Are words immaterial?

[Bomb#20]

The point is that never does the referent of a term have a lexical meaning. It's always the term that denotes meaning, so a lamp, for instance has no lexical meaning, but the word, "lamp" does.

What about "hello" and "hi". "Hello" may mean "hi", and "hi" may mean "hello".

There are times when words can be used interchangeably despite any differences in their meaning, usually because the distinction isn't contextually relevant. Hello has no lexical meaning, but the corresponding word, however, does.

Challenge accepted!

"Tetragrammaton". The referent of the term is "YHWH", which has the lexical meaning "I am.".

 

[ryan]

Would you please define material?

What context?

Material is ...

Or let me ask this. Is there possibly a space where there is no material?

 

[ryan]

I thought that we all understood that matter is material.

Parse it differently: what's wrong with just accepting that these things are material but (these things are) not matter?
So?
EB

I don't know what things you are referring to.

 

[ryan]

What about "hello" and "hi". "Hello" may mean "hi", and "hi" may mean "hello".

It would be incorrect to say that the words "Hi" and "Hello" mean each other as well as themselves. Instead, they have the same meaning (they are synonynous).

The act of saying "Hi!" is what's called a "performative". It's not a word (it's an act) but it does mean the same as the word "Hi" (or "Hello"), i.e. greeting somebody. Performative is doing what you say you are doing, e.g.: "I'm responding to you that I disagree". I think the point in your example is that to say "Hi!" to somebody is the same as making a sign, or displaying a symbol, and therefore has meaning, like roadsigns, with or without words, or most gestures.

Still, these are marginal to this discussion.
EB

How about this. The landmark in Hollywood known as the "Hollywood sign" has a lexical meaning. So the referent has a lexical meaning.

 

[Juma]

What context?

Material is ...

Or let me ask this. Is there possibly a space where there is no material?

Do you even know what "context" means?

 

[ryan]

Would you please define material?

Typically, dictionaries say:

Material Adj. Of, relating to, or composed of matter.

A car is regarded as material since it is made of matter though it has also a shape, a structure, a functionning etc. Shapes, structures, functionnings etc. are not made of matter but are regarded as material properties since they don't appear without some quantity of matter (words too). A ghost, if immaterial, would have, say, shape, perhaps movement, possibly colours, but not matter.

So things that exist would be immaterial if and only if they didn't need to be asociated with matter. Since shapes, structures, functionnings and indeed words are always associated with matter they are said to be material.

That being said, to say that the mind is immaterial makes sense. It means that you believes that the mind can exist without any matter associated with it, as indeed many people seem to believe.

However, I fail to see the point of arguing that shapes, structures, functionnings or indeed words etc. are immaterial. They are not made of matter, we all agree with that, but they always come with matter associated with them. We could not perceive them if they didn't come with matter associated with them. Even our mind does. Unless you can find an example.
EB

Like I asked Juma, is the space in the car, between the air molecules, between the virtual particles, between the gravitons etc. material?

 

[ryan]

Material is ...

Or let me ask this. Is there possibly a space where there is no material?

Do you even know what "context" means?

The "is" in "material is" is the context. Sorry, but that is the context that I need "material" to be in.

 

[ryan]

I can't bring myself to read 19 pages of this. Did I miss anything good?

No. It's basically "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" versus the mean boys who say mom and dad put the gifts under the tree. I'm the mean boy, or one of them.
It's a nasty task.

No, the "mean boy" is the one that has to tell the world that there may be more than just material. The safe predictable universe is the fairy tale.

 

[WAB]

No. It's basically "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" versus the mean boys who say mom and dad put the gifts under the tree. I'm the mean boy, or one of them.
It's a nasty task.

No, the "mean boy" is the one that has to tell the world that there may be more than just material. The safe predictable universe is the fairy tale.

Agreed.

 

[none]

I've been trying to keep up, but has anybody demonstrated a word that isn't material?

 

[ryan]

I've been trying to keep up, but has anybody demonstrated a word that isn't material?

Nobody is willing to define material, so I don't know how we are going to demonstrate anything.

 

[Perspicuo]

I've been trying to keep up, but has anybody demonstrated a word that isn't material?

Nobody is willing to define material, so I don't know how we are going to demonstrate anything.

