John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument is interesting, but is generally considered to have been invalidated by the computer science crowd.
The philosophical debate around this issue is fascinating. You can briefly examine the Searle’s argument, and some counter-arguments,in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I don’t think materialism is coherent. It sounds almost exactly like it suffers from what most po-mo does: it’s either saying something so trivial that everyone would agree (almost tautalogical) or something so absurd that few would agree. Why can’t we just talk about existence instead?
In my opinion, monism’s greatest flaw is in explaining emergent properties. I don’t mean that I don’t think emergent stuff (in a non-thing sense) happens, but that it exists. If it exists, it seems to me to walk right into dualism: we have a non-reduceable event or even property (I am thinking of immanent realism in this sense) that cannot be explained in terms of its material components—indeed, if it could, it wouldn’t be emergent.
Now, here’s the problem I face with this. Are emergent properties metaphysical existents, or are the the “mental” manifestation of epistemological limitations? That is, are they not really real but instead the result of an explanatory gap?
I think token functionalism and epiphenomenalism are striking for making this problem (as I see it) most striking.
And, now I am getting IP conflicts on my home network so I cannot finish this post.
TTT,
Well done.
For the problems on language, I suggest looking at Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings. He also addresses the problem of language, and actually tries to fix it. Needless to say, it’s not an easy read. But, for what you’re talking about, there’s few better.
In regards to the topic at hand, I think the most relevant philosopher is Immanual Kant. It would take a long time to explain, but to some up a few thousand pages in a couple sentences:
The physical reality that we experience is what is sent to us by our senses. So, we can only experience and comprehend what we sene. Thus, there can be all sorts of things existing out in space, but if we can’t experience it in some way, we’ll never know.
Then, Kant continues to explain that the senses we have aren’t the things ew experience, but rather representations. If a camera takes a picture of a flower, you don’t get another flower as a result. You get a visual representation of that flower. Similarly, our eyes and ears only give us representations of what is experienced.
So, what does this have to do with Materialism?
As TVAA said in the OP, “But what is space? As far as I can determine, the concept of space doesn’t involve anything other than a limitation on the ways things can interact.”
I know this gets very close to Plato, and for good reason. Many see the two as complementary.
I hope that adds something to the discussion. I’m sure someone could explain Kant better than I just did, but I think it’s relevant to the discussion.
TVAA: Consider my Searle point retracted. I’d say that the issue remains contentious:
From your link: “Debate over the Chinese room thought experiment - while generating considerable heat - has proven inconclusive. To the Chinese room’s champions - as to Searle himself - the experiment and allied argument have often seemed so obviously cogent and decisively victorious that doubts professed by naysayers have seemed discreditable and disingenuous attempts to salvage “strong AI” at all costs. To the argument’s detractors, on the other hand, the Chinese room has seemed more like “religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument” (Hofstadter 1980, p. 433) than a serious objection.”
We had, IMO, a great thread on the Chinese Room argument started by Ramanujan. Three pages.
TVAA
Again with signification. This seems so fundamental to you I cannot even fathom why this is so. This immediately seems to reduce all words to necessarily referencing direct existents or first-order properties, with higher order properties merely being assemblages of those other two, more basic descriptors. But that will immediately land you in the paradoxical water of asserting that “nothing” is either meaningless or that you are wrong about words signifying (in that manner).
That’s why my first response was simply, “Space is nothing”. I don’t think words have to signify a particular or universal.
So few? My good man, there are a shitload of answers.
Taken it away? Who has taken meaning away? If they have, put it back long enough for us to have a discussion here. Perhaps you’ll find why it was taken away. Perhaps it never was. 
I don’t know how you view “meaning” but if it is anything like
every_word -> some_referent
then yes, that meaning went largely away.
TTT, while I like your exposition, I have some questions.
Which errors? And how would we discover them?
Perhaps. Some problems have remained. One such problem is what we are dealing with in this thread.
