Perhaps it is merely that you cannot perceive the distinction and thus cannot be aware that there is a distinction because your consciousness presumes too much.
Dogs can’t perceive of and thus be aware of color either. They are not conscious of the idea that any such distinction exists. Trying to tell the dog differently wouldn’t help. So speak however you like.
That’s just a negative determination (no pun intended). What about the part that isn’t determined?
The answer, the “positive” thing we can say about it, is that that part might be something else than what it is.
Those are two different things. Life would only be that boring if you did actually know everything, not necessarily if you could (“in theory”!) know everything. (The former might require a much longer lifespan than has ever been attained by man, not to mention other possible requirements.)
A random universe could be equally boring. White noise is no better than black silence.
I agree that self-awareness or even consciousness cannot logically be the result of a mechanical or deterministic process. But this does not mean the cosmic process is not entirely mechanical or deterministic… Qualia may be inherent to all existence.
::
I repeat that I think being at its most basic is determining upon, willing. And as Parmenides said, the same is thinking and being. (This implies that the same thinks thinking and being–compare Aristotle’s unmoved mover, whose life is thinking thinking itself.) So I rephrase: I will that being at its most basic be willing. Somebody has to do it! At least that’s how I feel.–
Randomness means absence of pattern in information. That’s all it means.
Pattern is repeating sequence. Absence of pattern means absence of repetition/consistency in information.
People often make a mistake of thinking that randomness merely indicates ignorance (see James for an example.)
If you don’t see a pattern, they think, that only means you are not well informed.
In other words, you need to acquire more information, and sooner or later, a pattern will emerge.
But there is no guarantee that a pattern will emerge.
The process of acquiring information is infinite – you can go on searching for new information indefinitely.
How long before pattern emerges?
And if it emerges at some point, how can you be sure that it won’t disappear with the advance of new information?
Basically, this is a classic case of subjectivism.
They simply declare that what they want to exist exists and then set out to expend infinite amount of effort to protect it from being disproven.
They cannot be proven wrong. Why? Because you cannot disprove the possibility of discovering pattern at some point in the future.
In the same exact way you cannot disprove God. His discovery is always possible.
We didn’t observe it in the past? Sure, but how can we be 100% sure we won’t observe it in the future?
Ignorance of the hidden patterns or information (see Magnus for example).
An event is said to be random when there is too little known information to predict the outcome = “ignorance”. Although related, not quite the same as simple stupidity.
A state is said to be random when there is no knowledge of any pattern or form, thus no “in-form-ation” (also related to ignorance).
As I said … “ignorance of the information/pattern”.
Those are the same thing. Infinitely random is purely homogeneous = empty space (and also quite impossible).
And you would both be wrong about that.
Merely because you each cannot see how it works, cannot see the pattern and form of its functioning, you presume to know that it has none, "if I can’t figure it out, it can only be because there is nothing there".
If we dump a box of toothpicks and some form the shape of a house, isn’t that a pattern generated randomly?
The fact that randomness has more pattern than people like to believe is the underpinning of the casino industry. If we ask someone to write a random pattern of heads and tails, we’ll get something like: HTHTTHHTHTHT but in reality it’s more like: HHHHTHHHTH. Folks believing randomness is lack of pattern is what costs them their money.
Randomness is also the foundation for the theory of evolution since random mutations and natural selection lead to ordered beings.
Of course, none of my examples were truly random, but we consider them to be. And patterns don’t necessarily exist in reality; they’re just constructs of imagination.
Ego
Shall we open the ‘god’ can-o-worms?
The way I see it, there has to be some sort of god.
Clearly, the universe could not have spontaneously arisen from nothing of its own accord and to get around that problem, people employ the idea of infinite causality or an infinite timeline where one thing causes another thing and therefore surely results in our existence. But what they’re failing to see is that if it were true, then it necessarily means we’ve had this conversation an infinite number of times already and will have it infinitely more times in the future because anything that is guaranteed to happen by virtue of infinity is guaranteed to happen infinite times. Folks are welcome to believe that if they need a reason to exclude a sentient and freewill creator, but it seems silly to me.
If we try to find a way to make one occurrence in an infinite timeline, then the reason for the sole occurrence is not infinity and we’re back to something coming from nothing. There is no way to skirt the infinite re-occurrence problem.
