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RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 7:37:34 AM

juliaoceania

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I didn't attack you..

I suppose I am really thick skinned.

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Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people. Eleanor Roosevelt

(in reply to ChatteParfaitt)

Post #: 181

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 7:49:38 AM

xssve

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quote:

ORIGINAL: ChatteParfaitt

One reason why I rarely participate in P & R is b/c the few threads I read are so incredibly contentious: lots of back stabbing and name calling and jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

How someone could infer I have no meaning in my life based on what I said, I have no idea. As a reminder, here it is:

Human consciousness is applicable to that human. Every now and then we connect. The context involved with meaning or no meaning is is wholly situation driven. This is not a question that can be answered beyond the ephemeral second.

I find it interesting that instead of asking for clarification, it was implied I was sad and seriously disturbed.

This is *not* how you get new people to participate in your discussions.

BTW: I did go back and read the thread, since Julia mentioned it was not contentious. A thought provoking read.

I most especially enjoyed these two comments:

quote:

Human consciousness is not a 'meaningful' thing... it just is.
It only has meaning to us, as that is how percieve/justify and relate.
Without it, there is nothing, therefore we are nothing.

and we can't be having that, now can we?

by PopularDemand

quote:

I think, therefore I am.

I am, therefore I have meaning.

by ThatDamnedPanda

I believe I said pretty much the same thing in a different way, but only I got attacked. I'm going to assume it was time for the sharks to feed.

Well now, you are arguing from previous experience, episodic memory, but being such a nebulous concept, it's kinda hard to harsh on anybody's take on this particular subject - I've gone about it as systematically and empirically as I'm capable of under the circumstances, and I'm still not sure what meaning means.

I'm gonna have to resort to the dictionary to go any further, which is probably where I should have started.

(in reply to ChatteParfaitt)

Post #: 182

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:21:35 AM

rawtape

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: rawtape
But, just out of curiosity, can I take your assertion to mean that a human being, reared completely in isolation after birth, will have, or be able to ascribe, meanings for social constructs (which is what TB and I were talking about)?

If you'll forgive me interjecting, I don't think this is anything we'll need to sort out anytime soon. A human neonate with caretakers is by definition not being reared "in isolation," and one without any is dead.

Mea culpa. Partial isolation, say, with all interactions being done through robots and waldoes -- I suppose we can give our imaginary budgets free rein, since, ethically, we'd never attempt such an experiment. Mind you, there have been some attempts to look at this with quasi-feral/isolated children like "Genie", but the focus was primarily on language acquisition and testing the critical period hypothesis. In addition, NIMH found the studies flawed and eventually withdrew funding.

(in reply to Kirata)

Post #: 183

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:34:28 AM

rawtape

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Real0ne
Raw is trying to drag me into modern political posturing using meaning as the jump gate to validate the political side of communication.

Not really. I think there are several variants of meaning.

There's the one that you presented in your elegant example, which presumably, can be rationally arrived at without interacting with another human being.

There's one that I presented earlier while talking with Kirata, based on Bill Newsome's work, involving meaning which is hardwired into the brain, and doesn't even entail any of the ratiocination required in your example.

And then there are the meanings associated with social constructs which do require interaction with others.

(in reply to Real0ne)

Post #: 184

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:55:33 AM

rawtape

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quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail
It is a truth in the homo sapiens (as an example of the speciousness of this statement) that 100% of the births of new homo sapiens are conducted by women. 100% of the men do not give birth.

As a biologist, I'll just say that your statement hasn't been falsified yet, but is falsifiable. And based on some of the work that H. C. Liu has been doing at Cornell in trying to create artificial wombs, it'll probably be shown to be false within a decade (she's reached the point where she can get a mouse embryo to grow upon implantation in the engineered endometrial tissues of an artificial uterus).

BTW, and just for the fun of it, how are you defining "men" and "women"? Where do transgender people, intersex people, or say, XY individuals with a defective SRY gene fall?

(in reply to mnottertail)

Post #: 185

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 12:24:59 PM

rawtape

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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Speaking of language, earlier in the thread, I posed a question that no one thus far has been game enough to answer. It was:

Can meaning exist outside its symbolic representation (eg language, Art, numbers, signifiers etc?)

I think yes, it can, provided one doesn't confuse symbolic representations with the substrates for cognition. An example I provided earlier -- Bill Newsome's work on rhesus monkeys, showed how the brain/mind understands the "meaning" of seeing an object moving from left to right, or from up to down, insofar as how, by stimulating the relevant neurons (substrate) we can hack/manipulate this "meaning".

