Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
- Burning ghost
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
I said this:
"The brain is what it is due to environment and gene interaction, plus chance."
If you refute this you're wrong and nothing else you say matters if you cannot show evidence to the contrary (which literally no scientist can to my knowledge.)
Also, I would appreciate if you clarify the use of "functional system" and "functional description"; I am assuming you just used a term Gertie introduced without realizing it made your distinction no distinction at all?
Thanks
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
I can't tell what this means. Presumably you're not saying the brain is literally made of chance and interaction, so are you saying the output of the brain is due to environment and gene interaction, plus chance? In which case, it's just a statement of soft determinism, isn't it? The state of the universe at time t+1 is determined by the state of the universe at time t, proceeding from natural laws (which in this case include random events).Burning ghost wrote:"The brain is what it is due to environment and gene interaction, plus chance."
If you refute this you're wrong and nothing else you say matters if you cannot show evidence to the contrary (which literally no scientist can to my knowledge.)
If it's just a statement of determinism, the statement of an a priori espistemological assumption, then asking for evidence to refute it is kinda an empty gesture, no?
- Burning ghost
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
Each thread has its context. I am here to understand James not make this or that claim on the workings of reality.
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
Here's my attempt at clarification you asked for: a functional system is a collection of matter that has both a physical description and a specified functional description. In theory, the functional description could be applied to a different collection of matter, and the original collection of matter could have a different functional description. It is the functional description of inputs that determines the qualia.
Does that work?
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/arti ... ing-depths
So in nature are there really functions?
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
One animal's physical body is another animal's food. In the interconnected ecosystem, the function of that prey animal's very existence depends on whose ox is being gored, so to speak. Fleas and other parasites live on and in mammal bodies, and the function of those body parts is up for debate. Evolution, non-directed, takes the shapes of ears and noses and blindly selects which just generally works better according to all kinds of factors - does this ear keep rain out of the interior? is it too long so that you trip on it? is it good at directing the sounds within? Is it of a color or size which is too attractive to predators? Insufficiently attractive to potential mates? And so based on a million types of happenstance, your organs and other body parts just kind of sort down into their present forms - some of which seem to have a strongly predominating function to our eye.JamesOfSeattle wrote:Absolutely there are functions in nature. I'm assuming you are referring to the lure of the angler fish, which lure serves the function of attracting prey and also the function of attracting a mate. Just because a function is refined or a system is repurposed or multipurpose doesn't mean there's not a function.
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-- Updated November 12th, 2017, 2:12 pm to add the following --
I always think of this Monty Python bit in connection with natural selection and success/fitness:
"[The Piranha Brothers] would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money.
Four months later they started another operation which the called 'The Other Operation'.
In this racket they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them.
One month later they hit upon 'The Other Other Operation'.
In this the victim was threatened that if he didn't pay them, they would beat him up.
This for the Piranha brothers was the turning point."
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
Function is something that people imagine. They can build it into something that they make, and then complain when someone else uses it for a different function, saying, for instance, "Hey don't treat that as a chair - it is high art!".JamesOfSeattle wrote:Erm ... not getting your point.
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To say anything natural has a function is to anthropomorphise nature. If God created a rabbit to feed Adam and Even, then by all means, it would be sacrilege to imagine it having another function. If a rabbit evolved by natural selection, then surely it has no function, and no part of it really has a function. You can say that the heart pumps blood, and pumping blood is necessary, and no other part of the rabbit can pump its blood, and so then surely by that reasoning the heart has that functioning. But this is very different from a person designing a rabbit and making sure it has a heart to perform the blood-pumping function.
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
I have a different definition of function, and I'm pretty sure that by the rules of philosophical argument you have to go by my definition. Unfortunately (fortunately for me?) a complete explanation of how function comes about in nature is beyond the scope of this thread, but I feel pretty comfortable in thinking that most people agree with me that nature created the eyeball for the function of seeing, that the eyeball thus created contains a lens that has its own function within that system, and that these functions would apply in the complete absence of humans.
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
I'm gonna guess that Chili and others may deny that nature generates purpose. All I can say is that nature does something that looks like purpose and has the same results as purpose (think the lens in an eyeball v. the lens in a camera), so I feel okay calling it purpose.
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
So, the Piranha Brothers settled on "the Other Other operation" after trying other ways of going about things. Was this outcome something done or created by nature? After all, the thugs didn't seem to be able to intelligently design an operation, but just ended up able to recognize success when it happened.
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
As for whether it was done by nature, the simple answer is yes. Everything that happens is natural. But a purpose generated by intelligence stands as a meta-purpose relative to the purpose generated by nature. Thus, an intelligent, creative, purpose-creating brain was created by nature for the purpose of duplicating genes. This is not to say that "Nature" had an "idea" or "purpose". This is just to say that there is a natural mechanism that created a kind of pressure to create something with a function, and we can call that pressure a purpose. I guess if you want to insist that only an intelligence can generate purpose, we can call the naturally created purpose a proto-purpose instead. And then the functions created by the proto-purpose are proto-functions. Not sure what that buys you.
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For what it's worth, artificial intelligence will generate meta-meta-purposes. Or maybe just meta-purposes if we go with proto-purposes.
- Burning ghost
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Re: Are qualia functional descriptions of meaning?
Not really. The term "function system" serves no purpose I can see. Why is it significant? It looks to me like the "functional system" is the same as the "physical description". The physical description is after all just the structure ("collection of matter").JamesOfSeattle wrote:Burning ghost, I also cannot tell what you're getting at. I don't see anything in your statement that I need to refute. The statement is compatible with what I have been saying.
Here's my attempt at clarification you asked for: a functional system is a collection of matter that has both a physical description and a specified functional description. In theory, the functional description could be applied to a different collection of matter, and the original collection of matter could have a different functional description. It is the functional description of inputs that determines the qualia.
Does that work?
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