If awareness is transferable by perception creatively then rocks can be self aware because humans are self aware and can perceive them. This post is self aware accordingly.

So that’s a big if or a little if depending on how much importance you place in the universe being self aware rocks and chairs and ifs because of perception and hence the faculty for awareness which can be then imagined as if transferable. All within the whole universe, supposed.

This definitely a “religious” topic because while one can’t out a rock on mic and transmit their expressed awareness on youtube, one can take a leap of mystery and wonder that rocks are self aware, wonder that their plain form is how they express that self awareness. Rocks are what they are and rocks know it. It takes a rock to know a self aware one.

They could be self aware in plain sight just being rocks and we could only guess based on what we can sense.

I think it’s fun to wonder about rocks and that means the universe must be fun, huh?

For the linguistic habit of dividing our world into distinct phenomena to be supported as "correct", you have to show that the distinction is actually possible beyond language, and it isn't. You can't separate a human from the universe, because this thing we reference as "human" requires the universe.

I think the confusion (and subsequent discussion) stems from thinking it makes a difference, and it doesn't. It doesn't affect the fall to say "Joe fell of while climbing K2", "Joe fell while climbing the earth" or "the universe changed". It's just a matter of reference, nothing else.

I would argue that any language (logic, math, words) is based on treating constituent parts of the universe as whole, and that is certainly useful (language would be a rather impossible task for us if any phenomena had to be described from a frame of reference that enveloped the entire universe). But there is a danger here, and that is that once we treat a phenomena as information we also take on-board the limitations and capabilities of the language we choose. And if we're not careful, we might fall into the trap of thinking those limitations are essential to the phenomena itself.

No it's you who aren't willing to give up the wrong assumption that things are absolutely distinct from each other and distinct from the universe. If the universe has a uniform underlying structure, it cannot be that way. Everything must be reducibly the same. Trying to distinguish things from the universe or the universe from things contradicts the definitions. The universe being its things and those things also being the universe is a necessary truth of logic. To claim otherwise is to contradict logic itself.

When I say you're being illogically specific (you laugh at this) that's what I mean.

OrP's claims about logical distinction aren't claims that things are "absolutely distinct" from each other.

The point is that the OP made a logical argument that fails as such. OrP isn't arguing for a particular metaphysics.

tame: I'd agree that it's definitely possible to try to stretch analytical distinctions too far or to draw too many conclusions from them (re: it being dangerous) but I think you might be understating just how useful such distinctions actually are to thinking. If there's a danger in going too far in one direction it's pretty clearly a non-starter to go as far in the other as DODN seems to want to go.

But really the point of contention so far is mostly about what kinds of deductive arguments are valid, I think. It's definitely true that analytical distinctions between parts of the universe can be arbitrary and not particularly "real", or that making too much of them can lead to poor conclusions, but it's also true that "the properties of the part are properties of the whole" entails a logical contradiction, at least using common definitions for "property", "part", and "whole". So you can't make a compelling deductive argument that the universe is self-aware in this way.

This makes me think the universe is a language.

OrPs contention relies on the assumption that things are distinct from each other. No fallacy of composition is made if everything is ultimately composed of the same thing. It then becomes the logical necessity of composition.

No it doesnt. You're relying on the same assumptions of distinctness that you earlier claim are super-useful but admit are untrue. If the assumption is untrue, a logical contradiction is not entailed at all, only a mistaken assumption.

I'll give you an example. It's useful to assume that time exists and is a separate dimension from space. That's how all human beings reasoned prior to einstein and it proved very useful. But it entailed contradictions in data we had that we could not explain. Then came einstein with his SR and GR and now we reason that space-time is a 4+ dimensional manifold that has resolved seemingly entailed paradoxes that existed before. The logical contradictions are gone, because our assumption was wrong.

The basic assumption of science is that everything is reducibly the same. If it's not, there is no underlying structure of the universe that is even studyable. Nothing would be knowable. When you make a claim that an object in the universe and the universe are distinctly different, you are going against the basic assumption of science itself. It is necessarily true that everything in the universe is ultimately and reducibly the same thing. So there is no entailed contradiction, simply a mistaken assumption.

Sure, that's why I said it sounded like Neeeeel's metaphysics. He liked this argument. But if there is really only one thing and all analytical distinctions are meaningless (logically and metaphysically) then you could simplify your argument:

1) reality is self-aware.

Because how can you even talk about human beings (or rocks or chairs...) meaningfully if there are no distinctions between things? And if there are meaningful distinctions between things then you're back to using some kind of logical framework to analyze those relationships of distinction, and you'll find that it's quite difficult to construct an internally consistent logic which allows for such distinctions and in which your argument is also valid.

And in any case, it seems there are plenty of good reasons to acknowledge that meaningful distinctions do exist and that the basic rules of logic are useful to analyses of those distinctions, despite the general limitations to deductive arguments.

The fact that analytical distinctions do not neatly reduce to ontological distinctions says something about the fact that reality is not purely logical, but that does not make your logical argument work. I think you might be missing the point that you're making a logical argument. You're relying on the force of logic to persuade the reader that your conclusion is true. You can simply deny the applicability of logic to the question, but that would defeat the purpose of offering an argument in the form that you have.

