software, the information content - even if the museum that owns it still owned all the molecules that it had previously owned before the act of interplanetary vandalism took place.
But if you're agreeing with me that - regardless of whether it is actually possible - there is nothing philosophically wrong with the idea of a man-made machine intelligence that is person-like enough to both engender moral obligations in others and be in turn subject to moral imperatives about how it treats others - then doesn't that establish that morality doesn't logically depend on the supernatural ?
quote:
quote:
If the naturalistic worldview were true - if animals have the capacity to make real choices (in proportion to their intelligence) and future software will someday make real choices, and humans are something like animals and minds something like software...
...then why is it meaningful or not meaningful to talk about the morality of such choices ?
I'm literally not understanding what you mean here.
Put it another way - what do you mean by a "materialist universe" ? I know that you don't think we live in one. The obvious meaning is a universe just like our present one except that the atheists are right and the Christians deluded (instead of vice versa). Is that what you mean ?
Best wishes,
Russ
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Wish everyone well; the enemy is not people, the enemy is wrong ideas
Posts: 3169 | From: rural Ireland | Registered: May 2001
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
What does "meaning" mean?
Do we have any philosophers here who can tie themselves into a Klein Bottle in order to explain it?
Data-processing? That covers all living organisms, I think. Look at the waggle dance of the honey bee, which communicates a ton of information about food sources. It's symbolic communication, it seems to me. The individual forager bee has been able to process all the data about the food he has found, and then he can communicate it to the other bees, who can process that.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
This inevitably brings it back to context. A bee in a disco might get confused, and then end up constantly searching for a Bee el Dorado of pollen.
And context is subjective.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Well, there are important differences from animal communication - Chomsky's famous formulation was that human language is stimulus free, whereas animals tend to be triggered by certain stimuli.
So there is a kind of rigidity here, although primates are probably less bound by stimuli.
And humans have a meta-ability - that is, we can talk about meaning and communication.
None the less, I wonder if data processing and communication is at the core of meaning - after all, bacteria do it, so it seems synonymous with life itself.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
yes - we've paused and deviated a little here - moral meaning is, I would say, about relationship - which language may be, but isn't necessarily.
Linguistically, we seem to be slightly at the mercy of our grammatical system, and so some languages are formulated around relationship (e.g. aborigine - to the point that australian physicists art learning it to get a different understanding of quantum mechanics). Whereas most laying languages are formulated around doing and things. We label things a lot, particularly in the sciences - and another view of linguistics is that richer languages have more verbs, less nouns - thus become more interested in process.
If you consider, a language based on things would not really have a moral viewpoint. one based on process might have some moral processes. When you get to a relationship basis for language, then it becomes impossible to think of doing something to someone else (or nature) without also thinking about how you are affected. I'm not claiming that aborigines are moral giants, but they - and possibly other first people languages - may result in a different mindset. You can see the effect of being separated from land by the degree of alcoholism in all "tamed" native cultures.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
What does "meaning" mean?
A key feature of meaning is that whatever kind of reality we want to classify it as, it is inseparable from human perception. If anything means something, it means it to/for someone. Take away that association and the meaning does not exist.
That meaning can be shared relies on the ability of language to convey it. If morality in turn relies on having meaning to/for someone, morality too must be inseparable from human perception.
I don't think it makes much sense to describe the universe as materialist, but either way only human-like beings find meaning within it. No us, no meaning. To be human-like is for (parts of) the universe to have meaning to/for us, so meaning to my way of thinking is a foundational subjective reality.
Since morality without meaning makes no sense, perhaps one approach to thinking about morality is as a category of meaning.
[cross-posted]
[ 30. August 2014, 15:50: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
FFS, on this thread we've been trying to get Chast to define what he's talking about when he says "meaning".
Part of me is tempted to say, "what are you talking about? Meaning is meaning is meaning," but I shall try...
quote:
Human beings finding their own apparently does pass muster because its not ultimate enough.
Finding, as in discovering real meaning that exists, yes. Inventing in a sort of pretend way, no.
quote:
Hopefully it will go down a DH black hole of specified complexity and creationist information theory, which is nearly as entertaining a subject as mystic quantum woo.
Why "hopefully"? ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
I mean, when I look it up in, say, an online dictionary, the things that are basically in the ballpark are:
quote:
noun
1.
what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated; signification; import:
the three meanings of a word.
2.
the end, purpose, or significance of something:
What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of this intrusion?
3.
Linguistics.
the nonlinguistic cultural correlate, reference, or denotation of a linguistic form; expression.
linguistic content (opposed to expression ).
