Sound and Nihilism

[henryp]

We are physical beings analyzing a physical world.  Everything that exists, exists within it.

That seems rather parochial. Who’s to say that there are no other ways of existing and ways in which we unknowingly participate in them? People may be unaware of them now, but it seems premature to rule out the possibility.

We talk [of] meaning like it is an external [ ]measurable thing.  But what is meaning tangibly?

Must everything real be tangible? Is every real thing measurable?

It is our brains assigning values to our perception of the world. [/i]If you do not distinguish between the apparent difference between the physical processes of the brain and the qualitative experiences of the mind, you run the risk of begging the question. It assumes a mind-brain identity theory and closes off other options.

…that 'meaning' is not some intangible concept, it is a physical thing that exists.  It is a fact.  

A fact is propositional statement the contents of which are true. Do facts exist? If facts exist then you tacitly accept a category for intangible beings.

And when we are all gone, does meaning still exist?  No.

I don’t know. Does it?

…the conversion of the waves into sound in my brain is real.

Is the reality of a process, like converting vibrations into sound, somehow different from the reality of a sensible body, like an apple? Are you suggesting one category of being for processes and a different one for sensible bodies?

I'm not trying to write a proof with carefully picked out dialog that needs to be parsed line by line.  So if I use a word like "Fact" and you took some fancy argument class that says fact implies more than I intended to, oh well.  My bad for being a shoddy communicator.  But I'm hoping that as a whole my point is getting across in a very casual form, which I think it did.  I'm writing this pretty free form, to the point I'm often drawing new conclusions as I'm writing this stuff.  So I'd hope that you work with me on trying to understand my intent, rather than against me by trying to take vagueries and use them against me.  Probably asking a lot given the treatment of theists on this site.
That being said
1) I prefaced this as a discussion from the Atheist point of view.  In particular, that we are happy to dismiss God for not having any proof of existence, so we should probably be consistent in that in how we look at things.  I'm not really getting into what comes before this here.  
2) If our world view ends up being wonky or lacking, so be it.  This'll be ridiculously wrong.  But if we operated under the assumption that everything we know could be wrong to the point that we can't count on the 'known' laws of the universe, then we're not going to get very far thinking about anything.
3) Bit of a tangent on fact.  I'm not following.  Are you trying to say ideas and categorizations aren't tangible?  Ideas are certainly tangible.  Again, you'd just look to the brain we've got all kinds of words, thoughts, and definitions bouncing around in there.  
4) I don't think I was saying they were different categories.  I was equating both as input/output brain operations.

[Angrboda]

This may be true, but like consciousness, until we have a model of how the brain creates meaning, it's pointless to say you're sure that it's in there.  Maybe once we map out all the functional parts of the brain and we find it's not in there.  What is your response then?  You have faith that the physicalist model of mind explains it, but without an actual model of how it explains it, your assurances aren't worth much.

Why would you believe it's not there?  What possible rationale could you have to expect that this time, believing the laws of the universe, is an issue of 'faith.'  

That's like saying "We can't be sure gravity is still going to be a thing tomorrow until tomorrow gets here and we test it out."  

I'm not saying I believe it's not there. I'm saying that, at this time, without a model of how meaning works in the brain, the explanation "braindidit" is as empty as "goddidit". You don't actually know how any of this works, so you're putting the cart before the horse, claiming the brain does it without knowing in any sense how it does it. If you have a model, please present it. However all you've given us is a nice sounding metaphor.

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How about an alternative metaphor. Meaning is like an ant colony. No individual ant contains the instructions for building the ant nest, but the interaction of all the mindless ants results in a nest. What if meaning is like that? Something that occurs as a byproduct of meaningless activity, not in the brain, but in the social interactions of many individuals. Is this picture any less credible?

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[Chas]

Why would you believe it's not there?  What possible rationale could you have to expect that this time, believing the laws of the universe, is an issue of 'faith.'  

That's like saying "We can't be sure gravity is still going to be a thing tomorrow until tomorrow gets here and we test it out."  

I'm not saying I believe it's not there.  I'm saying that, at this time, without a model of how meaning works in the brain, the explanation "braindidit" is as empty as "goddidit".  You don't actually know how any of this works, so you're putting the cart before the horse, claiming the brain does it without knowing in any sense how it does it.  If you have a model, please present it.  However all you've given us is a nice sounding metaphor.