There is no such thing as the “grand fluke” where the universe arose as a fluke of probability because, without infinite causality, we’d still require a beginning and have a situation where something came from nothing. So either infinity is the cause or something came from nothing.
The only way to circumvent the problems of infinite causality and the problem of something from nothing is to define the existence of an eternally existing freewill entity that wouldn’t be subject to dumb process of mechanical causality and therefore, even in an infinite timeline, the universe could happen once and once only. The universe can be said to be a figment of god’s imagination and therefore came literally from nothing because, after all, consciousness is required to make particles from waves and “things” do not actually exist. There is no ‘known’ without the ‘knower’ and they come into existence together.
What god is, I have no clue. I don’t care much for the monarchical, patriarchal model because it doesn’t seem like god would create beings to worship him (as if god had an ego). Another model is that god became bored with infinite knowledge and so he decided to create games to play for the sake of surprise and therefore god is all life wearing the mask of what they are. We can get more creative with our conjecture, but it seems to me clear that there is some sort of god otherwise there would be no such thing as not-god.
That’s correct except that I do perceive the distinction and I am aware of the distinction, but distinction is arbitrary. You draw a line in the sand here and I draw one there.
Actually, they do perceive color, they just have no capability to be aware of it. We perceive UV, but have no capability to be aware of it because we have no mechanism to intercept the information that UV is hitting our eyes.
Awareness is 2nd order perception and consciousness is 3rd order.
We do not perceive UV and dogs do not perceive color.
Good observation. Randomness and determinism are co-dependent like yin and yang.
Good catch and I actually did think about that before, but still think it’s a matter of could because if it were possible to know everything, then the end result of our evolution would be nonexistence and that makes no sense. So existence must be the perpetual chase and never the destination and therefore it must be impossible to reach totality.
If it were possible for yang to eat yin, then it’s only a matter of time before it happens. Therefore if yin and yang had existed eternally, then they would not exist… and that’s nonsense. So, it must be fundamentally impossible for yang to ever be the victor.
You may be thinking, “How does knowing everything imply nonexistence?” Because there would be no duality. There can’t be ‘known’ without ‘unknown’. So, if it were possible, you’d learn yourself out of existence like yang eating yin.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfZZlpfaN0[/youtube]
Hence the duality you discovered, I suppose.
Can you clarify? Are you drawing a distinction between life and non-life? LIfe is random while non-life is determined?
I think therefore I am?
Let he who has an eye to see, see 
The dictionary only has authority to define words if people believe it, so I reject their definition for the purpose of adding clarity to discussion. You may prefer the definitions which produce confusion in order to retain the authority of the dictionary. That’s your prerogative, but I fail to see how we’re going to get anywhere by bowing to the dictionary. The idea is to convey ideas and words are just vehicles.
An event is said to be random if it cannot be predicted based on the information that you have.
That does not mean that if you acquire more information that you will be able to predict it.
In other words, if you see no patterns that does not mean it’s merely because you’re ignorant.
You’re presuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that if you acquire more information a pattern will emerge.
Of course, you never specify how much information has to be acquired.
Instead, you simply search for new information hoping that at some point a pattern will emerge.
You set no limits to this process – you search for new information indefinitely.
Once a pattern emerges, you call it a day, because you found what you wanted to find, never addressing the possibility that further gathering of information might dissolve the pattern.
Basically, a classic case of subjectivism.
You can never be proven wrong because of your future-orientation: no matter how little pattern there is in information you can always hope that further gathering of information will change the situation.
In the same way we cannot prove the existence of God to be wrong because you can always hope you will discover Him at some point in the future.
I agree with most of this–namely, with all you say about patterns–, but I don’t agree that randomness means absence of pattern in information. The absence of pattern in the decimals of pi, for example, is not random. There’s an infinite variety of absence of pattern in decimals, and the decimals of pi is not one of those varieties picked at random, but a very definite series. For pi is something very definite:
If the square is four, then the circle is pi. This goes for both surface area and circumference.
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I agree that ignorance is not the same as stupidity. However, I disagree about randomness. To say that a state is random is to say that it’s indefinite, that it isn’t fixed. Again, you’re basically a Platonist in insisting that everything is fixed, we just haven’t cognized all of it (yet). Such insistence is what I mean by “determining upon”. You’re apparently an unconscious determiner–making the (implicit) claim that you’ve had a revelation of the rationality of all existence.
