Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

That's clearly not the case for a computer.  Every function of a computer exists -as- the function of it's parts.  There's no "extra", no more, no greater.  Just what the parts can do and what they can't.  Again, the brain may be different, I just don't see any need to assume as much.  

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.

No, you couldn't say that -and- be right...you'd have to pick one or the other, lol.  What idea is imposed onto windows, in your estimation?  

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.

I'm saying that they -can- be, not that they are or always are.  As I said..maybe some ideas are not.  Maybe the brain is different.  What extra stuff? What's being imposed, upon what, and by what?

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.

MP3 is a digital compression algorithm.  A computational function.  Computational functions violate the seperation you insist on, their structure -being- their function, and so provide a counter-factual example of what you propose. An mp3 file -is not- a representation of complex interactions between scientific knowledge, the way we experience sound, and ideas about how to encode sounds. It's a format to store data. Your description is linguistic flourish, a mismash of things related to but -not- an mp3.