inthedarkness is saying it better than I have, but they are saying the same thing I’ve been saying. The universe doesn’t use numbers to do it’s job. Numbers means less to the universe than the human spoken word does to our pets. Our pets don’t operate on human language. Most of our language sounds to them as their language sounds to us- just a sound or sounds. They go by tone of voice mostly. The universe doesn’t operate on even that much concerning numbers. Human numbers don’t mean anything to the universe.
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That is what I just said. Then we are in agreement.
I am talking about the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of matter . The characteristics that sets one thing apart from another and governs how it interacts even without human observation.
Water does not need a human observer to form. Nature has many such self-organizing properties and patterns.
Fractals in nature.
Why our “wandering brains” are wired to love art and nature
(https://www.salon.com/2021/06/15/why-our-wandering-brains-are-wired-to-love-art-and-nature/)
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Properties of Matter
In science and engineering, intrinsic and extrinsic properties are two classifications of matter or objects. An intrinsic property is inherent or innate to the sample, while an extrinsic property is not inherent to the sample.
An intrinsic property remains the same regardless of the conditions under which it is measured. Its value depends on chemical composition and structure. The value of an extrinsic property may change, depending on conditions. It depends on the way external factors affect the sample.
These properties and their interactive values are present even without an observer.
Talk about nihilism.
So this entire Earth, its processes and its products are meaningless?
Meaning is in the eye’s of the beholder. But you know, even that is an interaction.
If the world hold zero meaning for you, then you gotta look inside of yourself. And if that’s too much, there’s the alternative oblivion, or try to enjoy your meaningless struggle and endure. Or not. You get to do whatever your body wants of you.
You seem to ignore the facts that life and consciousness are “emergent” properties as a result of “evolution via natural selection”. The natural self-organizing patterns that acquire meaning in their ability to persists.
And was already recognized by Plato. The Platonic solids are the “idealized” patterns in nature on which everything else rests.
There are only five such polyhedra:
| Tetrahedron | Cube | Octahedron | Dodecahedron | Icosahedron |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Four faces | Six faces | Eight faces | Twelve faces | Twenty faces |
 (Animation, 3D model) |
 (Animation, 3D model) |
 (Animation, 3D model) |
 (Animation, [3D model] File:Dodecahedron.stl - Wikipedia)) |
 (Animation, 3D model) |
Geometers have studied the Platonic solids for thousands of years.[1] They are named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who hypothesized in one of his dialogues, the Timaeus, that the classical elements were made of these regular solids.[2]
Evolution is a process that simply acts. The meaning it holds is what we assign to it.
False.
This is false. Not to mention the article is written by a professor of philosophy, not a reliable source. Our sense of beauty has nothing to do with fractals. Not to mention the studies he cites don’t really support this point or rather are sketchy at best.
He’s also sorta wrong that we aren’t biologically programmed to like this or that. It’s no coincidence that trees play a big role as some life giving myths because where there are trees there is food and other things.
Like just this alone in the link:
"Our brains do not represent the world, but rather respond to this stimuli with their own spontaneous fluctuations. They play between the waves with melodies that make up our thoughts and feelings. Like a jazz trio, the world, body, and brain have their own spontaneous fluctuations that are the basis of the creative improvisation we call reality. "
Kinda makes me not take him seriously since he gets it wrong. Our brains do represent the world, albeit a best guess of the world. It doesn’t play between things that make up thoughts and feelings. It’s not a creative improvisation either.
He’s even wrong about pareidolia in that it’s both bottom up and top down.
But again, he’s a philosophy professor not a scientist.
Just to hammer to point in why you shouldn’t take him seriously:
The notion that walking boosts creative thinking is nonsense and he just has one study to back it.
Ever seen a worm trying to get off the hook? Apparently life means something to that organism.
All self-organizing patterns do so from a mathematical ordering function.
Worms and animals like that simply act, they don’t know the “why” behind what they do.
And why should that be a requirement? They do it to stay alive!
When you are anesthetized, you are unconscious, yet your homeostatic system keeps you alive. How does it do that if it has no sense of “why”?