::
My view is that it’s you who determine upon there having to be some sort of God; all there really has to be is a man who determines upon there being a God. To be sure, that man is then in a sense a god… For all we know nothing is determinate unless some sort of man determines upon it. Usually this is done unconsciously, because the burden of responsibility would be too great otherwise. Usually men defer the responsibility to their God.
I disagree. There could be–indeed, there would logically have to be–infinite variety. Repetition can be understood as unique (it’s the same thing that recurs), and thereby as finite. It would just be a deference of the question “where did it come from?”
Aren’t we sentient and freewill creators? “Unfree will” is a self-contradiction!
Nice. Quite early-Nietzschean or Hindu.
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I’m not drawing a distinction; to the contrary. I’m suggesting self-awareness and even consciousness are inherent to all existence, including “non-life” (which must then at the very least be put within scare quotes).
No matter how chaos-theoretically complex a mechanism gets, if it didn’t have qualia in the first place, it logically can never have them. If the question “what’s it like to be that machine part?” is meaningless, so is the question “what’s it like to be that machine?”
In a sense, yes. But the “I” is an emergence from/in the thinking; the “therefore” does not designate a deduction (or even an abduction), but a causation:
“God said, ‘let there be light’, and there was light.”
Likewise: “I thought, ‘I am (thinking)’, and there I was.”
More precisely: “There was thinking, ‘I am (thinking)’, and so it appeared.”
Random just means that one deterministic system is unable to encounter another deterministic system in such a way as to make some sense of the other’s determination. That’s all it is.
To say that something is actually random, in itself, ontologically, is nonsense. “Random” is a kind of relation between two or more things of sufficiently different and far-removed causalities. Hence why statistical analysis works. But then the physicists confuse statistics for ontology… to be expected I suppose, as they are not philosophers trained in logic.
That is exactly, precisely, 100% what I said.
And that is an exact contradiction to what YOU just said.
Good point. Randomness is the antithesis of determinism and the antithesis of determinism is freewill. Coincidence?
If infinity is the cause of an event, it cannot happen only once. If it happens only once, then infinity is not the reason it happened. It’s hard to get your head around, but think hard about it. Maybe this article can help theorangeduck.com/page/infinity-doesnt-exist
If I flip a coin 3 times and heads comes up once, you could say “Ah, the reason heads happened is that you flipped 3 times and in an large pool of flips, heads is guaranteed to happen.” So if I flip infinite times then we’ll see infinite heads and tails. In an infinite roll of the dice, every possibility happens infinitely. So, infinity is digital… either things happen infinitely or they never happen. If we get infinite variety, then we get infinite variety, infinite times.
I think so.
I forgot to mention that the origin of “person” is the actor’s mask:
1175-1225; Middle English persone < Latin persōna role (in life, a play, or a tale) ( Late Latin: member of the Trinity), orig. actor’s mask < Etruscan phersu (< Greek prósōpa face, mask) + -na a suffix
I don’t know much about Nietzsche, so by “early-Nietzschean” do you mean to imply he revised his view later?
I wonder why the speed of light is the number that it is. How did it get to be that way? Obviously, light can’t be instantly fast or space could not exist because, from the point of view of light, space does not exist and neither does time. If we have the point of view of light, we would have no view of anything. So, there has to be a delay in order to expand space and define time. In other words, there has to be a surprise. If god became bored in a state of all-knowing, then he would somehow slow the speed of information to define space and time in order to have an element of surprise and something to do.
People say we live in the present, but it is not true; we live in the past. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see what I looked like some small amount of time ago. I snapped a stick once upon a time and my ear started ringing. The funny thing is my ear rang before I heard the snap. That’s how far in the past I am living. And the farther away I look, the farther in the past I am. If I could truly live in the present, there would be no surprise and it would be like existing in an infinitesimally small box.
And you know… people say the world has gotten smaller in recent decades due to the wealth of information. As the maps are filled in, there is less of the “mysterious unknown” and it makes us feel more contained.
What is the difference between a machine part and a machine?
