How meaning can exist in the world

[Syne]

No, empathy involves the process of comparing sense data to your own feelings of the recognized state. Gathering that sense data is completely independent of empathy. Since you seem to lack self-awareness of the simplest emotional cognition, I'm starting to doubt whether you truly feel empathy. It's sounding more and more like you're being defensive because you're a sociopath (or Aspie) insecure with his facade.

inference - a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning

So you think arriving at a conclusion is just information gathering? You sound more belligerently ignorant with every post.

Your emotional and fallacious arguments are irrelevant to anything but your fragile ego, and that your attempts at character assassination are willfully, intellectually dishonest. You should really have more faith in your own ability to make reasonable arguments.

Wow, so now you're plagiarizing my posts? https://www.scivillage.com/thread-3027-p...ml#pid8084 How pathetic.

[Secular Sanity]

No, empathy involves the process of comparing sense data to your own feelings of the recognized state. Gathering that sense data is completely independent of empathy. Since you seem to lack self-awareness of the simplest emotional cognition, I'm starting to doubt whether you truly feel empathy. It's sounding more and more like you're being defensive because you're a sociopath (or Aspie) insecure with his facade.

inference - a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning

So you think arriving at a conclusion is just information gathering? You sound more belligerently ignorant with every post.

Your emotional and fallacious arguments are irrelevant to anything but your fragile ego, and that your attempts at character assassination are willfully, intellectually dishonest. You should really have more faith in your own ability to make reasonable arguments.

Wow, so now you're plagiarizing my posts? https://www.scivillage.com/thread-3027-p...ml#pid8084 How pathetic.

Oh dear! I didn't cite the source, did I?  Sorry about that.  I fixed it.  

It was good advice. I’m simply returning the favor.  

Thanks, Syne!

[Syne]

No, empathy involves the process of comparing sense data to your own feelings of the recognized state. Gathering that sense data is completely independent of empathy. Since you seem to lack self-awareness of the simplest emotional cognition, I'm starting to doubt whether you truly feel empathy. It's sounding more and more like you're being defensive because you're a sociopath (or Aspie) insecure with his facade.

inference - a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning

So you think arriving at a conclusion is just information gathering? You sound more belligerently ignorant with every post.

Your emotional and fallacious arguments are irrelevant to anything but your fragile ego, and that your attempts at character assassination are willfully, intellectually dishonest. You should really have more faith in your own ability to make reasonable arguments.

Wow, so now you're plagiarizing my posts? https://www.scivillage.com/thread-3027-p...ml#pid8084 How pathetic.

Oh dear!  I didn't cite the source, did I?  Sorry about that.  I fixed it.  

It was good advice. I’m simply returning the favor.  

Fundamental attribution error? Oh, you mean like you attributing a simple and obvious typo as speaking to character? Hypocrite.

But I wasn't attributing characteristics to you over the plagiarism. The pathetic part was that you misapplied the quote and didn't have the integrity to even try to support its applicability with arguments of your own. For example, is the description of the process of empathy fallacious?

"empathy involves the process of comparing sense data to your own feelings of the recognized state. Gathering that sense data is completely independent of empathy."

How? If it is not, then you would have to agree with the observation that denying it can only be due to ignorance...and belligerent because this has been explained multiple times already. Or do you think "arriving at a conclusion is just information gathering" too?

LOL.

[Magical Realist]

Ugh...Yep.."dickhead" about covers it...

