Posted: Apr 12, 2017 3:10 am
Well shit.
Second, you may run into trouble trying to define 'territory' since it's not the grass or the soil either.
It is the grass and soil and trees and whatever, in totality
Of course if you start changing things around, moving trees and hills here and there, it's still the territory but it's no longer the map! Time to break out the colored pencils again...SafeAsMilk wrote:Let's take another example: sound waves. They propagate through a physical material, but are not the material themselves. Remove the material and they cease to exist. Not physical?
This is the more interesting question, and I think it's the one the OP is getting at.
I think it's tricky. But I'm not sure I want to get into it, having been through it with John Platko in another thread. For practical purposes, I don't think it's totally daft to think of there being information in material stuff and considering that information to be to some extent independent of the material. We arguably wouldn't be able to post stuff here without allowing that transfer of information from medium to medium.
On the other hand, maybe the medium is the information. Or vice versa. Or they are both properties of the same thing which is neither of them. There are theories that the basic component of the universe is information and that what we call matter is just a manifestation of it.
I think you make my point with "to some extent". I don't think you can give an example of something that's independent of the material, even the imaginary map is dependent on the material in your brain. To say it isn't made of atoms or whatever seems pretty meaningless to me because, "to some extent", it always is. How is information not a configuration of matter? I understand that in some situations it might be useful to differentiate between them, but that's my point: what's the OP's useful application? There doesn't seem to be any purpose to any of this so far, it's just fucking around with words.