Similar arguments, I think, can be made for the meaning of say "heat" or "pain" as experienced subjectively. Communicating that to others, however, would require symbolic representation.

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 186

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 1:10:31 PM

xssve

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I'd buy that, but just as in linguistics, "the map is not the territory" technically, even a pattern of particular neurons firing in a particular sequence is a symbolic process - the molecules that comprise the scent of frying bacon are not themselves stored in the brain, a memory of that scent and it's episodic and any other symbolic associations associations is stored, which can be triggered by the smell of frying bacon, or hypothetically, even me writing, "frying bacon" - if you're as hungry as I am right now - I need a new example...

So really, it's now about how technical you want to get in defining the word "symbol" - I'm going to have to take the stance at this point, that if it's not the thing itself, it can only be a symbolic representation of the thing.

(in reply to rawtape)

Post #: 187

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 1:16:31 PM

xssve

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Otherwise, you could argue the converse by assigning meaning to the experience of the thing, rather than the thing - experience is stored symbolically, if you accept the neural pattern as symbolism argument, but you can separate an experience from any other subsequent symbolic expression.

In short, you feel something, like pain, which has meaning (check that out), which is what I think you're saying.

< Message edited by xssve -- 6/26/2011 1:17:21 PM >

(in reply to xssve)

Post #: 188

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 2:01:20 PM

Moonhead

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quote:

ORIGINAL: rawtape
As a biologist, I'll just say that your statement hasn't been falsified yet, but is falsifiable. And based on some of the work that H. C. Liu has been doing at Cornell in trying to create artificial wombs, it'll probably be shown to be false within a decade (she's reached the point where she can get a mouse embryo to grow upon implantation in the engineered endometrial tissues of an artificial uterus).

Didn't somebody who'd enjoyed Brave New World a little too much try growing a foetus ex utero back in the '60s, come to that?
The write up I saw, the experiment didn't actually fail, but a few of the fundamentalist massive insisted on pulling the plug on it. (The notion of presumable right to lifers insisting on aborting a child is a pretty funny one when you have a sense of humour as vile and cruel as mine...)

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(in reply to rawtape)

Post #: 189

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 3:54:56 PM

Kirata

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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Speaking of language, earlier in the thread, I posed a question that no one thus far has been game enough to answer. It was:

Can meaning exist outside its symbolic representation (eg language, Art, numbers, signifiers etc?)

Speaking of language, I ignored this the first time I saw it because it made my eyes bleed...

The meaning has to exist outside it, because otherwise it's not a "representation" (re-presentation) in the first place.

Well in English, anyway.

K.

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 190

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 8:23:55 PM

tweakabelle

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Speaking of language, earlier in the thread, I posed a question that no one thus far has been game enough to answer. It was:

Can meaning exist outside its symbolic representation (eg language, Art, numbers, signifiers etc?)

Speaking of language, I ignored this the first time I saw it because it made my eyes bleed...

The meaning has to exist outside it, because otherwise it's not a "representation" (re-presentation) in the first place.

Well in English, anyway.

K.

If you say so.

I think we can both agree that, say, a tree can exist outside its symbolic representation.

So where's the meaning of a tree?

You might find you do better if you interpret "outside of' as "independently of" rather than literally.

< Message edited by tweakabelle -- 6/26/2011 8:28:16 PM >

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Post #: 191

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 9:15:02 PM

eihwaz

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quote:

ORIGINAL: rawtape
[...] Bill Newsome's work on rhesus monkeys, showed how the brain/mind understands the "meaning" of seeing an object moving from left to right, or from up to down, insofar as how, by stimulating the relevant neurons (substrate) we can hack/manipulate this "meaning"...

If the "meaning" here is that there is a moving object in the visual field, it seems to me that this is perception, i.e., experience, rather than meaning.

< Message edited by eihwaz -- 6/26/2011 9:29:57 PM >

(in reply to rawtape)

Post #: 192

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 9:41:06 PM

Kirata

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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

I think we can both agree that, say, a tree can exist outside its symbolic representation.

So where's the meaning of a tree?

You might find you do better if you interpret "outside of' as "independently of" rather than literally.

I might do better? Hey, I just answered your question on its own terms!

You might do better by using neither "outside" nor "independently," because both make "meaning" something separate from its representation. That is not the case. Meaning inheres in a representation, is a quality of a representation, simply by virtue of the fact that it is a representation, that it represents something.

