Information does not exist as such

[uwot]

I don't see your point, as I said, everything you listed falls under dualistic thinking, on one or more levels.

That's probably my fault for waffling on. The point is made in the first sentence:

The dominant western philosophy is empiricism, the defining feature of which is that it doesn't particularly care about ontology.

In other words, it does not fall under dualistic thinking. If empiricists happen also to be dualists, that is no fault of empiricism.

For example the noumena-phenomena dualism is a hallucination of the Western mind, these two are one and the same thing.

This is not an hallucination of the western mind. As I said, many western minds have been perfectly content believing that mind is all there is, including the empiricist Georges Berkeley.

But what we don't see, is a fundamental division that rips that part of the head out of the universe, or genuinely isolates it from its the environment.

Very few jobbing philosophers are dualists in this Cartesian sense, which is partly why David Chalmers sticks out like a sore thumb.

Dualistic thinking is very successful for scientific purposes, and probably sped up the development of humanity, but that doesn't make it true. Strange state of affairs, isn't it.

Indeed. It's the point I made here:

The point is not that a human thought does or does not refer to some actual state of being. It would be a very strange universe if some state of reality were not the case; the trouble is, we cannot tell from the phenomena which one it is. Technically, every explanation for the cause of phenomena is underdetermined

I think we can agree that most scientists have a materialist wordlview, and interpret mathematics in that materialists worldview. Even if they are unaware of it.

I have no idea about the metaphysical beliefs of 'most scientists'. For professional purposes, they behave as instrumentalists and empiricists, because the tools work and the data says so.

In other words, information is a description, abstraction of "stuff".
But there is this widespread belief nowadays that there really exists stuff AND information. That's the problem!

Well yes; if "stuff" exists, there are some things which are true about it. Why is that a problem?

Well most materialists talk about matter and energy, I mean it shouldn't be mistaken for matter and energy and information.

Most physicists, since Einstein, accept the equivalence of matter and energy. According to quantum field theories, both are simply fluctuations/shapes/patterns/whatever, in some underlying 'field'. In other words, the working hypothesis is that there is some sort of stuff and there are some things which are true about it. But again as Feynman says: "Every theoretical physicist that's any good knows 6 or 7 different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics." Western thinking does not commit anyone to any particular representation, and certainly not to dualism.

[Atla]

That's probably my fault for waffling on. The point is made in the first sentence:

The dominant western philosophy is empiricism, the defining feature of which is that it doesn't particularly care about ontology.

In other words, it does not fall under dualistic thinking. If empiricists happen also to be dualists, that is no fault of empiricism.

No. Western empiricism is, without Westerners realizing it, interpreted through dualistic thinking, and so can be seen as dualistic. Because it uses the same process of "thing-ifying" and projection of imaginary divisions that I described about monism.

This is not an hallucination of the western mind.

Of course it is. It's the standard in the West.

As I said, many western minds have been perfectly content believing that mind is all there is, including the empiricist Georges Berkeley.

Monistic idealism is a hallucination derived from the prior hallucination. First we hallucinate that there are two things and then we discard one of them.

I have no idea about the metaphysical beliefs of 'most scientists'. For professional purposes, they behave as instrumentalists and empiricists, because the tools work and the data says so.

Western instrumentalists and empiricists use dualistic thinking without realizing. And when some of them realize non-separateness in their field of study, they become rather confused.

Well yes; if "stuff" exists, there are some things which are true about it. Why is that a problem?

Most physicists, since Einstein, accept the equivalence of matter and energy. According to quantum field theories, both are simply fluctuations/shapes/patterns/whatever, in some underlying 'field'. In other words, the working hypothesis is that there is some sort of stuff and there are some things which are true about it. But again as Feynman says: "Every theoretical physicist that's any good knows 6 or 7 different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics." Western thinking does not commit anyone to any particular representation, and certainly not to dualism.