We don't have to know the mechanism to see that the evidence all points to an entirely brain-based mind.   All the different effects of brain damage, the direct electrical stimulation of the brain, phantom pain, and so on.  

How about an alternative metaphor.  Meaning is like an ant colony.  No individual ant contains the instructions for building the ant nest, but the interaction of all the mindless ants results in a nest.  What if meaning is like that?  Something that occurs as a byproduct of meaningless activity, not in the brain, but in the social interactions of many individuals.  Is this picture any less credible?

Meaning might be like an ant colony, but it resides in the brain.  
Further, not only meaning, but identity, self, consciousness may be a colony of mindless activities in the brain.

[robvalue]

I feel confident saying that we could analyse the brain and identify configurations or signals which relate to "assigning meaning" and similar, given good enough technology. It's really no different from any other abstract concept we store the image of in our brain.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I'm not trying to write a proof with carefully picked out dialog that needs to be parsed line by line…My bad for being a shoddy communicator.

I didn’t mean to be critical in a nasty way. If it came across that way I’ll try to be less curt. My own experience has been that in order to think clearly I must take extra care to use the right word. I have no intention of exploiting ambiguities for the sake of argument. I’m only looking for clarity so we don’t have a conversation wherein I’m talking about one thing and you another.

…if we operated under the assumption that everything we know could be wrong to the point that we can't count on the 'known' laws of the universe, then we're not going to get very far thinking about anything.

For everyday living people can generally rely on folk physics, e.g. you can’t push a chain, to get by. Folk laws of physics may hold most of the time, but everyone knows that reality rests on more fundamental physical laws that get refined, overthrown, and refined again as scientific scrutiny gets more intense. Rules and theories based on empirical confirmation allow educated people to adduce [/i]contingent[/i] truths. I believe application of these contingent truths do indeed take people quite far, literally all the way to the moon and figuratively into the infinitesimally small world of quantum effects. In the end however, people must accept some uncertainty about contingent truths since further. The question you seem to ask is this: are there necessary truths or absolutes knowable by applying reason to experience? I say that in order for there to be knowledge*, there must be necessary truths that are certain from which other necessary truths may be deduced.

Are you trying to say ideas and categorizations aren't tangible?

That is exactly what I am saying. Any word, like ‘apple’, or number, like ‘13’, that has a corresponding meaning is an arbitrary sign. The signs themselves have no essential properties in common with the things they signify.** Likewise, neural processes share no essential properties  with the concepts they represent. For this reason, computational analogies simply do not hold up to scrutiny. The beads of an abacus have no meaning apart from a knowing subject, even though used for calculation. Similarly, the outputs of an electronic computation, whether in the form of a printout or patterns on an LED display have no inherent meaning. The signs are tangible; the concepts that they represent are not.

*I added the phrase ‘in order for there to be knowledge’ because some smarty pants always comes along and says something like ‘your axioms only appear to be self-evident because we have evolved to think of them as such.’ To this I reply, ‘Then you are ignorant and don’t know anything.’

**Images are different in this respect and deserve special consideration.

[henryp]

I'm not trying to write a proof with carefully picked out dialog that needs to be parsed line by line…My bad for being a shoddy communicator.

I didn’t mean to be critical in a nasty way. If it came across that way I’ll try to be less curt. My own experience has been that in order to think clearly I must take extra care to use the right word. I have no intention of exploiting ambiguities for the sake of argument. I’m only looking for clarity so we don’t have a conversation wherein I’m talking about one thing and you another.

…if we operated under the assumption that everything we know could be wrong to the point that we can't count on the 'known' laws of the universe, then we're not going to get very far thinking about anything.

For everyday living people can generally rely on folk physics, e.g. you can’t push a chain, to get by. Folk laws of physics may hold most of the time, but everyone knows that reality rests on more fundamental physical laws that get refined, overthrown, and refined again as scientific scrutiny gets more intense. Rules and theories based on empirical confirmation allow educated people to adduce [/i]contingent[/i] truths. I believe application of these contingent truths do indeed take people quite far, literally all the way to the moon and figuratively into the infinitesimally small world of quantum effects. In the end however, people must accept some uncertainty about contingent truths since further. The question you seem to ask is this: are there necessary truths or absolutes knowable by applying reason to experience? I say that in order for there to be knowledge*, there must be necessary truths that are certain from which other necessary truths may be deduced.

Are you trying to say ideas and categorizations aren't tangible?

