Are words immaterial?

[Juma]

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

reality

Then material is what is real.

Truth is that "material" is a very difficult concept.
If we say that material is what is made of elementary particles then quarks, or any other sub particle, would not fit which they obvious should.

 

[Perspicuo]

Then material is what is real.

Yes. Though I would be more exact and say, "Material is what has been proven to be real. Even if an object is 'invisible', but proven to affect 'visible' object, it is said to have been detected, and therefore belongs in the category of the real, i.e. the material."

 

[WAB]

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.

Thousands of years of poetry, music, philosophy, science, literature, etc, and yet we have no accounting for the actual experience of what goes on in minds?

Bear in mind*, the above won't make any sense if you insist that brain and mind, physical and mental, are one and the same.

*lol. (just noticed it)

 

[ryan]

reality

Then material is what is real.

Are you serious?

Truth is that "material" is a very difficult concept.
If we say that material is what is made of elementary particles then quarks, or any other sub particle, would not fit which they obvious should.

I am quite sure that quarks are elementary particles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle .

 

[ryan]

Then material is what is real.

Yes. Though I would be more exact and say, "Material is what has been proven to be real. Even if an object is 'invisible', but proven to affect 'visible' object, it is said to have been detected, and therefore belongs in the category of the real, i.e. the material."

I don't think that "real" is a sufficient definition.

 

[Juma]

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.

Thousands of years of poetry, music, philosophy, science, literature, etc, and yet we have no accounting for the actual experience of what goes on in minds?

That has nothing to do with what I wrote.

the above won't make any sense if you insist that brain and mind, physical and mental, are one and the same.

Yes it does.

 

[Juma]

Are you serious?

Absolutely.

I am quite sure that quarks are elementary particles

Yes. My point entirely. But do they consist of elementary particles?

 

[ryan]

Absolutely.

Well then I am shocked that you would expect me to take seriously that blatant example of circular reasoning.

I am quite sure that quarks are elementary particles

Yes. My point entirely. But do they consist of elementary particles?

Why would it matter if we find particles that are more fundamental? And why are you so sure that the elementary particles known now aren't truly the elemental particles of the universe?

I think I am missing your whole point.

 

[Speakpigeon]

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.

Only if it was true that words have lexical meaning, which is something like saying that a footprint tells you that somebody walked there. Coming from someone who want to insist that properties which we always see associated with matter are not material, that's a bit rich.

Second, my point was not that a word cannot be the referent of another word. Words are things, meanings are things too, so we can pretty well do whatever we like in terms of the things we want to mean when we use words.
EB

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. Isn't language fun?

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.

It's not an acronym; it's Hebrew. The convention in Hebrew is to not write the vowels. It's transliterated into English in a variety of ways, for instance, "Jehovah"; the current prevailing wisdom is "Yahweh". (I gather the "H"s are supposed to be pronounced like the "ch" in "Bach".) According to the Bible, Moses asked God who he should say sent him, and God told him to tell the Jews "I am has sent me to you". So the Jews figured "I am" was God's name. After hundreds of years of this, for some reason it became taboo to say God's name out loud -- you'd probably get yourself stoned to death if you said "That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!" -- so they started using various circumlocutions. One circumlocution that became popular was "the four-letter word". Alexander the Great conquered Israel and a lot of Greeks moved there, which caused a lot of Jews to take up speaking Greek, and "the four-letter word" became "tetragrammaton", which made its way into English via Christianity. Crazy, huh?

(Actually though, it's not all that unusual for the referent of one word to be another word. Consider the following sentence.

In the statement, "The dog bit the man.", the verb is in the past tense.

In that sentence, the referent of the word "verb" is the word "bit", and "bit" has a meaning. But "tetragrammaton" is the only example I can think of where English literally has a word for a particular word, as opposed to a word for a category of words.)

 

[Juma]

I think I am missing your whole point.

We cannot define matter as what consists if elementary particles since then the elementary particles themselves would not be matter.