Nothing like pretending we're in 700 BCE, when science didn't exist and these things have to be done by scratch via wordplay. As if brains and everything we've discovered about them just don't exist and if someone happens to come up with such information, pretty much ignore it and call it a day.

 

[fast]

The point is that never does the referent of a term have a lexical meaning. It's always the term that denotes meaning, so a lamp, for instance has no lexical meaning, but the word, "lamp" does.

What about "hello" and "hi". "Hello" may mean "hi", and "hi" may mean "hello".

There are times when words can be used interchangeably despite any differences in their meaning, usually because the distinction isn't contextually relevant. Hello has no lexical meaning, but the corresponding word, however, does.

Challenge accepted!

"Tetragrammaton". The referent of the term is "YHWH", which has the lexical meaning "I am.".

Let me get this straight. There is a word, and that word is, "Tetragrammaton", and we'll call that word number one. There is also a second word, and that word is, "YHWH". We know not to confuse words with referents, and we know not to confuse referents with meaning, and we know not to confuse words with meaning. You're saying that the referent of word one is in fact another word (word number two--the word itself). The second word has a meaning, and that meaning is: I am.

Assuming "YHWH" is a word (what a strange word--looks more like an acronym), I suppose you're right: there is a case where the referent of a term can have a lexical meaning.

 

[fast]

That could well be.
You make frequent appeal to 'a realist sense' but I'm concerned that what you mean here is actually 'a physicalist sense'.

No. I make the distinction between the metaphysician’s possible view that concepts, such as for example the concept of circle, exist independently of minds and of the physical world. Fast I think supports this view. On this view, concepts exist but not in space, time, or even spacetime. Russell made the distinction between "existing" (in space-time) and "being" (nowhere, nowhen).
Also, I’m not sure there’s a proper physicalist view of the existence of concepts except to reduce our subjective impression that we know concepts to something physical inside the brain, and why not. Another thing would be to provide a convincing explanation how that could be.

The point I'm making is that an immaterial concept of ownership and sale is an accurate, useful and reliable way of dealing with the phenomenon, while a discourse on the neural changes made in the buyer's and seller's brain does not, in practice, accurately capture what is going on.

Yes, I admit that I had forgotten your views on this. I guess it’s been a while since last time you discussed them. And I broadly agree if by concept you meant the object of a thought rather than something existing outside spacetime.

Now you can make a conscious choice to try and base everything in physical interaction. So to represent a concept, you imagine a theoretical set of physical interactions that would populate all the necessary mental, physical and social interactions, from words on paper, to computers to people's heads, in which that concept is instantiated, or could ever be instantiated, in all of space and time.

You are assuming that concepts are shared. I don’t accept the premise and materialists do not either. I say, and they should say, that all you need to do to demonstrate that concepts are material is implement a physical mechanism which achieves the same result as what we people do when we perform an action on the basis of a particular concept. For example, we can implement the concept of circle in a computer and ask the computer to draw circles, to follow a circular trajectory etc. Obviously, it’s been done and more. Selling and buying for example, for instance selling and buying shares on the stock exchange.

It's possible, but there are some objections. A few off the top of my head...
The first is that this isn't a particularly useful way of representing a concept. The concept of ownership neatly categorises certain kinds of social relationship. A vast sprawling collection of physical states that are physically unrelated to eachother, while it may cover the same ground, doesn't do the same work.

It’s useful if you get machines to do the work for you as in the case of the stock exchange, or finding bigger and bigger prime numbers etc. It’s not useful if the machine won’t perform as or more efficiently than us at the particular task.

The second is that you're seriously violating Occam's Razor here. Insisting on the 'reduction' of a fairly simple and straightforward concept to a vast array of otherwise unrelated and unconnected physical processes is about as far from the concept of maximum parsimony as it's possible to get. This is important largely because Occam's Razor is the most common reason given for adopting some form of physical explanation in the first place.

If you were not talking about shared concept I would agree. But shared concepts seem to have to exist outside our minds and if they are not material then it’s ipso facto a massive ontological assumption.
If one takes the view that a concept is the object of a human being’s thought here and now then I don’t see how we could explain this other than through some physical theory. I would also disagree that it’s not ontologically economical since each concept would be explained by the same basic mechanism, ultimately for example the interplay of twelves material particles and one force. What would need to be explained on top of that would be the subjective experience of having a concept in mind. Which of course nobody seems able to even suggest the beginning of an answer.

