Come on, Banno. You know you have to do better than that. 5 words? Fucking Australians. There's a good chance the moderators will delete your post, with good reason.
Language is not the same as communication. It's is a medium of communication. So, what is communication? It is moving information from one head to another. Rather, moving experience from one mind to another.
Yeah, I don't agree. Communication has information at one end and more or less the same information at the other end. Language, on the other hand, builds or constructs or sets up information.
Perhaps, you not being a native speaker of English, I am explaining to you how to make use of "It's raining".
But if I was a native english speaker it would be redundant and what you mean by "explaining to me how to make use" is explaining what the auditory symbols refer to, which arent just other sounds, but the actual thing you're taking about.
Language, on the other hand, builds or constructs or sets up information.
Perhaps in the land of Oz, but I've never seen language build, construct, or set up a damn thing. "English and Swahili are languages." They do not sow, neither do they reap. They are employed but do not get paid.
So I would agree that "Language is not moving information from one head to another." Communication that is sent and received moves information from one head to another, and it may not involve English or Swahili. Old lady elementary school teachers are quite good at transmitting information without language. They have a look which says, "You'd fucking better stop doing that in the next three seconds or I will make you very unhappy." My elderly elementary school teacher sister uses those expressions at family gatherings to convey various disapproving communications to her siblings (usually) or sometimes her (or other people's) children or grandchildren.
Every year it works less and less. Her siblings give her the "fuck you" smile.
English and Swahili are both sets of sounds or ink-bits on paper which have been assigned meanings and uses. Language is a repository constructed by bright apes over many years. We learn it, then we deploy it. If we do it well, those familiar with the language will interpret the sounds or the ink bits and will probably interpret what they heard or read reasonably accurately.
So, Banno, will you bare it all for our edification?
Well, "moved" would be the wrong word. The information is still in your head. It didn't leave your head and get moved to the listener. "Copied" is the proper term to use. Information about how to use certain sounds is copied from one head to another.
And you still haven't explained what you mean by "use" as in "using words". Do you mean just making sounds with your mouth, or do you mean referring to states-of-affairs that aren't sounds from your mouth with sounds from your mouth?
I often wondered: why do people enjoy arguing with obvious morons? Morons are incorrigible, and all arguments to give them insight fail. What's the point?
The discussion in this thread is not at the peak level of philosophical discourse which might be hoped for, but I don't think it deserves the sort of pointless, insulting, self-aggrandizing criticism you have provided. If you don't like a comment or thread, you are not obligated to respond to it. I suggest you consider that approach in the future unless you have something substantive to contribute.
The problem with the OP is that it is all information, so you can't escape receiving information via the senses. Words are just different kinds of visual scribbles or sounds, which means that language is just a kind of information provided by your senses' interaction with the environment.
Ah. That language is a subset of information transfer.
It's a tempting notion. And to some extent is doubtless right.
Wittgenstein observes that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not found in stating it, but in following it. Is the information in a rule is given in the stating of that rule? If so, then since the enacting of a rule is so much more than the mere stating of that rule, the enacting that occurs in language is more than the mere information conveyed.
So even if language were a subset of information transfer, it is so much more!
Consider a transaction in which "slab" results in the apprentice bringing the slab. So much more is involved than just the transfer of information...
What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location?
Does information have a spatiotemporal location? We often say a file is moved from one computer to another. It might be uploaded, downloaded, synched to the cloud or what not.
We could say any instance of some piece of digital information, such as your banking number, is on a particular machine. But is it on the hard drive, in memory, inside the processor cache? Do the bytes that make up the file reside on one location, or in various ones that change as the operating system or whatever program moves bits around?
Or what if we just think in general about the capital of Australia. Does that information reside on Earth?
No, information does not travel through the air. If it did we’d know every language just by hearing it. First we must have the tools to decipher the language. We know the meaning by learning the meaning.
No, information does not travel through the air. If it did we’d know every language just by hearing it. First we must have the tools to decipher the language. We know the meaning by learning the meaning.
Radio and microwaves travel through the air transmitting a boatload of information from satellites, radios and cell towers.
I have in mind the sort of acts Austin wrote about in Speech Acts. So while asking of the salt does not move the salt, it does cause the salt to be moved.
The second person gives information to the first person, who thereafter knows where the library is. This is done via language. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Reply to Banno I think we want to resist having information scattered all over th environment because that would appear to be either behaviorism or panpsychism.
Metaphysician UndercoverJune 30, 2019 at 10:37#3023940 likes
Reply to frank
What's wrong with that? The detective goes looking for clues, relevant information.
Terrapin StationJune 30, 2019 at 10:42#3023960 likes
What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location? — creativesoul
Yeah - Terrapin Station?
I have to read through the thread in detail--I might be missing context I need here, but there would be [s]two[/s] three senses to talk about:
One, relative position. The position of my brain can change relative to my desk, for example. So definitely if we're talking about meaning, for example, that can move in terms of relative position.
Two, whether some phenomenon (in the general occurrence/event/thing sense) can be passed from one object to another in some sense.
In some cases it can. For example, vibrations in one object--a guitar string, say, can in a sense be transferred to another object--such as a guitar's scoreboard, and then whether that can be transferred to a microphone or to other amplification, etc. (even though that's not an "exact" transfer, it's close enough and it makes sense to say that the vibrations were passed from one object to another).
It other cases it can't. For example, the heat resistance properties of hafnium carbide can't be transferred to chlorine trifluoride.
So, it depends on the properties we're talking about, the materials in question, and just what's possible, process-wise, in terms of transference.
And actually I suppose I should say that a third sense is that of transferring, say, a baseball from one person to another. That's really just a relative positional change of the baseball, but it might be worth making a third sense for this type of motion since it's a transference in a way that simple positional change is not, but at the same time it's also not transference in the sense of something like sympathetic resonance (the guitar example).
When we're talking about meaning, that's a property of brains that can't be transferred to soundwaves, gestures, marks on paper, etc. Of course, in a very ontologically loose manner of speaking we say things like "I get your meaning, man," but what's really going on there is not a literal transfer of properties or processes.
What's wrong with that? The detective goes looking for clues, relevant information.
It reveals the ontological confusion underneath the OP. Behaviorism has been rejected for the most part, while science doesn't even have the conceptual tools to consider panpsychism.
Metaphysician UndercoverJune 30, 2019 at 11:30#3024050 likes
Reply to frank
I don't see how "having information scattered all over the environment", which appears to me to be an accurate description, (imagine if you could see microwaves, the pollution! - out of sight, out of mind), leads to behaviourism, or panpsychism. That's quite the stretch.
It's the "information in the head" situation. We located it there because we didn't want knowing to be an activity that's smeared across the universe. Too mind-of-Goddish.
Language is a code used for intrinsic and extrinsic mental communication (data encoding, messaging, and decoding).
Intrinsic Mental Communication: communication within a mind.
Extrinsic Mental Communication: communication between minds.
Information is the result of communication.
Information is the relationship between cause and effect. Effects carry information about their causes. You are not only informed what someone is saying, but informed that someone is saying something - that language is being used. How do you know that language is being used if you aren't informed language is being used? Seeing and hearing words is informing you that someone is using language because that is the cause of you hearing and seeing sounds and scribbles.
The mind is nothing but information as an effect of the interaction between your body and the world.
What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location?
Like I said earlier, the information isn't being moved, it is being copied. The information doesn't leave your head and arrive at another. It now exists in two places thanks to language use. So this whole idea that the OP is based on is wrong.
'Information transfer' is one way we do things with words
Think there's information transfer without words though, smoke indicates fire. A spider detects flies in webs through vibrations. Indicators are older than language.
There's probably a useful paradigm of thought somewhere that treats human language as a capacity which has evolved to symbolically attend or affect differences; transmission of information requires information to encode. Whether this is a continuous refinement of language abilities of human 'precursors' or whether human language is a discrete break from the tradition of language through the development of recursive grammars (or some other on-off property) matters less than the rootedness of 'information transfer' language capacities in the presence of information rich patterns in the world.
There is probably also a recursive component to the evolution of information transfer here, the current linguistic community's expressive capacity (what they can do with language) is likely to be something that is adaptive (or a favourable trait) for an ecological constraint.
Wittgenstein observes that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not found in stating it, but in following it. Is the information in a rule is given in the stating of that rule?
Information isn't in a rule. Rules are information.
I am informed of many things just by using my eyes and ears, not just what people are saying, but that they are saying something. If I am to understand what someone is saying I have to know that they are saying something - that they are using language in the first place. Language use is just a part of that information that makes up my mind, not the other way around.
Does information mean anything without a decipherer?
Perhaps not, but does this question have any bearing on whether language can move information from one head to the other? I gave a pretty clear example of that.
When someone is speaking (or has written) to me, I hear (or see) words (which are associated with concepts that have meaning). This is extrinsic mental communication (communication between minds), which first requires inorganic (then organic) data encoding, messaging (transmission, conveyance, and reception), and decoding; and finally, requires semantic data decoding.
Since the OP concerns human language (code consisting of a set of words having paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, hence; semantic content), it concerns all these types of information.
The second person gives information to the first person, who thereafter knows where the library is. This is done via language. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
PA
But if the second person “gives information” in a language that the first person doesn’t understand, no information is received. Only sounds/symbols/marks on paper are given. The receiver depends on his own knowledge, not information embedded in speech, to understand it.
Language is not moving information from one head to another. It's doing things with words.
That is more or less Maturana's position on 'languaging', which rejects the concept 'information' as a requirement for 'cognition'.
http://www.enolagaia.com/M78BoL.html
What sort of things can be moved? How about all of the things that have a spatiotemporal location?
— creativesoul
Does information have a spatiotemporal location?
No, and that's precisely the problem with such talk.
We often say a file is moved from one computer to another. It might be uploaded, downloaded, synched to the cloud or what not.
Yup. People talk like that all the time... as if the file is equivalent to information and can be moved in it's entirety, like a cup, from the cupboard onto the table. It cannot. The file consists of marks/symbols/commands/coding/etc. It does not consist of information. The file is but one part of information.
We could say any instance of some piece of digital information, such as your banking number, is on a particular machine. But is it on the hard drive, in memory, inside the processor cache? Do the bytes that make up the file reside on one location, or in various ones that change as the operating system or whatever program moves bits around?
All good questions. The banking number is a piece of something more. That something more is information. Are the bytes equivalent to the information that they are a part of? Is the number?
But if the second person “gives information” in a language that the first person doesn’t understand, no information is received. Only sounds/symbols/marks on paper are given. The receiver depends on his own knowledge, not information embedded in speech, to understand it.
3h
Indeed, I wouldn't want to deny any of these sensible points. The receiver has to have some background knowledge in order to interpret the noises of the speaker. I only insist that, given that the receiver has this knowledge, he can gain new information from the speaker via language. E.g, if speaker knows where the library is then he can give receiver this information so long as receiver speaks the same language, understands the concept of a street, etc.
And information can be understood as Shannon entropy...
Well, that brings up the question of whether information exists independent of minds, and minds are just acting on the information already there in the environment, because that's why minds/bodies could successfully evolve.
Alternatively, minds generate the information when interacting with the environment based on what is useful to those minds. If information is a subset of language games, which themselves are made up, then information doesn't exist without language users?
Well, that brings up the question of whether information exists independent of minds, and minds are just acting on the information already there in the environment, because that's why minds/bodies could successfully evolve.
Alternatively, minds generate the information when interacting with the environment based on what is useful to those minds. If information is a subset of language games, which themselves are made up, then information doesn't exist without language users?
This is exactly the debate I had earlier in the Wittgenstein thread. Neo-Pythagorean types might argue that our epistemological capacities MUST find patterns, as the patterns themselves allowed for survival and evolution proceed successfully.
I read an article a number of years ago that when we transmit a signal, to some degree the two things have to be touching at some point (even in a vacuum the light has move across space and collide with the antenna or antenna like object), as sound travels through matter. (light as you know travels best through a vacuum). Language is defiinitely alot of things but it certainly very often involves moving information from one person to another person. If there is no gods or God then yes, perhaps we should just smoke crack all day and keep our mouths shut. lol.
When we're talking about meaning, that's a property of brains that can't be transferred to soundwaves, gestures, marks on paper, etc. Of course, in a very ontologically loose manner of speaking we say things like "I get your meaning, man," but what's really going on there is not a literal transfer of properties or processes.
So it seems from this that you agree with the title of this thread?
So it seems from this that you agree with the title of this thread?
It would depend on the definition of "information" that we're using. That word tends to be used in a lot of different senses--including simply denoting "data," or alternately "knowledge"--all sorts of things; those are just two examples. So I'm never sure what someone has in mind with it unless they specify a definition.
When we're talking about meaning, that's a property of brains that can't be transferred to soundwaves, gestures, marks on paper, etc. Of course, in a very ontologically loose manner of speaking we say things like "I get your meaning, man," but what's really going on there is not a literal transfer of properties or processes.
Thats actually not entirely true. When radar scientists or certain types of communication engineers study "noise" and signal they can differentiate the two by whether they have patterns. Typically the more of a pattern something has then the more likely that it is not "noise" and that it is signal. I think i kind of know what you are getting at though. Life sucks so bad, why tell people that claim to be ethical that they have valid points (signal versus noise).
The best articulated definition comes from information theory. And in a way this thread is about how such information becomes meaningful.
I think you might be interested in studying signal processing, and also do a google or bing search on the differences between different sound files (mp3 and wave or cd files) as well as analog record players.
The best articulated definition comes from information theory.
Didn't Shannon not really define the term? I'm not sure about that. It's been awhile since I read any of that stuff, but I seem to remember the term not really being defined.
At any rate, I'd say that we can transfer data, but obviously I'd not say that we can literally transfer meaning.
Why study that stuff mentioned in the previous post? Because when information is important to an individual (some religions say information is not in every case beneficial) that more information or the pursuit of more information shows dedication to the pursuit of truth. Those topics are very pertinent to your OP.
Reply to christian2017 I doubt that. You made the assumption that I, and others involved in the discussion, did not have at least a basic grasp of information theory, despite it having a prominent place in the discussion.
I didn't say this earlier because you were nice at the time. Your OP was extremely short and extremely lacking. This is an online forum, don't assume anyone is worthy based on what they write on it. This is a place for ideas not judging someones value. It would help if you studied math as the years progress. I was mediocre at math when i was young but i've gotten pretty good at it as i've gotten older. IQ can improve greatly with age until you get really old in which case thats the case for just about everybody.
If you want to say my posts are short perhaps you should make your posts longer.
I agree.
The former is semantic information, and the latter is physical (specifically, first inorganic, then organic) information.
It seems to me that inorganic sensory information processing systems can process semantic information as well as physical information. For me there is no difference other than the causal relationships that result in information. Minds are just as much a transmitter (a cause) of information as a receiver (an effect), and simply attend to the information that is useful in the moment.
I have said that "Information is the result of communication." Specifically, information is a decoded message.
Information exists everywhere that we either attend or ignore depending on the present goal in the mind. If we arent ignoring information, what are we ignoring? There are both useful and useless information, not that usefulness makes information. The ignored information might be useful for some other goal.
Information isnt created from usefulness. Information is useful or not depending upon the present goal. Minds parse existent information to achieve goals.
...information does not have meaning until it does work.
Then its meaning and not information that gets copied to other heads via language use? You still haven't addressed the issue of moving information versus copying it. Can meaning be copied?
"George Washington is the first president of the United States." is information that has no meaning until it is used to do some work?
It seems to me that the above statement is meaningful and information as a result of the state of affairs of George Washington actually having been the first president, not because someone made the statement.
Language is not moving information from one head to another.
Information is pervasive, not confined to words. Words, if they work, activate informed responses. In ordinary language this is called 'conveying information'; which is a 'movement' metaphor; don't take it literally and the problem dissolves.
..information does not have meaning until it does work.
Per NASA, in the last 35 years, the amount of the earth's surface covered in leaves has increased by about twice the area of Australia. This is due to an increase in atmospheric CO2.
What work does this information have to do in order to become meaningful?
@Banno Doesn't making language about what we do in this way leave us vulnerable to the maundering, marauding post-truth postmodernists? Is there no fact of the matter? I'm told such and such happened on such and such a date - but really all that's happening is someone else is doing something with language to me?
It's the "information in the head" situation. We located it there because we didn't want knowing to be an activity that's smeared across the universe. Too mind-of-Goddish.
You know there's a difference between information and knowledge, don't you? That there is information all over the universe does not mean that there is knowledge all over the universe. I seek information so that I can have knowledge. When I find the information which I am looking for, it does not go into my head and become knowledge. Other people can find the same information which I find, and produce their own knowledge which is not the same as my knowledge, based on that same information. Clearly the information does not go into my head, if others have equal access to it. How could the same information go into all those different heads at the same time?
Or Harry's inability to see when a question has been answered...
I didn't catch the answers to my questions from the first page. When you answered, were you "using language" without communicating? If so, did you really use language?
So ... knowledge is when words are used to put information to work?
Knowledge is semantic information, which may be empirical (based on experience, such as tacit/implicit or declarative/explicit knowledge), or pure (based on metacognition).
Language is formal (not material, efficient, or final) cause.
Shannon's equation quantifies information, which he defined as the reduction of uncertainty.
This definition of "information" just begs the question. Certainty is subjective (of the subject), so a change to the degree of certainty, "information", must also be subjective. How can we account for any naturally occurring information with a definition like that?
It would depend on the definition of "information" that we're using. That word tends to be used in a lot of different senses--including simply denoting "data," or alternately "knowledge"--all sorts of things; those are just two examples. So I'm never sure what someone has in mind with it unless they specify a definition.
So language is copying something from one mind to another and we're simply disagreeing on the term used for that something. In other words, we agree that something is copied and we arent talking past each other. We are just using different terms? Are we copying information, meaning, knowledge or what? What if someone claims that all three are the same thing?
If none of that is the case then what happens when language is used? What kind of work is done?
So language is copying something from one mind to another and we're simply disagreeing on the term used for that something. In other words, we agree that something is copied and we arent talking past each other. We are just using different terms? Are we copying information, meaning, knowledge or what? What if someone claims that all three are the same thing?
If none of that is the case then what happens when language is used? What kind of work is done?
What a strange idea in my opinion--that language amounts to "copying" something from one mind to another.
What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that individuals assign meanings to the observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, where the "game" is to do that in a way that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behavior, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
Per NASA, in the last 35 years, the amount of the earth's surface covered in leaves has increased by about twice the area of Australia. This is due to an increase in atmospheric CO2.
This is good. Proper analytic stuff.
My posit is that meaning is information doing work. Frank's comeback is that if this were so, then every meaningful utterance ought have a use; but here is a meaningful statement from NASA that is useless...
What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that individuals assign meanings to the observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, where the "game" is to do that in a way that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behavior, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
This is pretty close to what I would say, except for the notion that meaning is assigned to the parts of language.
The implication of that would be that there is somehow meaning apart from its expression.
And I can't make sense of that. (@creativesoul and thought/belief)
Paraphrasing... What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that folk use observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, in a "game" that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behaviour, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
The big difference here is that meaning is found in the actions of the interlocutors, not in private languages.
Meanign is not private, but what we do together when we do things with words.
So you think my suggestions would lead to some form of relativism?
Not necessarily. I mean that if you're doing away with 'moving information from one head to another' then, though you've improved our understanding of salt-passing, you have an explanatory vacuum for language use like e.g. a teacher telling a student 'Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941'. If that's not information-passing, we need an alternate characterization.
Reply to csalisbury I put this, a similar point, to Banno earlier and received no response:
Information is pervasive, not confined to words. Words, if they work, activate informed responses. In ordinary language this is called 'conveying information'; which is a 'movement' metaphor; don't take it literally and the problem dissolves.
Too deflationary of the concerns motivating his thread perhaps?
What work does this information have to do in order to become meaningful?
— frank
Well, it might serve as an example in a philosophical discussion...
Or it might lead to action to reduce carbon emissions.
It probably won't inspire anybody to reduce carbon emissions. CO2 increases plant growth. We're dependent on plants, so.
But as for an example in a discussion, that would imply:
1. It was meaningless to me before I brought it up in discussion.
2. A person can't know something that's meaningless.
C. Therefore, I didn't know it before I brought it up.
So I brought up some facts that I didn't know prior to bringing them up.
I put this, a similar point, to Banno earlier and received no response:
Information is pervasive, not confined to words. Words, if they work, activate informed responses. In ordinary language this is called 'conveying information'; which is a 'movement' metaphor; don't take it literally and the problem dissolves.
Too deflationary of the concerns motivating his thread perhaps?
Perhaps, yeah. The correct title would be 'not *all of language* is moving information.' @StreetlightX already solved the problem in a very short post. Information-passing is a subset of language use.
I don't quite understand the thread. I mean, I get the idea [Wittgenstein, slabs, Austin, performativity etc] but I'm not sure what the occasion is. Haven't @Banno & others gone over this near a million times before? Wittgenstein's notion of language games is one of the most recycled themes on this forum (and its predecessor.) It's as though a resident Kantian, after years of involved forum discussion, posted a thread named 'the ethical is categorical'.
Maybe the op is an implicit response to some skirmish somewhere else that I missed.
What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that individuals assign meanings to the observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, where the "game" is to do that in a way that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behavior, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
— Terrapin Station
This is pretty close to what I would say, except for the notion that meaning is assigned to the parts of language.
The implication of that would be that there is somehow meaning apart from its expression.
And I can't make sense of that. (@creativesoul and thought/belief)
Linguistic meaning includes it's expression(how the language is used). There is no separation without loss. While the attribution of meaning can happen without(prior to) language, and thus without it's being expressed, such attribution of meaning is irrelevant here.
Here's what troublesome to me... aside from the talk of moving something that does not have a spatiotemporal location...
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
All information is already meaningful. All attribution of meaning(and thus all meaning) requires a creature capable of making connections(drawing correlations) between different things. So too does information.
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place...
Paraphrasing... What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that folk use observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, in a "game" that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behaviour, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
The big difference here is that meaning is found in the actions of the interlocutors, not in private languages.
Meanign is not private, but what we do together when we do things with words.
Some linguistic meaning, that is...
Witt began pursuing this vein. Enlarging the scope of observation to include not only the vocalization and/or written expressions, but also the accompanying actual behaviours during the utterance(speech act).
The Speech Act Theorists picked it up and carried it a little farther. They expanded upon the meaning in terms of force. There's much to be liked about Austin to this regard(expanding our considerations regarding how meaning is attributed).
Meaning is shared solely by virtue of a plurality of capable creatures drawing correlations between the same sort of things. The smashing of the bottle on the surface of the ship amidst it's christening.
Using a copy metaphor(copying information is copying meaning) is unhelpful here. The sender cannot copy themselves, and they are an elemental part of the correlations drawn between the marks and other things.
Communication of information- as Banno implied earlier - has the same meaning on both ends.
Communication of information is shared meaning. It's what happens when two people draw the same correlations between language use and something else. Miscommunication happens when the correlations between the language use and something else is different regarding the something else. That's how and why the same words can mean very different things to different people.
Situating meaningful information anywhere along the spatiotemporal line of evolutionary progression in a place/time preceding initial/original thought/belief formation presupposes meaning prior to thought/belief.