The problem is when we start to handle information like a new substance. Or do you not realize that knowledge, information, truth statements about something, are also made out of "stuff"?

[uwot]

Western empiricism is, without Westerners realizing it, interpreted through dualistic thinking, and so can be seen as dualistic.

No it isn't. Westerners believe all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, but to insist that western empiricism is all tarred with one particular brush is to create a straw man. Handy if your purpose is to persuade the hard of thinking that western philosophy is all at fault, but it simply isn't true.

Because it uses the same process of "thing-ifying" and projection of imaginary divisions that I described about monism.

No it doesn't. Again there are all sorts of philosophical naïfs and charlatans flogging their own brand of snake-oil, but the fundamental precept is instrumentalism. Whatever people believe about the instruments they use, it doesn't alter the fact that all such instruments are ontologically underdetermined. I refer you again to the Feynman clip, specifically at at 1:48, where he says: "every theoretical physicist that's any good knows 6 or 7 different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics."

This is not an hallucination of the western mind.

Of course it is. It's the standard in the West.

No it isn't. That is your straw man.

I have no idea about the metaphysical beliefs of 'most scientists'. For professional purposes, they behave as instrumentalists and empiricists, because the tools work and the data says so.

Western instrumentalists and empiricists use dualistic thinking without realizing. And when some of them realize non-separateness in their field of study, they become rather confused.

Really? Give an example.

The problem is when we start to handle information like a new substance. Or do you not realize that knowledge, information, truth statements about something, are also made out of "stuff"?

Personally, I suspect that everything is made of stuff and that information is simply the lumps and eddies in that stuff. How that translates into consciousness is a complete mystery, but that doesn't demand any sort of substance dualism.

[Atla]

No it isn't. Westerners believe all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, but to insist that western empiricism is all tarred with one particular brush is to create a straw man. Handy if your purpose is to persuade the hard of thinking that western philosophy is all at fault, but it simply isn't true.

No it doesn't. Again there are all sorts of philosophical naïfs and charlatans flogging their own brand of snake-oil, but the fundamental precept is instrumentalism. Whatever people believe about the instruments they use, it doesn't alter the fact that all such instruments are ontologically underdetermined. I refer you again to the Feynman clip, specifically at at 1:48, where he says: "every theoretical physicist that's any good knows 6 or 7 different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics."

You don't get it. Basically there are two main forms of human thinking. Pretty much all of Western thinking is dualistic since the Greeks. You are unaware that there exists an another, but there are at least hundreds of millions of people on this planet who have nondual thinking. Empiricism, instrumentalism or Feynman have basically nothing to do with this.

Really? Give an example.

For example some or most of the scientists who end up at the yearly science and nonduality conferences.

But I could also add that unknown figures like Tesla, Einstein, Bohr and Schrödinger ended up turning to Eastern philosophy.

No it isn't. That is your straw man.

Personally, I suspect that everything is made of stuff and that information is simply the lumps and eddies in that stuff. How that translates into consciousness is a complete mystery, but that doesn't demand any sort of substance dualism.

Very funny, but it's not a strawman. You just admitted yourself that you are in the dualistic hallucination. Consciousness is a mistery to you. See that's what I mean by an imaginary ontological division.

But anyway, what do you mean by information being the lumps and eddies in that stuff? Because that sounds a lot like the double vision this topic is about.

[Greta]

It's nothing to do with dualistic thinking. It's to do with the fact that reality has a substance to it, relative to be sure, but existent. There is a lot more energy in a cubic centimetre of a neutron star than there is in a cm³ of you, which contains more energy than the same amount of air. Meanwhile, there's more systematised information in you than in neutron stars or air. Information density is just as real as mass, related, but not the same.

Within the "fabric of the cosmos" (Brian Greene) is dynamic patterning / systematisation. What is this fabric? That's the question - what is energy? These things are obviously not currently known. So it's hardly "sidestep[ping] the main problem" to not claim knowledge about something about which none of us know..

