How meaning can exist in the world

[C C]

We perceive a dualism because language has separated us from nature.

Language and symbolic systems introduce us to ideas -- especially those of global and collective character. General concepts and abstract furniture which we'd otherwise never encounter as observable / sensed objects found in nature. That eventually results in an alternative, artificial style of representing the world than what experience natively delivers to us.

We have a set of kittens, a set of pebbles, a set of oranges. Even though they seem qualitatively different, what they have in common is their quantity. If we strip away the empirical details or phenomenal attributes (the kittens, pebbles, and apples), what remains is something abstract: A measurement of "5" (that is, five is what each set of those different objects counted to in terms of their contents).

This can be referred to as an intelligible[*] entity manipulated by intellect rather than expressed by the contingent qualities of sensation. For instance, a computer (proto-intellect) can use the measurement of "5" in its binary operations without ever experiencing a visual, aural, tactile sensation of even that placeholder symbol of ours, much less have an experience of that generic placeholder being filled with contingent phenomena like kittens, pebbles, and oranges.

But what if the "showing" and the qualitative attributes of the whole world was washed away, so that what remained were just abstract values, measurements, relationships, and functions? There would be "nothingness / silence" (actually not even those phenomenal states exhibiting themselves), and yet this "intellectual stuff" basis for the world might still be contended to be a manner of existence... As represented or mediated by our technical symbols, principles / forms, and abstract description back in our native, everyday reality. Choosing to label it with either an intelligible adjective or a material adjective might be akin to selecting a side of the same coin (both eliminate experience).

- - - - - -

[*] In older times if not still the case, "intelligible" could signal a meaning like "something apprehended or identified by the intellect, not by the senses". Such might be a general concept or abstract object[1] , a Platonic form, noumenon, etc. Or the technical principle behind a visual /spatial shape, the formulaic description it conformed to, etc.[2]

[1] Example: "Justice is pretty difficult to crash into as a tangible object on this highway or any other, but our drunken protagonist hopes to accomplish it tonight." --What's Buried On Church Hill?

[2] Example: "Mathematics operates in two complementary ways. In the 'visual' one the meaning of a theorem is perceived instantly on a geometric figure. The 'written' one leans on language, on algebra; it operates in time." --CNRS ... also: A Talk with Benoit Mandelbrot

[Syne]

The simple fact that an actor, or even a sociopath, can fake an emotional state well enough to elicit empathy proves that empathetic assumption may not be true. And that which may not necessarily be true, cannot be justified as knowledge. While the assumption may very often be right, that is reliably coincidental, not knowledge.

Besides, what is it you even "know"? You recognize an emotional state and have a mirror neuronal response. That tells you nothing of the cause, nor does it even make something like grief or misery accord with an otherwise joyous environment. You don't possess any new information than what was perceived through the senses and recognized.

I already told you what empathy allows you to know. It is the feelings behind an expression. Without it we are adrift in a wasteland of empty gestures and meaningless tonal shifts. Empathy allows us to access the emotional state of a person not itself given in the words and expressions. It is a form of information gathering no less than perception.  And an actor illiciting empathy thru his acting doesn't mean empathy isn't informational anymore than a magician fooling an audience means perception isn't informational. People can always be deceived, but that doesn't make their faculties  any less reliable as informative abilities.

Yeah, simple recognition. That's not functionally different from recognizing an apple. Expressions are just something that can, but don't necessarily (as you've pointed out), engage emotion, similar to how an apple can, but doesn't necessarily, engage salivation. People can equally recognize emotions or apples from flash cards, or even emojis. The engagement of emotion, or salivation, is not knowledge. The empathy you feel is no more guaranteed to be a true depiction of what another feels than imagining what an apple tastes like accurately reflects what any particular apple may actually taste like.