It does that because it has no sense of meaning. It is simply acting and not asking why or if it should. It keeps on because that’s just what it does.
That answer makes no sense. It does that because when there is need, the organism’s electrochemistry triggers evolved action potentials in the neural system that keep you alive.
It does not need to know why. It only needs to know how!
But it needs to know, else there is no response. Therein lies the meaning.
This is so obviously what he means, and CC and Write are obviously avoiding this. @inthedarkness agrees with Dawkins and every evolutionary biologist that actually understands evolutionary biology, that genes don’t think. Nothing that led to the evolution of genes thinks either, not the math, not the laws of physics, not gravity, nothing. They don’t have the emotion creating hormones that we do, nor do they have a frontal cortex that thinks about those hormones. Genes don’t care what you think because they don’t have the capacity to care.
Genes don’t have a desire to survive, but everything they are capable of doing leads to survival. That is the question of meaning. It is the mystery of complex life. It is the existential struggle of being human. That we are made up of and are the result of meaningless processes and those processes have created something that reflects back on itself and considers itself to have a desire for meaning. The non-thinking process created something that thinks.
Exactly. That’s what I’ve been trying to get at.
Yes. the emergent properties that are a result of evolutionary refinement (via natural selection) of the sensory response systems.
All self-organizing patterns strive to maintain integrity.
but you also avoid it once you get it. there is a next step once you realize this basic truth about being human. We’ve been working on it a few hundreds now. We have language and culture from 200,000 years prior that is dragging us down, but we are making progress. Anything we have discussed from that progress, you have poo-pooed.
That’s true, but don’t say it that way in conversations. What you do, is if someone says that the processes are meaningless, respond with something like this
inthedarkness does not ignore that at all. He has shown over and over that he is aware of that. He doesn’t need another one of your lectures about microtubules or anything else like that. It’s not what he is discussing, not even close.
With “ignore” I mean “dismiss”. He just dismisses all natural functions without giving a reason why he dismisses them.
He ignores these things and therein lies the problem.
And microtubules are part of the evidence that he dismissively ignores. It is the substrate from which consciousness and meaning emerges.
And here is where CC and I are in total agreement.
All levels of consciousness from chemical reaction exercising choice are levels of evolutionary processes. It is the ever-increasing emergent properties that eventually produce increasing self-awareness and “meaning” to existence.
But if you want to see what pack loyalty means to a dog. Patiently waiting by the door for “man” to come home , and if that is on a regular basis the dog learns an emergent awareness of the time “man” actually comes home and gets exited from anticipation. That is the definition of “meaning”.
To judge everything against what it means to you is only a narrow part of the objective story.
We’ve been over this, no it isn’t.
Self awareness isn’t the same as meaning.
Again no, dogs work like that because we literally bred them to. There is no meaning to it…again.
Because it’s not really progress so much as denial of reality. To insist on meaning is denial of reality.
You don’t know. And the neural network is the best guess in lieu of any evidence to the contrary.
But if you want to start from the top down, is ok with me. But you cannot dismiss both. Then all discussion is futile.
Yes it is. It allows for orienting yourself to your environment. That is called “selective focused attention”.
Ever tried this little game?
Except the reality of words used by humans. “Meaning” is a word. Humans evolved to use words to describe things, like, “there’s some movement in the grass, maybe it’s wind, maybe it’s a lion, let’s run away”. Some people survived because the wind was wind, some didn’t survive because the lion was a lion. Without language, there would be a lot fewer of us, regardless of wind or lions.
So, now that I’ve explained what a word is, do you accept that words are part of reality? They aren’t the things that they describe in reality, they are abstractions of it, but they still exist, they are real. Every word describes something, some are better descriptions that others. Like, “fart” sounds like what it is a word for. But “god” has way too many possible definitions, that it has lost much of its significance, to the point it causes more problems than it solves. “Meaning” is better, but still has a lot of baggage. Still, it describes something. To say the word, or any of definitions, or any of the lengthy discussions of it, are not part of reality, is to not understand what the word “reality” means.