But that's a dualistic self-contradiction. Everything about this underlying substance/fabric can be described as information, which you agreed with. So then the conception of the substance/fabric itself becomes a ghost, it's not "something extra" anymore.

Substance certainly could be something extra, even in your model. Who is to say that all information is equal and of the same nature? If everything is information, it's clear that some of those informational entities act as physical substrates for others, which then brings us back to dualism. Then again, if one adds another domain, such as mathematics, then we can think of trialism.

BTW, I did not agree that the underlying substance of reality is information at the quantum or Planck scales, I agreed that it might be. I'm more inclined to agree with uwot's "Personally, I suspect that everything is made of stuff and that information is simply the lumps and eddies in that stuff", but I do not BELIEVE it. Maybe James Jeans's "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine" idea was correct? Or maybe not.

Thing is, if it's "turtles all the way down", as your ideas suggest, what do you do with the regression problem where, at some point, the information needs to act on something? To be fair, the same problem exists with energy. Given that all we have ever known as relativity, the idea of something being fundamental is strange.

At this point I have to conclude that you have comprehension issues. Of course the theories are incomplete because reality is complex. Duh.

The fact is that the divisions between these domains are real. There really is a physical point, a scale where the rules change. Famously so. Don't blame me for it because the change in rules makes no sense to me too, but that is simply how reality is configured as far as we can tell so far.

I am not keen on claiming any absolute realisation of duality or nonduality as there is no certainty. My point was always only about where the evidence points at the moment - towards two major domains of reality that operate under somewhat variant physical laws. I don't mind whether that notion offends people's ideological notions of unity or dualism. Note that proponents of MOND, which is not yet discounted, might yet posit a third state of reality that occurs at the largest of known scales. Trialism

Ohh.. you really have fundamentally misunderstood physics and therefore reality.
There is roughly a point where we usually turn to the other theory, but that doesn't mean that there really are two domains?! Reality is NOT configured like that.
But if you have this misunderstanding, then I can see why you believe in dualism.

Ohh.. you really have fundamentally misunderstood what I am trying to say again. Physicists would no doubt quibble with both our ideas (and probably with 99.9% of what's said on this forum) but I feel they would be more perplexed by your posts than mine.

I think we need to clarify something. I am *open* to dualism (or trialism or quaternism or whatever). I do not *believe*. Why can't reality be configured as dual if that's what the experiments show so far? Most expect that eventually GR and QM will be unified, but that is still far from certain. I don't see the problem. The Earth is dual - land and sea. The cosmos is dual - clusters and voids. Computers are dual - hardware and software. Really, you can bend a perspective to posit two, three, or any number of domains.

At the moment, the evidence has pointed to dualism so far. Seemingly anomalous, but that's where we are up to.

[Atla]

Thing is, if it's "turtles all the way down", as your ideas suggest, what do you do with the regression problem where, at some point, the information needs to act on something?

THAT'S MY POINT, you are thinking dualistically, which is is the problem and leads to double visions

Ohh.. you really have fundamentally misunderstood what I am trying to say again. Physicists would no doubt quibble with both our ideas (and probably with 99.9% of what's said on this forum) but I feel they would be more perplexed by your posts than mine.

I think we need to clarify something. I am *open* to dualism (or trialism or quaternism or whatever). I do not *believe*. Why can't reality be configured as dual if that's what the experiments show so far? Most expect that eventually GR and QM will be unified, but that is still far from certain. I don't see the problem. The Earth is dual - land and sea. The cosmos is dual - clusters and voids. Computers are dual - hardware and software. Really, you can bend a perspective to posit two, three, or any number of domains.

At the moment, the evidence has pointed to dualism so far. Seemingly anomalous, but that's where we are up to.

You are making zero sense anymore. Land and sea is not a real duality. GR and QM is not a real duality. Clusters and voids is not a real duality.