Here, as earlier, a conflation between causality and meaning will ensue.
Knowing that it is feeding time doesn't require some sort of rule following either.
Drawing a correlation between directly perceptible things, such as the act of touching fire and the ensuing pain, requires neither following rules nor common language. That correlation is belief that touching fire caused the pain. That is nothing less than the attribution/recognition of causality. Expectation ensues.
Drawing correlations between directly perceptible things such as myself, the food container, the odor of the food, and the sound of the container lid being opened, etc., results in expecting to eat. The expectation that results is clearly put on display for all to see each and every time those correlations are drawn - once again - between the same things.
Both are well-grounded true belief. Both are meaningful to the creature. Both presuppose their own correspondence to what's happened/happening.
Neither requires language use, predication, or propositional content. Our report requires all of these. Neither requires my report.
Terrapin StationJuly 02, 2019 at 08:42#3030550 likes
If you take thinking about the actions of the interlocutors out of the picture, how would you say that meaning arises? In other words, how do those actions denote or connote anything, how do they achieve any semantic associations, if we remove thought from the scenario?
Well, yes I did, since in that meaning is what is done with information, meaning is not the sort of thing that moves...
Question: What is done with information? Answer: Meaning.
How is that a coherent answer to that question? Does meaning move information? What does that mean? Notice that I am informing you with my question - that I don't have information and that I am requesting it. Are questions meaningful, or informative in your mind?
Per NASA, in the last 35 years, the amount of the earth's surface covered in leaves has increased by about twice the area of Australia. This is due to an increase in atmospheric CO2.
— frank
This is good. Proper analytic stuff.
My posit is that meaning is information doing work. Frank's comeback is that if this were so, then every meaningful utterance ought have a use; but here is a meaningful statement from NASA that is useless...
It is only useless to the present goal in your head. If your goal was to understand environmental change then it would be useful. It is useless in this conversation. To say something off-topic is to say something useless to the conversation at hand. The usefulness or uselessness of some information coincides with your changing goals.
What would information without meaning be? Can you give an example?
— Harry Hindu
Not without making use of that information...
How do you make use of information - by moving it? It would help if you took the time to put a little more meat in your posts. You don't provide enough information to chew on.
A bit ironic from you :wink: . But "doing things with words" would be kind of arbitrary use of words. Doing things with forks and knives is not necessarily accomplishing anything with them. Once you use it for an actual task and it achieves an outcome of some sort (hopefully intended), then it is "getting things done". So doing something with words is just literally saying stuff. There is no outcome attached. Getting things done with words, is trying to get something to happen with words- some sort of outcome.
So doing stuff with words can be considered a sort of critique that language is not really accomplishing anything. It's a bunch of idle chatter. There is something else that has the efficacy to get something done outside of the language. Getting stuff done with words, would be saying that language can bring about outcomes, hopefully intended and has real efficacy in bringing about outcomes. So there is a major difference in the interpretations of your argument.
Reply to Banno...one question: What are those “things” (which you’ve referenced) that it does with words? Your explanation of this will be quite elucidative for argument’s sake.
...you have an explanatory vacuum for language use like e.g. a teacher telling a student 'Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941'. If that's not information-passing, we need an alternate characterization.
What's going on here? Is the point only for the student to be able to make the noises 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand?
Then that might be what is done in that little game. And what looked like information passing from one mind to another was a step in a game of recitation.
Compare that with the teacher making a recording of saying 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' - is the point for the recording device to be able to say 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand? Is that an instance of information being passed on? Does that make it an example of language use? Any noise would do for a recorder; but not for the student. Why?
Because the meaning is not found in transferring information, but in the doing. Information transfer is at best incidental.
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
Actually, agency is warranted. How do you think DNA could replicate without agency?
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
— creativesoul
Actually, agency is warranted. How do you think DNA could replicate without agency?
Easier than I thought...
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place...
Any noise would do for a recorder; but not for the student. Why?
Because the recorder doesn't have a goal to determine what sounds are useful and which aren't. Hammers and screwdrivers are both tools to get work done, just different kinds of work. One is more useful for certain tasks than the other. A tool's usefulness is dependent upon the goal.
Because the meaning is not found in transferring information, but in the doing. Information transfer is at best incidental.
Meaning is found in the relationship between the sounds and the state-of-affairs or visual concepts that they are about - like the state-of-of-affairs that was the attack on Pearl Harbor and like visuals of Japanese torpedo bombers dropping bombs on American naval ships anchored in a harbor.
There is much to be said about learning how to use language. I'm not talking about the average ordinary just talking about what's on your mind. Rather, I'm talking about using language with the intent to acquire a desired result.
We use language to ask questions about things, and make statements about things. Prior to either of these particular uses, we must first use language to pick individual things out of this world to the exclusion of all else as a means to isolate it as it's own subject matter worthy of subsequent considerations. Hard to talk about something or ask about something if there is no way to successfully refer to that something.
But there are other things that can be done with language...
Very early on, we make concerted attempts to use language as a means for obtaining what we want at the time. We use certain language in certain situations with a clearly understood, envisioned, imagined, thought of result(clear expectation of what will happen afterwards). The child behaves in such a way as to do what s/he/they believe will get them the result that they are looking for.
Each and every one of us has drawn and will continue to draw correlations between certain situations, specific things, and particular language uses. This is how one learns to use language with the intent to reach a goal.
All of these ways, and more, provide a concrete footing for Banno's earlier assertion that knowing(how to use and/or do things with language) requires some sort of rule following...
:kiss:
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 03, 2019 at 11:01#3034230 likes
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place
What are you saying, that information is meaning with causal power? But you wanted to remove agency, that's what I objected to. Meaning cannot be causal without agency. The form of causation here is commonly called "final cause", what you refer to as "the intent to acquire a desired result", and agency is implicit within this concept of "intent". Clearly, when we speak of "information" in this way, the assumption of agency is warranted, and cannot be overlooked.
All of these ways, and more, provide a concrete footing for Banno's earlier assertion that knowing(how to use and/or do things with language) requires some sort of rule following...
When did Banno assert such a thing? This is something that I, not Banno, have been saying for a long time on these forums - that knowledge is simply a set of rules for interpreting sensory data.
I even said it to Banno just a few weeks ago in another one of his poorly executed threads, here: Quoting Harry Hindu
To know something is to have a rule for interpretting some sensory data.
And of course, the typical Banno reply that leaves one wanting: Quoting Banno
It is? How do you know?
So is Banno finally coming around to knowing what knowing is?
What are you saying, that information is meaning with causal power?
It is really nice to know that people are coming around to my way of seeing things. This is another thing that I have asserted many times on these forums (search it if you don't believe me) - that information and meaning are the same thing and information/meaning is the relationship between cause and effect.
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place
— creativesoul
What are you saying...?
All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
What's going on here? Is the point only for the student to be able to make the noises 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand?
Then that might be what is done in that little game. And what looked like information passing from one mind to another was a step in a game of recitation.
That's a possible thing, but it's neither nor here nor there, since I'm not talking about a situation like that, but about people learning what date an event occurred on.
But what actually is learning what date pearl harbor happened on? I guess the deflationary answer is that its learning what date pearl harbor happened on. If the kid wasn't actually learning what date pearl harbor happened on, it would no longer be the example I'm giving.
Of course the significance of the fact changes quite a bit depending on the means you have at your disposal to contextualize that fact. A professional historian can read a lot more into a date than someone just learning to pass a multiple choice test. But does that mean the fact - PH bombed on 12/7/41 - is a different fact if used in different language games? It's possible, but that's what opens up the vaccuum.
Come on, Banno. You know you have to do better than that. 5 words? Fucking Australians. There's a good chance the moderators will delete your post, with good reason.
I guess we were too late. And he'll justify it by wringing at least 10 pages out of you suckers.
So ... knowledge is when words are used to put information to work?
Knowledge...
Folk seem to think of it only in terms of knowing that...; they forget about knowing how...
I've argued that knowledge being seen as justified true belief is at best a good first guess. Given that we should be looking to what words do rather than what they mean, we should be looking at what we do with what we know. Knowing that... reduces to knowing how...
So knowing that one plus one is two is being able to count and hence to add. it's the doing, the capacity of implement the rule, that shows the knowing.
But what actually is learning what date pearl harbor happened on?
Knowing such a date consists in so much more than the bare recitation. It's about knowing that it was after the start of the war in Europe, before the bombing of Tokyo, the event that caused the US to become involved, launched from aircraft carriers and so on. It's about being able to talk knowledgeably on the topic, and to relate it to other things you know.
It's this breadth of language, it's role in life, that is missing from an account of language as a conduit.
(@Coben)
Knowing such a date consists in so much more than the bare recitation. It's about knowing that it was after the start of the war in Europe, before the bombing of Tokyo, the event that caused the US to become involved, launched from aircraft carriers and so on. It's about being able to talk knowledgeably on the topic, and to relate it to other things you know.
I mostly agree, and was hinting at something similar in my paragraph about the historian vs the studying-to-test-well student (tbf it was an edit so may have gone in as you were responding.)
But : does that mean that the student doesn't know that pearl harbor was bombed on 12/7/41?
Only laboring the point because I think you're right to offer a corrective to the idea of language as information transfer. But if it isnt also information transfer, and is instead just making moves in games, the corrective itself can get very weird.
Google translation works by taking vast collections of already translated documents and examining statistically the recurrence of the words to be translated.
I am guessing that few here would say that Google translation understands the meaning of the texts it uses. It works on information at the level of syntax.
That's all that is needed for moving information about. Using language is far more than that, which again shows the poverty of the conduit model.
Only laboring the point because I think you're right to offer a corrective to the idea of language as information transfer. But if it isnt also information transfer, and it just making moves in games, the corrective itself can get very weird.
The title is intentionally a provocation. I'll posit that any information transfer that takes place is incidental; the main game consists in what we do together, not what is transferred from one head to another.
But : does that mean that the student doesn't know that pearl harbor was bombed on 12/7/41?
A rigid education system might offer the student a multiple choice question about the date of the bombing, and conclude that she has the knowledge. A more flexible system might insist that she write an essay on the import of the bombing before claiming that she knows.
It depends, of course, what we are doing with the word "know"...
If you take thinking about the actions of the interlocutors out of the picture, how would you say that meaning arises? In other words, how do those actions denote or connote anything, how do they achieve any semantic associations, if we remove thought from the scenario?
If you take the actions out of the picture, then aren't you left with only syntax?
Then why, Captain Obvious, would it be redundant and unnecessary to tell me, "It is raining", when I'm looking outside at it raining?
I am not aware that Banno or anybody else said it would be redundant. It is logically redundant, and hence redundant if one believes the only use of words is to convey information embedded in the words. But the OP suggested that that is not the only use of words.
For instance, the thing that the speaker might be doing is letting their partner, to whom the sentence is addressed, and with whom they have been in a furious, frigid, non-speaking standoff for two days, that they want to find a way to heal the breach.
There is indeed a message in the speech act, something like "I am sorry this has happened to us, and I would like to fix it. I am also sorry for my part in it, even though I don't think it was all me. Can we try to put it behind us and start again?".
But that message has nothing to do with rain.
So I would say that when we use words we are nearly always conveying some sort of message (even "Hello" usually signals friendly intent and that I consider the other person worthy of my acknowledgement), but the message often has nothing to do with the words used.
I suppose an instance where there is no information transmitted from one to another would be "I'm not afraid of you!", spoken to somebody I am afraid of, and who knows that. I say it to try and build up my own courage. Whether it has any impact on them is not the point.
(1)Replace 'conceptual schemes' with 'conceptual games' - various ways of knowing-how, rather than knowing-that.
(2)Retain Davidson
(3)Retain Wittgenstein
(4) Is there one all-encompassing game (or potential-game) all other games can be (in principle) translated into?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 04, 2019 at 00:51#3036670 likes
All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
When DNA replicates, it's quite clear that something is making a correlation between distinct things. If there was no correlation, it would not be a replication. So if agency is necessary to draw correlations between distinct things, then agency must be involved in DNA replication.
Reply to Banno In my understanding, information is the correlation itself. Knowledge is the capacity to make use of that information: to integrate it into an existing set of correlations, which then interacts with the world.
So I agree that language is not moving information from one head to another. Language is a set of correlations through which we can transmit other correlations among sets of correlations.
It is how we understand the nature of correlations at various levels or dimensions that confuses the issue. Some sets of correlations we consider to be things or entities, and tend to ignore the fact that they consist of correlations at all. This is because, despite what information we now have (ie. what correlations we have integrated), it requires less effort to interact with the entity than with the set of correlations. Other correlations we refer to as ‘concepts’, and recognise that interacting with them as an entity or ‘thing’ can lead to inaccuracies that render the interaction counterproductive.
Language enables us to integrate correlations across a number of different levels or dimensions of awareness by treating everything as ‘conceptual’. Ignoring the multi-dimensional aspect of these correlations is where language often runs into trouble.
Come on, Banno. You know you have to do better than that. 5 words? Fucking Australians. There's a good chance the moderators will delete your post, with good reason.
— T Clark
I guess we were too late. And he'll justify it by wringing at least 10 pages out of you suckers.
It's about information, meaning, and knowledge... and doing stuff with language that cannot be adequately accounted for by saying that language moves information from one place(mind) to another.
Reply to creativesoul The assertion of the OP was specifically about information; not about "all those things and more". Unless there is an argument that (moving) information is equivalent to meaning and knowledge (and more?)...
The assertion of the OP was specifically about information; not about "all those things and more". Unless there is an argument that (moving) information is equivalent to meaning and knowledge (and more?)...
As if information need be equivalent to meaning or knowledge in order for both to be germane to the OP?
Got an argument, or perhaps minimal criterion for correlation(what all correlation is existentially dependent upon)?
Argument? If you do not believe that there's a correlation between the two distinct instances of DNA, when DNA replicates, then just say so. But I think that's a silly argument on your part.
Terrapin StationJuly 04, 2019 at 13:21#3038700 likes
When DNA replicates, it's quite clear that something is making a correlation between distinct things. If there was no correlation, it would not be a replication. So if agency is necessary to draw correlations between distinct things, then agency must be involved in DNA replication.
One thing I brought up in another thread about this is that we could say that two things "match" when they're structurally similar--for example, two shirts that we'd loosely call "the same shirt."
But when we're talking about the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, surely we're not saying that they're similar in that way, are we? (And beside that, extramentally, we have nothing to make a determination that they're similar.)
With the DNA example you use, we're talking about a physical process that manipulates materials in a particular way. If we're proposing this for a way that correspondence can work when it comes to something like truth value, what analogous (to DNA) physical process are we talking about?
One thing I brought up in another thread about this is that we could say that two things "match" when they're structurally similar--for example, two shirts that we'd loosely call "the same shirt."
But when we say two shirts are the same, isn't this a kind of shorthand for saying that the pattern, color, size, etc. are the same? The sameness you're talking about is under the umbrella of universals. I think your nominalism is sort of shabby chic.
But answer this: if it turns out that language is more creative than we usually give it credit for, does that sit well with you? Try this out:
Imagine a dream in which the scenery comes into existence spontaneously with the flow of the dream. It wasn't there before the action takes place, but having come into being, the dreamer flows on with the rock solid assumption that the landscape it takes place in was always there. The dream gives itself its own history. When the dream characters interact, they all draw from this solid ground they find themselves in. And every word they speak is reinforcing and recreating that landscape moment by moment.
I think to some extent this is what we mean by form of life. Now that is doing something with words.
I am not aware that Banno or anybody else said it would be redundant. It is logically redundant, and hence redundant if one believes the only use of words is to convey information embedded in the words. But the OP suggested that that is not the only use of words.
For instance, the thing that the speaker might be doing is letting their partner, to whom the sentence is addressed, and with whom they have been in a furious, frigid, non-speaking standoff for two days, that they want to find a way to heal the breach.
There is indeed a message in the speech act, something like "I am sorry this has happened to us, and I would like to fix it. I am also sorry for my part in it, even though I don't think it was all me. Can we try to put it behind us and start again?".
But that message has nothing to do with rain.
So I would say that when we use words we are nearly always conveying some sort of message (even "Hello" usually signals friendly intent and that I consider the other person worthy of my acknowledgement), but the message often has nothing to do with the words used.
I suppose an instance where there is no information transmitted from one to another would be "I'm not afraid of you!", spoken to somebody I am afraid of, and who knows that. I say it to try and build up my own courage. Whether it has any impact on them is not the point.
All you have done is explain how words can be used to convey information. The fact that a word can be used to convey different information than what the word is defined as conveying doesn't contradict the fact that language is used to convey information.
The message does have to do with rain, but also has to do with the intent of the speaker (the cause) to start a conversation. There is more information that is conveyed than just what the words mean when language is used. You are also informed that someone is speaking, understands English, who is speaking and there location relative to you. Your senses provide you with nothing but information, and words - being visual scribbles and sounds themselves - are just part of that information. How you interpret the different levels of causes for what you are hearing or seeing is based upon learned experience - your knowledge.
It is up to the listener to get at the cause of what they are hearing (the effect) (effects carry information about their causes) - which would be the intent of the speaker. What information did the speaker really intend to convey? In the above example, the speaker is speaking indirectly about their intent. They could have just said "Can we try to put it behind us and start again?", and in that case the words would mean what they are commonly defined as meaning and that information would be conveyed more directly and the message WOULD have to do with the words being used.
Folk seem to think of it only in terms of knowing that...; they forget about knowing how...
I've argued that knowledge being seen as justified true belief is at best a good first guess. Given that we should be looking to what words do rather than what they mean, we should be looking at what we do with what we know. Knowing that... reduces to knowing how...
So knowing that one plus one is two is being able to count and hence to add. it's the doing, the capacity of implement the rule, that shows the knowing.
Then a toaster knows how to toast bread. Got it. :up:
You know how to plug in a toaster and flip the switch but a toaster is what knows how to toast bread as it is the one doing the toasting.
Terrapin StationJuly 04, 2019 at 14:54#3038910 likes
But when we say two shirts are the same, isn't this a kind of shorthand for saying that the pattern, color, size, etc. are the same? The sameness you're talking about is under the umbrella of universals. I think your nominalism is sort of shabby chic.
We're saying that properties are "the same," yes. I'm not sure what you're pointing out here, because "it's all properties" really.
Imagine a dream in which the scenery comes into existence spontaneously with the flow of the dream. It wasn't there before the action takes place, but having come into being, the dreamer flows on with the rock solid assumption that the landscape it takes place in was always there. The dream gives itself its own history. When the dream characters interact, they all draw from this solid ground they find themselves in. And every word they speak is reinforcing and recreating that landscape moment by moment.
I think to some extent this is what we mean by form of life. Now that is doing something with words.
Um . . . :confused: I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're getting at with any of that. So I'm not sure how to comment on it.
If phenomenalism posits that only unique physical stuff exists, perhaps. That's not how I normally understand stock phenomenalism, but if you want to say that's what it's positing, then okay.
Well, the point is kind of that I don't think that my view is actually just phenomenalism.
It would probably be better to learn more about what my view actually is rather than trying to squeeze it into some template you're already familiar with.
:grin:
Terrapin StationJuly 04, 2019 at 15:26#3039060 likes
(Of course, if I'm wrong and it is just phenomenalism, then that's fine. But I'm pretty sure that phenomenalists aren't saying just what I'm saying, so if you're interested in my view, it would be better to focus on my view as my view rather than trying to assimilate it into something that it's not.)
Reply to Terrapin Station I get that you're a physicalist, but you also want room for various realisms.
That leaves you redefining things like propositions and properties as (emergent?) physical things, processes, arrangements, etc.
I think this trail eventually opens up to contradiction. To continue on, you probably need to adopt a little anti-realism, which can just manifest as not knowing. You know?
Terrapin StationJuly 04, 2019 at 15:48#3039100 likes
The idea that properties would be somehow separable from physical things, from substance, is completely incoherent.
Properties are simply the characteristics of substances/(dynamic) relations of substances. You can't have something/(dynamic) relations of things without them being/behaving some way. That's all that properties are.
I don't buy "emergence" as that's usually characterized.
Likewise, you can't have the way that physical things/dynamic relations of physical things are, you can't have their characteristics, without actually having the physical things/dynamic relations. Thus you can't have properties sans physical stuff/relations either.
Philosophy started going way off track with this with Aristotle, because he tried to separate properties from substances (well, although maybe we can blame Plato because of forms). He made that initial incoherent move. It's just because they were confused about the relationship of thinking, concepts, language, etc. to the world in general.
So we've already been through that language isn't just information transfer, we can stipulate that that is one of its many uses; one thing we can do with words is communicate facts to each other.
Let's take the bit of language that we might be tempted to characterise as information transfer. Specifically:
(A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "Ulaan Baator", answered Sally.
Imagine describing (A) as a channel between Bob and Sally. Along this channel, Bob submitted a question, Sally submitted "Ulaan Baator" in answer. This seems to be the kind of imaginative exercise required in classifying the speech act this way. Then let's imagine that we have to explain (A) to someone; how would you do it? What presumptions do you have to put in place for your explanation?
I think if you wanted to form an account there, you'd need to know about questions and answers, what it means to ask a question, how that connects to the desire for an answer, what it means for those speech acts to be sincere...
So I think to characterise any instance of language as "information transfer", this is a higher-order characterisation based off of agglomerating different speech acts together that involve "information transfer". I imagine the converse would be like trying to teach a student what it means to transmit information along a channel, what bits mean and so on, without having any analogies in place for framing.
Whether you lose anything from the agglomeration probably depends upon the analytic context. Someone interested in modelling the semantics of questions based upon the semantics of propositions probably will not give too much of a crap, a student of pragmatics might give all the crap in the world.
Edit: though, it might be interesting to consider textual speech acts here. You literally transmit encoded information on sites like this, and it's decoded. I'm still 'explaining' and 'providing an exegesis' and 'giving examples', which are the kinds of thing one might do when making a post on a philosophy forum.
For added complication, writing does not share all relevant features with speech. Writing might piggyback its elements on some in speech ects, but share some essential characteristics differ from conversation. Text is asynchronous, gestural elements are encoded differently: emoji are a thing, emotes are gestural - rhythmic elements are gestural in some way in text; salient units for interpretation have different demarcation strategies available for them - purely visual ones are most common @StreetlightX.
My model is based on my own experience somewhere on the autism spectrum. I agree with Chomsky that a fair amount of speech and communication is innate.
When Bob speaks, Sally can tell on an emotional level that he's asking something. Not being autistic, Sally isn't even aware that she aligns her frame of reference with his (looks through his eyes) in order to understand what he's asking.
I think the components of this kind of frame of reference are partly innate, partly cultural, but influenced in varying degrees by an individual's personality and experiences. For instance, if Sally thinks all men named Bob are condescending assholes, she might assume that Bob is belittling her, not realizing that she isn't capturing Bob's frame of reference clearly. In some cases, this kind of failure to capture can result in miscommunication, but it doesn't have to.
So there isn't much in the way of transfer (Meno's paradox).
Priest: Alice, do you take Bob to be your lawful wedded husband?
Alice: I do.
