Wayfarer

This is the relevant passage: Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism, 39:00 emphasis added. The written lecture is here, the passage above p. 16.

Have a look at the Gerson video above - it’s been bookmarked to the passage about this point.

I am the very first to admit the scanty nature of my knowledge of Aristotle and indeed the classics generally. But there's a very interesting concept ...

thanks, good references, and I shall read them. //edit//although as often with these papers, knowledge of ancient greek is assumed, which poses a rath...

For the sake of clarity, then, an edited passage from Ed Feser, with my comments on it: I would say, that what Feser designates 'thought', I would des...

How does nominalism account for the nature of concepts, then? Isn't it the case that, according to nominalism, concepts (and the like) are simply name...

Philosophers wonder at that which most deem obvious.

Important point, and a contested point, in that almost nobody else on this forum will agree with it: that numbers, universals, and so on, don’t exist ...

Not object, but concept. Such a concept doesn’t exist anywhere but in a mind, but it is nevertheless the same for all who think. I think the big under...

Thanks. Informative.

The topic was originally about The Information Philosopher, and I endorsed his website. Then you introduced the further topic of ‘existential anguish ...

Jim Mattis has released a statement that Trump is a threat to the Constitution. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-deno...

I think you're looking for immortality in all the wrong places. Whatever is born will perish - that's a law deeper than physics.

that's the problem with physicalism - 'all compound things are subject to decay'.

You will find actually that Schrodinger himself leaned towards Schopenhauer and Vedanta, both of which he wrote about in his later career. Quantum Mys...

all over the place, I imagine. 'What did you do to the cat, Erwin? It looks half-dead' ~ Ms Schrodinger.

I like it, often peruse it. He's a kind of 'independent scholar' type but he's incredibly industrious, there's a vast amount of resources and articles...

You're welcome. (Actually decades ago I was manager of a University computer store, and Jim Franklin was one of my customers!) Have a listen to a coup...

James Franklin is your man.

You can understand philosophy to be, rather than love of wisdom, a state of love~wisdom. In the ancient world, Wisdom, Sophia, was personified as a be...

It is an interesting topic in philosophy generally and philosophy of science in particular. At issue are some of the foundational moves made by, and o...

Indeed. You might notice my relative scarcity around this forum of late, that's because I'm thoroughly sick of banging my head against said brick wall...

actually a distinction needs to be made between 'experience' and 'realisation'. Why? Because experience is a transitive verb. Experience implies a sub...

Nicely illustrating the fact that the boundary between ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ is a rather porous one. Information, however, sounds more scientifi...

Not getting drawn into another one of your schoolyard brawls SLX.

The engineering of information transfer is irrelevant to the question of the place that ‘information’ now occupies in speculative philosophy and biolo...

I had comments like this in mind.

If you say, well, everything is information - the space between every atomic particle, the composition of every object - then you're saying nothing me...

Yes, I’ve looked at them.

It's not incoherent, but it's a metaphor, and in the context of this discussion it obfuscates the subject.

actually Norbert Wiener's wikiquotes page has another suggestive aphorism about this issue: 'The best material model of a cat is another, or preferabl...

Simply that random collections of objects are not ordered, and therefore are not able to be ‘deciphered’ as there was no ‘cipher’ to begin with.

The Norbert Wiener quote is frequently quoted especially in this context. I read that Wiener quote in the context of a thread on this subject on this ...

Cipher: a secret or disguised way of writing; a code. "he wrote cryptic notes in a cipher" The 'book of nature' is Galileo's metaphorical description ...

Methinks Harry’s posts would be considerably better if he really was a Hindu. :grin: (I suppose that is ad hom, but I’ve put with a lot over the years...

I'd call them undeciphered texts (the Indus script, for instance). I don’t agree. It broadens the definition of information to be so all inclusive tha...

But random stuff contains no information, as a matter of definition. A person, or a scientist, can discover information about it - composition, densit...

It doesn't convey anything. Now, if I was lost on a desert island, and spelt out 'help' with that bag of rocks, and a passing helicopter saw it - then...

‘As to...’ means that I, as an intelligent agent, can ascertain information about it. But a bag of rocks contains no information in itself, and my asc...

How so? I'm not asking about information ABOUT the pile, but what information it contains. If you see a bag of stones, do you think it contains any in...

No - it contains nothing ordered. White noise and piles of rocks are not algorithmically compressible - the position of the rocks, being random, can’t...

I think what you’re actually saying is that if there’s order, then it can be expressed in an algorithm, isn’t it? To use a more rustic example, if you...

If you study Buddhism, you have to allow for the fact that many Buddhist terms don't have exact modern translations. That includes dharma, sa?s?ra, Ni...

Fair enough although I suspect we ought not hold our collective breath.

do you reckon it would have been a lot different if Corbyn had won? Of course we’ll never know but I suspect not.

And you didn’t answer my question.

Well, the bit of it that constitutes the alphabet is what makes communication possible, although of course the question remains moot as to whether //i...

But then what is it? You can’t answer that question - which is the point of the OP.

Chaos only exists in relation to order.

Quite true! And indeed, scientists at CERN have already decided that the universe ought not to exist. But the fact that it comes into existence throug...