[C C]

Whatever, please give me an explanation of "qualitative attributes"

attributes - Features, aspects or properties ascribed to something. "The attributes of the world." ... "The attributes of Colonel Klink."

qualitative, for this specific usage or context - Involving a category of distinction-making based on experiential qualities.

quale - An ineffable (or lacking structural components?) property of conscious experience, as distinct from any physical or computational process. "Qualia are often referred to as the phenomenal properties of experience, and experiences that have qualia are referred to as being phenomenally conscious." --Amy Kind, Qualia

DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH: "The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally [generic definition], phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience." --Phenomenology, SEP

"Phenomenal" is an adjective derived from phenomenon. The etymology of the latter is: [< Late Latin phaenomenon appearance < Greek phainomenon, ultimately < phainein show forth]

"Show forth" or "showing" is key here. A unique power of qualitative properties (as refined to the area of phenomenal, empirical evidence, qualia, etc) is that they "show" themselves (appear). They are not absent items inferred by thought / memory or mediated by linguistic and symbolic activity (they don't rely on intellectual evidence or intelligible be-ing).

They are the manifestations associated with consciousness rather than abstract conceptions of intellect and quantitatively expressed "matter & mechanistic relationships" schemes, which (if reified) would otherwise occur without phenomenal or empirical evidence (in the "dark" so to speak). [A non-phenomenal version of the world "does not manifest by its mere existence" as Schrödinger aptly puts it in a quote below.] Kittens, pebbles, and apples show themselves as images, felt sensations, odors, and even sounds (if creating disturbances), and are natively encountered by us in that manner rather than by technical descriptions in disciplines which lean heavily on symbolic systems and abstract nomenclature.

Etymological ancestry of empiric when usage specifically relates to experience, observation, etc rather than "experiment": [< Greek empeirikos ex-perienced < en- in + peira experience; also experiment]

You've heard of blindsight, where the afflicted individual can respond meaningfully to visual information without having an experience of it? You've heard of the infamous thought experiment idea called the philosophical zombie, where all the senses / feelings of the host are "blind" with respect to their lacking manifested content? But the p-zombie still outwardly behaves like a normal person would. Just extend that phenomenal blankness of the p-zombie (or a even a conventional dead person) to the whole universe, because there are no qualitative attributes in either an intelligible or a material version of the cosmos (IOW, as opposed to way the world is encountered in our experiences). Those are artificial, formulaic depictions of reality which have the original qualitative style of "be-ing" washed out (so to speak), that they were abstracted from.

In perverse contrast to commonsense tradition, however, those abstract / metaphysical versions of the cosmos will be treated as the "real world" by those projects of philosophy that circle around science or older themes of naturalism, materialism, Platonism, etc:

Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. --An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth

I have argued that things are abstractions. We create all things, we infer unity and mid-level individuation in the world. Seen in this light, consciousness has a much bigger job than just painting the apple red. It must create reality much more broadly, including the apple itself. Just as there are no red photons, there are no rocks, cars, dogs, or numbers. Nature presents us with a wash of particles, a continuous flux of quantum stuff, and we overlay this flux with stories about cars and rocks. --Realism: To what extent is the world out there the way it seems? ... http://www.jrg3.net/mind/realism.html

If you stare at a rotating disc for a little while and then stop the rotation, the disc will appear to be rotating backward, even though it is actually stationary. Similar illusory movement can be seen after looking at a waterfall, or the credits rolling at the end of a movie. This striking phenomenon -- the "motion aftereffect" -- has been known for hundreds of years, and is one of many visual aftereffects that have intrigued students and scholars of perception. Aftereffects reveal a gap between appearance and reality, and remind us that what we see is determined by how visual information is coded in the brain, and not simply by how things "really are". --adapted from (Current Biology 2004 14:R751) in Science Week's "Neuroscience: On Tuning in the Visual Cortex"

A "phenomenal property" is, very roughly, a characteristic of sensible appearance: a quality that qualifies how things appear. A classic source of examples is the study of perceptual illusion: of things seeming to have perceptible qualities that they do not have. It bears emphasis that in this root notion it is things that appear, and they must appear to the senses. The notion is not meant to characterize things as they are represented in thought, for example; nor is it a higher order notion char­acterizing one's perceptions or sensations of things. In the first instance phenomenal properties characterize how the world seems: how the entities that one perceives in the world appear to the subject who perceives them. --Phenomenal Properties: Some Models from Psychology and Philosophy

"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --What is Life? Mind and Matter

For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness

Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical. The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness

[Zinjanthropos]

Damn, Erwin had a great mind. I would have loved to meet him.