The priest nods: Bob, do you take Alice to be your lawful wedded wife?
Bob: I do.
Priest: Let's table that discussion for later, I will take your input into consideration.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 05, 2019 at 01:17#3040110 likes
One thing I brought up in another thread about this is that we could say that two things "match" when they're structurally similar--for example, two shirts that we'd loosely call "the same shirt."
But when we're talking about the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, surely we're not saying that they're similar in that way, are we? (And beside that, extramentally, we have nothing to make a determination that they're similar.)
With the DNA example you use, we're talking about a physical process that manipulates materials in a particular way. If we're proposing this for a way that correspondence can work when it comes to something like truth value, what analogous (to DNA) physical process are we talking about?
The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation?
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation?
Start with Shannon entropy. Information about X reduces it by reducing the range of expected states of X. But we can reduce Shannon entropy by barking commands or laughing contemptuously. The analysis of language rarely places enough emphasis on context, because it is impossible to gather all contextual evidence. But if I call you Boo-key it might mean the world to you, or it might mean nothing, depending on our shared history.
An important role in language is preparing the reader/listener for ... possibly nothing ... but possibly something important that would have otherwise have been missed. By redirecting the sensitivity of the listener, language does not always deliver the message in person. "Look!"
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 05, 2019 at 10:49#3040550 likes
Reply to creativesoul
As I said, if you plan to argue that there is no agent involved in the correlation between replicated DNA, I think you have a very silly argument on your hands. Activity implies agency, necessarily. Directed activity, like we find in DNA replication, implies activity with a purpose, which is a special type of agency described by "final cause".
Terrapin StationJuly 05, 2019 at 11:13#3040590 likes
The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation?
Meaning is something that individual people do. It's an associative way of thinking about things--making associations, thinking in terms of connotations, references, etc. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try to quantify thing/process A versus thing/process B as "more meaningful"--at least not in general. It can make sense a la the report of an individual, where they're telling us something about the extent to which they think about A versus B in terms of meaning.
In any event, this is avoiding the point I was making and what I was asking. I explained how it makes sense to talk about DNA "matching" something. That's referring to a physical process, inherent in the properties of the substances involved, that results in something with similar structure, etc. being fashioned out of particular substances. In what similar way would we be talking about matching when we're talking about propositions and states of affairs?
Reply to fdrake Thanks for the example of information transfer. You actually give two examples of information transfer. The transfer of information between Alice, Bob and the priest. And then you transferring the information about their conversation to me.
You informed me not only of what they said but how they said it, or what words they used to say it.
If meaning is use and if they could have used other words to say that, then how could they mean the same thing by doing (using different words) it differently?
One of the commonly known properties of consciousness is "aboutness". The aboutness of consciousness has to do with consciousness being a structure of information.
What it was meant to highlight was that "I do" there is not just communicative, it registers consent. Functionally, it marries rather than transmits. Of course, it also communicates, but it does more.
Edit: unless you have a much more general account of information transfer, typically it's a rather passive process of transcriptive encoding and decoding.
I am guessing that few here would say that Google translation understands the meaning of the texts it uses. It works on information at the level of syntax.
I would never say that. I'm sympathetic to Searle's argument. Syntax is not meaning. Google and Siri don't converse.
That's all that is needed for moving information about. Using language is far more than that, which again shows the poverty of the conduit model.
Language is not moving information about.
So computers move information about, but language is something more. It's fundamentally a social enterprise where we participate in these language games for all sorts of reasons.
computers move information about, but language is something more. It's fundamentally a social enterprise where we participate in these language games for all sorts of reasons.
Is computer voice recognition part of a social enterprise?
(4) Is there one all-encompassing game (or potential-game) all other games can be (in principle) translated into?
This is an excellent question.
It's about how Davidson and Wittgenstein might mesh.
Wittgenstein never says it, but folk tend to be left with the impression that language games are incommensurable.
Davidson offers a very strong argument for the commensurability of conceptual schemes. Indeed his conclusion is stronger than that - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is in error.
But I don't think these views incompatible. Language games are not conceptual schemes.
The "Slab!" game and the counting apples game could be played by the very same person. But in what sense could we translate one into the other?
I'm pretty much using the physical definition here - the difference in entropy of two systems, the minimum number of bits needed to encode a signal, and Shannon's equation that shows these are the same.
I think this trail eventually opens up to contradiction. To continue on, you probably need to adopt a little anti-realism, which can just manifest as not knowing. You know?
Anti-realism is just the wrong term to use. The world is always, already, interpreted. Hence, there is a world. Calling this view anti=realism is obfuscation.
Anti-realism is just the wrong term to use. The world is always, already, interpreted. Hence, there is a world. Calling this view anti=realism is obfuscation
I wasn't talking about world-anti-realism. Instead, ontological anti-realism. At least it's a good place to start so you don't end up just trying to find a theory that fits the conclusion you've already reached.
Reply to frank OK. So when we talk about the stuff around us, are we talking about the stuff, or the perceptions-of-stuff?
Realism is the view that we are talking about the stuff. Anti-realism is the view that we are talking about the interpreted stuff. Davidson is saying that these are the very same. That's why he never agreed to be called an anti-realist.
Banno agrees with Davidson, via Wittgenstein. The interpretation is not a conceptual schema, but a bunch of language games.
So Kuhn's work should be re-written with the language games of Newton and Einstein replacing incomensurable paradigms. Clearly we can and do use both F=ma and the relativistic equations, and which we choose depends on what we are doing.
But I don't think these views incompatible. Language games are not conceptual schemes.
The "Slab!" game and the counting apples game could be played by the very same person. But in what sense could we translate one into the other?
It's clear in that case, but above we were reducing the information-transfer aspect of language by focusing on the game-like nature of actual fact-exchanges and how learning a fact it only knowing-how when embedded in a larger game. Isn't a Kuhn suggesting something like competing conceptual games?
OK. So when we talk about the stuff around us, are we talking about the stuff, or the perceptions-of-stuff?
Terrapin claims to be a physicalist. It's not clear what that means. It's an unnecessary straight-jacket for the mind. Ontological anti-realism just says that in varying degrees of force.
In other ways, Terrapin nails it, though. He sees that syntax and meaning are bound together. I mean, it's not really syntax if it has no meaning, is it? And how could there be meaning without some vehicle for expression? Two sides of the same coin.
but above we were reducing the information-transfer aspect of language by focusing on the game-like nature of actual fact-exchanges and how learning a fact it only knowing-how when embedded in a larger game.
(A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "London", answered Sally.
What it was meant to highlight was that "I do" there is not just communicative, it registers consent. Functionally, it marries rather than transmits. Of course, it also communicates, but it does more.
Register, as in indicate, display or show, as in some form of output. Advertise, let know, inform... We are talking about the same thing - the movement of information with different causes.
What do your senses do? What kind of work do your senses do?
Reply to Banno Or make that Beijing, continued Sally coquettishly. I'm being earnest! Bob said earnestly.
Ok, so let's say conceptual or language games take place within a shared terrain. You can divide it up however you like, but all games still succeed or founder insofar as they're in some way adequate to the terrain. Mere internal coherence is not enough. There's still the question of whether there is the possibility of a unified theory or whether what we always have is a patchwork of loosely connected conceptual games that we shift between depending on what we're doing. If there's a metaphysical question lurking here,it's whether the world itself is any less patchwork than our games. (but importantly, if it isn't, that isn't full relativism. games still work or don't.)
Or make that Beijing, continued Sally coquettishly. I'm being earnest! Bob said earnestly.
Ok, so let's say conceptual or language games take place within a shared terrain. You can divide it up however you like, but all games still succeed or founder insofar as they're in some way adequate to the terrain. Mere internal coherence is not enough. There's still the question of whether there is the possibility of a unified theory or whether what we always have is a patchwork of loosely connected conceptual games that we shift between depending on what we're doing. If there's a metaphysical question lurking here,it's whether the world itself is any less patchwork than our games. (but importantly, if it isn't, that isn't full relativism. games still work or don't.)
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try to quantify thing/process A versus thing/process B as "more meaningful"--at least not in general. It can make sense a la the report of an individual, where they're telling us something about the extent to which they think about A versus B in terms of meaning.
I don't believe that you believe this. I'm sure you must see some activities as more meaningful than others.
In any event, this is avoiding the point I was making and what I was asking. I explained how it makes sense to talk about DNA "matching" something. That's referring to a physical process, inherent in the properties of the substances involved, that results in something with similar structure, etc. being fashioned out of particular substances. In what similar way would we be talking about matching when we're talking about propositions and states of affairs?
You didn't make a point. I was talking to Creative about "meaning", not propositions. And Creative seemed to be denying meaning from DNA replication on the mistaken account that nothing is making a correlation in DNA replication and the incorrect assumption that there is no agent involved in DNA replication. So to simply attempt to change the subject, and introduce "propositions and states of affairs", does not make a point at all. To make a point, you would need to say how the correlation between two sets of DNA is related to the correlation between propositions and states of affairs. Until then, you're asking me to compare apples and oranges. That's why I answered you by saying that I believe one is more meaningful than the other. What else are you looking for?
Well, what is the difference of the two in your conception? How are we not making everything just "use", and conflating words into each other, thus misconstruing them?
There's still the question of whether there is the possibility of a unified theory or whether what we always have is a patchwork of loosely connected conceptual games that we shift between depending on what we're doing. If there's a metaphysical question lurking here, it's whether the world itself is any less patchwork than our games. (but importantly, if it isn't, that isn't full relativism. games still work or don't.)
Not a loose patchwork. A family resemblance?
As with Gödel, set up such a unified theory and then the game becomes finding a counter-instance.
Well, what is the difference of the two in your conception? How are we need making everything just "use", and conflating words into each other, this misconstruing them?
Ok good. Sometimes I think these debates go down to "language as use" thing, which then leaves no room for "language as explanation". We use language to explain things about the world. Its use in explaining things is different than its use in "getting something done". One is trying to provide metaphysical claims. One is about something's utility. My guess, is you would reject making metaphysical claims about what is the case. Others might argue that the metaphysical claim is its own thing apart from how it is useful to getting something done.
One is trying to provide metaphysical claims. One is about something's utility.
Some language games have very little utility... and yet are still played on forums around the world. Sue is not just utility. Language as use is not utilitarianism.
Yes, but how is that not a truism? Who doesn't agree with that? But is being done, is something different than "getting something done". We are playing with semantics here. Getting something done would be more like a command, or trying to have an outcome come about. There is no outcome in an explanation other than the explanation itself. If you are saying, "We are trying to get done understanding what is the case about the world", ok.. but this is a superficial argument that wouldn't really be controversial.
Some language games have very little utility... and yet are still played on forums around the world. Sue is not just utility. Language as use is not utilitarianism.
No, but some might call it a kind pragmatism, which is about uses for people.
I'm not sure what they would be... We do make claims as to what is the case, just sans metaphysics.
Why sans metaphysics? State of affairs X is Y. This is not a metaphysical statement? Perhaps not a true one, but it is trying to get there, I guess. How we know it is, is something different.
What I'm arguing would be closer to saying that moving information is not moving meaning or knowledge. That much more is involved.
My concern with the OP, as others have already expressed, is that moving information from one head to another can be one use of language, even though it may not be its only use. If the OP was instead that language is not only moving information from one head to another, then I would be more inclined to agree. Also, I take 'moving information from one head to another' to mean informing someone of something (e.g. teaching, alerting), but I'm not sure whether that's what you mean by it?
Creative seemed to be denying meaning from DNA replication on the mistaken account that nothing is making a correlation in DNA replication and the incorrect assumption that there is no agent involved in DNA replication.
My concern with the OP, as others have already expressed, is that moving information from one head to another can be one use of language, even though it may not be its only use.
I've seen it claimed. I've seen agreement. What I have not seen is a coherent explanation of exactly how information - which is already meaningful, lest there could be no translation/decoding - can be moved. Meaning is not a monolithic single thing that is able to change locations like some things can, cups, cupboards, chairs, and tables. Rather, it consists of simple/basic elemental constituents, such as language use(a speaker), slabs, intonation, other behaviours and additional context. In order to move information, meaning has to be moved along with it.
So...
Since all of those things are required for meaning to be attributed, and not all of them move through a conduit, or phone line, or fibre optic, or airwaves, or... whatever, what since does it make to say that information(meaning) can be moved?
What I have not seen is a coherent explanation of exactly how information - which is already meaningful, lest there could be no translation/decoding - can be moved.
If you had read my entire post, you would have seen what I took 'moving information from one head to another' to mean.
to integrate it into an existing set of correlations,
— Possibility
I don't see that this helps. It just replaces meaning with correlation.
No, it doesn’t - it’s more complicated than that. There is a tendency to equate meaning with correlation and in doing so reduce the process by which we make meaning to the individual neural connections in the brain. But that’s only a small part of it.
Meaning refers to the whole process: from receiving the information to making the many intricate relationship connections with existing knowledge, to then using what results in how we interact with the world. It is a multi-dimensional relationship between information, correlation, knowledge, thought/belief and actions/words.
We transmit information, we share knowledge, but with meaning it’s more a matter of finding common ground or conceptual ‘space’. A word points to a particular meaning, and even though another person (the listener) can appear to ‘see’ a similar meaning to which that word points, the process that makes that meaning for the listener may be a very different structure to the one that led to the word being spoken. In order to ensure we’re talking about the same meaning, we look around the words - at the context, intonation, attitude, body language - at whatever correlations we can find that will help us construct the conceptual space in which that meaning is situated.
I don't see that this helps. It just replaces meaning with correlation.
"SLAB!"(language use), slabs, and other things are the content of correlation, which - if a plurality of capable creatures draw correlations between these things - results in shared meaning.
"Correlation" is not just a replacement term for "meaning", they are not the same thing. Rather, that's what all meaningful thought/belief have in common, amongst a few other things.
That's what is peculiar to me. Witt said look at how language is being used with all sorts of other things - besides the language use - in mind. His remarks guide our attention to all of the different content of correlation that makes one use("Slab") different than another("SLAB!!!"). All else being equal, the intonation, attitude, and past experience concerning similar situations plays the determinative role in the difference.
That difference in meaning is the difference in the correlational content.
Reply to creativesoul I've already stated my objection: that you are conflating meaning and information. I've also quoted you obviously conflating the two when you say "what since does it make to say that information(meaning) can be moved?"
Were you referring to some other "gratuitous assertion"? Because I have no desire to follow you in this conflation, and therefore no desire to address your "argument".
It's probably worth pointing out that a language game is not just words. It also involves slabs and apples, and other stuff.
Then it sounds to me that saying "It's a language game" just means "using words to refer to other stuff that are not words". Of course, we could use words to refer to other words, but that is what words do - refer to other stuff. It just depends on what the user wants to draw others' attention to.
When having discussions like this and we are all using words and playing a "language game" - what is it that you want others to do? What is it that you are trying to get others to do - behave in some way, think in some way, both or something else entirely? What is the point of the "language game" in this thread?
When translating languages, what is it about the language that we are translating? What makes one word translatable to another language or not?
If the OP was instead that language is not only moving information from one head to another, then I would be more inclined to agree.
I considered and rejected that wording. It wasn't strong enough for what I wanted to express. Moving information may indeed occur, but is incidental to language.
I see your point with respect to @creativesoul. I do not agree with him that moving information is moving meaning, nor that information implicitly has meaning. The difference parallels that between syntax and semantics, or between Austin's phatic act and illocutionary act.
I could go either of two ways: the first, call what is done with information the meaning of that information; the second, drop the notion of meaning altogether and just talk about information and its uses.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 06, 2019 at 09:54#3044530 likes
As I've said to @Wayfarer and @Joshs in other contexts, the dinosaurs called, they want their world back. The world back then is not a nothing, nor something about which nothing can be said, it does not fit the schema of a limit on language; demonstrably, we can understand it fine. More to the point, its structure still influences us in intelligible (and unintelligible) ways; oil!
Some of your writing is interesting. Then there is stuff such as this.
Not all words are nouns. Not all words refer to other things.
It appears that you do not have the background in analytic philosophy to follow the conversation going on here.
My intent wasnt to write something interesting. Is that what you are saying the point of this conversation is - to write something interesting - to get others to reply back, "Thats interesting"?
It's probably worth pointing out that a language game is not just words. It also involves slabs and apples, and other stuff.
Youre the one that implied that the language game doesn't involve just words but other stuff. What was the other stuff you were talking about besides the nouns you used as an example?
One only needs logic to follow any conversation. And if you're not being logical then are you really having a conversation?
For someone who has a habit of speaking in riddles, not answering questions, or only answers questions indirectly, it would be obvious why they think language is a game.
That's not a conflation Luke, and you know it. Information is meaningful. The parenthetic content you quoted was simply a reminder of that. In order to move information, one has to move meaning...
That was the point. Not a conflation.
Do what you like. I've already adequately argued my point. You've merely asserted your own, and it's wrong.
Language is not the same as communication. It's is a medium of communication.
SO what has been shown here is that language is far more than a medium for communication. It is philosophical myopia that leads one to think of language use as a conduit.
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
Show me your argument to support the claim that agency is not warranted in DNA replication. Something is establishing a correlation between two distinct things, distinct sets of DNA. And as I explained to Terrapin Station, this is very clearly a meaningful relation (without it we wouldn't exist). The meaning involved in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, depends on the meaning involved in DNA replication, for its existence, because without DNA there would be no propositions.
So, where's the argument to support what you call a "conclusion", (rather than what it really is, an assumption), that agency is not warranted. It appears to me, like you start with the assumption that agency is not warranted in DNA replication, and this false assumption has a negative affect on your understanding of "meaning".
All meaning is attributed. All attribution of meaning requires something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized, and a creature capable of drawing a correlation between that which becomes sign/symbol and that which becomes significant/symbolized. The drawing of the correlations is thought/belief formation. Complex thought/belief is required for agency. DNA has no such capability. It quite simply doesn't have what it takes. Therefore, there is neither agency nor meaning inherent to(or required for) DNA replication. Rather, it's a causal process. It's only meaningful to us as a result of our talking about it.
And as I explained to Terrapin Station, this is very clearly a meaningful relation (without it we wouldn't exist).
This conflates existential dependency and meaning. Existential dependency is causal. Meaning is attributed. So, the conflation between causality and meaning rears it's ugly head, yet again.
Did anyone notice that I did not use the word "meaning" in the title or OP?
We all did, I'm sure.
Are you proposing that information is not always already meaningful? You mentioned Austin earlier. Could you explain that connection a bit more?
I take him to be setting out illocutionary acts(assertions, promises, questions, etc.) and three locutionary acts; (i)the uttering of words/statements with specific meaning and/or reference, (ii)the uttering of words(without), and (iii)the uttering of sounds. I know this is over-simplistic... I should dig out my copy of How To Do Things With Words. I will if you choose to engage here...
I do not agree with him(creative) that moving information is moving meaning, nor that information implicitly has meaning. The difference parallels that between syntax and semantics, or between Austin's phatic act and illocutionary act.
What does the difference between uttering meaningful words/sentences and just uttering words(without knowing how to use them and/or what they mean/refer to) have to do with information and meaning? Particularly, how does that difference justify a claim that information is not always already meaningful?
The illocutionary act already has specific meaning/reference. The phatic act is not (yet?)meaningful to the speaker even though the words are already part of meaningful thought/belief(correlations). Parroting never counts, but is necessary in order for the speaker to eventually draw the correlations between the words use and something else, as opposed to mere mimicry(phonetic act). When the speaker begins to draw correlations between the same things(including the utterance) as the pre-existing language users, they're learning how to use language. Shared meaning.
More to the problem as I see it...
When talking about the locutionary phatic act and the illocutionary acts, we're dealing with instances concerning language that's already meaningful. The parallel between those and information and meaning would make information already meaningful as well, wouldn't it?
There's already been discussion about translating and/or decoding. If information is something that can be decoded and/or translated, then it is already meaningful... otherwise there is no such thing as an incorrect translation. As an aside, that issue also undermines all the talk about "what it's like to be...".
Both are already meaningful. Semantics is the study of meaning. Syntax is the accepted arrangement of words to make well formed meaningful sentences. The arrangement can affect/effect the meaning.
Do not see how the parallel allows us to say that one(information) is not already meaningful.
Moving information may indeed occur, but is incidental to language.
If moving information (or using language to inform people of things) is something that we use language for, then I don't see how it is incidental "to language". Again, I'm unsure if we mean the same thing by "moving information".
I could go either of two ways: the first, call what is done with information the meaning of that information; the second, drop the notion of meaning altogether and just talk about information and its uses.
I'm confused by this. It's unclear to me why you might want to "call what is done with information the meaning of that information".
Information can have meaning, but it does not follow that information is meaning (or the same as meaning). Likewise, a demonstration can be peaceful, but a demonstration is not peace.
Furthermore, meaning needn't be informative. I can understand the meaning of a word or a sentence without it informing me of something; without it teaching me or providing any facts about something. This informing, or information moving, is the context of use in the OP, which is why information should not be conflated with meaning here.
Reply to creativesoul Of course it sounds off - if you’re going to chop up the sentence like that. Try this:
There is a tendency to reduce [our understanding/explanation of] the process [by which we make meaning] to the individual neural connections in the brain [or, more generally, the physical correlation of information].
But the way I see it, meaning is not only correlation - it’s much more than that. If we equate meaning with correlation, then we may find ourselves arguing about whether or not DNA has sufficient agency to attribute meaning, for instance.
Correlation is only part of the process by which we attribute meaning. In my view, systems can still correlate and integrate information without being fully aware of meaning, let alone having the capacity to attribute it - even if the system acts as though the information is meaningful. This why I use the term ‘correlation’.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 07, 2019 at 11:32#3048230 likes
This is false, there is agency in inanimate activity. It appears like you are attempting to create an unwarranted boundary between the "agency" of complex thought/belief, and the "agency" other living things. No such boundary exists. It would be completely arbitrary to draw a boundary between living beings with complex thought/belief (and therefore agency according to your arbitrary requirements for "agency"), and living beings without complex thought/belief.
I want to see true premises, and valid logic, to support your claim that agency in DNA replication is unwarranted, not arbitrary definitions to support a faulty assumption.
There is a distinction between purposeful and non-purposeful agency, which is supported by the principles of final cause. But I think it would be extremely difficult, and futile to argue that DNA replication is not purposeful activity, because clearly the actions involved are carried out for the purpose of replicating the DNA. How could anyone believe that this activity is not purposeful? And so biologists use the linguistic terms of "information", "transcription", and "translation", in describing this activity. Furthermore, there is an extremely high degree of accuracy in this activity which far surpasses any human linguistic capacity for accuracy (except perhaps in mathematics).
This conflates existential dependency and meaning. Existential dependency is causal. Meaning is attributed. So, the conflation between causality and meaning rears it's ugly head, yet again
It's all attributed. We say, by way of logical conclusion, that B is causally dependent on A. So "existential dependency" is attributed. And again, you are attempting to create an arbitrary and unwarranted boundary.
But the way I see it, meaning is not only correlation - it’s much more than that. If we equate meaning with correlation, then we may find ourselves arguing about whether or not DNA has sufficient agency to attribute meaning, for instance.