Empathy can only work though gross or minute expression, posture, or gesture cues. You do not have some psychic connection to others through emotion alone. Empathy merely allows you to mirror the emotion apparent to your senses in others. Illusion is not knowledge either. So if you're seriously equating illusion to empathy, then I completely agree. Both are flawed by the inherent vagary of interpretation. You can fallaciously interpret an actor to be in real pain or an illusion to be real magic. Simple recognition doesn't engage such assumptions.

[Magical Realist]

The simple fact that an actor, or even a sociopath, can fake an emotional state well enough to elicit empathy proves that empathetic assumption may not be true. And that which may not necessarily be true, cannot be justified as knowledge. While the assumption may very often be right, that is reliably coincidental, not knowledge.

Besides, what is it you even "know"? You recognize an emotional state and have a mirror neuronal response. That tells you nothing of the cause, nor does it even make something like grief or misery accord with an otherwise joyous environment. You don't possess any new information than what was perceived through the senses and recognized.

I already told you what empathy allows you to know. It is the feelings behind an expression. Without it we are adrift in a wasteland of empty gestures and meaningless tonal shifts. Empathy allows us to access the emotional state of a person not itself given in the words and expressions. It is a form of information gathering no less than perception.  And an actor illiciting empathy thru his acting doesn't mean empathy isn't informational anymore than a magician fooling an audience means perception isn't informational. People can always be deceived, but that doesn't make their faculties  any less reliable as informative abilities.

Yeah, simple recognition. That's not functionally different from recognizing an apple. Expressions are just something that can, but don't necessarily (as you've pointed out), engage emotion, similar to how an apple can, but doesn't necessarily, engage salivation. People can equally recognize emotions or apples from flash cards, or even emojis. The engagement of emotion, or salivation, is not knowledge. The empathy you feel is no more guaranteed to be a true depiction of what another feels than imagining what an apple tastes like accurately reflects what any particular apple may actually taste like.

Empathy can only work though gross or minute expression, posture, or gesture cues. You do not have some psychic connection to others through emotion alone. Empathy merely allows you to mirror the emotion apparent to your senses in others. Illusion is not knowledge either. So if you're seriously equating illusion to empathy, then I completely agree. Both are flawed by the inherent vagary of interpretation. You can fallaciously interpret an actor to be in real pain or an illusion to be real magic. Simple recognition doesn't engage such assumptions.

No..empathy isn't an illusion or a fantasy inside your head. It is the cognitive grasp of a person's mental and emotional state based on having had those same experiences. It is a visceral understanding of their mood, their feelings, their intentions, and their attitude based on being able to identify with them and immediately relate to them. It's simply not possible to socialize with people without this fundamental grasp of their common feelings and experiences. I'm wondering if you've ever empathized with anyone yourself. It seems so foreign to you. Maybe that explains all the hateful bile you spue online. This disturbing inability of yours to understand people emotionally.

[Syne]

No..empathy isn't an illusion or a fantasy inside your head. It is the cognitive grasp of a person's mental and emotional state based on having had those same experiences. It is a visceral understanding of their mood, their feelings, their intentions, and their attitude based on being able to identify with them and immediately relate to them. It's simply not possible to socialize with people without this fundamental grasp of their common feelings and experiences. I'm wondering if you've ever empathized with anyone yourself. It seems so foreign to you. Maybe that explains all the hateful bile you spue online. This disturbing inability of yours to understand people emotionally.

A "cognitive grasp...based on having had those same experiences" is processing the external information against internal experience. So is the process to "relate to them". Just because that processing happens fast, or without conscious thought, doesn't change the fact that the gathered information is being processed.

Where exactly do you imagine that I've said anything about empathy not being important to socializing? I'm just making the factual distinction between gathering information and processing it. Do you somehow think processed information isn't important? That's silly. All of our value and relational judgements are processed information, including interpretation, empathy, risk calculation, preferences, affinities, etc..