So what the word "dog" means is "that barking furry thing I'm pointing to over there." But I'm talking more about something's basic essence, especially when it comes to the non-physical world.
But then to me, "essence" and "meaning" and "intrinsic nature" and "what a thing is" are all kind of referring back to the same thing. There really isn't anywhere deeper to go with that, as by definition it's at the rock bottom of reality itself.
Is that helpful? (He said, hopefully.)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
What does "meaning" mean?
Do we have any philosophers here who can tie themselves into a Klein Bottle in order to explain it?
Yes, that is part of the problem. ![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif) "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
They might even recommend looking up the word, "equivocation".
I don't believe I'm doing that, thank you; I'm trying to be honest and clear and direct.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
But you seem here to be admitting that this is a not-logically-inconsistent scenario. That there is no reason in principle why a mere arrangement of the atoms inside a computer should not give rise to a moral obligation.
Er... no, I didn't say that at all. Indeed, I believe that, if this thing we've never encountered, which we don't even know if it could happen at all, ever happens, then something would be at work beyond mere arrangement of the atoms, for reasons expressed here and elsewhere.
I don't know if there are sapient, organic aliens on other planets either, but if there are, I believe this would apply to them as well.
quote:
An obligation to the software, not the hardware.
Well, an obligation to more than that, but yes.
quote:
Just as it would be a sort of moral crime to destroy the Mona Lisa. For reasons which have nothing to do with the ownership of the pigment and canvas. A hypothetical alien which rearranged the molecules of the Mona Lisa for artistic reasons of its own would destroy the image - the software, the information content - even if the museum that owns it still owned all the molecules that it had previously owned before the act of interplanetary vandalism took place.
This is true, yes--the essence of what makes it the Mona Lisa would be, at least on a physical level, gone.
quote:
But if you're agreeing with me that ...
And alas, I don't.
quote:
Put it another way - what do you mean by a "materialist universe" ?
A universe in which there is nothing but matter, energy, and the processes of physics, etc.--nothing supernatural, metaphysical, teleological, or for that matter ontological apart from an array of purely human notions of things, themselves merely an arrangement of atoms.
quote:
I know that you don't think we live in one. The obvious meaning is a universe just like our present one except that the atheists are right and the Christians deluded (instead of vice versa). Is that what you mean ?
Close, perhaps. Obviously part of the definition of "just like our present one" would be precisely what's at issue. And of course it would not have to just be atheists vs. Christians but vs. most religions/supernatural beliefs/etc.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
What does "meaning" mean?
A key feature of meaning is that whatever kind of reality we want to classify it as, it is inseparable from human perception. If anything means something, it means it to/for someone. Take away that association and the meaning does not exist.
I'm not sure about this--though of course in a theistic cosmology, there would always be a Someone to perceive meaning.
Certainly as far as I am concerned, the existence of a "real morality" means something that would exist whether or not there are any sapient beings around to perceive it, just as the laws of logic, mathematics, physics, etc. would exist.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
That makes no sense - there is only morality because we have choice, by virtue of being Homo Sapiens. Apples and all that.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
That makes no sense - there is only morality because we have choice, by virtue of being Homo Sapiens. Apples and all that.
I don't understand.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
...
Certainly as far as I am concerned, the existence of a "real morality" means something that would exist whether or not there are any sapient beings around to perceive it, just as the laws of logic, mathematics, physics, etc. would exist.
whether or not there are sapient beings - morality is a choice of right/wrong - a stone can't make a choice. It just rolls. A mouse has no morality as such - it just does what mice do. We seem to be different - we can choose good or evil.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
...
Certainly as far as I am concerned, the existence of a "real morality" means something that would exist whether or not there are any sapient beings around to perceive it, just as the laws of logic, mathematics, physics, etc. would exist.
whether or not there are sapient beings - morality is a choice of right/wrong - a stone can't make a choice. It just rolls. A mouse has no morality as such - it just does what mice do. We seem to be different - we can choose good or evil.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
A key feature of meaning is that whatever kind of reality we want to classify it as, it is inseparable from human perception.
Since creativity is inseparable from meaning, if we define God as creator of the universe, and therefore see God as creativity itself, it follows that God is also meaning itself. Therefore, meaning is separable from human perception since much of the universe is not perceived by humans yet is still by definition created by God.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Data-processing? That covers all living organisms, I think. Look at the waggle dance of the honey bee, which communicates a ton of information about food sources. It's symbolic communication, it seems to me. The individual forager bee has been able to process all the data about the food he has found, and then he can communicate it to the other bees, who can process that.