That is exactly what I am saying. Any word, like ‘apple’, or number, like ‘13’, that has a corresponding meaning is an arbitrary sign. The signs themselves have no essential properties in common with the things they signify.** Likewise, neural processes share no essential properties  with the concepts they represent. For this reason, computational analogies simply do not hold up to scrutiny. The beads of an abacus have no meaning apart from a knowing subject, even though used for calculation. Similarly, the outputs of an electronic computation, whether in the form of a printout or patterns on an LED display have no inherent meaning. The signs are tangible; the concepts that they represent are not.

*I added the phrase ‘in order for there to be knowledge’ because some smarty pants always comes along and says something like ‘your axioms only appear to be self-evident because we have evolved to think of them as such.’ To this I reply, ‘Then you are ignorant and don’t know anything.’

**Images are different in this respect and deserve special consideration.

1) I didn't interpret it as curt.  I'm just trying to say I'm not looking to be as formal as most on here.  So if I use a word that looks out of place, I'd rather get the benefit of the doubt if possible.  I'm looking at this sort of thing all in a more collaborative light than most.

2) I'm setting my truth bar for this discussion at what neuroscientists seem to be saying.  I fully accept that this is a debatable spot for it.  

3) This is the interesting thing.  I'm saying the 'word' apple is a physical thing in the brain in the same way we can point at it in a dictionary, or more relevant, a computer.  I'm saying it is a large number of individual instances throughout the world rather than some universal law.  In the same way the abacus itself has no meaning.  But the perception of the abacus stored in our brain (tangible) may have the meaning stored with it (tangible).  

The tangent this goes down that I find interesting and is really the origin of all this for me, came from watching that movie Interstellar.  Anne was all "Love transcends time and space."  And I thought, isn't that a nice idea!  But then I thought about it more, and we don't love our grandma, we love the perception of our grandma stored in our brain.  And then it's down the rabbit hole with that idea.  Because I don't love the sound waves of a guitar makes, I love the conversion of soundwaves done by my brain.  I don't love a sunset, I love image created in my brain from all the refracted light getting passed through my eye.

So then the next question is, does our 'conscious self' interact with anything, really?  Or are we just interacting with the perception of reality created in our brains?  Are we our own Matrix so to speak, living in this silent colorless meaningless collection of matter, but evolution has somehow created this crazy awesome reality that we experience.

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I feel confident saying that we could analyse the brain and identify configurations or signals which relate to "assigning meaning" and similar, given good enough technology. It's really no different from any other abstract concept we store the image of in our brain.

This.  I think the confusion that we encounter, is wanting to believe there is more to it than there is.  There is no reason to believe 'love', for example, is some magical mystical force rather than a biological impulse.  We just really like the conclusion of it being a magical mystical force, so we say "well maybe such and such."  But that's not a very reasonable way to go about thinking.

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Why would you believe it's not there?  What possible rationale could you have to expect that this time, believing the laws of the universe, is an issue of 'faith.'  

That's like saying "We can't be sure gravity is still going to be a thing tomorrow until tomorrow gets here and we test it out."  

I'm not saying I believe it's not there.  I'm saying that, at this time, without a model of how meaning works in the brain, the explanation "braindidit" is as empty as "goddidit".  You don't actually know how any of this works, so you're putting the cart before the horse, claiming the brain does it without knowing in any sense how it does it.  If you have a model, please present it.  However all you've given us is a nice sounding metaphor.

---

How about an alternative metaphor.  Meaning is like an ant colony.  No individual ant contains the instructions for building the ant nest, but the interaction of all the mindless ants results in a nest.  What if meaning is like that?  Something that occurs as a byproduct of meaningless activity, not in the brain, but in the social interactions of many individuals.  Is this picture any less credible?

---

The explanation of braindidit, if they haven't already solved it, is a conclusion based on braindidit being what all evidence has thus far pointed to.  The understood laws of physics seem to mandate braindidit.  Again, it might already be confirmed, I could look into it more.  But for this, I'm working off the assumption the experts know what they are talking about.  Their correctness is a separate discussion.

Goddidit, on the other hand, is a loose philosophical solution for arriving at several desired (I believe faulty) conclusions.  

Flying Spaghetti Monster on the third hand, is just dopey and pointless. 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Which brings us to sound.  If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  The answer is no.  It creates vibrations.  What makes sound is our eardrums converting the vibrations into whatever we hear in our head.  I'm not sure of the physiological details, and I don't think they are important.  The key being vibrations exist, and our noggins convert those vibrations into the sound we hear.