I'm the first to tear up at sappy movies, but I'm not deluded enough to forgo rational thought just because I feel my precious emotions might be underestimated. It is truly pathetic that you are so insecure that a mere accurate classification of emotion, as a process rather than a perception, launches you into diatribe of ad hominem.

empathy - the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
understand - infer something from information received

Inference, and thus understanding and empathy, is a cognitive process, more involved than mere information gathering. It's so sad that your emotional reaction requires me to spell it out in crayon for you.

[Magical Realist]

I'm just making the factual distinction between gathering information and processing it.

Good. Then you'll recognize as I've said repeatedly that empathy is a gathering of information about a person's inner emotional and mental state. Much as inference and perception are also information gathering faculties. We acquire understanding of a person's words and expressions by empathizing with them even as they are performed. Some processing too, but it is basically an other-based cognitive state and so based on an ongoing acquisition of knowledge about another person.

[Syne]

I'm just making the factual distinction between gathering information and processing it.

Good. Then you'll recognize as I've said repeatedly that empathy is a gathering of information about a person's inner emotional and mental state. Much as inference and perception are also information gathering faculties. We acquire understanding of a person's words and expressions by empathizing with them even as they are performed. Some processing too, but it is basically an other-based cognitive state and so based on an ongoing acquisition of knowledge about another person.

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.

[Carol]

Whoever said feeling isn't a mode of information gathering? I empathize with someone's misery. It is a construct of my own feelings and perceptions. Have I not acquired information about that person I didn't have before?

You didn't give me much to work with for making an argument so I want to add another from you.

I already told you what empathy allows you to know. It is the feelings behind an expression. Without it we are adrift in a wasteland of empty gestures and meaningless tonal shifts. Empathy allows us to access the emotional state of a person not itself given in the words and expressions. It is a form of information gathering no less than perception. And an actor illiciting empathy thru his acting doesn't mean empathy isn't informational anymore than a magician fooling an audience means perception isn't informational. People can always be deceived, but that doesn't make their faculties any less reliable as informative abilities.

Now we can really chew on this subject   
We need to begin with the science of empathy.

This area of the brain helps us to distinguish our own emotional state from that of other people and is responsible for empathy and compassion. The supramarginal gyrus is a part of the cerebral cortex and is approximately located at the junction of the parietal, temporal and frontal lobe.Oct 10, 2013

The Neuroscience of Empathy | Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the...uroscience-empathy

We need to add to this the biological reasons for discrimination.  All animals discriminate to some degree between them and us, your children and my children.  This subconscious and automatic discrimination plays into our ability to learn.  That is the quality of our relationship with another will largely determine if we can learn from the other or not.  Our biology plays a very strong role in our morality and social organization, and we are making a big mistake by ignoring this fact.   

We also need to consider why everyone is not empathetic and why we commit acts of war for economic reasons without empathy for those whose lives are being destroyed.  This is not just about why we receive information, but also why we do not.  

Your second reply was made to a person who has a problem understanding empathy and the role it plays in our intelligence and social organization.  This seems especially common for males interested in science or business.  It seems males are more prone to making decisions without awareness of emotional information, and for sure this is what bureaucrats are taught to do, and women's liberation is not liberating females, but making being feminine taboo, and forcing all to be masculine, or excluded from roles of power.  

I learned of the bureaucratic reality of being emotionalness and impersonal in a college course on public policy and administration and found an explanation of it in a book for teachers and a warning about the dangers of being impersonal in books written at times of war.   And I want to say, your willingness to argue this subject is what many science forums are lacking and is what is wrong with public education since liberal education was replaced with education for technology for military and industrial purpose.  We are no longer the democracy we defended in two world wars but rather what we fought against, because this is what we prepared our young to manifest.   

If actors did not convey emotional information, they would not be doing their job!  Art, music and drama are perhaps the most important aspects of civilization, and when we do not realize that, we reduce ourselves to a level of barbarity and elect leaders who are strong but lack wisdom.  We begin to rely on an animal level of barbarity instead of reason.  This is what now defines our modern world and it could lead to our destruction.  It most certainly is threatening the democracy of the US.  And thank you for being part of this debate, because it would not happen without your willingness to raise awareness.

