Sound and Nihilism

[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?  

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.

I'm still not following your point.  Maybe someone smarter than me can explain it, or reply to you.

Do you think ant colonies have meaning that exists independently from perception? I would, again, ask where that exists tangibly. 

Re your edit, no idea what that analogy is supposed to mean either!

[Faith No More]

I think all the philosophical talk of meaning and value is just an evolved way of perceiving things which give us positive neurological feedback. For example, we need to eat food to sustain ourselves as organisms, and our bodies deteriorate without it. Since we are hardwired to survive and fight against this deterioration, we assign a positive value to the act of eating that food. Even the simplest organism would have been affected by such a relationship without even being aware of it, and the food would be valuable to the organism even though it was unable to consciously acknowledge that fact. The physiological feedback the organism received from eating the food creates the value of the act.

Jump to billions of years later where our motivations and needs are much more complex and here we are trying to conceptualize just how the input from our perceptions affects the neurological feedback we receive and we come up with concepts like value and meaning. It seems that one of the evolutionary side-effects of increased intelligence is making simple concepts like how different inputs create positive and negative feedback overly complex. I, for one, see meaning and value as fundamental aspects of evolution thrust upon us in order to perpetuate the self.

[Neo-Scholastic]

[

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]The marks in a dictionary are signs representative of concepts, not the concepts themselves.
[quote='wallym' pid='933199' dateline='1430500320'] … we don't love our grandma, we love the perception of our grandma stored in our brain… I don't love a sunset, I love image created in my brain... are we just interacting with the perception of reality created in our brains?

No, you do in fact love your grandma, although I don’t doubt that the brain mediates between your subjective experiences and the real person. Saying that we ‘just’ interact with perceptions apart from the objects of perception is a bit like saying that a painter is just interacting with the brush he holds and not the canvas on which he applies paint. Just because you are interacting with something about which you lack complete unmediated understanding of a thing doesn’t mean the thing isn’t there. I don’t see that as a problem in the way that some philosophers do.

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.

Given her admiration for Dennett, I will go out on a limb and say that Jörmungandr would probably agree with that analogy. It supports her notion that you won’t find anything ‘in there’.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and yet, the abacus will still be capable of calculation..even in the absence of a "knowing subject" (awfully generous with your description of human beings there Chad..lol).  An abacus is not, actually, a comp sys...of course, and so analogies to an abacus regarding comp systems are pretty much useless.  This was, however, a great example of precisely what I commented upon.  You're trying to weld meaning and "knowing subjects" together.  Why?

Meanwhile....the meaning you've given an abacus is non-existent in the mind of my daughter, who has never before heard this silly calculation business. Your meaning, given by a "knowing subject" appears to be as insubstantial as the meaning applied by any other object which you wish to deride as "no meaning" relative to what -you- have assigned....doesn't it? That you think my board is not capable of inherent meaning(or, conversely, that you think that such a term even makes sense in context)...will not change how well sorted the tomatoes beneath it are. These "knowing subjects" appear to be extremely ineffective, and possess no function which the aforementioned "non-knowing subjects" do not(again, in context).

[henryp]

I think all the philosophical talk of meaning and value is just an evolved way of perceiving things which give us positive neurological feedback.  For example, we need to eat food to sustain ourselves as organisms, and our bodies deteriorate without it.  Since we are hardwired to survive and fight against this deterioration, we assign a positive value to the act of eating that food.  Even the simplest organism would have been affected by such a relationship without even being aware of it, and the food would be valuable to the organism even though it was unable to consciously acknowledge that fact.  The physiological feedback the organism received from eating the food creates the value of the act.

Jump to billions of years later where our motivations and needs are much more complex and here we are trying to conceptualize just how the input from our perceptions affects the neurological feedback we receive and we come up with concepts like value and meaning.  It seems that one of the evolutionary side-effects of increased intelligence is making simple concepts like how different inputs create positive and negative feedback overly complex.  I, for one, see meaning and value as fundamental aspects of evolution thrust upon us in order to perpetuate the self.

In the case of the simple organism (and possibly complex), would 'value' be akin to our describing a brick falling to the ground as 'gravity.'  In that it is just our way of describing the nature of the universe.  So the organism 'values' the biological impulse in the same way a brick "Gravities" the ground.  Or perhaps, if we view the biological impulses as more deterministic universal laws, we might even say a brick "values" falling to the ground?

[Neo-Scholastic]

I think all the philosophical talk of meaning and value is just an evolved way of perceiving things which give us positive neurological feedback…The physiological feedback the organism received from eating the food creates the value of the act.

I wouldn’t say that simply responding to something is the same as valuing it. Someone considering the actions of an organism, like an amoeba, in terms of only efficient causes playing out in matter has no basis for saying that anything is good or bad for the amoeba. Assigning value requires observing that some actions taken by the organism bring it closer to or further away from its idealized nature.

[robvalue]

I tend to agree with the notion that the "meaning" we give to things is a more sophisticated offshoot of evolutionary survival techniques.