That fact that it can be encoded in multiple ways,without the meaning being changed, shows that the meaning can be distinguished from the representati...
I agree, I have just listened to a lecture on this matter - on Aristotle's hylomorphic dualism. Kreeft, the lecturer, was at pains to point out that w...
This is getting a bit rapid fire, Janus. Clearly 6 =/=7, and 7 exists, whilst the square root of two does not. So, in the vernacular, yes, numbers exi...
Are they? They can only be associated with persons and/or living beings. You can film a person or an animal apparently experiencing a sensation; but y...
I have no idea what that means, sorry. The question I asked (also evaded) was that the distinction between the symbolic and the physical that you gene...
In the context of the thread, the original post was about the fact that 'information' and 'representation' can be separated, thereby showing that whil...
Had the evidence of life been found on Mars, that would be big news. The question I had asked was about the fact that SETI is searching for order of a...
I'm not ignoring it. I'm saying that 'the arrangement' is of a different order to the physical. Semantics is not reducible to physics. Left to its own...
There have been huge efforts to detect life on other planets, under the acronym SETI. That search is looking for the telltale signs of life. So far, o...
Of course algebra problems are conveyed by physical (chalk) marks and symbols - I've already acknowledged that in the OP. But I'm saying the substance...
If I wanted to convey information about which of these events had happened, then it would be relevant to the OP. The mere fact that such things happen...
Well, I am saying 'not physical', so that's close! Natural numbers, perhaps. The flying spaghetti monster is a fictional parody. The Baby Jesus is a r...
All the same stuff, but arranged differently. And indeed, electricity is required to encode the information on the hard drive, as it's an electro-mech...
The only thing that 'consumes free energy' is the manufacturing of whatever physical copy you make. Samuel's point was simply that the actual informat...
I don't want to go down the QM rabbit-hole, there's another discussion about that, other than to say that 'the act of observation' is noetic rather th...
Thanks, but kind of oblique to the point I'm laboring. My original point is simply that it is incorrect to say that information is necessarily physica...
I don't want to get into this argument in this thread, but in my view, Jerry Coyne is - let's see - the materialist equivalent of a young-earth creati...
When h. sapiens evolve to the point of being able to recognise logic and number, I believe they are discovering something, not creating or inventing s...
quantum mechanics carries a metaphysical implication. If it were just physics, there'd be nothing to discuss. 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum th...
True, but they were still written in a script, written by people to record meaning. So they are different to the scratches left in a rock by glacial a...
Don't forget that back in the day when it was assumed that the universe really was 'made of atoms', it was assumed that science was on track to workin...
When I enrolled as an undergrad many years ago, I was keen to study philosophy, albeit from a generic '60's truth-seeker' perspective. At the Universi...
I happen to think that the term 'phenomena' applies to 'the manifest domain', i.e. approximately the area of study of the sciences. It's a very genera...
That has nothing to do with the statement that 'all meaningfulness is ultimately grounded in the materiality of the thermodynamic imperative'. I'm not...
It's not so much the assertion that the world is 'in the mind' - what is at stake is the issue of mind-independence or its absence. The 'observer prob...
Do you think that is something that would be subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by any possible empirical discovery? If so, what kind of disco...
It's not a 'personal distaste'. We're discussing a metaphysical principle - how we see the fundamental cause or ground of existence. (But of course in...
Also, I really don't want to *ignore* this argument, but as it keeps coming up again and again, I will try and articulate what I don't like about it. ...
Agree. Another great book I read decades ago, was Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. As (I think) Planck commented, scientific progress is made 'one ...
No need to get huffy. The basic argument I made has nothing to do with entropy, or negentropy, for that matter. What I observed was that, the same inf...
You could make an argument that DNA constitutes 'man's essence', insofar as there is one. Were a single piece of human DNA discovered by another advan...
I'm not at all disagreeing with the import of the experiment - that babies have some kind of grasp of right and wrong - they are, after all, human bab...
In the social sciences, psychology and medicine, in particular, that the replication crisis has reared its ugly head. The upshot of that often is that...
No that's got nothing to do with it. A rational argument is simply one where the conclusion follows from the premises. It may or may not concern a sub...
You ought not to anthropomorphise natural selection, to make of it an agent that 'does' something. Neither natural selection nor evolution 'does' anyt...
No, I think a switch is different to a mark. A switch does something; a mark means something. Different levels of explanation. So here, for instance, ...
This passage deals with a similar point to that made in the OP but offers an explanation in terms of the 'computational theory of mind'. (Steve Pinker...
The Tao of Physics was originally published in 1975 and has been continually in print ever since. Despite whatever faults it has, it has had a big inf...
As I understand it, autopoesis was coined by Maturana and Varela, but I don't think it was something that was thought to be explanatory at the level o...
Many people suppose that, but I don't know. There are, I am led to believe, many abstract mathematical problems which could never be physically repres...
I think something you're missing here is the sense in which DNA encodes information. The difference between squirrels (or organisms generally) and ino...
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