Wouldn’t that be self-causation? I thought he meant “I think” is the evidence that proves “I am” and not that “I am” because “I think” because that would mean the thing that is causing existence would be the thing that would have to think in order to exist. Here is an apple on a tree therefore it’s an apple tree. By their fruits you will know them. Out of the abundance of the heart men speak. Speech is the fruit that indicates the condition of the heart.
Ego is your sense of yourself… the “I” you think you are. It’s a thought among thoughts and the illusion produced by the real “I” that you cannot see because you can’t look at yourself anymore than you can bite your own teeth.
When god said let there be light, he was creating this dualistic existence by contrasting light from dark. When light (information) travels instantly, there is no light and it could be said to be dark. So to create light, just slow information down which will expand space and time. That is done for surprise.
Take God, for instance.
Thats reasonable, except that in the first case it isn’t information yet - as you clarify in point two.
technically, stage 2 is called apperception.
Perception is the registering of value.
Light is not information but value (technically, it adds and or takes away).
That value can become processed into info if it fits a pattern.
Thus, perception is not tied to consciousness.
I think that closes our case.
Good observation! I’ll have to ponder that more.
Is there a fundamental thing? If so, and if there is nothing more fundamental, then what is the determining thing that is determining the most fundamental thing?
The bigger things are, the more predictable they are… because they are made of many data points. The double slit experiment has been demonstrated on particles as big as buckyballs. How can we have superposition in a buckyball? Because there are not enough particles to guarantee it will be determinable. So at the basis of reality is a determining system that itself is fundamentally random (that is, not determined by anything).
We understand determinism like we understand mass. We don’t feel the increase in mass when we move an object and it almost seems absurd to consider such a silly idea that objects get more massive when moved. Likewise, we don’t feel the increase in determinism as particles get bigger. We live in a world of such vastness of particles that everything seems determined to us and we live much too slowly to ever feel increases in mass due to velocity.
What does ontology really mean? Does that mean empirical, material, observable, understandable? So to say something is ontological nonsense then is saying “what I see is all there is” and assumes things that are not seen, do not exist. And how can we prove that? It seems the basis for ontology is not ontological.
It’s like saying, “Every statement must be supported by empirical evidence, except this one.”
Good video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voUi8RtmVRw[/youtube]
Start at 28:00 for the story or watch the whole thing. Or start at 50:00 for the point.
I think it is information, but it’s not understood to be information. Everything is information. Photons are just information like sound is just a wave through a medium. We don’t perceive things; we intercept the information emitted from the things. One atom perceives the information from another atom and reacts according to the capability it has, but the atom doesn’t perceive the information that it perceives the information, so the atom isn’t aware.
Simply being in the path of information is what I am calling perception. We may do nothing with that information. It may bounce off or it may dissipate without causing a reaction, but we are still perceiving it (maybe receiving is a better term in this example, but it’s an extreme example to bring clarity).
Some may think it’s a silly idea to say a rock can have perception, but if a rock is traveling through space and we say “from the point of view of the rock, blah blah”, then it doesn’t seem such a silly idea any longer. How can a rock have a point of view if it’s not perceiving anything?
I’ll have to remember that word. Isn’t it a synonym for aware?
So, an atom perceives (receives) information that another atom is in the vicinity and then acts accordingly. The atom has no capability to receive or perceive or intercept information about the action that took place, so the atom cannot apperceive or become aware and the information is radiated out into space.
On the other hand, I can perceive information through my eye that causes a reaction in my brain and then I can also perceive that a reaction has taken place and I can also perceive that I can perceive the reaction and that is my consciousness.
I’m pretty sure light is just information. That’s probably why Einstein said he spent 50 yrs trying to figure out what a photon is and failed. Maybe it’s not a thing. Sounds is also not a thing; it’s just information. If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? No, of course not because there is no ear to make a sound with the pressure wave. We don’t hear sounds. We just hear. Hearing sounds is redundant. Like seeing sights.
In that case, we need a new case. Can’t get bored :-"
Why?
Oh I see, because they “have no ethics”, haha.
No, ethics is just a standard of action.
There is no one set of fixed ethics the the universe prescribed.
Sometimes.
That they are robotic.
Forgiven. Everyone struggles.
I don’t know who that is. But surely, yeah, most people don’t think, and thus don’t develop any thoughts.