Thanks ShoNuff for taking care of the exposition of Kant’s take on space. I believe Kant’s position is in fact even a bit more specific: space is something we deduce from the fact of our sense-experience, but what we cannot experience directly. Hence it ''is" not in the same way that a computer “is”. If (my) memory serves well, space is in fact an example of a synthetic a priori truth: a true ‘statement’ of which the truth can be deduced without actually going out and factually checking.
With respect to your questions, erislover, you could even define a lot of philosophy as the quest to uncover the ‘errors’ of its age. The thing is that you only know the unproven assumptions at the end of that quest (‘The owl of Minerva only flies at dusk’, sayeth Hegel). If the uncovering of them would be easy, they probably would not need to be uncovered at all. Provisionally I can give you some general assumptions that might qualify: ‘free will’ as an existing internal faculty of the mind (instead of an external description of certain occurences), ‘individual autonomy’ and/or ‘individual rights’ as a sound basis on which to build a political philosophy/ethics. YMMV
While it is true that some problems in a general sense remain (like the problem of ‘proving’ ethical egoism wrong, read Plato’s Gorgias or Republic), the current discussion is not one of those. I may be wrong, but I daresay the discussion of space as a separate phenomenon is something that only cropped up in modern times, after (or around the time of) Newtonian physics in which space was mathematically represented as the area in which things moved. Classical philosophers pondered about the existence of the universe, which is not the same as space (the universe exists in space). They were also mightily interested in the concept of movement/change (see Aristotle). If I get around to it, I’ll try to check Aristotle’s Physics and see whether there is a discussion of something akin to space.
Words have meaning. In and of themselves, they’re arbitrary and meaningless symbols. However, when they’re used to symbolize and represent complex associations of concepts, they allow us to generate meaningful relationships between those concepts.
If “space is nothing” accurately reflected the meaning of “space”, there’d be no reason to have the term “space”: “nothing” would do.
Precisely. The superposition of all possible answers contains no information.
** Noted. I shall return with definitions, which will be applied rigorously and completely.
I disagree. I think the act of philosophizing to, as you put it (but I wouldn’t), “uncover errors” also brings much more to the front as “knoweldge”.
I have found the easiest truths are the most hidden. Wittgenstein’s influence on me.
The play of what space was occupied greek philosophers quite a bit. Trying to grasp existence and motion was paramount. One such problem came from the atomists, for if everything was made up of something, how was there “room” to move?
I would be mightily surprised if there wasn’t.
Other longstanding issues: the problem of universals. Sometimes called the medieval problem of universals, though the three main schools of thought are still with us today. The base nature of existence for monism, and the interactions between disparate things in dualism have never seemed, to me, to be “solved”.
TVAA
Nothing is a larger word than space. Space can still be nothing.
Why on earth would you superimpose them???
Well, if you take that track you will probably meet with frustration fairly quickly. 
A discussion had here some time ago that you might like: Things we can’t know directly.
In this day and age, I don’t see how anyone can discuss the nature of space and matter on philosophical grounds for too long, without say, Stephen Hawkings overhearing you and running you over with his chair.
Space, matter (and energy and time) are linked together by some very complicated math. They are not what they used to be.
I have no problem with this. I gladly surrender these problems to the physicists, as gladly as I let a TV repairman repair my TV without nosing around asking about every little shiny object inside the set.
We can still discuss things that aren’t yet in the realm of conventional science. Such as the nature of being, knowing, existence, etc. If two hundred years from now the nature of conscience is “solved” through more methodical scientific means, then so be it. We at least get a first crack at it way ahead of that time. Just like Democritus had a first try at guessing the nature of matter thousands of years ago.
peace
Well, erislover, I seem to have started a notch too low. Your name should have warned me. But seriously, when discussing with people I don’t know I tend to simplify things, which for more philosophically knowledgeable persons is equivalent to a lack of rigor. You were right to take me to task for that. Let’s try to improve on that.
You are right that there is some progress in philosophy, but after more than ten years I still find it hard to give an easy list or show people a book in which clear and definite truths are found (but that may be my own ignorance). Most (all?) books that are proposed for being true have been buried under piles and piles of secondary commentary and criticism. Not too good a record for something to be a clear and definite truth.
