Sound and Nihilism

[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.

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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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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.