Is there no use for this argument? If it can dispel a false, and very misleading assumption, I think the argument is quite useful.
SO what has been shown here is that language is far more than a medium for communication. It is philosophical myopia that leads one to think of language use as a conduit.
It is scientific myopia that leads one to think that their senses aren't part of the equation of explaining what language is and does. When using your senses, you acquire information - nothing else.
The world is the medium for communication and language is simply part of the world, as language exists as sounds in the air, ink on paper, or light on your computer screen, which you use your senses to access.
We can communicate without language use. Our behaviors and shapes of our bodies communicate our state of awareness and health. So language is just one way to communicate, not the other way around where communication is only one of the things language does. Your senses provide nothing but information. In a sense the world is communicating with you via your senses.
The rules of language use is just more information. Once we have the rules (knowledge of language use), we know how to interpret those scribbles and sounds as about ideas in other minds, not about the ink and the paper, or the sound, or the light on the screen.
In a sense, language use is how we communicate our own interpretaions of our sensory data which can be a certain shape with a certain color, taste and smell as "apple", or "word" and "sentence". How we interpret it shapes our response to it. We eat it or read it.
Information can have meaning, but it does not follow that information is meaning (or the same as meaning). Likewise, a demonstration can be peaceful, but a demonstration is not peace.
Furthermore, meaning needn't be informative. I can understand the meaning of a word or a sentence without it informing me of something; without it teaching me or providing any facts about something. This informing, or information moving, is the context of use in the OP, which is why information should not be conflated with meaning here.
You're preaching to the choir Luke. I'm not conflating information and meaning. Information is not meaning. I'm arguing that divorcing information from meaning is the mistake here. Information is always already meaningful.
The comparison to peaceful demonstration fails to capture the relationship. Demonstrations are not existentially dependent upon peace. Information, however, is existentially dependent upon meaning. Not only can information 'have' meaning, it always does. Again, as before, if information is something that can be decoded, and/or translated, then it is already meaningful. The successfulness of the decoding/translating is itself existentially dependent upon that.
There is a tendency to reduce [our understanding/explanation of] the process [by which we make meaning] to the individual neural connections in the brain [or, more generally, the physical correlation of information].
Correlation is only part of the process by which we attribute meaning. In my view, systems can still correlate and integrate information without being fully aware of meaning, let alone having the capacity to attribute it - even if the system acts as though the information is meaningful. This why I use the term ‘correlation’.
We differ here.
Correlation is the only process by which we attribute meaning. I suspect there's an equivocation of the term "correlation" at work on your view. One sense for the process we use to attribute meaning, and one sense to characterize the results of certain command functions in computer language(and other 'systems', perhaps?).
One ought take care not to portray the senses as a diode, passing information in one direction only. There is feedback here, and hence complexity. Complexity occurs when small variations in the initial conditions are fed back into the system to be magnified and become great influences on the later conditions.
One sees, reaches out, touches, holds, puts down. One is not situated passively, doomed only to absorb information.
Better to think of oneself as embedded in the world.
One does not sit inside one's body, looking at mere phenomena and reacting to them. One is not separate from one's sensations and acts - far from it. One's sensations and acts are constitutive of what one is.
One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. Hence language is not mere communication. It is an integral part of the self-referential complexity that creates oneself, the other, and the various things in our world.
This looping is not simple; it is strange. It traverses from level to level, between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics unexcused. It provides the illusion of free will. It is not limited to the self, nor the mind, nor the body, nor the various items that together make up the physical world.
Terrapin StationJuly 07, 2019 at 23:45#3049700 likes
Better to think of oneself as embedded in the world.
These sorts of comments annoy me to no end, because it suggests a ridiculous misreading of anything I've ever said or would say. I can only imagine that the people responding with comments like this are applying their own misconceived ideological templates to things that I say, as if I'm somehow responsible for the wonky templates the person is employing in their understanding.
Reply to Terrapin Station Doubtless you are right that I have the wrong impression of your thinking, but nevertheless that is the impression you have left on me.
Perhaps our difference is one of emphasis rather than one of kind?
Terrapin StationJuly 08, 2019 at 00:14#3049810 likes
For one, say that someone is talking about stoves/ovens and what they do. You wouldn't assume that they're for some reason saying that stoves aren't embedded in the world, would you?
And a lot of what I'm doing amounts to pointing out that we use ovens to bake cakes, contra people suggesting that the actual baking part is a matter of people mixing the batter, cutting wheat to begin the process of making flour, or even suggesting that there's no such thing as ovens, or whatever other confused or intentionally ambiguous thing they might be suggesting.
You wouldn't assume that they're for some reason saying that ovens aren't embedded in the world, would you?
Sure. And the oven is also embedded in the language being used. That is, being able to use an oven involves dividing things up in such a way that there is a role for "oven" in what we do. The world is understood in such a way as that there are ovens in it.
Now I do not think that we disagree about this, so much as that it needs to be taken into account.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 08, 2019 at 01:18#3049980 likes
I'm still waiting for the argument to demonstrate that this claim, "agency requires complex thought/belief", is a conclusion rather than a gratuitous assertion. Continuing with gratuitous assertions is really proceeding in the opposite direction.
OED: agent, 2. a) person or thing that exerts power or produces an effect. b) the cause of a natural force or effect on matter.
As I said, one can distinguish agents which act for a purpose, from agents which do not act for a purpose, through the principles of final cause. But your assertion that agency requires complex thought/belief is nothing other than ridiculous. As is your claim that this is a conclusion rather than an assumption. Don't you agree that we need to root out such faulty assumptions, and get rid of them? Why keep asserting it when it's so obvious that the assumption is so wrong?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 08, 2019 at 01:36#3050030 likes
This looping is not simple; it is strange. It traverses from level to level, between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics unexcused. It provides the illusion of free will. It is not limited to the self, nor the mind, nor the body, nor the various items that together make up the physical world.
How does "looping" provide the illusion of free will? For that matter, how is free will any more of an illusion than any supposed relationship that an individual has with any other individual, or any other thing? How is free will less real than "the complex interaction one has with the world"? Isn't free will necessary for that interaction?
It seems to me that the relationships we have with others are far more illusory than free will is. I can move my hands, arms, or get up and move at will, and this is extremely clear to me, but the relationship between myself and others is something which is vague and illusory.
The juxtaposition of free will and determinism is a nonsense. Neither is coherent. What we do have is a complex looping of act and consequence
That's a vicious circle. If one truly has a desire to understand acts, and the causes of acts, which is integral to philosophy, then one would very quickly see that we cannot understand the causes of acts as a looping of the consequences of acts. That's rather nonsensical, like say that the effect is the cause of the cause.
Strange loops are inherently unpredictable. So yes, you are right that we cannot understand acts in terms of their consequences. Their consequences will be innumerable and unforeseeable. But we knew that , and it does not make this description wrong.
What's (the?) relationship between you and the world?
Who, me?
As if there were only one such relationship. Or many. Positing a relationship between me and other stuff already posits a separation between me and other stuff. So you don't get one without the other (hence solipsism is a nonsense).
What is my relationship to the world? I can't say. But if you watch, you will see.
What I have not seen is a coherent explanation of exactly how information - which is already meaningful, lest there could be no translation/decoding - can be moved.
I explained prior to this what I took "moving information from one head to another" to mean and I've explained it since. What I take it to mean is simply informing someone of something.
If I tell you "the building is on fire" and you were not already aware of it, then I have passed this information on to you. You might say that this information has passed from my head to yours (although I dislike this way of putting it).
What has not been passed on to you ("moved from my head to yours") is the meaning of the sentence, which is something you would need to know ("have in your head") already in order to understand the sentence.
One ought take care not to portray the senses as a diode, passing information in one direction only. There is feedback here, and hence complexity. Complexity occurs when small variations in the initial conditions are fed back into the system to be magnified and become great influences on the later conditions.
Senses do pass information one way, unless youre Superman and can shoot heat rays from your eyes.
One sees, reaches out, touches, holds, puts down. One is not situated passively, doomed only to absorb information.
Already said this. Go back and read my previous post. We react to the information that our senses provide based an our learned experiences. We eat apples, not the word, "apples". We read the word, "apple", not eat it.
We continue to use our senses to provide feedback of our reactions to prior stimuli. Our own actions provide information that we use to fine-tune our actions for future use. So, yes an information feedback loop occurs as a result of our using real-time information to shape our behavioral responses to accomplish some goal with more efficient means. We become better at with our most commonly used actions because that is what we have more information about. Practice makes perfect.
Better to think of oneself as embedded in the world.
Already said this too. Have you been paying attention? We are part of the world and therefore part of the information of the world. Our minds are as much of a causal force as anything else and is why we can access other minds thanks to the effects that they produce in the world. Words are about the ideas in a mind. Inventions are about ideas in a mind. Musical compositions are about ideas in a mind. We get at ideas in a mind every time we listen to the music some mind composed, or read the words they wrote. There are many levels of causes that lead to some effect that can go all the way back to the Big Bang. It's just a matter of what causal relationship, or what information, that is useful at any given moment per some goal. Information exists everywhere, but only minds have goals, so minds are what find any particular causal relationship useful, or attended to, or not depending on the present goal in mind.
One does not sit inside one's body, looking at mere phenomena and reacting to them. One is not separate from one's sensations and acts - far from it. One's sensations and acts are constitutive of what one is.
This is similar to my questioning what constitutes "you" - your mind, your body, or what? To say that one sits inside one's body is to say that one is potentially separate from one's body, ie. the soul. I have never implied, much less proposed, such a thing. You are your actions, but thinking and speaking are part of one's actions, or behaviors, and communicative of many things - not just what one is saying, but what language they are using, where they are from, etc.
One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. Hence language is not mere communication. It is an integral part of the self-referential complexity that creates oneself, the other, and the various things in our world.
Like I've been saying, meaning exists everywhere causes leave effects. Your interaction with the world is meaningful because you are part of that causal relationship. You are part of the world, which is to say that your existence is meaningful. Whether or not your existence is useful is a different story. Usefulness is related to goals and your existence could be useful or not dependent upon some goal, like your own survival, or some task a friend needs help with.
What creates oneself is simply one's interaction, of which language is just a part, with the world. One's actions are what defines one's self, of which language use is just one kind of action. You seem to think that language use is this god that creates the self, as if we couldn't be self-aware without language. That is strange.
What I said about the senses is accepted science. What you see, hear, feel and so on is mitigated by the nervous system. That the senses are far form passive is not something that ought be the subject of contention. So either you misunderstood, or you are wrong.
Perhaps we are doomed to forever talk past each other.
Tell me, is there any one who agrees with you that meaning is causal? Does it have a history?
Correlation is the only process by which we attribute meaning. I suspect there's an equivocation of the term "correlation" at work on your view. One sense for the process we use to attribute meaning, and one sense to characterize the results of certain command functions in computer language(and other 'systems', perhaps?).
I see what you’re saying, and I recognise that I haven’t been very clear.
Correlation can refer to the process of establishing a relationship between events OR to the relationship itself - neither of which is, in my view, equated with meaning or the process of attributing meaning. The relationship IS a process, so I guess that’s where the confusion occurs.
As a process, correlation is not dependent on thought/belief, language or self-awareness. It only requires the capacity to integrate information, and so it can occur at every level of awareness, to varying degrees. This, I think, is where we differ. That being said, it is a key component in the more complex and multi-dimensional process by which humans attribute and construct meaning.
Correlation is the building block of the universe - without it, all we have is potential.
Meaning, on the other hand, is a dimension of awareness in which we interact with the universe across and beyond four-dimensional spacetime. Language enables us to both integrate information and interact with events by establishing relationships (correlation) across all six dimensions (including a fifth dimension of value). Like sensing and evaluating, language is a set of correlations itself that help us to navigate meaning in relation to the lower dimensions, and to increase our understanding of this entire conceptual space in which we can now interact with the universe. The more we develop this capacity, the more information we can integrate, the more we can interact with the universe across these dimensions, and the more we can achieve.
One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. Hence language is not mere communication. It is an integral part of the self-referential complexity that creates oneself, the other, and the various things in our world.
This looping is not simple; it is strange. It traverses from level to level, between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics unexcused. It provides the illusion of free will. It is not limited to the self, nor the mind, nor the body, nor the various items that together make up the physical world.
I agree with you here. In my view, language is not moving information from one head to another; It is not mere communication. It is how we navigate the dimension of meaning: a means to integrate information, but more importantly to interact with the universe across spacetime and beyond it, to achieve, build structures of meaning, transcend or challenge value structures including the self, and even seek awareness beyond meaning.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 08, 2019 at 11:06#3050950 likes
Strange loops are inherently unpredictable. So yes, you are right that we cannot understand acts in terms of their consequences. Their consequences will be innumerable and unforeseeable. But we knew that , and it does not make this description wrong.
You're right, it doesn't make the description wrong. But a description which doesn't help us to understand the thing being described is generally not very useful, and therefore not very good.
I agree with you that "moving information from one head to another" is not a very good description of language. But I think "strange loops" to describe the relationship between actions and consequences, is a step in the wrong direction. In this sense, your description is wrong. If a move toward clarity in a description, is the right direction, you've moved in the wrong direction.
The relation between actions and consequences is a temporal relation. We move forward in time, lineally. "Moving information from one head to another" is consistent with how we understand the passage of time, in terms of entropy. "Loops" is not consistent. You have provided no descriptive mechanism to get us out of the entrapment of this paradigm of temporal understanding "entropy", to a new paradigm where "loops" and feedback into a system, actually makes sense. Such an image requires that there are systems, with boundaries. The description cannot be successful until the boundaries are determined. "One head to another" already assumes the necessary boundaries. If you deny these boundaries you no longer have separate systems, and therefore nothing to support the image of loops. If you allow the boundaries, then you need to account for the learning capacity within the system, such that feedback can be a learning experience. But this requires a comparison of temporally distinct events, memory, and the act of comparing. So it's not a loop we're talking about, it's memory, comparison of temporally distinct events, and judgement.
What I said about the senses is accepted science. What you see, hear, feel and so on is mitigated by the nervous system. That the senses are far form passive is not something that ought be the subject of contention. So either you misunderstood, or you are wrong.
Really? Care to show some scientific study that says just that?
What is the "you" that sees hears feels and so on that is mitigated by the nervous system? Isn't the nervous system part of what it is to be "you"?
Tell me, is there any one who agrees with you that meaning is causal? Does it have a history?
:brow: Why would I mention logic as the source of my insights and then make the logical fallacy of appealing to popularity like you did here?
Others agreeing with me doesn't make my ideas true or not. My ideas are based on logic and the way we use words like, "meaning", "information", "knowledge" and "understanding". When we ask what something means, we are asking about causal relationships. For example, "What is the meaning of life?" is a question about the origins and/or purpose of life.
And the oven is also embedded in the language being used. That is, being able to use an oven involves dividing things up in such a way that there is a role for "oven" in what we do. The world is understood in such a way as that there are ovens in it.
Now I do not think that we disagree about this, so much as that it needs to be taken into account.
Why, though? Why would you start talking about language when it comes up? You could just as well talk about the factory where the oven is made, the trucks that deliver it, the laws that have to do with how the business that makes the oven exists as a business and pays taxes and so on, the geological processes that enable us to mine and produce the materials used in the oven's manufacture, the planetary evolution processes that are necessary for the geological processes to obtain,and on and on--there are a bunch of things like that we could bring up. Why focus on language?
Is it just because that's a pet topic for you? It's what you'd prefer to talk about?
One ought take care not to portray the senses as a diode, passing information in one direction only. There is feedback here, and hence complexity. Complexity occurs when small variations in the initial conditions are fed back into the system to be magnified and become great influences on the later conditions.
One sees, reaches out, touches, holds, puts down. One is not situated passively, doomed only to absorb information.
Better to think of oneself as embedded in the world.
One does not sit inside one's body, looking at mere phenomena and reacting to them. One is not separate from one's sensations and acts - far from it. One's sensations and acts are constitutive of what one is.
One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. Hence language is not mere communication. It is an integral part of the self-referential complexity that creates oneself, the other, and the various things in our world.
This looping is not simple; it is strange. It traverses from level to level, between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics unexcused. It provides the illusion of free will. It is not limited to the self, nor the mind, nor the body, nor the various items that together make up the physical world.
I would not disagree with any of that; the complexity of the correlations.
I want to see true premises, and valid logic, to support your claim that agency in DNA replication is unwarranted, not arbitrary definitions to support a faulty assumption.
This is just wrong on so many levels...
I've already argued for an earlier premiss. You've a habit of calling premisses assumptions. I could argue for that one as well, but won't. All you'll do is continue to deny what doesn't fit into your own preconceptions here, and continue to say that this or that is false, and ask me to argue for the next premiss, ad infinitum.
I'll shorten the journey.
At conception, there is no thought/belief. All agency requires thought/belief. That's the basis of it.
The second premiss above is what you're currently denying. That's fine. Here's the bigger problem. You've taken the weakest of stances against anything and everything I've offered. Hand waving. "Nuh uh!". That's all you've done. You've yet to have offered a single argument. The irony is that you're the one presupposing agency where none is warranted. You're the one with the burden to bear, but don't/won't.
You actually want others to think/believe and/or agree with you that inanimate matter - rocks nonetheless - have agency? Theists might, I mean after-all God has to fit into the story somehow. I'm not.
Now, you could surely - being as clever as you are - come up with an argument for that. The problem is that inanimate matter does not have agency. Agency requires thought/belief. Inanimate matter has none.
Think/believe what you want. Seems pretty clear to me that I'm on the right side of this fence. There's no need to posit agency at the level of cell and/or DNA replication. It's a causal process, and one we're continually learning more about.
As a process, correlation is not dependent on thought/belief, language or self-awareness. It only requires the capacity to integrate information, and so it can occur at every level of awareness, to varying degrees. This, I think, is where we differ. That being said, it is a key component in the more complex and multi-dimensional process by which humans attribute and construct meaning.
Correlation is the building block of the universe - without it, all we have is potential.
Yeah we certainly disagree here. You're neglecting the difference between relationships, of which not all require thought/belief, and drawing correlations between different things... which are thought/belief.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 09, 2019 at 02:08#3052170 likes
Yes, many premises are assumptions. And since you have yet to provide any support for that premise, it appears I am most likely correct in calling it an assumption.
You've take a strong stance against anything and everything I've offered. Hand waving. That's all you've done
Actually, I've offered definitions and explanations. You've given me only hand waving, asserting over and over again that agency requires complex thought/belief, without any evidence or argument to support this premise.
You want others to think/believe and/or agree with you that inanimate matter - rocks nonetheless - have agency.
There are many inanimate agents. Have you no education in chemistry? There are reducing agents, oxidizing agents, catalysts are agents, etc.. And "agency" is the act of an agent.
Agency requires thought/belief. Inanimate matter has none.
There you go again, repeating your assertion, without argument. However, as I've explained, agency does not require thought/belief, that's something you've just made up, as a premise to support some sort of argument. Of course it's a very unsound argument you have there, because your premise is very false.
There are reducing agents, oxidizing agents, catalysts are agents, etc.. And "agency" is the act of an agent.
:roll:
You win, Meta. You win. The Ajax(a household cleaning agent) that I clean my toilet with has agency. The cleaning is the agency. Perfectly reasonable talk in this context. Fer fuck's sake.
Yeah we certainly disagree here. You're neglecting the difference between relationships, of which not all require thought/belief, and drawing correlations between different things... which are thought/belief.
One is establishing a relationship between two events, and the other is being aware of the relationship established as an event/entity, in relation to other relationships. Calling it ‘thought/belief’ only distinguishes it from the same process at a lower level of awareness.
One is establishing a relationship between two events..
I take it that this one to which you refer is mental correlation? I do not disagree. However, that barely scratches the surface. That's not the only thing done with thought/belief(drawing and/or previously drawn correlations between different things).
So, in agreement...
Sometimes we establish relationships between events.
To add...
Sometimes we establish relationships between other things(other than events). Sometimes we correctly identify relationships(some between events) that already existed prior to our account of them. Sometimes some of us can get both wrong. Some relationships are between language use and something else. These are the kind that some of us can have wrong if those relationships are still being forged through language use. All of us can get them wrong if that language is dead, in the sense of all of it's users have died.
...and the other is being aware of the relationship established as an event/entity, in relation to other relationships.
That is to think about thought/belief.
There are relationships that exist prior to the very first account of them. Those are the ones that all of us can get wrong. Those are not relationships that are existentially dependent upon language use.
There are also correlations drawn between different things by language-less creatures. Some of these correlations foster true belief.
So, while I agree that there is a difference between establishing a relationship between two events and being aware of the relationship established as an event/entity, in relation to other relationships...
...that's too incomplete a basis for any robust explanation of thought/belief and all that that includes/exhausts. I won't use "entails" due to my rejection of those so-called 'logical' rules.
Calling it ‘thought/belief’ only distinguishes it from the same process at a lower level of awareness.
Maybe this helps...
Calling mental correlations between different things "thought/belief" is a practice I've arrived at by virtue of taking proper account of what all statements of thought/belief have in common that makes them what they are. I determined what they consisted in/of, and then further discriminated between the individuals within that group of basic elemental constituents in terms of whether or not non-linguistic thought/belief could consist in/of the same.
It's a simple vein.
Some common denominators had to be set aside. Language, for instance, cannot be an elemental constituent of non linguistic thought/belief. Being a social creature can. Having physiological sensory perception and a complex nervous system can.
So...
The quote above has the wrong target.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 09, 2019 at 10:41#3052700 likes
You win, Meta. You win. The Ajax(a household cleaning agent) that I clean my toilet with has agency. The cleaning is the agency. Perfectly reasonable talk in this context. Fer fuck's sake.
The point being, if you propose that there is a special sort of thing, called "agency", which only beings with complex thought/belief have, i.e. that complex thought/belief is required for "agency", then you need to describe what "agency" refers to, in order to distinguish this special type of "agency" from the type of agency that things like household cleaning agents have.
If you distinguish this special type of "agency", by saying that the agent acts for a purpose (final cause), as I proposed, then the actions of DNA replication fall into the same category as the actions of a being with complex thought/belief, acting for a purpose.
But you claim that there is a distinction to be made between the activities of DNA replication, and the activities of a being with complex thought/belief. On what principle do you base such a distinction? Is it the principle of moral, or legal responsibility? Beings with complex thought/belief can be held morally and legally responsible, while other beings cannot. If so, how would this support your claim that there is no information in DNA, and no meaning in the activity of DNA replication? Why would meaning and information be confined to the communion of beings with moral and legal responsibility and denied from the communion of cells with DNA?
.
Terrapin StationJuly 09, 2019 at 14:58#3053210 likes
Because the answer to philosophical issues is often found in language.
That wouldn't be the answer to where anything is located or what substance it's a phenomenon of, because it's not a location, and it's rather itself a phenomenon of substances.
The point being, if you propose that there is a special sort of thing, called "agency", which only beings with complex thought/belief have, i.e. that complex thought/belief is required for "agency", then you need to describe what "agency" refers to, in order to distinguish this special type of "agency" from the type of agency that things like household cleaning agents have.