Because things can be descriptively different, or expressionally different while maintaining the same underlying attributes.

Language is an excellent example. "The dog was black" and "energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared" are two VERY different sentences, but they are both still sentences that rely on the syntax and symbols and logic of language. To separate a statement from language or languages from statements is a logical absurdity. They are one and the same.

That's an interesting claim, that there exist questions outside the applicability of logic. How would one argue that, I wonder? I dont know, but I know it wouldn't be with logic.

See for example empirical arguments. If I want to demonstrate to you that the substance we call "water" is made of hydrogen and oxygen, I can't use a purely deductive, logical argument. I will have to describe to you the methods I use to isolate and identify the elements that make up water. There will be some logical structure to my methods, but it's not a logical necessity that water is H2O, and the demonstration relies on induction.

I don't really understand the point of the rest of your post in relation to this topic, but I'll think about it more later.

I'm operating at the exact same level of specificity as your argument. If you are willing to give up the claim that the universe is self-aware, then I'm willing to give up the parallel claim that the universe is not self-aware.

Not exactly. Neeeel would argue that there is no such thing as the universe and so avoid the contradictions in D0DN's argument.

No, anything below the strata the existent-existence relationship is more specific than that, since that is the most general you can go.

Chair-chairleg is more specific than matter-energy, and as I said before information is probably the shared substrate between matter and energy.

The compositional fallacy applies to things seemingly different, it does not apply to things necessarily the same.

As TD put, the universe is no more distinguishable from the contents it contains than those things are distinguishable from the universe.

The fact that you can usefully separate them as a mind experiment and have always done so doesnt give the assumption truth value. Your assumption has always been and will always be ultimately false. It is necessarily so.

Nah, my argument requires a distinction between properties, not substance or ontology. Your intuition that whatever properties applies to a part also applies to the whole is seemingly so strong that you have been unable to grasp that is my position. This view doesn't mean that the part is "separate" from the whole (whatever that means), just that some descriptions of parts do not apply to the whole. If this isn't true, it implies almost immediately that any property that any part has, all other parts also have, which means that description is almost entirely useless.

In your example you can separate $99 from $100. I don't think the same is true for intelligence and the Universe.

Human beings are conscious because they have brains which are conscious. If you remove a brain from a human being it ceases to be conscious. A human being has the intellectual properties of the brain that sits in it has. You can't sever the two without destruction.

Intelligence is essentially the ability to navigate a reality. Separate intelligence from the universe(reality) and does intelligence even continue to exist in a meaningful way? Does the universe continue to exist?

It would be impossible to even conceptualize the separation of universe and mind because you would undercut the very existence of the thing you conceptualize with.

Substance seems necessarily prior to properties or attributes.

I feel like my position is pretty counterintuitive tbh.

Parts of things describe the general properties of the whole. The chair having an 18 inch long leg describes the chair as having length. The very act of analyzing parts of things is to determine the properties of the whole! That's why the scientific method works!

Did you use logic to come to that conclusion?

At the risk of being obnoxious, I ask this question in all honesty. Logics are the rules of your mind. Logics are the rules of reality. You cannot perceive, reason, speak, or even post on 2+2 without them (though some people make me wonder). Everything you do depends on logic.

Even arguing not everything relies on logic...relies on logic.

So?

Sure, properties of parts can tell you something about properties of the whole. Your mistake, as I've been saying all along is the specific inference you are making, that the whole has all the same properties as its individual parts. You can make the inference that parts of the universe is self-aware by using the syllogism that humans are self-aware and humans are part of the universe. But it requires additional work to also conclude that the whole has a property of a part. This is because part of A is not identical to A. You want to reject the inference (I assume) that part of A necessarily has all the same properties as A. However, you just don't seem to realize that this goes both ways, that this lack of identity means that A also doesn't necessarily have all the same properties as part of A, even given the very clear examples of this ITT.

Anyway, I'm just repeating myself here, so I'm not sure there's much point to continuing this conversation.

Nope. Mostly because I actually know what topology is, and specifically when a set is a topological space and when it isn't. I'll bet you don't even know what it means to be "an expression of topology." Those are just words that you're stringing together.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Yes, I clearly understand things in a content-specific manner whereas you're just babbling along. It might "make sense" if I were to refuse knowledge at the level that you do.

So in order for your argument to work, you require 99=100? Or that {1,2} = {1,2,3}?

well, Ive never been so offended

I have been tempted to join in, but I usually find it too frustrating.

My comment to Aaron earlier in the thread was to try and point the way to what I think is a more useful line of enquiry for DoOrDoNot.

I think that Aaron and Orp are using definitions of categories in a "moving goalposts" type of way.


I dont know if I would argue that. I think I would claim that there is only the universe, and that its human perception and thought that divides it up into separate objects. Perhaps thats saying the same thing though.

It seems to me that you are insisting on reading my post using a very broad definition of logic, whereas I was talking specifically about the kind of syllogistic, deductive logic employed in the argument in the first post of this thread.

One of the reasons I used "water is H20" (and logical induction) as an example of what I meant by the limitations of deductive logic was to try to make the scope of my comments clearer.