The third is that it's not really an adequate replacement. Replacing a conceptual category with the instantiation of everything that could fall into that category is not an equivalency. A category is not equivalent to its contents, a set is not equivalent to its members. One does not accurately replace the other.

Again, you are making this assumption. You are assuming that the view of concepts as something real outside our minds is adequate but you would need to show it. If a concept is the object of a thought, we only need to show how this kind of thought can be effective, as I suggested above, and how the brain produces these thoughts, while the question of the subjective aspect of the situation remains unexplained, by all.

A fourth objection is that you lose the distinction between fact and fiction. If 'the scientific method' is merely a collection of physical descriptions or conceptions of that concept, and 'Santa Claus' is similarly a collection of physical descriptions or conceptions of that concept, then on what grounds are they treated differently?

I don’t see any distinction as far as concepts are concerned, so I don’t have this problem. The distinction may be made by reality itself, i.e. some concepts may have a reference, other do not. But the belief that a certain concept has a reference is something else entirely.

So while you certainly can decide to replace all mention of immaterial things with physical things, it's not clear to me that it's somehow desirable, or accurate to do so.

I’m not sure we would need to do that for Santa Claus but that may be useful when it comes to numbers or even words.

Useful perhaps even to the point of making us redundant on day...
EB

I do not hold the view that the concept of a circle is independent of a mind

 

[Perspicuo]

I do not hold the view that the concept of a circle is independent of a mind

The concept of circle, like any concept, is an information-handling tool, not unlike a piece of software for your computer. A concept is a piece of information-handling instructions telling your brain how to handle other information. A very clear illustration of this are dictionaries, where concepts are defined and thus shows exactly what these pieces of human software tell your brain to do.

 

[WAB]

I've been trying to keep up, but has anybody demonstrated a word that isn't material?

If the word 'brown' had only material properties, no-one would be able to imagine the color brown in their minds. The material constitution of words is minor, though necessary for non-verbal communication; the most useful thing about words is their immaterial quality.

Of course, even speech requires the material: mouth, tongue, voice, air-vibrations, an ear drum; but the material, mechanical operations of speech and hearing are one thing. What words mean is the important thing. Meaning is not material.

 

[fast]

Haha, there ain't no neural activity goin'-on's in my mind!

:-/

And with that, good night.

And a good morning to you. (It's 7 in the morning here)...

The neural activity that does occur does so somewhere, and that is in the brain, which is also somewhere.

We speak as if we have minds--that they exist--and we do have them (and they do exist), but their existence is wholly unlike the existence of material objects. If we hold the view that to say of something that it exists is to say of something that it has properties, that doesn't imply that what has properties is material (e.g. The number three).

That which we can detect is one thing, and such things surely have properties, but something that we cannot detect doesn't therefore not have properties. The number three has the property of being odd.

People have wrestled with understanding the nature of mind, and the referent of the term, "mind" isn't necessarily what some posit it to be. I think many people are led astray by being so intent in believing in the notion that there cannot be something when there is no thing, but there is nothing mystic or unnatural about our positing the existence of what may be dubbed as mental objects like ideas, for example.

There is no physical detectable entity we refer to as our minds. It's the coupling of both physical phenomena (such as the brain) and our use of language that gives rise to this notion that we even have a mind said to house such mental objects like concepts, idea, etc.

 

[Juma]

Do you even know what "context" means?

The "is" in "material is" is the context. Sorry, but that is the context that I need "material" to be in.

Wrong. The context needed for a definition is in what context the word is used.
Is the subject ghosts, mind or reality?

 

[Juma]

There is no physical detectable entity we refer to as our minds. .

Yes, it is. It is the interplay of neurons. Everything in you mind maps to the interactions and processes going on in you brain.

What is nat accounyed for, yet, is the the actual experience of what goes on in your mind.

 

[ryan]

The "is" in "material is" is the context. Sorry, but that is the context that I need "material" to be in.

Wrong. The context needed for a definition is in what context the word is used.
Is the subject ghosts, mind or reality?

reality