Why “Creating” Your Own Meaning is A Moronic Concept

[volchok]

Volchok, you continue to disregard the self-evident existence of INTENT, of DELIBERATION.

We create intentional actions, if you continue to overlook this you'll remain at the dead end you've found for yourself.

The "intent" and the "deliberation" that seem to be so important to you are the product of the laws of physics and abide to them.
Like I said, human action doesn't take place in a buble.

[Dglgmut]

So thought is physical?

You might want to consider what thought actually is.

[volchok]

So thought is physical?

You might want to consider what thought actually is.

Yes, it is physical. We certainly cannot locate it or observe it or test it at this moment but how could it not be physical?

[anon]

So thought is physical?

You might want to consider what thought actually is.

Yes, it is physical. We certainly cannot locate it or observe it or test it at this moment but how could it not be physical?

Because when you say look at your thoughts, you're not suggesting that somebody split their skull open.

[phyllo]

Yes, it is physical. We certainly cannot locate it or observe it or test it at this moment but how could it not be physical?

The same way that the ideas in a book are not physical - the book itself, like the brain, is the physical medium for containing the ideas and transmitting them to others.

[volchok]

The same way that the ideas in a book are not physical - the book itself, like the brain, is the physical medium for containing the ideas and transmitting them to others.

An idea is just a representation of something physical.

[anon]

The same way that the ideas in a book are not physical - the book itself, like the brain, is the physical medium for containing the ideas and transmitting them to others.

An idea is just a representation of something physical.

By representation, do you mean manifestation? It's an odd choice of words - you seem to be invoking intensionality, in which case ideas always refer to other ideas, and only sometimes to something accessible to the senses.

[Russiantank]

How about we use my make-shift definition of thoughts. Thoughts are "mind-space" phenomena that have parallel physical manifestations and are thus completely subject to the physical causal chain!

[volchok]

How about we use my make-shift definition of thoughts. Thoughts are "mind-space" phenomena that have parallel physical manifestations and are thus completely subject to the physical causal chain!

It's a fancy way of putting it but it's basically the same thing I said.

[Amorphos]

How about we use my make-shift definition of thoughts. Thoughts are "mind-space" phenomena that have parallel physical manifestations and are thus completely subject to the physical causal chain!

Or that thought ‘may’ contain a subject related to a physical causal chain [sensory info e.g.], and can contain a few at any one time ~ at least as we experience thought. You then take a couple or few contained thoughts and ‘create’ a new thought-space [empty thought container], one which may be filled with the sum of those thoughts or some other manner of result.

The causal train now has your added input.

As far as I can tell there are few if any limits to the abstract potential of said resultant thought?

Thought experiment;
The very first (foetal) thought would enter the mind which would necessarily have to contrast that with something other than it?
If not, then that would mean the first thought is only known ‘exactly’ by what it is, the subject being contained in a hand-in-glove manner - let us say. …which would remove its subjectivity, no?

Thought is something which ‘knows’ it is the act of the experiencer experiencing, though one would think that the experience is both specific and general ~ or that’s how it seams to me as I experience it.


Btw, I’d like to see the evidence that thought [the experiential, knowledgeable or otherwise informational kind of thought that is] is chemical or electromagnetic?
Perhaps start with defining info as a physical thing?

[volchok]

Btw, I’d like to see the evidence that thought [the experiential, knowledgeable or otherwise informational kind of thought that is] is chemical or electromagnetic?
Perhaps start with defining info as a physical thing?

Well and I'd like to see you defending thought as something immaterial based on evidence...

[Amorphos]

Well and I'd like to see you defending thought as something immaterial based on evidence...

Observation [continual] that thought can experience and can know info, then that chemicals and electromagnetism doesn’t display such qualities. Hence if anyone can show how such things are in the material then I’ll happily concede my point.

[volchok]

Observation [continual] that thought can experience and can know info,.

What do you mean thought can experience and can know info ? thought IS info.