With regard to easy truths being the most hidden, I have no quarrel with that. However, as Aristotle mentioned, there is a difference between something being easy for an uneducated person and for an educated person. I was saying such unexposed errors (truths) are not easy to find (for an uneducated person), you are saying that what is easy (for an educated person) is the most hidden (for an uneducated person). Personally I do like such paradoxes, but then, I like to read Heidegger as well. However, such paradoxes do not help to advance a serious argument. [I can’t find the cite for Aristotle, I remember it was in the Metaphysics but where??]
Your remark about universals is to my knowledge correct; I do not believe that I disputed that certain problems have not been solved (in fact, didn’t I say exactly that?).
Your retort on my wild guess concerning space with Greek philosophers made it clear that you are more than dabbling in philosophy. Well, I looked it up with Aristotle, and you are in a sense right. There goes my claim to infallibility. But seriously, the concept is still a bit different from what you’d expect. The concept is choora (space, place) and is treated in the Categories (5a6) and the Physics (Book IV, 208b7, 209a8, 209b12). I may suffer a bit from the German disease (to wit that, like Nietzsche and the Romantics I am prone to think the classical Greek thought out everything better and different than we). Still the discussion seems to be rather different from what we are used to today.
I’ll give some quotes.
Categories:
Physics:
How’s that for definition? Can you say that this is the exact same concept of space that we think of nowadays? I’m not saying it is or isn’t, I still need time to think about it.
Well?
Is there anybody still paying attention? Anyone?
Isn’t that just like each time I get enthousiastic about philosophy? 
Sorry for the delay. These sorts of posts sometimes take time to mull over before actually being made
I find the third point to be quite interesting in itself: " The immediate place of a thing is neither less nor greater than
the thing." This seems to be a strange way to phrase the law of identity in space as I see it: a thing fits its own shape. And yet The Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide would have us just wonder what it is fitting in, if such a question can be asked (which I think it can but he seems unsatisfied with my answer). But perhaps that is a play of the words we are using to describe this—something I try to give much weight to before continuing.
The first two points are a rather concise way of stating that space is not a property of any existent—a clear enough statement. But to follow that by referencing a spatial law of identity seems strange to my head.
Furthermore, the fourth point seems to present us with a rule for construction of space as an abstraction (at the very least): what is left behind after the movement of an object is its space. This confuses me for it requires that there is also another space already made for it so that we may move it to observe the space left behind… a sort of circular demonstration at least.
The fifth point seems to me to simply be a contribution to the grammar of the word “space”; to wit, that we can refer to “it” with respect to the objects that are in it. No problems here.
What troubles me here is to tackle those first four points with respect to immanent realism in terms of shape. Is shape a viable universal? It is at least a viable concept (I trust we won’t be arguing that). Indeed, if we are to drive ourselves to the conclusion that a thing fits its own shape in space, we seem bound to the conclusion that shape is a viable universal. OK, that’s fine, I can live with that. Does this, then, make space itself the manifestation of shape?
An interesting comment on universals and their manifestation can be had in terms of geometry. For example, the universal triangle (in Euclidean geometry) must have 180 degrees as the sum of its interior angles. Now, is this universal triangle a thing…? Is it isosceles or scalene? —Of course every triangle is isosceles or scalene (if we consider the equilateral triangle as a special case of isosceles), so what about this universal triangle? Interesting to apply this very discussion to considering space as the universal manifestation of shape, and how it has every shape, or no shape, and in fact that we may reference it by objects that have a particular manifestation of shape.
Of course, the tricky bit is that space would exist a priori… definitely without experience. Now, perhaps it is fine for those of us who infer its existence a priori through the very virtue of our living in this universe, the Kantians in us. I have no problem with synthetic a priori claims, so perhaps there are others that might like to tackle this? But now where are we if space exists? Must we abandon the notion that all existents are composed of things? And there we are with the dodgy question of what it means “to exist”. I would immediately retreat to idealism to answer such a question—or perhaps we would call that avoiding the question?
However, I strenuously dislike the conlusion reached in 212a20. It seems to reach farther than what was presented.
You flatter me. I take to philosophy like I take to food, great stuff that I wish I was paid to consume. 