I am dubious about data processing as a metaphor here. In part because I don't think that turning a series of inputs into a series of outputs does have any meaning without the ability to interact with the source of the input. If one doesn't have the ability to make decisions one doesn't even have symbolic meaning.
Another, perhaps related, problem with black box computers understanding meaning is that the input is purely formal: for any given input there are an infinite number of equivalent problems which could give rise to that input. Yet meaning seems to have to do with the differences between problems.
Yet even decision making is not enough - art is all about meaning, about symbolic meaning, and I think also gesturing at some aspect of the meaning of life, yet art is only distantly connected to decision making.
Certainly someone lying awake at night worrying about the meaning of life is not worrying about how to process data.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
Is that helpful? (He said, hopefully.)
No, it isn't. It's the same problem we had on the other thread. When you talk about "basic essence", you are talking about something that is coherent only if we take as true your particular metaphysical baggage that "essence" is some reified entity we can talk of independently of the context in which it occurs in the natural world.
In the case of the dog there are, within the materialist paradigm, various levels of explanation we can work in, the psychological, biological, bio-chemical, physical etc. If you insist the essence of dog is something outside of the physical dog, all you are doing is asserting that your metaphysical view is correct, you are saying nothing at all about dogs in the materialist paradigm.
What you are doing is equivalent to a particular sort of atheist repeating over and over that your sky pixie doesn't exist.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ChastMastr:
Certainly as far as I am concerned, the existence of a "real morality" means something that would exist whether or not there are any sapient beings around to perceive it, just as the laws of logic, mathematics, physics, etc. would exist.
I think we're using "real" in different ways. Your concept seems to be what I think of as ultimate reality but as you imagine it. Anything you cannot relate to that monolithic reality is for you simply not real. If you like, it seems to be a single canvas on which something is either drawn ("real") or not ("made up").
That doesn't allow for what seem to me all the valid contexts where "reality" makes sense. For example, feelings. Are feelings real? I would say so. Mine are real to me. If I express them they seem to be understood as real by someone who cares. This holds irrespective of whether those feelings have any ultimate reality (which I would say is unknowable).
To match what "real" means in the english language, its use cannot be represented on a single canvas. I think it needs three: subjective, objective and ultimate. We can then think and talk about "how things are" (reality) on each canvas, provided we recognise that the scope of the sense we make is limited to that particular canvas.
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:
Is that helpful? (He said, hopefully.)
No, it isn't. It's the same problem we had on the other thread. When you talk about "basic essence", you are talking about something that is coherent only if we take as true your particular metaphysical baggage that "essence" is some reified entity we can talk of independently of the context in which it occurs in the natural world.
In the case of the dog there are, within the materialist paradigm, various levels of explanation we can work in, the psychological, biological, bio-chemical, physical etc. If you insist the essence of dog is something outside of the physical dog, all you are doing is asserting that your metaphysical view is correct, you are saying nothing at all about dogs in the materialist paradigm.
What you are doing is equivalent to a particular sort of atheist repeating over and over that your sky pixie doesn't exist.
Terms like 'essence' also seem like private language to me; I think they are OK in that respect, as when someone says, 'that movement expresses the essence of you somehow'.
But there seem to be no limits on this, or there are no constraints, because they are subjective.
I see this as a fundamental conflict going on in these discussions, since we seem to have private or at least very subjective meanings, and then more standard ones.
I don't see how the subjective meanings are to be grounded, although I suppose Christians will say in scripture and tradition, and so on. But that still seems like a private language to me, which rests on a kind of circularity.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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Dave Marshall
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# 7533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Since creativity is inseparable from meaning
What makes you think that? I'm suggesting that meaning is uniquely associated with human-like being.
But continuing:
quote:
if we define God as creator of the universe
Yes, that would work for me.
quote:
and therefore see God as creativity itself
No, doesn't follow. God creates =/= God is creativity.
God simply as "creator of the universe" has no context for the meaning that "created creators" may find in their contexts.
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:
Is that helpful? (He said, hopefully.)
No, it isn't. It's the same problem we had on the other thread. When you talk about "basic essence", you are talking about something that is coherent only if we take as true your particular metaphysical baggage that "essence" is some reified entity we can talk of independently of the context in which it occurs in the natural world.
In the case of the dog there are, within the materialist paradigm, various levels of explanation we can work in, the psychological, biological, bio-chemical, physical etc. If you insist the essence of dog is something outside of the physical dog, all you are doing is asserting that your metaphysical view is correct, you are saying nothing at all about dogs in the materialist paradigm.