You rejected that in lieu of Ajax and rocks. There's nothing left for me to say here. You've proven exactly what I stated earlier regarding sneaking agency into the back door(where it is not yet warranted) via use of "information"...
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2019 at 01:48#3054690 likes
Reply to creativesoul
Until you say what you think "agency" is, then your use of the term in any argument is not warranted. I said what agency is, and distinguished two forms, and "agency" in DNA replication is warranted according to that definition. You reject my definitions and seem to have some delusion about some form of "agency" which only beings with complex thought/belief can have, but until you describe what this "agency" is, you're just blowing smoke
This is more along the lines of what's appropriate here.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2019 at 11:13#3055570 likes
Reply to creativesoul
Right, I see your reference supports my description very well. The introduction provides an almost exact rendition of what I said:.
[quote=Stanford]In a very broad sense, agency is virtually everywhere. Whenever entities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on each other and interact with each other, bringing about changes in each other. In this very broad sense, it is possible to identify agents and agency, and patients and patiency, virtually everywhere.[1] Usually, though, the term ‘agency’ is used in a much narrower sense to denote the performance of intentional actions. This way of thinking about agency has a long history in philosophy and it can be traced back to Hume and Aristotle, among other historical figures.[/quote]
Notice, the "very broad sense", in which the toilet bowl cleaner is an agent, an entity interacting with other entities. Then there is the distinction which I made, which gives us the "narrower sense".
The only difference, is that in describing the "narrower" use of the term, Stanford uses the term "intentional", whereas I used "purposeful". By what reasoning do you insist that the actions which constitute DNA replication are not intentional, or purposeful? I think it is quite clear that these actions must be intentional. These are very complex interactions which are capable of producing two extremely similar copies of DNA from one, and consistently do, with an incredibly high degree of accuracy, there is virtually no mistake. How could such extremely complex interactions be simply random interactions of inanimate agents, like toilet bowl cleaner, producing copies of DNA? Don't you think that these actions must be purposeful, or intentional?
According to the common definition, an intentional act is one carried out for a purpose. So, taking the evidence, that the actions which replicate DNA, are extremely precise and consistent, in producing the replication with virtually no mistake, along with the additional premise, that when an extremely complex set of actions is repeated over and over, to produce the same result, those actions are carried out for the purpose of producing that result, we can conclude that these actions are carried out for that purpose, or "intention". On what basis would one argue that the actions which lead to the replication of DNA are not carried out for the purpose of replicating the DNA?
It appears to me, like you have adopted the false assumption that only beings with complex thought/belief may carry out intentional actions, and this has skewed your way of looking at things. But in reality, we see purposeful (intentional) acts throughout the realm of living beings, as well as within the various parts of living beings. Intention pervades all the activities within a living body, as these acts are carried out for their various purposes, including maintaining the existence of the body. When we see that a living being such as a human being, as a whole, a unit, acts with intention, this is just a reflection of the intention which exits within the living being, by which all the various parts of the being act with purpose or intention.
You should read it through a bit more carefully. There are those, like yourself, who want/desire to say that things like bacteria have agency. They are in the minority, but there. I'm charging those people(and you) with conflating goal oriented behaviour with causality, based upon what having a goal requires.
What is the goal of DNA replication, and who's goal is it?
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 10, 2019 at 19:00#3056560 likes
What is the goal of DNA replication, and who's goal is it?
The goal of that activity, which is commonly called DNA replication, is to produce two sets of DNA from one. Is that not obvious to you? There is activity, and the goal of that activity is DNA replication. I couldn't say who's goal it is, but that's the way goal oriented behaviour is. It's common that we cannot say who's goal it is in many cases of intentional activity. People often work together in groups, and the goal is communal. Who's goal is a communal goal? I couldn't tell you who's goal it is for me to follow the laws of the state, and various ethical rules. Nor can the RNA and proteins tell you who's goal it is for them to carry out the actions required to produce the replica DNA. But there's no doubt that this is goal oriented activity, because it is repeated over and over again, like a machine, consistently, with the same results, with very little if any mistake..
Just because we cannot identify the agent does not mean that there was not agency. When we come across physical evidence which indicates that an action was carried out with intention, for a purpose, and the agent is nowhere to be found, we do not conclude that the action was not carried out with intention, just because we cannot identify the agent. Agents are often stealthy in their actions. And, when we come across machinery in action, we can know that it was set up with intention, regardless of whether the agent that built the machinery is present.
And there you have it... exactly as I initially charged. Talk of information at the level of DNA presupposes agency where none is warranted.
The idea of making a mistake also presupposes agency/intention. In addition, the only way that you can know that a mistake has not been made is if you know both, the intended outcome and the actual. So, that doesn't help your case either.
Language is the framework or matrix upon which ideas can be transferred, but language itself is also comprised of information, simply a less complex type information. Just like computer languages are themselves blocks of information(code) to be interpreted by a cpu into a command, so does language run through the human brain to form an idea.
Metaphysician UndercoverJuly 11, 2019 at 11:06#3059610 likes
And there you have it... exactly as I initially charged. Talk of information at the level of DNA presupposes agency where none is warranted.
Clearly, agency is warranted, as there is purposeful action, and you've regressed back to your gratuitous assertions.. If you think that the activity which results in DNA replication is not carried out for that purpose, then you ought to be able to show this, with an argument, otherwise you are just making "gratuitous assertions" to support an unfounded assumption.
The idea of making a mistake also presupposes agency/intention.
Huh! Is this your argument? Purposeful acts may be mistaken, therefore acts which are not mistaken are not purposeful. Sorry, but you'll have to do better than that if you really want to demonstrate that the actions which replicate DNA are not intended for that purpose.
In addition, the only way that you can know that a mistake has not been made is if you know both, the intended outcome and the actual. So, that doesn't help your case either.
Actually, I believe that when actions are carried out, producing the same sort of object over and over again, as if by a template, we can conclude by inductive reasoning that these actions were carried out for that purpose. It's an inductive conclusion, because every time that we find such activity, such as machinery on a production line, there is intention involved. In no case do we find such activity without purpose.
And to take activity such as DNA replication, and argue that this is an example of such an activity without intention, would be simply begging the question, insisting that the inductive conclusion is not true in this case, for the sake of invalidating that inductive conclusion. In other words, it's just an unsupported assertion which is designed to undermine the inductive logic. So all you are doing is asserting that this case (DNA replication) is an exception to the rule, for the sake of invalidating the rule, such that the rule cannot be applied universally, and your case (DNA replication) may be accepted as an exception to the rule. Perhaps you might have some other examples which would back up your assumption that the rule might not apply universally?
Pattern-chaserJuly 11, 2019 at 11:12#3059620 likes
Is information just traces left behind by a thing? Can we have information about the future?
In my view, information is proof of meaning. Two dimensional information - noticing that the same space can have a different shape to it - is proof of a three-dimensional aspect to the space. Three-dimensional information - noticing that the same object can change in spatial details - is proof of a temporal (4D) aspect to the object. Four dimensional information - noticing that the same event can happen differently - is proof of an aspect of (5D) experience to the event. Five dimensional information - noticing that the same experience can have a different value - is proof of an aspect of (6D) meaning to the experience.
So when we notice that the same event can happen differently at different times, we can look for information about how those differences relate to surrounding events. Then we can recognise those surrounding events as causal relations, and predict certain future events based on the occurrence of related preceding events. In this way, we can have information about the future.
So what's the difference between information and speculation? Would you say it's basically the same thing?
Sorry, that wasn’t very clear. Information is not the same as speculation, no. Information is what we have that is real (not necessarily physically real, mind you). Speculation is the process of guessing what might fill the gaps between the information we have. The scientific method makes use of speculation in order to acquire more information.
The information we have is not of the future as such. It’s about the future as much as it is a correlation regardless of time. We use this information to speculate about the future, and we use our speculation to seek more information.
The way I see it, the higher the dimensional information the more variables, and so the more information we need to make reliable predictions. The scientific method struggles at these higher levels, leading to more speculation than we would like. But rejecting information that doesn’t meet certain criteria (ie. reducibility to three- or four-dimensional information) is detrimental to the scientific method’s ability to acquire more information, in my opinion.
Language is moving thoughts from one head to another.
Well, ideally that’s what it is, or that’s what we try to do every time we open our mouth. (Thoughts include factual information, ideas and feelings.) Unfortunately, a language is a very imperfect thing and our ability to use it is limited, so our thoughts are often very inaccurately transmitted. Still, since we lack telepathic abilities, we make the best of it.
It is said that we do things with language. Sure, we praise, we beg, we inaugurate events, but that is also essentially transformation of thoughts. Even when the words have been formed in advance, as they are when we recite a poem or perform a ceremony, we are essentially repeating thoughts. We don’t hammer nails with language…
Language is communication and nothing more. Words don’t have magic meaning and any one of them is as good as any other as long as it succeeds in communicating the speaker’s meaning.
Language is not identity, at least it shouldn’t be. We may put on a hat to signalize who we think we are, but if we use language for that purpose, we obscure its effectiveness. Moving thoughts from one head to another is difficult enough as it is.
Well language isn't necessarily moving, for starters. That would be an odd way to describe language, so not the best description of what language is. But then it's not necessarily doing things with words, either. In fact, that's more like a description of talking or writing. So I think you need to try again, @Banno, maybe with less words. But the right ones this time.
Comments (335)
Come on, Banno. You know you have to do better than that. 5 words? Fucking Australians. There's a good chance the moderators will delete your post, with good reason.
Language is not the same as communication. It's is a medium of communication. So, what is communication? It is moving information from one head to another. Rather, moving experience from one mind to another.
Quoting T Clark
Yeah, I don't agree. Communication has information at one end and more or less the same information at the other end. Language, on the other hand, builds or constructs or sets up information.
Perhaps, you not being a native speaker of English, I am explaining to you how to make use of "It's raining".
Which fits in exactly with the OP. It's what we do that counts, not the information involved.
But if I was a native english speaker it would be redundant and what you mean by "explaining to me how to make use" is explaining what the auditory symbols refer to, which arent just other sounds, but the actual thing you're taking about.
What else could you mean by "using" words?
...so context is important, which is part of what we are doing, not part of the transmitted information.
Hence, it is what we are doing that counts, not the information involved.
Any information involved is perhaps only significant in that it has an effect on what happens.
Perhaps in the land of Oz, but I've never seen language build, construct, or set up a damn thing. "English and Swahili are languages." They do not sow, neither do they reap. They are employed but do not get paid.
So I would agree that "Language is not moving information from one head to another." Communication that is sent and received moves information from one head to another, and it may not involve English or Swahili. Old lady elementary school teachers are quite good at transmitting information without language. They have a look which says, "You'd fucking better stop doing that in the next three seconds or I will make you very unhappy." My elderly elementary school teacher sister uses those expressions at family gatherings to convey various disapproving communications to her siblings (usually) or sometimes her (or other people's) children or grandchildren.
Every year it works less and less. Her siblings give her the "fuck you" smile.
English and Swahili are both sets of sounds or ink-bits on paper which have been assigned meanings and uses. Language is a repository constructed by bright apes over many years. We learn it, then we deploy it. If we do it well, those familiar with the language will interpret the sounds or the ink bits and will probably interpret what they heard or read reasonably accurately.
So, Banno, will you bare it all for our edification?
"I name this child Bitter Crank".
How is explaining how to make use of something not moving information from one head to another?
Quoting Banno
And I asked what you were doing if not referring to states-of-affairs with sounds and scribbles.
What moved?
As if language were all nouns.
But sometimes doing things with words results in moving information from one head to another.
Why else would the talking heads on Fox News be on 24 hours a day?
Well, "moved" would be the wrong word. The information is still in your head. It didn't leave your head and get moved to the listener. "Copied" is the proper term to use. Information about how to use certain sounds is copied from one head to another.
And you still haven't explained what you mean by "use" as in "using words". Do you mean just making sounds with your mouth, or do you mean referring to states-of-affairs that aren't sounds from your mouth with sounds from your mouth?
Who said all states-of-affairs were nouns?
It would be a much more interesting conversation if you weren't being purposefully obtuse.
The discussion in this thread is not at the peak level of philosophical discourse which might be hoped for, but I don't think it deserves the sort of pointless, insulting, self-aggrandizing criticism you have provided. If you don't like a comment or thread, you are not obligated to respond to it. I suggest you consider that approach in the future unless you have something substantive to contribute.
Ah. That language is a subset of information transfer.
It's a tempting notion. And to some extent is doubtless right.
Wittgenstein observes that there is a way of understanding a rule that is not found in stating it, but in following it. Is the information in a rule is given in the stating of that rule? If so, then since the enacting of a rule is so much more than the mere stating of that rule, the enacting that occurs in language is more than the mere information conveyed.
So even if language were a subset of information transfer, it is so much more!
Consider a transaction in which "slab" results in the apprentice bringing the slab. So much more is involved than just the transfer of information...
Yeah - @Terrapin Station?
Does information have a spatiotemporal location? We often say a file is moved from one computer to another. It might be uploaded, downloaded, synched to the cloud or what not.
We could say any instance of some piece of digital information, such as your banking number, is on a particular machine. But is it on the hard drive, in memory, inside the processor cache? Do the bytes that make up the file reside on one location, or in various ones that change as the operating system or whatever program moves bits around?
Or what if we just think in general about the capital of Australia. Does that information reside on Earth?
Radio and microwaves travel through the air transmitting a boatload of information from satellites, radios and cell towers.
None of which means anything unless something can decipher it.
My other reply was a bit brief.
I have in mind the sort of acts Austin wrote about in Speech Acts. So while asking of the salt does not move the salt, it does cause the salt to be moved.
Now, a signal has a location - or set of locations...
And entropy had a location...
And information can be understood as Shannon entropy...
So...
Well, I'm not going to say it. But someone else might.
"It's on 23rd street".
The second person gives information to the first person, who thereafter knows where the library is. This is done via language. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
PA
An excellent point. Does information mean anything without a decipherer?
I agree.
Language is a code used for intrinsic and extrinsic mental communication (data encoding, messaging, and decoding).
Intrinsic Mental Communication: communication within a mind.
Extrinsic Mental Communication: communication between minds.
Information is the result of communication.
What's wrong with that? The detective goes looking for clues, relevant information.
I have to read through the thread in detail--I might be missing context I need here, but there would be [s]two[/s] three senses to talk about:
One, relative position. The position of my brain can change relative to my desk, for example. So definitely if we're talking about meaning, for example, that can move in terms of relative position.
Two, whether some phenomenon (in the general occurrence/event/thing sense) can be passed from one object to another in some sense.
In some cases it can. For example, vibrations in one object--a guitar string, say, can in a sense be transferred to another object--such as a guitar's scoreboard, and then whether that can be transferred to a microphone or to other amplification, etc. (even though that's not an "exact" transfer, it's close enough and it makes sense to say that the vibrations were passed from one object to another).
It other cases it can't. For example, the heat resistance properties of hafnium carbide can't be transferred to chlorine trifluoride.
So, it depends on the properties we're talking about, the materials in question, and just what's possible, process-wise, in terms of transference.
And actually I suppose I should say that a third sense is that of transferring, say, a baseball from one person to another. That's really just a relative positional change of the baseball, but it might be worth making a third sense for this type of motion since it's a transference in a way that simple positional change is not, but at the same time it's also not transference in the sense of something like sympathetic resonance (the guitar example).
When we're talking about meaning, that's a property of brains that can't be transferred to soundwaves, gestures, marks on paper, etc. Of course, in a very ontologically loose manner of speaking we say things like "I get your meaning, man," but what's really going on there is not a literal transfer of properties or processes.
It reveals the ontological confusion underneath the OP. Behaviorism has been rejected for the most part, while science doesn't even have the conceptual tools to consider panpsychism.
I don't see how "having information scattered all over the environment", which appears to me to be an accurate description, (imagine if you could see microwaves, the pollution! - out of sight, out of mind), leads to behaviourism, or panpsychism. That's quite the stretch.
It's the "information in the head" situation. We located it there because we didn't want knowing to be an activity that's smeared across the universe. Too mind-of-Goddish.
So far this is sounding deeply related to Reddy's Conduit Metaphor essay and its criticism of folk theories of language use.
It started with the OP and Banno's inability to acknowledge and answer tough questions.
Quoting Galuchat
Information is the relationship between cause and effect. Effects carry information about their causes. You are not only informed what someone is saying, but informed that someone is saying something - that language is being used. How do you know that language is being used if you aren't informed language is being used? Seeing and hearing words is informing you that someone is using language because that is the cause of you hearing and seeing sounds and scribbles.
The mind is nothing but information as an effect of the interaction between your body and the world.
Like I said earlier, the information isn't being moved, it is being copied. The information doesn't leave your head and arrive at another. It now exists in two places thanks to language use. So this whole idea that the OP is based on is wrong.
Think there's information transfer without words though, smoke indicates fire. A spider detects flies in webs through vibrations. Indicators are older than language.
There's probably a useful paradigm of thought somewhere that treats human language as a capacity which has evolved to symbolically attend or affect differences; transmission of information requires information to encode. Whether this is a continuous refinement of language abilities of human 'precursors' or whether human language is a discrete break from the tradition of language through the development of recursive grammars (or some other on-off property) matters less than the rootedness of 'information transfer' language capacities in the presence of information rich patterns in the world.
There is probably also a recursive component to the evolution of information transfer here, the current linguistic community's expressive capacity (what they can do with language) is likely to be something that is adaptive (or a favourable trait) for an ecological constraint.
Information and meaning are the same thing.
If they aren't then what is the difference?
Information isn't in a rule. Rules are information.
Perhaps not, but does this question have any bearing on whether language can move information from one head to the other? I gave a pretty clear example of that.
PA
I agree.
The former is semantic information, and the latter is physical (specifically, first inorganic, then organic) information.
I have said that "Information is the result of communication." Specifically, information is a decoded message.
When someone is speaking (or has written) to me, I hear (or see) words (which are associated with concepts that have meaning). This is extrinsic mental communication (communication between minds), which first requires inorganic (then organic) data encoding, messaging (transmission, conveyance, and reception), and decoding; and finally, requires semantic data decoding.
Since the OP concerns human language (code consisting of a set of words having paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, hence; semantic content), it concerns all these types of information.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You could say everything that exists (actuality) is the sum of efficient cause (the laws of nature or intentionality) and final cause (information).
The mind processes experiential and metacognitive information.
Doing things with words, or getting things done with words? Those are two different things.
But if the second person “gives information” in a language that the first person doesn’t understand, no information is received. Only sounds/symbols/marks on paper are given. The receiver depends on his own knowledge, not information embedded in speech, to understand it.
That is more or less Maturana's position on 'languaging', which rejects the concept 'information' as a requirement for 'cognition'.
http://www.enolagaia.com/M78BoL.html
Quoting StreetlightX
It would seem so.
No, and that's precisely the problem with such talk.
Yup. People talk like that all the time... as if the file is equivalent to information and can be moved in it's entirety, like a cup, from the cupboard onto the table. It cannot. The file consists of marks/symbols/commands/coding/etc. It does not consist of information. The file is but one part of information.
All good questions. The banking number is a piece of something more. That something more is information. Are the bytes equivalent to the information that they are a part of? Is the number?
No.
Information is meaningful.
Indeed, I wouldn't want to deny any of these sensible points. The receiver has to have some background knowledge in order to interpret the noises of the speaker. I only insist that, given that the receiver has this knowledge, he can gain new information from the speaker via language. E.g, if speaker knows where the library is then he can give receiver this information so long as receiver speaks the same language, understands the concept of a street, etc.
PA
Well, that brings up the question of whether information exists independent of minds, and minds are just acting on the information already there in the environment, because that's why minds/bodies could successfully evolve.
Alternatively, minds generate the information when interacting with the environment based on what is useful to those minds. If information is a subset of language games, which themselves are made up, then information doesn't exist without language users?
This is exactly the debate I had earlier in the Wittgenstein thread. Neo-Pythagorean types might argue that our epistemological capacities MUST find patterns, as the patterns themselves allowed for survival and evolution proceed successfully.
How can anything occur without movement?
I read an article a number of years ago that when we transmit a signal, to some degree the two things have to be touching at some point (even in a vacuum the light has move across space and collide with the antenna or antenna like object), as sound travels through matter. (light as you know travels best through a vacuum). Language is defiinitely alot of things but it certainly very often involves moving information from one person to another person. If there is no gods or God then yes, perhaps we should just smoke crack all day and keep our mouths shut. lol.
Information theory treats the world as information - information being the order in a given system.
So it seems from this that you agree with the title of this thread?
Ah! This is new to me. Must take a deeper look. Cheers.
Ah. Better.
:razz:
Or Harry's inability to see when a question has been answered...
Better.
It would depend on the definition of "information" that we're using. That word tends to be used in a lot of different senses--including simply denoting "data," or alternately "knowledge"--all sorts of things; those are just two examples. So I'm never sure what someone has in mind with it unless they specify a definition.
Hmm. I'd happily posit that information does not have meaning until it does work.
I'm pushing the physics metaphor here, intentionally.
Thats actually not entirely true. When radar scientists or certain types of communication engineers study "noise" and signal they can differentiate the two by whether they have patterns. Typically the more of a pattern something has then the more likely that it is not "noise" and that it is signal. I think i kind of know what you are getting at though. Life sucks so bad, why tell people that claim to be ethical that they have valid points (signal versus noise).
The best articulated definition comes from information theory. And in a way this thread is about how such information becomes meaningful.
I think you might be interested in studying signal processing, and also do a google or bing search on the differences between different sound files (mp3 and wave or cd files) as well as analog record players.
Didn't Shannon not really define the term? I'm not sure about that. It's been awhile since I read any of that stuff, but I seem to remember the term not really being defined.
At any rate, I'd say that we can transfer data, but obviously I'd not say that we can literally transfer meaning.
Right. Characterizing knowledge is an important component in information theory.
I can know something without showing or doing anything. So can you.
Why study that stuff mentioned in the previous post? Because when information is important to an individual (some religions say information is not in every case beneficial) that more information or the pursuit of more information shows dedication to the pursuit of truth. Those topics are very pertinent to your OP.
I think that a bit trivial. To know something is to act in certain ways.
But given your name and your comment about god, perhaps 'trivial' is how you roll...
your exact quote was "Why". I think both of us have the same problem.
I disagree.
Be worthy.
I don't think so. Your view is doing violence to the English language though.
I didn't say this earlier because you were nice at the time. Your OP was extremely short and extremely lacking. This is an online forum, don't assume anyone is worthy based on what they write on it. This is a place for ideas not judging someones value. It would help if you studied math as the years progress. I was mediocre at math when i was young but i've gotten pretty good at it as i've gotten older. IQ can improve greatly with age until you get really old in which case thats the case for just about everybody.
If you want to say my posts are short perhaps you should make your posts longer.
Quoting Galuchat
It seems to me that inorganic sensory information processing systems can process semantic information as well as physical information. For me there is no difference other than the causal relationships that result in information. Minds are just as much a transmitter (a cause) of information as a receiver (an effect), and simply attend to the information that is useful in the moment.