I’ll make this a short post for the same reason as you, erislover. Good thinking must not be hurried.
I should make it clear up front (if you didn’t already know) that I have not quoted Aristotle in full but only the bits that contained clear conclusions. If you want to see more of the text, there are several sites that have free English translations available.
Thinking it over, it does seem as if Aristotle is concerned with the topic you mentioned earlier, to wit the question of the room/place/space left when a body movies, rather than to the question of the generality of the room/space in which all bodies move. I must add that this latter rephrasing of the question shows that the definition of space will not help TVAA with his original question. That was about the definition of material bodies, which were defined in terms of space, while now we are defining space in terms of material bodies. Go figure.
While your discussion is starting on the concept of shape is very interesting, I’ll have to give it some more thought before I can say something really intelligent (no guarantees that it will be so). A tentative first reaction would be again to check Aristotle, or Plato. The concept of shape might be equivalent to Form or Idea (greek: idea), to which both have devoted extensive discussions. As I remember, Plato hypostasized (sp?) the Idea as something separate from and indeed better, more real than the concrete object itself. Aristotle found that absurd and conceived of the object as an amalgam of form and matter. He never got around quite to finding what had priority, metaphysically or ontologically speaking: substance as unformed matter, or substance as the form that was imposed on matter. Anyway, in none of these conceptions of Form is it identical to space.
I’m sorry to say I do not immediately understand your remark
It must be the time of night. The latter part about ‘being’ (the Heideggerian in me rears its head) I can follow (although I’m not sure who you have in mind when speaking of idealism). But the first two sentences may have multiple meanings (at least to my presently non-too-clear mind). Care to elaborate?
Ah, that quote was pondering on considering “space” as the manifestation of the universal “shape”… and if universals exist, so does
shape[sub]universal[/sub]<->space[sub]manifestation[/sub].
Exactly, but whether or not Aristotle himself considered his universals to exist, immanent realism, a school that came from him, does hold that to be the case. What is interesting here is if we consider my proceeding argument, it might be said that both immanent realism and transcendental realism are correct, and “space” is the pure form of the universal “shape” (a conclusion we come to by considering instantiated shape in objects). Of course, Plato would appreciate that it takes our intellect to perceive it, not our senses.
or rather, preceeding argument.
I’ll shut up now. :smack::smack::smack:
I’ve had to take some time to think this over, and I’m still not sure whether I’m really getting to the bottom of this. Your suggestion is intriguing, to say the least.
If I may paraphrase: we could say that Ideas (at least in the limited sense of Shapes) do actually exist in the same way as the space occupied by the object exists. Going one step further, which you seem to do, not only do Shapes exist in the same way as Spaces, but in fact they are identical. To each Shape corresponds a Space. Please correct me if I have mistaken your thesis/theses.
Putting it in the above way, it seems as something has gone wrong. My suggestion is that the meaning of Shape is shifting from Idea-Shape to Physical-Shape. With this I mean that the word shape (Shape) is used in two different ways, the actual shape that a concrete physical object has (Physical-Shape), and the ideal shape that the object is intended to have or that can be deduced from the object.
Your triangle example does show this in a certain way. A concrete triangle that is not really well drawn may have a sum of angles larger than 180 degrees, either because of non-Eucledian geometry (drawn on a non-flat surface) or because the sides are convex or concave. Still if a teacher would use the drawing of such a concrete triangle to explain the theory, he would assume it to represent the Ideal shape of a triangle with straight sides, drawn on a flat surface. We can go further to the even more abstracted Idea of the triangle as such, that does not have the property of being isocleses or not.
When talking about Physical-Shape, this would indeed correspond exactly to Space. Note that ‘Space’ here means not physical space in the sense of Newtonian physics, but the space or room occupied by an object, which we might call Object-Space. In this respect it looks to be a purely physical phenomenon. However, we cannot see Physical-Shape or Object-Space directly; we deduce it from the visible contours of the object. If the object has been moved or destroyed, we can still talk about the Shape and Space as we remembered it. [later note: this would really be Ideal-Shape] Insofar even these concepts have a non-material, idealistic side. Shape and Space do ‘exist’ in this way apart from the concrete object.