What you are doing is equivalent to a particular sort of atheist repeating over and over that your sky pixie doesn't exist.
Except without the snark of "sky pixie" I hope. I would not want to do the theist equivalent of that. God knows (no pun intended) there are enough horrible co-religionists I have to distinguish myself from every time I mention being a Christian.
Well, let me try this another way:
If you held what you perceive as my beliefs, how would you put it re essence etc.?
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
No, doesn't follow. God creates =/= God is creativity.
I agree, wholly, not partial
Here with this statement of Dave Marshall.
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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ChastMastr
Shipmate
# 716
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Posted
As a total side note about dogs and ... the sort of concepts I operate with... which will probably make people think I'm insane...
It helps if you imagine this being said aloud in the voice and mannerisms of Pinkie Pie.
Am I the only one who wonders about whether dogs, when reborn in the New Creation, will be like they were on Earth or whether they will be more like their wolf ancestors? On the one hand, the various types of dog-kind were what they were like on Earth before, but on the other, they were essentially bred that way from wolves and often (alas) the dog breeds have some pretty poor genetic problems from being bred to be a certain shape, etc. I feel sorry for the ones who have predispositions to various illnesses--cats too--and who could never survive in the wild on their own because they're just too weak because of being bred to be the size of a large rat and carried like an accessory.
On the other other hand, I am sure they will be happy and be what they are meant to be. Perhaps they will still be wee chihuahuas but with the powers of Krypto or something, I don't know. Maybe they'll be like giant dire wolves (just, you know, friendly and lying down with the lambs, or whatever lambs turn out to be Platonically when risen and fulfilling ectypally their perfect archetypal nature, though of course with different kinds of perfection they needn't be identical or anything like that, maybe more like a tree having different branches, or perhaps all of organic life is like that and it will be something we can't conceive now, I hope we get to see dinosaurs, don't you? By the way I was talking with Rarity the other day and she said that I go on too much when people aren't listening oh look a froggie!
I think I should go put away groceries now. I ate breakfast at 6 PM today! ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity
Posts: 14068 | From: Clearwater, Florida | Registered: Jul 2001
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Dave Marshall: No, doesn't follow. God creates =/= God is creativity.
You're right that it doesn't follow logically. Still, I believe it to be true.
quote:
ChastMastr: Am I the only one who wonders about whether dogs, when reborn in the New Creation, will be like they were on Earth or whether they will be more like their wolf ancestors?
There's a scenario that says that in the Afterlife we will become our True Inner Selves™, that what we always wanted to be. I'm convinced that my dog has an Inner Wolf hidden somewhere.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
I am dubious about data processing as a metaphor here. In part because I don't think that turning a series of inputs into a series of outputs does have any meaning without the ability to interact with the source of the input.
We do interact with the input. With our senses. We can think of the stimulus-response of simple life forms as being at one end of a continuum that is meaning. The amoeba senses chemicals towards or away from which it needs to move, it also moves towards and away from light. There is proto-meaning here. In an unconscious chemical way, to an amoeba light "means" move towards it. There is a boundary between the amoeba and the outside world, and there is a very primitive isomorphism between aspects of the outside world and processes within the amoeba. That relationship is where meaning lies. Going to higher levels of complexity it gets more complicated, of course, but the principle is the same. Sensory information has meaning in this sense. A large part of our brain is devoted to processing sensory information. That processing is not just a matter of transferring, say, an image to our internal screen, it's a matter of interpretation. And you can't have interpretation without meaning. In the higher cognitive functions you are talking about here, the interactivity is with our memory.
It seems to me that if you insist that higher cognitive functions require some special metaphysical phlogiston, it follows that it's required for the lower functions, too, including, in EE's words, bile, puke and excrement, as well as the more lofty things like philosophy, art and music. Amoebas will need it every bit as much as Mozarts, Popes and naked mole rats.
I know the panentheists out there will say, well yeah, that phlogiston is God, and it is indeed consistent with that understanding. But that's a metaphysical choice we make, panentheism is not falsifiable, but to me it is an explanation in need of a purpose. I'm with Laplace in having no need for that hypothesis. Yet, at any rate.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
You are conflating personal beliefs with science
Science says - we work within the limits of what can be proven, but that may not include everything that exists. Sciencism (the religion of science) says - if science cannot go there, it doesn't exist.