Quoting Galuchat
Information exists everywhere that we either attend or ignore depending on the present goal in the mind. If we arent ignoring information, what are we ignoring? There are both useful and useless information, not that usefulness makes information. The ignored information might be useful for some other goal.
Information isnt created from usefulness. Information is useful or not depending upon the present goal. Minds parse existent information to achieve goals.
I'll just leave this here; have a think about it.
something can be true and just not be known. You are correct, only time will tell the truth to certain aspects of life.
Then its meaning and not information that gets copied to other heads via language use? You still haven't addressed the issue of moving information versus copying it. Can meaning be copied?
"George Washington is the first president of the United States." is information that has no meaning until it is used to do some work?
It seems to me that the above statement is meaningful and information as a result of the state of affairs of George Washington actually having been the first president, not because someone made the statement.
Information is pervasive, not confined to words. Words, if they work, activate informed responses. In ordinary language this is called 'conveying information'; which is a 'movement' metaphor; don't take it literally and the problem dissolves.
Per NASA, in the last 35 years, the amount of the earth's surface covered in leaves has increased by about twice the area of Australia. This is due to an increase in atmospheric CO2.
What work does this information have to do in order to become meaningful?
nice.
You know there's a difference between information and knowledge, don't you? That there is information all over the universe does not mean that there is knowledge all over the universe. I seek information so that I can have knowledge. When I find the information which I am looking for, it does not go into my head and become knowledge. Other people can find the same information which I find, and produce their own knowledge which is not the same as my knowledge, based on that same information. Clearly the information does not go into my head, if others have equal access to it. How could the same information go into all those different heads at the same time?
I didn't catch the answers to my questions from the first page. When you answered, were you "using language" without communicating? If so, did you really use language?
What would information without meaning be? Can you give an example?
What would be the cause of the act?
Knowledge is semantic information, which may be empirical (based on experience, such as tacit/implicit or declarative/explicit knowledge), or pure (based on metacognition).
Language is formal (not material, efficient, or final) cause.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Banno
Shannon's equation quantifies information, which he defined as the reduction of uncertainty.
What I take away from the Mathematical Theory of Communication isn't the math, it's the communication concept.
How is "the reduction of uncertainty" not either hopelessly vague or just not related to any conventional sense of certainty/uncertainty?
Read Shannon's paper, I'm not interested in defending his work.
This definition of "information" just begs the question. Certainty is subjective (of the subject), so a change to the degree of certainty, "information", must also be subjective. How can we account for any naturally occurring information with a definition like that?
So language is copying something from one mind to another and we're simply disagreeing on the term used for that something. In other words, we agree that something is copied and we arent talking past each other. We are just using different terms? Are we copying information, meaning, knowledge or what? What if someone claims that all three are the same thing?
If none of that is the case then what happens when language is used? What kind of work is done?
@Banno, I don't think you answered that one.
Shannon provided a definition of information.
I don't endorse it as a general definition of information.
What a strange idea in my opinion--that language amounts to "copying" something from one mind to another.
What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that individuals assign meanings to the observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, where the "game" is to do that in a way that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behavior, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
Well, yes I did, since in that meaning is what is done with information, meaning is not the sort of thing that moves...
This is good. Proper analytic stuff.
My posit is that meaning is information doing work. Frank's comeback is that if this were so, then every meaningful utterance ought have a use; but here is a meaningful statement from NASA that is useless...
Quoting frank
Well, it might serve as an example in a philosophical discussion...
Or it might lead to action to reduce carbon emissions.
Not without making use of that information...
Knowing involves some sort of rule following....
This is pretty close to what I would say, except for the notion that meaning is assigned to the parts of language.
The implication of that would be that there is somehow meaning apart from its expression.
And I can't make sense of that. (@creativesoul and thought/belief)
Paraphrasing... What happens instead, in a nutshell, is that folk use observable parts of language--utterances, text marks, symbols, gestures, etc, in a "game" that makes sense of further linguistic observables in context, as well as other behaviour, and where part of that is a game of trying to elicit particular behavior as well as gain approval responses, etc. from others.
The big difference here is that meaning is found in the actions of the interlocutors, not in private languages.
Meanign is not private, but what we do together when we do things with words.
Not necessarily. I mean that if you're doing away with 'moving information from one head to another' then, though you've improved our understanding of salt-passing, you have an explanatory vacuum for language use like e.g. a teacher telling a student 'Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941'. If that's not information-passing, we need an alternate characterization.
How do we know how to follow the rules? Further rules?
Information is pervasive, not confined to words. Words, if they work, activate informed responses. In ordinary language this is called 'conveying information'; which is a 'movement' metaphor; don't take it literally and the problem dissolves.
Too deflationary of the concerns motivating his thread perhaps?
It probably won't inspire anybody to reduce carbon emissions. CO2 increases plant growth. We're dependent on plants, so.
But as for an example in a discussion, that would imply:
1. It was meaningless to me before I brought it up in discussion.
2. A person can't know something that's meaningless.
C. Therefore, I didn't know it before I brought it up.
So I brought up some facts that I didn't know prior to bringing them up.
How did I do that?
Perhaps, yeah. The correct title would be 'not *all of language* is moving information.' @StreetlightX already solved the problem in a very short post. Information-passing is a subset of language use.
I don't quite understand the thread. I mean, I get the idea [Wittgenstein, slabs, Austin, performativity etc] but I'm not sure what the occasion is. Haven't @Banno & others gone over this near a million times before? Wittgenstein's notion of language games is one of the most recycled themes on this forum (and its predecessor.) It's as though a resident Kantian, after years of involved forum discussion, posted a thread named 'the ethical is categorical'.
Maybe the op is an implicit response to some skirmish somewhere else that I missed.
:lol:
Linguistic meaning includes it's expression(how the language is used). There is no separation without loss. While the attribution of meaning can happen without(prior to) language, and thus without it's being expressed, such attribution of meaning is irrelevant here.
Here's what troublesome to me... aside from the talk of moving something that does not have a spatiotemporal location...
I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
All information is already meaningful. All attribution of meaning(and thus all meaning) requires a creature capable of making connections(drawing correlations) between different things. So too does information.
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place...
Some linguistic meaning, that is...
Witt began pursuing this vein. Enlarging the scope of observation to include not only the vocalization and/or written expressions, but also the accompanying actual behaviours during the utterance(speech act).
The Speech Act Theorists picked it up and carried it a little farther. They expanded upon the meaning in terms of force. There's much to be liked about Austin to this regard(expanding our considerations regarding how meaning is attributed).
Meaning is shared solely by virtue of a plurality of capable creatures drawing correlations between the same sort of things. The smashing of the bottle on the surface of the ship amidst it's christening.
Using a copy metaphor(copying information is copying meaning) is unhelpful here. The sender cannot copy themselves, and they are an elemental part of the correlations drawn between the marks and other things.
Communication of information is shared meaning. It's what happens when two people draw the same correlations between language use and something else. Miscommunication happens when the correlations between the language use and something else is different regarding the something else. That's how and why the same words can mean very different things to different people.
Situating meaningful information anywhere along the spatiotemporal line of evolutionary progression in a place/time preceding initial/original thought/belief formation presupposes meaning prior to thought/belief.
Here, as earlier, a conflation between causality and meaning will ensue.
That overstates the case.
Some knowing does.
Knowing that fire causes pain does not.
Knowing that it is feeding time doesn't require some sort of rule following either.
Drawing a correlation between directly perceptible things, such as the act of touching fire and the ensuing pain, requires neither following rules nor common language. That correlation is belief that touching fire caused the pain. That is nothing less than the attribution/recognition of causality. Expectation ensues.
Drawing correlations between directly perceptible things such as myself, the food container, the odor of the food, and the sound of the container lid being opened, etc., results in expecting to eat. The expectation that results is clearly put on display for all to see each and every time those correlations are drawn - once again - between the same things.
Both are well-grounded true belief. Both are meaningful to the creature. Both presuppose their own correspondence to what's happened/happening.
Neither requires language use, predication, or propositional content. Our report requires all of these. Neither requires my report.
If you take thinking about the actions of the interlocutors out of the picture, how would you say that meaning arises? In other words, how do those actions denote or connote anything, how do they achieve any semantic associations, if we remove thought from the scenario?
Question: What is done with information?
Answer: Meaning.
How is that a coherent answer to that question? Does meaning move information? What does that mean? Notice that I am informing you with my question - that I don't have information and that I am requesting it. Are questions meaningful, or informative in your mind?
Quoting Banno
It is only useless to the present goal in your head. If your goal was to understand environmental change then it would be useful. It is useless in this conversation. To say something off-topic is to say something useless to the conversation at hand. The usefulness or uselessness of some information coincides with your changing goals.
How do you make use of information - by moving it? It would help if you took the time to put a little more meat in your posts. You don't provide enough information to chew on.
A bit ironic from you :wink: . But "doing things with words" would be kind of arbitrary use of words. Doing things with forks and knives is not necessarily accomplishing anything with them. Once you use it for an actual task and it achieves an outcome of some sort (hopefully intended), then it is "getting things done". So doing something with words is just literally saying stuff. There is no outcome attached. Getting things done with words, is trying to get something to happen with words- some sort of outcome.
So doing stuff with words can be considered a sort of critique that language is not really accomplishing anything. It's a bunch of idle chatter. There is something else that has the efficacy to get something done outside of the language. Getting stuff done with words, would be saying that language can bring about outcomes, hopefully intended and has real efficacy in bringing about outcomes. So there is a major difference in the interpretations of your argument.
What's going on here? Is the point only for the student to be able to make the noises 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand?
Then that might be what is done in that little game. And what looked like information passing from one mind to another was a step in a game of recitation.
Compare that with the teacher making a recording of saying 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' - is the point for the recording device to be able to say 'Pearl Harbour was bombed on December 7th, 1941' on demand? Is that an instance of information being passed on? Does that make it an example of language use? Any noise would do for a recorder; but not for the student. Why?
Because the meaning is not found in transferring information, but in the doing. Information transfer is at best incidental.
So, imitation then, rather than following specific rules?
Quoting Banno So, not too deflationary for the the concerns of the thread, but rather deflationary in a sense which is precisely the concern of the thread?
Actually, agency is warranted. How do you think DNA could replicate without agency?
Easier than I thought...
Push hard enough on the notion of information and a conflation between causality and meaning takes place...
Because the recorder doesn't have a goal to determine what sounds are useful and which aren't. Hammers and screwdrivers are both tools to get work done, just different kinds of work. One is more useful for certain tasks than the other. A tool's usefulness is dependent upon the goal.
Quoting Banno
Meaning is found in the relationship between the sounds and the state-of-affairs or visual concepts that they are about - like the state-of-of-affairs that was the attack on Pearl Harbor and like visuals of Japanese torpedo bombers dropping bombs on American naval ships anchored in a harbor.
We use language to ask questions about things, and make statements about things. Prior to either of these particular uses, we must first use language to pick individual things out of this world to the exclusion of all else as a means to isolate it as it's own subject matter worthy of subsequent considerations. Hard to talk about something or ask about something if there is no way to successfully refer to that something.
But there are other things that can be done with language...
Very early on, we make concerted attempts to use language as a means for obtaining what we want at the time. We use certain language in certain situations with a clearly understood, envisioned, imagined, thought of result(clear expectation of what will happen afterwards). The child behaves in such a way as to do what s/he/they believe will get them the result that they are looking for.
Each and every one of us has drawn and will continue to draw correlations between certain situations, specific things, and particular language uses. This is how one learns to use language with the intent to reach a goal.
All of these ways, and more, provide a concrete footing for Banno's earlier assertion that knowing(how to use and/or do things with language) requires some sort of rule following...
:kiss:
What are you saying, that information is meaning with causal power? But you wanted to remove agency, that's what I objected to. Meaning cannot be causal without agency. The form of causation here is commonly called "final cause", what you refer to as "the intent to acquire a desired result", and agency is implicit within this concept of "intent". Clearly, when we speak of "information" in this way, the assumption of agency is warranted, and cannot be overlooked.
When did Banno assert such a thing? This is something that I, not Banno, have been saying for a long time on these forums - that knowledge is simply a set of rules for interpreting sensory data.
I even said it to Banno just a few weeks ago in another one of his poorly executed threads, here:
Quoting Harry Hindu
And of course, the typical Banno reply that leaves one wanting:
Quoting Banno
So is Banno finally coming around to knowing what knowing is?
It is really nice to know that people are coming around to my way of seeing things. This is another thing that I have asserted many times on these forums (search it if you don't believe me) - that information and meaning are the same thing and information/meaning is the relationship between cause and effect.
All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things.
That's a possible thing, but it's neither nor here nor there, since I'm not talking about a situation like that, but about people learning what date an event occurred on.
But what actually is learning what date pearl harbor happened on? I guess the deflationary answer is that its learning what date pearl harbor happened on. If the kid wasn't actually learning what date pearl harbor happened on, it would no longer be the example I'm giving.
Of course the significance of the fact changes quite a bit depending on the means you have at your disposal to contextualize that fact. A professional historian can read a lot more into a date than someone just learning to pass a multiple choice test. But does that mean the fact - PH bombed on 12/7/41 - is a different fact if used in different language games? It's possible, but that's what opens up the vaccuum.
I guess we were too late. And he'll justify it by wringing at least 10 pages out of you suckers.
Knowledge...
Folk seem to think of it only in terms of knowing that...; they forget about knowing how...
I've argued that knowledge being seen as justified true belief is at best a good first guess. Given that we should be looking to what words do rather than what they mean, we should be looking at what we do with what we know. Knowing that... reduces to knowing how...
So knowing that one plus one is two is being able to count and hence to add. it's the doing, the capacity of implement the rule, that shows the knowing.
Knowing such a date consists in so much more than the bare recitation. It's about knowing that it was after the start of the war in Europe, before the bombing of Tokyo, the event that caused the US to become involved, launched from aircraft carriers and so on. It's about being able to talk knowledgeably on the topic, and to relate it to other things you know.
It's this breadth of language, it's role in life, that is missing from an account of language as a conduit.
(@Coben)
It turned out well enough to justify a spectator seat. I'll :zip: now
Tim Tams in your honour.
I mostly agree, and was hinting at something similar in my paragraph about the historian vs the studying-to-test-well student (tbf it was an edit so may have gone in as you were responding.)
But : does that mean that the student doesn't know that pearl harbor was bombed on 12/7/41?
I am guessing that few here would say that Google translation understands the meaning of the texts it uses. It works on information at the level of syntax.
That's all that is needed for moving information about. Using language is far more than that, which again shows the poverty of the conduit model.
Language is not moving information about.
The title is intentionally a provocation. I'll posit that any information transfer that takes place is incidental; the main game consists in what we do together, not what is transferred from one head to another.
A rigid education system might offer the student a multiple choice question about the date of the bombing, and conclude that she has the knowledge. A more flexible system might insist that she write an essay on the import of the bombing before claiming that she knows.
It depends, of course, what we are doing with the word "know"...
If you take the actions out of the picture, then aren't you left with only syntax?
I am not aware that Banno or anybody else said it would be redundant. It is logically redundant, and hence redundant if one believes the only use of words is to convey information embedded in the words. But the OP suggested that that is not the only use of words.
For instance, the thing that the speaker might be doing is letting their partner, to whom the sentence is addressed, and with whom they have been in a furious, frigid, non-speaking standoff for two days, that they want to find a way to heal the breach.
There is indeed a message in the speech act, something like "I am sorry this has happened to us, and I would like to fix it. I am also sorry for my part in it, even though I don't think it was all me. Can we try to put it behind us and start again?".
But that message has nothing to do with rain.
So I would say that when we use words we are nearly always conveying some sort of message (even "Hello" usually signals friendly intent and that I consider the other person worthy of my acknowledgement), but the message often has nothing to do with the words used.
I suppose an instance where there is no information transmitted from one to another would be "I'm not afraid of you!", spoken to somebody I am afraid of, and who knows that. I say it to try and build up my own courage. Whether it has any impact on them is not the point.
(1)Replace 'conceptual schemes' with 'conceptual games' - various ways of knowing-how, rather than knowing-that.
(2)Retain Davidson
(3)Retain Wittgenstein
(4) Is there one all-encompassing game (or potential-game) all other games can be (in principle) translated into?
When DNA replicates, it's quite clear that something is making a correlation between distinct things. If there was no correlation, it would not be a replication. So if agency is necessary to draw correlations between distinct things, then agency must be involved in DNA replication.
So I agree that language is not moving information from one head to another. Language is a set of correlations through which we can transmit other correlations among sets of correlations.
It is how we understand the nature of correlations at various levels or dimensions that confuses the issue. Some sets of correlations we consider to be things or entities, and tend to ignore the fact that they consist of correlations at all. This is because, despite what information we now have (ie. what correlations we have integrated), it requires less effort to interact with the entity than with the set of correlations. Other correlations we refer to as ‘concepts’, and recognise that interacting with them as an entity or ‘thing’ can lead to inaccuracies that render the interaction counterproductive.
Language enables us to integrate correlations across a number of different levels or dimensions of awareness by treating everything as ‘conceptual’. Ignoring the multi-dimensional aspect of these correlations is where language often runs into trouble.
Got an argument, or perhaps minimal criterion for correlation(what all correlation is existentially dependent upon)?
That bit about "the multi-dimensional aspect" points in the right direction.
:lol:
It's about information, meaning, and knowledge... and doing stuff with language that cannot be adequately accounted for by saying that language moves information from one place(mind) to another.
Read through it...
Those are not mutually exclusive options... are they? It can be about all those things and more.
Language can move everything in the sense that it can re-arrange one's beliefs.
The OP was an intentional provocation. Stir things up a bit.
As if information need be equivalent to meaning or knowledge in order for both to be germane to the OP?
Meh.
Thanks.
Interesting subject matter.
Argument? If you do not believe that there's a correlation between the two distinct instances of DNA, when DNA replicates, then just say so. But I think that's a silly argument on your part.
One thing I brought up in another thread about this is that we could say that two things "match" when they're structurally similar--for example, two shirts that we'd loosely call "the same shirt."
But when we're talking about the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, surely we're not saying that they're similar in that way, are we? (And beside that, extramentally, we have nothing to make a determination that they're similar.)
With the DNA example you use, we're talking about a physical process that manipulates materials in a particular way. If we're proposing this for a way that correspondence can work when it comes to something like truth value, what analogous (to DNA) physical process are we talking about?
But when we say two shirts are the same, isn't this a kind of shorthand for saying that the pattern, color, size, etc. are the same? The sameness you're talking about is under the umbrella of universals. I think your nominalism is sort of shabby chic.
But answer this: if it turns out that language is more creative than we usually give it credit for, does that sit well with you? Try this out:
Imagine a dream in which the scenery comes into existence spontaneously with the flow of the dream. It wasn't there before the action takes place, but having come into being, the dreamer flows on with the rock solid assumption that the landscape it takes place in was always there. The dream gives itself its own history. When the dream characters interact, they all draw from this solid ground they find themselves in. And every word they speak is reinforcing and recreating that landscape moment by moment.
I think to some extent this is what we mean by form of life. Now that is doing something with words.
All you have done is explain how words can be used to convey information. The fact that a word can be used to convey different information than what the word is defined as conveying doesn't contradict the fact that language is used to convey information.
The message does have to do with rain, but also has to do with the intent of the speaker (the cause) to start a conversation. There is more information that is conveyed than just what the words mean when language is used. You are also informed that someone is speaking, understands English, who is speaking and there location relative to you. Your senses provide you with nothing but information, and words - being visual scribbles and sounds themselves - are just part of that information. How you interpret the different levels of causes for what you are hearing or seeing is based upon learned experience - your knowledge.
It is up to the listener to get at the cause of what they are hearing (the effect) (effects carry information about their causes) - which would be the intent of the speaker. What information did the speaker really intend to convey? In the above example, the speaker is speaking indirectly about their intent. They could have just said "Can we try to put it behind us and start again?", and in that case the words would mean what they are commonly defined as meaning and that information would be conveyed more directly and the message WOULD have to do with the words being used.
Then a toaster knows how to toast bread. Got it. :up:
You know how to plug in a toaster and flip the switch but a toaster is what knows how to toast bread as it is the one doing the toasting.
We're saying that properties are "the same," yes. I'm not sure what you're pointing out here, because "it's all properties" really.
Quoting frank
Um . . . :confused: I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're getting at with any of that. So I'm not sure how to comment on it.
That's phenomenalism.
It's also my brand of (nominalist) physicalism.
:cheer:
If phenomenalism posits that only unique physical stuff exists, perhaps. That's not how I normally understand stock phenomenalism, but if you want to say that's what it's positing, then okay.
Properties are unique physical things.
That's why I like talking to you. You're incorrigible.
Well, the point is kind of that I don't think that my view is actually just phenomenalism.
It would probably be better to learn more about what my view actually is rather than trying to squeeze it into some template you're already familiar with.
:grin:
(Of course, if I'm wrong and it is just phenomenalism, then that's fine. But I'm pretty sure that phenomenalists aren't saying just what I'm saying, so if you're interested in my view, it would be better to focus on my view as my view rather than trying to assimilate it into something that it's not.)
That leaves you redefining things like propositions and properties as (emergent?) physical things, processes, arrangements, etc.
I think this trail eventually opens up to contradiction. To continue on, you probably need to adopt a little anti-realism, which can just manifest as not knowing. You know?
The idea that properties would be somehow separable from physical things, from substance, is completely incoherent.
Properties are simply the characteristics of substances/(dynamic) relations of substances. You can't have something/(dynamic) relations of things without them being/behaving some way. That's all that properties are.
I don't buy "emergence" as that's usually characterized.
Likewise, you can't have the way that physical things/dynamic relations of physical things are, you can't have their characteristics, without actually having the physical things/dynamic relations. Thus you can't have properties sans physical stuff/relations either.
Philosophy started going way off track with this with Aristotle, because he tried to separate properties from substances (well, although maybe we can blame Plato because of forms). He made that initial incoherent move. It's just because they were confused about the relationship of thinking, concepts, language, etc. to the world in general.
Let's take the bit of language that we might be tempted to characterise as information transfer. Specifically:
(A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "Ulaan Baator", answered Sally.
Imagine describing (A) as a channel between Bob and Sally. Along this channel, Bob submitted a question, Sally submitted "Ulaan Baator" in answer. This seems to be the kind of imaginative exercise required in classifying the speech act this way. Then let's imagine that we have to explain (A) to someone; how would you do it? What presumptions do you have to put in place for your explanation?
I think if you wanted to form an account there, you'd need to know about questions and answers, what it means to ask a question, how that connects to the desire for an answer, what it means for those speech acts to be sincere...
So I think to characterise any instance of language as "information transfer", this is a higher-order characterisation based off of agglomerating different speech acts together that involve "information transfer". I imagine the converse would be like trying to teach a student what it means to transmit information along a channel, what bits mean and so on, without having any analogies in place for framing.
Whether you lose anything from the agglomeration probably depends upon the analytic context. Someone interested in modelling the semantics of questions based upon the semantics of propositions probably will not give too much of a crap, a student of pragmatics might give all the crap in the world.