 

[Speakpigeon]

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

Me personally I don't know but never mind. However, if you want to say it's not material just because it's not matter then you don't have any substantial point. You are just making a frivolous point. Until you get to justify what the substantial issue is.

Some respectable physicists, most of them apparently, seem to think that time, space, or both, have no substance. Me I think that space and time are representational constructs, i.e. concepts in our minds. However, I don't see how it would be possible to prove anything. So, the question is, do you think you have a substantial point to make? If so, what is it?
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

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

IF there is a class of words that's immaterial then we wouldn't be able to perceive them so we would still keep saying all words are material.

To claim that words have meaning is to say that part of the word is somehow part of your mind and therefore potentially immaterial. Unless you see meaning as material too, like Quine, but then you have this problem that you have to find a materialist explanation to meaning, which you won't be able to do until you can show that the role of the mind in meaning is nil or show that the mind is material. We're not there yet...
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

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

Nobody is willing to define material

Really?

See below, a post you have responded to...
EB

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

 

[Speakpigeon]

If the word 'brown' had only material properties, no-one would be able to imagine the color brown in their minds.

So a computer reading an instruction "IF..THEN" can use it just because somehow "IF..THEN" has some immaterial properties?

The material constitution of words is minor, though necessary for non-verbal communication; the most useful thing about words is their immaterial quality.

Why is that a property of the word? We can communicate without using words. We would attribute meaning to a footprint in the right circumstances!

I guess we don't need minds if words somehow have meaning in them!

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.

But why would a meaning be a property of a word rather than something we attribute to a word, or better something we merely try to convey by using a word?
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

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.

Unless the number three has no properties at all. Maybe the concept of the number three is just a representation of whatever it is that our brain does when we perform activities involving the number three. Somewhat like what computers do. Computers don't have concepts that we know of. They are just mechanisms. And we call some of what they do the number three, even though we know that there is nothing like that inside them.
EB

 

[Perspicuo]

Yes. Though I would be more exact and say, "Material is what has been proven to be real. Even if an object is 'invisible', but proven to affect 'visible' object, it is said to have been detected, and therefore belongs in the category of the real, i.e. the material."

I don't think that "real" is a sufficient definition.

And I don't think spumante is a good selection to go with pasta. So what?



(Both real and material have been proven to make up the world and/or affect what makes up the world, empirically tested.
If you don't like it, I'm so [not] sorry. "I don't think" is no valid reason.)

 

[Speakpigeon]

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.

It does, I guess, but what people call the mind is just as much the quality of the subjective impression we experience (qualia) as what we think they stand for (perception).

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

That, I quite agree with it.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

reality

Then material is what is real.

Truth is that "material" is a very difficult concept.
If we say that material is what is made of elementary particles then quarks, or any other sub particle, would not fit which they obvious should.

Material is not a difficult notion. It's a natural notion.

The problem may be that it's not a scientific concept. We don't have any ready-made description of it.

It is also arguable that what is material is was is real. Reality is what it is irrespective of us and our views or even perceptions of it. Real things that would be beyond perception would still be real things. Our ignorance would be our ignorance.

And there is still the question of the quality of our experience or the fact that it exists as such. Material? Me, I certainly don't know that.
EB

 

[fast]

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.

Unless the number three has no properties at all. Maybe the concept of the number three is just a representation of whatever it is that our brain does when we perform activities involving the number three. Somewhat like what computers do. Computers don't have concepts that we know of. They are just mechanisms. And we call some of what they do the number three, even though we know that there is nothing like that inside them.
EB

I make a distinction between a lamp and a concept of a lamp. One is not a mental object. The other is. I make a distinction between the number three and a concept of the number three. One is not a mental object. The other is.

The number three has the property of being between other numbers. The concept of the number three has the property of being mind dependent. The number three (the class of all triples) isn't mind dependent.

The numeral three (not to be confused with the number three) is one thing, and the concept of the numeral three is quite another, and both are also distinguishable from both the number three and the concept of the number three.