Software and hardware isn't a real duality either, but many people nowadays take it as a real ontological duality because they misunderstand what information is. That's the problem!

Of course no experiment ever has shown that reality is configured to be dual between QM and GR. If I recall correctly, you said you see dualism everywhere, but maybe you have a strange way of thinking?

What you are saying makes no sense so how could scientific evidence be pointing to it.

Okay you're right let's agree to disagree, we clearly aren't speaking the same language and aren't following the same rules of logic.

[Greta]

Atla, unlike you, I am not a believer in things so I agree to disagree.

BTW, the examples I gave were obviously not meant to be precise, just an illustration of how anything and everything can be viewed as whole or divided into however many parts, depending on one's perspective. I could have been more clear, admittedly, but you could have also at least made an effort to work out what I was trying to say.

[-1-]

Some treat dualism as if it were something. "You are denying dualism", "your statement supports my idea that the universe is dualist", etc., while we forget that dualism in and by itself supports nothing. It is simply a descriptive word, saying "there are two" or "there are two kinds". This, in philosophical terms, has no deep meaning.

To insist on dualism or on the opposite to be universal, is crazy. Yes, some things are dualist, like binary code, but some things are decimalist, like the counting system we use. Some things are quattro-ventist, like the alphabet of the English language. Some things are centist, like the monetary system.

Saying that something is dualist, proves nothing about that thing. It is simply dualist, but no system or thing is defined by dualism. It is just one of its characteristic.

Some people on this forum, and on others, give too much belief that dualism or its opposite or its kind, is a very important characteristic of things. No, it isn't. From the quality of the thing being dualist, you can't determine anything.

"I am thinking of a dualist thing. What is it?" You are hard pressed to give an answer without wildly stabbing at guesses.

So dualism in and by itself, or the lack of it, or the opposite of it, is a stupid thing to argue about for its importance.

[-1-]

Software and hardware isn't a real duality either, but many people nowadays take it as a real ontological duality because they misunderstand what information is. That's the problem!

Information means knowledge available or passed.

If you have a different and coherent definition of information, PLEASE supply it here.

People may be misunderstanding what information means to you, because you have a completely different definition from what how the rest of mankind uses the word by consensus.

So it would be really helpful, by way of ironing out differences, if you could please supply us with your version what the word information means.

[Greta]

Another issue, while it may be possible to boil everything down to one thing, be it information or whatever, that is only one perspective. For instance, it recently occurred to me that the nature nurture argument was really an argument about the relative influence of the past. That is, genetics is basically just inherited conditioning, made especially apparent by epigenetics.

In truth, it's all "nurture", with "nature" effectively just being past conditioning handed down. However, there is a practical difference in that one's genetics are codified as DNA while some conditioning may have minimal or no influence on the expression of those genes. What is the stuff that the information / DNA / past conditioning acts upon? Basically systematised wet organics.

The wet organics too can be reduced to information - to atoms and their position, spin, valency and so forth. That's meaningful on another level, but at the level of conditioning and genetic transmission, not so much.

[Atla]

Software and hardware isn't a real duality either, but many people nowadays take it as a real ontological duality because they misunderstand what information is. That's the problem!

Information means knowledge available or passed.

If you have a different and coherent definition of information, PLEASE supply it here.

People may be misunderstanding what information means to you, because you have a completely different definition from what how the rest of mankind uses the word by consensus.

So it would be really helpful, by way of ironing out differences, if you could please supply us with your version what the word information means.

"rest of mankind" are you really that ignorant and arrogant?

Nowadays many people share the belief that information is more than just knowledge, that it is a new kind of "something" that was discovered lately. That's what I'm arguing against.

For example many will say nowadays that there is matter and energy and information.

And of course just how deep the problem with dualism goes went way over your head too, just like everyone else's head on this board. But that's not your fault, because you can't understand that there is another form of human thinking, outside the entirety of Western philosophy.