Edit: though, it might be interesting to consider textual speech acts here. You literally transmit encoded information on sites like this, and it's decoded. I'm still 'explaining' and 'providing an exegesis' and 'giving examples', which are the kinds of thing one might do when making a post on a philosophy forum.
For added complication, writing does not share all relevant features with speech. Writing might piggyback its elements on some in speech ects, but share some essential characteristics differ from conversation. Text is asynchronous, gestural elements are encoded differently: emoji are a thing, emotes are gestural - rhythmic elements are gestural in some way in text; salient units for interpretation have different demarcation strategies available for them - purely visual ones are most common @StreetlightX.
When Bob speaks, Sally can tell on an emotional level that he's asking something. Not being autistic, Sally isn't even aware that she aligns her frame of reference with his (looks through his eyes) in order to understand what he's asking.
I think the components of this kind of frame of reference are partly innate, partly cultural, but influenced in varying degrees by an individual's personality and experiences. For instance, if Sally thinks all men named Bob are condescending assholes, she might assume that Bob is belittling her, not realizing that she isn't capturing Bob's frame of reference clearly. In some cases, this kind of failure to capture can result in miscommunication, but it doesn't have to.
So there isn't much in the way of transfer (Meno's paradox).
It's the other way around.
It's not that language isn't just information transfer. It's that language is part, or a kind, of information transfer.
Priest: Alice, do you take Bob to be your lawful wedded husband?
Alice: I do.
The priest nods: Bob, do you take Alice to be your lawful wedded wife?
Bob: I do.
Priest: Let's table that discussion for later, I will take your input into consideration.
The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
QED
An important role in language is preparing the reader/listener for ... possibly nothing ... but possibly something important that would have otherwise have been missed. By redirecting the sensitivity of the listener, language does not always deliver the message in person. "Look!"
As I said, if you plan to argue that there is no agent involved in the correlation between replicated DNA, I think you have a very silly argument on your hands. Activity implies agency, necessarily. Directed activity, like we find in DNA replication, implies activity with a purpose, which is a special type of agency described by "final cause".
Meaning is something that individual people do. It's an associative way of thinking about things--making associations, thinking in terms of connotations, references, etc. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try to quantify thing/process A versus thing/process B as "more meaningful"--at least not in general. It can make sense a la the report of an individual, where they're telling us something about the extent to which they think about A versus B in terms of meaning.
In any event, this is avoiding the point I was making and what I was asking. I explained how it makes sense to talk about DNA "matching" something. That's referring to a physical process, inherent in the properties of the substances involved, that results in something with similar structure, etc. being fashioned out of particular substances. In what similar way would we be talking about matching when we're talking about propositions and states of affairs?
You informed me not only of what they said but how they said it, or what words they used to say it.
If meaning is use and if they could have used other words to say that, then how could they mean the same thing by doing (using different words) it differently?
One of the commonly known properties of consciousness is "aboutness". The aboutness of consciousness has to do with consciousness being a structure of information.
What it was meant to highlight was that "I do" there is not just communicative, it registers consent. Functionally, it marries rather than transmits. Of course, it also communicates, but it does more.
Edit: unless you have a much more general account of information transfer, typically it's a rather passive process of transcriptive encoding and decoding.
I would never say that. I'm sympathetic to Searle's argument. Syntax is not meaning. Google and Siri don't converse.
Quoting Banno
So computers move information about, but language is something more. It's fundamentally a social enterprise where we participate in these language games for all sorts of reasons.
Is computer voice recognition part of a social enterprise?
This is an excellent question.
It's about how Davidson and Wittgenstein might mesh.
Wittgenstein never says it, but folk tend to be left with the impression that language games are incommensurable.
Davidson offers a very strong argument for the commensurability of conceptual schemes. Indeed his conclusion is stronger than that - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is in error.
But I don't think these views incompatible. Language games are not conceptual schemes.
The "Slab!" game and the counting apples game could be played by the very same person. But in what sense could we translate one into the other?
I don't see that this helps. It just replaces meaning with correlation.
Yep.
What I'm arguing would be closer to saying that moving information is not moving meaning or knowledge. That much more is involved.
I'm pretty much using the physical definition here - the difference in entropy of two systems, the minimum number of bits needed to encode a signal, and Shannon's equation that shows these are the same.
Anti-realism is just the wrong term to use. The world is always, already, interpreted. Hence, there is a world. Calling this view anti=realism is obfuscation.
I wasn't talking about world-anti-realism. Instead, ontological anti-realism. At least it's a good place to start so you don't end up just trying to find a theory that fits the conclusion you've already reached.
Realism is the view that we are talking about the stuff. Anti-realism is the view that we are talking about the interpreted stuff. Davidson is saying that these are the very same. That's why he never agreed to be called an anti-realist.
Banno agrees with Davidson, via Wittgenstein. The interpretation is not a conceptual schema, but a bunch of language games.
So Kuhn's work should be re-written with the language games of Newton and Einstein replacing incomensurable paradigms. Clearly we can and do use both F=ma and the relativistic equations, and which we choose depends on what we are doing.
This is what is misunderstood by those who use "it's just a language game" as a dismissal.
It's clear in that case, but above we were reducing the information-transfer aspect of language by focusing on the game-like nature of actual fact-exchanges and how learning a fact it only knowing-how when embedded in a larger game. Isn't a Kuhn suggesting something like competing conceptual games?
Edit: I see you addressed that just above.
Terrapin claims to be a physicalist. It's not clear what that means. It's an unnecessary straight-jacket for the mind. Ontological anti-realism just says that in varying degrees of force.
In other ways, Terrapin nails it, though. He sees that syntax and meaning are bound together. I mean, it's not really syntax if it has no meaning, is it? And how could there be meaning without some vehicle for expression? Two sides of the same coin.
(A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "London", answered Sally.
:rofl:
Wouldn't not having to find where meaning is located in our neurones make his physicalism simpler?
Register, as in indicate, display or show, as in some form of output. Advertise, let know, inform... We are talking about the same thing - the movement of information with different causes.
What do your senses do? What kind of work do your senses do?
Ok, so let's say conceptual or language games take place within a shared terrain. You can divide it up however you like, but all games still succeed or founder insofar as they're in some way adequate to the terrain. Mere internal coherence is not enough. There's still the question of whether there is the possibility of a unified theory or whether what we always have is a patchwork of loosely connected conceptual games that we shift between depending on what we're doing. If there's a metaphysical question lurking here,it's whether the world itself is any less patchwork than our games. (but importantly, if it isn't, that isn't full relativism. games still work or don't.)
@Banno
You are all playing a language game by equivocating explanation and use.
What people do is activities. There is meaning in activities, but actions are not meaning.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't believe that you believe this. I'm sure you must see some activities as more meaningful than others.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You didn't make a point. I was talking to Creative about "meaning", not propositions. And Creative seemed to be denying meaning from DNA replication on the mistaken account that nothing is making a correlation in DNA replication and the incorrect assumption that there is no agent involved in DNA replication. So to simply attempt to change the subject, and introduce "propositions and states of affairs", does not make a point at all. To make a point, you would need to say how the correlation between two sets of DNA is related to the correlation between propositions and states of affairs. Until then, you're asking me to compare apples and oranges. That's why I answered you by saying that I believe one is more meaningful than the other. What else are you looking for?
Nuh. Explanation is one use.
Well, what is the difference of the two in your conception? How are we not making everything just "use", and conflating words into each other, thus misconstruing them?
Not a loose patchwork. A family resemblance?
As with Gödel, set up such a unified theory and then the game becomes finding a counter-instance.
In the relevant sense, the world is our games.
That's not what is being claimed here.
Ok good. Sometimes I think these debates go down to "language as use" thing, which then leaves no room for "language as explanation". We use language to explain things about the world. Its use in explaining things is different than its use in "getting something done". One is trying to provide metaphysical claims. One is about something's utility. My guess, is you would reject making metaphysical claims about what is the case. Others might argue that the metaphysical claim is its own thing apart from how it is useful to getting something done.
I don't see why that should be. Giving an explanation is one thing we can do with language...
Quoting schopenhauer1
[I]Explaining[/i] is something we do.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Some language games have very little utility... and yet are still played on forums around the world. Sue is not just utility. Language as use is not utilitarianism.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm not sure what they would be... We do make claims as to what is the case, just sans metaphysics.
Quoting schopenhauer1
If the meaning of a game is given in what one does in that game, metaphysics may be little more than a parlour game.
Is anything else required for the computer to be said to have understanding of the speech it acts on?
Yes, but how is that not a truism? Who doesn't agree with that? But is being done, is something different than "getting something done". We are playing with semantics here. Getting something done would be more like a command, or trying to have an outcome come about. There is no outcome in an explanation other than the explanation itself. If you are saying, "We are trying to get done understanding what is the case about the world", ok.. but this is a superficial argument that wouldn't really be controversial.
Quoting Banno
No, but some might call it a kind pragmatism, which is about uses for people.
Quoting Banno
Why sans metaphysics? State of affairs X is Y. This is not a metaphysical statement? Perhaps not a true one, but it is trying to get there, I guess. How we know it is, is something different.
Quoting Banno
I don't know. Can't there be degrees of metaphysical truths? Surely Newton's is pretty close to something? Surely Einsteins might be closer?
Depends on the bank, maybe?
Quoting frank
Doesn't the computer understand - and if not, how does it make those transfers for you?
I don't see a problem.
I wasn't presenting you with a problem. I was asking how far you go in reducing human cognition. You said: 'all the way.'
But also the obscure source that can disrupt the game, even when we're playing in way that has always before been right.
I agree.
that's a soberer way to put it, but yes.What's important tho is that the world is our games and something else as well.
My concern with the OP, as others have already expressed, is that moving information from one head to another can be one use of language, even though it may not be its only use. If the OP was instead that language is not only moving information from one head to another, then I would be more inclined to agree. Also, I take 'moving information from one head to another' to mean informing someone of something (e.g. teaching, alerting), but I'm not sure whether that's what you mean by it?
That's not an assumption. It's a conclusion.
I've seen it claimed. I've seen agreement. What I have not seen is a coherent explanation of exactly how information - which is already meaningful, lest there could be no translation/decoding - can be moved. Meaning is not a monolithic single thing that is able to change locations like some things can, cups, cupboards, chairs, and tables. Rather, it consists of simple/basic elemental constituents, such as language use(a speaker), slabs, intonation, other behaviours and additional context. In order to move information, meaning has to be moved along with it.
So...
Since all of those things are required for meaning to be attributed, and not all of them move through a conduit, or phone line, or fibre optic, or airwaves, or... whatever, what since does it make to say that information(meaning) can be moved?
If you had read my entire post, you would have seen what I took 'moving information from one head to another' to mean.
No, it doesn’t - it’s more complicated than that. There is a tendency to equate meaning with correlation and in doing so reduce the process by which we make meaning to the individual neural connections in the brain. But that’s only a small part of it.
Meaning refers to the whole process: from receiving the information to making the many intricate relationship connections with existing knowledge, to then using what results in how we interact with the world. It is a multi-dimensional relationship between information, correlation, knowledge, thought/belief and actions/words.
We transmit information, we share knowledge, but with meaning it’s more a matter of finding common ground or conceptual ‘space’. A word points to a particular meaning, and even though another person (the listener) can appear to ‘see’ a similar meaning to which that word points, the process that makes that meaning for the listener may be a very different structure to the one that led to the word being spoken. In order to ensure we’re talking about the same meaning, we look around the words - at the context, intonation, attitude, body language - at whatever correlations we can find that will help us construct the conceptual space in which that meaning is situated.
Quoting Banno
"SLAB!"(language use), slabs, and other things are the content of correlation, which - if a plurality of capable creatures draw correlations between these things - results in shared meaning.
"Correlation" is not just a replacement term for "meaning", they are not the same thing. Rather, that's what all meaningful thought/belief have in common, amongst a few other things.
That's what is peculiar to me. Witt said look at how language is being used with all sorts of other things - besides the language use - in mind. His remarks guide our attention to all of the different content of correlation that makes one use("Slab") different than another("SLAB!!!"). All else being equal, the intonation, attitude, and past experience concerning similar situations plays the determinative role in the difference.
That difference in meaning is the difference in the correlational content.
I read it. I'm disputing it. Care to address the rest?
I take that as a "No".
Gratuitous assertions won't do. Show the purported conflation.
Quoting creativesoul
I mean that and the argument that preceded it.
Guess you've no argument or valid objection...
Last try...
Gratuitous assertions won't do.
Were you referring to some other "gratuitous assertion"? Because I have no desire to follow you in this conflation, and therefore no desire to address your "argument".
Then it sounds to me that saying "It's a language game" just means "using words to refer to other stuff that are not words". Of course, we could use words to refer to other words, but that is what words do - refer to other stuff. It just depends on what the user wants to draw others' attention to.
When having discussions like this and we are all using words and playing a "language game" - what is it that you want others to do? What is it that you are trying to get others to do - behave in some way, think in some way, both or something else entirely? What is the point of the "language game" in this thread?
When translating languages, what is it about the language that we are translating? What makes one word translatable to another language or not?
Not all words are nouns. Not all words refer to other things.
It appears that you do not have the background in analytic philosophy to follow the conversation going on here.
I considered and rejected that wording. It wasn't strong enough for what I wanted to express. Moving information may indeed occur, but is incidental to language.
I see your point with respect to @creativesoul. I do not agree with him that moving information is moving meaning, nor that information implicitly has meaning. The difference parallels that between syntax and semantics, or between Austin's phatic act and illocutionary act.
I could go either of two ways: the first, call what is done with information the meaning of that information; the second, drop the notion of meaning altogether and just talk about information and its uses.
I see, a conclusion without an argument. "Gratuitous assertions won't do."
As I've said to @Wayfarer and @Joshs in other contexts, the dinosaurs called, they want their world back. The world back then is not a nothing, nor something about which nothing can be said, it does not fit the schema of a limit on language; demonstrably, we can understand it fine. More to the point, its structure still influences us in intelligible (and unintelligible) ways; oil!
My intent wasnt to write something interesting. Is that what you are saying the point of this conversation is - to write something interesting - to get others to reply back, "Thats interesting"?
I'm trying to clarify what you said:Quoting Banno
Youre the one that implied that the language game doesn't involve just words but other stuff. What was the other stuff you were talking about besides the nouns you used as an example?
One only needs logic to follow any conversation. And if you're not being logical then are you really having a conversation?
For someone who has a habit of speaking in riddles, not answering questions, or only answers questions indirectly, it would be obvious why they think language is a game.
That's not a conflation Luke, and you know it. Information is meaningful. The parenthetic content you quoted was simply a reminder of that. In order to move information, one has to move meaning...
That was the point. Not a conflation.
Do what you like. I've already adequately argued my point. You've merely asserted your own, and it's wrong.
Look harder. The argument was made early on prior to your entry.
SO what has been shown here is that language is far more than a medium for communication. It is philosophical myopia that leads one to think of language use as a conduit.
Not that you are obligated, of course.
When it does, it is incidental to what is going on.
Language without meaning...
That's a sign of a stroke.
Quoting creativesoul
Show me your argument to support the claim that agency is not warranted in DNA replication. Something is establishing a correlation between two distinct things, distinct sets of DNA. And as I explained to Terrapin Station, this is very clearly a meaningful relation (without it we wouldn't exist). The meaning involved in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, depends on the meaning involved in DNA replication, for its existence, because without DNA there would be no propositions.
So, where's the argument to support what you call a "conclusion", (rather than what it really is, an assumption), that agency is not warranted. It appears to me, like you start with the assumption that agency is not warranted in DNA replication, and this false assumption has a negative affect on your understanding of "meaning".
All meaning is attributed. All attribution of meaning requires something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized, and a creature capable of drawing a correlation between that which becomes sign/symbol and that which becomes significant/symbolized. The drawing of the correlations is thought/belief formation. Complex thought/belief is required for agency. DNA has no such capability. It quite simply doesn't have what it takes. Therefore, there is neither agency nor meaning inherent to(or required for) DNA replication. Rather, it's a causal process. It's only meaningful to us as a result of our talking about it.
This conflates existential dependency and meaning. Existential dependency is causal. Meaning is attributed. So, the conflation between causality and meaning rears it's ugly head, yet again.
We all did, I'm sure.
Are you proposing that information is not always already meaningful? You mentioned Austin earlier. Could you explain that connection a bit more?
I take him to be setting out illocutionary acts(assertions, promises, questions, etc.) and three locutionary acts; (i)the uttering of words/statements with specific meaning and/or reference, (ii)the uttering of words(without), and (iii)the uttering of sounds. I know this is over-simplistic... I should dig out my copy of How To Do Things With Words. I will if you choose to engage here...
Quoting Banno
What does the difference between uttering meaningful words/sentences and just uttering words(without knowing how to use them and/or what they mean/refer to) have to do with information and meaning? Particularly, how does that difference justify a claim that information is not always already meaningful?
The illocutionary act already has specific meaning/reference. The phatic act is not (yet?)meaningful to the speaker even though the words are already part of meaningful thought/belief(correlations). Parroting never counts, but is necessary in order for the speaker to eventually draw the correlations between the words use and something else, as opposed to mere mimicry(phonetic act). When the speaker begins to draw correlations between the same things(including the utterance) as the pre-existing language users, they're learning how to use language. Shared meaning.
More to the problem as I see it...
When talking about the locutionary phatic act and the illocutionary acts, we're dealing with instances concerning language that's already meaningful. The parallel between those and information and meaning would make information already meaningful as well, wouldn't it?
There's already been discussion about translating and/or decoding. If information is something that can be decoded and/or translated, then it is already meaningful... otherwise there is no such thing as an incorrect translation. As an aside, that issue also undermines all the talk about "what it's like to be...".
Both are already meaningful. Semantics is the study of meaning. Syntax is the accepted arrangement of words to make well formed meaningful sentences. The arrangement can affect/effect the meaning.
Do not see how the parallel allows us to say that one(information) is not already meaningful.
Make meaning to that which cannot attribute it for itself?
That sounds off.
The talk of correlations is more than fitting if pursued diligently.
If moving information (or using language to inform people of things) is something that we use language for, then I don't see how it is incidental "to language". Again, I'm unsure if we mean the same thing by "moving information".
Quoting Banno
I'm confused by this. It's unclear to me why you might want to "call what is done with information the meaning of that information".
Information can have meaning, but it does not follow that information is meaning (or the same as meaning). Likewise, a demonstration can be peaceful, but a demonstration is not peace.
Furthermore, meaning needn't be informative. I can understand the meaning of a word or a sentence without it informing me of something; without it teaching me or providing any facts about something. This informing, or information moving, is the context of use in the OP, which is why information should not be conflated with meaning here.
There is a tendency to reduce [our understanding/explanation of] the process [by which we make meaning] to the individual neural connections in the brain [or, more generally, the physical correlation of information].
But the way I see it, meaning is not only correlation - it’s much more than that. If we equate meaning with correlation, then we may find ourselves arguing about whether or not DNA has sufficient agency to attribute meaning, for instance.
Correlation is only part of the process by which we attribute meaning. In my view, systems can still correlate and integrate information without being fully aware of meaning, let alone having the capacity to attribute it - even if the system acts as though the information is meaningful. This why I use the term ‘correlation’.
This is false, there is agency in inanimate activity. It appears like you are attempting to create an unwarranted boundary between the "agency" of complex thought/belief, and the "agency" other living things. No such boundary exists. It would be completely arbitrary to draw a boundary between living beings with complex thought/belief (and therefore agency according to your arbitrary requirements for "agency"), and living beings without complex thought/belief.
I want to see true premises, and valid logic, to support your claim that agency in DNA replication is unwarranted, not arbitrary definitions to support a faulty assumption.
There is a distinction between purposeful and non-purposeful agency, which is supported by the principles of final cause. But I think it would be extremely difficult, and futile to argue that DNA replication is not purposeful activity, because clearly the actions involved are carried out for the purpose of replicating the DNA. How could anyone believe that this activity is not purposeful? And so biologists use the linguistic terms of "information", "transcription", and "translation", in describing this activity. Furthermore, there is an extremely high degree of accuracy in this activity which far surpasses any human linguistic capacity for accuracy (except perhaps in mathematics).
Quoting creativesoul
It's all attributed. We say, by way of logical conclusion, that B is causally dependent on A. So "existential dependency" is attributed. And again, you are attempting to create an arbitrary and unwarranted boundary.
Quoting Possibility
Is there no use for this argument? If it can dispel a false, and very misleading assumption, I think the argument is quite useful.
Quoting Banno
It is scientific myopia that leads one to think that their senses aren't part of the equation of explaining what language is and does. When using your senses, you acquire information - nothing else.
The world is the medium for communication and language is simply part of the world, as language exists as sounds in the air, ink on paper, or light on your computer screen, which you use your senses to access.
We can communicate without language use. Our behaviors and shapes of our bodies communicate our state of awareness and health. So language is just one way to communicate, not the other way around where communication is only one of the things language does. Your senses provide nothing but information. In a sense the world is communicating with you via your senses.
The rules of language use is just more information. Once we have the rules (knowledge of language use), we know how to interpret those scribbles and sounds as about ideas in other minds, not about the ink and the paper, or the sound, or the light on the screen.
In a sense, language use is how we communicate our own interpretaions of our sensory data which can be a certain shape with a certain color, taste and smell as "apple", or "word" and "sentence". How we interpret it shapes our response to it. We eat it or read it.
You're preaching to the choir Luke. I'm not conflating information and meaning. Information is not meaning. I'm arguing that divorcing information from meaning is the mistake here. Information is always already meaningful.
The comparison to peaceful demonstration fails to capture the relationship. Demonstrations are not existentially dependent upon peace. Information, however, is existentially dependent upon meaning. Not only can information 'have' meaning, it always does. Again, as before, if information is something that can be decoded, and/or translated, then it is already meaningful. The successfulness of the decoding/translating is itself existentially dependent upon that.
Ok.
Quoting Possibility
Agreed.
Quoting Possibility
We differ here.
Correlation is the only process by which we attribute meaning. I suspect there's an equivocation of the term "correlation" at work on your view. One sense for the process we use to attribute meaning, and one sense to characterize the results of certain command functions in computer language(and other 'systems', perhaps?).
Case closed.
One ought take care not to portray the senses as a diode, passing information in one direction only. There is feedback here, and hence complexity. Complexity occurs when small variations in the initial conditions are fed back into the system to be magnified and become great influences on the later conditions.
One sees, reaches out, touches, holds, puts down. One is not situated passively, doomed only to absorb information.
Better to think of oneself as embedded in the world.
One does not sit inside one's body, looking at mere phenomena and reacting to them. One is not separate from one's sensations and acts - far from it. One's sensations and acts are constitutive of what one is.
One does not build meaning inside one's head and then transmit it. Building meaning is part of the complex interaction one has with the world. Hence language is not mere communication. It is an integral part of the self-referential complexity that creates oneself, the other, and the various things in our world.
This looping is not simple; it is strange. It traverses from level to level, between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics unexcused. It provides the illusion of free will. It is not limited to the self, nor the mind, nor the body, nor the various items that together make up the physical world.
These sorts of comments annoy me to no end, because it suggests a ridiculous misreading of anything I've ever said or would say. I can only imagine that the people responding with comments like this are applying their own misconceived ideological templates to things that I say, as if I'm somehow responsible for the wonky templates the person is employing in their understanding.
