[Crucial typo below: "can't" should be "can". I've edited it now.]
The post information faster than light presents two demonstrations showing that the patterns we perceive in nature are our cognitions -- ideas or thoughts of patterns -- and do not actually exist as nature. There are two implications: one is that science is a conceptualization of reality, tied to reality by interactions including experiment and exploration, but are not natural, physical realities. Nature itself at its reductionist microscopic level of fields, particles, waves and whatever, are just those: behaviors that can be aligned into emergent explanations of scientific cognitions, ideas, thoughts and theories.
A key piece of this perspective is the representation and cognition of nothingnesses, like the numeral 0 which doesn't represent anything but a cognition of absence, or what lies beyond borders created by emptiness or empty sets -- like limits or terminations. These nothings are extremely useful in understanding the organization of reductionist reality. They produce and define the patterns, explanations and understandings. But in a sense the patterns produce understandings of themselves, extrapolated from reality; they are from reality but not in reality. The evidence I gave in that post was the speed with which a shadow can move -- faster than light because a shadow is not a thing, it's defined by light that obeys the laws of physics, but the shadow doesn't -- it's a mere conception of a pattern.
For those who haven't read the post: suppose the light of the sun is obstructed by the moon. The shadow of the moon forms a cone which will move following the motion of the moon. That shadow motion at some distance far from the moon will move faster than light even though the light that defines the shadow travels at most at the speed of light. And that's because the shadow is not a thing, it's just a pattern that can be conceptualized, not a physical phenomenal thing made of physical stuff. Patterns, as it were, are interpretations of things, a choice of the arrangements. They are, of course, not entirely independent on things. But they are not stuff at the reductionist level of physical stuff.
In another form, this paradox is presented in the ancient "Ship of Theseus" puzzle. If, in order to preserve the ship, every rotten plank has been replaced, is the ship still "Theseus' Ship"? For the ancients, it's a thought experiment that teases apart Aristotle's four causes. The material "cause" -- the wood -- is gone, and the effective cause -- the builder -- has been displaced onto a long line of repair preservationists.
The emergent-symbolic explanation demonstrated in the shadow-faster-than-light resolves the puzzle easily. The concept of the ship can be treated as independent of its origin and material, while the formal and teleological "causes" remain. And more than merely remain. The planks are not replaced by bunny rabbits or smart phones. They are replaced by another plank form, whether wood or plastic or steel, because the concept -- the formal and teleological cause -- rules. Again, the idea is not inherent in the physical object but a kind of constraint on the physical. On a reductionist view, that's reversed: the physical and the physical laws constrain the object. (If the ship's planks were turned into a smartphone display case of shelves, I'd expect the phone vendor might point out that "By the way, the display case was originally the Ship of Theseus you may have heard of!" Was, not is.)
The puzzle applies as well to Kripke's naming necessity where the pattern cognition is merely shifted to the naming process. So if the "The Ship of Theseus" belonged to Theseus because he had it commissioned, paid for it and named it in a ceremony, and things turns out such that this ship is not the one that sailed to Minoa when Theseus killed the Minotaur -- by mistake he got on the wrong ship and this is only discovered long after -- Theseus presumably will insist that the original ship is still his and is still "The Ship of Theseus" he commissioned, paid for, and named. Contesting it would be a matter of legal rights, not metaphysics. Ownership, like a symbol, is an emergent property of human cognition, not an intrinsic property of things. Not surprisingly, symbols and owned objects reflect both meanings and values. They are constrained by human emotions, attitudes, and social relations, beyond physics. (More here on the hierarchy of data in the sciences.)
Besides this implication that emergent properties and ideas are supranatural, there's a second implication: science is a world of external relations between behaviors, not internal knowledge. Whatever is understood of the internal, it is speculative based on the information of the experiments and explorations. We can't access the internal, except in our own personal qualia and thinking (maybe -- thinking is a complex that includes emergent properties like the symbols "I" "think" "therefore"and "am" so the thinking is more than just awareness). But as Wittgenstein showed, our own qualia are logically inert -- it doesn't provide any knowledge except the fact of its own existence. This second implication is Kantian: everything has a noumenal being -- a thing-in-itself being -- that is only accessible to itself. That alone suggests a kind of panpsychism, but that's a topic for a post of another color.
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