[Carol]

No, empathy involves the process of comparing sense data to your own feelings of the recognized state. Gathering that sense data is completely independent of empathy. Since you seem to lack self-awareness of the simplest emotional cognition, I'm starting to doubt whether you truly feel empathy. It's sounding more and more like you're being defensive because you're a sociopath (or Aspie) insecure with his facade.

inference - a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning

So you think arriving at a conclusion is just information gathering? You sound more belligerently ignorant with every post.

"Your emotional and fallacious arguments are irrelevant to anything but your fragile ego, and that your attempts at character assassination are willfully, intellectually dishonest. You should really have more faith in your own ability to make reasonable arguments."—Syne

I see where someone got the idea that he can judge people and give them negative points for being "intellectually dishonest".  That judgment and using it as a weapon, appears to be part of the culture of this forum.  What comes around goes around.  

Surely we have all heard we should not judge others.  Also, when an individual is made the subject of a post, that takes the thread off topic.  

These 3 rules can prevent many social problems.

1. We respect everyone.
2.  We protect the dignity of others.
3.  We do everything with integrity.  

Animals do not have much choice in how they react, but humans can have the ability to choose how they speak and behave.  It can take us many years to strengthen our ability to check ourselves and control our words and actions, and when we work together on this, we can actually manifest a better reality for ourselves and everyone else.  I think this is how humans give life meaning.  It is as we create it.  

[Carol]

Whatever, please give me an explanation of "qualitative attributes"

attributes - Features, aspects or properties ascribed to something. "The attributes of the world." ... "The attributes of Colonel Klink."

qualitative, for this specific usage or context - Involving a category of distinction-making based on experiential qualities.

quale - An ineffable (or lacking structural components?) property of conscious experience, as distinct from any physical or computational process. "Qualia are often referred to as the phenomenal properties of experience, and experiences that have qualia are referred to as being phenomenally conscious." --Amy Kind,  Qualia

DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH: "The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally [generic definition], phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience." --Phenomenology, SEP

"Phenomenal" is an adjective derived from phenomenon. The etymology of the latter is: [< Late Latin phaenomenon appearance  < Greek phainomenon, ultimately < phainein show forth]

"Show forth" or "showing" is key here. A unique power of qualitative properties (as refined to the area of phenomenal, empirical evidence, qualia, etc) is that they "show" themselves (appear). They are not absent items inferred by thought / memory or mediated by linguistic and symbolic activity (they don't rely on intellectual evidence or intelligible be-ing).

They are the manifestations associated with consciousness rather than abstract conceptions of intellect and quantitatively expressed "matter & mechanistic relationships" schemes, which (if reified) would otherwise occur without phenomenal or empirical evidence (in the "dark" so to speak). [A non-phenomenal version of the world "does not manifest by its mere existence" as Schrödinger aptly puts it in a quote below.] Kittens, pebbles, and apples show themselves as images, felt sensations, odors, and even sounds (if creating disturbances), and are natively encountered by us in that manner rather than by technical descriptions in disciplines which lean heavily on symbolic systems and abstract nomenclature.

Etymological ancestry of empiric when usage specifically relates to experience, observation, etc rather than "experiment": [< Greek empeirikos ex-perienced < en- in + peira experience; also experiment]

You've heard of blindsight, where the afflicted individual can respond meaningfully to visual information without having an experience of it? You've heard of the infamous thought experiment idea called the philosophical zombie, where all the senses / feelings of the host are "blind" with respect to their lacking manifested content? But the p-zombie still outwardly behaves like a normal person would. Just extend that phenomenal blankness of the p-zombie (or a even a conventional dead person) to the whole universe, because there are no qualitative attributes in either an intelligible or a material version of the cosmos (IOW, as opposed to way the world is encountered in our experiences). Those are artificial, formulaic depictions of reality which have the original qualitative style of "be-ing" washed out (so to speak), that they were abstracted from.

