Interbane wrote:My take is that although information requires a physical medium, it also has emergent properties that could be mapped to other physical mediums. But at no point can the information be divorced from any medium. At the foundation of any sized emergent-property pyramid, there is a physical layer.
I think this is the right idea. An idealist would emphasize the notion that some relationships between ideas, such as the mechanics of complex numbers or the moral inadmissibility of applying principles one would not accept if positions were reversed, are inherent in the cause and effect of the universe and would be rediscovered even if, as information, understanding of them was somehow lost.
A strong-form idealist would argue that these ideas are not contingent (that is, their content doesn't emerge from the circumstances leading to investigation of them) and so they will act as shaping forces on events rather than depending on events for their truth.
I am very sympathetic to that idea, but would not want to extend it to ethereal ideas of a transcendent realm of truths, or to imagining that some entity had created things that way and thus decreed them. I think it might contradict your idea that there "must be" a physical layer to such principles, but I would have to give it more thought.
Interbane wrote:Perhaps emergent properties transcend the physical, but not in the sense that they exclude it or do not need it to exist.
I think that is phrased too abstractly for me to feel I can evaluate it. It comes across to me sounding like some Zen koan about a tree falling in the forest where no one is there to hear.
Interbane wrote:I think this is one of those pedantic points that can be a fulcrum that tips a worldview one way or the other. It's the epistemic root of some people's belief in the supernatural vs the natural.
I think its epistemic tipping role is unfortunate. There is a small discussion on a religious website about the "two cultures" in the pews, with one set of people believing reality is "enchanted" (i.e. shot through with supernatural intervention) and another believing no such enchantment is occurring, and each thinking the other is out of touch with reality. (It turns out there are a lot of people who self-report going back and forth between the two, which would seem to rule out contempt for the opposite view.)
It seems to me those who take the enchantment view are engaged in wishful thinking, but that's kind of intentional. In a way similar to the way I come on trusting to people because I am hoping my trust engenders mutual trust, these people are "coming on grateful" to the universe. Perhaps they are engaged in fooling themselves in a sort of placebo exercise, but isn't it possible they are thereby giving themselves good medicine even so?
Interbane wrote:Can emotion be divorced from a physical substrate?
I would think that's a no. But what is happening when someone asks "What would Gandhi do?" and thereby experiences a simulated experience of Gandhi's emotions? This is no idle question. Traditional African religion relied on such exercise of the imagination, and contemporary evangelical Christianity asks its adherents to "experience the presence of Jesus." I grew up singing "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart."
Evidently there is a physical substrate within the person doing the imagining, but its capacity to create simulations of the world creates a connection between the seeker and Gandhi (despite Gandhi being dead.) You might argue "it is only the idea of Gandhi" but in a real sense that is true also of a contemporary sitting at Gandhi's feet while he was still alive. During Gandhi's life there is an additional connection, in that the devotee can ask questions that the live Gandhi can ponder and answer. But even the understanding of his answer, a communication theorist will tell you, involves a surprising amount of "theory of mind," as the listener exerts himself to understand Gandhi's meaning.
So to some extent my mind is hiding in the physical substrate of other people's brains. I'm perfectly willing to grant that this is a confusion of terms, but we don't have terms yet for the intersubjective processes in understanding, and so the individualist "substrate" version is also a bit of a confusion of terms.