Is free-will an illusion?

I didn't figure you as either ignorer or ignoree. Perhaps I'm just an ignoramus.

Other than my tendency to ignore jpegs, videos, and encyclopedia long posts, I don't ignore anybody.

Page down suffices when necessary.

P.S. A possible source of inconsistencies in my comments is the frame of reference I adopt (for various purposes) in carrying out a discussion. I may sound like a materialist sometimes, because in attempting to point out some logical contradiction in a materialistic model of things it seems more rhetorically effective to demonstrate the flaw while arguing within a less controversial context (even adopting the framework of my opponent in order to demonstrate a flaw in it) than to come at things from such a heterodox perspective that all I can do is reject the broad framework itself.

Even in discussions of historical or current events, I usually write in the spirit of the as-if-ness of things, because to conduct myself as a solipsist would leave me little to say (and to whom?). I'm trying to give myself a mental workout as much as anything else.

I aint a big fan of FBM's scientism. That may be why. Dunno, really.

That's a little ambiguous.

The connection between me and a lifetime of materialism is schooling and reading and the illusion of this world, which tend strongly to pull the wool over one's eyes.

The connection between matter and mind? I thought I answered that one already, at least in general terms. I tend to view matter as a creation of mind. Not as something exterior to it but rather as a particular phenomenological mode of mental experience.

Such a tribeman would also not understand, say, a car or a computer, but still these things exist. I can decode some texts but of course not (by far) all of them. Eg i can't read chinese texts. But they still exist objectively because two readers able to understand the scrip would read it the same way. At least would decode the same words.

If people are ready to pay good money to buy a book, it means it has some real existence. And what they pay for is not the paper and the ink mind you. What they pay for is the text.

I was asking in the first sense that you answered.

I don't worry about matter no more. It don't exist. It's all "strings," I tellya!



Well, there ya go, then. Strings aint.

Oh, wait.....

The text exists to the tribesman, but not as text: the ink and paper might as well be a Rorschach test. Maybe he's thinks they're insect droppings. Certainly not information. There is no intrinsic information there.

If I created a hoax "book" full of fake symbols arranged in fake frequency distributions and fake syntactical arrangements, someone might assume it was text they couldn't read, because it has all the trappings of text. But it isn't text, it's gibberish.

Text is something that consists -- to a particular viewer -- as.meaningful communication through linguistic or other (e.g. mathematical) symbols. But even then I could argue about it. I've seen patterns in naturally occurring things like rocks, that looked an awful lot like text, sometimes even real English words. Heck, just take a bunch of coffee grounds and push them gently around with the tip of a knife, and it won't be long before strings of letters and numbers emerge. Unless you assume that God, or the spirit world, or some removed aspect of your own mind is trying to send you messages, it isn't really text despite the coincidental appearance of text.

Even text designed as text has as many potential meanings as there are possible systems of interpretation. I could come up with a cipher system and a key that, if applied to this comment, deciphers a completely different message. Is this plaintext or ciphertext? That's how cranks find secret messages in Shakespeare proving he's really Bacon.

How about text that's printed in a foreground background combination that's invisible to the color blind? I could fill a hundred pages with cuss words, call it a blank journal, and give it as a gift. It's text to me but not to him.

But I'd also urge you not to make the mistake Brian does, in reverse. Don't try to make a part the whole (as with your solipsism).

Hmmm, seems I must have accidentally deleted the post which preceded this one. Let me try to recreate it here. It was something like:

In other words, you're saying "information" is not a physical thing, and is not "identical to" the physical objects which might serve to carry it.

I agree.

But don't run around trying to tell Brian that.

He aint gunna buy it.

No no... I'm open-minded. I mean "natural".


That'd be a shame! The mind-body problem is far too interesting to let anyone dispose of it by denying the existence of either body or mind. Frankly, you're being a party-pooper here. That's like throwing away the problem because we can't solve it. Puerile. Almost as puerile as denying the existence of the mind.

It boils down to what you choose as a criterion for being "real" aka existence. To me information is real, eg because two people can read the same text in two different physical support and it's gona be read the same way AT LEAST AT WORD & SENTENCE LEVEL. That level is objective, thus.

The MEANING of the text can be understood very differently though, I agree on that. It's a fundamental characteristic of all text (polysemia) that they can be understood in many ways. But to me, even a personal & unique understanding of say a poetry verse is REAL, as long as a real person really understood the text the way she did.

I think you two are talking past each other now, Ollie. He didn't say it wasn't "real." He just said



I read that as saying it doesn't exist in objective form, i.e., as an "object." Not that it isn't "real."

I would still argue that the "pure text" (the words) exists objectively. If William Shakespeare wrote for instance: "That parrot is dead" in one of his plays, and I state that he wrote instead "that parrot is transexual", i can very objectively be proven wrong, eg on the ground that Shakespeare never used the word "transexual" in any of his plays.

Well, sure, and I expect PP would agree with you on that (but maybe not, who knows). I think he was using "text" as a synonym for "information" or "meaning." That's "carried by" the text, but it aint the same thing. One is a physical object, one aint.

Insofar as the mere written words have any "meaning" that is strictly by definition, not by virtue of the ink and paper. It "means" nothing without a mind to interpret it, and any interpretation must be based on a priori knowledge, not a posteriori.

Information is real. Economically speaking, it's huge. In nature, it's everywhere. In science it's everything.

Sure it's real. It just doesn't exist as a three-dimensional "object." That's where Brian and his ilk seem to go wrong. They think one "is" the other.

But one IS the other. Information is only the FORM, the shapes, the patterns taken by matter. Without matter to form, there is no information, and it seems that you can't have matter without it taking some sort of form, so it's impossible to have matter without information in it.

It gets complicated with life, which can be seen as form taking over the control of matter. Form ensuring it's own replication, information maintaining itself against decay by way of maintenance of itself, and constant recycling of the matter composing it.

Eg your water = 75% of your body goes in and out of your "frame" or "form" all the time; other molecules or elements also get broken and excreted, replaced with elements found in food... Skin cells get eroded, etc. What's fascinating though is that meanwhile the whole structure (the form, the shape of your body) remains more or less the same. You still have that wrinkle at the corner of your eyes that you had ten years ago but the matter composing it has been changed, in flux in and out, hundreds of times.

An information capable of self replication and maintenance, such as life is, is an information taking control of matter. Bossing around the very matter it is written on...

Yeah, now we talkin!



But that's why I don't buy this. The strawboss aint the slave. Two different animals. One has a shotgun, one don't.

Give me a pen and a blank notebook, and that paper aint gunna tell me what to write. I will write whatever the **** I want, whether that paper likes it or not.

By "one is the other", i mean they are two sides of the same ohenomenon, two aspects of the same stuff. Information is the form assumed by or given to matter. And nothing more. Note that matter is information all the way down, since mokecules and atoms etc have forms, there is no known level of reality where matter is shapeles. Matter is information all the way down.

The fact that some forms of information learned to self-replicate by "working" with inanimate matter and energy, that fact just makes things a little more fun.


And therefore, for the human mind (which seems to be "made of" information, very different to DNA-based info obviously) to be able to boss around a human body... It wouldn't be the first time nature pulled the trick. Life is the name of that game since the first spark of it bl yrs ago.