Still we have to distinguish this concept of Physical-Shape from Ideal-Shape, to wit the Shape that the object was intended to be, or that we derive from the object by abstracting from its flaws. An example of the first is the design of an object (like the blueprint of a building) which does exist apart from the realized object. An example of the latter might be the Sphinx: even though its current shape hasn’t got a nose, we naturally tend to go from there to visualize a Sphinx with its original nose.
When writing this, I notice that this interpretation makes the distinction between P-Shape and I-Shape fluent. Still it makes sense (at least to me) to distinguish between the shape of the object as it actually is, and the shape of an idealization of the existing object.
The thing is, in the above interpretation there still is a gap between immanent realism and transcendental idealism. Space is still connected to an actual object, while the Ideal-Shape abstracts from the object hence does not exist in the same way. The only connection would exist in memory, in other words, in the mind. We could talk about Remembered-Space or Ideal-Space, but those would not correspond to an existing object/Space. Instead they would be idealizations of the mind. Hence the gap would remain.
I think you might have it but you’re approaching it from the wrong side. We would start with the empirical sensations gathered which have us infer the shape of an object either directly or indirectly (but still not idealized). The object always fits into its own space. And we may move it around from one space to another. What are we moving it through or in that always perfectly accepts it? And doesn’t it do this for all shapes? So it is like space is the container for all shapes. Or could we say, it is the universal “shape”? For the universal “shape” would have no shape itself (like our universal triangle was neither isosceles nor scalene).
Just an idea. I still think space is nothing.
Well I should hope so! You brought it in at the very beginning of your discourse.
Of course it does. But let’s stop short of incorporating platonic idealism before we set out to my exposition above. We take Aristotle’s commentary on shape in (4) and consider its applicability to all things that we encounter. Note that the comment applies equally well to apples and pears. And we would say that the shape of the apple is fit exacly by the apple, that they are inseperable. But “place”, the space, is seperable, “Place can be left behind by the thing and is separable.” But now we move a pear there, and find that place holds the pear as well. We might then think that place “holds” all shapes (all objects) (and this of course is incomplete induction). If we wanted to try and discuss what place was, we could say it was all shapes. You see here what I’m saying? Try and tackle “place” (space) first as a thing that has properties inseperable from it (immanent realism), and deduce the property it has from how we know it.
How we know it, however, is where the platonism would come in. Space is not a thing we perceive, but a contrast of a thing’s shape. Space (given the apple / pear discussion) has no shape itself, and we do not sense it except by way of the intellect. This then has the qualities of a platonic Ideal: it is a mental “thing” not available to the senses, and it is a universal (there are multiple spaces).
Does that help?
There of course should be a gap between immanent and platonic realism, I didn’t seek to dissolve that, but instead sought to tackle place from an immanent perspective and found myself in platonism.
Perhaps not the most brilliant exposition, I won’t be rushing off to publish it any time soon.
Thanks for the clarification. Still I would stress the difference between an idealized concrete apple-shape, and the concrete shape of an ideal apple (is that clear). The former may have bumps and bruises, while the latter (a perfect apple) has not. On of Plato’s mistakes was to confuse the two, in other words, confusing abstraction and idealization/generalization.
Your argument of ‘that what contains all shapes’ seems to show the distinction between the various concepts we’ve been discussing. What Aristotle is discussing is more like place/shape, while the generalized ‘container’ is space in the general, modern sense of the word. In other words, space is the container of all possible shapes/places.
The further argument that we cannot perceive space itself seems to me orthodox Kantian, not Platonic. I don’t remember Plato discussing that kind of thing. He may have devoted a passage to it in his later dialogues, but as I remember it he was more concerned about the origin of ideas and actual existing things. I recall that the Timaeus (or was it the Parmenides?) contains a discussion about the ‘mother’ of all ideas or so.
I’ve not read Plato in any serious way, so I don’t know. My concern is not so much that I follow Plato, but that the result is one of a platonic ideal. I wasn’t the one who suggested all philosophy is found there.