Kirata the Philosopher

< Message edited by Kirata -- 6/26/2011 10:07:26 PM >

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 193

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 10:50:11 PM

tweakabelle

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

I think we can both agree that, say, a tree can exist outside its symbolic representation.

So where's the meaning of a tree?

You might find you do better if you interpret "outside of' as "independently of" rather than literally.

I might do better? Hey, I just answered your question on its own terms!

You might do better by using neither "outside" nor "independently," because both make "meaning" something separate from its representation. That is not the case. Meaning inheres in a representation, is a quality of a representation, simply by virtue of the fact that it is a representation, that it represents something.

Kirata the Philosopher

Sadly for your thesis meanings aren't fixed. There is semantics(ambiguity/multiplicity in meaning). Meanings are constantly changing - and the change occurs not in the object in which the meaning is claimed to reside, but in the meaning ascribed to that object/sign. If the object/sign is unchanging, yet the meaning is changing, if the relationship between the two is arbitrary .... how can meaning be inherent or reside in the object/sign?

Art and semiotics teach us that anything can be a symbol/sign for anything else - there is no necessary relationship between the object/sign and its meaning/significance other than the meaning(s) humans agree to invest in/ascribe to that object/sign. There is nothing intrinsic to the sign '+' that signifies addition. The only thing that links the two is our shared agreement to interpret '+' in a agreed specific way.

Had your statement been along the lines:
"Meaning is ascribed to a representation simply by virtue of the fact that it is a representation that represents something to humans. "
we might have agreed.

< Message edited by tweakabelle -- 6/26/2011 11:00:05 PM >

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Post #: 194

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:21:25 PM

xssve

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quote:

Art and semiotics teach us that anything can be a symbol/sign for anything else - there is no necessary relationship between the object/sign and its meaning/significance other than the meaning(s) humans agree to invest in/ascribe to that object/sign. There is nothing intrinsic to the sign '+' that signifies addition. The only thing that links the two is our shared agreement to interpret '+' in a agreed specific way.

In that sense, sure, meaning is not the same thing as that which symbolizes meaning.

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 195

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:23:35 PM

tweakabelle

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quote:

In order for communication to occur, you do need a medium, in this case, the intrwbz, a common language, or mode, the ASCII characters set, the Indo-Anglo/European language, letter/symbols (a set of meta symbols, eidetic memory) in mutually recognizable letter combinations that signify abstract concepts (word/concepts, a set of common lexical symbols, lexical memory), formed into readable sentences (syntactical memory) capable of being interpreted through analogous mutual experience (episodic memory).

You have merely described the machinery of communication here. Had I everything you have specified at my disposal, the outcome would not be communication. It's like a recipe that omits the the role of the cook - outcome is zero. Something further is needed.

At a minimal level, that something is two humans and the series of agreements they must make to enable all the machinery you have described above to perform its role. Without human participation and agreement nothing happens ... the machinery listed remains idle, the ingredients remain precisely that - ingredients.

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Post #: 196

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/26/2011 11:46:14 PM

Kirata

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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Sadly for your thesis meanings aren't fixed. There is semantics(ambiguity/multiplicity in meaning). Meanings are constantly changing - and the change occurs not in the object in which the meaning is claimed to reside, but in the meaning ascribed to that object/sign. If the object/sign is unchanging, yet the meaning is changing, if the relationship between the two is arbitrary .... how can meaning be inherent or reside in the object/sign?

Sadly for your thesis, you can't seem to express it in a way/form/fashion I find comprehensible.

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Art and semiotics teach us that anything can be a symbol/sign for anything else

I presume you are aware, however, that that's only true of psychotics.

K.

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 197

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/27/2011 1:01:24 AM

tweakabelle

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quote:

ORIGINAL: rawtape

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Can meaning exist outside its symbolic representation (eg language, Art, numbers, signifiers etc?)

I think yes, it can, provided one doesn't confuse symbolic representations with the substrates for cognition. An example I provided earlier -- Bill Newsome's work on rhesus monkeys, showed how the brain/mind understands the "meaning" of seeing an object moving from left to right, or from up to down, insofar as how, by stimulating the relevant neurons (substrate) we can hack/manipulate this "meaning".

Similar arguments, I think, can be made for the meaning of say "heat" or "pain" as experienced subjectively. Communicating that to others, however, would require symbolic representation.

It's probable that I'm missing something but wouldn't a more minimal statement be something along these lines: 'Specific contra-typical responses to a stimulus are observed in rhesus monkeys when selected neurons are manipulated in a specified manner'.