Perhaps our difference is one of emphasis rather than one of kind?
Possibly.
For one, say that someone is talking about stoves/ovens and what they do. You wouldn't assume that they're for some reason saying that stoves aren't embedded in the world, would you?
And a lot of what I'm doing amounts to pointing out that we use ovens to bake cakes, contra people suggesting that the actual baking part is a matter of people mixing the batter, cutting wheat to begin the process of making flour, or even suggesting that there's no such thing as ovens, or whatever other confused or intentionally ambiguous thing they might be suggesting.
Sure. And the oven is also embedded in the language being used. That is, being able to use an oven involves dividing things up in such a way that there is a role for "oven" in what we do. The world is understood in such a way as that there are ovens in it.
Now I do not think that we disagree about this, so much as that it needs to be taken into account.
I'm still waiting for the argument to demonstrate that this claim, "agency requires complex thought/belief", is a conclusion rather than a gratuitous assertion. Continuing with gratuitous assertions is really proceeding in the opposite direction.
OED: agent, 2. a) person or thing that exerts power or produces an effect. b) the cause of a natural force or effect on matter.
As I said, one can distinguish agents which act for a purpose, from agents which do not act for a purpose, through the principles of final cause. But your assertion that agency requires complex thought/belief is nothing other than ridiculous. As is your claim that this is a conclusion rather than an assumption. Don't you agree that we need to root out such faulty assumptions, and get rid of them? Why keep asserting it when it's so obvious that the assumption is so wrong?
How does "looping" provide the illusion of free will? For that matter, how is free will any more of an illusion than any supposed relationship that an individual has with any other individual, or any other thing? How is free will less real than "the complex interaction one has with the world"? Isn't free will necessary for that interaction?
It seems to me that the relationships we have with others are far more illusory than free will is. I can move my hands, arms, or get up and move at will, and this is extremely clear to me, but the relationship between myself and others is something which is vague and illusory.
Quoting Banno
Isn't this an attestation to the reality of free will, right here?
The juxtaposition of free will and determinism is a nonsense. Neither is coherent. What we do have is a complex looping of act and consequence.
That's a vicious circle. If one truly has a desire to understand acts, and the causes of acts, which is integral to philosophy, then one would very quickly see that we cannot understand the causes of acts as a looping of the consequences of acts. That's rather nonsensical, like say that the effect is the cause of the cause.
Strange loops are inherently unpredictable. So yes, you are right that we cannot understand acts in terms of their consequences. Their consequences will be innumerable and unforeseeable. But we knew that , and it does not make this description wrong.
What's relationship between you and the world?
Who, me?
As if there were only one such relationship. Or many. Positing a relationship between me and other stuff already posits a separation between me and other stuff. So you don't get one without the other (hence solipsism is a nonsense).
What is my relationship to the world? I can't say. But if you watch, you will see.
Okay, we don't disagree, so what do you want from me?
Your original complaint was:
Quoting creativesoul
I explained prior to this what I took "moving information from one head to another" to mean and I've explained it since. What I take it to mean is simply informing someone of something.
If I tell you "the building is on fire" and you were not already aware of it, then I have passed this information on to you. You might say that this information has passed from my head to yours (although I dislike this way of putting it).
What has not been passed on to you ("moved from my head to yours") is the meaning of the sentence, which is something you would need to know ("have in your head") already in order to understand the sentence.
Senses do pass information one way, unless youre Superman and can shoot heat rays from your eyes.
Quoting Banno
Already said this. Go back and read my previous post. We react to the information that our senses provide based an our learned experiences. We eat apples, not the word, "apples". We read the word, "apple", not eat it.
We continue to use our senses to provide feedback of our reactions to prior stimuli. Our own actions provide information that we use to fine-tune our actions for future use. So, yes an information feedback loop occurs as a result of our using real-time information to shape our behavioral responses to accomplish some goal with more efficient means. We become better at with our most commonly used actions because that is what we have more information about. Practice makes perfect.
Quoting Banno
Already said this too. Have you been paying attention? We are part of the world and therefore part of the information of the world. Our minds are as much of a causal force as anything else and is why we can access other minds thanks to the effects that they produce in the world. Words are about the ideas in a mind. Inventions are about ideas in a mind. Musical compositions are about ideas in a mind. We get at ideas in a mind every time we listen to the music some mind composed, or read the words they wrote. There are many levels of causes that lead to some effect that can go all the way back to the Big Bang. It's just a matter of what causal relationship, or what information, that is useful at any given moment per some goal. Information exists everywhere, but only minds have goals, so minds are what find any particular causal relationship useful, or attended to, or not depending on the present goal in mind.
Quoting Banno
This is similar to my questioning what constitutes "you" - your mind, your body, or what? To say that one sits inside one's body is to say that one is potentially separate from one's body, ie. the soul. I have never implied, much less proposed, such a thing. You are your actions, but thinking and speaking are part of one's actions, or behaviors, and communicative of many things - not just what one is saying, but what language they are using, where they are from, etc.
Quoting Banno
Like I've been saying, meaning exists everywhere causes leave effects. Your interaction with the world is meaningful because you are part of that causal relationship. You are part of the world, which is to say that your existence is meaningful. Whether or not your existence is useful is a different story. Usefulness is related to goals and your existence could be useful or not dependent upon some goal, like your own survival, or some task a friend needs help with.
What creates oneself is simply one's interaction, of which language is just a part, with the world. One's actions are what defines one's self, of which language use is just one kind of action. You seem to think that language use is this god that creates the self, as if we couldn't be self-aware without language. That is strange.
We're in agreement.
What I said about the senses is accepted science. What you see, hear, feel and so on is mitigated by the nervous system. That the senses are far form passive is not something that ought be the subject of contention. So either you misunderstood, or you are wrong.
Perhaps we are doomed to forever talk past each other.
Tell me, is there any one who agrees with you that meaning is causal? Does it have a history?
Incorrect.
Language is not communication, full stop.
It is a mental modelling system used by advanced psychosemiotic organisms (i.e., human beings).
I see what you’re saying, and I recognise that I haven’t been very clear.
Correlation can refer to the process of establishing a relationship between events OR to the relationship itself - neither of which is, in my view, equated with meaning or the process of attributing meaning. The relationship IS a process, so I guess that’s where the confusion occurs.
As a process, correlation is not dependent on thought/belief, language or self-awareness. It only requires the capacity to integrate information, and so it can occur at every level of awareness, to varying degrees. This, I think, is where we differ. That being said, it is a key component in the more complex and multi-dimensional process by which humans attribute and construct meaning.
Correlation is the building block of the universe - without it, all we have is potential.
Meaning, on the other hand, is a dimension of awareness in which we interact with the universe across and beyond four-dimensional spacetime. Language enables us to both integrate information and interact with events by establishing relationships (correlation) across all six dimensions (including a fifth dimension of value). Like sensing and evaluating, language is a set of correlations itself that help us to navigate meaning in relation to the lower dimensions, and to increase our understanding of this entire conceptual space in which we can now interact with the universe. The more we develop this capacity, the more information we can integrate, the more we can interact with the universe across these dimensions, and the more we can achieve.
Quoting Banno
I agree with you here. In my view, language is not moving information from one head to another; It is not mere communication. It is how we navigate the dimension of meaning: a means to integrate information, but more importantly to interact with the universe across spacetime and beyond it, to achieve, build structures of meaning, transcend or challenge value structures including the self, and even seek awareness beyond meaning.
You're right, it doesn't make the description wrong. But a description which doesn't help us to understand the thing being described is generally not very useful, and therefore not very good.
I agree with you that "moving information from one head to another" is not a very good description of language. But I think "strange loops" to describe the relationship between actions and consequences, is a step in the wrong direction. In this sense, your description is wrong. If a move toward clarity in a description, is the right direction, you've moved in the wrong direction.
The relation between actions and consequences is a temporal relation. We move forward in time, lineally. "Moving information from one head to another" is consistent with how we understand the passage of time, in terms of entropy. "Loops" is not consistent. You have provided no descriptive mechanism to get us out of the entrapment of this paradigm of temporal understanding "entropy", to a new paradigm where "loops" and feedback into a system, actually makes sense. Such an image requires that there are systems, with boundaries. The description cannot be successful until the boundaries are determined. "One head to another" already assumes the necessary boundaries. If you deny these boundaries you no longer have separate systems, and therefore nothing to support the image of loops. If you allow the boundaries, then you need to account for the learning capacity within the system, such that feedback can be a learning experience. But this requires a comparison of temporally distinct events, memory, and the act of comparing. So it's not a loop we're talking about, it's memory, comparison of temporally distinct events, and judgement.
Really? Care to show some scientific study that says just that?
What is the "you" that sees hears feels and so on that is mitigated by the nervous system? Isn't the nervous system part of what it is to be "you"?
Quoting Banno
I'm not sure if we're talking past each other, or saying the same thing with different words.
Quoting Banno
:brow: Why would I mention logic as the source of my insights and then make the logical fallacy of appealing to popularity like you did here?
Others agreeing with me doesn't make my ideas true or not. My ideas are based on logic and the way we use words like, "meaning", "information", "knowledge" and "understanding". When we ask what something means, we are asking about causal relationships. For example, "What is the meaning of life?" is a question about the origins and/or purpose of life.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, I didn't think so. :wink:
Why, though? Why would you start talking about language when it comes up? You could just as well talk about the factory where the oven is made, the trucks that deliver it, the laws that have to do with how the business that makes the oven exists as a business and pays taxes and so on, the geological processes that enable us to mine and produce the materials used in the oven's manufacture, the planetary evolution processes that are necessary for the geological processes to obtain,and on and on--there are a bunch of things like that we could bring up. Why focus on language?
Is it just because that's a pet topic for you? It's what you'd prefer to talk about?
So there's no separation between you and other stuff?
That's not what I said.
The relationship between you and other stuff is what you choose.
I've chosen to be the King of the Universe. Something's not working.
It's working perfectly.
I would not disagree with any of that; the complexity of the correlations.
This is just wrong on so many levels...
I've already argued for an earlier premiss. You've a habit of calling premisses assumptions. I could argue for that one as well, but won't. All you'll do is continue to deny what doesn't fit into your own preconceptions here, and continue to say that this or that is false, and ask me to argue for the next premiss, ad infinitum.
I'll shorten the journey.
At conception, there is no thought/belief. All agency requires thought/belief. That's the basis of it.
The second premiss above is what you're currently denying. That's fine. Here's the bigger problem. You've taken the weakest of stances against anything and everything I've offered. Hand waving. "Nuh uh!". That's all you've done. You've yet to have offered a single argument. The irony is that you're the one presupposing agency where none is warranted. You're the one with the burden to bear, but don't/won't.
You actually want others to think/believe and/or agree with you that inanimate matter - rocks nonetheless - have agency? Theists might, I mean after-all God has to fit into the story somehow. I'm not.
Now, you could surely - being as clever as you are - come up with an argument for that. The problem is that inanimate matter does not have agency. Agency requires thought/belief. Inanimate matter has none.
Think/believe what you want. Seems pretty clear to me that I'm on the right side of this fence. There's no need to posit agency at the level of cell and/or DNA replication. It's a causal process, and one we're continually learning more about.
Yeah we certainly disagree here. You're neglecting the difference between relationships, of which not all require thought/belief, and drawing correlations between different things... which are thought/belief.
Yes, many premises are assumptions. And since you have yet to provide any support for that premise, it appears I am most likely correct in calling it an assumption.
Quoting creativesoul
Actually, I've offered definitions and explanations. You've given me only hand waving, asserting over and over again that agency requires complex thought/belief, without any evidence or argument to support this premise.
Quoting creativesoul
There are many inanimate agents. Have you no education in chemistry? There are reducing agents, oxidizing agents, catalysts are agents, etc.. And "agency" is the act of an agent.
Quoting creativesoul
There you go again, repeating your assertion, without argument. However, as I've explained, agency does not require thought/belief, that's something you've just made up, as a premise to support some sort of argument. Of course it's a very unsound argument you have there, because your premise is very false.
:roll:
You win, Meta. You win. The Ajax(a household cleaning agent) that I clean my toilet with has agency. The cleaning is the agency. Perfectly reasonable talk in this context. Fer fuck's sake.
One is establishing a relationship between two events, and the other is being aware of the relationship established as an event/entity, in relation to other relationships. Calling it ‘thought/belief’ only distinguishes it from the same process at a lower level of awareness.
I take it that this one to which you refer is mental correlation? I do not disagree. However, that barely scratches the surface. That's not the only thing done with thought/belief(drawing and/or previously drawn correlations between different things).
So, in agreement...
Sometimes we establish relationships between events.
To add...
Sometimes we establish relationships between other things(other than events). Sometimes we correctly identify relationships(some between events) that already existed prior to our account of them. Sometimes some of us can get both wrong. Some relationships are between language use and something else. These are the kind that some of us can have wrong if those relationships are still being forged through language use. All of us can get them wrong if that language is dead, in the sense of all of it's users have died.
Quoting Possibility
That is to think about thought/belief.
There are relationships that exist prior to the very first account of them. Those are the ones that all of us can get wrong. Those are not relationships that are existentially dependent upon language use.
There are also correlations drawn between different things by language-less creatures. Some of these correlations foster true belief.
So, while I agree that there is a difference between establishing a relationship between two events and being aware of the relationship established as an event/entity, in relation to other relationships...
...that's too incomplete a basis for any robust explanation of thought/belief and all that that includes/exhausts. I won't use "entails" due to my rejection of those so-called 'logical' rules.
Maybe this helps...
Calling mental correlations between different things "thought/belief" is a practice I've arrived at by virtue of taking proper account of what all statements of thought/belief have in common that makes them what they are. I determined what they consisted in/of, and then further discriminated between the individuals within that group of basic elemental constituents in terms of whether or not non-linguistic thought/belief could consist in/of the same.
It's a simple vein.
Some common denominators had to be set aside. Language, for instance, cannot be an elemental constituent of non linguistic thought/belief. Being a social creature can. Having physiological sensory perception and a complex nervous system can.
So...
The quote above has the wrong target.
The point being, if you propose that there is a special sort of thing, called "agency", which only beings with complex thought/belief have, i.e. that complex thought/belief is required for "agency", then you need to describe what "agency" refers to, in order to distinguish this special type of "agency" from the type of agency that things like household cleaning agents have.
If you distinguish this special type of "agency", by saying that the agent acts for a purpose (final cause), as I proposed, then the actions of DNA replication fall into the same category as the actions of a being with complex thought/belief, acting for a purpose.
But you claim that there is a distinction to be made between the activities of DNA replication, and the activities of a being with complex thought/belief. On what principle do you base such a distinction? Is it the principle of moral, or legal responsibility? Beings with complex thought/belief can be held morally and legally responsible, while other beings cannot. If so, how would this support your claim that there is no information in DNA, and no meaning in the activity of DNA replication? Why would meaning and information be confined to the communion of beings with moral and legal responsibility and denied from the communion of cells with DNA?
.
That wouldn't be the answer to where anything is located or what substance it's a phenomenon of, because it's not a location, and it's rather itself a phenomenon of substances.
You rejected that in lieu of Ajax and rocks. There's nothing left for me to say here. You've proven exactly what I stated earlier regarding sneaking agency into the back door(where it is not yet warranted) via use of "information"...
Until you say what you think "agency" is, then your use of the term in any argument is not warranted. I said what agency is, and distinguished two forms, and "agency" in DNA replication is warranted according to that definition. You reject my definitions and seem to have some delusion about some form of "agency" which only beings with complex thought/belief can have, but until you describe what this "agency" is, you're just blowing smoke
Right, I see your reference supports my description very well. The introduction provides an almost exact rendition of what I said:.
[quote=Stanford]In a very broad sense, agency is virtually everywhere. Whenever entities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on each other and interact with each other, bringing about changes in each other. In this very broad sense, it is possible to identify agents and agency, and patients and patiency, virtually everywhere.[1] Usually, though, the term ‘agency’ is used in a much narrower sense to denote the performance of intentional actions. This way of thinking about agency has a long history in philosophy and it can be traced back to Hume and Aristotle, among other historical figures.[/quote]
Notice, the "very broad sense", in which the toilet bowl cleaner is an agent, an entity interacting with other entities. Then there is the distinction which I made, which gives us the "narrower sense".
The only difference, is that in describing the "narrower" use of the term, Stanford uses the term "intentional", whereas I used "purposeful". By what reasoning do you insist that the actions which constitute DNA replication are not intentional, or purposeful? I think it is quite clear that these actions must be intentional. These are very complex interactions which are capable of producing two extremely similar copies of DNA from one, and consistently do, with an incredibly high degree of accuracy, there is virtually no mistake. How could such extremely complex interactions be simply random interactions of inanimate agents, like toilet bowl cleaner, producing copies of DNA? Don't you think that these actions must be purposeful, or intentional?
According to the common definition, an intentional act is one carried out for a purpose. So, taking the evidence, that the actions which replicate DNA, are extremely precise and consistent, in producing the replication with virtually no mistake, along with the additional premise, that when an extremely complex set of actions is repeated over and over, to produce the same result, those actions are carried out for the purpose of producing that result, we can conclude that these actions are carried out for that purpose, or "intention". On what basis would one argue that the actions which lead to the replication of DNA are not carried out for the purpose of replicating the DNA?
It appears to me, like you have adopted the false assumption that only beings with complex thought/belief may carry out intentional actions, and this has skewed your way of looking at things. But in reality, we see purposeful (intentional) acts throughout the realm of living beings, as well as within the various parts of living beings. Intention pervades all the activities within a living body, as these acts are carried out for their various purposes, including maintaining the existence of the body. When we see that a living being such as a human being, as a whole, a unit, acts with intention, this is just a reflection of the intention which exits within the living being, by which all the various parts of the being act with purpose or intention.
You should read it through a bit more carefully. There are those, like yourself, who want/desire to say that things like bacteria have agency. They are in the minority, but there. I'm charging those people(and you) with conflating goal oriented behaviour with causality, based upon what having a goal requires.
What is the goal of DNA replication, and who's goal is it?
The goal of that activity, which is commonly called DNA replication, is to produce two sets of DNA from one. Is that not obvious to you? There is activity, and the goal of that activity is DNA replication. I couldn't say who's goal it is, but that's the way goal oriented behaviour is. It's common that we cannot say who's goal it is in many cases of intentional activity. People often work together in groups, and the goal is communal. Who's goal is a communal goal? I couldn't tell you who's goal it is for me to follow the laws of the state, and various ethical rules. Nor can the RNA and proteins tell you who's goal it is for them to carry out the actions required to produce the replica DNA. But there's no doubt that this is goal oriented activity, because it is repeated over and over again, like a machine, consistently, with the same results, with very little if any mistake..
Just because we cannot identify the agent does not mean that there was not agency. When we come across physical evidence which indicates that an action was carried out with intention, for a purpose, and the agent is nowhere to be found, we do not conclude that the action was not carried out with intention, just because we cannot identify the agent. Agents are often stealthy in their actions. And, when we come across machinery in action, we can know that it was set up with intention, regardless of whether the agent that built the machinery is present.
And there you have it... exactly as I initially charged. Talk of information at the level of DNA presupposes agency where none is warranted.
The idea of making a mistake also presupposes agency/intention. In addition, the only way that you can know that a mistake has not been made is if you know both, the intended outcome and the actual. So, that doesn't help your case either.
Quoting creativesoul
Clearly, agency is warranted, as there is purposeful action, and you've regressed back to your gratuitous assertions.. If you think that the activity which results in DNA replication is not carried out for that purpose, then you ought to be able to show this, with an argument, otherwise you are just making "gratuitous assertions" to support an unfounded assumption.
Quoting creativesoul
Huh! Is this your argument? Purposeful acts may be mistaken, therefore acts which are not mistaken are not purposeful. Sorry, but you'll have to do better than that if you really want to demonstrate that the actions which replicate DNA are not intended for that purpose.
Quoting creativesoul
Actually, I believe that when actions are carried out, producing the same sort of object over and over again, as if by a template, we can conclude by inductive reasoning that these actions were carried out for that purpose. It's an inductive conclusion, because every time that we find such activity, such as machinery on a production line, there is intention involved. In no case do we find such activity without purpose.
And to take activity such as DNA replication, and argue that this is an example of such an activity without intention, would be simply begging the question, insisting that the inductive conclusion is not true in this case, for the sake of invalidating that inductive conclusion. In other words, it's just an unsupported assertion which is designed to undermine the inductive logic. So all you are doing is asserting that this case (DNA replication) is an exception to the rule, for the sake of invalidating the rule, such that the rule cannot be applied universally, and your case (DNA replication) may be accepted as an exception to the rule. Perhaps you might have some other examples which would back up your assumption that the rule might not apply universally?
...and then communicates it? :chin:
The irony...
Quoting Banno
See?
In my view, information is proof of meaning. Two dimensional information - noticing that the same space can have a different shape to it - is proof of a three-dimensional aspect to the space. Three-dimensional information - noticing that the same object can change in spatial details - is proof of a temporal (4D) aspect to the object. Four dimensional information - noticing that the same event can happen differently - is proof of an aspect of (5D) experience to the event. Five dimensional information - noticing that the same experience can have a different value - is proof of an aspect of (6D) meaning to the experience.
So when we notice that the same event can happen differently at different times, we can look for information about how those differences relate to surrounding events. Then we can recognise those surrounding events as causal relations, and predict certain future events based on the occurrence of related preceding events. In this way, we can have information about the future.
Sorry, that wasn’t very clear. Information is not the same as speculation, no. Information is what we have that is real (not necessarily physically real, mind you). Speculation is the process of guessing what might fill the gaps between the information we have. The scientific method makes use of speculation in order to acquire more information.
The information we have is not of the future as such. It’s about the future as much as it is a correlation regardless of time. We use this information to speculate about the future, and we use our speculation to seek more information.
The way I see it, the higher the dimensional information the more variables, and so the more information we need to make reliable predictions. The scientific method struggles at these higher levels, leading to more speculation than we would like. But rejecting information that doesn’t meet certain criteria (ie. reducibility to three- or four-dimensional information) is detrimental to the scientific method’s ability to acquire more information, in my opinion.
Well, ideally that’s what it is, or that’s what we try to do every time we open our mouth. (Thoughts include factual information, ideas and feelings.) Unfortunately, a language is a very imperfect thing and our ability to use it is limited, so our thoughts are often very inaccurately transmitted. Still, since we lack telepathic abilities, we make the best of it.
It is said that we do things with language. Sure, we praise, we beg, we inaugurate events, but that is also essentially transformation of thoughts. Even when the words have been formed in advance, as they are when we recite a poem or perform a ceremony, we are essentially repeating thoughts. We don’t hammer nails with language…
Language is communication and nothing more. Words don’t have magic meaning and any one of them is as good as any other as long as it succeeds in communicating the speaker’s meaning.
Language is not identity, at least it shouldn’t be. We may put on a hat to signalize who we think we are, but if we use language for that purpose, we obscure its effectiveness. Moving thoughts from one head to another is difficult enough as it is.