[Atla]

My point is, even on this board, we can read things like "Information constitutes the interface between the noumena and the phenomena."

Which statement is wrong like 2-3 times over.

[uwot]

You don't get it.

You mean I don't agree with you.

Basically there are two main forms of human thinking.

That pretty much sums up the history of western philosophy. Either you can discover how reality works by looking at it , or thinking about it. What you lazily call "Eastern philosophy" is a version of the latter which bears no relation the richness of actual eastern philosophy. How, for instance, does your myopic view relate to the work of Lao Tzu or Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, Islam, Shinto, Zoroastrianism or any other "Eastern philosophy" you care to mention. Where exactly, in the most populous continent on Earth, is this village that subscribes to the nonsense you think represents over half the world's population?

Pretty much all of Western thinking is dualistic since the Greeks. You are unaware that there exists an another, but there are at least hundreds of millions of people on this planet who have nondual thinking. Empiricism, instrumentalism or Feynman have basically nothing to do with this.

I am perfectly well aware that not everyone thinks like an ancient Greek. It's a point I've made several times-people discover or invent a story that makes sense to them which they are too quick to accept as true. Once it's in there, some people will defend their pet fruitloopery with all sorts of unfalsifiable film-flam.

Really? Give an example.

For example some or most of the scientists who end up at the yearly science and nonduality conferences.

You mean like this? https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/we ... -creation/ Like I said, westerners, including westerner scientists, believe all sorts of mumbo jumbo. The whole point about empiricism is that ultimately the only things that definitely exists are phenomena. Basically, Empiricists took Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' and said sorry mate, you cannot logically infer the existence of a thinking being from the fact that there are thoughts. If a bloody minded empiricist insists that there is nothing other than phenomena, there is nothing you can do to prove otherwise. That is as 'non dualist' as you can get and while few people take empiricism to such extremes, it is understood that everything about the phenomena is theory laden.

But I could also add that unknown figures like Tesla, Einstein, Bohr and Schrödinger ended up turning to Eastern philosophy.

Pardon? Under which rock are Tesla, Einstein, Bohr and Schödinger unknown? Assuming that's a typo, to what extent does the science of any of them reflect 'non dualism'?

You just admitted yourself that you are in the dualistic hallucination. Consciousness is a mistery to you.

No; I just admitted that I don't know how consciousness works.

See that's what I mean by an imaginary ontological division.

No I don't see. I'm not making any ontological division, I'm just saying I don't know. As I said above, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in verba, take no ones word for it, which pretty much is the modus operandi of western thinking since the 17th century-you won't get a Nobel Prize for proving that well established theories are true. If anything defines western philosophy historically, it is the Socratic admission that you don't know, and nor does anyone else.

But anyway, what do you mean by information being the lumps and eddies in that stuff? Because that sounds a lot like the double vision this topic is about.

Maybe. It would take a while to explain, so I wrote a book on it; you can get the gist of it here: https://willijbouwman.blogspot.co.uk

[Atla]

That pretty much sums up the history of western philosophy. Either you can discover how reality works by looking at it , or thinking about it. What you lazily call "Eastern philosophy" is a version of the latter which bears no relation the richness of actual eastern philosophy. How, for instance, does your myopic view relate to the work of Lao Tzu or Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, Islam, Shinto, Zoroastrianism or any other "Eastern philosophy" you care to mention. Where exactly, in the most populous continent on Earth, is this village that subscribes to the nonsense you think represents over half the world's population?

You don't get it, nondualism is about HOW we think.

I don't think that a few hundred million people are over half the world's population. Maybe nondualists are over a billion, maybe under, I don't really know. It's perhaps most inherent to Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. Probably also what the Tao and Zen are really about, and also found in some other forms of Hinduism.

I am perfectly well aware that not everyone thinks like an ancient Greek. It's a point I've made several times-people discover or invent a story that makes sense to them which they are too quick to accept as true. Once it's in there, some people will defend their pet fruitloopery with all sorts of unfalsifiable film-flam.