[Magical Realist]

I think empathy is the foundation of our moral values. That's how important it is. All morality seems to me to come down to empathizing with another person and getting that the same emotions and needs and impulses and hopes and dreams that you have they also have. The Golden Rule is literally one of the pillars of our western morality. I can't understand how people can dismiss empathy as an illusion or a neurochemical surge in the amygdala. It is so vital for us as a species to cultivate it in our kids and exercise it constantly when we are among others. It is also richly rewarding to us in the arts and entertainment industry that we can share in the feelings that are expressed in a film, a book, a song, or a performance. And in keeping with the op of this thread, it is part of the meaning we find organically rising up out of our experience of the world.

[Carol]

We perceive a dualism because language has separated us from nature.

Language and symbolic systems introduce us to ideas -- especially those of global and collective character. General concepts and abstract furniture which we'd otherwise never encounter as observable / sensed objects found in nature. That eventually results in an alternative, artificial style of representing the world than what experience natively delivers to us.  

We have a set of kittens, a set of pebbles, a set of oranges. Even though they seem qualitatively different, what they have in common is their quantity. If we strip away the empirical details or phenomenal attributes (the kittens, pebbles, and apples), what remains is something abstract: A measurement of "5" (that is, five is what each set of those different objects counted to in terms of their contents).

This can be referred to as an intelligible
[*] entity manipulated by intellect rather than expressed by the contingent qualities of sensation. For instance, a computer (proto-intellect) can use the measurement of "5" in its binary operations without ever experiencing a visual, aural, tactile sensation of even that placeholder symbol of ours, much less have an experience of that generic placeholder being filled with contingent phenomena like kittens, pebbles, and oranges.

But what if the "showing" and the qualitative attributes of the whole world was washed away, so that what remained were just abstract values, measurements, relationships, and functions? There would be "nothingness / silence" (actually not even those phenomenal states exhibiting themselves), and yet this "intellectual stuff" basis for the world might still be contended to be a manner of existence... As represented or mediated by our technical symbols, principles / forms, and abstract description back in our native, everyday reality. Choosing to label it with either an intelligible adjective or a material adjective might be akin to selecting a side of the same coin (both eliminate experience).

- - - - - -

[*]In older times if not still the case, "intelligible" could signal a meaning like "something apprehended or identified by the intellect, not by the senses". Such might be a general concept or abstract object[1] , a Platonic form, noumenon, etc. Or the technical principle behind a visual /spatial shape, the formulaic description it conformed to, etc.[2]

[1] Example: "Justice is pretty difficult to crash into as a tangible object on this highway or any other, but our drunken protagonist hopes to accomplish it tonight." --What's Buried On Church Hill?

[2] Example: "Mathematics operates in two complementary ways. In the 'visual' one the meaning of a theorem is perceived instantly on a geometric figure. The 'written' one leans on language, on algebra; it operates in time." --CNRS ... also: A Talk with Benoit Mandelbrot

[*]

I have probably spent a good half hour reading and contemplating your post.  I am afraid I do not understand what is said.   What is "qualitative attributes"?  Does this include things like magnetic force?  I looked for information and made matters worse for myself.  

My father was intelligent enough to work for NASA and be part of the team that sent Apollo to the moon, but what he told me of physical law is nothing like what is being said today!  The consciousness of those in physics and computer sciences is so different from what it was 50 years ago and so different from the consciousness of the masses.   I think this is worse than the language divide, where the ruling class speaks a language other than the common regional language, because it isn't just different sounding words, but a completely different understanding of reality.   

In the past people held a notion of ghosts and spirits, and these concepts are easier to understand than quantum physics and multiple dimensions.  Whatever, please give me an explanation of "qualitative attributes" that a 9 year old child might understand.  

[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."—Syne