In perverse contrast to commonsense tradition, however, those abstract / metaphysical versions of the cosmos will be treated as the "real world" by those projects of philosophy that circle around science or older themes of naturalism, materialism, Platonism, etc:  

Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call "perceiving" objects, are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in certain very abstract ways. We all start from "naive realism," i. e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will. Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. --An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth

I have argued that things are abstractions. We create all things, we infer unity and mid-level individuation in the world. Seen in this light, consciousness has a much bigger job than just painting the apple red. It must create reality much more broadly, including the apple itself. Just as there are no red photons, there are no rocks, cars, dogs, or numbers. Nature presents us with a wash of particles, a continuous flux of quantum stuff, and we overlay this flux with stories about cars and rocks. --Realism: To what extent is the world out there the way it seems? ... http://www.jrg3.net/mind/realism.html

If you stare at a rotating disc for a little while and then stop the rotation, the disc will appear to be rotating backward, even though it is actually stationary. Similar illusory movement can be seen after looking at a waterfall, or the credits rolling at the end of a movie. This striking phenomenon -- the "motion aftereffect" -- has been known for hundreds of years, and is one of many visual aftereffects that have intrigued students and scholars of perception. Aftereffects reveal a gap between appearance and reality, and remind us that what we see is determined by how visual information is coded in the brain, and not simply by how things "really are". --adapted from (Current Biology 2004 14:R751) in Science Week's "Neuroscience: On Tuning in the Visual Cortex"

A "phenomenal property" is, very roughly, a characteristic of sensible appearance: a quality that qualifies how things appear. A classic source of examples is the study of perceptual illusion: of things seeming to have perceptible qualities that they do not have. It bears emphasis that in this root notion it is things that appear, and they must appear to the senses. The notion is not meant to characterize things as they are represented in thought, for example; nor is it a higher order notion char­acterizing one's perceptions or sensations of things. In the first instance phenomenal properties characterize how the world seems: how the entities that one perceives in the world appear to the subject who perceives them. --Phenomenal Properties: Some Models from Psychology and Philosophy

"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.  Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --What is Life? Mind and Matter

For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness

Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical. The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness

Good gravy CC, it is going to take a long time to read and consider what you posted.  I absolutely love that you have referred so many times to the Greek root of the word.  I think I need to study the ancient Greek language because it gives us such a fascinating concept of life and how it happens.  I love doing what have done and it is how I came to understanding God as logos.   With the words you added,  I want to delve deeper into this ancient consciousness.  

What does this mean?  "Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical."  Is there a reality other than the physical one?  Can anything give nonphysical reality form and structure?   Jose Arguelles says this is so in his book The Mayan Factor.  I keep picking up that book and reading parts of it and then putting it down because some things he says just seem too ridiculous to take seriously, but is my judgment flawed by my lack of understanding?  He divides history into 13 baktuns and ascribes a specific characteristic to each one, explaining how one baktun evolves into another.  This can be understood as an awakening of consciousness. 

Going up your list of quotes  "Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. " if Jose Arguelles is correct, he gives us an explanation of what is happening, but that seems rather bazaar to me.

---

Damn, Erwin had a great mind. I would have loved to meet him.

That is what got me to take learning more seriously.  Like it would be so embarrassing to be seated next to one of the great brains, at the big dining table in the sky, and be very ignorant of that person and what that person knows.  I decided I better back up wanting to meet them, by learning something, so hopefully I don't embarrass myself too badly.