[Amorphos]

What do you mean thought can experience and can know info ? thought IS info.

Would you say that wherever in the universe there is info that remains the case?

In this info is aside from thought where thought is that which experiences said info. I do consider it likely that thought can create and change info and that the two are transferable, one would image they’d have to be in order to interact.

[volchok]

Would you say that wherever in the universe there is info that remains the case?

No. Thought is probably info being processed.

[Amorphos]

No. Thought is probably info being processed.

Right, so we can agree that thought is not all info but can be or may contain info.

I’d go all the way and say that thought is never info, this because the same informations may occur when they are not being thought or are being considered/read by thought.

Thought then is the container of info.

[volchok]

Thought then is the container of info.

Disagree. I think you call info, info, when it just "sits there" so to speak.
And you call info a thought when that info is being processed.
In essence they seem to be the same thing but one goes trough a process and the other one doesn't.
Of course this is a bit speculative but if you want speculate under a naturalistic view of the world I don't know what else you could say...

[Russiantank]

"Btw, I’d like to see the evidence that thought [the experiential, knowledgeable or otherwise informational kind of thought that is] is chemical or electromagnetic?"

We can control thoughts by affecting the chemistry and electrical interactions of the brain. Our control is currently limited as we are just poking around and seeing what happens. But there has been no evidence that I am aware of that there is any kind of "mind-space" phenomena (any kind of experience, mental image, voice in our head, conceptual scheme, element of language, emotion, sensation) that isn't theoretically manipulatable by poking around in our physical brains. If this is the case, than all "mind-space" phenomena must have some parallel physical manifestation in the brain. Some network of neurons and synapses and chemical/electrical reactions that are necessarily subject to the physical causal chain. There isn't any thought that arises only in the "mind-space" and is thus an "original cause." All thoughts are just links in the physical causal chain.

[volchok]

true, just think of Phineas Gage who after being hit inside his brain with a metal rod, started being a completely different person.

In essence the chemical interactions of his brain and even the physiology of it were manipulated...in this case trough an accident and permanently.
We know that after the accident he was a different person.

The study of his case pretty much killed the soul and it should have killed the idea that thoughts are immaterial also.

[Amorphos]

volchok wrote: Disagree. I think you call info, info, when it just "sits there" so to speak.
And you call info a thought when that info is being processed.
In essence they seem to be the same thing but one goes trough a process and the other one doesn't.
Of course this is a bit speculative but if you want speculate under a naturalistic view of the world I don't know what else you could say...

I don’t consider this to be a naturalistic view, more an observational and considered one. You said thought is info while I maintained this is only sometimes [if et al] the case. There are two bodies in the equation irrespective of semantics, that of information and that of thought, where they are under certain circumstances interactive.

Something [thought/mind/perception/experience] understands info, info doesn’t understand itself otherwise we’d have to include something else within its context which has such an ability.

A process could be a mechanistic interaction of objects [like a computer processor or DNA] or of patterns, yet thinking is not merely that, no? if we can decide that as above info is not thought [specifically at least] and that thought is other than it [its reader], then processes in the mind ~ of the thinker, are different to mechanistic processes. Surely this postulation is reasoned?

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Russiantank wrote: But there has been no evidence that I am aware of that there is any kind of "mind-space" phenomena that isn't theoretically manipulatable by poking around in our physical brains.

Naturally if the brain is the tool of the user [mind] then poking around will manipulate that. that’s what mind does! It manipulates its instrumentation [brain] thus it makes perfect sense that such can be manipulated! All science is doing is proving that, it is using that very fact, the very thing which mind does and the flexibility of the brain to be accessed and manipulated.

Russiantank wrote: There isn't any thought that arises only in the "mind-space" and is thus an "original cause." All thoughts are just links in the physical causal chain.

There isn’t any thought which arises in the physical space! There is an exchange between informations derived from the thinker/experiencer/knower and that of sensory and other cognitive info. It is that info which correlates the physical and the mental and is that what occurs in the space.