Woods have animals living in them. Those animals have ears. Their brains also convert vibrations to sounds.

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Your idea of meaning won't exist in terms of your brain when you're dead, but it's effects on your actions will affect others. This may alter their idea of meaning, and so on.

Unless you lived in total isolation of course.

I'm not following your point.  You're trying to say my meaning lives on?  That's clearly false.  As my meaning only exists in my brain.  It is not floating about in reality.

It is easily transmitted by words, such that I have influenced my son's sense of meaning in the world and have in one sense imparted the meaning in my brain onto him. Even if he doesn't agree with me about meaning, that he understands it means that he at least has an accurate model of my "meaning circuit" (pardon the inelegant phrase) in his head.

[The Grand Nudger]

This may be true, but like consciousness, until we have a model of how the brain creates meaning, it's pointless to say you're sure that it's in there.  Maybe once we map out all the functional parts of the brain and we find it's not in there.  What is your response then?  You have faith that the physicalist model of mind explains it, but without an actual model of how it explains it, your assurances aren't worth much.

We see how meaning can be assigned by other physical objects, any given one of which is far less competent than a single neuron could/should/would be.  That's not certainty....but it -is- a model............

.......and the requirements for assigning a value to a variable, or associating variables are laughably low. Your light switch can do this, a long trough with different sized holes will sort tomatoes not only by size...but also, by default, by age..and again..by default..by color - reliably. If you find a tomato under a particular hole...that -means- a whole hell of alot of somewhat obscure things about that particular tomato. Granted..the board can get it wrong sometimes, it can misassociate or misattribute...but I don;t think that -we- have any grounds to criticize the boards robustness on that particular count.

I'm fairly certain, whenever people talk about meaning as a mystery, or the mystery of how meaning is generated...they're talking about a whole range of associated concepts. Personally, I'm not so sure that we actually have to keep looking for meaning....by itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_n...omputation
-Some models for you, you can use these to list what sorts of meanings or associations comp (regardless of whether or not consciousness is comp...you don't need consciousness for meaning - though, granted, you may for appreciating it) could assign, how many, how fast, how often, and to what extent, if they were implemented /w biological architecture similar/identical to our own. The last one is fun, heres a direct link if you want to play with it.

http://neuron.duke.edu/

[henryp]

Re: Ants.  I'm saying if something's not tangible, it doesn't exist.  So my question for you would be where does this 'byproduct' of meaning exist? (edit: and why should we believe it exists) 

[Angrboda]

Re: Ants.  I'm saying if something's not tangible, it doesn't exist.  So my question for you would be where does this 'byproduct' of meaning exist?  

It exists as a pattern of interactions that individuals can perceive, but they don't create it.  More than that, it was just an example to illustrate that venturing forth with not only no model, but the wrong model, may lead to erroneous speculations.  It was just a way of pointing out that there's more than one way to skin a cat.

An analogy based on the sound metaphor is if the bottom layer of neural networks for sound chunks multiple notes into a time based meme.  The actual note is discarded for the representation of the sound-complex.  Sound-complexes are heard, but not individual sounds.

An interesting side-light:

In between 430 and 650 nanometers, human beings can discriminate more than 150 different wavelengths, or different subjective shades, of color. But if asked to reidentify single colors with a high degree of accuracy, they can do so for fewer than 15. The same is true for other sensory experiences. Normal listeners can discriminate about 1,400 steps of pitch difference across the audible frequency range, but they can recognize these steps as examples of only about 80 different pitches. The University of Toronto philosopher Diana Raffman has stated the point clearly: “We are much better at discriminating perceptual values (i.e. making same/different judgments) than we are at identifying or recognizing them.”

Technically, this means we do not possess introspective identity criteria for many of the simplest states of consciousness. Our perceptual memory is extremely limited. You can see and experience the difference between Green No. 24 and Green No. 25 if you see both at the same time, but you are unable consciously to represent the sameness of Green No. 25 over time. Of course, it may appear to you to be the same shade of Green No. 25, but the subjective experience of certainty going along with this introspective belief is itself appearance only, not knowledge. Thus, in a simple, well-defined way, there is an element of ineffability in sensory consciousness: You can experience a myriad of things in all their glory and subtlety without having the means of reliably identifying them.


Metzinger, Thomas (2009-03-17). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (pp. 49-50). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.