Complex Darwinian design: Teller not Geller

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:
...natural phenomena "outside" science is becoming ever more compelling...
Humans simply don't do "meta-meaning" very well...

What specifically leads you to believe there are phenomena outside the applicable realm of the sciences?

What specifically do you mean by "meta-meaning"?

What creatures have you met that are good at doing meta-meaning?

[Guest]

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
What specifically leads you to believe there are phenomena outside the applicable realm of the sciences?

The hard problem of consciousness, for example (see Colin McGinn).

What specifically do you mean by "meta-meaning"?

This could be the funniest question ever entered on this forum. But rather than break into hysterics, I hope you won't be offended if I take the question seriously: "meta-meaning" is whatever would be required to explain "meaning" -- in a manner analogous to the way that "meaning" is necessary to explain non-recursive concepts.

What creatures have you met that are good at doing meta-meaning?

Being human, I am unequipped to even recognize "being good at meta-meaning".

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
What specifically leads you to believe there are phenomena outside the applicable realm of the sciences?

The hard problem of consciousness, for example (see Colin McGinn).

For those who feel left out: I. The Hard Problem:
T.H.Huxley famously said How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.[2] We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

This looks similar to problem of how to know, be, do and know that you are knowing, what you are doing and how you are being all at the same time. IE how to manage multiple distinct SUBJECTIVE frames.

And agreed that we don't seem to have a way to manage this cross connect between the "what" of our knowledge of ourselves as measurable/observable and ourselves as experiential... even fast MRI scanners are starting to get some impressive and useful findings about where stuff seems to happen. :)

I was going to make a remark about your reply (as a meta-comment) but I figured you might not enjoy a joke about the meta-model and its applications (or the Milton model and its uses in advertising). ;)

One could well ask if things beyond science actually exist as measurable beyond their grammatical formulation. Or if states of knowing have utility to any creature we have not yet come across. A truly simple test for meaning is that of existence. Were a thing to exist, would it have meaning to us? Even if not, would it have meaning to anything we have seen or interacted with? From there we may be off into realms of the meaningless, which come to think of it may have its own category of Gdel coded statements. If one is the loneliest number, what is the most meaningless? :D

Pointing to Hofstadter and Bandler, who in turn point back to Gdel, Escher, Bach and Erickson and Chomsky... over to you.

[Guest]

Since magicians are so concerned about the origin of ideas, it may be worth mentioning Pascal, perhaps the first thoroughly scientific man to appreciate the fact that "Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it."

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:
...the fact that "Reason's last step si the recognition that..."

Really? Was the halting problem known at that time? The notion of frame nesting? Impressive. But what could make such a thing a fact? As the sentence stands it appears grammatically correct yet has deletions, presumptions and since you can put an "and clause" after it, provably false.

Gotta wonder about such statements as they seem more in line with the "open vistas" than the "closed options" view of life. Two that come to mind are "there is always room for jello" and "you can never have enough money/knowledge/fun".

Perhaps that was a meta statement? My favorite is "stack overflow". We can see an example on many calculators when we ask it to compute seventy five factorial. :)

BTW, this all has bearing on magic. What we do demonstrates the strange connection between the world as experienced by our audience which appears to contain much spontaneity and "magic" and what we do which is usually quite mundane and very carefully scripted and rehearsed. Yet both our world (backstage) and their perceived world (audience view) exist at the same real-time. Perhaps we could call that the "difficult problem in magic"? :D

[Guest]

In an earlier book, Dawkins also came up with a plausible scientific explanation behind 'synchronicity'.
He coined the term 'petwhac' - population of events that would have appeared coincidental.
Startling coincidence is a mundane statistical artefact.
Our day is replete with a huge but hidden population of 'opportunities for coincidence'.
"...the opportunities for coincidence go throughout the day and every day. But the negative occurrences, the failures to coincide, are not noticed and not reported."

For example, I remember returning one night to my home in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. A parcel of magic books from L&L had just arrived via surface mail from America (in fact they had arrived a couple of months ahead of schedule, slipping their way into air mail by mistake).
Usually I tear open the box, pull out the books and discard the packaging. This time I examined the padding material. It was a folded up newspaper sheet. I examined its contents. Lake Tahoe skiing runs.
Now, why would I be interested in ski runs? I can't ski. I doubt if I'll ever make it to Tahoe.
Then, to unwind from work, I sat down to watch the NBC morning show, which was broadcast at midnight in Australia.
The opening news story was Sonny Bono's death in a freak ski accident on a Lake Tahoe downhill run.
A spine-chilling revelation.
Which signified nothing.

[Guest]

The Lancet recently demonstrated that folk with considerably more sophistication in statistics than Dawkins can allow their ideologies to commandeer their good sense.

Having said that, the phenomenon you describe works wonders for the reputations of wonder-workers. Folks seem driven to want to inject meaning where there is none; to assign greatness to coincidence. What possible selective advantage do you suppose this universal human trait has?

There may be something Pascalian about it: the risk of assigning meaning where there is none is low, but the risk of overlooking meaning when it exists is high (witness autism?). Perhaps we unwittingly overlay this risk to our meaning-assignments, and thus trade-off many false alarms for fear of a single false reject? What is it about false rejects that are so to be avoided?