[Zinjanthropos]

I'm thinking that there's been plenty of time for evolution to incorporate quantum activity into many if not all living species. I can't see how it wouldn't. If it ever turns out that everything can be explained scientifically, especially consciousness and imagination, then that may definitely initiate a paradigm shift of major proportions. In another thread I speculated that dreams, imagination & thoughts could very well be the result of quantum activity within the brain. At the time I never realized that people are looking at that possibility very seriously and testable theories have already been formed. I find that more exciting than any unidentified light in the sky or elusive hairy ape, any day of the week.

[C C]

What does this mean?  "Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical."  Is there a reality other than the physical one?

It just signifies that experience (or the power of consciousness to "show" anything at all) is a "Oh, don't forget this" add-on to the physical / material school of thought. The incongruity between qualitative events (in phenomenal context) and quantitative matter (when the latter is treated as independent of and prior to consciousness) can simply be represented with a blank placeholder / question mark. It doesn't have to be filled with a particular consequence or a particular selection from a set of options regarding what it could mean or might imply. (Like "this is evidence of dualism" or whatever candidates.)

As Chalmers said, experience does not fall out of physical procedures or matter's style of be-ing and coherence of parts; experience would not be anticipated (at least in terms of physical theory / concept alone). There may be correlations between the unexpected presence of visual, aural, tactile, etc phantasma and the expected stuff (like the odor of garlic corresponding to _X_ neural fibers firing in the brain). But the two classes seem radically different.

The otherwise hidden material "stuff" makes itself known by reasoning / memory (conclusion-making) and the language or symbolic affairs which mediate such. While the phenomenal "stuff" perversely announces itself by simply "being there" in either introspection or extrospection. (Again, the abstract symbolic activity or data processing of the former can take place in the non-conscious "dark" as computers demonstrate; as can even images and music that have been broken down and converted into on/off digital states. But the phenomenal versions of such things entail they are being "shown" as qualia arrangements rather than abiding at that otherwise invisible, material level or manner of existence.)

A crude (partially flawed) analogy would be a room full of all the structural things that can be built out of plastic, interlocking Lego bricks. But then there is an orange in the room, also, resting at the top of a Lego-composed tower. The orange is an extraneous item which does not seem to follow from everything else (that results from the constrained sizes, character and relationships of the plastic blocks).

The remedy of course, would be to posit that there is something more fundamental than both Lego bricks and the orange which both have in common, which thereby could yield the unusual orange and the plastic blocks. Or add a novel, precursor property / capacity to Lego bricks whose combinations could then emergently account for the orange (making proto "orange-ness" as ubiquitous as the blocks).

However, such tactics are forbidden or are at least very unpopular. Experts of this or that professional expertise do not wish to discard the preset idea that Lego "stuff" is primary, or add new abilities to Lego "stuff" which may be un-testable or border on the fringe. Thus, the presence of the orange in the room or at the top of the Lego-built tower remains a curious item which is ignored or dodged around. An empty placeholder in terms of sufficient or deeper explanation.

Can anything give nonphysical reality form and structure?

In terms of physics, there are tentative leanings toward pregeometry being what makes "physical" (spatial / temporal) reality possible in the first place.

Brian Greene: Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.

This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet — just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules — time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable. --The Time We Thought We Knew ... NYT, 2003

Which at least superficially might seem to be intruding upon Plato or the ancient Greeks' intellectual realm. Which contemporary philosophers interpret as being non-spatial and time-less (or amounting to such if Plato himself had had the surgical range of technical concepts available today for removing some of the ambiguity from his ideas in that regard). The lack of spatial properties is why an immaterial or idealistic ontology ought to depend so much upon language and abstract symbols to represent it (there are no images, etc) -- why it should be dependent upon intellectual activity / furniture rather than the brute content of sensation.

But in that a "material" version of the world is usually against panpsychism (Galen Strawson's brand of materialism excluded), it rubs shoulders with an intelligible domain in respect to the "showing" and the qualitative content being gone, too. And if borrowing from physics, space / time affairs may be represented with quantitative slash abstract description rather than being pictorial (or pictures being unable to accurately portray and instantiate everything therein; often serving little more than metamorphical purposes).