Another thought about how to approach the connection between information and semantic content ... When a U-boat sends a coded message, there is an in-...
When I was in high school on the JV soccer team, some of us played the last part of the varsity season on that team after our season ended. We would r...
The short answer is: to avoid crap like this. The predicate logic we use was designed to formalize mathematics. It's supposed to help, not hinder, and...
You can't do this in classical logic because you would need the predicates "… is a statement" and "… is false". You can't have either of those. Classi...
If your point is only that this sentence can't be represented within classical logic, then duh. I still say the English sentence in question can justi...
Hey Sam. I'm looking back at the criteria you offered as candidates for judging the strength of an argument based on eyewitness testimony, and there's...
You can make the inference if you like, but the second version is also false, as I showed a month ago. I'll do it again: Let S be "S is false and all ...
Let's say I find the former more interesting than the latter, and you're the opposite. It's nice. No-- but then the foundation for this question has n...
I just don't see the need to jump from information-using all the way to Husserl. Plants use information. Insects. I don't see Mind there, I just see a...
We very nearly agree, I think. I see squirrels but not avalanches as information-using, until shown the error of my ways. On the other hand, despite t...
Does the squirrel know that it is hiding food? Maybe?! Does it choose to do this after considering the alternatives of perhaps leaving it out in plain...
I think I'm getting it. If it looked like someone was saying the data have to be quantitative or you're not doing science, no, nobody was saying that,...
Yeah I could see that as a motivation. It seems to me though, that once everything's mental, explaining why some things appear not to be is the new Ha...
Honestly, it seems like what happens is the standard "I've received a signal" response but with language that process is sandboxed most of the time. (...
I'm with you there. I don't understand it. I can see how a simple "causal" signal between animals would work, but even though language is similar to t...
No, the way I put that sounds backwards, doesn't it? Landauer's theory blocks some imaginable Maxwell's demon type systems by pointing out the cost of...
I start by distinguishing, let's say, "obvious" output and "not obvious": the difference between, say, on the one hand, dominoes falling in sequence, ...
? It's the central test case. If you can gather information about the state of a system without spending free energy to record that information (or to...
I was afraid you would ask that. Yes, I would think so, but it's not an area I know. Even without getting into neuroscience, there's various ways you ...
Can I what? Explain how life arose on Earth? No. If your argument is that I, Srap Tasmaner can't explain it, then you win, man. If you mean that no on...
Jeremiah's point is just this: what you are counting here, your data, is categorical rather than itself being quantitative. The fact that you counted ...
I just don't see how you get from the "haven't" we could all agree on to the "can't" you insist on. As you're reading Life's Ratchet, keep an eye on t...
Admittedly, not my cup of tea, so I appreciate your patience with me. From my point of view, it looks like a change in vocabulary. Does it look like s...
Wow. Thanks for the very thorough answer, since I don't know Whitehead at all. Here's what I don't get right off though: we're trying to understand th...
Is "panexperientialism" going to include, say, rocks? Clouds? Neutrinos? Supposing it does, does that solve your problem? Maybe you allow something "e...
Do dogs have souls? How about the most recent common ancestor of dogs and us? Yes? What about spiders? What about the most recent common ancestor of u...
<shrug> Mathematics is certainly not an empirical science. And it has a different notion of evidence. (Not just proof but also counterexample.) Even t...
A way of classifying 'things' (broadly), I suppose. There's some really abstract classifying it's pretty hard to imagine doing without language, but d...
Why not instead say that possession of a concept is always evidenced by behaviour, which in the case of some primates includes the sounds and marks th...
Caution's nice. Some of your points look to me like they could be, well, if not "settled" then at least addressed by research. An ape that learned to ...
This is becoming abusive @"Rich". I humbly suggest you stick to telling us what you think, and stop telling everyone else what they think. Nobody's as...
I am not getting your point. Suppose I was an accomplished mechanic who spoke only German. An English speaker could say truly both that I know how to ...
Besides which, there are loads of reasons to think this claim is simply false. You'd have to have a language without the logical constants. Even if yo...
Read this again. I did it that way specifically to leave room for the conclusion that the claim must not be a statement (i.e., not truth-apt), and tha...
I'll throw in Paul Grice too as someone with a theory of meaning that connects "natural meaning"-- what Eco calls "symptoms" in your quote, clouds mea...
Yes, this is exactly right. I've had this argument twice with another forum member. To predicate (truly or falsely) of an object does not show that th...
I'll agree @"fishfry" was a bit up on his hind legs. I didn't find it rude, but you did, and there's nothing more to say about that. (Might be a Merki...
Really? What other way is there to read this: Whether an utterance is an instruction depends on the context and the purpose of the utterance, its inte...
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