You culdn't be more wrong. You are the one making up a story that doesn't correspond to reality. My view is the lack of magical thinking. It's 100% logical and 100% supported by science.

You mean like this? https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/we ... -creation/ Like I said, westerners, including westerner scientists, believe all sorts of mumbo jumbo.

You will also find some bullshit too at those conferences and you had to single that one out, didn't you.

The whole point about empiricism is that ultimately the only things that definitely exists are phenomena. Basically, Empiricists took Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' and said sorry mate, you cannot logically infer the existence of a thinking being from the fact that there are thoughts.

So, Descartes fundamentally misunderstood reality, and then empiricists took this hallucination and discarded the noumena. So as I said, it's a hallucination derived from a hallucination. And now you take this hallucination, this story for a fact.

Dude you don't get it at all. I never said the findings of empiricists were wrong, just that they need to be reinterpreted.

Pardon? Under which rock are Tesla, Einstein, Bohr and Schödinger unknown? Assuming that's a typo, to what extent does the science of any of them reflect 'non dualism'?

It was a thing called sarcasm. What I said was that many scientists realized the non-separateness of things.

I'm not saying they were clearly nondualists, just that they realized that Western philosophy is a dead end for scientific purposes. (Bohr for example stated that there is no such thing anymore as objective-subjective etc.)

No I don't see. I'm not making any ontological division, I'm just saying I don't know. As I said above, the motto of the Royal Society is Nullius in verba, take no ones word for it, which pretty much is the modus operandi of western thinking since the 17th century-you won't get a Nobel Prize for proving that well established theories are true. If anything defines western philosophy historically, it is the Socratic admission that you don't know, and nor does anyone else.

You don't know because you are under the hallucination. But just because you don't know doesn't mean it's not known.

Maybe. It would take a while to explain, so I wrote a book on it; you can get the gist of it here: https://willijbouwman.blogspot.co.uk

So you studied all sorts of science, wrote a book and never realized how it's breaking Western philosophy.

---------------------

And long story short, you do probably have the double vision this topic is about. Well then you are probably seeing double. Information is just a descritpion, an abstraction of the "stuff".

[uwot]

You don't get it, nondualism is about HOW we think.

Fair enough. So how do you think you and I think differently?

You culdn't be more wrong. You are the one making up a story that doesn't correspond to reality. My view is the lack of magical thinking. It's 100% logical and 100% supported by science.

As I said, empiricism is the acceptance that all we know for certain is that there are phenomena. Strictly speaking all that is absolutely certain is the current experience that gives the impression there is a you to experience it.

So, Descartes fundamentally misunderstood reality, and then empiricists took this hallucination and discarded the noumena. So as I said, it's a hallucination derived from a hallucination. And now you take this hallucination, this story for a fact.

One of the key points that Descartes made was that everything could be an hallucination.

Dude you don't get it at all. I never said the findings of empiricists were wrong, just that they need to be reinterpreted.

And the point about empiricism is that any interpretation that isn't flatly contradicted by the phenomena could be true.

You don't know because you are under the hallucination. But just because you don't know doesn't mean it's not known.

Well yes, I accept that I could be under the hallucination. Ironically it is you that takes "this hallucination, this story for a fact". The challenge you have to meet is to prove it. As for it being "known", the problem with hallucinations is that you cannot be sure that your interpretation of an hallucination isn't an hallucination.

So you studied all sorts of science, wrote a book and never realized how it's breaking Western philosophy.

How is it doing that?

And long story short, you do probably have the double vision this topic is about. Well then you are probably seeing double. Information is just a descritpion, an abstraction of the "stuff".

Hang on a mo. I was the one who suggested that information is the lumps and eddies in stuff. If you claim that there is stuff and " a description, an abstraction", you are a dualist.