The two are very different statements. The first recognises that there are some areas that will never be open to the scientific method. The second assumes that the scientific method - in fact, more or less Aristotle's system of investigation - is a definition of what does or does not exist. The excluded middle (True/False and no other possibility) applied dogmatically leaves all scientific work open to the possibility that the wrong question may have been asked, or the right question with the wrong a priori assumptions.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Dave Marshall
Shipmate
# 7533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dave Marshall:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Since creativity is inseparable from meaning
What makes you think that?
On second thoughts, I see what you mean. That's a connection I hadn't made. To find meaning is a creative process.
quote:
Originally posted by LeRoc:
You're right that [God creates implies God is creativity] doesn't follow logically. Still, I believe it to be true.
I would have agreed at one point. If we only want to create a consistent metaphysical model of reality then God = creativity works. But there is no need to limit God in that way as long as we don't add unnecessary attributes, for example in the way traditional Christianity has with personhood.
For a model that is compatible with the Christian tradition I think we need to allow for God to be more than creativity should additional attributes turn out to make sense.
Posts: 4763 | From: Derbyshire Dales | Registered: Jun 2004
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Grokesx wrote:
It seems to me that if you insist that higher cognitive functions require some special metaphysical phlogiston, it follows that it's required for the lower functions, too, including, in EE's words, bile, puke and excrement, as well as the more lofty things like philosophy, art and music. Amoebas will need it every bit as much as Mozarts, Popes and naked mole rats.
Yes, my first suggestion, that bacteria process data, and communicate with each other, is not intended to say that this is the same as human linguistic meaning. But it seems reasonable to me to say that it might have led to it, via evolution.
And of course, we can point to the primates, and other animals, who show cooperation, empathy, and so on, and who also communicate with each other.
Thus, we could argue for a proto-semantics and a proto-morality in various living organisms.
I don't know whether some theists are saying that there is an unbridgeable gulf between animal communication and morality, and the human equivalents, which must be filled in by the phlogiston. But how will this be defined and demonstrated?
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Grokesx
Shipmate
# 17221
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Posted
quote:
Quetz wrote:
Yes, my first suggestion, that bacteria process data, and communicate with each other, is not intended to say that this is the same as human linguistic meaning. But it seems reasonable to me to say that it might have led to it, via evolution.
Exactly. That's how I interpreted it and I agree wholeheartedly.
quote:
Itsarumdo wrote:
You are conflating personal beliefs with science
No I'm not. I am outlining how, in a materialist, or more correctly, naturalist, paradigm, meaning, as in semantics, could - and in my opinion, did - come into being. The science, such as it is - I'm no biologist - is there because it is relevant to talk in those terms on a topic about meaning in a materialist universe.
quote:
Science says - we work within the limits of what can be proven, but that may not include everything that exists. Sciencism (the religion of science) says - if science cannot go there, it doesn't exist.
The two are very different statements. The first recognises that there are some areas that will never be open to the scientific method.
I don't really care what you believe science does or does not say. It actually says nothing at all, since it is a practical activity that human beings do to systematically study the natural world. What you seem to be saying is that there are some areas you don't believe are open to the scientific method, and that you know what they are. You may be right about the former, I'm doubtful about the latter.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Posts: 373 | From: Derby, UK | Registered: Jul 2012
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Grokesx:
quote:
Do you have some ultra-Derridean objection to attributing quotations? Is it that you think everything is text and there's nothing outside text and therefore you don't do anything so metaphysical as attribute text to speakers?
quote:
We do interact with the input. With our senses.
Are you being willfully obtuse?
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Yes, my first suggestion, that bacteria process data, and communicate with each other, is not intended to say that this is the same as human linguistic meaning.
Bacteria process data is a metaphor. Computers literally process data. When you say bacteria process data you are using a metaphor drawn from computing. And there are disanalogies between bacteria and computers. Grokesk acknowledged as much, although he misunderstood my point, and therefore evaded having to concede it.
quote:
But it seems reasonable to me to say that it might have led to it, via evolution.
Certainly there must be continuities between the prelinguistic stage and the linguistic stage. (Even the most Cartesian dualist has to concede that babies are pre-linguistic.) It doesn't do to pretend that there's no continuities between bacteria and humans. But at the same time, it doesn't do to deny that the linguistic dimension is genuinely a new dimension.
quote:
I don't know whether some theists are saying that there is an unbridgeable gulf between animal communication and morality, and the human equivalents, which must be filled in by the phlogiston. But how will this be defined and demonstrated?
I don't know whether some atheists are saying that there's nothing more to human cognition that simply manipulating strings of digits.
I don't know whether this 'I don't know whether some' formulation is simply a passive-aggressive way of imputing a straw man. But it does give that impression.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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