apokrisis

Sign or symbol starts where physics leaves off. A physical mark can "mean anything" only because that mark has zero dynamics. There is, in short, an e...

So have you decided what you are defending? Is it correlationalism or panexperientialism?

You are missing the point. Yes, the mind needs to relate to the world functionally and so its beliefs need to be "true". But that correctness is in re...

As usual, when you are under pressure to defend your claims, you divert to ad homs like eliminative materialism. Telling.

It doesn't. That is my point. And so it is ironic that some scientist are going overboard with the idealism. That is where I would disagree. Sure it i...

Ah religion. Aren't you always popping up every 10 seconds to tell us it's a "just so" story like science?

Yep. The story has to be told in a way that slips God and soul-stuff in through the back door even when talking about causality from a systems perspec...

Sure. In strangulated language, Whitehead is making the essential systems argument. The whole shapes its parts, the parts (re)construct that whole. Yo...

Of course I agree that an idealistic understanding is just as bad as a materialistic one. I'm just pointing out how many physicists are indeed "going ...

So explain to me how this story of correlation actually works then. If the material becomes convolutedly organised in a way that produces emergent org...

You did it again. As soon as you feel pinned down to a specific position, you switch the story. You just about grudgingly tied the correlational story...

I just gave Marty some references on the kind of emergence that goes beyond reductionist modelling still. But if you mean just references to the reduc...

That was the original holist proposal really, back around the 1920s level of understanding with guys like Broad, Smuts, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan. Ba...

It is hard to recommend non-technical books. But there are plenty of systems science or hierarchy theory texts. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's General Syste...

This is the more sophisticated view. Unfortunately reductionists can point to the liquidity of water or the magnetic field of an iron bar as simple re...

Worth mentioning that was Mr Blackholes, Stephen Hawking: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations....

Landauer was the one who made the information erasure point. Computation is physical because it doesn't have to cost energy to create information. But...

The shift is from things to relations. The things drop out of the picture to leave only the relations. So it is a shift from material cause thinking t...

So it is an ontology of relata rather than things. That is why the talk is of counting degrees of freedom instead of particles or things.

Yeah sorry. The comment was directed at the OP. Your Matrix remark highlighted for me that the literal view is the modern version of idealism. As to d...

Probabaly the best foundational definition of information - from Bateson and cybernetics - is that it is a difference that makes a difference. So mean...

I confess I am helpless against this level of rhetorical idiocy. Reason has completely departed the scene.

Hmm. It is ironic that a lot of you guys are reacting in horror at physicists who might take it literally that reality is just a pattern of informatio...

So in one breath, you seem to accept physical to mental causality, but say emergence as a mechanism feels too mysterious. Well that's a good place to ...

Not really as the way the brain "computes" is based on generating a forward model of the world. It attempts to predict its inputs, imagine the world a...

So your argument here says the physical parts can evolve complexity. We have the functional circuitry that is a brain connected to sensory organs and ...

Landauer certainly gets a mention. But there is something hilarious about this being a librarian's view of the contributions that information services...

One little fact that should give pause for thought. When Shannon discovered the way to quantify the information content of a message, it turned out th...

So now you are saying the mental is "wrapped up" in the physical. But somehow, that ain't causal? So where are we headed? Mondalogy? Correlationism? A...

You might have to go through that one step by step. But back to my question. Is emergence something that happens on the mental side of your equation o...

It's like the entirety of philosophy just passes you by.

?schopenhauer1 So does emergence work from the mental to the mental I wonder. Perhaps you can say how, or why not? Tell me more about the nature of th...

Yeah, that works. :-} So does the edge of one surface touch the edge of the other at every point? Or are you imagining a faint gap in-between? If touc...

But then what meaning does constraint have except that it is relative to a possible action? So how is the actual possibility of that action not prior ...

So does emergence work from the mental to the mental I wonder. Perhaps you can say how, or why not? Tell me more about the nature of this "mental".

Interesting how loop quantum gravity takes the condensed matter approach to explaining the emergence of spacetime. So in fact the grainy fabric of rea...

So is seeing believing or not? You can't have it both ways. Either we see the graininess and believe it, or we do what you do and still seek to deny i...

Hah. Don't get me going on PoMo approaches. They are generally hostile to hierarchical or structuralist thinking. They thus prefer the play of paradox...

We know it must be so. Otherwise any radiating body would radiate an infinite amount of heat (there being no smallest contribution if the underlying r...

You are right. Neither are acceptable (to me) as they rely on brute fact claims. Why should something come from nothing? Well it just did. Why should ...

This is the case once time has got going and a concrete history has developed. So it is not wrong. But it is a different sense of "potential" - one th...

So you are presuming that motion, change or action needs a cause and can't instead be spontaneous? I'm instead making the opposite presumption. Fluctu...

Small problem. Nature turns out to be quantum. There is a fixed fundamental grain of action and dimension. So spacetime and energy are discrete and no...

Does a wrench ever come to exist in a fashion that isn't dependent on a linguistic culture? The argument has to work both ways here. You are treating ...

It is to avoid that confusion that I keep reminding folk that epistemology and ontology are separate things. So subject-object describes an epistemic ...

Which is then what you did in saying chemoreception is "just signal transduction". In material terms, that might be true. In informational terms, it i...

That would seem to fit with my position then. Form stands "at the end of development" as ""emergent necessity". In the end, it restricts free choice a...

Remember that Peirce in fact defined vagueness as that to which the PNC fails to apply. So that is the definition in contention, not something else yo...

You could say that about the brain too. Or maybe a count of food fragments is a sign that points meaningfully towards a food source? There is a reason...

Hey, the fact you don't know stuff is probably less damaging to my self-esteem than you might think.