However, if folks thought that Philosophy was a stretch for the Genii forum, I won't hold out a lot of hope for statistics.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:
The Lancet recently demonstrated that ...
Folks seem driven to want to inject meaning where there is none;...I won't hold out a lot of hope for statistics.

Can we get a citation for the lancet article online?

Meaning is a SUBJECTIVE item.

Statistics (likelyhood) are part of what make magic work, as we do what is unlikely given what is apparent. ;)

[Guest]

Anyone want to pick a card?

;)

[Guest]

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
Meaning is a SUBJECTIVE item.

When NASA added a Space Greeting to Voyager, they weren't so sure about that. In the world of mathematics, there is objective meaning.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
[b] Meaning is a SUBJECTIVE item.

When NASA added a Space Greeting to Voyager, they weren't so sure about that. In the world of mathematics, there is objective meaning. [/b]

In the movie "Species" that very "greeting" was interpreted as a request for assistance and pest control.

Where might one look in mathematics for meaning, and objective meaning at that?

[Guest]

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
Where might one look in mathematics for meaning, and objective meaning at that?

The challenge is to abstract the symbols (whose interpretation is conventionally subjective), and see what underlies those symbols; to understand that mathematics is discovered, not invented, and to appreciate what those discoveries mean. For example, the number we call "pi" embodies a meaning in circular geometry that is NOT subjective.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
[b] Where might one look in mathematics for meaning, and objective meaning at that?

The challenge is to abstract the symbols (whose interpretation is conventionally subjective), and see what underlies those symbols; to understand that mathematics is discovered, not invented, and to appreciate what those discoveries mean. For example, the number we call "pi" embodies a meaning in circular geometry which is NOT subjective. [/b]

I hope we can agree that by "pi" we refer to ideal figures in the plane and the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. A wonderful discovery. Like finding the finding that e**(i*pi) is minus one. Okay, those are findings and we have definitions and proofs. But meaning?

I'm still not convinced there is meaning IN mathematics. I believe we can find meaning when we project our contextual sentiments into situations where mathematics offers pertinent findings.

For example, the four color theorem offers good news for map makers who can confidently buy only four colors of ink to print up maps.

But can any mathematical theorem have meaning in and of itself? Does the very notion of ideals strip sentiment and meaning from discourse to permit only implication and perhaps contradiction?

[Guest]

Funny, that to convey the objective nature of mathematical concepts, it's necessary to get past the arbitary (subjective) nature of the symbology that it relies on. And in doing that we're back full circle to the issue of a fuller understanding of language learning -- which was brought up earlier in this thread. One implication is that language itself isn't really subjective. I.e. the possibilities of language (and thought itself), like mathematics and the laws of physics, are constrained by some underlying reality.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Bob Coyne:
... One implication is that language itself isn't really subjective. I.e. the possibilities of language (and thought itself), like mathematics and the laws of physics, are constrained by some underlying reality.

The very notion of a singular knowable underlying reality may be the thing we need to let go of here.

Comparative studies of language across civilizations and Chomsky's notions of linguistics may get us somewhere near a map of experience on the plane of "context" and "meaning", though to be honest about it we may need to hold off extrapolating until we have some experience with OTHER creatures which use language.

There are hints of experiential/linguistic reality differences in early descriptions of cross cultural contacts. Our culture is not so good at sending out members to truly "live as" a member of other cultures and from that bring back the compare and contrast data we need.

Till then I am suspect of generalizations based upon a presumed cultural and shared experience framework that offer expressions of utility outside that framework. For example, we may have a notion of "chair" and even recognize a chair as an instance of an "ideal chair". Though to a dolphin or whale the notion and it's ideal may not have meaning. Again we get to the formal grammar versus experiential meaning question.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
Okay, those are findings and we have definitions and proofs. But meaning?

We do not (cannot?) agree to what we mean by "meaning", because we do not (cannot?) understand the concept in the first place.

Originally posted by Bob Coyne:
One implication is that language itself isn't really subjective. I.e. the possibilities of language (and thought itself), like mathematics and the laws of physics, are constrained by some underlying reality.

I like this idea very much. Unfortunately, since humankind appears unable to manage the inherent recursion, we may never grasp the "elementary particles" and "laws" of language (and thought) in the way we routinely manipulate those of mathematics or physics.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Doug Peters:

Originally posted by Jonathan Townsend:
[b] Okay, those are findings and we have definitions and proofs. But meaning?

We do not (cannot?) agree to what we mean by "meaning", because we do not (cannot?) understand the concept in the first place....[/b]

I get the feeling we are naming our elephants. And that IMHO is a good thing.

Perhaps the next step is to accept them and feed them and take good care of them.

We already seem good at walking (talking and writing) around them, and drawing pictures which include both sides or even a footprint of an elephant.

How about putting a smiley face in that blank spot in the center of Escher\'s Print Gallery and giving it a name? :)

[Guest]

Where is Derek Verner when we need him?

[Guest]

Originally posted by P.T. Murphy:
Where is Derek Verner when we need him?

That made me laugh!

:)