The causal chain includes what we perceive [even if incorrectly perceived] and what we know ~ in terms of the act of knowing rather than knowledge itself, that knowing experiencing and perceiving can and does change the information stored in the thought. Thinking then is both the physical mechanistic process and the non physical mental process combined.

I don’t know if informational thought even needs a physical counterpart, though I assume as it happens in the brain it probably does at least in part. Again this is something we need evidence for. I know that if you touch a certain part of the brain a memory occurs, but I don’t know if that is simply using the same interactive method which the mind utilises in order to interact with the memory anyway. We would have to find direct evidence of the very same memory as experienced by the mind, being within the chemicals and/or the electromagnetism in the brain. …I’d like to see that!
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[d63]

[Moreno]

In what way are the mentally ill exceptional here, phyllo?

A schizophrenic who hears voices and hallucinates is not reacting to the real world.

So there is another world.

[Dglgmut]

Russiantank wrote: But there has been no evidence that I am aware of that there is any kind of "mind-space" phenomena that isn't theoretically manipulatable by poking around in our physical brains.

Naturally if the brain is the tool of the user [mind] then poking around will manipulate that. that’s what mind does! It manipulates its instrumentation [brain] thus it makes perfect sense that such can be manipulated! All science is doing is proving that, it is using that very fact, the very thing which mind does and the flexibility of the brain to be accessed and manipulated.

Quetzalcoat, Russiantank is saying that every thought or function of your brain is preceded by something that lead to it happening.. Like, if you were unaware of what a person was thinking, but could see the physical effects of their cognitive activity, you could see how it's just one motion; how each event physically leads to the next. Everything in the Universe is like one giant line of falling dominoes, even if it seems you can create a thought out of thin air.

My argument is that although everything in the Universe is subject to the same chain of causality, we are partially in control of the chain. Consciousness, as a phenomena, is on the same level as the phenomena of existence itself. We control what we do, and what we do is controlled by the Universe... at the same time.

[Amorphos]

Dglgmut

Quetzalcoat, Russiantank is saying that every thought or function of your brain is preceded by something that lead to it happening.. Like, if you were unaware of what a person was thinking, but could see the physical effects of their cognitive activity, you could see how it's just one motion; how each event physically leads to the next. Everything in the Universe is like one giant line of falling dominoes, even if it seems you can create a thought out of thin air.

Yea but I don’t agree it’s a single line of dominoes in the mind, you get decisions where the mind is served say two variations of a thing [e.g. thesis/antithesis] ~ the dominoes have taken two routes. Then the mind compares and makes a choice, and that choice may derive from completely different info sets in the memory. You now have a new line of dominoes set on that choice!

I’d expect it to be the same in causality generally where there would be interference in the domino line from unpredictability and perhaps other quantum effects [I am not a physicist tho].

What I am saying is that if we cannot show where experience and other factors of mind are in the material, then we cannot state that the line of dominoes goes into the brain and back out again without any other factors changing their cause. We know these natures of mind exist by observing them in our minds [even if we don’t have them nailed down we have the overall idea of them], so for the physical causal line to be unbroken or otherwise changed, we’d have to say those factors have no effect whatsoever! If that were the case then how can we even know about them, to the experiencer at least there is something which experiences.

Science has no choice but to show such natures of mind are literally within the context of the material, or fail to describe our world purely in terms of matter.

My argument is that although everything in the Universe is subject to the same chain of causality, we are partially in control of the chain. Consciousness, as a phenomena, is on the same level as the phenomena of existence itself. We control what we do, and what we do is controlled by the Universe... at the same time.

In this we are agreed then.
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[volchok]

we are partially in control of the chain. Consciousness, as a phenomena, is on the same level as the phenomena of existence itself. We control what we do, and what we do is controlled by the Universe... at the same time.

Explain.