(September 28, 2016 at 2:48 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Are ideas interacting, how might they do that? By what means? According to what principles? What is their context? What purpose does the separation between functions or ideas or experiences and structures serve....could they not be the same? Why not? I'm going to need more than your insistence. I have an example that violates that separation right here in front of me, so obviously, it's something that computer stuff can do. Tell me why brain stuff or idea stuff can't do that, or why it has to be different, or why you think it is different?
Any time you bring small parts into a systematic organization, you have new information which the small parts didn't have. In other words, a system is ALWAYS greater than the sum of its parts, and the new "stuff" represents a level of context that doesn't exist at the level of function of its parts.
You could say, for example, that Windows is just a bunch of electromagnetic interactions of semiconductors, and be right. But what's important about Windows is that an idea is imposed onto those interactions which have meaning in a different context.
So yeah, you can keep saying that even ideas are physical. However, they represent a layer of entanglement with the environment-- the "extra stuff" isn't really of the brain-- it's imposed ON the brain by interactions with the environment.
Take as another example an .mp3 file. The information on it represents a complex interaction between scientific knowledge, the way humans experience sound, and ideas about how to encode sounds. That information comes from outside the medium, say a CD. The CD is not the thing that makes music, even though you couldn't have music in a CD player without it. The CD is a carrier for another context-- the context of musical ideas.