We know what the stimulus, the manipulation and the response are... but isn't everything in between less certain? How can we be certain the "[rhesus] brain/mind understands the "meaning"" in a manner similar or comparable to human brains? I do appreciate your tentativeness but there are some difficulties in transferring findings across species aren't there?

Both pain and heat are experienced/interpreted in diverse manners by humans. This being a BDSM site, I don't have to point out the multiple potential interpretations of pain do I?

However this identifies an area where the general approach we have been discussing seems a tad fuzzy. This is why I alluded to love earlier in the thread to another poster. It seems that inner or internal experiences/feelings are more complex to ascribe shared meanings to - How does my pain compare to yours? Is my love as passionate as yours? Are we even talking about the same thing? How might we know any of these things?

Different people could interpret the exact same pain differently and people possess markedly diverse thresholds of pain. OTOH if we consider say 'pain' as a group noun, as a classification of certain physical/emotional experiences, we've already attached a meaning to it haven't we?

So at this point I'm afraid I might need a little more persuasion. (Please don't resort to pain!

)

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Post #: 198

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/27/2011 1:38:40 AM

tweakabelle

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Kirata

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Sadly for your thesis meanings aren't fixed. There is semantics(ambiguity/multiplicity in meaning). Meanings are constantly changing - and the change occurs not in the object in which the meaning is claimed to reside, but in the meaning ascribed to that object/sign. If the object/sign is unchanging, yet the meaning is changing, if the relationship between the two is arbitrary .... how can meaning be inherent or reside in the object/sign?

Sadly for your thesis, you can't seem to express it in a way/form/fashion I find comprehensible.

I hope this is simple enough for you:

If "Meaning inheres in a representation, is a quality of a representation ...." as you claim, then would follow that changes in meaning could only follow a change in the representation(sign). But meanings change independently of representation. Words change their meanings. Art gets re-interpreted. The same representation (sign) can have very different meanings in different places or contexts (Think of what the swastika means in say, Germany, Israel and India) Meanings can be multiple or ambiguous. Meanings are not fixed. They can even be contradictory - the US flag is regarded by many as a symbol (representation) of freedom, but many others regard it as a symbol of oppression.

Thus there is no inherent relation between representations and their meanings. If there is, as you claim, please point out the inherent relation between addition and its representation (the + sign). And how addition inheres in this sign '+' while at the same time 'inhering' to "plus" and "and" while managing to avoid inhering to "as well as' or "on top of".

The only relationship I can discern is that humans agree to attach a particular meaning to a given representation. Hence the relation is arbitrary. That's what I believe Wittgenstein means when he says "Meaning is something you find in a dictionary".

< Message edited by tweakabelle -- 6/27/2011 1:54:58 AM >

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Post #: 199

RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? - 6/27/2011 4:24:34 AM

Kirata

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quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

If "Meaning inheres in a representation, is a quality of a representation ...." as you claim, then would follow that changes in meaning could only follow a change in the representation(sign). But meanings change independently of representation.

Okay, now I understand what you were saying. But I don't think you've caught what I was saying. So I'll try again too.

A representation has meaning because it represents something. Yes, what it represents might change. But meaning would still inhere in the representation because it would continue to represent something. Just something different. And yes, representations change. But meaning then inheres in the new representation. Meaning is a quality.

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

there is no inherent relation between representations and their meanings. If there is, as you claim, please point out the inherent relation between addition and its representation (the + sign). And how addition inheres in this sign '+' while at the same time 'inhering' to "plus" and "and" while managing to avoid inhering to "as well as' or "on top of".

Again, meaning inheres in a plus sign because it represents something. It might represent different things in different contexts, but that is irrelevant. What makes it meaningful is that it represents something. However, the statement at issue was:

Art and semiotics teach us that anything can be a symbol/sign for anything else

Some signs are indeed arbitrary, like the letters of the alphabet. Use whatever forms you like. They are just signs for simple sounds. But that is far from being true of all symbols and representations. Arbitrariness becomes forced beyond simple levels of representation.

An image of a snow tire will not serve as a symbol to represent a penis. It doesn't work. Not just because we didn't learn it that way. It doesn't work period. Our brains aren't wired that way. We are wired to respond and attribute significance to correspondences. Where there isn't even the remotest correspondence, things don't "connect." The association feels blank, forced, clang.

K.

< Message edited by Kirata -- 6/27/2011 4:39:39 AM >

(in reply to tweakabelle)

Post #: 200

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